Salt in The Blood
A friend of mine once told me a story
As the sun went down on the night of the seventeenth of February, he took a boat, a fishing trawler, and set out to cross the ocean from Ireland to Cornwall.
He did not know how to sail and he was alone.
He told me that he was no longer in control of his own destiny, that something else guided him that night and that he no longer cared if he lived or died.
While he was at sea, he claimed to have been visited by a woman whose presence, though it soothed him, gave him no rest.
Nobody but he ever knew for sure what happened that night on the ocean, but afterwards, when I visited the boat, I listened while he told me his tale.
Years later, I wrote this story. It is my memory of his memory. And now it is finished I finally understand that the woman in the story was me.
But I did not steer the ship that day.
He did.
As the sun went down on the night of the seventeenth of February, he took a boat, a fishing trawler, and set out to cross the ocean from Ireland to Cornwall.
He did not know how to sail and he was alone.
He told me that he was no longer in control of his own destiny, that something else guided him that night and that he no longer cared if he lived or died.
While he was at sea, he claimed to have been visited by a woman whose presence, though it soothed him, gave him no rest.
Nobody but he ever knew for sure what happened that night on the ocean, but afterwards, when I visited the boat, I listened while he told me his tale.
Years later, I wrote this story. It is my memory of his memory. And now it is finished I finally understand that the woman in the story was me.
But I did not steer the ship that day.
He did.
One
My dreams were always haunted by salt. Waking in the night, driven by a thirst which could not be quenched, I would stumble through the black, searching for water, never quite understanding the need.
There are always signs, but they are impossible to recognise if you don’t know what you are looking for. If you don’t even know you are searching. I was alone all my adult life, deliberately avoiding human attachment. My imagination soared. I saw things that most people miss, lived on the very edges of the torn corners of reality, haunted by salt.
I followed the patterns of the seasons, felt the rhythm of life in my bones, saw my existence as a part of everything, the universe expanding inside, filling me with all the colours. Even when awake, I saw my dreams painted red on an ocean of blue and gold.
Vertigo. Thirst. My hand reaching for salt.
If you look closely enough, you can see the signs.
There was a storm coming.
I continued with life, going through the motions. I could have carried on this way forever. Life, after all, was already over. Had never really started. I was okay with that. If it had not been for the thirst, for the salt, I might never have noticed. I might never have taken that first, fatal step into the cold. Into the space between worlds.
I was carrying a secret, buried deep, but truth always surfaces. Water seeps up through the floorboards, blood from the knife melts the white snow, the mirror cracks, and salt encircles the heart, creating a thirst.
On the morning I found the paper boat, I had been up all night, lit by the glow of the backscreen, a ghost haunting my own life. Dawn was the colour of slate and as cold as old steel, autumn dying into winter, mist rising from the field beyond the garden trees. I wandered down from the house and lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply. The glow burned orange, a light in the dark.
The path was a black snake coiling into the trees and as I stood there smoking, eyes adjusting, I noticed ahead of me something small and white. A paper boat. The sort a child might make. Small and white it sat on the black path in a slick of morning dew. It was perfect, undamaged, seemingly placed at my feet with great care by some unseen hand, the messenger having long since fled.
I extinguished my smoke and stood there with it in my hands, foolishly looking around as if expecting to see the mystery person lingering in the shadows. There was no-one, of course.
The paper had a roughness to it and I held it up to the light to examine it more closely. I knew already what the substance was which clung to its surface like barnacles to a rock but there was only one way to be absolutely sure so I raised it to my lips and brushed my tongue along its edges.
It tasted of the dark places beneath the ocean.
A secret. Such a small thing. A thought. An idea. A seed planted in the dark. A paper boat. I felt it all then, life rushing in like the tide.
There had always been signs. I could ignore them no longer.
Two
I bought the boat from an Irish fisherman I met in a bar. There are moments in life which change everything, moments when you look back and wonder at the madness of it all. I wasn’t thinking about the future, or the past. I wasn’t thinking at all. I had lost the ability to make a decision a long time ago, until finally it seemed that not making a decision had become the decision in itself. So I stopped thinking and allowed fate to take me.
And now I stood on the deck of a 40 year old trawler named Albacore. My trawler.
It was February and the stars in the black Irish sky were cold and hard and very bright. I had a bottle of beer in one hand and in the other, deep inside the pocket of my coat, the crumpled remains of the paper boat I’d discovered on the garden path months earlier. How I’d come to be here, I couldn’t tell. The wooden trawler, now decommissioned, was a rusting, rotting leviathan which stank of fish and the detritus of trawlermen long gone. Inside the hold the beams ran with black water.
Salt encrusted every surface.
I wanted to hold it right there. Pause. Stop. Inhale. Drift into the ether. Into the clear upper air. But a storm had swelled up regardless and deep, disturbed waters were yielding something new.
I looked up at the space beyond the sphere of the moon and wondered who, or what, would meet me there
I longed to be home.
I longed to be home but I knew that I had already gone too far. The space between worlds had become a chasm and I had stood with a foot in each for too long. I had to choose and I had to choose soon or I would simply fall into the gap. With the beer warming my veins I wondered if that would be such a terrible thing.
The fisherman in the bar had eyed me with a knowing look.
“You’ve been called,” he said. “And you’d best be sure to answer.” He took my money, a paltry sum, and ordered two beers from the barman. “Turn right out the harbour. Head west,” was all he said.
The engine took weeks to fix. By day I laboured below decks, by night I shivered in my sleeping bag, trying to ignore the thirst. I dreamed of seaweed and of the black space beneath me, and of salt.
I had never sailed and I knew nothing of the ocean. It stretched out beyond the lights of the harbour, silent and black and unknowable, a swallower of secrets. In the morning I would leave. I would turn right out the harbour and head west.
I drank up the beer and removed the paper boat from my pocket, smoothing out the lines until it regained its original shape. It quivered in the breeze as I held it above the water, giving a shiver of anticipation in the moment before I dropped it into the blackness below. A prayer, a promise. A flash of white on the way down and then it was gone, back to the sea, back to the hands that made it.
Three
I am just a person.
Until this day I had led a small life, keeping truth locked up in the dark, my ribs a cage, my head a dark place populated by moths. Hope and fear are two sides of the same coin. Where there is one, the other will invariably be found. I had lived without either for years, but on the morning I sailed from the harbour and turned right I felt the first butterfly flutterings of both.
If this was a story I’d have looked down on a tiny boat floating across a vast, green ocean. A red and white speck gleaming in the sunlight. Silence. Peace. Freedom.
But this is not a story, and I was not looking down across a green ocean, watching myself float into the future. I was there. And I was dragging the past in my wake, a long tail of rust and foam and noise.
I sailed alone. I was sure of it. All of my efforts, all of my focus, was taken with the boat which pulsed and roared its deep boom down into the depths, a vibration which echoed back to me from the ocean bed, stirring my bones and my blood which thrummed back in response.
After weeks, months, years of pressure building behind the eyes, I had finally pushed myself off the ledge. And the freefall was exhilarating. I had no thought of the landing. Why would I when the soaring madness of the dive had me fully in its grip?
Briefly, I caught sight of the old fisherman whose boat this had once been. He was standing on the last wharf at the edge of the harbour, the requisite pipe curling a long plume of smoke into the chill air. I raised my hand in farewell but he did not respond and I was already too far away to read his expression. I told myself it was one of nostalgia, of regret for a life now passed, but I knew that it was something else, something deeper and infinitely more mysterious. He knew where I was going.
He knew that I had been called and that I had answered. He knew what was waiting for me out there on the ocean.
The jump is only something to be feared in the moments before the leap. In the weeks leading up to my voyage I had climbed out of my own skin, turning myself inside out questioning my motives. Life was wrong, but wasn’t everybody’s? I had left behind worried friends, people who cared about me despite my secrets and my unreliability, people who wondered why I didn’t just buy a car instead of an ancient fishing trawler. People who had begun to ask if I was tired of life.
It wasn’t life I was tired of. One way to test that question, I suppose, is to take the leap, and on the morning I sailed from the harbour and turned right, I felt, for the first time in so long that I barely recognised the sensation, the first stirrings of blood in my veins, carrying with it fear. And hope.
Four
The paper boat reappeared at the end of the first day.
I was weary from standing at the wheel, from navigating a vast empty ocean from an app on my phone, pausing only to question my own sanity between smokes and hastily brewed mugs of tea.
The engine was holding up, although it sounded like the end of the world and smelled like hell’s own brimstone.
Adrenaline had exhausted me, replaced now by a growing apprehension of the longer voyage ahead.
As the light faded, taking with it all the colours of the day, I felt the first, delicate stirrings of a presence other than my own.
Sailors are a superstitious lot. The myths and folklore, rituals and sayings which have risen from the dangers of the sea are too numerous to count or to remember, although a few had lodged in my memory, as much from amusement as anything else, such as how a full teapot must always be kept on the go after a voyage had started or, as I remembered now, you must never wave a sailor goodbye from the shore. A woman on board was considered bad luck, due to the dangers of distraction, although not if she was naked, which whilst hardly less distracting to the men, might at least give them a smile as they sank to their watery deaths.
There was a woman with me now, as she had always been with me, and though I thought I had buried her deep, I could feel her swimming up through my blood, threatening to rise.
Truth always surfaces.
By the end of the first day I had salt in my hair, on my lips, a thin layer covering my skin. I made more tea. Watched the sun go down.
Land looks different when viewed from the ocean. It becomes blurred and undefined, an insignificant mass when measured against the endless empty space of the ocean. Mountains are reduced, coves and bays disappear, lights from a city dim under the great, vaulting sky. All is illusion and nothing can be measured.
