Ed crouches. He and Sam lower the gangway so that it hits the quayside with that high, strong chime that the skipper loves. It means safe. It means home.
It feels as if he has been away from home for a while – not one night, but longer. He does not like it, but he has grown used to it – the four crewmen staying the night in the hostel off Front Street on a Friday night, the threadbare pool table in the hostel’s bar, the fruit machine that Jonny puts his wages in. The warm beer. The sticky floor and the broken locks on the toilet doors. The only benefit – the single one – is that he spends a little time with his eldest son. He can eat a meal with Sam, or walk across to The Bounty Inn and have a pint or two in there. But it is hard to talk to him, like trying to prise a lid off a jar that has, perhaps, been dented.
Daddy!
He turns. And there is his surprise – the child who is yet to keep him awake at night with worries, and regrets, for she is only six years old, and for Nan the world is bright and safe. She still believes – adamantly – in Father Christmas. In Parla’s church, she treads very carefully down the aisle, for she claims that it is bad luck to step on the line between tiles and that if you do, the brass eagle who holds the Bible on his back might come to life, and swoop down.
She says do you want to hear a story that Mrs Coyle told …? And he picks Nan up, carries her as she breathes Fishman in his ear.
The crate comes to rest and its tarpaulin is peeled off. Milton reaches in, clamps his pale hands into the cut-out handles of cardboard boxes, and pulls. Here are his grocery orders – the kidney beans, the tuna fish, the yeast, the cat food, the intensive conditioner that Hester needs, the blank CDs, the notepaper, the oatcakes, the rosehip oil, the candles, the sliced ham, Lorcan’s piano music, the cartons of fresh milk. He hauls them up, and as he does this he smells perfume – something sweet, expensive. Kitty is beside him. She beams. Milton, guess what? She has her fabric flowers in her hair and rings on her thumbs, and she tells him she is going to have her work exhibited – in a proper art gallery, on the mainland. An exhibition! Which means I will be a real artist!
Milton thinks – not for the first time – how lucky her husband is.
As for George, he is scanning the quayside. He has a brown envelope in his hand. It has money inside it – a pad of folded notes. It’s Maggie’s payment, for her lobsters – and yet where is she? She should be here to collect it. But he cannot see her car or her white-blonde hair.
He’ll take it to Crest later.
And George hopes, as he stands there, that she is not hurting. This stranger is hard news for them – but surely for Maggie most of all.
* * *
She walks past the red telephone box, the old tractor which rusts in the ditch. There are sparrows in the hawthorn bush by the churchyard; they chirp, as she passes.
Maggie sees Lowfield’s roof. She sees the grassy banks that surround it. As the lane winds down, its garden comes into view.
There … It stops her. She shields her eyes: a tall, dark-haired man is standing in the garden. Broad. Bearded. And she is calm, at first. But then Maggie’s eyes widen and she says oh my God …
His shirt. I know that shirt … It is red and black – and Maggie knows there is a hole in it, a hole made by a spark from a bonfire five autumns ago, so that she had yelped to see that spark and she’d patted it out with her mittened hand and she knows there will be burn marks on the cloth – brownish, gold. There will be a missing button, too, and the left cuff will be frayed because Tom caught it on the wire fence above Store Bay as he climbed over it on a rainy day – they’d both heard the cloth tear and he’d said uh-oh as children do – and Maggie starts to run down the lane. She runs, and the man turns at the sound of someone running and he is tall, so tall, and he does not step back or lift up his arms as Maggie comes through the gate shouting you! You! You’re in my husband’s shirt. Why are you in my husband’s shirt?
He does not look startled; he does not look afraid.
She reaches for the frayed cuff and pulls. All she can think of is this is Tom’s shirt – so why is he wearing it? She takes hold of the collar, too. She can feel his beard’s roughness on the back of her hands and she is saying take … it … off in the same rhythm that she’s pulling in. The collar does not move so she grapples with the buttons now. She tries to undo them. She pulls one off entirely so that there is skin, suddenly; it shows between the shirt’s two sides. White skin, black hair. She swallows, lets go. And then Maggie knows: she sees the truth as she had seen it whilst she’d knelt in winter sand with her wrists plunged into bladderwrack. She knows it is not Tom.
