At daybreak there had come a bristling in the air, a crackle of menace, and there he was, naked in the doorway, gashes for eyes and a mouth, glaring down at her and his stone dead self, together under the sheet. He had a right, a grievance. But if he was angry, at dying, at her for being fast asleep, dead to the world, she had got over her anger soon enough and so had he. Hadn’t they done an autopsy? Carved him up like a carcass at the meatworks? Instantaneous. A finding of natural causes.
That’s the past for you, all backwashes and rips. On the longest night in the deep of winter you forgive and forget and what life there is goes on, on the surface. There may have been eyebrows raised in the town at how little she showed on the surface. So what if people looked askance and shook their heads saying it was none of their business but it looked as if she had taken it lightly and got off no less lightly? What did they know? What did she? Only that his heart had given out. Was it him in the doorway, his ghost, or a trick of the light, the mind? He blamed her – she blamed herself at heart – and was horrified at finding himself dead. He was waiting for her in the doorway. Struck dumb, she baulked, staving him off, her head in uproar, her whole being one shudder, one no out of the pit of the bed. That was what his ghost must have been screaming, no, at her, at death. Could he have heard her answering no, if she could have screamed back, across the gulf that divided them now? She had held his gaze and let him slip through her fingers, and gone on to let him burn down, her lardy livid slab of a man on his back in flames, and scattered him, ashes and bone, off the pier on the outgoing tide. When shall we two meet again, ashes to ashes?
Caught in a rip, what can you do but swim across into white water?
Not that she is so sure any more of an absolute difference, a line drawn hard and fast, a great gulf fixed. What if it only seems so on the surface? Surface changes, vital signs, reading, misreading the signs – we know there’s always more to know. He used to say he kept an open mind on the afterlife. All very well, but the earth is not open, sealed tight in its skin of air, and all life on earth is spun out of it only to end up back where it belongs. As far as we know – how far is that? – only human beings believe in their own death. We know we have to die, whether or not we believe in the afterlife – let alone believe what we were taught at Sunday school, that believing will make the difference between heaven and hell. But then, she was never a believer. Nor was he. He took things as they came. But if the body knows what she thinks it knows, it’s not telling, is it? – it’s leaving the mind open wide, playing fast and loose with place and time, awake or asleep, letting its inner world seep into the outer world through the sheer membrane of the self, and the other way round, the two are so swollen with each other wherever they meet, like the bloodstreams of mother and child, enfolded, anchored. Air and water fuse, and sea and sky, and body and mind, with no dividing line in sight, none you can put a finger on. Lines of water, sandbanks, shorelines, shifting, unravelling, all mirage and spindrift, rising and falling.
Coming back to haunt her, nevertheless, is how on the way back to bed on the death watch her foot slid in water, a pool on the floorboards, and, yes, there was his overturned water glass, not even cracked, that he must have knocked over, flailing, as if it might save him. Was it evidence? She had wiped up the water, washed and put away the glass – what if it had? She has good dreams where she wakes up in time to kneel, distraught, before him. She holds up to his mouth the water of life.
Now and then the sultry heat comes to a head in a thunderstorm, lightning and flash flooding all afternoon, and a strange yellow twilight of silence, not a breath, the still sea low among the rocks and breakwaters, under a deep yellow sky at nightfall. A cool night, a cool day, and the heat sets back in. Now and then a night is full of a warm sea fog that has slid in after dark, out of season, a dislocation, to lie low in the basin behind the dunes at the surf beach, setting off the foghorn and here and there a hoot, a ship’s horn, prolonged, and another interrupting, resounding on into the day, so that waking becomes burdensome, eyelids and lips swollen, rimed with salt, a sea as smooth as snow, a spangled silence in the tea-trees.
Into her head there seeps a memory of a gravelly voice, not her husband’s but like his, some old salt of a man on the radio spinning a yarn to schoolchildren about the time in Antarctica when he was a lad and his party and their dogs were marooned for two years, trekking on sleds at first and finally camped in one of Scott’s old huts. An expeditioner, he was. World War I had begun, in another world. There were stores in the hut, he said, tea and biscuits, pemmican, and passed an open tin around for them to sniff and gag over. To a man they were black with scurvy, rotting, by the time they got there, and one had died and been given an ice burial. Later, two more, desperate to get to the main hut over at the harbour where the ship had been moored before the ice floe clamped and carried her off, set out one day over the autumn ice, but a blizzard blew up and the sea ice was thin and they left no trace. How did the rest keep alive? Sir! Sir! You ate dog! No! In the long winter dark, huge seals hauled up onshore near the hut and the castaways crept up on them with knives.
