Connections

  “What have you done?” he mouthed through a pale hand, but Adrienne seemed not to hear.

  “For so long, you know,” she was saying, “I felt like a stupid, transparent person; like I didn’t really understand things. But I think, by living with you, I’ve been on a journey! Into me. Into you. Into us! And I think I know now what my importance is . . . to you. And what strength we draw from one another. Does that ring true for you?”

  Dennis smiled thinly, tearing his eyes away from those of the tiny cloth man. He loved this woman, and knew that she loved him. Yet he marvelled at how little love revealed of itself – its motives and methods. He imagined himself a clam, cemented to the ocean floor, watching a jelly fish as it pulsed and turned against the immense mirror of air. So beautiful. So unknowable.

  He reached to touch her shoulder and she, patting his hand, went smilingly back to her scrutiny of the quilt. In a moment, she began to croon over her work, but Dennis fancied he could hear other bird-like sounds riding faintly on the air. Unsure whether they came from his own throat or that of the cloth man, he turned and fled.

  He fled to the one refuge he knew, his one haven of dreaming silence – his studio. He crept into a dark corner, drew up his knees and tried to control his shivering. In his mind’s eye, he saw the homunculus, flattened and helpless on the quilt. He had felt numb for so long. But a sudden and astonishing pain was rising through his chest. It was as though a hand had been thrust inside of him; as though his own blood was being pushed aside.

  For a long, still time the shadows mumbled around him, taking him for one of their own until, slowly, the pain subsided. He fell into a momentary sleep and found himself dreaming of the dust – small shimmering motes that whirled like stars through the column of light in the centre of the room. While trying to fix on one that his eye might follow, he noticed that, from time to time, a second mote would drift near and the two, for only a second, would orbit one another frantically, on the same minute current of air. Then they would break apart, each to resume its lone, zigzag journey. It troubled him that, at that point, he couldn’t tell which star had been his.

  He woke in a panic and struggled immediately to his feet. He trudged to the pedestal, to the light, where the last marble rested. He leaned on it, embracing the cold stone. How he loved its resilience, its endurance and, most of all, its secrets. The closer he came to mastering it, the more he appreciated its resistance. It would reveal to him only what he was capable of seeing, and that, he felt, was an enduring wonder. He would grow old and die before it failed, this yearning to experience the infinity of possibilities that lay beneath every surface.

  Suddenly, two new realisations struck him. Firstly, this was not the figure that appeared on the quilt! There, the figure did not kneel. It stood, its face turned on the stricken little workman whose own eyes peered so helplessly out into the haze of reality; as though the sculpture had turned on the workman and defied him to continue.

  The second realisation was that this carving before him was exactly what he had always understood Adrienne to be! Peaceful. Meditative. A source of stillness. All of which she was! And yet, there was this quilt which heralded some new, unvarnished surface he’d not experienced before. Some challenge to him, to delve deeper.

  Numbly, he drew back the oilcloth that covered the tray of tools. He selected a wide, flat riffler and, with a deep intake of breath, began to draw the instrument over the kneeling figure. It felt as awkward as a broken finger and the stone hissed at him unkindly. The tool fell to the floor.

  From amongst the wood carving tools, a small, hooked blade caught his eye. A fine tool to work with, but on what? He placed the blade against his own hand and drew a short, deep line. Immediately the mice in his head began to race in crazy circles and the slumbering shadows rose up to loom over him, murmuring their approval.

  Yes, they chorused. She is there, singing as sweetly as ever. And the cloth man – also there – there forever, in the loving limbo of her care. She has won! Dennis pushed himself away from them; away from the marble, as well, leaving a crimson smear to seep amongst its crystals. Not so! Not so! Leave me alone!

  But the shadows continued to whine at him. The work is everything; that’s what you said! So many surfaces! So many hidden patterns! You can’t let it end! The blade twitched and rolled in his hand and his feet moved him, without his permission, through the dream-haunted trees toward the house.

