Tide of Souls, page 24
"Have you given any more thought to your future?"
What future? But that would be Negative. That would be A Bad Sign. He'd want more sessions. Fuck that. All I wanted now was just to get away. No more sympathy. No more understanding. Just leave me alone, everybody.
"Not as yet. It's hard to say."
"Well, no reason you can't continue your work as a lecturer, once you feel able. You said they were holding your post for you?"
My day job - lecturer in Marine Biology at Manchester University - was purely academic; I'd dived chiefly when I wanted to, in my own time. No. No reason I couldn't go back. Except the way the students would look at me, especially the pretty ones I would have flirted with before the summer break... a thousand years ago.
"Yes. Leave of absence. Get myself back in order."
"How long?"
"The next academic year, at least."
"Generous of them."
"Yes." I was reasonably popular, not bad going with half-a-dozen exes on the staff. But I was always good at staying friends. As a lover, I'd never been cruel. Just wanted more than they could give. Or they'd wanted more from me. Depends on who you asked.
"So, a year to recuperate and..." Whittaker spread his hands. "Chart some sort of course. Any ideas as yet?"
"Not for the long-term, not yet. But for now I've taken a lease on a place in Wales. Away from it all. The city's too..."
"Whereabouts in Wales?"
"Barmouth. Gwynedd coast. Nice place."
"The coast."
"Yes."
"Do you feel that's wise?"
"Yes. I do." I heard my voice rise. But I was tired of having my thoughts and motives picked over. Another reason I had to get away.
"Well, if you're sure..."
"I am."
"I'll give you my number, of course. Any time, night or day, if you have a problem."
"Thanks, doctor."
And I meant it, even though I had no intention of calling him.
"Ben?" I stopped at the door. "Is there anything else you want to discuss, before you go?"
I pretended to think it over, then shook my head. "No. Really. Thanks."
A lie, of course.
There were the dreams I kept having. I kept waking from them, sure I could still hear the sound of breaking waves. In the hospital I'd put them down to the sea's proximity, but they'd continued in Manchester.
So had the echo of voices, calling my name.
I told you my memories of the accident are blurred. In particular, what happened right after my hose broke. Bubbles and silt, blind panic, trying not to breathe in...
There were images in the dreams. Of the accident, except that I could see more clearly in the whirling dark. And there were faces in it, coming out of the darkness, out of the water itself.
Faces with eyes that glowed green.
I moved out of my flat in Didsbury village that weekend. Went round the place packing stuff. What to keep, what to throw away.
I took my old diving equipment. Wetsuit, aqualung, flippers and mask. I should have junked it. But somehow I couldn't. It was too final a goodbye.
One of my exes - a sweet, kind-hearted lady called Janet who I really should've appreciated more - drove me down one evening, saw me safely into my new home, pecked me on the cheek and drove home, gracefully turning down my offer of dinner.
Probably just as well.
I stood outside my front door gazing out towards the harbour. It was dark by now, but I could hear the break and hush of the waves. I stood there listening to them for a while, savouring the wind's salt tang, then went inside.
Chapter Twenty
I woke on a cold November morning. When I squinted at the red numerals on the bedside clock, they told me it was actually a cold November afternoon.
I tried turning onto my back, and immediately wished I hadn't. Debilitating pain burst from every joint in my body and washed through me in a sickening wave. My stomach rolled slowly. I moaned and clenched my teeth. It was hard to separate the dull throb and nausea of my hangover from the constant joint pain.
I lay for a while in that particular circle of hell where the pain is prolonged because moving makes it worse. Finally, I grabbed the blister pack on the bedside table and fumbled for the water bottle beside the bed. Praise Jesus, it wasn't empty. I popped two of the waxy tablets into my mouth and washed them down.
I'd had trouble sleeping the night before, so I'd been up till the small hours watching DVDs, fortified with whisky. I hadn't made it to bed till 4.00 am. At least I'd managed that. Falling asleep in a chair left me in worse agony still.
I thought of showering, but it seemed too much like hard work - undressing, staying upright in the cubicle. Sod that. Instead I clung onto the banister rail and limped downstairs for coffee.
