Chapter Seven #3
right idea, or would have in 2019: Priddy too could just bail out
and leave his uninvited guest to take the rap. Serve him right if
the cops arrived right now. He could explain himself, and the fate
of the Sweet Rose crew, and the rich stink of dope that had now no doubt drifted
all the way down to the iron door, without any help from Priddy at
all.
He went
as far as putting on his coat. Merou watched in amusement while he
turned up the collar, then wrapped a scarf around his neck and
jammed a woollen watch cap down over his ears for good measure.
“Where are you off to, then?”
“Out. Away.”
Merou’s
eyebrows rose. Then he nodded. “You’re a hell of an eyeful, Priddy.
But I’m starting to think that’s just the beginning of
you.”
“That’s nice. You know what, though? I don’t care what you
think.” The words became true in Priddy’s mind as he said them, a
self-made scaffold he could cling to and climb. “I don’t need to be
tempted by Baz Dingwall, or patted on the head by you for
resisting. Screw you both.”
He slammed the door behind him. There were a limited number of
places to try and walk off a temper fit in a lighthouse. The fog
might return. Despite the automation, tonight was a duty night and
he didn’t want to leave his post. He stamped down the stairs,
getting maximum clang out of each. Then he jogged back up them,
trying to invent a new combination of swear words every ten
steps. Cockwomble. Hoofwanker.
Thundercunt. None of these was original, so
he tried harder. Dickweasel.
Knobsocks. Heartbreaking sonofabitch who
might have been kind to him tonight, but instead chose to sit in
his living room, the one place in the world Priddy could call even
briefly his own, and bloody well taunt him. How often over the last
few days had he imagined Merou’s return? Strolling naked out of the
sea at Portheras, or out of the mist on Bodinnar moor. Pounding
down Hagerawl main street on a white sea-charger, putting down an
arm to sweep Priddy up and out of the dirt, mess and pain of
everyday life...
Not like
this. Priddy planted his hands on his knees outside the door,
fighting to catch his breath. Kit’s grandfather had told him to
check the settings, if the foghorn had sounded and then switched
itself off. The only way to access the controls was back through
his quarters and out onto the balcony deck. Once the red flashbulbs
of rage and exhaustion had stopped popping behind his eyes, he
straightened his spine and let himself in. He didn’t look left or
right—marched through the room, jerked open the weatherproof door
on the far side and into the air.
How
beautiful the night had become! Priddy could hardly believe the
transformation. The wind had died. The sea was held in a stasis of
moonlight, a silence so vast that his heartbeat rushed in his ears
like music. He could hear the workings of the tiny bones and
cochlear fibres in his ears, the very buzz and racket of his
thoughts. Clasping the handrail, he listened. And, as often on a
quiet evening in the wild far west, the sea began to
sing.
Priddy
knew some of the legends, of course. The best was the tale of a
fine young man with a voice like an oboe, a blackbird, the plashing
of water in the well, who every week came to church and sang the
hymns so sweetly that everyone wept. One Sunday in May, a woman had
appeared, veiled and dressed in black. In the middle of the service
she’d stood up, and held out her hand to the fine young man, who’d
followed her out of the church without question and straight off
the edge of the cliff. And up through the screams and the outcry of
his friends had arisen not one voice but two from the waters of the
bay—the oboe entwined with a pure, high viola, braiding and twining
to heaven. The young man had never returned. Why should he? And
every year on that same night, all the mermaids of West Penwith
sang.
The only
person who could sweep Priddy up out of the dirt was Priddy
himself. He’d known this for some time. Whether he was ready for
the effort didn’t really matter. Whether he was sane was of little
significance, too. He saw visions and heard mermaids. That had been
true long before he’d poisoned himself in a basement club in
Penzance. He closed his eyes for a moment in sheer lonely pain,
then gritted his teeth and let go of the rail.
He
climbed the ladder into the control cabin. The music followed him,
seductive, wrapping itself sensuously around him. He shook his
head: even if he’d finally lost his grip, the foghorn needed to be
reset. He did it quickly, then worked through the other checks on
the sheet and climbed back down.
The
source of the music had shifted. Maybe Priddy had written himself
off too soon this time. Maybe Merou was listening to the radio, or
had found some documentary about whale song. At any rate, the sound
was now coming from inside.
