The Moon Is Watching

by Adam Cloake

  Tom drove, with a new destination in mind – a closer one. To keep himself sane, he opened his mouth and yelled – a long, loud animal wail. It briefly helped him block out the indiscriminate sounds of Brendan and Annie, their voices still rising in intensity.

  Tom turned the car left off the motorway, and drove towards the heart of Glasgow.

  Eventually, he saw the old building on Castle Street, coming up on the left. The grey stonework of the Royal Infirmary Hospital reminded him chillingly of the old house in the Highlands.

  He brought the car to an abrupt halt, opposite the hospital’s front entrance.

  Tom leaned back to grab his overnight bag from the rear seat. He rummaged around inside it. Within seconds, he had found what he needed. In his hand, he held the old-fashioned razor.

  He jumped out of the car. Steadying himself against the open door, he twisted the razor’s wheel, opening the tiny gates in its head. He tipped the blade out into his open palm, then discarded the razor on the sidewalk. He would only need the blade.

  Looking across to reassure himself that he had plenty of witnesses near the building’s entrance, he pulled off his jacket and t-shirt, and threw them aside. The blade had begun to dig into his palm, but he refused to notice.

  Naked from the waist up, no longer self-conscious about the folds in his exposed skin, Tom realised that the torrent inside him was becoming more virulent, more sickening, than it had been while he sat in the driver’s seat. His increased blood circulation, perhaps! By now, the voices had been raised almost to screams.

  “Will you kiss the Devil when you get to Hell?”

  “You’re a worthless, hateful son!”

  Ignoring the traffic, Tom stepped out onto the road. Holding the thin blade in his right hand, he began to walk across towards the hospital. After a few steps, he took a deep breath, raised his left arm, and stabbed the blade into the flesh above his wrist. Clenching his teeth, he drew the blade along his arm, following the line of his veins. The skin separated, like a raw Sunday roast. Despite the savage burst of pain, Tom repeated this action several times, slicing his flesh, making a series of deep cuts, beginning at the wrist, and running all the way up to his elbow. By now, the blood was gushing from these fresh grooves. It ran off the joint of his elbow in a series of stringy drops, like fuel from the wing of a damaged plane. He continued to hack at himself, knowing that his plan wouldn’t work unless he located the arteries.

  Cars blared their horns at him as they screeched to a halt. Miraculously, not one hit him. By now, he was aware of the first screams coming from just in front of him. They joined with the screams still echoing inside him.

  Finally, the flow of blood became a spray. It cascaded towards him, red-painting his bare chest.

  He switched hands. Now holding the blade in the red stickiness of his left fingers, he began making gashes along his right arm. This process was more difficult, since his left hand was becoming weaker. Every time he moved it, a jolt of stinging pain shot up towards his shoulder and neck. His steps were becoming unsteady, and he could feel a narcotic lightness in his head.

  His vision was already hazy as he saw men and women run toward him. His life was ebbing away. Thankfully, the invading voices inside him were ebbing away as well, flowing out of him, along with his diminishing blood.

  Tom allowed gentle, concerned hands to take hold of him, and lower him onto the pavement. Lying on his bare back, he felt something like rags being wrapped around both of his outstretched arms.

  In this pose, he looked as if he had been crucified.

  Autumn was delivering its earliest bite as the tanned young man walked nervously along an unfamiliar tree-lined street in south Dublin. He passed a Catholic Church on his right, slowly emptying of its morning congregation. He watched as a dozen souls lightly dipped their fingers into the font beside the oak door, then flicked these same fingers towards their faces, their chests, their shoulders, bowing their heads in relief and supplication.

  He turned his back to the building, and to its people, and walked past.

  Further along the street, the young man found himself surrounded by large, confident houses of reddish-brown brick, all sitting haughtily back from the road. As he tried to make out the numbers on the distant doors, looking for one in particular, he felt his forehead gently brushed by a falling leaf. Other leaves, brown or yellow in colour, lined the pavements on either side. He smiled at their crunching sound as he strolled placidly over them.

  Five quick months had passed since his departure from the hospital, and Tom was finally ready for the next, most important, stage in his recovery.

  As he often did these days, he pressed his hand against the front of his jacket, pleased at the solidity of the stomach behind it. It wasn’t as flat as he wanted yet, but the exercise and the dieting were clearly paying off. That morning, while shaving his thinning, clear-skinned face with warm water and white, springy foam, he remarked on how far he had come since the cold, soapless shave of that Highland morning in April. He was fitter, healthier, cleaner. He was aware that people still glanced at him in the street, but this no longer made him feel awkward. Instead, these days, the warmth of their smiles made him feel self-consciously handsome.

  The transfusion had been completed by the time he had woken up in the Glasgow hospital. A middle-aged doctor, clearly having difficulty hiding her annoyance at Tom's actions, explained to him that he had experienced a Class 3 haemorrhage, and had lost one-third of his blood. She told him that, had he lost more than 40%, he would probably have been dead before they carried him through the front door. As she was leaving him at the end of that first visit, the doctor could not resist saying “You've created quite a mess, Thomas. It took them hours to clean up the sidewalk.”

