The Seahorse

by Anthony Masters

  Paul brought his hand back and hit Casey round the side of the head. The boy staggered and almost fell.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ said Paul, I’ll put a bomb in his pool, that’s what I’ll do–I’ll blow him up–’

  Casey recoiled and stared unbelievingly at Paul.

  ‘You mustn’t–you can’t–please, please don’t.’

  ‘I should forget him if I were you,’ said Paul, ‘because he simply doesn’t exist.’

  And Casey ran up the beach sobbing–away from Paul who stood there watching him until he saw him push his way through the crowd.

  He turned round and saw Lettie–she smiled at him, anxious to please–but he turned away from her and walked back to the pool.

  She said softly, after him, ‘You were quite wrong, you know, about the Seahorse–quite wrong,’ but he didn’t hear her.

  Lettie hung about for a few moments at some distance from the pools and then crossed over to the larger group. There was something lying on the sand which impeded her progress–a stretcher with a very damp blanket over it Storm came up and gently lifted a corner of it and she saw that it was Alexander–his face was a particularly strange colour but his expression was very pleasant.

  ‘Is he hurt badly?’ she asked Storm blandly.

  ‘I’m afraid he is, Lettie,’ said Storm gently as he walked away. She followed him and there was a bundle of something or other half in and half out of one of the pools. A doctor and a policeman were bending over it. They seemed to be taking notes and were standing a few yards away from the object. She went a few steps closer and caught a glimpse of it just as they threw a blanket over Adrian’s face.

  It was Laura Strang who finally took her away. Lettie was sobbing bitterly and Laura was brutally kind.

  ‘They ought never to have allowed you down here, old thing, should they, eh?’

  ‘But he must be very badly hurt to look like that,’ sobbed Lettie.

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid he’s very badly hurt,’ said Laura with a vague kindness as she propelled Lettie up and over the shingle towards the school.

  Adrian and Alexander were left on the beach until the stretcher bearers were ready. The rain had cleared to reveal a milky-blue sky scored with fleecy clouds. The waves formed a creeping threshold, gaining on the sand inch by inch, and the spur of water threatened to reach Alexander, so they moved him gently to lie alongside Adrian. Meg moved forward and tucked in Alexander’s hand under the damp blanket. She did it as if she was tidying away a stray hanky that protruded from a drawer–quickly, naturally she stooped and corrected the untidiness.

  Angus Clarke was chain-smoking, stubbing the cigarettes out on the wet sand. He offered one to Storm with an awkward gesture, but there was no response–Storm was watching the sea cover the sand, his eyes fixed on a sea urchin that nestled in the pool where they had found Alexander. Crabs scuttled into the crevices of the rocks, and from under the pier the water dripped from the weed-hung columns into the filmy lethargy of the pools beneath.

  Paul and Meg were standing with Lancing, who continuously twisted his large, podgy white hands in front of him, making little darts towards the dark uniforms, incessantly asking questions which they answered with a swift nod or a brief undertone.

  Two ambulance men approached with a stretcher and gently they lifted Alexander up and laid him on it–once again his hand flopped out from underneath the blanket and once again Meg briskly tucked it in. They walked up the beach with him, shakily negotiating the treacherous, acid-green rocks.

  Meg had not spoken to him at all so far and Paul found that he had nothing to say to anyone, let alone Meg. It was Lancing who seemed to be in desperate need of communication and he finally turned tentatively on them, his pale face flushed and his eyes appealing for some degree of normality.

  ‘I feel so absolutely helpless,’ he said. There’s nothing I can possibly do, yet I feel I must talk–do you mind?’

  Paul didn’t answer but Meg said, in a matter of fact voice: ‘Yes, I know what you mean. You feel you have to talk to someone just to prove that despite everything the world’s not quite mad. But there seems nothing to say about all this,’ she gestured towards the pool, ‘does there, really? Literally, I can think of nothing to say at all–except perhaps that when I lose the first sense of shock I’ll probably think that it was just so wasteful.’

