She has a waking dream of the stray seal pup in its raggedy hide, its empty eyes as she puts her hands around its coat of seaweed and slips it back into the shallows. But then with a sudden quick bob and a splash it heads off out to sea. And naked she follows it and then she is flying up, dipping and soaring in a green sky, looking everywhere. Waking she wonders if seals are born able to see like babies, or blind like dogs; and spends a morning fumbling in the dust and cobwebs and silverfish through the last pile of old books until she finds a photo of a newborn seal and its eyes are glossy black orbs in the frost of its fur.
Another day she comes across some cast-up plastic, a white shampoo flask with a green lid, perfectly smooth, silken, the wording on it almost erased, Chinese, or Japanese, and anyway the salt north wind whipping at her eyelids is making her eyes swim. The underside has a growth of something, seaweed, she thinks, turning it over, but no, it’s barnacles, dozens, of a sort she has only ever seen in a book before, goose barnacles, big and small, clamped on a bed of grit. They are grey with streaks, marbled, rimmed and striped once across in black, little mitres, all shut tight. A shank holds each one so tight that it’s impossible to prise off even the smallest one without crushing it; a shank of tough jelly, colourless except where it rises thick and black out of the shell.
Dead or alive, they are worth a closer look. She takes the flask home, where, her attention distracted, she puts it on the draining board and forgets all about it. Nevertheless it pulls at her thought, the way a drop of water as it trickles from wrist to elbow will pull a thread of skin after itself. The flask pulls tenaciously at her attention, until she goes back in and sees to her horror that the hot sun has been on it through the window, and the afterglow still is, and ants are massing. The pelt on the flask is alive, it’s all one ripple, a wave, each mitre shifting, restless, and opening to let a small black tongue with whiskers come poking into the air, and wave, straining, a blind probe. They shrink in at her touch. Out of them flows a ceaseless whispering and clacking, a susurrus, a cry of air. On the beach there was no sign of life, no sound and in the salt wind no smell: now their musty, rich, salty smell, incipiently rotten, fills the room, and their clamorous urgency so inhabits her that she runs with the bottle back along the sandy path and down the steps to the beach in the half-light – it is after eight and the sun has set – where, panting, she flings it away and watches it float, jostling in the wash, a life raft, she thinks, out to a rock pool, until a wave wedges it under an overhang dripping with brown seagrapes. Only this is the raft of the Medusa, and she turns away wrung with despair, if what she has read is true and goose barnacles only live deep in the ocean.
Like the days, the flow of dreams, in talk and murmurs, yelping voices, whimpering, as of swans or seals long gone. The morning dreams out of nowhere are the sharpest and cut the deepest and the pang of them lasts all day. One morning she wakes up from a crawl under the rock arch, the crossbar in the empty hourglass of rock under the jut of cliff that holds up the lighthouse, having threaded herself through at sunset, when the spiderwebs in loops over the seams and pits of golden rock, some in tatters, some new, shimmer like water, shifting in a sea breeze as light as breath. Each web has a pit in the middle, an eye, a mouth, for the spider. Crouched down she fits in under the crossbar, in a pit of her own. Another day she wakes up heavy in bed, a vast bulk, a dead weight, as the pale belly of a wave presses her floundering down, her gasp and outcry stifled, her eyes blind until they open out on to a wash of window light. Another night from the crest of the dunes she watches a figure soar up out of the sea like a rock stack and topple back down. More than once she is on her way home along the clifftop after nightfall when she is grabbed from behind, muzzled with a furry arm and bundled down the wooden stair on to the sand, the secret beach. She springs up and switches on a torch she has in her hand but at the first step she takes a web springs out, strung out of torchlight, and more webs, shawls, gilded or shadowy black. One gathers, jumps and clamps on her groin, yes, she is naked, and desperate to prise it off before it can sink its fangs in. But it has grappled on to two of her fingers and stabbed the web of skin in between. Pain drills up her arm. The webs shake under her blood’s spray and a wave of blisters washes up her arm until the skin is heaving all over like milk on the boil. A yellow glimmer in a hollow of the cliffs is a camp further along, black shapes hunched around a fire, she sees as she draws near, as red as ochre, masked in smoke. Long wisps of smoke go wavering over the rock face only to cling on and become web. She wakes in a welter of bedclothes. Her eyelids are hot coals.
