Buch lesen: «The Silver Dark Sea»

One

There are stories that come from the sea and those are good stories. They are the best I have heard, by far. I know stories, but none are better than those I was told in coastal homes, with sour-smelling oilskins drying by the fire or the pale chalk of whale-bones standing on their ends. I smiled into my hands, as I listened. A brown-eyed man would ask have I told you about …? I’d reply no – tell me … And we’d lean forward towards each other so that our chairs creaked. Salt on the windowpanes.

Stories of loss, mostly. Of the love that came before that loss.

I crawled inside them, cave-like, and held my breath as I looked up.

There were too many stories to count. The sea brought them in, daily. Like the wide, glassy straps of weed that came ashore on the highest tides, they caught the light and beckoned me. A story? I’d come closer and kneel. I’d stare, as they were told. And they were always more beautiful than I thought they’d be when I first heard them, or found them in the sand.

That’s how I imagine it. It’s the best explanation I can give. There were so many stories on that island that it felt like they came in on the tide. Every day, there was something. On every pebbled cove or beach there were gifts left by the sea – plastic bottles, nylon ropes, shoes, a tyre, cottonbuds, the spokes of an umbrella, a sodden child’s toy. Worthless? To some, maybe. But they were treasures, to others. A parched curve of driftwood could be dragged home and kept; a message in a cola bottle might change a life. At the beach called Lock-and-Key, there were lone wellington boots set upside down on its fence-posts – boots that had been washed up on that beach and were useless without their other, missing halves – and I’ve heard them called unsightly, this row of coloured boots. But I came to like them. I ran my hand across them when I walked on Lock-and-Key. I felt like I was one of them – weathered, and waiting. Fading and softening and watching the sea.

That’s me, perhaps: the forager. I’d be drawn to the shards, to what life leaves behind. As if I had nothing, I gathered what other people would pass by or step over – a mussel shell, still hinged, or a length of sky-blue rope. I trod along the line of weed and plucked, bird-like, at the shinier things. And in that same way I hoarded all the stories that reflected the light and dazzled me – like the whale that answered the foghorn, or the phosphorescent night. There was a tale of grief I heard – with puffins in it, of all things – and I fell upon that tale as if it were unsalted water, water I could drink. It nourished me, somehow. A tale, too, about a single lantern that bobbed on the horizon every Christmas Night.

So yes – it was like beachcombing. It was all treasure to me. In my kitchen, I kept shells; I stuck briny feathers in vases. And in my head I laid out the stories the islanders told me – the caves, the Fishman, the flakes of silver, the seals who are wiser than humans, the girl who floated like a patchwork star.

I was born inland. I grew up where the wildest water was a puddle, or a filmy pond in a park. Stories were harder to come by there. Trees bowed with the rain, and I found sparks of beauty in a flowerbed or a pigeon’s trembling, iridescent neck but it was not enough. I hungered for more – I sensed, always, that there was something more than this life that I was living. And then I fell in love when I thought I never would, and I came to live on an island so that the lines by my eyes deepened and my hair thickened with salt and ghostly-white crabs flitted over my feet and buried themselves in the damp sand, and every sea was different from the sea that had come before it – pummelling, or silent, or brown-coloured and flat. And the man I loved would tell me his stories. In time, others did. They poured whisky into my glass and settled beside me. They opened old books, said look … I have known people who believed absolutely that a gull could talk our language, and that the souls of their drowned friends could be found in the rattle and foam.

I heard her voice in the water. I did.

And I’ve felt his hand on my hand, on that boat. You have my word.

I do have their words – I do. I swagger with the weight of my wordy, priceless stash. And when I re-tell their stories now, I know that some people mock me or mock the island, and they shake their heads at the impossibilities – a Fishman? OK, right … I understand that – for I was, briefly, like them; I too have had my private doubts. But so much has been lost and found. So many things have come to pass that have no explanation and I half-wonder if you cannot believe in such stories unless you have lived or stayed in a house by the sea – until you have lost washing to a sea breeze or been bruised by the rain drumming on your anorak hood whilst trying to guide a dinghy in, in the blackest night. Until you have waited for a boat that does not come. Or until that boat is found but its crew is not. It is another way of living and not all can stand it. There is the word salt-bitten; it comes when hope is lost.

