Spring Tide

by Chris Beckett

  But still he walked away. The argument with his friends had shaken him quite badly. He’d been shocked by his own sudden eruption of rage. It had made him think about his dealings with other people in general, and the way he swung so suddenly from one feeling to another, from friendliness to contempt, from passion to indifference. And he was tired of blowing about in the wind, and doing whatever seemed easiest at the time. He knew he’d hurt people that way, especially women, and he’d had enough of the mess and shame when the wind suddenly changed.

  As Siobhan watched him dissolve into the forest, she wondered why he’d been in such a hurry to get away. He’d seemed very reserved, even by English standards, but she’d quite liked the look of him, and had assumed he’d like the look of her too – well, why wouldn’t he? – enough in any case for an evening together to seem like a pleasant prospect. Perhaps he was just shy, she thought. Maybe she should have suggested it herself? But something had stopped her. Siobhan wasn’t prone to shyness, so it wasn’t that. No, it was almost as if he’d seen her thought and metaphorically held up a warning hand. Which was kind of odd.

  But anyway, never mind. By the time she’d unwrapped the cheese and tomato sandwich that had travelled with her all the way from Dublin airport, she was enjoying the ruin in the moonlight and the chorus of cicadas, and thinking about other things. After about fifteen minutes, she headed back herself along the track.

  When she reached the side path towards the sea, she paused. She could go straight on to the village now and, as likely as not, she’d meet Thomas again outside the café, for where else was there for him to go? She could stop for a word and, if he seemed more amenable this time, a companion for the evening would perhaps be an option once more. Or she could turn left now down the path towards her little camp on top of the cliff. Spending the night there had been quite appealing in prospect, even in the absence of the camping equipment that her friends were bringing, but it seemed rather less so now. Meeting Thomas, and then watching him go, had made her more aware of the fact that she was on her own, and she felt unnerved by the moonlit forest and its shadowy and ambiguous forms. But recognising this fact made up her mind for her. She didn’t like to give way to unfounded fears. She preferred to push on through them.

  She’d just turned down the little valley when she saw a man ahead of her, standing just a few yards back from the path, completely motionless, and watching her with an odd, sardonic, sideways gaze. This was genuinely frightening and she was on the point of turning back and heading for the village after all when she realised this wasn’t a human being at all, but only the broken trunk of a tree. Amused by her own irrational fear, she walked over to the tree to give it a little kick, and had just returned to the path when suddenly a real man appeared on the path ahead with a gun in his hand, striding determinedly towards her. Her heart began to race again but the hunter walked straight past, heading back to the village without saying a word, and Siobhan was on her own again.

  How different it seemed on the cliff now, in the dark. She searched for some time for the sleeping bag which she’d left in a small hollow under some rocks, cursing herself for not marking the spot more clearly, and worrying that perhaps it had been stolen. Eventually she found it, though, and this was immensely comforting, a moment in fact of really intense happiness. Even returning to a patch of earth on a clifftop, it seemed, could feel, in the right circumstances, like coming home. She knew she wouldn’t sleep for some time, but she rolled out her sleeping bag and lay down quite contentedly on the outside of it. The stars were very bright, and the entire span of the Milky Way was stretched out above her across the sky. She wished she could name the constellations, but the only one she could remember was Orion, shining up there above the mountain.

  Never mind. The stars didn’t know their names.

  Still awake an hour later, she stood up and stretched herself and, as she did so, she looked down over the side of her rocky hollow at the small beach beneath, its narrow strip of sand dimly visible in the moonlight, and little waves glowing softly as they broke over it. Some way out to sea, the lamps of several fishing boats were moving slowly across the water, the crouched fishermen inside them half in light and half in darkness.

