The Silver Dark Sea

Two

He stumbles down to the beach. A steep path through gorse leads him there. He jumps onto the stones and the noise is sudden – the crunch of his heels, the clatter of rock against rock. He staggers, and then falls. Sam lands on all fours. The stones are powdery and the dark cracks between them are darker with old weed. He stares for a moment. Then he rights himself.

On, towards the shoreline. Over brownish wrack.

Oh God, he says. Oh …

It is not plastic, or sacking.

It is a human body. It lies at the water’s edge. Its upper half is out of the water; its legs are still being lapped at by the tide. It lies on its front and the head is turned so that the man’s right cheek (it is definitely a man) is pressed into the stones, and his right arm is raised above his head. He wears a white vest, or part of one. Sodden, dark-grey shorts.

Black hair. A black beard.

Shit …

Sam looks away. He breathes heavily through pursed lips. He tries to steady himself, puts his hand on his chest. Could he turn, go? No-one need know. No-one has seen me coming here. And wouldn’t the sea come back and take it? Carry it out? Sam shakes. His hands are shaking and he thinks, a dead body … He has not seen one before.

But he cannot turn and go. He must stay; he knows he must.

He looks back. The man’s skin is white. It is perfectly white, like fish meat. The arms are thick, muscled. His back, too, is strong-looking – there is a deep groove where his spine is.

He is tall. Was. Was tall.

Oh … His stomach clenches. He half-bends, as if he will vomit, and he expects this – he braces, locks his jaw. But nothing comes.

The body lies ahead of Sam. He tries to calm himself for he knows what he must do. He knows what needs to be done, right now, and so he lifts his left foot and steps towards it. He brings his right foot to join his left.

No smell. Would there not be a smell?

And flies, he thinks. There are no flies.

Carefully, Sam comes in. He draws level with the body and starts to lower down. He is tentative, scared of falling or getting too close. The stones shift, as his weight does, and he thinks and what about the eyes? He has found dead sheep before. They lose their eyes to gulls – the soft, jellied flesh is the first part to be eaten – and Sam feels nauseous again. His tongue tightens. But he has no choice: he has to see the face. He knows this but he does not want to and he is shaking as he crouches down. His breath is fast and his heart is thumping against his ribs so that they hurt and he does not want the eyes to have been pecked away or sucked out by fish. He does not want the mouth to be open, as if still fighting for breath.

Oh God oh God …

Sam puts his palms down on the stones. He brings his face alongside the dead man’s face. Nose to nose.

The man opens his eyes. Not fully, not wide – but his eyelids flicker and there are two black crescent moons of eye.

Sam yells. Falls.

He scrambles backwards, crab-like, shouting holy fuck oh my God, and as he tries to stand his left foot slips and the stones give way so he turns onto his front and crawls frantically on his hands and knees, and then he finally clambers up the beach and turns around.

There is the sea, and a gull’s screaming, and there is a sound which is coming from Sam – a whimpering, a half-sob. His grips his hair with both his hands. Not dead is what he thinks. Not dead not dead, oh Jesus. He looks at the skin, the beard, the mouth which is moving now as if trying to speak or trying to clear itself of salt or sand or pebbles and the eyelids still flicker, and the right hand flinches. The fingers find a stone and try to close upon it.

Shit. Listen. I’m going to get help, Sam tells him. I am. I’ll come back.

He sees a whorl in the man’s beard, as if a thumb has been pressed there – familiar, in its way. A shell, or a rose.

Sam stumbles through the grass. His feet snag on roots and old wire; the sheep lift up from their resting places and bleat at him, and move. His breathing is loud as he runs towards the lane. He knows the house with the striped socks on the line is to his left and that a woman will be inside it, but he cannot go to her. Not her, of all people. He does not look across.

Down the hill. Past the ragwort, and the rusting tractor.

Past the sheet of corrugated iron that is half-lost in grass.

