The Silver Dark Sea

by Susan Fletcher

  On an island called Parla. You were found on a beach the night before last. Do you remember the beach?

  She watches him drink – the long draws of water and the movement of his throat. He drains the glass, lowers it. A beach?

  Yes. A stony one. She takes the glass from him.

  The man shakes his head.

  I’m the nurse. Tabitha. Bright. My father kept a lighthouse so it’s a fitting surname. Her smile is quick. Your name?

  For a moment he looks at her. Then he turns his stare away and looks out of the window, at the dark-green nettle patch and the sea beyond. He is thinking. He thinks for a long time and in that time Tabitha looks at his profile, the lines on his forehead. She hears the grandfather clock in the hall. I don’t know –

  You don’t know your name? Really?

  I’m sorry …

  It’s alright. It will come, I’m sure. No headaches?

  No. And he looks troubled, then. He looks lost, so that Tabitha lays her hand on his forearm. It is all she can think of doing. He has come from the sea like driftwood. He has no memory and marks on his hand that she cannot fathom, and this is like an old, old tale that is hard to have faith in, in modern times. She is sixty-five, and it’s the twenty-first century, and surely there are no mysteries left? Falling in love is serotonin. Phosphorescent water is not God’s light.

  Yet here he is. Sea-smelling.

  Do you remember anything?

  Being in the water.

  Good. That’s something. She pats his arm. How about food? You must be hungry.

  No answer.

  A drink, then? Tea?

  He says tea … And he says it as if he does not know what tea could be, or perhaps he is agreeing to it – Tabitha can’t tell which. But he says tea … again, and he looks grateful, very tired.

  Tea for two. She smiles. I’ll be back in a minute. You stay put.

  She goes to the kitchen, feeling happy. She puts the kettle on.

  The wind lifts a flake of rust from a car, at High Haven. The ivy that grows on the minister’s house taps against the wood.

  Alfie Moss is by the primary school. It is closed for the summer but he stands in its playground all the same. He does a clumsy somersault on the fence and when he lands he wipes his nose on his bare arm.

  The primary school is three rooms in a grey stone building. It has a single classroom with its desk, globe, and its stack of plastic drawers with the children’s names taped on them. It has a whiteboard at one end that squeaks when his mother writes on it. There is also a tiny kitchen and beside it there are two toilet cubicles – one with a pink door, and one with blue. Alfie uses the blue one, as do the three other boys that catch the boat from Utta. He doesn’t live on Utta; Alfie lives next door.

  Alfie steps back from the fence. He is checking his palms for splinters when he hears footsteps, looks up. His mother is coming down the path; her hair is a cloud and the gold cross around her neck catches the light as she comes. She shouts Alfie! We’re late – into the car.

  They drive down towards the harbour – past the viewpoint, and the airstrip. Alfie presses his nose to the glass. He squints at each person who passes. He has heard there is a new man on the island – he came from the sea and he has no name. He has heard, too, that he looks a bit like Uncle Tom. But Alfie is too young to really remember his uncle Tom.

  * * *

  Three times a week the ferry comes and goes. For nearly a century, a boat called the Morning Star has made its way across the sea, tilting left to right and followed by gulls. This ferry – the vessel that sits in the harbour now – is the third to be called this, so it has Morning Star III painted on its prow and perhaps it is larger than the Stars that came before. But it has the same blue bottom. The same white railings with lifebelts on.

  On two days – Monday and Wednesday – it leaves Parla and sails directly to the mainland and back. It is nearly a two-hour journey in each direction when the weather is kind, or when Ed does not peel away from the usual route to follow a dolphin pod or a whale’s spray. In the summer, he often does this – for the passengers are mostly holidaymakers who live in cities, far from the coast. For them, a flash of back in the water is a gift, and he loves how they point, say look! There! In choppy sea the journey may take over three hours. In high winds or high water, the Star does not run at all.

  On Fridays, it makes its way over via the other isles. For these other, smaller islands this is the only ferry service that they have – one boat every seven days. Parla is busy and easy to reach compared to these strangely shaped rocks: Utta, with its standing stones and cluster of salt-walled homes; Say, with the many sea stacks that gannets whiten; and Cantalay, where there is a single sheep farm and a ruined fort that the wind whistles through in winter. Merme is uninhabited, now. No boats go to it. Nothing does, except the puffins and they do not stay long.

