The Silver Dark Sea

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Maggie closes her eyes. The wind finds her hair and it tugs, tugs.

I have to see this man. She must. He is not Tom; she knows he is not. But he is a new, rolled mass of weed; he is a new indefinable shape that she must kick at, at least, to make sure of. For otherwise, she will always be thinking what if …?

She will see him tomorrow.

This human driftwood. This jetsam that washed up with more unwanted things.

* * *

He is sleeping again. He is upright but his eyes are closed. Tabitha smiles, and takes the empty mug from his hand.

People are children again, when they sleep. Their frown lines go and their worries do, so that they lie as they would have lain in their childhood beds. She’s seen it enough. Her brother-in-law, Jack Bundy, was a fierce, bad-tempered piece by day but she found him sleeping in the armchair once, and his left hand was near his face as if trying to hide himself or, even, suck his thumb. He’d looked like a boy, not a middle-aged man. And if Jack Bundy could look sweet-natured …

She brings the blankets around her patient. She wonders, briefly, who else has done this for him – for whoever he is, he’ll have had a mother. Does he have a wife? There is no ring. No white mark where a ring has been.

Amnesia. It’s a new one for her. Nearly half a century since she became a nurse, and how many amnesiacs has she met? She will have to research it – books, online.

Tabitha pads through to her kitchen.

It is small, square. It is dark, too, for its single window looks out onto a bank of grass. A sheep has been here this morning – she can see its fresh droppings, berry-bright. Tabitha exhales, picks up the phone. The task she must do is motherly.

Hello? It is answered after two rings.

Em, it’s me.

What do you want?

I have a request …

There is silence from her sister.

Well – it’s this …

* * *

The quayside is empty, and still. Nancy cannot see anyone now – just their black cat and a gull that walks like a man in a waistcoat, his hands behind his back. The gull has eyed the cat; the cat, in turn, is treading in the shadows, keeping her distance. As a kitten, she got pecked at; her ear is split at its tip.

Nancy shuffles forwards, drops down onto the sand. There is a shell here – blue, and chalky inside. She brings it right up to her eye and looks at it. It is joined, with two halves and when she presses those halves together the shell clacks, like a mouth.

She makes the shell say hello to the cat. Hello to the mean-looking gull.

What have you there, little Nancy?

The voice makes her jump. She turns. It is old Mrs Coyle with her walking stick and her butterscotch breath. She has made her way down from the white house, near the sea wall. There is a line of sweat between her nose and mouth. Mrs Coyle dabs at it.

Another lovely morning. All this lovely weather!

She tucks the tissue up her sleeve.

May I join you?

They sit side by side on the harbour’s bench. Nan swings her legs. It’s a shell.

And a fine one, too. A mussel shell. Look at that blue …

I found it down there.

Well, they’re common enough. Have you eaten mussels?

Nan shakes her head. She likes doing this, as she has glass bobbles at the end of her plaits which knock against each other. She shakes her head more than she needs to.

Your brother could find you some, I’m sure. Whilst he’s out walking.

Nan picks at some grit she finds in the shell. She is not sure what to say to Mrs Coyle, or what to say about mussels, so she says Sam found a person on Wednesday night. He was washed up at Sye.

So I heard.

Daddy says he probably fell off a boat.

Does he? Perhaps.

Nan looks up. Do you think he did?

Fell overboard?

She nods.

Well, perhaps. It’s nine miles to the mainland, which would be a very long swim.

She squints at the ferry. Is he a ghost, maybe?

Oh I think he’s real enough. Your brother carried him! So did the Bundy men. If he was a ghost how could they carry him?

A pirate?

No pirates.

Nan studies the shell. I think he’s a pirate.

No, no. I don’t think so.

Who do you think he is, Mrs Coyle?

Abigail smiles. Me? She stays quiet for a moment. She takes the tissue out, dabs her nose and pops it back again. Then she leans towards Nancy and says do you like stories?

Stories?

Yes. I thought most children liked stories.

Only good ones.

Ah! Very wise. Have you heard of the Fishman?

She looks up from her shell. A Fishman?

The Fishman. A man who has the tail of a fish, but he can also grow legs and come ashore?

Nan stares. He’s a fish? A fish who grew legs? She looks down at the shell, wide-eyed. Maybe she has heard the story. Maybe Alfie told her in the playground once. And there is a book on her shelf – a pink spine, with thick cardboard pages – which has a mermaid in it, and so she turns and says like a mermaid?

Abigail considers this. Yes, in a way. But it’s always a man in the stories – a strong, bearded, good-looking man.

The mussel shell goes clack.

