The boards are wet under your boots and your step makes a thick, soft sound that goes nowhere. You walk out past the first lamppost, where the paint has come away in long strips and the iron underneath has taken on the colour of the sea. The sea is flat today, the colour of an old spoon. Ahead, the pier runs out a long way into the grey, narrowing as it goes, its rail softened by mist. A row of gulls stands along the top bar, all facing the same direction, as if they had agreed on it earlier. You do not hurry. The air tastes faintly of salt and of the creosote that was painted on these boards a long summer ago.
The planks are dark with the morning's rain. Here and there a knot in the wood has swelled and stands proud, and you step around them without thinking. Between the planks you can see thin strips of water far below, moving in slow ovals around the piles. A single black crab-pot buoy rocks on the surface, turning and returning. The paint on the benches along the walkway has blistered into fine islands, and salt has settled into the cracks and dried there pale, like frost that forgot to leave. You pass a cast-iron bollard worn to a dull shine on its crown by decades of ropes. A length of green twine is still knotted around its base, frayed at the ends, going nowhere now.
Further out, the gulls do not move as you approach. They stand with their feathers pulled close, watching the water, or watching nothing. One shifts from one foot to the other and settles again. Their bodies are very white against the tin-coloured sea, and the red on their beaks is the only warm colour in the whole hour. A small wave lifts against a pile somewhere beneath you and lets itself down with a hushed slap, and then another, spaced out long like breath. From somewhere further along the coast comes the two-note sound of a buoy bell, thinned by distance, and then silence, and then the bell again. A ship must be out there past the mist, though you cannot see it. You keep walking.
You put a hand on the rail. The wood is cold and softened, its grain raised where the weather has eaten the softer parts away and left the harder fibres standing. Your palm finds a brass plate screwed into the top, its edges rounded, its letters worn shallow by weather and by other hands. You can feel rather than read where they once were. A little further on, a section of rail has been replaced with newer timber, paler, still square at its corners, and where the old meets the new there is a seam of darker caulk. You rest your weight for a moment. Below the rail, the iron brackets are scabbed with rust in layers, red under orange under a dusting of salt. Everything your hand touches has been touched a long time by the weather before you.
The smell out here is simpler than it was on the shore. Wet pine from the boards. The faint tar of the old paint. A thread of diesel, very thin, rising from some boat tied up out of sight. And under all of it the great cold smell of the sea itself, which is not fishy today but only wide, like the smell of a stone pulled from deep water. A fleck of woodsmoke drifts past from the village behind you and is gone before you are sure of it. The mist has softened the horizon into a single grey, sea and sky meeting without a line, and the cold of it rests gently against your face without stinging. You draw a slow breath and the air goes down cool into your chest and comes back out as a little ghost that fades before it clears the rail.
The planks change sound as you go further out. Nearer the shore they gave a thick muffled knock; out here they have a hollower voice, with more water beneath them, and each footstep seems to travel some distance under the boards before it stops. A gull somewhere behind you lets out one soft mew, not a cry, more like a comment, and then is quiet. Water moves between the piles in long draws and releases, a sound like somebody turning pages in another room. A rope-end, hanging from a cleat, taps once against wood, waits, taps again. The pier does not creak, exactly. It settles. You can hear the small adjustments it is making to its own weight, to the tide, to the cold coming down from the north. You walk through these sounds without disturbing them.
Near the far end, the fishing rod is propped against the rail where somebody left it. It is an old rod, the cork of its handle darkened by use, the reel silvered with salt. A line goes from the tip down into the water and disappears there. No one is with it. A canvas bag slumps beside it, its top folded over, the fabric darkened along the bottom where it has sat on the wet boards. A thermos leans against the bag. None of it has been abandoned, you can tell. Someone is only elsewhere for a while. You pass it without looking long, the way you would pass a coat left on a chair. The line moves very slightly where it enters the water, shifting with the slow pull of the sea, drawing a faint silver thread that loosens and tightens and loosens again.
At the end of the pier there is a square of heavier planking and a last rail, and beyond it only water. You stop here. The gulls have stayed further back, a grey and white punctuation along the rail behind you. The sea reaches out flat in every direction, with the mist lowered onto it like a soft hand. A long way off, a darker shape — a headland, perhaps, or a tanker standing still at anchor — shows and then un-shows as the air thickens and thins. A cormorant surfaces nearer in, low and black, holds for a breath, and goes under again without a ripple. The water where it was smooths itself. A gull on the rail turns its head a quarter-turn and returns it. Somewhere the bell sounds once more, slower now, or perhaps only further.
The cold has come into the cuffs of your coat and into the edges of your hair, but gently, the way cold settles rather than arrives. You lean your forearms on the end rail and let your gaze go out over the flat water. The grey is not one grey. There is a lighter band where the sun is, somewhere behind all of it, pressing faintly through. There is a darker band where the sea deepens. Between them the mist holds its own shade, neither sea nor sky. A piece of kelp drifts past below, turning slowly, its long brown ribbon opening and closing like a slow hand. The tide, you can feel now, is on the turn. The water against the piles has changed the rhythm of its small slap, fractionally slower, fractionally lower. Nothing announces it. It simply is different than it was.
You stand a while. A gull lifts from the rail somewhere behind you without sound, the way they sometimes do, and resettles further along. The rope-end taps, waits, taps. The bell across the water gives its two notes and holds its silence longer this time before giving them again. The mist closes a little more on the far headland and the darker shape is gone. A single drop gathers at the end of a rail bolt above the water and falls, and another takes its place and hangs there, growing. You turn at last and begin the slow walk back, and the boards take your weight again with their thick soft sound, and the line of gulls stays where it is, facing the grey, and behind you the rod leans patiently against the rail, and the tide, unhurried, keeps folding its slow pages into itself, and the light goes on softening, and softening, and