The Love of Stones

by Tobias Hill

  She climbs down into the sewers. It is a way she has gone many times: the way she first came to the palace, years ago. Now the water is high around her ankles, but she knows the tides, knows how dangerous they can be. Even in the dark she is certain there is time to spare.

  It is the sound of the water which gives her away. The echo of it ripples back into the abandoned rooms. Somewhere under Haymarket she realises there are voices following her, the sounds of men distorted against the crumbling brickwork. Rats wheedle in the sewage of the Queen. Martha goes east, north-east. She is heading for the Fleet, the great sewer mouth of Blackfriars, a pipe which was once a river itself. She knows the way like the back of her hand. Better, even.

  The water rises. The men behind her have the advantage now. She thinks they do not know it yet. She is swimming, almost, the box fisting up one hand. Her breath makes her sound as if she is drowning. Martha, are you still afloat down there? she remembers, and laughs. Behind her the men slow, imagining monsters.

  There is a passage to her side. She feels it with one bare foot, the mouth of it quarter-hidden by the waterline. Martha pulls herself back and into its bolthole. Holding her breath, not letting out its sound of frightened birds. On all fours, and not knowing, now, where she is going, but only going. The passage is tarnished black with slime. It leads her upwards, turning once to reach its dry dead end.

  She sits back against the wall. The air hurts as she takes it, raggedly, the tears squeezing out of her eyes. The water is at her feet. The men she can still hear. In the dark, she can no longer tell if they are approaching or receding. Her lungs pitch inside her and she coughs up something foul, a bitter clot against the back of her hand. Its warmth feels good. She doesn’t wipe it away.

  She opens the box. Inside it lies the jewel, a form with three eyes. It feels beautiful to her. She touches the diamond. It winks, only once, catching photons of stray light. Beside it is the note she has written for the Mr Levys. She thinks of them. Mary and Joseph. Their kindness, which was the kindness of strangers, and is everything to her now. The way it has made her love them.

  She blinks, dark on dark. The voices of the men are gone. She didn’t realise. She feels for the water. It is at her waist, warm as her skin with faeces. The passage curves down into it. If she could hold her breath, she could get out. But she cannot hold her breath again. She listens to herself in the pitch blackness. She sounds monstrous. She feels her smallness.

  She feels the jewel, its outline. She thinks of giving it to the Mr Levys, and smiles. Water drips against her teeth. Martha thinks of summer, when the Mr Levys will have their money. It will be big when it picks up steam. There will be work enough for her. Work enough for her lifetime. The little Mr Levy will make the jewels. Mr Levy – her Mr Levy – will sell them.

  She tries to think what she will do. But she knows. She will write the letters. The water is at her chest. She closes the box. The water is at her throat. She closes her eyes.

  The box covered in flowers. Iris and convolvulus and narcissus, gripped in her fingers. The jewel held tight as someone loved. The tide rising and falling with the hiss of her disease, an emphysema which would have killed her in her first thirty years. Never knowing, at least, that she had been left behind. Spring and neap rising over her for seven decades. A lifetime before a man comes whistling through the dark.

  His lamplight arching across the brick. The radius, swinging down to Martha’s face. The whistling stopped. The light increasing. The box gripped in the cagework of her hand.

  * * *

  I open my eyes. I am alone in a room that is not mine. There is bedding under me, a low table to one side. There are animals on the walls. Parallel processions of zebra, lions, elephants. As far as I know I have never been here before. The sensation is not unfamiliar.

  It feels late. Certainly it is less than dark. There is some kind of daylight outside the shutters. The smell of tatami reaches me, sweet as hay. Everything is external, the details withdrawn. My head is empty as the volute of a shell. After a time the sound of breakers reaches me, and I remember the breakers and what brought me to them.

  It is an effort to look sideways. On the table is a blue cup with no handle. I reach out. Tip it to see inside. Water slops across my nose. I drink what I can get. The cold of it moves through my supine body.

