The Silver Dark Sea

by Susan Fletcher

  The island at night. I can see it. Sometimes I would wake, put a coat over my pyjamas and walk out into the dark. I’d see the small nocturnal moments that no human was meant to.

  They are happening now. There is the blackish glint of bladderwrack at Sye; down in the ditches, a creature moves across dead leaves. In the church porch, a spider plucks its web and the lighthouse finds it – a silver web with its little rounded maker who tucks up its legs at this sudden light. I’ve seen bedside lamps come on. Once I saw two silhouettes against a bedroom curtain – two people who became, as I watched, one person – and I looked away embarrassed. Is this happening, now? At School Cottage, maybe.

  A curlew calls – bubbling, sad.

  The minister sits at his piano. Lorcan tries his new music – the first four bars. He cracks his knuckles, tries again.

  In the nettle patch there is a vole. It chews a stalk – up and down. It stops, waits. A shadow? It passes. And so the vole resumes its chewing – up and down, up and down.

  Midnight passes.

  Clocks flash their green neon numbers: 12.03. Then, 12.04.

  At High Haven, the bed is no longer neatly made. Kitty lies on her left side, propped up on her left elbow. Her right hand is on her husband’s stomach and she is saying it doesn’t matter, it’s fine. Maybe we try again in a while? But Nathan knows it’s not fine. Tom. This washed-up man. Rona in her knickers and nothing else saying do you love me? Say you love me … He is rum-breathed and red-eyed, and nothing is fine at all.

  * * *

  The lighthouse turns.

  The hours pass.

  One in the morning, then two.

  At Lowfield two lights are on. In the mending room, the stranger lies on the iron-framed bed. He stares at the ceiling but he does not see its paint: he sees, instead, a woman. She is the blonde, hurting woman who had struck him saying no … He’d wanted to hold her. He is only thinking of her.

  As for the nurse, she reads. At this moment, she is sitting in the middle of her double bed with all her nursing books on either side of her, open and facing down. She has typed the word amnesia into the internet.

  There are no marks on his head. None. No bruises, or swellings.

  He was not drunk, when they found him, and he does not shake – so the amnesia cannot come from alcohol dependency.

  It leaves two options. Just two.

  She takes off her glasses.

  The first option is that his amnesia comes from a trauma of some kind – not physical, but emotional. Something has happened to this man that his heart and mind cannot cope with, so that his brain has chosen to forget it all. Wipe away the trouble, as a high tide does. What has he seen, or felt? An event too hard to bear, it seems. It makes her sorry to think it. But that is the option she’d prefer – because the second is that he is lying. That he has not forgotten anything, and is just pretending he has.

  She puts the books on the floor, one by one. Then she reaches across to her bedside lamp and switches it off. The darkness is sudden, welcome.

  In this darkness, she smiles. There is a third option, of course.

  He could be Abigail’s Fishman. A Fishman, with brand-new legs and lungs. He feigns amnesia for what else can he do? Humans would not truly believe him. So he cannot speak of what he knows – of shipwrecks, and whale song, and shafts of filtered light.

  The Loss of the Anne-Rosa

  Once I asked Tom this: why do you love the sea so much?

  We had been on Store Bay. It was an autumn afternoon. Spume was flying, skittering over the sand and against our boots and my hands were so cold that I blew on them. Tom was wide-eyed, amazed. He smiled. You’re asking me why?

  All night, he talked – of storms, of tides, of incredible fish that could not have been imagined by any human brain. Some produce their own light, he said. Some, far down, carry their own lanterns … Octopus can change colour; whales can recognise their pod, their friends. Once, a turtle passed him and lifted its nose, gave a tiny puff of breath as if in greeting. And he told me the story of a silent, mist-grey sea, not long after sunrise – how, as Tom had sat in Pigeon, he’d thought, I am not alone. He’d known it: there is something in the water. Something behind me … He’d stayed as he was, held his breath. He waited. Waited … And very, very slowly, two black orca fins passed by on either side. They were knife-straight and shining. I looked up at their tips.

  Orca? I gasped, clamped my hands over my mouth.

