by Tanith Lee
“I don’t think,” I said, enunciating pedantically, “I’ve ever done any good particularly. And last time, you decided my interest was solely prurient.”
She pushed the gate, leaning over the chair, and I went forward and helped her. I held the gate and she came through, Daniel floating by below.
“You take him out at night,” I said.
“He needs some fresh air.”
“At night, so he won’t see the water properly, if at all. How do you cope when you have to go out in daylight?”
As I said these preposterous things, I was already busy detecting, the local geography fresh in my mind, how such an evasion might be possible. Leave the house, backs to the sea, go up The Rise away from it, come around only at the top of the town where the houses and the blocks of flats exclude any street-level view. Then down into the town centre, where the ocean was only a distant surreal smudge in the valley between sky and promenade.
“The sea isn’t anything,” she said, wheeling him along the path, her way to the door clear now. “What’s there to look at?”
“I thought he might like the sea.”
“He doesn’t.”
“Has he ever been shown it?”
She came to the door, and was taking a purse out of her coat pocket. As she fumbled for the key, the wheelchair rested by her, a little to one side of the porch. The brake was off.
The vodka shouted at me to do something. I was slow. It took me five whole seconds before I darted forward, thrust by her, grabbed the handles of the wheelchair, careered it around, and wheeled it madly back up the path and through the gate. She didn’t try to stop me, or even shout, she simply stood there, staring, the key in her hand. She didn’t look nonplussed either—I somehow saw that. I was the startled one. Then I was going fast around the side of Number 19, driving the chair like a cart or a doll’s pram, into the curl of the alley that ran between cliff and wall to the beach. I’m not absolutely certain I remembered a live thing was in the chair. He was so still, so withdrawn. He really could have been same kind of doll.
But the alley was steep, steeper with the pendulum of man and chair and alcohol swinging ahead of me. As I braced against the momentum, I listened. I couldn’t hear her coming after me. When I looked back, the top of the slope stayed empty. How odd. Instinctively I’d guessed she wouldn’t lunge immediately into pursuit. I think she could have overcome me easily if she’d wanted to. As before, she had given over control of everything to me.
This time, I wasn’t afraid.
Somewhere in the alley, my head suddenly cleared, and all my senses, like a window going up. All that was left of my insanity was a grim, anguished determination not to be prevented. I must achieve the ocean, and that seemed very simple. The waves roared and hummed at me out of the invisible, unlit dark ahead. Walking down the alley was like walking into the primeval mouth of Noah’s Flood.
The cliff rounded off like a castle bastion. The road on the left rose away. A concrete platform and steps went up, then just raw rock, where a hut stood sentinel, purpose unknown. The beach appeared suddenly, a dull gleam of sand. The sea was all part of a black sky, until a soft white bomb of spray exploded out of it.
The street lamps didn’t reach so far, and there were no fun-fair electrics to snag on the water. The sky was fairly clear, but with a thin intermittent race of clouds, and the nearest brightest stars and planets flashed on and off, pale grey and sapphire blue. A young crescent moon, too delicate to be out on such a cold fleeting night, tilted in the air, the only neon, but not even bleaching the sea.
“Look, Daniel,” I murmured. “Look at the water.”
All I could make out was the silken back of his head, the outline of his knees under the rug, the loosely lying artist’s hands.
I’d reached the sand, and it was getting difficult to manoeuvre the wheelchair. The wheels were sinking. The long heels of my boots were sinking too. A reasonable symbol, maybe.
I thrust the chair on by main force, and heard things grinding as the moist sand became clotted in them.
All at once, the only way I could free my left foot was to pull my boot and leg up with both hands. When I tried the chair again, it wouldn’t move anymore. I shoved a couple of times, wrenched a couple, but nothing happened and I let go.
We were about ten feet from the ocean’s edge, but the tide was going out, and soon the distance would be greater.
Walking on tiptoe to keep the sink-weight off my boot heels, I went around the chair to investigate Daniel’s reaction. I don’t know what I’d predicted. Something, patently.
