A Summer of Drowning

by John Burnside

  That didn’t bother me, though. It had done, when I was younger, but now I enjoyed seeing her busy, and I told her that I would clear the table and wash up, so she could go straight back to work. She smiled. ‘Thank you,’ she said. I loved it when she smiled like that. It wasn’t the beautiful smile she kept for the suitors, or the two or three journalists who had come to the house. There was no effort to it, no reserve. It was just a smile.

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘I know you’re busy.’

  She nodded. ‘And you?’ she said. ‘What are you going to do?’

  I wanted to smile too, but I didn’t do it so easily, or so well. She used to laugh at me when I was little and pretend to be shocked by how serious I was – though I imagine she always thought I would grow out of it. She didn’t think I’d stay like that forever. ‘I’m going to wash the dishes,’ I said.

  ‘And after that?’

  I shook my head – and I did smile then, just a little, because it made me happy, thinking how I would spend what was left of the day. ‘Nothing,’ I said – and then I said it again, because I wasn’t just talking about that day, I wasn’t just talking about the next few hours, I was talking about something that I hadn’t really figured out yet, but knew was there, at the back of my mind, as some new possibility. Some new promise. ‘I’m going to sit in a chair and do absolutely nothing at all.’

  An hour later, when the kitchen was tidy, I went back upstairs to my picture books, with that wisp of a promise in my head – and that was when I saw Martin Crosbie for the first time. It must have been around ten o’clock and, because we were in midnattsol, I saw him quite clearly; yet for a moment, perhaps because of the light and perhaps because he looked so obviously out of place, I thought I was imagining things. He was standing by the gate that divides the inner, cultivated garden from the meadowlands beyond and he was gazing up at the house as if he thought it was something he ought to know, but couldn’t quite remember. Of course, he would have been unfamiliar with real midnattsol and he wouldn’t have been prepared for the effect it had on him. No doubt he had heard about the midnight sun before he came – everybody knows about that – but no amount of reading could have prepared him for the real thing and, besides, that term is hopelessly misleading. Midnight sun suggests a golden, perennial sunset quality, and it’s almost never like that. White nights is closer, though even that is too narrow a descript ion: these midsummer nights can be blue, or red gold, or silver grey, depending on the weather and also, as Mother always says, on the mood of the observer. On that particular night, the air was cool and fresh after the first day of real summer, and the light was that still, silvery-white gloaming that makes everything spectral: ghost tracks winding past our house and out along the shore as if returning for one night from the distant past, ghost birds hanging on the air above the glassy water of the Sound, ghost meadows for miles in every direction, every blade of grass and flower stem touched with a mercuric light, like the foliage in those ancient photographs I had been poring over earlier. It would have been easy to suppose that Martin Crosbie was a ghost too, that first time I saw him, for there was nothing factual about him, other than his unexpected presence there, in a place where he should not have been, and even that was provisional, a figment of the summer night that might crumble and fade before I could make out what it was. The sensation only lasted a moment, of course; still, at first glance, it seemed to me that he was a man without substance, not a ghost so much as an illusion, a phantasm in which he himself scarcely believed. It was as if he had stumbled upon presence by chance, just moments before, and now he was somewhere between a trick of the light that had, by some accident, become a human being, and a man who was on the point of vanishing, his features forming and, at the same time, on the point of melting away.

  He wasn’t an illusion, however. He wasn’t even a ghost. I had never seen him before, but I knew who he was; just as I knew, from what Kyrre had said about him in passing, where he had come from and where, for the time being, he belonged. What I didn’t know was what he was doing there, staring up at our house with an expression that looked like dismay, or disbelief, and I was almost concerned enough to go out to him. I didn’t, though. I could tell that, even though he was staring at the house, he had not seen me and, half concealed and motionless on the landing, I took the opportunity to size him up. He was tall and thin; around thirty, I thought, with pale, sandy hair and gold-rimmed glasses. If Mother had been there, she would have said he was sensitive, or delicate, but to my mind there was more to it than that, something that had to do with my first impression of his being hurt or lost, like some animal that has strayed from its own habitat and finds itself exposed, out on a road among backyards and wire fences and cars, a creature from the woods flushed from its cover, with nowhere to hide. Yes, his face was delicately made, but it really was the delicacy of feature you see in some animals, in deer, say, or foxes. It was a delicacy that came as the natural complement of a worried spirit, the delicacy of someone who was always waiting for something more: waiting, or dreading, or hoping – which, for him at least, was probably much the same thing. In ancient times, there were men who belonged to the horizon – Kyrre told me this once, during one of his stories – and because those men could see further than anyone else, the people made them their lookouts, quiet, abstracted sentinels who knew what was about to come, but never really grasped its importance, watchers of the skies who could report, but never interpret, the patterns in the stars. Martin Crosbie was one of those men.

