Крис Бекетт: Spring Tide

He was surprised at himself. He could already see, without even the benefit of hindsight, that this was going to be one of those moments he would replay in his mind. I should never have walked away from that Irish girl , he knew he’d tell himself at lonely moments, perhaps even years from now. Stupid, of course, but it would happen. And never mind the distant future. What about this very evening, what about the prospect ahead of him, trying to fill the time by himself in that sad little village? He did like being on his own, it was quite true, but there were places where that worked, and places where it didn’t. A depressed and slowly dying village wasn’t a good setting for solitude.

But still he walked away. The argument with his friends had shaken him quite badly. He’d been shocked by his own sudden eruption of rage. It had made him think about his dealings with other people in general, and the way he swung so suddenly from one feeling to another, from friendliness to contempt, from passion to indifference. And he was tired of blowing about in the wind, and doing whatever seemed easiest at the time. He knew he’d hurt people that way, especially women, and he’d had enough of the mess and shame when the wind suddenly changed.

As Siobhan watched him dissolve into the forest, she wondered why he’d been in such a hurry to get away. He’d seemed very reserved, even by English standards, but she’d quite liked the look of him, and had assumed he’d like the look of her too – well, why wouldn’t he? – enough in any case for an evening together to seem like a pleasant prospect. Perhaps he was just shy, she thought. Maybe she should have suggested it herself? But something had stopped her. Siobhan wasn’t prone to shyness, so it wasn’t that. No, it was almost as if he’d seen her thought and metaphorically held up a warning hand. Which was kind of odd.

But anyway, never mind. By the time she’d unwrapped the cheese and tomato sandwich that had travelled with her all the way from Dublin airport, she was enjoying the ruin in the moonlight and the chorus of cicadas, and thinking about other things. After about fifteen minutes, she headed back herself along the track.

When she reached the side path towards the sea, she paused. She could go straight on to the village now and, as likely as not, she’d meet Thomas again outside the café, for where else was there for him to go? She could stop for a word and, if he seemed more amenable this time, a companion for the evening would perhaps be an option once more. Or she could turn left now down the path towards her little camp on top of the cliff. Spending the night there had been quite appealing in prospect, even in the absence of the camping equipment that her friends were bringing, but it seemed rather less so now. Meeting Thomas, and then watching him go, had made her more aware of the fact that she was on her own, and she felt unnerved by the moonlit forest and its shadowy and ambiguous forms. But recognising this fact made up her mind for her. She didn’t like to give way to unfounded fears. She preferred to push on through them.

She’d just turned down the little valley when she saw a man ahead of her, standing just a few yards back from the path, completely motionless, and watching her with an odd, sardonic, sideways gaze. This was genuinely frightening and she was on the point of turning back and heading for the village after all when she realised this wasn’t a human being at all, but only the broken trunk of a tree. Amused by her own irrational fear, she walked over to the tree to give it a little kick, and had just returned to the path when suddenly a real man appeared on the path ahead with a gun in his hand, striding determinedly towards her. Her heart began to race again but the hunter walked straight past, heading back to the village without saying a word, and Siobhan was on her own again.

How different it seemed on the cliff now, in the dark. She searched for some time for the sleeping bag which she’d left in a small hollow under some rocks, cursing herself for not marking the spot more clearly, and worrying that perhaps it had been stolen. Eventually she found it, though, and this was immensely comforting, a moment in fact of really intense happiness. Even returning to a patch of earth on a clifftop, it seemed, could feel, in the right circumstances, like coming home. She knew she wouldn’t sleep for some time, but she rolled out her sleeping bag and lay down quite contentedly on the outside of it. The stars were very bright, and the entire span of the Milky Way was stretched out above her across the sky. She wished she could name the constellations, but the only one she could remember was Orion, shining up there above the mountain.

Never mind. The stars didn’t know their names.

Still awake an hour later, she stood up and stretched herself and, as she did so, she looked down over the side of her rocky hollow at the small beach beneath, its narrow strip of sand dimly visible in the moonlight, and little waves glowing softly as they broke over it. Some way out to sea, the lamps of several fishing boats were moving slowly across the water, the crouched fishermen inside them half in light and half in darkness.

She was watching their slow progress when she became aware of movement below her. There was a direct path to the beach from the village and a man was walking along it. She could see it was Thomas. Shadowy and indistinct as he was in the moonlight, there was something slightly dogged about his walk that she immediately recognised. It was as if he was battling against something, she thought, forcing himself forward into the world against some sort of resistance. She saw him pull off his T-shirt and shorts and wade out naked into the sea. The water glittered around him as he dived in, and it seemed a long time before he emerged again to swim thirty or forty strokes further out in a strong, confident crawl, before stopping and treading water so he could turn and look back at the shore. Not wanting him to see her watching him, Siobhan squatted down again behind her rocks.

Soon afterwards, she decided to get inside her sleeping bag, for the air was beginning to cool. As she lay there, she imagined herself in Thomas’s place: the moonlight under the sea, the play of grey shadows on the blurry stones on the bottom, the coolness of the water against her skin. If they’d spent the evening together, she thought, the two of them might well have both come swimming. By then he’d no longer be the shadowy being she’d met at the temple in the moonlight. They would have talked for a while, seen each other’s faces properly in electric light, knocked back a few glasses of beer or wine or ouzo or something, and learnt a few anchoring facts about one another, like where each of them came from, what they did for a living, and who was in their families. There would have been just the two of them together in a little pool of electric light. It would have felt intimate and conspiratorial, and, based on past experience and her knowledge of herself, Siobhan thought it quite likely that, after their swim, or even instead of it, they would have had sex. People differ a great deal in this respect, but Siobhan’s attitude was very straightforward. Pleasure was a good thing if it didn’t hurt anyone, and she was quite open to brief encounters in situations like this where there was little risk of difficult emotional entanglements.

It could have been rather nice actually, she thought a little wistfully, but then she smiled. Sex was such a funny thing when you examined it. She’d always thought that. Such a big deal was made of it. So many contradictory prohibitions and expectations were placed upon it. It was the focal point of so much huffing and blowing and agonising and general nonsense: sonnets, songs, sermons, Viagra, lipstick, rom-coms, operas, jokes, public stonings, pop songs, vows of celibacy, Romeo and Juliet, Ten Top Tips to Wow Your Man in Bed, the pill, the confessional, tears… On and on. So much drama and worry and guilt and longing. And all of it, whether disapproving or celebratory, was centred on sex as a wild and subversive force. Yet what was it in the end? What was that feeling? When you really came down to it, wasn’t it just scratching a rather fancy kind of itch? An itch, what’s more, that only existed because it ensured that living creatures didn’t stint in the business of making more creatures. What was wild about that? What was subversive about a force that pulled all the time, like a kind of biological gravity, in the direction of parenthood and domesticity?