The deception of childhood is the impression it gives of never ending. The risk of growing up in a place you love so much is to be haunted by it. Perhaps, if they had never left the cottage, his dad would not have died. The cottage was the glue holding everything together. But then again, nothing ever is held together like that. The elements of any life are constantly shifting. From time to time they gather into a constellation that works well and feels good. And we dare to imagine that those constellations we are happy with might gain permanence.
As he looks at the beach, itself a peninsula of ever-shifting land with no pretensions to permanence, it occurs to Ellis that no one ever does have it all sorted out. A few might think they do, but what sort of people are they? Denny never did have everything in order. The cottage was never completed, his income never secure, his children never safe and sound and guaranteed to remain that way. And certain of his scars were for life, bearable but not the sort that heal.
It is the same for all the men and women walking so purposefully along Jermyn Street, it is the same for the fishermen on the beach. It is the same for Joseph Reardon, who doesn’t even own the farm that has consumed him. A wonderful life of chaos and hope and disarray awaits all those prepared to risk it.
As Ellis folds his father’s letter and slides it back into the envelope, he sees a Post-it note clinging to the back of the envelope like a stowaway. On it, in Denny’s handwriting, are the words
Call Tammy
.
He listens to the gulls and to the shore break. He watches the woman sketching on the beach. A few hours ago he imagined her entering his house and making love to him. He added her to a long list of nameless, non-existent women who had loved him in this way. It was only a few hours ago but he is already embarrassed by what he used to be.
He goes to his bedroom. In a drawer, underneath his vests, is his address book. He goes to the kitchen and makes a call. He does it all swiftly so that he doesn’t leave time to talk himself out of it. A woman answers and says “Hello” and Ellis speaks tentatively.
“Does Tammy still live there?”
The phone goes quiet but he can hear her breathing.
“Is that you, Ellis?” Tammy asks.
“Yes.”
She laughs under her breath. He asks her how she is. She asks him where he is calling from and he tells her that he has moved to the coast. She says, “Nice.” He asks her if she’s OK again. Her breathing is as if she’s lying beside him.
“I don’t want to do lots of talking about everything under the sun, like people seem to want to do. But I’d really like to see you,” he says.
“See me but not really talk? Didn’t we do that before?”
“I suppose … have you got a boyfriend?”
“Ellis, I don’t want to be unkind, but after more than a year I’m not sure that’s any of your business.”
“No. That’s true. But have you?”
“I’m not very good at being on my own. I get lonely.”
“I am good at being alone. But I get lonely too.”
“Then maybe you’re not as good at it as you think.”
He thinks to himself and nods, neither of which helps the conversation.
“I just like my own space,” he says.
“Why?” she asks. “What’s so fascinating about it?”
Ellis covers the receiver with his hand and swallows hard. That was, he can’t help feeling, a very good question, to which he definitely does not have a good answer.
“Sorry,” he mumbles, and hangs up the phone.
He lies on his bed. He stares at the photograph of himself and Denny in the snow and he cries. The tears clog his throat and place pools of liquid in front of his eyes. He shuts his eyes and the tears are squeezed out and stream across his face.
When he wakes, the world is so silent that it must be the dead of night. There are no lights on in the house. The pilot buoy and the shipping lanes twinkle brightly above a black sea. Ellis walks through the house. He remembers the excitement as a child of being awake when the world was asleep. He recalls the night the police came to the house and supported his dad by the arm. That was a special night too. They were awake when the world wasn’t. It was exciting in its own strange way.
He returns the photograph to the page of the diary where he found it. Low down, amongst the tightly packed lines of Denny O’Rourke’s faded blue handwriting, are the words
Ilford, 10 February 1946
.
Ellis reads his father’s words.
