What loneliness sounds like

Image by Mieke Kenis at eltpics flickr

When he speaks, it sounds as if I have water in my ears. Normally, my hearing is very sharp, trained over years of spending time with my father and sister out on the old quarry lake. On summer evenings, we fished, we paddled, we watched dragonflies and water boatmen, and heard them whirr and plop. We listened, we looked, we sharpened our ears and our eyes, sometimes we took notes and drew pictures, and others we just talked. We were far from the clang and clatter of the city, tucked away in our weekend cabin a short walk from the quarry, and it was our favourite place. Dad always said, “silence is rare, learn to listen between its hush”. And I did. Birds, insects, the lapping of not-quite-waves, the chatter of dusk above the calm, glassy water. ‘Gelid’ my father called it. A word that tasted as good in my mouth as it sang in my ears. It tasted of peppermint creams. But now, when he speaks, I hear nothing clearly; my head, or my mind, fills with a HOOOO and a burble, words jamming like film in an old cinema projector, or Grandpa’s old vinyl records when the electricity spluttered.

My mother, my sister and I meet at the water’s edge on summer evenings at dusk. We don’t speak now. They used to throw wild flowers picked along the track to the quarry onto the water, but with time they have stopped. I never did that, not because I was a boy, but because I was loath to feed beauty to the dark, godforsaken, flooded pit that took my light and broke my family. I cannot see beauty in it, never could, only around it, and only before it took my mother’s fingers and my father’s life.

Now, on those twilit evenings, I see my father come towards me. “Don’t be angry,” his life-lost, lost-life face seems to say to me, as it flickers above the ripples, out near the sunken crane. Is that what he says? His words are too liquid to tell. His face is not a face now. The space in time where his face once was, and once bled from the impact with the propeller, is shimmering emotion around a hole. I see-not-see him, and his sodden emotions seep right through me – not fury, like mine, but nostalgia, melancholy: “Don’t be angry.”

That day at the quarry, it happened so fast. The signs read ‘Burrow Quarry. Hidden dangers! Do not swim! Sailing and watersports with care!’. As a child, I had asked my parents what the dangers were; if there were monsters, water-snakes, angry sprites with webbed feet waiting to chew the toes off hapless swimmers, steal their swimsuits and drown their dreams. My father would laugh and ruffle my springy hair, wipe some plates and pour me some pop, while Mum, flipping burgers and dusting crumbs from my mouth, would smile solemnly and say “Honey, the monsters here were made by people, and left lurking to catch your legs”. Machines, old huts, wooden beams, piles of stone, the old quarry was a waterlogged car crash of debris that not even our whining Pleases could change. 

Why, oh, why did we whine?

One day, my mother, a great initiator of things, magicked up a boat. “It’s borrowed,” she grinned, “so you can dangle your toes. It’s not quite swimming, we can't let you do that, but it’s near enough”. We piled on board, with sunhats and laughter, and she started the outboard like a pro. Oh, what joy; the propeller whirred, the little boat bumped forward, ripples spread out like swan’s wings opening, and the four of us laughed in the spray and the glare of the reflected sun. Truly happy. For the last time. 

We stopped to listen in the middle of the quarry, as Dad had taught us to do: heartbeats, wavelets, the breeze in wet hair. The air tasted of joy, midges and summer, the sun prickled over our legs and under our shorts, and Dad told us stories of quarry workers and cathedrals and life long ago. And then the breeze picked up, and we whined pleases again: “We’re coooold.” My mother started the small engine just as we skimmed and clipped a ‘Hidden danger’, a monster, a machine, who cares. The little boat shot forward and up, reared, and flopped down hard. We flew like four lead feathers in the air.

I remember seeing my sister’s legs, frantic as she clung to the side, pedalling and pivoting the boat to one side, grazed but fortunately intact. I remember seeing my father’s arm, sliced by the propeller as it pivoted over him, drop through his blood, as his bleeding face bobbed above me with hair like a mat of weeds. I remember my Mum’s three fingers, so oddly familiar with the rings still in place, drift slowly down past me and disappear in the gloom, the rest of my mother out of sight but breathing. And I remember seeing myself, hair tangled in the propeller as I tried to surface near my father. Twisting, clutching, arms flailing flung wide, I saw myself dance for a while, then fall still. 

On summer evenings at dusk, out at the old quarry lake, I come to be with my mother and sister, and to watch for my father as he returns to the shore. I long to be with them, flip burgers with my mother, watch water boatmen with sis. But they don’t see me, waiting near them, straining to hear them; they don’t see us at all. My father takes my hand and speaks to me as he passes, smiling sadly at my hair barely attached to my skull, my clothes and flesh rotted long ago.

“You still look beautiful to me, my son.”

When he speaks, I feel cushioned in bubbles, but it sounds as if I have water in my ears.

Image by Chrysa Papalazarou at eltpics, flickr