He swings the fish from the water, a wild stripe flicking and flashing into the boat, and grabs the line, twisting the hook out, holding the fish down in the footrests. It gasps, thrashes. Drums. Something rapid and primal, ceremonial, in the shallow of the open boat.
Flecks of blood and scales loosen, as if turning to rainbows in his hands, as he picks up the fish and breaks its neck, feels the minute rim of teeth inside its jaw on the pad of his forefinger, puts his thumb behind the head and snaps.
The jaw splits and the gills splay, like an opening flower.
He was sure he would catch fish. He left just a simple note: “Pick salad x.”
Briefly, he looks toward the inland cliffs, hoping the peregrine will be there, scanning as he patiently undoes the knot of traces, pares the feathers away from one another until they are free, and feeds them out. The boat is flecked. Glittered. A heat has come to the morning now, convincing and thick. The kayak lilts. Weed floats. He thinks of her hair in water. The same darkened blond colour.
It’s unusual to catch only one. Or it was just a straggler. The edge of the shoal. Something split it from the others.
He retrieves a carrier bag from the dry bag in back and stores the fish. Then he bails out the blood-rusted water from the boat.
Fish don’t have eyelids, remember. In this bright water, it’s likely they are deeper out.
He’s been hearing his father’s voice for the past few weeks now.
I’ve got this one, though. That’s enough. That’s lunch.
The bay lay just a little north. It was a short paddle from the flat beach inland of him, with the caravans on the low fields above, but it felt private.
His father long ago had told him that they were the only ones who knew about the bay, and that was a good thing between them to believe.
You’ll set the pan on a small fire and cook the mackerel as you used to do together, in the pats of butter you took from the roadside café. The butter will be liquid by now, and you will have to squeeze it from the wrapper like an ointment.
The bones in the cooling pan, fingers sticky with the toffee of burned butter.
He was not a talker. But he couldn’t imagine sitting in the bay and not talking to his father.
There is a strange gurgle and a razorbill appears, shudders off the water, flicks its head and preens. It looks at him, head cocked, turns as it paddles off a few yards. Then it dives again, and is gone.
*
He takes the plastic container from the front stow. It has warmed in the morning sun, and it seems wrong to him, the warmth. As if the ashes still had heat.
He unscrews the lid partially, caught by a sudden fear. That he will release some jinni, a ghost, the fatal germ. No. They’re sterile. He throws science at the fear.
He’s had to go through so many possessions, things that exploded with memories during the past few weeks; but it is the opposite with the ashes. He tries to hold away the fact they know nothing of what they are. Wants to remind the ashes of events, moments. To make them the physical thing of his father.
After the brief doubt, he relaxes again. Can feel the current arc him out, its subtle shift away from shore. A strong draw to the seemingly still water.
He has a sense, out here, of peace. Thinks, Why do we stop doing the things we enjoy and the things we know are good for us?
When he had fetched the kayak out from under the tarp, there were cobwebs, and earwigs in among the hatch straps.
He had not told her he was going. He’d expected it to be a weight he wanted to lift by himself.
There is a piping of oystercatchers, a clap of water as a fish jumps. He sees it for a moment, a silver nail. A thing deliberately, for a brief astounding moment, broken from its element.
*
Round the promontory, he fades the kayak, lets it drift, wiggling his ankles, working his feet loose with arrival. The water beneath him suddenly aglut, sentinel somehow, with jellyfish. He wonders if they are a sign, of some increasing heat perhaps. Then the noise of music hits him.
A child knee-high in the water, slapping at the waves. Another coming tentatively down the stones. A mother changing inside a towel.
The ashes sit perfectly in the drinks holder by his legs.
Laid out farther off, an adolescent girl. The sound of her radio travelling. A pile of bright things.
The child has found a whip of kelp and slaps at the waves.
It’s O.K., Dad, he says. We’ll come back later.
The sound of a Jet Ski, from the beach in front of the caravans. An urban, invasive sound.
We’ll come back when they’ve gone.
Out in the distance, a small cloud. A white flurry. A crowd of diving birds.
They won’t be here all day.
Then he paddles, the ashes by his legs, in a straight line out to sea.
