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         [  The Sea  ]                                 [  By Freon  ]


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    ____________________________________________________________________



The Sea
by Freon

Full moon tonight. The sky is clear and the world is bathed in a grey light;
not the dry pale yellow light of day, but the liquid light of midnight that
delicately paints the water of the bay with fine silver and tops Goat Fell
with a shimmering frost. The land is orange, sliced by the jagged shards of
illumination the sodium lights cast like a disinterested mockery of the
moon's breath of light. Six hours before sunrise. It seems to me like I have
six hours left to live.
	She's up ahead, still walking. She hasn't looked back yet. I could
call after her, ask her to stop, but I won't - she'll keep walking, going
away from me. Leaving me. I could catch up - she's walking briskly but it
would be easy enough. But I walk in fits and starts, stopping now and then
to tell myself I'm a fool to chase her, that I'm only making things worse.
She hates me, but if I go back to the house - if I give her time, speak to
her later, maybe she'll think again, think maybe she could come back to me,
think of all the good times. But I can't take her with me.
	I stop under a streetlight and hear her shoes mock me as she keeps
going, a steady 'tack-tack' on tar made metallic by the rains of the day and
the mercury moonlight.
	Maybe she will forgive me. Maybe she'll think about us again, maybe
she just needs to be alone. I'll speak to her in the morning. I won't beg, I
won't cry at her, grovel and - she's getting away. She turns down a
sidestreet and I panic and run, chasing her. It's all very well to stop and
see sense, but only if I don't lose sight of where she's going.
	She's going to the bunker.
	I slow down to a walk but I can't stop again.  Obviously, she'll go
to the bunker where we slept last night. I round the corner and she's up
ahead, quite far away. 'tack-tack-tack-tack.' She throws her hair over her
shoulder with one hand and I see the ring gleam in the light. She brings her
hand around in front of her and stops, her head lowered to look at it. I
stop. She's a couple of hundred metres up ahead, and I'm sure I can hear her
breathing - she's nearly crying. I start walking, planning to catch up with
her, but when she starts walking, too, I slow down and resume my role as the
floundering shadow.
	We're heading for the beach - or, well, she's heading for it, I'm
just the mournful tail. Half a man, just a shadow - just a shadow, following
its owner because it dies the moment it stops doing that. I feel sure some
streetlight's going to cancel me out and I'll be out there in limbo, a dead
shadow - but none of them do. I'm not dying, I'm just being left
	Alone. Like I'm going to leave her.
	Alone.
	I stop and watch her walking for a second. Walking away from me. The
further away she gets the more acute the sensation gets - my fingertips
tingle and my chest feels hollow, my eyes burn and I can feel the voices
screaming in my head, the better half of me banging on the inside of my
skull because he knew, HE knew all along I was going to mess this up...
	I walk again. I just want to do the right thing. Something's just
scooped out all the sense in me and I can't put together a plan, can't
scheme myself out of this. Can't find a way of interpreting this scenario
and extending it so I get to go home with her tonight and hold her and never
let her go. Where she'll forgive me and just forget this whole thing and we
can be together again and I can take her out on the water. We'll lie in the
boat and make love, caressed by moonlight and rocked by the gentle waves.
	But she keeps walking and my head keeps reeling. I'm starting to
wonder why she's not heading for the bunker any more when I realise what's
happening; she's going to the harbour, where we met.

			      *       *       *

I was hanging around, smoking and watching the seabirds cursing and wheeling
in the sky. Summer time. I sat on the rocks waiting for the tide to come
further up - as soon as it did, I'd head for the beach and pull out my boat.
Go out from the shore a bit and just lie there and read, with just the soft
slaps of the water against the hull for company. Heaven. She sat down beside
me.
	"Hi," I said, surprised; I hadn't heard her approaching.
	She sat silently by my side, looking out to sea. I'd never seen her
before. I tried to think of something to say - something like "Who the hell
are you?" seemed to be the best I could produce. So we sat in silence. It
was strangely comfortable, not a tense silence like you'd expect in the
circumstances. After a while, she spoke.
	"Spend a lot of time here?" she asked. Her voice was clear and
smooth, like cool spring water. I looked around to see her still gazing at
the distant horizon.
	"Yes," I said. "I sit here when I've got nothing else to do. An
hour, maybe two hours a day. Sometimes longer, if the weather's good." I
remembered I should be introducing myself - offer my name, ask for hers, but
somehow it wouldn't have fit. I expected her to think I was boring right
from the start - a nameless fool who sits on rocks all day doing nothing.
	"I can see why," she said, and fell silent again, looking down at
the water charging at the big red-orange rocks and falling back to regroup.
	Again and again.

