Cove

by Cynan Jones

  He has no measurement of time. Time seems too specific a word to him. He thinks of whiles, moments—things less measurable. And for a long while he watches the stars, the thin double halo girding the moon, rocking to and fro, building his own constellations, finding his own patterns, drawing his own imaginary lines.

  How long? How long has it been? Is this my first night out? I would have been thirstier, wouldn’t I, if I’d been out longer?

  He looks. Looks. A child awake in a dark bedroom. And, after a while, the stars seem to fade, at first very slowly. He does not know if it’s illusion, but they start to go out, like house lights across a night landscape.

  He focuses on one high above until it dims, his eye still as the boat sways. There is a definite chop come to the sea. He knows it, with a passive horror.

  He unwraps the emergency blanket, the silver foil of it speaking with reflected light. He lays it to one side beneath him, shifts onto it and pulls the sheet across him, tucks it around again, just his one good arm free.

  His feet are cold; the air, he can even feel, is cold. Settling like a sheet. But there is the dissipating heat out of his raw skin.

  The boat shifts up and down, a lullaby hush.

  One by one, the stars go out.

  *

  It is not from real sleep the noise brings him, but from a strange shallow place. The sleep we have when we travel. It is cold and it is pitch-black. Blacker when he opens his eyes, blacker than it was when they were closed—a stunning nothingness. He is hardly conscious. And he hears the child’s voice. Hears the clear troubling cry of a child.

  This is not real, he thinks.

  He feels that his heart is slow, his breathing flaccid.

  There is the cry again.

  The cold a complete tiredness. A calm. Like an acceptance of drowning.

  I can go now, he thinks. I’ve done my best. He feels passive toward it. He is so cold that if there was any challenge to him he would gently yield, let it happen.

  Cold now, he thinks. It’s okay. A thought of holding someone’s hand. It’s okay now. Slip. Away.

  The rattle call of a magpie by the boat. The sound of splashes in the dark. A kind of kazoo sound.

  A spray of water covers him, pattering the plastic blanket, falls on him warmer than his skin and he opens his eyes, sees the green light, the perfect shape of dolphins playing around the boat.

  It is a spell. They are a quick shape, a liquid in their own right through the black water, bright spirits under him.

  Somewhere he feels his ticking heart, an engine trying to start. Was he nearly gone? Was he gone? The child’s cry, close by now, of the dolphin calf; and the mother breaks the water, a luminous green form leaving a figure of itself in the air, bright water dropping, a glow, crashing color landing . . . back . . . into the water.

  The calf sounded so human. A baby in an upstairs room.

  Stay alive, he thinks.

  A bright tail, beautiful triangle.

  You have to stay alive.

  He woke with a strange specific clarity. Dawn had come with no chorus of sound. A stiffness had set into his body. The boat seesawed gently. The water had stilled again in the night.

  He lay there letting his body warm up.

  The night he had come through seemed tangible, as if it hung around him. It had passed, and it had left him alive, and with three solid, simple things: her, the child, his physical ability. These, now, were landmarks.

  He sat up. His skin where it was bare had tightened. Where he touched there was a fine sand of dried salt.

  He felt the kayak buoy on the meniscus of the water, had a clear image: prawns gathering with the boldness of small birds around her bare feet in a pool.

  He spots it, absolutely motionless in the still water, riding the faint change in the surface as he nears.

  It is a doll, floating. He feels as if he has found a lost child. As if he squeezes her shoulder, reassuringly, you will be safe, when he picks it from the water.

  Under the starfish color of her dress her body is filled with Styrofoam peas; they show through the wet-loosened wool.

  Her eyes are a deep blue. He feels he will damage her if he wrings the water from her, cannot bring himself to do it.

  He undid the buoyancy aid and got out of it, unclipping the drybag from it and placing them before him. Strangely, taking off the buoyancy aid was like taking off a rucksack or something he had carried on a walk.

  He took off the windbreaker and rolled it, stuffed it in by his seat, everything with one hand. Then he got himself out from the seat belt he had made.

  He was uncertain of it, but he seemed to sense more from his deadened arm. Still the electric bell rang in it. But it was as if he had the idea of it at least, that it was not just a dead foreign weight.

  He stretched himself best he could, bent his legs, pumped his ankles. In the doing of it, his lips split and bled. He saw beneath him a flock of jellyfish, like negligees. Felt they were a sign. Some augury. An echo. That he had seen this before.

  With the knowledge of her had come the need to ease her worry. It was impossible for him to believe he would die, but it was possible for him to believe he could leave her alone. Her and the child.

  The real fear he was trying to keep the lid on was for them.

  He took the fish from the shopping bag in the drybag and the fishing knife and put the fish down on the side of the boat.

  It’s raw fish. People pay for that. There was a hollow gawp in his stomach.

  He cut down behind the gills, turned the blade flat and drew it along, feeling it bump over the bones of the spine. The fillet peeled off like a flap, the meat changed and cured in the heat. It looked like weathered translucent plastic. It moved like the thick skin on a blister.

  He ate the fillet and chewed it, the salt meat of it, but spat out the skin, which he could not break down. It left a taste of oil, a metally feeling on the roof of his mouth. Then he drank some water. It had cooled again in the night.

