This all happened when I was six years old, but I still remember every detail as if it were yesterday. I told it back then, first to Dad, later to a series of kind credentialed women. No one believed me. Even Lisey, who should have known better, denied it afterwards. But I know what happened, and I know he was real – maybe the realest thing I’ve ever met.
We were on holiday in Xadac, a rocky fishing port in the north-east of Spain haunted by chic French families, dusty German beatniks, and the artists who came for the famous quality of its light, strikingly visible in the work of the mad Torrentius, who settled there in his later years and painted his famous Paraferno on the front steps of the Casino.
Dad had been telling us the Story of the World on the long winding drive through the mountains. We’d nagged him into it – in that year he was too exhausted to resist us much – me in English, Lisey in the private language she’d adopted since the Accident. Before, the Story of the World had been a tag team effort, delivered in instalments by Mum and Dad, beginning with the formation of the first stars from pockets of density in swirling clouds of primordial hydrogen, working its way via various clumps of expertise (Dad never forgot the gist of anything he read in New Scientist or wherever) towards the present. We’d got onto the first humans, who according to Dad had lost their fur, and habit of walking on all fours, through shoreline living - wading about foraging for seaweed, trapping fish and diving for oysters. Like the cetaceans, we were mammals who’d returned to the sea, only without quite taking the plunge. This, he told us, explained our species’ fascination with beaches.
We were on the beach the day after our arrival. It was crowded with well-ordered French children and their sleek topless mothers, fathers running to fat like sealion harem bosses. Dad was taking Lisey paddling while I tried to catch fish in a rock pool, my trusty unicorn beach bucket filled with seawater ready to receive my catch. We’d gone through the usual argument, one we had several times a day throughout that year: we both wanted to do something just with him, he didn’t want to leave either of us on our own. We always won – he was shattered and outnumbered – but I was hardly ‘on my own’. Lisey was crooning and muttering to herself, and she was close enough that I could clearly hear her words, with their hint of dark logic just out of reach: ‘Doray, doraah, dackom. Amaalick navay doray...’
I was being an early human, my nylon net woven from dried seaweed, my plastic bucket baked terracotta (my sense of the prehistoric tech tree was hazy). The tiny fish flashing in the sun-streaked rockpool would make a fine dinner, so much tastier than limpets. I pictured the rest of the troop scattered about the beach – teaching the young how to swim, fashioning tools out of driftwood, a single old male playing on a flute made of bones. I drifted my net, slowly, slowly, into the path of the fish, as the bone song looped round and round the same five bars. The fish were canny, though: every time I scooped up the net it was a little too soon, and away they’d dart.
Oh, and I was sucking on a lollipop. How could I forget the lollipop? Maybe because at that point I had forgotten it – stick clamped between my teeth while it gradually dissolved in my mouth, a background strawberry glow over my scenario.
I let my net sink again, face bent low over the water, barely holding onto the handle, seeing it from the fishes’ point of view: here was a skein of long-dead dried-up seaweed that had blown into their pool, gradually sinking to the bottom. It must not twitch, must exhibit no volition at all till one of them was too deep in to escape. Waiting was the thing. Waiting, and listening to the five bars of breathy melody, and somewhere very far away now the bustle of the French and Lisey’s barbarous jargon: ‘Ickonta-tonka! Dackom! Djranta djranta!’
And it was happening this time. One of the fish – two! – drifting lazily in the depths of the pool, had found their way into the throat of my net. Already I reckoned it was too late for them to escape if I scooped them out quick enough, but I forced myself to wait, longer, longer. They were mine…
Plip, went something right next to my ear, shockingly close, and I couldn’t control my startled movement. The net jerked, the fish were gone, and I was turning, already angry with Lisey because surely this could only have been Lisey, but then something caught my eye – a wriggle of sunlight on the water in my bucket, furious movement of that which had plipped: a little fish, turning frantic circles within the blank plastic walls. And then it gave up, floating stunned, aghast, and I could see it clearly. I loved it. It was black with tiny bright golden eyes and an iridescent blue tinge that seemed to come from impossibly deep beneath its skin.
