At new moon and full moon, high tides have always ravaged this southern shore, back beach and front beach alike, and this year the last of the winter king tides has been dragging on into September, in the wake of the spring equinox. Storms and dark days of heavy swell have sent the waves smashing over the bluestone seawall, breaching it, flooding; a slab of the cliff face has slid off overnight, cracked in half like a biscuit; the little wooden pier by the lighthouse has kept disappearing, lurching, reappearing from under a weight of water; and the ocean swell always licking away at the dunes has been wolfing them down lately, undermining them, dragging out post-and-wire fences and making sandslides, scouring the ropy roots of the marram grass. When at last the day dawns, when the sky and sea are silent and the sun is out, a sparkling stillness has fallen on the town overnight, a sense of aftermath, a salt haze to the horizon. A stillness, suspended. At low tide the rock shelf at the headland falls open and steaming under a knitted brown hide of bladderwrack sleek with wet. More bladderwrack lies rotting in mounds along the waterline, and black bull kelp with tough shanks and claws, holdfasts, some shod in stone.
As on any other fine day the woman is walking barefoot on the water’s edge under the lighthouse, where the rock shelf runs under the sand except for limestone formations here and there, grey hoary fretworks. This first day of the calm being a Sunday, along with the locals walking their dogs, some on a lead and some loose, there are city folk down for the weekend. Up ahead on the waterline, where a spur of rock is split into pools, black figures are gathering against the light, one or two stooping to clip on a dog’s lead, in a far yelping of voices. Eel, she makes out, and sea! – no, see the eel? And then a couple go hurrying past saying loudly, There’s a seal up there. A seal? Alive? Seems so.
A seal! Alive? And yes, now she can see it for herself, oil-dark, water-dark and as glossy as the bull kelp, a blot on the hard sand, rearing and blinking in the sun and taking no notice of the gathering onlookers. Some are keeping pace alongside as the seal goes back in, floundering in and out through the low pools and channels, the water breaking over it making it look like any smooth rock. The woman’s heart beats hard. In all her born days she has never seen a live seal on the beach and she strains her eyes now to see the last of its rolling back as it makes its way out to sea.
But the seal has changed its mind. It turns and begins heaving up the beach again on its bent wrists, tucking its back flippers in like a dog its tail, to sit up with closed eyes, its narrow nose lifted and its long whiskers coppery in the sun. It shakes itself violently and sends a spray over the onlookers, who fall back exchanging shamefaced grins and remarking on their own jumpiness. A beading of water shines on the cape of fur over the shoulders, and the tips of the ears that poke down like dark little teats. Can it hear the voices? Her own ears are too full of her harsh breath. The crowd edges closer, no one can get enough of the wonderful apparition. What does it want? a child asks, and is answered in hisses and mutters. Is it hurt? Not as far as I can tell. It’s got blood! Where? Yes it has! Is it a him or a her? Male, by the size of it. Yeah, bull seal. Massive! See the mane? It’s been beaching itself here. How’s that? Sick, is it? Ma? Is the seal sick? Look, it’s got blood. Will it die out of the sea? Why won’t it?
The seal’s rump and belly have a pale coat of sand. Absently he scratches his back with a hind flipper while his pin head rolls. For a moment his eyes open, dark eyes, globular, and again he shakes a spray of sand and water off, a halo of light. Then he is off humping down the sand, clumsy, laborious. His track is a double warping like that of a turtle, a caterpillar tyre like on a tank, and the dogs on leads come stiff-legged to sniff at it, hackles rising. But they back away fast when he turns around. He is tough-haired like a cattle dog but they all know this is no dog oozing and moiling up the beach again.
Fluid, wire-whiskered, blind, monumental, the seal sits and shakes his water off. He bends himself to scratch and sends more spray flying out with his flipper, which is a long-boned hand of bronze, she sees. A mailed hand. Where is the blood? She can’t see any. A beading, or is it water, along a fold, or gash, burning – she peers. And now two girls dare to step up close, giggling, and then a tall young surfer in a wetsuit. Some of the onlookers exchange grins. Tame for its size, eh, someone says, poor old bugger. There is a shift of mood as plain as a tide and everyone feels it, feels how the awe is seeping away and threatening to turn into contempt, impatience, hostility. The woman’s jaw drops. Any minute now, she thinks, someone is going to make the first move, throw sand or a stone in its face, slip a dog’s lead for the hell of it. It only takes one. She moves forward. Seals are protected, she gets ready to say.
One of the girls, the one in red who is right in front of the seal, is moving her body now in time with his sway, insistently, swinging her skirt in a slow dance and staring up into his face because he is so tall, taller than any of them there, even the surfer, and her hair swings from shoulder to shoulder catching the light, in rhythm. Still the seal is taking no notice, the eyes in his roving head fixed somewhere beyond and out of reach, so that the other girl is emboldened to lean in and whisper in her friend’s ear, a dare perhaps, or a warning, or a splutter of laughter.
The seal rears up. He sees where he is. He sees the crowd of faces that are close enough to kiss. Suddenly eye to eye he takes them in and his head splits open, a throat stretched wide, a ring of golden bone, a silent roar as he sways over them like a cobra, transfixing them, bathing them in a sour hot breath of fish. Then before anyone can move he convulses. With a cobra’s speed he whips away and in seconds the dark bulk of him is gone from the sand, leaving them gaping, and gone from the shallows, surging strongly from pool to pool far out into the high breakers of the Rip.
It has happened faster than the shocked girls can leap back into the circle of onlookers, who in their turn gape in fright, and then laugh, shaking their heads in amazement. There is an outbreak of relieved chatter, the hilarity that comes after a close escape – Shit look at him go! He won’t be back in a hurry! Nothing much wrong with him! – as they scatter away with their dogs along the beach.
All but the woman, who is left standing rigid, open-mouthed with shock. Before her eyes is the salmon-red gullet of the seal bared in a mute, a mutual scream of horrified recognition.
The house she has lived in for most of her life stands midway between a lighthouse whose lantern swings out wide at night over the rock pools, and whose foghorn is caught up by passing ships and boomed back and back, and a church with a Sunday bell that is also the passing bell on those weekdays when a new grave lies open in the grass of the cemetery, planked over, with the tawny sand that underlies the soil spilt in a heap alongside, like sawdust. Her house is wooden, old and thin-skinned, and her windows are hooded except at the back, where the storm winds blow up. In rough weather the wind, the rain and the sea are one torrent that bellows and thumps at her shell of a house. She wakes to the creaky groan of branches nudging the roof. Now and then rain seeps through the ceiling boards or spills down the inside of her back windows instead of the afternoon sun.
After all these years she is still under her mother’s roof; and her father’s, of course, only she was so young when he died.
A deep sleeper for most of her life, she has slipped into the habit of sleeping light in summer, getting by on catnaps; she can always make up for it over the winter. Now more and more she lives for the hot weather, slow as it is to arrive on these shores, intermittent at best. Half the year the prevailing winds up from the Antarctic ice flay the branches off trees and jolt roof iron, filling every space with the sea salt and seethe and roar. A still day comes as a rare blessing, a reprieve, a visitation, the sea barely moving, like a memory at the back of the mind or a waking dream, a silence fallen out of nowhere, out of time. Except after heavy rain the sea is at its clearest in the cold months and dolphins breach out in the channel, sometimes even a whale or two, puffing out mist. Some years even in the height of summer the sea runs cold, murky with sand, when the heat is swept away for weeks at a time by southerly gales that tug at roofs and branches, whipping waves and sand high over the seawall, felling fenceposts and trees. Then the town battens down and waits for the sun to bring it back to life, much as the skinks do that she comes across on the stairways up and down the dunes on the first calm days of spring, crouched with their fingers spread out on top of a fencepost, as still as the wood, grey whorls and stripes and a red eye, waiting till the last minute to whip off into the scrub. There are big lizards huddled in their hides, and invisible snakes that come summer will go looping like molten glass over the sand. When a snake comes across a snakeskin, does it know if this was its own old skin, or not? All the wildlife of the dunes lies low in the long dream of winter, numb of flesh, inert, congealed, lying in wait for the sun.
The paths that tunnel through the tea-trees used to be stony at first, then dark soft ash, the shadowy sand up the back of the dune, then paler grey gnarled with roots, then yellow, then down into one long white hot barefoot swoop of sand. Now there are wooden steps up to the brow, where you break through and all you see is the water, as if you could take a running jump in or climb down a ladder, like the deep end at the baths. A step or two on and you see the beach and behind it the sea is rising to a height of horizon, a blue wall right across, with a toy ship on top, tossed high in the air, all in a dome of blinding light. On the loose edges are deep footprints running, and now and again a heavy track, a double rope of tread goes winnowing up, or down, too faint to make out what walker left it behind, before you scorch downhill and thunder wallowing into the first break of wave.
For the swimmer the surf beach at the foot of the dunes is full of pitfalls, undertows, rocks and whiskery limbs of dark weed. It was a childhood dread of hers, being taken to the surf beach. Try as she might to stay between the flags where it was safe, the current would always haul her stumbling on to hidden rocks sooner or later, or a wave knock her down and pull her out of her depth, and she would be told off. Sometimes she just sat on the rocks with her legs in the water and her back to the ridge she has always thought of as the Mountains of the Moon, for its air of remoteness, with no other landmark seaward; a promised land at a distance in shimmers of light, a relic, a sunken castle in its labyrinth of stone. High and dry or submerged – always the last to go under the tide, where the whorls of wave give them away, and the first to come back up – the Mountains are smoother and lighter than the rock shelf, a pale gold, sculpted. Her mind might veer away sometimes but never her eye. Not that she has ever swum that far out of her depth, into the dark chambers of rock and rooted bull kelp where an octopus might be lurking or a stingray. Never a strong swimmer, she mistrusted the sea until the day she was lent a mask and bobbed under and saw it come alive. Once she had seen the underwater as it really was the fear was gone. She found her way easily among the rocks that in the water light were more deeply coloured than when they were high and dry, and through the weeds in their lushness, layer on layer, lacy, ambered, weightless, moving as the water moved. Since the first time she put on a mask and lost her fear, though she was still wary, she never saw any point in going in just for the sake of it. In swimming blind.
