Deliquescence

--This is work in progress. I'd appreciate any feedback on this
story.
Thank you --

They've all been dealing with the same event in different ways. My best
friend Beth has taken an overdose to avoid the whole thing. Dad just
sits in his chair watching daytime TV, eating junk. Darrel has locked
himself in his room. Mum is at the kitchen counter in the crying
silently. I haven't felt anything yet.

I'm forced to take the call about Beth. None of them are able to react.
It rings and rings until I pick it up. There's the hollow voice of
Beth's mother at the other end, worn down to a whisper. The receiver
slips gently back onto its hook.

"I have to go and see Beth. She's in the hospital in Ryton," I tell my
mother across the room. No response. She rocks gently on the stool as
if moved by a slight breeze. The hair that has fallen across her face
is highlighted with grey tufts and the wrinkles around her eyes have
become fissures. The skin around her moth is taught and without joy.
She looks at me, so much confusion in her eyes, unanswered questions,
guilt, fear, and grief. Fingers move across her trembling lips but she
cannot hide, her hand trembles more. Her throat spasms hoarse dry tears
and both hands enclose her face as she sinks into sobbing again.
"I'm going to see Beth, I'll be back later."

Outside the heat of summer leaves me breathless. Gulls shrieking on the
rooftops replace mum's crying, disrespectfully pecking at black bin
bags. I walk down to the harbour where a bleached timetable is bolted
to the wall. Mum and Dad bough me a car after my exams. Beth and I
would drive along the coast or to the city or anywhere to feel the
freedom, see the hedges blur green and the tarmac swallowed by the
tyres. Today I want the responsibility to be in someone else's hands.
When it arrives, I pay the driver. I must be the first passenger in a
week. He starts to force a smile but it fails and we're left staring at
each other awkwardly. I rip my ticket from the machine and walk to the
back.

We wheeze up the coast road. A few houses shudder by replaced by
unfenced fields, the road a boundary between cultivated and salinated,
the sea in the distance. Right now, everything feels at that
distance.

There were twenty-four children on the school trip, two teachers, three
mothers and the driver. On the return journey, their coach crossed to
the oncoming carriageway of the motorway into the path of a tanker. The
incident closed both carriageways for five hours. There were no
survivors. Our fishing village is woven together like the nets,
stronger than nylon, bound by history and heritage. Every family has
been touched, except ours.

A telephone wire rises from the ground onto poles that move by then
turn of at an angle to some farm over the hill. In a class of
twenty-five only one did not go. I lied to my parents about Darrel. I
said he broke my stereo so they wouldn't let him go. Everyone Darrel
grew up with is gone. Beth's twin brothers Jake and Simon were in
Darrel's class, their teacher Mrs Price taught me nine years ago. Sally
Parks was my friend Chris' sister. I can't bear to get halfway down the
list.

It feels as if we're not moving, as if the landscape outside was
painted on a cloth moved by a frantically peddling operator. These are
the first colours I've seen for days. Unrealistically bright the greens
are fuller, spirit level luminous, the yellows more golden. I've seen
the village joined in grief but I've felt no more a part of it that the
vulture reporters that flocked there. I'm feeling what I know my mother
thinks, what she won't ever say.

"Why didn't you talk to me Beth?" Sandwiched between crisp hospital
sheets Beth looks tiny, her hand is paper thin in mine. We have been
friends for ten years and best friends for a discontinuous six. We used
to talk about boys and careers as beauticians. Now Beth whispers
because the tubes they pumped her out with scratched the vocal cords.
She tells me the doctor told her this morning that her liver may be
permanently damaged. "But I think he's just trying to scare me." Her
voice sounds distorted and unreal.

I squeeze her hand. "How's your mum?"
"Don't know. Angry I guess. She wants to take me home."
"Your dad?"
"Same. Upset. He told me I couldn't leave them alone."
"You can't. You can't leave me either. What would I do?"
"I really miss them Jess. I don't know how I'm going to get through
this. How will they all get through it?"
"They will. You will. It's going to take a long time, I don't think
things will ever be the same, but they will get better. I saw Chris on
the quay yesterday."
"Did he say anything?"
"Not to me. He looked tired, worn out, smoking." When Beth and Chris
were going out, she was always trying to get him to stop.
Beth laughs and winces, "Everyone has their poison," and she fakes
death on the pillow. I can't help but laugh and we both laugh together,
something like it use to be. We try to freak the nurses out by
tampering with her chart and attaching the heart monitor to the
hospital radio. They are not amused. I smuggle in burgers to defeat the
canteen slops and they ask me to leave.

I think Mrs Price taught me about the salt flats when I was ten, but
that might be a poetic distortion of the truth. A mile out of the
village there's a field that flooded by the high tide. On hot days, the
seawater evaporates to leave a wide, white desert. I like to stand out
there late in the afternoon and wait until the tide washes over my
ankles. I've always loved to feel the gentle tugging on my sandals.
When I walk back across the film of surface water I feel like Jesus.
With the light reflected on my face, I feel like a god.