  Minutes passed. The shadows in the studio stood whisper still to hear, but there were no cries. Silence hung like dust in a locked room; like desire behind paralysed hands; like love behind clenched lips. When finally Dennis returned, blood had soaked so deeply into the knife’s boxwood handle that it could never be removed. Up in the house, blood was also spattered over the quilt.

  In the studio, Dennis moved swiftly into and out of the column of light, causing the dust to swirl up past his knees and the shadows to draw back out of reach. He ducked his head this way and that, studying the marble where lines and hollows and curves beyond number were suddenly apparent. So many curves! So much to do! He set to work immediately, watched over from his pin board by Adrienne’s little cloth man.

  Up in the house, the quilt sagged loosely in its frame, like a wounded thing, a white square marking the area from which the worker had been cut. When Adrienne returned to her workroom, the vacant square caught her eye immediately. And then the blood. She went to the door and listened. From far off, the sound of steel on marble came to her and she knew that, in Dennis, a new depth, a new surface had been revealed.

  She smiled and marvelled at his strength, how always he came back, like a sweet dream. God, how she loved that man! How she loved to provoke him, to challenge him, to stretch him! She went back to the quilt. Easily repairable, she considered. And there, in the gloom, was that suggestion, that smirking shadow of a face; just waiting for her to make of it what she could. Something very tantalising indeed.

  Sheddings

  Ahead lay a windswept knob of stone. Beyond it lay the sea, fussy and incoherent, at its endless dabble with sand. The man did not look up. Through miles of misted and salt-stung distance behind, a city stood. The man did not look back. A watcher might almost have believed him to have a destination. A place to be arriving; a designated hour; someone waiting.

  In the sand of the previous bay, waves snuffled near a tattered leather shoe, soaked through a threadbare cotton sock. Elsewhere, the water placed nuggets of sand in the drowned pockets of a far-flung jacket. They were the rueful sheddings of a man whose mind simmered and spat toward dryness, like a neglected pot.

  “I will not give any more!” he had raved like a street-corner loony, stomping down the little train of waves as they stuttered about his feet. “That’s all there is! Take it and be buggered!” And the jacket had flown, emptied of its man, into the arms of the sea.

  In his day-long flight, the man had crossed dozens of stony headlands, muttering and groaning amongst red, round, granitic stones, the size of heads. Still, if each stone head had had a stone body buried beneath it, none could have been more hopelessly mired than he, here at the end of his landslide life. This passage was a final rage which would take him at last and irretrievably beyond the reach of caring.

  He rounded yet another headland and a spray of gulls rose, clamouring into the air, causing him to recoil; to raise his eyes and an arm to curse them. But he stumbled instead into stillness. For there, halfway across the narrow, nameless bay, perhaps fifty meters ahead, a small pod of pilot whales lay, driven hard up onto the beach.

  For long minutes the man stared in amazement, his arm and his curse frozen in the air. The whales lay like tipped benches, tilted and uneven, where an earlier tide and their own thrashing had caused them to settle into the sand. Some were so high on the berm that it seemed the sea might bodily have lifted and thrown them there.

  He approached in awe. There were no signs of decay, other than a dry dullness on what he knew should be glistening blac
k skin. And yet the whole earth seemed focussed on these deaths. In the sky, eagles wheeled, awaiting the breaking of flesh. Below, gulls waddled and quarrelled, celebrating the feel of sun-warmed blubber under webbed and crepey feet. On the sand, platoons of blue-shelled soldier crabs marshalled for the task ahead.

  As he entered the field of carnage, a confirmational whisper hissed in the man’s ears. This is where life takes you, it seemed to say! Clean, hard decisions have to be made! Perhaps it was some spirit of the dead whales reaching out to him. Perhaps it was the sound of the crabs, vibrating out of sight, cocooning themselves with sand to wait while the nuisance of the living passed above them.