*
It’s as he’s holding his hands in the water, rubbing the blood and scales from them, that the hairs on his arms stand up and sway briefly, like seaweed in the current.
The birds that had indicated the fish had lifted suddenly. They are faint implications now, a hiatus disappearing against the light off the sea.
He is far enough offshore for the land to have paled in view.
The first lightning strikes somewhere out past the horizon. At first he thinks it just a sudden glint. The thunder happens moments later, and he feels sick in his gut.
He sees the rain as a thick dark band, moving in. Starts to paddle
Then there is a wire of electric brightness. Three. Four. A rumble that seems to echo off the surface of the water.
He counts automatically, assesses the distance to land. Another throb of light. The coast still a thin wood-coloured line. The wind picks up, cold air moving in front of the storm. And then there is a basal roll. The sound of a great weight landing. A slow tearing in the sky.
One repeated word now. No, no, no.
When it hits him there is a bright white light.
*
He wakes floating on his back, caught on a cleat by the elastic toggle of his wetsuit shoe. Around him hailstones melt and dissipate. They are scattered on the kayak, roll off as it bobs on the slight waves. There is a hissing sound. The hailstones melting in the water.
He stares around, shell-shocked, trying to understand, a layer of ash on the surface of the water. He cannot move his arms. They are held out before him as if beseeching the sky.
Dead fish lie around him in the water.
He gets himself to the boat, the boat to him, drawing it with his leg, shaking until he frees the toggle, turns, kicks, twists, trying to lever with his useless arms. Somehow tips himself into the boat.
Live, he’s thinking. Live.
His fishing rod on fire upon the water as he slips off the world again, and passes out.
*
He moves because he coughs, a cough made of glass. Slowly lifts himself. One eye closed with salt. His face has been in the floor of the kayak and the salt is from the evaporated water. The sun had come out hard after the storm and evaporated the water, leaving the salt in a crust on his eye. When he opens the other, the light blinds him. It hurts to breathe because his whole body hurts. As if he has suffered a great fall. His mouth, too, is crusted with salt. He does not know where he is. There is a pyroclast of fine dried ash across his skin.
He blinks and struggles to raise himself a little, the kayak shifting below him. The world slipping, rocking. When he grimaces, his lips split and bleed.
He looks down at his hands, feels the briefest twitch in his right arm, a wave and it spasms, smashes unfeelingly against the inside of the boat and goes dead again, falls against his side, a fish flicking after suffocating.
What happened? His consciousness a snapped cord his mind tries to pull back together.
His left hand stays inert, fractalled with purple; seems tattooed, in a pattern like ice on airplane glass.
*
The right arm, for a while, is wayward. Movable, but numb, clumsy.
He does not know how long he has been like this. Who he is.
He sees a rouge burn through the dry salt on the muscle of his forearm, sees the line of his shinbone startled and red. Feels his face. Like something felt through packaging, hears more than properly feels the paper of his dry cracked lips. He has the strange conviction that if he opens his stuck eye he will see what happened.
When he tries again, it’s as if that eye leaves his face and flutters by him. A butterfly.
It takes him a while to focus, to accept it. He’s forgotten there is other life. It puppets around him.
He cannot believe that a thing so small, so breakable, is out here. A thing that cannot put down on the water. How far must we be from land?
The butterfly settles on the bright lettering of the boat. He watches it open and close its wings in the sun. Opens and closes his working hand.
He reaches up and scrapes the salt from his closed lid, picks at the hard crystals. He wets his hand in the water, blinks with the sting as he bathes the eye.
When he refocusses, the butterfly is gone. For a split second, he believes again it was his eye, then he spots it, heading out over the water.
He feels a confusion, a kind of throb in his head. There is a complete horizon. A horizon everywhere around and no point of it seems closer than another. It brings claustrophobia. He does not know if he’s moving—if he’s travelling. He cannot tell in which direction if he is.
He feels only the rock, the sway, the dip and wallow of the boat.
*
For a moment, as he lifts from sleep, he thinks the warm sun on his neck is someone’s breath. Hears, far off, the sound of a speedboat engine. There is land in sight, like a presence that has woken him.
