In Too Deep (13 page)

From beneath the gauzy blanket of a dream, the old man felt something shift, compromising the stillness. He strained to listen, but the world was full of sounds that he'd only lately begun to hear, and it was a full minute before he caught the certain telltale sound of a floorboard's groan, the loose board on the landing just beyond his bedroom door.

‘Jack.' His mouth shaped the name, a flicker of old tongue and a small widening of cracked and sunken lips, but the sound that wheezed to the surface was as dry and blanched as withered November leaves. Then, even before opening his eyes, he smiled.

Smiling really did make everything seem better. The air lost its stifling clamour and lightened around him, and even irreversible situations felt suddenly bearable. He held the smile until it had spread its rays out to the very furthest reaches of his face and delighted one more time in how the muscles tightened, how the creases of time flexed and deepened into the place of worthy shadow.

Then he opened his eyes on the half-lit day.

‘How did you know it was me?
'
Jack stood in the doorway, small and impossibly young, a flower still a long way yet from fullest bloom. The glow of wonder at this piece of magic glimpsed lit a bonfire in his wide, heart-shaped face and made pools of his dark staring eyes, yet it was clear enough that he had reached a kind of precipice. Eight years old was childhood honed to a deadly edge, when all innocence felt distilled to its very purest form. At eight, every breath tasted of newly hatched summer, every bone ached to run. There was mystery to be found at every turn, the bristle and thrill of another challenge to be met and faced down. But all that chasing, laughing and playing had to lead somewhere.

The old man, the grandfather, shifted in the bed, then opened up that smile again. ‘A trick I picked up over the years,' he said. He could feel the frail words flutter winged from his mouth, and almost expected to see them in flight. ‘There are other things than maths and geography to learn, boy. And school won't have all the answers.'

Shyly, Jack approached the bedside, stood uncertainly for a second or two, then perched on the edge of the bed. The mattress barely sagged beneath his lithesome body. He stared at his grandfather, then took to studying what the fingers of his left hand were doing, how they bunched and built the white linen sheet into neat and even pleats. Two knuckles were skinned raw, the pale thin flesh pocked with a crust of scab. Fighting perhaps, or a careless careen against some pebble-dashed wall while in the fullest flight of some important game. Those were nasty wounds, yet of a kind quick to heal; a few wincing tears shed, a duty served, and then that stinging – surely the worst pain in the whole world – would begin to fade. Summer was calling, full as brimming wells with dew-laden mornings and joyous, rambling afternoons. There was time for tears, but not time to linger over them.

‘Mammy's crying.'

The answering sigh had that same crumbling texture as the words. Naturally, being their raw ingredient. ‘Is she? Well, mammies will do that sometimes.'

‘She said that you won't last the night. I heard her telling Dad. She said you're dying.' Jack's voice seemed to snag on something then and jolt shut. He smoothed out the pleats that he had made, but the sheet wouldn't quite settle back to the way it had been before he touched it. When he spoke again, a dryness had crept into his throat, and the new words squeaked around their edges: ‘Is she right, Granddad?'

The old man chanced a spurt of laughter and was pleased with the result. Over by the window he could see motes of dust fluttering in a veil of light, spores that danced and spun on vague draughts and spun again on stray, wandering breaths. ‘She's as right as morning rain, boy.'

Jack looked up, caught between awe and terror. The old man could feel those child's eyes studying every fold of flesh, every jagged poke of bone, looking for an answer that felt like it just had to be there somewhere. Equal parts hoping and dreading a glimpse at the face of death itself. After a moment, he risked another question, his voice no bigger than before.

‘Are you afraid?'

‘Afraid?' The time was ripe for laughter again. ‘Why would I be afraid?'

‘But dying …'

With effort, the grandfather raised himself until he was sitting up in the bed. That felt better. Sitting up, he could see the window. A lot of things had changed over the past few years, the village where he'd grown up and grown old had shifted faces many times. But his bedroom window looked out across the fields and woodland to the west, and nothing much had changed out there. The patchwork hills still rolled in crests and troughs, the sky still scratched itself pale at dawn and set itself alight just before night came tumbling in. From this position, it was possible to believe that time had found a way of standing still, that the sun had crawled across the sky to bed down there night after night for simple fun and nothing more.

‘Listen, Jack,' he said, just as he felt a wave of weariness rise and threaten to overcome his heart and mind. ‘I'm sick. Way down inside, something's gone wrong. That happens, you know, and when it does there's nothing much than anyone can do. No point in crying about it or looking for someone to blame. Just one of these things, boy. But it's made me awfully tired, and it hurts a lot if
I don't lie still. Over the last few weeks the pain's gotten so bad, Jack, that it's living I'm afraid of now, not dying.'