No, you cannot trust the sea – even now. Even with our satellites that tell us where we are. Even with our sonars, radars and computerised charts. Even with our space travel and vaccinations and our atom bombs and cloned sheep, and even though we can make a new human life in a Petri dish, we still cannot reach the furthest sea floor. We cannot breathe underwater or decode whale song. We cannot find a body, when it goes overboard. We may know that a human heart has ventricles and can be shocked into beating again, but we do not have the words for what immense and extraordinary emotions it can feel – what heights and depths, together. Love is too small a word – too small.

Abigail Coyle used to tell me, we only know the foam … A sweep of her arm, over the sea. And I’d walk home understanding her.

We do not know it all. That’s what I’d tell myself, when standing waist-deep in water. When I sat on a boat I’d think of what was beneath me – the deep, deep chasms, the secrets and the dark.

This island is small, neatly shaped. Its cliffs are high as towers and streaked with white from the roosting birds. These cliffs echo with bird calls and to look up at them from a rocking boat is to feel tiny, and cold. Feathers come down and settle by your feet. They drift on the water like dreams.

There aren’t many trees, on this island. Nor are there many houses, but there are some; they all have missing tiles, damp window frames and peeling paint. Their names are blunt: Wind Rising, or Crest. Calor gas bottles stand by back doors.

There is litter on the beaches. The wheel-arches of cars are brown with rust.

Strands of grey fleece shake on wire.

There is a lighthouse, too. It stands at the north end of the island and swings its slow, pale beam over the fields, the bedroom walls and the night-time sea.

Let us call it Parla. Names do not matter, as they never truly do in the tales I know. What matters are the people themselves – the souls who have lived on this island and how they have felt on its sand and rocks. Many generations of firm, resolute people have mended their nets here, or pressed their knees onto sheep as they’ve sheared them. The men have caught gannets for eating; women have gathered seaweed at low tide, with baskets strapped to their backs and their skirts hitched up. They have fed their children kale and sour milk, sang their sea songs, and they’ve lived in fear of God and the waves. That was years ago. But there are still photos – blurred, soft-edged.

Now, the Parlans live by other means – sheep, tourists, sponge cakes, crafts that they sell on the internet and send to the mainland in protective wrap. One woman knits teacosies and baby clothes; another paints in an attic room with skylights that close themselves suddenly in the gusty, north-westerly winds. No-one eats gannets these days. But they still have their own vegetable patches, and still reach for eggs under downy behinds. They still stand on the headland from time to time with their arms held out, and let their coats fill up with the wind. They still drink too much, or some do. They know the moon’s cycle as their forefathers did.

And the sea. They still know the sea or as much as any human can. It is part of them, in their blood; it shapes their lives as the sea shapes a stone over the months and years. Some cannot sleep inland. They cannot be where there aren’t sea sounds – for Parla is never, ever quiet. Even in calm weather there is the lap lap lap against the quayside or the clack of mussel shells as the water rises over them. At Tap Hole, when the tide is rough or at its highest, the sea sprays through the single hole in its roof – a puff and a splattering, like a whale’s breath. Near the harbour, there are cliffs which are curved to make a bowl of water so that the sea is trapped, or nearly; it says stash, stash, as it tries to get out. The water here is weedy. There is an oily shine to the sea, at The Stash – and rubbish. Once, a rubber duck – and no-one knew why. A well-travelled duck, they called it. George Moss took it back for his son and it sits by their bath, even now.

The youngest Bright daughter – in her mid-sixties – remembers the single wave that rose up against the lighthouse one winter, when she was a girl. It smacked against the lantern’s glass. It struck the tower with such a deep, thundering boom that she had felt it inside her – under her ribs. She’d held the wall, in fear. It woke something in her, that shuddering wave – a womanly knowledge that she both wanted and was scared of, but had no name for. She knows it all much better, now.

Maybe that’s the sea telling stories of its own. Like me it has a lust for them; it cannot stop saying listen to this … Listen to me … After all, think of the tales it has – the deaths, the near-deaths, the curious lives. Even now, as I am telling this, there is the handclap of a wave that falls back into itself and the gentle hiss that follows. Soon, a sprawled, moon-blue jellyfish will rise to the surface and give two slow clenches. Against the black water, it will glow.

Before he died, Tom Bundy said I have never known silence. Never. He had been born in the fields at Wind Rising. Each hour of his life had had the sea in it. His early death did, too.

* * *

Can you hear it? The water? It breathes, as you breathe.