He turns right at the sign that says Wind Rising. He runs up the drive and the dog barks as she sees him, and the rooster stretches up and flaps his wings. Sam bangs on the back door which swings open on its own so he hurries inside saying Ian? Ian? The kitchen smells of casserole and coffee and dog hair and Ian is standing there, very still, with the kettle in his hand.

* * *

A man?

A man.

Dead?

No. I thought he was, but he’s alive. He opened his eyes.

Washed up? Are you sure he’s not just … Ian shrugs. I don’t know … Lying there? Sunbathing, or …

No, he’s washed up. Sam’s hands grip the back of a chair.

Is he hurt?

Don’t know. Probably. He is pale, Ian – properly white. I really thought he was dead. Oh God …

Ian sighs, holds up a hand to stop the boy talking. OK. Fine. I’ll get Jonny. And Nathan’s in the barn. He’s big, you say?

Looks it. And heavy. Arms like … He holds his hands apart, showing him.

Ian takes a sip of coffee. He holds it in his mouth for a moment before swallowing. He takes a second sip, puts the mug down. Then he pulls on a jumper and walks towards the door, talking under his breath, but as he reaches it he turns to see Sam’s still standing there, holding the chair. Coming?

Ian, listen …

The older man pauses.

He’s dark-haired. There’s a mark in his beard – like a whorl. I didn’t look too closely –

Ian’s eyes are hard. Let’s just get there. OK?

* * *

Four men make their way across the fields as the sun starts to dip. They move quickly, without talking. The sheep move away from them, find a safe place and then glance back.

The Lovegrove boy leads the way. His shirt is darker under the arms; his forehead is lined for his age. He looks over his shoulder once or twice to check he is still being followed. The farmer from Wind Rising is next – greying at the temples, breathing through his mouth. He is Ian Bundy and he has the family build – stocky, short-legged. His son, too, has it. And they both have the family colouring – brown eyes, sallow skin, hair that is almost black. Jonny chews as he jogs – gum, which he snaps in his mouth with his tongue until his father says get rid of that. The younger man scowls, throws the gum into grass. The fourth man sees him do it. He is Nathan Bundy. He, too, is dark-eyed, but the summer has lightened his hair and it is long so that it brushes his collar and curls by his ears. He’s the tallest of them. He has marks on his arms from barbed wire; he hasn’t shaven for days. Nathan says nothing as they make their way to the cove called Sye.

Brush-brush – their legs through the grass.

They all have their thoughts, their worries.

A ewe watches them. The men crest the hill so that they are, briefly, four dark shapes against the sky, four silhouettes – and the ewe sees this. She shakes her ears, lowers her head. She tears, steadily, at the grass.

There, says Sam. He does not need to point.

Ian squints.

The man is still lying there. His right arm is still raised and his legs are parted. Christ. He’s big.

Told you.

The tide is lower now. There is a metre or more of shingle between the sea and the man’s bare feet. Ian makes his way down through the gorse, onto the stones which are dry, chalky to touch. He says, steady – talking to himself as if he were a horse or a dog. He holds his arms out for balance; his feet slip between the stones as he goes. He wonders when he was last at Sye and doesn’t know. He is never on beaches. He hates finding sand between his toes or in his mouth.

Ian sees the black hair. The beard.

He kneels, presses his thumb against the man’s cold neck. Can you hear me? Hey?

Is there a pulse? Jonny stands over him.

A moment. Then, yep.

Sure?

Yes – got one. Let’s roll him over.

All four of them crouch, put their hands on his body. After three?

Ian counts.

As they roll the man over he makes a sound – a groan, as if in pain. There is a creak, too, as if his ribs are being released or a bone which was pressed upon can return to its right place. Grit sticks to his cheek. There is weed splayed on his chest, like a hand.

Ian stares for a moment. Then he reaches, takes the weed away. We need to get him to Tabitha’s. We’ll carry him.

