The Silver Dark Sea

by Susan Fletcher

  Really?

  They’re here to be used.

  He watches how she presses her lips together, how she flexes her toes as she looks down at them. She is sad, he thinks. It is clear. Is Kitty your real name?

  Katherine. But I’ve always been called Kitty. She looks up. You? Still nothing?

  I think I am the Fishman …

  She smiles. Of course.

  Kitty stays. Together, they move through the shelves. She finds him gloves – canvas ones, hard-wearing – and screwdrivers, sandpaper, a claw-hammer and nails. As she does this Kitty asks how long will you be here for? On Parla?

  A while.

  She does not press for more than that. She accepts it, moves her hair to one side. Then you probably know that we’re a quiet place. Not much happens – or nothing good. Any – she pauses, thinks for the word – excitement or adventure is rare and I think we feel it all the more because of that. Do you know what I’m saying? What I’m trying to say? She turns the silver ring on her thumb with the forefinger of the same hand, waits. Then, I like Maggie. Maggie has been through so much. We all have, I guess.

  Maggie?

  Come on … It’s a small island. We talk. She teases: we have eyes …

  What can he say? He can think of no reply to her.

  Kitty does not wait for one. She only nods as if she is happy now and goes back into the house. And later, when the man from Sye is pulling his bag onto his shoulder to make his way to Tavey, he glances up at the house and sees her. Kitty, the artist. She stands by her easel but she is not looking at it. She is looking at him.

  He thinks, she looks like she is underwater. Or he is underwater, looking back at her – her mermaid’s hair, her sorrow and her mouth which moves a little as she watches him, as if singing or reciting, or as if in prayer.

  * * *

  In the day that follows, new sounds come. There is still the sea, of course; still the soft squeak of Ed’s anemometer, as it turns in the wind. And there are all the brief, passing sounds that a person’s day may have in it – the rattle of a saucepan as it comes to the boil, the clack-clack-clack of cream being rubbed into hands. The staccato slurp from Nan as she drinks milk through a straw.

  The damp hiss of a candle being lit from another. I do this, in the hush of Parla’s church.

  But there are, too, new noises. And they come, it seems, from Tavey: the slow squeak of boards being prised off windows, the bang as they’re thrown onto the ground.

  Emmeline looks up from her flowers, listens.

  Leah pauses as she carries a bin-bag to the dustbin. She wrinkles her nose, thinks what is …?

  And George Moss, too – he hears the sounds from Tavey. He is filling up his bird feeders with peanuts and sunflower seeds, and he stops, calls out. What’s that? Can you hear that? His wife comes to the doorway. She tucks her hair behind her ear, as if to listen better.

  It’s coming from the pig farm, Hester says, unsure.

  * * *

  Tabitha had said who can object? But afterwards she knew very well who could object to these hammering sounds. She knew who could glower, stamp her foot. It’s only a matter of time …

  It is mid-morning. Tabitha is readying to make her way to Lorcan, packing her nurse’s bag. Stethoscope, bandages, lint, an eye-bath – all the items that she carries with her on her rounds, just in case. She shuts the bag, lifts it. Then the telephone rings.

  Tabitha? What’s he doing?

  Good morning to you, too.

  Your man. What the hell is he doing at Tavey? I can see him right now, and I can hear him. You know that’s Bundy property?

  Is it? Casually.

  You know it is! What is he doing there? If he damages a single –

  Damage? Oh for God’s sake, Em – of course he’s not damaging it. And frankly, if it’s Bundy land, it’s Abigail who owns it, not you, and I happen to think she’d be delighted to know he was doing something useful with the place. It’s been an eyesore for a decade.

  With that, she hangs up.

  That’s the advantage of telephones; Tabitha can escape her sister’s anger in one swift move.

  Emmeline stares at the receiver she’s still holding. Tavey? Isn’t it hers? It was Jack’s, and she was Jack’s wife. But then, what of bloodlines? Maybe it is Abigail’s. Well, she is welcome to it: a rundown shack with pig shit on its stones.

  Emmeline sniffs.