  His wounds had healed quickly, but that was not the most important part of his recovery. When he woke up, the voices were gone. And they hadn’t returned since. Despite his guilt, Tom was relieved at this. He wondered why his plan of escape had worked at all. He finally decided it was his lack of faith which had caused the ritual to fail. The souls of Annie and Brendan didn’t belong where they were, so he had rejected their essence like a pair of transplanted organs. Not only had the transfusion saved his life; it had also flushed him clean. He had fresh, new blood running in his veins, blood which had never been near his mother and father. Blood which had never been touched by the Brethren.

  This new essence was flowing through him the day he had finally emerged from the Royal Infirmary, and into the brightness of that late spring day. As he’d expected, the Toyota was no longer parked across the street. It might have been towed, or stolen, but Tom suspected that one of the Brethren had come and quietly brought it back to Mayo, where it belonged.

  He had been given money by his parents at the beginning of their fateful trip – a tiny fraction of what they had brought to the Commune – to pay for their expenses along the way. Tom now used part of this to bring him to Dublin, via the ferry port in Larne. He arrived in the capital city the morning after his discharge, and immediately jumped on the 37 bus. For the first time in years, he was following the familiar route to Blanchardstown. With trepidation, he walked up the old street, and found himself standing across from the forecourt of his father’s old garage. It was still there, barely changed in the eight years since his exile. Even better was the head which he could see from across the road, avidly studying the inner workings of an Audi engine. The hair had changed from peppery-grey to almost pure white, but it was clearly that of his father’s former partner.

  Their reunion had been emotional, despite the subtle suspicion which Tom detected from Lenny. The old man seemed surprised to hear that Annie and Brendan had died naturally in the colony, just a few months apart. He seemed to decide, however, that he wasn’t going to pry into this part of Tom’s life.

  “God rest their souls,” Lenny said to him.

  All Tom could say was, “Yes”.

  And so, he found himself back where he had be
en at the age of eleven, his head hovering over the occasional car engine. Lenny agreed to accept his help at the garage in return for a bed in his son’s old room. Tom also secured a more regular job in a nearby supermarket, packing shelves, mopping floors, and cleaning toilets. He had convinced himself that this was just the beginning of a brand-new journey, and that the brightest part of his life still lay ahead.

  He had not heard from the Brethren in months, and had come to believe that they were permanently out of his life. His failure to provide an adequate receptacle for the spirits of their departed brother and sister may have convinced them finally that there was little point in harrying him to re-join their congregation. Perhaps they felt better off without him.

  Since his visit to the big, remote house, and since the bloody Ceremony of The Living Soul, Tom had not prayed once. He was certain he would never pray again.

  Another leaf bounced off his shoulder as he reached his destination. He was standing beside a low, black gate at the entrance to a short drive. Like all the other houses on the street, about a dozen stone steps led up from the drive to the Georgian door. He opened the gate, and walked up the drive.

  From a nearby tree, he could hear the rattling sound of a bird-call. Seconds later, from a different tree, a similar sound replied.

  As each step brought him closer to the house, he thought of how, in the past months, his present life – the life of the Real Tom – had merged with the ethereal life of the Other Tom, as if he was returning to the path of his original destiny. This alignment felt proper and correct.

  He mounted the steps, taking each one deliberately. His nerves were jangling. He cursed his own lack of surety.

  Once at the door, he took a few breaths to steady himself. Then he rang the bell.

  The chime was faintly familiar, like a piece of classical music heard in an advert. It took just a few seconds for a change in the frosted glass to indicate the approach of someone from inside the house. The thick bubbles in the pane took on a purple tinge, which grew larger as the person in the hall came towards the door.

  When the young woman saw Tom standing on her front step, she froze, her mouth clamped slightly open. After a few seconds, all she could say was, “What are you doing here?”

  Tom was at first disquieted by the harshness in her eyes and in her voice.

  “Hello, Eileen,” he said. “It's good to see you.”

  “Is it?” She seemed genuinely surprised at these words. She had heard nothing from her family for years, and had grown used to applying the word “family” only to Ross and their two children.

  “May I come in?” he asked. “I have a lot to tell you, a lot of explaining to do.”

  Her hesitation was almost painful. She stood in silence for a few moments. Then she closed her eyes in resignation, and exhaled a long, heavy sigh. Involuntarily, Tom felt himself do exactly the same.

  Eileen stepped back, pulling the door back with her.

  He stepped inside.

  She closed the door.

  They spent many hours together – talking, crying, explaining, apologising.

  Then they spent many years together. A brother and a sister. Two for joy.

  Shore

  Cloudy. No stars. The moon barely seen.

  She stands beside the mossy rock, amid the rough grass that slopes down towards the shore. She stands here every night. She looks, with longing, beyond the sand, down towards the waves. It was these waves which stole her man away from her, as if they were soldiers of the sea, sent to do its wicked bidding. Taken into the sea’s embrace, he had been sent down, deep down, into another place, a place where there is no deadly water, a place where there is nothing we can know.

  That day, his last day, had been many summers earlier, and many winters, long before she was old.

