Falls the Shadow
Page 12
Daybreak. No, not as sudden, more a vague throbbing of light, a fading as subtle as the birth of a wave, virtual cinematography, the vast screen filtering through black, to grey, on to white, the bare stone walls and colourless cold of this cruel dawn. Water iced with severity, air the discomfort of damp rags about your body, the light moving on to white but failing, reflecting grey off the bleak surrounds, unable to pierce the leaden mist that hangs forlornly above this land, this era, this cold morning dawning. Damp or sweat or both caught in webs between blankets, dark pockets of the life struggle, a freckled boy stunning flies to feed the spiders, frantic and painless, the deathlike hour of greyness before the sunrise.
Motionless on my back, an Arundel tomb, dead martyr to a lost cause, sad, bronzed, a tourist distraction, even unable to die in one clean movement, lingering in stone or metal, shrouded in shadows, both victim and accused in the case of State versus Individual, still unsolved and awaiting judgement, awaiting the full light of day that never seems to come.
In this limbo that I call my home something stirs. A sound? An arc of movement? The formlessness of a suggestion? It runs with the shadows and hides in the damp, it seems to belong to nothing but sea and rain. I listen but it communicates in silence. I doubt it but I chase it nonetheless. How can there be so many voices in this echoing silence? The unfurnished room trilling with guilt, my head in panic silhouetted against the dirty windows, afraid of someone behind me while the slug, victim of salt, died an ugly pussy pointless death. Who was watching me from that deep emptiness? And though I held you to blame, dad, you and your abstract cruelty, was I unaware, was I really so innocent, awaiting the voice of chastisement. Or salt? Yes, there is definitely something moving out here, I will look for it in the sea and the rain, at least I can start to understand them, especially the rain. Yes, I think I understand the rain now. A thousand million drops, each one a word, each cloudburst a torrent of speech that always concludes with the same simple meaning. Rain, the messenger of the sea, its remainder. Rain is hope, purely and simply. It is hope for the sea, the land, the sea-shore. It is hope in a call-to-arms, hope in a wistful frown, hope fragmented into jewels and tears. It is of the sea, to the land, a sprinkling of emotion on the dry rocks of logic, a faith in passion, an irrigation of intellect.
No, no, I know it isn't that at all, it only seems like that. People shelter from hope? It's possible, but I must be careful where I tread in the bogs of thought with no one to guide me. Caught in the quicksand when the tide rushes in.
The sea. Cruel and deep and unpredictable, a brooding pool of tears, revengeful and powerful, hurling storms onto the passive rocks, eroding. It is worse than looking into a mirror to look at the sea. Out there, in that endless enigma lie the things I fear or misunderstand. I do not trust it, it has no care for me.
It's cold here. Yes, this world is cold and damp and full of shadows, strange noises, isolation. But it is not unnatural, or evil, or soiled. And should the sea smash a man it would not be out of malice, it has no will (these words don't ring as fully as they should). The fish I snatch from the sea feel no sorrow or fear or even surprise, they simply end with me. There is no hatred in the chain of being, no unnecessary violence: it is not war. And whenever and however I leave this place I will leave cleanly and unafraid. Let the fish have me. Yes, the fish and the water will reclaim me, without a fight. Enough, I must get up and break these dawn enigmas, scatter them like chicken feed to be pecked at by the hens, those strutting, foolish creatures outside that always look so shocked and peck, peck, peck all day to produce their barren eggs; bourgeois birds ... Sluggishly I crawl into another day of compromise, the price of survival.
Later, in the hut, rain closes the day. Steamy, wet clothes in a railway carriage, lights on in the daytime, a bored schoolboy staring out across the felt roofs towards a wood somewhere where maybe a girl is waiting to play. Lying on my bed allowing the visions to tumble. The little boy in tight shoes, no older than three, smart, fashionable shorts and a patterned collar, sucking the muzzle of his toy gun. And I sigh and exclaim, what do we do to them, what do we really expect? Little girls of four or five stuffed like soft toys, hardly able to walk. Greek children picking the heads off tiny fish, squidging their brains between indifferent fingers. Or Spanish adolescents singing songs to God, herded like sheep by deluded pastors into what? Confusion, delusion. My own father, pushing and pulling me through absurd hoops so that I am now me, complexes and confusions all nicely packaged, and if I happen to go wrong somewhere, it's my fault, they did their best. Did their best to make me frightened before the sin of sex, didn't they my love, you remember it of course, floundering and embarrassed before those sticky sensations. Perhaps we should have laughed, or cried. And nowadays, huge and solitary, those entangled days still return in new guises, and I lie back on my stale, sterile bed and dream that she comes a traveller, lost and bemused, a young German girl with hair as silver as sand loose about her sunrise-red, excited cheeks, a tiny cut of rubies to add autumn sky sadness and hot, living blood. She comes entangled with visions of sperm-froth beer and a cotton-bosomed wench who spills the whiteness onto her full, wet breast in nipple hard, head thrown back, beautiful, innocent, sensual laughter that makes your very blood stir and rebel against the coarse clothing, the skin feeling and groping with fine hair tinges, hating its smug shell of fabric, pushing and screaming against the thin impenetrable walls of material strait-jackets, crashing amply against the dam and flooding wildly in torrents of bubbling blood into the dry ruts of mind, crashing and tumbling and cascading along the dusty roads of anger, greed, aggression, hatred, confusion, frustration and cynicism, until the images of sun-drenched, sea-drenched, sweat-drenched, skin-drenched, beauty-drenched, sex-drenched tropical surf-sperm run away in droplets of dyked lust, scattered on the barren steppes of a hot stomach. The seeds of doubt.
And later still, the rain swept on to whisper to someone else, I wander down to my evening rocks to watch the sunset perform astonishingly once more, and again that story begins to take shape like an idea or a vision, its source lost in the crowd of memory. Where do I know it from? Father's nasal-hair breathing, heavy as coal on the tucked-in bed? A Miss from training college on a rainy afternoon? An illustrated hardback scrambled amongst the plastic or wooden toys? And why does it bother me now, is it merely its story of a sunset or is it ... is it a story or a fable?
The lighthouse claps its rhythm across the waves, but it falls pathetically upon the sunlit waters, its moment not yet arrived. And in that other story of forgotten childhood a little boy sits watching the sunset too.
Events jingle and shift and search for space as time and voice approach the action. Richard never could remember it entirely, always changed some aspect of it in his haste, or maybe missed something out altogether. He had only the idea, the total conception evaded him. So it was that the boy in the story, somehow, discovers that there is a pathway to the sun, a golden carpet spread across the evening waves, disappearing as the last tip of orange wax drips into the horizon's cup. Doubts and uncertainties surround this mythical causeway, but beyond the path, in the kingdom of the sun, he knows lies adventure and freedom. The childish tale continues through dreams and dashed hopes until one day the boy is ready to tackle the task. He has to run the whole length of the path (how far is the horizon?) and dive into the sun before it disappears. If Richard times it right he finishes the story as the sun is turned away from us and the lighthouse holds sway over the bay and Heron Point. And the boy dives, and the sun hesitates, and Richard can never decide what happens. Should he make it or not? What would happen if he did? Why was the story so incomplete, so begging to be finished but so afraid of termination? No answers at all, the tale remained, repeated, repeated.
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