			      *       *       *

She's walking faster now, so I speed up too. I can't lose her. I can't just
lose her. She's turning off past the tourist information centre, still
headed for the harbour. Reflexively, she looks both ways before she crosses,
then takes a diagonal route across the crossroads and onto the road that
leads up the hillside. Not the harbour, then - the cliffs. I follow. For
some reason I look both ways, too - there's never any traffic here, even in
the daytime, even at the height of the tourist season.
	I start walking too, keeping a hundred and fifty metres between us.
Suddenly, she turns around and heads for the shore.

			      *       *       *

"Going out in my boat," I explained to her. I stood up and turned to face
her. Would you like to come with me? I didn't say it, but I felt I should
have. She held out her hand, face down. Her fingers were long and slim and
regular; she had aristrocratic hands. In a few seconds, I figured out what
to do. I took her hand and gently helped her to her feet. She weighed
nothing at all.
	She followed through and suddenly her lips were on mine. I kissed
her back, wondering what to do, then she extracted herself and looked up at
me, eyes full of fun. I wanted to ask - what was that for? What's going on?
Something about her little half-smile silenced me.
	She headed down the rocks, picking her way back towards the road. I
followed. When she got to the broken tar, she turned around and smiled.
	"Where's your boat?" She was coming with me. I just felt it.
	"This way," I said, heading off along the rocky beach. She walked
beside me, silent. A quarter of an hour passed and the rocks gave way to
rounded pebbles, which gave way to sand. I waited while she took off her
shoes and socks.
	"We got in from the mainland a couple weeks ago," I began. "I
thought this place was hell. I wanted my clubs, my friends, the traffic.
Here, it was always so damn quiet it freaked me out. You could just walk out
the door and right into the road and you didn't get a honk. No cars.
	"Then I came down to the beach, but just because my parents made me.
Said I should get to know the place. Get out of the house, away from the
damn computer, the usual stuff. I was bored out of my skull so I dumped
them and walked along the beach towards the harbour. I sat on those rocks
for an hour and nobody spoke to me. I just looked at the water bunching up
like a fist and smashing into the rock, then pulling back and going again.
I looked out to sea and the horizon looked so close, the water looked so
warm in the sun, twinkling like all the stars were in it. I got down from
the rocks and walked the other way.
	"I got back to the sandy beach where I'd started, but my parents had
gone so I headed on, further that way. The sand gave way to rocks which gave
way to sand. A long way over there there are walls of basalt reaching out
into the sea like giant arms. It gets really hot in the sun and when I got
to them I just walked around on them barefoot, stepping off into the puddles
of seawater now and then to cool my feet. There's this ridge of salt round
each of the dips where the water collects.
	"After a while I carried on along the beach until the sun started
setting and the twighlight made everything look unreal. I turned around to
pick my way back and I saw a boat." We were still walking along the warm
sand, the Atlantic slowly climbing up to consume the beach from the West.
She didn't speak, so I continued.
	"It was just lying in the grass upside down, glossy green hull
shining in the sunlight. I walked up to it to get a closer look, lifted it
up and saw a piece of paper taped to the floor inside. I turned it over - it
was more bulky and less heavy than it looked - and read the paper.
	"It said the boat belonged to the first person to come along and
take it. The owner had just dumped it there for someone to pick up. So I
did.
	"And I half walked, half crawled for a quarter of a mile. The boat
was really too heavy for me to carry on my own. After a while, I realised I
was being stupid and took it down to the water. I waded out with it for a
while until it was afloat, made sure there were no leaks and struggled in.
I pulled out the oars and set them up and took the boat out to sea a bit.
I meant to just take it out two hundred yards or so then go along the coast
but I just went out and out, seeing the coastline shrink and more and more
of the island appear from both sides. It was beautiful. The most beautiful
thing I'd ever seen." I stopped and looked at her, to see if she understood.
	She did. She didn't say anything, but she looked at me and I could
see it in her eyes. She knew what I'd seen, and she knew what it had meant
to me. Eyes that looked like they were almost moved to tears rested on my
face for a moment then turned back forwards. We were there.
	We took the boat out and she just sat in front of me, facing away
from me and back out to the shore, watching what I'd watched a week or so
back while I rowed the boat out. It suddenly struck me.
	I was sitting where I'd sat all those days ago, watching something
even more beautiful.

