““She remembers something her sister said, that they used to be like thieves. The phrase stays with her as she climbs through the house, forgetting what it is she is searching for.” ”
The cut on her hand is deep and red and shaped like a small mouth where the blade of the knife caught the flesh at the base of her palm. The blood tastes good in the winter air, warm and sweet, but the cut begins to sting as she continues to hold it to her lips. She had been waiting for her sister’s yellow van to arrive, and she’d used the time to trim the loose binder twine on the fence post. Her fingers had been too stiff and cold to do the job well, and now here was the hinge of dead white skin, and the bloom of red beneath.
She still has the heel of her hand pressed against her mouth when he appears at the edge of the park. He walks so casually that he could be coming home. It’s the way she’ll remember him later, when her sister has gone and she’s alone. Dressed in jeans and a shirt, and no coat, despite the cold. He’s too far away for her to note the colour of his hair immediately, or recognise that his face is unshaven. But she sees the knapsack on his shoulder and the rod wrapped in canvas, tied with cord, and the way he handles it as though it is familiar and natural to him. She can sense his strength there in the easy balance of things. He’s leaning against the wind to keep upright on the slope as the night starts to rise up the cliff. A bluster of wind dashes his head, he moves the long parcel from one hand to the other, ducks beneath the fence to make his way onto the cliff path and down to the beach. He’s different than the others who come to fish in the night. The knapsack looks empty, and only big enough to hold the bait, and perhaps a small amount of food for him to eat. Not enough until morning. He isn’t experienced, she reasons, but he’s young enough not to care.
The dark of his hair as it blows against the lingering daylight is the last she sees of him. A minute passes and the sound of the van’s tyres crunch against the gravel, bringing her back to reality. She waves as she sees her sister, and steps down from the porch and reminds herself again to fix the sign on the public path, warning people from trespassing on the farmland, so she doesn’t have to see them, these intruders in her life.
They spend their time in the kitchen, drinking tea. Her sister doesn’t mention the cut on her hand until she’s leaving, and then the two sisters stare at each without speaking, old rivalries teased, a sense of competition under the surface, disapproval. She’s the first to smile, and they hug and when they embrace a second time as the sister climbs into the van, she feels the cut open up and begin to bleed again.
When the van is out of sight, she moves to the cliff edge and looks down to the beach, finds the shape of him against the silvered water. She considers climbing down, but when she gets to the gate she begins to worry. It comes from nowhere, this sense of fear, and before she knows it she’s moving back to the house, angry with herself. She remembers something her sister said, that they used to be like thieves. The phrase stays with her as she climbs through the house, forgetting what it is she is searching for.
Two sisters. Thieves.
While the bathroom sink fills with hot water she plunges in her hands and tries not to wince, watches the white flesh of the cut in her palm open under, as perfect as a kiss. She studies her palm, as though it were some specimen of fish, curious at the whiteness. She savours the pain. Strange how painful it can be, a small cut like that. Not even to the bone, just a slice through the surface of the skin. Just deep enough to hurt.
She pictures him looking out to the tide, wondering what he sees there in the blackness, hoping the sea will bring him back tomorrow, so she can stop him before he reaches the cliff, before the beach. This is private land, she’ll tell him. You need to ask if you want to fish. She’ll refuse him permission and he will go away, and that will be the end of the matter.
It is week before he returns. She does not see him arrive, but at night as she is walking her dog, there is the shape of him down on the beach. He has brought a coat today, and a torch. It is set in the sand, the torch, its halo of light drawing the perfect edge of the fishing line, fine and still and extending out, impossibly long, into the waves. Maybe he’s only a boy, she tells herself. Her memory of him from that first time has already retreated, hard to retrieve. But he was tall, she remembers that much. She regrets she hadn’t been here to stop him by the fence, because the thought of climbing down to the beach to confront him is unpleasant, causes an alien jolt of anxiety in her. Down in the dark, she thinks, with a boy – she has decided he is a boy, for no better reason than it makes her feel less angry towards him, more generous and even accepting, because she does not want to be angry. On the beach with him – there’s something disconcerting about the idea. No, it’s not climbing down there that she dreads, not the confrontation. She has spent years arguing with strangers, men, who stray onto her fields. No, it’s anticipating the climb back, up the worn timber stairs, with him watching her. It’s that which causes her to remain where she is. Him, the boy, watching her go. Although, when she tries to search for a reason she cannot easily explain why.
In the night, she has a change of mind. The anger has grown in her since dinner, righteous anger. She does not respect fear, not in others or herself, and she will not be denied from crossing her own beach, will not let a stranger stop her from protecting what is hers. When the words come to her she feels she understands what she means by them, but as she makes her way across the grass, over the stile at the clifftop, she is carrying a flask of tea. And once she is on the sand, and he does not turn from the noise of the sea, from the roar of the black water, she can think of nothing else to say but, You must be cold.
Just that – You must be cold.
She is still angry, even when he thanks her for the tea. He does not ask her to join him, but she remains anyway. They are both standing now, facing the sea. He pours a third cup of tea, and drinks from it. She folds her arms.