Jack stared hard, then his chin began to jog with the effort at holding back a swell of tears, and when he bowed his head it was in surrender. The old man gave him time to cry, and he waited while minute tied to minute, each one seemingly precious now. When his voice came, it felt separated from his body, full of air, a long steady stream that whispered of its own accord, and he knew that it was as much for his own benefit as for his grandson's.

‘At eight, you know, a boy takes pleasure in wasting time, because it feels enormous, incomprehensible, like it will never run out. And that is as it should be. Seconds to a child are like stars sprayed across the glass of a powerful telescope, and even though each one seems to bear a crumb of magic, a whisper of the unknown, each can be easily replaced by another once it burns out. But they stack up fast; those seconds somehow build into years, and by the time you realise that you'll have wasted towers of them.'

‘I don't want you to die.'

Jack bunched the cuff of his shirt into one small fist and began to swab his eyes. His voice rode a stampede of hiccups, each a sword-thrust through his words.

‘Well, if it helps, try not to think of it as dying.' He sighed, tired now, but happy too. ‘Look.' It took great effort to raise a hand towards the window. The boy turned. ‘See how when the light comes in at a certain angle all that dust starts to shimmer? It's beautiful really, isn't it? You step into a room and see that and your breath turns to stone in your chest, and you'll stand and stare at it for as long as you can, maybe until the light begins to wane again, and you won't quite understand why you feel the way you do. It looks nice, yes, but there has to be more to it than that, right? Now, look at it, enjoy it, but wonder what happens to those little specks of dust once the light falls away. Well, I'll tell you; nothing happens to them. They are there all the time. We just need a certain angle of light to make us aware of them.'

The boy stared, trying hard to understand, and the old man gave him time, though very soon now he'd need to dive back down into sleep. Already waves of exhaustion were lapping at his mind and he could feel the air around him begin to dim.

‘There's more to us, you know, than bodies. If that was all we were, just skin and bone and a few pints of blood, we wouldn't be worth very much now, would we? No, our value is something untouchable, like time, and just like time it doesn't wear out. Our bodies are like flowers that grow with the sun and the rain, that bloom for a little while and then eventually wither and die. But the rest of us, the part that makes us who we really are, lives on. Just in another way. So, Jackie, after I'm gone, think about me like the dust in the room when the light has stopped shining. Just because you can't see me doesn't mean I won't be there. Okay?'

He closed his eyes, and for a while his sense of things began to drift away. The world around him held its breath and grew still, but one tether refused to break. Jack still sat there, watching, crying soundlessly, waiting for old to become ancient and ancient to become dust. The old man wanted to soar, but this one anchor was enough to keep him grounded.

‘Won't you miss us?' the boy said, when his grandfather opened his eyes again. The young face was pointed with sorrow, grief scored eyes and mouth, revealing itself as a tension of posture. ‘Won't you be sad about dying?'

‘No, boy, I won't. How can I miss you when I'll see you all every day? This is my house. I was born here, I laughed and cried here, hid under beds, played games of hide and seek in these wardrobes. I've had great times and sad times here under this roof, I fell in love and grieved over loved-ones lost. I'm in every corner of this place, and I'm in you too, Jackie. Right now I'm sitting on an old man's bed looking out through a child's eyes at this shell that makes me sad to have to see. I beat a drum in your heart when you run and I tickle your mouth when you laugh. And downstairs I'm with your mother too, in her, listening while she talks and cries into the telephone, tasting the cup after cup of hot sweet tea that she likes so much. I might die an hour from now, or it might be during the night when all the world is fast asleep, but all that I am losing is my shell. Don't you understand that yet, Jackie? You and your mother have grown from me, and tomorrow and next year I'll still be running around inside of you both, just as a hundred years from now you and I will both be running around inside your children's children's children. Can you just imagine that, how wonderful life will be for us then? Time won't matter anymore, and we'll be eight or twelve or eighteen years old forever, a permanent prime. Dying is like being born, boy, a stop on a journey and nothing more. We have nothing to fear from that.'

He had closed his eyes again, and although a sort of joy shivered through his voice it was a soft, frail thing, as delicate and obscure as spun sugar. Jack watched as the muscles of that old, beloved face stretched out in one last smile, and then there was nothing more but sleep. Breaths came in thin hasps, barely enough to count for anything at all, and he counted, unhurried until he lost his way somewhere between seventy and a hundred, then he stood and crept from the room, careful not to make another sound. Behind him, the room seemed to shift, settling anew to its altered situation, but he ignored the urge to look back.