  He moved on, bare-headed and bare-footed, weaving amongst the carcasses, noting how every tail pointed seaward; how every pilot, without exception, had held its resolution. The thought astonished him. He imagined them at sea, this pod of pilots, huge and exhilarated, rifling into limitless distance. A cataract of whales, with an infinity of directions to choose from. And the one that they chose brought them here! He pictured sand flowering up, inches from their flashing bellies! Ahead, the stony teeth of the land, champing at the waves! And they didn’t stop! Not until their own weight clamped them to the earth! Why?

  He reeled with the wonder of it, and woke an hour later, prostrate on the sand, his head cradled in the shade of a dead pilot whale. A yellow-eyed gull peered down at him from its back. Too long a day, he thought; too long a life.

  He struggled to sit up and the bird rose, squawking angrily into the sky. His head spun. Seared skin prickled tightly on his neck and shoulders and he found himself bracing against the ripening carcass, smelling the early rot of sea-things. A line of words came dancing through his mind: “No more may gulls cry at their ears or waves break loud on the seashore.”

  He drove himself to his feet, then, and plunged ahead, suddenly needful of getting beyond these mounds of wrinkling, hot flesh. It was too much and yet, also, too little. Something grander and more mysterious needed to be there with them; some revelation. Not just this mortification on a remote, forgotten beach.

  At the furthest reach of the bay, the last whale had embedded itself in the mouth of a trickling stream, its girth entirely blocking the channel. The water, in its patient way, had nosed a new track around the carcass and there, the man dropped to his knees. He crawled slowly, until his face hung over the small pure stream. In the water he could see tiny flecks of silica; flecks that had been in the fire and in the rock and now went down to the sea with this stream. They were like stars in a firmament of sand. He hung there, his burnt lips cracking into a grisly smile.

  “When the bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,” the poem came again, “they shall have stars at elbow and foot.”

  Stars at elbow and foot?

  Stars in the water?

  Stars, perhaps, fallen from the eyes of the defeated.

  Without drinking, he turned his back and sat on the sand, gazing back the way he had come; back through the scattered bodies; back through the silent shipwreck which life must ultimately become.

  Almost immediately, however, a massive release of air at his shoulder startled him into a rolling yelp of astonishment. There was a high pitched whistle which was choked off and followed by a gasping intake. It was short, sharp and agonising, like a breath drawn into a chest that was being crushed with stones.

  Aghast at what it signified, the man waited, on his knees, and watched. For three, four, nearly five minutes, the waves chanted on in their cloudy rhythm and the birds wheeled, squawking over their unmarked territories of flesh.

  When the blow-hole finally, suddenly, snapped open, the man found himself gasping in unison. A racking, tortuously shallow sip of air. He sat on the sand and tried to focus his wavering senses. Bellied as it was into the cooling stream and partly supported by the channel’s profile, the whale clung inexplicably to its ruined life. Horrible to imagine how long it had lain here, on the burnt and alien shore of the continent. A day? Two days? Panting out a pointless ordeal while the rest of life went diligently, heedlessly on. How? Why?

  For the rest of the long afternoon, the man sat by the imprisoned pilot, breathing with it, waving off the birds; trying to ignore the sun which hammered at both their heads. If he knew nothing else, he knew that death must soon assert its dominion over this creature and he longed to witness the step, the trip, the blessed instant of surcease. Perhaps even to share it.

  But the whale continued to live and the day drew on, as though nothing were amiss anywhere in the world. At one exhalation, the man thought he heard the snap of a bone somewhere within. He moved to test his own solidity and decided it must have been within the whale.

  Increasingly, he found himself regretting his decision to stay, to witness so obstinately pointless an ordeal. He tried once to rise but felt himself crushed back to the earth by a weight as encumbering as the whale’s. He lay back and closed his eyes against the iron bell of the sky.

  “Twisting on racks when sinews give way,” he heard himself saying; “strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break.”

  The words seemed imprinted on the air, contained in the voice of the water. They shall not break, he repeated softly. Why not break?

  When he woke, he saw that the sun had stepped well down the sky and the tide had come nearly close enough to touch the whale’s flukes. He partly hoped, partly feared, that the event had passed. Moments later, however, the rasping breath came again – seemingly no stronger, no weaker.

