Seahorse (34 page)

Her eyes were sky-pools, edged in black. “What do you mean?”

My mouth was dry. “One afternoon… one Saturday afternoon, in London… I walked into a pub near King's Cross, and accidentally stumbled on this club… a cross-dresser, transgender-friendly place… they had tables and sofas… and these curtained booths… which people could use… for privacy. And one of them…”

“I don't see how this has anything to do with dad.”

I looked at her, wondering if it had been a mistake. “He was there… in one of the booths…”

At first she held my gaze, then she looked away, her face drawn in confusion. In hilarity, disbelief.

“You must be mistaken Nem, surely…”

Despite the fire in the room, it was cold, like a window had swept open.

“I don't know if you remember… on my first evening here, I said… I mentioned that I'd seen your father somewhere… that his face was familiar…”

“Yes,” she said, quietly, “yes, you did.”

“I only realized the night before he… the accident. And all this time, I didn't know how to tell you—”

“Are you certain? How close were you to this… booth?”

I hesitated. “I was on the other side of the room… but it wasn't a large room…”

“You said it was dark…”

“But there were lights from these video screens… and bulbs along the ceiling.” I added gently, “I saw him there.”

She stood up, pacing, her dress glinting ferociously in the firelight. “Did you go up close? Did you see what he was doing… no…”

“There was a gap in the curtain…”

“No… I don't want to know…”

“I couldn't tell…”

She was on the other side of the room, but I could see her eyes brimming with tears.

“I'm sorry, Myra…”

“If you knew… why didn't you tell me?”

I uttered the only truth I could muster. “I didn't know how.”

“Did he… know? That you knew? That you'd seen him there?”

“No.”

A space less than a heartbeat.

I moved across, and held her in silence.

The world, the next morning, was somehow intact.

I was in the loft, packing slowly. Even then, it didn't take me long—my clothes, a sheaf of papers, my slippers, folded, lined into my suitcase. I checked the bathroom, and picked up my toothbrush, the toothpaste. And then put the toothpaste back, uncertain whether I'd brought it along in the first place. Towels. A pair of socks, rolled up and dusty,
under the bed. My pen. It didn't take me long.

While casting a glance around the room before I stepped out, I caught sight of the jade figurine. I'd forgotten it was there. I dropped it into my pocket, and then, by the door, I changed my mind and placed it back on the table, at the very centre, the table cloth under it a field of embroidered snow.

Myra was waiting for me by the car. She was dropping me to the station. Her eyes tired, shiny in the morning air. I placed the suitcase in the booth, and said goodbye to Elliot and Mrs Hammond. To Wintervale.

At first, we drove in silence.

Of the same timbre as the previous night in Myra's room, on her vast, cool bed. I'd glanced at her repeatedly in the dark; she was awake, staring out before her. The light sculpting her face, her neck, the line of her shoulder. Once, she turned, as though she had something to say, but she held her words.

At some point, I couldn't bear it. “I knew I shouldn't have told you…” I blurted.

She remained quiet.

“I shouldn't have…” I sat up.
I would leave. Now. I would leave.

Her hand was cold on my back; it stayed me. She spoke in barely a whisper:

“All these years, I've spent thinking it was my fault… that he behaved the way he did. I couldn't understand it, where it came from… the bitterness… and so I claimed it. But it wasn't mine… it wasn't mine to claim.”

In the car, she lifted her hand from the gearstick, and lightly, for a moment, touched my knee. We drove without a word until we reached. In a silence natural as the one found at wild places, moors and forests and seas.

The small station was livelier during the day, even on this smoke-grey winter morning.

Passengers alighting, leaving. The ticket office unbarred, the gates
clicking in importance.

“Thank you,” I said, when we'd disembarked.

I left her by the car, her lips briefly on my cheek, her fingers entangled in the collar of my coat. She didn't smile when I glanced back, but lifted her hand, her palm open, her fingers parted. Life is filled with these gestures. The ones that have no equivalence in words. And we carry them away, and we arrange them and we know them as carefully as birds know the pattern of the winds.

