I burrowed into his shoulder, and he held me, feeling my back and arms for injury. The bar fell quiet, the Smiths’ “Cemetry Gates” playing on the jukebox, and I could sense everyone’s eyes upon me. I felt a sudden exhaustion, like a spirit leaving my body.
I just need to lie down, I said.
Upstairs Fred hustled me down the hall into our rooms.
Let’s get you in a hot shower.
I peeled the remnants of my suit off of me, the blood caked and half-dried all over my body. There was no way to hide it.
Elly? What the fuck happened?
I hit some rocks, I said.
After a shower I lay on the bed and we examined all of the cuts and Fred dabbed the bleeding spots with wads of toilet paper and taped cotton balls on the largest scratches. He was trying to be tender but his hands were clumsy and he swiped at the cuts, leaving swaths of blood. His face was loose, and he shifted from side to side. He wasn’t drunk as I thought. I knew this look. He was high; my husband had been smoking pot with the woofers. I looked down at my body, the rising swell of my breasts, crosshatched with cuts, the poke of my hips, the soft pad of my stomach and pelvis, the looseness of my thighs. I pulled the sheet over me and started to cry again.
Oh, honey, Fred said. Please, I’m sorry.
You better go back downstairs, I said.
You sure?
Yeah, I’ll be fine.
Okay, he said. Come down and tell me all about it.
He bent over and kissed me on the forehead. Laughter from the pub downstairs and the insistent wind tugging at the windows. I pulled the covers up to my chin and stared at the ceiling, blinking away tears.
* * *
They implored me to tell them what happened, so I played down any real danger because I thought that Fred was going to be upset about me doing the swim without him. The woofers were dutifully impressed, some I think even incredulous that I would attempt such a thing. The American girls eyed each other over their beers. Akio was touching my arm and saying, no no no, don’t do that. I didn’t mention the girl on the Fastnet Lighthouse or the killer whales.
Patrick was shaking his head with a serious frown. Standing among the crusty woofers and my husband, Patrick looked like an accountant who’d wandered off the golf course. He was clearly sober.
You don’t want any part of Conchur Corrigan, he said.
Why? I asked. What are they doing out there?
Salvage operations, Patrick said, essentially scavenging shipwrecks, garbage, anything that becomes lost or damaged at sea. The old salvage laws still apply around here. You leave a wreck unmanned and it becomes fair game, and few places in the world have as many shipwrecks as this area. You don’t want to mess with that area around Fastnet.
Ja, Gus said. He’s right.
And Fastnet sinks ships, Patrick said. Been doing it for a thousand years. Those rocks are littered with wrecks, Spanish galleons, tankers, military ships. A hell of a lot of personal craft, sailboats.
There’s a fucking U-boat down there, Gus said, just a quarter mile west. Ships down there, stacked up deep.
And the thing is, Patrick said, nobody else can get to them. The Corrigans have laid claim to the whole area. His crew takes what they want, and nobody else gets any. Like their own personal junkyard.
The other woofers were nodding in agreement, sipping their drinks.
They saved me, I said. Conchur Corrigan, his boat, they saved me out there.
Fred put his arm around my shoulders and gave me a squeeze. It was quiet for a few moments. Rain beat on the front windows, and I looked at the hot cup of tea in my hand, the swirls of milk, and felt like I was about to cry.
Don’t you think, Patrick said, it’s funny how they just happened to be right there?
Fred slapped his hand on the bar.
Another round of shotguns, he bellowed, for Conchur and his band of pirates!
I’m sorry, I said, I gotta go to bed.
I’ll come up later to tuck you in, Fred said.
Sure. Good night, everybody. Have fun.
* * *
I slept through the night and well into the next day, awakened by the sounds of truck horns in the harbor. My body was dotted with the tiny bandages Fred had put together, blotched with dried blood. A few of the cuts stung badly, and peeling back the tape I could see the yellow crust of infection, likely caused by some kind of toxic barnacle on Fastnet. I replayed in my mind the vision of the girl on the lighthouse, her lizard speed and staring, blank eyes. Her body had been smooth and almost asexual. Perhaps it was some trick of the weather and my vision. After a few hours of swimming your eyes will often swell, filling your goggles, and this often affects your eyesight. Conchur and the other men on the boat must have thought I had lost my mind, bug-eyed and babbling about a girl climbing the side of a lighthouse. And where was O’Boyle?
