The Silver Dark Sea

by Susan Fletcher

  She sniffed, smiled. I guess you should know. You of all people.

  Yes, me. Me of all people. Me, who knows too well.

  It was Tom that I thought of, in my final island days. I thought of his bones: how we may have clamoured for them – yearned, in fact, to have them so that we could bury them in dark, Parlan soil – but maybe we clamoured so much that we forgot what he himself would have wanted, what he would have preferred. The grass? Never the grass. A man who’d loved the blustery air and the changing light would never have wanted a tomb in the ground. He’d have asked for the resting place he has – tides, storms, weed, the shimmer of scales, the extraordinary silence of the underwater world. I love the sea because we can never wholly know it. Perhaps he has come as close to knowing it as anyone will.

  And those were the days when I came to believe it was only his bones in that water. Only the shell that held him – not the man he had been. Tom himself was inside me. He was no more on that island than he could be in deserts or forests, and no less. He would be wherever I took him. No more waiting, like a solitary boot; no more thinking come back, come back. For I decided, in Pigeon, that he had never gone away.

  * * *

  The brambles at Tavey fattened with fruit. Nancy had picked them, blue-fingered and cheerful. Look how many! she chirped, as she tilted her bucket. But I am leaving lots for the birds …

  Then November.

  Then gales, and high seas. We weighed down the tarpaulins that kept our firewood dry.

  In sleet, I met a straight-backed man. Young, a reddish beard that made him older. He wore a jacket lined with sheepskin with its collar turned up to his ears and leather gloves and we faced each other, smiled. Nudged stones with our toes.

  It’s within days, isn’t it? Your leaving?

  Sam who had found his absolution. Sam who knew the truth – the only Parlan that did.

  * * *

  They were not surprised and they did not try to stop me. I guess they always thought the time would come. I went from house to house, explaining. There were Christmas cards on strings, and dogs by fires. Homes smelt of wet clothes, diesel, salt and cinnamon.

  Most knew. When I knocked on the door with a sleet-stung face and a bunched smile they’d say, ah … Yes, they’d guessed that I was leaving; they’d tug the cork out of the whisky bottle or clear the cat off the best chair and say so what are your plans? Tell us. And I’d sit and name the things that I hoped for: a new coat that did not smell of lobsters; a trip to a bookshop; a walk in a place with trees. Beech trees, I told them. Oak, maybe … I’d find a small job that did not ask much. I’d live simply, safely. Far from the sea.

  When I left the house at the harbour I heard Ed saying to his wife, it’s right she goes. New start. She’s still young, or quite young …

  I had spent six and a half years on that island. Nearly a seventh of my life – but in some ways all of it.

  * * *

  Maggie. Can you see her?

  On a December morning, when the sky was half-dark and the sea had ice in it, Maggie moved through Crest. She stood in each room. She looked at the wallpaper, the worn carpets, the curtains she had sewn by hand. She took in views that she’d thought, once, she would always live by – the bathroom’s view of the vegetable patch; the kitchen’s view of the sea. In the bedroom, she lay down on her dead husband’s side.

  She did not leave everything there. A box had gone ahead of her in which were the most cherished, larger things: Coralee, and his wedding suit, a guide to the seashore that he’d written in, a sketch of them both that Kitty had done, long ago. Maggie’s clothes, too, had been taken. But the furniture was staying, in Crest. Where it was meant to be.

  Can you? See her?

  She is standing there now. She wears a navy-blue coat with a fur-trimmed hood. Her mittens are old; the left thumb is unravelling. By her feet there is a single bag – a rucksack filled with books, photos, stones she has painted, driftwood he’d found and given to her.

  Goodbye, she says to the house.

  She also says thank you to it. For it gave her all the good things.

  Maggie pulls the door behind her, hauls her backpack on. The car stays in the drive; Pigeon stays rocking in her half-moon harbour. And she walks down the lane from Crest for the last time, past the rusting tractor and past the sheep that are steaming next to lines of hay. She sees the painted words Wind Rising, and the rusting car parts, and at this moment Maggie turns very slowly – she turns in a full circle, in the middle of the lane. Remember this … The church, the playground, distant Tavey. The sleeping lighthouse. All the different rooftops, the friendly chestnut mare.

