The Silver Dark Sea

by Susan Fletcher

  Do you miss it?

  The mainland? She considers this. Some things. Not enough to go back there – or not yet. I know people who can’t spend one night inland. They can’t sleep where there is no sea, no sea’s sound. She does not look up. What about you?

  Me?

  Yes, you. The fabled Fishman, the fish that grew legs and walked onto Sye. Do you miss the water? The whale song and shoals of fish?

  He opens his mouth to speak, but does not.

  He comes here to restore hope and wonder. The Fishman. Are you going to do that for us? She doesn’t know why she speaks like this – sourly, as if testing him.

  Hope and wonder?

  You look exactly like him. I have seen the drawings and they could be drawings of you.

  * * *

  A woman with a small tattoo stands in the empty house. She has moved from room to room. She has called his name, as if coaxing.

  Nathan is rarely here – he tends, by day, to be digging or building, or out in the fields with Ian. Burning ragwort. A few months ago he was lambing and he’d come indoors to eat or to rinse strings of blood off his hands in the sink. Even when he is here – on a chair, or watching the television, or upstairs on their computer – he is not here, not with her.

  Kitty can feel nothing so easily – numb, in every sense. Once, she was fire and appetite, and she’d run up to the attic to fling down new colours or sketch wild lines of charcoal on white. Now? She wants things back that may never come back. She wishes she was younger; she wishes her husband was in this bedroom and not wherever he is – which is drunk at Milton’s, most likely, or lying in a field. Trawling the beaches, bottle in hand.

  It is not what she wants – this absence. How long can a person live with what they do not want? Or live with what makes them unhappy? Once this island had meant everything that was honest, loving and good.

  * * *

  Late, now. The lighthouse opens its white eye.

  Jim Coyle thinks he can hear piano music.

  The chestnut mare blows through her nostrils and it flattens the grass into stars.

  Those moments that we remember. The tiniest moments, or parts of a moment – a tap of a nail against a mug or the sound of a man swallowing, or how the sweeping beam finds the kitchen walls and then leaves them. We count the seconds, he and I.

  At Crest we are sitting in darkness. I have not stood, turned on a lamp. All we have is the glow of a waning moon, and the lighthouse when it comes.

  He has been here for six hours. We have talked a little, and sat without talking. I have given us a small meal – cheese, fruit, bread.

  All the while, the sea has spoken. And all the while I have known what he has been wanting – longing – to ask, but has not.

  In the end, he does not have to ask.

  I tell him. I say I want to tell you how my husband died.

  And he replies yes – as if grateful. Yes – OK.

  There’s a boy on the island called Sam Lovegrove. He’s fair-haired, tall. He found you, on Sye – remember? He has a boat called Sea Fairy – it’s still in the harbour, with a green tarpaulin. He doesn’t use it now but he used to. He used to take tourists round the island in it – the caves, the beaches that are hard to reach on foot. Bit of money in it. Nearly four years ago he took two boys out. It was a warm day, the sea was calm … But off a beach called Lock-and-Key one of the boys went overboard. I still don’t know how and Sam doesn’t know how but over he went. And he’d had a lifejacket on but it can’t have been fastened properly or perhaps it was too big for him because it came off in the water. He lost it, and there are currents off that beach if the tide’s on the turn, and the lifejacket was gone and this boy began to struggle. They were trying to reach him, and I guess they were shouting because Tom was out in Pigeon and he heard them. He was baiting the pots near Bundy Head but he heard them and so ran the boat down to Lock-and-Key. He turned off the engine. Dived in. Saved him.

  Saved the boy?

  Saved the boy. Tom was a strong swimmer. He was the best swimmer on the island and he got this boy, pushed him up into the air so that they could grab him and haul him back onto the boat, and I don’t know if they were slow to turn back for Tom or if the current had picked up or if he was just too tired from the swim or if he got cramp or something else we’ll never know of but when they turned round there was just sea. Empty sea. He was … gone. Her eyes are huge. She stares at nothing. There were boats and helicopters for three days. We searched every beach, every cave.