I want you to hear the whole island – as it is now, at this very moment. There is the sea’s stirring, always. But also, there are many sounds on Parla which are more than the waves, more than stones being moved by them. The sheep bleat, throatily. A wooden gate squeaks open. There are tiny bells on a piece of string which dance, and call out sing-sing-sing. In a house with herbs on its windowsill a kettle is boiling – its metal lid is starting to rattle, and there are footsteps coming to it and a woman is saying I’m here, I’m here … to the kettle, as if the kettle understands her. She lifts it up with a tea-towel; there is the sound of a mug filling up. Elsewhere, a dog scratches its ear. On the quayside, a child crouches; she watches a crab creep in a red plastic bucket, tapping the sides with its claws. The old pig farm, empty now, creaks in the late afternoon sun. There is also washing on a clothesline – four pillowcases which snap at themselves, and a pair of striped socks. The line itself bounces in the breeze – up and down.

There is the tick-tick of computer keys.

A mobile phone lights up and thrums across a table, before dropping to the floor.

There is a man in his bathroom, cleaning his ears of sand with a flannel’s tip. He hums, as he does so – dum-di-dum …

And there is a mother telling a story. She has her child in front of her, in his dinosaur pyjamas. He sucks the end of a white cloth, holding the cloth with both hands and he listens to her with eyes like the world. Have I told you the story of the silver in the fields? She is Hester – a true Bundy, with the dark Bundy eyes – and she knows her stories. She has the voice for telling them. She is Parlan, after all.

Can you hear these things? Each of them?

A gull is calling out – ark ark ark! It stands on the chimney of a cream-walled house.

And can you hear this: the brush of legs through long grass? At this moment, a young man is walking. He wears jeans which are damp and frayed at the hem. The lace on his left boot is undone, and its plastic ends tap against rocks as he goes. There is sheep dung pressed underneath this same boot; he feels it with each footstep so when he comes to a stile he puts this boot on the step and scrapes his sole against it. He twists his leg, checks. Then he climbs over the stile and briefly, as he climbs, he looks over to the house with the washing line. He narrows his eyes to see it – the striped socks, the yellow front door. He sniffs, steps down.

Brush brush. Through the grass.

It is early evening. This young man is fair-haired, freckled. He has caught the sun today – his cheekbones are pink, and his scalp feels sore. It has been the first day of sun in a long, long time and he’d not expected it. None of them had. He knows, in time, his skin will peel.

He is Sam Lovegrove, and he is twenty-two, and when he reaches the coast path he heads west.

The sea glints. In the distance, he sees Bundy Head.

To his right, the cove called Sye appears. It starts to show itself. As he walks, the cove widens and he looks down into it. It is a fleeting glance, nothing more, for he does not expect to see anything. Nobody goes to Sye – it is a small beach, with no sand to speak of; its high cliffs make it shaded and cool. Who might go there, and so late in the day? No-one. And so he glances, that’s all. A sweep of the eyes. But there is something down there today.

He stops. He stops so sharply that his right foot slips.

Sam takes two small steps towards the edge. What is …?

Then he says oh shit. Oh God. Oh my God …

* * *

Me, the forager. Or the salvager, perhaps – crouching in the wet sand to gather what is left. Is that what stories are? The debris of a life? The remains that can be dried, passed on so that a little of that life is passed on too, in its way? I have lost so much. So much I have never had, and so much of Parla I have looked for meaning in. And I miss it – I miss the island. I miss its pebbled strands, its button-eyed voles, and the weightless bones of cuttlefish that fitted the palms of my hands. I miss the people who I called family, or tried to; I miss how magical a winter’s night sky could be for I’d never seen a falling star until I stood on that island, and I’ve not seen one since. And I miss him above all others – how I miss that one man. But at least I have my stories, sand-covered. A well-told story takes me back to Lock-and-Key.

Oh, the stories. So many.

A thousand strange things have been washed up on Parla’s shores – loo seats, dolphins, a list of dreams in a sealed plastic bag. But it has never had a story which begins with Sam Lovegrove saying oh shit, oh God on a Wednesday evening as he runs down to the beach with his sunburnt shoulders and his left bootlace slapping back and forth, back and forth.

And it’s never had this: a man, half-naked. He is lying on his front, his face against the shingle. He is dead-looking – still, white-skinned.

I know some wonderful stories – but this is the beginning of the best of all.