Seascraper

by Benjamin Wood

He gets the sense that something’s turning in his fortunes. All those dreary shifts at sea, gone unrewarded. All his ma’s relentless praying before bedtime. Well, at last a table scrap of luck’s been thrown to them to gnaw the meat off. It’s been ages since he rode along this track without a grumbling dread inside his stomach, looking forward to the night.

Pop would say the biggest catches are the ones you can’t be there to make. The mind will taunt itself by dwelling on the could’ve beens – no good will ever come from those regrets.

When you’re young, you think life is a string of choices. It’s either you choose this door or the other door, or jump out of the window. You don’t realise that most of what’ll happen to you is because of other people’s choices. There’s a door already opened for you, so you walk straight through it, and you wonder how you wound up on the fire escape.

It’s his mind he’s worried for – he hasn’t quite emerged yet from the place he was before. The presence of his father lingers in his mind, as though the sun has passed behind a cloud; still there, still coming back, but when?

He can’t pretend it wasn’t meaningful to know his father’s voice in concert with his own, how good it might’ve been. Perhaps his appetite for music was inborn and he’s been drowning it at sea each morning he comes out here.

the town feels smaller than it did when he rode through it last, the outer world seems fuller and less difficult to reach. He’s added something to it now – it mightn’t be much cop or good enough to get the admiration of the crowd down at the Fisher’s Rest, but he can say he made it on his own, and there’ll be more to come.

This little snippet of the coastline he relies on for his livelihood does not belong to him or anybody, but it’s always there, preceding him, outlasting him for sure, and he can recognise his loyalty to the ghosts who walk along it – he can even manage to respect himself for being steadfast to the work – but there’s no meaning in it any more. It doesn’t matter to the sea who visits it, or to the shrimp who scrapes them from the sand. A song, though – well, a song belongs to someone. To whoever dreamed it up. Yesterday it wasn’t even born, and now it’s in the world. He can’t go on ignoring what he’s best at, and it isn’t shanking in his grandpa’s cart.