He
opened the door, and a perfect silence fell. No radio, no TV. No
trace of dope in the air either, somehow, as if a spring breeze had
blown through the room and taken all that away. The chairs were
straightened up, the foil packet vanished from the table. Priddy
went to stand by the bed, where Merou was stretched out on the top
bunk, stark naked and apparently sound asleep.
“You’d better not have thrown that shit out of the window. God
knows what it’ll do to the fish.”
The
beautiful mouth curled up at the corners. Merou shifted his head
against the pillow, as if a pleasant dream had taken hold of him,
and trailed one hand down his chest. Priddy had thought him
hairless there, but now he came to look again—and he couldn’t look
away—he was lightly furred, a near-translucent down that marked out
frost-fern patterns between his nipples, then a delicious runway
line across his solar plexus, over the pit of his belly, and out,
spreading butterfly wings to frame the root of what he called his
external John Thomas, now stirring and lifting at his own touch.
The hair was strange. Each curl of it seemed to be flattened,
pressed close to the contours of his body. It gave off a faint
sheen like opals or mother-of-pearl when he shifted, pushing up one
hip to meet his blindly seeking hand.
Priddy
remembered his kiss. It caught up on him like a time bomb, as if
his reactions had been waiting at the end of a mile-long fuse. He
retreated from the bed, hot shivers running through him. Whatever
game Merou was playing, he didn’t want to be part of it, was
certain he’d provided enough amusement for one night. He
passionately wanted two conflicting things—to be up there in the
bunk, taking hold of that swelling cock and guiding it between his
thighs, and to be completely alone.
The
former was impossible: the latter a big ask in a one-room tower.
Kit had left him the keys to the keeper’s cottage. Priddy could
lock himself away down there. That was a good idea, cold and damp
as the place was. He could crack a window open, put the fire on,
air it and warm it through ahead of Kit and Geoff’s arrival. Curl
up and put his hands over his ears, and whatever madness and
mystery was arising in this room beneath the Hagerawl light, it
could all play out without him.
He
unhooked the keys and stumbled out. But he wasn’t going to get that
far, not by a hundred feet of spirals. He ducked into the bathroom
on the half-floor below and shut the door.
As refuges went, it was an ice-box. The moon was making her
westward arc now, hanging like an old bronze coin over the sea. The
bathroom was nothing but a whitewashed concrete box, but the top of
the window had a poignant, church-like arc, and Priddy went to
stand there in the moonlight. He pulled off his hat and scarf
despite the cold. His coat, too: an unbearable constriction,
dropping to a heap behind him on the floor. The various heats and
pressures racking him began to converge. Oh please, he silently begged the
moon and the glittering lifeline she’d thrown to him across the
water, let this one be
real. Not a twitch, an unscratchable itch,
an impulse that arose then died off like a lost bloody
sneeze...
He undid his jeans, and gasped in relief as proper big hard-on
rose into his hand. He pressed his other palm flat down on the
window ledge, leaning his weight on it, feeling with joy the clench
of bicep and forearm. He hadn’t destroyed himself entirely. He
wrapped a soft grip around his balls and the root of his cock,
lifting himself clear of the elastic of his briefs. Kicked his
shoes off, even though it was so perishing cold, to get the press
and thrust of concrete against his feet, to make a strong pyramid
out of himself, his propping arm and straddled, tense-muscled legs.
Jolts of laughter met his arousal like backwash under an incoming
wave: he’d end up on Southwest news himself, if any of his mates
were passing in a fishing boat just now. Local lad wanks off in lighthouse window. “We won’t need a
light up there anymore,” the elderly keeper humorously remarked,
“with Priddy-boy flashing away...” He was
probably safe, the angle wrong for anyone outside to see, but he
wouldn’t have cared, not if a cruise liner had been drifting
by. Moon goddess, sea goddess, just let me
come...
Merou on the bunk bed, sleepily caressing himself. Maybe at
this very moment doing what Priddy was doing, and thinking of him
in return. Maybe Merou was the wave and Priddy the undertow,
meshing and scalloping the surface of the sea. Why not? Merou had
sat with him impossibly in this room before, read his memories and
gone to settle the balance with Vigo. Maybe Merou could share skin
with him, join with him, breath to breath and nerve to accelerating
heartbeat. Priddy threw his head back. The grip on his cock was all
his own, but he felt as if someone was holding his hand. He thrust
hard, crying out as the first peak hit without releasing him. “I
can’t do it,” he rasped, and a reassuring arm seemed to go around
his waist, a hot mouth brushing the junction of his neck and
shoulder. Yes, you can. Yes, you
can.
