The Silver Dark Sea

by Susan Fletcher

  I did not know why I’d struck him outside Lowfield like that. Nor did I know – or I was not ready, maybe, to acknowledge – why I had laid my head on his chest, or why I had tried so hard to forget the white patch of skin in the space where a shirt’s button should be. But I knew I wanted safety: a simple, painless life.

  Abigail had said see? He is the Fishman. And others might think I am a mad old woman but … She’d shrugged. Here he is. Here, on this page.

  I walked past the church, past the fields. The lighthouse found the sheep, as it turned; five seconds a minute they glowed on the dark-grey grass.

  I decided this, as I walked: that yes, he was this creature. He is half-man, half-fish. I would believe it. I would tell myself that he could live underwater, that he had had scales and a bright tail. For this made him non-human. This made him impossible to have feelings for. Who could want a fish? No sane person would. Despite his face, and black-mirror eyes.

  Not human. I repeated it.

  Not human. Not at all.

  And so.

  It is night. I run my bath and climb in.

  In High Haven, Kitty can’t sleep. She goes downstairs to find her husband sleeping on the sofa, a bottle in his hand. It saddens her so much that she lowers herself down, sits beside him for a while. The white light moves across the walls.

  Lorcan is also awake. He sits on his piano stool, peers at the music – a nocturne – on its stand. He hums the tune to himself – tum-ti-tum-tum … It is trickier than he thought, this piece, but one day he will manage it. One day he will play it without all his mistakes. He lifts his fingers and puts them on the ivory. He exhales slowly. Then he presses down.

  And Sam is almost sleeping. He lies in his attic bedroom, one foot still on the floor. He is nearing sleep when he is woken: there is a thrum against his mattress. The springs vibrate beneath him, so that he jumps. He gropes for his phone. It flashes blue, with this: 1 message received.

  I’ve met him. He’s wonderful.

  Sam wonders what to reply. He stares at her words.

  A rock pool reflects the crescent moon and stars.

  The Message in a Bottle

  On a low-cloud day, many months and years ago, a bottle was found on a beach. A glass bottle, with no label – a bottle like so many other ones.

  This bottle was wedged between rocks on the beach called Lock-and-Key, at its southern end. And it caught the eye of a man who rarely walked on beaches. For him, they were unstable places – windy, too cold. Sand in the eyes.

  It was late and he did not wish to be there, but his daughter – five or six years old – had asked to come. She was crouching by a rock pool, a bucket by her side. The highest tide – the tide they called sly, sometimes – had passed through that morning and left its gifts behind. Shells, pebbles, wood as smooth as bones.

  They meant nothing to him. No shells in his pockets as he went; no interest in the rounded stones.

  Daddy! And he looked down. He looked down to find his daughter squinting, holding up a glass bottle and in that glass bottle there was a piece of paper – folded, written on.

  He tipped the note out, opened it.

  Please let this get better. Five words and five only.

  Black ink, neatly done.

  * * *

  He hadn’t kept it, of course. Ian is not the keeping kind. He had put the note back in the bottle, popped the bottle in his pocket and binned it, later, as they walked home. Leah had been dragging a strand of egg-wrack behind her. She’d been chirping as she used to. She talked to the things she passed – litter, old deckchairs.

  Please let this get better.

  He’d mocked it. He’d dismissed it as foolish, sentimental. A message in a bottle? Please … The stuff of romance novels or films he’d never choose to see. It had annoyed him, somehow, and he’d walked too fast for Leah so that she’d called after him – plaintive, shrill. He carried her in the end. He made her leave the seaweed behind so that she’d called out bye, weed – mournfully. And later in the evening, as she slept with a cockle-shell in her hand, Ian had sat down at the kitchen table and said to Constance, we found a note today.

  A note?