I dragged myself out of bed and surprised Fred on the computer in his office. He had his headphones on like he normally does, and when he sensed my presence he quickly alt-tabbed away from whatever he was looking at. I didn’t see the screen clearly, but it was obviously some images, fleshy oblong shapes, human forms.
You okay?
Yes, I said. I don’t know what happened. It wasn’t that long of a swim.
Elly, you swam to the fucking lighthouse.
Just a few miles. You know it isn’t that far.
And you didn’t have a boat, someone with you?
Yeah. It was that guy O’Boyle I told you about.
The busker? Well, what happened to him?
Not sure. The weather got weird, got rough pretty quick. He might have lost me.
Lost you? How . . . how could you lose a swimmer in the open ocean?
I don’t know, I said, but I don’t think it’s his fault. I was fine until about halfway, when I reached the lighthouse. Then . . . things kind of got strange.
Like how?
I don’t know. I was seeing things. Things in the water, on the lighthouse.
I sat on his lap, wincing as the cuts on my waist folded and rubbed. I put my arms around him and rested my cheek on his head, rubbing my face in his hair. He was still slightly smoky and funky from the night before, and I could tell by the tension in his body that he was embarrassed. He was embarrassed about what he had been looking at before I came in.
What’d you see out there? he said.
Promise you won’t make fun of me.
Of course I won’t make fun of you.
Yes, you will.
I swear I won’t.
I saw a girl. On Fastnet.
On the island?
Actually on the lighthouse. Like, climbing up the side?
Wait a minute, he said. Tell me exactly what you mean.
So I described to him how I felt during the swim and what I saw.
Killer whales? Are you fucking serious? Jesus, Elly.
They are extremely rare, I said. And there is no record of a killer whale attack on a swimmer.
That’s just because the water is too fucking cold! Nobody swims in water like that except you!
But the girl, that’s the thing . . . I can’t understand.
Maybe an effect of light or exhaustion, Fred said. A hallucination. But killer whales . . . seriously, you have to promise me you won’t do that again.
Okay. I won’t.
Fred squeezed me and nuzzled my neck.
Weren’t you scared?
Yes, I said. I was.
I don’t know how you do it.
Me either.
You should have told me.
You would have tried to stop me.
Fred took my face in his broad hands and put his nose against mine.
No, he said. I would never do that. I would have helped you.
* * *
A note arrived at the pub the next morning, sealed and addressed to me.
E— The fulmars, bonxies, and shearwaters will be filling the skies over the Bill. The hedges will be full of nightj
ars. Cheers, Seb
Chapter Fourteen
The next week I took morning walks across the bogs of Ballyieragh and along the southern path to the Bill of Clear to sit with Sebastian and watch the skies. He was there to catch the single migratory refugee as it beat through the winds to the island. But when I sat with him in the tussocky grass, cross-legged and passing his binoculars, Sebastian making notes in his book, he had a way of making me feel like his attention was never divided. The conversation was casual, but comfortably steady, and Sebastian mostly asked me questions. When I talked he would watch me, turning to the sky for a moment, then back, but he always let me play out the thought until I was done.
I didn’t really know what I was doing with Sebastian out on the Bill, but I did like to hear him talk about birds. When the bird-watchers gathered in the pub, it was impossible not to eavesdrop. Bird names sound like the ravings of a madman. Greenshank, chiffchaff, firecrest, glaucous gull, teal, wigeon, scaup, shoveler, coot, kittiwake, and black redstart. Such hallucinatory verbiage, like the vibrant language of insanity. Sebastian had an endless supply of these absurdities at his disposal, and he would pepper his sentences with goldcrest, bonxie, pipit, wagtail, rook, pochard, plover, merganser, shelduck, turnstone, ring ouzel, wheatear, crake, ruff, brambling, and lapland bunting.
Fred had this saying he liked to trot out at gatherings with literary scholars. Literary theory is to writers like ornithology is to birds. It was just another way for him to lighten the responsibility, a bullshit way of alleviating the need for an explanation while sounding profound.
Sebastian and I seemed content to respect the relative privacy of our personal lives. One afternoon as we were perched on our usual crag on the Bill, I found myself crossing this boundary.
