The Silver Dark Sea

by Susan Fletcher

  Last night she’d worn cream lace, and there was a deep, fruit scent on her belly and the insides of her wrists – plum, or fig. Her hair had parted on either side of him.

  Shit. He winces.

  She’d said these things happen … No, they don’t. Or they do, but they should not. Perhaps he deserves the embarrassment of it but she doesn’t. Not Kitty, who talks to plants as she waters them. Whose fingertips smell of turpentine.

  On their wedding night she’d asked so am I now a farmer’s wife? Kitty’s never looked like one – not as his mother did, or as Constance can do. Kitty, who has no broken veins from bad weather and no jumpers that fray at the neck. She shakes the earth from vegetables, but she also paints a rich, regal purple onto her toes.

  What had Tom said, when he’d met her? Brother, you don’t do things by halves …

  He can see the broken fence. Above Tap Hole, part of the wire has come away from its post and has curled up to leave a gap that a sheep could easily get through. The post itself is crooked – from years of wind, and of being scratched against. Nathan comes to it, pushes it back and forwards in the earth. It’s been here a long, long time. Nathan’s father would have put it here, or his grandfather. Even his great-grandfather farmed on Parla, although it isn’t farming he’s known for. He put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger with his toe. That dark Bundy cloud that no-one speaks of. He wonders if this fence-post had been Randall Bundy’s work.

  Randall. Nathan’s father had wanted to call him that. Emmeline refused. She’d called it a cursed name, chosen another and no doubt Jack resented her for that. But who can argue with the person who carried the child, pushed the child out? Bled?

  There are strong women in Nathan’s life. Kitty is strong, in her way. If she found out about two nights ago, or the other nights, she would rage – she’d flame, and fight. But inside, he knows she’d be breaking.

  He doesn’t want her breaking. Not Kit.

  The grass is damp. He kneels down upon it, feels in his pocket. The post is rotten, or as good as. It will need replacing but he can’t do that just now. He can only knock a few staples into the post, enough to close up the hole until he can return to do a proper job.

  He hammers them in, straightens up.

  When was the last time he was happy?

  Nathan turns to go. But as he does, he glances down towards Tap Hole. There is a sheep down there. One of this year’s lambs. Ach … It is rare, for a sheep to fall – they are sure-footed beasts, meant for sloped land – but this side of the isle has loose soil and breaking cliffs. Grass grows over edges so that you could step too far.

  I should have checked the fences.

  Did it die as it landed, or after?

  He thinks I let it down.

  And Nathan thinks, too, I love her. I love my wife. He had shared a bath with her one New Year’s Eve. They’d drunk red wine and counted the old year out through the scented foam. Ten … nine … eight … And he had felt happy, then. But that was seven years ago.

  Tap Hole booms near him. It is where his Aunt Thomasina lost her life. She hid in the cave as the tide came in. And perhaps that would have been fine, on other nights. But that night there was the sly tide, the highest tide so that the cave filled up entirely. Had nobody told her? About the sly tide?

  Her brother – Nathan’s father, Jack – had found her. Floating on her front. Her head, being the heaviest part, was hanging underwater and her arms were bent at the elbows, so it was her torso that Jack saw, and the legs which trailed as herons’ do. They were straight and pale behind her, as she drifted out with the tide.

  * * *

  At Crest, Maggie is painting. She returns to the gutters with her brush and yellow paint. She tries not to think of the tall, nameless man.

  The black cat from the harbour is rolling in the dust – left to right, right to left. She shows her underbelly where there is a patch of white.

  And a gull stands on Jack Bundy’s gravestone. It marks it sloppily; there is a greenish tinge to the dropping, and it coats the J of his name.