Is the first time something ever happens to you imprinted for good? Why do our earliest memories last the longest, as if having had longer to embed themselves made all the difference? She remembers learning to swim at school, the brown bus to the baths, the instructors strutting, blowing their whistles. She can still see her underwater arms and legs all marbly with light, every faint hair in its own bead of light, and her bubble bathers. They were red, like her frilly sundresses and beach towel, so that her mother and father could always pick her out straight away; and ever since then she has had a red beach towel, to mark where she left her clothes in case a current sweeps her away along the beach. Her bathers were wet flame, flickering, huge, she was always a big girl once she was in the water, a red balloon, her arms and legs all in a dapple of waterskin. Even so she was never allowed to swim alone or out of her depth; she was all right as long as her toes reached the bottom. But sandbanks shift with the tides and sometimes the sea would go in one step from glassy and warm to cold blue-black and deep. One day she splashed out and some of the water running down from her new bathers was dyed red, she saw, only it was blood all down her legs, when she was eleven, and her mother towelled her down and hustled her home and straight into the bathroom before anyone saw. What’s wrong? she whined all the way.
Never mind, muttered her mother. Come on, hurry up.
It’s my bathers!
No it’s not. Is it hurting? Did you hit a rock in the water?
She shook her head in the bath, being sluiced down. Let’s see, her mother said, parting her legs. Oh it’s the curse all right.
What curse?
I’ve been meaning to tell you. You’re early. It’s about turning into a woman, you know. Having babies.
I’m only eleven, she whimpered.
That’s what I said. When you’re married.
What curse?
The curse. It’s a nuisance, that’s all. Just a saying. God’s curse on Eve or one of them. In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.
Why did God curse Eve?
She ate the apple.
Are you sorry you had me?
Of course not, silly! It’s in the Bible. God’s will. You put up with it. The birth pangs –
Pangs?
So I am having a baby!
Of course not! Turn round, I’m trying to dry you.
It was just blood and it had its part to play like everything else and she was to keep out of the water while it lasted or she would fall ill. Why? Do as you’re told, like a good girl. How long would it go on for? A few days. Days! And no baths, did she hear? Or going in for a swim.
As if that was not enough, and the blood, she was ill anyway from the ache, the deep gripe and drag inside, the birth pains. Pangs. For five days she had to hold between her legs one of the cottonwool pads in the pack her mother gave her, pinned on an elastic belt. The pads shifted and she had to walk tightly, stiffly, to keep them in place. The ends poked out under her uniform. Some of the girls were exchanging secret smiles. Once at playtime the pad fell out, shredded into red wads and tufts that she had to chase all over the basketball court in the wind, floundering, while the others stood and watched, even the boys in their playground were lined up jeering along the wire fence. She would never live it down. As long as there was blood she was not allowed to have a shower or a bath or have her hair washed over the basin. It was for her own good and as long as she lived under her mother’s roof she would do as she was told. And she was not to tell her father, as if the thought ever crossed her mind.
One bedtime her mother came in with a leaflet that had a diagram of two little nests she had in her tummy, like lamps on a stand, where her eggs were stored. Eggs? Yes, eggs, and blood when each egg was flushed away. Don’t look so full of woe, she said, it’s natural. Haven’t you done it at school? No? Well, it’s the same for all us mammals. We start life as an egg inside our mother.
One night when the blood had run dry at last she went for a swim in the air. She was in the act of taking a bite out of her meat pie and sauce at lunchtime when there she was airily afloat facedown at shoulder height over the playground, not flying but lifting off, swimming, and no one saw her clear the fence and hover in the headmaster’s garden, out of bounds, and dogpaddle back into the sun, until her pie broke in half and splashed like a red egg on the asphalt. Heads jerked up then, white faces calling out, wanting to know how you did that, not that she knew, all she had done was slide forward and float on thin air. It was like Peter Pan, she thought, it was true all the time, a revelation of weightless, effortless free flight, miraculous. Knowing she was going too far she tried diving upwards, palms joined; only to wake up in bed, bathed in a rapture she would remember all her life.
Then the blood came back.
Well, I told you! said her mother.
You did not!
You knew you’d get a period every month. It’s like the full moon.
I didn’t.
Then I’m sorry. You do now.
I still can’t go in the water?
There’s a good girl.
Why don’t you have them?
I do, she said. All women do.
Her mother threw up her hands. God help me, she said. One will have to do.
So there is a curse.
Her mother shook her head. It’s just a manner of speaking. It’s something you keep to yourself. Bodily functions.
What was it, anyway, if not a curse, this clenching and queasiness that came over her as the blood drained, freely at first, then in a slow leak that turned her pads black and gave off a ripe stink no baby powder could hide, whatever her mother said, the stink she had smelt before on summer afternoons in school with the flies busy in the window panes. As if keeping it to yourself meant that no one could tell! Though, as far as she knew, no one in the class knew who else had a period and was keeping it to herself. She scratched, she was sour with sweat all over. Not that she wanted a bath in her own soapy water and blood – why not a shower though? Or a swim, she pleaded, was it in case sharks could smell the blood? They didn’t the first time!
You heard.
Do babies come out of there as well? How do they?
You stretch, said her mother. My mother thought they came out through your belly button.
Who said I wanted babies?
You will. You wait and see.
And so she did, and she found a husband and it was her heart’s desire and his. But while her blood had come back thick and strong just about every month of the moon year after year, she never had even one.
And she was sprouting hair down there, dark fur, and in her armpits – what on earth was she turning into now? But that she would keep to herself. Thus far, no further.
Always after sunset or a cool change, though the sea holds its heat for hours, it goes glassy and dim with the sun out of it and the tawny kelp forests gone dark. On days of heavy surf a hail of air drops and sand makes it impenetrable. Even on calm days all you see from the outside, from above, is a mass of glazed blue opacities. Not so once you see into it and beyond, though, from the inside – rock walls riven into canyons and arches furred with auburn plumes and rubbery straps of weed that roll and sway and slowly unravel, depending on the tide, and skeins of old rose or shrill green. Fastened in the dapple of the rock faces are fans, grapes and feathers and tight scrolls, flukes, foxtails, sponges, banks of moss, hairy pods, mussel-black and green, and soft ones like pussy willow. Now and then a shower of needles goes by, and silver coins hung on edge, as if on strings, twitching their wide eyes. A blunt fish there in a hollow is a parrot fish lurking, wary at the size of you; here a small one in a striped yellow and grey vest has waited almost until your hand can close over it before jerking away just in time as if on a string. Glass shrimps dangle like hairs in a cluster of bubbles. The tide swings back and forth, softly, or like a storm wind. Sometimes you take fright at the sweep underneath of a sudden giant shape scarred with growths of weed and shell, but you are the one in motion, and the carapace nothing but a rock, a smooth shield. Sometimes the blue limbs of other swimmers move in the distance, slow and magnified underwater, as you are, and reflected in shreds on the molten ceiling. As you approach the turbulent outer edge of the rock pools the water turns icy and is crossed with cloudy shafts of sun that dissolve all around you into sand, bubbles and specks of weed glittering like mica. Mostly you stay on the surface. The deeper you dive, the stiller and heavier the water, a dark weight. Out in the kelp beds the deeps must have the density and weight of stone.
When no one else is at the pools, for as long as you can hold your breath and hang on hard to the rocks you can stay down on the seabed until you have to let go and rise up into your mirror image, your hands, yourself, your underimage – not the same one as when you waded in, alight over the ripples, with the weave of their threads falling all over you – and bubbling and splashing, gulp air.
No matter how hot the weather you can only stay in a little while before you freeze. A cold fall of water is forever pouring through the Rip from the swell out in the strait, deep water overrunning the pools and filling the bay with a hail of sand.
The town is a holiday place, a backwater, built on the last spit of scrubland dividing the bay from the open sea, and popular in summer for the chain of front beaches scooped out of the cliff between two headlands and only held in by the bluestone seawall. The high point is the last headland with its old white lighthouse, the first reason for its being, beyond which the dunes begin and the surf beach. The headland is the border where two seas meet, one higher than the other; and two weathers as well, as often as not, since it breaks the winds no less than the waters, so that the bay may be a choppy bowl of wind on a day that is all glassy stillness around the corner at the back beach; or mild, calm, barely moving, when around the corner the surf is running high and wild.
All manner of curiosities wash up on this border, charred logs, crates, spars, oil-caked seabirds, shreds of fishing net and ships’ garbage that she picks up and puts in a bin or passes by angrily, according to her mood. She pokes about in mounds of seaweed and black stalks like trumpets, idly fossicking. Once as night is falling she stumbles on a shark hauled up against the seawall, alive, it seems, in the half light, a long leathery grey body as long as her own, with not a scratch, as far as she can tell, and heavy – she tugs at the dorsal fin and it drags her arms down. Slit white eyes and a puffy maw caked with sand, toothless, a gummy shark – can it really be dead, and so unscathed? She washes her hands in the sea and then over and over with soap at home, and even so the stench of shark fin lingers on.
Another day at around sunset on one of the early hot days in November she comes around the point into the shade after long hours on the surf beach. Against the shadows the sand shows up as a sugary frosting, each grain distinct, as do the insects that are scarcely more than grains of sand, playing dead, until she flicks them with a leaf of seaweed and they waver in alarm. The waterline is alight with bottle glass or jellyfish or the egg-case aspic of the sand snails, no telling which, a glistening trail so bright that she is dazed, half-blinded, and when at last she is forced to turn her back on the sun it feels like going underwater, the light is so deep a blue and her shadow self is flung so far down ahead.
She is on the secret beach before the front beach, already in twilight, a faint expanse, at high tide, of net on yellow net of water quietly cast up, loosening and pulling tight over the sandbanks. But this is low tide and a green glint catches her eye, new bottle glass, in a crevice of the rocks at the foot of the cliff, a cave under the high waterline. She makes a point of picking up the glass and cans and plastic, the shreds of net and fishing line, bait bags and hooks on her way. As she kneels and puts out her hand to this green glow, blinking, something else, something round, glints further in. She reaches down and there it is, wet on her finger and not, as she first thought, the ring pull of a can, but a ring of gold, uninscribed but for a scratch or two, a plain wedding band of the usual kind, a man’s by the size of it, she thinks, since she has thick fingers for a woman and yes, it is loose on her. A lot of husbands wear a ring these days. Not so much in her time, and never her husband, a man’s man who would have scorned the idea, a no-nonsense man who has been dead and buried for so long that she can barely recall his face, unless in her dreams. Loose as it is, the ring rasps the loose skin of her knuckle and, tugging uselessly, she feels the welling up of an old anger that is half panic. The ridges of skin and the knuckle bone make a bar and the ring has drawn blood, or the sand inside it has, by the time she remembers soap. Then it slips off easily enough.
In the morning she catches the bus to the police station, where the officer on duty says that if the ring goes unclaimed for three months she can have it if she desires. It says so on the form: I *desire / *do NOT desire to claim the above property. In the space for the description he writes One gold coloured Ring. She nods and he crosses out *do NOT. She signs on the line and is handed a pink slip. She writes a FOUND notice in black ink with a drawing of the ring and has it stuck in the milk bar window, where it stays put, fading to parchment week by week in the sun, and the bold ink fading to bronze.