Of course it is not him.
A sound from her, now. It is high, like a whimper. A small, injured noise.
Then thump. She strikes him. Without knowing it or meaning to, Maggie strikes his chest with her half-opened hand – weakly, far too weakly for harm – but she strikes him once, and then a second time. Three, four, five strikes against his chest and the red and black shirt whilst saying, take it off but in a quieter voice, now – quiet, as if pleading.
Maggie feels afraid. She did not expect it, but she does. And she knows that she is getting closer to him – and yet he does not take her wrists, say stop or back away. He allows this striking, somehow. He stays where he is as a rock would, but he is warmer than a rock. She can feel the warmth against her hands and forearms; it rises, with his body’s scent. And Maggie stops. She turns her fists back into hands, lays their palms upon him. Firm. Broad-chested. She keeps her hands upon him – and at that precise moment, Maggie wants to rest. She has a yearning to be still, to lay her head against him as she has laid her hands. It is overwhelming – this sudden wish for silence, for a resting place. Like a harbour or a cave or, strangely, she thinks of woods – a place of green, with shade and no sounds but the wind in the branches; grass so thick and lush that she may lie in it and not be found. And she wants this: peace. To sleep – and to feel safe, as she’s sleeping. She looks at her hands. She moves her thumbs gently, feels the strength that is beneath them. He has a warm, clean, salted, unknown smell.
Maggie rests. She has to. She feels she has no choice in it. She sighs, as she finds him – her right cheek on his chest, on the red and black shirt.
Stillness.
The wind cannot find her for she is sheltered.
His chest moves, as he breathes – a rise, and a slow fall …
Margaret!
She jumps. Maggie makes a sound, falls back.
Tabitha is standing by the front door. She is holding a tea-tray, and her hair is pinned back in two brown grips, showing a line of scalp. She looks shocked. She must have seen the fighting, or heard it, for she says enough! Do you hear?
Maggie stumbles. I …
What are you doing? Were you hitting him?
He’s – she is breathless – he is in Tom’s clothes.
He is.
Why?
Because the man had none of his own. What were we supposed to do?
Nathan has clothes. Ian. George.
Maggie … She exhales. Look at the height of him.
And Maggie does. She turns back towards this stranger. She sees the shirt but now, for the first time, she moves her eyes upwards – up, past his collarbone, up over his beard. He is looking at her with eyes that are black. Black eyes.
The nurse’s voice is much softer. I was going to tell you. I’m sorry, Maggie. Tea?
The cup is pressed into her hand. Emmeline doesn’t mind?
Probably. But he needed clothes – and these are old, worn-out. Tom was done with them. They would never have been worn again, anyway.
His hands are huge. The skin between the thumb and forefinger is red; on one hand, there is a scar like a hole that has sealed.
He needed something, Maggie.
Yes.
She can feel the shame, now – she, Maggie, who tries to be composed. Maggie, who cannot remember the last person she touched and yet she’d fought him, scratched him.
There is a mark on his neck which is now starting to show.
He has amnesia. Temporary, I’m sure. Tabitha holds the lid of the teapot as she pours. The mind can choose to shut down, sometimes – with traumas and hardships.
Amnesia?
It happens.
I’m sorry, he says. His voice.
Maggie looks up. How can his eyes be black? And how can they shine, all the same? And how could she have struck him and then brought herself against him and rested there when she doesn’t know him at all? When he is a stranger? He looks back at her. He looks without blinking, tilts his head – as if he is astonished, as if she is brand-new.
Later, Maggie takes the tray inside. She rinses the teacups at the kitchen sink, places them upside down to drain. She dries her hands on the tea-towel and sees that she is shaking.
I do not understand. I do not understand.
How can he have no name? How could I have –?
He is in the doorway. The sun is behind him so he is almost silhouetted and she wonders if he has been watching her – how she rinsed the cups and then looked down at her hands.
