Silence. Except for the waves on the beach. The most beautiful sound in the world. That’s what she used to say. He used to say it too, but now there’s only her. And the child. She tries not to forget the child. It’s not his fault. He hasn’t made the sound of the sea the sound she hates most.
She still came, though. Still listens.
He looks out the window and swings his leg so the heel of his foot taps the wood under the sill. The world is a wonder of grey. He revels in the spectrum of its shades, the bright metallic clashing with the heavy and dark, swollen and hanging low with its own weight. He can tell what is sky and what is sea. They are barely distinct, but they hold on to their essential natures, cannot be confused. Sky stays sky and sea remains sea. Something’s never change. But not many. He watches the sky, how it swells and tries to get comfortable with the weight of the storm to come inside it. Hopes for the sky to be sundered by quick, all-consuming white light.
He sits so long he becomes numb and begins to ache in different places at the same time. He carries on waiting though. Waiting and hoping.
Open up sky, open up.
The storm came and passed and left a mess behind, but no real damage. A lonely tree took a direct hit from the lightening and was split and blackened, its bark turned to charcoal unfit for art. He loved the look of the tree now. Stark against the brightening clouds that still coated the sky it was a beautiful hand reaching up and beyond, stretching free of the earth. The storm had been glorious, and he cried for its ending, but this relic carried its memory and that just about was enough, for now.
The tree reached up and its reach tried to break the division between land and air, ground and sky. But all its sharply delineated skeleton did was accentuate the separation. There was the sky, there was the tree. There was no comparison. No confluence.
It’s the ocean.
The ocean.
Just one; but there are more. Well, a few oceans and many seas.
It goes on forever.
No. It looks like it does, but there are other places, like this.
Just like this?
No, not exactly. Every one’s a little different.
How do I get to them?
Each afternoon they ate and then walked down to the beach. Sometimes it rained and sometimes there was some sunlight among the clouds. It was October and neither expected warmth or blue skies. They walked to the shore together, until the sand was sodden and spongy under their feet, holding the pattern of the soles of their shoes for a moment before gradually fading.
He stood beside her for a while. He did the same every day. Occasionally he glanced at her hand if it dangled by her side and thought about reaching out and holding it, inviting her to hold his. He doesn’t try though. Usually he just looks out to where she looks, he thinks it’s the horizon but it’s hard to tell. He is loyal, and he wants to stay by her side, whether she notices or not. She is as far away as the land she claims sits somewhere far behind the edge of the water. But he had not believed her when she told him there was an ocean, a lake that was so big you couldn’t see the other side of it. So much water she could not describe it as she gathered clothes and shoes and pushed them in heaps into the boot of the car, not much room left for the few toys and books he had grabbed without asking permission, sure none would be forthcoming.
He hadn’t been in the house long. He wouldn’t miss it. He had missed the first house, the one he couldn’t remember anything happening at all before everything happened in it. It was a long time ago. Like a story he had loved but nearly forgotten – who was in it, what the story was. Just a few pictures left that came and went when they wanted. He didn’t often try to call them up himself.
He stood beside her, and he loved her, but he was a child and he got bored and his body screamed with the effort of stillness. So he would look up at her shyly, and see that she was elsewhere anyway, and he would murmur something he meant to sound a little like asking and a little like telling, and off he went, steps growing in confidence as he went further.
After a little walking something would happen. He felt lighter somehow, more open, less folded up into himself. The world was a little brighter. The shore extended a little further. The sand offered up secrets. He picked up shells and compared their shapes and patterns. He did not connect them with anything living – thought instead they were light, fragile pebbles – until he picked on out from a rock pool and glimpsed a hermit crab as it scurried back into the dark. He tried for ages to make it re-emerge, almost convincing himself he hadn’t seen any movement at all. But when he put it back and it moved away by itself he knew that it was no stone, but something living. Through a child’s logic he arrived at the truth; that the shells were what remained of things that lived in a world of their own between the land he felt more and more he’d left behind, and the endless mass of water he could only look out at.