  I had never seen him before, but I knew he was Kyrre’s summer guest. He had that bemused, abstracted look of the recent arrival and it was quickly evident that he was searching for something to anchor him in this new landscape of water and light, trying to convince himself, not that he belonged so much, as that belonging was at least possible. He needed a way into all this and it must have seemed to him that our house – a house he must have convinced himself he had seen before, in a tourist brochure, or some line drawing in an old guidebook – would supply the focal point to what was, otherwise, nothing more than a dream. What he wanted, in fact, was something he could recognise. I suppose he didn’t know, then, how strong a feeling déjà vu can be in this part of the world, even for people who have lived here all their lives.

  I’d seen that look before, though, more than once. When people come here they can’t quite take it all in: the light, the sky, the deep quiet. When you read about it in a geography book, it doesn’t sound like much: a small island, or rather a string of islands running from Tromsø in the east to Hillesøy in the west, with Kvaløya right in the middle, three islands in one, like a clover leaf. Our southernmost leaf is the most populous. On the map, it looks like an angel in flight, but it is only another island in the Arctic Circle, an unexciting fringe of coastal settlements – Straumsbukta, Skognes, Mjelde, Bakkejord, Sandvik – around a silent, almost deserted heartland of woods and low mountains, populated by herds of elusive, non-native elk, but haunted by something older and less amenable to language. There is one good road that rings the island, running through the straggling, sea-facing settlements and out to the ferry at Brensholmen, or the white beaches at Sommarøy, before it stalls on the mystery of Hillesøy. On Hillesøy you can see reindeer, and our delicate northern orchids, subtler and, to my mind, more beautiful than the exotica you find in florists’ shops. As the summer ends, you can gather cloudberries out on the point; Mother says nothing tastes as fine as those particular cloudberries, just as there is no sight so fine as the northern lights seen from the far side of Hillesøy, where the island turns its back on its dozen or so houses and faces out into the dark.

  For a stranger, though, this place can be overwhelming. It’s not dramatic, or picture-postcard beautiful, like the western fjords, it’s just stark, and empty-seeming and, at night, so still and wide that it can make even the most pragmatic of souls think about spirits. Here, seventy degrees north, it’s not rare for new visitors to spend their first several day
s wondering why they ever came. They had chosen to make the journey, they’d bought tickets for the various ferries or driven two thousand kilometres to rent a primitive hytte from Kyrre Opdahl but, all of a sudden, they don’t know why. While they were planning the journey, while they were on the boat, or coming in to land at Tromsø airport, they had found reasons for coming, reasons they had dreamed up and repeated in casual conversation to make it all seem plausible, but in the white night, in the lull of midnattsol, those reasons have evaporated.

  Which is how it must have been for Martin Crosbie. Everything was unfamiliar and, after the first faint glimmer of recognition, our house turned out to be just as strange as everything else. Nothing was as he’d expected it to be – and, like so many visitors before him, he was beginning to suspect that there was nothing here at all. Kvaløya was a mirage, nothing more; the whole string of islands was an illusion. Standing at our gate that first night, he must have thought he’d made a long, wishful journey for nothing, that he’d travelled all that way just to end up being nowhere. For what seemed a long time, though it was probably no more than two, or maybe three minutes, he stood staring at our house, willing it to be real – and though I should have been clearly visible, right there on the landing in his direct line of vision, it was obvious that he couldn’t see me. For as long as he stood there, he was staring straight at me, yet he saw nothing. Nothing and nobody. Then he turned and walked back along the path, without once looking round – and I couldn’t help thinking that, by the time he got back to Kyrre’s hytte, he would already have begun to suspect that nothing he had seen in his entire life, whether here or anywhere else, was real.

