It is winter, and the land is stretched taut as though turned by a screw. In the fields above the village the frost holds each blade of grass in a vice. It throttles the hedgerows. The corpses of small birds lie rock-like upon the frozen leaves in the ditches.
Down in the bay, the wind is a knife. It comes off the grey whetstone of the sea, stabs its way down the rows of empty holiday homes, makes the mechanisms of the key safes fixed on the cottages’ walls rattle, blows away the thin skin of ice that settled overnight on combination locks untouched since early September. It shakes the laser-etched slabs of slate which bear names like Skipper’s Retreat and Oystercatcher Cottage.
If anybody was about to drop litter, then it would be sent skittering along the cobbles by the wind as it twists up the hill into the guts of the village and snaps against the less desirable houses which sit there. The lights of these houses stay on throughout the winter. They don’t have names like The Old Sail Loft, just numbers.
The upstairs window of number six has been left open and unlatched. The wind sends it slamming against the frame, from which splinters of flaking paint drop onto the carpet inside. Downstairs, a woman in her mid-sixties pours her second gin of the afternoon and pays no heed to the noise from upstairs.
It’s the window in her son Oyster’s room, and at this moment in time he is out. He can deal with it when he returns. His mother has had enough. Of sorting things out. Of dealing with his moods, of the tears that he shows nobody else but her when his plans come to nothing. Of the way that doing this leaves her without the energy or the will to do much else. So she pours another drink and turns up the Ministry of Sound 80s Mix playing on the stereo.
*
At this precise moment Oyster is in the pub and you are sat with him, tucked away from the wind and the cold. Oyster is often to be found here. This is partly down to his predilection for Sharp’s Atlantic, and partly because two gardens – number six’s small and immaculate, the pub’s larger and unkempt – are favourably adjoined.
Some children wait desperately until they are tall enough to go on all the rides at theme parks. Oyster waited desperately until he was tall enough to climb over the fence into the pub garden. Sometimes people – usually tourists in the summer – ask why he simply did not find a stepladder. At which point a look comes into Oyster’s eyes which makes people wish him a good evening, finish their drinks and leave. Oyster then bursts into laughter.
Anyway, you are there with Oyster, sat at his usual table. It looks out onto the pub entrance – this viewpoint allowing him to make a quick exit out the back and over the fence should a dissatisfied customer, vengeful tourist or his mother come searching – and you are listening to his latest idea.
‘Seabirds, Oyster?’ you ask him, in case you have misheard. ‘Seabirds?’
He gulps his beer, bought by another friend who Oyster promises he will pay back (the number of people to whom Oyster owes a pint is another reason why he sits where he does). You sip your own pint more circumspectly, because you only have enough money for two, maximum, and no more. ‘Seabirds?’ you repeat again, for good measure.
‘Spot on.’
‘You want to catch seabirds?’
‘You heard.’
‘But why?’
He takes another gulp of his ale. ‘Lots of reasons.’
‘Such as…?’
‘Tradition,’ he says thoughtfully. ‘Or a kind of tradition. We used to fish. That’s gone. But we can swap one kind of catching for another.’
‘Okay. What else?’
He considers. ‘People might want them as pets.’
You express your scepticism about this in the strongest possible terms.
‘No need to swear, mate. Alright, fine. We could stuff them, sell them as ornaments. Trinkets. Knick-knacks. Would look good on the mantelpiece, don’t you think? A big herring gull?’
‘Look good? Look creepy.’
He gulps. Puts the almost empty pint glass down carefully on the beer mat in front of him. ‘A herring gull, maybe. I’ll give you that. But a nice little redshank? A plover?’ His eyes light up. ‘Might not even need to bother to stuff them. Just pluck them. Sell the feathers to tourists.’
You sigh and look out of the window, at the empty street rapidly being cast into darkness by the short day. You look back at Oyster. You had a friend who, until the funding cuts, worked for the local wildlife trust. If she was here, she would be explaining to Oyster the concept of the red, amber and green lists of UK birds, each colour denoting the level of threat posed to each type of bird. But she has moved away to the town in search of a new job, and so you do the explaining instead, telling Oyster of the potential issues associated with capturing, killing and selling the feathers of birds, many of which are protected by law.
This does not bother Oyster all that much. ‘Fine, so some birds are off limits, fair enough. Thanks for pointing that one out. But,’ he emphasises, ‘nothing wrong with going after gulls.’
He’s starting to wear you out now, but you restrain your frustration. It’s not often you get to go out much these days and even if it is just Oyster, at least you are out. ‘Gulls,’ you say.