He made up games and he explored the rocks and pools. He never went so far that she was not still clear in sight, as clear as the blasted tree. He started to know the beach. If he closed his eyes he could see it. He could place every rock and pool and outcrop. Everything that was there when the tide was low, hidden when high. Everything that was there all the time; the dunes and the hills and the house. One afternoon, he took a stick and drew everything into the sand. He had to stop and start and wipe away whole areas when he realised that the marks did not meet the exacting requirements of the world he squatted in. Each time he did it, he did it a little better. Eventually he recognised the world in the marks he had made. Everything was there. Like a mirror, he realised. Like a little mirror reflecting the bathroom as he brushes his teeth in the morning. This mirror doesn’t turn everything around though, reverse the world the way the mirror does. He learned how the mirror turns the world around in a book, held up its pages to see the words made nonsense by the shiny surface.
She is part of it, in fact central. Everything is drawn in relationship to her, to where she stands every day. He is tempted to go and pull her to what he has made. Come and see. She would come and see and she would be puzzled and he would explain, and then she would tell him he is clever and he is good, and is that me? And she would take him up into her arms and say his name and tell him
But he is not a silly child, and she has not talked to him or him to her for so long – since the day after they arrived – that he does not really know how. She’s there though, she’s there and that’s all, and that’s even enough. She doesn’t shout or scream or cry and that’s worth it, worth not making any noise at all. The sea is always there and always singing. That’s enough sound. Enough for always.
He loves the sound. It’s the most beautiful sound he has ever heard.
There is little left in the pantry, the cupboards. He is thin and he is pale and he needs more protein, vitamins, calcium. He doesn’t complain, never complains. Once, she saw him and wondered how a little boy had found his way there. This first time, her horror jammed up her throat, choking a sob. Since, she just shakes her head a little to make the knowledge settle back where it should always be.
The arms of the bay arch around her but they will never close and clasp her. There is a promise on the horizon that is never fulfilled. The water is always coming to her but it never reaches her. No one is coming, she thought.
He tries to catch the line of the water as it laps up to and falls back from the sand. He wants to try to make the edge of the water match the long rippled mark he makes with the stick. Wants to make the world match his marks. He becomes obsessive for an afternoon, trying again and again, knowing it’s a pointless task. If he knew the name, if it had appeared in any of the books he read and re-read each evening when they got back, he might even compare himself to Sisyphus. He doesn’t; just keeps re-drawing the line, trying to catch the tide.
She doesn’t call him when it’s time to go inside. Over the days and weeks, maybe months he has grown attuned to whatever clock she runs by. He has no sense of weeks but looks up and over, wipes sand from his trousers, and starts towards her as she turns from the sea and goes back to the little house. He has one last, brief last ditch attempt, sighs, flings the stick to the hungry sea – there are always more sticks – and turns.
She is not there.
He looks to the house, to the route they always use to get to and from the waves. Nothing.
He can see all along the bay, can see she hasn’t wandered off to find a new observation point, a better angle. He knows the whole beach, knows exactly where she should be leaving from to head home by where everything else on that beach lies. In his mind he can see lines, from the rock pools and the outcrops and the particularly rich troves of shells, all converging on the place she should be.
He is being silly; he is a silly boy after all. She will be in the house, making tea or just in the bathroom. Carried away with drawing lines – silly lines – he had misjudged the time and she had just gone without him, probably thinking she should leave him be when he’s having so much fun.
When he gets to the house, breathless, searching each room with increasing panic, she is nowhere. He does it again, and then he does it again. He stops in the hall and breathes hard, struggles to control it. He takes long but broken draughts of air and he clenches and unclenches his fists, trying to remember how to do it, how to call for her.
His first attempt achieves nothing but a strangled croak, and a fit of coughing. By the third his voice echoes round the house, and he repeats himself until the sound is little more than a child’s long howl.
When his voice is exhausted, his throat raw and burning, he stops making noise though his mouth keeps up the motions. He goes out to the front of the house where there is nothing but the burnt tree and the long rough dirt track that stretches between long flat fields to nothing but distant hills. He calls again, but it is nothing more than an echo of earlier efforts.