Down here the heat is hardly ever constant, it comes and goes in waves. But this summer is shaping up as one of the good ones, still and barely stirred by wind, becalmed, a heat wave without movement, like the eye of a storm. More and more as she picks her way at low tide on the sandy bed among the rocks she feels the presence of a swimming self who has hovered open-armed like a bird over this sand, these rocks, time and time again, and will again, its shadow in green shreds drifting over the dry sea floor.
The house, like the sea, is slow to take in the day’s heat and as slow to let go of it. The winter sun brims up in the windows all day, but the high summer sun bears down from pane to hooded pane through leaf shadow, now flaring on a mirror, now melting and buttery, now red. At night she mostly does without electric light, for the sake of the small difference it might make, that one degree cooler. In the gloom the gas under her saucepan is a hot ring of blue teeth. If there is a moon she leaves the blinds up at bedtime rather than swelter in the dark, as if the icy moon, a full or a droop-lidded eye staring in, will cool her down. Her sleep is never so deep in the summertime and she wakes with a shiver at daybreak, or moonrise, only to see 2:28 in red light on the clock, and then 3:42, 5:00, the bed a raft in a sea of milk all the while. A heat wave at full moon is the best of times, when like water the moon finds every chink of the simmering house. In the cool of the morning she goes in for a swim and again in the late afternoon, almost always at the front beach. The surf beach is a long walk away and up and down the dunes and to be stranded there in the sun is to dissolve blinded in a world of shimmer and daze, of craving for the underwater. At night she sometimes walks there and loses count of time passing, the moon and stars for light, and the red tip of the lighthouse burning on and off, on and off, like a cigarette somebody is smoking. Afterwards in her sleep she swims through a milky trail of bubbles and from time to time a seal rises up from the sea, rises and sinks, and she hears its harsh breathing, or her own, or the sea’s. I stitch the sea red and white, in and out, she dreams, with a silver needle and my hot head fills with water.
A trawler has set up shop in the boat harbour on Sundays this summer. Curious, she catches the bus over one Sunday morning to have a look. The tide is out and as she is walking along the footbridge over to the inner jetty, a shadow shifts. She sees out of the corner of her eye a turbulence under the shallow ceiling of the water, and peers down, but there is only the green jelly of the seabed. Suddenly dizzy in the bright heat, she steps back.
By the time she has bought herself a small snapper, pearly pink in its ripple of skin, two or three families are strung along both sides of the footbridge staring down. Dad, Mum, a boy calls out. Over here! And now she sees in the green shallows vast platters of glossy black flesh, stingrays hovering, sweeping silently in and out of the stringy grey piles of the jetty and the hulls of the moored boats, above and below each other no deeper than their own sunken shadows and the shadows of hulls, and the reflections, roving like cats for the fish being tipped in the water from the trawler, whitebait, in a silver gush out of the bucket. They are nothing like sharks, there is no haste in them and no greed, lords of life though they also are, and death. They are basking, dancing together in peace and abundance, lustrously black and immense, by far the biggest stingrays she has ever laid eyes on. Children are sprawled full length on the planks now, heads over the edge, calling and pointing, trying to keep count, with a parent holding them down hard, here where a fall can only mean a lightning strike. But the stingrays might as well be under glass for all the notice they are taking. Can they see up through the smashed water? They have invisible eyes in among the smudges and spots of their backs and the watermarks, the speckles of shadow that come into focus as they swoop under the planks to reappear with a white flick of a wingtip, a breaking wave.
A book is too small to live in but you make yourself small enough while you’re in it, and ever after, and whenever it comes to mind. As a girl she always dreamed of travelling to see the places hived in her books; but travel is for the young and she has been here too long, left it too late. Here at full moon and new moon the tide will sometimes pull so far out over the rock shelf that hidden places come to light, leggy peninsulas, all coves, outcrops and arches, sandbanks, caverns, pitted cliffs strung with seaweed, for an hour or so; and sink back down like the isles of the dead, the promised land. Something about this expanse of shoals in the lee of the lighthouse, the rock shelf moated in light, always makes her think, rounding the point, the beginning of the world, or the end of the world, so serene does it seem, so remote, and yet so near, hushed, like the sea in a shell held to one ear; lost, as it is half the time, under the tide. Day by day, tide by tide, the sea brims up and drains down the channels, some still and shallow and barely visible, and the beach rings its changes, so slight, as a rule, that you have to know it by heart to notice: pools as loose as clouds, pools within pools stacked high with sand or scoured bare; rocks dislodged, cracked, punched full of holes; driftwood and seaweed thrown up high and dry. A brown mat of weed snags on a high rock and for a week becomes the furry snout of a bull seal, until it rots and washes off. When sunset is at low tide, the hot cap of the lighthouse is a broken mirror in the dips and trickles of the rock shelf; in the deeper pools it makes a double exposure of itself with sea stars, weeds, rocks and shells in meshes of green light where slivers of fish, black-backed with silver bellies, hang over a drift of sky. At any time of the day when the reef lies open at low tide the rock pools at the foot of the cliff have a lighthouse in them, a column superimposed, twitching and fraying in the water light, fuming away like salt. Now and then someone rounding the cliff face will come on her bent over a pool, catching her off-guard and suddenly absurd in her own eyes. She never meets their eyes, never so much as moves an eyelid. With her pale hair loose, cobwebby, stiff with salt, windblown or stuffed under her black hood, she is as good as invisible anyway. Anonymous, a scarecrow. Even so, would she be so surprised if one day someone pushed her in, just for the sake of seeing her flap around gasping, gigantic, in what was suddenly too tight a fit, for all that she seemed to think it was a world?
And so it is, the underwater, another world half-hidden in this one, a world of its own, and mirroring, matching, where one twitch of the waterskin is enough to send hills and valleys warping to the horizon. The whole lighthouse fits in, from its green hood and coils of glass to its pedestal, as does her own tall shadow looming over her reflection laid flat on a roof of sea and sky. Only keep still for long enough and whatever is hidden – fish, sea stars – will venture out. A sea star is a star born of hard flesh. As above so below. There are sea whips here, sea wolves and sea leopards, leafy sea dragons, sea spiders, sea scorpions, sea serpents and horses and snails, sea urchins. Sea purses, that are the shark egg cases drying on the waterline into crackly amber pods. Sea ears, the abalone shells, grey crusts pierced and lined with satin. Sea swallows, sea grass. Lantern fish, sun fish and moon fish, watery equivalents everywhere you look. Equivalences.
Out on the edge of the rock shelf a squat black and white Pacific gull or a pair is perched most days, and in still weather a grey heron, either transfixed, so that a grey shadow in the pool is all that betrays it, or out and about, unruffled, keeping a sharp eye out, wading, peering, pricking down on a crunch of shell; here and there around the high tide line is this or that sodden blue black mound and ruffle of white, a penguin, a mutton bird, wry-necked; one week a pelican lies in rags under the lighthouse, the next a cormorant, and a gannet in great plumy flounces under the brow of the dunes; a seal pup swaddled in seaweed, hollow-eyed, its fingerbones like rosary beads and its hide gaping on the bone, comes washing in and out of the swill, shrinking by the day. But of the bull seal neither hide nor hair.
East across the water from the tip of this peninsula is another one, a mirror image, except that it has no lighthouse and no town behind its spur of headland. The space between is a haunt of rainbows, sometimes a whole one spanning the Rip, sometimes a patch swallowed up in the cloud that sits over the far headland, black as mud, raining down. But it has been a long time since the last rainbow or fall of rain here where time and the weather are coming to a standstill. Sometimes a haze will gather over there at sunset, a fume of haze masking the jagged rocks at the waterline, the shipwreck rocks, and then the other peninsula seems to float in midair. At dusk when the last sun goes and the lamps come on in the streets, a full moon in its blood may rise behind the other headland and heave into the wad of cloud with its bottom hanging out, a boat of fire high over the sea, only to bob up again, on top of the cloud, upside down, and up through the ladder of cloud, higher and smaller and whiter all the time. Once, by magic, a smouldering sun came up on the far side, a copper gong, the mirror of the one that had just slid underwater in the west, as if time had skipped a beat, behind her back, to daybreak. More often a filmy pale full moon and watery reflection appear together in the dusk of the east while the west is still aflame. Summer after summer, full moon after full moon, the heron stalks aslant in the mirror of the pools and gulls skim overhead, a spindrift of twilight closing in and the sea and sky one blur. She has times when it seems as if she has been here on every full of the moon on this or that ramp of sand or rock shelf with the sea of the bay so silky, so almost motionless, and, once past the lighthouse, into the Rip, turbulent. This is the western portal of the bay. The opposite portal, that hummock alight in the sun or gloomy, nearer or further away depending on the light, is in fact so close that if the bay were dry land, swamp and river flat, the way it was before the ocean flooded in, you could walk across in an hour or so. Two headlands, two seas, and in between them this gash of a waterway, the Rip, beyond which is opacity, upheaval. But the waters are all the one water and once in a while even here it falls flat, a sky mirror, with the full moon low in the east and the sun, gold vermilion, low in the west, suspended.
She has a waking dream of the stray seal pup in its raggedy hide, its empty eyes as she puts her hands around its coat of seaweed and slips it back into the shallows. But then with a sudden quick bob and a splash it heads off out to sea. And naked she follows it and then she is flying up, dipping and soaring in a green sky, looking everywhere. Waking she wonders if seals are born able to see like babies, or blind like dogs; and spends a morning fumbling in the dust and cobwebs and silverfish through the last pile of old books until she finds a photo of a newborn seal and its eyes are glossy black orbs in the frost of its fur.
Another day she comes across some cast-up plastic, a white shampoo flask with a green lid, perfectly smooth, silken, the wording on it almost erased, Chinese, or Japanese, and anyway the salt north wind whipping at her eyelids is making her eyes swim. The underside has a growth of something, seaweed, she thinks, turning it over, but no, it’s barnacles, dozens, of a sort she has only ever seen in a book before, goose barnacles, big and small, clamped on a bed of grit. They are grey with streaks, marbled, rimmed and striped once across in black, little mitres, all shut tight. A shank holds each one so tight that it’s impossible to prise off even the smallest one without crushing it; a shank of tough jelly, colourless except where it rises thick and black out of the shell.
