Every
evening in the long months of summer, the man would go down to the beach and
sit looking out to sea.
He was short and broad, his limbs still
thick with muscle, and he moved with a grace that belied his bulk. But time had
carved gullies in the skin of his face, and his eyes were bleak below the bony
ridge of his brow and the brim of the ancient hat he always wore. His clothes,
too, were old, and though they had once been dark blue, the sun had bleached
them greyish-white.
The man felt at home on the beach. As he
walked down each evening between the old wire fences, past the boardwalk now
warped and splintered with wind and sun and rain, he felt that he was leaving
the present behind and going back to the time when it all still had some
meaning, some hope.
Behind him, the town lay, the buildings
crumbling to dust even as they were buried by the blowing sand. Every year, the
desert crept closer, stealthily like a predator sneaking up on its prey. In ten
years, maybe twenty, it would swallow the town, and then the beach would be
merely an extension of it. But the man did not expect to live to see the day.
On the way down to the beach, he would
always avert his eyes from the weather station with its masts and cables, now
sagging and crumbling like everything else. Once, in the old days, he’d worked
there, and he didn’t want to remember that. Nor did he want to remember the
life he’d had – the kind of life almost everyone had had. All that was over,
and everyone was gone. He’d keep telling himself that, and sometimes he’d
believe it.
And sometimes the memories would make him
come awake in the night, and he would wipe away the tears from his face.
Each evening, then, as the heat of the day
receded and the sun sank over the sea, he would go down to the beach and sit,
looking out over the water. And, sitting like that, he could almost imagine
that he was no longer alone.
And so the months passed, as summer turned
into autumn, but the man went down to the sand every evening, waiting for
something to happen, only he did not know what.
He only knew that it would happen, or he
would die waiting.
*****************************
He saw
her in the distance, on an evening when the first winds of autumn were flinging
scraps of cloud across the sky. She was a tiny figure, outlined against the
lurid glow of the setting sun, so far away that she was a wavering dot on the
horizon. The old man didn’t react, didn’t turn his head. Only his faded eyes
turned, watching, as she came closer. She was walking along the edge of the
ocean, leaving dark footprints in the smooth wet sand, red with the light of
the sun. Her head was down, studying the ground at her feet, and she seemed
oblivious to him, until she was almost directly below where she was. He became
convinced that she was about to go on.
But then he must have made some kind of
noise, because she looked up and walked up the beach towards him. He patted the
sand next to him, and she sat down, without hesitation. For a while he didn’t
look at her, but kept staring out to sea.
“I didn’t expect to find anyone,” she said.
Her voice was husky, as if she hadn’t spoken for a long time. “Do you live in
this town?”
He finally dared to sneak a glance at her
then, under his brows, as though expecting that she was a creature of light and
shadows, and would have vanished. But she seemed real enough, from the tangled
hair which hung around her shoulders to the narrow elegant fingers with which
she was sifting the sand by her knees. “Yes – I’m the only one left. Where do
you live?”
She made a vague gesture, in the direction
from which she’d come, round the distant headland. “Over there.” Her face was
narrow and triangular, her eyes darting quickly away from his. It was
impossible to guess her age; she moved like a girl, but her face and eyes
seemed older, experienced. She was dressed as an older woman would be, too, in
faded jeans and a blue windcheater. “I never thought I’d find anyone else,” she
repeated.
“I’ve...” I’ve been waiting a long time, he wanted to say. I’ve been waiting a long time for someone to
come back. But he couldn’t make himself say it. “I never thought I’d meet
anyone either,” he compromised.
She smiled suddenly, and flipped a pebble
at the setting sun. “So we were both wrong. It’s good to be wrong sometimes. Is
it a good town to live in?”
He glanced involuntarily over his shoulder
at the houses. “It used to be good to live in, once, and it hasn’t crumbled too
much yet. The desert will swallow it in a while, though, and I can’t say I’m
sorry. Too many ghosts.”
She nodded, and got to her feet in one
smooth easy motion. “Sun’s almost down,” she said. “I’d better be going.”
“Wait!” he said, and almost made the
mistake of reaching out to hold her, drawing back his hand at the last second. “Will
you be back?”
She looked down at him, the sun behind her
head making her expression unreadable. “Do you want me to?”
“I’ve been waiting,” he said, “for someone
to come. It’s been a long wait.”
“Fair enough,” she said, turning away. “I’ll
be seeing you.” Walking back down the beach, she did not look back.
The sun went down, and the darkness came.