Can we? I mean – Sam shrugs – he’s huge.

He is, but there are four of us. We’ll manage – have to. Ian taps the man’s face twice, calls hey! Hello? As he does this he sees the twirl of hair in his beard, the rosette, and he rests back on his heels, wipes his nose with the back of his hand so that Nathan puts his hand on his brother’s arm. Ian?

Let’s get going.

They take hold of the stranger and lift him into the air.

It is as if they carry an upturned boat. The man is on his back, being moved head-first, with Ian and Sam beneath his shoulders. Their hands take care of his head, arms and neck. Behind them, his right thigh is resting on Jonny’s shoulder and his left thigh is pressed against Nathan’s ear. The men all move slowly, saying careful and easy, now.

When they reach the coastal path they move faster.

Nathan thinks, I was in the barn … An hour ago, he’d been sitting on the spare tractor wheel in the barn at Wind Rising, filling the last few sacks with fleece. He’d been on his own, thinking of his wife. The farm cat had padded by, and the beams had creaked, and he’d been inhaling the smells he had known all his life – wood-dust, hay, diesel, sweat – when his brother had marched in saying a man’s been found. Washed up. At Sye. Ian said it as if it happened all the time – like the ferry arriving or fences blowing down. An hour ago Nathan had been alone in the barn and now he is carrying a half-dead man who’s barely dressed, cold-skinned and fish-smelling.

Things change quickly. But he has known that for years. Four years, or nearly.

He can hear the man’s breath, as they carry him. His thigh is heavy, and his lower leg hangs from the knee and swings. His heel knocks gently against Nathan’s back.

* * *

In the garden at Crest, a woman stands. She is blonde, wearing denim shorts, and she has a clothes peg in her mouth. One by one she takes her washing down. She lifts off tea-towels, a bra, two striped socks. The sun is lowering, and it glints off the windows. She pauses, looks. There is still beauty, she thinks – the light on the water.

Another woman – grey-haired, not blonde – makes her way past the island’s church, poking at the weeds with her walking stick. She glances to her left. There are the Bundy men and the boy from the harbour carrying something high in the air. What? A boat? Part of a machine? The sun is in her eyes so she cannot tell.

The church glints, also. From inside, its windows are jewel-coloured – ruby, emerald, a deep royal blue. These colours lie down on the tiled floor.

On the west coast, the sinking sun catches the row of single, rubber boots that stand upside down on fence-posts. None match; none are the same size. They shine in a line, looking wistful. They cast their strange shadows on the scrubby grass behind.

And at the same time – at this exact, same moment as the stained-glass windows glow, unseen, and as the widow from Crest takes her washing inside – the men come to a stile. They stumble, hiss watch it! The man they carry hears this. His head lolls. He feels the rock of his body and the fingers pressing into him, and there is the brush of legs through the grass. He smells sweat, sheep, salty air.

He says a word. It is sea, or a word like it.

When he opens his eyes, all he can see is sky.

Tabitha looks at the clock on her kitchen wall. It is past eight. This means, to her, that she can pour herself a small glass of sweet, pink wine so she goes to her fridge and opens it. She loves the sound of a cork coming out. She likes the cool bottle, and choosing the glass from her shelf – for none of her glasses are the same. Small rituals. Everybody has them. Her mother always tapped a wooden spoon twice against a saucepan, having stirred it; her father had names for the weight that would lower itself down the stairwell, and in doing so, turn the lamp.

She sips.

Berries. Vanilla, maybe.

Her home is Lowfield. It is small, cream-walled and south-facing – and it’s a house with no logic, for the kitchen leads into the bedroom and the bath is in a room of its own, far away from the loo. Things creak. Floors slope. She says it has character, as most Parlan houses have – and why would she want a bland home? With paper lampshades and plastic chairs? She has furniture from her childhood here – a linen chest, a grandfather clock. Tabitha touches the clock as she passes it, her wine in her other hand.

