Some people think that a breathless hush is the natural state of the universe, as darkness is: that sound is like light, a rebellion of angels, a thin and fierce and ultimately doomed attempt to hold back the crushing weight of utter stillness.
They’re mistaken. White noise is universal, it’s woven into the fabric: the sound of the Big Bang infinitely elastic, infinitely stretched. In the beginning was the Word, and what we hear is still the scratch of God’s pen on the paper as he made it, as he spoke it, as he wrote it.
I hear it, almost, on a daily basis. I sit in the Silence Room in the Lit & Phil, the quietest place I know, where even the books are bound and gagged, tied shut with strong white ribbon; and when I’m alone, when I’m not turning pages, when I listen past my lungs’ breath and my heart’s beat and my belly’s churn, I think I can hear the faintest possible scritching sound, inherent in the air. White noise: but actually this isn’t that everlasting, ever-fading echo of the slam of all existence. This is something entirely other, contained within walls, within covers. Books telling their own damn stories. I swear to you, it’s true. Go in, sit down, sit quiet, you can hear it for yourselves. It’s there, it’s always there; it’s the sound of all those books. Rewriting.
Death is a deception, it’s a trick. It’s a game that books play. What do they know? They want to keep everything, unchanging and for ever. They take what is liquid, mutable, permeable, life; and then they fix it like a dye, set solid. Historically, what are the three most scary words in the language? It is written. You can’t argue with that.
But the rules change, surely, when the books rewrite themselves. Somewhere—downstairs, probably, on a shelf in the Silence Room—there’s a book that’s rewritten the border between life and death, unless it just scribbled something illegible in the margin. Like this:
It was a Saturday morning, and I was alone, content, down there at the large table with my back turned to the room. I had charts spread out before me, and an ocean in my head. That afternoon I’d have the real thing beneath my keel, and I ached for it already; but out there, quite often I would ache for this. When a man can measure his happiness coming and going, he should probably be grateful.
What’s good can always be lost, or broken, or taken away: by our own carelessness, by other people’s clumsiness, by envy or greed or disregard.
The door opened, at my back.
There were two of them, I could hear that in their footsteps. Both male, I thought: the length of their strides or the sounds of their shoes, perhaps the timbre of their breathing. One was older than the other. By a distance, by a generation.
I heard the squeak of chairs at one of the little alcove-tables, and turned back to my papers.
Then I heard another kind of noise: not incidental, not the haphazard sounds of bodies in motion. Steady, irregular, deliberate.
And familiar, and I didn’t believe it. I still didn’t turn to look, but I listened, and was sure. Those were the sounds of chessmen being set out on a board. And this was the Silence Room, it says so on the door, they must have seen; and it is impossible to play chess silently.
I didn’t turn, but my back was stiff with outrage. They paid no heed. They played, and every move was an offence; and soon—of course!—they started talking.
It’s not conversation, exactly, but talking always counterpoints the play. Some moves have to be discussed, some lingered over like a line of beauty. And this was an older man and a boy, a youth, so the game was a lesson also. The boy had that abrupt, husky teenage way of talking, stumbling over his words; it jarred me every time he spoke.
I could have swept up my papers and stalked out. Perhaps I should have done; hindsight aches for me to do it, for another me to have another chance. Matthew, I’m sorry. Look, I’ll go, and all things will be different for all of us, amen…
I didn’t move, though. Even that would have been a statement, an accusation, awkward for everybody. I stayed, they played, I seethed and nothing further happened until the older man left the room in the middle of their game. He might have been fetching coffee, he might have been visiting the toilet. It didn’t matter. He was gone; and some imp of the perverse felt it right that, just as the door swung closed at his back, the boy’s mobile phone should ring.
Then I did swivel round in my chair, I was too blindly angry to keep still. The boy knew; he was already looking in my direction, even as his hands fumbled for the phone.
“Sorry…”
“If you were sorry,” I said, “you wouldn’t answer it.”
He flushed, suddenly and thoroughly; and glanced down at the phone, stabbed it with a finger, lifted it to his ear. Hunched over it as though that would help, and muttered, “I’m in the library.”