Dead or alive, they are worth a closer look. She takes the flask home, where, her attention distracted, she puts it on the draining board and forgets all about it. Nevertheless it pulls at her thought, the way a drop of water as it trickles from wrist to elbow will pull a thread of skin after itself. The flask pulls tenaciously at her attention, until she goes back in and sees to her horror that the hot sun has been on it through the window, and the afterglow still is, and ants are massing. The pelt on the flask is alive, it’s all one ripple, a wave, each mitre shifting, restless, and opening to let a small black tongue with whiskers come poking into the air, and wave, straining, a blind probe. They shrink in at her touch. Out of them flows a ceaseless whispering and clacking, a susurrus, a cry of air. On the beach there was no sign of life, no sound and in the salt wind no smell: now their musty, rich, salty smell, incipiently rotten, fills the room, and their clamorous urgency so inhabits her that she runs with the bottle back along the sandy path and down the steps to the beach in the half-light – it is after eight and the sun has set – where, panting, she flings it away and watches it float, jostling in the wash, a life raft, she thinks, out to a rock pool, until a wave wedges it under an overhang dripping with brown seagrapes. Only this is the raft of the Medusa, and she turns away wrung with despair, if what she has read is true and goose barnacles only live deep in the ocean.
Like the days, the flow of dreams, in talk and murmurs, yelping voices, whimpering, as of swans or seals long gone. The morning dreams out of nowhere are the sharpest and cut the deepest and the pang of them lasts all day. One morning she wakes up from a crawl under the rock arch, the crossbar in the empty hourglass of rock under the jut of cliff that holds up the lighthouse, having threaded herself through at sunset, when the spiderwebs in loops over the seams and pits of golden rock, some in tatters, some new, shimmer like water, shifting in a sea breeze as light as breath. Each web has a pit in the middle, an eye, a mouth, for the spider. Crouched down she fits in under the crossbar, in a pit of her own. Another day she wakes up heavy in bed, a vast bulk, a dead weight, as the pale belly of a wave presses her floundering down, her gasp and outcry stifled, her eyes blind until they open out on to a wash of window light. Another night from the crest of the dunes she watches a figure soar up out of the sea like a rock stack and topple back down. More than once she is on her way home along the clifftop after nightfall when she is grabbed from behind, muzzled with a furry arm and bundled down the wooden stair on to the sand, the secret beach. She springs up and switches on a torch she has in her hand but at the first step she takes a web springs out, strung out of torchlight, and more webs, shawls, gilded or shadowy black. One gathers, jumps and clamps on her groin, yes, she is naked, and desperate to prise it off before it can sink its fangs in. But it has grappled on to two of her fingers and stabbed the web of skin in between. Pain drills up her arm. The webs shake under her blood’s spray and a wave of blisters washes up her arm until the skin is heaving all over like milk on the boil. A yellow glimmer in a hollow of the cliffs is a camp further along, black shapes hunched around a fire, she sees as she draws near, as red as ochre, masked in smoke. Long wisps of smoke go wavering over the rock face only to cling on and become web. She wakes in a welter of bedclothes. Her eyelids are hot coals.
In one of these waking dreams she is in a hospital nursery among women who have lost their babies at birth or before. Here they are in their glass cases, the babies who never saw the light of day, flat on their backs, naked, blue, underwater babies, staring up blank-eyed like china dolls. Nurses are on hand to lift each one out of its crib, wrap it in a blanket and give it to the mother for a hold. But she is gone before they see her.
Other dreams go deeper, out of sight and out of mind, and then the body in the bed is a heaviness and the awakening is awash in sweat and a moil of bedclothes and the ache of the void is in her bones.
The lighthouse overlooks long stretches of coastline and open sea. She sees the New Year in on its platform, in a bitter wind that flings her hair in her eyes and beats her coat like wings as she hunches at the railing by the silent bole. Its white is stained red by its tide lamps under a long raft of cloud. There is no moon, only the stars. The towns far along the coast are strings of yellow beads. There will be fireworks, and towards midnight a little crowd of merrymakers converges in the dark to watch. No sound comes through at that distance in the wind, only the light in high splashes, sprinkles and waterspouts, fading constellations one after another, and little jets of light and sunbursts, red and golden, then blue and green, afterimages of sunflower and a slick of colour along the keel of the cloud. Once it dies out the crowd wanders off. The only illumination left is the turning lighthouse lantern as it lifts the rock shelf far below into regular moments of pallor. At one of these moments a brightness catches her eye, a pool of flame among the outcrops. A shadow passes over, small and ragged, then another, and soon there are luminous hollows flickering here and there in the rocks, tunnels of red and gold, domes and recesses, shrines, moth wings in the limestone. Huddled in a chimney of rock out of the wind each flame falters and steadies and casts around itself a skin like mother-of-pearl only tawny, spun out of fire and stone.
Where are those hollows in the plain light of day? In the morning she potters around the rocks until she finds the remains. Red candle wax in silky shreds, stuck thick and cold among the spiderwebs in the mouths of the rocks, snakes of red lava, pooled blood.
Blowing off the dust and fluff one day she hunts down an old sea book she still has, in search of barnacles. Here are the smoky old pencil drawings she loved and traced over, even a sheet of her tracing paper, blank, shrivelled along the fold, keeping the place. She has not opened the book for years but she knows her way. Rough periwinkles, barnacle larvae, and here, the barnacles and their life cycle – why a cycle, when a chain is truer to life, to death, link over link? The larvae hatch out of the egg in milky clouds, in their millions, to float around through their frail beginnings, microscopic, until the time comes to latch, like the embryo to the lining of the womb, on to rocks or drowned trees, spars, driftage, the piles of piers, to finish their metamorphosis and secrete a shell. There they will go on growing and moulting, as cicadas do, leaving behind a white ghost, ever expanding their shell to fit. When they die, other intertidal forms of sea life like periwinkles will creep into the empty shell – periwinkles that will go on for months responding in the flesh to the memory of the tidal rhythms of that original place. How can a living thing in a blue crumb of a shell no bigger than the pupil of an eye have a knowledge of the sea so vast that it outweighs absence?
How the past clings. In the same way our former selves may be our own ghosts, all the shed skins we wear in dreams, in flashes of memory, frozen in the past – though like as not we are the ones who would look to them like ghosts, if they could only see us back, see us in the flesh, withered as we are on the bone. Or would they turn a blind eye? Would they even know us for ourselves? Our dreams are like the stars. What we see is light years ago.
Another book she loved began with a wolf hunt in the Arctic night, only back-to-front, since it was the wolf pack, led by a she-wolf who was half dog, that was hunting down fur traders on a sledge day after day, night after relentless night; only to begin again, like a dream, in another world, a cave that is the she-wolf ’s den, where her cub is nosing his way into the world through the white wall, as he sees it, the hazy membrane of daylight that is the cave mouth, in a second birth. White Fang was his name and the book’s. Death is like that, or so she has heard people say on the radio, claiming to have come back from the brink; death dawns as a clear light at the end of a tunnel. Maybe so, but to her it sounds as if the body’s dying memory is of the light of birth, cyclical, winding back on itself, swallowing its tail.
The light of birth. What a miracle that was, that first sight in the history of the world, on the page, on the screen, of a child living inside a golden bubble of a womb, fast asleep, thumb in mouth, folded in the skeins of its cord and barely less translucent than the waters, a genie, in a lamp of flesh. And these days anyone can watch it in real time, as we say, the heart squeezing in so unformed a lump of flesh, so impassive, it might be a sculpture barely roughed out; it might be flesh on the way to being anything, a mouse, a whale – what it looks most like is a white whale, the baby one in the sea aquarium, torn out of its mother like a wound and flung into the cold blue masses, hanging there in shock behind the plate glass, until she boosts it up high to take its first breath, all caught on video.
Sometimes a child will float into her dreams like that, eyes squeezed shut among the jellyfish, the shreds of weed, rocked in the cradle of the deep – where did she get that from, what song or storybook lost in the past? A boy prince was the hero, whose hidden realm was a city at peace, preserved after a tidal wave in a golden bubble under the green sea, haunted by cruising sharks, a microcosm, like our own blue bubble in space. And a little naked gesturing lad in another book, a water baby, a chimneysweep, poor Tom, who is drowned in the stream, but all is not lost, he has just popped out of his sooty husk to be with all the other water babies drowned in this make-believe water world of the book that she half-believes in; or maybe the other babies were those stillborn or never born at all.
Where have they gone, the old books, every one as alive in its way and as haunting as a dream? One was a big red wonder book with fairytales and legends of Our Islands, meaning the British Isles, of course, all about the sea and the past, magic and illusion, spirits, immortals – all except a true story about a faithful hound whose master the prince loved and trusted it to mind his baby son. But he came home one day to find a welter of blood and torn bedclothes, and his hound sprawled on the floor, blood on its muzzle and its great sad eyes searching his face. With a roar of rage and despair the prince drew his sword and killed the hound with one stroke. Only then did he go into the inner room, where a wolf lay dead, and behind it his son, who had only been asleep, who was now starting to cry. Too late the prince sank to his knees and clutched the hound to his breast in an agony of remorse. Whenever she read that one she held her breath for the prince not to, this once. Knowing it was forever.
Her biggest picture book had been her mother’s when she was young. It had thick pages and a hard shiny cover with a white fur seal on the cover cresting a white wave, an albino seal, a Moses born to save his people; and this was also in the Arctic, a beach where the Inuit maraud every year for sealskins, driving all the young seals they can inland to be clubbed to death and flayed. The yearly massacre is watched but never spoken of by the surviving seals. So when the men lay eyes on a white seal, and take him for a dead man’s ghost and leave him alone, he follows innocently enough in their tracks and sees the frenzied hacking and bellowing, his kin gashed, slithering, roiling in blood. Horrified, he vows to explore the seven seas for a haven inaccessible to man and lead his kin to safety. Through Arctic and Antarctic seas he swims for years until he finds a last surf beach inside a high ring of rocks where only seals can land, and then only if they swim for their lives on one breath down through an undersea tunnel and up again into a luminous bay never before seen by a living seal. And he returns to his people triumphant and fetches them away over the seas and down into the depths and back up into the light of the promised land.
The last of those summers was the year of Alice in Wonderland – the title on the grey green cardboard cover and spine, though inside it were Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass – when she was old enough to read on her own, the words if not always the meanings. If only there really was a mirror world where you could come and go at will; the otherworld of living back-to-front behind glass that any mirror would let you into, so that when you looked, there was your other self in a parallel life. So it went on for a long hot summer, like this one, of staying up in the afterheat of dusk, long past her bedtime, while her big white mother goose read out loud beside her in the sheets, putting on the voices and, as always, taking up almost all the bed, her bosoms billowy and loose in her nightie; only not so big a goose as the summer before because she herself had grown. She was the one to turn the pages as it got darker, knowing when without having to look, knowing by heart.
