The Shadow Between Us

by Carol Mason

  More than kisses, letters mingle souls. John Donne. I love that!

  This is not a letter but my arms around you for a brief moment. Katherine Mansfield.

  When I get to the soldier’s table, I pick up his little quote and read it, aware of him observing me doing so. Your handwriting is like your face. It is personal. It is you. Good grief. I carefully put that one down, trying to be casual about it.

  ‘Oh, look at this!’ I suddenly notice an old post box like the ones we used to have in England.

  ‘I bought it off Amazon.’ Beth pats its top. In the background I can hear that annoying Amy recounting the dog story to the old man. ‘Apparently antique mailboxes are quite a collector’s item. I thought that after we write our letters we can pop them in there and I’ll send them off tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s a wonderful idea,’ I tell her. ‘There’s literally nothing you haven’t thought of!’

  ‘Be careful,’ she says. ‘That sounds dangerously like a compliment.’

  We smile.

  ‘Daniel is going to be writing to his pen pal.’ The old man introduces himself as York. I’m sure he’s relieved to have escaped Amy’s clutches.

  ‘Granddad found me one on the Internet.’ Daniel grins.

  ‘It’s not as irresponsible as it sounds.’ York looks amused. ‘It’s through a charitable organisation. Daniel is going to be writing to a little boy in a Bosnian orphanage. Apparently he wants to improve his English, and Daniel could use that too – well, his written English. Clearly there’s nothing wrong with his spoken word.’

  ‘Who are you going to write to?’ Daniel asks Beth, while he beats the top of his head with two pens like he’s playing the drums.

  Beth says, ‘Oh! Well, I have a sister. She lives in Austria. We haven’t spoken in thirty-five years.’

  ‘Thirty-five years is a long time!’ Daniel stops the drumming business. ‘What did she do wrong?’

  Beth stares at him for a second as though he’s telepathic. ‘It’s a very long and complicated story.’

  ‘Who are you going to write to?’ he asks Ned.

  I didn’t know we’d be having some sort of discovery session. He’d better not ask me.

  Ned rapidly waggles the foot that’s resting across his opposite knee. ‘Well, there’s a guy I was in Kuwait with. And maybe some others. I’ll see how it goes.’

  ‘Who are the others?’

  ‘Daniel!’ his granddad says. ‘It’s none of your business!’

  Daniel beams a cheeky smile then sits down at the first desk. ‘This is cool! I’ve never had a pen pal before!’

  I sit at the desk immediately behind the soldier. I watch Amy walk over to him, pull out her phone and say, ‘Let me tell you a story about man’s best friend . . .’ and I can’t resist mumbling, ‘Oh God.’

  But then I pick up my little framed quote. Rather remarkably it says, Reading your old letters reminds you of the person you used to be. I gaze out of the window, far across the water. I wrote so many letters to Mark when I had to go back to England for my dad’s heart surgery, just a few months after we’d met. I’d just found out I was pregnant. My mother was horrified and thought it the end of life as I knew it. There was an entire letter devoted to breaking the news to Mark. International phone calls were expensive back then; I’d never have dreamed of saddling my parents with a bill. I wrote something like, I know it’s a shock. Please don’t tell me we’re too young . . . With or without a baby I am going to make my life a success . . . Blah. Blah. But I remember the last line quite clearly. Please think your response through carefully, because what you say will shape the way I’ll remember you for the rest of my days. Because I’d just found wisdom I was convinced I must have invented it. Not all that long ago I stumbled upon it in a shoebox filled with old photographs, CD sleeves, and some other paraphernalia from my younger days and I showed it to Mark. I watched his face as he read it. It’s so true that your old letters transport you to a chapter in your life in a way that nothing else can. Something so fugitive is captured – a chime of your old conscious self, the embodiment of who you were in the palpable moment. Nothing else is quite like it; not even a photograph. Mark is wary of over-sentimentality. I could tell he was trying to mask the fact that he was overwhelmingly moved by it. ‘Yup.’ He smirked at me, giving me his best loving look. ‘Melodramatic as ever! What’s changed?’

  ‘Eat the muffins.’ Beth’s hand on my shoulder startles me from my daydream. ‘Be warned, if there’s any left over you’re just going to have to take them home.’