But I wasn’t prepared.
You’ve heard the words: Sea-change.
Daniel was changing. I don’t mean in any supernatural way. Although it almost was, almost seemed so. Because he was coming alive.
The change had probably happened in the eyes first of all. Now they were focussed. He was looking—really looking, and seeing—at the water. His lips had parted, just slightly. The sea wind was blowing the hair back from his face, and this, too, lent it an aura of movement, animation, as though he was in the bow of a huge ship, her bladed prow cleaving the open sea, far from shore, no land in sight.... His hands had changed their shape. They were curiously flexed, arched, as if for the galvanic effort of lifting himself.
I crouched beside him, as I had crouched in front of the house searching for the make-believe spare key. I said phrases to him, quite meaningless, about the beauty of the ocean and how he must observe it. Meaningless, because he saw, he knew, he comprehended. There was genius in his face. But that’s an interpretation. I think I’m trying to say possession, or atavism.
And all the while the astounding change want on, insidious now, barely explicable, yet continuing, mounting, like a series of waves running in through his blood, dazzling behind his eyes. He was alive—and with something. Yes, I think I do mean atavism. The gods of the sea were rising up in the void and empty spaces of Daniel, as maybe such gods are capable of rising in all of us, if terrified intellect didn’t slam the door.
I knelt in the sand, growing silent, sharing it merely by being there beside him.
Then slowly, like a cinematic camera shot, my gaze detected something in the corner of vision. Automatically, I adjusted the magical camera lens of the eye, the foreground blurring, the distant object springing into its dimensions. Mrs. Besmouth stood several yards off, at the limit of the beach. She seemed to be watching us, engrossed, yet not moving. Her hands were pressed together, rigidly—it resembled that exercise one can perform to tighten the pectoral muscles.
I got to my feet a second time. This time I ran towards her, floundering in the sand, deserting the wheelchair and its occupant, their backs to the shore, facing out to sea.
I panted as I ran, from more than the exertion. Her eyes also readjusted themselves as I blundered towards her, following me, but she gave no corresponding movement: a spectator only. As I came right up to her, I lost my footing and grabbed out to steady myself, and it was her arm I almost inadvertently caught. The frantic gesture—the same one I might have used to detain her if she had been running forward—triggered in me a whole series of responses suited to an act of aggression that had not in fact materialised.
“No!” I shouted. “Leave him alone! Don’t you dare take him away. I won’t let you—” and I raised my other hand, slapping at her shoulder ineffectually. I’m no fighter; I respect—or fear—the human body too much. To strike her breast or face would have appalled me. If we had really tussled I think she could have killed me long before my survival reflexes dispensed with my inhibitions.
But she didn’t kill me. She shook me off; I stumbled and I fell on the thick cold cushion of the sand.
“I don’t care what he does,” she said. “Let him do what he wants.” She smiled at me, a knowing scornful smile. “You adopt him. You take care of him. I’ll let you.”
I felt panic, even though I disbelieved her. To this pass we had come, I had brought us, that she co
uld threaten me with such things. Before I could find any words—they would have been inane violent ones—her face lifted, and her eyes went over my head, over the beach, back to the place where I’d left the chair.
She said: “I think I always expected it’d come. I think I always waited for it to happen. I’m sick and tired of it. I get no thanks. All the rest of them. They don’t know when they’re well off. When did I ever have anything? Go on, then. Go on.”
I sat on the ground, for she’d knocked the strength from me. She didn’t care, and I didn’t care.
Someone ought to be with Daniel. Oh God, how were we going to get the wheelchair back across the sand? Perhaps we’d have to abandon it, carry him back between us. I’d have to pay for a new chair. I couldn’t afford it, I—
I had been turning, just my head, and now I could see the wheelchair poised, an incongruous black cut-out against the retreating breakers which still swam in and splintered on the lengthening beach. It was like a Surrealist painting, I remember thinking that, the lost artefact, sigil of stasis, set by the wild night ocean, sigil of all things metamorphic. If the chair had been on fire, it could have been a Magritte.