  There is talk that parts of Parla’s church are made from the timbers of a ship that sank off Utta, and that Parlans had scavenged and claimed what they could. Most say that isn’t true. All the same, the roof does creak like a boat. Lorcan has always thought this. He came to this island two decades ago and it was the noise he noticed first – the slow, hushed stutter that a boat gives when it strains on its lines. It wants to be free. To sail away …

  It creaks like that today. Perhaps it is the northerly wind or some other reason entirely. But he talks of God’s mysteries, he talks of the faith we must have in the unknown and how God will never leave us without comfort, or alone, and the eaves shift above their heads so everyone looks heavenwards when Lorcan says amen.

  Two hymns, and a blessing. Lorcan states, kindly, as he always does, that the church is never locked; it is always open for prayer and reflection – and then he mentions a red umbrella that was left behind last Sunday. Anyone’s? No-one says so. Perhaps it was a tourist’s – he will leave it by the door, just in case.

  Now Lorcan clears his throat. And Edward? I think Ed would like to take a moment to …?

  The captain stands, moves out of his pew. He wears a shirt that is ironed and buttoned up to the neck, and his hair has been combed back. He tells them what they all know about the bearded man, which is very little: where he was found, by whom and when; of his minor injuries; of his height and breadth and quiet voice. How he is at Tabitha’s. How he can give no reason as to how he came to Sye.

  Amnesia … Ian scoffs to himself, but they all hear.

  I know, Ed says, palms raised. I know. It sounds impossible. But here he is …

  Does he have an accent? Constance.

  No. Nothing. No clues at all.

  What now? What of him? What do they do?

  No-one mentions the police. Not a single person in this place of worship suggests that Ed calls the station on the mainland and asks them to come out. He is not surprised. They have their reasons – unsafe cars, tax evasion, the tiny abattoir at the back of Wind Rising which is only a rumour if anyone asks. And aren’t there curious plants in Milton’s airing cupboard which he dries, bags and sells to Jonny Bundy? Oh, Ed knows it all.

  So are we agreed? We let him stay?

  Send him back. Emmeline’s voice. Just put him on the ferry and send him back.

  A murmur swells up, now. Dee turns in her pew and reasons with her; Tabitha states very firmly that she is not prepared to do that – I am, she declares, a nurse and he is my patient – and she stamps her foot as she says this, as if underlining her words. Ian calls to his aunt: what if he’s a thief, Tab? A murderer or rapist? We know nothing … And this makes Tabitha stand, flushed, and Emmeline stands also and so they become the two sisters that the island has always known them to be – standing on either side of a space and pointing, raising their voices, not hearing the other in any proper way – and they are so loud in their quarrelling that nobody hears Lorcan at first. He is banging a hymn book against the lectern. Enough!

  They keep going.

  Enough! Emmeline!

  Now they stop. There is a sudden hush. The women lower themselves. Lorcan is a measured man and they have not heard him shout before.

  I think, he says, it would be ungodly to send an injured man away.

  Who could argue with that? Or with Lorcan?

  The roof creaks as if it agrees.

  So it is decided. So it will be: the nameless bearded man will stay until he is mended. He will stay until he remembers, or until he chooses to go.

  Emmeline can barely contain her fury. Nor can her eldest son, who mutters as he walks away – this will not end well …

  But as for the rest of the congregation, they do not mind too much. He is different, after all. He is handsome and curious. And they cannot perhaps name the feeling that they have had since he came ashore but it is a feeling they do not want to be rid of, qu
ite yet. Leah does not; Abigail does not.

  Nor does Tabitha, who smiles as she cycles downhill.

  Such sunshine, she thinks. There has never been so much sun.

  * * *

  I was not at church. I did not see or hear the Bright sisters, as they fought and jabbed the air. All day, I was running the yellow fan of a paintbrush over wood, trying to think of nothing. But no-one can think of nothing – nothing itself is something. And I was thinking of eyes as black as the space inside my cupped hands.

  It was Constance who told me. She saw me, walked across the fields.

  Do you object? To this Fishman staying here?

  Fishman?

  She’d smiled, dismissed the word. Whoever he is. Tell Ed, if you want him gone. Ed would listen to you.

  I wonder what my life would be like if I’d said yes. Yes, I do object. Yes, I want him gone.