For a moment it had seemed as if they would hold their balance. The sky above was clear, dying towards black as the last edge of sun fell away and offering the first dim flash of stars off in the east, but a gale had blown for most of the evening and the ocean roiled, a swollen heave all deep troughs and great peaks that ruptured over and over in mud-coloured crescents. Pascal had been fighting to keep them upright, wrestling with the wheel, and Jacob could hear the low, desperate mutter of his prayers in between the wind's roaring gasps. Irish words, pleading to the Blessed Virgin, they filled the hollows of the falling night like music. The boat spun loosely on the churning sea, and there was that moment when it had seemed as if they'd make it, that their insignificance would somehow be their salvation, but then they took a broadside hit and it had felt like a wall coming down on them.

The rest was darkness, desperate flailing as the water closed in, its coldness crushing any effort at breath, coldness that destroyed its own taste and smell, everything.

Something odd had happened. Jacob thrashed and screamed, but he was engulfed by the grip of the sea. When he made the surface, the night opened up above him, and some incalculable distance away he caught a single flare of light as the last glimmer of sun careened off the final visible foot or so of hull and glistened on the water, and then the boat slid from view, the sun following it down. His breath beat hard in his throat and all around the wind rolled, drilling at the water, and he had never known a greater sense of desolation as he rose and fell with the turmoil of the sea, trapped in the thickening blackness. Gradually, his legs and arms were overcome by the cold and lost all feeling, and he floated because of the life-jacket, the orange padding swollen around him, holding him upright and alive.

Late the following afternoon one of the other boats found him. A miracle, everyone said, and it was; caught in a riptide, he could have been hauled far out from shore instead of drawn in an arc and taken back to within a mile of the island's most westerly edge. When the fishermen hauled him onboard he was conscious, though not for talking much. The boat was lost, he whispered, glaring past their faces and shoulders to check on a sky that still festered with the threat of further storm but which had mercifully found stillness, at least for now. The men understood and wrapped him in a piece of tarpaulin, all they had on board and useless really. One of them pressed a half-full flask of whiskey into his shaking hands and helped him to drink from it. He closed his eyes so that he might better savour the taste and also because it didn't do any good to see the deep dead spread of grey that had overtaken his fingertips nearly down to the first knuckle. His salt-encrusted lips bled around the flask's mouth and he gagged as the whiskey railed against his breath, but he didn't stop until every drop was gone, and then he lay back on the bed of the boat and slipped into a solitude of mind again.

There was something necessary about being alone. At home he kept himself mostly to the back bedroom. Around his family, he became ghostly. He ate the meals his mother prepared, or ate enough to assure everyone that he'd be all right, given just a little time. His mother couldn't help but worry, even after Dr Crowley explained that it was shock, that it would take some getting over a thing like that, such a tragedy. There had been concern over Jacob's fingers, and even greater concern about his feet, which steadfastly refused to bear his weight for days after he'd been taken from the water. The flesh was soft and discoloured, but a week of soaking in a warm water and mineral solution helped allay the worst of the doctor's fears.

By the middle of the second week it was decided to call off the search for the bodies of the other men. Jacob had given details of where they'd been fishing when the seas turned bad, of how they had been hunting for herring out along the rim of the sound about twelve miles south-southwest of the Calf Islands. But of course the swell had been treacherous, and they'd had a couple of hours at least of being hauled by the many cross-currents so it was impossible to guess with any degree of accuracy where exactly they were when the broadside wave had hit.

It was more or less accepted that the other men, Pascal Breathnach and Tommy Quinlan, had gone down with the boat. For the sake of the grieving families, it was better to believe that; under the sea, at least they were together and at rest. There was something less lonesome about that, somehow. Pascal, who shared ownership of the
Sorcha
with his sister-in-law, had been at the wheel during the worst of the weather, wrestling to keep them upright; Tommy had spent the last hours below deck, trying to keep the ballast from slipping. Jacob, as the youngest, had without discussion been given the short-straw duty of securing the nets and cargo crates, exposed to the worst of the elements. Short, with a low centre of gravity and possessed of broad shoulders and a strong back, he was used to the hardship of the sea, even at just twenty-two years old. Still, a couple of hours spent hunched against the sweeping gales and of fighting to keep his feet on the drenched and constantly pitching deck had worn him to the edge of exhaustion even before he had been thrown free by the collision wave. In the water, as the numbness took hold, it was almost a relief to give up and just wait for the end.