  The kitchen is in darkness now; they can only see each other’s eyes.

  He was declared dead two weeks later. But I kept looking. We all kept looking. And four years later, here we are …

  Somewhere, a clock ticks.

  I loved him. I love him still.

  He says I am so sorry.

  I don’t blame anyone. So many people blame Sam, or did. But I never have.

  I swallow – a single, soft sound. And in the hush that follows it, we look at each other.

  There are things we know and cannot be sure how we know them, but we know them all the same. And I know what he’s thinking. I am also thinking it.

  * * *

  Even now, I can see us perfectly. I can see how we were, how we sat without moving for a very long time.

  When it was too dark to see him, I rose and turned on a lamp which half-lit the kitchen – a glow that caught the sides of things. The side of the fridge, the side of shells. The left side of his face.

  I did not wish to be still. I was tired but I could not be still. I feared stillness and I feared how he was looking at me so I moved through the room doing small things that did not matter – moving a spoon, touching the feathers in their glass vase.

  He stood. He came behind me. He did not touch me but he was close, very close, and I felt as I had felt in the garden at Lowfield – old, in need. Turn around, he said.

  No.

  Maggie …

  I couldn’t turn. I knew what would happen if I turned – that I would weaken again, lean gently against him so that I would hear his heart and he would touch my shoulder or more than my shoulder. I wanted it and feared it – both. And so I stepped away. I walked into the hallway and opened the front door and stood beside it, looking down. The evening air filled the house.

  The Fishman watched me do this. He nodded, as if he understood.

  He came towards me and the open door.

  I can’t, I said. Not yet.

  His was the face of a saint, or the face of someone who knew what the truth was when others did not. Yes, he understood it. He understood it all – loss, want, how things end and how they begin. He did not say any more. He only smiled very sadly as he passed me, and walked out into the night.

  I watched him go. He went as the pots did, when I lowered them into the water – fading, fading so that you think, briefly, don’t go, stay … But then the darkness has them. It takes them entirely and they are gone from sight, and it seems they were never here with you at all. Were they ever real? Did you ever touch them? You stare at the water where, once, they had been.

  The Wild Sheep and the Stormy Night

  This was always an island of sheep. Sheep are well-suited to rough land and thin grass – and so it was always sheep that the Parlans raised, sold and ate. I have seen the photographs. I have seen an old, whisky-coloured reel of film in which the sheep may be brainless but they’re still quick-footed. Still outwitting the men.

  Stupid beasts. Nathan said this. One afternoon when Tom was still alive, we had helped to shear them – we’d wrestled the sheep down and kept them there. Nathan never drank in those days, or rarely. The three of us were sitting on a stone wall, sticky with fleece. Damp from kneeling in sheep dung that had been loosely, frantically made.

  Stupid. You know the story of how they charged?

  Charged?

  Tom smiled. With a mouth full of sandwich he said, this is a good one – tell her, Nathe.

  Tell me, I
nodded. I love stories.

  * * *

  Hester is combing her hair. She is picking through it – grass-seeds and old leaves can lose themselves in her curls. She used to hate them. There are no grips or bands that last; there is no spray that holds her hair for more than a minute or two. It is thick, bush-like, so that when George first took her to bed he spent half the time stroking her dense, wilful locks, amazed by them. Look how they spring back up when I pull … In time, he’d stroked the rest of her. But it all began with her hair.

  Like fleece.

  She hates it less, now. It is her – part of her. And if George loves it, then it helps. But in the early days, her father would call her a scruff or a gypsy – although he’d never hiss these words to her directly. Always to her mother, or someone passing by. Look at the state of that one … as if Hester’s hair was her doing, and she chose those curls.

  I never chose the curls.

  She never chose anything except her husband, her motherhood and her trust in God. The rest of it was put upon her and she bears it and does her best. But even at forty-eight she has small dreams of straight blonde hair – Maggie’s hair, or how Nancy’s will be when she’s older. Hair that doesn’t snag on branches or barbed wire so that you are left there, calling out for help, which happened several times when she was younger. Hanging and hollering next to tufts of fleece.