  Like all other days, she had gone to the shore a little after sunrise to watch him leave. He had waved to her from the cove, the place of their earliest love. She had watched him push his boat into the tide, and had watched still as he leaped aboard to begin the day's work.

  And then, she had turned, going home, her own chores to do.

  That day, his last day, she had turned away early, a few moments early. A feeling, perhaps, of being busier than usual? She had taken her eyes from him too soon – eyes that had always promised him safety.

  Was it this turn of hers that had caused the other turn, the one the boat had taken, the turn that took him down, down into the depths?

  She still blames herself.

  The wind seems to like her tonight. It has been calm for days, brushing lightly past her, as if ignoring her. Tonight, it plays gently with her hair, which is still red-brown, like her sun-filled skin. She still glows with beauty, despite her years. She has a beauty unlike that of the girls in the village, many miles inland. They are plain; they are a community. But she is remote, like her house is remote. Its windows allow no view of other houses, as if jealous of its own solitude.

  Throughout her days and nights, she does not see many people. Just the passing traders. They bring cotton and tweed for her clothing, and wood for her fire, and they take with them the crafts that her hands produce. They leave with her beads and her bracelets, all made from the patchwork of the shore – the stones and the shells. These beauties, unlike her beauty, will be taken to the towns. There, they will be sold to those who can afford them. In this way, she lives.

  The traders – ugly, wart-faced men and fat, gin-drinking women – talk of her strangeness, her isolation. “I couldn't do it,” they say. “I couldn't live like her.” If she cared to have an opinion about these people, she would probably say the same of them.

  Her man had been young when they first knew each other. They both hailed from the seafront; it is where they have always belonged. He grew up near the western part of the beach, and her people came from the eastern. Both their families fished, and sometimes they foraged. They met often, at the cove, and they were right for each other.

  He wanted her for the firm strength she had, for the knowing laughter in her dark eyes. She had the ancient wisdom of the land that watches over the sea. She would be mature for him, for she wanted him to stay young. She loved his smiling, bearded face, and his sea-blue eyes, deep with mischief. He had a spirit that roiled like waves, and he looked to her for her stillness, the stillness of sand.

  Tonight, his memory draws her away from the mossy rock and the grass. She walks down towards the shore, closer to where he lies. Before her, the fresh, young waves roar playfully to each other as they race towards her, like children. Then they whisper gently as they recede, their passion spent after a brief life. When her man was still here, she would stand with him, in the late dimness of evenings like this one, watching these waves, listening to them. Side by side, they would hold hands, as the wind blew her soft, light clothing towards him, gently touching his own. Her hair seemed, in these moments, to be reaching out to him, to caress his face. He would sense this, and would move closer to her, so that he could feel the light strands on his cheek, mingling with his beard. It was as if they were playing with Nature, changing it. As if the beach were flowing over the waves.

  They would watch terns as they preened for each other, and crabs as they scuttled in their slowness along the sand. Crabs feel they are exploring the whole world. It was how the man and woman felt. There was no other world but this one.

  He went often to the sea. Sometimes the fish were plentiful, sometimes scarce. No matter. It always seemed like enough. He cherished knowing that his beloved water was around him, as the woman was around him in the night-time. His passion for the great blueness matched the love she felt for the shore. They looked to both these expanses for much of what they needed. They lived on the fish of the sea, and the kale of the shore. They adorned their home with rough shells and smooth stones.

  They promised each other that they would never be apart, that no force would separate them.

  And then, in just a few months, he was taken from he
r.

  The tide returned his shattered boat to shore, but the sea had kept him. The sea was jealous. She had wanted him for herself.

  The woman had mourned for many months.

  But she chose to forgive the sea, as we forgive our dearest friends. As we forgive our neighbours.

  And so, she made an appeal to the sea, and the sea accepted.

  Tonight, again, she waits. Her arms are folded, her brown-black eyes fixed on the waves, a smile playing on her lips. The woman has no interest in timepieces, and yet she knows that it will be soon, as she always knows.

  And, in a moment, it happens. A mile out from the beach, a tern, screeching with purpose, swoops along the top of the water. Its nimble claws grasp a fish swimming near the surface. Now, with its long wings outstretched, the tern rises again, and flies, with the fish, towards the shore, towards the woman. Her gaze follows its approach. When the bird is over her, it opens its claws. The fish, now released, falls towards the sand. But its fall is graceful, pure. It seems to be sailing on the breeze. The clouds, which have been filling the sky with greyness, are clearing, and the moon is slowly revealed, pushing the grey aside. Its emerging light glints off the smooth silver skin of the falling fish.

  As it nears the sand, its descent seems to slow. Now it glides down towards her. It turns slowly in the air, the fullness of the moon making of its skin a tiny carousel. The woman can see that it is changing. Its scales and gills are becoming brighter. Soon, it is like a slowly falling star, small and safe, glowing with intermingling colours.

  The woman closes her eyes as the shimmering light floats softly to the sand before her.

  When she reopens them, all has changed. She is no longer alone. Now, her man is standing before her, smiling. He is here with her again, and he is the same as he was on that fateful day.