How well could seals see in the dark, she wonders now, with only the starlight or a moon casting shadows? But they were safely on land, where they had no enemies, fast asleep or in a trance of cold; and if they saw or heard the shadowy men closing in they were none the wiser, never having seen a man. The old man fondly recalled his young thirst for their blood, a thirst so great that he would have plunged his face in and swallowed it hot as it hosed out of their throats. You had to club them on the nose with the icepick, pull off your glove and grab the knife, he said, in your bare hand and strike home in the second before your skin froze to the hilt. Steaming, the blood jetted over your clothes and boots and froze on instantly. She sees the heave of huge hulks, the ripple of necks tossing in shock as one after another sprawled meekly and its blood pumped and each round eye set and stared in the glaze of death, lidded with snow.
There was no water but the snow they melted over a blubber stove that reeked and filled the hut with flares and shadows. Snug in that frozen vault by the light of blubber lanterns they boiled up the seal meat and gnawed on it for ten soot-sodden months, men and dogs. Like Jonahs in the belly of seal after seal they ate their way through. Day by day of spring as the sun oozed back for minutes at a time they took on solid shape, hounds and battered knights in armour, in helmeted sealskins rigid with blood. Out the window the vaulted carcasses came to light, hacked to the bone, folded in coats of snow on black glass, white glass. Sentinels.
Some of the old books are still around, so thick with dust on top that it stays put if she pulls one off the shelf. If she opens one up, the pages are in lacy holes and silverfish swim out in their silken skins. When she sees a silverfish she always thinks of a library she once read about, in Portugal, a palace, a cathedral of a library with high walls of old books, hand-painted mediaeval books inscribed on vellum or parchment, leather-bound, that no one reads. This library, as if under a vow of silence, is closed to readers. The inhabitants are librarians and silverfish and bats like ghosts, skeletal, almost transparent, no bigger than moths, that live on the silverfish. At twilight they wake up for the hunt, weaving their flight paths, flitting and chittering, swooping down in whirlpools of dust. At closing time the librarians cover the tables to catch the droppings. In the morning they clean up. She wonders if they leave a lamp on overnight and if a librarian ever stays behind to watch, as she would if she had a bat. Or would one bat die of loneliness? By daybreak they are hung up in skeins out of sight, asleep, invisible. This library is its own ghost, a real library in a city and a living fairy tale, or myth, or fable.
Of all the childhood possessions she remembers, the one she most misses is a pocket book of poems on a golden cord, Poems from Coleridge, with a blue tongue of silk ribbon hanging out for a placemark. It was some great-aunt’s relic, all blue print and curlicues, or so it is when it opens in her mind’s eye. One poem, the longest, she knew b
y heart, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, about a sailing ship lost in the Antarctic fog and ice, and an albatross that follows in her wake, a black cross, sky high, day after day, until one of the crew shoots it down with his crossbow. At this all nature turns against them, until they are becalmed in the tropics, rotting in agonies of thirst – Water, water, everywhere – and his shipmates curse the murderer and hang the albatross around his neck. But still they die, they give up the ghost, all but him. He has fallen prey to the nightmare Life-in-Death, who sweeps up in her black ship with Death as her skeleton mate and claims him. His penance, his blood debt, his curse, is to roam the earth, undead, apparitional, waylaying strangers and recounting his tale of horrors, endlessly reliving it. Only she, being careless, lost the book, or threw it out, embarrassed that it was too fancy, more of a love token than a real book. But she must have loved it, anyway, since it lives on in her mind, coming back as it always did if she happened on the poem in this or that real book. A square blue shell parting, a flutter and silken sigh of gilt edges.
One afternoon she is on the bend of the cliff path, alongside the mesh fence of the concrete lookout, when she nearly treads on a rat, a baby one cowering in the grey sand, beady-eyed and shivering, all its fur on end. She steps softly closer, waiting for it to run. But it seems not to notice, not even when three girls come prancing rowdily along with a terrier on a lead and stop short, shrill with disgust. The dog takes one wary sniff and backs away. At a loss, the girls shriek and shove each other over to where the rat is bowed down. It’s dying, she says, fixing them with her gaze, and they stare. Is it yours? one calls out. No, she says. It’s a wild rat. Their goggling eyes averted, they edge past out of sight.
