The Silver Dark Sea

by Susan Fletcher

  The moment, for Jim, comes later. He finds his walking stick, follows them into the garden. He hears Abigail talk of the old pig farmer, how he found true love so very late in life, and isn’t the weather glorious? It is rare to have sun like this. She shows him her geraniums; she touches the string of bells.

  And Jim lets go of his stick. He opens his palm, so that it falls. It clatters onto the path – and he hears the Fishman come nearer, crouch down saying I’ve got it – don’t worry. Here …

  Thank you. The stick is held against his hand – but Jim does not take it. Instead, he grasps the Fishman’s wrist, leans forwards.

  He says, do not tell the truth. Jim Coyle spills these five words into the space between them – the salty space, the space that is cool with an evening breeze. Jim tightens his grip. He moves his eyes as if trying to see the man he is holding. Do you hear me? Understand me?

  Yes. Yes, I do.

  As for Abigail, she has not heard. She is minding her geraniums. She is noting that they are being blown from north to south, so that the north wind is still blowing. Still – how long for, now?

  These are strange times and the Fishman is the proof of it: him, with her husband. Pressing his walking stick back into Jim’s hand.

  * * *

  You could ask how do I know this? How do I know this happened, when I wasn’t there? But the fact is, both men told me. I would hear this from both of them in time and both their stories would be the same. The Fishman did hear – he heard Jim very clearly. Do not tell the truth. Stay the Fishman. It is what they want – do you hear?

  Jim told me this, too: I knew he loved you. As I sat in that chair.

  I doubted it, of course – who can smell love or the feeling alone? But he’d not meant love exactly. Jim said there was a scent to him … For a while I could not place it. But Jim Coyle knows the sea’s sounds, and he can tell the wind’s direction from other, smaller sounds and he knew when the tide was out simply from the stronger, acrid seaweed smell as wrack dried in the midday sun and so it did not take long for Jim to say gardenia! That’s what it is. The Fishman had smelt of gardenia – a sweet, white, feminine flower which does not grow on the isle.

  Me. I wore it. I had not worn it for years, but as I had waited for him to walk back from Sye and knock on my door, I’d found my bottle of gardenia scent. A dab on my throat, and one by each ear. Jim had smelt it on me, in the past; later, he smelt it on the beard of the man who, they say, walked out of the sea.

  Sam writes to Leah tonight. Or rather, he is not writing – he is sending a message on his phone which reads thinking of you.

  At the lighthouse itself, Rona is also typing. She sits at her computer and has written: I ran into Kitty today, at the shop. Did she tell you? It was dreadful. I know she is a good person – sometimes I try to tell myself she is not, that she’s a bad wife and deserves all of this – but I know that’s not true. She’s kind. She’s very beautiful.

  It gets harder the longer we wait. There will never be a good time to tell her, Nathan – you know that, don’t you? It’s better for Kitty that she knows soon. If you don’t tell her, I will.

  I could make you happy. I’d spend my life making you happy. Lots of fruit scones.

  As for her brother he has been sitting on the stile that leads to Sye. Sam smokes, and thinks the last time I walked here, I was carrying the Fishman. We held him in the air, like a boat. And it feels like it just happened, but also it feels like months ago – months or years.

  At Crest, Maggie’s bathroom light is on. He looks up at the house – its shape is darker than the night-time sky. He would not knock; he never would. Instead, Sam walks along its driveway and places a single plastic bag on her doorstep. It is not much. It is a few eggs, tea bags, a single candle, a note that says let me know if I can help.

  * * *

  She does not hear him. All she can hear is stash …

  Maggie lies in the bath. Her eyes are closed and she thinks of the sea. Tom would talk of sea music. He knew the shanties, the old sailors’ songs and he’d sing them to her, as she bathed. He’d sit in this room, beside her.

  When will I see my true love again?

  Soon, says the water; soon, says the wind …

  Sometimes he would take his hand and lower it, into the foam.

