Susan Fletcher - The Silver Dark Sea

Nathan has not slept at all. He knows it shows. Kitty said as much when she crept downstairs to find him still sitting in the armchair, an empty glass tilted in his lap. She’d said, you look like crap, Mr Bundy , smiling and stroking his knee.

As he’d walked along the lane to Easterly he’d tried out the different words in his head, whispered them under his breath, and he’d hoped that perhaps his mother would be out – that he’d find a note on the doormat saying gone to shop or elsewhere. But he’d looked up and seen her. She’d been tending to those pink flowers of hers, and he’d thought she looks old. The hunched back, the iron-grey hair.

When they’d hugged, Nathan had felt small again.

Now, they stand inside. She is looking at him, waiting. She licks her lips as she always does when she is nervous, and she says is it Kitty?

No.

Hester, then? Ian? The grandchildren?

No, Mum. Everyone’s fine.

You? Are you fine?

Been better …

Are you ill?

Mum … He’s forgotten the words. He tries to think of them but cannot so he puts his hands on top of her hands and says listen. Some stuff happened last night. At Sye.

Sye? She is frowning. The cove?

Sam Lovegrove was walking up there –

What happened? Did he fall, or …?

Sam’s OK, too. Mum, listen – he found a man. Washed up on the beach.

Emmeline is still.

Sam thought he was dead, but he wasn’t. He was lying on his front … Sam ran to the farm and got us – me, Ian, Jonny. We all went to Sye, and we carried him back. Took him to Aunt Tabitha’s.

Nathan pauses, breathes. He watches his mother’s face, and waits until her eyes show what he knows she will, shortly, be thinking. He waits. He waits. And then he sees her eyes change.

She says, Oh God …

Mum, it isn’t Tom.

How do you know? It might be.

He takes her wrists. No. It’s not. That’s what I’m here to tell you. It is not Tom.

Does he look like him?

Nathan winces. In part, I guess. Yes. But he is too tall. He is too tall, and he is wider than Tom ever was. The teeth are wrong, and –

It’s been four years. People change in four years. They grow.

Mum –

He’s at Tabitha’s? She breaks frees of him, hauls her jacket off the hook behind the door. I’ve got to go there.

Mum, he’s not Tom –

She shakes her head, she can’t hear him. She is fumbling in the pocket of her jacket, finds the car keys, and she trips out of the house into the sunlight and gets into the car.

Nathan calls, Mum! But he only calls it once. He is too tired to stop her, and knows she cannot be stopped. He stands on the grass and watches her go – over the potholes, past the log-pile. Once her car is gone he shuts his eyes.

The wind pushes at him. He can feel it, buffeting.

When he looks again he sees a plastic toy windmill on a stick, beside the fence. It turns, in the breeze. It is red, or it was – years of sun have faded it. He watches it turn. A northerly breeze.

What now? He knows.

Somebody else needs to be told – about this washed-up man.

* * *

The plastic windmill turns, and catches the light.

In the mending room at Lowfield, the stranger still sleeps. Tabitha watches his chest rise and fall.

In the harbour, a gull stands on a boat’s tarpaulin cover. It drinks from a pool of rainwater that has gathered there. To swallow, the gull lifts his beak to the sky, straightens its neck and gulps twice. Afterwards, it shakes its tail.

Sam sees this gull. He is at the top of the harbourmaster’s house – a double-fronted, red-bricked building that sits on the quayside. From his attic room, he can see everything – the harbour, the sea wall, the open water beyond it. He can see the mainland too – dipped and bluish, like a sleeper’s back. It is a good room. The eaves mean that Sam must stoop in places but he likes being here at the top of the house. His bedroom is untidy, boyish – a music system, a games console, a dartboard, crumbs on the carpet, mugs of cold tea, a row of free weights that he lifts in the evenings as he looks at the view. A single bed which is never made.

He sits on this bed now. He sits with his hands underneath him, looking out to sea. Sam did not sleep last night, or barely. When he closed his eyes he was there again – standing on the coastal path and looking down at Sye. He could see the man exactly. He can see him now.

Dark hair.

The fingers that tried to close around a stone.

Last night, Sam had thrown up by the sea wall. When he’d returned home, wiping his mouth, he’d found his father watching the news and whispered Dad? Something’s happened. He’d sounded young, afraid.

Things are passed on here. Houses, jobs, names – they are handed down to the next generation because that is the island’s way. This has always been a Lovegrove house. Sam’s great-great-grandfather had been the captain of the first Morning Star and he’d built this house himself with a clear sense of the Lovegroves yet to come. He’d captained the boat for fifty-six years. When he died, his son took over; then his son did. And a century later, the captain and harbourmaster of Parla is Edward Lovegrove, with his receding hairline and chapped hands, and last night this man had been watching the television with his feet on the coffee table. He’d lowered his feet when he saw Sam’s face.

What is it, son?

Ed is the law on Parla, if there is such a thing. Ed will know – a common phrase. It’s only based on his first aid certificates, his knowledge of the water and the radio in his study which he can talk to the coastguard on. It isn’t much, but it’s enough. A man’s come ashore.

What? Dead?

Alive.

Do we know him?

No. But for a moment, I …

Sam shifts now, stretches. He can feel the weight of a sleepless night on his shoulders. A night of hearing the curtains stir, of watching the hours tick across the neon face of his clock. In the last few minutes before daybreak, he’d been nearing sleep – drifting, growing heavier. But then the phone had rung. It had bubbled up the stairs, rousing him. His father had answered it. He’d said, hello Tabitha. Yes. Yes – Sam told me …

Everyone will know by now , Sam thinks. Or most of them, at least .

This is a fact that he is sure of: it is hard to have secrets here. Something happens and the island feels it. If a cat kills a bird in the morning, the feathers will have blown into each house by nightfall; if there is a quarrel on the quayside, the account of it will be unloaded with the rest of the boat, and carried inland. Guess what I saw … And taps will be turned off by women who think they have misheard their children or their friends, and say what? Really? Elbows will be taken hold of in the lanes. When he was a boy, there was a fire at the school one night and the red-edged curls of paper floated over the island, settled on the outboard motors, roofs and bonnets of cars – and Sam thinks news is like that. It gets everywhere. Never any secrets, never any surprises and he has wondered if that’s what has buckled Leah in the past – the lack of privacy, the way that all things are known.

Phones will be ringing. Hands will reach for other hands.

Emmeline … Will she rage? Grapple? Most likely.

And Sam thinks of Maggie. Who will tell her? And how will she be, when she’s told? He imagines her face. He sees the lines by her eyes, how she holds her fingers up to her mouth as she listens. How broken she can look.