I found my way into a harbour on the southern tip of Ireland, guided into its relative safety by the harbour master who, as I tied the mooring lines, looked at me long and hard and without comment. If he wondered how a fool like me had come to be sailing a 55ft trawler single-handedly across the Irish Sea, he kept his curiousity to himself. I suspected it wasn’t the first time that he had encountered my kind.
It was a temporary reprieve. In the morning I would sail again. I wasn’t sure where I was heading or if I would make it to wherever that was.
I wasn’t sure if I cared.
I handed over my mooring fees for the night and lit a cigarette. It was still, and quiet, and cold. My breath mingled with the smoke.
“Storm’s coming,” said the harbour master. He took my money and walked away.
I checked the mooring lines one last time and went back on board. The boat creaked and moved on the slow ripples of the tide, settling for the night like a sleeping whale. Inside its ribcage I arranged my sleeping bag and looked at my phone. There were messages but I did not read them. Instead, I climbed up into the wheelhouse to make sure that everything was off, and that was when I saw it.
I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise and I turned around, searching once again for the messenger. I thought for a moment that I saw something slip away across the rear deck in the dark, a wraith from a fairy tale, a memory, a fragment from a dream glimpsed from the corner of an eye. There was a sound as of something or somebody sliding into water, and then nothing. Or was I imagining things now, in the shadows? Maybe finally, I really was mad.
She (because in my mind it had to be a she) had left the paper boat next to the ship’s wheel, as crisp and as unspoiled as the day I had found it on the garden path. I picked it up, held it in my hands, remembered the salt through my fingertips.
We are the lucky ones, I thought. To have this moment. Had I dreamed those words? Or was I remembering?
I went out onto the deck and leaned over the back of the boat. It was dark. My eyes swam.
“We were the lucky ones,” I said out loud, to no one in particular.
To the ocean.
Five
For the first time in months I passed a dreamless night. There was salt in my sleeping bag. On deck, an early morning frost rimmed the mooring lines. Condensation ran down the sides of the shelterdeck, gleaming in the faint light from the rising sun which was trying to push through the sea fret.
I pulled on my boots and made some tea, contemplating the ocean. It drew me, but so, unexpectedly, did the land waiting for me on the other side of the crossing. Perhaps it was simply the idea of being safe again which made Cornwall appear like a land of hope and magic. Perhaps it was the underlying knowledge that twenty-four hours alone at sea on a boat I now suspected was haunted would inevitably leave its mark. That I would be changed. Whatever the reason, the voyage ahead had opened up like a chasm in my mind like the space between worlds that I had been straddling for too long. If I was going to fall in, it would be now.
The engine heaved into life, oddly muffled in the early morning fog, sending a dull pounding down into the ocean and up through the salt in my veins. I untied the ropes, took the wheel, put her into gear and steered her slow and steady from the harbour. No one stood on the wharf to watch me go. The harbour master had seen this scene too many times to count and there was nobody else here to be concerned with my departure. Back home, wherever that was, a million years ago now, I wondered if all bets were off. I wondered if someone, somewhere, might be listening anxiously to the shipping forecast.
A V of wild geese shadowed me from the harbour. I heard them coming, gaggling furiously. They flew overhead and I wanted to shout to them to wait, to lead the way. I imagined them tied to my boat on gossamer thread, pulling me along, lifting me into the sky, a fairy tale voyage. Then they were gone. And I was alone.
Six
I sat at the wheel and slid through the fog. I drank tea and smoked cigarettes and looked out onto a white world, my thoughts as formless as the mist. There was nothing on the radar, no indication of life other than my own, no sound apart from the engine and the steady, constant slosh of water as I cut a passage through the waves. I kept my thoughts neutral and my body relaxed and allowed fate and the sea and the fog to take me. I followed the shipping lanes, their existence the only sign that I was still, tenuously, attached to the ordinary world, and took comfort from the weight of the phone in my pocket.
I had trained my mind over years to remain calm, empty. I neither dwelled on the past nor worried about the future, but stayed firmly anchored to the present moment. In this way I had learned to be an observer, to see the world and its inhabitants with a clear eye and an unfettered heart. I suppose I was a drifter. I felt no regret because I believed I had no control. I felt no fear because I experienced no hope. It was easy, but there was a reason I was out here now. Fleeing from or running towards, I couldn’t tell if it was one, or both, or neither.
There is something called snow blindness, a burning of the eyes after a long exposure to bright light, but there is a psychological aspect to snow blindness which anyone who’s experienced it doesn’t really talk about. Spatial distortion. Sensory illusions.
I was thinking about the ocean. Wondering idly about the depth below me and how it was that a boat could float across its surface, unaware that it was flying. I wondered what might be peering up through the darkness as I skimmed overhead, a shadow across light.
The fog had thickened. I checked the radar, empty, and took a swig of tea. Salt. I grimaced and set down the mug, glancing round. Fog curled in on the breeze through the open door of the galley below and settled in fine droplets on my skin and in my hair. My eyelashes dripped water when I blinked.
Someone was waiting for me out here in the white darkness. I felt her presence now as I had always felt her, but where she had previously fluttered at the edges of my consciousness, a thing of transparent fragility, as insubstantial as the mist I floated through, I felt her now gaining form, growing solid in my thoughts. I had denied her for the longest time, ignored her siren call, told myself she had no substance, but she had persisted, gaining strength in the gaps between moments. She was the weight under my ribs, the goose flesh on my arms, the breath on the back of my neck.
I had known her once before, long ago. She had passed through my life when I was a young man, trailed her cool fingers across my face, whispered into my ear. She was a ghost, a hallucination, sleeping on my bed, filling the room with her scent of sea spray and sky. I had been afraid to touch her should she disappear, and disappear she had, as slippery as the tide, leaving nothing but mermaids’ tears in my palm.
A million years since she slipped below the surface, since she vanished into the fathomless depths, life swallowing her whole, until now. Now, when it was already too late. When choices had been made. When paths had been taken. Here she was again, trailing salt, threatening to rise like truth in a fairy tale.
Seven
Life ebbs away.
It is pointless to try and tell a young person what this means. The truth of it can only be discovered through the living. To be young means not to understand the length of a year. A decade cannot be comprehended until, finally, a decade has passed and you realise that in that decade absolutely nothing has happened. Nothing changes except the face which looks back at you from the mirror. Hope fades and the life you find yourself leading bears no resemblance to the life which plays out inside your head. The unlived life. The secret life. You think that there is time. You think that something will change. That something will happen. But nothing changes. Except for you.
I had known her once before and without even knowing, I had kept her close. She had been calling to me for years and I had ignored her, buried her deep, accepted my life, but somewhere down in my veins the salt had flowed, creating a thirst which would never be quenched, and she knew. She knew my secrets. And so she called.
It was nearing mid-morning. The water was as flat as a millpond, the sun a pale disk illuminating the fog which lay like a blanket over the sea.
I had been down in the engine room, beneath the wheelhouse, to investigate a hollow knocking noise that I could feel in my bones as much as hear through my ears.
To reach the engine, I had to climb down a steep ladder into a narrow, dark hatch. It was hot and loud and smelled overwhelmingly of diesel. Shining the light from my torch into the shadows, I stepped through the dark and tried to ignore the prickling on the back of my neck and the growing sense that I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t afraid. I am not the sort of person who fears their imagination or who recoils at the things which live in the dark, but I knew that there was someone else down there, that someone was watching me.
I killed the engine and listened. My ears hummed in the sudden silence, echoing with the memory of its sound. There was a light down the side of the engine which I switched on now, half expecting to see the stowaway hiding in the corner, but the room was empty.
There was salt on the pipes and I was thirsty.
I manoeuvred myself through the narrow gap alongside the engine and ducked through the hatch which led into the old fish hold. The massive, oak ribs, black with age and grime, curved inward. An ancient whale. Water dripped down the sides, running into the cracks in the floorboards and disappearing into the unseen bilges. Occasionally, when it got too much, the pumps would kick in and the water would be expelled, grinding and slurping like some thirsty beast.
The hold was divided into sections. My sleeping bag, a spare kettle, tea and coffee, biscuits, tobacco and a book, lay in the nearest one where the floor was dry and the hatch above could be opened to allow air and light to reach the dark places.
Between the beams, near to where I slept, some words had been scratched into the wood. The writing appeared faded, old, but I could not remember seeing it before. I shone my light onto the words and read:
‘I went to sea to forget.
But I was remembering.
I remembered all you taught me of moments.
So I will not be alone,
When it is no longer this moment.’
I could see through to the chainlocker at the front. All else was in darkness.
“Hello?” I shone the flashlight into the gloom and crept forward, afraid to startle whatever or whoever was hiding in the shadows. “I know you’re in here.” I felt foolish and wondered again if I was, perhaps, going mad.
I found her sitting against one of the supporting beams. Just sitting. She seemed as insubstantial as the mist outside and I blinked several times, expecting her to disappear like the mirage of a migraine, an afterglow of light in the eye after staring too long into the sun. But she didn’t disappear. She remained. Pale and gleaming, trailing seaweed and salt, a creature from the depths. I glanced quickly at her legs and was ridiculously relieved to find that she did, indeed, have legs. No tail.
I knew her.
She was older now. Thinner. She looked sad. Worried.
“‘Meet me in The Ether’, you said. ‘That is where I will meet you. Inside the clear upper air. Beyond the sphere of the moon.’ ” She looked at me, eyes gleaming. “You brought me here,” she said.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I wrapped her in a blanket and made her some tea. She was shivering.
“Am I dreaming you?” I asked.
“Maybe I’m dreaming you,” she replied.
“Your dream?” I asked. “Then are you steering this ship?”
“You steer your own ship,” she said. “And I keep you safe.”
I wondered if she was here. I wondered if I was awake. I wondered if I was sane.