I’m sorry. I won’t wear this again. I didn’t know … I don’t want to upset the people who are being so good to me.
Tom would often dress whilst doing something else, like talking on the phone or cleaning his teeth or reading the paper, and so he’d find odd socks on his feet that night. A vest, back to front. His pants, inside out. You don’t remember anything? At all?
I remember being in the water. Kicking.
What else? What about before?
No. Not yet.
It is late afternoon. The light is beautiful. It makes the grassy banks at Lowfield gold, or nearly gold. She glances down, sees how the backs of her plimsolls have been flattened by her heels and how old the laces are, and she knows that Tom would have kicked, also. He’d have wanted to stay living.
Just not that shirt?
Not this shirt. I promise.
And please don’t – she looks away, trying to find the word. What is the word? The expression for what she fears and could not survive? And what did she feel as she fought him, or as she rested? Nothing makes sense, at this moment. He is not Tom and yet she is feeling … She can’t find the words. She sighs, stops trying: don’t fuck us over. This island is … Broken? Tender? Tiredness floods in. She regrets how she has spoken, she is ashamed by the language but she is so tired, so very tired. All the small struggles. All the trying she has done and she shrugs, gives up. She leaves the sentence as it is.
A feeling. It flutters, as if waking.
And with that, Maggie moves past him. She steps into the light.
Kitty walks barefoot; she can feel the three days of sun in the tarmac, and she swings her sandals in her left hand.
High Haven. She passes the rusting car parts, the log-pile, the dog cage where no dog has been kept for years. Old wooden crates are piled on it now and a metal bucket is green with rainwater. So it is – living here. Living with a farmer. She didn’t expect it but she hasn’t minded so much.
Kitty pushes the door, walks in.
Nathan?
There is no answer. She did not expect there to be one – not late in the afternoon when the sun is still warm and there are sheep to count, fences to mend, thistles to tug up and burn. Once, he would have been waiting for her – standing on the quay with a clean shirt on and his easy smile. Or he may have been here with the kettle singing, wet-haired from a shower. But these days, the wind has blown at their marriage so that it has changed shape and he is not making tea for her or towelling his hair.
It happens to all marriages, of course. In time. She tells herself this: it is normal.
And it could be worse … She has seen Maggie on Pigeon. She’s watched her sit, and stare at the water.
Kitty puts her keys on the table, pads upstairs.
She wants to tell him, I am an artist. She wants to tell him about the gallery on the outskirts of the town, about the owner who said I think your work is … bold, inventive, appealing. She wants to tell her husband that there will be an opening night, and reviews, and she wants Nathan to be proud of her. To hold her, to whisper well done in her ear.
But where is he, to tell? Not in the house. Not in the shed outside.
She goes to the bathroom, turns on the taps. The water thunders into the tub.
Kitty walks into the bedroom, undresses. She hums softly as she does so, lifting the necklace over her head and unhooking her bra which she hangs on the end of their pristine, uncreased, perfectly made double bed.
* * *
Can you hear the bath running? Kitty humming?
Can you hear a string of bells tinkling in the northerly wind?
Jim can. Jim Coyle stands with his hands on the gate, and hears them. These bells mark the cliff edges so that he does not fall. His wife’s idea – bells that are meant for a cat’s collar strung up on baling twine. They bounce, and say sing-sing.
He hears more, besides. A lamb calls for its mother somewhere near The Stash; also, there is a skylark. It peeps, high up.
Jim’s hearing is the gift that a thief handed to him. It is what he was offered when his sight was hauled away. He’s always known he’d go blind, in the end. His father had begun to knock his shoulders on doorframes or drop cups when he was middle-aged; by his seventies he’d walked like a man in the dark. Jim can sense light and shadow but little else. Retinitis pigmentosa. He’d rather he didn’t have it, but as his eyes grew worse his hearing grew better. His sense of smell did. His taste and touch. When he kisses his wife he can taste tea, medicated lip salve, denture fixative cream. He can smell her lily-scented moisturiser. To kiss her is more of a treat than it ever was with his working eyes – that’s what he thinks, or tells himself.