  Rage. It is always in her. Sometimes, fire-like, it is merely the glow of warm ashes that, if blown, could redden and grow; other times she cannot contain it. Now? Her anger simmers. Emmeline hates it, of course – the sound of work. But is it because it is Tavey? Or because it is him – this man who should be Tom, but is not? Or are there other reasons? Perhaps this is the sound of progress – of betterment – which feels wrong and unacceptable when Tom is not here; how can there be progress until her boy is found? Or it is Tabitha. Or the north wind. Maybe all these things.

  Emmeline listens: the sea, and hammering.

  She puts the receiver back down.

  * * *

  The two rooms now are flooded with light. Sunlight streams in through the windows; on floors and far walls, it makes window shapes in white.

  He walks towards a window, stares. He can see the islands; Leah has whispered their names to him and he says Cantalay … The sea glitters. It is nothing like the sea he knew and swam through. The sea he knew was blackish; it seemed to push him down. Is this the same water?

  So much has changed, since Sye. Since folding up his tail.

  Maggie brushes through the grass. She wears jeans with a hole in one knee and a white blouse that is thinning from years of wear. She, too, has heard. As she’d dug in her garden, she’d paused at the sound of planks being prised off, flung.

  I have never been to Tavey. Not inside it.

  That is why she is walking there. It is why she’s treading through the fields, ducking under wire, moving past the waist-high gorse and pausing in the doorway of the old pig farm. To see Tavey. No other reason.

  The room is filled with daylight. It makes his black hair bright.

  So much light. I had no idea …

  He smiles. Come here. Look at the view.

  She joins him. She looks across the shingle beach, out towards the isles. That one? It is Utta. They say it had a giantess whose weight and bad temper cracked the land, gave it streams. It is the only isle to have them.

  She is the woman he can’t stop thinking of. She smells of flowers, and earth.

  Without turning from the view she says I think I was rude. The other night. I was rude in how I asked you to leave.

  No. You weren’t rude.

  I was. I wanted you to go because –

  It’s OK.

  Let me tell you. I want to tell you. I was afraid – that’s why. I don’t let many people stay for as long as you stayed. People drop in, but … She drops her gaze. I don’t know who you are. I don’t know your name or why you are here. All I have in my head is that you’re a fish – a fish! There is nothing else. No boats have gone down. I’ve listened to the news every day and there’s nobody missing from any of the crews, and who could have swum here? From the mainland? All I have is that you’re a bloody fish …

  Maggie turns. She drifts back, through the room. Slowly, she moves past the hearth, its wrought-iron grate, past a wooden table and a single chair. She moves towards the far end where there is a stove and a metal kitchen sink and, as he watches her, the Fishman wants to speak to her – to speak plainly, to fill the room with all the truths that he has. His wound; his name. The constant taste of brine. But he does not tell her.

  I hate being afraid. She says it very quietly.

  Of what?

  Of you. I don’t know you. You could be anyone. Am I meant to just believe that you’re just a decent man?

  Is that so hard to do?

  A sigh. She rubs her eyes. I thought I had found a … Peace. A lonely sort of peace, perhaps, but still peace. A form of
it. And then you turn up …

  Maggie has stopped walking. And so, very carefully, he starts to make his way through the room, as she has done. He treads through the dusty shafts of light. Maggie is still rubbing her eyes, and yet she knows that he has come to her, that he is standing before her now.

  Don’t. Please …

  He touches her. Her shirt is as thin as air.

  I don’t know what this is. I think of you and I don’t want to think of you.

  I think of you too.

  Maggie drops her hand. Everything is so hard …

  And she cries. She tries not to, briefly – but the tears come. Her forehead wrinkles; the skin by her eyes becomes starry with lines. Her mouth opens, chick-like.

  The Fishman puts his hands on her waist. He lifts her.

  She allows it. Instinctively, Maggie lets him place her very gently onto the old metal draining board. Their faces are level now.

  I am, she says, so scared. I’ve not felt like this since … And I don’t know who you are. Do you know how that feels? I don’t know who – She hiccups.

  I won’t hurt you, Maggie.

