The Silver Dark Sea

by Susan Fletcher

  I hear it, now – the regret.

  He looks down. He steadies himself.

  She’d had dreams of a wedding, as most girls do. She hoped to marry in her childhood church, to have her four bridesmaids in a pale shade of blue. And a jazz band in the evening and a firework or two. Roses, on the tables.

  That was the plan. But …

  I wait.

  There are dandelion seeds. In the fields, a ewe calls out for her lamb and I wait. I wait, but I know. I know what’s coming.

  She began to feel ill. Aches.

  Celia began to bleed more than she should. She ignored it at first; it meant nothing, most likely. But then she bled when she should not be bleeding at all, and she noticed a hardened shape to her belly that was sore and new. Quickly, too quickly, they came to know the smell of hospitals, the noise and size of X-ray machines, the coldness of the room she had her scans in and the look – the look, oh God, that look – that the specialist had in his eyes when he came into the room and shut the door behind him. We have detected a shadow … Detected – that word, as if this shadow had been hard to see and the doctors had done well to find it. But it was not hard to see. The X-ray was placed on a box of light, and they saw it instantly: a flourishing, ink-dark bloom of cells. It could, perhaps, be removed but there were other, smaller blooms – her womb, her stomach, her kidneys, her bowels. A rope of ink had started to curl up through her spine.

  When they told Celia, she turned, looked at him. She took his hand. She said I am so sorry. Those were her only words.

  It doesn’t take long. Does it? He means for everything to change. For the happiness to be halted and for all the tiny details – a letter, a lost earring, a wasp trapped in an upturned glass – to have a new, horrible meaning. I thought I could hold her forever. I thought … She, who played chess. Who believed moths were in love with the moon.

  They were married by the hospital chaplain with her red-headed family around. No jazz band, and no time for rings, but Celia had her roses – a vase of them, still-budded and sugar-pink. They kissed so that their noses touched. And she still looked beautiful. How could she still look beautiful, when …? And her sisters clapped lightly, threw confetti – horseshoes, bells, heart shapes – over her hospital bed.

  I loved her more than I’d loved anyone.

  Yes.

  She died ten months ago. Her family scattered her ashes in a garden with a magnolia tree. On the east coast, where Celia was from.

  We talk into the night. Or he does – he talks and I listen, side by side. Our hips and elbows are touching, and we look at the darkening sky. We stay on the doorstep until it grows cool and then we go inside. We draw curtains, light candles. Lie on the bed, fully clothed.

  Maggie … he says slowly. Like he is grateful. Worn-out.

  For a while we do not talk. We only listen to the waves, to the sheep in the darkness. He pushes his fingers between mine.

  A long, soft silence. But, in the end, I ask how did you end up on Sye?

  There are as many sorrows as there are people who feel them and there are no rules, and there is no list over which you can hover a pencil’s tip and think yes, that’s me; no, that’s not … I know this because they told me. They – friends, others who have lost their loves – would try their best and I’d listen, but in my head I’d think you don’t understand – because I was me and Tom was Tom, and who could understand it? Who could truly understand it unless they were also me, and they had also loved Tom, and been loved by Tom, and unless they also knew how Tom looked when he placed his forearms on the mattress either side of my head and smiled down? It is solitary. I never knew that till he’d gone. Grief is such a lonely thing. There is no-one in it with you – others may grieve for the same soul, but they do not grieve exactly for what you also grieve. No-one has lost precisely what you have lost. Not exactly, never exactly. We are in it alone.

  Sometimes I looked for my husband. I’d pull out drawers, or take down old boxes; I knelt, pressed my cheek to the carpet and peered under the bed thinking are you there …? Was that a form of madness? All I knew was that he was somewhere – he had to be somewhere. He could not be gone.

