The tide is high, the gas is gone, my tobacco. Soon the kibble will be gone too. All it would take is some slight fault of the handbrake. Not even a press, but a tweak, just a tweak. It’s a cold day; is it still Christmas? I can’t remember. There are rocks beneath the surface, below the headlamps. I can’t see them, but I know they’re there. I know by the way the waves are broiling. Whereas far out, they are simply swelling and rolling, failing to break. It’s a sad place, but then I seem to find most places sad, and maybe it’s me who’s sad and not the places after all. Maybe there’s nowhere I can go, and no point in going.
Now look in the rearview mirror and see the cows and the sandpits and the holiday cottages, deserted now. See all the licensed earth in its hundred different shades of brown. Now look through the windscreen and see the floating lighthouse pulsing red, the empty water. I’ve never been able to figure out exactly how much you can see through your lonely peephole. Does it affect distance, depth, perspective? I know I don’t need to list everything we pass like I do. I know I don’t need to talk to you like this. I know it’s nonsense, it’s all nonsense. But now I have to tell you something, and this time it’s important, okay? This time you have to listen. You have to understand.
I’m no spinnerman. Remember the spinnerman? How he continuously began again for nothing? Well I’m no spinnerman. And remember the burrowhole in the forest that I almost followed you down? Well now I wonder why I drew back instead of pushing on and allowing the bank to cave in and extort the air from my lungs and be done with it. But that wouldn’t have been right, because you don’t belong to me, One Eye. You don’t belong to me and I was wrong to ever treat you like you do. You belong to the inveigling hills, to the fields and ditches untrammelled, to the holes in the forest, the horizon line, the badgers. The seasons don’t belong to me and the sea doesn’t belong to me and the sky doesn’t belong to me. All I own is my father’s house, the saddest place in our whole small world. And the warden will return in time, the old man’s bones will be sloshed back to shore and identified, and even if I did change, I’d only change back again. And so.
Do you think if I take the handbrake off, the car will roll us home to the salmon pink house, grudgingly yet irresistibly, like I always said it would? There’s a free bird of fear inside my chest but beneath its wings my organs are putrefying, bit by bit by bit. There’s a hunk of grassy rock a little way out. A tiny island upon which ten, fifteen, twenty cormorants are gathered. Now here’s a lobster buoy and a plastic bottle coasting past. Now a blue gallon drum with a common gull perched on top. I’m sorry, I’m doing it again. I’m listing every last thing as though you can’t see at all, as though I am the eye you lost.
‘See for yourself,’ I tell you, ‘see.’
My hand is on the handbrake, my lamps are to the water. And now you must turn around from the shore. Now you must listen to the forests and the fields.
You are the only thing, One Eye. You are the only.
Now listen. Can you hear it? The badgers are calling you.
I close my eyes and our life is a film and we are rolling, rolling, rolling.
The car parks in its space outside the terrace with two wheels abutting the footpath, and inside I tidy up the mess of firelighters and Easy Oil and out again we go along the bird walk and laid on the mud at the foot of the shore wall we find the pillowcase of bones on its doorbox chariot and I carry it down our laneway and up the stepladder and into the roof. I shut up and lock the shut-up-and-locked room, realign the snake.
Now in the kitchen I place the sausage pan on its hob and you sit at my feet and wait as I fry. And you are a good boy and so I tell you.
‘Good boy,’ I tell you. ‘Good.’
There is a tiny figure, right on the cliffslope’s edge, like a sock puppet to the theatre of the open sea.
His shoulders are bunched and his head is lowered. There’s a trail of smashed briars and gorse running across the slope in a straight line, from the spot where the tiny figure is hunching, into the water. And he is looking down as though he is waiting for something to rise from there.
The tide is high.
He can see a gallon drum, a plastic bottle. He can see a lobster buoy nodding in time with the waves, tussling against its anchoring pot. But he can’t see a fleet of by-the-wind sailors which has just been disbanded by a mighty disturbance. Now they are struggling to regroup, and he cannot see because they are too small, too blue, too scattered. And he can’t see the conger eels several feet below the surface either. Unseen they are nibbling, nibbling, nibbling.
Now he turns his head to look to the fields. He stares at the telegraph poles and firs and hedges, as though he is learning the horizon off by heart, as though he is listening very carefully.
Now a bird scaring machine fires its thunder clap into the sky. And all the crows and gulls and starlings, all the cormorants out on cormorant island ascend flapping and soaring in perfect synchronicity. And the tiny figure on the cliffslope’s edge ceases his waiting and springs to his paws and sets off at a sprint.
He is running, running, running.
He is One Eye.
He is on his way.
Thank you Thomas Morris: without your bizarre encouragement, constructive criticism and completely unrewarded efforts on its behalf, this would certainly never have become a book.
Thank you Sarah Davis-Goff and Lisa Coen: your kindness, conviction and commitment have continually confounded my expectations of the publishing industry.
Thank you David Baume: for condoning my ludicrous career path, and Mark Beatty: for all the elegiac observations with which you enhance my days.
Thank you Deborah Baume: if I ever manage to achieve anything good in life, it will be because of you.
And thank you Wink, of course, wherever the fuck you came from, for all the trouble you cause me, still and all, I’m glad you washed up here.