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He set off on foot across the marshes, following the
pylons, just as they had on the day it all happened.
As he walked he tried to picture the day in his mind,
the moment they had first touched each other in play,
the moments that followed, the moment they took each
other by the hand, the silence between them, the
moment they stopped to look back in the direction they
had come, made the choice, the moment she leaned into
him and kissed him.
He tried to relive the day, to play it back on itself.
He would create a map in his mind, and he would trace
his way back there, to the ships graveyard, to the
very place where he’d felt his heart slip into her
possession.
The birds skimmed across the flat marshland, Common
Gull, Herring Gull, Black Backed Gull, names he had
learned, come to recognise in his time here with her.
They rose up on the current and then disappeared from
his view beyond the seawall. He listened to the
raucous calls of the bigger birds, the peeps and
chucks of the smaller birds. He listened to the buzz
of the insects, the gentle rhythmic accompaniment of
the sea. He trained all of his senses into searching
for every memory, stopped to gauge the temperature of
his surroundings and waited for it to be right, then
he walked on. In this way he would find the graveyard
again and there he would find his answer, hidden where
the crabs were, amidst the skeletons of the boats,
amidst the ghosts.
He felt extremely close, so close he could feel its
presence, but when he climbed the seawall and looked
out across the beach there was just the shingle shore,
the wispy grasses and bright flowers, the flat sea
beyond. He looked over at the horizon and tried to
gain some perspective but it was all the same to him,
impossible to identify one point from another.
She could do it, he thought.
But she wasn't here.
He gave up on the marshes then and jumped down from
the seawall onto the pebbles. He was on the nature
reserve now. He felt certain they had not wandered
onto the reserve that day, but another part of him
nagged and nagged until he felt perhaps they had.
Perhaps the secret to finding the place was the
reserve. Perhaps the reserve helped to keep others
away. Perhaps they had been so engrossed in each other
that they had wandered aimlessly. It was true they
had.
The sky was empty, the light of the day fading blue to
pink. Here in the solitude of the reserve, all was
quiet. His heart started to race. He could feel it in
his chest, pounding violently. His breath quickened.
He was close. Something inside him started to twist
and stretch his nerves so that he felt pain too, a
searing pain behind the eyes. Was his body trying to
warn him? He scoured the grasses for a sign, a piece
of wreckage, driftwood, the tip of a mast, anything,
but there was just the grass and the flowers, the land
and the water.
The sky grew darker as he walked. A bird shot up out
of a patch of thick kale in front of him. It screeched
and circled above, dived, coming close, protecting its
young, sent him scurrying away across the beach, his
concentration gone, his nerves spent.
A chill surged through him then and he recognised a
new feeling. He was unwelcome in this place. He had
never been welcome. It didn’t want him. He had no
rights being here. The air was colder. There was a
breeze coming in straight off the sea, straight off
the water, which looked choppier now, changed from how
it had been just a few short minutes before. His skin
tightened and pimples appeared up his arms. The sky
blackened.
When the thought came to him, it came in such a way
that all of his insides felt hollowed out, as though a
ferocious creature had gutted him. He remembered the
old man they’d met weeks before, the words he had
said.
"You’ll never find it if you go looking for it."
He turned and looked back along the coast towards the
town. Lights were twinkling in the dusk. The earliest
stars were visible above. He stood and watched the
light drain from the day and the last embers of
comfort drain with it. He felt that life itself was
following close behind.
All was silent.
All was still again.
Even the sea seemed to have stopped offering its
familiar sound. Darkness was coming to the marshes.
There was nothing to see, nothing to discover, nothing
to tell him that any of it had been real. All he had
was memories. He wanted to leave them behind, bury
them in the shingle and let the sea break them up and
carry them away, grain by grain. But the sea didn’t
want them. Nobody wanted them. He was stuck with them,
lucid pictures of moments that would spring up
unannounced, catch him out, tease and haunt and play
with him at will.
He jumped onto the sea wall and stared back at the
town, at the hill, tried to make out her house amongst
so many. He told himself that she would have memories
too, moments that would turn her insides out, moments
that would bring pain, moments like this, but he knew,
even as he thought it, that he was lying to himself.
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