I remember that we went to see the Coyles. They invited us. We drank homemade lemonade and Jim talked about his old lighthouse days – how the only thing he loved more than that light was this woman here, patting his wife. As he did that the Fishman turned, looked at me.
We walked on every headland. We crossed every fence, ducked under every wire. I told him that I’d seen him lift Nancy up, long ago – that I’d heard her wild, delighted squeal, how she’d begged again-again – and I took his hand, held it. That’s when I trusted you. Loved you.
Then? That moment?
That moment.
And we had made love. People marry believing there will be no-one else, in any sense: when I married Tom, I thought there would be no other in every conceivable way. It never occurred to me that I might ever find myself imagining another – and so I did not find the walk to Tavey easy, that night. But I knew how I looked in that peacock-blue dress; I knew that I felt, at last, a feeling that was right. If it wasn’t happiness, it was near it – as a damp chick is not far from a soaring, white-feathered bird.
Him with no name – but we called him the Fishman.
The man who held his breath when touching me as if he, or I, might break.
* * *
The dandelion globes start to break apart. The northerly wind is strengthening, and it finds the weeds and blows them. They rise up, and are carried south. They whiten the air, like ghosts.
Maggie walks through them. She turns in a full circle as she walks – looking up, bemused. She wears the linen trousers that are too long, too low on the hips; her silver M hangs around her neck.
She pushes the gate, moves past the gorse.
Hello, Fishman – teasing him.
He never knew that humans could be this beautiful.
Gardenia. Lotion. That slight salt smell.
He says will you sit with me?
Where?
Here. On the doorstep of Tavey. Looking out at the garden and the dandelion sky.
She sits with her knees bent, and her hands are palm to palm between her knees. Those are the hands, he thinks, that hit him when they first met, when he was standing in the garden and she had clutched at his collar, said that’s my husband’s shirt. Take it off … It feels like a lifetime ago.
He has seen her in her boat, lifting lobster pots up. He’s seen her making coffee, drinking it. He knows how she can close a drawer with a push of her hip, how she twists strands of hair whilst she is thinking and how she tries to hide her laugh with her hand. How she bites her bottom lip, to stay quiet.
He says I’m so sorry.
She looks up. He thinks he can see all her grief in her face, all her love and empty days. You? Why?
There are stories of phosphorescent seas. There are tales of unicorns and giants that are turned to stone, and there are stories of men – human men – carried out of the earth and placed on the moon where they left their footprints in lunar dust. There are tales of twins who can feel the pain of the other so clearly that it is like that pain is happening to themselves, and there are fish in the darkest depths of the sea that have their own lanterns held out on a stalk, and there are seals that feel our pain, and there are lobsters that mate as humans do – tenderly, facing each other. And which are the hardest tales to believe in? Which are the ones that sound the best of all? Are they all true? None of them?
He has so much to tell her.
Why are you sorry? I don’t understand.
In ten seconds or less, it will be different. It will be too late to ever come back to the time when he was a mystery – a man with no story, a man with no name. He thinks how much he loves her – when he wanted to love nothing, when he thought that his own loving days were gone.
Oh, her face.
He takes her hand.
It is not sea.
What is not?
In my sleep. When I am sleeping. The word I say is not ‘sea’.
She inhales, holds it. Then she breathes out. Seal?
Not seal.
Then what? What are you saying?
The Fishman swallows twice, as if preparing his mouth for the word. And then his mouth says it – his lips, his teeth, his tongue that she has kissed.
Celia.
And so it exists. It sits between them – new, unexpected. She says the word, shakes her head. Was she a boat? Did you fall from a boat?
He looks at her sadly. She wasn’t a boat.
Maggie makes a sound – small, scared.
Hey. He strokes her cheek. It’s OK – it is. Are you ready for this?
She nods.
Are you sure?
Yes.
You want me to tell you here? On this doorstep?
On this doorstep. Tell me.
* * *
He tells it all. Side by side, in the evening sun. There is the smell of sawdust, and honeysuckle, and he does not hurry. He speaks as he always does – carefully, gentle-mouthed. It is a long story. It is a story like no other. His words are gilded with strangeness and beauty, pain and kindness, love and the loss of love. He talks of being under the waves and Maggie listens. She believes it absolutely. Nothing is impossible – not now, not these days.
The man they found at Sye said I saw you, and I knew you. I felt I recognised you. And I thought that, maybe, you knew me.
And I did. I did know him. I listened to his story and I fully understood. There was no single part of it which I did not feel inside me as the truth, as possible. After all, what world is this? With no answers in it? It has so few answers.
He told me everything – how dark it becomes underwater, how the lighthouse looks from a night-time sea. He told me how it felt to lie on Sye, how Tabitha had murmured at his bedside that night. He never lost his memory. He always, always knew. And so I asked why did you lie? Why did you not tell us all?
He had his reasons. Who would have believed me?
Me. I would have done.
