One evening I head out to the Swordy to meet a girl from Newlyn a couple of years younger than me who I’ve seen hanging around the skate park below the promenade most evenings with other kids, doing tricks and playing music out towards the sea. A few days previously she had approached me out of the blue asking who I was – ‘because everyone’s clocked you, you know?’ – and what was I doing disappearing off on fishing boats for weeks at a time?
In London the majority of my time is spent amongst young women. When I call them up after adventures in Newlyn, none of them can quite believe what I am doing, or why. Amongst my friendship group I often get branded with words like ‘kooky’. This is my role; it is how my shape can be known – even though nothing that I have done has ever felt especially odd to me. I ended up in Cornwall because it was my mother’s land and on boats because that gave me the opportunity to experience how other people live, not just hear about it and infer from that how it must feel. There was no other way of doing it.
The girl and I sit in the hut outside the Swordy underneath Ben Gunn’s abstract painting, while she talks at a hundred miles an hour, I doing my best to match her, as she tells me of her fisherman dad, her certainty that there is nowhere better to live than Newlyn and of her Grandmother Lamorna – ‘So I can’t help but thinking of you as a really old lady with wrinkles!’
She makes me laugh constantly. I’ve missed talking to young women. There is a breathlessness and a joy to these kinds of first conversations that I’ve never managed to replicate when meeting boys on dates and the like. We are accommodating, eager to know things about each other. There is no power play, no need to display or present the best versions of ourselves. We just want to speak and be spoken to, about anything, about everything.
Two men at the next table come over to us to borrow a light. One is in oilskins and yellow gumboots, the characteristic garb of a fisherman just in from the sea, the other is his image, but as if that copy had been twisted through something painful, something sharp. This second man has two black eyes, the right one an old bruise – greeny-yellow to the left’s blackberry – and a thin scar right across his forehead. He lacks the muscular, meaty build of his fisherman friend, his arms comparatively thin and white, his hands noticeably shaking. Both are drunk, but the drink covers the thinner man more; it wears him, pushing him around and causing him to stumble. The fisherman notices me watching his companion.
After lighting up, the fisherman tells us that this is his best friend – has been his best friend since they were kids, mucking about down by the harbour together. His best friend nearly collapses again and swears loudly at the ground, as if blaming it for rising up at him. As if I have said something, maybe my expression speaking words enough, the fisherman says: ‘It’s negative reinforcement, yeah?’ He smacks the table and his friend ducks his head instinctively. ‘He needs to be told he’s doing a good job, not given a slap every time he tries.’
I nod, uncertain how to respond to this. The two men head back inside to get themselves another round, the fisherman with his arm protectively linked through that of his friend’s and hoisting him up by the back of his hoodie so he does not fall again. I finish my drink and the girl returns to the flat where she lives with her boyfriend, promising to meet up again soon, and to think of me when I’m out on trawlers. It sounds so grown up to me, so secure, to already be living with one person.
Once adjacent with the harbour, I find myself compelled to walk right up to its perimeter. I stop at its very edge so that my toes are floating over its dark waters. Whether it is caused by the drink or the conversation we had with the fisherman and his friend, something doesn’t sit right in my body that night. It is as if some part of me has become unsettled. I hang there for a moment, suspended above the black water, then turn up the Fradgan back to Denise and Lofty’s, where they are still watching telly, both cats squeezed in beside them on the sofa.