In which Billy’s life only gets worse.
The fishermen still used the inn though they damned the traitor that sold it to the incomers. They had no choice, as it was also the only meeting place in the village. Tomorrow was an important day, and they had to be prepared.
Billy was the last to arrive, and stepping over the threshold felt like committing a crime against his own beliefs. He had showered and changed his clothes, but the smell of fish still lingered. It was in his blood whether he liked it or not.
‘Where you been?’ a rough voice barked out.
‘Sorry, Ralph,’ Billy said, sliding into a chair at the collection of tables. ‘Had to get something done.’
Ralph scowled at him, his grey eyebrows meeting in the middle, his mouth fixed in a sneer more often seen on bulldogs.
‘Nothing more important than tomorrow,’ he growled.
‘What’s a-matter, Billy?’ a voice mocked. ‘Got cold feet about choosing a girl?’
‘Gone soft like Mackerel Willy did twenty year back,’ another man said. ‘He couldn’t make up his mind and buggered off. You doing the same?’
‘I know what I am doing,’ Billy said. ‘And what I’ve got to say. Who’s got me a drink?’
‘Get your own,’ Ralph spat back.
Billy looked at the bar where the London woman stood. There was no-one else in the pub except that weird old lady. She sat at a corner table with a fork in one hand, a ‘Hello!’ magazine in the other, and a hotpot between the two. Her mouth was turned down in a grimace, and Billy couldn’t decide if it was because of what she was eating or what she was reading.
‘Well?’
‘I ain’t putting money on that counter. You know me, Ralph.’
‘I know you to be a yellow son of a guppy. Get yourself a drink or go without.’
Billy gave in and stood up just as the London lad appeared behind the bar.
‘You’re alright,’ he said, sitting again. ‘I’ll go without.’
‘If you’re sure, Tinkerbell.’ Ralph laughed, and the other men sniggered.
Billy swallowed and forced a grin. ‘Just get on with it.’
‘Who you got in mind then, Billy? Who’s the lucky girl?’
‘Oh, hello, Dad,’ Billy said. ‘Didn’t see you there.’
He looked around the circle of faces: grey or white beards, tanned flesh, creases in their cheeks crisscrossing like trawler nets, sunk-in eyes and hair worn long and shaggy. They could have been clones. He knew there had been no inbreeding in the village, none that was recorded at any rate, because he’d researched the local genealogy, but still, someone somewhere back in a family line had crossed a line. Everyone was someone’s cousin. You were either a fisherman, or you were a fisherman’s son, or else you were a fisherman’s wife or daughter. The men, all older than Billy, had been sculpted by the weather over the years, chiselled and salt blasted into near identical shapes. It was how he would be one day.
‘You with us, Billy?’ his dad asked and rested a calming hand on Billy’s arm. ‘You’re shaking some.’
‘Just excitement, Dad,’ Billy lied. He had no idea why he was trembling. Perhaps it was because he had just realised that he didn’t want to end up looking like everyone else.
‘So,’ his dad carried on. ‘Who you going to choose?’
‘Ah, now there’s the thing,’ Ralph said. He put down his beer in such a way that the other men felt obliged to do the same or else find a glass smashed over his head. ‘Thing is, I decided that we’re doing things different tomorrow.’
‘Different?’ Billy stopped shaking and flushed with concern. He didn’t like anything interfering with village tradition.
‘You see,’ Ralph explained. ‘I am going to make the Merman Speech tomorrow, not you.’
Billy’s blood froze in his veins.
‘You what?’
‘You heard.’
This was an outrage. Every year at the fisher-festival, the youngest working fisherboy spoke as the merman. It was a great honour and one that had been handed down through the generations. It had always fallen to someone in Billy’s family, apart from once in 1925 when a boy called Mary had lied about his age. There was a suspicion that he had also lied about his gender, but his grandfather was the village elder, so no-one liked to say anything. Every year the merman would be called to the platform. The boy would talk about the importance of keeping the village safe from the outside world. He would also select a girl to be the Fisher-Festival mermaid. The honour would guarantee her family free haddock for a year. The merman always became the most popular boy in the village, with one family at least. Not only that, but he could keep the mermaid as his girlfriend.
‘But I got my speech all worked out,’ Billy protested. ‘And I’m going to say what you want to hear.’
‘And what’s that?’ Ralph challenged back.