He spends hours running up and down the beach, tracing every inch of its plotted surface, hoping against hope to find a cave, hidden by a fold of rock, where she had decided to have a rest, have a bit of a lie down. There was no cave. No part he did not know. He stood where she stood, and knew the tide was retreating, slowly ebbing back towards the end of the world.
He stood and he looked until dark.
After a couple of days he started eating again. He did not know how to cook much, but as there was little to cook it didn’t present much of a problem. He got to sleep easily, sobbing until there was nothing left in him, but it never lasted long.
It got colder, so he lit fires, weak and short-lived, from the books he had ceased to read. He started to sit outside at night after spending morning and afternoon stood at her spot, looking out where she looked. Day after day he sees only the shades of grey, the shimmering grey of the sea, the bulging grey of sky, the distinction between them growing less distinct by the hour. When he sits outside he wears a blanket, gathered close around him. It may be coming to the end of November. He doesn’t know, doesn’t care.
Less often, he goes to the other side of the house, the one that faces away from the sea. He looks up the dirt track, looks to the hills. That is where we came from, he thinks. He considers reasons to follow the road, the dirt track, to see what that was; where they come from. He doesn’t consider it long. He closes the door firmly on that side of the world.
Sitting out on the back steps, he thought about how cold it had become and looked out to the darkness which he knew but could not see was the sea. That was where she had gone; he knew it, had known straightaway, though he didn’t know how and he didn’t think about it. Tried not to think about her, gone.
He wished he could draw the sea. Wished he could trace lines to make it make sense, mark it’s surface so he could find his way around its great face. But its face was blank. There was nothing to mark and nothing to place, nothing to which there was something relative. How would he ever find a way on that? Even if he knew how to build a boat?
He could not look any longer; the sea was a mirror where his own reflection threatened to swallow him whole. He looked up. The sky was clear; not a single cloud blocked the firmament.
He saw the stars. He had almost forgotten them, but was sure he would not remember a time when they’d been so many and so bright.
They were scattered in the sky like sand kicked by a foot. Covering the world above with glitter. He stared and his gaze roamed, as if he’d found a new kind of treasure, one even more precious than shells.
He picks the brightest.
Draws a line from it to another.
SHORELINE
Silence. Except for the waves on the beach. The most beautiful sound in the world. That’s what she used to say. He used to say it too, but now there’s only her. And the child. She tries not to forget the child. It’s not his fault. He hasn’t made the sound of the sea the sound she hates most.
She still came, though. Still listens.
He looks out the window and swings his leg so the heel of his foot taps the wood under the sill. The world is a wonder of grey. He revels in the spectrum of its shades, the bright metallic clashing with the heavy and dark, swollen and hanging low with its own weight. He can tell what is sky and what is sea. They are barely distinct, but they hold on to their essential natures, cannot be confused. Sky stays sky and sea remains sea. Something’s never change. But not many. He watches the sky, how it swells and tries to get comfortable with the weight of the storm to come inside it. Hopes for the sky to be sundered by quick, all-consuming white light.
He sits so long he becomes numb and begins to ache in different places at the same time. He carries on waiting though. Waiting and hoping.
Open up sky, open up.
The storm came and passed and left a mess behind, but no real damage. A lonely tree took a direct hit from the lightening and was split and blackened, its bark turned to charcoal unfit for art. He loved the look of the tree now. Stark against the brightening clouds that still coated the sky it was a beautiful hand reaching up and beyond, stretching free of the earth. The storm had been glorious, and he cried for its ending, but this relic carried its memory and that just about was enough, for now.
The tree reached up and its reach tried to break the division between land and air, ground and sky. But all its sharply delineated skeleton did was accentuate the separation. There was the sky, there was the tree. There was no comparison. No confluence.
It’s the ocean.
The ocean.
Just one; but there are more. Well, a few oceans and many seas.
It goes on forever.
No. It looks like it does, but there are other places, like this.
Just like this?
No, not exactly. Every one’s a little different.
How do I get to them?
Each afternoon they ate and then walked down to the beach. Sometimes it rained and sometimes there was some sunlight among the clouds. It was October and neither expected warmth or blue skies. They walked to the shore together, until the sand was sodden and spongy under their feet, holding the pattern of the soles of their shoes for a moment before gradually fading.
