by Mark Morris
“Not all of them; but Easter’s early this year, and they haven’t all gone. Still enough left to make a noise.”
“Oh, lovely…”
She perched again beside me and we watched the sky, the sea, the boats, and the horizon until they came.
From October through April, the starlings gather in great roosts along the cliffs and inland, on church roofs and pub window ledges, on every tree that offers. In daylight they scatter, to forage in smaller flocks all across the parish and further yet. As the sun sets they all converge, to wheel and dance and display in extravagant, astonishing flights that write patterns in the air. Murmuration was the word that Bruce had taught me. The noisy sky, Rowan had called it once when she was little. That worked for us: noise in three dimensions, figured by forces far beyond the random. White noise loosed into the world, given shape and substance and a name.
We watched it happen, we saw the sky fold itself in sheets and curves and angles, in blasts of sound and shadow that gave momentary solidity to the wind, as though they outlined all its fluid edges.
There’s a native human urge to see patterns in what’s random, to give significance to what is incidental. We have a word for it, even. We see shapes in clouds and call it pareidolia, as though we understand it. As though there were anything to understand.
If I saw faces, one face, making itself again and again and again—well, nobody could blame me. Besides, I didn’t need to say what I was seeing, so long as I didn’t ask her.
At last the light began to fail and the birds spread themselves more thinly, diving this way and that, tearing themselves out of all coherence. We stirred, gathered each other silently and trudged on arm in arm again, and here came the cliff edge.
“Careful now,” I said, pulling free and guiding her behind me. “The council’s done nothing to make this path any safer, and the cliff face is still crumbling.”
“Of course it is. It’s not going to stop, just because a parish council finds it inconvenient. Or expensive. I’ll step where you step.” She put both hands on my shoulders, to be sure. When she was small we’d go down just like this, except the other way around: I’d set her in front and steer her slender frame, keep fast hold and think how fragile she was, and how robust. She could outlive any boat that left my yard, and I knew exactly how well those were put together.
Down and down, winding back and forth until we came to where the path splays out onto the beach. It is, in honesty, not much of a beach. More rock pool than sand, and more simple rock than either one; at high tide there’s a bare margin between sea and cliff, at spring tides none at all. Tourists head to the other side of the bay, to the wide sprawling spaces and the cafés and the tat. Ramblers following the coast find their way down sometimes, if they’re serious, but mostly not.
Which suited me, because at the end of the beach, in that marginal questionable territory where the river runs into the sea, just on the point, there was my yard. Formal access came from the other direction, along the riverbank. Approach from this side and all you saw was a wall of timber and corrugated iron, reaching from cliff to water. In fact, there was a gate, but you might not spot it at first: like the whole stretch of wall, it was compounded of wood and iron, painted with pitch to protect against the actions of storm and sea. Black on black, salt-stained and discreet.
There was no more an established path down here than there was in the ninety-acre; what the cows achieved above, surf and tide worked to match below. Pools and puddles shifted, new weed was laid down while old was washed away. Even I stepped somewhat differently from sand to rock to sand again, every time I crossed the strand. Rowan hopped and cursed and giggled, slipped and shrieked and drew her foot up sans boot, leaving it stuck in a crevice. Batted me away when I went to the rescue, then grabbed for me again; couldn’t decide whether to cling to my side or hold my hand more distantly or spurn me altogether.
“Piggyback?” I offered neutrally.
“Uh, yes. Please…”
First I rescued her waterlogged boot while she balanced stork-like on one leg, then I bent my back so that she could climb aboard. With her legs jutting forward at waist-height, I used her feet as a battering ram to knock the gate ajar, and carried her through like a queen.
* * *
We built our boats from wood, with handheld tools. Nevertheless, noise was no stranger to the boatyard, echoing off the cliff and out across the water. Nevertheless, the racket that evening was exceptional. One boy, one mallet and a heavy copper sheet; he’d laid an old folded tarpaulin between sheet and concrete, and even so. Sixteen square feet of copper will sing when it’s beaten.
