Sea Without Islands
Short Story
In Dante’s journey the closer you get to perfection the more extreme became the pleasure or the pain.
Vessels crossing that huge space called sea barely touched its width or depth. Certainly they did not sink, and their foamy wakes, unlike the scratch of a skidding brick across a hard floor, vanished. A ship was not a red brick.
Seeing the one that had smashed through glass and skidded to etch a dusty mark on the new parquet floor lying lifeless but vindicated against the seaward wall, Mina knew Andrew who was supposed to be the new manager, wouldn’t be back. He’d been scarred off by this vandalism from the ‘priced-outs’ who never wanted The Dock, and upped and gone, a café owner across the way explained, handing Mina a letter. His heart sank. Last night he’d dreamt his friend was an impossibly fragile tree in a forest called Doubt. Since when have friends been trees?
The letter was not from Andrew but Jack, the fisherman who took his boat out at night. He was sorry about the brick. He didn’t share the perpetuator’s hostility. To prove it he’d personally supply Mina, as newly appointed chef of The Dock Fish Bar, with the town’s best catch. With this seed sown, line thrown, the sea, that huge space traversed every day but barely touched, couldn’t be left out of the fullest of full equations.
City man and cooker of fish Mina prepared his catch by smoking, baking, steaming, boiling or poaching. But he had another sea. That one he filled with friends. Sometimes he saw them as traffic islands offering respite from the hurtling traffic, other times like islands he could row or cruise in a ferry to. Either way home had been a place that was a person. A single one or clusters disappearing off the edge of the horizon. Hundreds of islands of people, patches of soul dotted all over the water: tiny tightly packed balls of energy, huge and wallowing, blond-dazzling, pert-precise or long-lingering ones filled up his world. Pin-pricks, dots, spills, full moons or steady suns, an endless source of delight and colour. A place where people jostled together beside the shore or sat at neat distances apart, equal space of waters of days, weeks or months smooth and silent oozing between them. Or skipping on rushing tides.
Apart from Andrew there was also Andrea, Angel or Audrey at the beginning of the alphabet. All had competed for attention. Then Bernard from Ballinisloe or Colin from Come what may, school friends, colleagues or random acquaintances forgotten apart from incidental memories. And further on between the alpha and the omega had been even more resonant, resolute presences of comrades chucked together through thick and thin, landmarks of people sealed in gum, weaving their lives based on each other’s, in and out of the years. As much like fish as islands.
Despite coming from a community where close-knit families counted, Jack catcher of real fish, didn’t care for any of that. Besides he could scoop scallop, cockles, mussels, whelks and prawns out of the sea. He could catch cod, scrod or Dover sole, fluke of the flounder flatfish, anchovy, shad, smelt, striped bass or halibut, herring, haddock, dabs and plaice. Even anadromous sea-trout, weakfish that matured in salt water but spawned in fresh. Creatures like him from two worlds.
Since his father died, Jack, third descendent of proper smugglers, lived in a wooden house on a pebbly beach with arched windows. He looked out not on islands but passing ships. No sign from there or from the waters he took to in his fishing boat of quasi places Mina envisaged. He called his boat Simon Saul because Simon Peter, rock, fisher of men, caster off of chains, had watched out for fishermen. Saul had seen the dazzling light.
Jack’s father had walked to school from the beach house up a steep zig-zag path cutting like a goats’ track into the white chalk cliff. In the afternoon he’d dawdled home through birch, beech and dappled eucalyptus woods that nestled under cliffs with caves. They’d once housed buried contraband run in by boat loads at the foot of the cliffs. Jack’s granddad had helped smugglers carry ‘two tubs at a time’ to carts waiting at the top. That path and a rail-tunnel, where children squeezed perilously between tracks if a train came, was the only way to leave the beach. That was until Jack’s granddad helped bore a new access tunnel at the narrowest part of the cliff, though really there was no need to escape.
Jack’s dad didn’t care if he never left the beach. The acute blackness of the small tunnel-hole boring into the chalk face exaggerated the white beside it as if something immaterial poured out of petrified matter more white than the cream-white blazing of the sun from every expansive surface of the huge exposed cliff.