Something in that, the flush or the defiance melted my anger in a moment. All the pent-up rage flooded out of me, leaving me hollow and brittle and defenceless. Then I did have to move; I slipped out and went walking through the library. I went to old friends, old books, sailors and travellers: Hakluyt’s Voyages, Ibn Battutah.
When I went back down, when I could face it, the older man was packing chess-pieces into their box. The boy was standing by my table, looking at the charts and my own notes where I had left them.
He saw me and flushed again. “What are these?”
Earlier today, any other day, I might have been angry. Now I was past that, in unknown territory. “Nautical charts,” I said. “Soundings, landmarks, everything a sailor needs to know. These are contemporary; that one’s three hundred years old. Well, you can see,” the paper crumbling at its edges.
“Are you a sailor, then?”
“Yes, I am. Don’t touch that.”
It came out perhaps sharper than I meant. He snatched his hand back as though I’d burned his fingers. So then I had to give him balm, a little. “No harm, only that it’s fragile.” It’s odd how possessive you can be, towards what is not your own. Tom Turner’s chart was mine by rights of intimacy; I knew it better than any man alive, I knew it the way you know your lover’s skin, their every expression, the rhythms of their voice overheard on someone else’s phone. Soon I hoped to know the chart better yet, from the inside.
“So why do you bother with it? The new ones are better, yeah?”
I confronted the intricacies of explaining that marriage of art and craft and science to a teenager, and sighed. “The new ones are more accurate, of course. GPS, satellite imaging, they’re exact. But this is beautiful, and it’s the work of a sailor, not a machine. This is real mapping, drawn to a human scale, one man’s expression of his world and its dangers. It’s the original, not an engraving; look, you can see the pen-strokes, sometimes you can see the pencil-lines beneath.”
He wasn’t interested in pencil-lines. “What dangers?”
Did he really know so little? I took a breath to tell him, but the older man interrupted.
“Leave it, Matthew. You’re not meant to talk in here.” And then he nodded at me, and walked out. The boy blushed one more time, mumbled something incoherent and was gone.
The next week, they were back. This time, the boy Matthew came straight over to my table. I had to glance up then; he smiled, put a finger to his lips, set something down by my elbow.
It was his mobile phone. He left it there like a promise, look, no calls today. Or it could have been a more aggressive message, look, it’s in your hands now, up to you not to answer it if it rings.
I fairly swiftly gave up any hope of working, and went to watch the chess.
The old man frowned up at me once. Matthew didn’t lift his head. His determination not to was so obvious, he reminded me of me.
Halfway through the second game, the old man left us abruptly, without explanation, as was his apparent habit. As the door closed behind him, I said, “I haven’t the faintest idea what to do if it rings, you know. Except throw it at your head, obviously.”
“No worries. I switched it off.”
“Thank you, then. Though you’re not supposed to be playing chess in here either.”
“I know, but he won’t be told. Thing is, he hates it when people come up and comment, criticise, make suggestions—”
“Uh-huh. While he’s gone, then—pawn to king’s bishop five.”
“Eh?”
“Here.” I showed him, on the board. “Just a suggestion.”
“Yeah, but—he’ll take it, won’t he?”
“Yes, of course.”
“So what am I supposed to do next?”
“You’re supposed to work that out for yourself.” I gave him back his own smile from earlier and left him to it.
I sat with a book in my hand and listened to the gameplay. I heard him make that sacrifice, and how he used it to queen another unregarded pawn, and how he won the game thereafter at a merciless canter. I heard the triumph in him; I heard the moment when he remembered I was listening, when he wondered suddenly if I’d give us both away.
Not I. I sat quiet, and he came across to scoop his phone up as they left, and neither one of us said a word.
The third time, he came in alone. He laid his phone down at my side, and then he said, “Grandad can’t come today, he’s sick.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Would you, would you like a game?”
I could have said my work was too important. But that would have been to say that he wasn’t important enough: true, perhaps, but cuttingly unkind. Besides, it was working on me again, that gawky charm of the adolescent, the way he laid himself open for the rebuff.
So I said yes when I shouldn’t have, I broke a silence where it mattered most, and of us all, I’ve paid the least price for it. Betrayal can be like that.