  Orca. I could have reached out and …

  He had a thousand stories. Sometimes he’d say, I wish you could have seen that too – and I’d nod, take his hand; I wished I’d seen it too. But if a story’s well-told it places you there. I saw those orca passing by.

  * * *

  The Anne-Rosa was no ghostly galleon with a pirate flag. She was not lured onto rocks by wrecking lights and there were no smugglers hiding liquor or rubies in her hold. It would make a better story, I know. But she was a tanker, in the end.

  She was empty, having unloaded on the mainland hours before. But it was wartime: fires made the mainland’s cities glow at night, and submarines stalked the deeper waters, and as the Anne-Rosa made her way past Parla her left side was blown away. The noise shook the island. Water churned and whitened; it belched as it closed around her portholes and decks. The Parlans ran to the north coast – but what could they do? The sea was too stormy for their small fishing boats. They could only clutch their coats to their throats and pray. Lord, in their hour of need …

  You could say God heard – or you could say that the Anne-Rosa’s crew were hardier than most or that it was luck entirely. In any case, their lone lifeboat made it onto Lock-and-Key and some men reached the shore on their own by clinging to driftwood or just swimming for their lives. They were ushered into Parlan homes, given blankets and broth and a whisky or three. All of the men survived.

  So the Anne-Rosa is not a grave. But it carries a sadness all the same. At the lowest tide, the hull will partly show itself and to see its dark, dripping metal is to be reminded of all lost things. I have seen it twice. Both times I mourned what I’d had for a time, but no longer.

  Visitors often ask if someone died, in that wreck. They take a leaflet from Milton’s shop and go to each place that is marked on it – Tap Hole, Sye, the nettle patch where the voles live – and when they come to Bundy Head they ask, did they die? The crew? Some islanders say yes to that. It’s a lie, but it’s the answer the tourists want. They want a wooden wreck like a pirate ship with mossy candlesticks and coins still down there, held by skeletal hands. On wild nights, the ship rises up … They say there was gold on board … although there is certainly no treasure in the Anne-Rosa now. The Lovegrove twins told me this. They used to dive her rusty shell, inch through her half-open doors. They parted the weed and only found eels there – blank-eyed and toothy, mouthing oh, oh, oh …

  * * *

  Maggie dreams of the tanker tonight. She dreams of how it must have swayed, back and forth. Did the men shout? They must have shouted. In her dream they are shouting the names of those they love.

  She has dreamt this before: that a skeleton lies in the Anne-Rosa’s walls. All the men survived except for this one man. Against the iron hull are the bones she knows – the collarbone she traced with her thumb, the spine she heard crack as he stretched. Flakes of rust float through the darkness. There is a jawbone whose teeth she has seen before – counted, touched with the tip of her tongue – and eye sockets that have no sight, now. There are no brown eyes. Tom does not lie in the Anne-Rosa, she knows that – for divers would have found him, if he was lying there. But she dreams he reclines gracefully. He turns his head towards her. She sees his wedding ring.

  Maggie … Sighed out.

  She wakes. Her name echoes; her body feels damp. She gasps as the eels do – oh, oh.

  Later, she sits on the loo seat, her arms wrapped around her waist. Sometimes, when he bent down, she would see the knots of vertebrae beneath his skin, like a row
of knuckles. The skin whitened against them. She can see this so clearly. She can see his mouth. How can it now be a jawbone with teeth and nothing more? She knew it when it was warm, flesh-coloured. She knew how he’d bite his bottom lip when thinking, or when she’d …

  Maggie blinks it away.

  She tears the paper, dabs at herself.

  The lighthouse turns, and as she flushes the loo and washes her hands she thinks of the man at Lowfield. I don’t want this; I did not ask for this. What had she felt when she saw him? What had she felt when she’d struck him and what is she feeling now? He had said shh, very gently. As she’d rested, he’d put his hand on her shoulder – lightly, as if she might break.

  She treads back to bed, ashamed.

  He had also whispered, I know … Or at least she thinks he said it. He’d said I know, as if he knew Maggie, as if he’d felt her sadness or met her before. But how could he have done? I have never met him. She’d remember, surely, if she had.

