Until now I have only seen a blue like this in a stained-glass window. You know the trick: you’re looking up at a window, so-called, though it doesn’t let in much light – for a window. It’s in some trendy, modern abstract mode so there’s a lot of near-opaque, dark stuff and then – a punch of colour through the murk, a crimson, blood-gout red, pulsing at you out of the void. Life! it grins gleefully. Coming to get you!
And higher up, there’ll be a blotch of unapologetic green: holly green, old and knowing green, swimming along about its own mulchy business and then, way, way up there, a cobalt, mineral but alive, shock-charged with utter blue; the heavens in a bleb of glass.
Here the sea has caught exactly that vivid, lucent colour. Between this shoreline and the island opposite, and around to the right – the passage out to Scotland – the sea is a thoroughfare of blue, bright as enamel, shivering like a pelt. I fill my eyes with it, against next winter’s dearth.
We sit in Davy’s conservatory: tea, cake, the amazing springtime sea beyond the glass. We were boys together and I listen as Davy and his mother talk. They both have it, that gift of conjuring pictures. I see another house that Davy has his eye on, a house in a seaside town, not remote like this. I see a sketched-out, post-retirement life. I see the double-fronted desirability, the good sense. Davy at eighteen, circumspect. Davy at forty-eight, shrewd.
Let me adore all efforts of this kind: this planning to be content. I adore as a man does who is amazed at a thing he can’t really comprehend.
As I leave, Davy’s mother sparks up about my uncle. He lived a few miles away. With the frankness of age, she says of him, Odd wee man. Aye.
His house was comfortless: a bilious green inside, with him sputtering around in it, a hampered, frightened spirit, hoping that jokes would do the trick. What trick? Learning to live? Like the failing comedian, doomed to ridicule or the forced laugh, he was an embarrassment; never learning how the others get it right; damaged from the start. To be with him was to be with death because he tried so frantically to keep death at bay that there was hardly room to think of anything else. He favoured jerky callisthentics and long walks that took him out past Davy’s house. Did nobody ever give him just a hint at how to live? But it gets so that nobody knows where to start. So much to undo before you could build it up again.
It takes some nerve to take a stand, I think, to take a stand and… but the roof of a car is glimpsed, higher than the hedges, and here are the Missouri Yanks Davy has been expecting. How large they are in fawn chinos and roomy polo shirts. How thrilled and – yes – only just arrived at the place and they’re enquiring if Davy’s holiday let is for sale. Well. They’re planning content. The woman hugs a pile of sheets that Davy’s mother gives her. She beams. A rental week of bliss. They’re planning content.
I think (as they mistake the Polish gardener for Davy’s brother), I think: it takes some nerve to take a stand and take a risk and say: You’re wrong. Don’t. Don’t do it. Don’t (whatever the thing you’re trying to tackle is) – don’t keep us all at bay with quips and riddles; don’t jog in your track suit in the kitchen while you’re talking – you’re as doomed as the rest of us; don’t think we can’t see that you don’t know how to let anyone love you – I think that would be brave.
Other people’s wounds. I used to think it went like this: wounds are displayed, pity evoked, poultice applied. But now I wonder if there should be a calling out – like Lazarus from the tomb; a summoning up of serum from within so that the wounded learn to live from deep within themselves. It’s someone else’s voice that calls but….
Parp! The Americans’ huge car slots into place beside The Salt Bay door. Davy has made a ruin into a nest, tucked into the black, shallow steps of rock that face east. Such a view! The edge of Ireland’s north, and Scotland seeming touchable, out at sea. And such a story. To this spot the Sons of Uisneach were lured by the false promise of a king from the sad safety of exile in Scotland, and Deirdre of the Sorrows stepped ashore among them, equally duped, equally hoping against hope. The Americans are practically fainting with awe; itching, I bet, to send the news back home. Davy’s mother urges blankets For the nights are cold yet. Davy’s quick to say, Central Heating as he leads them to the door.
Such a harsh remedy here, before. He’ll be telling them the story there inside. How, two hundred years ago, that sea, that glinting, element they’re gazing at, was rendered to astringency in the salt pans out of doors: natural basins formed in these shelves of rock. Fevers and madness were swathed in salty, saturated sheets and plunged in the whirlpool’s maw – yes, a whirlpool, out there beyond. Don’t cross those rocks at night! he’ll joke, not joking. Aye. They’d tie the patient to a chair then lower it, down into the rocky void.
Gee, why?
Well, he’ll say, who knows, but would YOU be thinking about your symptoms in circumstances like those? A shock to the system. Frightening the patient back to life, d’ye think?