Chess is a bridge between strangers, between generations. Get them talking, and everything’s fair game.
Sometimes the less people say, the more they tell you. Matthew went to school, he went home. He spent time with his grandfather. He didn’t want to talk about his parents, nor much about his life. He didn’t really want to talk at all. Rather, he wanted to listen. He wanted to hear about my boat; he wanted to know why I spent my Saturday mornings in here with dusty old charts and books, when I might have been out on the water.
“Look,” I said, setting the chessboard aside and reaching for that despised paperwork, “here’s Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot, published in 1693. A naval captain called Greenville Collins spent seven years charting the entire coast line. It’s our first detailed, practical survey; it changed inshore navigation for everyone. But look, look here…”
I showed him the chart of our own waters, and let him find the problem for himself.
“There’s a bit missing,” he said. “What happens here?”
There is, indeed, a bit missing. A neat blank square a mile offshore and two miles on a side, where even the rhumb-lines and the bearings break off, where Collins has delineated emptiness. It’s unique, throughout the forty-seven charts of the survey.
“The most dangerous rocks on this coast,” I told Matthew, “that’s what happens there. They’ve been wrecking ships since Roman times. People around here call them the Silences.”
“So why didn’t he, you know…?”
“Chart them? Because sailors are superstitious folk, and those rocks have an evil reputation. It’s a known hazard, and every captain tries to steer clear; but they say it’s like the Sirens, something lures them in regardless. You know about the Sirens?”
He nodded. “We did Odysseus in school. The sailors stuck wax in their ears.”
“They wouldn’t do it here. Collins’ crew simply refused to go near the Silences, they came close to mutiny. Hence this absence. A local fisherman, Tom Turner, made and printed his own chart, here, but that’s drawn from observation more than measurement. Tom was a sailor, not a surveyor. If you compare his plan to this, from the Admiralty, which is put together from satellite photos, you can see how inaccurate he was.”
Matthew nodded uncertainly.
“I want to make my own chart of the Silences,” I said. “I want to do it Collins’ way, using his instruments.”
“Aren’t you scared?”
“Rocks are only dangerous if you’re careless. The Admiralty charts are quite clear about depths, currents, the shoals that are hidden at high tide. Though I’ll tell you what’s interesting, they had to rely on satellite imaging because GPS doesn’t work around the Silences. There’s some magnetic anomaly that interferes.”
“No,” he said, “I meant, aren’t you scared of the Sirens?”
“Would you be?”
He shook his head, grinning, suddenly all cocksure boy. And then someone else came into the room, and we had to move or else stop talking. He helped me carry all those papers across the corridor to where there was a larger table and permission to speak, and somewhere in the shift and flurry of it all either he begged or I offered, I truly can’t remember which. Either way, a day’s sailing was the prize.
“Not without your parents’ permission, mind.”
“They won’t care.”
“Even so, I’d better come and meet them.”
Another shake of the head, this one quite urgent. “Talk to Grandad. Next week, if he’s better. He’ll be in.”
He was better, he was in; we did speak. In the Silence Room, naturally. When sin slides into habit, that’s when you’d best beware. Careless talk costs lives.
I said, “I’ll just give him a day’s run, see if he likes it. I’ll undertake to bring him back wet, cold, filthy, smelly, starving, exhausted and intact.”
That was good enough. The following Saturday I found Matthew waiting by the kerb outside his house, chewing his nails with doubt of me. He brightened in a moment, jumped into the car and said, “Did you bring any wax?”
“Wax?”
“For the Sirens.”
“Oh. No, not today. We’re not going near the Silences.”
“Aren’t we? I thought…”
He’d thought we were heading for adventure, danger, high risk on the high seas. I disabused him.
“Today, we sail in circles. Well, triangles, largely. Way out, where we can’t hit anything. You’ll learn the ropes, you’ll learn to say ‘aye aye, skipper,’ you’ll make mistakes by the yard, and by the time I bring you back, you’ll have learned how to sail. Next time we go out, you’ll still make mistakes, but at least you’ll know what they are.”
