Fish Going Anywhere

by Freya Bainbridge (United Kingdom (Great Britain))

A leap into the unknown United Kingdom

It was my first time on the east coast of England, and it sent a certain thrill up my spine to know that as I stood at the water’s edge I was looking beyond, that Europe was on the other side. Places like Copenhagen, Monaco, Budapest. A small village somewhere in the south of Italy that I didn’t know the name of where someone was pushing a boat from the soft sand and releasing it like a fish, going anywhere. I was always standing somewhere and looking for somewhere else. We were in the Yorkshire seaside town of Whitby on a writing retreat. The evening before, a small group of us had bundled into a late coach that took us from the university over moors dressed in dense fog like the view was being deliberately coy. The hostel we were staying in was four centuries old and sat atop the East Cliff, quietly overlooking the harbour below. At night the landscape was dotted with small, bobbing globes of light like the buoys out at sea - street lamps turning on, strings of bulbs hung to decorate the decks of small boats blinking into the water and the water blinking back. The hostel overlooked the harbour, but it also rubbed shoulders with a building even older than itself - the ruins of the 7th century Whitby Abbey, destroyed during Henry VIII’s reign in the Dissolution of the Monasteries. A husk of itself, it had remained a landmark on the headland for returning sailors. After unpacking - and a reading of Stoker’s Dracula - Rob had told us of a pub that “exists.” He said it’s where a friend would go for a drink in Whitby back in his uni days. He said he couldn’t quite remember the name, but he reckoned he’d know it when he saw it. And this is how we followed him in the dark: with an open trust, the kind that can be found in both familiar and foreign places, where you navigate by what feels right. We were following a nameless second-hand memory from the nineties, a vague idea that somewhere a pub once stood, and wouldn’t it be nice if it still did? This cat and mouse game we play with memory reminded me of a trip to London with my dad, where the capital had startled itself on me - a Northerner - in predictable ways and I had walked like a cliché through its streets, wide-eyed and hopeless. He had wanted to find a pub he’d visited thirty years earlier and I had followed him with the same open trust, chasing after the ghosts that we leave in the places that we visit and return to. To get into the centre required traversing the famous 199 steps and we teetered slowly, a kind of vertigo swirling within us, the hand railings too far away on either side and Whitby town coming up to swallow us whole. From here, 176 steps up, we looked across the bay and noted several streets veering upwards on the other side, lined with more strings of multicoloured bulbs like little lit runways, a sense of going places. A little further to the right and there was West Cliff, and if we squinted our eyes we could just make out the Whalebone Arch and, through it, the James Cook monument. Made of bronze, he was forever staring at the sea. Like me, he was a man who was always standing somewhere and looking for somewhere else. Later, after we’d wound our way through Whitby's side streets and soft bends like a knot, past Arguments Yard, we came to a spot that Rob thought could be the place, but it was long since closed, and bordered up to time. There was a sense of sadness, but also relief. Though we didn’t openly acknowledge it, it felt like we had been released from the past and we continued onward through the dark, our steps a little lighter in the knowledge that we were each walking towards memories that were reaching back to meet us, still unknown, and entirely our own.