Big Low Tide

by Candy Neubert

  part two

  dreams of fish

  The artist must have sat in a boat a little way offshore, or imagined that he did.The lower half of the painting was of the sea, the sea until it reached the wall of black granite, the sea wall of the island.Above the wall the small white dwellings sat squat along the coast and spread over the hills. Below the wall in the deep water there was one fish, a very big one, swimming in an open-mouthed, uncaring fashion, from left to right across the canvas.

  Of all the paintings stacked against the walls of his house (one of these same small white dwellings), she liked that one.When he held it up to the light he said that if he owned the whole island he would knock a hole in every roof and plant a tree in the foundations of every house.Then the trees would grow and grow towards the sun and push up the ceilings and crack open the walls and in time the hills would return to their own.That was his vision.

  _____

  Across the road from his house Sarah de Garis is sitting now, where there is a gap in the wall and concrete steps leading down to the beach.There is no beach tonight because the tide is high; she sits down there on the steps as if she is hiding and the swell of the sea slides up and down the steps below, sucking and rolling, black and still. If a car should pass she would not want to be picked out in the headlights, but she need not hide, for there are no cars and the whole night is the same, black and still.

  She is wearing a white nightshirt. She holds her hand flat against the wall on which the sun has shone since the morning, and the stone is warm. She is thinking of the fish. She can feel it passing by along the coast, a fish twenty, thirty, forty feet long, thunderously silent under the surface.

  _____

  On the east coast of England the shoreline is different. Small round grey pebbles are heaped in shelves; the tideline is marked by crackling fingers of brown seaweed and squares of white polystyrene.The pebbles roll into dunes with the waves, but still they are grey. Behind them are the beach huts and the promenade where the wind blows; before them the sea sits without much heart, throwing out those little waves from time to time.

  So it is on the east coast where the land is flat.This is not the deep Atlantic where a huge fish may pass; this is the North Sea and the lights of Harwich are a straight line winking in the dark.

  The coast is different but the night is the same. The young girl would be down there on the beach but it is not allowed, so she watches at the window. She might go sometimes but not often, since she can’t go unnoticed forever and she must keep her secret for the necessary times.

  Her school fellows sigh and turn in their beds behind her.The clouds spread and spread again across the moon. There is no depth to the sea and she could wade right across to the level muds of Holland.

  _____

  Sarah the child climbs down from the window and peers into the mirror. Her eyebrows are very dark in the moonlight. In the corner of the mirror she has pinned a postcard of the island, and its blues and greens show bravely in the thin air of this other place. She kisses the card and slips into her bed.

  Sarah the woman stares out at the sea a while longer because she’s not tired and she doesn’t want shelter.The lights on the island show the bars and the hotels where she is not, and the moving headlights are cars in which she is not moving between one place and another.At last she stands, looking quickly up and down the road, and runs towards the third cottage from his and through her own front door. She could tear her skin off with her hands but she will not.

  _____

  The bell begins to clang from the far end of the corridor.

  – oh no. Tuesday. Double maths. Hockey.You awake, Sarah?

  It’s her friend in the next bed. Sarah murmurs; mm. She is awake and she does not want to move.The dor-mitory is cold. Five minutes more she wants to lie in her bed, listening to the water in the pipes. But the bell sounds louder as Matron walks along.

  Beneath her tunic the vest and shirt feel awkward on her body as she sits at the breakfast table.Twelve girls sit at the table and twelve spoons dip into porridge; at the next table, twelve girls, at the next and the next. She doesn’t hear the clattering of spoons. Through the window there’s a glimpse of hedge and school wall and the brown North Sea reflects another morning with its mirror lies.

  From the main house to the school buildings the girls walk two by two. Some straggle behind and run to catch up, grey cloaks flying in the cold east wind. Best friends naturally pair together. Sarah is wondering whether dark-haired people are tougher than blond. Miranda Thompson’s white and freckled legs remind her, for Miranda is always unwell. And that Angela in the lower fifth, she looks almost albino and she is a sickly thing. Sarah has never heard of such a theory but still, the mind will ask its questions.

  Her own self gives no clues. Her hair is a brown the colour of desks and floorboards, her nose is freckled; she is sometimes sick.

  _____

  On the island, the adult Sarah unlocks the greenhouse at the far end of the row of greenhouses, and props the door open with a brick. This house needs clearing next and she will do it this morning, for the flowers in number three are tight and can be picked this afternoon.

  The smell of earth and hay folds around her. She ties a scarf over her hair and begins to work.

  Outside in the chicken run the hens gargle softly in their throats as they scratch the ground. Henny-Penny’s head is pinker and more naked every day; the other hens will not stop pecking her. Inside, the weeds lift easily from the dry earth. Only the stems of the oxalis break, leaving their translucent pearls shining down in the soil. She forks them up, searching out the last, knowing how they multiply. Oh, this earth and its fine yellow dust, high up on the island and far from the sea.

  _____

  Danny Duncan, grown into a man now, grunts in his sleep and reaches for his woman. She is gone, the pretty one, out somewhere under the sun which is already high in the sky.Well, she’s on holiday; he will sleep until she comes back to make him some tea.