  When the ambulances had gone, they went back to the school. Storm hurried into his study, followed by an over-helpful, zealously sympathetic policeman, and the others scattered to various parts of the building, where they prowled, unsettled and irritable, for the rest of the morning. Virginia made coffee in the staff-room and they all had brandy in it, supplied by Angus from a battered hip flask. No one talked very much and they haphazardly read the morning papers, lowering them immediately if anyone came into the room and raising them again should there be no conversation ensuing. They had the appearance of waiting, impatiently, for some new devil’s prank. But nothing happened and there was a certain flatness–an aftermath not unlike the week following Christmas–or a party that sagged miserably in the middle–or even a rainy Saturday night after the most escapist of films. The sensation of appalling bleakness made them all a little guilty–as if their feelings were numbed and they ought to be feeling something they weren’t. The shock of sudden death–visible, unmitigated deadness–left them curiously apathetic to personality. The grief they were not feeling–that they ought to feel–seemed remote. There was no real involvement with death. A horror at the sight of it–but no noticeable regret, hysteria, sorrow or anything at all except a mounting disbelief and a constant pressure to feel–a need to realise the sheer enormity of non-existence, which all the same they could not feel.

  They drank cups and cups of the weak coffee whilst Angus smoked incessantly. Each step in the corridor, or indeed movement anywhere, was at least a promise of development.

  Lancing came in, his face blank, his hands fiddling with the lower button of his waistcoat. ‘What are we going to do now?’ he asked, ineffectually.

  No one saw fit to reply–there was really nothing to say. For a while he roamed around the room picking up this and that until his antics drew an irritable sigh from Angus, whose spreading rash of sensitivity was sharpened by Lancing’s neurosis.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, sit down or something. There’s nothing you can do and we’re trying to work out how best we can help Storm. My God, he’s going to need it–Parents’ Day was bad enough without all this on top of it.’

  ‘You sound rather callous,’ minced Lancing pedantically. ‘This is more than a trick, a joke, this is–’

  ‘All right, don’t let’s go into it. We’ve seen it, surely that’s enough? We’ve all seen it, chum, we don’t want to talk about it–can’t you understand that?’

  ‘It’s just the way you’re talking about it,’ puffed Lancing, ‘as if it’s rather an inconvenience. Don’t you realise how ghastly the whole business is–what on earth were they doing? Did they fall? What were they up to at that time of night? How did they get into the water in the first place?’ But his questions were in vain and Virginia waved a hand irritably at him.

  ‘Look, leave it, Gerald, that will all matter later, there’s no need to have an inquest now, is there? The thing is that there was obviously the most dreadful accident, the reasons can come later. Has anyone phoned the hospital about Eric, or has he been overlooked?’

  ‘I’m sure Storm’s attending to that,’ said the deflated Lancing.

  ‘Well, why don’t you phone too, then at least you can be doing something constructive?’

  Pathetically, Lancing stumbled obediently out whilst Virginia and Angus relapsed into silence again. It was mid-morning and school had been cancelled for the day. It had been difficult to know what to do with the children, but eventually they had been successfully dispersed amidst the garden, where they weeded, trimmed and mowed the dilapidated lawns. Their tasks were unnecessary, but an immediate therapy had
been important–or at least relevant–to the feelings of the staff. The children themselves took the tragedy strangely, once again eccentric in their reaction to death. Unlike their seniors, whose numbed incapacity generated a feeling of bewildering lethargy, they seemed to record a future that had dismissed the immediate past in a few moments. They jostled and fought amongst the ragged flower-beds, oblivious of the presence of such sudden annihilation. Inexplicably they divorced both Alexander and Adrian from their minds–and unaffected by their abrupt disappearance they played on. As a body, a group, a community, they had no time for death–an irrelevancy that was un-creative–and the games were continued, leaving only a slender element of surprise and momentary fear. Unlike the sombre grown-ups, who made it their business to remember loss, the children forgot, and in a few days the memories of the dead would not return, even if they were recorded high on some pedestal sacred but unimportant. Death was a spoilsport–to be dismissed as soon as possible.

