Cold Feet

It is a sad day. The sky agrees, downcast and bleak and heavy and under its burden of silver-lined clouds, shrouding the sun in vaporous mummifying linen. It could be day or night, I think, watching it, distant. It is a sad day. It is a cold day too; the sea breeze bites, tearing away my flesh before lapping up the wounds with its caressing tongue. There is salt in the air, a harsh, amniotic smell which mocks me. It reminds me of my own presence, my reality that persists despite the cold and the smell and the sadness. I used to love the beach, used to love the holiday crowd and the cheer of children playing by the seashore. There are no more cheers here.

It’s empty here – who would come to the beach on a day like this? I ask myself as my feet test to see if the pebbles will support me. Truly empty, devoid of colour, life. It’s a weekday in winter and the wind is howling: there is no face to greet me here, no children to cherish or chastise. I wouldn’t want to see anyone now, anyway. Tears are solitary creatures – to them, companionship is voyeuristic. The pebbles do, in fact, hold my weight. They grind a little beneath the sharp point of the polished shoe, but they support me. I step from the street into the stones and gaze out at the horizon, so very far away. 

It’s so enormous, the ocean, the entire world. How strange to think that I, in my own universe, am minute in comparison to the vastness of the water stretching away before me. This body of water stretches all the way to America. I have never been – I have always wanted to, but I am anchored here like a long-lost ship with a faulty foghorn, barnacles crusting with boredom on my bottom. ‘The Land of the Free’, they call it, a utopia of fast food and faster bullets. I wish I could go there, I want to fatten on processed meat and cheese and be free. I start to wonder if I could swim there, the whole way, right now. What would I find there? After such a journey, the freezing ocean dragging at my heavy, heaving clothes, finally clawing myself from the clutches of that dreaded salt, would I find the free people of that land? Or would I find another woman dressed in black, dreaming of a free land elsewhere?

At my heart, I know I am going to be late. Usually, I’m punctual to a T – I can’t stand tardiness, it stresses me out, and I am told that stress makes me emotional. That’s not wrong; but nor is it right. That was me Before; this, standing on this beach, is me After. It feels like my life has been split, spliced clean in two, as if some crude butcher has taken a cleaver and simply cut apart my life, skewered and severed me nice and fine, and is now trying to serve me up as if the skewering and the severing had never happened. There was the time Before, where I was whole; and now, I find myself After the event, incomplete, lacking. At least my misery is gourmet. 

I’m rambling, I know, but I think I’ve earnt the right to ramble, I think I deserve that much if nothing else. And if I don’t keep rambling, I will remember, and God knows I will do anything to stop that.

Well, here I am. The beach. I’m sad, did you know? Do you know how sad you’ve made me? I doubt it. Grief is making me secular. But I’m comforted by the thought that if there is by chance a heaven, and if, by some sheer amount of luck, you’re in there, and if in some bizarre scenario Christ has handed you a telescope in the Great Up There and you just happen to be watching me right now, I think (but I can’t be certain) that you’d feel bad. I hope you feel bad. I hate the beach.

I’ve known for some time now that I’m not alone. Further down the shore is another figure, one whom I am religiously trying to ignore. Can’t a woman cry openly in public in peace anymore? Let them do what they want – let them laugh, or look away embarrassed, or leave, as they inevitably will. If I let them do that, maybe they’ll let me be alone.

I breathe in the salt, and I revive. The world has taken on a newfound clarity – it’s like when you’re at the optician’s and they’re asking you whether you can see better through the first lens or the second lens. You can see fine already – this test is just a precaution, your mother’s sight dwindled early in life, so it’s just to check – but the optician, who knows better than you, forces down the next lens, and suddenly everything is too bright, too clear, you can see all too well every colour, every harsh line and carving in the backdrop of life. Microscopic details are now elephantine. How had I never noticed how bright sunlight was? It scathes me, makes me itch and crawl. My phone vibrates in my pocket. I ignore it once more. The tinny vibrations remind me of crickets.