The memory has long since set into one whole as clear and remote as a film clip. Her mother pushing hot and plump against her, her own toes pushing down into the tucked-in sheet, the little book growing dark until she had to pull the overhead string to switch on the bedlamp that her father had set up back when there was a dog, a tiger, a snake at the bottom of the bed biting her toes and she would wake up screaming. She had her own bedroom by the age of three. They had each other, she had no one. The lamplight, the huddle of flesh, the buffet of faint breath whenever a page scraped or fluttered over, in a whiff of moth wings, ghostly, smelling of autumn, of late summer and autumn, the dry spell. It came out soon after the War and was plain and drab, with tiny print, and the paper, so thin and clear and crisp then, had grown stains and freckles and age spots all over, soft golden brown, the last time she set eyes on it, with edges of the same brown rimming every page; plain, but there were drawings here and there to immerse yourself in. Foxing. She would have had no more use than Alice for a book with no pictures or conversations, if she had ever seen one.
Where is it now? And how would it be to crawl back for a moment into any one of those early books so intimately known by the look and feel and fine dry leafy smell, always there to burrow into, so lightly shed once grown out of, like a snake its old skin, or a crab cast or cicada husk? Didn’t the spell wear thin, though, once you learnt to read the words by yourself, anywhere, any time you liked? Some of it, maybe, but not all, nowhere near all. As if having once learnt something off by heart made it yours for good.
In no time the school holidays bring back the campers and busloads, the clamorous darting children. As always she keeps to herself. Life alone may have its drawbacks, but at least you have only yourself to please. Twenty-one years of widowhood have slipped by and what has she got to show for herself? As good as nothing, under a clear sky. Emptiness. Yet life felt full enough at the time, day by day, always busy, at least on the surface. So clear once, it has frittered away like a dream on waking – or is this the dream? – as if those twenty-one years were the one year over and over, of living on the surface and in the shallows of the present moment. The years of getting off lightly, of treading water, treading far too lightly. Isn’t she all the lighter on her feet for being skin and bone? A swimmer, a dreamer, a dancer spun into a red dress. There came a big shy sailor boy, holding on tight. A husband. A wife.
He was a swimmer himself, a seaman and a fisherman, a loner all his life, a quiet man, as much at home at sea as on land – and is this all he has left of himself, a widow’s rags and tatters of memory? If he walked into the room this minute, her own man – and she has a quick flash of the look and feel of him, only when she tries to fix it, to look him straight in the eye, nobody is there. It’s as if the souls creep up out of the past, in a solemn game only they can play. As for herself, if what she has heard and read is true and the body renews itself cell by cell every seven years, every cell as it dies being replaced by a new cell in a slow invisible wave of change – a stealthy metamorphosis, one that leaves no shell or cast skin, a reincarnation – what’s left of her now, as a husband’s wife? She has changed bodies three times over and no present part of her has ever known a man. She is restored to a virginity of sorts, a second virginity of old age and obdurate isolation. A freedom, if to have worked her way so loose amounts to freedom; a dour enough kind of freedom, but her own and it fits like a glove. For better or for worse she is on her own, body and soul. Lust long gone, outgrown, forgotten. No more tides of blood. The moon has no more influence, waxing and waning. What started in childhood and went on over and over ran dry at last and she is well into a second childhood, or so it feels. And, again, a freedom.
And yet, though it makes no sense, she knows that of their own accord her moods are still in time with the moon, from darkness into light into darkness again; and she goes on keeping track of the tides, slack water and the phases of the moon, and the shifts over the year in the point of the horizon where the sun and the moon will rise and set; just as, pleasing nobody but herself, she goes in swimming. For most of the summer the morning sea is still too cold from the night, and in the heat of the day the beaches are a furnace and the air like fire, almost too harsh to breathe. Around four in the afternoon is the best time, unless a cold sea breeze has blown in. By then the water is like a pane of lamplit glass, thick and dimpled, a pub window. She gives herself up to the lovely lapse of the flesh as it dissolves and floats, barely visible, almost asleep.
When she comes dripping into the house an orange afterlight lies sprinkled all over the floor. Sometimes the sky is dim and the sun scarlet, the red glow at the world’s end, as if a storm is brewing, or a bushfire laying its smoke over the world. The wind will change, the sky clear a little – the sun still not fully clear all evening, but creamy, opaque. Morning will be hot and still again in the town, no sign of a change, as if the heat wave were a spell it had fallen under, a blessed interval.
She has never been a beachlover as such, never a sunbather. Her skin is as pale as the day she was born. The sea is what she loves, the undersea, and even so she can never stay in long without getting stone cold. There is an old wetsuit in the house, if she could be bothered wrestling it on; she prefers a T-shirt over her bathers, less for the slight warmth than as a shield against sunburn; and even so, between swims she has to change out of it and the bathers that cling too clammily, or else huddle in her towel. She fears the sea cold, the way it goes straight through her and lasts so long after she comes out, even if she is sweaty and red, gasping. The sea is a different, deeper cold than the weather, and she knows it to the quick of her, in her bones, as the saying goes. She feels the stiffness of cold in them as she walks. In her mind’s eye they are green and knuckly, those bones, under a filmy flange like egg white, like a jellyfish mantle. It must go back to when she was little, the X-ray machine in the shoe shops. You stood up straight up against it with your toes in the slot and through the window on top, like a diving mask, you saw them wriggling in the haze of the shoes, your own bony, cold, pale green ghostly underwater toes.
This summer is another matter. For once she spends hours of every afternoon in the deep gold of the water, clear pale gold and dark gold, the colour of beer, in a tight webbing. It is murky underwater with the turns of the tide. Little fat fish flee to crouch in the weeds as they swing sharply back and forward in a shower of sand. Murky underwater, though seen from above the water has gone that transparent deep gold. But you must know not to trust it too far. There is turbulence around all the shores of the Rip, currents so suddenly icy, swirling in from the strait, that a swimmer can get cramp and be transfixed, helpless, struggling for breath. The Rip is all turbulences and surges, whirlpools, hidden platforms and scoured rocks, shallow as it is, except for the Entrance Deep, and the safe – for ships – passage known as the Abyss. Every once in a while a swimmer or diver gets swept out, only to be fished up hours later, by helicopter, drowned, while sightseers line the cliffs and jetty. Storms strike and boats overturn.
Even so, you know where you are with the front beach. Two arms of rock shelter it and sand accumulates there, so that the shallows go out a long way and are safe, golden, faceted, warm as bathwater. In spite of the rocks – blanketed in seaweed and green out of the water, but, once underwater, shadowy – this is where everybody swims. Here she picks her slow way out through the paddlers and the rocks into the dark blue deeps and back. Day after day the world she comes up into is stiff to her eyes, dry and sparse, glaring with a yellow heat that is wearisomely heavy to move in. Families sit gasping in a film of sweat. All our summers have come at once, they tell each other. No one can remember one like it, the stinging flies, March flies, on the beaches, the dry gardens simmering day and night with mosquitoes. The regular afternoon sea breezes fail and what shade there is as it grows long with the day, even the dense shade of the pines along the seawall, is no match for the heat. You take to staying indoors, stripped to the skin, moving behind the sun as it goes from room to room, each room once the sun has left feeling for the moment as deep and dark as a tank of water. All you have the strength to do is drift from room to silent room, one tank of stale air to another, looming in glass, white edges in a dimness or briefly alight, in waves of your own making, as if you are your own ghost. Night brings little diminishment; if anything it is harder to breathe after dark in the blinded houses. In cupboards and wardrobes the heat brews. Even when a cool change sends a wind hissing all through the house, you only need to open a cupboard door for the stored heat to come spilling out over you. Masses, walls, the unmade bed, and the couch, are nesting their heat. Even fruit, so that a peach is a shock to the hand closing over it, so like living flesh is the blood heat under the felty skin. If the front and back doors are left open to air the house, they swing shut with a thud all night, open and shut, and at each thud the house shudders and takes a deep breath.
Summer is daddy-long-legs in wisps upside-down in the corners, in webs that are invisible until the light goes on and pencils their shadow on the wall. The faintest current of air will sway the web and spin the spider, sending it whizzing into a tailspin before it calms down. A mosquito as it floats will be caught up and spun too, until the spider swings down headfirst on it. Some mornings, broken limbs litter the bench, webbed cellophane wings and furry moth skin, scraps of shell, even a bunched whole spider. They are almost as fine as their webs, as if they have spun themselves into being; so light that a daddy-long-legs can pick its stilted way over the hairs of your arm and you feel it less than a breath. Yet its venom makes it the deadliest of all spiders to any living thing its fangs can pierce, or is that an old wives’ tale? It becomes the shadow astraddle another spider, the incubus, sucking. It is highly territorial. Many have legs missing, the victors. One day two will be facing off on a wall, and the next day closer still, then grappled together in slow motion, a mating or death struggle. Then one hangs crooked and still. The next day it has shrunk to a ghost of itself; the next, emptiness. In the morning sun the anchoring threads have a sheen and a shadow as faint as dust.
Summer is a stiff pillar of skin rimy all over with salt, itchy, a Lot’s wife of a body, a stuffy nose night and day, a rustle of fullness in your ears when your head moves, loud and furtive, like paper crumpling, the sea water shifting its weight. What you hear through water is magnified, like what you see. It runs out warm on the pillow at last, one side and then the other, a molten discharge. In the morning the pillow has snail crusts of salt and this was the way of the first summers ever, heatstruck, the amplified thunderous sea in your ears, the sea smell, the scrape of sand in tangled sheets, turning and turning over and waking up tasting of salt. You sail like a fish in the ribcages of shipwrecks. In your sleep you are any age and all the ages you have ever been. No lying awake on summer nights in a bed like an open coffin, in the full knowledge of the void, extinction. A heat wave floats you off into another life, swollen with lightness, diaphanous, a water being.
Summer. If the dead walk in the light of day it must be in such a form as this, of water, she thinks, a formless flow, all shadow and shimmering transparency, shaking the air like fire. And what of the dead who never lived, were never born, had only an inner life?
Shall these bones lie smothered, netted, woven in a shroud of spider silk?
Late one sultry afternoon when she goes down for a swim she finds whitebait strewn about as bright and sharp as knife blades, nets, rods and buckets everywhere, and men down on the waterline scrabbling for worms. There is a throb over the beach, a pulse, and a hiss, a rustling she can’t place, until she sees the large barrel-bodied grey fish flapping on the wet sand in a heap behind each man knee-deep in the water with a rod, reeling in, no time to waste finishing off what can be safely left to die in its own good time. In the gear are plastic bags, open, slimed and bloodied, crammed with more fish – mullet, yellow-eye mullet – arching, flailing, eyes and mouths wide. A little boy runs yelling out from heap to heap, poking them with a finger, looking up for applause. She turns away. Along its full length the beach is alive with their flutter and glint.