  Casey took the path Meg had taken earlier. It was a favourite walk–the hemmed-in discretion of the dense foliage comforted him. Despite the fact that he spent so much time on the beach he hated open spaces–his resilience disappeared and an unconscious unease made him indecisive. A wasps’ nest on his right fascinated him for a moment–their busy hum gave him a warm feeling as he passed by. So much activity was comforting in his indolence–it blasted out the wall of fear that was growing and turning inside his stomach, screwing his nerves into a state of mounting tension. Paul had shattered the credited retribution–it seemed only too apparent that the Seahorse had been angry. He felt nothing for Adrian–very little for Alexander. Neither had ever really troubled him, yet an unconscious fear of their intent had imbued him–they were alien to his interest. It had seemed so unlikely that they would deign to invade his imagination like this–his imagination that took precedence over the material to a degree of comfort, rather than lunacy. He walked on until he had emerged on the side of the smooth down and he sat near the first dip of the golf links.

  Somehow it was all crazily mixed up in his mind–reality and fantasy merged, producing a torrid confusion. Everyday life, the normality that he tried to avoid, held no Seahorse–because it was to the safe haven of his own imagination that he always fled, and there the Seahorse was–in his own world, not theirs. But suddenly the Seahorse had betrayed him. It had attacked savagely and fiercely, leaping from illusion to reality in a single, drastic bound that had bewildered and distorted Casey’s already hazy logic. Now that illusion was fused in his mind with actuality he was unable to divorce one from the other–and they became a nightmare mixture of utter confusion at which his mind could only register one emotion–fear. Somehow, he believed, he had created from his own mind a force that had taken life suddenly and uncaringly. So there was an existence, an entity that he was responsible for and only he could control–and have. He knew he loved his creation with a fierce and protective intensity.

  Soon he would be called upon to defend his Seahorse–soon he must substantiate his claims and rally to them quickly. But what was there to do? He was convinced that Paul was poised to destroy, and he supposed that Paul’s sustained interest had been mere espionage. Paul had spied on his fantasy, gleaned information and was now ready to demolish. Tears welled up in Casey’s eyes as he remembered his own continued betrayal of the Seahorse–the stream of confidences that he had showered not only on Paul but on Storm and Lettie, too. How angry the Seahorse would be–how stupid he had been to break the secrecy of their tryst. But the more he had talked the more realistic the myth had seemed to grow, until its reality shatteringly exceeded his own conceptions. The dream became more and more important until it eclipsed normality and lived, as a renegade entity, growing too big for him to love or protect. Casey had betrayed his fantasy to a sudden logic that refused to live within the boundary of a dream. Paul was trying to eradicate something that he, Casey, had loved and had thrown away as a confidence to too many people simply because this very exhibitionism had made him believe in it more. He had conjured a monster out of the pool beneath the pier and now he was afraid–afraid of them all–authority, punishment, Paul, and particularly the Seahorse. Alexander and Adrian had been slaughtered by the vengeful myth, disturbed from its lair by their prankish invasion. He began to feel more and more responsible for them–they should never have been so silly as to tempt such a force. It was his fault they were dead. His conscience staggered under the sudden weight of this burden–and it grew as his overloaded imagination responded, eagerly, to renewed instigation. The tears were streaming down his face and he nuzzled his lips with his tongue, feeling the rough salt of the emotion. Something sharp in his back pocket reminded him–and he drew out the skeleton miniature that Paul had given him. Bending over it, he kissed the top of its scaly mane and then he kissed the delicate bone structure of the nose. His tears fell on it too and soon the little Seahorse was slippery in his grasp.

