Крис Бекетт - Spring Tide

It might start out in the moonlight on a beach, Siobhan thought, but it ended up with stair gates, and car seats, and grown-ups saying ‘weewee’ and ‘poo’.

She had to admit, though, that her thoughts at this point were somewhat coloured by the fact that her friend Anne, back in Dublin, had had a baby a few months ago, and seemed to have lost interest in all the things the two of them had shared. In fact, if it wasn’t for that baby, Anne would have been with her now.

And actually, Siobhan thought, in all fairness, and setting jealousy aside, opening your legs and pushing out an entirely new human being who no one had ever seen before, well, that wasn’t exactly tame . The poo and the stair gates might be, but they were just anodyne trimmings, as Valentine cards and silly pet names were anodyne trimmings for sex. The raw reality was something else.

In fact, when you came to think about, wasn’t it life itself that was the really subversive thing? Not just sex but motherhood too? All of life was a rebellion really, a doomed, Lucifer-like rebellion against the peaceful downward pull of entropy, the orderly clocklike unwinding of galaxies and planets and stars.

This last bit, however, came to her more as images than as words, for as sleep took hold, her thoughts ceased to be made of language. They weren’t even images really either. They were something more abstract than that: forms, diagram-like chunks of meaning that were as much tactile as visual. Some huge dark falling thing, creatures moving in a moonlit forest, water running downhill in torrents and streams and dripping from sodden peat…

Dear God, she thought, coming awake suddenly, Thomas hadn’t even been the first opportunity that day when it came to sex! When she’d asked Spiro about the price of rooms he’d winked and said there was no charge for those who shared his bed. Christ, how sordid! No way was she going to stay there after that! No way. Of course the old goat had spotted her distaste almost at once: ‘Forgive me my silly joke!’ But it didn’t fool her. She’d already seen him watching her, eyes slightly narrowed, like a shrewd old fisherman watching his line to see if the bait would be taken. He was about the same age as her dad.

Still, she thought, it had probably worked once, thirty years ago, when Spiro wasn’t so flabby and Greece had seemed much more exotic to northern Europeans than it did now in these days when Bali or Thailand were commonplace destinations. The pull of the other. She remembered some nature programme she’d seen. Female chimps sneaking away from their troop when the alpha male was sleeping in his tree, risking attack by leopards to journey all by themselves by moonlight over a mountain ridge and down into the next valley. They’d mate with males from another troop down there and then return again over the rocks and through the leopard-ridden night. Hedging their bets, the programme had said. New genes to mingle with their own.

A leopard in the moonlight. Dear God, imagine that. Those spots among all these speckled shades of grey. The creature would be right on top of you before you’d seen it at all.

Several hours later, she surfaced from sleep again and sat up to have a look around.

The moon had gone, and Orion was right down at the horizon. This evidence that the planet had been quietly turning while she slept was for some reason immensely comforting, and she felt a surge of that same delicious happiness that had come to her when she found her sleeping bag. It reminded her of when she was a little girl, back in the days before her brothers were even born, wrapped in a warm blanket in the back of her parents’ car as they drove through the night to her nan’s house in Galway. Sometimes, after an aeon of silence, one of the grown-ups would say something in the front there, some murmured thought or observation, and she’d half-wake to see the street lights of some little town flickering in the windows above her, or maybe the headlights of a passing truck, briefly illuminating the door handles and head-rests, the plastic lining of the car roof, the pocket in front of her, with her pad and crayons, on the back of her father’s seat. And then quietness and darkness would return, and she’d slip back down into sleep.

Everything in her immediate surroundings was in almost complete darkness. So was the sea below, except for the faint grey ghosts of waves breaking below her on the beach. There were no fishing boats now, and Thomas had long since gone.

I remember when I first saw the moon. It was on a summer evening when I was fifteen years old. I was with my two friends, Chaz and Mick, in a disused quarry. The moon was just a couple of nights away from being full, so there was still a sliver of shadow to prove it was a sphere. And when I looked carefully, I could see how the shadow’s edge was broken up by the contours of craters.

‘Wow, that’s amazing,’ I said. ‘I must have seen the moon hundreds of times but I swear this is the first time I’ve ever really seen it!’

It wasn’t just a light in the sky, that’s what I was trying to say. It wasn’t just a set of facts in some illustrated book about astronomy. It was really there, far away and unreachable perhaps, but every bit as solid an object as I was, and part of the same continuum of space.

‘Yeah, nice,’ said Chaz. He was busy, and glanced up without any real interest.

‘Go on, look at it!’ I told him. ‘It’s amazing. The moon’s real! It’s truly in the world. And so are we !’

That last bit was the best part, actually. If the moon was real and separate from us then we were real too, distinct entities who were also truly in the world. That might seem obvious, but it came to me as a revelation.

You may possibly have guessed by now that we were smoking weed at the time, that famous converter of commonplace observations into amazing insights and half-baked philosophies. In fact, right then, while I was still staring at the moon, my two friends were splitting open a cigarette over an assemblage of Rizla papers, heating an oily hunk of hash, and crumbling it onto the dry brown strands to make our second joint of the evening. Hence their lack of interest in my discovery.

I smoked a considerable amount of weed back then. I didn’t think of it as a problem, though in fact I was stealing quite regularly from my parents just to help me fund the habit. Over the next few years, I was to increase my consumption to a point where I lit up as soon as I woke in the morning, and again last thing at night, for the world just seemed too empty, too drained of meaning, without that THC in my veins to bring it alive.

But all the same, acknowledging all of that, I still don’t think my insight about seeing the moon was simply the product of being stoned, because that distinction between seeing a thing in the everyday sense and really seeing it, does still seem meaningful to me even now, more than forty years on. What’s more, I’m pretty certain it was something I was groping towards long before I’d ever smoked the stuff. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that the reason I was so drawn to the weed in the first place was that I longed to see , and was casting about for ways of doing so.

The funny thing is that Chaz and Mick and I liked to think of ourselves as rebels, inspired visionaries, using drugs to smash our way out of the dim half-world where most people seemed content to live out their cautious and conformist lives. It only really strikes me now that we may have had that the wrong way round. Those who most long to see are not the visionaries but the ones who can see the least. Those who long to break free are the ones who are the most confined. I wonder if some of the famous artists who are praised for their vision were not so much experts in seeing, as people who had to work very hard indeed in order to be able to see anything at all.