Do you have a family?
No, Sebastian said, not at present.
Were you married?
No, he said. Almost once. But no.
Brothers or sisters?
I had a younger brother, Mick. He died a few years ago.
How’d that happen?
Sebastian ran his fingers through his hair and leaned over and inspected the grass at our feet.
Look at this, he said. Shrews.
There were a couple of tiny rodents, smaller than my thumb, tumbling among the roots of the thick grass. Their tiny pink faces came to fleshy points, their back legs spinning, crawling over each other.
He killed himself, Sebastian said. Cut his wrists in the bathroom of a chip shop.
We kept watching the shrews struggle.
I’m sorry.
He didn’t want our mother, Sebastian said, to find his body. Mick was quite the famous Egyptologist and cryptographic translator, one of the best in the world. He was under a lot of pressure.
I touched his arm, and he turned away from the shrews and looked at me. I had his full face now, that cone of warm, focused attention. He gazed at me like he could do it all day.
My brother was quite a prick, actually. Our father . . . hated the little bugger.
Sebastian sighed, rubbed his hands together.
Is your father still alive? I asked.
No. My father was the sixth Earl of Selwidge. We barely knew him. He left when we were young, went to America.
What was he doing there?
Oh, gambling mostly. He lost everything. Everything he could get his hands on.
More shrews joined the band in the grass. It soon was clear that there were two factions, warring with each other, moving fast, tiny gangs fighting over turf, a patch of grass on a long field that to them must have seemed like the whole of the known world. It was a strange thing to witness on an island with so few animals. There weren’t even any insects; the wind was too strong. The flightless animals that do exist there, a handful of rodents and small mammals, all evolved anchoring techniques such as special hooked claws on the forelimbs, collapsible rib cages, spines telescoping to pack the animals into shallow depressions, burrowing abilities like those of moles, shrews, and weevils. Some had spiny jackets of fur, tiny tusks jutting from their upper jaws, flattened tails that could be wedged into cracks, or prehensile tails that could grip rocks or vegetation. Everybody was just hanging on.
* * *
In the short muddy yard behind the Five Bells there was a stunted fruit tree of unknown type and origin; early each spring it would produce several odd and singular fruits, like small red apples but perfectly round and with flesh like a pineapple or some other tropical fruit. Sheila served the fruit, simply sliced, in a bowl upon the bar one night each year. The pub patrons lined up to take a slice, eating it quietly and quickly. It was delicious; sweet and subtly sour, like a mango mixed with grapefruit, and the sticky juice remained on your hands for days, no matter how much you scrubbed with soap and water. Ariel tended to the tree, the central part of her nursing involving tying long ribbons of white cotton, old bedsheets torn into strips, to the tips of the thorny branches. The tree had only a few leaves even in the warm months of spring, and the ever-present wind whipped the streamers around in circular patterns of white light, like a storm of snow trapped in a glass.
* * *
The next week was the first and last time I saw Patrick drunk. He glowered at a table in the Five Bells, a surly expression on his lips, his hair hanging down over his eyes. He quaffed lagers when they were handed to him but did not enter into the conversation. It was a Friday afternoon and the pub was crowded with birders, builders, woofers, boat crews, and ferry guys mixed together among the small tables and barstools. The other woofers were also drunk but trying to put a good face on things, chatting amiably. I waved to the woofers but stayed by the fire. I sipped a cup of Sheila’s mushroom soup and read Cheever.
When I’m unlucky I get drunk and go to the movies and return to Bristol. The idea is to get away from one place, but I never get away, I never reach another place. I try to struggle with the things that bind me, but I forget the nature of the bonds. I go to the movies. I get up at four and read until dawn. I do everything but the work that I came here to do.
At some point Kieran Corrigan slipped into the bar and was standing at the rail, sipping a pint of stout. Most of the patrons were bird-watchers, so there was no noticeable ripple of identification, but the woofers, most of all Patrick, certainly were on alert. He stared brazenly at Kieran, gripping his glass. The room took on the stale air of anticipation, warming and close, and people shifted uneasily. Akio put an arm around Patrick, squeezing him, whispering something in his ear. At the end of the bar Magdalene was holding Conchur’s hand, palm open, and tracing his massive paw with her fingers. His hands were lined with grease and oil, his fingernails beyond recovery. Conchur stared at her, his heavy chin set, and I could see that he was embarrassed. He tried to pull his hand away, but she held on to it.