It’s quite nice, this loneliness. It’s indulgent, decadent. When was the last time I was truly by myself? The past week and a half has overflowed with grim faces and gaunt smiles, hollow and heartless, sympathetic yet separate. Before that, well – hospitals aren’t lonely places. I feel liberated in a way. Freedom is my reward, my penitence. It’s a gargantuan liberty, huge enough to swallow me whole. It’s the freedom that Icarus felt before he decided to fly into the sun. 

The tide crawls closer. And so does the figure on the beach. I clutch my blazer closer about myself. Step by faltering step, the water looms closer and closer, until the tips of my shoes are dampened as they hover over the brink of infinity. My toes tingle – they crave the cold comfort of the ocean. So I give in, as I always do: off come the heels, I step into the briny liquid. I don’t dare look down – if I look down, it’s real. If I look down, I’m lost. Instead, I look at the sky, at the sea, at the silver thread where the sky meets the sea, at the bride standing in the water beside me.

I stagger. There is a bride standing in the water beside me. A bride. In a wedding gown. If it was not for the glacial tide curling over my bare toes and the stink of sea salt, I’d think it was a joke. Or a bad trip. Despite everything, despite the ridiculous garment she is shoving down my throat, it’s her face that I focus on, her eyes which draw me in. The woman stares at me with a certain daring I can’t quite place. They challenge me, poke at my wounds and rip them open. She is a picture of perfection, could well be a painting – I can almost see the brush strokes of her hair beneath the flimsy veil – she is truly beautiful. Her cheekbones are high, her jawline is smooth and sloping, her nose is a little button sewn right into the middle of her face. She is symmetrical in her beauty – one ear is as graceful as the other. The bride’s lips are a deep, profound red. They don’t belong in this vista of slate and silver. There are depthless holes where her pupils should be. Her neck is slender, the shivering stem supporting the head of the rose bud in bloom. Shoulders are exact, collarbone pronounced, breasts voluptuous, skin clear, not too tall, not too small, not too skinny, nowhere near fat, ‘curvy in all the right places’, ‘hot’, ‘fuckable’, the enemy. She’s wearing a strapless dress, silky, the kind I like which exposes the shoulder, with long lace Audrey-Hepburn-Breakfast-at-Tiffany’s gloves reaching to her upper arm, true elegance. The dress bunches up around her like heaped snow, coiling under her arms as she hikes it up. It suddenly occurs to me that she’s actually standing in the water – as much as she tries to stop it, her train is waterlogged, swirling beneath her like sour milk dripped in oil. It stretches out towards me, welcoming as eels swimming sperm-like over the pebbles. The sinews of the fabric make me think of the ancient mummies of Egypt; like them, this woman is enveloped, her beauty preserved underneath the layered wrappings. The delicate lace coating the dress is heavy with its liquid load, dragging her down. I look behind me – she, too, has shirked her shoes. They sit quite aimlessly a few metres away, oblivious to everything except for their own vacancy. They look stupid sitting there, like gulls, or children. They must have a wonderful view of the two of us, standing there, my new female friend and I, one in dazzling white, the other in depressing black. A binary contrast so severe, so stark, it will split the world in two. Our two veils conceal our pity for the other. They trap us within our own selfish minds – I cannot see the tears that stroke her face, though I know they are there, nor can she see mine. All the better – tears are solitary creatures, after all. I know why I am standing there, feet freezing in the soaking cold, shoes lounging on the shore. Why is she? Should this not be the happiest day of her life? Where is her groom, her maid of honour, her friends and family, her parents, her photographer, her florist? All of a sudden she drops the whorls of silk and they splash into the sea, spraying me with vicious flecks. She is all grit, tension limning her every limb. Determination runs through her like an iron core. She is made of metal, this beautiful woman, she consists of irate mettle. She terrifies me – I wish I could be like her. The sound of the waves humbly washing our four bare feet is like the lapping of thirsty