  Oh it is wild and it is lonely. It is as if you’ve woken to a world that you recognise but it has been tilted, somehow – coated, or rubbed down, or made colder or less bright. It echoes where it should not echo; where it should echo, it is as echoless as a single, muffled thud. And grief is not merely sadness, as if sadness alone was not enough to bear. I had imagined the sorrow to be as deep as a well, a howling grief, but I had not imagined the other feelings that have no right to be there, which seem wholly misplaced in a state of grieving – rage, impatience, self-pity, disgust. They come from the dark and rush in upon you so that you snap at good people or you fling food in the bin whilst hissing what’s the fucking point? Of eating? And eating on your own at a table meant for two? Why would you want to keep going? He was thirty-seven. He was only thirty-seven … And then there is the softening, the hands clasped over the mouth in shock at the fact you thought such things, and then grief returns to the familiar routine – the loss, and the disbelief; the fear at those six words which are I will not see him again. And guilt; guilt comes. Guilt, at having snapped like that, at having broken a neighbour’s ovenproof dish when they’ve been so kind as to make a meal for you, the guilt at having smacked a fly a dozen times over until it is no longer a fly, or a fly’s body, but pulp, just pulp – a grainy, blackish smear on the rolled magazine – when you could have simply ushered it out of a window as you used to, once. And so you sit down. You close your eyes and feel guilty that you are already forgetting things, and you are frightened, and you miss him all the more, you miss him all the more.

  I didn’t recognise the things I did …

  He was the same. He tells me this: I was exactly the same.

  At first, he worked and worked. He took orders, sawed wood, toiled into the evenings until he was told, very gently, you should go home … But at home, he kept working. He repainted things, moved furniture, took books off bookshelves and then put them back on. He’d sand table-legs at four in the morning. It could not stay like that.

  Then through lack of sleep he hammered a nail into the side of his hand. No-one could understand how. How? What the hell …? It pierced the fleshy web between his thumb and forefinger – a hole, like a bloodied eye. His hand was bandaged and he could not work; he could only walk the streets – bumble – or sit on the sofa and stare at a television screen that brimmed over with face after face but none was the face that he wanted to see. He’d sit on benches, or wedge himself in the corners of pubs where nobody knew him. He went to the café where they had their first lunch together – Celia and him.

  He stared at the chair she had sat in, once. Talking of freedom, twisting her hair.

  I grew angry, I tell him. After Tom.

  He nods. For a while. I was unfair – I thought unfair things. I wanted to know why she had died when there were others who were less kind, less clever, less … Dictators; murderers; lying politicians; drink-drivers; molesters; racists; thieves – he kept a list in his head of the people who were worth less than his wife, which he knew was not decent or just. Who was he to judge them? It was not his nature; he had never judged like this in his former life. But then he’d pass geese grazing in the park or hear the sound of a vacuum cleaner through the walls, or he’d lift the morning’s mail from his doorstep to find mail order catalogues with her name written on them. He’d watch a woman walking by in lavish, high-heeled shoes.

  Anger gave way. It went overnight, as floorboards might give way to a weight they had borne for too long. In its place there came exhaustion. A strange fog of tiredness made him lie down as if his bones had been broken, or taken away. For days, he lay still. The phone rang unanswered. He’d watch the line of sky through the half-drawn curtains turn from dark, to grey, to dark again. He only left the bed to drink from the bathroom tap. His hand mended but nothing else did; noth
ing else got better. How could it? What could heal? Celia’s sisters had emptied her flat, and the things that they had given him – to remember her by – sat in a cardboard box in his bedroom, as if that was Celia – all she had been. As if her life had been reduced to this: books, a diary, her green leather gloves, a rag doll from her childhood, a hairbrush with copper strands.

  Too much to bear, too much to feel.

  Too much. It was all too much … And too much became nothing, in time. As if the body knew it could not bear it any longer, it chose not to bear it and it made itself feel dead.

  You don’t have to tell me this.

  Maggie, I do.

  He wanted to be with Celia. That was all he knew. He lifted himself from the mattress one day thinking I want to be where she is, as if she had merely stepped on a train or walked down the road. He brushed his teeth. He left notes for a friend that read I need to get away for a while. Not sure where or how long, but I’ll call when I’m back. Don’t worry. It was not a lie; he wrote it without thinking if it was the truth or not the truth. He merely wrote it. He used a chewed ballpoint pen and he knew whose teeth had chewed it. She’d nibble the end, when thinking. Crosswords, or tax forms.

