Coral
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It doesn’t begin with the bit about Jesus because I would not want to give you the wrong impression.
They said, they said to me, as we sat at this long table on the waterfront as the sun went down and the blue blue blue blue sea behind them glittered, And you just drive around? Is it safe?
I pull over by the side of a long blacktop road. Trucks veer wildly left and right to avoid the massive potholes. A man and woman ahead kick about in the long grass collecting glass bottles in a wheelbarrow. There’s rubbish everywhere. The other side of the road is a small township, a few half-built roofless houses made of breezeblocks, then a stone building with wrought grills over the bare windows and a woman on the porch nursing a baby. People are singing over the way. The road peters out. The hulks of three old Isuzu trucks up on their axles. There’s a pocket Bible on a stone and I sit cross-legged on the bald grass and flick through it. Two boys sell me a ripe mango.
Feeling the weight of the waves drag him in, drag him out, he goes limp. Lets his body go limp. The better to feel the awesome strength of the current dragging his arms, torso, legs, dragging him outwards as the wave rolls back then tumbling his body over itself as the back draw meets an incoming wave and the conflicting forces roil round him, washing him up in the shallows, splayed ragdoll with grit in his pockets.
Or else to stand against the waves. Dig your heels in hard and put your fists up, turned side on to brace against the enormous crash, shouting, You will not take me alive! To feel that the body can stand firm against it, knocked off its feet or closed over by a wave taller than he is, tumbled yes and dragged back yes but heels pushed into the dense sand below and fingers snagged in backwards as the wash goes over him. Surrendering to the power of the oceans, yes, but also and alternately energised by the power of the body, of your body, of this body.
The beach is marked on either side with guard towers manned by employees of the hotel complexes in tan uniforms. A string of buoys runs into the water on either side and then comes round in front, giving those who use the public beach a hundred feet of water to swim out in before someone whistles for them to turn back. The country cut up into thousands of tiny, walled off, guarded principalities, little universes owned by hotel groups. I stay in one of them for twenty hours. The marble lobby opens out onto a beach combed by an army of cleaners raking the sand flat. A sea of blue recliners on which greasy Westerners lounge about like moribund glistening sea creatures. Samba music plays loudly from everywhere, all the time. I cross the boundary of the beach without being stopped and in a flutter of unplanned freedom my depression lifts and soon I’m on a wide curved bay that’s almost empty. Some tourist information on the wall of a wooden pagoda, a faded poster showing off the coral reef, labelling the beautiful whole colours and the fish you can spot among it. Then I look out at a shelf of dull, grey-green stone. The coral’s dead, a result of the usual concatenation of disasters – climate change, over-fishing, pollution caused by mass tourism. All the public beaches have a frieze of plastic fragments near the water’s edge.
The problem with me is I just can’t relax, I find it so hard to let go of this thing I’m holding.
While all this was happening the woman I was in love with was sending me pictures of the gallery we work at, the shadows on the floor and her reflection all watery and imprecise on the slanted window. I send her pictures of the wedding and the pictures look like a glassily serene, polished impression of a life, something impossible to touch, even though it’s right there. The white ruffles on a pristine blue sea. The sun is going down. A man and woman holding hands. I check out that same night and within thirty minutes I’m on a pitch-black empty highway cut through with scruffy brittle scrubland and nothing in the distance but more skinny dogs.
She plays those WhatsApp games: she doesn’t read the message for four hours so the ticks stay grey, then the ticks spin blue but she doesn’t respond, even though she’s online. Whatever, she’s immature. Forty-one but immature.
I’d disembowel myself for that woman.
I wrote her poems and still she rejected me. I don’t know if they’re good poems, I don’t know how you’d judge, except that actually they are good poems, I know they are, in the same way I know how much to slow down in the car in order to take that corner smoothly.
I pass a cartoonishly angular grey horse standing next to a tree. The string round its neck isn’t fastened to anything, it just hangs there. The horse’s head hangs down as does its long drooping dong. It’s bigger than mine. Much bigger.
What a disappointment I am.
For a long time I watch this coconut rolling back and forth, bashed hither and thither, disappearing under the waves and then bobbing up closer in, rolling onto flat sand that lightens as the soaked wave recedes and then borne up once more as the foamy breaker rolls in and draws it out. And all like that for ages. Forward and back. Forward and back.
The problem with me is I just can’t relax, I find it so hard to let go of this thing I’m holding. Usually I can give it a name, I can explain what it is I need to do and this need gives shape to the anxiety, but sometimes, usually in those too brief moments after I’ve miraculously let it go and it just isn’t there anymore, in such moments I understand this relentless need to be doing something, making up for lost time, proving myself, will never be appeased. Proof of this overbearing weight and pressure is the extraordinary lightness I feel during the fleeting moments in which it ceases to exist. I feel weightless. I’m just watching a coconut.