  His cottage, this early summer morning, breathes too in its hundred-years sleep. Cool in its thick walls of granite and the mortar soaked through and through with salt. Under the floors the sand that once blew about in the marram grass now lies tamped down, solid and suffocated under the cement and the tarmac road. The waves that touch the sea wall leave other sands behind when the tide falls. On these she is lying, Melissa, the pretty one. A blanket, a book, and her little black shoes.

  She will leave Danny alone for these first few days; his hunger for her will grow. It is her holiday and the sun shines.

  _____

  The cloakrooms are dim and the air is chilly with leather and stone.Through the open door there are shouts from the hockey pitches under a washed-out sky. Sarah sits on her heels among the cloaks and she is still, finding a space between things which is safer than on the outside.

  The pain for home is almost gone; eaten, swallowed down, and only the taste remains. The schoolgirls long for boys now instead of their mothers; it is easier to yearn collectively than separately. Each one confides the name of a boy from home, a talisman against the darkness of self. Photos are pressed into diaries with talk of first kisses.

  Each homecoming to the island when she steps off the plane, her legs tremble. Each time the tears spill; it isn’t even a happiness, only a swing of the pendulum. Her bed, her home, her place in the world so thirsted for, saying: come back and look at us and sit in us and sleep in us, and drop out of us again through the mesh.

  – hello, funny face! Hobbsey missed you, you’ll be for it tomorrow!

  Sarah smiles and jumps up. Now she is one of them, girls changing their shoes, worrying over homework, friendships, spots.

  _____

  In the midday blue a high tide covers the sand and a shadow passes.The reflections catch like so many windows, and an eye pivots slowly, this way, that. Or perhaps it is just a cloud. In the cottage he drinks his tea quickly now that it is cooled. He looks at Melissa sitting on the bed
, then with one hand he peels back the towel that covers her big sweet breasts.The rhythms of life are simple; in and out, in and out.

  In the greenhouse by the chicken run, the two front and centre beds are clear, except under the lights where the rain comes in and fresh weed grows. Sarah sits on the water pipe and pours tea into the lid of a flask. She will sleep tonight, surely.

  When the tea is finished she leaves the flask on a shelf by the door. On the shelf there’s a glove and two wire hooks and a length of pipe; they were there last week and will be there next week and this comforts her. She takes an arm-ful of weed for the bonfire on her way to number three.

  There are ten rows of the dark green leaves and their freesias.The flowers are perfect with their one opening bud.Yellow on the left, mixed on the right. She bends and picks and bends and picks for Covent Garden tomorrow morning and the hours pass as the surface of water over her head.

  _____

  She’s a schoolgirl studying a geography book and sometimes looking down on the road. The innocent road curves with the school wall and hedges and tennis courts where free people walk slowly along with their dogs and their shopping. There from the roof of the shed where the moss grows, she looks down.

  Tonight after lights-out she can tiptoe to the wash-rooms and climb down the fire escape. In the dull yellow corridors she can run noiselessly down to the dining rooms and out through the window, dropping down into the soft flower bed. She can skip from darkness to darkness while the housemistress bends her grey head over a desk behind the glass. Climb the wall by the gatepost. On the beach her feet can scatter stones, beating the wet stones with her sandals, standing knee-deep in a sea which will not suck.

  Ah, but it’s no good.After supper she queues for the library and takes her books upstairs. She looks at the timetable for Wednesdays and tidies her clothes, filled with such a wanting that she knows, now, is just a wanting and not for anything she can name.

  _____

  At five o’clock Sarah finishes work. She makes her way home along the back lanes where the yellow and white hedgerows are full of threat. From the high ground she zigzags downhill, past the farm where he played as a boy and across the fields where the magpies strut. Skirting the cottages as a rabbit feigns not to know the nearness of the burrow.

  Filling the kettle she watches the movement of people along the coast.When Melissa walks by it fills her heart and stops her heart as the blonde curls toss in the breeze. Sarah would like to calm her and quieten her and cup her loveliness in her own hands. She discovers that love of a man is the love of his women too, extending past the point of the heart.To stop is to be jealous and to go on is a miracle of air and high altitudes.The smells and tastes and secrets touch a place further than their little lives; their blood is her blood, it is all the same. Melissa! But Melissa goes by and steps into his car and disappears.

  The tide is out at sunset and the night-clouds over the land will pull the sea back up like a blanket. Sarah walks the low tide after the planet tips back from the sun. Rocks bare their pools for an hour where fish dart from her feet and crabs shuffle into the sand. In wet places the shells spiral and hiss, feeling the coming of the water. Sarah paces the tide.The aftertaste of pain is hugged to her stomach. If she belonged anywhere she would sink her pearls into the earth and the soft rain would come.

  _____

  Danny the boy stole a horse from his uncle’s farm, the same summer a body was found down a well by the old house. It wasn’t really stealing if the beast wanted to canter down to the beach, and the broad grey back was a kingly mount. Quite sure of himself the boy opened the gate and crossed the stream and touched the warm neck, down to the slipway with the hooves on the cobbles, to wade into the ocean like some god.