  He locked the front door, put the key under the flowerpot.

  He caught the bus to the coast where her flat had been. As if he’d dreamt the inky bloom or the white coffin being rolled into the furnace, he knocked on her door, and he felt his blood roar as he heard a radio being turned off and footsteps coming nearer and I thought I would see her face, Maggie – he thought she’d throw the door open, flash her wide smile and open her arms to him so that they’d waltz for a moment at the top of the stairs, his mouth pressed down on the crown of her head which would smell of roses, marshmallow, shampoo. But the face was a man’s. He wore glasses. A tea-towel lay over one shoulder and he said no, there’s no Cecelia here.

  Celia.

  Nor her. Maybe the floor below?

  Late evening. He walked along the promenade. He glanced up at the room that had been her bedroom and he could hear her laughing, he could see the whiteness of her skin where it stretched across her hips, and the neat, copper rectangle; he could feel her shift position, turn him over and climb on top, and he could hear Celia saying his name and yet where was she? Not on the promenade. Not in the streets. Not in the off-licence with its strip-lighting, not in the eyes of the women who passed him by, arms linked, and said well, hello … as if they stood a chance. She wasn’t in the waste ground where the promenade ended. She wasn’t on the beach of concrete blocks and car parts and rusting beer cans.

  It’s a lonely thing. Grief.

  Yes.

  Jesus … I just – he takes his hand off my waist, turns onto his back. I just missed her. I wanted it to stop being … as it was.

  It was cold, of course. Perhaps he’d wanted that – the shock of the cold, a feeling that was not loss, for one moment. Perhaps he wanted a physical pain to replace, very briefly, the heart’s one that he could not bear – and so he waded into the sea. It came to his knees: his calves looked bone-white in the water. He wanted to see his thighs as white, also, and so he unbuckled his trousers and left them behind. The coldness found his groin, and his pelvis. It was bitingly cold, and yet he undressed as he went – the shirt, the T-shirt beneath it which he’d been wearing for days. He waded on, unable to feel for the coldness. Celia … Who came to him with her hair like a veil that she’d throw back, causing a draught. No stones beneath his feet any more, but she was biting her bottom lip saying come closer and he swam into the darkness. The space beneath him. The unbearable space inside.

  I wasn’t thinking of … He turns his head, looks at me. I know how it sounds. But I wasn’t trying to do anything other than … Rest … He tightens his eyes. His forearm goes across them.

  I think, like me – like me, in the garden at Lowfield, where all I wanted was peace from it; all I wanted was a place where I could, for a time, escape the truth, where I could sleep safely and deeply and not feel afraid. I had chosen him, for that safety – his chest, his arms like branches; he had chosen the sea. And who can understand it? Each grief is its own kind.

  I push myself up. I move until my face is level with his face. When I hit you, when I saw you for the first time and I hit you, you said something to me. You said, ‘I know.’

  I did. I did know. I understood it.

  I was angry with you. Scared …

  I knew that. We wear it, don’t we? The loss.

  This is what happened in the dark, midnight water. This is what happened to a widower of ten months whose grief and disbelief were so thick and hard to live with that he found himself on a beach with litter and sewage pipes. A full, sad moon overhead.

  He swam. But he was not swimming with purpose – no rhythmic kicks or curves of his arms. His limbs moved when they chose to move. He half-floated, half-sank.

  I felt my body lowering. I remember that – and so his arms tried harder, briefly. But a wave slapped across his eyes and his mouth was salt-filled. The sea covered and uncovered him so that a silence came and went. And he grew cold, so cold, and his body weakened with the kicking and he knew that he was sinking. It grew colder, as he sank.

  His eyes are closed. He is remembering it.

  I whisper what happened next?

  His eyes open. I kicked. Suddenly. It was like …

  Instinct?

  Instinct, yes. My legs just … kicked.

  He surfaced like a whale – darkly, with a gasp of breath that came back down as rain. He inhaled with a roar; he turned with his arms, looking for land. Nothing but water.