  The Man of Sea Shanties

  It has been a long time since Parla but I still hum its sea shanties. I still sing its saltwater songs.

  I was told this, and learnt it: that from the stubbled mouths of fishermen straining their eyes for herring shoals, or perhaps from the round, plump, wanting mouths of wives who were left by the fireside with their teats stopping their babies’ own pink mouths, there have been songs. Incantations. Prayers with a tune.

  I love their names alone, which are songs in themselves:

  ‘Five Ladies’ Lament’.

  ‘When Will You Come?’

  ‘And Will She Wait For Me?’

  ‘For Agnes-May’.

  And they are love songs, I learnt that too. They might have been sung to haul nets in to or to row in time or to shorten the hours but they have love in their words more than anything else. For the sea may take lives away, but it can’t touch the love. Love cannot be splintered or drowned. It lasts, and so there are songs.

  It feels like a lifetime ago, when I first heard them. Which it was, I suppose.

  But enough. This is about Maggie, mouthing the words in her night-time bath. It is about the man from Sye who she will love. And it is about Nathan who knows the songs – all of the songs.

  * * *

  He knows this one, from Cantalay. Like the isle it comes from, it is simply done.

  When will I see my one true love again?

  Soon, says the water; soon, says the wind.

  When might I see her brown eyes again?

  Soon, says the water – soon.

  When will I breathe in her sweet breath again?

  Soon, says the water; soon, says the wind.

  When might I feel her warm skin again?

  Soon, says the water – soon.

  When will I watch my love sleeping again?

  Soon, says the water; soon, says the wind.

  And when must I leave her behind me again?

  Soon, soon, soon …

  Nathan whispers it, now – or rather, he hums the tune very softly and the words are half-mouthed. Soon …

  He knows them all – all the old sea songs. His grandfather knew them. Granddad Bright, with his jar of peanuts, his Bible, the crackle of his pipe as he smoked it. Missing front teeth. Come and sit by me, boy. He’d called Nathan boy. Not the others – just Nathan.

  When will I breathe in her sweet …

  He pauses, drinks. It is past midnight, and the house is silent. Upstairs, the cat sleeps where Nathan knows he should be.

  I’ll teach you a song, boy … He taught them all. Abelard Bright polished the brass but he also polished the old, old songs. As the weight in the stairwell lowered itself down so that the cogs turned and the lantern did, he found the words and handed them over. He sat in a wing-backed armchair. Nathan sat on a cushion at his grandfather’s feet. Tweed slippers. Dog hair on his trouser legs.

  Only ever him. Only the one grandchild there. Why never Ian? Or Hester? They had no interest in it, perhaps. They never sang.

  Just him and his Granddad Bright.

  Soon, says the water …

  And then Tom. Tom came along, and he sang. Tom had his own songs – wordless, but with a tune of sorts so that one night in Wind Rising, when Nathan and Tom shared a room with bunk beds, the elder brother had pushed his toes up through the slats of the bunk above him and said do you want to know a song? And Tom’s head had appeared upside down, saying a song? Is it good?

  That’s how it started. The boys’ bedroom, in the empty hours. Noises downstairs – a breaking of glass or a single bad word – and Nathan’s eyes would open and say do you want to know another song? Or story? Other things, too.
He showed Tom that if you pressed two shells over your ears you might hear the sea’s secrets.

  I can’t hear anything.

  Here, like this …

  He drinks. The song is in his head. Peanuts are.

  My wife. Kitty who I love.

  He looks into the glass, at the last of the whisky. Rona comes to him, too. She rolls into his mind, the birthmark on her hipbone, the vertical line she gets between her eyes when she implores him – stay … She is all hands. She has no shyness to her when she asks for what she wants. Their first kiss had been ambush; she’d clambered across to the driver’s seat of his Land Rover, pressed her mouth against his. Sometimes he thinks he hates her, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t hate her. It’s what he does with her that he hates; he hates that she thinks he is worth loving perhaps because look, look how he sits here, drunk again, with Kitty upstairs and the ghosts, and where is Tom now? Not singing.