So also will a boy sing, when he’s thumping something in rhythm. At least until he looks up, to see that he’s no longer alone.
The Japanese are a quiet folk, by and large, with a yen for quiet art, low-cal, static. A solitary flower in a wabi-sabi vase, three characters in slow ink with a swift brush, a garden of raked gravel. A single square of paper folded whole—uncut, untorn—into a formal stylised figure: a crane, a unicorn, a frog. A boat.
There was nothing Japanese about Josh, and nothing quiet. Rather it was a restless energy that had led him to origami, simply to give him something to do with his hands. All through our first interview—in the pub, which doubled as my office—his swift neat fingers had transformed sheets of coloured paper into a little line of figures: Darth Vader and R2-D2, two copulating unicorns, a cat in a box. Classic technique married to pop culture in a crisp and reckless style as inappropriate as it was charming. Mix that with tools, materials, and the space to scale up; the result had proved robust. Noisy. Origami unleashed.
The Boat of Going Nowhere was a yacht flying a jib and a mainsail, folded from four-by-four copper rather than paper. It had cost me one sheet already as proof-of-concept, a practice piece to learn how to fold and crease metal sharply; now he was working on the thing itself. Technically in his spare time, outside working hours—but my young apprentice shared not only my yard and my home, but also my casual approach to timekeeping. Sometimes we’d be up half the night, working under arc lights until the task was done; some days we’d start at noon or quit at three or never reach the yard at all. Just now I couldn’t have turned his mind away from The Boat of Going Nowhere if I’d tried.
Rowan was unsure how to feel about Josh, the idea of him or the boy himself. In other circumstances I could have been amused by her wary detachment, her inability to figure out which of us was the more vulnerable, who was exploiting whom. She saw me replicating what Bruce had done—for me, with me, to me—and so forging one more link in a chain I might have broken. She could disapprove of that quite thoroughly. At the same time she could thoroughly distrust the motives of a young man latching onto an older one in his grief, at his time of least resistance. She loved me, was protective of me, knew what was best for me far better— of course!—than I did; and that best did not include a boy less than half my age; her age.
Now she was here, face-to-face with the reality of him, in the cottage and in the yard. Angular beauty and heedless charm, the relentless driving energy and the sudden slamming walls; she might have been his next conquest, or he hers, if it wasn’t that he occupied that unexpected, unnegotiated space, the bed that Bruce built.
She was quite bewildered about what to feel. And I hated to see her in such a muddle, so confused where she ought to have felt most comfortable; and I could think of no resolution except to do as Bruce had done, live with the boy for the rest of my life and see if that was some kind of reassurance to her.
* * *
Just now, I set her down on an upturned cable drum and handed her lost boot back to her with a courtly bow. Knowing, as she knew, that Josh was watching, mallet poised, work suspended.
“Hey, Cinders,” he called. “Aren’t you supposed to leave the slipper and run away?”
“Yeah, well. I can’t get anything right. He’s not even my Prince Charming.” Slight emphasis on the my; bless her, she was really trying. She might disa
pprove of both of us, but she’d do her best not to let it show. At least to him.
Freshly shod, she walked over to view his progress and admire the crispness of his creases. “But will it float, when it’s finished? We learned how to fold boats at school one time, but they were different, more like barges. Those floated. And you could load them up with cargo, beads and stuff. Until you overloaded them, and they sank.”
“I guess this would float,” he said. “You can make boats out of concrete, so copper ought to work. I think she’d turn turtle, though, first thing. The sails make her top-lofty, see, and there’s not enough keel to counter that. Unless you load the hull with ballast, but then I guess she’d sink anyway.”
“Just as well it won’t be going to sea, then. Or going anywhere.”
“Aye that.”
He left his model lying on its tarp, rose and stretched— slowly, fastidiously, like a roused cat reaching back into itself—and smiled across the yard at me. All physicality, all purpose: wickedly deliberate. Rubbing her nose in it, but that was incidental. If he knew how she was feeling, he didn’t let it trouble him. Or stop him.
