‘Don’t you want it?’
‘Michael slaps his stomach. ‘I may want it, but I surely don’t need it the way you do.’
I eat his chocolate, gnawing the fat of it, the sweet calories that are light and heat. Blood warms the ends of my fingers.
‘And now we’ll go back,’ says Michael.
‘Back where?’
‘Don’t you want to go home?’ He looks at the bog, the quivering reeds, the flat black skin that looks innocent as water. ‘Strange place. Is it really as deep as you told me?’
‘What do you think?’
‘It’s a duckpond.’
And now there’s nothing left of what happened or didn’t happen. The spars of wood stick out, exactly as they did, and the rain falls lightly. I think of the body of the ship down there, its ribs arched in the bog like a cradle. I think there was a judgment here once, and an execution. I can’t identify the judge or the executioner or the victim. Their faces are like leather, and anyway they’re turned from me. But I can watch the gestures they make. They are familiar. I know how me judge withdraws as he gives judgment, making himself all words. Otherwise you couldn’t carry on. The executioner looks like any one of the crowd until he steps forward, not importantly but casually, as if this has been agreed for a long time. Between victim and executioner there’s always a start of recognition.
The victim stands there carrying his narrowed choice in his hands. A week ago he could have run. If he’d done that he might never have been caught. Perhaps he believed he would be safe, or else he trusted someone he shouldn’t have trusted. Or perhaps he didn’t, but he assented. He moved towards all this with the glide that we would call sleepwalking, and he might have called belief. A day ago he still had the freedom of twenty-four hours ahead of him. It seems so much when you look back and haven’t got it any more. You could have stretched, or yawned, or slept. You could have had all those dreams you never had, packed into less than five seconds.
There’s no time left now. An hour ago he ate, and felt the weight of the food descend his gullet in painful swallows, then lie in his belly. He knew he would not be able to digest it, but he had to eat it. His throat feels raw. No sound would come out even if he tried to speak. And he doesn’t try to speak. He’s beyond panic now, in a place where the trembling of his own legs doesn’t disturb him. And that stain of piss on the front of his tunic has nothing to do with him either. The same wind flutters past them all, judge and executioner and condemned man. The same promise of rain or sun in the quiet marsh light. They are all three together in the equality of flesh, needing food and shelter. Then the judge opens his mouth and they begin to separate.
I remember how hard and cold my father felt when I touched him. I went forward to touch him. No. I went forward for him to touch me. For him to put his arms out and hug me. For me to smell the smell of him, and feel his body heat which was always alight, like a steady fire, and be grazed by the stubble on his cheek. But he didn’t touch me. He lay there and felled me with a cheek of stone. I didn’t move back. I didn’t even wince. There was someone in the room with me, watching closely. My mother, maybe. I didn’t cry out. I let the blow sink into me silently, and I’m still reeling from it.
TWENTY-THREE
‘Yeah, we’d better head back,’ says Michael, as if it’s already been decided where we’re heading.
‘You’ve really checked out of the motel?’
‘Like I said, I left my bag at the station.’
‘So where are you going now? The airport?’
He shrugs. We’ve climbed back up the wall and are fastening our jackets against the rain. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Then where?’
‘Back home with you.’ But it sounds like a question, not a statement.
‘All right. Come back to the house and have breakfast.’
‘Do you mean that?’
‘I met you on my walk. You got caught in the bog. There was never any danger, but your clothes got wet and dirty, and you’re a long way from where you’re staying. I asked you back to the house. I thought you could borrow some of Donald’s clothes.’
‘You don’t mean it.’
‘You’re right. I don’t mean it. I can’t have you in my house, Michael. I don’t know what you’ll do. I don’t know what you’ll say.’
‘If you listen, I’ll tell you.’
