Waves

 

Rain spat bitterly, and the wind buffeted him along. The shop windows carried Tom's blurry reflection under veils of condensation, slipping in and out of existence in the breaks between frames like some kind of ephemeral acolyte weaving amongst realms.

Ducking into a doorway, he paced up the stairwell, footsteps reverberating through the concrete. The hall was dank and quiet around his door. A bulb at the far end blinked fitfully.

Inside, he peeled off his sodden jacket and slumped onto the sofa. Heavy drops cut a shimmering curtain in the window, and the soft-focus fuzz of stars swam behind them with a gentle pellucidity and lightness. There was a crackle and flare in the dark as he lit a cigarette. He sunk back and his head filled with clipped fragments of work and people. Nothing was distinct and separate. Thoughts merged into a singular grey mass of being.

There was a soft tapping at the door.

Coughing, he padded over. He eased the door open and stuck his head between the gap. No-one was there. He opened the door wider. A small woman appeared as if she had just grown up out of the hallway floor. She was squinting at him. Her face was pensive and she scratched impatiently at her brow, as if it were Tom who had interrupted her.

'Your electricity,' she mumbled, 'has your electricity gone off?'

He looked blankly at her, stepped back into his flat, flipped a switch, and sagged.

'It seems so.' 

The woman stood, shuffling. She looked distraught.

'Look, I've some candles - do you want to come in for a drink, and we'll... we'll see if we can make some calls, sort this out?' 

She nodded, sniffling, and followed him in. The rain drumming the roof and the sharp shrieks of wind spoke of a world detached from and ambivalent to their concerns, lost in its primal rhythms. Angling his mobile for light, Tom rooted around a drawer and came up with a box of candles, arranging them on the coffee table. He poured two glasses of wine, placed them on coasters, and stood awkwardly, hovering.

'Thank you for this,' the small woman mumbled, 'it's been a bad day.'

'It's - that's okay.'

The flames from the sallow candles danced as streaked, jittery wraiths upon the walls, fusing into a single many-limbed chimera spasming around them.

*

His eyes felt scratchy as they slid open. He tried to raise himself on his elbows, but his body was stripped of energy. His throat was parched.

'You're not well. You should rest more.'

He twisted his head on the pillow. She was sitting by the window. The curtains were drawn, but thin patches of soft light washed through the slits to press angular shapes onto the floor. He watched as these lucent panels moved across the carpet, drifted up the wall, and disappeared. Suddenly it was dark again.

She slid over and curled herself beside him on the bed, pressing the bulbs of her lips against his own. He wondered how much he had had to drink the previous night. Her eyes glinted close to his own. She looked fresh, calmer, and beautiful.

'You're not well,' she whispered, running delicate fingers over his forehead. 'You've probably caught something. You should sleep.'

Tom wanted to protest. He thought about work, but already a tremendous tiredness was pulling him down, and he drifted off.

*

His head seemed glued to the pillow when he woke. It was pitch black; fumbling for his phone, he projected a little square rectangle of light into the gloom. Her face flitted into the beam. It was old, and haggard, and webbed with deep nests of wrinkles. The light blinked off. Her voice came as an aged croak through the wall of darkness.

'You're not well. You should sleep, you've caught something.'

A tiny flame flickered skittishly in Tom's brain. He felt as if something were deeply, horribly wrong, but the sensation was dumbed, as if shrouded in layers of bubble wrap. Still, he pushed himself to rise, flinging off the duvet. He managed no more than two steps before his legs seemed to turn to mush, and he collapsed into the chair beside the bed. His head was pounding. A wizened hand separated from the layers of black, and sandpaper fingertips pressed against his eyelids.

'You're not well, you must sleep.'

