Short story · 4 min read ·
The Puppeteer of Gannet Quay
A travelling puppeteer performs a seaside show on the quay at Gannet Point, and one puppet, a fisherman with a face that is always half in shadow, keeps turning round to look at the audience as if it knows who among them is going to drown.
Mortimer Quill had toured the coast with his puppet theatre for thirty years, and in that time he had performed for fishermen, farmers, children on holiday, and once, memorably, a congregation that had come to the wrong hall. He carried his show in a battered van: a painted proscenium with a red curtain, a box of marionettes wrapped in tissue, and one large wooden fisherman with a clay face and a cap that had belonged to his father. The fisherman was the star of the act. He was called Old Jack, and he was the only puppet Mortimer had never repainted.
The show at Gannet Quay was booked for a Saturday in late September, on the stone steps by the lifeboat house, with the tide out and the boats drawn up on the shingle. The audience was small and mostly local: a few women with prams, a man with a dog, three lads from the chandlery who had come to heckle and stayed to watch. Mortimer set up the theatre under a sailcloth awning, lit the lamp, drew back the curtain, and began.
The story was an old one. Jack and his mate Sam took their boat out to sea one morning against the advice of the harbour master. The weather turned. The boat went down. Jack came home alone and told the village what had happened, and the village wept and went back to their nets. Mortimer had performed it a hundred times, with the usual gestures and the usual music, the wind rising on a tin whistle, the boat tipping on a length of blue silk.
Old Jack spoke his lines as he always did, a rough, honest voice pitched slightly low. But halfway through the storm scene the puppet stopped, and turned its head, very slowly, and looked out over the stalls at the audience.
Mortimer had not moved the strings. He was sure of that. He felt the wooden frame stiff in his hand, quite still, and he went on speaking the lines and working the boat, and the puppet went on looking.
It was looking at the lads from the chandlery, who had gone quiet. Then at the man with the dog. Then at the women with prams. Its painted eyes seemed to measure each face in turn, the way a fisherman reads a sky, and when it came to the youngest of the lads, a thin boy in a red jumper who had been laughing, the puppet's head tilted just a little, as though it had seen something behind the boy's face that was not yet there.
The boy stopped laughing. He stood up and said, rather loudly, that he had to get home. His friends laughed at him and told him to sit down, and he did, but his face had gone white.
The show ended with Jack alone on the quay, staring out to sea. Mortimer packed up the theatre in the fading light and found the boy waiting by the van.
"Mister," the boy said. "Your puppet. He was looking at me."
Mortimer said that Old Jack looked at everybody, that was the art of it, and the boy nodded and walked away down the quay toward the harbour road.
That night Mortimer did not sleep. He sat in the van with the lamp lit and the wooden fisherman on his knee, and in the small hours he found, tucked under the cap, a scrap of paper he had never seen before. It was dated the day of the show. It listed three names in pencil, in a careful hand that was not his, and beside the third name, in the same hand, a single word: *Tonight*.
The third name was the boy's. Mortimer rang the harbour the next morning and asked. The boy's family had been out on the water since five, fishing the outer reef in a small motor boat. The sea had turned at dawn. They had not come back.
Mortimer took the puppet down to the quay and sat it on the steps by the lifeboat house, facing out toward the empty water. He did not work the strings. He did not speak. Old Jack sat there all day, and when the boat came in at last, late in the afternoon, very slowly, with a single grey figure at the tiller and nobody else aboard, the puppet's head had turned to face the harbour mouth, and the painted eyes were quite calm.