  There is a noise in the house around me. The creak of stairs. I try to sit up and fail. There is a pain in my chest, something that might be a broken rib, although I have never broken a rib before, cannot be sure of my own breakages. For a moment it hurts so badly I can’t breathe. The cup tips over and the last water blooms coldly round my hair.

  I watch the door open. The fisherman is standing in its aperture. When he sees I’m awake he comes in. He goes over to the shutters and folds them back, flooding the room with light. He goes back out, not closing the door.

  He comes back in again. It is like watching a tennis match. I do it without moving my head.

  ‘What time is it?’ It seems important. The words hurt. I cough at the pain.

  ‘Two o’clock.’

  ‘Who are you? Are you Hikari Murasaki?’

  There is a bowl in his hands. He comes and picks up the cup. Rights it.

  ‘You should have taken me to a hospital.’

  ‘We did.’

  Another cough begins and I choke it back. ‘I’ve been to hospital?’

  ‘You have two fractured ribs, bruising, lesions. There was some concussion. After you regained consciousness they said you were ready to leave. The practice is small here, and busy. They say you must rest. I did not know where else to take you.’

  ‘I don’t remember that,’ I say. As if he might be lying, and he might. He sits next to the bed, cross-legged, watching me. We watch each other. Outside the sky is bright white, a marine lucidity. A seagull begins to laugh in the distance. I close my eyes and think of Punch and Judy. Southend, the pier a road to nothing.

  ‘How long have I been asleep?’

  ‘A hundred years.’

  ‘I want to know,’ I say, but when I look up he has gone again, busying himself. Embarrassed at something, possibly, although it is hard to know, his face is not one which gives up emotion easily to strangers. The whirr of an electric fan begins.

  ‘Two days,’ he says, and straightens.

  ‘Why didn’t you leave me?’

  He comes back. Picks up the bowl. ‘This is a soup made from crab shells. You should eat something.’

  ‘You could have left me. The sea would have come back up. I wasn’t going anywhere. No blood on your hands.’

  I sip, a spoonful of soup. It is nothing but taste, barely a food at all. My stomach groans with it. Quite suddenly I am avid with hunger. I can smell the man’s sweat as I empty the bowl. Pepper and sea salt. He is still watching me. ‘You are arguing for your own death.’

  ‘No.’ Talking with my mouth full of sweetness. ‘Just curious.’

  ‘I have never killed,’ he says. As if it is a reason. He takes the bowl back and stands to go. His eyes are sanguine. The colour of old blood. At the door he pauses. ‘Have you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say, and close my eyes. Turning away from him and his talk. Sleep breaking over me.

  Every day he cooks for me. Warm rice with broth, white miso soup. Each meal a step back. Soft rice noodles, steamed eggs with fern. Comfort foods and temptations. Raw sweet prawns. Salt-baked bream. Scallops grilled with their corals. His nourishment draws me out of myself. I watch him and wonder if he knows what he is doing.

  The porch door wakes me each morning, banging shut before first light. From the bedroom window I can see the man, walking the dune path to the quay. His boat starts up, turning out to the open sea.

  By seven he is always home again. He cycles the children to school. Tom frowning to keep up, Iren happy as a Buddha in her child seat. They are visible on the empty coast road, all the way to Tosa.

  No one comes to the house. The postman stops at the mailb
ox by the quay. Sometimes, at low tides, an old woman appears further down the beach. She is thin and bent, always alone, raking for clams or razorshells. I watch her searching. The strand reflects her back.

  For three days the stairs are beyond me. I make myself exercise, pacing the room, under the watch of the elephants. Everything here is watchful, waiting. The man brings up my belongings, the bag I once left behind. When I don’t open it he leaves me books instead. Only three are in English. The rest overestimate my Japanese. I sit by the open window and read the King James Bible, the 1892 Pears Cyclopaedia with its arguments for a flat earth, the poems of Robert Louis Stevenson.

  Mother, speak low in my ear,

  Some of the things are so great and so near,

  Some are so small and far away,

  I have a fear that I cannot say…

  Odd things, desert island books. Heirlooms inscribed with half-familiar names. To Hikari. From his grandfather, Michael. To Mari, 1946. On her wedding day.