“A bullion-burst blaze of metaphor beats down on our home from the chalk face”, Jack’s granddad had told his son. “Never mind the bales of tobacco, the tubs of tea, the kegs of spirit or boxes of guineas lowered from ‘cocktail’ boats to low-lying sandbanks half way across the channel. Smugglers don’t owe anything to anyone” he’d said, sick of evading the coastal blockade officers, “only to themselves and each other to keep their hiding places secret”.
To his son in turn Jack’s dad said “forget the new contrabands - drugs, black markets, tax free goods - you owe it to yourself to look to the speck that grows, to the light on the cliff and ocean, the rhythm of time and tide, the privilege of sea. Listen when you lie on the pebbled beach to the sounds of the waves unravelling, east to west, left to right, liquid in a falling pack of cards coming closer then passing like the whoosh of the wind in the trees, through a sucking, slurping melees of pebbles”.
By then the tunnel Jack’s granddad helped bore had been covered by a concrete seawall stretching from beach to town, trapping barrels of alcohol from luggers that had outrun cutters, immortalising duty-less goods. Still the wall couldn’t block out the light that bounced off the cliffs, or Jack’s father’s faith in the continuous rhythm of the washing waves. Jack used the gently undulating concrete strip to cycle, head down, streaming himself into the wind till he reached The Dock where he was barman, when not fisherman, in a shack he’d inherited along with his boat.
The Dock, a shed-like wooden cabin overlooking a harbour struck with diagonals of keels at low tide, bobbing boats on rippling grey waters at high, had known the rip of a musket or the thrust of a bayonet, but from ruffians to day-trippers always been a dock for all. Double spirits costing a straight two pounds could be taken to a room upstairs with damp plywood walls and a pool-table that looked out over the star-lit harbour. Lights from the harbour-wall flashed red and green. Car headlamps on the jetty reflected orange into the bobbing boats’ cabins. They could have been torch-lights shining out from inside.
When the tide rose it trickled at first through the narrow entrance between the harbour walls into shadows under the boats. Then poured with the inrushing influx of a damn. Words spilled too in anger or kindness from the Dock drinkers’ weekly brawls or ripening friendships. Then thickened like the full-flavoured béchamel sauce that one half but not the other, they mistakenly thought, would sample in the restaurant when the Dock was gone. At the tide’s retreat, objects peopling the harbour’s stinking silt - metal detectors, balls, bottles, coats, coat-hangers or springs from mattresses - oozed upwards like mud humans crawling out of slime.
After he’d been paid by the town’s regeneration project for the plot of land The Dock Bar got ripped down and Jack redundant but richer, took some of its wooden planks for a room he’d add to his house, tied them in a bundle, fastened them to his bike and rode off back to the cliff side. The vortex of petrified light sucking him home.
The bar was flattened. White cardboard walls with Construction Site/Keep Out signs erected around nothing. Yet waves at high tide still lapped against the harbour walls.
At high tide also Mina, see-er of islands, had ebbed away from the city and his postage-stamp sized Victorian house with its brickwork set off against a huge glass skyscraper rising behind, beside and above it. Away from his surprisingly private garden deep with undergrowth and layers of burgeoning colour. Away from its walls clad with creeping pink clematis and blue cyanosis that had replaced carpets of bluebell that had replaced yellow daffs and white heather. Away even from the head-on rush of spring that mocked then affirmed the beauty of loss: crimson roses on green blotting out wilting colours of dull seed. Guests that he and Abby had hosted parties for - well known chefs, or the little islands of people they called their own – filtered out into their garden no more. He was going for an interview as chef at the restaurant replacing The Dock Bar on the coast. He kissed Abby goodbye.