Or they may walk, our dead, the way our reflections do, appearing deep in mirrors and windowpanes and still waters, shifting and fraying, back to front, the way the lighthouse at sunset lays its long self facedown in rock pool after rock pool.
Sometimes at home a presence seems to amble up beside her, keeping her company, some vast and benign presence, ponderous, resplendent, just under the surface of the everyday, like the stingrays – a surface as clear as day, as sea, and yet, like sea, so covered in facets and flares of light that only shadow shows through. Now and then in her sleep the bed sinks under a slow familiar weight and she holds her breath hoping to not wake up, to stay under, in the dream – but at the first cold impact her head breaks the surface and there she is alone in the dark of her room, wide awake, the dream already a memory, an afterimage, out of reach, then gone, forgotten. The sheets, when she throws them off to let the heat out, breathe out a whiff of blood, rich and hot, salt blood, gone too, by the time she buries her head back in; but it stays with her all day as she moves through the hours with the shape and weight of the dream at her side, the absence felt as a presence; not that she ever brings it to mind; the lingering is in a form other than thought or dream, the residue, the feeling of this having happened before – has it? Has what? Some sense is vigilant in her and knows, riven with loss, and hope.
Tides mould the beaches. Sand as well as water is always in motion, now thick and smooth, now so thin and gnawed away that the bedrock stands out, gaunt, from the seawall, the dunes, down into the shallows. Even halfway, with the rocks just poking through at slack water, they are as good as invisible. The sea wears holes and rings in the limestone, caves and tunnels, wears it wholly away in time, but not smooth. On these beaches, hidden or laid bare, the rock is all as crusty and finely fretted as coral and as sharp underfoot, sandy-coloured, but not sandstone. Limestone is the bedrock of these beaches where we walk in the flesh while we may; and limestone is made of the bones and shells of the dead. How stubborn life is, when you think, lodging its residue in the worn old skin of the earth until some convulsion crumples it into mountains, studded with coiled and spiny fossils from the earliest beginnings, beaks and claws and skulls. Whole stone mountains of the sea’s dead. Even marble is limestone, salted with mica, and metamorphic, and crystalline, however much like bare skin it looks. To think that all the statues in the museums are made of bone and shell, the dust of the dead given a new lease of life, an afterlife, or a semblance of one. Simulacra. All bearing the old gravestone words of foreboding. As you are now so once was I.
High and dry in the cliff, in a pit, snug, a sea star, blue grey but for a red star at its core, like the core of a star apple.
A heat wave to end all heat waves, a summer to end all summers. In some weathers the pulse of the sea stops dead and only after a long silence begins again, as her bloodstream does at night sometimes in the depths of her but also aloud in one ear, a swish, swish like the surge in a seashell, resounding, then a halt long enough to wonder if this is death, before the beat. It resounds in the still of the night like the sea. Use your head, she hears, remembering a black and white play she saw on TV once, when she still had the TV, that was putting her to sleep until a blind man said straight out of the screen that something was dripping in his head – a heart in my head – and she nearly jumped out of her skin, to think he of all people knew about that. It was a weird, jerky, fierce Punch-and-Judy kind of a vaudeville, all antics and nasty digs, and she saw it out to the bitter end she was so at home in it after that, with the four shabby actors onstage and the puppet master, the unseen, unknown, who had put the words in those heads.
At the front door one hot morning, a knock, a policeman, taking her aback. He hands over the ring in an envelope, and his notebook for signing. One gold coloured Ring. She slits the envelope. The same ring, it’s come back. Real gold, no doubt, not that she cares, she who lost her own gold ring some time ago and never turned a hair. It was almost a relief, it got in the way, weighed on her. Did she desire this one? What had made her say she did? Of course she can always sell it. With this ring, she thinks, until death us do part and the marriage is over and done with, the handful of ashes scattered over the sea, the grief outlived, the loss got over in the end. This ring is cold in the hollow of her hand, her property. It had completely slipped her mind.
She stares, puzzled why anyone would take a ring off at the beach, just asking for trouble. Unless you were having a quarrel, then you might. Whoever it was had never bothered to make inquiries. Though it might have come off in the water, or been thrown in from somewhere else, anywhere, the clifftop, a ship, to wash up in her hands, or slipped off a drowned man’s finger of bone, and been swallowed by a fish, or among ashes scattered at sea, unseen, until too late, a hidden ring. What are you worth, she wonders, slipping it into her purse with the vague idea of having it valued when she goes to the city, not that she goes much any more; and as the days pass, so does any thought of selling it.
Since it might slip through her fingers among the loose change in her purse, she puts it on a shelf of the old wooden dresser in the back room with her other keepsakes on a nap of sand: the whelks and earshells and crab casts, the rosy cuttlebone with its white hood, the stubbled red sea urchin, the seabird skull on its fretwork of neck, the crab nipper inkwashed blue, the chunk of jade green bottle glass. There it catches the sun, the ring of gold, immortal. Wherever she moves it to among the relics sooner or later it catches the sun.
When it begins to weigh on her mind she shuts it up with her jewellery, the pendants and necklaces, amber, glass and bloodstone, in the camphorwood box she has had since she was a girl. Still it feels wrong to have it there, as if it belonged among the trinkets of her young days or anywhere else in this house either. Whose is it really, the above property? At a loss, she holds it in the palm of her hand, a circle of light and shadow, bedded on wrinkles. Where was it at home, if it comes to that? Meanwhile she slips it in among the folded clothes in a drawer. She is never going to wear it and yet selling it has become unthinkable; she would as soon have sold her real, her own wedding ring. Losing it was one thing. Selling it, never. I *desire. In her dreams it dilates as she bends closer, auburn frills of seaweed and then a glint, a pale hoop half in half out of the sand, the water.
All the same, one day close on sunset, her heart in her mouth, she clutches it in her fist and runs to the old concrete lookout on the clifftop. The crevice where she found the ring is right underneath, but the tide is in and there is no sign of the secret beach under its swill of froth, the waves swinging, crashing headlong through the sunken caves and rifts. All the cliff face is deep in shadow, only a flock of gulls drifting, balancing on the wind long-legged, still alight with sun. She hurls the ring out as far as she can, so high it shines like a star among them before diving down and taking a shred of the flock down with it out of sight.
But not out of mind. It preys on her at odd times, awake or asleep. With this ring. As if she has been unfaithful and this is a sign that even in death he knows and is angry – or is he simply angry at dying, when he might have been saved? He has a right. She got the blame. They all thought she should have known when he was struck down – instantaneous, so the doctor said, there at the inquest – when his heart was torn in two. But nothing broke the surface of him, or of her sleep, or not enough to wake her up; unless she just went back to sleep, as she usually did when he turned over or got up in the night. You would call yourself a heavy sleeper? She would. He was always so fit and strong, she hears herself say. He had no time for doctors. He said you took what came in this life. She had woken up shivering to find him half on half off the bed, headfirst like a toppled statue, immovable, a man as solid as a rock. And that was enough for her to tell that he was dead, was it? He was like a drowned man, she said, stone cold. No pulse, no breath, his eyes and mouth gaping. Do you have medical qualifications? She shook her head. I’ve seen my fair share of bodies. Anyone could have told. In my experience, she said, there is an absolute difference between the living and the dead. She can see him now in her mind’s eye, like lard under the lamp, only livid all over, except for his face. And naked? We always sleep naked, he must have thrown off the bedclothes. What time was this? She never thought to look. So she had just got into bed and gone back to sleep, her words, had she? In fact she had run to the toilet and been sick and got out a clean sheet to fold him in (a flow of fall, a white wave) and heaved him back up and got back in beside him to lie awake as anyone would with a death in the house. Anyone? But she has remembered the clock emblazoned in red. Half past three! she said. We’re not on the phone. It was not as if it was an emergency to be getting a doctor out of bed to. How could I leave him on his own? You disturbed the body. I got him back to bed. When had you gone to bed? About nine, she thought. What more could anyone do, she said, but see him through the night, as I knew he would have wanted? – as I would in his place? All we had was each other. And so she believes to this day, in the dream and lying awake, knowing that if her heart is riven in two in bed one night she will be down to rags and bones before anyone finds her; raging at him in her heart for dying on her like that, behind her back, as she had on the night, mourning and going cold and quiet under the lamp and the longer she lay the harder it was to move.
At daybreak there had come a bristling in the air, a crackle of menace, and there he was, naked in the doorway, gashes for eyes and a mouth, glaring down at her and his stone dead self, together under the sheet. He had a right, a grievance. But if he was angry, at dying, at her for being fast asleep, dead to the world, she had got over her anger soon enough and so had he. Hadn’t they done an autopsy? Carved him up like a carcass at the meatworks? Instantaneous. A finding of natural causes.
That’s the past for you, all backwashes and rips. On the longest night in the deep of winter you forgive and forget and what life there is goes on, on the surface. There may have been eyebrows raised in the town at how little she showed on the surface. So what if people looked askance and shook their heads saying it was none of their business but it looked as if she had taken it lightly and got off no less lightly? What did they know? What did she? Only that his heart had given out. Was it him in the doorway, his ghost, or a trick of the light, the mind? He blamed her – she blamed herself at heart – and was horrified at finding himself dead. He was waiting for her in the doorway. Struck dumb, she baulked, staving him off, her head in uproar, her whole being one shudder, one no out of the pit of the bed. That was what his ghost must have been screaming, no, at her, at death. Could he have heard her answering no, if she could have screamed back, across the gulf that divided them now? She had held his gaze and let him slip through her fingers, and gone on to let him burn down, her lardy livid slab of a man on his back in flames, and scattered him, ashes and bone, off the pier on the outgoing tide. When shall we two meet again, ashes to ashes?
Caught in a rip, what can you do but swim across into white water?
Not that she is so sure any more of an absolute difference, a line drawn hard and fast, a great gulf fixed. What if it only seems so on the surface? Surface changes, vital signs, reading, misreading the signs – we know there’s always more to know. He used to say he kept an open mind on the afterlife. All very well, but the earth is not open, sealed tight in its skin of air, and all life on earth is spun out of it only to end up back where it belongs. As far as we know – how far is that? – only human beings believe in their own death. We know we have to die, whether or not we believe in the afterlife – let alone believe what we were taught at Sunday school, that believing will make the difference between heaven and hell. But then, she was never a believer. Nor was he. He took things as they came. But if the body knows what she thinks it knows, it’s not telling, is it? – it’s leaving the mind open wide, playing fast and loose with place and time, awake or asleep, letting its inner world seep into the outer world through the sheer membrane of the self, and the other way round, the two are so swollen with each other wherever they meet, like the bloodstreams of mother and child, enfolded, anchored. Air and water fuse, and sea and sky, and body and mind, with no dividing line in sight, none you can put a finger on. Lines of water, sandbanks, shorelines, shifting, unravelling, all mirage and spindrift, rising and falling.