  Still early, but there are lights on at High Haven. Maggie knocks, and Nathan opens it. She says no long goodbyes …

  When they embrace, he exhales like it hurts him. She closes her eyes. She tries to soak him up – his scent, his firmness. I’ll phone.

  You’d better. And come and see us.

  Nathan. Tom’s brother who kept him safe. Who made him wear socks on splintery floors and held shells to his ears.

  As for Tabitha’s words, they are simple. We will miss you. Dearest you.

  At the Old Fish Store, the Coyles are waiting for her. Abigail smiles through her tears; Jim pushes himself out of his chair, holds out his arms and says how about a hug for an old man? Eyes as milk-white as the moon.

  And of course she goes to the church. How could she not go to the church? She lifts the heavy latch that she has lifted so often before. She makes her way to the second-to-last pew on the right-hand side and settles herself there. Cold, in the church. She can see her breath, and it would be dark also if there were not tall, red candles in brass holders – homely, festive. Lorcan loves Christmas time.

  She looks down at her hands. The mitten’s loose thread.

  There will always be stories, she knows that. There will always be the ones that she tells over and over, and there will always be the ones that she keeps for herself and no-one else. And then there will be moments when she lacks the words – when no words can describe it. This feeling.

  Tom. The word whitens the air.

  I carry you.

  She lights a candle. She is sad, and she is strengthened – both.

  Sleet, and a wind that has no clear direction so that as Maggie carries her pack to the harbour she has to narrow her eyes and tighten her hood. Her cheeks are pink, and her nose is. She smiles as she passes the viewpoint, for there is no view to speak of today – grey cloud, grey waves.

  In the harbour she finds the Morning Star.

  Ed and Sam Lovegrove are in their fluorescent coats. Nancy waves from her bedroom window. And there is Emmeline: Emmeline stands on the quayside. She wears a green coat and quilted boots and her hands are clasped in front of her – neat, prepared. She does not move when she sees Maggie, but she smiles and says I wanted to be here.

  I like that you are.

  So the men load the Star, and the two women who loved Tom Bundy face each other. They say very little but they say enough. Tom is the love of my life, Maggie tells her. Always will be. And the older woman hears this, gives a single nod. She accepts it because Emmeline understands that things can never stay unchanged; nothing can stay as it always was. Seasons pass. A man who treads water, she knows, will tire. And she knows, also, that Tom’s bones may not be safe in a box and easily found but her love for him is. Maggie’s love is.

  I am sorry. For having been so …

  It’s OK. And it is.

  Look after yourself, Maggie. Find happiness.

  You too. I will write. I’ll phone.

  I’d like that.

  * * *

  I think we’d both imagined the moment to be bigger than that. I think we expected tears, or uneasiness. But the moment was small. It was tender, and calm.

  Talk of him. Won’t you? Those were her parting words to me – as if she feared I’d never speak of her youngest child again. As if I didn’t have story after story. As if I didn�
�t carry his heart inside my heart.

  I will. I’ll never stop.

  I boarded the Star. I stood at the ferry’s stern, leant on the railings. Had Emmeline believed in the Fishman? Perhaps, like some, she hadn’t cared who he was, or where he was from – he simply wasn’t the man she had hoped for. But perhaps, in time, he became more than that. As he was for the rest of us, he became a change, a gift from the sea when it had only seemed to take away, and he was a chance to say who knows …? Anything can happen …

  She waved, and I waved.

  Parla grew smaller.

  Strange – how huge endings can slip by like water when, at last, they come.

  The Stranger, Celia and the Night-Time Sea

  Tavey is his, entirely. For me, the mere word makes me think him – and of our four weeks together. To me, it is not an old pig farm; to me, it is not a house that had, once, splintered wood and rusting troughs in its garden. It is him, and it is loving him. His firm push at the door.