Oh dear God, but he reminded me of me, so much. Sometimes too much. A young man aware of his own power and reckless with it, heedless with it, willing to give it away. Willing to give it all away, in exchange for—what? A life, a companion, a craft, a home. Everything I had from Bruce, I was handing on wholesale, the complete package. Unless that whole package existed separate from ourselves, and we merely inhabited the roles for a while, each in turn. It could feel that way sometimes, that we were groomed by some force outside ourselves, shaped to fit and held in place by a nameless inevitability. I had been him; he would be me. We would both of us be Bruce in the end, ashes in an urn. Lessons learned; lessons passed on. Someone else’s duty.
Something stirred in the sky. At first I thought it was one more late flight of starlings, turning in unison towards a cliff-side roost, their wings catching some fugitive final glimpse of light from the sunken sun. The other two hadn’t noticed, intent as they were on building some kind of awkward detente on sand sodden with resentment and distrust. I had the words in my throat before I recognised what I was seeing; the words were out before I could swallow them down. “Hey, look, look up—”
They turned, lifting their heads just at the moment when I would have called them back, when I would have said, No, don’t look, don’t see that…
In the dark of the sky was his face again, impossibly, irresistibly. No matter if it was only scudding cloud lit from beneath, each of us saw the same thing. Pareidolia. And each of us knew whose face that was. Two of us had known the man himself; Josh knew him only from photographs, but that was enough to put a bewildered certainty into his voice.
“That was, that was…” It was a sentence that couldn’t end, certainty notwithstanding; so he ducked it. “Was that awesome, or what? The way that looked like Bruce?”
Josh was at my elbow, though I hadn’t seen him come; and Rowan was just as sudden on my other side, taking my arm and clinging tight with no hint of adult irony. “It did,” she said. “Didn’t it?”
It did; and no, it was not awesome. At least, not in the way Josh meant it. A portrait like a sidelong glance, painted with twilight and cloud and suggestion—but not randomly, and not in our heads. If Josh was sure, who’d never met the man; if Rowan was sure, who’d known him and disliked him, how much more sure was I, who had known him and loved him and lived with him for thirty years? All three of us stared up and saw clouds shredded by the wind, saw the first pale stars in the looming gloom, saw no hint of any face at all, and even so.
“Come on, kids. You know he never took his eye off me. Why should death make any difference?”
Humour struck a jarringly false note, but what could I do? Give one last lingering, anxious glance upward, then grip each of them by the shoulder and turn them bodily. Sometimes the inexplicable is too great for challenge, for question, for curiosity. You have to just stand under the reality of what’s numinous, and then walk away.
It’s hard to turn your back on the sky, but we could at least set the sea behind us. And a bare dozen paces ahead lay the workshop, with a light already burning and the side door set ajar.
Far more than the cottage, this was home and shelter to me, since I had been that feral teenage boy. I used to sleep down here more often than not, curled in a nest of blankets, my dreams scented with wood shavings and diesel. I would wake to brew coffee on the paraffin stove and sharpen yesterday’s tools on the oilstone and call greetings across the water to friends on the day-boats as they chugged out in pursuit of shoaling mackerel or pilchard. All with one eye on the cliff path, waiting for the day’s first sight of Bruce, a distant potent figure heading down.
There was electricity in the building now; a new floor beneath a new roof and proper plumbing; a real bed for Josh or me or both of us together, those nights we never made it home. Even so, it was still essentially the same place, imbued with the same long history. Even the paraffin smell still lingered. Perhaps that was only in my mind, like fugitive glimpses of that same distant figure with that same familiar stride. I could almost find a comfort in those moments, believing that he still kept watch over me. Especially when I turned my head and looked more closely and of course he wasn’t there. He was still dead, and I was still dealing with it. What better comfort could he give me than these occasional reminders that I really could get by without him?
