“When anybody dies, there is always someone else who was the last person in the world that they saw before departing to whatever fate awaits their consciousness. The chances that this someone else is a complete stranger to the deceasee must, I guess, be pretty high. I often wonder where I’ll be, who’ll or what’ll be within sight, what I’ll be doing, what’ll I be listening to... In fact, turning it on its head for a moment, I may one day be that complete stranger as the last visual intake by one who is on the point of dying...”
The speaker was a florid gentleman in his fifties who lolled back on a deckchair, his voice flattened out by the strength of the warm wind. The deck of the cruise ship sloped both ways at the same time, it seemed to me, as I swallowed hard to keep the bile down.
I was on honeymoon: a holiday of a lifetime, I had imagined. Of course, the venue had been kept secret from Em until the last moment. We had left the quay in a small launch, laughing together, as we waved goodbye to all the good-hearted souls milling amid the party balloons. They had tied tin cans to the end of the launch, which we did not at first notice, because the roar of the sea prevented any rattling. However, we had a very angry launch captain cursing the “crazee Ingleesh” when the cans got tangled up with the propeller.
***
But I still cannot put out of my mind an earlier honeymoon, a pre-Em affair when I forever thought I’d met my mate. It had not turned out to be the ideal venue. Having taken my then new bride to an eastern island, I did hope to entice her into the life-style of the locals and away from that prissy part of the city where she thought the world started ... and ended. Nancy was that one’s name.
Night seems to come earlier by the sea. That’s because the days are shortened by the gull cries, the salt savours of ripe fish and bracing beach walks. It’s strange, the fuller life is, the shorter it becomes. Nancy and I are lodging at a fisherman’s hut in sight of the lighthouse. The surge of its sporadic beams through the dark hours acts as the natural seabreak to the crests of our lovemaking. Pent up urgency is far sweeter than its eventual release ... or so all the theory in the manuals told us.
***
I loved Em, long after I loved Nancy. But, even if it wasn’t love at first sight, Em was a childhood sweetheart, one whom I had first seen across the English infants’ playground, doodling with her toes in the dust. Em and I had been brought up in a very hot climate and us nippers often walked about nude – like the natives – and, from that day forth, we walked hand in hand. She became an essential part of me and I of her. So, our dream trip was to be as special as I could make it. The cruise ship was to make a tour of the most exotic spots imaginable, leaving the southern hemisphere for glorious Liverpool and Belfast as the first ports of call.
We had heard legends of the northern home country but now, on honeymoon, Em and I would have the opportunity to see these places for ourselves. My paternal grandmother was originally from Northern Ireland, my maternal grandfather an East India Docks man from Leyton Orient. I remember them squatting in the hot sun, letting their toes dangle in the bright blue rockpool, telling tales of those strange haunting lands up north.
***
The Nancy honeymoon, however, is quite different. I was brought up not far from here. Nevertheless, the locals have grown beyond my comprehension since I left the city as a young man. They now seem older, more weathered, with gnarled expressions that take rather than give. Those I half recognise fail to acknowledge me. Even the young women look as if they’re wed to sea dogs from this southern clime. The fish-wives are closer to death, their mouths opening and shutting, upon seeing me again, but failing to say anything.
Many lags point to Nancy, nudging each other, spitting foul oaths into each other’s ears ... and I do not give them the benefit of naming her by introduction. Even on the first day of this ancient honeymoon, I have surrendered hope of anything good rubbing off on us. If I had been born here, I must have died years ago. I laugh to myself at that thought.
In any event, it little matters, for we love each other, Nancy and I.
***
The launch eventually delivered Em and I up to the cruise liner – a day late, admittedly – but, luckily the crew had not finished the victualling until late on the previous evening, so we had not delayed them unduly.
There were only three other passengers: the florid gentleman, a spinster lady of an indeterminate age ( who had taken to wearing the most revealing swimwear as soon as we were out in the open sea) and a younger man who kept himself to himself.
And there were also Em and myself, the only two who shared a cabin. She was excited about the prospect of the trip, having only known about it for the last few hours: she had automatically assumed that we were to go island-hopping in the temperate gulf waters where we had been born. I was later to curse that I exceeded such ambitions and took poor Em into regions to which she was in no way suited.
***
The hut where Nancy and I stay is little more than an upturned hulk, pitted by centuries within centuries of salt spray. The windows have been forced through the seasoned wood with jagged gutting knives, by the look of them. And, by the relentless warning beacon, we watch the gravestone tongues in the churchyard – whereto the cliff edge has reached, already consigning the once-ancient church itself to the fate of the tides. A graveyard with nothing to landmark it except the remnant stubs of tombs, this is one unromantic view from our bedroom window, although death, I’ve heard it said, must have its own romance.
***
The florid gentleman told Em and I how dismal Old England would be. We did not believe him (and told him so) for “my respectful grandparents of both bloodstreams told me, sir, that the place is full of interesting nooks and crannies, tall proud buildings where the happy workers live and fruit their stock, wide esplanades where gilded carriages wend from Coronation to Coronation, burnished architectural feats of Religion spiring into the varied skies...”
He would interrupt me with his philosophical ramblings concerning death, as if that were answer to every argument. So, from that time on, we took him with a pinch of sea-salt, putting him down as a natural melancholic.
***
“I wish it were not so quiet,” says Nancy, nuzzling my chest, as she resettles into the ruckbed from gazing out of the ill-cut window.
I am entranced by her shapely form – sculptured as it is against the twirling beacon – aching for her to tiptoe back to our bed to staunch a new wave of passion in my loins. Now that she has returned, I’m falling into half-dreams, so tenuous they may even be dreams within dreams – imagining her to be but a tenant of one of those graves. Corpses do not stink of fish. But sweat does.