*

It was still dark when he awoke, slumped in the chair. There were two people in the room, a lady and a man. They were young, sharply dressed, and arguing. He couldn't hear what they were saying. Their bodies jerked with animated gestures, but no sound escaped their lips. He watched the muted debate spill across the room; watched the man clasp the lady's hand and stroke her hair, saw her slap him off. He raised his own hand to wipe a slick of drool from his chin, and stared blankly at the emaciated, bony slip of his forearm.

Beside him, the small woman who had come into his life ran a hand through his wispy hair. She looked much younger. Her cheeks were smooth and flushed. Tom croaked, and tried to lean towards her.

'These people...'

'Ssh. They live here in this time. You're not well; you've caught something, and you need to rest.'

His stomach tightened. He fought to stop his eyes closing. 

At some point in the night his head slipped from his shoulder and he started awake. Amongst the inky spread, he saw the lady and the man - the arguing couple - sitting at his coffee table. Two small children sat with them. They were all laughing, playing some kind of board game. A terrible sadness washed over him.

*

His eyes blinked open. Her silhouette moved as a velvet spectre by the window. He tried to stretch his arms, but they resisted. Head dipping into his chest, her voice came to him as if thrown across centuries.

'You're not well. You have to rest.'

Shadows moved in amorphous trails. He had no idea how long she had been here. Several days or a hundred years could have passed. 

Please go, he thought.

Straining, he tensed his muscles. With great effort he lifted himself from the chair and staggered over to the window. The curtain was drawn aside and he flinched at his own watery reflection in the glass. His cheeks were hollowed, his face a network of deep wrinkles, and his eyes were enormous glistening spoons sunk within cupped pits.

Past his scrawny image, cliffs fell away to expire on a grey strip of beach. A black sea stretching as far as the eye could see tilted and sighed, moonlight glazing a purple strip through it. 

'Where are we?' 

She folded her arms around him and kissed his neck. 'You've not been well for a long time,' she breathed.

He felt faint as he shook her away. 'Please. Please, I've had enough.'

Clasping his hand, she led him back to the chair. Folds of darkness meshed around them, an oilish, seeping residue of errors from lifetimes past.

'A question,' she said softly, as he eased down. 'What were you doing before you came back to your flat, the first night we met?'

Tom closed his eyes. Images swept back.

'I was working.'  

'Were you?'

He scratched at his trouser legs and frowned. He couldn't remember anything before he had arrived home that night.

'Let me tell you a story,' she whispered. 'When I was younger, I took a bike ride out to the countryside. I sat by the beach watching the blue waves and the beautiful blue sky, and I wondered if I would always remember it like this. I wondered if I was already remembering.

I was playing in the sand when an old lady approached me. She was oddly dressed, like a Victorian person. I couldn't quite place her face - in the same way I thought about remembering the sea, and the sky, I felt like I was trying to remember it as soon as I looked. It kept slipping away. 

She said there was a storm on the way, and that I shouldn't be caught in it. She told me I could come to her home and keep warm until it passed. At any other time, I probably would have returned to my bike and left, but there was something magnetic, something so certain about her.

We set off, and sure enough, it started to rain heavily. Great rolls of thunder boomed across the beach. We cut across fields and hills, and before I knew it we were scrabbling up cliffs. Right at the top stood an old castle.

I don't remember much else about that first day. We had tea, and I slept. When I woke up, I could hardly move. I felt a terrible heaviness within me. The old lady sat by my bed and told me that I was ill, that I must have caught some chill in the storm. She told me to rest.

It became the same story every day. I would wake, unable to move, and she would return to tell me that I must rest, that I was unwell. So much time seemed to pass. There seemed to be less and less light every day, until it felt like it was always dark. I forgot why I was there, and I forgot to ask.

Sometimes, in the half-light, I would see people come and go, but they didn't seem to notice me. They would be so close, sometimes they would even get into the bed with me. Then I would sleep, and forget about them too.'

Tom was hunched, shaking, in the chair. He had the terrible sense that he was coming close to an understanding. Her bright, beautiful eyes glinted. He wondered if everything before, everything he thought about with feeling, was a past life. He wondered if he would remember things again with the same feeling.