Have you caught anything? she asks him, having to raise her voice.
He is young, but not a boy. No taller than her, and similar build. He is ten years younger than her, perhaps a few years more. His beard is dark, and she wonders if he is Spanish or Portuguese. Wonders if he understands her. There is a way about him that is polite, but unfamiliar. He looks at her without answering, and there is no sense he is being rude, and neither is he self-conscious, but he does not reply. He chooses not to reply, that is all. So they stand in silence, and they watch gulls struggle in the night. They do the same the next night, and the next. On the fifth night, she offers to make him something to eat for breakfast, when he is finished fishing. He has to only knock, she tells him.
But I should know your name, she adds, surprised by her own motherly tone. She does not want to appear like a mother to this man, and yet she has noticed herself falling time after time into maternal gestures.
When he tells her his name, she nods. It is not a name she would have given him, not a name that matches his voice, his manner, nor the fluid, often unreadable expressions that pass so subtly across his face. It doesn’t match his gentleness, or the quiet bearing he has. But she nods, because at least now she has a name.
I’ll make soup, she says. Just knock. She does not expect him, however, and when at six the sound of the door wakens her, she’s surprised, having forgotten the arrangement. She answers half-dressed, in her husband’s old shirt and a pair of grey, cotton pants. The man sits patiently as she fries bacon for him. He doesn’t ask about the soup that was promised, and doesn’t offer to help her. Instead he sits and he talks, describing the cold in the night, detailing how he needed to pee three times, despite not having drunk any water, only the tea she had brought at around ten the previous night. How he had coaxed a tern to him with some of the fish bait. A tern with a black face. It sat with him all night, he tells her. He says he was surprised because it did not beg for food or peck at the bait box. It merely sat with him, as though it had chosen this to be the best way to pass the time. He explains how the idea, inexplicably, made him feel happy, grateful even. He talks like this as she cooks, talks more in these minutes than he’s ever talked before. As he talks, he rubs his hands, as though they are still cold. She hasn’t thought to light the oven for him, to heat up the kitchen. His hands are blue with cold. His nose red. He is very handsome, she thinks. She wants to tell him that he has a very handsome face, but she fears it will sound motherly. And so she says, It was a black headed gull. It won’t have been a tern, if it had a black face. But a black headed gull, or a little gull. A Mediterranean gull even. But not a tern.
He eats in silence. He has not washed his hands, and his fingers are dirty, nails rimed with black. His face, however, is clean, as is his beard and his hair. He does not live rough, she reasons, and his clothes, although faded and worn are good quality. When he is finished, he climbs up and she follows him to the door. They do not say goodbye, but he smiles and appears very happy. The sort of happiness she does not trust. A childish joy that she finds suspicious in men, unless they are drunk.
By May, he has moved in, is living in her house, sleeping in her bed. She becomes used to waking with his hand wrapped around hers, his breath against her face. His hair lays crumpled and dark against the pillow. When she makes the bed, she finds both his hair and hers matted at the bottom of the sheets, where their feet, in the cold nights, interlock and fold against each other.
They work together on the farm. He is strong and agile, and when she tells him he smells and needs to shower, or that he works too hard and needs to rest, he does not argue. He does not ask about her husband or her life before him. He does not mention the hairs on her legs or under her arms, or the soft rolls of fat at her belly. He does not ask her to call him by his name, although he notices that she never does. She likes that he does not take offence. She likes that he does not talk when they make love, but merely touches and tastes and smells and grips and squeezes and sucks. For a slight man he is physical, and she likes this, too.
When her sister comes to visit, he greets her as though they have known each other all their lives. The three of them eat outside on the porch, despite the cold, and her sister doesn’t complain, which she would have done if it had only been her and her sister, she knows this. And yet, she doesn’t feel resentful, doesn’t feel critical, only satisfied and happy. He has brought this calm with him, she reasons. Or she has, by bringing him here, into her home.
They make love every day, and then they dress, eat breakfast and go outside to work. Sometimes they don’t shower for two days or more. She no longer notices if he smells, and neither is she aware of her own smell. Or rather, she is aware, and she likes it, savours it. She lifts her shirt and inhales, and enjoys the ripe smell of her own body. She likes how she smells when they’ve made love, likes the feel of her skin as it dries, the crust of saliva and semen he leaves against her.
When she is in the field working, he walks up behind her and wraps his arms around her waist, lets his hand linger against her belly, his fingers briefly tucking themselves into the waistband of her jeans. When he is working, she leans over and kisses his neck, below his collar, takes in the scent of his hair, his sweat. She bites the knuckle of the vertebrae at the base of his skull when he tries to push her away.
Sometimes at night they make love, but often they just sleep. When spring comes, and the mornings become too light to sleep, they rise early and walk along the coast, all three of them – the dog, and her and the man. They walk for hours without saying a word, and when they do speak it is him that talks mostly. He tells her about his childhood, and his father, and living in a boat when he was ten. He tells her about the first time he saw a horse die. He tells her about the pets he had, the cats and dogs. He explains how to a repair a sail when you have no yarn or rope or thread. He tells her how best to cook octopus.