Initially the movement didn’t register. It seemed part of the insurge and retraction of the waves. A sort of pale glimmer, a gliding. Then the weirdness of it registered with me, and I realised it was Daniel. Somehow he had slipped from the chair, collapsed forward into the water, and, incredibly, the water was pulling him away with itself, away into the darkness.
I lurched up. I screamed something, a curse or a prayer or his name or nothing at all. I took two riotous running steps before she grasped me. It was a fierce hold, undeniable, made of iron. Oh she was so strong. I should have guessed. She had been lifting and carrying a near grown man for several years. But I tried to go on rushing to the ocean, like those cartoon characters you see, held back by some article of elastic. And like them, when she wouldn’t let me go, I think I ran on the spot a moment, the sand cascading from under me.
“Daniel—” I cried, “he’s fallen in the water—the tide’s dragging him out—can’t you see—?”
“I can see,” she said. “You look, and you’ll see, too.”
And her voice stopped me from moving, just as her grip had stopped my progression. All I could do then was look, so I looked.
We remained there, breathing, our bodies slotted together, like lovers, speechless, watching. We watched until the last pastel glimmer was extinguished. We watched until the sea had run far away into the throat of night. And after that we watched the ribbed sands, the plaster cast the waves forever leave behind them. A few things had been stranded there, pebbles, weed, a broken battle. But Daniel was gone, gone with the sea. Gone away into the throat of night and water.
“Best move the chair,” she said at last, and let me go.
We walked together and hoisted the vacant wheelchair from the sand. We took it back across the beach, and at the foot of the alley we rested.
“I always knew,” she said then. “I tried to stop it, but then I thought: Why try? What good is it?” Finally she said to me: “Frightened, are you?”
“Yes,” I said, but it was a reflex.
“I’m glad,” she said. “You silly little cow.”
After that we hoisted the chair up the alley, to the gate of Number 19. She took it to the house, and inside, and shut the door without another word.
I walked to the bus stop, and when the lighted golden bus flew like a spaceship from the shadows, I got on it. I went home, or to the place where I lived. I recall I looked at everything with vague astonishment, but that was all. I didn’t feel what had occurred, didn’t recognise or accept it. That came days later, and when it did I put my fist through one of my nominative aunt’s windows. The impulse came and was gone in a second. It was quite extraordinary. I didn’t know I was going to, I simply did. My right hand, my painter’s hand. I managed to say I’d tripped and fallen, and everything was a mistake. After the stitches came out, I packed my bags and went inland for a year. It was so physically painful for a while to manipulate a brush or palette knife, it became a discipline, a penance to do it. So I learned. So I became what now I am.
I never saw Mrs. Besmouth again. And no one, of course, ever again saw Daniel.
You see, a secret agent is one who masquerades, one who pretends to be what he or she is not. And, if successful, is indistinguishable from the society or group or affiliation into which he or she has been infiltrated. In the Magritte painting, you’re shown the disguise, which is that of a human girl, but the actuality also, the creature within. And oddly, while she’s more like a chess-piece horse than any human girl, her essence is of a girl, sheer girl, or rather, the sheer feminine principle, don’t you think? Maybe I imagine it.
I heard some rumour or other at the time, just before the window incident. The atrocious Ray was supposed to have laced my drink. With what I don’t know, nor do I truly credit it. It’s too neat. It accounts for everything too well. But my own explanations then were exotic, to say the least. I became convinced at one point that Daniel had communicated with me telepathically, pleaded, coerced, engineered everything. I’d merely been a tool of his escape, like a file hidden in a cake. His mother had wanted it too. Afraid to let go, trying to let go. Letting go.
Obviously, you think we murdered him, she and I. A helpless, retarded, crippled young man, drowned in Ship Bay one late autumn night, two women standing by in a horrific complicity, watching his satin head go under the black waters, not stirring to save him.
Now I ask myself, I often ask myself, if that’s what took place. Maybe it did. Shall I tell you what I saw? I kept it till the end—coup de grâce, or cherry, whichever you prefer.
