Smoke And Mirrors

CHAPTER 26: The Sea Change

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Now is a good time to write this down,

now, with the rattle of the pebbles raked by the waves,

and the slanting rain cold, cold, pattering and spattering

the tin roof until I can barely hear myself think,

and over it all the wind's low howl. Believe me,

I could crawl down to the black waves now,

but that would be foolish, under the dark cloud.

"Now hear us as we cry to Thee For those in peril on the sea."

The old hymn hovers on my lips, unbidden,

perhaps I am singing aloud. I cannot tell.

I am not old, but when I wake I am wracked with pain,

an old sea wreck. Look at my hands.

Broken by the waves and the sea: and twisted,

they look like something I'd find on the beach, after a storm.

I hold my pen like an old man.

My father called a sea like this "a widow-maker".

My mother said the sea was always a widow-maker,

even when it was grey and smooth as sky. And she was right.

My father drowned in fine weather.

Sometimes I wonder if his bones have ever washed ashore,

or if I'd know them if they had,

twisted and sea-smoothed as they would be.

I was a lad of seventeen, cocky as any a young man

who thinks he can make the sea his mistress,

and I had promised my mother I'd not go to sea.

She'd prenticed me to a stationer, and my days were spent

with reams and quires; but when she died I took her savings

bought myself a small boat. I took my father's dusty nets and lobster pots,

raised a three-man crew, all older than I was,

and left the inkpots and the nibs for ever.

There were good months and bad.

Cold, cold, the sea was bitter and brine, the nets cut my hands,

the lines were tricksy, dangerous things; still,

I'd not have given it up for the world. Not then.

The salt scent of my world made me sure I'd live forever.

Scudding over the waves in a fine breeze,

the sun behind me, faster than a dozen horses across the white wave tops,

that was living indeed.

The sea had moods. You learned that fast.

The day I write of now, she was shifty, evil-humoured,

the wind coming now and now from all four corners of the compass,

the waves all choppy. I could not get the measure of her.

We were all out of sight of land when I saw a hand,

saw something, reaching from the grey sea.

Remembering my father, I ran to the prow and called aloud.

No answer but the lonely wail of gulls.

And the air was filled with a whirr of white wings, and then

the swing of the wooden boom, which struck me at the base of the skull:

I remember the slow way the cold sea came toward me,

enveloped me, swallowed me, took me for its own.

I tasted salt. We are made of seawater and bone:

That's what the stationer told me when I was a boy.

It had occurred to me since that waters break to herald every birth,

and I am certain that those waters must taste salt-

remembering, perhaps, my own birth.

The world beneath the sea was blur. Cold, cold, cold…

I do not believe I truly saw her. I can not believe.

A dream, or madness, the lack of air,

the blow upon the head: That's all she was.

But when in dreams I see her, as I do, I never doubt her.

Old as the sea she was, and young as a new-formed breaker or a swell.

Her goblin eyes had spied me. And I knew she wanted me.

They say the sea folk have no souls: Perhaps

the sea is one huge soul they breathe and drink and live.

She wanted me. And she would have had me; there could be no doubt.

And yet…

They pulled me from the sea and pumped my chest

until I vomited rich seawater onto the wave-wet shingle.

Cold, cold, cold I was, trembling and shivering and sick.

My hands were broken and my legs were twisted,

as if I had just come up from deep water,

scrimshaw and driftwood are my bones, carved messages hidden beneath my flesh.

The boat never came back. The crew was never more seen.

I live on the charity of the village:

There, but for the mercy of the sea, they say, go we.

Some years have passed: almost a score.

And whole women view me with pity, or with scorn.

Outside my cottage the wind's howl has become a screaming,

rattling the rain against the tin walls,

crunching the flinty shingle, stone against stone.

"Now hear us as we cry to Thee For those in peril on the sea."

Believe me, I could go down to the sea tonight,

drag myself down there on my hands and knees.

Give myself to the water and the dark.

And to the girl.

Let her suck the meat from off these tangled bones,

transmute me to something incorruptible and ivory:

to something rich and strange. But that would be foolish.

The voice of the storm is whispering to me.

The voice of the beach is whispering to me.

The voice of the waves is whispering to me.