The Night Swimmer (25 page)

Stay calm and do not drown me, my secret beloved one,

And I give you my word that Cleire I will never return.

Nice, I said. You make that up?

Nah, he said. Traditional.

O'Boyle stroked his chin thoughtfully.

Ought to come up with me own, I suppose. Tho' I've never actually come out
to
the island.

And what about Padraig Cadogan? I said.

O'Boyle took a long drink from his bottle and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

Back when I was just a lad, he said, Padraig had a wife and two kids. Two pretty lassies, ginger like you. This was the winter of 1972, they was maybe twelve, thirteen. Just before Christmastime, and all the kids on the island were set on going to a party on the mainland. St. Mary's parish of Cork had a big festival with singing and treats and such, so pretty much every lad and lass on the island was lined up to go, including ol' Padraig's. His wife helped organize the thing, was one of the chaperones. So Christmas Eve all the kids get on the afternoon ferry to go over to Baltimore, thirty-six kids. Wind was up but nothing too serious, but damned if it didn't start to blow soon as they got out of the harbor. Sky went black and seas came up, no warning. Gale season is always bad, but sometimes we get storms that come out of nowhere. Donovan Corrigan, Kieran's brother, was pilotin' the ferry, a good pilot. Did the route a thousand times. Knows this bay like all the Corrigans, like a map is printed in the brain.

O'Boyle picked up a handful of rocks and started pitching them into the water.

Me mother wouldn't let me go. Didn't go in for Christmas and all that. But a good group of people was right down here, watchin' that ferry, and the sky went dark and damned if it didn't blow the boat into Gascanane there, broadside. Gutted the hull like a fish. The crew never had a chance. It heeled over and went down in thirty seconds. The seas was up to twenty feet by then in the bay, all whitewater and foam. Some say they saw some of the kids up on the rocks, hanging on. But they all drowned, every last one of them. A whole generation, wiped out in one stroke. Kieran's only daughter was out there. Mary. I knew her well. Me and Ariel the only ones who didn't go. The island never really recovered. Padraig, of course, well, he lost everythin'. His daughters, wife. Since then he's been coming out here to watch that last ferry.

*  *  *

That evening I left the Five Bells fortified with cod and chips and a pint of Murphy's and took the seawall path around the Ineer to the Giant's Causeway. I climbed up and over the boulders to the channel between the rocks where the sea fans were thick like forest ferns and starfish lay scattered, rocking in the swells. The cloud cover was light, the sun an angry glow on the water. The story of Padraig Cadogan and the drownings on Gascanane Rock haunted my heart like a shadow. Highgate's children were not on the island that day, Christmas Eve 1972. They were already on the mainland with their mother and so were spared, but this was also the day that Highgate was told that they wouldn't be coming back, the day he was abandoned by his family. He had his own private storm of heartbreak to deal with. I couldn't shake the image of small children clinging to the rock, smashed by icy waves, crying out for help that never came.

I perched on the rocks as the night came on, waiting until I felt fully adjusted, watching the vague shapes of wave crests, the bend of the horizon a faint line of green against the black sky. Fastnet was hidden behind the cliffs of Focarrig and Blananarragaun on the western edge of the bay, the light casting a faint orange swatch across the harbor mouth. The rocks at my feet were swathed in a shimmering foil of light, the effect of phosphorus, tiny organic compounds that drifted into the bay in fluorescent clouds.

*  *  *

The surging power of the killer whales thundering under me, the way they pushed water into bulky moving shapes, the tall black sails cutting through the water.

*  *  *

I didn't have to look back, up the hill toward Highgate's farm; I knew Miranda was watching me. I could feel it in my skin. As I thought of her I felt the deep pocket of fear begin to drain out of me. I knew what she wanted me to do.

*  *  *

I took off my clothes and dove in. The water felt hard and crisp and I came to the surface and swam with my head up, falling into an easy rhythm with the swells, the water flashing with each stroke of my arms. After the initial shock of the cold I could feel my pores shutter and seal and stroking out into the center of the bay I began to warm up. My whole body glowed as the microscopic organisms crushed themselves against my skin. I knew I would have about an hour at the outside before the cold started to cut the blood from my hands and feet. In two hours the delirium of hypothermia would overwhelm my consciousness with a storm of hallucinatory dreams.

