The Silver Dark Sea

by Susan Fletcher

  The other giants mocked him. Too quiet. Too kind.

  One day they called across the water. They claimed he had no strength at all. What giant was he? Who was not very tall and had no powers? Who brought shame upon them all, or so they said? They dared him to prove his strength.

  Throw rocks, they chanted. Lift the houses!

  No, said the Parlan giant.

  Tear up the trees and toss them high!

  No, he replied. I will not.

  Scoop up the sea and fling it wide, so that boats may go under!

  Never.

  And they were so angered at his calmness, at his soft voice and softer soul, that the giants laid a curse upon the islanders – that all Parlans might be turned to stone. For what better way to punish him than to damage the ones that he loved? They flung the curse across the sea, like spray. But the giant’s eyes were so mournful at the thought of this that they glinted, mirror-like, and they reflected the curse so that it returned to them. So the four sea stacks near Tap Hole are the four giants of Utta, Merme, Say and Cantalay – turned to stone by their own foul curse. One stack has a heavy upper half, with a cleft at its centre. They say that this stack is the giantess – that she has retained, in rock, her swaying female form.

  * * *

  Rona thinks of this. She thinks of the womanly sea stack – its curved parts, its higher weight. It makes her smile. A man, surely, dreamt of such a tale. A lonesome fisherman, perhaps, looked up at the stacks as he went by them and saw, on that third stack, two rounded rocks and the groove that runs between them and the slight hunch as if those breasts are too much to bear. At sea, so much is womanly. Boats are female. The winds are calmed by a bare female chest. Surely the work of lovesick sailors? Men with physical love on their mind? Maybe a sailor, a long way from shore, might see his wife’s body in the white surf or her long hair in the fronds of weed? He might hear her breath in the sea’s sighing breath.

  Sea shanties. All the best ones are about missing a girl.

  Nathan sleeps beside her.

  He lies on his front, his head turned away from her. Rona thinks of pushing her fingers into his hair; she wants to nuzzle him, move her left hand down. But these things will wake him. He sleeps lightly and she knows he needs his sleep.

  I am a woman now. Once she’d been as dormant as the sea stacks are, but now Rona is awake – capable, assured. And she is in love with a married man. She is in love with this man, this farmer who rubs his chin as he’s thinking, who presses his face into his upper arm when he sneezes – a neat, boyish sneeze. Has she always loved him? For a long time, at least. For a long time, each passing thing has made her think Nathan … This man, sleeping here.

  She does not believe in ownership. Rona rejects – or tries to – the idea that a vow and a handful of confetti means he can’t be loved by, or be in love with, anybody else. Nobody is owned. He is, she tells herself, choosing this; he is lying in her bed because he chooses to. He could be elsewhere but he is not. And I love him. Rona has the fervent hard belief that all young lovers have – which is no-one has loved like this before. Our love is stronger than all the other kinds.

  There is nothing she would not do for Nathan Bundy.

  The lighthouse swings in, swings out.

  Five

  Leah wakes. She lies on her side, her legs tucked up. The curtains stir beside her, and she can smell the sea.

  She stays as she is – no yawning, or stretching out. If I stay perfectly still, it will be like I am still sleeping – and the world will not know she has woken up. As a child, she’d play such games. She took to hiding in the coal bunker, or under the bed, and once she hid in the barn behind the tractor’s back wheel so that her parents grew cross, and later, concerned. What are you always hiding from? Leah never quite knew.

  She is nearly twenty-two and still pretending to sleep. On her last birthday, she had asked for nothing more than a sandwich lunch and a walk with her mother. Her gift had been a necklace which she had known was beautiful – her head had said, this is beautiful. Look how it shines – but her heart had felt nothing, as she’d looked at it. She saw how delicate it was. It was a pearl on the thinnest of gold chains and as her mother had stood behind her, fastening it, she’d said there you are, my baby girl …

  Baby girl. That had been her name for the first ten days of life. Baby Girl, for they’d believed she was going to be a boy and so had no name prepared for her – no better, proper name. For those ten days, she could have had any name. And if they’d called her something else, not Leah but a different name, would she be like this now? Would she have a different nature? Different hopes, and fears? Baby Girl – like a blank page. Like a low-tide beach that had not yet been walked upon so that it seemed to be waiting for her and her alone.