She never calls him by his name. She wonders at times about giving him another name, one more suited to who he is or who she knows him to be. But when she tries to find the right name. nothing seems appropriate. And, anyway, he does not seem to mind. She worries, however, that the reason why she can’t give him a name is because she does not know him well enough. Conversely, she worries there is nothing left to learn about him. She worries that at times he sees her as an adult, someone to parent him. She worries he does not need her. She worries they have both gone mad. She worries this will not last. She worries and works and smells him, and bites him and they make love, and they sleep.
For a while they stop talking altogether. They take turns cooking, then they begin to make their own meals separately. They begin to sleep at different times. He sleeps in the afternoon, and then reads through the night. She sleeps at night, and wakes to find him sleeping in the grass by the porch. They eat breakfast, then he climbs upstairs to bed, as she begins the work. They do not make love. She is too tired at night, and he is too awake to lay beside her in bed. Some nights, he takes the dog for long walks, and she finds them both asleep in the kitchen in the morning. She thinks he must hate her, but then, when they are together he often seems so happy, it appears to her to be a sort of delirium. And she cannot help but feel it is a happiness that she has caused.
Then, one day, they argue, and he leaves her house and does not come back.
For a day or two, she waits with her anger, knowing he’ll return eventually. He has taken his things, but she reasons that in itself does not signify anything permanent. He has so few belongings, and when he left he was in a temper, they both were. She had told him to take his things and go, and he had done just that. It was an automatic impulse. He only had as many clothes as could fit in a single bag, and then there was the fishing equipment. She hadn’t dared to get up and watch him go, so she had stayed seated as he’d slammed the door shut behind him. She had told herself her anger was good, it was earned. He had been insensitive and uncaring, he had not listened to her, had refused to understand. She had enjoyed the anger, but later that night she had still expected him to return. And when he didn’t return, her anger with him only grew.
By the time winter comes, the anger has left her. She no longer cries, and truthfully, the crying had only lasted a couple of weeks. She does not miss him, only the habits and routines they had shared. Her sleep improves, and she loses weight. She feels less weary, she tells herself. She now showers twice a day, and enjoys the sensation of being clean. It makes her feel young. She had felt old with him, despite being loved, being seen, heard, she had always felt old, and no matter what they might have done to repair what had been lost, she knew that would not have changed. He was, in many ways, still a boy.
When she sees him again it is years later. He has changed, but only in small ways that individually, in themselves, would not appear too significant, and yet each make him less interesting to her, less attractive. He has shaved his beard, and his face is very bright and soft. It shines in the sunlight, as do his eyes – which appear to be a different colour than she remembers. He is dressed in an ironed shirt and shorts, very clean and neat. He remains the same man, she sees, but he is different, too, less himself perhaps, or what she once saw as him being himself. His true self. His authentic self. Although, she realises that this, too, may have been something that had only ever been real in her perception. As they talk, he glances down many times, as though he has arrived here reluctantly, despite the fact that it was him who asked her to meet. They are shown to their table, and he has not stopped talking. She is not listening fully, she is still trying to take him in, absorb who he is now. She feels rushed to sit, to eat, when all she wants is to be quiet with him, as they once were, when sometimes they would not speak for days. When they would fight on the floor of the bedroom, and bite and scratch each other like animals.
They have almost finished their dessert, when she manages to ask him what she had been meaning to ask all afternoon.
So why were you attracted to me?
His answer, when it comes, surprises her, but doesn’t upset her. It is probably the most honest he’s been in an hour.
I wasn’t.
You didn’t like me?
I didn’t not like you.
Then what was it?
You seemed vulnerable. No, not like that. Shit. You seemed hard.
I am hard. I know that.
But there was a vulnerability, too.
Where? How? Explain it.
You’d cut your finger.
I’d cut my finger.
Yes. when I first saw you, I saw that you’d cut your finger, You sucked on it. On the beach, when you were talking to me. You didn’t seem embarrassed or shy, you just sucked on it, like a child would. Because it hurt.
She realises this is him, his voice now. As he was. The same unapologetic honesty. And it makes her unreasonably angry.
It was my palm, she says. She remembers now. It wasn’t my finger, it was the palm of my hand.
He seems hurt by this, she thinks. There is hurt in his eyes, as though she’s denied him a memory he has cherished. And she tells herself, after all these years he is still a boy.
When they part, she stands a while, thinking about how he had injured her that night he had left. She remembers she had felt very hurt, too, as though in a few words he had undermined everything she felt secure of, everything she knew herself to be. But she cannot feel the hurt now, cannot remember the words. But the memory of the hurt tells her it was real, that the ending was inevitable. She wonders that, if she had not responded in the way she had, would he have become the man he is now – this somewhat polite, formless, banal man. A man with whom she could not fall in love.
He had become this man by leaving her, she reasons, and therefor if he had not had to leave, he would necessarily still be the man she had loved so dearly. Then, too, she would have remained the woman who had loved him, and not the woman here, now, the woman standing reflecting on a relationship that ended. This is what she thinks about.