Читать книгу Cove - Cynan Jones - Страница 11

He is holding his hands in the water, rubbing the blood from them, when the hairs on his arms stand up. They sway briefly, like seaweed in the current. Then lie down again.

He looks up. A strange ruffle come across the surface.

The birds had lifted suddenly and gone away. As if there were some signal. They are flecks now, a hiatus disappearing against the light off the sea.

He is far enough out for the land to have paled in view.

The first lightning strikes out somewhere past the horizon. At first he thinks it some sudden glint. The thunder happens moments later, and he feels sick in his guts.

A metallic sheen comes to the water, like cutlery. Like metal much touched. The white clouds glow, go a sort of leaden at the edge.

There was a delay, he thinks. Enough delay. Sees the rain as a thick dark band, moving in. Starts to paddle.

Then there is a wire of electric brightness . . . Three. Four . . . A rumble that seems to echo off the surface of the water.

He counts automatically, assesses the distance to land. An-other throb of light. The coast still a thin, wood-colored line.

The wind picks up, cold air moving in front of the storm.

And then there is a basal roll. The sound of a great weight landing. A slow tearing in the sky.

One repeated word now. No, no, no.

When it hits him there is a bright white light.

• • •

He swings the fish from the water, a wild stripe flicking and flashing into the boat, and grabs the line, twisting the hook out, holding the fish down in the footrests. It gasps, thrashes. Drums. Something rapid and primal, ceremonial, in the shallow of the open boat.

Flecks of blood and scales loosen, as if turning to rainbows in his hands as he picks up the fish and breaks its neck, feels the minute rim of teeth inside its jaw on the pad of his forefinger, puts his thumb behind the head and snaps.

The jaw splits and the gills splay, like an opening flower.

He was sure he would catch fish. He left just a simple note, “Pick salad x.”

He looks briefly toward the inland cliffs, hoping the peregrine might be there, scanning as he patiently undoes the knot of traces, pares the feathers away from each other until they are free and feeds them out. The boat is flecked. Glittered. A heat come to the morning now, convincing and thick.

The kayak lilts. Weed floats. He thinks of her hair in water. The same darkened blond color.

It’s unusual to catch only one. Or it was just a straggler. The edge of the shoal.

He retrieves a plastic shopping bag from the drybag in back and puts the fish safe, the metal of it dulling immediately to cloth in his hands. Then he bails out the blood-rusted water that has come into the boat.

Fish don’t have eyelids, remember. In this bright water, it’s likely they are deeper out.

He’s been hearing his father’s voice for the last few weeks now.

I’ve got this one, though. That’s enough. That’s lunch anyway.

The bay lay just a little way north. It was a short paddle from the flat beach inland of him, with the vacation trailers on the low fields above, but it felt private.

His father long ago had told him that they were the only ones who knew about the bay, and that was a good thing between them to believe.

You’ll set the pan on a small fire and cook the mackerel as you used to do together, in the pats of butter you took from the roadside café. The butter will be liquid by now, and you will have to squeeze it from the wrapper like an ointment.

He smiled at catching the fish. That part of the day safe.

I should bring her here. All these years and I haven’t. It’s different now. I should bring her.

The bones in the cooling pan, fingers sticky with the toffee of burned butter.

He was not a talker. But he couldn’t imagine sitting in the bay and not talking to his father.

There was a strange gurgle, a razorbill appeared, shuddered off the water, flicked its head, and preened. It looked at him, head cocked, turned, looked over its shoulder as it paddled off a few yards. Then it dived again, was gone.

He took the plastic container from the front stow. It had warmed in the morning sun, and it seemed wrong and strange to him that it was warm. It was as if the ashes still had heat.

He unscrewed the lid partially, caught out by a sudden fear. That he would release some djinn, a ghost, the fatal germ. No. They’re sterile. He threw science at the fear.

He’d had to go through so many possessions, things that exploded smally with memories over the last few weeks; but it was the opposite with the ashes. He was trying to hold away the fact that they knew nothing of what they were.

Their value, he knew, was that they caused him to come out here. Something he had not done for a very long time. He found himself wanting to remind the ashes of events, things. He had to make them the physical thing of his father.

