The man woke to a screaming tension and rushes of anxiety like he hadn’t felt since the worst days in Seattle. He lay on the caravan floor breathing stale air. Trying to get the knot in his chest to unwind just a little. It was one of those things that, when it wasn’t there, you forgot just how crushing it was. So you could do the basic functions of life without constantly dreading its return. But then on mornings like this when the thing in his chest was writhing, constricting, squeezing him in its vice, it felt as though the world was simply a loop in time, a circle with no solution or exit.
He had been complicit in terrible things and nothing he ever did was going to let them go. He was an imposter on this anaretic planet, something inhabiting the form of a human being but with none of its genuine interior.
A buzzing rose, an infinite swarm of bees outside the greenhouse window that was Tempest Bay—
His chest constricted to what felt like the size of a coin, he was immobile—
But something inside of him coiled back. Breathed hot emergency oxygen into his limbs and mind. Like water in the desert bubbling up from some deep hidden aquifer beneath. It wasn’t much but it was enough and at exactly the right time.
That stubborn spark had kept him alive all these years, had dragged him like a blind mole though tunnels and constrictions and labyrinths of all kinds, an animal that was relentlessly cruelly focused on the simple fact of universal forward motion. Move. Breathe. Eat. Live.
He remembered the functioning of his eyes and opened them.
The soft orange light of the caravan. Muggy with the sleep of three people but warm and morning soft. He loved the 1974 Concord. Loved every aspect of its rickety ceiling and worn fixtures and tiny bed and narrow chintzy optimism. He had never loved any vehicle or object like this before.
No one was here. He gathered his legs and gave himself a moment. His head had been bathed in sweat and left a stain on the old duvet cover beneath. He’d figure out a way to wash it today.
He was grateful, for a moment, that they’d all taken refuge here last night. He could see where Hedy had perched next to Lucia. Three human beings in their own version of a cave, together.
He pulled on his shirt—another thing that needed washing—and emerged into the clifftop light. Later again than he’d thought it was. Clearly his sleep patterns were irregular but he had the strongest feeling for a moment that the actual length of the days and nights was beginning to swing. More like tides than earth rotations.
As his anxiety receded, as the wind up off the beach blew a swirling crosswind over the tower, he was surprised to feel something else moving through him. A restless itch, long forgotten. Something he thought he’d lost.
Lucia and Hedy were both by the memory garden. He ambled over in his bare feet, ready to greet the day—
I don’t know where it came from, Lucia was saying. It wasn’t me.
I don’t believe you, Hedy said. I just bloody well don’t.
The memory garden was running riot with whisper finger plants. The strange organisms covered the lines and whorls and half-buried items like weeds. Worms oiling their way out of the soil. It was an astonishing bloom for overnight. Like there’d been an invisible rainstorm.
Lucia carefully traced one of the spiral arms with her finger. Whispering to herself. Hedy rocked back and forth on her hunched heels. Staring at something that had been placed, very deliberately, in the earth.
A dead rabbit clawing its way over a winking cartoon grocer. Mr Sixbox, that he remembered from the furry toilet in back of the Doris cafe. The pose felt like an echo of how he and Lucia slept in the caravan.
Mr Sixbox. Sells but never tells.
What did you do? he demanded of Lucia.
I didn’t kill a rabbit! Lucia yelled. She strode off in a scared huff down the cliff edge meadow.
Hedy led him into the tower. Up to the dangerous second floor with its broken timbers. A small pile hoarded away in a corner. Trinkets, knick knacks, books. Objects with the look of preciousness to someone.
She’s been stealing things from all over town, Hedy said. I don’t see how this helps the situation. For anyone.
Tired eyes. He could see the stress on her face.
We’re leaving today anyway, he said. It’ll be sorted.
But instead of relief Hedy gave him a look of utter betrayal.
• • •
He decided to provoke a confrontation. Continue the push he’d begun last night in the bookstore with Angela. Force some kind of reckoning with this tangled place, rip the face off it all before the bus arrived. At least do something to leave Hedy with some protections.
He headed for town taking the dead rabbit and Mr Sixbox with him in a cloth bag. Ignoring the rising itching vibration of his body. He would start with the Doris cafe and go from there.
Tempest Bay itself felt like it was in bloom. Pressure rising. Whisper fingers everywhere, tufting out of letterboxes and railings and gutters.
He thought about Lucia. Was stopping here what he’d hoped? Especially for the girl. Or had this simply been the latest in a long line of mistakes in his handling of, well, everything?
After having her in his life for nearly three years now, he understood that it wasn’t that she was being wilful or contrary: she moved and lived in a different world from other people. She could be profoundly fascinated and confused by the simplest things. The arrangement of glass milk bottles on a doorstep. The ins and outs and of daily small talk between neighbours.
Lucia. Often lost, but frequently finding. As he once had been, on the mad wild journey of his life. They were different people, utterly so. But even as he fled the things that haunted him, he hoped that she would be someone providing a way through the new world that was emerging so painfully, through all the tumult overseas. That for Lucia, this new world might make sense, and not just be something to run and shelter from and have to endlessly negotiate and compromise with.