  Leah Grace Bundy. In it came. And she was happy, wasn’t she? She has clear childhood memories – climbing the metal bars of the sheep pens, pushing chocolate buttons onto a birthday cake or hugging the pet rabbit, finding a coin where a milk tooth had been left. Yes, she was happy. Shy, watchful, self-contained – but happy, in her way.

  Slowly, Leah sits up. She looks to her right, out of the window. Her bedroom is above the porch, so that when she was smaller she’d lean out of the window and see her father’s bald spot, or the flowered hair grips that Aunt Kitty still likes to wear. There is a view of the driveway, too. The rooster who is threatened daily with the casserole dish is treading by the wire fence. His ladies – plump, gingery – peck at seed, or the flying ants which nest in the hardcore that is piled on one side. That hardcore was left there, after the laundry room was built. No-one’s ever moved it, and ragwort sprouts there now. Driftwood is pinned to the gatepost; Wind Rising, it says.

  This is the view she has had all her life. There was the secondary school on the mainland and, later, six weeks of university – but otherwise it has always been this.

  The lane, running north to south. Beyond it, the roof of High Haven.

  She gets out of bed. She takes down her dressing gown and fastens it. She’s always been quiet, she knows that. But Leah wasn’t always this heavy-hearted. This weight (It, as if it does not have a proper name) only came to her four years ago. She’d been on the mainland, at the time. She’d always longed to get there – to have a life of music, neon, buses, cinemas and adventure in a place with people she was not related to. No gulls, no lighthouses. Leah had been inland, walking the wood-panelled corridors of a university that smelt of books, aftershave, chalk dust. And she had liked it at first – she’d liked to pull back her curtains in the morning to a new view entirely; a cathedral spire over the rooftops, an office block that looked like a hundred eyes at night. But slowly, Leah altered. Or rather, everything altered except her. There were lectures, parties, libraries, alcohol, boys with friendly hands and girls with glittered make-up, and so much that was new – and yet Leah was still Leah. Still nervous. Still quieter than most. She’d look at the name she wrote on her essays – a first name too small to matter, a surname which dragged its anchor through the mud. I am Parlan. I have a Parlan accent. I come from a line of surly farming men. And so what was the point? What exactly was she trying for? All she saw were the painted words Wind Rising, the way a sheep would gallop frantically with its dragging fleece when they tried to catch it at shearing time. Stupid, she thought – to be studying textbooks or discussing poetry when she was rooted to Parla by name and birth. I am out of my depth. I don’t belong here. In bars, they told jokes she didn’t laugh at. They talked of bands she hadn’t heard, of films she hadn’t seen. They took drugs she didn’t want so whilst they danced and sang and found dark corners, Leah sat on her own and looked at her trainers, at their sheep-dung and saltwater stains, and she knew that she was lost. Unmooring herself, day by day.

  Uncle Tom helped. She’d call him, whisper I’m not coping very well … And he listened. He told her that she was bright, deserving, funny, remarkable – and loved. So very loved, Leah. Remember that. Promise me?
>
  I promise.

  Then he died. He went overboard in the autumn. Her mother had rung with the news so that Leah had heard about her uncle’s vanishing whilst standing outside the Students’ Union, with a low battery so that her mobile phone beeped like a hospital heart. A warm, gritty wind had blown around her. She’d said gone? Uncle Tom? I don’t understand … And if Leah had been struggling before, this buckled her; if she’d felt heavy up till then, this dragged her to the ground and kept her there. That was the start of her depression. What Leah refers to as It.

  Leah walks across the landing, locks the bathroom door.

  They say there is a family curse. Her great-great-grandfather Randall put his shotgun in his mouth one New Year’s Eve. His son, her great-grandfather, had broken the bones in his wife and children, or so she’d heard behind closed doors. What had been the tale of Thomasina? And why are Leah’s own family so mute, so reluctant to talk or smile or embrace? When her father stands in a room with Nathan or Hester, they do not say much and nothing that matters. They stand, arms folded.