As a boy, I used to teeter on that brink, watching the churning suck-hole far below. Even to look was brave. But I’m on a lawn now. Safe. These gardens are a marvel: nooks and sunny spots and all the flowers that can live in such salty air. What an amount of work has gone into this, creating a pleasurable place.
The air is cooling in the swift spring twilight and the sea is navy. It ripples heavily like a bolt of serge unfurled across a counter for inspection.
Going to see my uncle – it was a penance. You’d see the curtains twitch in the house of death. He might or might not answer. You’d have to step over the gate because he kept it locked. The neighbours’d be looking, the kids in the street calling out, astonished, Mammy! There’s a man going in! The door would open just a chink and there’d a chain-lock on. But once you were inside he’d be fizzing with manic energy, keen to show off his bargains – multiple tins of soup or how much money he’d made from burning all the family photos and selling the albums. If he stopped, he’d die. Did he even sleep? He’d pull you down if you didn’t keep your head.
That’s my father’s family. Quick to laugh, if that’s what they thought would get them by, but it struggled to reach the wary eyes. People who were always alert, knowing they were begrudged what good they got; ready to be snarled at and turned on, expecting the rebuff and the put-down. No repartee from them apart from the clinker of stored-up wrongs. Planning survival, not content.
There’s laughter from The Salt Bay and hosts and guests emerge. The Yanks are beaming. Up they get into the vast car and away for supplies. I take my leave by the door that gives onto the beach where the whirlpool lurks.
From all around, colour has drained away. Ahead, the island, like a stencil on a wall, presents itself in blocks of black. The strand to the left is grey; the village it leads to, a dark mass on its promontory; beyond that, a silvery veil of sky with a hem of cold light touching the sea. I climb up on to the rickety wooden walk-way that leads out to the whirlpool, over boulders and gaps. As a child, the thrill! It was a Walk To Doom, clinging to the one hand rail, daring to glance down between the cracks in the boards at the wavelets darting and retreating below. And then, a leap, to land on the great outcrop itself, a hardened, burnt-brown, pitted honeycomb of rock, thwarting every step. And the sound! A booming, threshing growl from somewhere underneath suddenly bursting up through the dark mass as a jet of white spray, grabbing the air and falling back, defeated – this time. There would always be a next!
But not for us. I know that now. There is a photograph of me as a toddler standing at this spot. I frown, all pudgy in my little bathing trunks. I frown. My hand is in my father’s hand. That’s all of him that the photo shows, his hand and arm. He’s long, long dead.
That swaying sensation at the brink. You know?
Down in the chamber the sea rushes in and funnels and spins and races out and away, a chain of demons, roaring: Face your worst fears, old friend. Face us and live. Hold back and die. Such a seductive choir. I could just go, let go, give in and cease. My heavy head could droop, tipping the balance and I’d fall, slowly….
Throw me a rope, haul up on my chair! I must not drown. Must I?
Which do you fear more: sickness or health? the demons cackle and sneer.
I teeter on the edge. Fling me out now! Be merciless. Kindness can kill, keeping everything unchanged. Let the sea salt my wounds. Then, with clear eyes, I will plan my content. I will!
Who am I babbling to? Myself? I turn to look at the way I’ve come. The cliff that backs the strand is enormous, looming, and the sky above it starless and cold. The waves discuss the beach, over shingle, endlessly but they can’t be seen. The hole behind me chuckles and thuds. I baulk at the journey back across those rocks. Then a sudden tiny brightness flares, low down by the shore, like a mercury-silver gash in the darkest of glass panes. Life! it giggles. Coming to get yooooo! The Yanks home for the night.
I have to laugh, stranded here, between that hole at my back and that cosiness ahead! And I have to laugh at myself, as I go, slipping and wavering, cursing and sploshed. Very heroic. I pitch forward and shells slit and skin my hand. Instinctively to the mouth it goes. A salty tang. Blood and sea.
When I make it off the rocks I sit down and I sob. It has to go. What? What has to go? The family skin. I have to zip it off, stepping out of it somehow. I must unwrap myself, calling myself out of the devil’s maw. That’s no name for yer Granny! my uncle’s voice quips instantly, quick to belittle anything serious, anything real. Cover it up, quick, quick, or we’re all done for. The thing is never to look and see, he advises, nervily.
No. I must look. I must see. I must choose Life that’s coming to get me. Silly and tragic.
Waving in the darkness, Davy’s daft, doomed, beautiful, pale, what-the-hell roses reach for the shore over his garden wall.