I waited on the platform, looking on either end at the vanishing tracks, glittering in the cold white air. At times, there is only one way back, and one way forward. Only a single line, out of so many, that takes you where you were always meant to be. The train slowly drew in, with a gush and a clatter; I found a window seat in a carriage that was almost empty. Motionless, suspended, until, with a slight tilt, we started moving.

As it sped away, the landscape rushed past me like water.

Pulling out of the countryside, my phone came to life, lighting up with missed calls, voice mails and unanswered texts.

“Back. For ages. All well? Ring when you can.” Eva.

“Drink? Have you been abducted? By attractive aliens hopefully.” Santanu.

I laughed, putting my phone away. This wasn't the appropriate time to reply.

For now, I cast my eyes to the sky, burdened by itself, looking for birds, the sun, anything that could fly.

I thought of Eva, her vast and abiding loneliness. The absence in the shape of a person, endlessly filled by the world. By Tamsin. Of love in the shape of lilies.

Of Santanu. His face when we mentioned the poet's name. The line that separated the ocean from the sky. Sole and many. A perpetual destruction and rebuilding. A love that belonged to no one.

I thought of Myra, lying on the bed. The sunshine through the loft
skylights falling on her hips and arms. Hair the color of a lost season. Eyes like water, clear and changing. Our parting marked by something unlike sorrow.

I was filled with a sudden lightness.

All these years, the crevices had carried others, Nicholas and Lenny.

Never wholly myself.

I thought of all the train journeys I'd taken, here and in a country across the world.

That led me to and away from people, that pulled me to the past and hurled me into the future. The winter morning lay pearl-grey around me, the clouds in the distance rolling in inky waves, slashed by pale blue, a silver disc edged by radiance, locked by land, and somewhere beyond that, its end. Now I was ready to meet the sea.

EPILOGUE

W
HEN
I
REACHED THE TOWN BY THE SEA, IT STARTED SNOWING
.

The winter that had begun before I visited Myra hadn't yet ended. Even though it was early April now, and we should have been well into spring.

It didn't help, no matter how brisk or offended the weather forecasters sounded on the television or radio—“Unbelievable!”, “This is outrageous!”—the cold lingered on, befuddling the birds, stifling the trees.

The station my train pulled into was a High Victorian construction, built in the Italianate style popular at the time. Its ceiling a vaulted iron canopy, with ornate pillars and a grand four-faced clock. While the edges were lined with modern contraptions—a WH Smith, an M&S, Upper Crust stall, and AMT Coffee counter. If I took the road in front of the station, explained a kindly officer, it would lead me straight down to the sea.

Outside, I could see it in the distance, a patch of silver-blue between the buildings flanking the sloping street. As I strolled out, passing a Chinese medicine shop, a kebab place, an old-fashioned laundrette, the air around me changed and glimmered. Something—pure, intense, ephemeral—hung like bated breath, and released as snowflakes.

At the end of the road, the sea unraveled before me, a smooth, empty expanse dotted in the distance by a single, white ship. I took a right, away from the giant Ferris wheel, and a desolate pier that looked grievous in this weather, walking past a singularly ugly Odeon, a '60s Brutalist conference hall, and then, in soft, curving contrast, a line of voluptuous Victorian hotels. At the next crossing, I waited for the light to turn green, and strode over, keeping my eye on the ruin in the sea.

I'll meet you by the West pier.

A set of steps took me down to the beach. I walked on the pebbles, crunching beneath my shoes, the snow falling so lightly it barely touched the ground. The sea, topped by small, constant ripples, was
darker towards the horizon, a stain of ink growing more dilute, paling into silver. With every lap, it washed over the shore, pushing the sand and stones closer, drawing them away.

From its depths rose the skeleton of an old pier, intricate in its tangle of crossbeams and seaweed. A row of iron pillars, that once had supported the walkway, began on the shore, continued a short distance into the water, and then abruptly stopped, disconnecting the pier from land. It floated on the water like a dream, silhouetted against the sky, circled by swooping sea gulls.

