Leviathan

A short story I wrote just before going on n Arvon Foundation course.

LEVIATHAN

“All those stars both silvery and golden shall shine out again”
Walt Whitman

An image as lucid as a photograph. My brother’s body vaulted high in a vast rise of water, vanishing amid a tumult of splintered light amid sudden walls and the lurching gape of cathedral spaces. A final image. Shutter in the mind snapping shut.

My shrieks drowning in the roar of the night and the gulp of salt.

But this is no photograph. Those images fade. This replays in slow motion in my mind. Night after night. Year after year. Always vivid seventy years on.

A memory that revivifies that first ocean-dark despair. Afterwards amid the bobbing remnants of the ship there was just the struggle to survive – and long hours of drift and desperation. Hot grief, sodden cold and gnawing hunger. Empty lifeboats nearby.

Eventually helping hands hauled me aboard something adrift and the balm of a precarious sleep took me, cradled on the bourne of the deep.

But out there lost forever, both my brother and the ebb tide of faith.

But I survived along with a handful of others. Until we were received back into the realm of life.

After that, the long years of remembering and forgetting - trying to honour the future we’d taken for granted as children and appreciate the wealth of the long life I have been given in the aftermath.

He was seven and I was eleven. Refugees being shipped to safety from the darkening dangers in wartime London. He was lost. I was finally found, out there in the Atlantic waters. But much else was lost.

Now I am eighty-one. A widower living alone. My family are dispersed. My wife long ago gone and my sons living far away. One in the North, the other in Canada, the country that should have become our temporary homeland. But for that night.

Everyday now I wake early. In the growing dawn sit quietly cradling a teacup and listening to the birds chattering on the lawn. Noisy magpies today, stealing the calm of the early hours. And further away the ever-present murmur of the sea.

People talk of the habits of a lifetime, but new behaviours modified by age overlay them and become the new habits of this late segment of a lifetime. Today as for some years now I await the arrival of the morning paper. The gate will squeak open and I will hear the thud on the doormat.

It is the same newspaper I have read since adulthood. It has changed of course. But so have I. Now it is trawling for younger readers. The reviews of music I have never heard and the denizens of a dozen fashionable worlds I have never heard of make the paper a briefer read. But its snapshots of the troubles of a troubled world still dismay me.

Then a light breakfast. That has changed too. My appetite is diminished and my digestion less easy.

With marriage and children and a demanding profession, there were structures and patterns. But they were the warp through which the crazy weft of events drove to offer a life that never seemed predictable.



Now long into retirement more evident patterns emerge. Today, for example, I will walk to a pub near the shingle beach. With other men, who to outsiders appear like me, we will discuss the affairs of our town and of the world. Much of what we discuss will aggravate us. But we do know clearly that any power we had to change the world, if it were ever within reach, is long gone, like reaching out in the tumult of the sea.

My wife Margaret used to hold me on those nights when I awoke wracked by nightmares. Now I face these nightly dreams alone.

The town I now call home is by the sea. My house is where that community begins to straggle back into the countryside and where the cliff, surmounted by a lighthouse, begins to swell.

Is it strange of me to choose to live here, beside the element whose casual brutality so transformed my life? I think not. The old so often choose to live by this transformative element, the protean sea catching the disquiet of old age,

For me absence has been so profound that it has offered a way to navigate the mysteries of life. Faith otherwise drowned in the sud and foam of the ocean.

My son Robert lives in Scotland with his wife Joni and their two children, my grandchildren, Britney and Max. They do not visit often and I no longer travel.
But Robert bought me a computer and a webcam and so, each week. we spend some time talking via the screen. An electronic telescope bringing my scattered family into focus. Modern technology amazes me.

It also enables me to see that even more distant son – my oldest –who lives in Toronto. Jimmy is now a Canadian. He was named in memory off my brother.

And so another anniversary of that day has passed. I have just one old photograph of my brother taken when he was still a toddler. A smiling child sitting with our mother.

But that was long ago. Another lifetime. Things split off after he drowned. I was finally returned home to my parents. We never got news of James. No official confirmed his death. The sea and the swirling tides of wartime swallowed him entirely.

Until my son telephoned me early one evening.

I had just awoken from my habitual late afternoon siesta into early evening dark. I was still caught at the bottom of what was always now a long ascent. Usually it took an hour to return to wakefulness from a sleep that never refreshes but whose onset was not to be resisted.

“Pop”, he began. It always irritated me. This Americanisation. Why not dad, or father, or almost any affectionate diminutive? But I bit my tongue. His voice now had a North American tang.

“Pop, are you sitting down? Please sit down. I’ve some strange news.“ The cautionary note set me on edge.

“I am sitting down. Now tell me, what is wrong.”