  Today it’s Friday. Today, the Star will go out to these islands. It will creep in and out of their harbours, carry lives and luggage elsewhere. The ferry is fuelled and ready. Its white railings are shining in the morning light. The metal gangplank which the passengers must walk upon is also white and when it is lowered down onto the quayside there is a sudden, hard chime which sends up the gulls, makes a black cat flinch down against the ground.

  It is nine twenty in the morning. There is a slight glint of dew on the fields and there is already heat in the sun. Most of the islanders are at the harbour. The grass verge that leads down to it has their cars parked upon it – cars with no wing mirrors or hubcaps, and most have dents in their sides. Hester steps out of a hatchback, pulls open the door behind her seat saying out out out to Alfie.

  As they walk down, they pass a purple car. Its passenger door is open and a small, denim-covered bottom is beside it; its owner’s head and body are still inside the car. There is the smell of baking, and ginger. Hester glances inside as she passes – she sees the dark butter icing of a chocolate cake. Alfie does too – Mum, look … They hurry down to the Morning Star.

  Rona straightens herself, sees them go. In her arms she carries six plastic, airtight boxes. They are transparent – they hold scones, chocolate cake, iced gingerbread, a cheesecake with grated limes, flapjack with apricots, and a huge, powdered Victoria sponge that’s filled with homemade jam. She rests her chin on the uppermost box, shuts the car door with her foot.

  On the quayside itself are the island’s men. Edward Lovegrove, of course. He wears a luminous jacket with matching trousers and a baseball cap with Skipper on it. He takes the cargo – suitcases, bicycles, cardboard boxes – and puts it in a crate that rests next to the boat. Anything else? He calls this out and Rona quickens her step. Yep, Dad! Her car keys are hanging from the back pocket of her jeans and they jangle as she hurries.

  There are other men in bright-yellow clothing – the crew, the men who have worked on Morning Star for years, or all their adult lives in some cases. George Moss – late fifties and not yet greying – stands at the end of the gangway, a rolled cigarette between his thumb and forefinger as if throwing a dart. He sees his wife and son coming. Alfie waves cheerily. On you hop, George tells him. Hester’s hair is wild-looking, today – the curls are tight like springs and he loves it like this, wants to push his hands into it and grip those curls at their roots. He winks at his wife as she passes.

  Sam Lovegrove and Jonny Bundy are also in fluorescent yellow. They are both on board, making the ferry’s final checks – securing lines, checking lists on clipboards, handing out brown paper bags just in case the water gets rough. Sam has not slept properly for two nights now and it shows in his face. There are shadows under his eyes; the sunburn has lessened against his pale skin. Jonny is by the winch. He leans over the side of the boat, watching Ed pack up the crate. Rona, he thinks, is looking good today. She always looks good – but those jeans are tight and when she peers over the side of the crate to make sure her cakes are packed well, and safely, he can see down her top for a moment. White lace – very ni
ce. She has sunglasses pushed up into her hair.

  Nine twenty-five. Ed shouts, last call! Kitty hears this and kisses Nathan. She carries an overnight bag, steps onto the gangplank. She pauses to say something to the skipper who laughs, touches her shoulder. Two tourists are the last ones on – clanking with binoculars, sour-breathed from the seasickness pills they have taken, sad to be leaving Parla for city life.

  Sam lets them pass. Then, at that moment, puts a hand on either side of the gangplank and leans down from the deck. George?

  The older man treads out his cigarette, looks up.

  Has Maggie been? Haven’t seen her yet.

  He nods. On the far side. Under the tarpaulin.

  She must have come early.

  She was waiting for us. Maybe seven thirty? She’s done herself proud, though. One of them is a monster.

