For some time after I stopped talking Willie remained silent. I got up and went over to the windows. There was no moon, and the air was sticky and warm; there was not even the slightest breeze to twitch the black fabric of the night.
All these nights, telling Willie about my life and my marriage. What had I accomplished? I had expected to feel liberated, unburdened. But in the end I felt only a deep sadness for myself, and, something which I had not expected, for Robert too.
Something in the dark scrim of the sea flashed in the corner of my eye. I thought I was mistaken, but a second or two later it appeared again.
I turned away from the window. ‘Fancy a stroll on the beach, Willie?’
The sea was quiet, the waves listless. The mansions behind the trees were dark. The sand was still warm from the day’s sun. I set a brisk pace, guided by a faint glow from a fisherman’s hut. The seed of light was as faithful as a mariner’s star. We had gone about fifty paces when I pulled up abruptly.
‘Look – out there in the sea,’ I said.
There was nothing, just dense blackness. Then a patch of blue light flared up in the water. Another patch lit up, followed closely by another, like lightning trapped inside a wall of storm clouds.
‘Goodness,’ Willie said softly.
He was mesmerised, I could tell. ‘You know what’s the best thing for a sticky night like this?’
He caught my meaning instantly. ‘Oh, no. Absolutely not.’
But I was already unbuttoning my blouse and my skirt. They whispered down the length of my body onto the sand, to be joined a moment later by my undergarments. I stood there in the warm, starchy air, completely naked. I didn’t give a flying fig about Willie. Well, he was homosexual, wasn’t he? And anyway, he couldn’t see me clearly in the darkness; even so, I sensed him averting his face and taking half a step away from me.
‘It’s pitch-black out there—’ he began.
‘Oh, stop bleating like an old woman, Willie.’
He took off his clothes, his reluctance palpable even in the darkness. He placed them at his feet and then, naked except for his trepidation, he followed me into the sea.
The water was blood-warm, and I seemed to dissolve into it. It had been a long time since I last swam at night, and I couldn’t help picturing shoals of creatures in the water, circling us in a silent tornado of razor-sharp teeth. Idiot. I pushed those fears away. We breasted far out to sea, the earth sloping away beneath us into valleys and chasms and broad silent plains untouched by the sun since the beginning of the world. I couldn’t make out the coast of the mainland in front of me, couldn’t tell where the sea joined the sky. I turned to look back, but the house and the beach had been folded into a crease of the night. Only the distant, faintest hiss of surf effervescing on sand told me that the land was still there behind us, still existed.
All at once we were swimming in cobalt fire, every kick and stroke igniting the tempests of plankton swirling around us. I laughed, the sound rupturing the quiet, windless night, and then Willie joined me as well. We dunked our heads under the blazing sea and came up again, spluttering fire from our lips. Rivulets of blue flames streamed down Willie’s hair, his face. I touched my own cheek, felt it glowing; I scooped up handfuls of the sea, marvelling at the fire-snakes writhing down my arms. We grinned at each other with stupid, childlike glee. Our naked bodies were visible in the water, but what was there to be embarrassed about? We were nothing more than two insects preserved in amber, after all.
Whenever the fire dimmed, we would scissor our legs and swing our arms, stoking the watery furnace. ‘If we flapped our limbs hard and fast and long enough,’ I said to Willie, ‘do you think we could light up the entire ocean?’
Like an anchor sliding from a ship, I sank beneath the surface of the sea and cleaved my way down, descending in a cocoon of light. Shadowy fishes darted around me. The water grew colder, but still I kept falling, intoxicated by the sensation that I was travelling back in time. Was it because the sea was so unmeasurably old, existing even before the firmaments had been formed to divide the waters from the waters? I was gripped by an atavistic urge to keep sinking, down and ever down into the impenetrable darkness, boring a narrow tunnel of light into the fathomless sea, nebulae burning from my fingertips, comet-fire trailing in my wake. What would happen if I kept falling, all the way to the beginning of time?
A hand gripped my shoulder, jerking me from my spell. Half-turning around, I saw Willie. I was suddenly conscious of the painful band tightening around my chest. I panicked, realising all at once that I was rapidly running out of air.
As though he could see into my thoughts, Willie grabbed my wrist and kicked us upwards, pulling me along. The surface seemed too far away for me to reach in time. My lungs were screaming when, finally, my face burst through the skin of the sea.
I sucked in gluttonous, choking gulps of the warm night air. We treaded water, Willie watching me. His face was illuminated by the glow in the water, but his eyes were hidden inside caverns of shadow.
‘We should head back,’ he said quietly.
‘I’m all right, Willie.’
I lay on my back and floated in the flat, glowing sea. After a moment Willie followed me. That night, side by side, we drifted among the galaxies of sea-stars, while far, far above us the asterisks of light marked out the footnotes on the page of eternity.