I was deliberately making it sound like school. He sulked, a little, but that blew away as we came down into the marina.
“Which one’s yours?”
“There.” I pointed along the floating jetty. “Sophonisba.”
“She’s enormous,” he said, in the tones of someone who’d been looking for disappointment, and hadn’t found it. I hid a smile and said, “Big for one, certainly.”
“I really will be a help, then?”
“Oh, yes. You really will. Not today, though. Today you’ll just be a nuisance.”
He grinned contentedly and followed me as I opened her up and showed him over, stem to stern. Then I tossed him my spare waterproofs and said, “Turn off your mobile, before you zip them up. Sailing’s about getting away from all of that, being out of touch.”
“You mean it’s about the silences,” he said.
If he thought that, he’d never been to sea without an engine, but I knew that already. He had a whole new world of sounds to learn, from the creaking song of rigging under strain to the slap and hiss of waves against the hull to the half-human cry of a gull over deep water.
Me too, though, I had my own learning to do that day, my introduction to the teenage wall of sound. The groans and curses I’d expected, but not the sudden yelps and whoops, nor the singing in a breathy monotone, nor the jokes, the jabber, the utter inability to keep quiet.
We tacked back and forth until he was comfortable with the sheets and stays and winches. Then I let him take the tiller, while we went around again. He didn’t raise a protest when I decided that was enough, and turned for home; he saved that for later, once we’d moored, when I introduced him to the mop and bucket.
I took him home in the state that I’d promised, drained and overloaded both at once. As he stepped out of the car I said, “Next weekend, then? Up for it?”
“You bet,” he said, with as much relief as anticipation. “Thanks, skipper.”
Saturdays, we played chess and sailed; Sundays we sailed and played chess. After a month I decided he was ready, we were ready, captain and crew. Next week, the Silences.
We started early, in perfect weather, a steady offshore wind and a smooth, swift sea. I offered Matthew the tiller; as he came to take it I saw wires dangling from his ears, disappearing into a pocket.
“What are you listening to?”
“Oh—my new phone. Birthday present. Doubles up as an MP3, it’s brilliant.”
“Not on my boat, if you don’t mind.”
“Well, but it’s too early to talk. And I can still hear you…”
“Even so. Turn it off, please.”
His face was foul, but he did as I asked. And took the tiller, checked the course, did everything he ought to. Best leave him to it, I thought, show some confidence and let the wind blow the temper out of him. I made my way forward, settling into the bows where I could watch for trouble and eventually for the Silences.
At last there were nubs on the horizon that were not other yachts’ sails. I called out and pointed.
“Where?” he asked, trying to peer past the mainsail.
“Fine off the starboard bow. Come see; I’ll take the helm.”
“Aye aye, captain.”
I watched him scurry forward, then came about onto the other tack. We’d sail by on the seaward side, to give us both a good look, before we came back inward.
As always, the breakers were easier to spot than the rocks themselves, a sudden stitching of white water in a grey swell. The Silences lay low in the water, but there were no savage currents to beware of, no tidal suck; it was hard to understand their reputation. I took plenty of sea-room none the less, running no risks with my beloved Sophonisba. We’d need to be closer on the return leg; at this distance I could barely distinguish rock from spray.
I murmured as much to Matthew at my side. And turned my head for his reaction, and of course he wasn’t there, he was all the way forward. I felt as though I had fallen through an unseen door. There was no one in the cockpit with me—and yet for a moment there had been no question about it, an absolute presence.
I couldn’t recapture that brief certainty, any more than I could understand it. Let it go, then; stranger things happen at sea. I glanced forward, and saw Matthew coming.
Matthew frowning, puzzled, a little upset. As he jumped down beside me, I saw those earphone cables again.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. Sorry. But I was on my own up there, just looking, and—well, I thought it needed a soundtrack, that’s all. It’s no good without music. Listen, though, just listen…”
I thought the world made its own soundtrack, but I wasn’t sixteen. He held out one of those earphones, gesturing, impatient for me to share. Reluctantly, I listened.
Nothing.
Or no, not nothing: white noise. A steady swish and slurr of interference, the echo of God’s heartbeat.