  She has always known the tale of how the sheep charged. Nathan was the one for telling stories, and he told this tale one evening as they sucked lollipops in the barn. All four of them – Ian, Nathan, Tom and herself. The lollipops were cherry-flavoured.

  A roll of thunder. It shook the metal arms of the barn.

  Ages ago, there was a really wild storm …

  So it began. Nathan spoke of a parched summer that led to a night of such thunder and shaken sky that the lanes became rivers and the smell in the air was of wet earth and wet stones, and there were no stars or moon to see by for the rain was blinding, too strong. The islanders listened to the drumming on their roofs. The Parlan voles tucked up into balls. Boats rocked, and hens curled their toes.

  A flock of sheep went mad. That is the story – that the flashing light and the banging sky and the gusting wind that seemed to have no direction at all in how it raced through the grass and tore through the nettles were all too much for a flock of two dozen sheep or so. Where to turn? They did not know. They bleated, circled in the dark. Their ears were flat and their eyes rolled and their nostrils clenched and unclenched, and there was one sudden, low slap of thunder at the back of the flock so that they started to run. They charged blindly and unwaveringly towards the west coast; they fell off the cliff and into the sea. They died on the rocks or drowned very promptly, for the sea had been huge, shattering, monstrous. Nothing could float, or survive it.

  So they died.

  In the morning, when the storm had passed, there was no sign of the two dozen sheep save for a line of trampled grass. The farmer could not understand it.

  And this is what Hester knows, as I know it, and as Abigail knows it from her leather-bound book – that if you walk on the beach when a storm has passed by, so that the air is clean and the sand is strewn with driftwood and plastic and lengths of rope, look at the foam that’s been left there. Often, there’ll be a line of foam – brown-coloured, thicker than foam tends to be. The wind may catch it and blow it, as it blows all sea foam – but this is fibrous, heavier. It rolls, turns itself over. It does not skitter, or fly.

  This is not foam, is what they say. It is fleece from the long-drowned sheep. And it is sent ashore to remind the one who finds it – you, me, the person walking on that beach – how lucky they’ve been to survive the bad weather. See? Others did not.

  Others did not. Hester lowers the comb.

  They had all listened in that barn. Cherry-breathed. Tom had said, poor sheep.

  And Nathan had shaken his head and said but we’re alive, aren’t we? That’s the point of the foam when we see it. It’s to tell us we’re still here. See?

  Like everyone on Parla, she has her share of guilt. She has her guilt because she thinks she could have saved him, somehow – a sisterly warning, a tale of some kind – and she has her guilt because she is here when he is not. But also, she got out of there. That’s the expression she’s used herself, over and over: I got myself out of there … Or rather, George got her out, by marrying her. By coming to Parla on a birdwatching trip and not watching any birds whatsoever; he’d watched Hester, instead. What if she’d not married him? Stayed at Wind Rising with the boys?

  I survived and he did not. The brown foam that the sea leaves behind is pollution, most likely, and the two dozen sheep will have made a good meal for crabs and fish and diving birds. But when she sees fleece on wire, or the scudding froth of beaches, it is Tom she thinks of. Tom who, like the sheep, made the wrong choice that day.

  Part of everything is missing. Nothing is quite as it was before.

  He was the most loved, without question – so radiant and eager that it felt like he had been born for a reason, or that he knew something the rest of them did not. He was precious – they all knew it. Like the few rare shells that come ashore after a storm and are not broken.

  I was his big sister. Proud, and sad.

  Where has he gone? Sometimes it is like he was never here – she has merely imagined the embraces he gave her in which he lifted her off the floor. There is not even trampled grass to show where he has been.

  Eight

  I have never – not once – asked for love. I was not born with it; I’d had no family and no sense of home, and so I never missed it. I never sought it out or prayed for it to come.