The new building with super slick kitchen cantilevered its glass and brickwork over the waters and pebbles of the harbour. Andrew, beaming broadly from the other side of the table had been amongst the panel of four that questioned him. When it was over all shook hands, they’d be in touch. Andrew took Mina to the beach reminding him of the time years ago when they’d stood here looking out to France. Tiny prawn-like creatures had hopped over the pebbles and queuing ferries chucking to and fro in a storm had moved sideways not forwards on the horizon. Waiting for permission to dock.
Not just Andrew, Mina thought as he watched him walk away over the pebbles, but Tom and Harry too had been the lands as places in his mind’s life that filled his sea. Surfaced sumptuously with forests and moss; roughly with pebbles and humps; or softly like fine sand sifting through the toes. Standing up out of the sea their weighty beings had pushed it aside like huge bodies displacing water in a bath. All that was to change.
In the cafe on the station platform with its wide white-framed windows and red and white checked curtains standing tucked away from the high speed train, Mina not yet knowing he’d got the job, had waited for the rushing locomotive to bear him back to Abby and his city home, bijou against the sky-scratching glass, just for now.
Weeks later he was back again staring at the scare made by the brick that was not a ship on the restaurant’s parquet floor. The letter was in his hand. The sea was beyond. In due course the scratches would be filled in, the tiles varnished and the broken glass replaced by something harder.
Here was the change. When Mina looked out to sea now past things pailed against its ageless gravitas, its unfathomable sense. Friends weren’t promontories any more displacing it. Moorings had been picked at, loosened and untied like crochet. Lost in the churning of seas not butter to spread - to a future you’d no longer share with them . Entropy, after all, was stored up in the salt-tidal current, whoever saying salt was a preserver lying. Yet emptiness itself emptied and became like the vortex of cliff-white light that had drawn Jack back, full as the sea that was drawing Mina in.
Ready to leave for the seaside town and sail the unassailable seas we sail, Abby, having stepped into the shoes of Mina’s many islands, was waiting at the station of the city she called New Troy. From the platform she could see London’s oldest church rising above trees in a hidden park. Blackberries hung heavy from brambles in a garden that ran between the railway and canal. Gushing water spilt over lock gates. It was nothing she imagined to the roar of the sea breaking through harbour walls in the seaside town whose saint’s grandfather had seen Augustine touch our jagged shore.
In the new house they lay out their clothes in drawers under the bed. Huge ferries swelled on the horizon and shadows of seagulls’ wings flashed like angels over green walls opposite. Mina dreamt foot prints burnt into the shingle, and a folder on a computer desktop could only be opened by real doors creaking on real hinges opening outwards.
It might have been a ship they were launching on the restaurant’s first night, its neons outstripping the harbour’s reds and greens. Its foundations solid like a ship’s sides gliding then breaking the high-tide’s skimming shoreward, with Simon Saul having returned from a night out, eels no longer dripping from its sides, moored beside it. Mina daubed whiting with garlic and herbs. Cubed melon with mint and roasted rockfish with rosemary and spliced red grapes.
Downing the last of the free champagne one guest who Jack had known since childhood, asked him with a slur what it was like to be cast adrift at night to do the city boy’s dirty work. Her husband, who’d been Jack’s best mate in their last year of school told her to mind her own business, but solitary Jack at home with adrift answered he’d no idea but he did know it was her husband, one time stalwart of the defunct Dock, who’d thrown the brick through the restaurant’s glass. The leg of the woman’s stool on which she’d been teetering finally gave way. After she landed on the floor there was a stunned silence. Mina and Jack helped her up. Her husband walked out. The other guests resumed their revelry and the fish, herb and garlic aromas lingered long into the night after they’d all gone home.
The next day Jack and Mina tore on cycles like boys along the concrete apron stippled with shadows from the steeply rising grassy banks. The wooden beach house lay a mile and a half away. Waves sucked and splashed through tunnels within the cliffs. The white rock hung strong against a granite grey sky and towered high over a slate-blue sea lidded by a striped, granite-peach horizon. Purple-leafed, yellow-flowering sea cabbage sprouted brightly from the rust seeping chalk. Pink campion too. The blazing chalk-faced cliff was like an island on land as islands are mountains in sea. The brilliance it reflected from an almost ray-less sun seemed both to cosset and transfix, while over the sea birds forming an inky ball, twisted into a grey sky to become invisible. Then flicked back, black again, like snake s or smoke curling through air.