  I didn’t say that, of course. I wiped the paintbrush on a cloth tied to my belt-loop and said that it didn’t matter to me, either way. I squinted at Constance, smiled, shrugged. He can stay, if he wants. Or go.

  Leah. She of the bitten fingernails and small, neatly made words. She is walking, and that in itself is a newness; she has found even walking hard, in the past. Sat herself down on the ground.

  There is an old towel wrapped around a piece of their electric fence to make a safe crossing place, and so here she climbs over. The rabbits do not run from her. Gulls hop a little, and then look back.

  She is aiming for Lowfield. She is making her way south, across the fields of Wind Rising and towards its grassy banks. Tabitha’s old bicycle is propped against the wall. As she comes closer, Leah sees the window of the mending room is open and its curtains are stirring.

  He is there. He is sitting on the bed, looking down.

  Leah stands by the window. She angles her head, looks through its curtains. He is handsome. Sad-looking.

  Excuse me? she says.

  Leah, she tells him. From the farm there? The big one? My father and brother helped to carry you from Sye.

  I don’t –

  Know your name? I know. Doesn’t matter.

  They go slowly; they walk at her pace which is a careful one. He walks beside Leah where he can; where there are stiles or gorse to pass through, the stranger drops back and follows her. She is thin-boned and pale – paler than him, even – but she climbs over wire fences without touching them as if stronger than she looks.

  He sees the small things. She bites her bottom lip. Her nails are torn, picked at; the skin beside them is dry.

  See those? Sea stacks. They were giants once, or that’s the story …

  Leah Bundy. Had the nurse mentioned her? The nurse has mentioned many people. Last night, he had sat in the kitchen at Lowfield and listened as she spoke of what she thought he should know: now that you’re staying for a while … Tabitha talked of tides, homes, the shop’s opening hours, the chestnut mare, the family names, where the puffins nest. She talked, too, of herself – of her sister, of her own nursing days in foreign lands where she found a mosquito bite as big as her thumb, where she fainted through heat – and he’d thought she wants to talk. She wants to be listened to.

  Perhaps this girl is like that. Leah, whose face had appeared at his window; whose hair seems to twist in this wind so that, as she walks, she holds most of it down. One hand on the nape of her neck, one pointing. It is Bundy Head, in the distance. And that’s Wind Rising – where we live.

  He looks. A broad, stone house. There is a dog chained outside it, a barn with a small concrete room at its rear. A single towel flaps on the line.

  You remember nothing? At all?

  I remember being in the sea.

  Sye?

  No.

  They talked of you in church. There was an argument. Emmeline’s my grandmother – did you know that?

  No, he hadn’t known that.

  Most people are related, she tells him – in some way.

  They pass to the south of Wind Rising, towards the east and the single lane. Leah walks by his side, but slightly ahead. She tugs at the taller grass as she goes, and when she has a long stem of grass in her hand she holds it up in front of her, tries to divide it lengthways with her thumbs. Her eyes are on this piece of grass.

  Have you heard of the Fishman?

  Fishman?

  There’s a story of him. An old story – older than anyone here. He’s a man with a tail, lives at sea. He grows legs and comes ashore when people need him to.

  He has nothing to say. What can he say?

  But Leah keeps talking. She throws the stalk away, tells him that her great-grandfather used to be the lighthouse-keeper, and there is a café at the base of it now, that there used to be a pig farm but the pigs are gone, and as Leah steps over a stile into the lane she says and that house? With the yellow door? Maggie lives there. You’ve met her – haven’t you?

  He nods. He thinks she knows … They must all know how he met her.

  Yellow. He wonders when he last saw yellow – for what was yellow in the night-time sea? In his former life?

  Leah takes him back, towards Lowfield. She shows him the school and its playground; they pass the shop and its wall of rhododendrons which are no longer flowering, but their leaves are glossed – and he listens to Leah, as she talks.

  But in her silences, he glances back. A yellow door.

  Maggie. He wants to say her name.

  He wants to ask about her but does not.