By the second cup, the pain was subsiding. The fridge yielded two rashers of questionable-looking bacon and three eggs. I put the bacon under the grill, broke the eggs into the frying pan and hunted down the heel of a loaf. Pepper and brown sauce made the whole lot vaguely edible.
Get out and about, lad. Come on.
It was almost 3.00 PM now. Maybe two hours of daylight left.
Just another day in my new life.
The pain was constant, as forecast, and as prescribed I'd 'managed' it with DHC. Although the lovely Dr Scrimgeour would've had a seizure if she'd known I was replacing it with gin and whisky of an evening. I had days where I'd skip the evening dose of DHC in favour of getting ratarsed instead. Unlike most opioids, alcohol didn't induce constipation.
A range of high, craggy hills called Dinas Oleu overlooked the town - in Welsh, 'the Fortress of Light' - but hill-walking was another pre-accident pleasure I could forget about now. The altitude change would expand the bubbles in my joints further, shifting the pain from 'medium, constant' to 'utter fucking agony.'
I walked every day, as much as possible. With the aid of a stick I got around reasonably well. There was still pain, but I blocked it out as best I could. I wasn't going to be robbed of any more pleasures than I had to be.
In short, I alternated healthy, outdoorsy stuff and exercise with getting thoroughly wrecked. I got by.
But I still had those dreams. Virtually every night unless I drunk myself unconscious.
I went to a couple of shops, replenishing vital supplies and dropping them back off at my digs, then wandered out again. I started at the harbour. Even at that time of year, it was picturesque. Fishing boats bobbing at anchor, Dinas Oleu and Cader Idris looming above, the iron bridge across the mouth of the estuary. After that I walked down the promenade that cut the harbour off the from the beach. I had to use the top of the seawall, because the footpath was long gone, vanished under the piled-up sand.
The prom led to a long, stepped concrete jetty extending halfway across the harbour mouth. Broken mussel shells littered the jetty, dropped or beaten by gulls to smash them open. They crunched underfoot.
I reached the end and limped down the steps. A warning beacon stood at the bottom. I turned my back on the town and harbour till I could only see the steel-grey ocean. The sun was dying behind thick banks of cloud, but a dull red glow burned through and made the waters blaze further out.
The waves were breaking in a soft, lulling rhythm. I closed my eyes and tilted back my chin; the wind rose, blowing my matted, greasy hair back and chilling my face.
Above the sounds of wind and sea, I heard somebody crying out.
I opened my eyes. No-one in sight. A car moving along the coast road, under the hills, away from the town. The sea was empty too. But I could hear a voice. Two voices. Male and female. But not the words. I couldn't tell if the tone was anger or fear.
The wind was moaning. I had to shout over it.
"Hello?" I called out. "Hello?"
The wind died, and the voices with it. Waves burst on the sand.
I looked around, still saw nothing.
Carry on.
I didn't feel comfortable on the jetty anymore. Too open, too exposed. Too easy to go in. I knew how the sea could be. A huge predator, waiting for one mistake. I'd forgotten that once; look at me now.
"Well chuck yourself in then you bastard. Finish the job. Why should you be alive when we're not?"
I started, almost overbalanced. The voice was right in my ear. But no-one was there when I spun around. And that last sentence - it couldn't be real. Maybe just my unconscious talking. Not necessarily a sign of madness.
Naomi had warned me that opioids like DHC occasionally caused hallucinations. But I'd been taking the stuff for months now; surely it would've happened sooner?
I walked back along the jetty and came down onto the beach. A ridge of dunes had built up between sea wall and shoreline in recent years, topped with coarse marram grass. I climbed them, as I did more or less daily, and walked towards the shore.
I felt the surf wash around my boots. Touched my fingers to the waters as they lapped round me, then to my lips to taste the salt. Felt the fresh briny smell blow in, the smell of rotten fish and seaweed too. But something rotten doesn't have to smell bad. The smell of autumn is of decay, of leaves rotting and mulching down, but you can't beat a walk in the woods. Not as far as I'm concerned, anyway.