It’s okay, Magdalene was saying, it’s okay. My father was a mechanic. I know these hands.
Patrick murmured something to Akio, who released him and turned away. Patrick stood up, leaning a bit on the table, then made his way over to the bar where Kieran was standing. Patrick reached across and gripped the rail next to Kieran and, with his head lowered, began to speak to him in a quiet voice. If Kieran was listening he gave no indication. Patrick grew more insistent, his body lurching a bit, and Kieran stepped back, smiling now. Other people in the bar had begun to notice the confrontation and conversations died down, the patrons nearest to Kieran and Patrick picking up their drinks and moving off. Magdalene still had Conchur’s palm in her hands, murmuring to him, their faces close.
Such strong hands, she said.
A mistake, Patrick was saying, his voice rising, you have made a mistake. This island could be completely self-sustaining. You know that.
Patrick was now leaning in close, shouting in Kieran’s ear.
But you won’t let it happen. What I want to know is why? Why?
The pub was now silent. Kieran stood there as if it wasn’t happening at all, sipping his pint, setting it on the bar, patti
ng his pockets and pulling out a cigarette, as if he was just a man at the pub having a drink.
You’re scared of what he can do, Patrick said. You know you can’t stop him.
Conchur, his eyes riveted on Magdalene, said something quick in Irish, and Kieran grunted in reply, a slight shake of his head. Then Kieran straightened up and addressed Patrick in Irish, something that sounded like a question. The other islanders in the bar shuffled and looked at the floor, muttering in Irish. Patrick narrowed his eyes and shook his head. Kieran smiled, as if he’d received the answer he wanted. He set his glass on the bar and placed a bill across the top. Then, the pub still quiet and watching, Kieran Corrigan shrugged on his coat and walked out, Conchur rising, disentangling himself from Magdalene, and following. At the door Conchur stopped and gazed across the crowd. When he found me he paused and wrinkled his eyes, nodded. You again. He glanced at the woofers, then back to me, giving me a quick wagging finger, and ducking his head he stepped out the door.
The woofers gathered up Patrick and took him home. They said they laid him down in his little stall in the barn, where he crawled into his sleeping bag and laughed and seemed contented.
In the morning he was gone.
* * *
The next day was a Saturday, and in the North Harbor a group of women clustered around the Holy Well of St. Kieran. They had sprigs of wildflowers in their hair and carried baskets of white crepe streamers which they attached to a dark-haired young woman in a wedding dress. Each woman took hold of the end of a streamer until they all radiated from her like the arms of a delicate ivory starfish. The sky was clear and the sun bright and hot on my skin, and the island women reveled in it, taking off their sweaters and rolling up their sleeves. Sheila and Ariel each held a streamer, as did Nora, and they chatted and laughed with each other and other islanders who began to gather. I stood at a polite distance near the Siopa Beag. I know I was a familiar enough presence by that time to cause little interest, but I was still a bit surprised that none of the women acknowledged me.
There was a shout and the creaking of O’Boyle’s fiddle and the buzzing chant of a jimby, and a group of men came down the Waist road to the harbor. They were dressed in somber shades of black, coats and pants pressed, some with ties, O’Boyle wearing a black coat and scarf. A man in a suit was at their epicenter and they clapped him on the back as they joined the group of women. He was a gangly, black-haired fellow with the wide mouth and features of a Corrigan. The bride and groom held hands and the rest arranged themselves behind them, the women trailing holding their streamers, followed by the men, then O’Boyle and the hatchet-faced man, who was plying the jimby, his face as expressionless as ever, bringing up the rear. I noticed Dinny skulking about the back in a somber black coat, but he flicked his gaze over me like I wasn’t there. A gaggle of young children formed a series of lines at the front of the group, and with a simple hop-step to the whirring jimby tune, they led the procession along the Waist road. Other hangers-on, islanders, a few birders, joined in the rear, so I followed as they trooped up the sloping northern road past Highgate’s farm and toward the eastern end of the island.
The Night Swimmer Page 18
