The Night Swimmer (28 page)

Nora stayed upstairs or in the parlor, not greeting me at the door. In the morning we had painfully cordial exchanges as she served breakfast.

Why don't people like us here? I asked her. I mean Fred and me.

She was standing in the doorway to the kitchen and I immediately regretted asking. She was one of the few islanders who treated
me kindly, and I didn't want to lose that. I owed her for what she did for me the night I found Patrick's body.

You don't know, Elly, she said. That's not how it is.

Nora maintained something like a smile. She kept looking back into the kitchen, as if checking something on the stove.

You're right, I said, I don't know anything. I'm just trying to understand.

You shouldn't worry about this, she said. I'm afraid I've got the kettle on the hob. Do you need more toast?

I can't seem to get a straight answer, I said. Only a couple of people will talk to me. Some people are real friendly, like you of course, but still, there's this feeling. I can't explain it. It's bad in Baltimore, with Fred. Nobody comes to the pub.

Her face worked and her eyes drifted away to a spot over my head. She didn't want to say what came next.

We keep to our own kind, she said. Just the way of things.

But you helped me before. You know me.

Please don't ask me about this. There are some things that cannot be explained. There are things about this island that even we don't understand.

She turned away and went into the kitchen.

*  *  *

Standing in the road in front of Nora's I saw a man perched in a window in the old lighthouse up the hill. He was wearing a long coat, and what surprised me most was that I didn't think you could get inside the lighthouse as the entrances were all gated and locked. His face was behind a giant camera lens levered on a hunk of stone, pointing in my general direction. I figured that he was a birder, likely trying to get long shots of Fastnet. I waved to him. After a moment he raised his head from the camera and held up a hand. We stood there for a few moments, our hands raised. I turned and went down the hill.

Clear had always felt lonely, but now I desperately wanted to see a kindly face. I crossed the western plateau and through the boglands
to O'Boyle's caravan. His new house now had three standing walls, a washbasin, an old bureau, an expensive-looking leather armchair, and a gleaming stainless-steel gas barbecue grill in the yard. But still no roof. Smoke puffed from the chimney of the caravan so I took the path down into the gentle depression in the bog. Across the way by the northern cliffs, toward Dún an óir, I saw another figure, standing in the waist-high bracken, a black silhouette against Roaringwater Bay, watching me approach. Another birder? It was not Miranda, I could see that right off. When I stopped and shaded my eyes she quickly turned and I could tell it was a young woman. She disappeared behind the rise toward the northern cliffs.

O'Boyle was lounging on the couch in a pile of blankets and drinking tea, sleepy and content looking. There was the close, sweet aroma of bodies.

I saw a girl up on the hill, I said, to the north. Wearing a cloak?

O'Boyle leaned forward to pour me some tea. He was a bit sweaty.

Ariel, he said. Havin' a cuppa wit me.

Really.

Yah. Nice lass. Known her since she was a babe.

How old is she?

Oh, she must be something like thirty-five by now.

That's impossible, I said. She can't be a day over twenty. She looks like a teenager.

Clean livin' I suppose. Island living.

Wait, how old are you?

O'Boyle grinned and stood up, slapping his belly. He was wearing an old flannel shirt and gym shorts, and his erection was painfully obvious.

Thirty-nine, he said.

I stood up and stared at his face. It was worn, but unlined, the skin taut, his eyes rounded and bright. I didn't believe him and I told him so. He shrugged and scratched himself and ambled into the kitchen. Perhaps his sense of time had become warped because he never left the island. Perhaps an island year was a different unit of measurement.

Ariel was born here too?

Oh yah, O'Boyle said. She goes back, well, back as far as I do, that's for sure. Our people . . . have known each other for many centuries. More tea?

He was taking something that looked like dirt out of a small pouch and pressing it into a tea diffuser. The kettle was whispering on the hob. The caravan rocked with buffets of wind. I looked into my cup. There were bits of flotsam and I could dimly discern a small pile of twigs on the bottom.

No thanks.

Your man Fred still in the cave, working at the forge?