I looked out towards the horizon. I don't know how to describe it. Perhaps... if I said it's like living across the street from someone you once passionately loved. Someone you shared everything with, every thought, every dream. You've slept together. You've seen them naked. You know their body, maybe better than they do. They know yours the same way. You know where and how to touch them, how they like to be kissed. And you'll never see them that way again, never sleep with them. You had that intimacy, but it's been withdrawn. Lost. Gone forever.
"Doesn't have to be," a voice said in my left ear.
No way could this be a hallucination. It was real. But something was wrong with it. Something missing. What?
"It doesn't have to be," the voice repeated. It was a man's. Scottish. "You can go back to her if you want."
I didn't turn around. Couldn't. I didn't understand why. It should've been simple. But I couldn't.
"It's easy," said a second voice. It was a woman's. An older woman, forties or fifties, husky and like velvet. "It's where you're happiest, isn't it? So why don't you?"
I didn't answer her either. There was something wrong about her voice too. I still didn't know what, but it was there.
"Benjamin?" Jesus Christ, even my mother didn't call me that any longer. "It's very rude to ignore people when they're talking to you. Wasn't this always where you were happiest?"
"Course it was," said the man. "We all know that."
"You loved her, didn't you?" The woman went on. Her voice was caressing and tender. "The ocean. She could take you deeper than any woman ever could. That's the real reason you've never married, isn't it? It's why Sara left."
I could feel them stood behind me. And I did not want to turn around, I did not want to see their faces. Mustn't. Because now I'd realised what was wrong with their voices. Their lips were so close they must be all but touching my ears, but when they spoke, I couldn't feel any breath.
"Course it was," the woman said. "She knew she'd always be second best. Didn't she?"
"What do you bloody want, boy?" the man asked. "Hobble around like this for however fucking long you've got left, pissed out of your skull so you'll not have to think about it anymore? Cos you're not just drinking to numb the pain, are you? Not the one in your body. No. It's because you can't be in there, isn't it? Can't be inside her like you used to. So are you gonna moon around like a lovesick teenager? Or are you going to be a man and go to her?"
"I can't," I hissed at last.
"But you can." The woman's voice was soft as feathers. It went with touching, somehow. I should have been feeling her fingers brushing down my arm, but thank God, I wasn't. "Just put one foot in front of the other. Just walk out into the water, and keep going."
"What?"
"You heard. She'll take you into her. You'll be inside with her always. That's what you want, isn't it?" The woman was murmuring into my ear now. That velvet voice. Despite everything, I felt my cock stir. "Go to her, Benjamin. Go to her."
"No," I said.
"You know you want to."
"No."
"You're just making it harder for yourself in the long run, laddie," said the man, but there was an edge to his voice.
"Leave me alone."
"Go into the water, Benjamin." The woman sounded as though she was speaking through her teeth.
"Why the fuck should you get away?" demanded the man. "How fucking dare you be alive when we're not?"
"Go into the water." The woman, all tenderness gone. Her voice was a cold command. "Go into the water and drown."
And at last whatever paralysis held me broke, and I could move. "Fuck off!" I shouted, and wheeled round, lashing out with my stick at -
Nothing.
Sweat clung to my forehead; my heart thudded against my ribs. The beach was empty.
I didn't look back at the sea, not then. I just stumbled up, back over the dunes in the gathering dusk, scrambling to the steps that led up to Marine Parade, firecrackers of pain going off in my shoulders, knees and arms. That was when I looked back.
A last gleam of dull red sunlight glanced off the water; then it dimmed and there was only the empty sea. But just for a moment, I'd seen something else. Only for a split-second, but just long enough to be sure it was there.
There'd been three, four, perhaps five of them, all standing in the shallows of the water. I couldn't see their faces, or even much detail about their bodies; that last dull blaze of sunlight had silhouetted them. But there had been something about them. Something... incomplete. But their hands had been outstretched. Beckoning me. And their eyes glowed green.
Chapter Twenty-One
I didn't venture out the following day, or the one after. I could afford not to, as I now had all the relevant provisions - bacon, eggs, bread, milk - and most importantly a couple of bottles or two of cheap Scotch.
