Girls’ Night In. Jessica Adams
hot, heavy slumber. I’d missed breakfast, missed the man with his carefully quartered toast. I dressed without showering first – you’d have been appalled – pulled on yesterday’s tired clothes, dragged my matted hair back into a careless ponytail. There was a new urgency, I didn’t know why or what for, I did know I’d better get out there and use it before my inebriate brain woke up properly and grief lethargy hit again.
The sun was hot on my covered arms, your old jumper that I’ve been wearing half the time for most of a year was not meant for summer, not even British summer. I pulled the sleeves up to my elbows and looked at my pale arms, thin since you. Bony fingers reaching out for a hand to hold. I stopped on the road above the shore and saw the man, his telescope trained on a rock far out, exposed by the low tide, I saw wheeling dots around the rock, no doubt he saw and knew his prey, jotted notes on salt-damp paper, categorized, called and caught. He watched the birds for an hour or so, I watched him for almost as long.
It was peaceful and warm, not enough tourists had lasted the wet week for the remaining few to disturb me over much. Those who had stayed were families with too many small children and too few large bank balances to move on to the next place the sun might be. The shore was blessedly free of hand-holding couples who might have rubbed sea-salt in my fresh wounds. It is close to a year, I know, but the wounds are as fresh as the day you made them, ripping yourself away from my grasp. They stay fresh, I like them that way. I understand them that way.
The man began to pack up his equipment and I quickly moved on, up the hill, beyond the headland where the wind is fresher and cooler. I did not want him to see me watching. He might equate distraction with interest, and I can no longer manage polite conversation. Strangers are not usually equipped to deal with unexpected tears. I never used to cope so well either. Now the salt-flow is my norm. You always preferred sea water to fresh. How nice to know I am still pleasing you. (I would rather not please you.)
Venice. They all said not to go in summer. They were right. Would have been all right if we had been tourists, clammy bodies cramming St Mark’s Square, over-flowing flesh flooding into the Lido overflow. But we were not tourists you and I. I had not travelled to the lagoon to marvel at Tintoretto or applaud the bravery of the Guggenheim collection. Instead I took a hotel room-bound long weekend to marvel at the delicate flesh tones of you, to applaud the priceless modern collection, astonishing bravery of spirit, the audacity and shock that was only you. Your body offered to me on cool white sheets, your self laid out with room service care, the touch and taste of you making a bland white bread of their coffee, biscotti, bruchetta, prosecco, proscutio, prandial-offered prospect. Childhood-myth and long awaited Venice lay before me, open plate, offered wide. I closed the shutters on the grounded visitors of the grand vista, Grand Canal, you were all the view I needed. I toured you that weekend. Unlikely rest weekend away, I went home exhausted and thin. Who could ask for more?
Since then I have been offered another chance to view you, laid out on equally cool white sheets. They said it might have helped. But I wasn’t interested in making it better. They could not make you better, you were my very best, so why bother? I closed the wide eye-shutters on their kind offer. Some sights should remain unseen wonders; wonder-full, awe-full. Awful.
You and I swimming. You have always swum further, faster, deeper than me. I would struggle to keep up, against the current, against the waves, against my grain. I am really a land person, understand dirt, rocks, hills, mountains, prefer my horizon bordered with recognizable jigsaw edge pieces. You like a long straight line of water against the sky, would swim far out until I was left behind, bobbing in the shallows, straining salt-splashed eyes for your return. No change there then. But I always enjoyed the intensity of your enjoyment, happily lay hours on the beach, leathering my skin as you watered your parched soul, several summers of block-buster reading discarded for the better-seller option of reviewing you.
Fifth morning and I found myself watching the man again. This time from my bedroom window, wet day, no sleep, no energy to make the dressed politeness of dining-room breakfast, I sipped already cold tea with UHT milk and couldn’t taste the difference anyway. He walked through the morning drizzle, apparently untouched by the disgruntled irritation of bed and breakfasters all along the coast, their one-week-a-year panic settling and sending out just-suppressed fury, a heavy wave of pissed-off mist lining the damp shore. It seemed though that perhaps this was just what the man wanted. Empty coastline, morning haze, ugly mudflats of low tide exposing the bird breakfast smorgasbord. Like him, you wouldn’t have cared about the weather, might even have welcomed the rain, clearing the sea for your endeavours alone. But you wouldn’t have seen his sights. Your eye would have been trained on the fuzzy horizon, the thin grey line blurred by the cool land and the warm rain. You would have walked right past him, run even, to get into the water, drench your skin in its welcoming cold. But I watched him searching carefully, patiently training his eye on something too far to touch, too wild to get close, yet there. Within his sights. Watching and noting and writing down the real.
And then I found I’d been watching the man for three hours. He’d been watching the birds for three hours. It was almost midday, the clouds began to clear and the beach-bound families re-found their summer resolve – we will play on the beaches, come rain or shine. The shine finally came and so did they, deserting the indoor shopping malls for the outdoor version. The bird man turned away. Clearly needed fewer people for his telescopic foray. It seemed that perhaps no people might suit him better. Made sense to me. And I began to think about what he was looking at, that he seemed to have made it his job to view what was actually there.
When they told me what had happened, it was impossible to believe. Not that I chose not to believe, or couldn’t understand, simply too far-fetched for truth. We’d talked about it. Late-night lover conversations, ‘How will I survive without you?’, ‘You won’t ever have to.’ ‘I’m never leaving you.’ ‘I’m never leaving you.’ ‘If anything ever happens to me I’ll come back.’ ‘Promise?’ ‘Promise.’ But it wasn’t something else that happened to you. Not something outside, beyond our control, no freak accident, creeping disease that took you. They told me that you took yourself, the creeping disease of accidental freak. You should have come to find me, confided in me. You should have cooled yourself swimming in me, but while I could always lose myself in you, soothe myself in you, it seems the reverse was not true. In summer, in London, sweltering city of land-locked people and grid-locked cars, you could find no water-marked horizon to cool yourself, so you swam out into the sky instead. Diving towards a sharp line horizon that could not be real, swimming yourself to the same place.
And it seems I’ve been doing the same. Training my telescopic eye on the not-there. Scanning impossible horizons for a blessed untruth, notebook and pen poised to record the self-created hope.
The next day, a solid night’s sleep for the first time in nearly a year, and again I am up before the sun has made it through the thick morning drizzle. My bags are packed, my room tidied, and I’m on the shore before all the other visitors who have learned to wait until at least five hours of daylight has burnt away the rain. I carry you to the shore as you sometimes tried to carry me. Picking me up and stumbling a few feet to dump me in the water, both of us tumbling in the waves and each other. I carry the full urn and take this chance to look at you, really see what is here, not my dream of you. The truth is that you are ashes. That is all you are. And ashes cannot come back to me.
I can see the bird man, maybe three hundred feet away, his telescope trained on the high cliff to our right. The breakfast waitress told me he had hoped to sight a pair of gannets this week, that someone had told him they had been seen around here recently, staying on too long into summer, a special treat for the watcher. She told me gannets mate for life. It’s a nice idea, but I don’t know much about birds, don’t care much about birds. It turns out the hope of flight was your thing, not mine. The man raises a hand to wave to me, after all, we’ve seen each other every morning, every day, for almost a week now. But I don’t respond. I have a job to do. Something real of my own to view. I have the truth of you to concentrate on.
The water is warmer than I had expected. I walk out to almost waist deep. There is very light rain, a thin horizon of pale grey, the certainty of bright sunshine in another hour or so. I’m training my vision