Billy could see that Ralph’s knuckles had turned white around his jug handle, but he braved it out. ‘That we have to stand up to these incomers.’ He said it loud enough for Sandra and Mark to hear. Paper rustled at the corner table. ‘That we ain’t going to put up with them from down south coming here and thinking that they can take over, just because they’ve got money and all we got is the sea. I’m going to remind everyone of our ancient traditions. Traditions that my dad here and his dad, and all of yours, have kept alive all this time. People ’round here have got a sniff of what they can make from selling their houses now that the pub’s not ours anymore, and we got to stop the rot before it spreads. That’s what I’m going to say. What are you going to come out with?’
Ralph let go of his glass and sat back. He spoke softly, a sure sign of danger. Ralph only used a pleasant voice when he was about to rampage. ‘Well, Billy,’ he said. ‘For one thing, I don’t think you really mean that. I know you like all the old stories, and you got this thing for keeping it all going, but you ain’t tough enough. Who’s going to listen to a sprat like you? We got to make them understand, particularly the women, that our village is dying. There’s just three boats left working and one of them’s Old Sam’s. He’s only got one eye now, and no sense of direction.’
As if to prove the point, Old Sam stubbed his cigarette out in his beer.
‘We have to face it, Billy. We need someone stronger than you standing up there. A real man who can hammer the message home. That’s how we’re going to keep our village alive and keep the bloody foreigners out.’
‘I can do that,’ Billy replied in his firmest voice.
‘Well, that ain’t true, Tiddler.’ Even his dad agreed with Ralph and thought Billy too weak to stir the villagers up and inspire them to repel any future invaders.
‘I’ll say this one last time,’ Ralph said, and the thin layer of charm melted to reveal the threat behind his eyes. ‘I’m the elder, I make the rules. I can change the old customs if I want, and I’m going to. I don’t trust you young folk. You’re all too soft.’
Ten pairs of eyes darted from one pair to the other until all possible combinations were exhausted and they came to rest on Ralph.
‘But I’m the merman this year!’ Billy protested, but it was feeble. ‘I’m the youngest. That’s how it’s always been.’
‘Not anymore,’ Ralph shot back. ‘I’ve decided you don’t count. So, got any problem with that?’
The pairs of eyes fell into place on Billy one after the other, like a line of net-floats dropping behind a boat.
‘You don’t question my plans, right?’ Ralph’s voice was menacing. ‘Not if you don’t want to get your hand hooked to a trawl line two mile out and three fathoms down.’
A chilled silence settled around the tables. Billy’s dad nudged him as if to say, enough. The other men admired their filthy fingernails.
‘I bet you’ll make a great merman, Ralph,’ a keenly sycophantic voice chipped in.
‘I do like to have something to sink my teeth into,’ Ralph said. ‘Like shutting down this pub and kicking the foreigners out on their arses.’ He grinned, showing that, in fact, he had no teeth to sink into anything.
The flash of a wall light on a glossy cover caught Billy’s eye, and he saw that the woman in the corner had changed magazines. This one was titled, ‘Indeed?’
Ralph crossed his arms and sat back. The others followed suit.
‘But where will we go to drink?’ the sycophant squeaked.
‘That’s the beauty, ain’t it? We get these foreigners out, we get our pub back. None of this fancy B and bloody B, gastro-grub and toffy-nosed toffs from toff land. No more bleeding foreigners, just our own pub, like it used to be. Thought you’d like that, Billy.’
Billy caught a whiff of cigar smoke and wondered if perhaps Ralph was right. He swallowed that alien thought and scowled at the London boy to reassure himself.
‘How are you going to do it?’ Billy’s dad asked, reaching for his pint. He hesitated a moment because Ralph wasn’t drinking, but when the leader reached for his own jug, everyone else did the same.
‘You leave that to me,’ said Ralph. ‘It’s all in my speech. Let them come and hear it with everyone there. They’ll realise they’re not welcome and soon turn on their rudder and bugger off back to wherever. It’ll be a lesson for anyone else thinking of selling up to outsiders. You’ll see.’ He threw a toothless sneer at the mother and son behind the bar. ‘They won’t feel so safe after tomorrow, not when I’ve made the Merman Speech. All in favour?’
Everyone, apart from Bill,y spat on the floor.
‘That’s carried then.’
Billy’s dad leant to him and whispered, ‘Sorry, lad. Maybe next year.’
Billy knew there was nothing he could do. He didn’t mind the idea of getting these Londoners out of the pub, but he didn’t like the way Ralph had just written off years of folklore in one spit.
The talk around the table turned to fish as it always did, but Billy didn’t join in. He sat seething. The old guard had stolen his one chance to show that he was more than just a fisherboy, and now, no-one would ever know his true potential.