  How – a sob – can you say that? You’re a … fish, or –

  Because I won’t. Believe me.

  How can I believe you?

  Maggie …

  He moves in around her. His arms go around her shoulders and he brings her against him so that Maggie’s chin rests on his own shoulder and he can hold her, he can hold her properly as he has thought of doing from the moment that she struck him. He says to her shh … And she cries. He strokes her hair, as she does so. The minutes pass this way.

  He has so much to tell her.

  Maggie pulls back from him. Her eyelashes are damp, and have split as feathers do. He can smell gardenia.

  Her mouth is near his mouth.

  * * *

  It takes so little. It takes so little time and so few words.

  Kitty knows this. She knows how things can fall apart with the smallest breath of wind.

  She is in her studio, at the top of High Haven. The sky is starting to darken when, at last, he comes back. The front door opens; she pauses with her brush in her hand. There is the sound of his boots dropping onto the floor and the banisters creak as he takes hold of them, and she knows he is angry. Kitty?

  He has been in the shed, maybe. Or he has heard that this Fishman is hammering nails with Nathan’s tools, or both. Attic, she calls out. Waits.

  His anger is never the family anger that she has heard of: he never curls his fingers into his palm to make a fist; he never slams his knuckles against walls or furniture and she has never been afraid. I have never been afraid of him. But her heart is beating in time with his footsteps as Nathan comes up the stairs.

  They are only tools …

  My tools! Mine! They’re expensive. And –

  I lent them! Lent – do you understand that word? It means you’ll get them back.

  And it didn’t used to be this way. It didn’t used to be a sour-smelling house with pillows and a blanket downstairs by the sofa and a cat that mostly keeps outside, and it didn’t used to be that in order to be spoken to by him – looked in the eye and spoken to – she would have to irritate him so that he’d shake his head, disbelieving, and fit his lips around such words as you had no right …

  No right? Nathan, I am your wife!

  He could be a thief, or –

  They’re tools – they aren’t gold bullion! He wants to fix up Tavey – that’s all …

  She flings down the paintbrush. One hand on her hip, the other pressed across her forehead and Kitty shuts her eyes. She wants to ask him when did this happen? How have we let it? She has not seen her husband for too long, too long: it is not the physical absence of him that hurts her but the other, dreadful way in which a person can be absent. It is like sleeping next to a shell. It’s like how, as a child, she’d turn a boiled egg over in its cup so that it looked perfect and her parents might think it was still uneaten, still full and rich. It’s not full; it’s hollow and does nothing, and it will break when tapped. This will break. Kitty will break it.

  They are just tools …

  She moves past him. She goes downstairs and does, swiftly, the things that Nathan probably does not know must be done or has not done for years – cleaning the worktops, clearing out the plughole in the kitchen sink. She does it briskly. She lifts things, slams them down. Once, Nathan would leave flowers in a jam-jar by her bed – cowslip, or campion; she’d wake to find primroses beside her glass of water. Now? She cannot reach him. He, in turn, could reach her so often – over and over – but he does not choose to. Arms by his side.

  A thousand times over she has knelt beside him, said what’s the matter? Talk to me … And his one thousand replies were always nothing. Leave it. I’m fine.

  Four years …

  She thinks of that boiled egg. She sees it turned over in its cup. She’d thought that no-one else knew of its emptiness – they think it’s still full of egg … But she had been a child. Now she is a woman and she thinks of course they knew it was a trick. They all did, and they still do. Even a man who has no name or memory can look at her and see that she is giving up. She tried to fool them all but she has failed.

  And at that moment, she looks across the fields. Maggie is there. Maggie is walking through the sheep, so that the sheep part like water. It is a sight she’s seen before, but also, it seems different. How is it different? Kitty asks herself where has she been?

  But she knows. Kitty can tell. For when she looks to the south of the island, she can see a long, green river of grass between two banks of sheep to show where Maggie’s come from. It leads down to Tavey. It ends beside its gorse.

  The unhappiness rushes in. The quiet loss and envy.

  Love feels like a dream she had; a dream, and nothing more.