He nods vigorously. ‘Yes. Plenty of them about. Lots to catch.’
‘But why?’ you find yourself asking again.
Oyster pauses, and you feel certain that even as he opens his mouth to speak he still has no idea what it is he is going to say. This is often the case with Oyster. It’s part of the reason – along with the fact that six generations of his family can be found buried in the village churchyard – that he remains tolerated in the village, despite all he has done.
‘Meat.’
‘What?’
‘Meat,’ he repeats. ‘Gull meat. Fry it up, sell it with chips, make a killing.’ He looks up, drains his pint, and then calls out to a mutual acquaintance who is passing. Through a mixture of charm and earnest promises he persuades them to buy him a pint. Leaning back in his chair contentedly, he continues. ‘As I was saying. Sell the meat. Imagine. You’re a tourist. Long day at the beach. Your family are in a right old mood. Hungry. You come up off the seafront, see a van. Green van, nicely painted, a pro-looking logo. There’s a hatch at the side of it. Open, and you look up and see my smiling face. What a relief. You order herring gull breast and double chips for everyone. Imagine.’
‘But that happens, Oyster,’ you say.
He looks shocked. ‘Does it? Who’s selling?’
You move quickly to reassure him, although at the same time know that you shouldn’t, not really. ‘Well, not seabird meat, but go down to the seafront in summer and there’s three fish and chip vans, an ice cream van. Even a smoothie bar thing. No one’s going to buy deep-fried seagull.’ A thought strikes you. Perhaps this is your chance to bring this whole thing to a halt. ‘Have you ever eaten seagull?’
Oyster’s pint is brought, grudgingly, by his acquaintance. Oyster promises to get the next one. He takes a large swig before replying. ‘No. Have you?’
‘No,’ you reply. ‘Nor has anyone ever. And there’s a reason for that.’
‘Is there?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s that then?’
‘It’s probably disgusting. Seagull, I mean. And hard to catch.’
‘But how do you know?’ He’s leaning forwards now, is Oyster, that gleam in his eye and that dopey grin on his face. As though he’s done a load of something – which he almost certainly hasn’t, a disdain for any sort of substance beyond ale and lager being another thing that sets Oyster apart from some elements of the local community.
‘I don’t. I don’t know.’ You hate saying it, but there’s no other answer you can really give. As he does so often, Oyster has backed you into a conversational corner. He grins.
‘That’s it. You don’t know. Imagine. A nice shiny van, bright green with Oyster’s Seabirds on the side. I’ll work on a batter recipe tonight. Maybe even create a special sauce to go with it. Instead of ketchup.’
You shake your head. ‘It’s not going to happen, Oyster.’ You’re reaching the outer limits of your patience now. ‘You’re not going to be able to capture any birds, and even if you did, none of your ideas about what to do with them will work.’
Oyster drinks again. ‘That,’ he says, placing his glass down with a thump, ‘is precisely where you’re wrong. Another pint?’
*
Everyone has met Oyster at some stage of their lives. Oyster has the quick-draw grin. He brings ideas out like Friday night card tricks, sweeping them into and then out of view faster than your mind can follow. The enthusiasm with which he speaks remains with you even after he has gone, like the afterglow of a sun-flushed day.
If you have not met Oyster, you have met an iteration of him. He is a friend whose presence works like too many drinks on a night out, beginning with excitement and euphoria, gradually twisting into disorder and overly ambitious plans, built on nothing but delusion and cider bubbles. There might be something in this, you think as the next drink takes hold, or as another hour in Oyster’s company passes. Sat with him, you become a surfer riding the crest of a wave that won’t seem to break.
Only it does. It breaks with each wave of light that pounds against your hungover head. It breaks in pangs of embarrassment at how you found yourself carrying the microphone whilst Oyster shot his documentary about the local wildlife, or how you stood handing out leaflets for the beer he brewed in his cellar and which for all you know is still down there. You cringe at how you were swept away by his vision of the old farmhouse you and a group of friends would buy in France and painstakingly restore, because why would you live so far away, and how could you afford to do so? You know that you tried to resist these ideas at the time but that your resistance met the wall of Oyster’s seemingly unfailing self-belief. And that, also, part of you is envious of the grandiosity of his visions. You have never felt that way. You understood your lot early on.
*
The next morning is a Sunday. Wearing two jumpers, coat, scarf and hat, and nursing a hangover bought with money you can’t afford to spend, you walk out of the town and along the coast to the dunes. You sweat unpleasantly into your multiple layers. Oyster strides ahead, and your hangover is made worse by your attempts to keep up with him. You feel flushed, even faint.