He stood beside her for a while. He did the same every day. Occasionally he glanced at her hand if it dangled by her side and thought about reaching out and holding it, inviting her to hold his. He doesn’t try though. Usually he just looks out to where she looks, he thinks it’s the horizon but it’s hard to tell. He is loyal, and he wants to stay by her side, whether she notices or not. She is as far away as the land she claims sits somewhere far behind the edge of the water. But he had not believed her when she told him there was an ocean, a lake that was so big you couldn’t see the other side of it. So much water she could not describe it as she gathered clothes and shoes and pushed them in heaps into the boot of the car, not much room left for the few toys and books he had grabbed without asking permission, sure none would be forthcoming.
He hadn’t been in the house long. He wouldn’t miss it. He had missed the first house, the one he couldn’t remember anything happening at all before everything happened in it. It was a long time ago. Like a story he had loved but nearly forgotten – who was in it, what the story was. Just a few pictures left that came and went when they wanted. He didn’t often try to call them up himself.
He stood beside her, and he loved her, but he was a child and he got bored and his body screamed with the effort of stillness. So he would look up at her shyly, and see that she was elsewhere anyway, and he would murmur something he meant to sound a little like asking and a little like telling, and off he went, steps growing in confidence as he went further.
After a little walking something would happen. He felt lighter somehow, more open, less folded up into himself. The world was a little brighter. The shore extended a little further. The sand offered up secrets. He picked up shells and compared their shapes and patterns. He did not connect them with anything living – thought instead they were light, fragile pebbles – until he picked on out from a rock pool and glimpsed a hermit crab as it scurried back into the dark. He tried for ages to make it re-emerge, almost convincing himself he hadn’t seen any movement at all. But when he put it back and it moved away by itself he knew that it was no stone, but something living. Through a child’s logic he arrived at the truth; that the shells were what remained of things that lived in a world of their own between the land he felt more and more he’d left behind, and the endless mass of water he could only look out at.
He made up games and he explored the rocks and pools. He never went so far that she was not still clear in sight, as clear as the blasted tree. He started to know the beach. If he closed his eyes he could see it. He could place every rock and pool and outcrop. Everything that was there when the tide was low, hidden when high. Everything that was there all the time; the dunes and the hills and the house. One afternoon, he took a stick and drew everything into the sand. He had to stop and start and wipe away whole areas when he realised that the marks did not meet the exacting requirements of the world he squatted in. Each time he did it, he did it a little better. Eventually he recognised the world in the marks he had made. Everything was there. Like a mirror, he realised. Like a little mirror reflecting the bathroom as he brushes his teeth in the morning. This mirror doesn’t turn everything around though, reverse the world the way the mirror does. He learned how the mirror turns the world around in a book, held up its pages to see the words made nonsense by the shiny surface.
She is part of it, in fact central. Everything is drawn in relationship to her, to where she stands every day. He is tempted to go and pull her to what he has made. Come and see. She would come and see and she would be puzzled and he would explain, and then she would tell him he is clever and he is good, and is that me? And she would take him up into her arms and say his name and tell him
But he is not a silly child, and she has not talked to him or him to her for so long – since the day after they arrived – that he does not really know how. She’s there though, she’s there and that’s all, and that’s even enough. She doesn’t shout or scream or cry and that’s worth it, worth not making any noise at all. The sea is always there and always singing. That’s enough sound. Enough for always.
He loves the sound. It’s the most beautiful sound he has ever heard.
There is little left in the pantry, the cupboards. He is thin and he is pale and he needs more protein, vitamins, calcium. He doesn’t complain, never complains. Once, she saw him and wondered how a little boy had found his way there. This first time, her horror jammed up her throat, choking a sob. Since, she just shakes her head a little to make the knowledge settle back where it should always be.
The arms of the bay arch around her but they will never close and clasp her. There is a promise on the horizon that is never fulfilled. The water is always coming to her but it never reaches her. No one is coming, she thought.