More walkers will be along. It has at least to be got out of the way, over the fence out of sight. It’s not as if it will bite or scratch or even struggle in the state it’s in – all it wants is its mother. How long can it last, bowed down in the open like this, so meek in the grip of its death, so beyond knowing, possessed and whirring in all its electric vibrancy? How is she supposed to pick it up – by the tail? What if its snaps out of its trance in a last spasm of terror? Now she is getting into a state herself. Something has reared up in her that will not for anything let her clasp this quivering scrap of fur in her bare hands. Its life, in her hands, its death. No, only its death, and common sense says to throw it off the cliff or find a rock and finish it off, be cruel to be kind. But never in her life has she put a fellow flesh and blood creature to death and there are no rocks that she can see up here, only down on the beach; by the time she gets back anything could have happened. Is it a kindness, as they say, a mercy killing, a violent death? What if she misses or only stuns it and has to go on smashing and smashing it to pulp? Its blood, on her hands. Is it really any better than walking on and leaving it to its fate? No one knows the answer to that. No one living. She walks on.
Day after day on the bend in the cliff path her heart squeezes shut even before the rat surfaces in her mind’s eye. It is nowhere on the path. Its absence is the shimmer on the path, the hot spot. The stink of it ripens in the scrub then fades away. Not so the afterimage.
Gone and not gone, the gold ring reminds her of Venice, where she had always dreamed of going one day, if she went overseas. Venice, so ancient, so rare, knee-deep in the sea, a dreaming city of the dead where the streets were water and the bridges that spanned them, the walls and roofs, the boats, were one shifting mesh of reflected light, an emanation of a city risen whole and perfect out of the depths. Glassy vistas opening, a slideshow of the mind, a jumble of landing stages, masks, reflections and once, indolent, gliding, a woman fingering black strands of water. Venice was the temple of the wedding feast, where every year a man clothed in gold, the Duke, stood high on a prow among a fleet of gondolas, swan boats, black as night, where the lagoon met the sea, and plighted his troth and sent his gold ring spinning down to the seabed. It could be one of his rings that has washed up here on the far side of the world after centuries of rolling around the seabed, like a message in a bottle, and gone off on its way again. Pools of glassy light filling the black gondolas. Stranger things have happened.
He plighted his troth in a loud voice even the sea could hear. Was this to keep it at bay? Venice was a city twice daily under siege. What if the sea held him to it one day and rose up in a great wave and plunged down, crushing him, green waters and gold, engulfing squares, domes, towers, burying Venice underwater, a lost Atlantis? The high tides go higher and higher. Sooner or later the city will go under for good, so they say, if not to any great depth. Then the ebb tide will bring to light an underwater maze of canals, the sun washing in ribbons of ripple on roof tiles, and fish with eyes like gold rings threading in and out of doorways and windows, until the tide floods back in. Divers in masks will grope through her domes and towers as they do between the ribs of shipwrecks.
With the city shuddering all over with bells he throws in his ring. So the sea is the bride! No, the sea is male. The city is the bride, the Queen of the Adriatic. And the groom is the sea. With this ring I thee wed. And the Duke takes the vows in her name. Is he giving her away? Like a father? No, more like a proxy bride, all so long ago, in Venice, in another world beyond this one.
The bridegroom’s fate is to rise up and smother the bride and be the death of her.
But why?
Out of love. He doesn’t know his own strength.
Not that she wants to go any more, not to the all too solid, thronged, everyday Venice. The way the world is going, as far as anyone can tell the sea will rise and make a clean sweep of us anyway. There will be only this one blue abolished world, a silence, a universal Venice of dreams, of underwater domes, towers, lighthouses, phantom foghorns and bells no one hears, dead and swarming with life. Newborn.