  “You might as well let go!” he croaked at the animal. “You can never . . . never go back!” And the animal breathed again.

  Unaccountably, a pale fury began to rise in him. It was too much to have to endure! The time for living was past. The fury lifted him to his knees and then to his feet. A crust of blood cracked across his lips. He was here – they were both here – waiting on something. Where was it? What was it? There had been enough taunting!

  He pounded a fist against the whale’s back and, “Die!” he screamed. The birds rose blaring into the air, seeming to echo his demand, but the blow-hole, ringed by its own smear of blood where the skin had dried and split, remained resolutely closed. Tears filled the man’s eyes and his arms came to rest on the sea-borne flesh. It was hot and dry, already shrinking over the blubber below. “For pity’s sake!” he sobbed.

  Behind his clenched eyes, he saw again a vision of the sea with its twisting green light. Perhaps in the whale’s mind, it was there, even now, singing down into the cold blackness or flinging itself at the sun. You start with dreams; you finish with dreams. Maybe that’s all there ever was. And subtly the man’s anger and self-pity began, at last, to yield to compassion. This was the pilot’s journey and its alone. He had no more right than the gulls to crave its end.

  He pushed himself away from the whale and let himself down as lightly as a sigh, into the fresh water of the stream. The current stroked him with small, consoling hands and he drank. He rolled to cool his sun-baked shoulders, accepting the effortless gift of the water.

  In the distance, the glow of the city made the sunset seem to linger, as though the day was snagged on its block-like towers. People from the city, it occurred to the man, would have come here had they known of the plight of the whales. The knowledge shamed him slightly. He had thrown away so much in his life but rarely to anyone’s benefit. He took off his soaking shirt and, draping it over the whale’s blunt head, began to lave its back.

  And quite unexpectedly, he found himself involved in the desperate kinship of the living; the stubborn, unaccountable obligation to persevere; to seek courage, both within and without, and to cling to it and share it through every field of pain.

  “Split all ends up, they shall not crack,” he remembered clearly. “And Death shall have no dominion.”

  It was then that he began to dig. He began to strive with the impenetrability of the beach and of the sea and of the whale’s mysterious purpose. Without knowledge or understanding, bu
t with a reviving sense of belief, he began to chart a course back into life.

  It may have been as little as an hour before the tide turned. He spent it with his shoulder propped against the whale’s side, dragging at the sand, piling it, pushing it, heaving it. Its ooze and slide, its resistance to his every effort, seemed like the despair that must be part of every dream, part of every test of courage. The dread of failing to be strong enough.

  He had fallen into a stupor of motion, slowly, steadily, expending the last of his strength, when a movement within the mound of flesh snapped him back to awareness, He gasped with astonishment.

  The prospect of surviving, of enduring, even this terrible desiccation of sun was such a defiance! And there had been movement! He had seen it, felt it!

  But it didn’t come again. Neither did the whale breathe. After several minutes, the truth struck him. He crawled forward and, in the pale light of early stars, he could see the blow-hole sagging open. Even as he reached out, there was a vibration through the corpse as the waves nuzzled by. For the pilot, there would be no second chance.

  Back down the glimmering beach, the man could see the black carcasses of the rest of the pod. He thought of how this single pilot, eking out its final dream had held him here by the mere fact of its living. He thought of how the sea and the sand and sun would now conspire to break it down; how the crabs and the birds would participate in the urgent effacement of its death. In short weeks, all evidence would be gone. Only life would remain.

  He lay down on the sand. With his raw hands clutched between his thighs, he listened to the chittering of the sea. He heard the birds cluck and gurgle as they settled on the waves. He would sleep, but he knew he would awaken early and go, before the birds again took to the air.

  In the east, the moon began to spread its pale benison over the sky, another cycle beginning. Back toward the city, on a silver beach, the waves spread a man’s jacket out to dry in a place where he would find it on his journey home.