  Leah decides this: he is kind. He is handsome and very tall and yes, he is kind. He’d held back a branch as they’d passed the rhododendrons so that it would not catch against her skin or clothes.

  Not a conman. Not a thief, like her father said.

  And he listens. She has talked and talked – of shearing, haymaking, vegetable patches, the church, the chickens that they keep; and he has listened to her, without interrupting. Without yawning or saying come on …

  She looks across. He is meant to make things better – the Fishman. That’s how the story goes. Abigail Coyle has the story in a book – if you want to know more about yourself. She lives by the harbour. The house of bells?

  He slows, shakes his head. You think I’m a Fishman? Half-fish?

  Maybe. Aren’t you?

  Leah can imagine it – his hair, underwater. Light reflecting off his swimming back.

  * * *

  She is right. The house of bells is the place. When I was needing answers or comfort or a little rest, or to be told the best of stories, I made my way there. I followed the sing-sing-sing. I’d tread up the path and they would be waiting – always, as if they knew.

  Maggie is walking there now.

  The sun sets, as she goes. The sky is every colour as she makes her way down – navy, silver, orange, red – so that if it was ever painted or written of, it would not be believed. No sky, they’d say, could look like that … But it could; this sky does. She is walking underneath it and she knows that there is beauty, still; it does not stop existing.

  She comes to the Old Fish Store. An evening breeze on its bells.

  When Abigail opens the door she gives a small, bright ah!

  I wondered, she tells her, when you’d come to me. It’s been a while.

  I know.

  This is a room that Maggie knows. She knows the Earl Grey tea and the framed, embroidered map of Merme that hangs by the door. She knows this flowered armchair, for she’d come here in her early island days – to hear of whales that spoke, of night-time seas that glowed. That was a different time. A better time.

  You look so tired. Sit …

  Maggie sits. Have you seen –?

  Him? The man they found? I have. You have, too.

  You know?

  The older woman smiles. I saw you strike him, darling.

  Maggie flushes. You did? Oh, I don’t know why I did that. I just –

  Hush, now.

  I scratched him, and –

  Margaret. She takes Maggie’s han
ds down from her face. I have something to show you.

  Abigail carries Folklore and Myth from the bookshelf and lays it on Maggie’s lap. And Maggie looks down, touches it. She remembers this book. It has been years since she last opened it but it feels as it used to – parched and rough, under her palms.

  Open it.

  The drawings have not faded; the stories are, of course, the same. Maggie turns the pages, and it is like seeing half-forgotten friends: the seal, and the foolhardy man who was turned into a black-coloured stone. There is the tale from Merme that she always loved – of a whale that fell in love with a girl’s singing voice and stayed near her, could never leave. Maggie finds this story, smiles; the whale’s round, dolorous eye peers up through the waves.

  It’s beautiful … I’d forgotten.

  The fourteenth page. Keep going.

  She turns a page, two pages … And Maggie catches her breath. She stops, stares. For he is there: he is drawn on the page as clearly and precisely as he has stood in front of Maggie in a red and black shirt. It is him … It is exactly like him. If he were to swim and look back at the land, he would look as the Fishman does in this drawing; if he were to walk, half-bare, on the damp sand he’d look like this Fishman does in the next. Maggie swallows. She looks up.

  I know, says Abigail.

  How –?

  See what it says? Hope and wonder …

  He looks like this. Exactly like this.

  I know, dearest. I know.

  * * *

  Fishman … I spoke it out loud. I walked back through the dark and I said it over and over, feeling the shape of the word. Perhaps the sheep heard me. Perhaps the moon – a crescent, yellow-coloured – watched my lips as I spoke.

  I cannot talk of the power of want, of how much desire can do. I don’t think it can be measured. I think want is forgotten too quickly or dismissed as being worth far less than the other feelings – love, hate, envy. But to want something … To wish for it so much that you think you cannot last, your heart and body cannot continue to hunger for something as much as this. It comes from loss. We want what we do not have. We want what we had, but don’t now.