John Banville - Nightspawn

‘What is it?’ she asked, ‘this little thing.’

I grinned, and showed her my empty palms.

‘How would I know, not having found it yet?’

Her hands stirred on the table before her. She stood up, saying,

‘It’s time for my swim.’

She pulled off her trousers and her pullover, revealing an intricately made body covered in places by a tiny black bikini. If people really do gulp, as it is said they do, then I gulped. A dark cicatrice was inscribed under her left shoulder blade, which heightened the pale lucidity of her skin. She walked across the beach, hopping on the hot sand, and slipped into the sea. She was a good and graceful swimmer. From my pocket I took a scrap of paper and looked at it. When again I lifted my eyes, she had left the water, and stood now with her back toward me. The little waves lapped at her feet. For a time she stayed motionless, her face turned seaward, and then began to wade through the shallows. Her long hair hung down her back, and her shoulders gleamed. She came to where the sun burned on the water in a golden mist, and the light took her form and blurred its outline, so that she seemed to tremble on the brink of sea and light. She paused, and turned from the waist to look back at me, lifting her hand in a strange small gesture, languidly.

She came back to the table, tossing her head, running her fingers through her hair. Damp dark fern-strands gleamed in the pits of her arms.

‘Do you not swim?’ she asked.

I closed my mouth, and cleared my throat, and said,

‘No.’

She smiled, showing her small white teeth.

‘Another thing you fear, yes?’

She went and lay down in the sand beyond the shadow of the tree. After a while I followed her, and sat beside her on my heels. With her chin on her hands, she gazed at the white sand before her.

‘What do you write about?’ she asked.

‘Things.’

‘Not people?’

‘As seldom as I can.’

‘Tell me,’ she persisted.

I would say nothing. She frowned, and pushed damp hair away from her cheek with the pale soft underside of her wrist.

‘If I wrote, it would be about people.’

I shaded my eyes and looked out at the holy island on the sea.

‘Yes, I write about people too,’ I admitted. ‘But you have to be careful with them. They always want to have meanings, or be symbols, always something more than they are. They want to think, while all that matters is what happens in the little space between one person and the next.’

I bit my lip. She noticed nothing.

‘Like electricity and metal,’ she said, pleased with herself. ‘Or is it magnets? I never know. I shall buy one of your books.’

‘There is only one.’

‘Well I shall buy it, and if I do not understand it, then you can explain it to me.’

I shook my head and said solemnly,

‘That wouldn’t do at all, Mrs Kyd.’

I was eager to end the conversation. Helena sat up, and her swim suit sagged with the weight of damp sand which clung to it. Silver beads of water lay between her breasts. I left her, and went back to the table to finish my beer and curse at myself for a while, for no particular reason, apart from the eternal one of knowing myself to be a fool.

The afternoon went imperceptibly away into the enormous sky. The heatstorm raged briefly on the horizon, with lightning, and distant understated thunder. Nothing of that rage came to the beach but for a fitful murmuring of the olive tree, and a moment while the sea was alive with ghostly glimmers of phosphorescence. Helena put on her clothes, smiled at me, took up her bag, and started slowly away up the road with her head bent. The sun slipped down the sky above the headland, and the light ebbed on the beach. The old woman, sighing and nodding, came and asked me if I would take another drink, or a salad perhaps, a nice roasted fish. I thanked her, and refused, and went to the road. Purple shadows were flooding the sea. The wild reeds were clacking. There was the voice of the sea. I found her sitting on a low stone wall some distance up the hill. We said nothing, but moved away together. The sky turned through its colours, pale rose to blue, a wild soft purple shading to white on the horizon. The burnt barren fields around us were touched with gold, and the bushes gave up their shadows lingeringly from among the leaves and thorns. A cloud of white glittering light exploded slowly on the sea below us, as though a huge invisible hand had smacked its quiet surface. Somewhere a cock sent up a querulous and irritated squawk. We crossed the spine of the island. A fresh breeze sprang up, and a hawk climbed the liquid air.

Well, well, a new day.

Noonday burned above the olive grove, in the trees among the boughs, on the ground where the little lizards stalked with their fragile and considered tread. Crazed with heat and the wild blue light, we rolled and writhed on the clay, grappling, joined at thigh and mouth, but she would not yield, and would not speak, and fought me in a savage silence. All round about us the air was singing, and through the leaves and the bitter fruits, something slowly moved. The lizards saw it and were still, transfixed by a hypnotic throbbing of the air and light, the yellow sun, the music and weird chanting high in the limitless sky. The limp leaves stirred, and the lizards watched, and the sun-drunk piping song grew loud and cried, and cried, and receded, slowly, with a dying fall, and died, into the trembling distance. I released her, and lay on my back in a silence of my own. She sat with her arms around her legs and her chin resting on her knees. With a quivering lower lip clenched in her teeth, she sifted a handful of dust through her fingers. There were leaves in her yellow hair. I got to my feet and went away, stooping under the branches and plucking the dull green buds. She took up her towel and followed me.

On the road, I turned my face away from her, whistling carelessly. The cicadas sang in the fields, and somewhere, distantly, a dog was barking. A far clear silence was abroad on the air. She said,

‘Mr White — Ben, I have something to say. If you want us to remain friends then you must never do that again.’

‘Fuck.’

‘What —’

‘Look, you can see the yacht from here.’

‘That is not what you said. I heard what you said. I think, Mr White, it would be better if we do not see each —’

‘Listen, lady.’

‘Well?’

‘Oh, nothing.’

One pace, two, three paces through a tight silence, and then,

‘I am a married woman,’ she said.

I began to laugh. I could not stop. She stood and glared at me, quivering with fury, said something which I did not hear, stamped her foot and stalked away. I galloped after her, flapping my hands.

‘Helena, listen, I’m sorry. Helena.’

I caught her arm, but she wrenched away from me and strode on down the hill, arms stiffly flying, knees bouncing, an angry little soldier. I trotted by her side.

‘I’m very bad. The lady is very good. I’m nothing but a big stiff prick.’

‘Do not think that I do not know these words.’

‘Yes yes, but listen, I love you.’

Whoops, she halted. We stood and faced each other, panting. With her head on one side, frowning as she tried to absorb what I had said, she stared at me, absently fidgeting with her hair. I shrugged, and threw out my arms, grinning helplessly.

‘How can —’ she began, but I gave her no time to finish. Spiderlike, legs and arms crook’d, I took a leap at her. We crashed into the ditch among the stones. Helena screamed. I had been a little too enthusiastic. A stab of pain shot through my leg, and then I found myself lying on my back, clutching my knee, and Helena was running headlong down into the village with a small angry cloud of dust following on her heels. Gone, gone forever. I took up a rock and gave my already wounded knee a fine new wallop. I was left with a crushed slab of chocolate and a burst bag of grapes. I laid my face into her fragrant towel and wept bitter tears of rage and pain.