I watched her serving wine at table nine, a Chablis, not the best on the menu, but an acceptable wine all the same, and well paired with the local oysters. She served a sample for the man to taste. When he nodded his approval she reached across and poured wine into the woman’s glass. She filled the man’s glass, the couple smiled and thanked her, she left the bottle on the table, and that was that.

Fourteen steps from table nine to the kitchen.

“Are you out of your mind?” I asked, as the door swung closed behind us. “How could you?”

“How could I what?”

She acted as if nothing had happened, as if she didn’t give a damn.

“I can’t believe you, really I can’t. This isn’t some two-bit diner.”

I’m not sure where the two-bit diner came from, probably late nights reading the Chandler novel some guest had left behind.

“What are you on about?” she asked.

“What am I on about? You always, always serve the wine from the right.”

I might have said ‘always’ a bit loudly, especially the second time. She shook her head and blew air from her nostrils.

“Are you for real?” she asked, then did the thing with her eyebrows and shoulders.

I couldn’t reply. Two-bit diner was bad enough. I might find myself calling her ‘doll’ or ‘sweetheart’, or accuse her of being a ‘crazy dame’. To top it all the couple even slipped her a tip, as if they couldn’t care less from which side the wine was served.

“You need to lighten up,” she said, not meanly, but she said it all the same.

Instead of countering with a cutting Marlowe comeback I blushed, feeling inadequate, as if I was the one at fault.

I don’t think she means to rub me up the wrong way. I do it to myself. I’m not entirely self-unaware. She’s everything I’m not: down-to-earth, easy-going, always ready with a smile. Her unaffected charm earns far more tips than my conscientious efficiency.

I live above the laundromat. I save a ton on heating bills in winter, which lasts three-quarters of the year in these parts. But in summer the dryers downstairs make it so hot I have to leave windows open. Apart from the free heating the best thing about the place is the view. I lean my elbows on the wooden windowsill and look out at the harbour while people take it in shifts to hang around sucking cigarettes on the pavement below, narrowing their eyes and mixing their smoke with the floral fragrances of washing powder.

The pier measures three hundred and seventeen steps from end to end. On my days off I fish out past the harbour’s rainbow slicks where the diesel smoke from passing boats is swept away by the Atlantic’s cleansing breeze. I taste the cold ozone tang of bladderwrack and kelp’s brine on the flat of my tongue. Embittered gulls moan like unoiled cranks and swoop and flap, wings flashing white against the grey and green. I never tire of it, unless it rains, and even then it’s not so bad.

I nod to the fishermen. I know all their boats. I know who’s coming in, who’s going out, who’s due back. I can tell how good the catch has been by how deep a boat sits in the water. The tides, the phases of the moon, when the fish run, I know all that as well and could banter with the fishermen about it. But I don’t. I keep to myself. Aloof, or an anagram thereof.

I stay out on the pier until I’ve caught enough for dinner. It’s free food, fresh and healthy. Economy and autonomy, all on the gambler’s edge of anticipation, waiting for the tug, the play, the reeling in. I allow myself this careful window of unpredictability, fiddling with bait and fishhooks close to the salty stacks of lobsterpots, forty six of them at last count.

I catch pollock and mullet mostly, but in summer there’s an abundance of mackerel. I only take the small fish, within the legal limits of course. The older, bigger fish are toxic, full of mercury and plastic. My blood boils just thinking of it. Sometimes it makes my wind-whipped eyes streak with angry tears and I find myself beating the glittering heads of my scapefish against the shined granite of the harbour walls.

I gut my catch on the spot and scrape away their shimmering scales. I’ll even filet them, if my hands aren’t too cold for the job, and leave the heads and tails and spines and guts for the harbour cats to scavenge. There’s no shortage of them, with their lithe slinking and their sideways looks. They’ll still be on the prowl long after I’ve gone back upstairs to flour and fry the fish. I eat the fish silently, with boiled potatoes, in alternating forkfuls. I don’t need fancy food or variety. This liminal meal of earth-meets-sea is more than good enough - a bit of salt and pepper, a squeeze of lemon if they have any at the grocers, which mostly they don’t. The rest of the time, when I’m at work, I eat whatever the cooks serve for staff meals.