  He told her. He recited it, rolled his eyes and Constance put down her knife and fork and said you didn’t keep it? You didn’t bring it home? She was angry for a while. She did not understand why he’d chosen to throw something away that had (he can still see her, pushing back her plate) meant so much to someone … Ian, it’s like a prayer! A wish! And you put it in a bin? All night she had brooded. In bed, she had radiated a dark, unreadable heat. He’d thought of touching her, sensing he had made a mistake that had hurt his wife far beyond his own understanding. Was this Constance’s anger? Or a woman’s? When he dared to place his hand on her back she raised herself up off the mattress with her forearms and said no. Clear.

  By morning, the anger was gone. She shrugged at the memory of a sea-travelled note, hummed as she ate. Constance forgot it, and Ian forgot, and he hasn’t thought of it since then. Not once. Fifteen years have passed in which he has not looked back at that lemonade bottle with the curious wording that it held – why would he? He doesn’t like beaches and he doesn’t find wonder or beauty in a scrawled note in a bottle that he can only view as littering the sea.

  And yet … Here he is. The words that meant nothing fifteen years ago are in his head.

  He exhales. He swears to himself.

  Ian stands on the edge of Bundy Head. It is early morning, and the day’s already warm. Beneath him he can see the body of a ewe. He’d found it by chance and brought it here – he always does with the dead ones. In comes a wave. It peels across the rocks, breaks around the sheep and covers it. The sea will take away all things you leave.

  Tom. Always Tom, in some way.

  He is in evening skies, and in lobster pots. In this man that’s come ashore.

  And is Tom in the message, now? Did the words mean nothing to Ian fifteen years ago because at that time he had not known loss? Now, he is a different man. He still farms, he still sleeps on the same side of the bed in the same room and Constance still sleeps on her front, arms bent. But he himself has changed because Tom went. They all did. They all turned to something in the aftermath of it. No-one stayed the same: Leah came back from the mainland like a ghost; Constance tucked herself away with her knitting needles late into the night, dropped stitch after stitch and fretted about money; Jonny said nothing. Of course he did; it is what Bundys do. We shear and we plough and say nothing.

  Did it get passed on in the genes or in other ways? Other ways, surely. Emmeline is not Bundy by blood and yet she is the one with the fewest words of all. She would place words out at breakfast as she handed out the butter or a boiled egg. She had certain phrases – how nice, or not now, or never mind – which she’d hold out in the same manner that Leah had held out that glass bottle, and they all accepted it because she was their mother. What else is there?

  Ian knows he is the same as her. Or rather, he is not like Jack: he makes sure of that.

  He walks back across the fields. And as he goes, he sees the eastern side of everything on Parla is gold-coloured; the sun finds the eastern edge of each fence-post, each car and chicken shed. Their western sides are in shadow. It is, he thinks, beautiful. And if someone was with him would he say it? Or would he let this beauty go unmarked? And does he ever really talk of anything at all?

  The barn. He thinks of the barn at Wind Rising. It comes in a rush: Hester and him. How old? It doesn’t matter. They had run there because of what they had heard – the single sound of a breaking glass. That was all. But they had run to the barn in case that broken glass signified the start of something that they, as children, did not want to hear – more glass, raised voices. The sun had been low. The barn had been striped with shadows, and Hester and Ian had said nothing at all to each other. They’d run for the same reason; they both knew what happened in that house from time to time – and yet they said nothing. They sat on a
bale and let the minutes pass. Swung their legs. Twisted hay.

  Hester is, maybe, the only one that speaks. She has found God whereas Ian remains hard and Nathan is no better – a drunk, or nearly one. They have faith in nothing – whilst Hester tends to the church’s flowers and wears that cross around her neck and she chooses to believe things happen for a reason. Tom’s death was … What had she called it? Part of His plan – as if she didn’t mind it when she did. Oh, she minded. They all minded, and still mind. Ian has heard her crying – in the school once the children had gone, in the church, the fields.

  This man. This bearded amnesiac who they talked about in church as if he is of significance; a miracle of some kind. He is not a miracle. He will have a story; he will have a lie.