“I think your gadget’s broken.”
“Only it’s new, and it was working fine, and then it just went…”
New toys do just go, sometimes; but I looked at him and remembered what he was clearly remembering, something I’d said before.
“Take the tiller, I’ll go and see what’s what.”
Down in the cabin, no little lights glowed on any of my expensive equipment. No GPS, no radio, no radar.
No warnings, and no way to cry for help. We were on our own.
On our own in clear weather, open water, not a worry in the world. I glanced back out at Matthew and saw him startle as he looked aside, as though he was looking for someone he knew was there and then not finding them.
I did that, I thought.
“Not your phone,” I told him. “It’s all out, all the electronics.”
“You said, that’s what GPS does around here.”
“I know I said it. That doesn’t mean I believed it. Are you happy to go on?”
He shrugged. “You’re the skipper.”
That meant yes, for God’s sake, why not? with a subtext of I don’t suppose you will. I surprised him, then; I didn’t let him down. I just nodded, and took the tiller.
Sophonisba was still sailing sweetly, over a sea like glass in motion. The Silences were a presence, but no threat; I wanted to be closer, to see them better, to sketch their profiles from the seaward side. Half a dozen times I caught myself letting her drift in towards the rocks, half a dozen times I nearly sent the boy for a pad and pencils. Each time I checked the motion, checked the words before I was committed to them. In honesty, I didn’t want to speak. There was a hush to the air, to the moment, that words would only spoil.
A moment stretched, not ended, becomes momentum. A word not spoken gives us impetus. We ran by the rocks, and it was the easiest thing in the world to throw the tiller over, to gybe, to let her headway bring her around and all the way around, until the sail could catch the wind again and take us back down inside that line of rocks. Sailing can be like that sometimes, where wind and water seem to be unusually willing. Here there might have been currents after all in air and sea together, circling the Silences as a storm circles its dead centre, drawing a path that we could follow.
Between rocks and coast there was room to tack and turn, there was water enough beneath the keel, but a good sandy bottom within the anchor’s reach. Now we weren’t sailing, we were surveying. We dropped anchor half a mile off the northernmost rock, and established our position as best we could by landmarks and estimate, by telescope and eye. Then we turned towards that chain of rocks and I took bearings on each of them with an authentic period compass, calling the numbers for Matthew to write down.
Surveying by running traverse is a technique as old as the compass rose, and we had practised it up and down the coast till we could do it without thinking. Suddenly, though, it was hard to keep focus. Water sang past the hull, urging us to movement; wind whispered in the shrouds like a summoning, like a question, why the delay?
Only the rocks were patient, and they needed to be. Perhaps they could afford to be. My eye kept shifting, caught by a spume of water flinging high or the eerie stillness in the lee of a rock. My mind drifted another way, into fancies. I thought I heard footsteps aboard Sophonisba, out of my sight. I thought I heard cries on the wind, greetings and questions, as one sailor might call to another across a gulf of sea. There were other boats in the corners of my vision, that were only gulls or clouds or nothing when I looked. I could see the same effect in Matthew, the way he shied suddenly and stared around and couldn’t concentrate.
I didn’t talk to him about it. I didn’t want to talk at all. My own voice sounded harsh and alien here, calling numbers; his was an untuned string, a dull vibration, flat and grating.
At last we were done here. We could weigh and set sail, reckoning speed against the clock to know how far we went before we let the anchor go again at the southernmost point of the Silences. That was hard; there was such a temptation to let her run, to come about on that helpful wind and work up the seaward side again, closer in this time…
But I turned her head into the wind, all the air spilled from her sails, Matthew dropped the hook and we were there, with all the work to do again, bearings to be taken on the same rocks from this new position. Later I could mark those two positions on a chart, draw in all the bearings, and where each pair crossed should be definitive, this rock stands here.
Find the rocks, take the reading, cry it out. Listen for the boy to call it back—but how much more you hear in the emptiness behind his voice, how hard it is to care for what you tell him, or for what he says…
Was it him who moved to draw the anchor up, or did I send him to it? Were we finished, had I checked my figures, or did I skimp the work?