It was a dark clear night, with not much illumination, that slender moon, those pulsing stars, a glint of phosphorous, perhaps, gilding the sea. But naked, and so pale, so flawless, his body glowed with its own incandescence, and his hair was water-fire, colourless, and brilliant.
I don’t know how he got free of his clothes. They were in the chair with the rug—jeans, trunks, pullover, shirt—no socks, I remember, and no shoes. I truly don’t think he could walk, but somehow, as he slid forward those three or four yards into the sea, the sight of the waves must have aided him, their hypnotism drawing off his garments, sloughing them like a dead skin.
I saw him, just for a moment. His Apollo’s head, modelled sleek with brine, shone from the breakers. He made a strong swimmer’s movement. Naturally, many victims of paralysis find sudden coordination of their limbs in the weightless medium of fluid.... Certainly Daniel was swimming, and certainly his movements were both spontaneous and voluntary.
And now I have the choice as to whether I tell you this or not. It’s not that I’m afraid, or nervous of telling you. I’m not even anxious as to whether or not you believe me. Perhaps I should be. But I shan’t try to convince you. I’ll state it, once. Recollect, the story about Ray and the drinks may be true, or possibly the quirk was only in me, the desire for miracles in my world of Then, where nothing happened, nothing was rich, or strange.
For half a minute I saw the shape of a man, spearing fishlike through the water. And then came one of those deep lacunas, when the outgoing tide abruptly collects itself, seems to swallow, pauses. And there in the trough, the beautiful leaping of something, white as salt crystal, smoky green as glass. The hair rose on my head, just as they say it does. Not terror, but a feeling so close to it as it be untranslatable—a terror, yet without fear. I saw a shining horse, a stallion, with a mane like opals and unravelling foam, his forefeet raised, heraldic, his belly a carven bow, the curve of the moon, the rest a silken fish, a great greenish sheen of fish, like the tail of a dolphin, but scaled over in a waterfall of liquid armour, like a shower of silver coins. I saw it, and I knew it. And then it was gone.
The woman with me said nothing. She had barricaded her windows, built up her wall against such an advent. And I said nothing because it is a dream we
have, haven’t we, the grossest of us, something that with childhood begins to perish. To tear the veil, to see. Just for a moment, a split second in all of life. And the split second was all I had, and it was enough. How could one bear more?
But I sometimes wonder if Magritte, whose pictures are so full of those clear moments of terror, but not fear, moment on moment on moment—I sometimes wonder—
Then again, when you look at the sea, or when I look at it, especially at night, anything at all seems possible.
Paper Boat
The summer heat had come. It burned the hills to blocks of standing smoke. It filled the bowl of the shore and the spoon of the bay with its opium, it painted the terracotta of the house in progressively darkening washes of red and umber. The sea, a throbbing indigo, pulled itself to the beach and tumbled there as if drugged. The island lay dumb, half conscious, scarcely breathing, vanquished.
It seemed to the poet he was made of some form of clockwork and the clock had stopped. He stood by the narrow window, looking at the blue-black sea, the distant shadow of a dreamlike mainland chalked in haze. Perhaps this was how the island itself felt, the sea; the rock... this lifeless, numb, internal silence, devoid of anything, even questioning or fear.
This was where they had planned to spend the summer. This island and this house. This house, like a doll’s house. If you opened the side of it you would see all the pretty dolls in their doll-like attitudes of occupation. Laura, scribbling bitter witty prose, with the yellow blind shielding her window from the sun, turning her to amber, a fierce amber hand, the scorched ember-coloured pages. Farther down, Sibbi bending like an Egyptian over a bowl of osiers and sun-mummified flowers, Sibbi with her magical face and her bright shallow brain, and her husband, Arthur, a bear, at the eternal business of his pipe, knocking out dottle, refilling it, that rank black tobacco odour woven by now into the scalding incense of every room. And somewhere, Albertine, like a tall, white goddess from a frieze, moving silently and gently about, being careful to tread on the paws of none of them, this moody tribe of cats who inhabited her domestic landscape.