‘Michael –’
‘Please, Simone. Listen.’ He turns to me. His hands, lightly clenched, stretch towards me as if they hold something which he is going to offer to me. ‘Let’s stop all this. Come back home with me, back to Annassett. You know it. I know you can still shut your eyes and see it. It’s so beautiful. I’m not asking you to go somewhere you’ll be a stranger. A place like Annassett doesn’t change. You’ll be at home there. How many people have something that’s always been waiting for them? There isn’t a day that I haven’t thought of you there.’
‘That’s impossible,’ I answer him in the kind of whisper I find on my lips in churches. ‘That can’t be true.’
‘It’s true. Listen, Simone, next month there’ll be the fall colours and I’ll take you up to Vermont again. We’ll go to the apple orchards. You liked that, you remember? We’ll take the boat out and fish before the storms come. You won’t need to worry about a thing. I don’t make a lot but we’ll get by. I’ll always have plenty of work. The summer people will be gone. That’s when we have our summer. We’ll go walking in the woods. One of those still days when the leaves are so thick on the ground they fly up every step you take. Yellow and red and all the burnt colours you can think of. And you still smell the ocean, even when you’re deep in among the trees. You know there are Indian walls up in those woods? They find bones, when they’re clearing. The guy who keeps the store now, you won’t know him, he’s new since your time. He reckons there was an Indian burial ground up there. It’s all covered over now. I’ll show you.
‘The season’s wound down, it’s all quiet. You don’t know what the place looks like in the winter, with the snow. It’s so beautiful. That’s the time I like it best, when the roads get bad and the whole town fills up with snow, so deep it takes you till noon to dig yourself out. You don’t get strangers coming then. When the pond freezes up everybody skates there, and they put lanterns in the trees at night.
‘You stay on late after everybody else has gone and there aren’t lanterns any more, only stars and the moon. Big hard stars that give plenty of light. When you listen all you hear is the hiss of your own skates going round. You don’t feel the cold. You’ll be sitting on the edge of the pond, lacing up your skates, and I’ll be turning circles on the ice and waiting for you. All I’ll see of you is the cloud of your breath but I’ll know where you are. I always know where you are, wherever I go. You’re here in me, Simone. You’re the best part of me now. All those letters I wrote to you from the hospital. I know you never got them. I tore them up, every one, because I was ashamed for you to get mail from that place.
‘It won’t be like that any more, Simone. All those bad times are finished now. You won’t have to be afraid of anything.
‘You’re going to love the woods in winter. When the leaves come off the dogwoods the stems turn red, so red you’d think someone just came along and stained them that colour. Red as rubies. And when it freezes you hear those stems rattling in the wind like they were talking to one another. And the ice on the pond creaks before it bears your weight. Well you know, Simone, sometimes you could almost believe if you stood there long enough you’d begin to figure out all those sounds and understand what they were saying to one another. You know where I mean. The pond at Silvermine, where I took you to fish for bass.
‘The winter goes by really quickly. There’s plenty of work, getting the boats ready for the next season. I’m in the yard most days, but you can do what you want. Or you can work with me. People come by in the evenings. Maybe we’ll do some travelling. Get in the van and go down South.’
‘Michael –?
??
‘You know, Simone, I always had this picture of you, right from the day you left. You remember the way you used to put those flowers on the table? Black-eyed Susans or daisies or whatever. It used to kill me the way you did that, with the place full of cigarette butts and beer cans and grass. When I walked back to the cabin I’d see those flowers in the jar by the window. You were always changing the water, and you’d cut the stems back because you said it made them live longer, you remember that? You wouldn’t have a dead flower in the house.’
‘I don’t think so much about flowers now, Michael. I have two children.’
‘That’s no problem. That’s fine. The boys can come too. It’ll be a great life for them there. I’ll build them a room. Hey, I could build them a boat.’
This is what he’s come for. His face is shining. I never believed a face could really shine, like a candle that had waited a long time in a cold place and then felt the taper touch it and its own flame dip and then stream up into the air. All the flesh on his face is waxen and beautiful. He makes me feel heavy beside him.