  There are thirty stitches in my left thigh. I cover them with one hand as I wash, bent over on the bathroom stool. The bruising is deepest below my ribs. In a week it begins to fade. The trapped blood sinks to a livid belt above my hip bone.

  It is late November. Only the nights are colder. I spend the evenings downstairs, glad of the liberty and the warmth of the hearth. The radio whines through Japanese and Korean. The children are sullen, venomous with hurt, wanting me gone. I stay out of their way when I can. Listening to their games and arguments, their private comings and goings. Beyond them, always, the sound of the gulls, and their correlative, the sea.

  We talk carefully. Always of the present, avoiding futures and pasts. Never of why I came, or why I stay. Never of what he is doing, and for whom. Circling the periphery of accidents.

  ‘You have a lot of books.’

  ‘I like to read.’

  ‘No photographs. Nothing of your family.’

  ‘I could say the same about you. Hold this.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Something for killing fish.’

  ‘So what’s that?’

  ‘Also something for killing fish.’

  ‘They must run a mile when they see you. The Great White Hunter of the eastern shore. What do you have against them?’

  ‘Nothing. I need a living. They don’t run.’

  ‘Still, I’m sure you’d make them if you could.’ Waiting for him to smile, his face relaxing into its lines. Wanting it. I can admit these things to myself. ‘What about this?’

  ‘Something Iren made.’

  ‘Don’t tell me.’

  ‘For luck. For my boat. She is good with her hands. Do you like it?’

  ‘Especially the glass. It looks like you could kill many fish with it. You must be proud of her.’

  ‘Of course. There. Fixed.’

  ‘You don’t sound sure.’

  ‘Why don’t we find out?’

  He turns in a circle out of the harbour. We head due south-east into the Bay of Tosa. It is a beautiful day, the sun and sea both so blue that the horizon is almost invisible at their juncture. I look back for the promontory and it is already distant. The island rising above it, greener than green.

  He watches the sea as he steers, eyes running over the seams and glassy flats that demarcate currents and submarine geography. At a point that seems like all others to me he cuts the motor. We sit, drinking Sapporo beer from a cooler, fishing for sea bass and black bream.

  ‘This is nice.’

  ‘I’m glad you think so.’

  ‘Is this all you do?’

  He grunts. ‘I go to market in Kôchi. I work on the allotment. I look after my children.’

  ‘Did you ever want to be anything else?’

  ‘No.’ He drinks his beer, eyes narrowing.

  ‘You must have had ambitions. Fire-eater, international playboy, prime minister of Japan.’

  ‘No.’ And then, more quietly, ‘I wanted to be a teacher.’

  ‘You would have been good.’

  I don’t ask him why he never tried. To be a teacher would mean living among people. To live among people would risk the Brethren. I know, as clearly as if he had told me, how the jewel can split a life in half.

  A fish jumps, then another. I catch a horse mackerel, making hard work of it. The man squats beside me, gutting it against the deck. He grins. ‘Congratulations. There is packing ice in the cabin.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Under the seat. The blue box.’ He calls after me. ‘Kaori-chan–’

  I stop by the cabin door. He is still bent over the fish, face in shadow. Wind hums in the radio mast. ‘Who’s Kaori? Is that your wife?’

  And already we are too close. We have crossed the line into the circle. Hikari Murasaki shakes his head. He stands up. Reaches for our rods.

  ‘We should go back,’ he says. The reels sing in his hands. ‘There is rain on the way.’

  I think of him at night. His hands dabbed with fish blood. The way his eyes are always on me. Watching me for something, like the child on the aeroplane. Not like a child.

  Sleep stays away from me. I have had too much of it. I sit at the window until morning, watching the sea. Out across the dunes, the waves advance and advance without ever coming closer. Soft and phosphorescent, like lines on a computer screen.

  Sunday. At dawn he is out by the ginkgo tree, caulking the dinghy. I sit on the porch and drink his coffee. The first of the sun falls across us.