  Fishermen unhurried rowed their boats and turned the horse’s head and shook their fingers at the boy: go home, rub the mare down and wash off the salt, mind now. And he obeyed them, but he knew that he would take his moments like this and not care.

  _____

  In the dark of midnight Sarah lies in her bed.There are no more hours to spend daring the outside and walking the beach. The sea laps the wall and drives her in. Her house is a small white dwelling on the coast and behind its dark eyes she lies quiet and still, with the bruise of his love almost gone, eaten, swallowed down.

  Three doors away his cottage glows with candlelight. He moves up and down and in and out of the woman, watching her fingers clutch the sheets. Next week after the spring tides he will start work on the roof and replace the joists that rot.

  The sea rolls its stones and leaves them deeper than the waves can reach. With each thump of ocean the wall shudders and the dwellings toss in their concrete beds, so close to the switch of a great tail and the rhythmical breathing of gills.

  part three

  one

  The church is never locked; the great iron ring always turns. It opens a small gate set into the heavy doors of the porch.The flagstones are cold.The church is full of the cold air of the hereafter.

  Brenda lifts the latch on a little pew, and sits. She does not look up towards the altar or aim her prayers anywhere. But she seems to be praying. She is muttering something under her breath. Her hands clasp and unclasp in her lap.

  The nave of St Stephen’s church stands over her, dim and gracious. The family crests of old Port Victoria families can just be made out on the cloths hanging from the beams.The colours have faded to nothing, the threads eaten away by the passing of the years.They hang dead straight above her head.

  She stirs, after a while. She retraces her steps and lets the door fall shut behind her.The gravestones lean back into the grass. She says something, a little louder this time.

  – Wish they were all under there. Her. And him. And that bloody Hilda Pickery too.

  She sets her lips into a straight line and walks past the gateposts and down the driveway to Les Puits.The curtains are drawn across the upstairs windows. In the jumble of the porch she sees that Peter’s boots are missing; for a moment it seems that he must be at work this morning, as usual. But Peter took his boots with him when he left, two weeks ago.

  She bangs the knocker against the door, sending the pigeons flying up from the roof. Again and again the noise echoes round the yard but no one comes to the door. Either Elsa sleeps like the dead or saw her coming and won’t answer.

  Brenda leaves the front door and opens the yard gate. She doesn’t know whether or not the hens have been fed; she isn’t interested in hens. She stands back and looks at the window she knows to be her sister-in-law’s. She stoops to pick up a small pebble and sends it tumbling against the pane. Nothing happens. She lifts a sizeable stone and hurls it hard. The glass shatters inwards; tiny shards tinkle down towards the earth.

  _____

  PortVictoria is not a big town. Even so, the summer is a breathless season in those streets, after the open fields.The boys haven’t been back to Les Puits since their father left, they live under the little grey roofs of Turkenwell now, with their mother, closer to her than they have ever been before.

  – get off that cushion.

  – that’s my cushion.

  – it is not; it’s mine.

  – I sleep on it.

  – yes, but it’s mine. Now get off.

  – why?

  – Daniel, just get off. I need my skirt. Oh, look at that

  – it’s all creased. Can’t you look where you put things?

  – I didn’t.

  – you put your cushion there.

  – ’s not my cushion you said.

  – you know perfectly well what I mean. Cheeky little beggar. Henry’ll just have to put up with me like this; I’m not changing again.

  – why d’you go?

  – got to earn money to feed you lot, haven’t I.

  – don’t want you to go.

  – don’t start, Chrissake. Patrick, get your nose out of that book and listen.You listening?

  – yes, mum.

  – ther
e’s a quid for bread. Go to the park and get bread on the way back. For gawd’s sake keep quiet – don’t want her sticking her nose in again. Got that?

  – yeah.

  – and don’t lose that money. Right then, I’m off.

  She doesn’t look the same now, walking along the road.

  How can a body change its shape so, in a few weeks? It’s not the shape that is different, but the flow.

  Patrick and Danny wrestle in the cushions for a while in the empty flat. When they leave, the crashing of the front door behind them sends the next door flying open as if on a spring.Wilf Pickery has been waiting; he can get a word in before opening time.

  – eeugh! Don’t let me catch holda yer. End of the month an’ yer out! Garn!

  They skate down the steps, away from the park, down to the harbour.The sheet of water draws them; magnet-like it pulls the soles of their feet along the wharves.This is their playground, the crates and cranes and piles of timber.The sea wall is the tightrope, with safety on one side and the deep on the other.

  _____

  There’sWilly le Cras still sitting in the same place. Not so much time has gone by after all. Brenda slides a pint of mild towards him; wipes the froth off the bar.

  – all right,Willy?

  – aye.

  – I’ll leave you to it, then, nice an’ peaceful. Henry – you got a moment?

  – can it wait, love? I’ve got these invoices to do.

  – Okay then.

  She’s tired; she could sleep for a week. It must be the worry.What’s wrong, exactly? The boys, of course.What else – Gerry? Oh no, she’s better off without him, isn’t she? It’s quite a relief, isn’t it?