Lost Boys

by Darci Bysouth

  ©Darci Bysouth, 2019

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Thistledown Press Ltd.

  410 2nd Avenue North

  Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7K 2C3

  www.thistledownpress.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Lost boys / stories by Darci Bysouth.

  Names: Bysouth, Darci, 1968- author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190134593 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190134607 | ISBN 9781771871754 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771871761 (HTML) | ISBN 9781771871778 (PDF)

  Classification: LCC PS8603.Y86 L68 2019 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  Cover: photograph from Cueva de las Manos (Cave of Hands),

  Santa Cruz, Argentina, circa 7300 BC

  Cover and book design by Jackie Forrie

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Author photo by Peter Kalasz

  Thistledown Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Government of Canada for its publishing program.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The author would like to thank the editors of the following magazines and periodicals for publishing earlier versions of some of these stories: The Antigonish Review (Issue 92), Appletree Writer’s In on the Shore, The Bridport Anthology 2012, New Writing Scotland (Issue 30), Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts (Volume 12 Issue 1), Bridge House’s On This Day, and The Bristol Prize Anthology (Volume 3).

  Thanks to my teachers at the University of Edinburgh: Douglas Dougan for showing me how to see the story, Gavin Inglis for insisting I choose the right words, and George Anderson for making me look the audience in the eye. My gratitude to the very much missed Helen Lamb, whose mentorship fostered myself and so many others.

  Thanks to the folks at Thistledown Press, and particularly to John Lent, for his kindness, patience and keen insight in editing these stories.

  Thanks to my family for providing a peaceful place in which to create. And finally, my gratitude to Brian and Deanna, for their unflagging encouragement and enthusiasm.

  To my Muse, the original lost boy

  CONTENTS

  ALL THINGS COME TO PASS

  Between Sea and Shore

  Meat

  Cryptodome

  Purple Martin

  Sweet the Sting

  Marrakech

  The Lake of Bones

  Waylaid by Beauty

  The Fabulist

  The Heartbreaks

  THE NIGHT PASSING THROUGH

  Sugar Moon

  Petey

  Logging the Black Spruce

  The Hitchhiker

  WEIGHTING DOWN THE DARK

  Sacrifice

  The Things that Never Happen

  Hold

  Lost Boys

  ALL THINGS COME TO PASS

  BETWEEN SEA AND SHORE

  I HAVE TO CROSS THE WATER to find him. One ocean was behind me, flown over in a haze of engine roar and low oxygen, the hours passed in meal trays and movies while I looked for breaks in the cloud cover. The water was such a long way below that it looked like some other thing; static, dead as stone. That night in my hotel room I dreamed of slipping into those waves and the water setting like concrete in my mouth, and when my alarm woke me I could not move. But there is still a sea crossing to come, and this is the trickier one.

  I make the long drive north through the grey towns and churning turbines, past the scrambling sheep and occasional cow, and north still, to where the rock crumbles to sand. The barrenness surprises me; I’d expected lush hills or rolling heather. Then I turn a bend and the sea swings into view. It’s a warm tropical teal, and edged with pure white sand. A cloud passes and the sky darkens, and the sea is once again that sullen navy. Transient, illusory. It occurs to me that I really could find him here. My belly clenches.

  The ferryman is waiting on the dock, smoking a cigarette.

  “Cannae take your car,” he says, “You come by foot or not at all.”

  So I pocket my keys and hand over my silver. My ribs press against the rusted railings while I wait. There’s a damp fog coming in that’s deadening sight and sound, and leaving me neither here nor there. The ferryman flicks his ash to sea and turns, gesturing for me to come.

  I could go back. I could tell Dylan he wasn’t there and I could watch Dylan pretend detachment: “Yeah cool, mom, I’ve done without him all my life so what’s the difference?”

  But the ferryman waits and I’ve already paid. I hoist my suitcase up the gangplank.