In sight of the Doris cafe, now. The Idle Hour. Townsfolk milling around the intersection, faces he half-recognised, excited bright shining eyes and odd gaits. His footsteps quickened, and he was ready to use the rabbit and Mr Sixbox like a crowbar in the cracks of this town—
But a shiver ran through the street. Harder this time than he’d felt in the Spriggan pub. Wilder. Like a miniature tornado. It ripped past him, entered him, turned his itchy body into kindling and lit a fire—
Autopilot from that moment forward.
He turned sharp north. Away from the main intersection. Up towards the forested tracks by the fancy houses, the ones the fisherman at the Hermit Cave had mentioned. The ones where the fucking was good.
• • •
The north hills. A scent in the air, the trees, the sunlight up here. The silhouette of the hills seeming to bend, the light intensifying, hitting sparks of green and blue at the edges of vision.
Many others out today in the trails. Shapes and sounds flitting through the trees. He wasn’t the only one susceptible.
It was driving him, leading him, running through him like a finger winding right through his knees and legs and crotch—
Three people emerged ahead of him. Differently matched in age and bodies. WIthout any concern for his presence they headed for a spot where the track opened out into a small meadow. There, breathing happily, they began stripping off their clothes and helping each other.
Soon, in the lucient sunlight of Tempest Bay, they were fucking loudly and happily, and it did indeed look really good.
• • •
Everyone had something, he knew. That thing that really got them. For some it was gambling, or drugs, or anger, or food, or sorrow, or power, or so many other classic traps and confusions.
For Hedy, perhaps, it might be a need to dash herself against the rocks of a lost event, a memory, that would never return the favour or help make her whole.
But for him, quite simply, starting not long after he’d moved away from the town of his birth, it had been anonymous sex with everyday strangers. The utterly addictive drug of chance encounters and momentary seductions, shorn of all responsibility or pretence or complication.
He had been forced to give most of it up, years ago, and it had perhaps been the hardest sacrifice of all. But he understood this place and the shiver running through him. Understood it perfectly well. In a dizzyingly complex world of distractions, sometimes you just need to walk up a hill and get naked with someone.
Almost as though the weather itself knew his secrets, and saw him.
Watching the trio—they were aware of his presence and didn’t seem to care or mind, being fully focused on the convolutions possible with three bodies—he almost didn’t see the other woman until she was nearby. Watching too, with an itchy hunger that mirrored his own.
She was older than him by a little. She had the feel of someone who lived in a house and occupied a routine. Her hair was an interesting shape. Her eyes looked alive.
He was out of practice at giving himself over. He could have gone on to overthink the whole thing, driven himself into tangles and spirals, except it was she, blessedly, who offered a short circuit.
Ullo, she said pleasantly. Out for a walk?
The invisible weather flurry all around them, both of them feeling it—
He didn’t know the methods, or rituals, or any of how this was done here, and a tightness rose in his chest again—
She grinned. Tossed him a coin. On pure instinct he caught it.
Dropped the bag as he did. She picked it up. Looked inside. Saw the rabbit. Drew it out with a cruel smile. Dug her fingernails in, ripped the rabbit’s head off with one hard wrench and began to smear the blood in places unexpected and gloriously obscene. Advanced on him with hard shining eyes and began to smear it everywhere, both of them.
The next few minutes were unadulterated madness.
• • •
Appreciated, she said afterwards with a quick smile full of renewed energy.
He was still unable to speak.
She was already pulling her pants on with matter-of-fact skill. After a moment’s improvised cleanup, she headed away up a skinny trail to the west.
The other trio, also, had departed, having well and truly seeded the meadow.
Silence in the Tempest Bay hills.
He sat there a moment. Chemicals and emotional weather coursing through his body. Though even with his shoulders tingling and a relaxed feel in his toes, he found himself with a rumble of grief in his stomach, a giving away of the things that gave him the simplest pleasure but through the course of his life had inevitably become complicated and rare.
A feeling too, that he had somehow been distracted from something important.
Voices from a fancy house above, to the west. His quickie companion greeting her partner. Asking what everyone felt like for dinner. Lamb burgers, honey?
Well, he reflected, he understood that too. We do what we have to do, and then we return to the home we’ve constructed, and we don’t bring things across the threshold in either direction. The world can work surprisingly well that way, for a long time. Until something crashes through it all. Or the pot starts to boil.
Lost for a moment in everything, his vision unfocused then recentred on something just ahead of him. He stared.
A book nailed to a tree with a thick rusted iron nail. A distinctive sea-blue cover. The Invisible Storm: Meteorology & Imagination, by H.B.
Just for an instant, in the dying moments of his afterglow, he saw a gleaming trail, like an eyeblink memory of cartography lines on some invisible map, wending its way down towards the warehouses and intersection of the town below. But then it was gone, and he couldn’t follow.
He knew exactly who had stolen the book and nailed it there, of course.
This place, then. An entire town made up of intense, strange, vivid moments like turning points inside a dream. So full of mysteries they literally poured out of the cupboards. There’s no logic in Tempest Bay. No sequence of events. Just a canvas of land and sea and sky and buildings and people, splotched all over with moments like a painting.
And Lucia, like him, like Hedy, like the married woman up the hill, like everybody, trying to chart her course through it all. Trying to draw a map and find the centre of the maze.
Goddamn that girl was a pain sometimes.