If I was, as she insisted, steering my own ship, then I had steered myself off the map, into the gap between worlds, into a fairy tale. I felt like I was fading, that I would shortly wink out like the last, dying beam of a lighthouse in a storm. I was unafraid, but I felt anything but safe.
I watched her for long moments as she sipped the tea, pale fingers warming on the mug. I had thought of her many times over the years.
“How are you here?” I asked her.
“You brought me here.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I didn’t mean to. It was an accident.” I was beginning to lose my grip on reality. “How are you here?” I repeated, but even to myself, the question sounded flat, redundant. I looked at her. “Am I dead?”
I stood up, needing to get back to the wheelhouse, needing air. “It’s bad luck to have a woman on board a boat,” I said as I darted up the ladder. I paused and stuck my head back down into the hatch, meeting her eyes as she lifted her gaze over the rim of the mug. “Unless they’re naked,” I added with a grin.
Eight
I climbed into the wheelhouse and checked my position, half expecting that nothing would work anymore, that my phone would be dead, that the radar would be empty, that the fuel from the engine would have leaked away and that I would be cut adrift in some kind of enchanted sea fog for all eternity. It was almost disappointing to find that everything was as I had left it. The only thing which had changed in the interim was a clearing of the mist which had lifted enough for the day to reveal itself. The sea was flat and green and in the distance a small motorboat skimmed its surface, close enough that I could hear the hum of its engine. I checked my phone. Two more messages. 11.43am. Time was passing in the normal manner, regardless of the fact that, tail or no tail, there seemed to be a mermaid in the fish hold.
I turned the ignition and the engine spluttered then thrummed back to life. Water churned from the propeller and the silence was broken. Mermaid or no mermaid, dream or reality, I still wanted to get to Cornwall.
The morning passed and turned to afternoon. I sailed on. The mist evaporated in the sun, prisms of light bouncing from the water. I stared ahead at the horizon, a mirage in all directions, the sea flat, without end, the sky curving down like a vast dome. I imagined myself within a giant snow globe and wondered about the universe outside, about the forces which had trapped me here, and I waited to be shaken from my reverie, for the storm which I knew was coming.
I checked the shipping forecast:
Irish Sea.
Wind: West backing southwest 7 to severe gale 9, decreasing 5 or 6 for a time.
Sea State: Rough or very rough.
Weather: Squally showers, rain later.
Visibility: Moderate or poor.
I peered into the sunlight, the blue, the water so flat and formless that it was almost indistinguishable from the sky, high white clouds reflected in its depths, confusing up with down.
There was a storm coming. The shipping forecast said so, and I could feel it in my veins, salt and wind and rain rising in my blood. So I sailed on, and I watched. And I waited.
I drank tea and smoked cigarettes. I made a sandwich, cheese and salt, checked my phone messages, texted my mother All good, don’t worry, focused my thoughts on the journey, ignored the strangeness of the day and the woman from my past who had seemingly stowed herself away on my boat.
She kept herself hidden and I didn’t go down to check on her. I assumed she was sleeping, or singing to the mysteriously absent storm, or combing the seaweed from her hair, whatever it was that mermaids do in their downtime. By mid-afternoon I had relaxed enough to convince myself that I had imagined the whole thing. It seemed likely, given my state of mind in recent months. Stress can do things. Make you see things that aren’t there. Make you believe in things which don’t exist. The mind is a powerful thing. Memory mixed with wishful thinking, dreams of the past mixed with hopes for the future. Alternate realities. After everything that had happened, everything that I had done, it seemed only logical that I should be losing my mind. Too much salt in the blood. The pressure had finally boiled my brain.
Nine
The sun had dropped low to the horizon and I was tired from staring into its glare. Points of light swam across my vision and my head had developed an ache. I was thirsty so I made more tea, absently brushing a dusting of salt from my hands as I did so. I killed the engine and allowed the boat to drift a little, not too worried about losing position in the unnatural calm, and with the full mug warming my fingers I stood in the doorway and looked out across the back deck to the eastern horizon where the deeper blue of the afternoon was already turning the sky to night.
I was only mildly surprised when she pulled herself out of the water and emerged dripping from the sea in front of me. She clambered over the side of the boat and dropped lightly onto the wooden deck, trailing seaweed from her feet and pausing only when she caught me watching her.
“I like to swim,” she said. A child caught in the act of wrongdoing.
I took a long, long drag on my cigarette, inhaled deeply, struggled to find a suitable response, shook my head and gave up.
“As you’re here,” I said. “Perhaps you could make yourself useful.”
I made her put on some warm clothes. An old pair of jeans and a thick, blue checked fleece that I’d had for years. “I remember you wearing this,” she said as she slipped it over her head. She insisted on remaining barefoot, claiming she didn’t feel the cold, that she came from the north where the warmest item of clothing to be found was a denim jacket.
“Take the wheel”, I said. “Watch the charts. If you see anything, give me a shout.”
“Where are you going?” She looked worried.
“I’m tired,” I said. “I need to lie down.” Just saying the words out loud made me realise how true they were.
“There’s a storm coming,” she said.
I paused in the doorway. A very deep part of my brain was trying to warn me that none of this was real, that she wasn’t real, that I was probably asleep. That I had probably been asleep for a long time, and that I should wake up. But the part of my brain which could feel the fatigue, feel the weariness in my bones, the ache in my back and the pounding behind my eyes, was telling me otherwise. That part of my brain was telling me I needed to rest. Because there was a storm coming.
I wasn’t sure if she would be there when I returned. I wasn’t even sure if she was there right now. I left her at the wheel and went out on to the top deck for a quick check round. Everything seemed to be okay. I looked back at the window of the wheelhouse and saw her face, half obscured behind the dirty glass panel. She smiled and breathed on the glass, wiping some of the grime away with her fingers, but still she appeared as a mirage, a ghost behind glass, unreachable. She looked so remote, so far away. I felt my stomach twist, though from what I couldn’t be sure.
There was seaweed in her hair.
The sun was dropping behind the horizon now, a deep orange disk melting into the sea. All the clichés about sunsets over the ocean are true. I stood on the prow, feeling the thrum of the engine beneath my feet, the sea parting smoothly to allow for our passage. The sky had turned all the colours I had once only imagined. Blue and red and gold, all the dreams made real, painted with fearless brushstrokes. I had been a painter once. I’d almost forgotten.
A life unlived.
Ten
Below decks it was cold and dark. I crawled fully dressed into my sleeping bag and closed my eyes, teeth chattering in the chill, damp air. I had nothing to warm me, so I shivered until I fell asleep, my dreams rising up to meet me like mist rising from a morning sea.
I dreamed of the Siren waiting for me on the shore. I could see her always, even though she was always far away. Sometimes she was small, pacing the shore, seaweed hair flying in the wind. Sometimes she was huge, filling the entire horizon, the curves of her body the hills and the valleys of the land, her breath rising like smoke from the fire burning in her belly.
I woke in a sweat, burning with fever, my mouth full of salt, my sleeping bag hot and wet. She was kneeling beside me, a glass of water in her hands which she held to my lips whilst I drank, the cool liquid quenching my thirst, my sweat drying on me, leaving me cold and shivering. I could hear the wind outside, a change in the weather, saltwater sloshing against the hull inches from where I lay submerged beneath the ocean. This was her domain. She placed the empty glass down and touched a warm hand to my face, speaking soothing words which I couldn’t understand. Her hair floated in the light from above, tendrils of seaweed, orange and red. None of this could be real, but I no longer cared that she was an illusion, a memory, a dream. She reached above me to turn out the light and I pulled her down, her face younger than I knew she could be.
“I think of you still,” I said. “Even though I am quiet. Thought is as real as real.”
She pressed her fingers to my lips, breathed into my dreams. “You are tired,” she said. “You are nothing but rags of sinew strung together with salt, and rope and air.” She ran her hands along the veins on my forearms. “There is a storm coming,” she warned. “But I am holding up the ocean. And I will make the waves fall down before you.”
She pulled my body into hers, wrapped me in her arms until I slipped below the surface, willing her to accept what was freely given, to remember this moment, wherever she truly was, as the moment we would both remember. When we were old. And blind. And could no longer walk, we would still have this.
‘I went to sea to forget.
But I was remembering.
I remembered all you taught me of moments.
So I will not be alone,
When it is no longer this moment.’
Eleven
I woke alone. The lights were out and it was darker than coal. I couldn’t see so much as the proverbial hand in front of my face.
I sat up quickly and the last of my dreams fled back into the shadows, the cold rushing in to meet my nakedness. I could no longer discern the difference between my dreams and reality. The Siren, the stowaway, memories of the past, the boat, the storm …
She was gone now, I was sure. I could feel her absence as keenly as I had felt her presence, but the moment remained, as promised by the writing on the wall. I fumbled for my torch and shone the light at the words, understanding their meaning at last. Had the old sailor who’d sold me the boat known his own siren then? Was there somebody he had missed all his life, as I had done? Had he gone to sea to forget, only to find himself remembering, and being glad of, the moments? Precious moments which remained as real as real for all the remainder of time.
The boat groaned and pitched and the sound of wind and rain and water rose above the deeper sound of the engine and the even deeper roll of the ocean, booming from far below. It was night and the storm was here.
The lights flickered as I turned them on and I dressed quickly, staggering a little as the boat pitched, pulling on gloves, boots, hat, jacket. Fear rose like bile, unexpected, threatening to overwhelm me, and I fought it down, willing myself calm. How long had I been asleep?
I scrambled up the ladder and opened the hatch into the shelter-deck. A smattering of hard rain gusted into my face and I fought the wind for the door, steel on steel rising above the sound of the storm as it slammed shut. The boat roiled, side-to-side, up and down, and I slid and scrambled across the deck into the wheelhouse, grabbing at the wheel which was spinning the boat unattended and wild across the Irish Sea.