Did we have an argument, or did I dream it later, whether we should sail round those rugged rocks again? She was my boat and I was captain, but did he win against the odds, to take us southerly, homeward, away?
I don’t know, I can’t remember. I know that the sun was setting and I was on the tiller, I could see the city’s lights tainting the sky ahead which meant that it was later than I liked, later than I could understand. He was trimming the sails, quiet and confident; on that thought he glanced back at me in the cockpit and said, “So when do I get to go solo, skipper?”
“You don’t.”
“Oh, why not? She’s built for one to handle, and I can do it, you know I can…”
“The insurance is in my name. She can’t go to sea without me. Sorry.”
He groaned and sighed and made faces, as he ought; and then he said, “So how’s about that night sail you promised?”
He was right, I had promised him stars and moonlight and the extraordinary potency of the sea at night. We settled on the following weekend; then he dropped onto the bench beside me. “What happened back there, that was really weird, wasn’t it? Or was it just me…?”
“Not you,” I assured him. “I think you coped better than I did.”
He shrugged. “They are haunted, those rocks. The old sailors knew. We should’ve listened.”
“We did listen. Once we got there. But I think the Silences listened back.”
That was how it felt, at least to me: that they were attentive, interested, listening. I thought he was wrong, though, it wasn’t the rocks that were haunted. The rocks just were. It was the water, the wind, the liminal world about them that held more than it ought to. If there are ghosts, that’s where they abide, in the shift between state and state, that blur where you can’t say this is water and this is air or this is life and this is death, that was then and this is now…
I didn’t say any of that to Matthew. We were better being quiet, I thought, each of us finding our own place to stow what had happened for mulling over later. Or for rejecting later as a fancy of the day, the rocks’ reputation, a desire to be impressed. Strange things happen at sea, but they happen inside our heads as much as they do on the water.
It was full dark before we berthed in the marina. When we were done cleaning up, Matthew reached into his pocket with a half-smile that might have been wider if the day hadn’t been so pressing. Still, he was a boy, he’d prepared this, he loved it; he said, “I’ve got a present for you,” and handed me his old mobile phone.
I gazed at it blankly. “I don’t use these things.”
“I know, but you should. I want you to. Look, we can play chess,” and he touched a key and the panel lit up, already primed, P—KB3. “We can text moves to each other, see? I’ll show you how. And if you never tell anyone the number, then you’ll know it’s me, every time it rings.”
And clearly he wanted me to think this was a good thing. I thought his loneliness was showing, brighter than I’d seen it before; so I let him teach me how to text, and how to make a call and answer one. Then he gave me the charger, jumped on his bike and was gone. I sent a message after him—P—QB3—to await arrival, and locked the boat up. Checked the spare key was still hanging on its line below the water—and no, I didn’t really think the ghosts had taken it; I always check, it’s a neurosis—and then I headed home. Thinking about ghosts, already finding ways to rationalise.
Halfway back, the phone beeped. In Morse, SMS, twice. I ignored it. Five minutes later it rang properly. I sighed, pulled over, picked it up.
“Hullo, Matthew.”
“Did you get my text?”
“Yes.”
“Only you haven’t sent your next move. Aren’t you going to bring the queen out? You always bring the queen out.”
“One of these days I’ll surprise you. But right now, I’m driving.”
“Oh. Right. Sorry…”
It wasn’t just a lesson in his loneliness, it was a lesson in his youth; at a guess, no one else he might call would have a licence, let alone a car.
When I got home, I sent him the move he expected. And spent the rest of the evening answering his texts, his moves, at five minute intervals. When I wanted to go to bed, I realised that he hadn’t told me how to turn the damn thing off. I phoned him to ask; he just giggled, and said goodnight.
A couple of nights later, I did have a good night, I had a really good night. Until that damn phone started up. I apologised, didn’t answer it, promised to leave it at home in future. Presumptuous of me, she hadn’t promised me a future; but she only quirked an eyebrow, and asked if I couldn’t turn it off.
“I don’t know how,” I confessed. “He won’t tell me.”
So then of course I had to explain, and she pealed with laughter and took it from me and nor would she tell me how to turn it off, but she did switch it onto silent running.