  No memory. It is not easy to believe it. But perhaps it is not easy to believe any of it – the size of him, his face, how he was found at Sye. Hard to believe this life at all, and hard to believe that someone could make love to you, press a kiss into the space behind your ear and say your name and smile at you and then, within two hours, be gone. Dead. How can she believe that? Even now, she can’t.

  So maybe he has no memory.

  Or maybe he is a Fishman, as she has heard. Maybe there is silver in the fields and an underwater world. Maybe seals do, in fact, have human hearts and know what love feels like, or being in love – and maybe she’ll believe every story ever told. Why not? The only thing Maggie won’t believe, what she refuses to believe is what others may, in time, choose to: that this huge, nameless black-eyed man is the sea’s replacement for the loving man it took.

  Six

  Hours pass. The tide comes in and out.

  At daybreak, I go down to Pigeon and I find a feather there. It is a gull’s feather and so I see it long before I come to it – it glows, in the half-light. It is beautiful, far from perfect. Its comb is splayed, broken; its downy lower parts are matted with salt and it could not beat air now. It could not offer flight. But I take it, pocket it.

  * * *

  And at the house called Easterly, a kettle is newly boiled. It sits, steaming. Emmeline lifts it, pours it into a mug.

  She has not really slept. Sleep has been hard to come by for the past few nights and so she has found herself doing crosswords in bed at two in the morning, or sewing on buttons, or reading her book on gardening – dog-eared, tea-coloured.

  Last night she went to Easterly’s spare room. It has been the spare room for years – fifteen years or more – but in her mind it still belongs to her youngest son. It had been his bedroom when they first came to Easterly. They had painted the walls a fine sea-blue, and the curtains were navy with cushions to match. A boy’s room, Tom’s room. And she may call it the spare room to her other children, or Tabitha, but in her head it remains Tom’s room even now, and it remains Tom’s bed, and it remains Tom’s sheepskin rug at the side of his bed which she’d put there so that when he woke up each morning the first thing he felt was soft, soft. And last night Emmeline had sat here. She’d looked at the shelves. The empty cardboard box that she had lifted his old clothes from – grey jumpers, old socks.

  I doubt I’ll ever need them, he’d told her, long ago. But this is an island. It costs, always, to take unwanted things away – and so a broken fridge sits near Wind Rising, and an old sink has been filled with soil and plants, and Nathan has rows of wheel-less cars that merely sit and will never be mended. And so Emmeline stored her youngest son’s holey, worn-out clothes.

  She sniffs. This man – washed up like wood is.

  She’d had no wish to lend anything to him. But how would it look, if she had kept those clothes? Held onto them? Bitter, she supposes – resentful. Tabitha might have called her unkind – but what does it matter, what Tabitha thinks? She made up her mind long ago.

  Hester rang. Hester is a Bundy in how she looks – the thick hair, the deep-set eyes – but she does not have the temper, not at all. On the phone, she’d used a gentle voice: Mum, are you alright?

  Why wouldn’t I be?

  I hear he’s wearing Tom’s clothes, and …

  Hester wore her brothers’ clothes too when she was young. It was cheaper that way, and practical; there are photographs in which Emmeline’s children look like four dark-eyed boys. Hester had worked just as well as them. She’d wanted to match their shearing times or running speed, and perhaps she got that stubbornness from me … That tight little stare that Hester had which meant she was thinking yes I can, yes I can …

  I know what I am doing. Emmeline said it on the phone. That’s a phrase she’s heard over and over, in her life – the truculent, close-minded retort of a farming man who needed no help or would not admit to it. She knew such a man for over four decades: she married Jack when she was eighteen. It had rained on their wedding day.

  Jack. She leans back against the sink, and the draining board. They were married forty-two years and three months before a heart attack took him. Forty-two years – an adult lifetime, for some people. She tells herself that she chose this life – the sour-smelling sheep, boots in the hall, dog hair on the armchairs and bathroom towels – but did she? Truly? She married when she was a child, still. Her mind and heart had yet to reach their adult size, or strength. What she had seen in Jack was adventure, a taste of real, grown-up life – glamour, even, although it’s impossible to think that now. Her naïve eyes had seen him handle a ewe, as she birthed, and Emmeline had wondered how those hands might feel between her own legs. He’d been good-looking and strong. He’d often wandered up to the lighthouse at strange hours and sat, mute or nearly, in the corner of their sitting room which Emmeline had thought to be romantic in its way. At twenty, Jack wanted a wife. He announced it, as one might announce one’s plans for the day. Emmeline had been smitten and he’d liked her capability – her size, and her hefty child-bearing hips. And so the eldest Bright child married the youngest Bundy one on such a blustery day that the church door shook during their vows.