In one of these waking dreams she is in a hospital nursery among women who have lost their babies at birth or before. Here they are in their glass cases, the babies who never saw the light of day, flat on their backs, naked, blue, underwater babies, staring up blank-eyed like china dolls. Nurses are on hand to lift each one out of its crib, wrap it in a blanket and give it to the mother for a hold. But she is gone before they see her.
Other dreams go deeper, out of sight and out of mind, and then the body in the bed is a heaviness and the awakening is awash in sweat and a moil of bedclothes and the ache of the void is in her bones.
The lighthouse overlooks long stretches of coastline and open sea. She sees the New Year in on its platform, in a bitter wind that flings her hair in her eyes and beats her coat like wings as she hunches at the railing by the silent bole. Its white is stained red by its tide lamps under a long raft of cloud. There is no moon, only the stars. The towns far along the coast are strings of yellow beads. There will be fireworks, and towards midnight a little crowd of merrymakers converges in the dark to watch. No sound comes through at that distance in the wind, only the light in high splashes, sprinkles and waterspouts, fading constellations one after another, and little jets of light and sunbursts, red and golden, then blue and green, afterimages of sunflower and a slick of colour along the keel of the cloud. Once it dies out the crowd wanders off. The only illumination left is the turning lighthouse lantern as it lifts the rock shelf far below into regular moments of pallor. At one of these moments a brightness catches her eye, a pool of flame among the outcrops. A shadow passes over, small and ragged, then another, and soon there are luminous hollows flickering here and there in the rocks, tunnels of red and gold, domes and recesses, shrines, moth wings in the limestone. Huddled in a chimney of rock out of the wind each flame falters and steadies and casts around itself a skin like mother-of-pearl only tawny, spun out of fire and stone.
Where are those hollows in the plain light of day? In the morning she potters around the rocks until she finds the remains. Red candle wax in silky shreds, stuck thick and cold among the spiderwebs in the mouths of the rocks, snakes of red lava, pooled blood.
Blowing off the dust and fluff one day she hunts down an old sea book she still has, in search of barnacles. Here are the smoky old pencil drawings she loved and traced over, even a sheet of her tracing paper, blank, shrivelled along the fold, keeping the place. She has not opened the book for years but she knows her way. Rough periwinkles, barnacle larvae, and here, the barnacles and their life cycle – why a cycle, when a chain is truer to life, to death, link over link? The larvae hatch out of the egg in milky clouds, in their millions, to float around through their frail beginnings, microscopic, until the time comes to latch, like the embryo to the lining of the womb, on to rocks or drowned trees, spars, driftage, the piles of piers, to finish their metamorphosis and secrete a shell. There they will go on growing and moulting, as cicadas do, leaving behind a white ghost, ever expanding their shell to fit. When they die, other intertidal forms of sea life like periwinkles will creep into the empty shell – periwinkles that will go on for months responding in the flesh to the memory of the tidal rhythms of that original place. How can a living thing in a blue crumb of a shell no bigger than the pupil of an eye have a knowledge of the sea so vast that it outweighs absence?
How the past clings. In the same way our former selves may be our own ghosts, all the
shed skins we wear in dreams, in flashes of memory, frozen in the past – though like as not we are the ones who would look to them like ghosts, if they could only see us back, see us in the flesh, withered as we are on the bone. Or would they turn a blind eye? Would they even know us for ourselves? Our dreams are like the stars. What we see is light years ago.