  ‘Forewarned is forearmed,’ I say and we smile.

  I turn my attention out of the window again, oddly grateful I can be here rather than on my own in that little house with a bottle of wine and a laptop.

  Beth switches on some music. ‘Let the ink flow and cell phones be idle. May the force of Goddess Iris be with us.’

  It occurs to me that you know when a cultural art form is dying when people make a point of celebrating it. And I think there is something sad and beautiful in that.

  I was going to make another stab at writing to Sarah. That was my reason behind coming here – the hope that the nature of the gathering, the shared purpose, would make it easier to focus and find the right words. But now the moment is upon me I don’t feel I can; I am blunt, blank, and I can’t bear to think about her right now. So I decide I’ll write to my mother, instead. I’ll tell her all about Jessica being in Europe – the baby she always thought I was too young to have. Describe it all in magnanimous detail. What I don’t know, I’ll invent.

  ‘Who is Goddess Iris?’ a little voice pipes up.

  NINE

  I spot him sitting near the lighthouse, staring out to sea. He has his back to me. There is something about the perfectly aligned neck and head, the close cut of his hair, that makes him immediately recognisable. A couple of old fishing boats bob on the water, but other than that everything is postcard still and serene – and so is he.

  I’m about to sneak off but my arrival disturbs some seagulls who were sleeping on the stones. As they disperse in a flurry of wings he glances around and notices me. ‘Hi,’ he says, his tone carrying only a trace of surprise.

  I am taken aback by the sight of his burns once again and hope my face doesn’t show it. I walk over and try to perch casually on the end of the log beside him, and he joins me in staring out to sea as though this were some sort of mutual meditation we’re participating in. ‘You know, this is my favourite place to sit on this entire beach,’ I tell him.

  ‘By the lighthouse?’

  ‘This very log, actually.’ I pull off my sunglasses and we meet eyes, briefly. ‘You’re sitting in my seat, says Papa Bear.’

  ‘Ha,’ he says, without any mirth. He studies my profile as though feeling he’s obliged to say more, but not knowing what. Then he says, ‘Well, I can move. I mean, if you’re one of these people who likes to spread out.’

  I tilt my face to the sun, enjoying how nice it feels now that it seems to be sticking around. ‘It’s OK. You can stay.’

  ‘Anyway, I was here first.’ There is a note of playfulness in his voice.

  I find myself smiling. The act of it makes my shoulders relax, because I realise they’ve been up by my ears – a bad, headache-triggering posture I ended up having to get acupuncture for around the same time that I accepted I couldn’t live off a diet of wine and Tylenol. We sit like this for a while without speaking, our faces to the sun. ‘Did you get any writing done last week?’ he asks.

  I think about this, and our tentative common ground of the Correspondents’ Club.

  ‘Hmm . . . Not really. Attempted one to my parents.’

  Jessica is in Italy and we hear she’s having a fantastic time! Sorry I haven’t written in so long. The good news is Mark and I are doing fine now. It was very hard for a long time but you’ll be pleased to know I am much the old me again.

  When I came to putting it in an envelope it ended up in the bin instead.
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br />   ‘I’m not the best at staying in touch,’ I add. ‘My parents never use email, and I’m not always in the mood for phone calls . . . It’s a funny thing, though, when you’re not used to writing; the pen was like a foreign object in my fingers. And my handwriting is awful now. Can’t believe I used to get gold stars for it in school.’

  ‘I never ever saw myself as being a member of any writing club,’ he says, ‘but I’ve written letters my whole life. I grew up in the tech age but I hate everything computers represent and I can’t stand all that shallow texting shit. I think I just like the process of putting words on paper with a pen. In many ways I communicate better that way. You have to kind of reach into yourself and think, which is a cool exercise.’

  ‘You’d be quite at home with my parents then.’ I look over at the seagulls, who are back, facing the same direction, gathering like they’re at church. ‘I know what you mean, though. It might seem very old-fashioned but there’s an intimacy about writing a letter, isn’t there? A sort of self-consciousness that’s been lost with modern communication. A letter is such a physical, lasting thing that you feel it deserves the very best words you can bring to it . . .’ I smile. The way he is studying me makes me think I’ve gone a bit esoteric on him, so I say, ‘Amy’s a character, huh? Oh my God, the dog story!’