There was no time for me to be afraid. Years later I would look back on that night and wonder how I survived. Years later I would still be wondering if my Siren had been the lighthouse or the storm, if it even mattered. Years later I would still bear the scars, white lines of memory seared into flesh, still feel the ghost of exhilaration when I remembered. But right then all I could do was respond to what the moment demanded. Right then, all I could do was hang on to the wheel and fight to bring the spinning boat back under my control.
I had never been to sea. I knew nothing of the ocean, of its beauty or of its black fury. Before that night I hadn’t understood that the sea was a living creature, as old as time, that it was full of feeling and that it could see into your heart, into your soul, and that it would play back to you what it found there, over and over if necessary, until the lesson was learned.
Truth surfaces.
I switched all the outside lamps on, sending beacons of white light out into the darkness, but there was nothing out there to illuminate except the rain and the seaspray as the waves broke across the bow, and the light only seemed to serve to throw the darkness back at me. I felt very small out there on the endless black water.
“I am holding up the ocean for you,” she had said. “I will make the waves fall down before you.”
She was gone now, but the memory remained. I willed myself calm, willed myself to believe that fate would take care of me, that whatever happened would be what was meant to happen. That there were no wrong choices. I willed myself calm and stared out into the vast, endless dark beyond the lights and prepared to face the long, black night alone.
Twelve
The clock read 2.00am. I held my course as steady as I could, bearing south-west, aware that I was now so far out in the middle of the Irish Sea that I could no more go back than I could keep pressing onwards. I considered turning east and heading towards Wales, and I found myself hesitating, imagining myself finding safe harbour along the Welsh coast, exhausted, relieved.
Defeated.
It would have been so easy at that point to give up and turn east. Why didn’t I? I suppose that once you cross a certain threshold you know that there is no going back. Of course, I could have turned east and sailed over to Wales. I could have moored up and caught the train back home, gone on with my life, put my head down, stayed quiet, no harm done. Everyone would laugh and shake their heads and comment on my moment of madness, and I would laugh along with them and roll my eyes and drink my beer and smoke my cigarettes and no-one would be any the wiser.
Except for me.
I would be wiser. I would know that I had had my chance. And I would know that I had turned away from it. And I would go on with my life in the knowledge that I had died out there on the ocean that night, without even trying to live.
So I continued on into the great, dark night, straight into the storm.
There is a certain peace which comes after a decision has been made, even when there is no way of knowing what the outcome may be, even if the decision seems foolish or dangerous. I had known the agony of limbo for as long as I could remember, never choosing, unable to decide. Making the choice to head right into that storm, to hold my course, to steer straight into uncertainty and danger, I felt the years of indecision and doubt lifting from my bones. I think I relinquished control at that moment, placed my fate in the hands of the gods, the storm, the Siren. But whatever it was that made me turn the boat into the storm that night, ultimately, it was me that steered the ship. It was me who decided to choose.
So I sailed on, knowing I might die, hoping I would live.
The radar placed me firmly in the middle of the Irish Sea. The boat pitched and troughed as I sailed into the waves. Seawater broke over the bow with every fall, washing across the windows of the wheelhouse, threatening to break the glass. It was slow going. The wind and the sea seemed determined to push me back. Time slowed whilst the sea held me in that place for longer than seemed possible, until I began to wonder if I was trapped, that I would become a ghost ship from the stories that old sailors told. I longed for dawn, still several hours away.
I saw one other ship out there that night, a great ocean liner or cruise ship, lit through the sheets of falling rain like some futuristic city. The radar told me that it was a couple of miles away and as it slid past me, oblivious to my existence, I wondered about all the lives onboard, all concerned with their own dreams and hurts, jealousies and fears, all the tiny, mayfly lives flickering in and out of existence. I was no different. If I died that night it would make no difference at all. The ocean and the night would swallow me up and I would become a part of the whole once again, all my concerns as an individual absorbed back into the dark. It was a comforting thought.
I saw myself as the others on the ferry must see me. A stranger in the dark. A drifter. Nobody of consequence or meaning. I closed my eyes and let the ocean take me.
Thirteen
The ocean keeps secrets. You can shout into its heart and it will listen, impassive. The ocean does not care.
I went up onto the top deck and held on to the railings, leaning over the side where the black ocean boiled and surged beneath me, its unfathomable depths holding all the secrets of the ages, all the countless sailors and sirens who had passed this way before me, fought their battles, created their stories, all lost now to human history but remembered by the ocean, the ocean which did not understand or recognise time but which held all those moments safe, hidden.
I shouted to the ocean my secret heart, laid my soul bare before it, saw my words catch on the wind and fly upwards into the night where they snagged on the spray and were absorbed by the deep, impassive sea, and in that moment my secret became real and because it was real and because the ocean did not care, my fear evaporated and lost its power. My life would go forward, and it would be my life, and I would live it from the heart and it would be the truth.
Truth always surfaces. My Siren, my love, my life.
Dawn was a smudge on the horizon. Dark grey illuminating the black. The boat groaned and creaked, oak from an ancient forest. I held on to the ropes as the tail of the storm writhed and twisted its way west. The wind blew strong, humming its song through the rails, a choir of banchees, and fine salt rain settled in my hair, my eyes and my nostrils. I imagined the sea would rise up and claim me, but I was no longer afraid. The sea had called and I had answered, given it my life, told it my secrets. What it chose to do with me now was no longer my concern. I merely had to play my part and allow it to reach its conclusion.
Thunder rumbled behind me and I looked back as lightening flickered around the skies, but the storm was losing its grip. The sea, visible now in the slate grey light, was a seething cauldron of foam. I remembered the story of The Little Mermaid. A story corrupted into a children’s fairy tale, masking its brutality and far darker origins. The mermaid, unable to win the heart of her sailor, had sacrificed her soul to save him from death. No happily ever after for her, she had turned to foam on the waves.
“I am holding up the ocean for you. I will make the waves fall down before you.”
I still didn’t know what it all meant, how it was that the woman from my past had visited me on the boat that day, if I had imagined her there with me or if some part of her had indeed met me in the ether, as had once been promised, but standing there on the deck watching the ocean foam, I reached up for the edges of a hope which seemed to be floating above me on the eddies of the wind. I couldn’t grasp it. Like chasing the remains of a dream on waking, it seemed to retreat the more I pursued it, so I left it there to hang, liminal, just beyond reach, and hoped that it would settle, that my courage had not come too late, that I would have a life waiting for me on the other side.
Fourteen
Dawn broke as a grey smudge on the horizon, turning blue, purple, red, orange, clouds parting reluctantly as the new day asserted control over the night and the storm. The wind dropped, the waves flattened, silver then gold as the sun sent out its first tentative rays across the water.
I stood up on deck the whole time and watched the day begin. My clothes were soaked through and I was cold, but it no longer bothered me, my attention wholly focused on the light which was now spilling out across the sky and the ocean, filling the world with a new promise.
Did I feel like a new person? I’m not sure. Although my memory tells me that I did, I know from experience that such things cannot be trusted, but I do know that I had hope, I had peace, and that a threshold somewhere deep inside me had been crossed.
I returned to the wheelhouse and made some tea, taking comfort in the familiarity of such a mundane ritual. I was still some way out from land and I had drifted off course a little during the night, but my goal of reaching Cornwall seemed finally to be within reach. I looked at the charts for a long time before returning to the upper deck and contemplating the ocean, stretching vast and empty from horizon to horizon, nothing but blue and green and gold and grey, flat and featureless and unfathomably deep with whispered, shouted secrets and dreams and lonely lives unlived.
I had wanted it to take me.
I had given myself up to it and felt the utter relief and joy that comes at the end of a long struggle, the peace of letting go. I had allowed the water to pull me down and I had welcomed it. The cold. The dark. The quiet. But somehow, somehow, I had learned to breathe underwater. And so I had been released, back into the world of the living, to begin again.
Fifteen
I missed my Siren. She was quiet now and I suspected she would remain so. I wondered where she was in the real world, as I had wondered many times over the years, and if she still thought of me. If she still waited. And watched.
“I am holding up the ocean for you. I will make the waves fall down before you.”
I believed she had. I believed she did still.
I leaned over the rails and watched the boat cut a steady, smooth channel through the water. The sea was clear and blue, a reflection of the sky, and I could see into the ocean and imagine what lay beneath the surface. I imagined a mermaid, unencumbered with the cares of the human world, swimming alongside, a creature of joy and purity, unspoiled by the disappointments and hardships of life, and I knew there was no such thing. If my Siren had ever even existed, she would be foam and rust and memory by now, like all of us. All I could hope was that she, like me, believed that it had been worth it. That the moment was everything. That the moment was all.
I thought I saw her then, and I leaned further, watching the shadow of a body cutting through the water just off the prow. After a few seconds I realised that what I was watching was a dolphin, darting and skimming alongside me. It was joined a few seconds later by another, then another and so on until there were six or seven of them racing off the prow, their fins cutting the water as they rode the bow wave out front.
I wondered if it was her, sending me all the charms of the sea to keep me on track.
A breaking of light.
Friends along the way.
The kindness of strangers.
I believe she watched me still. Waited on the rocks. Maybe, like me, she was learning to breathe underwater.
Epilogue
He arrived at the mouth of the harbour early one morning, battered and exhausted from a night on the ocean.
I’d heard the storm. Felt it coming for months. A pressure behind the eyes. A heaviness in the air.
He drifted in on the breeze on an ancient fishing boat, peeling red paint a trail of blood in its wake, a tall, thin figure with sinewy arms and hollow eyes, white-knuckled hands clinging to the old-fashioned wheel.