  An early moon-rise. It is a half-moon, or nearly – a pale slice against a navy evening sky.

  Sam Lovegrove sees it. He is leaning out of his bedroom window, smoking. He inhales, exhales, and then stubs the cigarette out on the windowsill.

  When will it be full? What of the tides? It matters to Sam; he likes to know, as his father does, what the water will be doing in the same way as a soldier might eye his enemy and make notes. Always, he thinks, better to know – and with that, he makes his way downstairs. He goes into his father’s study, sits at the computer.

  Tick-tick as he types.

  Sixteen days until the moon is full again. A Friday. There are numbers and symbols by this date that he understands – tide times, the times of sunrise and sunset – but there is also one he does not see too often. He leans forwards in the chair.

  Sam scrolls down.

  Ah … He swears.

  He, like all the Parlans, knows the stories. He knows the legends and fishermen’s songs. This doesn’t mean he believes in them: mostly, he does not. Sam knows that a phosphorescent sea is not a sign, merely a build-up of plankton, and seals cannot fall in love. But he has one belief. There is, Sam admits, one small superstition that he is wary of.

  The sly tide. That’s its Parlan name. On this computer screen it is called the perigean spring tide. Two names, but they mean the same thing: it is the highest tide of all. When it comes to Parla, it seeps into the dunes, partly submerges the wooden stairs that lead to Lock-and-Key. It leaves driftwood in fields and fills rabbit holes. It comes when the moon is closest to the earth and is, also, full – and so it does not come often; three or four times a year, at most. But no-one is too fond of it. No-one really trusts it. It is called the sly tide because of the trouble it brings.

  Men drown in it, Sam – so he was told. Hearts break with it. Whales beach themselves …

  Oh, he’d mocked that. He’d half-scowled, half-smiled and said yeah, right … But there had been a sly tide when he last sat in Sea Fairy; a sly tide when he last saw the soles of Tom Bundy’s feet as he pushed off from Pigeon and dived overboard.

  Sixteen nights.r />
  Sam shuts down the computer. I will tell Maggie, he thinks. For she has her lobster pots; she thrums out in her little boat three times a week, on her own. And he will tell her because she is Maggie: she is who she is. She is her.

  So yes, Sam will warn her; it is his duty to.

  * * *

  At Lowfield, the grandfather clock ticks.

  Tabitha stands in the hall. He sleeps – she can hear him, in the mending room. She hears his breath; she hears him say sea …

  Why does he say that? What does he dream of? Or is it a memory that he cannot speak of yet? One day she’ll ask him. Or perhaps one day he will tell her of his own accord; he will take her arm and say Tabitha, I remember. But it won’t be tonight. Tonight, he sleeps.

  She turns to go. And as she does, she hears this: Maggie …

  What? She pauses. And the word comes a second time, as if making sure.

  Tabitha steps back. Maggie? Briefly, it surprises her. But then she thinks, of course … And it does not surprise her at all. For she can see them, as they were – standing in her garden, nearly two weeks ago. Maggie had leant, gently, against him. He had touched her shoulder and looked down at her blonde hair.

  She has a fleeting sadness, as she climbs into bed. Or perhaps it’s not sadness, but a shallow, passing envy – at having one’s name sighed out, like that. Tabitha would love to think that someone, somewhere had breathed a soft, desirous, nocturnal Tabitha … or that she has simply been in someone’s dream. To have been longed for. But she is pretty sure that she has never been that.

  Never mind. So it goes. And she turns out the light, settles down.

  Also, she thinks I am glad. She is truly happy for the widow and this man. She has seen Maggie’s frail, stooped shape in the pews at church; once, she saw her kneeling in evening sand at Lock-and-Key – and the nurse cannot imagine how it felt, to have that loss. To have such love, and lose it.

  For love, she knows, is rare. Deep, romantic love does not pass by often and for some people it may not come at all. And so how can Tabitha mind it, when it comes for someone else? She doesn’t mind it. She can only help them. I will help them – so that their love can strengthen; so that Maggie’s little heart will not break a second time.