  And so Tom had been unexpected. I had not woken that morning and thought I will meet him today. I had only ever gone to that harbour town because I was tired of my impermanent, shifting life – the rented homes, the jobs I grew bored in, the men I did not feel enough for and so had to leave without warning. I thought a harbour would suit me. A place of safety and rest.

  But it proved to be a place of love. Love – after all this time. And love proved to be a smiling, dark-haired lobster-man called Thomas Bundy – how could I have guessed that? But life, I’ve learnt, has its surprises. And I would say that most of the things that I have asked for over the months and years have, in fact, not happened. I used to ask for Tom’s safe return; later, I prayed to find his bones. After that, I feared losing his face, or my memory of it – his pores, say, or the shape of his lips – and I could never remember them when I longed to, when I thought please don’t let me forget … Only later did they come back: a clear, perfect vision of his teeth, as I was standing in a shop queue or trimming the fat off bacon so that I’d pause, amazed, grateful, teary-eyed.

  For me, it is the unasked things that seem to come.

  And I did not ask for the Fishman. I had not hoped for love a second time. Why would I have hoped for love? I did not want to replace the husband whose ring I still wore, whose surname I still signed cheques with, whose handwriting was still in our shared address book so that sometimes I would touch where his hand may have rested as he wrote a postcode or a name. I formed a wall around me; a wall of protection. I feared that wall breaking. Fear had made me fight him outside Lowfield, saying no!

  All I wanted was an existence where I could put one foot before the other, and then the other foot in front of that, and lift feathers from the beach which were remnants of a passing life. The salty shards of a greater thing.

  I would tell him this, in time. I didn’t want you to come. I didn’t ask.

  And his answer? He touched me, said and I didn’t ask for you. But look …

  * * *

  In the days after we’d talked at Crest, I stayed away. I thought of him constantly. I said he is a fish over and over; I tried to keep to the north of the isle.

  All the same, I heard him spoken of. Over glasses of wine or rich, black slices of Rona’s chocolate cake I started to hear stories about this namel
ess man – how he changed the lightbulb in the school’s porch, or helped Lorcan move his piano against a different wall. Milton told me how the Fishman had stood in the mare’s field and shown Leah how to blow a blade of grass and it was this shrill, sudden sound that had made Milton walk to his window and see him, for the first time. Big fellow, isn’t he? I stood in his shop, listened. And then I shrugged, cleared my throat, pretended that I had no wish to know.

  I asked my lobsters if they’d seen him. Have you? Passing by?

  I pulled up my vegetables and thought how about you?

  As for Nan, she sprang out of a ditch near the Old Fish Store, rapped her knuckles against his knees and yelled, just checking! Laughed until she had to sit down.

  Not all spoke highly of him, of course. Some sucked their gums at the mention of him, and gave a hard ha! I went to Easterly, and Emmeline hissed he is up to no good. I’m telling you, Maggie. Do you know what he did? This morning? She’d opened her curtains to find him in her driveway. He’d been crouching by her single rose bush as if entranced. The flowers had been browning; they were past their best, dropping petals like pink rain and yet he’d leant down towards them, touched them tenderly. I mean – what on earth …? Such a thing enraged her. Emmeline had thrown open her window, called out can I help you? She’d said it in a tone that implied she intended to give no help at all.

  Nor were the Bundy brothers keen. They were kicking at the rotten fence-post above Tap Hole when they looked up and saw him at Tavey – the old pig farm. What the hell’s he doing? For the Fishman had been walking round it – feeling the planks that were nailed to its windows, pressing his shoulder against its softened door.

  * * *

  Late afternoon. It is late afternoon and I do not want him and yet I think of him. I have no answers.

  The north wind gives white tips to the waves.

  I am sitting in Pigeon as if Pigeon can help.

  Abigail Coyle sits in the graveyard. She sits on the bench with the south-facing view. It is where she always sits, when she comes here. The brambles and blackthorns hide her from the lane, and she can see all across the southern coast – Lowfield, Tavey, the little shingle beach. The mare swings her tail as she grazes. The sea is glittered and bright.