I watched as his boat cut a channel through the silent water. The air was thin, washed clean by the rain, a fierce morning sun bleaching the world to white. I’d known he was coming. I’d been calling to him for months. In the dark corners of my imagination I’d known about him for years and I had waited. Waited. Waited.
Now I watched, as I had always watched, as he steered the boat creaking and oozing a rust-stained path into the safety of the harbour, a squabble of seagulls following in its wake. The ancient motor smoked and heaved with the effort of those last few yards and when finally he reached the mooring, the hull grinding and splintering across the quay wall, the echo of his arrival lingered for long moments in the silence.
Gasping under the memory of rust and kindness, where you kept me hidden away, learning to breathe underwater, I waited. And I waited. And I waited.
My dreams were always haunted by salt. Waking in the night, driven by a thirst which could not be quenched, I would stumble through the black, searching for water, never quite understanding the need.
There are always signs, but they are impossible to recognise if you don’t know what you are looking for. If you don’t even know you are searching. I was alone all my adult life, deliberately avoiding human attachment. My imagination soared. I saw things that most people miss, lived on the very edges of the torn corners of reality, haunted by salt.
I followed the patterns of the seasons, felt the rhythm of life in my bones, saw my existence as a part of everything, the universe expanding inside, filling me with all the colours. Even when awake, I saw my dreams painted red on an ocean of blue and gold.
Vertigo. Thirst. My hand reaching for salt.
If you look closely enough, you can see the signs.
There was a storm coming.
I continued with life, going through the motions. I could have carried on this way forever. Life, after all, was already over. Had never really started. I was okay with that. If it had not been for the thirst, for the salt, I might never have noticed. I might never have taken that first, fatal step into the cold. Into the space between worlds.
I was carrying a secret, buried deep, but truth always surfaces. Water seeps up through the floorboards, blood from the knife melts the white snow, the mirror cracks, and salt encircles the heart, creating a thirst.
On the morning I found the paper boat, I had been up all night, lit by the glow of the backscreen, a ghost haunting my own life. Dawn was the colour of slate and as cold as old steel, autumn dying into winter, mist rising from the field beyond the garden trees. I wandered down from the house and lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply. The glow burned orange, a light in the dark.
The path was a black snake coiling into the trees and as I stood there smoking, eyes adjusting, I noticed ahead of me something small and white. A paper boat. The sort a child might make. Small and white it sat on the black path in a slick of morning dew. It was perfect, undamaged, seemingly placed at my feet with great care by some unseen hand, the messenger having long since fled.
I extinguished my smoke and stood there with it in my hands, foolishly looking around as if expecting to see the mystery person lingering in the shadows. There was no-one, of course.
The paper had a roughness to it and I held it up to the light to examine it more closely. I knew already what the substance was which clung to its surface like barnacles to a rock but there was only one way to be absolutely sure so I raised it to my lips and brushed my tongue along its edges.
It tasted of the dark places beneath the ocean.
A secret. Such a small thing. A thought. An idea. A seed planted in the dark. A paper boat. I felt it all then, life rushing in like the tide.
There had always been signs. I could ignore them no longer.
Two
I bought the boat from an Irish fisherman I met in a bar. There are moments in life which change everything, moments when you look back and wonder at the madness of it all. I wasn’t thinking about the future, or the past. I wasn’t thinking at all. I had lost the ability to make a decision a long time ago, until finally it seemed that not making a decision had become the decision in itself. So I stopped thinking and allowed fate to take me.
And now I stood on the deck of a 40 year old trawler named Albacore. My trawler.
It was February and the stars in the black Irish sky were cold and hard and very bright. I had a bottle of beer in one hand and in the other, deep inside the pocket of my coat, the crumpled remains of the paper boat I’d discovered on the garden path months earlier. How I’d come to be here, I couldn’t tell. The wooden trawler, now decommissioned, was a rusting, rotting leviathan which stank of fish and the detritus of trawlermen long gone. Inside the hold the beams ran with black water.
Salt encrusted every surface.
I wanted to hold it right there. Pause. Stop. Inhale. Drift into the ether. Into the clear upper air. But a storm had swelled up regardless and deep, disturbed waters were yielding something new.
I looked up at the space beyond the sphere of the moon and wondered who, or what, would meet me there
I longed to be home.
I longed to be home but I knew that I had already gone too far. The space between worlds had become a chasm and I had stood with a foot in each for too long. I had to choose and I had to choose soon or I would simply fall into the gap. With the beer warming my veins I wondered if that would be such a terrible thing.
The fisherman in the bar had eyed me with a knowing look.
“You’ve been called,” he said. “And you’d best be sure to answer.” He took my money, a paltry sum, and ordered two beers from the barman. “Turn right out the harbour. Head west,” was all he said.
The engine took weeks to fix. By day I laboured below decks, by night I shivered in my sleeping bag, trying to ignore the thirst. I dreamed of seaweed and of the black space beneath me, and of salt.
I had never sailed and I knew nothing of the ocean. It stretched out beyond the lights of the harbour, silent and black and unknowable, a swallower of secrets. In the morning I would leave. I would turn right out the harbour and head west.
I drank up the beer and removed the paper boat from my pocket, smoothing out the lines until it regained its original shape. It quivered in the breeze as I held it above the water, giving a shiver of anticipation in the moment before I dropped it into the blackness below. A prayer, a promise. A flash of white on the way down and then it was gone, back to the sea, back to the hands that made it.
Three
I am just a person.
Until this day I had led a small life, keeping truth locked up in the dark, my ribs a cage, my head a dark place populated by moths. Hope and fear are two sides of the same coin. Where there is one, the other will invariably be found. I had lived without either for years, but on the morning I sailed from the harbour and turned right I felt the first butterfly flutterings of both.
If this was a story I’d have looked down on a tiny boat floating across a vast, green ocean. A red and white speck gleaming in the sunlight. Silence. Peace. Freedom.
But this is not a story, and I was not looking down across a green ocean, watching myself float into the future. I was there. And I was dragging the past in my wake, a long tail of rust and foam and noise.
I sailed alone. I was sure of it. All of my efforts, all of my focus, was taken with the boat which pulsed and roared its deep boom down into the depths, a vibration which echoed back to me from the ocean bed, stirring my bones and my blood which thrummed back in response.
After weeks, months, years of pressure building behind the eyes, I had finally pushed myself off the ledge. And the freefall was exhilarating. I had no thought of the landing. Why would I when the soaring madness of the dive had me fully in its grip?
Briefly, I caught sight of the old fisherman whose boat this had once been. He was standing on the last wharf at the edge of the harbour, the requisite pipe curling a long plume of smoke into the chill air. I raised my hand in farewell but he did not respond and I was already too far away to read his expression. I told myself it was one of nostalgia, of regret for a life now passed, but I knew that it was something else, something deeper and infinitely more mysterious. He knew where I was going.
He knew that I had been called and that I had answered. He knew what was waiting for me out there on the ocean.
The jump is only something to be feared in the moments before the leap. In the weeks leading up to my voyage I had climbed out of my own skin, turning myself inside out questioning my motives. Life was wrong, but wasn’t everybody’s? I had left behind worried friends, people who cared about me despite my secrets and my unreliability, people who wondered why I didn’t just buy a car instead of an ancient fishing trawler. People who had begun to ask if I was tired of life.
It wasn’t life I was tired of. One way to test that question, I suppose, is to take the leap, and on the morning I sailed from the harbour and turned right, I felt, for the first time in so long that I barely recognised the sensation, the first stirrings of blood in my veins, carrying with it fear. And hope.
Four
The paper boat reappeared at the end of the first day.
I was weary from standing at the wheel, from navigating a vast empty ocean from an app on my phone, pausing only to question my own sanity between smokes and hastily brewed mugs of tea.
The engine was holding up, although it sounded like the end of the world and smelled like hell’s own brimstone.
Adrenaline had exhausted me, replaced now by a growing apprehension of the longer voyage ahead.
As the light faded, taking with it all the colours of the day, I felt the first, delicate stirrings of a presence other than my own.
Sailors are a superstitious lot. The myths and folklore, rituals and sayings which have risen from the dangers of the sea are too numerous to count or to remember, although a few had lodged in my memory, as much from amusement as anything else, such as how a full teapot must always be kept on the go after a voyage had started or, as I remembered now, you must never wave a sailor goodbye from the shore. A woman on board was considered bad luck, due to the dangers of distraction, although not if she was naked, which whilst hardly less distracting to the men, might at least give them a smile as they sank to their watery deaths.
There was a woman with me now, as she had always been with me, and though I thought I had buried her deep, I could feel her swimming up through my blood, threatening to rise.
Truth always surfaces.
By the end of the first day I had salt in my hair, on my lips, a thin layer covering my skin. I made more tea. Watched the sun go down.
Land looks different when viewed from the ocean. It becomes blurred and undefined, an insignificant mass when measured against the endless empty space of the ocean. Mountains are reduced, coves and bays disappear, lights from a city dim under the great, vaulting sky. All is illusion and nothing can be measured.
I found my way into a harbour on the southern tip of Ireland, guided into its relative safety by the harbour master who, as I tied the mooring lines, looked at me long and hard and without comment. If he wondered how a fool like me had come to be sailing a 55ft trawler single-handedly across the Irish Sea, he kept his curiousity to himself. I suspected it wasn’t the first time that he had encountered my kind.
It was a temporary reprieve. In the morning I would sail again. I wasn’t sure where I was heading or if I would make it to wherever that was.
I wasn’t sure if I cared.
I handed over my mooring fees for the night and lit a cigarette. It was still, and quiet, and cold. My breath mingled with the smoke.
“Storm’s coming,” said the harbour master. He took my money and walked away.