‘We have wild cherry in the woods in the springtime,’ he says. You could bring in branches of it. You should see those woods then. You never saw anything so beautiful. Maybe it’s even better than the snow. It was the first thing I saw when I came back, the trees lighting up one after the next, as far as I could see. And the twigs black as soot. They always bear the flowers towards the top of the tree as if they’re pushing them up into the light. Jesus, you could die looking at it. But I didn’t touch any of it. I didn’t feel like I was entitled to do that.
‘Simone, I can’t believe this is really me, talking to you after all this time. Do you know what I mean? Do you feel the same? It feels like everything’s rolling on top of me. Jesus, Simone.’
His hands hang down at his sides, and his eyes are wet. His face is transfigured by something I can’t see. And I know that when the moment passes it will roll away and sorrow will step back into its old home. It has emptied him away. It’s been emptying him for years. The war started it, and even by the time I met him he must have known he was never going to get himself back again. God knows what the years were like that led to hospital.
And for the first time I really see how big he is, how his hands hang down and how strong he is. He’s talking about a dream he’s built for himself over long years when he counted the minutes, the hours and then the days. And you can’t argue with people’s dreams.
‘I bought you a ticket,’ he says.
‘You bought me a ticket?’
‘It’s right here in my pocket.’
He reaches into his inside jacket pocket and brings out a cardboard airline wallet, flips out the tickets and plants his finger on one, then the other.
‘See here. This is mine, this one here is yours. It’s an open ticket, so you can use it any time.’
‘You shouldn’t have done that, Michael.’
‘What do you mean?’ he asks, fast, his face clenching.
‘I mean – it’s expensive. Those tickets cost a lot of money.’
‘That’s OK,’ he says, relaxing. ‘I have money. I know I don’t look it, but I have money. Besides, what else would I want to spend it on?’
‘Oh Michael.’
A flurry of rain spatters the tickets. ‘Put them away quick, they’ll be spoilt.’ And he does. He puts his future, and mine, back into his inside pocket.
‘We’ve got to move on, Michael. We can’t stay here.’
‘Then you’ll come?’
The bliss has burned away. He can’t see the white cherries any more, or the pond with one figure endlessly turning on the ice in a smoke of breath. There’s still an afterlight of hope in his face, but I don’t know how much he really believes in it. My eyes sting as they do when my son comes out of school bracing his thin shoulders against the disappointments of the day that’s past. I can hardly bear them for him. I have to stand back because I am not the one who can comfort him. I’m not the one who can comfort Michael. I’m the past into which he’s pouring everything, hoping that it’ll stand up and walk.
But he has caught me too. Shut my eyes and I’ll see them as he sees them. Flowers at the window, and ruby-red stems of dogwood against falling snow. The music of masts in the harbour, the weight of the Atlantic rolling grey.
‘You can watch the whales passing, in winter,’ says Michael. ‘If you go up to the Point, some days in winter you’ll see them for sure.’
I watch them now. Michael could always do that. The grey sleek backs travelling so low in the water that you would think it was the turn of the Atiantic rollers fooling your eyes. Until the whales blew. They showed us their backs above the water and then they went on out of sight into a life we can’t touch. We can kill them but we can’t touch that life. And the older I get the farther it flows away, until I’m not even listening for it any more.
Michael still stands on the Point to watch the waves becoming whales. I still cut back the stems on flowers. Donald bought me a bunch of anemones in spring, the first flowers he’d given me since we came here. They were blood-red, and purple, with black soot spilling off their stamens onto the table. They opened wide, like paper hearts, yawning their colour.
Michael stands, with his face fading and his hands hanging down.
On the seaward side, just here, the edge of the wall is sharp. It looks as if it was finished yesterday. And then there’s the long drop to the beach. You mustn’t swim from here because of the sandbanks and the tides.
‘Michael,’ I say, ‘we must go back.’ I touch his hand. He starts slightly, like a sleeper coming awake.
‘OK,’ he says.