  Forty-two years. So much became normal – his waterproofs hanging in the porch, the creak of the wooden stairs. How he sucked his tea through his teeth, as if sifting it.

  For over four decades Emmeline did the same things, over, and over: shampooed her children’s heads on a Sunday, mopped the kitchen floor on the Friday, and every autumn she’d pick the disc of greaseproof paper off the top of the blackberry jam she’d made the autumn before, when everything had been exactly the same, but she’d made that jam thinking maybe things will be different when I make more jam next year. But things never were – except for a few more grey hairs. The children would be taller but they’d still leave muddied boot-prints on the floor. And she’d still buy aspirin or antiseptic cream or plasters as often as others bought yeast for bread – mouthing it’s not for me to Milton and trying to smile. A bag of peas lived in the freezer that she’d press onto herself in the bathroom, when the rest of the house was asleep.

  Year after year. Forty-two of them.

  She puts bread in the toaster, presses it down.

  When she is asked how many children she has, she still says four. Once, she said three, but one is missing at sea, and the face of the girl who’d asked it grew flushed, and she’d stepped away, embarrassed. Four is the better answer. And it’s the true one – for until she has Tom’s bones to bury in the Parlan earth, Emmeline will keep hoping – as if her hope is something tangible that might help him, like rope or a torch’s light. She cannot retract it. She cannot say he is dead in case it might, somehow, make him so – and she doesn’t understand how others can say it as firmly as they do. She is his mother, still – and so she tells them, yes, four children. Three grandchildren.

  Ian, Hester, Nathan and Thomas. Her best words are these names.

  She sips her tea.

&n
bsp; A man with no name. What might Jack have said, to it all? Bloody nonsense, most likely. Let him sort himself out.

  Emmeline holds her mug and looks out across the flowerbed. At that moment, she thinks of three things: that the peonies are beautiful, at their best, maybe – not fully unfurled but nearly, and should she cut some for her bedroom or leave them where they are? She also thinks of this man at Lowfield with his black, black beard and the whorl in it. Again, there is the wave of resentment: she resents him (or hates? Is it hatred she feels?) for not being who she longs for him to be, who he should be if there was fairness which there has never been. And thirdly, Emmeline remembers how Tom would take her hands without warning and dance with her round the kitchen to no music at all except for the sea and the calling sheep, and as they danced he would ask how was your day? Past the fridge, down the hall.

  * * *

  Her second son walks across the fields.

  Nathan wears a quilted jacket. It is sleeveless, navy-blue. In its pockets there are fence staples – sharp, so that they pierce the lining and scratch against his waist – and Nathan holds a hammer in his left hand. His feet snag on grass, the stems of buttercups.

  Ian had rung as Nathan was cleaning his teeth. He’d answered the phone with a frothing mouth, and heard there’s a gap in the fence above Tap Hole. Think we’ve lost one.

  You on it?

  No – I’m off to church.

  He’d spat his toothpaste in the sink. Church? Seriously?

  Yeah. Ed wants to talk to us afterwards.

  Ed?

  About this man. Just see to the fence, will you?

  Nathan has not had breakfast – coffee, but no more. There is a slight wetness to the grass, as he walks, so that the toes of his boots are darker than the rest. He looks up. Swifts are darting.

  He’d left Kitty sleeping. He’d glanced at her, as he’d dressed. She looked beautiful. She always does – but maybe a husband sees his wife as an islander sees water, in that he sees it so often he stops seeing its shine. He hardly ever watches the sea any more. The tourists stare for hours, but Nathan has no time to, and does not feel the need. But then, once in a while, he will glance out and see its bright water. Once in a while, she will throw back her hair.