  Sam steps back. He goes to the far side of the ferry. Sure enough, he finds the black plastic crate with tarpaulin on it, and he crouches down beside it. Slowly, he peels the covering aside. The lobsters shift as he does this. Their smell is fishy and cold. They are midnight-coloured, their claws tied with elastic bands, and he wonders what time Maggie went out to get them this morning – first light? Maybe it was still dark when she went. Maybe, he thinks, she’s not sleeping either, and he imagines her, in that little boat – hat and gloves, setting out at dawn. The birds would still have been roosting. Perhaps the first sign of daylight was a pink glow in the east and she would have seen it – on her own, in that boat.

  Everything about Maggie makes him sorry.

  He covers the lobsters back over, secures the tarpaulin to keep them safe.

  * * *

  On Fridays, the boat doesn’t come back. It takes nearly three hours to dock at the three smaller islands, making the journey to the mainland nearly five hours long, in the end. It’s too much to return the same day. So tonight, the Morning Star and its crew will stay overnight in the mainland’s harbour with the stacked lobster pots and fishing fleet. That’s a pungent harbour, ten times bigger than Parla’s. It has the ferry office, a youth hostel, a small museum of fishing life, The Bounty Inn with its picnic tables and a trailer which sells cockles in paper cones. The gulls are bold, beady-eyed. Some will take a chip right out of your hand, and laugh as they eat it – ark-ark!

  Nancy knows all this.

  She sits cross-legged on the sea wall. She looks at the quayside, the dark sand and the Star.

  Ferry day, in Nan’s head, is her day – or her family’s. Her father runs the boat. He runs the whole harbour and has to write down which boats come in and out, and he has to listen to the radio each night to hear what the weather will do. If it’s too rough to sail, he runs a red flag up a pole. Nan likes that flag. It is the same height as her bedroom window, and it goes snap in the gales as if it’s talking to her. He marks down sightings of whales, too, and rare birds. But Nan’s father spends most of his time caring for the ferry. He polishes the brass bits, scrubs down the deck, sponges the green mould from the life-rings that hang on her sides. Sometimes, the ferry is hauled out of the water and run up onto rails as if she were a train. This is the boat’s dry dock. Nan has stood beneath her as the Star’s rested there, and looked up. It feels like looking up a fat lady’s skirt.

  The ferry will leave any minute.

  She squints. The winch lifts the crate from the quayside. It swings a little so that her father puts his hands up against it, guides it across. Jonny operates the winch from the boat. Nan isn’t too keen on Jonny. He once called her a rat, as if she couldn’t hear, and Rona doesn’t like him much either. Creepy Jonny Bundy which sounds like a nursery rhyme.

  Rona. Nan studies her. She can see a beaded chain on her sister’s left ankle and her toenails are painted bright pink. Rona is watching the crate because her cakes are in it. She makes cakes for her tea room at the lighthouse, but she also makes them for a café on the mainland – a café with dried starfish in its window and deckchairs outside. Nan has been there, with their mother. Last summer they went. They had banana bread and a coconut slice, both made by Rona two days before. In loud voices they said how good the cakes were, how they were the best they’d ever had in all their living days and everyone should try some so that the café would order more.

  Nan’s favourite cake in the world is a chocolate brownie. Definitely. For her sixth birthday she had a plate of brownies, with actual cherries in. That was her best birthday yet.

  Her father and brother are on the Morning Star.

  Her mother and sister are on the quayside, watching it.

  Ferry day is our day. The gangplank is pulled up, on board. The ferry begins to shudder, the water behind it starts to churn and very slowly the Star turns from the quay. She can see Alfie Moss, waving. She can see her brother Sam, too – his yellow hair which she is sometimes jealous of. Kitty is also on board – her skirt is blowing and she wears sunglasses so that Nan can’t tell what she is looking at. Perhaps she is looking at Nathan, but he is not looking at her. His hands are in his pockets, and he’s looking at the ground. Maybe there’s a shell, there? Or a beetle? He looks at the ground for a very long time.

  * * *

  There is a track which leads from Crest towards the most northerly part of the coast. At the cliff edge, there’s a fence – wire that sags, rotting posts. There is a sign by a break in this fence which reads Do Not Use In Wet Weather – but Maggie has often used these steps when the rain has been so heavy that it has bruised her. She’s used them in a thunderstorm. She’s used them at night.