But there was more than that. There was a greater reason, and I think I already knew what that reason was. It’s not the tale they wanted. They did not want the truth. It was the Fishman they asked for, Maggie; a fish that grew legs and walked out of the sea. A shrug, a shy smile. How could I let them down? These kind people? So it was the Fishman that I chose to be.
* * *
That night, I decided this: that the acts done out of love for another life, or for many other lives, are the best of all. They make the world worth staying in.
I just wanted to be happy, Maggie. For all of us to be.
I loved him. I love him still.
I took his hand and kissed the tips of his thumb and each finger – one, two, three, four, five.
The Sly Tide, or the Perigean Spring Tide, or the Highest Tide of all
We had no choice but to know the tides. Perhaps we did not live by the sea as much as others had, in days gone by – no trawling for herring, no days out of sight of land. But an island is water; it is made and defined by the sea that surrounds it. And the tides make an island bigger and smaller; less of a world and far more of one.
Tom taught me that. He talked of the spring tides. He said it’s best to know them, especially with Pigeon. And so on my calendar I made marks: I ringed, in blue pen, the dates that mattered for the moon and the sea. Sometimes those dates would already be ringed, but for other reasons – and I would smile, feel strange with that. We are the same. Woman is moon. Woman is restless sea.
The perigean spring tide. It sounded beautiful but it was far from it. It was the highest spring tide of all – so that it covered Sye entirely. It snaked into the dunes, flooded burrows. It could slip into fields and steal a sheep or two. And it filled Tap Hole to the brim.
When the water retreated that evening, it carried Thomasina out. Her limbs and head hung down. She was pulled ashore by her brother and Jack tried to make her live again. He put his hot mouth on her cold, open one and blew; he pushed down, clumsily, on her broken heart.
* * *
Why h
adn’t she remembered? What made her forget?
They had always known of the sly tide – Abigail and her. Mercy Deepwater had told them her tales – not ones from the book but from her own lifetime. Merme was such a flat isle. No hills and no trees, and so when they knew that that highest of tides was on its way they said prayers, lit candles and took all their treasures up onto their roofs where they huddled under blankets and held tight. From their rooftops they watched the sea rising – moving under doors, filling up corners, parting and joining around table-legs. And we had all that mattered with us – the Bible, our calf, a barrel of herring, the lace from Mother’s wedding dress and my best pair of shoes.
A calf?
Oh yes. She was on the roof before we ever were. That calf was a prim one; she never liked getting wet …
This tide was spoken of, over and over. Tales of babies being swept away in their cradles; a tale of a man swimming after his dog, for he’d loved that dog so dearly, but whilst the dog made it back to land and shook himself as dogs do, the man was gone. Pulled under. Never trust it, said Mercy. You keep an eye on the tides, and know when the sly one is coming. Stay where the grass is. Keep high if you can.
So yes, Thomasina knew. She knew in the way that she could spell Thomasina. She knew – just as they all knew that despite the stench and darkness and the inquisitive snouts of the pigs that lived there, the shelters at Tavey were a fine place to hide. Safe and well-tested. We were never found …
Yet on the day of the sly tide Thomasina chose Tap Hole instead. Had she preferred it? Felt it was safer? A place that her father was less likely to find?
Abigail winces. Little thing …
She has often wondered how they’d been – those last moments of her sister’s life. When had Thomasina remembered? About the highest tide? As the mouth of the cave was lost, underwater? Or as she was lifted up, towards the cave’s roof? Or was it as Thomasina pressed her mouth against its single, tiny hole and tried to breathe through it, pushing her fingers into that hole as if trying to widen the rock? Abigail will never know. Nor will she know what her twin’s last thoughts had been – if she’d begged please no, please no … or prayed as she’d been taught to. But in the months that followed, Abigail made a choice. She chose to believe that the seals who had loved Thomasina – who’d always loved her – came into the cave that day. They comforted her, sang to her; they nuzzled her wet pinafore. And so Thomasina’s death had not been lonely, or tearful, or absolute. Come with us, the seals told her – we will take care of you … And so her soul left her body and moved out with them – to the open water, leaving her body behind.
Abigail has tears now. Small ones, in the bathroom. Her husband sleeps, but Abigail sits on the wicker basket where they put their laundry. She holds a damp tissue; she looks down at her blue feet.
She knows this, too: that all the world’s stories, all the seals with human hearts and all the falling stars and all the silver in the fields may make the world brighter, and they may bring hope back into one’s life but they can’t erase the things that you wish you’d never seen. You may cling to the tales and they may lift you up – up, up, out of the storm – but it does not mean you can forget it. And didn’t Thomasina know that all too well?
Even the Fishman cannot erase the winter’s day not long after Mercy’s death. Abigail woke to a draught. She went downstairs to find the back door open, and two sets of footprints – marked out in a dusting of snow. Large, booted footprints, and smaller, bootless ones. They led out to the chicken shed. Abigail frowned. She followed the prints, quietly. And as she came towards the shed she heard noises that she did not know – rhythmic, injured, breathy, high-pitched. The hens? Are they hurting? And so Abigail put her eye to a hole in the chicken shed’s wall, and she can never forget what her one eye saw.