  She was watching their slow progress when she became aware of movement below her. There was a direct path to the beach from the village and a man was walking along it. She could see it was Thomas. Shadowy and indistinct as he was in the moonlight, there was something slightly dogged about his walk that she immediately recognised. It was as if he was battling against something, she thought, forcing himself forward into the world against some sort of resistance. She saw him pull off his T-shirt and shorts and wade out naked into the sea. The water glittered around him as he dived in, and it seemed a long time before he emerged again to swim thirty or forty strokes further out in a strong, confident crawl, before stopping and treading water so he could turn and look back at the shore. Not wanting him to see her watching him, Siobhan squatted down again behind her rocks.

  Soon afterwards, she decided to get inside her sleeping bag, for the air was beginning to cool. As she lay there, she imagined herself in Thomas’s place: the moonlight under the sea, the play of grey shadows on the blurry stones on the bottom, the coolness of the water against her skin. If they’d spent the evening together, she thought, the two of them might well have both come swimming. By then he’d no longer be the shadowy being she’d met at the temple in the moonlight. They would have talked for a while, seen each other’s faces properly in electric light, knocked back a few glasses of beer or wine or ouzo or something, and learnt a few anchoring facts about one another, like where each of them came from, what they did for a living, and who was in their families. There would have been just the two of them together in a little pool of electric light. It would have felt intimate and conspiratorial, and, based on past experience and her knowledge of herself, Siobhan thought it quite likely that, after their swim, or even instead of it, they would have had sex. People differ a great deal in this respect, but Siobhan’s attitude was very straightforward. Pleasure was a good thing if it didn’t hurt anyone, and she was quite open to brief encounters in situations like this where there was little risk of difficult emotional entanglements.

  It could have been rather nice actually, she thought a little wistfully, but then she smiled. Sex was such a funny thing when you examined it. She’d always thought that. Such a big deal was made of it. So many contradictory prohibitions and expectations were placed upon it. It was the focal point of so much huffing and blowing and agonising and general nonsense: sonnets, songs, sermons, Viagra, lipstick, rom-coms, operas, jokes, public stonings, pop songs, vows of celibacy, Romeo and Juliet, Ten Top Tips to Wow Your Man in Bed, the pill, the confessional, tears… On and on. So much drama and worry and guilt and longing. And all of it, whether disapproving or celebratory, was centred on sex as a wild and subversive force. Yet what was it in the end? What was that feeling? When you really came down to it, wasn’t it just scratching a rather fancy kind of itch? An itch, what’s more, that only existed because it ensured that living creatures didn’t stint in the business of making more creatures. What was wild about that? What was subversive about a force that pulled all the time, like a kind of biological gravity, in the direction of parenthood and domesticity?

  It might start out in the moonlight on a beach, Siobhan thought, but it ended up with stair gates, and car seats, and grown-ups saying ‘weewee’ and ‘poo’.

  She had to admit, though, that her thoughts at this point were somewhat coloured by the fact that her friend Anne, back in Dublin, had had a baby a few months ago, and seemed to have lost interest in all the things the two of them had shared. In fact, if it wasn’t for that baby, Anne would have been with her now.

  And actually, Siobhan thought, in all fairness, and setting jealousy aside, opening your legs and pushing out an entirely new human being who no one had ever seen before, well, that wasn’t exactly tame. The poo and the stair ga
tes might be, but they were just anodyne trimmings, as Valentine cards and silly pet names were anodyne trimmings for sex. The raw reality was something else.

  In fact, when you came to think about, wasn’t it life itself that was the really subversive thing? Not just sex but motherhood too? All of life was a rebellion really, a doomed, Lucifer-like rebellion against the peaceful downward pull of entropy, the orderly clocklike unwinding of galaxies and planets and stars.