He wakes with the understanding that the paddle is gone, and with that comes low panic.
His good arm has been in the water, and it is only as he raises it that he feels the little finger has been stripped.
It is torn and frayed to the first knuckle, skinned and swollen ragged with water, the pain searing and hot. The nail is still there but tooth-marked where the little fish have bitten at it. As he touches the finger, his head spins, and when he passes out, again, it’s like another white light shoots through him.
*
The thump of the fin stirs him.
His head was resting on the gunwale as the dark fin struck.
He does not move. Cannot move. A few yards off, the fin rises again, a half-metre sail out of the water, a gun-grey body. His primal systems fire a wave of fear through him, the adrenaline trying to get through him like water poured on ice; and the fin folds, disappears.
He is frozen, urinates, cannot move his head.
When it bumps again it is as if the fin has grown tactile. It folds and flops, reaches into the boat, hallucinatory, cartoonish, like a sea lion’s flipper. And then the body of the fish, clownlike, lolls side-on in the water, a disk the size of a table.
This cannot be happening, he thinks. The sunfish and he eye to eye, its curious fin folding, flopping. An aberrant ripple to the water in the otherwise lambent calm. This is it, he thinks. This is it.
*
The sunfish stayed with him for hours. It could be said it steered him. It was almost the size of the kayak in length and bumped and rubbed the boat with a droll instinct, as a cow might a post.
The sunfish is not fishable, not edible, and no instinct has been driven into it to stay away from man. And perhaps it was the warmth of the boat it liked, with the plastic heated by the sun. Or perhaps it was something more.
But it stayed and bumped the boat for hours, and by doing so steered it; and it cannot be known whether it was deliberate, benevolent, that it did not steer the kayak farther out to sea.
*
He tries the screw of the locker in the centre of the kayak, confused by his sureness that there is a first-aid kit, confused given the things he does not know. The locker will not shift. Focus, he thinks. Just accept the pain. Focus on the fact that the land is there.
He turns in his seat and reaches for the dry bag, husbanding the finger. Uses his teeth and his hand to open the bag and spill out the looser things — the sunblock, the T-shirt, the old cloth.
His ears are blistered and cracked. His skin parched and sore, stretched and gritty with salt. He rubs the sunblock in. A baffling thought of holidays. Works urgently, as if the next few moments are vital.
He rubs it on his dead hand and is frightened. That he cannot feel it. That it lies so inert. He feels a sort of horror at his body. How long has this taken to happen? How long have I been out here?
He looks again at his useless hand, the now fernlike pattern. It seems to follow his veins, mark tiny capillaries, a leaf skeleton disappearing under the tide line of ash into the sleeve of his top.
A wave of sick goes through him.
The idea of breath on his neck lies under everything. A suspicion that someone has been left behind.
*
He takes the T-shirt and wets it, wraps it on his head, the touch of it a heat at first against his burned skin. But then it cools, and there is a sort of weight lifted, as if the sun had stopped pressing.
He unzips the pocket of his buoyancy aid and fumbles out the phone, drops it into his lap as he pops open the waterproof pouch. He turns it upside down and tips the phone out, thunk on the boat, picks it up and tries to start it. Nothing.
Take it apart. Let it dry out.
He struggles with it until the back slips off. And there against the battery is a wren feather.
He traps it with his thumb. Holds it carefully. His memory like a dropped pack of cards.
Next door’s cat. Its strange possessive mewling, crouched over the wren, the bird like a knot of wood.
The bird vibrated briefly when he picked it up, a shudder of life. Then flew away.
He could not picture her, but a sense of her came back with that.
They had kept a feather each.
*
Shouts. Faintly. Loud shouts that reach him quieter than whispers. That seem to carry on the air like faintly visible things.
He notes movement, just a shifting of the air, the smallest breeze that bears the shouts; a sure current, the kayak drifts. Goes sideways past the shingle bay.
He is in a dream. He sees, there, a penguin crowd of people bathing in their clothes. In black-and-white suits. They are playing in the water. Children in waistcoats. As if a wedding has run into the sea.
Where am I?
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