I checked the mooring lines one last time and went back on board. The boat creaked and moved on the slow ripples of the tide, settling for the night like a sleeping whale. Inside its ribcage I arranged my sleeping bag and looked at my phone. There were messages but I did not read them. Instead, I climbed up into the wheelhouse to make sure that everything was off, and that was when I saw it.
I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise and I turned around, searching once again for the messenger. I thought for a moment that I saw something slip away across the rear deck in the dark, a wraith from a fairy tale, a memory, a fragment from a dream glimpsed from the corner of an eye. There was a sound as of something or somebody sliding into water, and then nothing. Or was I imagining things now, in the shadows? Maybe finally, I really was mad.
She (because in my mind it had to be a she) had left the paper boat next to the ship’s wheel, as crisp and as unspoiled as the day I had found it on the garden path. I picked it up, held it in my hands, remembered the salt through my fingertips.
We are the lucky ones, I thought. To have this moment. Had I dreamed those words? Or was I remembering?
I went out onto the deck and leaned over the back of the boat. It was dark. My eyes swam.
“We were the lucky ones,” I said out loud, to no one in particular.
To the ocean.
Five
For the first time in months I passed a dreamless night. There was salt in my sleeping bag. On deck, an early morning frost rimmed the mooring lines. Condensation ran down the sides of the shelterdeck, gleaming in the faint light from the rising sun which was trying to push through the sea fret.
I pulled on my boots and made some tea, contemplating the ocean. It drew me, but so, unexpectedly, did the land waiting for me on the other side of the crossing. Perhaps it was simply the idea of being safe again which made Cornwall appear like a land of hope and magic. Perhaps it was the underlying knowledge that twenty-four hours alone at sea on a boat I now suspected was haunted would inevitably leave its mark. That I would be changed. Whatever the reason, the voyage ahead had opened up like a chasm in my mind like the space between worlds that I had been straddling for too long. If I was going to fall in, it would be now.
The engine heaved into life, oddly muffled in the early morning fog, sending a dull pounding down into the ocean and up through the salt in my veins. I untied the ropes, took the wheel, put her into gear and steered her slow and steady from the harbour. No one stood on the wharf to watch me go. The harbour master had seen this scene too many times to count and there was nobody else here to be concerned with my departure. Back home, wherever that was, a million years ago now, I wondered if all bets were off. I wondered if someone, somewhere, might be listening anxiously to the shipping forecast.
A V of wild geese shadowed me from the harbour. I heard them coming, gaggling furiously. They flew overhead and I wanted to shout to them to wait, to lead the way. I imagined them tied to my boat on gossamer thread, pulling me along, lifting me into the sky, a fairy tale voyage. Then they were gone. And I was alone.
Six
I sat at the wheel and slid through the fog. I drank tea and smoked cigarettes and looked out onto a white world, my thoughts as formless as the mist. There was nothing on the radar, no indication of life other than my own, no sound apart from the engine and the steady, constant slosh of water as I cut a passage through the waves. I kept my thoughts neutral and my body relaxed and allowed fate and the sea and the fog to take me. I followed the shipping lanes, their existence the only sign that I was still, tenuously, attached to the ordinary world, and took comfort from the weight of the phone in my pocket.
I had trained my mind over years to remain calm, empty. I neither dwelled on the past nor worried about the future, but stayed firmly anchored to the present moment. In this way I had learned to be an observer, to see the world and its inhabitants with a clear eye and an unfettered heart. I suppose I was a drifter. I felt no regret because I believed I had no control. I felt no fear because I experienced no hope. It was easy, but there was a reason I was out here now. Fleeing from or running towards, I couldn’t tell if it was one, or both, or neither.
There is something called snow blindness, a burning of the eyes after a long exposure to bright light, but there is a psychological aspect to snow blindness which anyone who’s experienced it doesn’t really talk about. Spatial distortion. Sensory illusions.
I was thinking about the ocean. Wondering idly about the depth below me and how it was that a boat could float across its surface, unaware that it was flying. I wondered what might be peering up through the darkness as I skimmed overhead, a shadow across light.
The fog had thickened. I checked the radar, empty, and took a swig of tea. Salt. I grimaced and set down the mug, glancing round. Fog curled in on the breeze through the open door of the galley below and settled in fine droplets on my skin and in my hair. My eyelashes dripped water when I blinked.
Someone was waiting for me out here in the white darkness. I felt her presence now as I had always felt her, but where she had previously fluttered at the edges of my consciousness, a thing of transparent fragility, as insubstantial as the mist I floated through, I felt her now gaining form, growing solid in my thoughts. I had denied her for the longest time, ignored her siren call, told myself she had no substance, but she had persisted, gaining strength in the gaps between moments. She was the weight under my ribs, the goose flesh on my arms, the breath on the back of my neck.
I had known her once before, long ago. She had passed through my life when I was a young man, trailed her cool fingers across my face, whispered into my ear. She was a ghost, a hallucination, sleeping on my bed, filling the room with her scent of sea spray and sky. I had been afraid to touch her should she disappear, and disappear she had, as slippery as the tide, leaving nothing but mermaids’ tears in my palm.
A million years since she slipped below the surface, since she vanished into the fathomless depths, life swallowing her whole, until now. Now, when it was already too late. When choices had been made. When paths had been taken. Here she was again, trailing salt, threatening to rise like truth in a fairy tale.
Seven
Life ebbs away.
It is pointless to try and tell a young person what this means. The truth of it can only be discovered through the living. To be young means not to understand the length of a year. A decade cannot be comprehended until, finally, a decade has passed and you realise that in that decade absolutely nothing has happened. Nothing changes except the face which looks back at you from the mirror. Hope fades and the life you find yourself leading bears no resemblance to the life which plays out inside your head. The unlived life. The secret life. You think that there is time. You think that something will change. That something will happen. But nothing changes. Except for you.
I had known her once before and without even knowing, I had kept her close. She had been calling to me for years and I had ignored her, buried her deep, accepted my life, but somewhere down in my veins the salt had flowed, creating a thirst which would never be quenched, and she knew. She knew my secrets. And so she called.
It was nearing mid-morning. The water was as flat as a millpond, the sun a pale disk illuminating the fog which lay like a blanket over the sea.
I had been down in the engine room, beneath the wheelhouse, to investigate a hollow knocking noise that I could feel in my bones as much as hear through my ears.
To reach the engine, I had to climb down a steep ladder into a narrow, dark hatch. It was hot and loud and smelled overwhelmingly of diesel. Shining the light from my torch into the shadows, I stepped through the dark and tried to ignore the prickling on the back of my neck and the growing sense that I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t afraid. I am not the sort of person who fears their imagination or who recoils at the things which live in the dark, but I knew that there was someone else down there, that someone was watching me.
I killed the engine and listened. My ears hummed in the sudden silence, echoing with the memory of its sound. There was a light down the side of the engine which I switched on now, half expecting to see the stowaway hiding in the corner, but the room was empty.
There was salt on the pipes and I was thirsty.
I manoeuvred myself through the narrow gap alongside the engine and ducked through the hatch which led into the old fish hold. The massive, oak ribs, black with age and grime, curved inward. An ancient whale. Water dripped down the sides, running into the cracks in the floorboards and disappearing into the unseen bilges. Occasionally, when it got too much, the pumps would kick in and the water would be expelled, grinding and slurping like some thirsty beast.
The hold was divided into sections. My sleeping bag, a spare kettle, tea and coffee, biscuits, tobacco and a book, lay in the nearest one where the floor was dry and the hatch above could be opened to allow air and light to reach the dark places.
Between the beams, near to where I slept, some words had been scratched into the wood. The writing appeared faded, old, but I could not remember seeing it before. I shone my light onto the words and read:
‘I went to sea to forget.
But I was remembering.
I remembered all you taught me of moments.
So I will not be alone,
When it is no longer this moment.’
I could see through to the chainlocker at the front. All else was in darkness.
“Hello?” I shone the flashlight into the gloom and crept forward, afraid to startle whatever or whoever was hiding in the shadows. “I know you’re in here.” I felt foolish and wondered again if I was, perhaps, going mad.
I found her sitting against one of the supporting beams. Just sitting. She seemed as insubstantial as the mist outside and I blinked several times, expecting her to disappear like the mirage of a migraine, an afterglow of light in the eye after staring too long into the sun. But she didn’t disappear. She remained. Pale and gleaming, trailing seaweed and salt, a creature from the depths. I glanced quickly at her legs and was ridiculously relieved to find that she did, indeed, have legs. No tail.
I knew her.
She was older now. Thinner. She looked sad. Worried.
“‘Meet me in The Ether’, you said. ‘That is where I will meet you. Inside the clear upper air. Beyond the sphere of the moon.’ ” She looked at me, eyes gleaming. “You brought me here,” she said.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I wrapped her in a blanket and made her some tea. She was shivering.
“Am I dreaming you?” I asked.
“Maybe I’m dreaming you,” she replied.
“Your dream?” I asked. “Then are you steering this ship?”
“You steer your own ship,” she said. “And I keep you safe.”
I wondered if she was here. I wondered if I was awake. I wondered if I was sane.
If I was, as she insisted, steering my own ship, then I had steered myself off the map, into the gap between worlds, into a fairy tale. I felt like I was fading, that I would shortly wink out like the last, dying beam of a lighthouse in a storm. I was unafraid, but I felt anything but safe.
I watched her for long moments as she sipped the tea, pale fingers warming on the mug. I had thought of her many times over the years.
“How are you here?” I asked her.
“You brought me here.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I didn’t mean to. It was an accident.” I was beginning to lose my grip on reality. “How are you here?” I repeated, but even to myself, the question sounded flat, redundant. I looked at her. “Am I dead?”