tongues. Imagine the scene – a widow and a bride watching each other side by side, black versus white, old versus young, life versus death. Here we both are, both with our baggage waiting, with our friends and family waiting too, no doubt. We are both intended for abbeys. She is the cherubim atop the church spire, and I the grotesque. We have stood like statues for so long that time cannot exist anymore. We are bubbled within our own little eternity here. Why do I stay? It is a good question, and one that I evidently have the time to answer. Because I want to look at her? Because, for once, I want to share my loneliness? To remind someone else of my physical presence for a change? Perhaps. But I want to see what she does next. We are twins, she and I, connected deep within our souls – her thoughts are my thoughts are her thoughts. But I want to watch, like the shoes, I want to observe the demonstration. Here is the beautiful bride on her wedding day, standing in the rising ocean – what will she do next? She tilts her head at me, and I wonder if she is going to speak; but no, that would be perverse. It would be blasphemy. Her fingers are slim like the rest of her, taloned like a bird of prey. They are barren – there is a hard glint over from where the white shoes lie, a little comical wink, perfectly timed and staged. I feel myself quail before the gaze of this austere woman. She is like a nun in her white, silken habit, stoic and proud to a fault. I feel as though I have known this woman her whole life, since she was a little girl, since I was one too, I feel every emotion and thought which has wracked that creaking brain of hers. I try to visualise myself through her eyes – am I as powerful? As tragically beautiful in the watery sunlight of this sad, sad day? I doubt it – she has bested me once again. Something shifts between us. There is no particular gesture; no nod of the head, or melancholy smile. It is merely a mutual acknowledgement that the time Before has passed, and now is the time After, when we must do what must be done. She is brave, this forgotten bride, I have to give her that. The cold has sapped all warmth from her bones – it calls for her, like to like. It is not a submission – it is the regal acceptance of a suitor’s hand. The bride, taciturnly silent, turns from me. She steps forward, step by tiny little step, the water opening up around her, embracing her with its lapping hugs. Her train disappears – it is now simply part of the wake, a contribution to the perpetual ebb and flow of this damned sea, caught up in the tumult of white foam as the tide breaks against the pebbly coast. She shares the elegance of a sinking liner – the Titanic never looked more dignified. Her head is held high as the mermaid at the stern of a ship. Soon the water grips her around the waist, her breath escapes her in a miasma of steam. It is oddly beautiful, that steam, for it is her soul. I wonder if she will swim to America; I wonder what she will find there in the Land of the Free – another corrupted bride? Down go the voluptuous breasts, the pronounced collarbone, the exact shoulders, the rose-bud-stem neck, all dissolving into the sea like the sweetest sugar. Soon all that remains is her veil, floating gracefully on the surface, bobbing like the drowned body of Ophelia. It makes me want to laugh. Then it disappears. And all I can think is, That poor dress!

She does not reappear. I stand for quite some time, waiting for her breath to come out, for her to shoot up to the surface like an exquisite dolphin, shrieking, “Again, again!” But she does not. I step out of the ocean – my feet are cold now, too cold. I slip on my shoes, grateful for the warmth I had momentarily lacked. I stoop and pocket the glint. But I leave the shoes – they are her cross, and they don’t know any better. She may have bested me, but in doing so, who wins?

I leave the beach and the bride behind me. I walk until I reach the church. I do not look at the gravestones lining my path. When I reach the hole in the ground, the rich chestnut box polished so I can see my face in it, I stop. There are voices around me – they swirl and blow and huff and puff. They ask me what I have been doing. They ask me where I have been. I look at myself staring back at me, but all I can see is her. She wants to watch me. She wants to observe, she wants to see what I will do next. So when they ask me what I was doing, what I’m thinking, what I’m feeling, I say:

“Nothing.”