  But she will not think of the curse – not today.

  The word Fishman has come.

  Leah heard the word last night. Her mother said it over a saucepan, having passed Dee in the lane. Abigail thinks he’s the Fishman … and Leah had stared, put down her fork.

  Fishman …?

  She turns on the taps. As the sink fills, she looks up at the air vent – hears its tut-tut-tut.

  * * *

  He sits on the edge of the wrought-iron bed. The blankets are around him, tucked up under his armpits. He rubs his right hand across his beard.

  Tabitha says, here you are. Some clothes.

  She lays them on the bed. There is a shirt, trousers, a grey jumper. Smaller items. He looks down, feels the edges of them and whilst he does this Tabitha leaves the room and then returns with a pair of boots hooked over her fingers. I’m not sure what size these are, but try them on. They might do.

  Thank you.

  The bathroom is down the hallway – last door on the right. There’s a towel in there, and a toothbrush. Use whatever you need to.

  Tabitha? It is the first time he has said her name. He has pushed himself off the bed, so that he is standing tentatively. His left hand still touches the mattress, but he stands straight, and keeps his balance. Doesn’t someone need these clothes?

  A fly is knocking against the windowpane. They both hear it. The nurse’s eyes go to it, briefly; when she glances back she is resigned, half-smiling. No – a whisper. And then no a second time.

  The bathroom, when he finds it, is small – the frosted sash window is propped open with a block of wood; ivy curls under the window, into the room. He touches its leaves. They feel waxy, and thick. The mirror is flecked with water marks – and it is low for him so he must stoop to see himself.

  My face. My beard. His black eyes.

  In time he washes. He turns on the showerhead over the bath. When the water has warmed, he lifts one leg over the side of the bath, hauls the rest of himself into it. It hurts to do this as if his body does not know these movements. Once in, he tends to himself. He lathers up a soap and washes his hair, his torso and down to his thighs. Sand crunches under his heel. When he looks down he can see grains of it in the white enamel tub. It collects by the plughole, the colour of rust.

  And his hands. He sees their grazed palms. On the looser skin of his left hand he sees the scar – round, reddish-brown.

  It is all new, he thinks. The ivy. This island.

  Parla. He says the word. He looks in the mirror, as he says it.

  In his mind, there is a flickering. There is another word he wants to say. He wants to breathe it, as he has breathed it, lovingly, before. But he shakes the word away.

  He towels himself. And then this man puts on a red-and-black checked shirt whose top three buttons he can’t do up and a pair of jeans that are too short in the leg, too tight when fully buttoned so that he will, later, use Tabitha’s safety pins – and the man they found at Sye unlocks the bathroom door.

  * * *

  To the north of the island, a ewe scratches her shoulder against the step of a stile. Back and forth. Her eyes are closed, feeling it.

  And Rona opens the tumble-drier door. From its scented cave she hauls an armful of bed-sheets. They are warm as toast, and she carries them to the sitting room where she shakes them out and folds them. Today, five more guests will come. Here at the Lighthouse Hostel and Tea Room she has three white-walled dormitories – rooms which were once for the lighthouse-keepers and their families but which are now filled with bunk beds and lockers and No Smoking signs. This had been a sad place, for a time. When the lighthouse was automated, the rooms were locked up. But six years ago Rona had pressed her face against the window of these buildings and imagined what she might do with them – a hostel, a café, a place of her own. All things are possible – so her mother always said. If you want something enough, it can be.

  Rona knows about wanting.

  She counts five pillow cases, five duvet covers. Five single sheets.

  Upstairs, the dormitories have all been emptied for the day. Her guests will be walking the coastal path or heading down to Store Bay with their hats and windbreakers. Binoculars and picnic rugs. Why not? She’d be down there, too, if she could be. Rona was born on Parla, but she cannot remember such a row of cloudless days.