I stood up, needing to get back to the wheelhouse, needing air. “It’s bad luck to have a woman on board a boat,” I said as I darted up the ladder. I paused and stuck my head back down into the hatch, meeting her eyes as she lifted her gaze over the rim of the mug. “Unless they’re naked,” I added with a grin.
Eight
I climbed into the wheelhouse and checked my position, half expecting that nothing would work anymore, that my phone would be dead, that the radar would be empty, that the fuel from the engine would have leaked away and that I would be cut adrift in some kind of enchanted sea fog for all eternity. It was almost disappointing to find that everything was as I had left it. The only thing which had changed in the interim was a clearing of the mist which had lifted enough for the day to reveal itself. The sea was flat and green and in the distance a small motorboat skimmed its surface, close enough that I could hear the hum of its engine. I checked my phone. Two more messages. 11.43am. Time was passing in the normal manner, regardless of the fact that, tail or no tail, there seemed to be a mermaid in the fish hold.
I turned the ignition and the engine spluttered then thrummed back to life. Water churned from the propeller and the silence was broken. Mermaid or no mermaid, dream or reality, I still wanted to get to Cornwall.
The morning passed and turned to afternoon. I sailed on. The mist evaporated in the sun, prisms of light bouncing from the water. I stared ahead at the horizon, a mirage in all directions, the sea flat, without end, the sky curving down like a vast dome. I imagined myself within a giant snow globe and wondered about the universe outside, about the forces which had trapped me here, and I waited to be shaken from my reverie, for the storm which I knew was coming.
I checked the shipping forecast:
Irish Sea.
Wind: West backing southwest 7 to severe gale 9, decreasing 5 or 6 for a time.
Sea State: Rough or very rough.
Weather: Squally showers, rain later.
Visibility: Moderate or poor.
I peered into the sunlight, the blue, the water so flat and formless that it was almost indistinguishable from the sky, high white clouds reflected in its depths, confusing up with down.
There was a storm coming. The shipping forecast said so, and I could feel it in my veins, salt and wind and rain rising in my blood. So I sailed on, and I watched. And I waited.
I drank tea and smoked cigarettes. I made a sandwich, cheese and salt, checked my phone messages, texted my mother All good, don’t worry, focused my thoughts on the journey, ignored the strangeness of the day and the woman from my past who had seemingly stowed herself away on my boat.
She kept herself hidden and I didn’t go down to check on her. I assumed she was sleeping, or singing to the mysteriously absent storm, or combing the seaweed from her hair, whatever it was that mermaids do in their downtime. By mid-afternoon I had relaxed enough to convince myself that I had imagined the whole thing. It seemed likely, given my state of mind in recent months. Stress can do things. Make you see things that aren’t there. Make you believe in things which don’t exist. The mind is a powerful thing. Memory mixed with wishful thinking, dreams of the past mixed with hopes for the future. Alternate realities. After everything that had happened, everything that I had done, it seemed only logical that I should be losing my mind. Too much salt in the blood. The pressure had finally boiled my brain.
Nine
The sun had dropped low to the horizon and I was tired from staring into its glare. Points of light swam across my vision and my head had developed an ache. I was thirsty so I made more tea, absently brushing a dusting of salt from my hands as I did so. I killed the engine and allowed the boat to drift a little, not too worried about losing position in the unnatural calm, and with the full mug warming my fingers I stood in the doorway and looked out across the back deck to the eastern horizon where the deeper blue of the afternoon was already turning the sky to night.
I was only mildly surprised when she pulled herself out of the water and emerged dripping from the sea in front of me. She clambered over the side of the boat and dropped lightly onto the wooden deck, trailing seaweed from her feet and pausing only when she caught me watching her.
“I like to swim,” she said. A child caught in the act of wrongdoing.
I took a long, long drag on my cigarette, inhaled deeply, struggled to find a suitable response, shook my head and gave up.
“As you’re here,” I said. “Perhaps you could make yourself useful.”
I made her put on some warm clothes. An old pair of jeans and a thick, blue checked fleece that I’d had for years. “I remember you wearing this,” she said as she slipped it over her head. She insisted on remaining barefoot, claiming she didn’t feel the cold, that she came from the north where the warmest item of clothing to be found was a denim jacket.
“Take the wheel”, I said. “Watch the charts. If you see anything, give me a shout.”
“Where are you going?” She looked worried.
“I’m tired,” I said. “I need to lie down.” Just saying the words out loud made me realise how true they were.
“There’s a storm coming,” she said.
I paused in the doorway. A very deep part of my brain was trying to warn me that none of this was real, that she wasn’t real, that I was probably asleep. That I had probably been asleep for a long time, and that I should wake up. But the part of my brain which could feel the fatigue, feel the weariness in my bones, the ache in my back and the pounding behind my eyes, was telling me otherwise. That part of my brain was telling me I needed to rest. Because there was a storm coming.
I wasn’t sure if she would be there when I returned. I wasn’t even sure if she was there right now. I left her at the wheel and went out on to the top deck for a quick check round. Everything seemed to be okay. I looked back at the window of the wheelhouse and saw her face, half obscured behind the dirty glass panel. She smiled and breathed on the glass, wiping some of the grime away with her fingers, but still she appeared as a mirage, a ghost behind glass, unreachable. She looked so remote, so far away. I felt my stomach twist, though from what I couldn’t be sure.
There was seaweed in her hair.
The sun was dropping behind the horizon now, a deep orange disk melting into the sea. All the clichés about sunsets over the ocean are true. I stood on the prow, feeling the thrum of the engine beneath my feet, the sea parting smoothly to allow for our passage. The sky had turned all the colours I had once only imagined. Blue and red and gold, all the dreams made real, painted with fearless brushstrokes. I had been a painter once. I’d almost forgotten.
A life unlived.
Ten
Below decks it was cold and dark. I crawled fully dressed into my sleeping bag and closed my eyes, teeth chattering in the chill, damp air. I had nothing to warm me, so I shivered until I fell asleep, my dreams rising up to meet me like mist rising from a morning sea.
I dreamed of the Siren waiting for me on the shore. I could see her always, even though she was always far away. Sometimes she was small, pacing the shore, seaweed hair flying in the wind. Sometimes she was huge, filling the entire horizon, the curves of her body the hills and the valleys of the land, her breath rising like smoke from the fire burning in her belly.
I woke in a sweat, burning with fever, my mouth full of salt, my sleeping bag hot and wet. She was kneeling beside me, a glass of water in her hands which she held to my lips whilst I drank, the cool liquid quenching my thirst, my sweat drying on me, leaving me cold and shivering. I could hear the wind outside, a change in the weather, saltwater sloshing against the hull inches from where I lay submerged beneath the ocean. This was her domain. She placed the empty glass down and touched a warm hand to my face, speaking soothing words which I couldn’t understand. Her hair floated in the light from above, tendrils of seaweed, orange and red. None of this could be real, but I no longer cared that she was an illusion, a memory, a dream. She reached above me to turn out the light and I pulled her down, her face younger than I knew she could be.
“I think of you still,” I said. “Even though I am quiet. Thought is as real as real.”
She pressed her fingers to my lips, breathed into my dreams. “You are tired,” she said. “You are nothing but rags of sinew strung together with salt, and rope and air.” She ran her hands along the veins on my forearms. “There is a storm coming,” she warned. “But I am holding up the ocean. And I will make the waves fall down before you.”
She pulled my body into hers, wrapped me in her arms until I slipped below the surface, willing her to accept what was freely given, to remember this moment, wherever she truly was, as the moment we would both remember. When we were old. And blind. And could no longer walk, we would still have this.
‘I went to sea to forget.
But I was remembering.
I remembered all you taught me of moments.
So I will not be alone,
When it is no longer this moment.’
Eleven
I woke alone. The lights were out and it was darker than coal. I couldn’t see so much as the proverbial hand in front of my face.
I sat up quickly and the last of my dreams fled back into the shadows, the cold rushing in to meet my nakedness. I could no longer discern the difference between my dreams and reality. The Siren, the stowaway, memories of the past, the boat, the storm …
She was gone now, I was sure. I could feel her absence as keenly as I had felt her presence, but the moment remained, as promised by the writing on the wall. I fumbled for my torch and shone the light at the words, understanding their meaning at last. Had the old sailor who’d sold me the boat known his own siren then? Was there somebody he had missed all his life, as I had done? Had he gone to sea to forget, only to find himself remembering, and being glad of, the moments? Precious moments which remained as real as real for all the remainder of time.
The boat groaned and pitched and the sound of wind and rain and water rose above the deeper sound of the engine and the even deeper roll of the ocean, booming from far below. It was night and the storm was here.
The lights flickered as I turned them on and I dressed quickly, staggering a little as the boat pitched, pulling on gloves, boots, hat, jacket. Fear rose like bile, unexpected, threatening to overwhelm me, and I fought it down, willing myself calm. How long had I been asleep?
I scrambled up the ladder and opened the hatch into the shelter-deck. A smattering of hard rain gusted into my face and I fought the wind for the door, steel on steel rising above the sound of the storm as it slammed shut. The boat roiled, side-to-side, up and down, and I slid and scrambled across the deck into the wheelhouse, grabbing at the wheel which was spinning the boat unattended and wild across the Irish Sea.
There was no time for me to be afraid. Years later I would look back on that night and wonder how I survived. Years later I would still be wondering if my Siren had been the lighthouse or the storm, if it even mattered. Years later I would still bear the scars, white lines of memory seared into flesh, still feel the ghost of exhilaration when I remembered. But right then all I could do was respond to what the moment demanded. Right then, all I could do was hang on to the wheel and fight to bring the spinning boat back under my control.
I had never been to sea. I knew nothing of the ocean, of its beauty or of its black fury. Before that night I hadn’t understood that the sea was a living creature, as old as time, that it was full of feeling and that it could see into your heart, into your soul, and that it would play back to you what it found there, over and over if necessary, until the lesson was learned.