Another book she loved began with a wolf hunt in the Arctic night, only back-to-front, since it was the wolf pack, led by a she-wolf who was half dog, that was hunting down fur traders on a sledge day after day, night after relentless night; only to begin again, like a dream, in another world, a cave that is the she-wolf ’s den, where her cub is nosing his way into the world through the white wall, as he sees it, the hazy membrane of daylight that is the cave mouth, in a second birth. White Fang was his name and the book’s. Death is like that, or so she has heard people say on the radio, claiming to have come back from the brink; death dawns as a clear light at the end of a tunnel. Maybe so, but to her it sounds as if the body’s dying memory is of the light of birth, cyclical, winding back on itself, swallowing its tail.
The light of birth. What a miracle that was, that first sight in the history of the world, on the page, on the screen, of a child living inside a golden bubble of a womb, fast asleep, thumb in mouth, folded in the skeins of its cord and barely less translucent than the waters, a genie, in a lamp of flesh. And these days anyone can watch it in real time, as we say, the heart squeezing in so unformed a lump of flesh, so impassive, it might be a sculpture barely roughed out; it might be flesh on the way to being anything, a mouse, a whale – what it looks most like is a white whale, the baby one in the sea aquarium, torn out of its mother like a wound and flung into the cold blue masses, hanging there in shock behind the plate glass, until she boosts it up high to take its first breath, all caught on video.
Sometimes a child will float into her dreams like that, eyes squeezed shut among the jellyfish, the shreds of weed, rocked in the cradle of the deep – where did she get that from, what song or storybook lost in the past? A boy prince was the hero, whose hidden realm was a city at peace, preserved after a tidal wave in a golden bubble under the green sea, haunted by cruising sharks, a microcosm, like our own blue bubble in space. And a little naked gesturing lad in another book, a water baby, a chimneysweep, poor Tom, who is drowned in the stream, but all is not lost, he has just popped out of his sooty husk to be with all the other water babies drowned in this make-believe water world of the book that she half-believes in; or maybe the other babies were those stillborn or never born at all.
Where have they gone, the old books, every one as alive in its way and as haunting as a dream? One was a big red wonder book with fairytales and legends of Our Islands, meaning the British Isles, of course, all about the sea and the past, magic and illusion, spirits, immortals – all except a true story about a faithful hound whose master the prince loved and trusted it to mind his baby son. But he came home one day to find a welter of blood and torn bedclothes, and his hound sprawled on the floor, blood on its muzzle and its great sad eyes searching his face. With a roar of rage and despair the prince drew his sword and killed the hound with one stroke. Only then did he go into the inner room, where a wolf lay dead, and behind it his son, who had only been asleep, who was now starting to cry. Too late the prince sank to his knees and clutched the hound to his breast in an agony of remorse. Whenever she read that one she held her breath for the prince not to, this once. Knowing it was forever.
Her biggest picture book had been her mother’s when she was young. It had thick pages and a hard shiny cover with a white fur seal on the cover cresting a white wave, an albino seal, a Moses born to save his people; and this was also in the Arctic, a beach where the Inuit maraud every year for sealskins, driving all the young seals they can inland to be clubbed to death and flayed. The yearly massacre is watched but never spoken of by the surviving seals. So when the men lay eyes on a white seal, and take him for a dead man’s ghost and leave him alone, he follows innocently enough in their tracks and sees the frenzied hacking and bellowing, his kin gashed, slithering, roiling in blood. Horrified, he vows to explore the seven seas for a haven inaccessible to man and lead his kin to safety. Through Arctic and Antarctic seas he swims for years until he finds a last surf beach inside a high ring of rocks where only seals can land, and then only if they swim for their lives on one breath down through an undersea tunnel and up again into a luminous bay never before seen by a living seal. And he returns to his people triumphant and fetches them away over the seas and down into the depths and back up into the light of the promised land.