I looked up and there he was. His face was creased and brown, framed by shaggy greying hair, and he wore a loose linen jacket over a faded khaki t-shirt with a tiny bright pink heart embroidered onto the left side of the chest. His eyes were the same blue of the fish’s iridescence, of the bay of Xadac in that famous light, rich and dark and bright all at once. Years later, when I saw Torrentius’s Paraferno in the Prado, the sky in the painting was the same blue as those eyes and I had to sit down in a hurry. He was smiling, and then he tucked in his lower lip and whistled five bars of melody through his big square teeth, but the sound that came out was like no whistle through teeth or puckered lips: it was the sound of a flute whittled from the hollow bones of gulls, paper-thin, sun-bleached, ancient as the seashore.
He looked down at my bucket, a pointed look that said, Do you like my gift? The little fish stirred and swam a single lazy circle, and I knew it was responding to his look as surely as I knew his was the only face I would ever see again.
Still whistling, he nodded, pleased with my insight. The fact of having pleased him made me feel all warm and floaty. He was all there was: the beach, the sea, my family, the French tourists were all less than a haze. His eyes went back to the bucket, and I was permitted to notice it as he stretched out one hand towards it.
Seeing his hand, my feeling of warmth began to turn like milk left out in the sun. It was beautifully formed, that hand, skin smooth and brown, fingers long and agile-looking like the fingers of a solo violinist or a virtuoso painter. It was only when you got to the ends of the fingers that it all went wrong. The nails were yellow and thick, flaky at the ends, some fungal growth beneath them bulging them up away from the skin. The thumbnail had sloughed off completely, a brown remnant clinging on over the effulgence of woody fungus like a scrap of rotten banana peel. I had never seen anything more disgusting in my life, and haven’t yet. Still, I couldn’t look away. His hand reached out over the bucket, then did a little twirl like a magician’s hand – see? Empty! – then in a flash the hand with nothing in it dropped something into the bucket where the little blue fish was floating.
The water thrashed, the bucket nearly fell over. I couldn’t make out what was happening, only that some unspeakable violence was taking place within that tiny plastic-walled world. Then it was finished. My little iridescent fish was gone. In its place floated something plump and ugly, eyeless, the length of a man’s thumb, its skin a dirty brownish-yellow streaked with neon pink. Drifting towards the surface of the water was a little thread of dark purple viscera, all that remained of my fish, and then the eyeless thing darted up with appalling speed and snapped it up.
He was still whistling, five bars over and over as he smiled and nodded and reached out his hand towards me, the two of us floating together in a warm bath that tasted sweet like death, and even my rising dread couldn’t break the surface. I didn’t want to touch that hand. I knew somehow that if I did, my future would be short and nasty as the struggle I’d just witnessed. I didn’t want to touch that hand, the water was foul, but it tasted sweet, his eyes so blue, the pink heart embroidered on his chest, warm bathwater that made me want to gag yet still tasted of –
Strawberry lollipop.
I blinked, and even though he didn’t break off the whistling for a single moment I thought I saw something in his eyes, a ripple in the lazy depths as if I’d done something unexpected.
I won’t claim what I did next was clever. It came from some garbled mish-mash of the lollipop in my mouth and that rule all children are told about not accepting sweets from strangers. Somehow, I suppose, I thought I could turn it around. I’d accepted the fish, it was too late for that, but what if I offered my sweets to him?
I was six. It was all I could think of. I knew if I didn’t do something now it would be too late, forever and ever. With an enormous effort I lifted my hand to my mouth, took out the lollipop, and offered it to him.