I worked my way along the western wall toward the tip of Blananarragaun so I could see Fastnet and the northern seas that stretched into forever. I stayed just beyond the breaks, adjusting my stroke to resist the pull of the crashing waves. I would have to stay close to shore. That was where she wanted me to go.

I made the point of Blananarragaun in thirty minutes, the westerly breeze stronger and the pull of the current forcing me to stay dangerously close to the rocks. The spray made the going difficult without goggles, and I alternated head up and down, taking a half dozen strokes facedown in the black, then raising up to get my bearings. On the small plateau along the finger of Blananarragaun the humped shapes of seals, sleeping. Fastnet was a charcoal smudge with a red eye, the light weakened it seemed by the weight of the night. I treaded water and watched it for a moment, timing the light in my head, watching the sweeping path it created on the ocean. It was a path I had swum once, like a golden road, there and back, almost. Each rotation seemed to make the path cleaner and closer. But then I thought of the immensity of the black beneath my legs, the water that I wore up to my shoulders like a vast dress that had no bottom and no end, and I was terribly afraid again.

There could be a being out there, in the dark, moving through that space, something the size of the island itself, cruising the deeps, displacing black matter like a rogue planet, a brain stem and consciousness buried in thick tons of flesh, a ticking flicker of intelligence between the roots of continents. Or a dense pack of creatures
like a silvery emulsion, writhing in fluid shapes, playing out some destiny of instinct that had nothing to do with humans. Billions, more, countless minds, working, thinking, acting, the simple contortions of cellular life, the sublime muscular flanks of whales, the plastic imagination of invertebrates, creating unknown forms.

*  *  *

The milky-white shapes of drowned children in darkness, their arms clutching at the shimmering air above, their silent cries.

*  *  *

Once the ocean was benign and necessary, and now it seemed adversarial, malignant. I was afraid. I treaded water and wept, facing the open sea.

*  *  *

After a while I had to back off the rocks as the current was pulling me south and west, and I decided to turn back to the harbor. My hands were tingling and I had lost sensation in my feet, my legs like kicking stumps. I worked back along the cliffs of Pointabullaun, not far from where Sebastian and I watched the migrating birds, the rocks now on my left, the flashing waves like explosions of white light. I was growing a bit tired and let myself get pushed closer to shore, figuring it would be best to get beached if I lost control of my muscles. I had knots in my forearms the size of apples and my shoulders felt like stone. I felt my jaw shuddering. I had been out too long.

There was a white shadow on the rocks to my left, a shape half out of the water, rolling limply up the slope of a boulder, then back down a dozen yards in front of me. My first thought was a harbor seal, disturbed in its sleep by my splashing and coming to investigate, and I thought it would quickly swim off below me, but the form sank into the water and then rose up in a swell, clearly inert. I didn't have time to fight the push of the wave, and I was picked up and smashed right into it, my right hand slapping on the exposed skin of its back. I shrieked and I fought to get my legs under me. I pushed
away and the tender give of the skin and the shape of it up close made it clear that this was a person, a drowned body. It was a man, wearing a collared shirt, the body grossly swollen and mottled, and though he was facedown in the water I could tell that it was Patrick.

I sprinted out and around his body, fighting the urge to scream again. After a dozen strokes I turned and his body was cast back on the rocks, his limbs splayed in unnatural ways, the back humped, legs twisting in his pants like they were on swivels. His bones were clearly shattered by the constant pounding on the rocks, and as he rolled back into the water his head lolled toward me in the moonlight and his face was moving; he was trying to say something to me, as if he was still alive.

Oh, god help me
.
I can't do this!

I took a few strokes back toward the body, coming closer, within arm's reach. As he settled back into the water and rolled faceup, I could see that his head was covered with swarming clusters of small crabs. They had eaten away his face, filling his eye sockets and hollowed mouth.