  She had asked Nathan, what will you do today?

  Repairs. Whilst the weather’s good. It wasn’t a good answer but she took it, heard its tone.

  Nathan. There are things imprinted in her that she has carried since she was small – her love of baking, her birthmark like a star, how she can hold her breath underwater for longer than anyone she knows. Once, she swam Parla harbour without breaking the surface. She has carried her will which is stronger than most.

  And him. She reckons he is part of her, now – like air in her lungs, or water. Him with the scar like a comma under his eye, and the skin on his waist that she has closed her teeth upon so that he flinched, said ow …

  Rona throws a white sheet open, lays it across the bed. She tucks the corners down and as she straightens back up, she glances out of the window. The sea is at its bluest. She can see gannets, far out. Nearer to her, beneath the lighthouse, she sees the highest stones of Sye where no-one ever goes. She’s heard about the man they found. Her father rang her on Thursday morning to ask if any of her guests had disappeared, so that she’d thought there’s been a suicide, or a fall from a cliff, and she’d had to lean against the wall for reassurance. But all her guests had been accounted for. And she’s not had any bearded men in their early forties stay at the lighthouse for a long time, if at all.

  Who do you think he is? This man?

  But Nathan had shrugged, turned away from her. And perhaps other people would have lain in the dark and thought about this stranger, but Rona thought, instead, of Nathan Bundy. Of what they’d been doing an hour before – her to him, and him to her.

  Outside there are tables to be laid. Rona carries nine white tablecloths into the sunlight, and returns for the salt and pepper pots. Also she has stones – heavy, rounded stones – with numbers painted on them. They are cool in her hands. Five springs ago she’d gone down to Sye with a bucket and lifted the smoothest stones she could find – nine of them, all dry and pale-grey. Kitty had suggested it – bring them to me, and I’ll paint the numbers on, if you like. Kitty the artist, with her silver rings – and how could Rona have refused it? Rona looks at the one she is holding. It is 8, and an orange-shelled crab is painted by it. 5 has a lobster. 1 and 3 have black-backed gulls. Customers have liked these table numbers. They have asked where they might buy them from – paperweights, for their inland homes. And Rona has said, do you know the smaller farmhouse? With the cars outside? It is called High Haven …

  4 is a whale, blowing its spout.

  And there is more, of course. There are canvases on the café walls, inside – roman
tic landscapes called Parla at Dawn, or Litty or View from Bundy Head. West-Facing is the largest of Kitty’s paintings – wide, red-coloured, the lighthouse silhouetted against a setting sun. It is the most expensive, too. Who would pay so much for them? Rona shakes her head, not understanding it.

  There is, sometimes, guilt. She wants what she wants but Rona is, also, human. She thinks of how Kitty looks, when she paints – rimless glasses on the tip of her nose, her hair held back with a tortoiseshell clip or a fabric flower or, once, two wooden clothes pegs – and it hurts her. Kitty is so kind – and it makes this hard to do. But also, Kitty is different – bare-footed, with a wind-chime in the garden and a curious tattoo and she’s talked about star signs before which no-one is sure of. She’s alternative, perhaps – and surely that doesn’t suit Nathan? Surely he needs a traditional wife, who understands the farm and island life? The weather, the sheep? How lonely the winter months can be?

  This is what she tells herself. I would be the better wife.

  The hems of the tablecloths shimmy like chorus girls.

  When Rona licks her lips, she can taste his aftershave.

  * * *

  At this precise moment, the dog from School Cottage squats in the lane, and urinates. She leaves a dark patch behind her. A small snake of it creeps around pebbles, down into a ditch.

  The rhododendrons rustle their leaves.

  I am walking down to Lowfield. My thumbs are hooked into the pockets of my linen trousers and I wear a silver necklace with a tiny silver M.

  The Morning Star has returned.

  Ed stands on deck. He holds the hand-rails, looks down as the space between the Star and the quayside grows smaller and smaller; then he feels the gentle knock. Jonny jumps down from the boat. He lifts lines, and throws them back up to George. And soon, George whistles. All done.