Leaning their bikes against the sea wall Jack and Mina sat on the porch looking out not at islands in an island-less sea, the palaces the fallacies of friends, but huge white ships moving slow and dignified across a rainbow arching over them.
Thoughts crossing time and space were protected by these ships as if from an endless cyberspace of dark and needless information. Yet every day they traversed a Channel whose volume was barely touched, skating to and fro over a myriad sea-creatured ideas more nourishing than needless.
Jack and Mina imagined Jack’s grandad retrieving treasure from sandbanks or pushing ten-oared galleys laden with gold out into the stillness of a flood-tided night, running the gauntlet of gun-brigs and salutes of musket balls. Fools’ gold his father had called it urging his son to look behind reflections of light without looking directly at the blinding sun.
Take away the speckles of pockets of people or thoughts as islands at sea and the sea without islands though barely touched wasn’t lonely at all. Just a huge unspoken idea sunk into something rich and strange. Goodies smugglers hadn’t ‘crept’ from the sea-bed. Permutations subsumed rather than lost.
Subsumed by what?
A hiding place?
A restaurant replacing a shed?
Cerulean, azure, sapphire? A speck that grew?
Only in as far as the ocean, that widening expanse of island-less water between and beyond each mainland, reflected a huge light. And only in the sense that that huge iridescence skipping and twinkling in agitated molecules on the surface of a bellying wave-swell, blotted out all else. Not that what people might or might not have done needed forgetting, or that memories lying buried deep on the seabed in flailing seaward or on mounds of sandbank continually re moulding needed restoring. But because for an expanding second that makes all of us children of light and water, none of this, unable to compete with the sea’s resplendence, mattered.
The dazzling light that lay deep in the mind wasn’t buried.
‘Great fish’ Mina could imagine the woman who slurred say.
‘Perfect’ her husband replying.
Short Story
In Dante’s journey the closer you get to perfection the more extreme became the pleasure or the pain.
Vessels crossing that huge space called sea barely touched its width or depth. Certainly they did not sink, and their foamy wakes, unlike the scratch of a skidding brick across a hard floor, vanished. A ship was not a red brick.
Seeing the one that had smashed through glass and skidded to etch a dusty mark on the new parquet floor lying lifeless but vindicated against the seaward wall, Mina knew Andrew who was supposed to be the new manager, wouldn’t be back. He’d been scarred off by this vandalism from the ‘priced-outs’ who never wanted The Dock, and upped and gone, a café owner across the way explained, handing Mina a letter. His heart sank. Last night he’d dreamt his friend was an impossibly fragile tree in a forest called Doubt. Since when have friends been trees?
The letter was not from Andrew but Jack, the fisherman who took his boat out at night. He was sorry about the brick. He didn’t share the perpetuator’s hostility. To prove it he’d personally supply Mina, as newly appointed chef of The Dock Fish Bar, with the town’s best catch. With this seed sown, line thrown, the sea, that huge space traversed every day but barely touched, couldn’t be left out of the fullest of full equations.
City man and cooker of fish Mina prepared his catch by smoking, baking, steaming, boiling or poaching. But he had another sea. That one he filled with friends. Sometimes he saw them as traffic islands offering respite from the hurtling traffic, other times like islands he could row or cruise in a ferry to. Either way home had been a place that was a person. A single one or clusters disappearing off the edge of the horizon. Hundreds of islands of people, patches of soul dotted all over the water: tiny tightly packed balls of energy, huge and wallowing, blond-dazzling, pert-precise or long-lingering ones filled up his world. Pin-pricks, dots, spills, full moons or steady suns, an endless source of delight and colour. A place where people jostled together beside the shore or sat at neat distances apart, equal space of waters of days, weeks or months smooth and silent oozing between them. Or skipping on rushing tides.