He was still sitting on the sand when the moon came up behind him, throwing a
silver sheen on the sea. And all the time, his eyes did not leave the direction
in which she’d gone.
That night, the old bed seemed colder, and
the town even lonelier, than he’d ever known them to be.
*****************************
She came
again five days later. This time she was already there when he came down to the
beach, sitting where she’d sat before, leaning back on her elbows with her legs
stretched out. “I thought you might not be coming,” she greeted him.
“I come every day,” he said. “Even days
like this.” The wind was whipping past overhead, dragging sheets of cloud at
the height of the cliffs along the headland round which she’d come.
“The autumn storms are coming,” she
observed. “It might not be safe out on the beach then.”
“Would you like something to eat?” Every
day now he’d brought something from his stock of food, in expectation of her
coming. He rummaged in his bag. “Chocolate?”
She
shook her head. “I’ll be all right,” she said. “You eat it if you want.” But he
didn’t want to eat without her, so he put the bar back inside the bag. She
watched, looking faintly amused, he thought.
“What were you,” she asked suddenly. “Back
in the old days?”
He swallowed. “A meteorologist.”
She grinned. “I probably put my foot in it,
talking about the weather.”
“No, it’s all right.” He glanced up and
back towards the hulk of the weather station. “These days I know as much about
the weather as you do.”
She laughed suddenly. “Wasn’t that what
people used to talk about in the old days? The weather?” What a waste of time
and effort. I mean to say – the weather!”
Far out to sea, lightning flashed, as
though on cue. The wind began to whip a light drizzle against the beach.
“Time to go,” she said. “We’re probably in
for a rough night.”
He almost invited her up to the town then,
but hesitated. “I’ll be waiting for you,” he said.
“I know.”
*******************************
She came
often after that, but at irregular intervals, so that sometimes a week would go
by without a sight of her. Always, she wore the same clothes, but that was
nothing odd – so did he. And as the winter clamped down on the beach and the
town, with its squalls of rain and the storms that raged out to sea, he still
went down each afternoon and waited on the beach till it was dark, hoping she
would come.
He still hadn’t dared ask a thing about
her, her name, where she came from, or anything else about her. It was a
fragile link they had, one he was desperately afraid that would snap if he
pushed hard. And even if it was lashing down with rain, she would never come
anywhere but to the spot on the beach where they’d first met, there to squat
uncomfortably on the wet sand, but without complaint.
One day he found the dog. It was the
morning after the great storm, when the wind had picked up sand from beach and
desert alike and hurled it so hard against the town that he’d been afraid that
the walls and roof would disintegrate. But somehow the old houses had held
together.
She’d come the evening before, but only for
a few moments, and looked at him with concern. “You shouldn’t be here,” she’d
said. “It’s not safe out here with the storm. It’s going to be a bad one.”
He’d looked at the water, grey and
flattened from the force of the wind. “What about you?”
“I’ll be all right, don’t worry. I’ll go
back now, right away. I just came to make sure you wouldn’t sit out here in the
storm waiting for me.”
“I wouldn’t have...” he’d begun, but she had
already been walking away, her hair blowing like a cloud around her head. Besides,
she was quite right – he’d have waited for her, at least until it was dark, and
maybe longer; and if she hadn’t come, he’d have spent the night worrying
something had happened to her.
And in the morning there was the dog.
It was a small black bitch, half-grown, and
more than half-starved. He found her cowering outside, and she whined when she
saw him, and tried to crawl away. Then he noticed that she was dragging a hind
leg.
“Where have you come from?” he asked her,
though he knew that she must be from one of the packs of feral dogs which haunted
the fringes of the town. She whined again, and turned around to snarl at him
when he approached, though she was so weak that it was little more than a
formality.
“You need help, girl,” he informed her. “Don’t
worry, I’m not going to hurt you.” After a little thought, he fetched a packet
of biscuits and tossed one in front of her. The biscuits were old and
crumbling, and fell to pieces on hitting the ground, so she shied away for a
second. Then, extending her muzzle, she sniffed, and her pink tongue darted
out, licking. In a few minutes, she had finished off the packet, all the
biscuits, one by one.
He gave her a bowl of water after that, and,
a little later, she curled up on his doorstep, and slept.
The woman didn’t come that day, nor the day
after that.
*******************************
He named the dog Reena. Little by
little, as her leg healed, she began to follow him around, slinking along at
his heel as though apologising for her presence. But as the winter passed, and
the days began to lengthen, she began to run at his side, and nuzzle his hand for
attention. When he went down to the beach each afternoon, she went down with
him, and raced excitedly up and down the beach, barking at the glint of sun on
water or the scuttle of a crab. He laughed sometimes to watch her.