I am in the bar of the General Havelock hotel in Ilford. I wanted somewhere less busy than the pub, to write my final entry in this diary. Today was my last day at sea. We put in at Tilbury at 6 p.m. at the end of a six-month voyage that has taken us from Liverpool to Panama to Auckland, round the Horn and to Spain. My one and only peace-time commission, and my fourth voyage in all with the New Zealand Shipping Company. I have spent 4 years at sea. I had hoped it would be 44. After missing a daylight buoy signal on a four-hour watch off Hobart I have been diagnosed with glaucoma. So, my career as a merchant seaman is over. I don’t know if the upset I feel about it has affected me but today has been a strange day. As we made our way through the English Channel, I came out on deck to have a smoke and watch the sunrise. We were passing the lighthouse at Shingle Point and I was looking at a small vessel that has run aground on the sandbanks there, when I saw a young man standing on the shore. He was watching the ship. Immediately, I thought he reminded me of someone but I couldn’t think who. He was watching me. And then the idea came upon me that he was my son. I wasn’t sleepwalking and I hadn’t been drinking, but it was as if he was my son and it made perfect sense that he was. Of course he wasn’t, isn’t, couldn’t have been. He was about my age for a start. But despite all those things, I felt that it was my son there, that that is who I was looking at. I even thought of waving. He was watching me all the while. Well, that’s how it felt. He was more likely just watching the ship, of course, if he was there at all. Now, I am sitting here and I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life. I half expect the young man to walk in through the door and sit with me. Maybe he could advise me. I will have a few drinks, go home as late as possible and tomorrow morning I will tell my parents the news. Father had always hoped I would join him at the P&O one day and will be distraught that I am no longer at sea, although he will not show it.
Ellis sits motionless at the table. Hours later, the stirring of sunrise distracts him. He opens the back door and goes to the shed. He takes out the shrimping frame and buckets and his shrimping belt and loads them into the car. He runs a bath. Steam fills the tiny bathroom. He opens the window and the steam snakes towards the cool air outside. He pours blue bath foam into the water. The label has been peeled off and in its place, in black marker pen, are the words
Spider Blood!
He wrote that when he was drunk. He lies in the bath and the water is too hot. He feels his body temperature rise and he reads the Spider Blood label over and over again. He decides that it is time to call a truce with himself. A truce with his yearning. A truce with the mute world of accepted forfeiture he has made his domain. He considers the lengths his father went to to avoid being hurt again, and it occurs to him that he does not want to emulate his father; that he does not want to be like him in every way. He toys with this idea as if it were blasphemy. He allows it to settle. It does so without kicking up a fuss.
I do not want to wait until the end to say what I am feeling.
He makes the phone call, again.
“Hello?” Tammy’s voice is dense with sleep.
“Hello,” Ellis whispers, as if not wanting to wake her.
“Is that you, Ellis?”
“Yes.”
She isn’t annoyed but she tells him it’s five-thirty in the morning.
“Sorry.”
She breathes heavily and it is almost a laugh. He knows she is smiling right now. Smiling at him.
“Did I tell you that my dad died?”
“No.”
“Well, he did. And I’d like to tell you about him, so I was wrong when I said about not talking much because I could end up talking for a week.”
There is a long pause before she says, “I’ll listen for a week.”
“What if you break my heart?”
“Or you mine.”
“No, I wouldn’t do that.”
“You don’t know that. Ellis, given how young we are, there is a good chance we won’t last for ever and that one day one of us will hurt the other. But that might not happen. Even if we stay in love for ever, we are going to get hurt from time to time. You do realise that?”
“That’s one of the few things I do know.”
“But are you up for that? There’s no place to hide, you know?”
“I enjoyed being with you more than I enjoyed anything.”
“You never told me that.”
“I know. I’m telling you now.”
He hears her smile to herself. “Yeah … you are,” she mutters, then adds, “You’re an orphan, Ellie.”
“No … not really.”
“Well, you are.”
“I’m too old to be an orphan. I just lost my mum and dad, that’s all.”
“Sounds awfully like being an orphan to me.”
They fall silent, as if their foreheads are touching.
“Ellie …”
“Yeah …”
“I want to be loved to bits.”
“OK.”
“I’m glad you rang.”
“Me too.”
“Don’t go yet. Tell me something, Ellie … any old thing, just talk a while.”