Apart from Andrew there was also Andrea, Angel or Audrey at the beginning of the alphabet. All had competed for attention. Then Bernard from Ballinisloe or Colin from Come what may, school friends, colleagues or random acquaintances forgotten apart from incidental memories. And further on between the alpha and the omega had been even more resonant, resolute presences of comrades chucked together through thick and thin, landmarks of people sealed in gum, weaving their lives based on each other’s, in and out of the years. As much like fish as islands.
Despite coming from a community where close-knit families counted, Jack catcher of real fish, didn’t care for any of that. Besides he could scoop scallop, cockles, mussels, whelks and prawns out of the sea. He could catch cod, scrod or Dover sole, fluke of the flounder flatfish, anchovy, shad, smelt, striped bass or halibut, herring, haddock, dabs and plaice. Even anadromous sea-trout, weakfish that matured in salt water but spawned in fresh. Creatures like him from two worlds.
Since his father died, Jack, third descendent of proper smugglers, lived in a wooden house on a pebbly beach with arched windows. He looked out not on islands but passing ships. No sign from there or from the waters he took to in his fishing boat of quasi places Mina envisaged. He called his boat Simon Saul because Simon Peter, rock, fisher of men, caster off of chains, had watched out for fishermen. Saul had seen the dazzling light.
Jack’s father had walked to school from the beach house up a steep zig-zag path cutting like a goats’ track into the white chalk cliff. In the afternoon he’d dawdled home through birch, beech and dappled eucalyptus woods that nestled under cliffs with caves. They’d once housed buried contraband run in by boat loads at the foot of the cliffs. Jack’s granddad had helped smugglers carry ‘two tubs at a time’ to carts waiting at the top. That path and a rail-tunnel, where children squeezed perilously between tracks if a train came, was the only way to leave the beach. That was until Jack’s granddad helped bore a new access tunnel at the narrowest part of the cliff, though really there was no need to escape.
Jack’s dad didn’t care if he never left the beach. The acute blackness of the small tunnel-hole boring into the chalk face exaggerated the white beside it as if something immaterial poured out of petrified matter more white than the cream-white blazing of the sun from every expansive surface of the huge exposed cliff.
“A bullion-burst blaze of metaphor beats down on our home from the chalk face”, Jack’s granddad had told his son. “Never mind the bales of tobacco, the tubs of tea, the kegs of spirit or boxes of guineas lowered from ‘cocktail’ boats to low-lying sandbanks half way across the channel. Smugglers don’t owe anything to anyone” he’d said, sick of evading the coastal blockade officers, “only to themselves and each other to keep their hiding places secret”.
To his son in turn Jack’s dad said “forget the new contrabands - drugs, black markets, tax free goods - you owe it to yourself to look to the speck that grows, to the light on the cliff and ocean, the rhythm of time and tide, the privilege of sea. Listen when you lie on the pebbled beach to the sounds of the waves unravelling, east to west, left to right, liquid in a falling pack of cards coming closer then passing like the whoosh of the wind in the trees, through a sucking, slurping melees of pebbles”.
By then the tunnel Jack’s granddad helped bore had been covered by a concrete seawall stretching from beach to town, trapping barrels of alcohol from luggers that had outrun cutters, immortalising duty-less goods. Still the wall couldn’t block out the light that bounced off the cliffs, or Jack’s father’s faith in the continuous rhythm of the washing waves. Jack used the gently undulating concrete strip to cycle, head down, streaming himself into the wind till he reached The Dock where he was barman, when not fisherman, in a shack he’d inherited along with his boat.
The Dock, a shed-like wooden cabin overlooking a harbour struck with diagonals of keels at low tide, bobbing boats on rippling grey waters at high, had known the rip of a musket or the thrust of a bayonet, but from ruffians to day-trippers always been a dock for all. Double spirits costing a straight two pounds could be taken to a room upstairs with damp plywood walls and a pool-table that looked out over the star-lit harbour. Lights from the harbour-wall flashed red and green. Car headlamps on the jetty reflected orange into the bobbing boats’ cabins. They could have been torch-lights shining out from inside.
