Michele Forbes: Ghost Moth

T HE SEAL APPEARS FROM NOWHERE, an instant immutable presence in the sea — although he must have been swimming silently beneath the surface for some time without her knowing. Katherine shudders in the water; her thoughts are moving like fast cold spikes inside her head. Where has he come from? Is he lost? Has he come to feed? The seal’s heavy muzzle thrusts toward Katherine; his nostrils — two dark inlets — flare: He is taking in her smell, her fear. His stiff eyebrow hairs, beaded with sea drops, crisscross the thick shadowy skin of his dark, wide head. Battle-scarred, his snout slopes to an ugly dull point where his long wiry whiskers afford him the seductive familiarity of a family dog. But it’s his eyes — the eyes of this wild animal — that terrify Katherine the most; huge, opaque, and overbold, they hold on her like the lustrous black-egged eyes of a ruined man.

Briefly the seal’s lips roll to display his sharp conical teeth, strong enough to dismember a large bird, she thinks, strong enough to rip her flesh. Her panic rises. If she turns her head away from him to look for help, even for a second, God knows what he’ll do. He may strike. Seals startle easily, someone once told her, their behavior as unpredictable as human love. Yet if she remains where she is. .

They tread the cold sea together, Katherine and the seal. Above them, sandpipers drop their miserable cries as they fly. Splinters of high voices peak on the blue wind. In the distance, there is the low mechanical churr of a train. Around them, the sea continues its cool lamenting slap.

A sudden thought. Is he alone? Are there more seals? Are there cows or pups to aggressively protect?

The bobbing sea confuses the distance between them. It feels as though he is moving closer to her with every swell. She is keenly aware of her quivering limbs, of her too-quick breathing, of the saltwater in her mouth: a jagged dark fear filling her up. Her mind shrinks to the size of one thought: He may kill me.

Out of this fear there is the sudden impulse to reach out and touch him. Like the only way to stop the white panic of vertigo is to jump. To finish it. To decide to finish it. Or by reaching out, by touching, she might just connect with him, soothe him, soothe herself, make it mean something. Madness, she knows. But his heavy beauty is suggesting just this.

She doesn’t do it.

She hears her husband, George, calling out for her from the shore, his voice traveling like a lone seagull’s cry, searching for her. But she doesn’t respond. Transfixed by the seal’s gaze upon her, by this odd and uncomfortable gift of him, by the fear of the ever-opening sea, she remains.

The seal is the first to move. He shifts his head a little, as though he is beginning to lose interest in her, and he snorts abruptly, spraying her face with seawater, the spiky claws on his fore flipper breaking the surface of the water as he moves. He turns his head, creating thick dark wrinkles around his neck. But after his black eyes casually scan the horizon, they return to her. His eyes, those eyes, brimming black liquid pools, stare into her. They are asking something of her; they are waiting for her to answer him.

The sea blasts an icy wash over her body.

She hears George calling her again. This time, the sound of his voice is pitched with relief that he has spotted her in the water. His voice pulls at her. “Katherine! Katherine!” he calls. Does he see the seal beside her? Does he see him? “Katherine! Over here!”

A new spiral of fear kicks in at the sound of her husband’s voice. What if George cannot reach her? What if he frightens the seal and provokes it? She feels her stomach lurch, as though she might get sick. Reflux burns her throat. Her chest tightens. The eyes of the seal still hold on her. The heft of his body is now remarkably still, his bulk buoyed by the obedient sea. That big gray head.

Against her common sense, she turns her body to look for George and sees him wave to her from the rocks, beckoning her to come to him. She opens her mouth, but she cannot find her voice. Instead, her mouth fills with seawater, a thick glide of salt blue into pink. She swallows some, spits out the rest.

When she turns back, the seal is gone. She hangs in a quiver of cold sea.

That morning, George had casually announced that he had taken a day’s leave due to him from his job at the Water Commissioner’s Office. Katherine, surprised by George’s uncharacteristic spontaneity, had nonetheless decided it opportune to pack a picnic and take their girls — Maureen, Elizabeth, and Elsa — and baby Stephen out for the day to Groomsport beach. After all, the girls are already on their summer holidays and the weather is holding up so beautifully, she had thought.

By early afternoon, the Bedford family were well on the road from their home in east Belfast, their bottle green Morris Traveller winding its way through the fourteen miles of unremarkable countryside away from the city toward Groomsport town. Apart from Bangor and the small village of Ballyholme, there was only the occasional farmhouse to be seen, some scattered clusters of whitewashed buildings here and there, and one or two forsaken churches whose crumbling stone walls had long since exposed their sacred interiors to a disinterested sky.

Katherine let her head rest back on the warm leather of the car seat, her body heavy, as though the hot August sun were inside the car with her. She looked out of the window and saw the world passing her by. She watched as the mottled hedges of hawthorn and gorse, the trees, and telegraph poles moved briskly into and then out of her view. Glancing beyond the low hills to the east, she caught a glimpse of sea. The blue sky offered a singular white cloud, as though it knew how to be summer.

Stephen was fast asleep on her lap, his plump, hot body rounded like a basking pigeon. Elizabeth and Elsa were jostling with each other beside her in the back of the car, whacking each other with a flat palm when they spotted a blue car on the road and sticking out their tongues at each other when they saw a brown car. Katherine’s eldest daughter, Maureen, sitting in the front, was talking to her father as he drove, finding points of interest along the way. To Katherine, Maureen sounded older than her fourteen years, so amiable and agreeable was her tone, so ladylike and pleasantly curious. As her father drove, he occasionally lifted a hand off the steering wheel to point to a particular building or a stretch of land, and Maureen nodded her head and smiled politely and said that they had learned that at school, and her father said really, had they? Only when Elsa or Elizabeth stretched through the gap between the car seats to punch Maureen had she lost her composure to bark at her younger sisters and roll her eyes at them.

Katherine pressed her body against the car seat with some difficulty to adjust her position. Her skirt had crumpled up underneath her thighs and her nylons felt damp. She arched her lower back to ease Stephen’s weight forward a little, being careful not to wake him, then, raising herself slightly, pulled her skirt back down to her knees.

“Everybody all right?” Her voice squeaked, as though she had forgotten how to use it. George responded with a “Fine, thanks,” while Maureen did another little bobbing motion with her head. Elizabeth remained firmly scouring the road for blue cars, but Elsa turned to look at her mother.

“Are we nearly at Groomsport, Mummy?” Elsa smiled.