  I hear the word and I am in a dress of peacock-blue. I say Tavey and I think of the way I’d touch his face, press a fingertip against it as if checking he was real. It is him lifting me into the air, like a child.

  And it is a dandelion day.

  Dandelions. I kicked through them as I walked there so that their stems broke in half. Their seeds rushed out like water. At Tavey itself, the cobwebs flinched to feel them and my hair grew feathery. The man from Sye had to lift a seed off the tip of his tongue and I can see him doing this, even now– the wetness, his thumb and forefinger.

  Not sea, he said. In my sleep, I do not say ‘sea’.

  There are moments that change us entirely. There is no-one on Parla who does not understand that, or has not had their own lives buck and bound from a second or half-second, or less. A man diving overboard; an eye pressed to a hole in the chicken shed wall. A lighthouse-keeper’s son saying I saw something in the water, off Sye …

  Celia. He took my hand. That’s what I’ve been saying.

  Was she a boat?

  She wasn’t a boat.

  * * *

  I am there now. I am back in my linen trousers that are too long by far, dark at the hem and fraying. He is sitting beside me. We are on the doorstep.

  I’m not half-fish.

  I didn’t think you were.

  No? Some people think it. Some seem certain.

  Perhaps I imagined it – for a while. I shrug. I had nothing else to think. But I know you are human. I had known it all along.

  He takes a dandelion seed from the tip of his tongue. And I say tell me. Tell me your story.

  The Fishman? Who grew legs, and came to live amongst us all?

  It is not much of a story at all compared to what was true.

  There was a boy from the mainland. He was born in a grey, inland town that had thrummed with factories; once, it had shaken with engines and darkened with smoke and there had been wealth there – wealth, in that town. But by the year of his birth, it had faded. The factory windows were boarded up; the chimneys stopped breathing. There was still pride, or a form of it. But pride was hard to find in the overgrown parks. It was rare amongst the needles in the underpass, or in the bus shelter that had boredom sprayed, like rainbows, on its broken glass.

  He was born in a terraced house, with a lawn that was spotted with windfall pears. There was a stream across the road where he fished for minnows with a coloured net, and his father would say that’s a beauty … The two of them, trousers tucked into their boots. They’d name the minnows, pour them back. It is a good memory; he smiles, as he talks.

  His mother died too soon. Her illness lasted for weeks; she was always sleeping so her son had to close doors quietly, could not throw sticks for the neighbour’s dog or kick a football against the garage door. She died before Christmas and was buried after it. Cold, he tells me. There was frosty ground.

  And so his father raised him; his father, who he loved – a whiskery, soft-voiced giant of a man, with eyes so black that they seemed to have no centre; a man who played the mouth organ, put money on the horses, wore a tweed jacket that smelt of teacakes and attics and who watched the football on a Saturday. When his son was older, he taught him the family trade. See how it’s done? Just like that … He played cards with his son, liked jazz and secondhand bookshops and he talked of the places he wanted to see one day, but never would for he died in his mid-sixties. His heart gave up – worn-out.

  The family trade?

  You haven’t guessed yet? And he looks above us. He eyes the sanded wood, the paint. I love it, he tells me – making places. Making and decorating people’s homes.

  So he could join two lengths of wood perfectly. And he grew: he grew as a tree does – up and up, as if it may never stop. He broadened, matched his father’s height and then overtook him. People he did not know would ask him to reach the top shelf, in shops; once he climbed a telegraph pole to retrieve a child’s balloon. He was strong from his work, but also he ran. He lifted weights and swam sometimes. As for friends, he still met with boys he’d known at school and he drank with his workmates on Friday nights. He was known in the town – for his size and good manners. And for the smile that was just like his father’s, or so they said.

  He had his choice of the girls, of course. They eyed him as he passed them; they glanced up at the house that he might be working on. He had girlfriends, but none lasted – a few months, no more. He liked them – but … I guess I was always waiting.

  For Celia?

  She smiles. To feel certainty. And I was lucky – I knew when I saw her. There are others who wait and keep on waiting but I found her. And later, I found you.