When the tide rose it trickled at first through the narrow entrance between the harbour walls into shadows under the boats. Then poured with the inrushing influx of a damn. Words spilled too in anger or kindness from the Dock drinkers’ weekly brawls or ripening friendships. Then thickened like the full-flavoured béchamel sauce that one half but not the other, they mistakenly thought, would sample in the restaurant when the Dock was gone. At the tide’s retreat, objects peopling the harbour’s stinking silt - metal detectors, balls, bottles, coats, coat-hangers or springs from mattresses - oozed upwards like mud humans crawling out of slime.
After he’d been paid by the town’s regeneration project for the plot of land The Dock Bar got ripped down and Jack redundant but richer, took some of its wooden planks for a room he’d add to his house, tied them in a bundle, fastened them to his bike and rode off back to the cliff side. The vortex of petrified light sucking him home.
The bar was flattened. White cardboard walls with Construction Site/Keep Out signs erected around nothing. Yet waves at high tide still lapped against the harbour walls.
At high tide also Mina, see-er of islands, had ebbed away from the city and his postage-stamp sized Victorian house with its brickwork set off against a huge glass skyscraper rising behind, beside and above it. Away from his surprisingly private garden deep with undergrowth and layers of burgeoning colour. Away from its walls clad with creeping pink clematis and blue cyanosis that had replaced carpets of bluebell that had replaced yellow daffs and white heather. Away even from the head-on rush of spring that mocked then affirmed the beauty of loss: crimson roses on green blotting out wilting colours of dull seed. Guests that he and Abby had hosted parties for - well known chefs, or the little islands of people they called their own – filtered out into their garden no more. He was going for an interview as chef at the restaurant replacing The Dock Bar on the coast. He kissed Abby goodbye.
The new building with super slick kitchen cantilevered its glass and brickwork over the waters and pebbles of the harbour. Andrew, beaming broadly from the other side of the table had been amongst the panel of four that questioned him. When it was over all shook hands, they’d be in touch. Andrew took Mina to the beach reminding him of the time years ago when they’d stood here looking out to France. Tiny prawn-like creatures had hopped over the pebbles and queuing ferries chucking to and fro in a storm had moved sideways not forwards on the horizon. Waiting for permission to dock.
Not just Andrew, Mina thought as he watched him walk away over the pebbles, but Tom and Harry too had been the lands as places in his mind’s life that filled his sea. Surfaced sumptuously with forests and moss; roughly with pebbles and humps; or softly like fine sand sifting through the toes. Standing up out of the sea their weighty beings had pushed it aside like huge bodies displacing water in a bath. All that was to change.
In the cafe on the station platform with its wide white-framed windows and red and white checked curtains standing tucked away from the high speed train, Mina not yet knowing he’d got the job, had waited for the rushing locomotive to bear him back to Abby and his city home, bijou against the sky-scratching glass, just for now.
Weeks later he was back again staring at the scare made by the brick that was not a ship on the restaurant’s parquet floor. The letter was in his hand. The sea was beyond. In due course the scratches would be filled in, the tiles varnished and the broken glass replaced by something harder.
Here was the change. When Mina looked out to sea now past things pailed against its ageless gravitas, its unfathomable sense. Friends weren’t promontories any more displacing it. Moorings had been picked at, loosened and untied like crochet. Lost in the churning of seas not butter to spread - to a future you’d no longer share with them . Entropy, after all, was stored up in the salt-tidal current, whoever saying salt was a preserver lying. Yet emptiness itself emptied and became like the vortex of cliff-white light that had drawn Jack back, full as the sea that was drawing Mina in.
Ready to leave for the seaside town and sail the unassailable seas we sail, Abby, having stepped into the shoes of Mina’s many islands, was waiting at the station of the city she called New Troy. From the platform she could see London’s oldest church rising above trees in a hidden park. Blackberries hung heavy from brambles in a garden that ran between the railway and canal. Gushing water spilt over lock gates. It was nothing she imagined to the roar of the sea breaking through harbour walls in the seaside town whose saint’s grandfather had seen Augustine touch our jagged shore.