By the second night, though, I was climbing the walls and decided to risk one of the local pubs, the Royal. I walked down Marine Road before going over the railway bridge. As I did, there was a brief, soundless flash. I thought it was lightning, but the brief report that followed wasn't thunder. A firework? But it hadn't had the loudness of a rocket bursting, and all I could see was a single pale spark, sinking and dying against a deep blue sky. Besides, I realised, Guy Fawkes had been and gone
Signal rocket. I walked on because there was nothing I could do. The lifeboat would be going out if it was needed. Someone else would be fighting for his or her life. All I could do was silently (and drunkenly) wish them luck, whoever they were.
I only had a couple of pints in the Royal. It was more for the company, such as it was that time of year, than anything else.
The next day, for once, it wasn't an effort to get into the bathroom and shower. I even managed a shave beforehand. I'd been wearing the same clothes pretty much unchanged for the last two weeks; I threw them into the wash. I stripped the bed as well. This happened now and again; I'd experience a surge of revulsion at the state of myself, or the house, or both, and there'd be a burst of activity.
With that all done, I inspected myself in the mirror and pronounced myself almost presentable.
The mind, as somebody once said, is a monkey. I'd alleviated the boredom with imaginary conversations with people I knew - people like Dr Whittaker, Janet or even Naomi Scrimgeour, there was no-one I knew that well around here - about the incident on the beach:
"Ben, you know some opioids can cause hallucinations, DHC included. It's infrequent, but it can happen. If they come back, see a doctor."
"Naomi, I could feel them behind me."
"Did they actually touch you, Ben?"
"Well, no."
"There you go then."
"But I saw them, standing in the water."
"Only saw them for a moment, when the sunlight reflected off the surface. You said so yourself."
"... yes."
"Well, then. Look, Ben, you've been through a hell of a lot. And you've made a great deal of progress. But it won't all be plain sailing, and you won't get over it all overnight."
"Dr Whittaker is right, love. Give yourself some time. Get out a bit. Socialise. Last thing you want is to stay in and brood. Meet some people, make some friends."
"Janet, I'm fine."
"Then why are you sat around having imaginary conversations with us?"
I took my stick and went out.
On the beach, a bitter rain drove in from the sea like a cloud of nails. A tractor, a mechanical scoop at the front raised high, as if in triumph, trundled towards the water. It was towing a small, four-wheeled trailer. On it rested a bright orange inflatable dinghy with an outboard motor and RNLI on the bow, which pointed back towards the town. Four men, in the bright orange jackets and white headgear of lifeboatmen, sat aboard it.
At the water's edge, the tractor turned to face the sea. The lifeboatmen jumped out. A warning klaxon blared; the tractor reversed into the shallows. The lifeboatmen lifted the dinghy into the water, then clambered back aboard. Within a few seconds, they were speeding out into Barmouth Bay.
I was in no rush - it wasn't really an option, in my state - and dawdled to study any random object that caught my attention or just admire the view; I reached the concrete jetty about twenty minutes later. As I clambered over the jetty and walked down the half-buried promenade to the quay, I saw the dinghy coming back in. They seemed to be empty-handed. A practice run, maybe, training.
Or perhaps they'd gone out to try and rescue somebody and failed, without even a body to bring back.
Not a pleasant thought.
It was 2:30. Still time, just, for lunch at Davy Jones' Locker.
The Locker is a small building, built from grey Welsh slate and dating back to medieval times. A small open deck out front overlooks the harbour. Inside, the rough, irregular stonework is whitewashed, except for the huge fireplace at the very back, which retains its natural grey. Sadly it's not a real fire, just red electric light seeping through the chopped logs in the grate. A huge stuffed fish (an allis shad, the old marine biologist in me noted, a member of the herring family) hangs over the front door. Seafaring paraphernalia adorns the nooks inside, or hangs from the black-painted ceiling beams - green-glass buoys in nets of knotted brown string, old fishing nets, a spider crab, ship's wheels, lengths of chain, winches, lobster pots, model ships, propeller blades, a sawfish's snout (rostrum, to give its right name), a basket of dried starfish, sea-urchin and empty conch shells, and a brass diving helmet with its single, Cyclopean window at the front. Lighting came from old ship's lanterns hung from the rafters and lit by electric bulbs within them.