Yeah, how'd you know?

Dinny told me.

Really. Didn't know that guy even spoke.

Not much, O'Boyle said. But he comes around, has a can or two. He's a good lad all considered.

What happened to him? I mean his hands, the scars.

O'Boyle slouched on the couch and frowned into his sagging belly. A thin patter of rain rang on the sheet metal roof of the caravan.

An accident, he said. On the salvage boat.

Conchur's boat?

Yeah.

Was there a fire?

O'Boyle shrugged and stared into his teacup. We sat there for a few moments listening to the rain.

Dinny used to be a talkative chap, O'Boyle said. Talked plenty. Sometimes . . . he talked too much. He used to work the ferry, other jobs on the mainland.

For Kieran?

Yeah. One day, 'bout four years ago, Kieran puts him on Conchur's crew. They head out the first day. They had a couple boats then, smaller ones, and Dinny was driving one of them, him being Kieran's nephew and all. That night his boat comes floating into the South Harbor, all afire. A ghostly sight. It just drifted in, full of flames, and beached itself on the rocks. Dinny was still on board, alive. They
didn't find him until after they put the fire out and drug the boat up. He was badly, badly burned. I was there when they pulled him out, blackened and arms and legs drawn up. Looked like a burnt spider. Hands, legs, most of his body. A real mess. His boots were melted to his feet. Some kind of accident. The rest of the crew got off on Conchur's boat, but Dinny was trapped belowdecks.

O'Boyle sipped his tea, swallowed.

'E never said much after that.

*  *  *

That night I slept fitfully, everything seemed uncomfortable. I lay in bed with the mental image of a tangled knot of springs and wires, all twisted and straining around some central force, the whole spiny mess about to explode and fly in all directions.

*  *  *

The Spring Regatta was held every year in April to mark the beginning of the tourist season on Cape Clear. The Ineer was packed tight with yachts and sloops from all over Europe, and in the Five Bells they were four deep at the bar, the stone patio serving as the dance floor, and O'Boyle and a few others played all hours of the day and night.

Fred closed the bar and we came across on the sailboat with Bill and Nell. We had a thin stream of people coming through on their way to the island, stepping in to have a pint while waiting for the ferry. But they didn't stay long.

Fred had assumed a consistently belligerent manner with customers, as if each one who came in was a kind of intrusion. On the bar he had long, narrow hunks of iron ore, and in between pulling beers he was trying to bore out the barrel. In a large bowl-shaped stone he had powdered charcoal that he was grinding with a piece of granite, the handle wrapped in seaweed. A wooden box held chalky hunks of sulfur that made the bar smell faintly like rotten eggs. In the alley behind the bar he had a six-foot pile of manure mixed with potato peels, leaves, and other food refuse. Twice a week he went out and
poured a bucket of his urine over the mixture. In a few weeks he'd be able to extract the potassium nitrate, or saltpeter, to complete his gunpowder recipe. None of this was helping business, but Fred didn't seem to care. He shrugged off anything I said about it, maintaining that we only needed to hang on until the summer season. His book would be finished, he said, and he could devote himself fully to the business. I didn't believe him.

By this time we were lucky to have sex more than once a month. In the beginning of our marriage Fred was so desperate for me that he would actually pine and beg for my naked body, to have his hands upon me, to be inside me. Now we mostly had brief, awkward encounters, mechanical in tone, that seemed to make Fred more relieved than anything else. I did not fake or overplay my enjoyment of these acts, and Fred seemed fine with this as well. I wondered if he had grown tired of my body, that what had attracted him to begin with was the strangeness of my size and shape, and after time I merely became ugly to him. I would lie in bed at night, Fred snoring beside me, and touch my arms and stomach, feeling my skin, the thousands of tiny bumps. I didn't know how it felt to him.

That heat Fred had for me, was it displaced somehow or alleviated at some other portal? I never felt for a moment that Fred would cheat on me with another woman, rather I suspected mostly that he was cheating with himself. I do not know which is worse. There is a lot to be salvaged in being displaced by a fantasy, a memory, a projection of the mind, rather than an actual person. But I was a real body, here, waiting, and to be left aside for a thought was another kind of unpleasantness that is difficult to consider, now, after all that has passed.