  It’s a summer’s morning. I’ve just been for a long walk, down across the meadows and along the shore and, all the way, I could feel how alone I was, now that everyone else is gone. Of course, Mother is still here, working in the studio as always – perfect, silent, wishing for nothing. She has worked long and hard to achieve that state and, though it might have seemed to the rest of the world that she achieved it long ago, I know that she’s only just arrived there. I know because, even before I knew what I was doing, I have been watching her all my life, and now that I see her clearly, I’m beginning to understand what that achievement cost her. The odd thing, though, is that I am there too, now. I’m in exactly the same place, exactly the same state, and I can seriously say that it has cost me nothing at all. All that happened ten years ago, during our summer of drowning, and almost everything that has happened since, happened to someone else, not to me. The only thing that happened to me was that I chose, one day, to become invisible. Not to go away, like Mats and Harald, or like Martin Crosbie, who travelled so far from home to stage his own, rather theatrical disappearance. No: I have remained in these meadows, on the shores of Malangen Sound, where I have always been, and I have done nothing at all; or nothing other than to choose the life I am living now, a life someone else would think of as close to non-existent. No career, no husband, no lover, no friends, no children. I am not an artist, like Mother, or not in the usual way. I make things perhaps, but they are just things for their own sake, and I wouldn’t ever pretend that I have something to say. I simply look out, over the meadows, over the water, and I pay attention. I can’t remember where I first heard it – I think it might be from Shakespeare – but I do recall being struck by a phrase, a phrase that now has no worldly context for me at all, a fragment drawn from a play or a novel, in which the phrase God’s spies occurs. It’s preposterous, I’m quite ready to admit it, but I cannot help feeling that that phrase describes me perfectly. I am one of God’s spies. I do not believe in God, or not in the usual way, but I do find that I am here for a reason, and that is to keep watch. To pay attention. There was some ancient Mexican tribe whose members took turns each night to watch the sun go down and then waited in vigil through the dark till it returned – and they never assumed that it would, they never took that light for granted. They took turns to stand watch, and they believed that the real reason why the sun reappeared each day wasn’t to do with gravity, or how the earth turned on its axis. They thought it was their attention that drew it back – and I live in that same state of attention, day and night. It is an easy, comfortable attention, and it has no purpose. I’m sure it mystifies Mother, who cannot help but make something new of everything she sees or hears. For my part, though, I have no wish to do anything, no wish to create. I am a witness, pure and simple, an unaffiliated, lifelong spy.

  Back then, though, I was a different kind of spy. In those days, it was people I watched, mostly because they puzzled me. Their desires, their fears, what they wished for and what they hoped to get away with, the stories they told and the stories they chose not to tell – it all puzzled me, and I watched them from a distance, through the binoculars, or my camera lens, because I wanted to understand them. Or, maybe what I wanted to understand was why I wasn’t like them. They were so attached to things that I didn’t see any use for. They took the world so literally, and they seemed to want the things they wanted, not because they really wanted them, but because these things were the prescribed objects of desire. At the time, I suppose, I thought that was what interested me, but it wasn’t the reason for my spying – not really. The reason I watched, the reason I became a spy, was that I thought something was wrong with me, and I wanted to know what it was. I wanted to understand why I didn’t want anything at all.