But the winter turned to spring, and still
the woman did not come.
He’d become unable to sleep because of
waiting for her. Each evening he’d stay out longer and longer on the beach,
till the dog would whine to go back and begin tugging at his sleeve. And then
he’d lie in bed, staring into the darkness, and willing her to be there
tomorrow. But she never was.
It was on the day of the vernal equinox
that he finally decided to go and look for her. He’d never asked her where she
lived, but he knew that she had to be somewhere within walking distance. And he
knew there wasn’t any town or even a shack within walking distance that way
down the beach.
“We’ll find her, though, Reen,” he told the
dog. “I made a mistake, not asking her. It might have scared her off, I thought
– but this is much worse, the not knowing.”
They started out in the mid-morning, the
man and the small dog. Though it was the equinox, it was a cold day, with the
squalls coming off the sea and the rain falling in curtains. Ordinarily, he
wouldn’t have gone out on such a day – but he couldn’t make himself wait any
longer.
It was further than he remembered to the headland,
but it had been years since he’d last bothered to walk this way. The wet sand
sucked at his shoes, and the rain soaked his clothes, so that he was cold and
uncomfortable by the time he rounded it. Beyond, there was a little bay which
he remembered, lined by a white sandy beach. But as he rounded the headland, he
stopped suddenly.
A ship lay beached in the bay.
It was a fairly large ship, which must have
been abandoned at sea, and driven to shore during one of the storms of the
previous year. It lay listing far over, so that the red-painted bottom of its
hull stuck far out of the water, and its masts leaned over the strip of beach,
almost touching the wall of rock on the landward side.
The dog whined, pushing her wet nose into
his hand, disturbed by his sudden stillness. He shushed her, still looking at
the ship.
“That’s where she stays,” he said finally,
aloud. “It’s got to be.”
For several minutes he stood where he was,
watching the ship, trying to decide whether to go and look for her or – now that
he knew where she was – to go back home. But there was nothing at home except
to wait for her, and waiting was what was destroying him little by little. At
last he sighed and looked down at the dog.
“We’ll go and look for her, Reena. If she’s
angry about that...well, not much we can do, is there?” Shrugging, he walked
past the headland and toward the bay. Puzzled at his hesitation, the dog
followed warily, her flank at his side.
Seen close up, the ship was smaller than he’d
first thought, probably one of the tramps which had hauled cargo up and down
the coast in the old days. It even looked vaguely familiar, which was not a
surprise; he’d probably seen it in harbour more than once. It had also taken a
dreadful battering, its windows shattered and the smashed remnants of a
lifeboat hanging from the davits. But the hull looked solid enough, and a
jumble of rocks gave easy access to the deck, almost like a staircase.
Still, at the last moment, he hesitated. “Hello?”
he called, his voice wavering. “Anyone?”
The rain dripped from the mast on the deck
and the sand, and the wind moaned in the rigging. But there was no answer.
Slowly, his legs reluctant at this last
moment, he boarded the ship, climbing over the rocks till he stood on the deck.
A look around showed him that there was nobody in the wrecked bridge or in the
cabin in the superstructure, but with the smashed windows he hadn’t expected to
find anyone there. And then, after rounding the stern, he found the stairs
leading down into the hull.
There was something at the bottom of the
stairs. In the grey light, he couldn’t make them out clearly, but after
descending a few rungs, he saw them; a blue windbreaker and a pair of faded
jeans, both salt-stained and battered as if with the passage of years.
There was nothing else.
He sat down on the deck, leaning his back
against a bulkhead, and looking out to sea. “She must’ve just gone somewhere,”
he said to the dog. “It stands to reason that she just went somewhere, and she’ll
be back. I mean, I couldn’t have just imagined her, could I?”
The dog whined and came closer, uncertain on
the tilted deck.
“It’s not as though I saw this ship
earlier, and found these clothes, and wiped the whole thing from my mind, could
it, Reen? And then I imagined her? It couldn’t be like that, could it?”
The dog, not understanding, sniffed at him,
trying to gauge his mood.
“She must be somewhere around, and she’ll
come back,” he said. “We just have to wait. We’ll just wait a while. That’s
what we’ll do.”
The dog lay down beside him and put her
head in his lap. Her tongue licked his wrist, and he fondled her ears in
response.
“I wonder how long we’ll have to wait,
Reen,” he said.
Copyright B Purkayastha 2013