  Not singing. Nathan says this, raises a finger. He is not singing.

  He drains the glass, puts it on the table.

  His grandfather, if he’d still been alive, would talk of God. He’d say, Thomas is with God, now – because the Brights had their faith as all lighthouse-keepers did. A framed square of embroidery in their hall had said Have no fear, for the Lord is with you, and it looked like a promise, hanging on their wall. A promise made to Nathan. He believed it for a time and then he did not believe it, because as a boy he’d knelt and prayed, but no help had come.

  He is not singing … Nathan exhales. He runs his palm over his hair. Drunk, but not so drunk that he can’t see Tom’s worth against Nathan’s own. If someone had to die, why was it him? Not me? There wasn’t a single thing that Tom did to hurt a person, or sadden them, and yet he was taken and is dead whilst Nathan got all of it wrong but is still here on Parla, whisky-mouthed and failing too many people to count. Why wasn’t it him? Who is worth far less than Tom was? There is never fairness.

  When will I hold …

  He sniffs. Curses, under his breath.

  He has been told that all the best sea songs are about loss – what people yearn for. What people miss. Nathan misses his grandfather and he misses his own wife but it is his little brother he is seeing now, at half past midnight – that upside-down head of his as he said a song? Really? His hair hanging down.

  Tom, who deserved better. He should not have died young.

  It is only in these moments, these lonely hours, when Nathan truly feels it or allows himself to – the absence, the size and the permanence of it. By day, he tries to hide it; sober, he tries to box the loss away. Don’t people drink to forget? Not him. Not this man. He drinks to feel the hurt in all its force – for the grief to crash and swell. It is how he opens the sadness that comes with knowing that the boy who drew crayon pictures of them both on the bedroom wall, with smiles and sheep, is bones, now – bones – and not singing. I want him back – his brother. But don’t the singers of songs all want something? Doesn’t everyone on this island? Don’t they all miss Tom Bundy? But Tom is not coming back.

  Nine

  She has a dream, and it is this: that he is with her again. That he is not wrapped up in weeds, with fish swimming through his ribs: he is fleshed, and warm, and with her. He kisses her neck. He lifts her hair to one side and kisses the skin behind her ears. Then he moves down, touches the skin across her collarbone and then he kisses that, too, and in the dream Maggie gasps so that he draws back, anxious. Suddenly he is not Tom. He is the Fishman and he is saying am I moving too quickly? Are you OK?

  She wakes. She wants to say no, keep going; she wants him to be there beside her, propped up on one arm.

  The Fishman has a dream also. It is a dream of water, but also a dream in which there is a kiss – a small kiss in a green-walled room. He wakes, and the dream stays with him. It takes a few minutes for the dream to fall away.

  * * *

  Tavey is the most southerly building on the isle. It sits in the south-west corner, in the fields beyond Lowfield; its windows mostly face onto a shingle beach. The gorse bushes and nettles in its garden are so high that they brush against the wooden boards that have been nailed across the glass – chest-high, or higher. The grass, too, is overgrown. Half-lost amongst it are the last, rusting signs that it had been a pig farm, once: troughs and three shelters of hooped, corrugated iron. Flowers bloom, here: decades of fresh pig manure have led to honeysuckle, foxgloves, ox-eye daisies.

  The Fishman is here again. He pushes at the door with his shoulder; then he puts his knee against it, and his hands. Slowly, the door gives way. Inside it is small – two rooms, only. But there is furniture here, and no smell of damp. And as he stands amongst its dust and its faint scent of sheep and trapped air, he sees that if a person can have a second form of life – if a man who has swum through night-time seas can grow legs, and kick, and come ashore to a place of kind people and to a woman whose small, coy smile makes his heart stir when he sees it – then why shouldn’t a building? Have a second life, too?

  When he asks Tabitha, she looks surprised. That place? It’s been empty for … She blows air through pursed lips, thinking. Ten years? Maybe not quite ten.