  Then what?

  A light. It wasn’t much. He thought he’d dreamt it – salt in his eyes, or a half-drowned mind. Then a second light. A half-second flash, five times a minute.

  You swam? All that way?

  No. Not quite.

  He tried to. But as the first lines of grey appeared in the sky, he felt something in the water. A soft stroke of his thigh. He gasped, yelled out – a fish? Weed? A swimmer’s hand? He rolled over to see it more clearly.

  Rope, in the end. Rope. Fraying nylon rope, like twine. Also, a container of some kind.

  So much can be impossible to believe in this world. So much defies all the safe answers and chance is all that’s left – but chance sometimes does not feel enough. Chance? This was the ocean. It was bigger than humans can fathom, and he himself was just one man. Yet a floating plastic object passed him, trailing twine.

  They wanted a Fishman. It felt more likely than my story. I think the Fishman of Sye was easier to believe.

  Him, who I love. I tell him so.

  How can you be real? Any of this?

  I look at him, thinking the same.

  He held onto it. He half-slept, half-kicked. He’d held onto the container or he lolled on it as seals loll. He said her name, as he made his way.

  I remember nothing else.

  Sye?

  Just stillness. And the stones … And he remembers footsteps on those stones. And a man saying oh God, oh God. Can you hear me?

  Later, he knows he was carried like a boat.

  * * *

  I think he was right, all in all. I think the tale of the Fishman of Sye – a fish that grows legs and can walk ashore – was an easier tale to have faith in. The whale that could speak was easier, too, and maybe even the story of the giants being turned to stone because hadn’t that been a long time ago? Centuries ago? We hadn’t been there at the time.

  But this story? This truth? Where could I even begin? Which part of it was the strangest or the most remarkable? That night in Tavey, he slept a deep sleep in which he did not move, or talk – he slept as if, at last, he could. But I stayed awake and I watched him. I watched the candle’s light on the wall.

  Plastic, and twine? A voice that said kick? The fact that a cold, heavy, half-naked man could make a distance that takes a ferry two hours? Or the fact it was Sye that he came to rest on – that dank c
ove, as slick with rumour as it has ever been with weed?

  But the strangest part of it is this: that we found each other. We knew what the other knew; we had felt as the other had felt or was still feeling. I, too, had crawled along the carpet looking for strands of hair as proof of life and I had also rung a mobile phone that I knew could not be answered in the wild, foolish belief that, this time, he’d pick up. We both looked for our loves in odd places. In the windows of shoe shops, or in a boat’s tarpaulin. In a single magpie’s cha!

  At first light, when he woke, he said you’re still here? He thought I might have left him.

  Why would I have gone?

  Because it sounds like a lie.

  The sheep began stirring and the lighthouse clicked off. We pulled the blankets about us, and in that early, dew-damp morning he told me why he’d never breathed a word of this, till now; why he’d never sat a person down and said I know my name.

  You said you had amnesia.

  No. They thought it. Tabitha thought it – and she lit up when she said the word. Maggie, she lit up like a star …

  So it began with her. It started in the nurse’s mending room. For on that first night, as he slept or half-slept, he had heard Tabitha talking. She’d whispered – prayed, even – please … Let this be the start. Of something good. And he didn’t want to hurt her. He could not tell the truth to her – for how did his truth have any goodness in it? Ovarian cancer in a thirty-one-year-old? A vase of roses that she never saw in bloom?

  He didn’t want to let this gentle person down.

  This nurse with hair like cotton wool.

  And there was Leah, after that. Her, and her sorrow. He’d known it when he saw her – for he’d had his own form of it. It – she called it. She picked at the blistered paint on the doorframe, chewed the skin by her nails and she said very little for a long time. But then Leah began to tell stories. She began to sweep Tavey, paint its skirting boards. She explained text messaging to him – see these buttons? – and tugged nails out of rotten wood and for one small moment he thought that the truth might help her. A story about a slow recovery. But then she’d said if you aren’t the Fishman, I never want to know it. A decisive nod and then she went outside.