In the new house they lay out their clothes in drawers under the bed. Huge ferries swelled on the horizon and shadows of seagulls’ wings flashed like angels over green walls opposite. Mina dreamt foot prints burnt into the shingle, and a folder on a computer desktop could only be opened by real doors creaking on real hinges opening outwards.
It might have been a ship they were launching on the restaurant’s first night, its neons outstripping the harbour’s reds and greens. Its foundations solid like a ship’s sides gliding then breaking the high-tide’s skimming shoreward, with Simon Saul having returned from a night out, eels no longer dripping from its sides, moored beside it. Mina daubed whiting with garlic and herbs. Cubed melon with mint and roasted rockfish with rosemary and spliced red grapes.
Downing the last of the free champagne one guest who Jack had known since childhood, asked him with a slur what it was like to be cast adrift at night to do the city boy’s dirty work. Her husband, who’d been Jack’s best mate in their last year of school told her to mind her own business, but solitary Jack at home with adrift answered he’d no idea but he did know it was her husband, one time stalwart of the defunct Dock, who’d thrown the brick through the restaurant’s glass. The leg of the woman’s stool on which she’d been teetering finally gave way. After she landed on the floor there was a stunned silence. Mina and Jack helped her up. Her husband walked out. The other guests resumed their revelry and the fish, herb and garlic aromas lingered long into the night after they’d all gone home.
The next day Jack and Mina tore on cycles like boys along the concrete apron stippled with shadows from the steeply rising grassy banks. The wooden beach house lay a mile and a half away. Waves sucked and splashed through tunnels within the cliffs. The white rock hung strong against a granite grey sky and towered high over a slate-blue sea lidded by a striped, granite-peach horizon. Purple-leafed, yellow-flowering sea cabbage sprouted brightly from the rust seeping chalk. Pink campion too. The blazing chalk-faced cliff was like an island on land as islands are mountains in sea. The brilliance it reflected from an almost ray-less sun seemed both to cosset and transfix, while over the sea birds forming an inky ball, twisted into a grey sky to become invisible. Then flicked back, black again, like snake s or smoke curling through air.
Leaning their bikes against the sea wall Jack and Mina sat on the porch looking out not at islands in an island-less sea, the palaces the fallacies of friends, but huge white ships moving slow and dignified across a rainbow arching over them.
Thoughts crossing time and space were protected by these ships as if from an endless cyberspace of dark and needless information. Yet every day they traversed a Channel whose volume was barely touched, skating to and fro over a myriad sea-creatured ideas more nourishing than needless.
Jack and Mina imagined Jack’s grandad retrieving treasure from sandbanks or pushing ten-oared galleys laden with gold out into the stillness of a flood-tided night, running the gauntlet of gun-brigs and salutes of musket balls. Fools’ gold his father had called it urging his son to look behind reflections of light without looking directly at the blinding sun.
Take away the speckles of pockets of people or thoughts as islands at sea and the sea without islands though barely touched wasn’t lonely at all. Just a huge unspoken idea sunk into something rich and strange. Goodies smugglers hadn’t ‘crept’ from the sea-bed. Permutations subsumed rather than lost.
Subsumed by what?
A hiding place?
A restaurant replacing a shed?
Cerulean, azure, sapphire? A speck that grew?
Only in as far as the ocean, that widening expanse of island-less water between and beyond each mainland, reflected a huge light. And only in the sense that that huge iridescence skipping and twinkling in agitated molecules on the surface of a bellying wave-swell, blotted out all else. Not that what people might or might not have done needed forgetting, or that memories lying buried deep on the seabed in flailing seaward or on mounds of sandbank continually re moulding needed restoring. But because for an expanding second that makes all of us children of light and water, none of this, unable to compete with the sea’s resplendence, mattered.
The dazzling light that lay deep in the mind wasn’t buried.
‘Great fish’ Mina could imagine the woman who slurred say.
‘Perfect’ her husband replying.