– There’s one thing Tommy said that’s really stuck with me, ‘I don’t hold with superstition.’ He said it to me the night before his last trip. The last time that I ever saw him. You’re asking me what it was like for us in those days? The sense of community you got back then. Well, there’s nothing to match it now. But it was hard on the boats. I heard about the ice and the being frozen stiff in your boots, and sometimes you’d get these skippers that were plain evil. The stories I heard. I worked in the docks, but I heard the stories in the pub. They all came in when they were back on land. Nothing went on that I didn’t hear about one way or another. But what Tommy said. That’s stayed with me. In those days everyone had a little something, a charm or a taboo. It were normal. Some still do. So to say, ‘Oh, that’s not for me, I don’t believe in all that.’ It was a big thing. And then for his ship not to return from the very next trip he took after saying it? Well. Some would say there’s the proof of the old beliefs.

Kate leans across the coffee table and picks up a custard cream. She nibbles it along each of the four edges in turn. Mr Osborn is lost in a reverie. His eyes flicker, seeing faces from the past, even as they are focussed on nothing in this room here in the present. Kate swallows a yawn, but even swallowed, the yawn makes her eyes water. She doesn’t want to be rude so she quickly blinks the tears away, looking into Mr Osborn’s face with extra attentiveness.

– Yes, Mr Osborn, – she says, encouragingly. Half the time he speaks in riddles, and the rest he leaps and loops around so many different subjects and time periods that Kate’s head is spinning.

The old man is pausing now. He’s ready for a cup of tea. Kate brings it over to him. He’s the third resident of this nursing home that she’s interviewed. It is interesting, she tells herself, it is. It’s just that after a while their stories sound the same to her. There’s always the evil skipper, and there’s always the lost community spirit. In the evenings the empty screen of her laptop reflects eerily onto her face. Her thesis won’t write itself. She needs their memories. Mr Osborn is ready to begin again. He has dipped a digestive into his tea and stuffed the softened biscuit between his 87 year old lips. When he talks Kate can see the grainy mush on his tongue. She looks away from him, pretending to scribble on her notepad. She tries to bring him back to talking about himself:

– What was it like working in the docks? Was that what your dad did?

– No, my dad was a trawlerman. Took me on the pleasure trip, like all the other boys at my age. I didn’t find it pleasurable. – Mr Osborn laughs. Kate can hear gurgling in the laugh, fluid in his lungs.

– They don’t let me smoke in here, – Mr Osborn says, lifting yellowed fingers to his lips in a memory of a movement. – Tommy though, he loved it when he went out with his dad on his pleasure trip. I remember he came back, couldn’t stop talking about it. About the things he’d seen. You’d think no-one else ever saw a seal or the sea frozen in plates of frost. You’d think no-one else had anything to show Tommy after that. We fell out in fact. I didn’t see him for a while. I had just got married to my wife, Lollie.

– So what was it about the pleasure trip with your dad that put you off?

– It wasn’t that, – Mr Osborn is suddenly angry. – I got on with my dad, Tommy and his dad were always at each other. It wasn’t that at all.

– I’m sorry, Mr Osborn, I didn’t suggest, I didn’t mean to suggest, – Kate says, starts to say, but Mr Osborn is already talking again. Her words have the impact of motes of dust hitting him in ineffectual mock-meteor strikes. The digestive biscuit is long disintegrated, making reappearances in wet crumbs flying on his plosive speech onto her shirt.

– I asked Tommy about it, this unbelief in the taboos, and he started telling me about his mam. I knew her already a bit. Me and Tommy used to run up and down the streets when we were bairns, so I’d met her before. Big Maggie she was known as. We was all a bit frightened of her. Tommy wasn’t, he could twist her round his little finger.

‘The thing about my mam,’ Tommy told me, ‘is that she really believes in all that stuff. Don’t put new shoes on the table. If you wash on sailing day you will wash your man away. All of that. She never let us say goodbye to our dad when he was off on a trip. He was never allowed to look back at us to wave or owt when he left the house. I used to run after him though and when we was round the corner he’d turn around and put me on his shoulders and we’d go together like that to the dock. So he wasn’t that serious about superstition and he’s always come back.

‘You look surprised,’ Tommy said to me, ‘but me and my dad we didn’t always get on so bad as we do now. It’s just me still being in the house under his roof, it does his head in. “No wife, no girl,” he says to me and it ends up in a row and we end up clouting each other, and then my mam gets upset, and then my dad clouts her and then I get involved, and we all three of us end up with a bloody nose or black eye or summet like that.’

I didn’t ask why he never got married. It wasn’t down to me to ask him about that. We’d been friends so long. We only fell out when I ended up marrying my wife, Lollie. He didn’t speak to me for the longest time. Maybe he thought I’d let him down. He almost said as much that night. We were on our third or fourth pint. He was buying rounds, he was always flush between trips.

‘Don’t you remember when we was kids,’ he asked me, ‘it was always you and me against the world. Do you remember that time we snuck into the Hellyer Brothers warehouse, how old were we then? Eleven? Do you remember how we raced jumping between crate towers, and you twisted your ankle? I was that scared that your mam would find out what we’d been doing and bray us I was shaking.

‘Nowadays it’s all, “settle down, have kids”. I’m not ready for all of that. I don’t think I will be. It’s not for me. I like it on the trawlers, all men together. It’s like the old days then, like we’re all brothers fighting against this great thing, the sea. We’re fighting to keep alive most of the time. It’s not even about fishing then, it’s trying to stay afloat. Battling the waves. Warring against your own body when it wants to collapse with the pain of staying awake and being on your feet so long. You know, ignoring your arms when they’re screaming at you for a rest. Pushing through the pain of the ice that gets right into the middle of you, so all you can feel is the cold stabbing you over and over and your hands are bleeding from the frozen rope rubbing on the gloves. But you’re there with your crew, your brothers, all standing against everything the sea wants to throw at you. And we win, don’t we? We harvest the fish, bring the catch back. That’s living. That’s life.

‘You remember my sister Jodie don’t you? She married One Cod Joe, a great trawlerman he is. He’s a skipper of his own boat now. They’ve got a couple of bairns themselves, sweet children. Jodie, she goes to me, “Tommy you’re missing everything. You’re not looking at life.”

‘But I’m not like her. Or One Cod Joe. Or anyone round here.’

And I knew what he meant. He was looking at me with those screwed up brown eyes, all sea salt worn around the edges. Red and raw. I remember thinking at the time that he looked like he was welling up to cry, but it will have just been the soreness in his eyes from staring into arctic winds. I remember thinking, I know what you mean. But I didn’t tell him. And I didn’t see him again after that night. His trawler never came back.

Mr Osborn stops talking. Kate feels uncomfortable. Something has just happened, she thinks. She will transcribe this interview tonight. She asks Mr Osborn if he has anything else to tell her today.

– No, lass. I think I’m done now. It was good to talk to you, – he says. He pats her hand and she packs up her recording equipment. She stands up to leave first; he is frail and might struggle to stand. But he refuses her offer of help and gets to his feet on his own to shake her hand.