  That summer, I still thought that spying was a game and I played it because I found people both sad and amusing, especially Kyrre’s guests. Naturally – I was eighteen, after all – I enjoyed the sadness as much, if not even more, than the amusement. I didn’t want to spy on Martin Crosbie, however, not after that first vision of him at our garden gate. I wasn’t sure why, but there was something in his face that made me want to leave him be, some concealed thing that I didn’t understand, but saw quite clearly, even on that first night, when he stood looking up at the window, staring right at me, and seeing nobody. I had no desire to watch from the landing, the next morning, as he walked back and forth between his car and the hytte, bringing in boxes of bottles and groceries. I didn’t want to know what was in the bags he retrieved from the boot of the car, or what books he read. I didn’t want to know anything about him. But I’d been up half the night and I was bored, and it didn’t really feel like spying, when I picked up the binoculars and trained them, first, on the meadows and then, gradually, one yard at a time, moving across the bright tide of summer grass, on Martin Crosbie’s car, standing in the place Kyrre’s van had occupied the day before, its rear door open, the boot and all but the driver’s seat piled high with luggage of various kinds. With the binoculars I could make out some of the contents of the boxes and bags: there was a huge quantity of books, almost as many bottles of various shapes and sizes, a camera bag, a quantity of CDs, and their owner – I knew his name, because Kyrre had said it the day before, when he’d told me about the strange arrangement the man had made, to stay the whole summer – their owner, this Martin Crosbie, was different in the daylight, more alert, and significantly more substantial, than he had seemed in the nighttime. He worked quickly and, even though some of the boxes looked fairly heavy, he carried them easily – and all the time, it seemed, he was talking or singing to himself, the way a child does when it’s occupied and doesn’t think it’s being watched. For as long as it took him to unload the boot, he only stopped once, setting a box down on the roof of the car and pulling out a squat, dark bottle, from which he took a long swig, before moving on. That was the one time he stopped singing, that time when he took a drink, and I could see, through the binoculars, that his face altered for a moment, assuming a serious, even slightly troubled look, as if he were thinking of something that he would have preferred not to remember. A moment later, he was working again, and singing to himself as he went – and I have to confess that, as sentimental as it seems, I felt sorry for him. He was so like a child – so blithe and, at the same time, so determined not to think again
about whatever it was that had troubled him. Finally, when the last box was inside, he closed the car up and locked it – which was absurd, of course, in a place like this – and I didn’t see him again until he emerged about an hour later, got into the car and drove away.

  Three hours passed. I sat on the landing with a pile of books, only glancing up now and then when my attention was drawn to some change in the light, or the slow, stealthy apparition of one of the big cruisers that slide in and out of Tromsø, keeping to the far shore of the Sound and moving silently past the dark, mountainous backdrop of Malangseidet. I wasn’t waiting for Martin Crosbie, I wasn’t spying on him, but I happened to look up as he came back along the track and I didn’t think there was any harm in taking a peek through the binoculars, as he got out and started unloading a new set of bags and boxes from the store at Eidkjosen. It took him several trips to get it all inside: obviously, he’d decided to stock up. Later, when he wasn’t around, and I was interested enough to want to know more about him, I saw what he had bought that day and stacked away in the hytte’s cupboards: dried goods, jars of sild and pickled beets, bottled sauces for cooking, economy packs of rice and pasta, tinned soups and vegetables, film-wrapped packs of Ringnes beer. Practical choices, for someone who wanted a simple life, the kind of thing people have stocked up on for decades, out here, but he had bought other things too – odd, non-essential items that, at that time, struck me as quite touching. A local newspaper and a pile of children’s comics. A box of imported chocolates. A red geranium in a pot – one solitary flourish of colour to brighten the place up a little. And I think he really did believe that would be enough. A sufficiency of tinned food, some treats, a pile of books and CDs, a nice pot plant. That, and a whole summer of peace and quiet. It wouldn’t be long, though, before he admitted to himself that he had no idea what real quiet was, that he wasn’t prepared for the plaintive sounds that seeped in, day and night, through the constant light. No doubt, he’d thought of quiet as something pleasant, a tonic for the soul, a refuge from whatever he had left behind; he hadn’t expected the endless field of murmurs and far-off cries that he had so casually drifted into, like a man wandering haplessly into a house of ghosts, seeing nothing out of the ordinary but troubled, from time to time, by random changes in the atmosphere, fine but significant shifts in the quality of the light and the background noise. It was as if someone had altered the dials by the merest fraction on a radio he had been listening to all his life and, over the next few days, while he hid himself away from the world and I tried to stick to my resolution that I wouldn’t spy on him, he gradually became aware of other voices, other sounds, from some station that, up till then, had never even existed.