Captain

Captain

THE WALLS were quivering by faux candlelight so that without the pictures and the fixtures he could imagine them moving, shifting, like sand on the seabed, and the room smelled of old smoke. He sat at the back in an oak armchair with his forearms crossed at the table in front of him, slowly turning his glass between thumb and fore and eying the room. It was quiet. The low rumbling of activity hung dull in the air like an ache. The main room. Half a century and he had never stayed there more than ten minutes. Too many faces, too inconsistent. The door to the street opened with a jingle. He scanned the room for distraction but found none.
Old footballers and champion fishermen, proud businessmen and decorated soldiers smiled in gilded frames on every wall. Like an audience, full of pride and expectations, fixed jeering at the old man and his cheap clothes. As a boy he used to sit by the fire now extinguished and imagine himself up there. Every other Sunday, while the fiddlers set up in the corner. People coming and going. Pipe smoke and swirling dust motes. When the music started everyone would turn. Slow to begin - that same enticing rhythm - winding lazily like smoke from the strings, but building, and quickening as if by magic to a frenzy, until the pub became dense with the sound of it. His parents sat drinking, laughing as their friends told jokes about sailors and about politicians and John would imagine himself celebrated on the wall and the music would be in celebration of him. When he became Captain his moment seemed to have arrived. It was a proud day. The high seas. His family assembled at the Blyth quay in a downpour, their best clothes soaked through and shouted well wishes swept from memory. On winds that carried in their arc the dust of tropic mountains. He turned his glass slowly, round and round and for a moment the carving sound reminded him of the very first jet fighter he ever heard and saw, tracing its perfect course in white across a new Northumbrian sky.
Sirens. If he had been at home the sound would have troubled him, he would have checked the latch, peered out the kitchen window; but here he was safe. He knew that. The windowless walls felt thick, the room warm. Like the worm mottled core of some ancient tree. A woodland hollow gnawed and scratched into being by creatures of the earth, shy of the morning sun, saving limbs and kernels for a coming dark.
A lackluster Cheryl leant across the small bar top in the corner. The door to the street opened with a jingle. Cheryl fiddled absently with the napkins, and from where he sat turning his glass John Muldoon could see the rest of her work friends carrying on in the main room, where the real punters were buying drinks and smiling and watching the lights traverse the bandit. He could sense her impatience, the hunger, and so got to his feet draining the ale from his glass. Her eyes followed him lazily across the room and flared with interest as he collected his stick from the stand. No need to thank me he thought; go on dear, enjoy yourself.

Bout that time a’ reckon Cheryl.
Y’off John?
Mm… Gan hyem... Ta-da love.
Wrap up tight. It’s bitter.
Aye.
Same time?
Aye.

The street was dead and glazed in amber. Cold and barren. He could still smell the warmth from inside and see reveling shadows dancing on the acid etched windows and again twice removed on the pavement. Adjacent, beyond the shops and houses, he could feel the ocean move and smell it on the air, huge and profound. His old life. It was only the coldest nights that he chose to walk the bay.  He crossed Front Street at an amble and his hooked cane ticked alongside him. Rounding the corner he neared the lifeboat house. A dog glanced across his path from the leaning shadows and he watched the hair on its back shaking and clad with sand under the moonlight. Its coat looked healthy but an air of defeat hung about its shoulders, the low arch of its back, lagging in its gait. The poor lad must belong to somebody. Must be someone’s responsibility. He turned to watch it disappear down an alley to his left, coalescing with the ink black cobbles.
By the time he arrived at the foot of the lifeboat house he was chilled to the marrow. Soft land-clothes he cursed to himself. Not befitting a captain. He imagined his old crew laughing to each other; pinching at his polyester sleeves. All dead of course except Manus; and the old mick was never the same. Not after the Sapphire was sunk. John Muldoon never could recall the explosion. Only the calm of nighttime; the gently lapping waters and the numbing waves swallowing, swallowing. Burning fragments dancing in the void. Blood in the water. Norwegian winter everywhere and a blackened ocean that bore up the scraps like a hundred floating effigies.

The sea breeze felt cool and direct. He descended the grey concrete stairs at the edge of the promenade and his first steps sank into the sand and he could feel his weight in the world supported. The ocean lay ahead and he walked towards it until it was all that he could see. Flat and even and not a sound. Barely a ripple in the calm. Each breath fell thick and in time and he savored the taste of the ocean as if enriched by the magnitude of it. He began to walk, following the arc of the bay north toward the Church Point. Bedroom lights were steadily disappearing from the front row of houses; curtains drawn, children tucked up. John Muldoon felt invisible. In the quiet he was able to think. Without becoming cluttered, without drowning in it. He felt regulated by the tide and its steady breathing. He could remember Manus, his face and the sound of his old voice, without crying. He could think about Evelyn without becoming distracted from how it truly was. And how he felt day to day as she slowly died away upstairs. He could see the fullness of the moon and he loved it. Bold and emblematic in the cold.
It was getting on but he intended to walk the full way. Right to the church grounds which stood out to sea on a finger of land that marked the edge of town. He crushed through the wet sand leaving dark prints that would be gone by dawn and John Muldoon could just make out the texture of the cliff face that held up St Bartholomew’s and all of its graves. He could see the railings at the edge, and the petrified forest below that seemed to emerge from the ocean like an ancient skin advancing slowly towards the town.