  This sea is nothing like stone. It twists and chops, and the small boat heaves. I lean over the railings to retch and the ferryman looks the other way. I’m thankful for the fog, for the way it throws a curtain between us, and for the fact that I am the only passenger.

  The mist has lifted by the time we reach the village. The little white boats bob in the harbour with their masts jutting like needles from a satin sea, and the houses glow crayon-bright in a setting sun. It’s familiar from the BBC children’s programme Dylan and I would watch when he was little. The opening credits would pan over the smooth sea and untroubled sky, through the open doors of those bright houses and onto the smiling faces, and into a world where every upset could be remedied with enough twinkly application. Dylan could do the rolling accents perfectly and this spooked me; I wasn’t sure if it was a new-found talent or some kind of genetic memory. He asked for the video when he was sick, or when he twisted restless and would not soothe. It calmed him, this place where the worst that could go missing was a letter or key, where all lost things would be recovered before tea-time. But Dylan turned sixteen last spring.

  “You never looked for him. You never told me his name,” he said, glaring at his computer screen. “You never even told him, did you? About me.” His knee juddered underneath the table.

  At sixteen, you don’t know the sea change a few words can bring.

  My son stared at me and rocked back in his chair, his eyes dark and moody, his body precarious and threatening spill. The resemblance was shocking.

  Ronan. I said it out loud for the first time in years, and it still had that feel to it, that moue of mouth halfway between pleasure and sorrow.

  Ronan. Ronan McLeish. The chair righted itself as Dylan sounded the syllables, and his fingers tapped the keyboard. We waited for what might surface.

  “He’ll have changed,” I said while I scanned the faces. “I would hardly know him.” I had the presence of mind to keep my voice steady and my hands from clutching for my son.

  I didn’t think that Ronan could be netted on a social site — I had dabbled a few times, once after a bottle of wine, once after a truly awful blind date — and he was not to be found in any of the usual places. Dylan saw his name in a tourist directory instead, listed under chartered boat services and promising close encounters with seals.

  “Seals?” smirked Dylan. “Freakin’ hell, Mom. Is he some kind of hippie?” But I saw how his eyes had pulled to the name, and desperation made me devious.

  “We could visit,” I said. “We could do the big European trip together, check him out on the way. Hey, maybe he’s got another family now, maybe you’ve got a Scottish stepbrother or two. Wouldn’t that be random, Dilly?”

  Dylan flinched, and I bought just the one ticket. I left Dylan with my mom and told her I was going
to an international conference in Glasgow. My son stared at me; he’d never heard me dissemble before. At least not to another adult.

  Ronan. There’s a slow syncopation when I say it under my breath, like the slap of the sea against dock. The last of the sunlight catches the spume as the ferryman ties on. He shoves his hands into his pockets, then coughs and spits. I see that he’s done with me. I grab my suitcase and pull it behind me, badunk badunk down the gangplank, conscious of his gaze. He’s got the engine started before I reach the sand.

  The lady at the bed and breakfast folds her arms over her cardigan when I ask for the seals.

  “Ronan,” she says, “It’s him you’re wanting. You’ll need to be sharp tomorrow morning. Ronan runs smartly no matter if the tourists come. The seals are his, you know? A right blether he has with them, but he’s always back for the first round at the Blue Man. And still there for last bell, if you know what I mean. You cannot have come for the seals, surely?

  Have you relations on the island?” Her arms unfold and her cardigan droops open. I stay quiet. She sighs. “Aye well. Ronan tells a fine story. When he’s in the mood.”

  She presses a leaflet into my hands the next morning. It’s written in some ornate old script, pure theme pub kitsch, and probably what the tourists expect. The name of the boat knots with his own.

  I find the Selkie Maid, but there’s no sign of Ronan. A seagull steps along the dock, with one bright yellow eye turned in my direction. I settle myself on a bollard. My hands are clammy despite the morning sun.

  He must have changed. But I can’t picture how. I have him in mind as he was, and I’ve held him like that for years. I doubt he did the same for me. He would hardly know me now.