  ‘Thanks for taking me fishing.’

  He nods. There are nails in his mouth. A skylark goes up over the dunes.

  ‘Have you always lived here?’

  He takes the nails out of his mouth. ‘Not always. You look better.’

  ‘I feel better,’ I say, and I do. Even the ribs are mending. ‘I never asked whose room I’ve taken.’

  ‘Tom’s.’ He works out a tuft of oakum from its sack. ‘He can share with Iren while you are here.’

  ‘I don’t need to stay much longer.’

  Nothing changes in his face. Delicately, smiling with effort, he chisels the oakum in between planks. ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I wrap my hands around the mug. “They won’t talk to me. Tom and Iren.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is it the dog?’

  ‘Lyu.’ He straightens and comes back to the porch. Sits down and drinks my drink. It steams in the sunlight. He is wearing a plaid shirt, short-sleeved. It makes him look older.

  ‘Can we talk about it?’

  He turns to look at me, considering the question. ‘If he was alive he would have come back by now.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It isn’t your fault.’ He is still looking at me. His pupils narrowed to my proximity. ‘I shouldn’t have sent him after you. I didn’t know what else to do.’

  ‘No.’ It is only the second time we have talked of that night. I think of how slowly we turn towards one another. Imperceptibly, like hands on a clock face.

  ‘I have explained this to the children. It is easier for them to blame you.’

  ‘What if I spoke to them?’

  ‘How fast do you think you can run?’

  ‘Faster than they can ride bicycles. What are they armed with?’

  He smiles, a little grim. ‘Whatever they can find. They’ll be on the other side of the headland. Bring them in for breakfast.’

  It’s further than I thought. Bound by nothing but thistles and scrub, the sand falls away into my monstrous footsteps. After ten minutes my legs are shaking with exertion. I stop at the top of the next dune. There are four more between me and the shore. Breakers, the land mirroring the sea.

  The wind changes. I hear them. Two voices, playing hide-and-seek at the easternmost point of their easternmost island.

  ‘Tom?’ The sun is already high overhead. The children are imperceptible, the sounds of them fading away. A martin dips over the marram grass. ‘Iren?’

  ‘Go away.’
>
  I turn. Tom is a yard behind me. I never heard him come up. He is barefoot, bare-chested, with a stick in one hand. The wind catches at his coiled hair. ‘I need to talk to you.’

  ‘We don’t want you here.’

  ‘About the dog.’

  ‘Lyu. You killed him.’ His face is twisted. It is hard to tell if he is angry or sun-blind or about to cry, or some combination of all these things. His expressions are difficult, like his father’s.

  ‘I came to say that I’m sorry.’

  Iren comes into sight, two dunes back. Hurrying, calling out her brother’s name. Tom-kun. Pleading: wait for me. Matte. Matte.

  My legs are tired from the climb. I sit down carefully on the warm sand. ‘How old was Lyu?’

  ‘Don’t say his name.’ His voice goes up high. I see that the shaft in his hand is not a stick at all. It is a piece of fishing equipment, metal-tipped, tridented. A harpoon or eel spear.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Ten.’ The boy looks round for his sister. ‘He was a good dog, but he didn’t sleep too well.’

  ‘He looked like the models they sell in Kôchi. Where did you get him?’

  ‘My dad bought him. To protect us.’ I don’t ask him what from. He is looking at my thighs. The curved smile of stitch-marks. It is wide as his head. ‘He bit you bad.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He never hurt anyone before.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘He must have been mad. I guess if you didn’t fight him he would have bit you some more.’

  ‘I think so.’

  He sits down. The grass bows around us. ‘He was a strong boy. You must be strong.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Tom.’

  ‘Will you help us make his grave?’

  There is nothing to bury. My ribs creak as I dig. When the hole is three feet deep Iren gets down inside, as if she is going to try it out. Tom hands her a picket painted with black prayer characters. I fill the sand in around its base. Iren is buried to the waist. It is an effort for me to pull her out. She doesn’t seem to mind. All the way back to the house she talks about cats.