He pulls up his hood, hunches into it and begins to walk. He’s too close to me, and because I’m on the seaward side that means I’m walking right at the edge of the wall. I don’t think he means to crowd me, but I don’t like it. The rain has made the top of the wall slippery. I walk a little faster, to get ahead of him and put more space between me and the edge of the wall. He lengthens his stride and keeps alongside me.
‘Michael.’
He turns his face to me. The life of his eyes has sunk right back now, into the place where prisoners hide their thoughts. His lips move. He looks as if he’s counting.
‘It’s all right, Michael. We’ll get back easily. It’s not too far.’
It’s raining hard again, and the rain cuts straight into our faces now we’ve turned back to the west. The top of the wall is slick with water. I struggle forward, my feet so heavy they seem scarcely to move. The air has turned sticky as nightmare. We will never get home. We’re off the path and I’m still right on the edge, but by now we’re past the sandbanks so it feels a little safer. There’s a pebble beach underneath us again, and the beginning of breakwaters. The wind’s starting to lift the sea, chopping it into short, uneasy waves. I wouldn’t want to swim in it now.
And then suddenly Michael’s much too close, bulking on my right side.
‘Michael.’ I don’t know if he even touches me but one of my feet slips. I lurch and grab out and there is a long second where I hear myself whisper, not cry out his name: ‘Michael.’ My breath catches, the concrete edge rocks under my feet, sea and sky juggle round me.
‘Michael!’
I catch at him. He catches me. I feel him slip too but as his body jolts he pulls me in, across the front of his body, and I fall onto the sea-wall.
He is behind me and I don’t see him fall. I am on my knees on the sea-wall, clutching the concrete. I hear a grunt, a thud. Muffled sound. A room with the air squeezed out. I look round and there is nothing behind me but air. I look down and there are my fingers in front of me, gripping tight onto nothing.
TWENTY-FOUR
Michael lies on his back, on the beach at the bottom of the wall, looking up at me. He does not look away. I see the pebbles under his head, and the splay of his legs, and the way his head has been flung back. A gull peels out of a circling crowd, lights onto the beach a
nd begins to walk towards him. I flap my arms and scream out and the gull flaps its wings back derisively, climbs up into the air, and hangs there, its eye on Michael. The nearest steps are about two hundred yards down the wall. I begin to run.
There is very little blood. I can see where he struck the side of his head against the wall, as he fell. I lift his head cautiously, and feel under his hair. It is wet and warm with blood. More blood seeps down onto the pebbles, but it doesn’t fall fast. His head flops back.
Michael’s eyes are open and now they are pale as clouds. They don’t see me and they’ve got nothing to do with where we are any more. There is a thread of blood coming out of his right ear. Slow, seeping. He is absent and he doesn’t feel it. There’s no impulse in me to wipe it away.
I kneel down and put my face against his. It is warm, but it’s not his warmth any more, only borrowed time. I am afraid of the time to come when his flesh will fight me off, hard as stone. I put my hand on the side of his neck, then I place my fingers on his wrist to hear the tick of nothing. No time passes. He needn’t be frightened of the minute hand now. Then I sit back on my heels. The rain falls steadily on Michael’s face, on his forehead where the hair is already wet, and onto his open eyes. It makes runnels as if the face is a pane of a substance I have never seen before. I’ve never seen a dead face like this, accepting the rain on it without a quiver.
I unzip his jacket, and reach into his inside pocket. There is the cardboard ticket wallet, with the two tickets in it. He has only just put them back in there. If he could speak he’d say, ‘I just put the tickets back in my pocket.’ But he doesn’t speak. His lips are full and secret. I take out the tickets, then I feel through the rest of his pockets. There’s a black leather wallet with a wad of notes in it, English and American. No credit card. No driving licence or photographs. A bit of paper with a telephone number on it. In another pocket there’s a little bottle, an airline miniature of Johnny Walker. I put the tickets and the wallet in my own pocket. The rain falls harder and the song comes back into my mind.