  This last bit, however, came to her more as images than as words, for as sleep took hold, her thoughts ceased to be made of language. They weren’t even images really either. They were something more abstract than that: forms, diagram-like chunks of meaning that were as much tactile as visual. Some huge dark falling thing, creatures moving in a moonlit forest, water running downhill in torrents and streams and dripping from sodden peat …

  Dear God, she thought, coming awake suddenly, Thomas hadn’t even been the first opportunity that day when it came to sex! When she’d asked Spiro about the price of rooms he’d winked and said there was no charge for those who shared his bed. Christ, how sordid! No way was she going to stay there after that! No way. Of course the old goat had spotted her distaste almost at once: ‘Forgive me my silly joke!’ But it didn’t fool her. She’d already seen him watching her, eyes slightly narrowed, like a shrewd old fisherman watching his line to see if the bait would be taken. He was about the same age as her dad.

  Still, she thought, it had probably worked once, thirty years ago, when Spiro wasn’t so flabby and Greece had seemed much more exotic to northern Europeans than it did now in these days when Bali or Thailand were commonplace destinations. The pull of the other. She remembered some nature programme she’d seen. Female chimps sneaking away from their troop when the alpha male was sleeping in his tree, risking attack by leopards to journey all by themselves by moonlight over a mountain ridge and down into the next valley. They’d mate with males from another troop down there and then return again over the rocks and through the leopard-ridden night. Hedging their bets, the programme had said. New genes to mingle with their own.

  A leopard in the moonlight. Dear God, imagine that. Those spots among all these speckled shades of grey. The creature would be right on top of you before you’d seen it at all.

  Several hours later, she surfaced from sleep again and sat up to have a look around.

  The moon had gone, and Orion was right down at the horizon. This evidence that the planet had been quietly turning while she slept was for some reason immensely comforting, and she felt a surge of that same delicious happiness that had come to her when she found her sleeping bag. It reminded her of when she was a little girl, back in the days before her brothers were even born, wrapped in a warm blanket in the back of her parents’ car as they drove through the night to her nan’s house in Galway. Sometimes, after an aeon of silence, one of the grown-ups would say something in the front there, some murmured thought or observation, and she’d half-wake to see the street lights of some little town flickering in the windows above her, or maybe the headlights of a passing truck, briefly illuminating the door handles and head-rests, the plastic lining of the car roof, the pocket in front of her, with her pad and crayons, on the back of her father’s seat. And then quietness and darkness would return, and she’d slip back down into sleep.

  Everything in her immediate surroundings was in almost complete darkness. So was the sea below, except for the faint grey ghosts of waves breaking below her on the beach. There were no fishing boats now, and Thomas had long since gone.

  Spring Tide

  I remember when I first saw the moon. It was on a summer evening when I was fifteen years old. I was with my two friends, Chaz and Mick, in a disused quarry. The moon was just a couple of nights away from being full, so there was still a sliver of shadow to prove it was a sphere. And when I looked carefully, I could see how the shadow’s edge was broken up by the contours of craters.

  ‘Wow, that’s amazing,’ I said. ‘I must have seen the moon hundreds of times but I swear this is the first time I’ve ever really seen it!’

  It wasn’t just a light in the sky, that’s what I was trying to say. It wasn’t just a set of facts in some illustrated book about astronomy. It was really there, far away and unreachable perhaps, but every bit as solid an object as I was, and part of the same continuum of space.

  ‘Yeah, nice,’ said Chaz. He was busy, and glanced up without any real interest.

  ‘Go on, look at it!’ I told him. ‘It’s amazing. The moon’s real! It’s truly in the world. And so are we!’

  That last bit was the best part, actually. If the moon was real and separate from us then we were real too, distinct entities who were also truly in the world. That might seem obvious, but it came to me as a revelation.

  You may possibly have guessed by now that we were smoking weed at the time, that famous converter of commonplace observations into amazing insights and half-baked philosophies. In fact, right then, while I was still staring at the moon, my two friends were splitting open a cigarette over an assemblage of Rizla papers, heating an oily hunk of hash, and crumbling it onto the dry brown strands to make our second joint of the evening. Hence their lack of interest in my discovery.