I could navigate the dining room with my eyes closed. I count the steps between each table and the kitchen. It’s a habit I find hard to break, this involuntarily accountancy of footfalls. I see how Ciara wastes her steps, covering unneeded ground.

“Work with your head, not your feet,” I’ve told her many times. I tell all my colleagues, hoping they’ll see the value in my advice, in the kilometres they might save. Instead they tease me, asking me the number of paces between table seven and table three. They laugh when I tell them the answer, then as if I am not to be trusted they count for themselves and laugh even more when they discover I am right. Except Ciara, she doesn’t laugh. We exchange glances and something passes between us, though quite what I’m not sure.

The shine and sparkle of the linen-clad tables when they’re set up is something, especially on bright days with the small framed rectangles of the windows casting their stretched rhomboids and parallelograms across the room. I show Ciara how to line up the horizon with the window frames so that the curve of the earth is clear to see.

I use my saved kilometres to walk out on the cliff path between lunch and dinner shifts, my view unfettered by the geometry of window panes, the near constant rush of cold wind roaring in my tingling ears, reminding me I’m alive, while numbing me at the same time. The freeness of the unhindered trail is an antidote to the mincing dance steps of stops and starts and turns. Few people credit the fancy footwork restaurant work requires. There are days my mind wanders and I mercifully forget to count my steps, though those days are few enough. Besides, there are rituals that must be observed: shoe laces tightened at the halfway point between the hotel and the lighthouse or the sacrament of black tea sipped from a metal flask while sitting cold-arsed on the granite foundation stones of the lighthouse.

The flask was an improbable Christmas gift from Ciara.

“But I didn’t get you anything,” I said.

“You didn’t need to.”

I find it hard to square her generosity with her carelessness, the way she’ll let the tablecloth hang unevenly, or neglect to square and centre the chairs with their front edges barely touching - in my mind it’s gently kissing, but to say those words aloud would be another chance to invite the mockery of my colleagues - the starched white cloth.

I bought her a notebook in return. It wasn’t the first thing that sprang to mind, but anything else in the harbour gift shop seemed fickle, tawdry, cheap in every way except in price.

“Handmade by women in Nepal,” the shopkeeper assured me, her head dipping as she spoke, the hennaed curtains of her hair drawn and undrawn either side of her pale and eager face as she turned the pages, eight, nine, pointing out the fragments of Himalayan plant-stalks and petals embedded in the rough-made paper.

I gritted my teeth as Ciara tore open the wrapping, forcing myself not to suggest cutting the tape with a scissors or a knife. She crumpled the paper into a ball. I would have folded it, whether to discard or save, maybe to cut into origami squares that my restless fingers could bend and fold into camels, flowers, and cranes.

“You can write in it,” I mumbled.

“Oh, is that what it’s for?”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“It’s lovely. Thank you.”

She leaned forward and gave me a peck on the cheek. No, peck is the wrong word, it’s too fowl, too avian, but if I say she kissed me it gives the wrong impression. At least I think it does. I’m unsure. I have trouble telling how these things work, the things other people do so naturally, without calculation or forethought. I’m not good at spontaneity. Small talk makes me cringe and blush and that makes people feel awkward and I don’t want that. I don’t like to ruffle feathers if I can help it, least of all my own. But sometimes I can’t help it. I do the opposite of helping and make things worse.

I prefer to keep to myself, within the safety of my routines. I’ve built a life around order, setting up the tables, polishing cutlery and glasses. At times I think I might have done well on an assembly line, but that would be too stifling. I enjoy the variety in my work, but also the reassuring nature of the unfolding of events. There’s a start, a middle, and a finish to each work day: the set-up, the serving, the tidying everything up at the end of a shift, order restored.

Most people here work in the hotel, or on boats. Indoors or out, on water or land. I am a blow in. Ciara grew up here around ropes and knots and nets and has the calloused hands to prove it. The untamable blonde frizz of her hair is well used to being tossed by ocean winds. Her eyes change colour with the weather, like the sea. She blushed when I told her. I used to think she only talked to me because she felt sorry for me, which made me feel sorry for myself. But she said she wanted to know how and what I thought, and asked me about the books.