			      *       *       *

She cuts across the street and heads for the footpath along the coast to the
South. She's sweeping her hair back again with one hand and pushing the
little gate open with the other. It creaks forlornly and clicks shut behind
her as she sets out along the path.
	I follow.

			      *       *       *

Eventually she turned around, settling into the back of the boat and smiling
at me.
	"It is beautiful," she said. "I never thought of that island as
beautiful, but I guess I never really looked at it before."
	"Nobody does," I agreed. "I didn't, either, until I saw it from my
boat. There's something about hearing the water pat the wood that makes it
better in a way." She dangled one hand over the back into the water. I kept
rowing for a while until we were far enough out and pulled the oars in,
laying them along the sides of the boat. Suddenly we were very alone
together, an isolated island of life drifting in my beloved Atlantic.

			      *       *       *

I feel like my world is dying and falling apart as I step over roots,
padding along the soft earth as the path writhes around the colourless
ferns. She strides purposefully along, seeming to move faster on this rough
ground than she did on the pavements of the town. The land is silent. The
only sounds I can hear are the soft breathless noises her clothes make as
she walks and the hissing of the ocean.
	I realise with a quick start that we're near where I kept my boat.
She turns from the main path onto a narrower one that follows a little
stream down to the sea. I follow fairly close behind her. We come to a
little cottage with white walls and she stops by it. I stop too, but she
doesn't start walking again. She just stands looking out to sea. I walk up
to her; I'm just a metre or two behind her now and I can see what she's
looking at out there. The sea is very close and dark, and in the distance
the prickling lights of the fishing village seem shy and afraid.
	"I'm sorry," I croak, my throat closed up. For a long time she
stands silently, then she sets off down the path again. I look at her back
for a few moments, then set off after her.

			      *       *       *

"I love the sea," I said. She smiled and blushed a little. "I come out here
and read sometimes, but mostly I just think. I think of how much I hate what
I was like for all those years. How much I love to sit here and just rock on
the swell, drifting and not caring where I end up, really. Because I'm home
when I'm out here." She smiled again.
	"I love you too," she said. I wondered what she meant.

			      *       *       *

Suddenly she turns around, standing right on the spot where my boat used to
stay. She looks at me and I see that she's full of a kind of futile rage.
Like when you yell and slam doors and feel like you're going to hit someone,
but you know inside you're really crying. We just stand there, a couple of
metres apart on the sand, looking straight at each other. I wait for her to
talk.
	For a while she doesn't, then -
	"Why?" she asks.
	"I don't know, I - we - my parents are going away back to the
mainland, I have to go back with them." A tear rolls down her cheek.
	"You don't have to. You just don't love me," she says unreasonably.
"You said you loved me."
	"I do love you," I say. "I'll keep in touch," I offer. She doesn't
reply, but instead looks at me like I've said something incredibly stupid.
Then she turns and walks towards the water.
	I follow her.
	"I do love you!" I call after her, as she melts into the breakers.
	"Not enough," says her voice, but she's completely vanished.
	"I'm sorry," I say to the waves as they patter up the sand.
	"I know," they whisper.  I feel the water gently brush my ankles
with her fingers.
	And I know that I will always love the sea.


					http://www.nkpwhq.com/~freon/
					freon@kmfms.com

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