“Nothing Pop. Nothing wrong. But erm, what I am going to tell you could be a big surprise. Heck. I wish I could talk to you face-to-face.

“Yes – what is it Jimmy? This news. Are you and Maxine okay? Has something happened? Is someone ill?

“No – no its nothing like that. Let me tell you what happened exactly as it happened. Its probably the best way.”

I listened without comment.

“My agent had a letter a few days ago. From a man living in the Northern part of Canada. A small place called Labrador City. I’d never even heard of it. Anyway this guy… somehow he tracked her down – from one of the TV shows I appeared in. “

My son Jimmy is a very minor celebrity in Canada. He appears in television drama, usually in supporting roles. He hasn’t yet made the big time and, in all probability, he never will. So not a star, but illuminated enough that his face prompts feelings of familiarity from strangers in his hometown.

“She gave me the letter when I went into her office a couple of days ago. Pop…. It’s from a man who says he thinks he is related to us.”

“Related? Well he can’t be a close relation. You’re the only Canadian bit of the family that I know off though I suppose there might be a distant cousin there somewhere.”

“Er no Pop. You see this guy reckons its something much more astonishing. He says he thinks we might be first cousins … that you are his uncle and, and… “At this point his voice took on a sense of strain as if the words would hardly leave his throat.

“I think I get it, “ I said.

Yes Pop… he, he thinks that his father is your brother… that you both survived… I know. I know. Seems impossible. And yet…well, he says he grew up like we did, thinking that this father’s brother had downed… but you didn’t. And so it seems possible crazily possible that somehow he survived as well.

I said nothing. The full gravity of what he was saying was rising up into me still. The impossibility and yet… I felt a rising nausea.

“Pop…. Perhaps you and he both survived that night. Do you think that is possible?”

I spoke softly with a sense of calm that belied my inner feelings. “No. It isn’t possible. I saw him lost. This must be a mistake or a lie. Someone who knows what happened and is lying.“

“Why would anyone do that? And how would they know? I know it’s not a family secret but its also not ‘out there’ is it – not something that is public knowledge. Really it’s just the family that knows – you, me, Robert – the girls.
I don’t think I ever really talked it to anyone, even as a kid.

“Dad… look. Maybe it is true. And if it is, don’t you feel we have to know? I want to know. Robert will want to know. I’m sure of that. You know, I figure what will probably be best is for you have to come here and meet him. “

“I don’t think so. I don’t travel anymore. You know….”

Pop. Thank about it. What if t really is your brother. How do you actually feel about the possibility it just might be true. I mean it is true then this is astonishing. You and he would have so much to catch up about. A whole lifetime. I mean, that is like, just amazing isn’t it?

“Calm down Jimmy. You know this can’t be true, surely. I don’t see how it could be,” I said. “I know what happened. I saw it. He cannot have survived. And Jimmy, as I say, I don’t travel anymore. I am too old. Just too old. I think we all need to take a deep breath here and ask what this is really about. Yes, we do need to know more. It might just be a crank or someone being malicious. You want me to travel half way across the world for that?

But in truth as I paused and awaited his reply I felt knowledge taking shape inside me. It was as if somehow the Red Sea of time was parting. And on the further shore…



“Pop…. I agree and I do think it is important for you and for us all to find out the truth here. The only way to be sure will be for you meet. And it has to be you who comes here. This guy, this man who may be your brother is old and far frailer than you. He’s in a home. Who knows how long he may have. Can you stand to not know? To not have him back. If it IS your brother.

“Even just to be sure… to know that the past as you understand it is maybe different. Maybe ….

I remained silent a moment and then I put the telephone down. It rang again and I ignored it.

How was I to make sense of this? Could it possibly be true? What was I to do with this? I felt the image of the water and that thin helpless arm embraced by turmoil reaching out and vanishing. I felt the maelstrom alive and real within me.

The telephone rang again and again. Finally I answered it again. It was my other son.

“Dad, Jimmy called me. He’s worried the news has shocked you. Are you all right? Look I am going to head down to see you tomorrow….”

“I am fine, Bob. “ And with that again I placed the phone back in its cradle.

I went to my computer. Found images of the region. Ice and haunting light and men in work shirts. An alien, hard and strange way of living.

Late that evening to escape the telephone I walked out and down to the sea. To be alone with my thoughts.

The streets were empty. A single street lamp cast a circle on the asphalt and beyond the scrub leading to the beach.

High above the town, the lighthouse blinked, guiding ships beyond the teeth of the sea to the deceits of the land. An ocean merging past and present, melting geography.

And so I walked out beyond these lights onto the moon blanched shingle strand, looking out at the tranquil bay.

Piercing the dark roiled clouds The Pleiades were suspended glistering clear. I feel something returning. A homecoming. The growing surge of a new tide.



C John Kelleher 2011