Coming back to haunt her, nevertheless, is how on the way back to bed on the death watch her foot slid in water, a pool on the floorboards, and, yes, there was his overturned water glass, not even cracked, that he must have knocked over, flailing, as if it might save him. Was it evidence? She had wiped up the water, washed and put away the glass – what if it had? She has good dreams where she wakes up in time to kneel, distraught, before him. She holds up to his mouth the water of life.
Now and then the sultry heat comes to a head in a thunderstorm, lightning and flash flooding all afternoon, and a strange yellow twilight of silence, not a breath, the still sea low among the rocks and breakwaters, under a deep yellow sky at nightfall. A cool night, a cool day, and the heat sets back in. Now and then a night is full of a warm sea fog that has slid in after dark, out of season, a dislocation, to lie low in the basin behind the dunes at the surf beach, setting off the foghorn and here and there a hoot, a ship’s horn, prolonged, and another interrupting, resounding on into the day, so that waking becomes burdensome, eyelids and lips swollen, rimed with salt, a sea as smooth as snow, a spangled silence in the tea-trees.
Into her head there seeps a memory of a gravelly voice, not her husband’s but like his, some old salt of a man on the radio spinning a yarn to schoolchildren about the time in Antarctica when he was a lad and his party and their dogs were marooned for two years, trekking on sleds at first and finally camped in one of Scott’s old huts. An expeditioner, he was. World War I had begun, in another world. There were stores in the hut, he said, tea and biscuits, pemmican, and passed an open tin around for them to sniff and gag over. To a man they were black with scurvy, rotting, by the time they got there, and one had died and been given an ice burial. Later, two more, desperate to get to the main hut over at the harbour where the ship had been moored before the ice floe clamped and carried her off, set out one day over the autumn ice, but a blizzard blew up and the sea ice was thin and they left no trace. How did the rest keep alive? Sir! Sir! You ate dog! No! In the long winter dark, huge seals hauled up onshore near the hut and the castaways crept up on them with knives.
How well could seals see in the dark, she wonders now, with only the starlight or a moon casting shadows? But they were safely on land, where they had no enemies, fast asleep or in a trance of cold; and if they saw or heard the shadowy men closing in they were none the wiser, never having seen a man. The old man fondly recalled his young thirst for their blood, a thirst so great that he would have plunged his face in and swallowed it hot as it hosed out of their throats. You had to club them on the nose with the icepick, pull off your glove and grab the knife, he said, in your bare hand and strike home in the second before your skin froze to the hilt. Steaming, the blood jetted over your clothes and boots and froze on instantly. She sees the heave of huge hulks, the ripple of necks tossing in shock as one after another sprawled meekly and its blood pumped and each round eye set and stared in the glaze of death, lidded with snow.
There was no water but the snow they melted over a blubber stove that reeked and filled the hut with flares and shadows. Snug in that frozen vault by the light of blubber lanterns they boiled up the seal meat and gnawed on it for ten soot-sodden months, men and dogs. Like Jonahs in the belly of seal after seal they ate their way through. Day by day of spring as the sun oozed back for minutes at a time they took on solid shape, hounds and battered knights in armour, in helmeted sealskins rigid with blood. Out the window the vaulted carcasses came to light, hacked to the bone, folded in coats of snow on black glass, white glass. Sentinels.
Some of the old books are still around, so thick with dust on top that it stays put if she pulls one off the shelf. If she opens one up, the pages are in lacy holes and silverfish swim out in their silken skins. When she sees a silverfish she always thinks of a library she once read about, in Portugal, a palace, a cathedral of a library with high walls of old books, hand-painted mediaeval books inscribed on vellum or parchment, leather-bound, that no one reads. This library, as if under a vow of silence, is closed to readers. The inhabitants are librarians and silverfish and bats like ghosts, skeletal, almost transparent, no bigger than moths, that live on the silverfish. At twilight they wake up for the hunt, weaving their flight paths, flitting and chittering, swooping down in whirlpools of dust. At closing time the librarians cover the tables to catch the droppings. In the morning they clean up. She wonders if they leave a lamp on overnight and if a librarian ever stays behind to watch, as she would if she had a bat. Or would one bat die of loneliness? By daybreak they are hung up in skeins out of sight, asleep, invisible. This library is its own ghost, a real library in a city and a living fairy tale, or myth, or fable.
Of all the childhood possessions she remembers, the one she most misses is a pocket book of poems on a golden cord, Poems from Coleridge, with a blue tongue of silk ribbon hanging out for a placemark. It was some great-aunt’s relic, all blue print and curlicues, or so it is when it opens in her mind’s eye. One poem, the longest, she knew by heart, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, about a sailing ship lost in the Antarctic fog and ice, and an albatross that follows in her wake, a black cross, sky high, day after day, until one of the crew shoots it down with his crossbow. At this all nature turns against them, until they are becalmed in the tropics, rotting in agonies of thirst – Water, water, everywhere – and his shipmates curse the murderer and hang the albatross around his neck. But still they die, they give up the ghost, all but him. He has fallen prey to the nightmare Life-in-Death, who sweeps up in her black ship with Death as her skeleton mate and claims him. His penance, his blood debt, his curse, is to roam the earth, undead, apparitional, waylaying strangers and recounting his tale of horrors, endlessly reliving it. Only she, being careless, lost the book, or threw it out, embarrassed that it was too fancy, more of a love token than a real book. But she must have loved it, anyway, since it lives on in her mind, coming back as it always did if she happened on the poem in this or that real book. A square blue shell parting, a flutter and silken sigh of gilt edges.
One afternoon she is on the bend of the cliff path, alongside the mesh fence of the concrete lookout, when she nearly treads on a rat, a baby one cowering in the grey sand, beady-eyed and shivering, all its fur on end. She steps softly closer, waiting for it to run. But it seems not to notice, not even when three girls come prancing rowdily along with a terrier on a lead and stop short, shrill with disgust. The dog takes one wary sniff and backs away. At a loss, the girls shriek and shove each other over to where the rat is bowed down. It’s dying, she says, fixing them with her gaze, and they stare. Is it yours? one calls out. No, she says. It’s a wild rat. Their goggling eyes averted, they edge past out of sight.
More walkers will be along. It has at least to be got out of the way, over the fence out of sight. It’s not as if it will bite or scratch or even struggle in the state it’s in – all it wants is its mother. How long can it last, bowed down in the open like this, so meek in the grip of its death, so beyond knowing, possessed and whirring in all its electric vibrancy? How is she supposed to pick it up – by the tail? What if its snaps out of its trance in a last spasm of terror? Now she is getting into a state herself. Something has reared up in her that will not for anything let her clasp this quivering scrap of fur in her bare hands. Its life, in her hands, its death. No, only its death, and common sense says to throw it off the cliff or find a rock and finish it off, be cruel to be kind. But never in her life has she put a fellow flesh and blood creature to death and there are no rocks that she can see up here, only down on the beach; by the time she gets back anything could have happened. Is it a kindness, as they say, a mercy killing, a violent death? What if she misses or only stuns it and has to go on smashing and smashing it to pulp? Its blood, on her hands. Is it really any better than walking on and leaving it to its fate? No one knows the answer to that. No one living. She walks on.
Day after day on the bend in the cliff path her heart squeezes shut even before the rat surfaces in her mind’s eye. It is nowhere on the path. Its absence is the shimmer on the path, the hot spot. The stink of it ripens in the scrub then fades away. Not so the afterimage.
Gone and not gone, the gold ring reminds her of Venice, where she had always dreamed of going one day, if she went overseas. Venice, so ancient, so rare, knee-deep in the sea, a dreaming city of the dead where the streets were water and the bridges that spanned them, the walls and roofs, the boats, were one shifting mesh of reflected light, an emanation of a city risen whole and perfect out of the depths. Glassy vistas opening, a slideshow of the mind, a jumble of landing stages, masks, reflections and once, indolent, gliding, a woman fingering black strands of water. Venice was the temple of the wedding feast, where every year a man clothed in gold, the Duke, stood high on a prow among a fleet of gondolas, swan boats, black as night, where the lagoon met the sea, and plighted his troth and sent his gold ring spinning down to the seabed. It could be one of his rings that has washed up here on the far side of the world after centuries of rolling around the seabed, like a message in a bottle, and gone off on its way again. Pools of glassy light filling the black gondolas. Stranger things have happened.
He plighted his troth in a loud voice even the sea could hear. Was this to keep it at bay? Venice was a city twice daily under siege. What if the sea held him to it one day and rose up in a great wave and plunged down, crushing him, green waters and gold, engulfing squares, domes, towers, burying Venice underwater, a lost Atlantis? The high tides go higher and higher. Sooner or later the city will go under for good, so they say, if not to any great depth. Then the ebb tide will bring to light an underwater maze of canals, the sun washing in ribbons of ripple on roof tiles, and fish with eyes like gold rings threading in and out of doorways and windows, until the tide floods back in. Divers in masks will grope through her domes and towers as they do between the ribs of shipwrecks.
With the city shuddering all over with bells he throws in his ring. So the sea is the bride! No, the sea is male. The city is the bride, the Queen of the Adriatic. And the groom is the sea. With this ring I thee wed. And the Duke takes the vows in her name. Is he giving her away? Like a father? No, more like a proxy bride, all so long ago, in Venice, in another world beyond this one.
The bridegroom’s fate is to rise up and smother the bride and be the death of her.
But why?
Out of love. He doesn’t know his own strength.
Not that she wants to go any more, not to the all too solid, thronged, everyday Venice. The way the world is going, as far as anyone can tell the sea will rise and make a clean sweep of us anyway. There will be only this one blue abolished world, a silence, a universal Venice of dreams, of underwater domes, towers, lighthouses, phantom foghorns and bells no one hears, dead and swarming with life. Newborn.
As for a clean sweep, high tide, high time she put her mind to it closer to home. Out with the clutters of seashells, pebbles and river stones, nuts and leaves, feathers black and white, drops of bottle glass, the red and blue crab claws and papery carapaces, the skulls and bones she has walked blindly past, and added to, while they and she gathered cobwebs and dust and lost track of where they came from and how they washed up here. So what if each one was a living memory of whatever it was, a keepsake, a talisman? Even the packets of photos went off to the tip long ago, the faded, remembered, unremembered, faces and places meaningless to any living soul. Dry leaves, winter leaves, the photos were, lost in the afterlife – though even now coming alive in the odd dream, in memories she can never put a name to. The lost and gone books, those front doors into other lives, haunt her the most. But all this clutter goes in handfuls into brown paper bags. High time the decks were cleared. Those of the earth she takes and scatters in the scrub on the clifftop. For those of the sea she finds a pool in the cliff shadow with the tide rolling in, where some settle, some shuttle down, some float. A rainbow glint in an earshell. A coil of bone. A black swan-shape of swans far overhead.