My husband saw him, once. At Sye.

Nan’s eyes grow like moons.

Jim was young, but he remembers it. Says he looked up from the beach and saw a man swimming – a man with dark hair, and a very solemn face. Then he went under, and where he had been swimming there rose a huge, silvery tail …

Mr Coyle saw him? Properly?

He did.

And this is him? This man is the Fishman he saw? But he’s got legs now?

Abigail smiles. Why not? Humans think they know everything but there is so much more.

They are watched, as they talk. One of the oldest and the youngest inhabitants of Parla, side by side on the wrought-iron bench.

Dee Lovegrove stands in her bedroom. She has taken a pillowcase off the radiator, and she folds it by the window. Outside, she can see them. Nancy is wearing her denim dungarees with the heart-shaped buttons. She insisted on plaits this morning but one is already escaping its band and there’s mud, Dee notes, on her knees. Never, ever tidy. Nan discards clothing like petals, sticks her fingers into all manner of dirt. It was sheep dung last week, and diesel the week before. Little Nancy Lovegrove. Dee feels a pang of love. It is the sudden punch of it that she always feels with her children – Nan’s reddened knees, or how Sam puts his sunglasses on, patting the sides to make sure they’re in place. Today, Rona had looked so beautiful, standing on the quayside with her arms full of cakes and Dee had watched her step back from the crate, shield her eyes against the sun. Dee had thought, she’s mine. All grown up.

And her other boys, too. After Sam, there came the twins – as alike as shoes are. In the first few years of their life, it was Dee and Dee alone who knew who was who, and it was their ways that told her, not how they looked. Ben would gaze past her, as he lay on the changing mat; he’d watch a bee or a bird’s shadow on the bedroom wall – whilst Austin’s eyes would be on her, and her alone. Austin spoke first by three weeks. Yes, Dee knew who was who.

A pang, too, for those boys. Where are they now? Backpacking. Sticky with mosquito repellent, drinking beer with foreign names. Meeting girls, no doubt. Austin claimed he would not shave again till he was home, and Dee tries to imagine it – that wriggling tot on the flowery changing mat being able to grow facial hair at all. Ben wants to get his eyebrow pierced. How did it happen? Be safe, boys. Drop me a postcard, sometime.

But they fly. It is what the fledged birds must do, and she’s always known that. The nest can’t always be full.

She looks at Nan. Nancy aged six and three-quarters, who is far from fledged, thank God. There are the great surprises in life, and then there is Nan who was conceived after half a bottle of sweet sherry and a fumble on the sofa when Dee was nearly forty-four. She’d thought it was her menopause until she was sick in the footwell of the car. The risks … Ed had been nervous. But a life had been made so the life must be born. And now that life is swinging her legs on the bench outside.

Above them, and above the stone wall, is the sea. Wide, wide water. In the far distance is the white dot of the Morning Star and the trail of white water she leaves in her wake. It will be a house of girls tonight – just Dee and her youngest daughter. She wraps her arms around herself. Her other son, too, is on the Star – her second oldest child, with his stoop and silences, with his migraines which make him whimper with the pain. Sam, who loiters near Crest, runs along the coastal path or stays in his room, lifting weights. He does not do much more than this. No speaking, no letting go of the old ghosts. He trawls his self-blame as boats trawl their nets; it gathers everything, and slows him down, and one day she fears he’ll go under.

* * *

At Lowfield, the nurse is outside. She stands in her garden and watches the wind, as it blows through the grass. The nettle patch at Litty whitens, for the undersides of the leaves are paler than their tops. She loves these small moments.

In comes a car with a broken exhaust.

Emmeline parks, and climbs out. She leans into the back of the car and lifts out a large black plastic bag; the plastic has stretched and greyed in places where Emmeline’s fingers have been. Here.

Perfect. Tabitha goes to it. The bag is passed over as a child might be – with the nurse’s hand going underneath it, bringing the bag to her chest. I’m sorry I had to ask, but it’s all I could think of.

I’ll want them back.

You’ll get them back. Of course you will.

And I don’t want them torn. Or damaged.

They’re already torn and damaged – aren’t they?

Emmeline sniffs, ignores her. Has he said anything yet?

Not much.

His name?

No. Thank you for these. And Tabitha goes inside.

In the kitchen, she unties the bag and reaches in. There is a cream shirt, a blue jumper with a hood. Socks. T-shirts. They are clothes that Tabitha partly remembers. They were Tom’s – fraying, stained or worn-out clothes that he’d kept at his mother’s house. For once he’d met Maggie, he’d wanted to make room for her clothes – in his wardrobe, up at Crest.