  ‘Ha,’ he says, after perhaps absorbing the shift from serious to playful. ‘I’m just glad I’m not the guy who lives next door.’

  I snort. We look at one another and smile. In the bright sunlight his bloodshot eye appears angry against the pallor of the burned areas of skin. I wonder if it’s painful. Then he turns serious again. ‘I drafted a letter to my old friend who I was in Kuwait with. To kinda flex my writing muscle a bit. But then I didn’t know what to say after all these years. I’m not great at small talk at the best of times, and how do you write the bigger stuff in a letter when it’s coming pretty well out of the blue?’

  I am suddenly reminded of that poem about unwritten letters and haunting ghosts. Distantly off on the horizon I see faces. Words flickering like tiny meteors somewhere between their world and mine.

  ‘You make a start, I think. Everything has a beginning, right? Even things we think have ended are never as over as we believe.’

  This seems to give him pause. ‘In Afghanistan I wrote a lot of letters home. I even wrote them for all the other guys . . . They said I had a way of phrasing things. They’d tell me approximately what they wanted to say, then leave it up to me to package it.’

  There is a wistfulness about him – for his buddies? I don’t know. What I can’t grasp is that he will have witnessed things most of us wouldn’t even begin to stomach imagining and yet there is a certain untainted, almost naive quality in his eyes that’s way more befitting of his age than his experience.

  ‘I hope you charged them. That sounds like quite the undertaking,’ I say.

  ‘Yes. I should have thought of that . . . Probably could have got rich . . . It wasn’t always easy, I’ll tell you. You’ve got to make each one sound like it’s still coming from them. I could hardly have all their letters to their wives sound like they were written by Ned Parker.’

  ‘Or they would probably never have dared go home.’

  He looks at me for a moment as though he doesn’t quite get it. Then he says, ‘Ha. True . . .’ He gazes out to sea again and seems to turn nostalgic. ‘It was how we passed time, or so we kidded ourselves. I’m sure what we were really doing was making sure we were leaving something behind . . . you know . . . in case we didn’t come home. Like you say, letters are physical things.’

  ‘Oh my.’ I recognise it’s an inadequate response. It strikes me that this consciousness of your own mortality in someone so young leaves me feeling a little helpless. He is watching me with an openness about him which makes me say, ‘I sometimes think I’ve spent way too much time around an awful lot of sheltered people. I’m not meaning this cruelly; you can’t really blame people because they haven’t led a tortured existence . . . I just sometimes wonder, what’s the darkest thing that friends, people around me, have ever experienced? I mean, is there stuff? Do they just not talk about it? I know a lot about their diets, their proud parent moments, their vacations, naturopaths, politics, Pilates, but I don’t know what eats away at their conscience late at night. I don’t know if there’s anything to know about them that you couldn’t put on a bumper sticker or a car decal.’

  I stare at the seagulls and suddenly think, Yes, flock behaviour; I have shied away from it at the best of times, and it was truly something to run from at the worst. I guess I could never have hacked being a bird. ‘Sometimes I’ve just longed to say to people, What’s the one thing you would undo if you could? But I’m frightened of finding out there’s nothing.’

  ‘Wow,’ he says, and I realise that was way too much of a ramble to a virtual stranger.

  ‘Sorry,’ I tell him. ‘How did I get on to all that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says, ‘but it’s some deep shit.’

  I meet his eyes again, and we smile.

  ‘Daniel’s something else, eh?’ As soon as I’ve said it I think, Why is he making me so nervous that I’m gabbling? Can’t I just shut up? He’s going to think I’m awful.

  ‘He’s a kid with a lot to say, I guess. And that’s either going to work for him in the future or be his downfall.’

  ‘Watch out, world!’ When I glance at him his face registers something between fascination and surprise. ‘You think I’m cruel. I suppose we are bad-mouthing everybody.’

  ‘We? Not me. You.’

  I briefly hide my face in my hands. ‘Sorry. I’ll be kind now . . . Well, once I’ve said my piece about Beth.’