He tries to catch the line of the water as it laps up to and falls back from the sand. He wants to try to make the edge of the water match the long rippled mark he makes with the stick. Wants to make the world match his marks. He becomes obsessive for an afternoon, trying again and again, knowing it’s a pointless task. If he knew the name, if it had appeared in any of the books he read and re-read each evening when they got back, he might even compare himself to Sisyphus. He doesn’t; just keeps re-drawing the line, trying to catch the tide.
She doesn’t call him when it’s time to go inside. Over the days and weeks, maybe months he has grown attuned to whatever clock she runs by. He has no sense of weeks but looks up and over, wipes sand from his trousers, and starts towards her as she turns from the sea and goes back to the little house. He has one last, brief last ditch attempt, sighs, flings the stick to the hungry sea – there are always more sticks – and turns.
She is not there.
He looks to the house, to the route they always use to get to and from the waves. Nothing.
He can see all along the bay, can see she hasn’t wandered off to find a new observation point, a better angle. He knows the whole beach, knows exactly where she should be leaving from to head home by where everything else on that beach lies. In his mind he can see lines, from the rock pools and the outcrops and the particularly rich troves of shells, all converging on the place she should be.
He is being silly; he is a silly boy after all. She will be in the house, making tea or just in the bathroom. Carried away with drawing lines – silly lines – he had misjudged the time and she had just gone without him, probably thinking she should leave him be when he’s having so much fun.
When he gets to the house, breathless, searching each room with increasing panic, she is nowhere. He does it again, and then he does it again. He stops in the hall and breathes hard, struggles to control it. He takes long but broken draughts of air and he clenches and unclenches his fists, trying to remember how to do it, how to call for her.
His first attempt achieves nothing but a strangled croak, and a fit of coughing. By the third his voice echoes round the house, and he repeats himself until the sound is little more than a child’s long howl.
When his voice is exhausted, his throat raw and burning, he stops making noise though his mouth keeps up the motions. He goes out to the front of the house where there is nothing but the burnt tree and the long rough dirt track that stretches between long flat fields to nothing but distant hills. He calls again, but it is nothing more than an echo of earlier efforts.
He spends hours running up and down the beach, tracing every inch of its plotted surface, hoping against hope to find a cave, hidden by a fold of rock, where she had decided to have a rest, have a bit of a lie down. There was no cave. No part he did not know. He stood where she stood, and knew the tide was retreating, slowly ebbing back towards the end of the world.
He stood and he looked until dark.
After a couple of days he started eating again. He did not know how to cook much, but as there was little to cook it didn’t present much of a problem. He got to sleep easily, sobbing until there was nothing left in him, but it never lasted long.
It got colder, so he lit fires, weak and short-lived, from the books he had ceased to read. He started to sit outside at night after spending morning and afternoon stood at her spot, looking out where she looked. Day after day he sees only the shades of grey, the shimmering grey of the sea, the bulging grey of sky, the distinction between them growing less distinct by the hour. When he sits outside he wears a blanket, gathered close around him. It may be coming to the end of November. He doesn’t know, doesn’t care.
Less often, he goes to the other side of the house, the one that faces away from the sea. He looks up the dirt track, looks to the hills. That is where we came from, he thinks. He considers reasons to follow the road, the dirt track, to see what that was; where they come from. He doesn’t consider it long. He closes the door firmly on that side of the world.
Sitting out on the back steps, he thought about how cold it had become and looked out to the darkness which he knew but could not see was the sea. That was where she had gone; he knew it, had known straightaway, though he didn’t know how and he didn’t think about it. Tried not to think about her, gone.
He wished he could draw the sea. Wished he could trace lines to make it make sense, mark it’s surface so he could find his way around its great face. But its face was blank. There was nothing to mark and nothing to place, nothing to which there was something relative. How would he ever find a way on that? Even if he knew how to build a boat?
He could not look any longer; the sea was a mirror where his own reflection threatened to swallow him whole. He looked up. The sky was clear; not a single cloud blocked the firmament.
He saw the stars. He had almost forgotten them, but was sure he would not remember a time when they’d been so many and so bright.
They were scattered in the sky like sand kicked by a foot. Covering the world above with glitter. He stared and his gaze roamed, as if he’d found a new kind of treasure, one even more precious than shells.
He picks the brightest.
Draws a line from it to another.