  Who lived there?

  Moses Bundy. The pigs were his. After him? A shrug. Just … tourists. Birdwatchers. It was rented on and off for years. And then people just stopped coming. She looks up, enquiringly. What are you thinking?

  I could work on it … Try to.

  Work? Fix it?

  It wouldn’t take much. A few nails, some paint. I could make it a good place again.

  You could do that?

  With tools. I think so. Do you know who owns it?

  She shakes her head. The rent went to Jack Bundy and he’s a long time dead.

  So now?

  Emmeline’s? Abigail’s? Ian, maybe. God knows. I don’t think it matters. If you want to fix it, fix it. Who can object? It’s just – she waves her hand – sitting there …

  Thank you.

  Tabitha eyes him. Can I ask why? It’s a strange thing to do.

  He smiles. He thinks to himself before he answers. And he says because I want to be helpful. I want to make a difference. And I’d like to say thank you in a better way than words.

  * * *

  In a cool, airy attic a woman with the tattoo of a bird on her neck is drying a paintbrush, her weight resting on one hip. Before her she has a view and, before that, an interpretation of it – the red tiles of Easterly, a textured sea of many different colours. Black, green, navy, white, yellow, electric-blue.

  Kitty muses. She rubs her left calf with the sole of her right foot so briefly she is balanced, stork-like.

  She’s yet to meet an islander who fully understands what she does. Nathan tries to, or did. They met here, on Parla, one midsummer’s eve. Kitty – freshly single, heavily laced with both the zest and heat of freedom and the weight of such a drawn-out separation – came to the island for the longest day of the year, to feel as much light as she could after too long in darkness. She was half-drunk. Cider? Cider, which she doesn’t drink and yet somehow she was drinking it. A backless red dress. No shoes.

  Nathan asked her to dance; that’s how it started. When she’d told him I’m an artist – oils, mostly, he’d looked concerned, afraid even. Artist? He was a farmer. Sheep … – as if regretful. But there were worse things. And his hands felt gentle against her back, and he’d been drinking cider too so that when they kissed it was fruit-juicy, apple-sweet.

  Kitty puts the paintbrush down.

  She can hear the wind-chime in the porch. The dog from Wind Rising is barking in the lane.

  So far, Kitty has made her work into greetings cards and framed prints and she has sold a few originals through the lighthouse café. Rona has been generous to let her hang her artwork there; the percentage that Rona takes is small. But now, I will be exhibited …

  That word. Exhibited. It thrills her, but to Nathan it had meant nothing; he’d said that’s nice as if he’d barel
y heard her.

  There is someone at the door – three raps.

  He stands before her in a dark-red cotton shirt and grey tracksuit bottoms. He does not lean against the doorframe nonchalantly, or have his hands in his pockets; he does not look annoyed at how slowly she’s answered the door. He only stands.

  Kitty?

  Yes.

  I’m … He points his thumb over his shoulder, back towards Lowfield.

  She tilts her head. I can guess who you are … I think I’m the last to meet you. They shake hands, business-like, and she blushes.

  She has seen him from a distance but nothing more than that.

  Kitty is not what he expected. There is an old, broken fridge propped up against the porch, a crate of empty bottles beside it and the boots that stand in a row are all muddied and sheep-smelling – yet the woman who stands on the doormat is fragrant, barefoot, moving languidly. She has an emerald-green line around her eyes; earrings brush her jaw. Tools? Oh, we have heaps of tools … What do you need?

  Not too sure yet. Hammers and nails, certainly. A crowbar. If you have a saw, and any spare wood, or …

  He follows her to the shed. She talks, as she goes – apologising, mostly, for the shed’s disarray, the cobwebs and the smell of turpentine. She opens the shed door. Inside, blackness. Then Kitty finds a switch – click – and the illumination is sudden, flickering and huge. He stares. There are workbenches, car parts, an upended boat, shelves that spill with old paint tins. Tubs of screws, bolts, nails. Help yourself. Take anything.