There is logic in its name, at least. Lowfield – for it sits in a hollow, a nest of grassy mounds. Three sides of the house look out onto banks of gorse, bramble and grazing sheep; on those three sides, it is fully sheltered from the wind. When Tabitha moved here in her early thirties she had lain in her bed and thought where is the noise? The rumbling? The spray on the windowpanes? For these were the things she was used to. Her childhood had been in the lighthouse-keeper’s quarters and so any inland sleeping place seemed eerie to her, and still. Surely an island home should rattle in the wind? When she came to Lowfield, a storm passed overhead one night and she knew nothing of it. She only learnt of the storm the next morning: as she stood in the garden in her dressing gown and looked at the fallen fence-post – upended, with black earth at the base of it – she told herself this will make a good home. A safe place. It also makes a good place for the tired and sick to come.

That was thirty years ago. Now, her waist has thickened. She has pouches of skin beneath her eyes and when she walks in her slippers she hears herself – the padding on the wooden floors, the slow pace. I walk as if I’m old. It has happened so quickly, or seems to have done. It seems like a day or two ago that she’d worn a red bikini, jumped from the sea wall.

Briefly, Tabitha feels sad. She has her regrets – but Lowfield is not one of them. It is hers; she has spent half of her lifetime here. It feels nurturing, as a home should. Cupped by the Parlan land.

The only room with a view of the sea is what she calls the mending room. She’s always called it this. Surgery feels too grand for it: a white-painted room, linoleum floor, a small cabinet of pills and liquids that islanders have prescriptions for and others which she keeps just in case. A table and chair face the door. Behind them, she has a poster of the musculature of the human body – reddish and gruesome, which the children love. On the table, Tabitha keeps an African violet; she likes its dark, furred leaves.

This room has seen plenty, that’s for sure. It holds its secrets – small ones, and ones that have changed a life and other lives. She, Tabitha, knows all of them. Lorcan, also, must have heard some strange confessions over the years – he walks with the weight of what he’s been told, or so it looks, for he has lumbar pain that she gives him codeine for and a stern telling-off when he carries too many hymn books. They go to him for their souls; for their bodies they come to Lowfield, and so here it is that Tabitha listens to hearts and takes temperatures and tends to the wounds that come from a life of farming, or the sea – a half-severed thumb from the shearing blades, or rope-burn that has broken the skin. She knows who has high blood pressure, who does not sleep, and who is on the contraceptive pill. She knows who drinks too much, whose skin flakes under their clothes, who takes pills to thin their blood, who has athlete’s foot, cold sores, piles. She knows of Sam’s migraines, of her own sister’s painful joints. And Tabitha has brought babies into the world, in her time – all five of the Lovegrove children and three of her own family have slid like eels into her waiting hands.

Tabitha sips. She thinks all those secrets … Once, newly qualified, she’d believed that everything was curable – every human pain. But she was wrong to think it. Guilt, heartbreak – what cures them? Or simply makes them bearable? Nothing on her shelves.

Still – she views this room as safety. She wants each person who steps into it to feel cared for. With the pot-plant and the pressed bed linen, she has always tried for that.

In the far corner, there is an iron-framed single bed. Tabitha goes to it, sits down. She pushes her slippers off with her toes, swings her legs up and nestles back. From here, she can see the finger of land called Litty, the nettle patch which no-one has ever mowed or dug up because of the voles that live there. The tiny, tufty-eared Parlan vole – it is its own species, and rare, and she has seen one or two in her time or at least the nettles swaying where a vole has darted from. Beyond Litty, there is the water. The sea – scattered with light. What view was ever better than this?

She wiggles her toes in their polka-dot socks.

Tabitha drinks her pink wine.

* * *

You knock.

No, you. I can’t take my hand away, it’s under his head – see?