  I smoked a considerable amount of weed back then. I didn’t think of it as a problem, though in fact I was stealing quite regularly from my parents just to help me fund the habit. Over the next few years, I was to increase my consumption to a point where I lit up as soon as I woke in the morning, and again last thing at night, for the world just seemed too empty, too drained of meaning, without that THC in my veins to bring it alive.

  But all the same, acknowledging all of that, I still don’t think my insight about seeing the moon was simply the product of being stoned, because that distinction between seeing a thing in the everyday sense and really seeing it, does still seem meaningful to me even now, more than forty years on. What’s more, I’m pretty certain it was something I was groping towards long before I’d ever smoked the stuff. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that the reason I was so drawn to the weed in the first place was that I longed to see, and was casting about for ways of doing so.

  The funny thing is that Chaz and Mick and I liked to think of ourselves as rebels, inspired visionaries, using drugs to smash our way out of the dim half-world where most people seemed content to live out their cautious and conformist lives. It only really strikes me now that we may have had that the wrong way round. Those who most long to see are not the visionaries but the ones who can see the least. Those who long to break free are the ones who are the most confined. I wonder if some of the famous artists who are praised for their vision were not so much experts in seeing, as people who had to work very hard indeed in order to be able to see anything at all.

  I was a bright kid and, a couple of years later, in spite of doing very little work, I got myself a place at a university. It was a disaster. Without the rudimentary structure that had been provided by school, I stopped working altogether, failed all my first year exams and duly dropped out. I fell out badly with my parents over that. They said some cruel things which I found hard to forget or forgive, specially my bully of a dad, and I decided to punish them by doing nothing with my life at all.

  I was already with Josie by then. I’d met her at a rock concert in King’s Lynn when I was seventeen. (I remember gold-painted Artex walls, smelly toilets, interminable guitar solos.) I had been getting rather panicky about the fact that I’d never had a girlfriend and had no idea how to go about finding one. It was hard enough making friends from among my own gender. Driven by desperation, and fortified by enough cheap cider to make staying upright a fairly challenging task, I attempted to chat up a shylooking girl who seemed to have come to the gig all on her own. She responded, to my amazement, with enthusiasm.

  I decided at once that I was going to fall in love with her and yet, at the same time, on that very same evening in King’s Lynn, I experienced doubts. I still remember the questions
going through my addled head, queasy with booze, assaulted by prog rock. Had I really made a choice here? What was wrong with this girl anyway, that she should be on her own, and be interested in someone like me? Weren’t her ears a bit big, and wasn’t there something a bit desperate about her? And wasn’t it all a bit repulsive: her desperation, my desperation, those ears? I suppressed those thoughts as soon as I had them – I was seventeen, I’d never had sex, I’d been afraid that sex would always be beyond my reach, and to turn away from Josie then would have been like a starving man turning down a food parcel – but I couldn’t expel them altogether. My doubts about her, and about my own motives, were there from the beginning, digging and gnawing away. (Not that I was such a great catch either, of course. Josie’s apparent enthusiasm for me presumably also involved suppressing her awareness of certain things, such as my poor personal hygiene, my bad breath, and my utter inability to ask her questions about herself.)

  Josie also went to university and, unlike me, managed to stick out the full three years. When she was in her second and third years, I lived with her, sleeping in her room, picking up various temporary jobs in bars and so forth, and otherwise watching daytime TV and smoking weed.

  Josie scraped a degree, but she had no idea what to do next, and, as her contemporaries gradually launched themselves out into the world like baby birds taking wing, she and I clung to our now-familiar twig, trying to carry on a student life without either study or fellow students. It was actually quite scary, no matter how much weed we smoked. It was like one of those anxiety dreams in which you’ve somehow lost the ability to move forward. But Josie finally managed to get herself an administrative post in a hospital in King’s Lynn and we both returned to the area we’d grown up in. I went along to a few IT courses, found I was pretty good at picking up this stuff, and in due course stumbled into a temporary job helping to set up a new computer network for the local council in that part of Norfolk, back in the days when PCs were something new.