She has heard nothing worse than that whimpering sound, from her sister. The telling of good stories and the loving words of Jim have covered it up, or tried to, so that she no longer hears it – but Abigail knows what she heard.
And she has seen nothing worse, either. There is nothing worse to see. Not even a coffin being lowered; not even a helicopter’s beams sweeping a sea that will not give back what it’s claimed as its own.
Abigail sniffs.
She had been desperate. She had lost all her faith in the world and had nothing to take hold of. Oh, how she’d wanted those stories of Folklore and Myth to be true – the chance for something better than what she’d learnt in her small life. And then there was Jim. Thank God for Jim. Thank God for his glorious words and nervous smile and teenage rash on his chin. Thank God for how he said her name – carefully, beautifully, as one might say thank you when you mean it with all your heart. Jim … How right that he worked the lighthouse for he was a lighthouse to her, in the end. He was steady, safe, dependable; she loved it when he entered a room. A light, quite simply. Without him, would there have been no light at all? Without him her heart, at least, would have died.
She blows her nose daintily, and stands.
I believe in everything. So that whilst there may have been two sets of footprints leading to a chicken shed, there have also been – thanks to Jim – phosphorescent seas and puffins that talk if you ask them to, and there is the human soul which never dies, and there is a fish that has grown legs and come ashore and so the world remains beautiful. It has the worst of shadows – but it also has the brightest and most remarkable light.
* * *
Next door, Jim is awake. He can hear her in the bathroom – the creak of the wicker, her tearful breath. He knows it all. What he has not been told he has guessed at. The sly tide always hurts her; so did the pig farm called Tavey, but that was before it was mended, painted, swept and cared for. Before it had its rusty pig shelters taken out and thrown away.
She comes back to bed, nestles in.
She smells of herself – talc, toothpaste, lily-scented cream.
Jim wants her happiness more than any other thing – more than his own, more than his sight.
Fifteen
I have loved stories all my life. At the start, I chose them because I preferred them – they were better, far better, than what was real. I had no family of my own and so I filled the echoing spaces with tale after strange tale. I used my imagination to feel like I had friends.
Small things, mostly: that a blackbird was singing for me and me alone. That a crack across the ceiling in an unfamiliar bed had been caused by a fat lady jumping, or music played too loud or maybe it was not a crack but a long line of industrious ants who had thought no-one would notice them but look, they’d say to each other – that little blonde girl has spotted us … And I’d whisper to the ceiling’s crack don’t worry – I won’t tell. I’d see people on the bus and give them names – I would imagine their jobs, the houses they lived in, what they longed for and what they loved. Did they like tea or coffee the most? If they could be an animal, what animal would they be? This was how I lived. I imagined.
So I was for stories. I was for stories just as gannets were for balls of silver-flashing fish – I’d crash towards them, gaping. I’d try for as many as I could. And I’d keep them safe like feathers in a vase. For weren’t my own tales colourless? Who wanted to know about the different smells of the care system? About counting the steps to each bathroom I slept near, so that I wouldn’t get lost in the night? Other tales were better – other people’s. Sunsets, dragons, ghosts that said ooo … I held them up to the light.
They have been my comfort. My family. My strange nourishment.
And I thought I had heard every kind of story that there was.
But then I heard his. I heard the Fishman’s tale – my Fishman’s. I heard his proper tale and I had no words for it.
* * *
The lighthouse turns until the moon sinks down and the sun, slowly, rises.
I can see them all sleeping: Nancy, with her one-eared bear; Hester whose pillow is lost beneath her curls. Abigail and Jim are side by side, l
ike salt and pepper pots. Her lower teeth fizz in a glass.
At the lighthouse, Rona does her usual morning things – tea, the radio, pre-heating the oven for the quiches she will make. When she looks in the mirror, she sees her tired eyes.
Where can he be? She knows he has not left the island. She knows because Sam and her father work on the Star and they know – always – who they are carrying to the mainland, and back. Nathan is still on Parla – but where? His sheep still graze. His rusting cars still flake in his driveway. This cat – their cat, his and his wife’s – still licks her paw and runs that paw behind her ear.
Where is he? Why does he not come for me? Or text, or email, or phone?
Rona, whose love is like those rocks she can see at Bundy Head. It exists, and will not stop existing. It is strong, and it can bear any weather, and it is named for him – my love for him. And so she tells herself the stories that the less-loved one in a pair will often do: he isn’t well, or he is busy, or something has happened with his mother and so he must be with her, or he is lying low for a while. She chooses that excuse and tries to believe it.
She carries the tablecloths outside. She squints at the sunlight as it bounces off the courtyard walls. How many days of sun have there been? How many more to come?
Nathan is standing there.
I know it’s still early. You’re busy. Sorry.
She catches her breath. That’s OK. Coffee, or –?
No. I –
The Silver Dark Sea Page 27