  The house called Wind Rising gets closer. He imagines the breakfast that will be waiting, the steam from the kettle that clouds the windowpane. He has lived nowhere else. All his life – half a century of life – has been spent in its rooms, scuffing over its flagstone floors.

  Please let this get better.

  Why now? Why these words now? He can’t be sure. He pushes down the uppermost strand of a wire fence, climbs over it, lets the wire spring back up and he has so many questions. They come to him for the first time: who wrote this plea? This message? And who, precisely, was the writer hoping to reach? A deity? Someone who could, in fact, help them in some way? And why? Why would he (Ian assumes, strangely, the writer was a he) choose to write a request on a square of paper and give it to the tides instead of saying it to someone who could, perhaps, help? Maybe he wasn’t a talker either. Maybe he wasn’t a believer, and this act was the closest he could bring himself to prayer.

  It makes him a little sad. Compassionate even.

  Ian also sees the irony as he enters the house. If it was a wish, it’s not been granted. If someone fifteen years ago had hoped for some divinity – for the note to be found by someone of worth or purpose or a little magic dust – it could not have gone more wrong. That bottle washed up by the feet of a man who believes in nothing – nothing whatsoever. Me. Just a man, a farmer. How could he make something better?

  There is no magic in him. There is nothing divine about a man whose boots are grooved with sheep dung and who can never find the words.

  He washes his hands.

  There is no God, no Fishman, and no point in stories. There is no life other than the one we see and so who would write a note, send that note to sea?

  Ian cannot remember believing. When he was very small he may, for a year or so, have believed in Father Christmas; but it didn’t last. He learnt the lie before his siblings did – but he kept his new, adult truth (it’s Mum and Dad, stupid …) to himself as they crowed on Christmas morning. What has he believed in since?

  He dropped his dreams like marbles and they scattered and ran so he can never get them back, now. Surely, at his age, it is too late to try.

  Seven

  A week, by now, of sunshine. These were offered days – an old Parlan saying for days of such sunshine and calm, blue sea that they felt like a gift. Rare days.

  Towels were laid out on Store Bay. Milton sold ice creams in little paper tubs. And I found a cormorant standing on a buoy that marked my lobster pots – blue-black in the sunshine, with its wings held out. It stayed as it was, very still. Only when Pigeon’s prow bumped against the buoy itself did the cormorant dive into the water – as deftly and soundlessly as oil.

  My laundry dried within an hour.

  The earth in the horse’s field grew powdery.

  The rock pool near Litty that was deep enough to swim in grew as warm as a bath. I saw Kitty floating in it – a dark-red swimsuit with a purple trim.

  I could not remember better weather. There had been handfuls of days – two, three or four in a row – during my first Parlan summer in which there had been beach cricket, dancing and late-night beers outside Milton’s shop; I remember looking up at the clearest of night skies. But this had been a week, now, of heat. And it’s lasting a while yet, Ed said.

  Of course, it was rumoured it was the Fishman’s doing.

  Maybe my patient brought it with him, said Tabitha, as she cycled past me in the lane.

  And it was good lobstering weather. Hard to check – or to want to check – the pots in high swells or driving rain, and a lobster is less willing to clamber into rope and wood when the tides are running at their strongest. But these were flat waters. They shone with the sun. Each pot that I lifted had a life in it. I wondered how it was for them – to be taken from the sea’s dark chamber into this dazzling light.

  Emmeline passes Crest in her car. She glances over, sees Maggie tucking tarpaulin over a black plastic crate and she knows what is in there. She never liked lobsters herself. She does not like the meat nor does she care for having to crack into their bones – and the cost? Too much for too little. She won’t be fooled.

  She drives past the old tractor wheel, parks beside the lighthouse.

  It is another day of sunshine and as she stood in her kitchen, rubbing cream into her hands, she thought I will go to the café. Order a coffee – foam and steamed milk.

  She will drink it in the courtyard where she used to play.