In this weather, the beach was empty. Apart from a couple on the far edge, walking their dogs. A man with a bundled-up toddler. A young girl in a hoodie, sitting cross-legged, headphones plugged into her ears.

It looked like Nicholas hadn't yet arrived.

He'd asked me to meet him there, in front of the old pier.

Or Lenny.

Once, I'd read about a young Dutch artist whose last performance piece was to sail out in a small boat from Cape Cod on a solo voyage across the Atlantic. He called it
In Search of the Miraculous.
He was never found; he never returned.

I like to think that too was Lenny's quest.

Above me, the stony silence of the sky was filled by the swirling flight of birds.

“They say seagulls are the souls of dead sailors.”

A figure stepped out from behind a rust-encrusted pillar.

I didn't turn to greet him. I stood and waited. He was a ghost, a figment of my imagination, an apparition.

“Although if that were true,” he continued, “they should at least be more careful…” Nicholas pointed to his left shoulder; the black of his coat marked by a splash of watery greenish-white.

“Perhaps it's a curse. It'll happen everyday,” I said. “Each time you step outside.”

“I have a feeling you may be—cross with me.” He stood beside me, also facing the sea.

“I wonder what gave you that idea.”

“Remember… Ithaca has given you the beautiful journey.” He gestured with his hands, palms upturned and open. It was generous, as though he was offering me the world.

“Has it? To a freezing place by the sea where I'm in danger of being crapped on by birds.”

“It matters not where you anchor… etcetera… etcetera… I think you need to revisit some of the poetry we read together.”

A brief wind started up, scattering the snowflakes, stirring the waves.

“Before I came here, I thought we had to revisit a lot of things,” I said. “Now, I'm not so sure.”

We were both silent, listening to the gush and swallow of the tide.

“Did you find it, my builder of new worlds?”

I turned, and looked into eyes the color of the sea at dawn. “What?”

“What you most wanted, of course…”

A chariot of winged horses.

“Why Myra?”

Nicholas sighed. “Because the truth can only be told by someone else. My confession would have been tainted, no matter how hard I'd fought it, by self-preservation.”

Behind us, the couple passed us with their dogs; we waited for their chatter and footsteps to grow fainter.

“And now,” he continued, looking up, “we meet under a sky that is a blank slate, an empty sheet of paper.”

Yet paper carries the marks of the wood that burned, the sky traps all sunsets and storms, the sea cradles every memory of giving life.

“Perhaps…” I said.

The snow was falling lighter. Soon, it may stop, and make way for spring.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

Nicholas smiled. “They have a word for it in Italian…
salsèdine…
the saltiness of the sea. I've always wanted to live by the sea.”

In all these years, the flow of time had carved lines across his face, plotting their way around his eyes and mouth. The cartography of him that I used to know so well had changed, shifted between latitudes. He stooped slightly beneath its weight.

“Everyday, when I walk out of my house,” he gestured vaguely to the town behind us, “I round the corner, and everything is the same, every aspect of the landscape in its place, yet everything is different. At the coast, I'm greeted always by newness.”

“Or the illusion of.”

He tilted his head, slightly. “Not here. To love the sea is to long for inconstancy.”

The wind rushed at us, suddenly wilder, tugging our coats, pricking my lips, my eyes.

“Why did you leave?”

My words hovered in the air, drifting in slow circles like snowflakes.

“Then, or in a month, or a year, or ten… it had to happen.”

“Not in that way.”

Very rarely do we have a choice on how to make our departures.

“Not in that way,” he repeated.

From high above us rose the cry of seagulls, bright and piercing. They swooped ahead, their grey-white wings held taut and tense, disappearing against the blankness of the clouds. Nicholas walked closer to the water's edge; I didn't follow, not until he turned and acknowledged I was there, and with a gesture, beckoned me over. The pebbles glistened and fractured in the light, wet and shiny, a scattering of a million mirrors catching our reflection, gathered endlessly by the tide.