He pulled his cock against his belly, planing and squeezing
from base to tip. Again and again, and on the ninth
stroke—a ninth one, gathering half the
deep, and all the wave was in a flame—let
go and came like sweet death in an avalanche. Semen jetted from
him, spilling over his fist, pooling onto the window ledge as he
jerked the wild joy of it out of him, riding his body’s convulsions
to the last exhausted surge.
A tide
of relief hit him, casting even Baz Dingwall’s finest crack into
poverty and shade. He folded to one knee, grabbing at the ledge to
keep upright. “Thank you,” he croaked, resting his brow on the
sill. “Thank you God, Goddess, Merou, whatever the fuck you are.
Fucking hell.” He could breathe again, right down into the pit of
his lungs. The structure and grain of the granite he was staring at
was supernaturally clear, as if his vision had been washed, his
perceptions rebooted, restored to factory settings.
Kit would be so pleased. Priddy half-wondered if he should
tell him, take the world’s most debauched selfie right now, with
his pants still undone and his come still gleaming on the window
sill like opals in the moonlight. See,
mate, nothing to worry about. All systems go. After another long minute, when his head had stopped spinning
and his heart rate had slowed, he hauled back onto his feet. He ran
water into the sink and squeezed out a flannel. He’d forgotten to
switch on the boiler today, but the chill on his belly and worn-out
shaft wasn’t unpleasant as he washed himself off. He rinsed the
flannel, took it to the window and mopped up there too. What was
vaguely poetic in the moonlight just now wouldn’t be at all nice in
the morning for whoever came in here first to pee and clean his
teeth.
The moon
had almost set. He paused to trace her lifeline from the horizon to
the breakers of Hell’s Teeth. The night was still clear, but a fret
must be lingering far out at sea, fanning her light into bronze and
purple feathers. Priddy offered her an uncertain salute. He wasn’t
as cut off from all nature’s glories as he’d feared. The lifeline
could be an umbilical, tethering him gently to a larger world than
his own.
Lifelines, umbilicals, navels. Absently Priddy zipped his
jeans and pushed his feet back into his shoes, idea following idea
like beads on a string. He’d been standing by Merou’s bunk. Fevers
had been rising in his brain, and he’d seen things without noting
them. That strange, flattened-out, fern-pattern hair, marking a
line down Merou’s midsection... Kit was furry there as well, though
far from so picturesque, just a nice hairy Cornishman whose pubes
came halfway up his belly then narrowed to a meridian. Yes,
measuring down from Merou’s chest or up from Kit’s cock, that
central line should part to accommodate a navel. Kit’s certainly
had, a belly button deep enough to accumulate fluff and the odd bit
of seaweed in summer.
Merou
didn’t have one. Simple as that, and Priddy would’ve staked his
life on it. His stomach swept smoothly down to his abs with no
interruption at all.
This was a new development. Priddy was certain. He’d seen
Merou undressed from skull to toes, and if he hadn’t specifically
noticed his belly button, he’d have picked up on the lack of it.
Words came back to him from the night when he’d hauled Merou out of
the sea, when he’d been there in time to see the webbing between
his fingers and the silver film on his eyes. You won’t believe it yourself in the morning, when I’m all
dried off and finished and just like you... A change, then, a transformation. A creature from the sea who
had to reconstruct himself to match a landsman’s expectations,
and...
And
tonight had forgotten one detail. Priddy splashed water into his
face, feeling the old mammalian reflex in his throat to close off
and keep his lungs clear. He’d read somewhere a theory that humans
had gone through an aquatic stage in their evolution. But humans,
aquatic or not, floated prior to birth in a different ocean, and
came into the world with the mark of their maker-goddess upon them,
her thumbprint pressed into their flesh. What happened to Merou
when the time came to go back? In what order did the signs of his
assumed humanity disappear?
A shriek
ripped through the silence. Priddy froze, staring at his blank face
in the mirror. He’d never heard a sound like that in his life. The
reverb from it set the thick, deep-embedded window glass rattling
in its frame. If the cry came again, the glass would break. The
mirror would shatter and Priddy would have a nosebleed, weep blood,
die on the spot from a haemorrhage. He ran for the door and
wrenched it open. “Merou!”