Cristelle Comby - Alone Together

I stayed near the back of the church for the service, making a point not to sit in the same aisle as my father. That way, I could do my best to ignore his presence as the ceremony went on. That was the very reason I’d showed up at the last minute, betting on the first couple of rows to be full.

But I hadn’t been able to avoid a run-in with my father later that afternoon. The mourners had gathered in the nearest pub; we couldn’t miss each other in that cramped up place. That tends to happen when you were the only two people who were a good head taller than anyone else.

The gaze he’d pinned me with then, it was the same one he was aiming at me now. Not an I’m-happy-to-see-you gaze, but an oh-so-you-dared-to-come-after-all kind of look. It was the type that made you feel like you had to apologise for something, even if you hadn’t done anything wrong.

“What must I be sorry for this time?” I heard myself asking, in a rough, strained voice. Father’s eyebrows drew closer as he frowned at me. Disappointment… that was always his sign that I was supposed to know the answer to that question already.

A large burst of wind came at me from the ocean. Though I was covered in sweat, I shivered. I’d never felt so miserable and weak in my life. But proud old Rowan Gordon didn’t move, didn’t show an ounce of compassion for his sick son. He remained motionless, like he was waiting for me to say what was expected.

Vision swimming, head pounding, I clutched hard at the plastic bottle I held in my hands. The answer eluded me. I didn’t know and I said so, mumbling the words as loud as I dared.

I knew the instant the words left my mouth that it’d been the wrong thing to say. My father’s lips turned down in a nasty sneer as he took a step closer to me, his right hand rising. I knew what that meant. I’d always known what that meant.

Suddenly, he was looming over me, his adult figure large and imposing, impossibly tall to my child’s eyes. We weren’t on the beach anymore, but standing in the living room of our old Inverurie home. Instead of corduroy pants and three layers of shirts and sweaters, I was wearing jammies with green dinosaurs on them. But the sneer on my father’s lips… that was the same. As was the burning pain on my cheek.

I reeled from the blow, knees buckling. Where my fingers expected to find the cold hardwood floor, they found wet pebbles. The thunderous waves called for me, rumbling ashore as they swirled about my feet. They urged me to follow them in their return to the sea, luring me into their depths and mysteries with promises of safety and care.

A strong bout of coughing blinded me for a moment, forcing me to close my eyes. When I reopened them, the waves bobbed flatly to the far horizon ahead, their fury abated for now. I was once again alone, deserted by everything and everyone, even my ghosts.

I made it back to the tent by crawling on all fours. I fell inside, lacking even the strength to zip the door closed. Just before sleep caught me in its nest, I found the answer to my father’s question. Everything . That’s what I had to be sorry for… everything.

The next time I awoke, a storm was brewing. And cold water was lapping at my feet.

Two things struck me as my eyes flew open. Night had turned to day and there were several inches of water inside the tent.

I pushed the covers to the side and bolted outside as fast as I could in my bedraggled state. I found clouds hanging low in the sky, dark and menacing. If the clouds’ darkness and the surrounding yellowish hues were anything to go by, they were minutes away from bursting, showering the island in yet more damp rain.

The skies weren’t the only thing that were menacing. The ocean was in a fluxing turmoil, angry waves coming up the cove high and fast. As I turned around, I discovered that they were leaping at the rocks from all sides. There wasn’t a single part of the cove that wasn’t underwater.

The rock formation that had protected me all these days now served as a funnel to allow strong winds to come in from the large body of water. The gusts relentlessly pushed and pushed at the high-tide waves until they came crashing at the back of the cove. The frothing water stole whatever they could as they scurried back to the ocean proper.

My water buckets were gone. So was some of my fishing gear. If I was lucky, I’d find it floating in the cove the next morning. If not, who knew where these currents would carry them next.

The only reason the tent was still there was because I’d been in it, grounding it with my weight. The minute I stepped outside, it’d started floating and dispersing its contents of blankets and clothes into the waters. To make matters worse, the red and blue suitcase—and the lighter, knife and what little medicine I had left within—was already floating several feet to my left. With the sea churning, there was no time to get both. And it was no choice at all. I let go of the tent so I could reach for the suitcase.

Carrying the suitcase out of the cove was difficult in the low lighting. The small footpath leading away from the shore was narrow, making it slow and treacherous going. The first drops of water hit the plateau at the same time I did. Already drenched and exhausted, I sat down and placed the suitcase beside me, watching the icy drops pelt down on the world around me. There was no hiding from the rain anymore.

The wind wasn’t weakening as the sky darkened. As a result, it got harder and harder to make out the green and orange canvas of the tent’s canopy as it was being pushed away. The raging ocean eventually swallowed it whole, leaving me homeless.

Laughter bubbled up in my throat at that last thought. Hadn’t I been more or less homeless for most of my life? Living out of airplanes and cheap hotel rooms whilst I moved from country to country, office to office? Technically, yeah, I had a flat in Inverurie. But I spent so little time there, I wasn’t sure why I bothered to keep it at all. Now that flat had been empty for months, I wondered how long it’d be before someone noticed my absence. The rent payment process was automated, so I guessed it would take my bank account running dry for someone to figure it out. I was a living ghost in my own life and nothing more.

After all, what did I live for? Expectations I could never meet? My late father’s approval that I knew full well would never come? All that time wishing for someone to find us, hanging onto life in the hopes that tomorrow would be the day we’d be rescued? And even if it came, then what? What was waiting for me back in the world I’d left behind? More pain, more travel, more… loneliness?

A lifetime of spreadsheets and numbers, of hotel bars and breakfast buffets, surrounded by people who feared me because they knew my coming to their office was a bad omen. A life spent putting as much distance as I could between me and the place where I’d grown up. Was that what I wanted to go back to, then? A life that could literally fit in a briefcase?

I’d never believed in any kind of afterlife, but if such existed, if there was an ‘after’, then Rowan Gordon had to be laughing his arse off now. Here was the culmination of his useless son’s life: sitting at the edge of a cliff, stranded on a deserted island, long forgotten by the rest of the world, alone and drenched to the bone. I’d become the failure he’d always believed me to be. It killed me inside to have to admit to such.

I could almost see his shadow, there in between the birch trees. His dark and sunken eyes, deep under their heavy eyebrows, looking down on me. Always looking down on me, with a sense of reproach in them. Nothing I ever did was enough for that man. I’d never been enough.