As for a clean sweep, high tide, high time she put her mind to it closer to home. Out with the clutters of seashells, pebbles and river stones, nuts and leaves, feathers black and white, drops of bottle glass, the red and blue crab claws and papery carapaces, the skulls and bones she has walked blindly past, and added to, while they and she gathered cobwebs and dust and lost track of where they came from and how they washed up here. So what if each one was a living memory of whatever it was, a keepsake, a talisman? Even the packets of photos went off to the tip long ago, the faded, remembered, unremembered, faces and places meaningless to any living soul. Dry leaves, winter leaves, the photos were, lost in the afterlife – though even now coming alive in the odd dream, in memories she can never put a name to. The lost and gone books, those front doors into other lives, haunt her the most. But all this clutter goes in handfuls into brown paper bags. High time the decks were cleared. Those of the earth she takes and scatters in the scrub on the clifftop. For those of the sea she finds a pool in the cliff shadow with the tide rolling in, where some settle, some shuttle down, some float. A rainbow glint in an earshell. A coil of bone. A black swan-shape of swans far overhead.
Day after day, filling and draining in channels all along, the rising tide leaves finny wakes behind in wet sand that is always on the boil, flooding full of the bubble breath of hidden sea life, or of empty air, who knows, as memories rise and sink under the surface of time.
A fierce pang in her belly wakes her one night out of a dream and sends her staggering to the bathroom to double up over the toilet, retching. When the pang is down to a dull ache she shudders, recoiling at the thought of going back, but the bed is a blank sheet in the lamplight, immaculate. Was it something she ate? Sure that it wasn’t, she puts it down to the dream she was in, of a cramp in heavy cold water and something warm slipping out between her legs, not just seawater, something soft and dense and rubbery. Forgetting all about the mask she put her hand down inside her bathers and peered down – blood! – only to choke on a gutful of water from the snorkel. Then she was doubled up shuddering in her towel on the sand, losing blood from whatever was in her bathers, knowing what it must be, what she would have to keep to herself fore
ver. The curse is come upon me, she cries, out of nowhere she can name. It was not as if she had defied her mother. She had kept the house rules until she left school and home as a grown woman with a live-in job, and then a husband and a roof of her own and it was up to her when she went swimming. How far was she gone? She had missed a few times before when she was overworked, rundown, run dry, never dreaming – what had gone wrong? It’s your own fault, her mother would say if she knew. So might her husband or, worse, think so and not say, but eat his heart out over it. Even the doctor might blame her. And she was fine in a week or so, good as gold – it would never happen again. Nor did it. That day she waded back in, deep, deeper, reached into the dank weed of her groin for the little clump of membrane and, screaming bubbles, opened a red hand to send it bobbing off in the undersurface, a jellyfish trail, pulsing, alive; and before she could snatch it groggily back a wave tossed it down. As soon as she could she dragged herself home and lay down in agony. As she does now, and groans, dozing off, only to wake in daylight empty of pain, warmly wafting, again having got off lightly, with a belly as light as a blown egg.
All along the shore the flimsy weatherboard, weather-beaten houses look out to sea, beached, stranded. Life is short enough at any age anywhere, over in no time. This has always been a house of hollow spaces and echoes and her heart is not in it. Drifts of cobweb and fallen hair, dry moths, fluff, lie like shadows on every surface. They belong as she does, no more, no less, as frail and as constant. Her windows, whether or not they get the sun, are smeared outside with dust and cobwebs and still the mirrors inside under their nap of dust bring the windows in and double the light. Moving from mirror to mirror she is someone who looks as if she has seen a ghost, greedy for light. Otherwise she is frugal, saving her strength, never missing meals, doing her chores, living for summer time. Never a big eater, she lives all year round on potatoes, grain foods and pulses, salads, eggs and cheese, fish, stone fruit in summer and in autumn grapes, apples, last oozings. A paradox in a nutshell is a stone fruit. Nothing goes to waste. Everything does. Being a creature of habit is fine as long as you trim your sails to the wind like a ship at the mercy of the sea (it has none); what we all come down to in the long run is a little ship of death. Who was it said that? No sailor, whoever it was (nor is she). Little ships all lay down a glisten of thread across the dark like garden snails only to falter one by one and lose their way and go under – there they go out past the winking buoys and starlight, over the moon path into the sky, moonships in a lost picture book. After a lifetime with her nose in books, reading was making her eyes fail and she has given it up, content with whatever scraps from once upon a time come floating back on the tide over the quaking membrane of the days – loose as the skin on a rock pool – as she makes her way, reading the signs, falling into place, tiding things over as she used to in a book at bedtime before she could read, falling asleep.
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