Truth surfaces.
I switched all the outside lamps on, sending beacons of white light out into the darkness, but there was nothing out there to illuminate except the rain and the seaspray as the waves broke across the bow, and the light only seemed to serve to throw the darkness back at me. I felt very small out there on the endless black water.
“I am holding up the ocean for you,” she had said. “I will make the waves fall down before you.”
She was gone now, but the memory remained. I willed myself calm, willed myself to believe that fate would take care of me, that whatever happened would be what was meant to happen. That there were no wrong choices. I willed myself calm and stared out into the vast, endless dark beyond the lights and prepared to face the long, black night alone.
Twelve
The clock read 2.00am. I held my course as steady as I could, bearing south-west, aware that I was now so far out in the middle of the Irish Sea that I could no more go back than I could keep pressing onwards. I considered turning east and heading towards Wales, and I found myself hesitating, imagining myself finding safe harbour along the Welsh coast, exhausted, relieved.
Defeated.
It would have been so easy at that point to give up and turn east. Why didn’t I? I suppose that once you cross a certain threshold you know that there is no going back. Of course, I could have turned east and sailed over to Wales. I could have moored up and caught the train back home, gone on with my life, put my head down, stayed quiet, no harm done. Everyone would laugh and shake their heads and comment on my moment of madness, and I would laugh along with them and roll my eyes and drink my beer and smoke my cigarettes and no-one would be any the wiser.
Except for me.
I would be wiser. I would know that I had had my chance. And I would know that I had turned away from it. And I would go on with my life in the knowledge that I had died out there on the ocean that night, without even trying to live.
So I continued on into the great, dark night, straight into the storm.
There is a certain peace which comes after a decision has been made, even when there is no way of knowing what the outcome may be, even if the decision seems foolish or dangerous. I had known the agony of limbo for as long as I could remember, never choosing, unable to decide. Making the choice to head right into that storm, to hold my course, to steer straight into uncertainty and danger, I felt the years of indecision and doubt lifting from my bones. I think I relinquished control at that moment, placed my fate in the hands of the gods, the storm, the Siren. But whatever it was that made me turn the boat into the storm that night, ultimately, it was me that steered the ship. It was me who decided to choose.
So I sailed on, knowing I might die, hoping I would live.
The radar placed me firmly in the middle of the Irish Sea. The boat pitched and troughed as I sailed into the waves. Seawater broke over the bow with every fall, washing across the windows of the wheelhouse, threatening to break the glass. It was slow going. The wind and the sea seemed determined to push me back. Time slowed whilst the sea held me in that place for longer than seemed possible, until I began to wonder if I was trapped, that I would become a ghost ship from the stories that old sailors told. I longed for dawn, still several hours away.
I saw one other ship out there that night, a great ocean liner or cruise ship, lit through the sheets of falling rain like some futuristic city. The radar told me that it was a couple of miles away and as it slid past me, oblivious to my existence, I wondered about all the lives onboard, all concerned with their own dreams and hurts, jealousies and fears, all the tiny, mayfly lives flickering in and out of existence. I was no different. If I died that night it would make no difference at all. The ocean and the night would swallow me up and I would become a part of the whole once again, all my concerns as an individual absorbed back into the dark. It was a comforting thought.
I saw myself as the others on the ferry must see me. A stranger in the dark. A drifter. Nobody of consequence or meaning. I closed my eyes and let the ocean take me.
Thirteen
The ocean keeps secrets. You can shout into its heart and it will listen, impassive. The ocean does not care.
I went up onto the top deck and held on to the railings, leaning over the side where the black ocean boiled and surged beneath me, its unfathomable depths holding all the secrets of the ages, all the countless sailors and sirens who had passed this way before me, fought their battles, created their stories, all lost now to human history but remembered by the ocean, the ocean which did not understand or recognise time but which held all those moments safe, hidden.
I shouted to the ocean my secret heart, laid my soul bare before it, saw my words catch on the wind and fly upwards into the night where they snagged on the spray and were absorbed by the deep, impassive sea, and in that moment my secret became real and because it was real and because the ocean did not care, my fear evaporated and lost its power. My life would go forward, and it would be my life, and I would live it from the heart and it would be the truth.
Truth always surfaces. My Siren, my love, my life.
Dawn was a smudge on the horizon. Dark grey illuminating the black. The boat groaned and creaked, oak from an ancient forest. I held on to the ropes as the tail of the storm writhed and twisted its way west. The wind blew strong, humming its song through the rails, a choir of banchees, and fine salt rain settled in my hair, my eyes and my nostrils. I imagined the sea would rise up and claim me, but I was no longer afraid. The sea had called and I had answered, given it my life, told it my secrets. What it chose to do with me now was no longer my concern. I merely had to play my part and allow it to reach its conclusion.
Thunder rumbled behind me and I looked back as lightening flickered around the skies, but the storm was losing its grip. The sea, visible now in the slate grey light, was a seething cauldron of foam. I remembered the story of The Little Mermaid. A story corrupted into a children’s fairy tale, masking its brutality and far darker origins. The mermaid, unable to win the heart of her sailor, had sacrificed her soul to save him from death. No happily ever after for her, she had turned to foam on the waves.
“I am holding up the ocean for you. I will make the waves fall down before you.”
I still didn’t know what it all meant, how it was that the woman from my past had visited me on the boat that day, if I had imagined her there with me or if some part of her had indeed met me in the ether, as had once been promised, but standing there on the deck watching the ocean foam, I reached up for the edges of a hope which seemed to be floating above me on the eddies of the wind. I couldn’t grasp it. Like chasing the remains of a dream on waking, it seemed to retreat the more I pursued it, so I left it there to hang, liminal, just beyond reach, and hoped that it would settle, that my courage had not come too late, that I would have a life waiting for me on the other side.
Fourteen
Dawn broke as a grey smudge on the horizon, turning blue, purple, red, orange, clouds parting reluctantly as the new day asserted control over the night and the storm. The wind dropped, the waves flattened, silver then gold as the sun sent out its first tentative rays across the water.
I stood up on deck the whole time and watched the day begin. My clothes were soaked through and I was cold, but it no longer bothered me, my attention wholly focused on the light which was now spilling out across the sky and the ocean, filling the world with a new promise.
Did I feel like a new person? I’m not sure. Although my memory tells me that I did, I know from experience that such things cannot be trusted, but I do know that I had hope, I had peace, and that a threshold somewhere deep inside me had been crossed.
I returned to the wheelhouse and made some tea, taking comfort in the familiarity of such a mundane ritual. I was still some way out from land and I had drifted off course a little during the night, but my goal of reaching Cornwall seemed finally to be within reach. I looked at the charts for a long time before returning to the upper deck and contemplating the ocean, stretching vast and empty from horizon to horizon, nothing but blue and green and gold and grey, flat and featureless and unfathomably deep with whispered, shouted secrets and dreams and lonely lives unlived.
I had wanted it to take me.
I had given myself up to it and felt the utter relief and joy that comes at the end of a long struggle, the peace of letting go. I had allowed the water to pull me down and I had welcomed it. The cold. The dark. The quiet. But somehow, somehow, I had learned to breathe underwater. And so I had been released, back into the world of the living, to begin again.
Fifteen
I missed my Siren. She was quiet now and I suspected she would remain so. I wondered where she was in the real world, as I had wondered many times over the years, and if she still thought of me. If she still waited. And watched.
“I am holding up the ocean for you. I will make the waves fall down before you.”
I believed she had. I believed she did still.
I leaned over the rails and watched the boat cut a steady, smooth channel through the water. The sea was clear and blue, a reflection of the sky, and I could see into the ocean and imagine what lay beneath the surface. I imagined a mermaid, unencumbered with the cares of the human world, swimming alongside, a creature of joy and purity, unspoiled by the disappointments and hardships of life, and I knew there was no such thing. If my Siren had ever even existed, she would be foam and rust and memory by now, like all of us. All I could hope was that she, like me, believed that it had been worth it. That the moment was everything. That the moment was all.
I thought I saw her then, and I leaned further, watching the shadow of a body cutting through the water just off the prow. After a few seconds I realised that what I was watching was a dolphin, darting and skimming alongside me. It was joined a few seconds later by another, then another and so on until there were six or seven of them racing off the prow, their fins cutting the water as they rode the bow wave out front.
I wondered if it was her, sending me all the charms of the sea to keep me on track.
A breaking of light.
Friends along the way.
The kindness of strangers.
I believe she watched me still. Waited on the rocks. Maybe, like me, she was learning to breathe underwater.
Epilogue
He arrived at the mouth of the harbour early one morning, battered and exhausted from a night on the ocean.
I’d heard the storm. Felt it coming for months. A pressure behind the eyes. A heaviness in the air.
He drifted in on the breeze on an ancient fishing boat, peeling red paint a trail of blood in its wake, a tall, thin figure with sinewy arms and hollow eyes, white-knuckled hands clinging to the old-fashioned wheel.
I watched as his boat cut a channel through the silent water. The air was thin, washed clean by the rain, a fierce morning sun bleaching the world to white. I’d known he was coming. I’d been calling to him for months. In the dark corners of my imagination I’d known about him for years and I had waited. Waited. Waited.
Now I watched, as I had always watched, as he steered the boat creaking and oozing a rust-stained path into the safety of the harbour, a squabble of seagulls following in its wake. The ancient motor smoked and heaved with the effort of those last few yards and when finally he reached the mooring, the hull grinding and splintering across the quay wall, the echo of his arrival lingered for long moments in the silence.
Gasping under the memory of rust and kindness, where you kept me hidden away, learning to breathe underwater, I waited. And I waited. And I waited.