J. Ledgard - Submergence

She caught his fallen expression. He was a spy, but utterly readable. ‘Cheer up. I could learn to love a dog. Singular.’

He smiled at her. He felt they needed to hold on to one another or they would be swept apart and not find each other again. They stood and looked out over the crescent-shaped expanse of the Atlantic.

‘Let’s get on with it,’ she said. Unexpectedly, she reached up and touched his cheek.

She moved fluently and without hesitation. She pulled off her wellington boots and socks, her fleece-lined tracksuit trousers. She wore light knickers with a darker trim. Her hips were wide. Her skin rose at once to the new day in ranges of goose pimples. She took off her wax jacket, scarf and woollen hat. She peeled off her cashmere sweater and was naked. She ran and dived into the sea. A wave crashed over her. She did not shout or call out as he expected she would. She lay herself down and stretched out between the waves. Her fists were clenched. She held onto the water. Then she kicked away in a front crawl. She was a strong swimmer, stronger than he was. She swam in line with the shore, then stood up and ran out, her feet catching on the shells and gravel. Her nipples were large and brown and pulled tight with the cold. She was youthful in the thickening of her belly, and her broad shoulders in the winter sun made her frame momentarily appear to be facets of a gem. She took off her knickers and rubbed her chest down with one towel while he rubbed her legs and hips with the other. Her hair was wet across her face. She dressed as quickly as she had undressed. She could not speak for breathing. They set off towards the hotel at a fast pace.

Without any indication it could be otherwise, he went up the stairs with her to her suite. She drew a bath. He turned on the television. When the bath was full and he heard her laying back in it he became distracted and after some minutes, as if pulled by orbital forces, he undressed and went into the bathroom and slid in with her, so the suds spilled out over the tiles. She embraced him and they lay together and then rose and he made love to her over the sink. She pushed him out and took his manhood and handed him off over her belly, up to her chest.

There was then that unforgiving moment which follows the coming before. She dreaded it. It was so often a disappointment and many times worse. She fucked and instantly deduced it had been the act only. She returned to herself, to Flinders, to the scientist. But no such rift opened between Danny and James that might have obliged them to walk separately out of the bathroom. The tiles on the floor stayed sure, affixed one to the other, and there was only tenderness between them.

They dozed hand in hand in bed. Later, she found a condom in one of her bags and peeled it onto him in a similar motion to how she had unpeeled her sweater on the beach, and they made love steadily. A while later it was more powerful. It was as if they were screwing each other to a place where the body is spent and the true affair can begin.

*

It was a morning on Christmas week and it might have been absolute zero outside, with everything slowed and congealed into superatoms. He was unconcerned with emailing Legoland. She put her work aside. They ordered sweet, buttery porridge, juice and coffee. The suite was rearranged around them, the fire lighted. For that short day they were curled together on a blue and silver embroidered sofa. They chose to watch A Matter of Life and Death , with David Niven in the lead. An opening sequence of the universe cut to Squadron Leader Peter Carter, his burning Lancaster bomber plane dropping into the English Channel, giving his last thoughts to June, an American radio operator:

‘But at my back I always hear, Time’s winged chariot hurrying near; and yonder all before us lie deserts of vast eternity.’ Andy Marvell, what a marvel. What’s your name?

Carter jumped from the Lancaster without a parachute, expecting to die. The next scene showed him climbing out of the sea and wandering in dunes not unlike those around the Hotel Atlantic. By fault of angels, who missed him in the pea-soup fog, Carter miraculously survived into a technicolour so intense, the first technicolour of British cinema, that the sofa became colourless and the wintry sky outside, which was prismatic when they sat down, cloudless, with wisps of orange, turned to gruel.

In Francis Bacon’s work New Atlantis there is a description of perspective-houses:

where we make demonstrations of all lights and radiations; and of all colours: and out of things uncoloured and transparent, we can represent unto you all several colours; not in rainbows (as it is in gems and prisms), but of themselves single. We represent also all multiplications of light, which we carry to great distance, and make so sharp as to discern small points and lines. Also of colourations of light; all delusions and deceits of the sight, in figures, magnitudes, motions, colours all demonstrations of shadows. We find also divers means, yet unknown to you, of producing of light originally from divers bodies. We procure means of seeing objects afar off; as in heaven and remote places; and represent things near as afar off; and things afar off as near; making feigned distances. We have also help for the sight, far above spectacles and glasses in use. We have also glasses and means to see small and minute bodies perfectly and distinctly; as the shapes and colours of small flies and worms, grains and flaws in gems, which cannot otherwise be seen.

It is common knowledge that Osama bin Laden was born into a rich Saudi family. It is less known that the family fortune was invested in Western banks in contravention of Islamic law. If Osama had been born a poor Saudi, things might have been different. So would they be if he was born into a rich family in another country. If he had been an Italian industrialist’s son, for example, he might have exercised his religious feeling by becoming a priest in the Order of Daniel Comboni, whose motto is Africa or Death!

It would not have been possible for that alternate Osama, Father Giacomo Ladini, to stray so far from the sanctity of life.

He had lain down beside the trench and had a dream so lifelike he could not believe it was his alone. It was a Lenten carnival. A Christ-like figure on a float was leading a crowd of young people in a dance. The music was techno. The street was narrow. Bodies were pressed up against old buildings. There were shouts in German and French. It might have been the pharmaceutical town of Basel. The Christ spelled out a message in hand movements like the hand movements of the flagellants who marched through Rhineland towns during the Black Death spelling out I am a liar, a thief, an adulterer , except that these hand movements were not confessional: the Christ and the crowd repeated over and over with their hands a thousand years of love, a thousand years of peace.

The faces were diverse. They were moved by a common happiness. Then there was a pop of a suicide bomber’s vest, a drawing in of air, and an exhaling, so that the carnival float, the Christ, and many in the crowd were reduced to shreds.

They carried him from the sea to a whitewashed mosque separated from the beach by a wall of coral and lava stone. It was an old mosque; the first believers in Kismayo were buried in a shrine in the courtyard. The doors and window frames were intricately carved from planks of mango wood.