  It was a good child’s place. A lighthouse. How many others in this world can say that they grew up in a world of mirrors, bulbs, brass and talk of shipwrecks? Not many, but Emmeline can. There were three lighthouse-keepers. The job was always too crucial, too lonesome, too demanding of wakefulness to be left to one man alone and two was not much better. So at the foot of Parla’s lighthouse there were three lodgings for three men and their families – identical, cream-coloured buildings which formed three sides of a courtyard, and they had three back gardens, three washing lines … The Brights, the Coyles and the Hallidays. Everything was three.

  She’d liked it. As with so many things, she only knew how much she liked it when she had let it go. When she went to draw the curtains at Wind Rising, she would see the light turning and she’d feel a punch of regret, or homesickness. The day that the lighthouse was automated was the second-worst day of her life. But how could Jack have understood it?

  It’s only a building, he said.

  All earth, those men. They were sheep farmers and left the sea to others. Land is our business – Emmeline remembers her father-in-law wheezing this, when he first heard that his only son was marrying that homely Bright girl who was all brine and tides. You’re a farmer, now. And that light won’t last … Men won’t need a lighthouse in the future, Emma.

  It’s Emmeline.

  Emma. Mark my words.

  She did mark them, sourly – but he was wrong for the lighthouse might be automated now but doesn’t it still swing its light each night? It does. It was Old Man Bundy who did not last – for his lungs gave up on Christmas Eve the following year, and Emmeline had toasted the news with cooking brandy in the kitchen when the rest of them were in the sitting room, in black.

  She parks the car. The lighthouse’s buildings are all painted a pristine white now, with pale-brown doors and window frames. They shine. She smiles: Bright.

  Rona looks up, slows. She tidies herself and then she finds her best, wide smile and says hello, Emmeline! Which table? Smoothing out the tablecloths as if talking to a queen.

  Emmeline selects one and settles.

  The courtyard is swept; the paint is unblistered.

  Is this Emmeline’s home? In her bones? Or did home become the stone walls of Wind Rising? Or has her true home become Easterly, with its peonies and garden chairs? Home is where the heart is but Emmeline can’t be sure where her heart is any more. Her husband died twelve years ago. He died when he still had four children – one curly-haired daughter, three warm-bodied sons. And so her heart is not with him. Perhaps her heart is quartered and a part of it is with each child – three Parlan houses, and the deep blue sea.

  She closes her eyes.

  Tom had not been planned. She had borne three healthy, vigorous childr
en and had not wanted a fourth. There weren’t enough bedrooms, for one thing. And not enough money, if truth be told – for when did sheep bring in fortunes? Not in her lifetime. Three children were plenty. But men can be insistent on a winter’s night when there’s beer in their bellies and women can unlock themselves from their bodies and go elsewhere, when they must – so nine months later Tom slipped out. His head was perfectly round – she remembers that. And she swears he was smiling. A joy – when joy was so hard to find.

  The coffee is brought. Emmeline sips it, licks her lips.

  She knows she ought to hold a hatred for Jack, of some kind. There were moments of such darkness in her marriage that she was shocked into a numbness when they happened – a cool, empty otherness in which she felt no pain. When she fell, she would stare at the skirting board; she’d press her lips together, shut her eyes. The shock itself crept in later – in the shower, or out in the fields.

  She hates those moments, now. Emmeline can see herself against the oven, both her hands up by her face so that it might not be marked for a bruised face needs answers from children, whereas a bruised body does not. She was always so calm when it happened. She’d accept it and not cry. Afterwards, she would lock herself in the bathroom and tend to the new shapes of her, the colours, as if it was not her body. Sometimes she’d sing under her breath.

  It is how it is. I have no choice. Where does one go, on an island?

  Yes, perhaps Emmeline should hate her husband. But nothing – nothing – is as simple as that. Jack was also the man who spoke to his lambs when they came into the world – welcome, little one – and who dressed up as a pirate on the school’s last day of term. He knew the constellations. He would rub Emmeline’s feet as they watched the evening news, tending gently to each pink toe. And he gave her the four best things in the world, her four strong hearts, her daughter and sons. How could she hate him? She loved him sometimes.