The tide is out and the beach is vast. Only the footprints of you and Oyster, along with those of a dog and its owner, mar it. To your left, grass grows patchily up from the rolling dunes like the hair of a balding man in need of a trim. The wind has died down, but it is still bitterly cold, the kind of day when the low temperatures seem to drain the colour from everything. The blue of the sky, the green of the grass on the dunes, even the distant brown band of the sea appear like a photograph left too long in the sun.
Only Oyster is bright, dressed in a long fluorescent yellow coat. You wonder where he got it and why he wears it. The coat hangs down to his knees and is segmented with horizontal silvery strips. He also wears his father’s old fisherman’s cap, and a scarf is wound tightly about his neck. Between these two pieces of knitwear his eyes water from the cold and appear manic and glistening. The outfit, and Oyster himself, look absurd.
You listen as he points up at the gulls that bicker above you. You nod as he talks again of the green van on the seafront, of the queues of hungry holidaymakers, how this is an idea that is going to turn things around, that will mean he can start helping his mum out more, pay for things, fix them – starting with that bloody loose window latch.
‘Yes’, you say. ‘Uh-huh’, and ‘I’m sure’, you add at appropriate moments. You’re half-listening, partly because of your dry mouth and pounding headache but mostly because in one ungloved hand Oyster carries a fibreglass hunting bow and in the other a bundle of arrows. Looking at it, you find yourself lagging a little way behind Oyster, as though a few metres might reduce the chances of being associated with him. Or complicit in what he is about to do.
You hear the call of a curlew from the estuary beyond the dunes. Normally you would be interested in this, might go and search for it, but not today, because you are really, genuinely, beginning to think that Oyster might have lost it.
Today is a test, he tells you. ‘Gonna bring down a herring gull, a black-headed gull,’ he confides. ‘Just to take home and cook up. Perfect the recipe. And to check I’ve still got my eye in with this,’ he adds, holding up the bow. He halts. ‘This’ll do,’ he declares. ‘A good spot. Not much wind. Sun out of my eyes. Lots of targets.’ He looks skyward and his eyes widen with delight. He sticks the four arrows carefully in the sand in front of him.
You scan the beach. You can see a dog running about a little way down it, a figure the size of your thumb some way behind it.
‘This’ll do,’ Oyster repeats.
‘Oyster—’ Your throat is dry, and you can only croak, the sound of which Oyster does not appear to hear. He looks at each arrow in turn, uprooting them from the sand, marring its surface.
‘Oyster.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Let’s think about this.’
‘Think about what?’ He selects an arrow, looks at it with the air of a wine taster. Makes his choice.
‘Just this whole thing, mate. The. The, the feasibility –’
He laughs disbelievingly. ‘It’s feasible. We’re here, aren’t we? The birds are up there. I shoot. They fall. That’s the start of it. I’m on to something here, I really am.’
You want to tell him he isn’t, he really isn’t. You want to scream that it’s a ridiculous idea, that he’s delusional, that no one in their right minds is going to buy deep-fried seagull, that if there was any possibility of seagull being good or easy to catch then it would have been done long ago and there’d be a van up there on the seafront every summer with all the others. But you know this is Oyster, that to him everybody else is probably delusional, that this idea cannot be discounted until it’s proven beyond all distinction and that, even then, it’s the world’s fault for not seeing his genius. You’ve been through this all before. However many times you tell yourself you’ll ignore him, you find yourself at the crux of things, the point where, like the spot in the estuary, two currents meet. Because the current of Oyster’s delusion is meeting here with the current of reality, and you’re being swept along by it.
‘Oyster…’
‘Just you wait. Just you wait.’ He leans back, his absurd yellow coat flapping open, the arrows and displaced sand at his feet. You try to think what to say, to put what you have thought into spoken words, but the swiftness of the moment and the slowness of your drink-soaked brain prevent you from doing so.
He draws back the bowstring, aims at a black-headed gull soaring far above you. He quivers with the tension of it. He looses the string. It snaps forwards, sharp and clear. The arrow rushes skywards.
You catch sight of the dog you saw earlier bounding along towards you, the more measured tread of its owner following. They are close enough that you can see the features of the woman’s upturned face. At last the warning comes from your lips but it’s too late and you’re not sure whether you are warning Oyster or her.
The arrow reaches its highest point and you all three watch, a captive audience to this little segment of time. Your eyes follow it against the blue sky, see it miss the long-gone gull, and then trace its passage as it drops back down towards the earth.
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