  Celia Jones. No middle name. It was a day like any other, of course – they always are. He’d been working on a house near the town centre and he was pausing for his tea break, sitting on the wall. She walked past him. Tall, he thought. What hair … And she was walking as if she was happy, as if she’d never been to this town and she was loving what she saw despite the graffiti, the litter that skittered along with the leaves. She seemed to notice everything – the weeds that pushed up through the pavement, the pigeon with the stumped foot, petrol in a puddle, the coins in the fountain that were turning green.

  The black-eyed man sitting on a wall. She noticed him, too.

  A drink, that evening. Lunch the next day.

  Her hair was straight, a deep copper colour that she twisted as she talked. Her eyes were part-brown, part-green. She had recently left a relationship that had made her feel trapped and sad, and so when the black-eyed man remarked that she’d walked down the street looking so happy – no-one looks that happy here – her answer had been freedom! At long last! A dramatic wave of her hands.

  Celia – a teasing word. A word that opened like a door.

  He loved the things about her that most people did not know. She played chess. She liked coffee but did not like coffee-flavoured things. She’d jump over the cable of the vacuum cleaner as she used it and he loved that – that jump, feet together. Celia’s flat was in a coastal town that she’d moved to, for her brand-new start, and he loved that flat for its mismatched cushions, the beaded curtains, the family photograph in which all of them (parents, a brother, three sisters and a niece) had that copper-red hair. Her smell was hers, like no-one else’s – marshmallows, roses, talc. She had some shoes that she had never worn because they are just too beautiful … Look at them! How could I wear them? Gold stilettos; red velvet shoes with a bright-pink bow.

  And he loved her beliefs and superstitions: that the end of a loaf of bread is unlucky; that a flame should be snuffed out, never blown; you must greet a single magpie with a cheery how-do-you-do? Sometimes, before bed, she would list the things that had made her happy that day, and they were all strange and tiny moments – blue tits eating a sandwich, a sneeze that had its own tune. She loved moths when most people hate them. Since childhood, Celia had believed absolutely that all moths want to fly to the moon.

  It’
s navigation, he told her gently.

  They don’t just … want to go there? Shocked, let down.

  He loved that she pouted in her sleep; he loved (but never told her so) her unshakeable fear of geese, how she’d grasp his arm near ponds and say please don’t let them chase me. She collected greetings cards of every size and kind and she’d send them to friends for no reason other than she loved those friends. When she’d drunk too much, she’d sing ballads to strangers – taxi drivers, doormen, an urban fox, a tramp who sang back to her in a perfect baritone. Celia had her own words for certain things – milk was cow-juice, a walk round the block was a bumble – and she had a theory that you should try to fill your life with people with wrinkles next to their eyes because it means they’ve got it right: they’ve lived and laughed … She liked matching underwear and gifts in tissue paper. Poetry – she loved poetry, and read it in the bath. She could, also, be grumpy. Once a month, she would sulk – prod at a cake she’d made, saying it’s not bloody risen. Stupid bloody cake … or she’d eye a thumbprint on a window and wail I just cleaned that! So no, she wasn’t perfect. But her grumpiness never lasted; she couldn’t be sulky for long. Her scowl turned, always, into I’m so sorry … and she’d pad over to him for a hug. He hated her crying but loved comforting her – the childlike, hiccupping breath.

  Celia. Cee-Cee to her mother. Silly to her niece, who was only four.

  Cee to him – his own name for her.

  I loved the sounds she’d make. When – he pauses. Is this hard to hear?

  Perhaps. But I understand it. I’ve felt as he is feeling; I have also loved elsewhere. And I say it’s part of your story. It’s OK. Go on.

  He asked Celia to marry him sixteen months ago. They were lying on a picnic rug, and there had been no clouds. Will you? She squealed – she would, she would. And not only had they been in love, they had also wanted the same things – marriage, a family, a house with no view of other houses from it, a bath with taps in the middle so that they could lie back at both ends. A magnolia tree, he says. She loved magnolia trees … I’d have planted one for her. At night, maybe, so that when she pulled back the curtains …