I put my head down and swam hard for the inner harbor. My arms were gone at the elbow, my feet lost somewhere in the sea, and I began to feel the shrinking sensation of my torso shutting down. I thought of Fred at the Nightjar, sitting before the peat fire, his glass of whiskey, damp pages of notes on his lap, thinking of me.

I don't know how to explain it except to say that I found something else deep inside, beyond any other pain or anything else I had known. I would make it.

When I finally dragged myself up the mossy steps in the Ineer my whole body was shaking uncontrollably. The air, warmer than the water, felt like a hot blanket and I knew that this meant my core temperature was dangerously low. I felt my nakedness, the tingling of shocked pores dilating, and I cowered at the base of the steps for a moment. I pounded the stones with my hands until I could feel my fingers again and stalked up the steps, flexing every muscle, trying to drive the blood back into my nether regions. I struggled into my clothes, slapping my legs and arms, teeth clacking so hard my jaws
ached. I knew that I had to get back to Nora's and warm up fast, and I jogged up the hill with an awkward gait because I couldn't feel my feet. I fell several times heavily on my hands and knees, but since I couldn't feel them it was like some invisible force was catching me just before I hit the ground. When the incline steepened, I set my legs apart and leaned into it, focusing on the fine gravel of the road.

By the time I reached Ard na Gaoithe, my flesh stung with fresh sweat and my face was slick, but I was still shaking and my fingers looked strangely gray and streaked with blood. The light was on in the parlor room, which meant Nora was up reading by the fire. I got through the gate before my muscles started to seize, the cords of my hamstrings going first, tightening up and popping like piano strings. I went to my knees, my stomach and back wrenching me sideways with spasms as I beat on the front door with a numb fist.

When the door opened, a pair of bare white feet, and I grasped an ankle with both hands, sobbing. I heard the voice of a boy call out, a throaty, desperate cry:
Mother! Mother!
Then the pounding of footsteps and Nora's whispered curse and I felt her hot hands on me, helping me up and inside.
Help me, boy!
I felt another pair of hands pulling at me and we were going down the hall, Nora on one side and her son Finbar on the other.

What happened, Elly? she said. Good lord, what is the matter?

My jaws felt like iron but I managed to hiss
hypothermia
through my gritted teeth.

They set me down on the bed and I rolled into a fetal position and retched and coughed up a good quantity of liquid. Finbar stood in the doorway, in his shorts and T-shirt, hair askew, his eyes wide and staring.

We have to get her warm, Nora said. Here, Finn, get a hot bath going! Bring in the heavy blankets from the hall closet.

Nora stripped me down, and because I was too heavy for her she helped me crawl into the bathroom. The tub water was far too hot and I knew I was risking shock, but I flopped into it anyway. There were a few seconds of nothing, then my numb skin warmed, the
nerves adjusted, the capillaries popped wide open, and the blood that was gathered in a knot in my torso shot into my frozen limbs. The pain was excruciating, like being set on fire, and I howled like an animal, pausing for breath, then howling again, gripping the sides of the tub, scrambling to get out. Nora to her credit was unfazed and didn't crack. She planted her hands on my shoulder and hip and held me down, turning her face away as I swore and thrashed. In a minute it was over and things equalized and I could feel the pounding beat of my heart in my fingertips and toes and the water in the tub grew cloudy with sweat and the seawater ejected from my pores. I was exhausted and lay back, gasping for air.

Finbar was in the doorway, a stack of blankets in his arms. Nora was talking to me, asking me questions, but I couldn't hear anything except the throb of my heart and the roar of wind and sea. I looked into Finbar's eyes, the deep pools of blue-green, the color of the ocean in the morning, and I could almost see his brain invert itself. Seeing a woman like me, doing what I just did, completely naked and without shame, must have put a mark on that young boy, but what exactly I cannot say.

I
spent about ten hours in bed before I could get upright and eat some soup. Nora sat with me as I ate and told me that the guard had arrived and that Patrick's body was retrieved. She sent a message to Fred that I was recovering fine and would be back soon. The word down at the harbor was that they were ruling it a suicide. The investigators determined he threw himself from the cliffs of Pointabullaun. Nora crossed herself.