  You could cut the top off, invert it in the neck. A memory of a stream, strange-armored caddis-fly larvae, small fish darting in the bottle. No, you’d catch nothing bigger than your thumb. And you’d have nothing to drink from. You can’t sacrifice the bottle.

  Even if you had a pen, and some paper, to send some note, trust the tide to take it home, you cannot sacrifice the bottle.

  This is going to be about rhythm. You cannot control anything else, remember. But you can control your rhythm. You have half a small fish and four inches of water. If you grow impatient it will go wrong.

  The thick heat seemed to have lifted. The sun came but there were sparse white clouds, a clarity in the air.

  The foily taste of the fish grew as he swallowed the water, brought a strange sting to his mouth.

  You have to conserve energy; and you have to be patient.

  When he turned around to stow the drybag, he saw the land.

  This is just rhythm, he said. You cannot race. You will move the boat only a little, but you must not be impatient.

  He tied a trace onto the line, knotting it awkwardly with his one hand to the swivel he held in his mouth. He clipped a lead weight to the end of the trace. Could smell the sunblock on his hand.

  You will move only a little and you must not race. Just proceed. That’s all it is about. When you are tired, rest; but do not let the boat turn around and undo the work.

  He hung the trace in the water, the colorful feathers immediately shivering like small fish, then let the line play out from the reel.

  When it was some meters out he wound the line around the carry handle of the boat and dropped the reel into the cockpit.

  He took off the sweater and folded it into a pad. Then he knelt up on it, put on the buoyancy aid, and picked up the small frying pan.

  After a few strokes he got the boat around.

  The pain of resting on his burning shins balanced the pain of using his raw finger into a tough holdable thing.

 
That’s the land, he said. That’s everything.

  It was a low undulating line on the horizon.

  It is all about rhythm now.

  And he began to paddle.

  It does not matter where you land. You can make fire. All you would need would be the empty bottle, a little water.

  He imagined the bright dot suddenly blinding, a halo of ash and the sudden scent of burning, seaweed firing with a quick crack.

  Find a cove. Get yourself to a cove with fresh water, and you will survive. You can eat limpets if you have to.

  If you disappear you will grow into a myth for them. You will exist only as absence. If you get back, you will exist as a legend.

  He fell into the rhythm of paddling three times each side. Long slow strokes that were an attempt to drag the boat, as if he were pulling it along a rope.

  He took his bigger breaths as he changed sides, his stomach muscles burning immediately, a sort of dumb ache happening straight away in his hand. Even the missing extra leverage of his little finger made it more awkward.

  When he missed the water he fell forward, having no other arm to catch himself.

  Just adjust, he said. It is not easy. Just adjust to it. The call was to do something rather than nothing. It’s a new movement. Your body will get used to it.

  The fish took the line while he was resting. It did not seem the land was any closer.

  You know the boat is moving, though. It has to be, he said quietly within himself.

  Every so often as he paddled he would look over his shoulder at the short reassuring wake. The wake that shows the calm water.

  It is moving. It is.

  He sat to give relief to his knees and was glad when the nose of the boat did not go around, that it seemed the kayak accepted the direction he had put it in. He thought of it for a while like a cooperative horse.

  The fish hit and with the transfer of struggle the boat seemed to tense and squeeze and flutter. He hauled in the line, having to trap it with his knee against the gunwale as he drew it.

  He saw the blue edge of the golden fish as he got the trace to the surface. It was foul-hooked through the fin. Not a fish he had seen before.

  He had caught it on a deep line, and as he lifted it clear of the surface it glimmered and flashed and seemed to leap. Then it came loose of the hook and fell back, disappeared into the water.

  It did not seem to belong. He had the idea, in the gray waters that he knew, that the fish were gray. Or silver and green: the colors of the water. It was a shock to him to see the gold-red and the bright blue of the fish, as if it was from somewhere warm.

  He thought again of the huge table-shaped fish and did not know if it was truly real.

  Am I in different water? he thought. Have I drifted somewhere? He was sure he sensed towns and villages beneath him, sunken. How in the bay at home they believe you could still hear the bell ringing in the drowned tower from an ancient town. How his grandfather as a child saw a U-boat rise by the spit before the village.

  He thought of the strange sunfish. The heat. Was that just yesterday? Time was a wide ocean. He’d lost the occasion of things as he floated, and remembering the sunfish was like remembering a dream.

  In the fluttering that had come to the boat and through the line he remembered the wren vibrating briefly in his hand. The signs of life under her surface.

  He looked up at the land. On the other horizon, a dark line of cloud was appearing, like a shelf.

  He unwrapped the mackerel from the shopping bag and cut off the head.

  Trapping it then against the side of the boat with his knee, he ran a large hook through the mouth and out through the flesh and back so it came through the nose.

  He clipped the line that was attached to the hook to the feather trace and moved the weight so it was linked from the baited hook. Then he threw out the rig and let out the line.

