I’ve just driven five hundred kilometres under a merciless sun and I’m sitting on a quay near a river that hereabouts is known as a sea, listening to the rising tide. It hasn’t been dark for long, and a few walkers are strolling hand in hand along the quay. I put my notebook down on the concrete platform and realize I’m the only person not holding someone’s hand. It doesn’t make me sad. If P. was here, I wouldn’t be holding his hand anyway, because I hate hands that stop you moving your arms freely and take their grip in a manner suggesting possession. P. knows it, just as he knows I can only be his if he doesn’t put a ring on my finger or the weight of his arm on my shoulder. That’s how it will be until the end. I want to collapse alone and with my hands free, near a man — P. — who’ll let me sink into the slow-moving earth.
I interrupt my work for a few moments and go to the patio doors that look onto the backyard, go back to my desk, back to the door, and then take a jar of pistachios out of the pantry and snack on them frantically, licking the salt off my fingers as I go and watching the starlings search for insects in the shorn grass. I haven’t written for two or three weeks, it feels like five, and the reality of this is causing me anguish. I need to move, to ease the tension, eat, chase away the flies bothering me, the prickling in my legs, before I am able to return to that river, that sea, the couples walking in the dark.
On the shingle beach, I couldn’t take my eyes off the white splash of a bird that stood out against the black sand. Everything pointed toward the bird’s dying — its isolation, its immobility, its diminishing whiteness — and I tried, while not taking my eyes off it, to make it understand that it wasn’t alone, that when the sea washed over it there’d be a witness to its last flight, and then a couple walked by, hands intertwined, and I abandoned the bird, which was perhaps just one of those free spirits defying the laws of its species and therefore destined to solitude. I gave it one last look and headed toward the far end of the quay.
I’d been in the seaside village because, the following day, I was due to give a reading from my latest novel, but the power of the river had taken me away from Boundary just as it took me away from Heather, Vince, and Howard W. Thorne. The only character the sea didn’t submerge was P., whom I would tell about the bird as he described, in turn, the network of rivers that waters our countryside; whom I would tell about the smell of iodine, and the feeling of well-being, of the isolation that the increasingly deserted quay inspired in me — just me at one end, a shadow that, had you not read such peace in her posture, you might have believed was about to wade into the foam.
Leaning on the piled-up stones protecting the quay from the sea’s repeated assaults, I watched the waves cresting, white in the immense darkness, telling myself that their parallel lines were perhaps only the result of our capacity and desire to make order of chaos.
Strangely, I felt at home, in my element, perhaps because of the waves’ regularity, which apparently echoes the rhythm of our breathing. I filled my lungs with salty air, endeavouring to conform to the cadence of the sea, the roaring of which seemed to emanate from further away than the waves — as if they’d actually broken before hitting the rocks and the blast preceded the collision that would ultimately split and disperse a force that only had cohesion in its plurality.
Fascinated by the roaring, the sounds of wet shells, and the rumbles of thunder ripping through the darkness, I closed my eyes and understood that I was hearing the echo of a primordial breaching.
The next day, in an enormous garden, I shouted, “Who’s there? Who’s fucking there?” channelling Zaza Mulligan, the first girl to die in Boundary. Afterward, I hit the road again under another baking sun. Hundreds of kilometres from the sea, Heather was waiting for me with her head on Vince’s shoulder at the intersection of the 1st Line and La Languette, in front of a wayside cross reminding us that others had believed in resurrection before us.