  Dylan laughs at the photos of me from school. Morbid Michelle with hair jet-black and crimped, eyes soot-ringed and sullen. I wasn’t one of the cheerleaders, with their teased highlights and lip gloss smiles. Call me Shell, I told them then, imagining something razor-edged against the skin.

  “Shell,” said Ronan, when he knew me better, “a delicate thing. Pale pink and sounding of the sea. You’ll keep your pearl well hidden, won’t you?”

  It sounded better in his accent. No one talked like him, no one understood the power of delivery, of the soft lilt and dark-eyed glance.

  He’d arrived in the last year of secondary school, in the middle of winter while the sea storms rattled the glass and tore needles off the firs, and he was always cold. He stood alone in the smoke pit and went through cigarette after cigarette, pale-faced and shivering in his ridiculous yellow coat. We knew he was from Scotland, a country that seemed lacking in both edge and pleasure, and faintly associated with the hard toffee and tartan-packaged shortbread our grannies sent at Christmas. We knew he was from some fluidly named island in that country, which we made him pronounce again and again, along with the words murder and water and home. The girls giggled and watched, waiting to see if he was cool.

  He was not. He was thin and dark and prickly intense, a restless boy who rocked back in his chair and stared at nothing. Sometimes the wind would come in from the coast, bringing with it a hint of salt, and Ronan would tilt his head as if listening for something. His chair would scrape back and empty then, and we’d run to the window overlooking the playing field. There he’d be, wheeling and turning with his fingers spread to the wind, his coat pooled bright where he’d dropped it.

  The jeers started soon after and Ronan smiled. He told the football captain that his neck was thicker than a bullock’s and he called the pretty girls a bourach of snotty mingers. The hockey players swung at his long hair and pallor and threatened to kick his foreign arse all the way back to fairy land. Ronan shrugged off the blood and slipped away to his auntie’s house. She was the town librarian, a spinster who sang in the church choir and wore odd tweed skirts. We mimicked her clasped hands and rolling r’s, and she was another strike against him.

  “It was a terrible shock, him turning up on my doorstep,” she whispered to my mom. “But there was nothing for it. The mother ran off and he’s just lost his da, and he has no other kin willing to claim him.”

  Of course I needed to know him. I loved his voice and his history and the way his wrist bones jutted when he reached.

  The seagull plonks his yellow feet on the wooden slats of the dock. I watch the waves slap against the moorings and wish for a cigarette, even though it’s been years since I quit. There’s a hitch as someone steps down the gangplank, and the seagull flaps its wings and screeches, its red mouth gaping.

  I turn, my breath suspended.

  He’s filled out and coarsened. He looks salted, years older than he should be, and his eyes are hooded with flesh. The turn of his mouth remains the same. He could be a mythic warrior or sea-weathered drunk; he could be any of the men I’ve seen in this place. I can see nothing of Dylan in him.

  “I’m here for the seals,” I say, and the seagull screeches again.

  He looks me over like he’s dragging something from memory and I tense, waiting for my name to surface.

  “You’ll take a small,” he says, and throws me a lifejacket.

  He steps onto the boat without a backward glance and busies himself with the engine. I clamber on after him, wondering how many customers he gets and whether they consider his terseness part of the local character. We set out and I lean into the wind, remembering Dylan when he was young and we travelled to the island, how he’d poke his face through the ferry railing to catch the spray and lick the salt from his lips after. How he would not come easily from the waves, and would slip shrieking from my grasp until I wound him in a beach towel with a promise of fish and chips from the fry shack.

  “How was the trip?” Ronan calls to me over the noise of the motor. “Was it rough coming in?”

  “A bit,” I say. “Such a long drive to get here, nothing but sheep and potholes, and I’m in this little rental car, which the ferryman tells me I can’t take on board. So I leave it parked and the crossing is so choppy that I — ”

  Ronan grunts. “It keeps the world away.”