  They are slick, black steps cut into the rocks and which lead down to a small harbour. Uneven steps, and steep. Once, perhaps, they’d been used for smuggling since the lighthouse’s beam never reaches them and they can’t be seen from the sea; but they are not used for that now. They wind down into darkness and end, abruptly, on a slab of rock. This slab is the quayside. It is lost entirely at high tide and so it is both rough with barnacles and velvety with weed, and Maggie is careful when treading on it. She comes here three times a week, or more: Pigeon is kept here.

  Pigeon. Named by Maggie herself, long ago.

  So she can always find her way home.

  Maggie started early today. She dressed in the half-dark, made a flask of tea, put a head-torch on and made her way down those steps. She looked east, as she readied the boat. She looked through the harbour’s narrow opening and saw the dawn – pink, grey, the last blue of night.

  And she’d hauled on the cord to start the outboard motor, thrummed across the water, past Sye and Bundy Head. A cool, early morning. The smell, always, of fish and diesel fumes. She’d felt the motor’s vibration, heard the quiet slosh at her feet of water that had come aboard in various ways – off the pots, or rainwater – and it is the same every time. It does not change – how Pigeon smells, how the silence rushes in when she turns the engine off. There are the same rituals as there always were, and she finds a comfort in them. Pigeon is familiar. So are the orange fibreglass buoys, the sound of the sea against the boat’s sides, the gulls that follow hopefully, the ghostly loom of the lobster pots as she pulls them up from the dark.

  Nothing changes on Parla. That’s what she was told, when she first came. It stays the same – just so you know … And Maggie had loved that. She’d loved the idea of a safe, strong, unchanging life. Just Tom, and her, and the water.

  But then he died. And everything changed. Nothing changes here proved, in fact, to be the greatest of all lies. He died and so much died with him; countless more things were lost. She learnt this: that grief changes more than you ever thought it could. All certainty goes away. All strong things stop being strong. Tom was there and then he was not: and so what could be relied upon? Nothing felt safe any more: a lone sock felt symbolic; an embrace from a friend seemed like a trap; letters had no meaning or too many meanings so that sorry for your loss felt coded, impenetrable, too hard to understand. Maggie believed, for a time, that she was being lied to. She’d eyed others, lookin
g for that lie. Nothing can be trusted – to be kind, or safe, or to stay with her.

  I will not feel or care for anything. I will rely on nothing.

  But no-one can live like that. Maggie tried to be self-reliant, and hard – but she could not fully. She had to give shape to her days. She had to hold her hand out or she’d sink, she knew that. And it was routines that Maggie turned to. Tentatively, she sought comfort in small, necessary, practical things – so she’d make proper coffee in a cafetiere, clean the bath, pluck tomatoes from her plants and inhale their bitter smell. She’d pull the cord on Pigeon as she used to when Tom was still living. She’d bind the claws of lobster with coloured elastic bands.

  And this place. Coming here.

  Maggie is walking, now. She has left the half-moon harbour; she is walking down the island’s western coast. The wild west, Tom called it: bare, fully exposed. No other islands lie to the west of Parla; from here, there is only the open sea. And centuries of storms and thundering water have battered it – picked off rocks, and scooped out caves so that this coastline echoes. The sea booms; the birds wail. She hears them now, as she walks.

  This was her routine, too: she’d walk on this coast at every low tide. For two years Maggie would come, twice daily – so she has come to know each stile, each thistle patch, each rabbit hole. She knows each track through the gorse, how the word Tom! bounces back to her from every dank cave wall. And in the early days, before she believed that he was truly gone, and not returning, she’d step down the wooden staircase onto Lock-and-Key and tread across its sand. For it is on this beach that a whale stranded itself, where the best shells have come, where there has been driftwood so smooth and bleached by the waves that they looked like bones and it’s here that Maggie has found pottery shards and a piece of glass that had been so worn, so turned over and over by the sea that it had been rolled into a ball. A marble as green as an eye. There is a fence, too, on which those lost rubber boots have been hung – boots that have been washed ashore without their other, matching halves – so they look out to sea forlornly. And if something of worth – something she’d loved, and still loved – was to wash ashore, she has always believed it would be here. This beach.