No comfort now. Here I was moving beyond mourning and with my own apprentice, this sudden shift, a turning away that could seem quite like abandonment; and here was Rowan too, ever a thorn, a trouble, a wall between us where nothing should ever have come; and now his face was in the sky, and no comfort meant. Something else, something more, some expression of fury or claim of possession and death apparently not a factor.
But here we were, all three of us under my roof—mine now, mine!—and cut off from the sky’s glare, his glare. The workshop had no view out to the slipway and the sea; that wall was all door. The window looked out to the river and the road.
Just as I steered them both inside, Josh glanced back and yiked, ducking free of my grip and slithering outside again. I half-turned to follow and felt myself seized by indecision, there in the doorway with her on one side and him the other. Chase or stay, him or her? It wasn’t possible—and then thank God it wasn’t necessary, because Josh was no sooner gone than he was coming back.
With The Boat of Going Nowhere snatched up from the concrete apron, tucked securely under his arm.
“In case it means a storm, that sky,” he said, laughing, shrugging. “I’m not leaving her out there for some stupid flood tide to take away.”
People think that way. We all do. It’s what makes me a blue water sailor, why I want a hundred miles between myself and any land when weather’s on the way: because danger lies in that liminal space where the ocean meets the shore. It comes from the deep and hits the land and God help you if you lie between the hammer and the anvil. It’s why we stand and look outward, why we have lighthouses and foghorns, barriers and sea walls and defences.
Sometimes we should look the other way. Inland, where everything is fixed, reliable, coherent; where structures have weight and certainty, where the variable moon harbours no influence, where wind and rain together must work hard to achieve a little local damage. Where it’s all too easy to forget how everything from peak to valley bottom is designed to channel trouble to the sea.
Water finds its own level, they say. That would be here, where the rushing river meets the rising tide.
* * *
Perhaps there was a natural dam high up on the moor somewhere: a fallen tree, accumulated blockage, with no one to notice. Perhaps there was a freak of weather, rain beyond measure just where a lake could build and build. Or perhaps water is somehow an expression of malevolence, or of will, or of endurance. Perhaps Bruce could just make water happen. All at once, in flood.
It start
ed as a rumour, a distant rumbling, something ripping deep in the fabric of the world. The kids looked to me for reassurance, enlightenment, anything. I had nothing to offer except a mirror for their blank questioning stares. I shook my head at them, and turned to the window.
It was dark out there, but not dark enough. I could see what was coming all too well. The village upstream gave me a horizon of light, a beacon that drew us nightly to pub, to cottage, to dinner, to bed. This night I saw half those lights go out, almost all at once. Those that survived on higher ground served only to frame that darkness. Everything happens at the margins; at that lit edge there was a churning chaos, a moving roiling wall in silhouette, sound made solid, that growing growling roar…
“Get out,” I said. “Out now. Not that way,” as Rowan turned hesitantly towards the door we’d come in by. That way lay my truck, the gateway, the road and the village and the world; but half the village was gone, heading our way in shattered pieces. It was breaking the road to ruin as it came.
“The river’s in flood,” I said, as mild a way as I could find to say, It’s over, that world you knew; death is coming, and it’s meant for us. “We’ll go along the beach and up the cliff. Keep together and we’ll stay safe.” Quick as I was to herd them out, I was almost too slow. Floods should lose their power as their reach broadens, as a narrow valley riverbed opens to the sea—but this one met a wind and tide that should never have come together, that neither clock nor calendar was ready for. We were a week past springs and three hours before the full, but even so: here was the tide, too high and too soon, racing up the slipway as I heaved open the workshop door. And the wind that battered me, that tried to force me all the way back inside, was a storm wind out of season and unforecast, implausible, as close to impossible as weather ever had been.
The wind held up that rushing wall of river; the tide thrust underneath and lifted it higher yet, the water and the rubble that it swept along, half the village in its seize. I stood on the slipway and saw it hurtling towards my gate, my truck, my workshop—towards us, head-high and lethal with rocks and beams and filth and sheer force.