*  *  *

It was a bright and sunny day, though the winds still tore through Roaringwater Bay. The boats that made the journey actually under sail, as we did, did so reefed and lashed, and Fred scrambled about the foredeck as Bill bellowed commands from the cockpit. I hadn't been on the sailboat with them in a while, and Fred attacked lines and rigging
like an old salt, hauling away and swinging around the halyards, grinning at me like a fool. Some part of me was reluctant to have him on the island. Clear had become a kind of private kingdom for me.

We had chilled oysters with hot sauce and great mounds of Sheila Flaherty's potato salad, apparently made without mayo or mustard, bound together by some other ingredient I could not name. The Five Bells patio was a babel of languages, the yachting set in their linen pants pouring liberally from magnums of champagne, birders with their lenses askew across their chests, imbibing, always with one eye to the hillsides. Fred slipped off with the woofers and came back goofy-eyed and chatty, massaging my neck and telling me how much he loved me. I watched Bill, one arm clamped around Nell, the two of them beaming as they watched the furious activity of the harbor at sunset.

There were several especially large sailboats drawn up at the quay, and people sat on chaise lounges on the teak decks with cocktails and glass bowls of peeled shrimp. A three-masted schooner at the far end of the dock flew a large American flag, the deck oddly empty. It was the same sailboat that we'd seen anchored behind the Calf Islands when Bill attempted to sail us out to Fastnet. I saw a tall man emerge up the steps from the cabin, adjusting a camera bag and putting on a pair of sunglasses. He turned to take in the scene up the hill, and the afternoon sunlight fell on his face. Sebastian. He stared for a moment, but I do not know if he could pick me out in the crowd.

*  *  *

Later in the Five Bells we got drunk with the woofers. I was tired and sort of half listening to their talk, watching the windburned tourists at the bar feeding each other drinks, resisting the urge to go outside and walk down to the Ineer to see Fastnet. Fred, Gus, and Magdalene were bent over a scrap of paper. Fred was making a list with a pencil, tallying a set of numbers.

This guy owns a chain of pubs, Fred said, all through County Cork. I'm talking like forty pubs. He loved the stuff. The cheeses especially. People love the organic thing. They may not give a shit in places like Baltimore, but in the cities it's all the rage.

No way we could produce that, Gus said. Too much.

See, this is how you do it. You give them everything you got. Then if it sells, they will front you the money to expand. A kind of partnership.

Are you serious? Magdalene said. Is this real?

It was Patrick's idea, Fred said. I just happened to meet some of these guys through Murphy's. I think it could work.

The American girls, Stacy and Sara, were whispering to each other. They looked sorrowfully drunk.

Stacy put her arm around her friend in consolation, and I realized in that moment that it hadn't been Patrick digging out an unattainable romantic vision of love, rather it was Sara who had fallen for
him.
The girls held hands and looked into their empty pint glasses. They still thought that he killed himself. I wanted to reach out across the table and touch their faces, say that I was sorry. I wanted to tell them that Patrick did not kill himself, that he did not throw himself off the cliff. I know this because I was in the water that night with his body. I was there because he had to tell me.

*  *  *

After midnight we were in the Five Bells on the bench by the fire. I was nearly asleep, resting my head on Fred's shoulder. Fred was still high and lecturing the woofers on some matter of Herman Melville.
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.

I felt a touch and Ariel was standing there, one of her gecko fingers on my wrist. She could stand beside you and you would still not know she was there. It was as if she had no discernible presence, until she wanted to. She gestured to the patio outside.

You should see this, she said.

We all tumbled out onto the near-empty patio illuminated by sputtering tiki torches. The band was winding down, clearly exhausted, and the only pair on the dance floor was Bill and Nell, dancing a rather formal waltz. The moon hung over the waters of Roaringwater
Bay like a watch on a chain, the streak of buttery light stretching into the harbor mouth.

He does it every year, Ariel said.