Last light; a portrait of Newlyn
A commission from Linseed Journal for their second volume, ‘The Olive’.
“In the brighter months, we are a mirror of water. The tide retreats and we flood forwards, crossing the threshold of the shoreline until we are a stroke beyond our depths. Evening arrives quietly, tipsy with the heat of day. On one side, the harbour stagnates with filling crab tanks; on the other, a young chef grills sardines over coals.
Smells converge, hot and airless, leaving appetites confused in their wake. This heat brings cravings for salt, the kind that washes over and dries as map-lines that mark where once was water, crystallised in eyebrows or lining the top edge of our lips. Where the harbour walls extend into suggestions of beach, we brine in the shallows, faces beaconed to the sun in an outline of water. We spill everywhere — hair dripping onto the rocks, soles opened on barnacles, food wrappers and beer cans left in gaps between the stones.
This is the endless season. Last light is a mirror of the first, the unmediated hours stretching with the tide and offering a quietening as the sun begins its descent. It takes a certain familiarity to come to call this ‘quiet’ — the harbour calms but never stops entirely. Everything is constantly in shift. Boats and people arrive and often leave but don’t always return; lorries drive the catch away; the slipway reverberates with hulls being gutted and reformed; lifeboats create temporary gullies as they look for casualties; children jump through the waves.
It seems a few of us are here tonight, drawn seawards in an unspoken preservation of these final warmer evenings. At any hour, the harbour is subject to the occasional painter or photographer, each offering their own translation of the same scene in a mirror of the many who came before. It’s a carefully positioned view, as if for its place on a postcard, the frame rarely shifting towards the streets after-hours or the lines of graffiti that read as evolving conversations of political debate.
They say the light is different here; evening turns the sea into a pool of liquid metal that a breeze might spill. It is an inevitability that Summer will soon give way to Autumn, which itself holds a promise of Winter tides. Trawlers leave for open water almost as soon as they return, sounding disjointed horns on exit from the harbour and lowering their netted arms in strange calls for embrace. Ring netters join them in this soft-lit evening, the boats circling shoals of pilchards whilst gulls predate. Salted whole and pressed, this place revolved around preserving these oily fish, slight traces remaining in the lower streets that house old presses and channels where the debris washed out.
We are a small curve in a bay of a land much larger, but tonight it seems we are on an island of our own. Someone lights a fire that will stay burning through till dawn, driftwood blackening with the flames beneath whole mackerels that drip with their own oil. We stretch and turn our bodies to heat another surface until the sun slips and we are cast in shade. It is last orders for our final entry into the sea, joining the boats and gulls as we wash sweat from our bodies and make a promise to return to this stretch tomorrow.
A quiet at last light; the water stilling, our bare skin salting.”