After the brief doubt he relaxed again. He could feel the current arc him out, its subtle shift away from shore. A strong draw to the seemingly still water.

He had a sense, out here, of peace. He could feel not only the proximity of the bay but a proximity to himself. He thought: Why do we stop doing the things we enjoy and the things we know are good for us?

When he had fetched the kayak out from under the tarp, there had been cobwebs, and earwigs were in amongst the hatch straps.

It’s not such a bad day.

He had not told her he was going. He’d expected it to be a weight he wanted to lift by himself.

There was a piping of oystercatchers, a clap of water as a fish jumped. He saw it for a moment, a silver nail. A thing deliberately, for a brief astounding moment, broken from its element.

He fades the kayak, lets it drift around the promontory, wiggling his ankles, working his feet loose with arrival. The water beneath him suddenly aglut. Sentinel somehow, with jellyfish. He wonders if they are a sign, of some increasing heat perhaps; but just as he feels a sense of settlement, the sound of music hits him.

A child knee-high in the water, slapping at the waves. Another coming tentatively down the stones. A mother changing inside a towel.

The ashes sit perfectly in the drinks holder by his legs.

Laid out farther off, a girl, at adolescent distance. The sound of her radio traveling. A pile of bright things.

The kayak jumps a little over the brief waves bouncing around the point, the sea seeming to goose-bump for a moment, as if cold air goes across it. A kick under his hand, the ocean of her stomach.

The child has found a whip of kelp and slaps at the waves.

It’s okay, Dad, he says. We’ll come back later.

The sound of a Jet Ski, from the beach in front of the trailers. An urban, invasive sound.

We’ll come back when they’ve gone.

Out in the distance, a small cloud. A white flurry. A crowd of diving birds.

They won’t be here all day.

Then he paddles, the ashes by his legs, in a straight line out to sea.

*

He wakes floating on his back, caught on a cleat by the elastic toggle of his wetsuit shoe. Around him hailstones melt and sink. They are scattered on the kayak, roll off as it bobs on the slight waves. There is a hissing sound. The hailstones melting in the water.

He stares around, shell-shocked, trying to understand, a layer of ash on the surface of the water. He cannot move his arms. They are held out before him as if beseeching the sky.

Dead fish lie around him in the water.

He gets himself to the boat, the boat to him, drawing it with his leg, shaking until he frees the lace, turns, kicks, twists, trying to lever with his useless arms. Somehow tips himself into the boat. A primal instinct to make land.

Live, he’s thinking. Live.

A loud bell sounding in his head. The shock of an alarm.

His fishing rod on fire upon the water as he slips off the world again, and passes out.

His mouth is crusted with salt. He does not know where he is. There is a pyroclast of fine dried ash across his skin.

When he comes to, the strongest thing he feels is the tingling in his hands. It feels as if they are distant things, strange ringing bells. Finds out anew he cannot move his arms. He does not remember getting back into the kayak. Does not understand. The ground is moving. Is sure that if he moves he will abolish himself. Holds on to himself like a thought coming out of sleep.

He moves because he coughs, a cough made of glass. Slowly lifts himself. One eye closed with salt. Does not know why, why it will not open. His face has been on the deck of the kayak and the salt is from the evaporated water. The sun had come out hard after the storm and had evaporated the water, leaving the salt. It is in a crust on his eye. When he opens the other, the light blinds him.

It hurt to breathe because his whole body hurt. As if he had suffered a massive fall.

He blinked and struggled to raise himself a little more, the kayak shifting below him. The world slipping, rocking.

He felt the briefest flicker in his right arm, a wave of something, and it spasmed, smashed unfeelingly against the inside of the boat and went dead again, fell now against his side, a fish flicking after suffocating. The other arm still stood out in front of him as if waiting to receive something. The tingling remained, like the pain when you crack your knee.

There was a ringing in his ears, a high, insecty whine. He felt drunk. His head pumped full with something. He let the light in bit by bit, as if sipping it with his eye, raised his head and saw the water. For a moment he thought he was in some way blind; but then he understood: there was just the water, there was nothing else to see.