The last of those summers was the year of Alice in Wonderland – the title on the grey green cardboard cover and spine, though inside it were Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass – when she was old enough to read on her own, the words if not always the meanings. If only there really was a mirror world where you could come and go at will; the otherworld of living back-to-front behind glass that any mirror would let you into, so that when you looked, there was your other self in a parallel life. So it went on for a long hot summer, like this one, of staying up in the afterheat of dusk, long past her bedtime, while her big white mother goose read out loud beside her in the sheets, putting on the voices and, as always, taking up almost all the bed, her bosoms billowy and loose in her nightie; only not so big a goose as the summer before because she herself had grown. She was the one to turn the pages as it got darker, knowing when without having to look, knowing by heart.
The memory has long since set into one whole as clear and remote as a film clip. Her mother pushing hot and plump against her, her own toes pushing down into the tucked-in sheet, the little book growing dark until she had to pull the overhead string to switch on the bedlamp that her father had set up back when there was a dog, a tiger, a snake at the bottom of the bed biting her toes and she would wake up screaming. She had her own bedroom by the age of three. They had each other, she had no one. The lamplight, the huddle of flesh, the buffet of faint breath whenever a page scraped or fluttered over, in a whiff of moth wings, ghostly, smelling of autumn, of late summer and autumn, the dry spell. It came out soon after the War and was plain and drab, with tiny print, and the paper, so thin and clear and crisp then, had grown stains and freckles and age spots all over, soft golden brown, the last time she set eyes on it, with edges of the same brown rimming every page; plain, but there were drawings here and there to immerse yourself in. Foxing. She would have had no more use than Alice for a book with no pictures or conversations, if she had ever seen one.
Where is it now? And how would it be to crawl back for a moment into any one of those early books so intimately known by the look and feel and fine dry leafy smell, always there to burrow into, so lightly shed once grown out of, like a snake its old skin, or a crab cast or cicada husk? Didn’t the spell wear thin, though, once you learnt to read the words by yourself, anywhere, any time you liked? Some of it, maybe, but not all, nowhere near all. As if having once learnt something off by heart made it yours for good.
In no time the school holidays bring back the campers and busloads, the clamorous darting children. As always she keeps to herself. Life alone may have its drawbacks, but at least you have only yourself to please. Twenty-one years of widowhood have slipped by and what has she got to show for herself? As good as nothing, under a clear sky. Emptiness. Yet life felt full enough at the time, day by day, always busy, at least on the surface. So clear once, it has frittered away like a dream on waking – or is this the dream? – as if those twenty-one years were the one year over and over, of living on the surface and in the shallows of the present moment. The years of getting off lightly, of treading water, treading far too lightly. Isn’t she all the lighter on her feet for being skin and bone? A swimmer, a dreamer, a dancer spun into a red dress. There came a big shy sailor boy, holding on tight. A husband. A wife.
He was a swimmer himself, a seaman and a fisherman, a loner all his life,
a quiet man, as much at home at sea as on land – and is this all he has left of himself, a widow’s rags and tatters of memory? If he walked into the room this minute, her own man – and she has a quick flash of the look and feel of him, only when she tries to fix it, to look him straight in the eye, nobody is there. It’s as if the souls creep up out of the past, in a solemn game only they can play. As for herself, if what she has heard and read is true and the body renews itself cell by cell every seven years, every cell as it dies being replaced by a new cell in a slow invisible wave of change – a stealthy metamorphosis, one that leaves no shell or cast skin, a reincarnation – what’s left of her now, as a husband’s wife? She has changed bodies three times over and no present part of her has ever known a man. She is restored to a virginity of sorts, a second virginity of old age and obdurate isolation. A freedom, if to have worked her way so loose amounts to freedom; a dour enough kind of freedom, but her own and it fits like a glove. For better or for worse she is on her own, body and soul. Lust long gone, outgrown, forgotten. No more tides of blood. The moon has no more influence, waxing and waning. What started in childhood and went on over and over ran dry at last and she is well into a second childhood, or so it feels. And, again, a freedom.
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