“I can’t begin to imagine what that’d be like,” she said when I told her I had only ever seen the sea by looking out from land. “We can’t be having that.”

She took me out on her father’s fishing boat, just the two of us, on unsteady footing, the waves rocking us from side to side, the sea smelling like blood. She steered and worked the noisy engine while I stood closer to the prow, gripping a metal rail so tightly my hands ached, feeling it uneven and rust-mottled beneath salt-slick layers of blue gloss paint.

Out at sea the waves were more regular, uninfluenced by the complicated harmonics of the harbour’s percolated backwash. I caught myself counting them, seventeen, eighteen, which was a new one, and tried to stop, nineteen, twenty. The motor chugged a faster beat. I counted that desperate measure too, onetwothreefourfivesixseven. The wind pulled the exhaust fumes away behind us, our faces buffeted by a clear fresh wind that might have travelled thousands of kilometres without encountering an obstacle.

The rise and fall of the boat, four, five, reminded me of the giddy disorientation of a childhood playground swing. My mother’s hands pushing me from behind as I swung higher, feet facing towards the treetops, higher, twelve, towards the sky, thirteen, excited and afraid. I couldn’t remember where that playground was, but this image long-forgotten resurrected stayed, projected on the murky green Atlantic rise and fall, my mother’s hands thrusting me forwards, hands I knew would find me as I fell backwards through the twin arcs of gravity and time, a tiny me, squealing in joy and fear, pinned against the sky, counting every day of every year that had passed without her.

“Are you alright,” called Ciara. I nodded, letting go of the rail for long enough to wipe my eyes.

“Just the wind making my eyes water.”

“It’ll do that,” she said with a laugh, half-shouting to make herself heard over the engine noise and the rhythmic slushing pulse, five, six, of the water parting against the hull. “You could always face the other way.”

I turned my back to the wind, away from the horizon, only to find another horizon, the band of coast frighteningly distant, intermittently hidden by the rise or fall of a wave, or the rim of the boat’s hull.

“How far are we from land?” I asked, trying not to let the terror I felt creep into my voice.

“Not far if we can still see it,” she said. “Less than three kilometres. We’ll go a wee bit further.”

The strip of land stretched and narrowed even further until it disappeared. Only water in every direction. Frightened, disoriented, exhilarated, I was on that childhood swing again.

Ciara shut off the engine. The sudden ringing silence almost hurt my ears, then other sounds flooded in: the creaking flex of the boat’s timbers, water lapping against the hull. The sea was calmer now that we no longer tried to plough a furrow through it. Sunlight through the clouds struck the sleek green skin of the water’s surface and shattered into a thousand glistening sparkles. Other than a few gulls wheeling and diving in the distance there wasn’t another living being in sight.

In a movie this would be the part where something intimate happens. But this wasn’t the type of movie where we kiss, or fall to making riotous love on a heaped tangle of smelly fishing nets, though I can’t say I didn’t play these scenes before my eyes. It could be a quieter, more austere kind of movie, the type that comes in black and white with subtitles. But no subtitles were needed for this silent sharing of sea and sky. Ciara smiled, not saying anything, aware this was my first time. My world was bigger, stretched to infinity. I let go of the rail.

The stack of plates was still hot from the dishwasher and heavy in my arms. I distributed them around the tables, two here, four there, a whole line of tables-for-two by the big bay windows. We placed the cutlery. Ciara was nearby. She stopped to watch me carefully align a knife and fork. She reached to unstraighten them, sending them off at ridiculous angles. I set them right and she did it again. I was about to realign the knife and the fork once more, but Ciara took hold of my hands.

“It’s okay,” she said softly.

Despite the impulse to fix the cutlery I let her keep hold of my hands, a quivering vibration moving up my arms and through my heart to somewhere in my stomach, like a sudden shoal-surge of fish glinting just below the surface of sunlit water.