This time he was definitely surprised – but not disconcerted. His laugh was the laugh of someone who thinks they’ve seen it all before, suddenly presented with a new and startling joke. His face split into a grin, and a warm, rolling chuckle came rumbling up from deep inside his belly. It went on and on building, eyes crinkled with glee, those big square teeth gleaming white in the sunlight.
The world returned, the sounds of the beach snapping back as if I’d just removed a pillow wrapped tightly round my head. Looking past Fungus Fingers, I could see my dad gazing around with a look of rising panic, and Lisey looking straight at me, with a look on her face I’d seen once before, in the sandpit at Highbury Fields playground back home, when a much older boy – eight years old, at least – had tried to steal her spade. That time, she’d gathered up all her strength and screamed in his face as loud as she could until he scarpered, looking over his shoulder doubtful that something so small could make a noise like that. Now, her gaze shifted to Fungus Fingers just as her inspiration peaked, and then she let rip.
The utterance that came out of her then was indescribable, but I’ll do my best: a whale’s death-gasp squeezed through a plastic primary school recorder; a bagpipe made from the gutted canopy of a giant squid; a typhoon’s Ground Zero in the hydrogen seas of Jupiter. It didn’t have syllables so much as modulations, one impossible timbre to another even more so. It was nothing like a word, but there was sense in it, somewhere just out of reach, coming from the place of all her private words from that year after mum died. Fungus Fingers hadn’t said a word to me, and I don’t think he could have – I don’t think he knew language in the ordinary way – but the sense got through to him.
Even a dog recognises the sound of its own name.
I remember the feeling he’d woven around me came back then, turned up to eleven – the warm bath scalding hot, the fluting melody a tiger-clawed blackboard, the sweetness with its faint tinge of decay a choking bolus of rotten eggs and aspartame. I remember thinking this is it, you’re going to die now, and then it gripped me tighter and thought went out of the window.
And then he was gone. This is another bit where description fails me, and there’s no metaphor that will help either. He did not ‘disappear’, he was not gone ‘in a flash,’ nor did he ‘blink out of existence.’ There was no moment of going, to be rendered in the past historic tense. Just a moment after, when he was gone. There are moments in dreams like this, where a new state is the state of affairs, that which has always been. Of course you’re still studying for your A-levels at 35; of course you’re often naked at this restaurant; of course you know how to fly. It was something like that. I still knew he was real. As real as the rocks, as real as the stars. And he was still in the same place he’d always been, and it was I who had moved, somehow, out of his grasp.
Pointless. He was from somewhere that language doesn’t reach. I might as well try to transliterate Lisey’s scream. Speaking of which, the French were all shocked (I saw one small boy standing knee-deep in the sea looking at her with a sort of dazed envy), and Dad looked embarrassed for half a moment and then he saw me and came running, face collapsing with relief.
‘Where were you?’ he said, sweeping me up into a tight squeeze. ‘You disappeared, you mustn’t do that, Jesus you scared the fucking shit out of me!’ (That was also the year he gave up all pretence of not swearing in front of us.)
I was clasped against his shoulder, eyes shut, my cheek moulded into his warm prickly neck. I wanted to ask him if he’d seen the man (already I was trying out that word for Fungus Fingers), even though I knew already what his answer would be. I opened my eyes and saw Lisey gazing up at me. Her eyes were always a deep blue too, come to think of it. She knew what I was thinking, and she knew what Dad didn’t, even though later that day, as I tried with increasing anger to get him to believe my story, she’d deny it. The fact she could deny it must have eclipsed, from his point of view, whatever strange fantasy I’d come up with. Until then she hadn’t said a word of English for months, little Lisey, the precociously verbal one: what must it have been like for him, on top of everything else, to have her lose the power of speech?
I was the one who witnessed the precise moment of its return, though. In that moment, Dad’s attention was all on me – the disappearing girl squeezed in his arms – Lisey forgotten for now as she looked up at me and articulated a single English word.
‘Monster.’
I hope you write more of this!
I just…my hair is standing on end and it won’t go back down! Scary!