  He cuts the engine when we come to a little cove and the boat rocks gently back and forth in the current. I peer into the water and Ronan leans back against the railings. We wait.

  The water rolls green and opaque and I wish for something to throw into it. Dylan once made a boat from his fish and chips carton and floated it on the waves, and watched for it long after it bobbed into oblivion. Not gone, he insisted, not gone just because you can’t see it. Not gone, because everything comes back on the tide.

  Ronan is rubbing his thumbs against his fingers, as if he’s needing a cigarette, or a drink.

  “We tell a story here,” he says. “There’s a dark-eyed boy, a son of the village. He has a mother and a father, like any boy should, but this boy is different. This one’s a listener. The storms call him to sea one night and he’s lost. The villagers go looking, but there’s nothing to find but a pile of clothes on the sand. Years pass. The boy is forgotten. One day a man washes ashore. Not a stitch on him. Flapping about like a seal pup, and barking, like this.”

  I laugh at the noises Ronan makes. But his eyes are on me now and my throat’s closing.

  “Ah Christ,” he says and turns away. Thumb over finger, again and again.

  “What then?” I ask to keep him talking. “What happened to the boy? When he was a man, I mean.”

  Ronan looks at me. I see that the skin around his eyes has softened and pouched, and his cheeks are traced with a delicate broken red.

  “He goes back to the sea,” he says. “They always do.”

  He turns his back on me and for a while there’s nothing but the susurration of waves breaking on rock. I swallow, and think of the dark-eyed boy tilting his head towards sea. Ronan doesn’t tell it like he used to but I remember the tale, and how his hands slid over my skin as he spoke. How his words could soothe.

  Will I tell you about the selkie? Gentle things. They sing the sailors from the storm, you know
? Out there, calling. My dad says there’s this stretch of silver sand, that’s where they slip off their skins to dance. Between sea and shore, and belonging truly to neither.

  Underneath the birches and behind the bleachers, his hands would tug at my clothes and I would panic, unnerved by the open lacework of branches.

  But if you find a sealskin cloak draped over rock? Ah. Then they’re yours.

  A button loosened or a t-shirt pushed up and my breath, hitched in.

  Hide that skin and they’ll stay. But always looking out to sea, you know? Yours for a time, but the sea will call them back. My dad says.

  But I always stopped his hands. Not here, not now, I said. Not where everyone can see.

  “Look!”

  My belly rises as the waves rock the boat.

  “Look,” shouts Ronan again, his voice higher and younger. I follow his pointing finger to the sleeked heads: three, then four and more breaking the surface, gathering and nudging like children for a story. Ronan smiles and murmurs something in another language. He pushes a cooler box towards us and pries it open. The silvery scales flash and I remember the sunlight dappling through new leaves, and him haloed with it while he pulled me onto the damp grass. He grabs a fish and his hands on that slippery flesh are disconcerting, too intimate. I look away, busying myself with my phone.

  Ronan throws the fish to the seals while I aim the phone at the dark velvet eyes and baby faces, wanting something to take back to Dylan. Ronan ignores me; he’s speaking to his seals now in that throaty murmur, coaxing the smaller ones forward. He gestures towards the fish and I take one in my hands. It’s sinuous under my touch and I let it slide into the water.

  My graduation dress was made of deep blue satin that slipped over my legs as I walked. I sashayed up and down the hall and my mother sighed at its long trailing skirt, its mournful hue. I didn’t care; I was a gothic mermaid.

  I sat tangled in its folds as the music pulsed. The others danced while Ronan and I passed a mickey of vodka under the crepe-covered table, my hand touching his then brushing his thigh as the alcohol kicked in. Ronan grew moody and pushed back his chair. I followed him outside, past the bleachers and through the birches, to where the leaves grew lush. My dress floated above my hips like waves and I didn’t care, I let him crash against me while the stars spun in a queasy spiral. He sunk his face in my hair after and cried. From love, I thought then.