There is silence. Ellis looks at the very first traces of colour bleed into the sky from the east. Then he says, “There’s a ticklish spot on the hind legs of a tarantula and if you can get your little finger in there to caress it, then that hairy old tarantula is putty in your hands and if you’re very quiet you can hear it chuckle. My dad told me that and he never lied when it came to spiders.”
He walks to the lighthouse, thinking all the while how he loves her calling him Ellie. At the foot of the lighthouse, with his back pressed against the concrete, he looks up and watches the sway of the tower. It is always moving, even in this stillness before dawn.
The tide pulls on the shingle. Relentless. Unstoppable. Each shore break could be a passing soul. Denny once said that Ellis was both infinite and minuscule in the same breath. It is the same with deaths, each one unique yet commonplace, shocking and predictable.
Ellis asks of the morning: Do I have what I came for? Have I captured it, retrieved what I needed? And so, if I have, can I go now please? May I leave the table? Because I’ve been here at the water’s edge long enough.
Time is finite and Ellis intends to waste no more of it debating the likelihood or absurdity of a life beyond. The soul may be a fanciful luxury. The afterlife mere solace. Faith, a spiller of blood. Church, a house of fear. But something has passed and even if the true dimensions of eternal life are no more than the volume of Ellis’s imagination, something resides there. Even imaginary, it is real. To doubt it is to glimpse it.
The morning stirs and the wind picks up across the beach. A series of clouds are draped across a world which, becoming lighter, reveals a familiar crimson sky. Until now, his mother has always appeared at dusk, but today she is in the sunrise, first to arrive. The strengthening wind sweeps across the peninsula like a shadow and Ellis finds himself crossing the shingle as if pursuing it. At the water’s edge he sees the waves being stirred by the wind, each one lifted a little higher than the last and becoming the colour of storm. He takes deep breaths and realises, with surprise but without doubt, what it is he is on the brink of doing. It is no longer a challenge in words, it is no longer a fear that crushes him, it is an image, an image of cold blue, an image that makes perfect sense to his mind’s eye, an image he can lose himself in. He is already stripped to his pants and, for a fraction of time, airborne above the water. And he is swimming and immediately he feels the brutal strength of the currents. He remembers to swim towards the steeple on the Marsh and yes! the currents are taking him to the
Bessie Swan
and oh! it feels wonderful and Christ! the water is so cold, it’s so extraordinarily cold that only panic and exhilaration prevent his blood from freezing as he is yanked towards the silt ridge by the will of the sea and deposited there on his knees, left with the strength only to hold on to the world as if it were a passing raft.
Out by the wreck, the wind is even stronger. Sucked through the bottleneck of the Channel, it rages at Ellis. He gets to his feet and digs his heels in, to anchor himself. Inside the furious gale comes Denny, roaring across the face of the earth. He is as forceful and pure as a child again. Instantly, Ellis sees that his father has better things to do now than remain with his son. The wind howls around him and rocks his body. His father circles him once, twice, then soars into the sky and heads across the water towards Ellis’s mother in crimson. Ellis watches Denny’s final moments as a lost soul and sees him reach his mother. They are reunited on the horizon at the vanishing point and then they disappear out of sight.
Ellis’s body shivers to the point of spasm. His heart is at the brink of transparent joy. He could not have dreamt that it would feel so good to let go. He would not have imagined that the words he uttered a thousand times through his school days, which tormented him and riled his teachers, would be waiting for him here to offer him such peace, such self-knowledge.
“I don’t know …”
“I don’t know …”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know the answer …”
I don’t know the answer, God.
I know you don’t, comes his reply. And that’s fine. Neither did I, my dear boy. Neither did I.
The sky is left dishevelled, like bed sheets in the morning. The wind has calmed and the world seems quiet. Ellis is alone with the
Bessie Swan
and he sees her for what she is, a vessel abandoned, having done the best she could. Now comes the sound of an outboard motor and the sight of Towzer Temple’s small clinker-built boat cutting through the water. Instead of sitting, as he normally would, Towzer is standing, his body contorted so as to reach down to the tiller whilst straining upwards to look across the water at the sodden figure standing out by the wreck. Towzer grabs the black woolly hat off his head and throws it down at his feet.