Chapter Six
The Shape of Loneliness — Tavish
Monday and Tuesday she photographed the harbor and I carried the tripod. She’d found a film body in the bottom of her bag, an old one, and she shot it like a woman glad of the excuse.
Wednesday she wanted the headland, so we walked north along the top with the wind coming off the water for once instead of through it. The coast had been quiet for four days. It hadn’t been quiet in nineteen winters and I said nothing about it.
“What’s the white one?”
“Fulmar.” I put my chin at the cliff face. “Stiff wings. He doesn’t flap; he glides the updraft. The black-legged ones on the ledges are kittiwakes.”
“And that one going in like a dart?”
“Gannet. He’ll drop from a hundred feet and hit at sixty miles an hour.”
She got the camera up and missed it and laughed at herself.
“How do you know all this?”
“I’ve been on this coast a long time.”
True. She let it go, and I marked it down the way I’ve been marking everything down. Objective met. Be useful. Be worth something.
“The rip runs east off the point and takes sand off the third beach every winter and gives it up again in March,” I told her. She wrote it in the back of her notebook.
Then she turned the camera on me.
I should have put a hand up. Nineteen years I’ve kept out of frames because there's no point to it.
I have an opinion about photographs. It’s a likeness, taken and held. Somebody has you, and you’re not there. There’s a version of that which finished me, and this was the small harmless cousin of it, and I stood in Isla’s dead husband’s coat and let her have it.
The shutter went twice.
“You’re not going to ask what I want it for?”
“I’ve no use for the answer.”
She lowered the camera. “That’s the least reassuring thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
“I’m out of practice.”
She laughed before she meant to. Covered her mouth with her hand, which didn’t help, and gave up and let it out.
I’d wanted the laugh. That was the problem. I’d wanted it a half second before I remembered it was useful, and the order of those two things stayed with me the whole way down the track.
Isla’s nephew keeps a dinghy on the slip, and Thursday she got the loan of it and I got the outboard going on the fourth pull.
Cold spray, diesel, fish scale under the boards. Useful again. Two for two.
“How deep is it here?”
“Nine fathoms off the mooring, and it shelves at the point where the tide runs two ways, so you’ll get—six seals off to the left. Going north, three of them close under. They’ll come up past the mooring.”
I realized my mistake after I'd said it.
She said nothing. She leaned over the side, peering at black water with nothing in it, and she waited, and about forty seconds later three heads came up past the mooring buoy and the other three after them.
She twisted on the bench, eyeing me.
I felt the weight of her gaze, heavier than the engine’s pull, and braced for the question I was sure would come next.
There was always a question. What are you, really?
How did you know? Why does the sea obey you?
But she held the silence the way you hold a breath underwater—testing to see which of us would break first.
I kept my hand on the tiller and my mouth shut.
Isla left the bottle and two glasses on the counter. She stopped at the foot of the stairs with the cloth over her shoulder.
“There’s peat in the basket. Don’t let it go out on you, pet.”
She gave the pair of us a look on her way up but didn’t say anything else.
The fire was built high. I sat in the chair by the window, well off the hearthstone, the way I usually sit. Twelve feet over my head and one room along, my own hide lay folded in a drawer under a jumper. I could have walked to it in the dark.
I got the two stones out of my pocket and worked the flat one with my thumb.
“Can I tell you something stupid?”
“Aye.”
“I was getting married in eleven weeks.” She had her glass on her knee. “We’d been together for six years. Daniel. He’s a good man—I want to be fair, he never did anything. That’s the whole problem. Nobody did anything.”
She turned the glass round.
“We had a house picked out. He’d got the schools in a spreadsheet. Schools, and we didn’t have children, and we hadn’t talked about having them.”
I let that go past.
“And I kept saying yes to it, because saying yes was easy, and every yes was one more foot of water. The venue. The band. His mother’s list. I said yes to a chair. There was a photograph of a chair, and I said yes to it and went and sat in the car.”
Her hands had been going the whole time she talked. They stopped there.
“It’s a slow drowning, choosing safe. You don’t notice. You’re fine, you’re fine, you’re fine, and one day you’re standing in a kitchen in Portland and you can’t get a breath.”
I worked the flat stone. A better man would have said something warm into that gap. I’ve heard other men do it.
I know the kitchen she means. Mine has been a hundred miles of coast road with the water two hundred feet down it. You keep walking, and you tell yourself the walking is a life, and the day you understand it isn’t, you’ve already given it nineteen years.
She was the one who’d nearly drowned, and she was telling me about it, and I sat there taking the sympathy off her like a bowl held out in both hands.
“So I left. Eleven weeks out. Told him in the car.”
“That’s not stupid.”
“It’s not brave either. I didn’t tell him for three days. I let him book the flowers.” She drank. “I’ve an email sitting on my laptop about a permanent job. Nine days they gave me. I’m on five.”
“And?”
“And I haven’t opened it since Tuesday.” She looked at the fire. “That’s the same thing again, isn’t it? That’s the exact same thing.”
“No.” I turned my glass. “It’s the other thing. It’s late.”
She looked at the glass on her knee. Her thumb moved once across the rim.
“Yeah. It’s late.”
In what passed for a small mercy, I realized Mara hadn’t even noticed the way the air in the room had shifted; the way it seemed to spin around the two of us, separate from what was outside. She was used to being alone, even in company.
I went up the back hall after midnight.
The room Isla made up for me has a bed, a chair, and a window onto the wall of the next house. Nothing of mine in it.
There were four stones on the sill.
Smooth ones, off the third beach. The flat one at the left with the long one set against it at an angle, the round one out from the pair, the small one below.
It’s the water off the point on a falling tide. The set of the rip, the eddy in behind it, the shoal water on the inside. I’d built the current I can’t swim in on the windowsill of a room I’d be out of the day this ended.
I’ve no memory of putting them there.
I stood with my hand over them and reached for the number, the way you check a pocket. How many days until she gives it to me? I’ve had a running count since the corridor.
Nothing came.
I had stopped counting the days.
She was on the landing with her boots in her hand, coming up from bolting the back door after me.
“You’ll want the front one done as well.”
“Isla did it.” She went up two steps and stopped with her hand on the rail. “You should get some sleep. Whatever’s wrong with you, the sleeping helps.”
She went on up.
I stood in the dark hallway and listened to her footsteps fade.
Tomorrow I’d take her to the moon pool. It was the only place left where the truth might come out without breaking her.
And I was running out of time.