I get off the bus at the stop out of town and go down to the flats. The
tide is still far out the earth sparkling dry. I sit in the dunes,
watching for lizards but there are none. No birds dare the unforgiving
saline. Only the ants walk in undeterred columns between driftwood and
stones. I undermine the sand around a dune plant until its roots are
exposed.

A claustrophobic weather front drifts in from the south bringing the
sky down to my level. I can't breath inland so I walk to the quay and
huddle in a porch, waiting for signs. The quay smells of lobster pots
festering in the June heat. I want it to rain. I want it to snow. I
want nature to fill up my pores but my body is intent on expelling
moisture, drying me out in the sun to a lifeless husk. The boats are
all in, a single flag at half-mast.

I take medicinal double vodkas in the sung of The Anchor. Andy and
Chris are playing pool without a word. Last week the dynamics of our
conversation kept this pub alive. Now the smart remarks, dirty jokes
and remorseless flirtation have vaporised and we are silence.

I want to soak it in. Spilt beer and saltwater. Drink in the
atmosphere. Mop it up until my cells dissolve in an ocean and the
barriers disintegrate between outside and inside, the world and me, so
I'm part of everything I'm apart from now, at one with everything, lost
in the sea.

It isn't like that though. Chris nominates his shots with imperceptible
nods to the table, working his way around the green, focused on taking
his mind off his sister, striking the cue ball with precision,
listening for the click of contact and the rumble of another number
going down. Andy stands across the room, repeatedly picking up his pint
from the white recess of the window, lifting it to his lips, swallowing
no liquid, replacing the glass like one of the machines in Dad's
factory. He's pretending to look at the table but his head doesn't
follow Chris's motion. He's looking at me whenever he can then dropping
his eyes to the floor and messing with his cue. There's blue chalk on
his cheek.

Andy wasn't born here. He only moved here when he was six. Our harbour
may be his shelter but not his home. He always made a joke out of being
an outsider but it was always a nervous laugh, too close to the truth
to be palatable.

I always found the sense of community overwhelming until the accident.
Maybe I envied his detachment. Now I'm adrift from everyone else we
have become connected. Chris plays pool in short, sharp shots, until he
misses an easy blue.

"I used to fight with Sally all the time. She had that whole innocent
little girl routine, so she always got away with everything." he says
suddenly.
"That's what they're like at that age when you have to hate them. They
get everything handled to them," I tell him. "Darrel can be a right
little git."
Before I finish my sentence, I know I've said the wrong thing. "I'm
sorry." Chris turns back to the table.
"At least you can still hate him."

Andy followed me outside. It seems I'm too dry for tears, as if my eyes
have been blotted until the cornea are as stiff as yesterday's contact
lenses. My skin has begun to flake, moulting confetti pieces into the
air, bolts of brittle hair crackling from my scalp. I feel that I'm
blowing away, becoming one with the sky instead of reuniting with the
water.

"Chris doesn't mean it Jessie. You know he doesn't."
"Yes he does Andy. He's got every right. I don't know why I said
that."
"I wouldn't matter what you say. Everything's wrong. He hates everyone
right now."
"But me especially."
"What?"
"He's got every reason to."
"Why Jess? I don't understand what you're talking about."
"He's just the same as everyone else. Nobody will say it, but they all
thinking it. They all wish their brother, or daughter was at home and
Darrel had gone instead."
I walk along the harbour wall, away from the village. Andy follows
me.
"Is that what you think Jessie? Is that what you really think? That
everyone wants a swap with your brother?" He comes up close to me,
shouting, pulls at my shoulder when I won't look at him.
"Nobody thinks that. They're all shattered. This has broken their lives
apart. How can you expect them to be anything but devastated?"
He's swelling up with rage.
"How selfish can you be to expect them to be happy for you right now?
Do you feel nothing for them Jess?" and he pushes away from me, off to
the end of the wall.

We're at the point of the harbour wall furthest from the land. I try to
imagine a time before the wall was here, how it could ever have been
constructed and how it can stand against the abusive lashings of the
winter storms. Even today, the calm sea foams against the rocks at its
base. I sink on a bollard thick with weatherproof paint, turn back to
face the village. Pink and white houses, sturdy and rugged as their
occupiers, fan out from the harbour into the hillside, tied together by
telephone and electricity cables. I wonder how Beth can function
without her twin brothers, when Mr Price will leave his wife's
graveside, if the fishing boats will ever sail again. The metal of the
bollard is cold against my skin.

"I haven't cried once. It's been happening around me like a hurricane
but I'm untouched in the calm at the middle. I'm so glad Darrel's all
right sometimes I can't think of anything else. I'm sorry. I don't want
to feel like this. I'm sorry Andy, sorry for Beth, for Chris and
everyone."

Wires jingle like violin strings against the masts of the beached
fishing boats. The boats rise and fall against wooden jetties, ropes
creaking. The jetties are washed by the harmonies of the tide. Waves
move to cover the mud by the slipway. Something stings my cheek.
Droplets become torrents, torrents fall into the harbour. On the
marshes, the water is trickling onto the salt flats. Hairline fractures
that spread into trickles, streams and rivers, the fine crystals of
salt saturating and melting into the brine, becoming indistinguishable
from the sea.