'One day the lady came in and she looked different. She looked young, and pretty. She lifted me carefully from the bed - I was almost bones and dust by then - and carried me to the window. We looked out at the starry night and the thick, rolling sea, and she told me to look carefully at the waves. 

At first I didn't know what I was looking for. I was exhausted; I was exhausted by the weight of time, the room, the darkness, and then I saw them. There were dark, slippery shapes in the waves. There were people. Eel-like, fluid, and strange, but people. The sea was heaving with them. 

The lady held me close and told me that most of what I thought I knew about life was wrong. She said there were still some people who were like me, who were born, and died, but that in the most part, there were residual memories. Memories of times before. And the world, or what remained of it, had kept those memories. She said that the last proper people - people like her, and now me - could live in these memories, carve out whole lives in them.'

Within their dark chamber, the woman cradled Tom and, easing him up, guided him back to the window. He looked at the sleek mass of sea. Raising a hand, she pointed out the great stone walls rising from the water on the horizon. Tom didn't know how he had missed them before. Black water broke against the rocky base in frothing plumes.

'The lady told me that was the end of the world. She said the people left were like batteries. They had learned how to be a natural part of the environment, and rest when they were depleted in the sea. But they had to sustain themselves. They lived on the memories that were left.'

Tom coughed. The foreboding stretch of wall dominated the skyline, and beneath it slippery forms writhed in the water. He felt the same unbearable sadness he had become so accustomed to. He wondered at which point his own life had started to wilt away; if it had been here, in this room, or if it had been many years ago, and he had simply been frittering away leaden blocks of time just to arrive at this awful destination. 

He wished he had done so much more.

'How long do you - ?' He choked. 

She smiled.

'A single life can sustain us for many long years. I was told the same when I was in your position. Centuries, and the memories of centuries, have passed.'

He swallowed a surge of sickness. People always wanted to take more from life than it was able to give. The darkness closed around him and he felt exhausted again. He knew he was near the end. With great effort, he placed a finger on the filmy glass of the window.

'What's - what's after the wall?'

She lowered his arm and stroked his brittle face.

'You don't want to know. Not much that comes close to being human, anyway.'

His finger slid down the glass, tracing a spiderish streak in the fog of condensation. The sooty sky dusted with dying stars, the grey slip of beach - everything there ever was seemed distant and removed, as if built to serve as constants tired and dulled by the numbing repetition of human folly.

'What do I do now? Do I die?'

'Of course not. You go into the water, with the others. You wait for a memory to feed on.'

'What happens when they're all gone?'

'Then everything is.'

Tom pressed his forehead against the cold glass.

'I don't want to do that. I don't want to live on people's memories.'

'This is what everyone does now. This is what I learned to do. You take from what is around you.'

Tom looked back at the monolithic barrier. It was imposing and forlorn in equal measure. He tried to conceive of taking people - taking them for sustenance, chewing them up, and spitting them out. He felt desperate, but already she was pulling him out the door, out into the harsh whip of wind, and down a steep and meandering path.

At the beach, she led him to the water's edge and pushed him down into boggy folds of sand. The sea made muffled, probing licks in his direction. Tom sagged back, and saw the cliffs, the hills, the vast stretch of sky. You could feel history in everything if you wanted to, he thought. You could make your own history from whatever you wanted; you had that choice.

'Thank you for this time,' she said. Her upright figure was stark and proud as she disappeared along the windy beach.

The putrid slick of water lapped at his hands as they clawed at the grains. He tried to clutch at something real and substantial, and realised he could remember nothing. Everything was broken into little bits - all these years, all this tramping about and talking and dreaming and loving for nothing. 

Still, he wanted to be. Everyone drifts through history differently. With final, wretched motions, he crawled into the water, dipping his head to let the flow engulf him.