I wake fitfully to say: “The sea is sounding...”
“Yes, but that is just an ingredient of the silence,” is her almost voiceless reply.
If her parents can see her now, they would not recognise their Nancy who is still wet behind the ears with first communion. The words she speaks are too poetic for the city. At least, some good has come, I think, as my passion is spent against her rump.
***
The captain and his crew, as well as the young male passenger, kept their distance from Em and myself. They were blurred outlines at the fringes of our otherwise fevered excitements.
***
I search the town’s library for old books about the churchyard and come across dusty (sometimes, sticky) volumes that bear return dates decades ago stamped down the margins. The retired librarian retains a catalogue, but most of the spines are unreadable and the listing itself stained by foxing. Apparently, though, the most telling books are kept together furthest from the sea in the attic, and we soon discover in one corroded tome that the set of gravestones viewable from the hulk are those of rat catchers.
***
Em and I had previously played sex games together, so had the highest expectations of the fore-, mid- and post-play that wedlock would allow. And, at first, we did live upon a wild shimmering plane of existence, a near continuous state of orgasm.
If our cabin had had flies upon its walls, they would have spun violently round on their rumps in over-excitement at the sights they had seen. However, it all tailed off gradually, the nearer the cruiser carved its path into the grey sealands further north.
***
Nancy wonders whether rats are common at seasides, but I soon put her right. There was one rat catcher in particular who was actually buried with the rat that killed him. A two-way thing, ratting, I assume. Though in my days as a child in this area, I knew only one rat-catcher who told of killing thousands in one sitting. I didn’t believe him, of course. Until he showed me the bodies he hung as trophies in the tall fishing-tackle hut near the Naze beach.
“There are rats in the sea,” I remember him telling me, with a knowing touch to the nose.
***
Em and I imagined the dark faces of the cruiser’s crew spying on us; we saw them in every corner in whispering huddles. Little did we know, but they were talking in undertones so that we would not worry about the unseasonal storms that had been forecast for the area.
***
The honeymoon period is due to end shortly. Nancy and I have long spent our passions, so we both fall asleep. Now, I am unaccountably drawn to the hulk’s window to see why the beacon has stopped flashing. Being spring, I know the sunrise will soon streak its screaming oranges and reds along the sharp divider of sea and sky. However, I am quite unprepared for the glow that the sea itself gives off, a lambency seeming to filter, not from above, but from below. It is constituted of a myriad flickering tails, long luminous tangles and tentacles undulating in the manner of living flesh-coloured seaweed.
***
If it had not been for the spinster lady, Em and I would have jumped overboard, hand in hand. Despite the encroaching edge of the new winds, that lady still maintained the flimsy holiday garb, visibly shuddering as her hair flew about her face “like the black panicky flames of hell,” as the florid gentleman put it.
***
“Nancy, Nancy...”
She snores, oblivious to my calls from where I watch.
I go over to shake her, but she is trapped by her own dream. I have no option but to return to the ragged window. I swear that one of the gravemarkers is moving, dislodging, even growing...
***
The spinster lady waved away the florid gentleman’s “silly remarks” and leant closer towards Em and I, as all three of us sat in deckchairs, saying:
“Just because I myself haven’t hitched the knot doesn’t mean that I don’t know that things don’t always go smoothly between married couples. But rest assured, dear people, love will certainly prevail.”
My eyes filled with tears. Em stared out to sea. Our hands were still entwined.
***
There’s a knocking at the hulk’s door ... our sealords have arrived to turf us out. The honeymoon’s over.
***
The spinster lady lay back on her deckchair. Another one flew across the planks in the snatching wind, like a striped awning stick-insect. The florid gentleman sauntered towards us, smiling broadly:
“Don’t listen to that old bat.”
Then, he walked on, rubbing his striped belly waistcoat.
***
I return to the torn window. The sea is indeed rising – the tide rolling innards – surging rattail intestines, seething eels amid the spume and wild insulting fingerstalls. It all moves as one. Covering the graveyard in one giant swell of disintegrating kelp and fucus.
I relax, because this is not the present but the past. This can be nothing but a dream. If it were real, then I was surely mad. Or, at best, dead.
I swivel to her whom I have wed so recently. Nancy has the largest rat head I have ever seen, pillowed against the headboard whereupon we earlier ground our love. And I duck to kiss its red lipsticked snout for forgiveness. I feel its wagging fishtail tongue probing mine, making the curdled beer in my stomach heave in tidal swells of sick.
***
Exactly when it was that Em had died, I was then and am still unsure. Her little hand had been colder anyway for some time, but now it stuck like ice. Her eyes flickered for the last time, I suspected, as the young male passenger passed along the deck-rail between her and the sea, en route for the dining hall.
***
More in half-recognition, I see someone lying between Nancy and myself in the bed, the body, I assume, having floated in on the surgetide. “Ridden on ratbacks” are the words that haunt my convoluted thoughts. I must be a ghost, for Nancy ignores me as she turns to smile on him.
***
Along the horizon, I had been watching the distant misty shapes of dockside cranes rearing into the turbulent sky like stilted dragonflies. Unaccountably, I recalled those jokester wedding guests back home and wondered if they would send us a postcard.
Like life, the end was rather sudden.
If ghosts do dream and death’s a romance, then I’m a kingfisher’s daughter.
MISCREANT IN MOONSTREAM, Rachel Mildeyes.
Published 'Hermaphrodite Brig' 1999 (with parts originally in 'Back Brain Recluse' 1989)