  As the gray weight dropped he imagined the sunk U-boat sounding out of control through the deep water, the horror of the crew entombed. No understanding of what has truly happened to them; a horrible iron chrysalis careening like a sinking weight into the tower, the slow animation of the drowned structure, shattering, the great bell, loosed, thumping into the bed of the ocean

  . . . the weight bounce and settle on the seabed, the accuracy go from the line. How long it takes the weight to land. A gray falcon folding through the sky, a thunk of mass.

  When she realizes I am missing she will look on the cliffs, thinking I will be there. I should have told her I was coming out. Why? Why would I have not?

  He imagined what it must have been like, in that first moment when they realized the dyke was breached. The flat rich land asheet suddenly with salt water. What if they had survived, continued to live there below the water. What would they think of the submarine then?

  The abstract thought seemed to give him hope. That he could think of something beyond himself.

  Stay aware, he thought. You are not beaten.

  By now the heat came thickly again. A different sense to the air, but no escape from the sun.

  He took the windbreaker and cut away the hood from it, put the hood awkwardly on his head.

  Again he paddled.

  If you couldn’t see land you could drift. But there is land, so you have to do this. This is going to be about rhythm, remember that.

  And suddenly and gently he recognized his father’s voice.

  You cannot get angry.

  It made him very still for a while, made him stop.

  If you get angry, it is better to be still and do nothing.

  He understood, with quiet wondrous horror, the foundation of ash still in places on him.

  Slowly let the voice sink in.

  What of you, if you do not get back? What will you sound like in the mind of your child?

  He pushed the thought away.

  You cannot get angry that your effort is not moving you faster. It will not make sense, in a flurry of anger or hope or ambition or anything that is not to do with rhythm, to try to race, because you will not be able to keep it up. You will get tired and distraught and you will give up. Keep rhythm. It is all about rhythm.

  If you can just get close enough, then you’ll be in the play of the tides. Then it will be about rhythm and luck. If you get the ingoing tide. That will be your landfall.

  With every stroke he tried to stave off the cold, leaking recognition: you are miles away. You are hardly progressing. There will be another night. And there is no more water to drink.

  The last of it had seemed to evaporate. A tiny slug. He hardly felt it as he drank it.

  I could get out, he thought. He had the idea of making a cord with the drawstring of the windbreaker. Or the paddle leash.

  I could get out and swim the kayak along. Rest on it when I get tired.

  But then he thought of the reality of the water. The idea of it now was like being at a great height. It was a great drop below the frail platform of the boat.

  He was trying to do math. He was doing the math as a rhythm as he paddled.

  How long can a body go without water? Really? Not what we think. How long without food? How far off is the horizon?

  Turn half your height in feet to miles. The horizon is that far off. If I’m three foot kneeling here, I can see one mile and a half. But the land is beyond that.

  If it is three miles then the land is more. Say seven miles off. Be conservative. Which is about ten kilometers.

  What am I doing? A meter per stroke? Some five meters for each side I paddle? With the momentum. Five. Say five, ten meters together, twenty meters a minute. With a break every three or four goes. A hundred meters every ten minutes.

  He worked with numbers he could do.

  Let’s say half a kilometer an hour.

  He looked up at the land. It just wasn’t possible. Not by nightfall. And then the boat braked in the water. Suddenly. Veered, jerked, even against the forward pull of his paddle stroke.

  He saw the line
go taut from the carry handle, buzz with strain. The kayak shifted.

  It’s caught, he said. It’s snagged. It’s the drift of the water making it feel it’s being pulled.

  When he put down the frying pan he could hardly open his hand. Then the boat went inexorably through the water.

  He grabbed the line, tried to lift it, and it immediately cut into his palm. A quick sharp paper cut with a pain that seemed to have a noise to it. The line zipped in the water, cut out from the flank of the boat, oblique, then went slack.

  He leaned forward on his knees, tried to reach the little pad of cloth. There was a strike and the boat moved again, the nose turning this time into the line.

  He took the line with the pad in his hand and heaved with all his might, felt a sheer force against him, a surging weight that turned the boat, seemed to haul it sideways for a time then faced it out to sea. They gathered speed.

  When he cut the line the boat thumped with the release and for a moment hissed through the water. Then went quiet, and slack.

  He looked down at his bleeding hand. Thick cloud on the horizon. The loose line riffling in the breeze.

  A kind of quiet came inside him.

  It was like a portent.

  All of his life he’s had a recurring dream: the car leaves the road. It is never the impact that terrifies him, wakes him. His fear comes the moment he feels the car go.

  His life does not pass before his eyes. There is even a point he feels calm. But then he sees the faces of the people he loves. He sees their faces as they see him go.

  He held the drybag against the gunwale and pushed the knife through from inside.

  When he had the address label loose he carefully wrapped the drybag down past the bit he’d cut, and clipped it.

  He looped the fishing line into a slipknot and secured the label against the doll. Then he wrapped it around and around, leaving the address visible, until he was sure it would stay on.

  Because he could not write anything, he told everything he wanted to say to the doll. The few simple sentences.

  When it came to it, he could not put her back into the water.

  A revenant of a dream. An absence, or, he does not know, a memory, tunt tunt, warping, like sound carried on the breeze. Swash filtering in the pools.