  He says, ‘Ha,’ again. No actual laugh, just a voiced expression of vague amusement. I’ve noticed he does this; it’s his thing. My sudden realisation that I know a quirk about him bobs there between us for a moment. I don’t know him. He’s led a life I can’t even begin to fathom. And yet there’s something very pared down about him that makes him easy to talk to. It’s been a very long time since I had a proper conversation with someone without feeling like they’re looking at me but only seeing what I did. Without knowing they’re avoiding every possible topic that might hit a nerve.

  ‘Daniel really looks up to you,’ I say. ‘There’s part of him wants to be you, and yet he’s seen what that can mean now and he’s terrified.’

  ‘Well, everywhere I go people want to know how I got to look like this and kids are no exception. I guess it’s natural. I’d be doing the same. I suppose I thought if I came to a small town, once everybody had got their fill they’d eventually just leave me alone.’

  ‘Has it worked?’

  ‘I’ve only been here ten days. I’ve not had much interaction with anyone.’ For a moment he seems solemn. ‘He reminds me a bit of my son.’

  ‘You have a son?’ I glance at his left hand. I thought I hadn’t noticed a wedding ring. Perhaps he’s divorced.

  ‘Jamie. He’s eight.’ He tilts his head back, closing his eyes to the sun again, so I can look at him without feeling conspicuous. I wonder how his scar tissue responds to changes in the weather. If it does better in rain or sunshine. If it tans or burns. If it has no feeling at all.

  ‘He’s with his mother. We’re not exactly together.’

  I want to ask more, but I’m going to sound as bad as Daniel. So I settle for ‘That must be hard.’ There is a tramline of hairless new skin in his crew cut. I’m guessing it’s not a fashion statement; perhaps he’s had surgery on his head, too. A shiver travels up my spine.

  ‘I was deployed a lot. If you’re not doing that you’re doing work-ups, training, pre-deployment exercises. You’re away sometimes ten months in the year. But I suppose the difference in all of those cases is that I was always coming back to them – so long as I was alive, anyway.’

  ‘I can’t really imagine what it must be like to go to war,’ I say. ‘I can’t pretend that I know what to sa
y to you. I have a hunch everything would sound uneducated or highly simplistic.’

  ‘Don’t worry. You can’t imagine until you’ve been there.’ He leans forwards, resting his elbows on his knees. I look at the ground where he’s staring. Our feet. My small, white Converse and his big, brown Merrells. ‘War is a testament of failure in diplomacy, in the ability to compromise. It defies human decency. The military spends three to six months training kids how to kill and sends them off as these tremendous patriots without properly preparing them to mentally deal with the emotional impact of killing or coming to terms with their own mortality. Or they’re older, they’ve messed up their lives, made a few mistakes and they see the military as an opportunity to get sorted out, and they’ve got no idea what that’s going to mean.’

  ‘Did you ever regret signing up? I mean, you must have. I’m guessing. At some point.’ When you lost your face.

  ‘Not sure that’s the word. Regrets are really just lessons we’re slow in learning, aren’t they? The military is so much a part of who I am. Being a SEAL was everything I wanted and admired. In many ways I am who I am because of the path I chose, and a lot of good things came of that. But a lot of bad did too . . . But I’m alive and I know many guys who aren’t sitting here saying that. They weren’t as lucky as me, though don’t get me wrong, I don’t always feel so lucky.’

  ‘I didn’t realise you were a SEAL.’ I’m aware it’s somewhat of an unfinished remark, and a bit of a conversation-stopper for me. What do I think a naval officer of Sea, Air and Land looks like? Bigger? Meaner?

  He doesn’t elaborate so I say, ‘I’m glad I had a girl. If I’d had a son and he’d wanted to sign up I’d have put him under house arrest. I know wars have to be fought but I wouldn’t want my child doing it. Maybe it’s not politically correct, but in my opinion nothing is worth dying for and war should never be thought of as the only way. I could start quoting some of the war poets I studied in university that had such a profound impact on me, but best not to get me started!’ He is watching me again as though I’m either massively fascinating to him or he’s pitying my idiocy. When he doesn’t say anything, I find myself flooding with embarrassment. I hope I haven’t offended him. Mark has often told me I shouldn’t always voice what I think.