At this moment, his wife is walking along the earthy path through waist-high grass that leads from the crossroads to the Old Fish Store. He knows this because he can hear her. Her stick brushes the grass, taps the brambles back towards the church wall; sometimes she pauses and flattens a nettle’s branch by standing on it, breaking its stem. And he can hear Abigail’s breathing – steady, and low.
It grows louder. He turns. There is the shuffle of her feet, the smell of dust and lotion and she says you’ll never guess, Jim. You won’t guess what I saw.
They sit in deckchairs, side by side. Abigail smoothes her skirts, readies herself.
She says, it’s definitely him.
You saw him?
I did – at Lowfield. And the size of him! And the beard! Oh, he is as handsome as he is in my book … But do you know who else? I saw Maggie.
Oh?
And do you know what she did? She hit him, Jim.
Hit?
She struck him on the chest. And he just … allowed it. He didn’t try to stop her. He looked so calm, and … She takes another sip. The bells sing. He’s the Fishman. Definitely.
Jim thinks, my wife – who has more faith in a leather-bound book and its stories than she has in medicine, or the local news. Who seeks out stories – fairy tales, the impossible – because she prefers them to what the truth, most likely, is. She thinks that he has not lost his sight from a genetic disorder but from a lifetime of lighthouse-keeping – the flashes, the polished brass, the long nights peering into the dark. Legends are her meat and drink. They sustain her old body, lighten her voice. In the past few days she has been stronger, more talkative – like the girl he remembers with the hay-seeds in her hair.
Abigail. Who has weathered more storms than he ever saw from his lighthouse. She is a boat that has knocked against rocks but made it. I love you, Mrs Coyle. How he does.
She lifts his hand, kisses it.
* * *
The Fishman … Is this him? With the wound on his hand as if someone had tried to hook him out of the sea? With his briny smell and mirrored eyes? Some say yes, already. Some yearn for him to be.
Ed, of course, does not believe it. He of the weather station, the shippi
ng forecast and the radio. He who, as a boy, loved his metal detector because it showed what was actually there – what he could hold in his hand and keep safe.
There’s no such thing as a Fishman, he says.
Nan, with a mouth full of mashed potato, does not agree. There is, too. Mrs Coyle told me.
She’s just telling stories, Dee tells her softly.
She says Mr Coyle saw one.
Jim Coyle is blind … Sam shakes his head.
Before he went blind!
Enough, Ed says.
Silence, for a time. Then Nancy spikes a pea with her fork and says he’s still the Fishman.
And so they eat, at a table with spotted cloth napkins, and Ed wonders how it happened – that he’s the captain of a ferry on a little island where a man with no memory has come ashore as the odd rubber boot comes in on Lock-and-Key. What can Ed do next? He has talked to the coastguard. He feels he ought to call the police but Tabitha’s words – her precise words – had been let’s wait a bit longer … I see no need, just yet. And he is inclined to agree. He does not want to call the police; the more he thinks of calling them, the more he fears what would follow if he did. And there is Tabitha, too. She has been good to his family; she has delivered each of his children, helped with broken bones and chickenpox and migraines and Ed will never forget the time he saw her arguing with Emmeline outside the island’s shop. She’d said it was not Sam’s fault! Don’t you see that? So he is grateful – indebted, even – to Tabitha Bright.
No police would be his preference, and hers. But he is also aware that this island is not his island. Perhaps this is not fully Ed’s decision to make.
Later, as he stacks the dishwasher, he says do you think I should hold a meeting?
A meeting?
A vote of some kind. He’s amnesiac, he could be anyone … Ian isn’t pleased. And as for Emmeline …
Dee lowers the tea-towel. She smiles, kisses him. Sounds like a good idea.
Sam’s mobile phone flashes blue. He reaches for it.
The message says sleep well. L x
It is not much, but Sam is glad of it.
He replies you too x
The Silver Dark Sea Page 11