The men who came to the house held their black wool caps crushed in their big fists and looked around before settling for the fixation of the cold slab floor, and they thanked Jacob in whispers for his help, feeling ridiculous to be saying such a thing. No one suggested that he might join the search party, because it was better not to have to force a refusal from him. ‘Well,' they said, nodding as they moved through the door, ‘God bless', or ‘take care, now', those who no longer kept religion, having seen the things they'd seen.

In the back room, he spread himself out across the bed and read old yellowed paperback westerns. He liked the simple clarity of the stories, the way good men were good and always did the right thing, and he liked the gaudy cover illustrations, with rearing horses, cowboys on the draw and scantily clad damsels in distress. The three or four hours at a time that he spent immersed in a Louis L'Amour was time spent wandering freely in another world. It was better, he discovered, to fill his mind with the words of other people.

‘Your father's worried about you,' his mother said. He moved a potato across his plate and pressed the tines of his fork down amongst the slices of carrot, turning each piece from an orange penny into shapeless pulp. He glanced towards the corner. His father was sitting there with the newspaper folded up into quarters, studying the crossword, the stub of a pencil hovering and waiting to pounce.

‘It's been a few weeks now,' she continued. ‘He's afraid that you've gone into yourself. Isn't that right, Jack?'

In the corner, his father pursed his mouth, scrawled some answer into his crossword and then sighed with breathy satisfaction through his nose. He might have been alone in the room, but Jacob's mother chose to take the sigh as an affirmative.

‘You're only twenty-two,' she said. ‘You have your whole life ahead of you.'

Jacob nodded, tried to eat enough so that he could leave the room without a fuss. Later, he shaved himself in his bedroom, half-filling a dish with water heated on the stove and studying his face in the small six-inch square of wall mirror. The mirror was old; flecks of rust showed black around the edges where the glass had been worn thin by handling. His skin felt rough, his face an island face. Twenty-two, but already the sea winds had left their mark, creasing the flesh around his eyes and mouth and across his brow. In the weeks since the tragedy he'd lost a significant amount of weight; what remained hung heavily on his strong frame. He shaved and the face that looked back from the glass belonged to a stranger, only vaguely recognisable to his mind; he considered the features for a minute or two, tilting his chin one way and then the other for the fullest effect, then he dressed in his Sunday best and knotted a tie that he'd bought the year before on a trip to Cork city.

‘I want to go into the village for a drink,' he said, standing close enough so that his father, sitting in the corner, was forced to acknowledge him. He could feel his mother standing in the doorway behind him and to the left, but he didn't turn. She'd be wearing her apron, maybe she'd be drying a mug or a plate with her ‘Welcome To Killarney' tea towel. She was always either washing or cooking. The thought would be in her mind that she had pushed him too hard, that it was too soon yet to be getting at him, and he felt some undeniable satisfaction at the idea of her torment, though he could never have explained why.

His father looked up at him, pursed his mouth and nodded. ‘Right, so.'

‘Have you money at all?'

‘What? Oh, money, yeah.' Jack dug in his pocket, drew out the handkerchief that he used to keep his money together. In amongst the oily folds, there was a ten-shilling note and some coins. ‘How much will you be needing?'

Jacob didn't know. ‘Enough to get drunk,' he said. Behind him, he could hear his mother's breath catch, and the muffled sound was her pressing the tea towel to her mouth in an effort to stifle a moan. Jack hesitated for just a second, then bunched the handkerchief closed and held up the bundle to be taken.

‘Take care of yourself, lad,
'
he muttered, the words barely perceptible. Jacob nodded in a way that meant nothing.

Outside, a wind was blowing. The weather had shifted these past few days, and it leaned now from the northwest, bringing the first signs of winter. Jacob quickened his pace. It was a mile into the village, and it felt strange to be walking at this time of day. Not yet four o'clock, the boats would still be out. Ordinarily, he would have been too. He nodded to the few people he passed, but his pace deterred them from anything beyond a simple salute. They'd be thinking of the others, Pascal and Tommy, and even if they meant no harm at all, there was harm enough in such thoughts.

He walked on. Out in the harbour the ocean churned. The breeze flapped its irritation in the ash trees that huddled just behind the graveyard wall. There were a few boats tied up along the pier, but not many. Even with the weather, men had to work. Jacob sighed to himself, catching some of the sadness in the air. Maybe later he'd go for a swim. First things first though; he had a handkerchief full of money and thoughts that needed dimming.