  Miserably, he got up and wandered over to the edge of the cliff. He could see the beach and the pier distinctly in the rain-washed clarity. The helicopter had gone, leaving a pool of oil-streaked water, but there was a crowd of people on the beach standing on the last stretch of sand as the tide slid in, looking up at the pier with interest. The news of the tragedy had spread and an anonymous crowd had gathered to gawp silently at the normality of the setting. A few photographers were still taking pictures, one after another in rapid succession, and this appealed to the crowd’s sense of occasion. They watched them in silent wonder, gazing back to the sea every now and then in shocked curiosity, hoping to glean something at least of the events of the morning. There were a large number of cars drawn up in front of the school and a smaller crowd stood patiently at the gates, viewing anyone who emerged with awe, as if they were royalty. A tradesman’s van drew into the drive and ten minutes later drove out again. The crowd turned and watched it, fascinated, until it was out of sight. Then they turned and stared hopefully between the dusty laurel hedges, garbled stories spreading amongst them as a self-appointed spokesman led and harangue. Two of them, late arrivals, joined the crowd and stared expectantly at the speaker, hoping to be involved. He was nothing loath to do so and they were not disappointed by the embroidery of his much-told story. He was mysterious at first, leading them on, then he really let them have it. The others, standing around him, had heard it two–three–four times before, depending upon their status in the crowd. But however many times they had all heard it they hung on every word avariciously. The spokesman was tall, thin and bowler-hatted–a sanitary inspector who had been due to call upon Storm at an early hour. Meg had sent him away with a brief explanation and he had been pleased to find an easy audience in the assembled group at the end of the drive.

  ‘Dreadful business,’ he said through his teeth. ‘Three or four lads drowned this morning–shocking–boating accident or something. Dashed against the pier–all unrecognisable. Irresponsible, I call it. What would I have felt if it had been me own kids–that’s the first thing I asked myself–what would I have felt?’

  The others clucked sympathetically as his eyes searched around the group. A woman near him said, ‘You’re right, you know–there’s not nearly enough supervision of children today. I watch mine like a hawk–because you can never be certain they’re not up to something or other–You’ve got to watch them, you know.’

  The commentator frowned; he didn’t want her to start a circle of her own and oust him from the group’s attention.

  ‘Exactly,’ he said, instantly dismissing her from their consideration. ‘It’s just not good enough. Fancy letting those boys out in a boat in this bay on their own. We all know it’s dangerous. Full of cross-currents–What the hell were they thinking about? If I had my way I’d have them all prosecuted–always so bloody superior–lot of know-alls yet they can’t even look after other people’s kids.’

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw the woman open her mouth to speak again and so he swiftly went on, anxious to avoid fu
rther interruption.

  ‘Anyway, it’s a right cranky old set-up,’ he said, waving mysteriously towards Exeter Court. ‘Chap here lets them run wild–one of these progressive set-ups, you know. They work if they feel like it sort of idea. If they had a bit of discipline this wouldn’t have happened–it’s discipline that counts, you know. Ah, here come the police–let’s hope they’ve arrested him.’

  A shiny black car swept out of the drive and they stood back and watched it disappear into Seahaven.

  ‘If I had my way,’ the speaker concluded, admonishing the new arrivals with a steely eye, ‘I’d have that headmaster of theirs in the stocks.’ And with this medieval pronouncement he turned to stare expectantly up the drive again.

  Casey saw the police car emerge too and flash down the road. He wondered if perhaps the police wanted him–in connection with the dreadful carnage his Seahorse had wrought. He turned away from the cliffs and walked on.

  They walked over the cliffs in a strung-out line, Paul, Storm, Angus and Meg, armed with flashlights and shouting themselves hoarse. It was almost midnight and they had been searching for Casey for hours. This final shock had made surprisingly little impression on them–they had almost expected some other occurrence to take place. The extraordinary flatness that had stretched endlessly through the afternoon had ended with Casey’s non-arrival for tea. It was then that they remembered that in their preoccupation they had overlooked the fact that he had not even appeared for lunch.

  ‘He’s missed an injection,’ said Meg, as they set out. Storm said nothing. He was in a bad state and was on the verge of tears. The incredible crack-up of everything hit him again and again; he had no resolution left to deal with anything–he could formulate no decisions nor implement any action. They took him with them and he followed like a child. Paul cursed silently. It was an incredible stroke of bad luck. He was desperately worried–this was the worst shock of all.