“Vibrator effect,” she said. “So you’ll know, but it won’t bother me.”
And a couple of nights after that, I had to phone Matthew and cancel our night sail on Saturday.
“But you promised…!”
“I know I did, and I’m sorry, but something’s come up.”
“Well, get out of it.”
“I don’t want to.” I might have lied, of course, but it was just too much trouble. “This is too good to get out of.”
“Oh, what is it, then, a woman?”
“Yes.”
That silenced him, but only momentarily. He was passionate, he was furious, he was almost tearful and pleading; mostly, I thought, he was jealous. Deep-down, fiercely jealous. He would not be placated, I would not be moved; we both said some harsh things before I hung up on him.
I regretted that, of course, the way you do. Not enough to call him over the next few days, but enough to keep the phone charged up and close at hand. It was still and silent all week, until the Saturday. Saturday evening, when for him we should have been out at sea already, watching the stars appear and hoping for the Northern Lights; when in fact I was in my bedroom, trying to decide what to wear.
I was running late already, I didn’t want another confrontation; it was my turn to be resentful, that he should try to elbow his way into my evening. I threw the phone onto the bed, and ignored it.
It rang three or four times, in the half-hour that I took to get ready. That felt deliberately intrusive. When I went out, I deliberately left the phone behind.
And had a good, a very good time, and so I guess did she. At all events, she came back home with me. I left her in the living room with Miles Davis and the Macallan, while I made that traditional hasty scour of the bedroom, changing the sheets and hiding what else must be hidden.
And there was the phone, and the screen showed half a dozen calls from Matthew; and I suppose this was part of the scouring, to sit on the bed and listen, not to leave unfinished business hanging over what lay between here and morning.
Half a dozen calls, but only one message on the voicemail. He sounded faint and frightened, far away. He said, “I’m sorry, skipper. Really, I am. I was, I was angry with you, and I thought I could manage her on my own. I didn’t mean to come this far. I don’t know what happened, I got too close and I couldn’t see the rocks but I don’t think she hit anything, she just turned over. I’m, I’m up under the hull and I can’t get out. I called for help, I tried to call you and then I called my grandad, and he told the coastguard. I think I heard a helicopter one time, but I guess it didn’t see us. It’s gone now. And my battery’s going, and then it’s going to be all dark in here, and I’m so cold already, I can’t keep my legs out of the water and I don’t, I don’t think anyone’s going to come…”
They didn’t find Sophonisba till the morning, drifting keel-up off the Silences. They never found Matthew at all. His body should have been there, trapped inside the yacht’s hull, but it wasn’t. Perhaps he tried to swim out, in the end. They say that bodies are seldom recovered from the rocks there, something in the current holds them under.
It doesn’t matter much to me, where his body is. He won’t need that again.
Nor do I think the rocks have him, in any sense that matters. Rocks have no reach, no stretch beyond themselves. All their strength looks inward.
I looked for Matthew on my boat, when they gave her back to me. That they couldn’t find him, didn’t mean he wasn’t there. I even sailed her, when she was fit for it, back up to the Silences. I called his name into the wind, but he didn’t show. Why would he?
I sold the boat, in the end. She had nowhere left to take me; and I didn’t lose Matthew, in losing her. I take him with me, everywhere I go.
I still keep the phone charged up, as he told me to. I keep it in my pocket, mostly. Always set to vibrate, to silent mode. That way it needn’t disturb anyone but me, in the Silence Room or elsewhere, anywhere.
Mostly, it keeps silent on its own account. Sometimes, though, quite often, it does shiver into life; and I do answer it, every time. At night, I keep it beneath my pillow and I sleep alone, so that if it wakes me, I can pick it up.
I’m too much of a coward to ignore it. I’m afraid that if I do, I’ll find another message on the voicemail. I don’t want that. I’d rather be here for him, every time he calls. I’d rather listen to his silence, to his listening: white noise, the hissing attention of the universe, that slow dragging pulse of nothing that—when you listen, when you wait, when you give it long enough, as I have—pounds in your head like surf over shingle, like breakers on a rock, all the surge and suck of the sea.