Day after day, filling and draining in channels all along, the rising tide leaves finny wakes behind in wet sand that is always on the boil, flooding full of the bubble breath of hidden sea life, or of empty air, who knows, as memories rise and sink under the surface of time.
A fierce pang in her belly wakes her one night out of a dream and sends her staggering to the bathroom to double up over the toilet, retching. When the pang is down to a dull ache she shudders, recoiling at the thought of going back, but the bed is a blank sheet in the lamplight, immaculate. Was it something she ate? Sure that it wasn’t, she puts it down to the dream she was in, of a cramp in heavy cold water and something warm slipping out between her legs, not just seawater, something soft and dense and rubbery. Forgetting all about the mask she put her hand down inside her bathers and peered down – blood! – only to choke on a gutful of water from the snorkel. Then she was doubled up shuddering in her towel on the sand, losing blood from whatever was in her bathers, knowing what it must be, what she would have to keep to herself forever. The curse is come upon me, she cries, out of nowhere she can name. It was not as if she had defied her mother. She had kept the house rules until she left school and home as a grown woman with a live-in job, and then a husband and a roof of her own and it was up to her when she went swimming. How far was she gone? She had missed a few times before when she was overworked, rundown, run dry, never dreaming – what had gone wrong? It’s your own fault, her mother would say if she knew. So might her husband or, worse, think so and not say, but eat his heart out over it. Even the doctor might blame her. And she was fine in a week or so, good as gold – it would never happen again. Nor did it. That day she waded back in, deep, deeper, reached into the dank weed of her groin for the little clump of membrane and, screaming bubbles, opened a red hand to send it bobbing off in the undersurface, a jellyfish trail, pulsing, alive; and before she could snatch it groggily back a wave tossed it down. As soon as she could she dragged herself home and lay down in agony. As she does now, and groans, dozing off, only to wake in daylight empty of pain, warmly wafting, again having got off lightly, with a belly as light as a blown egg.
All along the shore the flimsy weatherboard, weather-beaten houses look out to sea, beached, stranded. Life is short enough at any age anywhere, over in no time. This has always been a house of hollow spaces and echoes and her heart is not in it. Drifts of cobweb and fallen hair, dry moths, fluff, lie like shadows on every surface. They belong as she does, no more, no less, as frail and as constant. Her windows, whether or not they get the sun, are smeared outside with dust and cobwebs and still the mirrors inside under their nap of dust bring the windows in and double the light. Moving from mirror to mirror she is someone who looks as if she has seen a ghost, greedy for light. Otherwise she is frugal, saving her strength, never missing meals, doing her chores, living for summer time. Never a big eater, she lives all year round on potatoes, grain foods and pulses, salads, eggs and cheese, fish, stone fruit in summer and in autumn grapes, apples, last oozings. A paradox in a nutshell is a stone fruit. Nothing goes to waste. Everything does. Being a creature of habit is fine as long as you trim your sails to the wind like a ship at the mercy of the sea (it has none); what we all come down to in the long run is a little ship of death. Who was it said that? No sailor, whoever it was (nor is she). Little ships all lay down a glisten of thread across the dark like garden snails only to falter one by one and lose their way and go under – there they go out past the winking buoys and starlight, over the moon path into the sky, moonships in a lost picture book. After a lifetime with her nose in books, reading was making her eyes fail and she has given it up, content with whatever scraps from once upon a time come floating back on the tide over the quaking membrane of the days – loose as the skin on a rock pool – as she makes her way, reading the signs, falling into place, tiding things over as she used to in a book at bedtime before she could read, falling asleep.
Who am I, coming back into being here in this tight skin each morning? At the time of waking, anyone, no one. Where am I, she thinks, until it dawns. And how old? All the ages she has ever been. Summer and winter, the sun rises and up she comes in the same gauzy slick and glow of living light of yet another day by the sea, of lifting her head like a seal in a shawl of shed water; of porridge cooked her mother’s way, under her mother’s roof, with milk and a coil of honey, just right; of sitting up straight at the bench like a good girl, eating it all up. Sometimes her mother boiled her an egg with a pencilled face that cracked when she banged down the spoon. When the egg was all gone she put it back in the eggcup upside down. Hurry up and eat it, you’ll be late for school, her mother scolded, only to find an empty shell. That was the game.
Still she goes in swimming, evades the hanging jellyfish, snatches at a passing shoal of little skeleton fish that, ogling, deflecting as one, evade her, and comes up against strung seaweed and waves and once, vast, a black undulation, looming overhead, pitched to come thundering down, that she takes for a stingray and dives away from, gasping, struggling to the shore. Flat there, the sea, lap-lapping at her toes. Was it just bull kelp? No way of knowing. Playing safe. She never swims in the dark, even in her dreams, only in the light.
The schools are back and still the weather is holding and the house, like the sea, has its tides of heat and cold that lag behind night and day. At sundown crickets jitter out of the dry land and a rim of dust, or haze, fumes, ash, keeps the sunsets alight in ribs of flame, of apocalyptic fire, like years ago when a volcano far to the north, in Asia, poured out blood and fire in a mirage over these shores, aflame, week after week, as if beamed up from the roof of the world. What next, the apparition of bushfires in the sky, faint flames, smoke, ash in the throat and lungs, a long haze on a gilded sea – what omens, what black ships looming, what icebergs? The sun burns and the moon waxes and wanes, and all this she is aware of, attentive to the rhythms without knowing she is, having no need to look at a clock any more, or a moon chart or tide table, knowing anyway, more than she has ever known unless in her earliest childhood: so much so that she drifts into waking, eating and sleeping a little later each day, left to herself as she is in a slowly unspooling tidal life, the immortal first summer of memory and dream, the essence of summer.
Well into April the spell of heat endures, barely broken by the one wild week of cold tempestuous winds and high tides swamping the beaches. White water smashes into the dunes and the standing rocks and swills up over the flat rock under the lighthouse, the one like a head in profile, an old man’s sleeping head pillowed on sand, and washes away the bottom steps of the staircase. Even the planks of the pier are spurting, awash. When the sky clears and the sun comes out again, all the old warmth is there still, but unmistakably now, for the first time in the year, it’s the hazy, salty inner warmth of autumn.
All along the front beach the mounds of seaweed lie stewing, hopping with sandfleas. More weed is swilling in the shallows. Niches in the rock face have a floor of sand with globules of the red wax of the New Year candles still poking up, like sucked lollies spat out, raspberry jujubes. At the headland a salty sweetness hovers thick as honey. The cliff face harbours gnats, at rest invisible in the pitted limestone among the shadows and cracks and mussel spat, until triggered off in black outbursts that patter and sting, crowding into eyelids, nostrils, earholes, wings of black gauze in a blind whirr. Even if you keep well clear, skirting the pools out to seaward, something in the cliff is aware and shifts, a rousing and swelling up as of the great stone honeycomb itself, tawny and black-tipped.
For once she has it all to herself, as she wavers, faint, rickety, at the thick edge of the water. Warm as it is, and not so long after midday, the sun is low and the shadow long, the sand already more than half in the shade of the cliffs. The forecast is rain and a strong wind warning and she knows this is the last hot spell, if she wants one last swim, at the tail end of the summer, on the hinge of the year. But not here in this swampy backwater by the seawall. She has her bathers on underneath. Just this once, for the sake of its vast bare wash of sky and sand, she will go on under the lighthouse in the distilled heat of the day and swim at the surf beach.
Here too, wherever you look – her feet go so slow in the soft sand, so astray, sinking and rising – are the traces of the battering of the past week; loops and shreds and grass skirts of bladderwrack strung up drying at the high tide line and on the torn wire fence along the dune, bleaching beads and amber hanks and tentacles; and dog turds and driftwood and shells all through the marram grass, where the sea has carved out channels and new high gashes. But it faces southwest and is still flooded in sunlight, the broad beach a clean sheet, the sand and sea one white glaze and not a soul in the surf for once, no encampment of surfers and dogs. And this too she has all to herself.
As usual she strips to her bathers, drops her towel at the waterline – red towel, red bathers, a lifetime – and walks straight in, by instinct finding a channel of sand in the maze of the rock shelf at the same spot, she thinks, as the cold clamps her legs, where a seal bolted one day and fled out to sea. High water then, but low water now, water enlaced in stone, stone in water, and harder to tell water from shadow or shadow from substance. She perches shivering on the bare rock at the base, leaning back against the jagged ridge of crests, her Mountains of the Moon, as of old, the promised land. Green, gold and bronze, the rich weedbeds of the pools are all around, long pulsing hairy arms in a sway, ripples in yellow webs pulling in tighter as they are disturbed and laying open all their weave again into a stillness. This is the place of the apparition like thunder of the seal, where he reared up taller than anyone and gaped and fled convulsing in all his length, the seal, sprawling his tumultuous way over the rocks out to sea. How those eyes burned bronze-black, and those long-boned hands – the rocks all around her bristling and glinting with strings of drops and bubbles – and that furry head split into a wound, a husk, a pod that burst into a flower of blood, hot with breath, silenced, a raw mouth. And the lightning disparition of a seal.
Out to sea, a long way past the lip of the farthest rock pool, smooth water has begun flooding into the network of channels, a webbing of white light dissolving and reappearing with each new wave, rolling in midair, waves such as she has never seen. Is the tide on the turn, so soon? She squints into the distance, spellbound and yes, she is not mistaken, there it is again, a glassy flow and then on its way is one long wave of winnowing incandescence.
The sheer mass of it takes her by surprise, the vast heave of itself sheer over the edge of the rock shelf, engulfing pool after pool. She tries to stand and is hurled hard against rock, a jagged overhang, and her shoulder stings, and her nose, her scalp, a sharp bang and gash, searing, as the wave sweeps her back through and over a channel and she’s out, over the last edge into the open water choking on mouthfuls, the snorkel swinging as she is filled down to her depths with icy water. The mask is on crooked and her frantic fingers jab her in the eye just as she is slammed into the rock wall again in the crash of a new wave. Her other hand is jammed hard, and she wrenches, groping for a foothold in a clamp of rock, and grabs at the mask, its pane cracked from side to side, a blade of light, but it yanks off, tossing, hurtling itself and the snorkel free, and now she is wedged hard in the rock, blindfolded, caught in a web of torn hair and seaweed and in her throat a curdle of blood, a scream of water.