Ian curses. He is aching. He has carried a thousand sheep in his life, slung round his neck like a collar and he’s carried boat engines and tractor wheels and his own kids when they were young – but not this weight, and not so far. I’m too old for this, he thinks.

He kicks at Tabitha’s door. Three kicks, low down near the doorframe – all too hard.

The men shift. They are steaming like horses, sweat on their top lips and brows. The man they carry groans overhead so that Ian says, hurry up …

The kicking must have startled her for when Tabitha unlocks the door, she peers around it as if unsure of what she might find. But then she sees Ian. She sees all of them, widens her eyes. Looks like you’d better come in, she says.

She leans against the wall to let them pass.

The room smells of disinfectant and a false, lavender scent which comes from a bottle plugged into the wall. Put him on the bed.

He goes down heavily.

All four men exhale. Then they stretch, step away. Nathan straightens and his back clicks. Jonny rotates his right shoulder and says Jesus. What do you think he weighs?

Tabitha is by the bed. Foremost, she is the nurse – not the aunt, not the great-aunt or the friend – and she busies herself with what a nurse must do, lifting the man’s head and arranging the pillow beneath it. She takes his wrist, watches the wall clock as she does so. With her eyes still on the clock she asks who is he? Do we know him?

Ian says no.

What happened?

Sam found him.

Where?

At Sye.

On the stones?

Just lying there, says Sam. I thought he was dead.

She nods; the man’s pulse is good. Tabitha can feel the warm bloom of his breath against her arm. She feels the edge of the vest he wears, finds it is cold and hardening with salt – so she opens a nearby drawer, lifts scissors out. When had she last used them? For what? On whom?

She cuts away his clothing. The chest that appears is dark with hair. Has he spoken?

Jonny shrugs. He’s muttered a bit –

He tried to say something, Nathan tells her.

So he’s been conscious?

Yes.

He didn’t lose it at any point?

Not since we’ve been with him.

Any wounds?

His hands – Ian points.

She looks. Ian’s right – the fingernails are torn, and three of his knuckles are bruised. When she turns the hands over, she finds his palms are dirtied, rough and red-coloured. Pinheads of blood. Grains of sand. Grazes.

From what?

Rope, maybe? Hard to say. And here …

There is more, too. On his left hand, in the soft web of flesh between the thumb and forefinger, there is a very different wound. It is neither fresh nor old. It is reddish-brown. Perfectly round, like an eye.

Tabitha cannot know what caused such marks. But hands mend and mend quickly; hands do not worry her too much. It is his head that Tabitha turns to now: the head, which she always thought of as a world in its own right – with its seas and land and weather, its mysteries that, in fact, no human brain can fathom. She snaps on latex gloves. Slowly, she starts to feel through his hair. She searches for cuts, or swellings, or a tender part that will make him wince. His hair is so thick she must move it aside, in sections. Where there is scalp, she presses it; like this she makes her way round his head – from ear to ear, from brow to nape. His eyes half-open. His lips move, as if he dreams.

No sign of swelling, she says.

That’s good. Right? Sam is anxious.

Yes, Sam – it’s good.

She peels off the gloves. There is a woollen blanket at the foot of the bed and she pulls it up over her patient, over his long, muscular legs. It does not reach beyond his chest so she tucks it round him, brings his arms to his sides. There is, Tabitha thinks, a strong smell in the room – of sweat, from the men, and cigarette smoke, but also fish and brine and an earthiness. Sheep.

She turns to them. You needn’t stay. It’s late.

He’s OK? He’s not dying?

No, he’s not dying. A childish question from Sam. He stands there – awkward, thin, with sunburn and his unbrushed hair. Tabitha had delivered this boy. That day feels like yesterday. She remembers his mother in this room, refusing to lie down or to sit – she’d paced the room as an animal might. And then Samuel came out as she’d crouched on the floor, gripping the table legs, with Tabitha saying one more! That’s it! How long ago was that? Two decades and more. She feels sorry for him, suddenly. He is both so old and so young.