He was at a wedding I think. He told me something about a wedding at the Hilton somewhere in the Caribbean, said it wasn’t his idea of a holiday but a friend had asked him to be best man. He didn’t really understand why he’d been asked, they were friends, yes, but he was surprised, he’s always surprised, he says, when people persist in trying to spend time with him, keeping in touch, he finds it so tiresome, it never gets easier, not that you’d know he felt that strongly about it, he was always good company when he was around, everyone said that, he was just hard to pin down, flaky, unreliable, everyone knew he was elusive, hard to get hold of, that he preferred his own company. And yet he said he was in love with me, he insisted on it, even though I told him he was wrong, how could that be true, he barely knew me, we’d just meet up here and there at work, in the Tanks, send each other WhatsApp messages, and okay, seeing as I have a boyfriend I shouldn’t really have been speaking to him the way I was, I should have told him earlier, but I liked the attention, that’s the truth of it, he wrote me poems, he wrote a poem in the sand then panned down the lines with his phone, filming it, and he sent it to me and we’d send each other pictures of the moon, we had this bond, as though we were attuned to one another, and I liked that, I’d not known that before, that kind of connection, it was oddly melancholy, this friendship, it was intimate and private, and yes, I knew, of course I knew how he felt, of course I knew that he thought he was falling in love with me, I’m not a child, I’m a good looking woman, I know the effect I have on men, I knew he was beguiled, but my point was he’d fallen in love not with me but with this thing that we’d made, he’d confused the two things, conflated the two, I was able to keep them separate but he couldn’t, he didn’t want to.
The only thing that still holds me is this glittering belief that somehow things will shift and change and a new light will finger its way through the darkness.
My app, the dating app I’ve been using, automatically switched to travel mode and updated my location. I did the usual two minutes here, two minutes there. Yes, no, yes, yes, yes, no, no… I must have had a hundred women write to me in the last few days. Hola! Hola! Hola! I’ve never been so popular. Most of them are in Santa Domingo. I get talking to this one girl, Katherine, she shows me pictures of her daughter, basically tells me her life story. She clearly needs someone to talk to, someone to confide in, and I like to play that role, I become that person for people, for women, quite naturally. And there I am on my profile picture, healthy, smiling, St Pauls Cathedral behind me, the outcome of empire, all complexly proud and apologetic.
For me life has been very difficult. I cry without my mother. I did not have a childhood since I was little I have had to work, I am a single mother since I am 15 years old. Thank God the girl’s father is very responsible, well it has been very difficult but I am not complaining I am thankful for everything and I just hope that in a while I will see myself in a better place.
If I spent two weeks in Santa Domingo I could be going home with a twenty-two year old wife. I know that sounds distasteful – predatory even – but I think there’s something real in that. If I were kind to her and generous. If I made her life better, materially, alleviated some burdens that she could think again about what she likes and who she is, then she could love me for that, it would be real.
I know, I know…
I was very moved by the bit where the woman – perhaps she’s blind – says, Jesus, please make me see again, and he says, Do you believe I can make you see? and she says yes I do, and he says, Go your way. Your faith has made you well. It’s her belief that he can cure her that cures her. Jesus doesn’t cure her, she cures herself. But if there were no Jesus for her to believe in then she couldn’t cure herself. I find that very powerful. There is a synergy there close to paradox but not quite. In the same way – this feels like part of the same thing, the same texture of the Gospels – many of the stories are retold in slightly different ways, we get the stories and parables from different perspectives, and I find this layering very rich and very satisfying. The repetition. The insistence.
There’s a long-handled dustpan and brush on a hook behind the door so I can sweep all the sand out. I hate having bits in the bed. I’m a light sleeper. I need silence. I haven’t had any of that here. It’s been either the noise of the jungle – the bugs, the birds, the bats – or the sound of the sea. Yet I’ve slept like a baby. Ten hours a night, six nights on the trot. I’ve never slept so well. Maybe it will be different then. Maybe I just needed some rest.
Not that I want a housewife, that’s not what I mean at all, she doesn’t have to keep house, I’d keep house, I like all that, cleaning, ironing, cooking, I like that stuff, I find it peaceful.
The guy who owns this place – it’s the last place I’ve booked, a beach hut in a row of them and I’ve gotten lucky again, the rest are vacant, it’s just me – the owner, Manny, who lives down the end came out last night as I was wading back to shore and he said very assertively, No! No! You cannot go into the water at night! Being a good little Englishman I apologised and sat on one of the wooden recliners with the towel around my shoulders, chastised and sullen till he went away again. The clouds – now I mean – over the water are the colour of black cherry yoghurt.
What is that glistening beside you?
Is it the light?
Is it the shallow glassy wave
soaking into the sand?
Could it be something else?
I lose interest pretty quickly. The dating app, the coconut. The only thing that still holds me – and I really don’t know what this is worth, what it counts for – is this glittering belief, however contrary it is to all the evidence around me, that somehow things will shift and change and a new light will finger its way through the darkness.
.
.
Cover image: The Sea, Jan Toorop, 1887.
Joseph Pierson‘s stories have been published by, among others, 3AM Magazine, Ambit, Litro and Minor Literature[s]. He is a recipient of the Bridport Novel Prize and holds a PhD in Creative Writing. He is an English Teacher based in Southeast London.
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