Ata doesn’t bother to unpack her small bag but pulls out a tracksuit top and mixes herself a rum and Coke. She steps back out onto the open deck, to face the open sky and freedom again. Bare wood, paper, salt wind, and fire-liquid — these things caress her as the red moon rises slowly. The celestial disc slips day into night in her.
The book in her hands remains unopened, Naipaul’s Loss of El Dorado. She won’t turn on the lights anyway. The wet breeze licks her cheek and she pulls her top around her neck. The sea-breath slips cool round the back of her waist as the moon pales to gold. She moves to the corner of the deck so she can see both setting sun and rising moon. A surge of sharing breaks in her. Someone is there with her, she feels it — but it is not a threatening presence. Cautiously, she lies back to share the magnificent sky with him. The twin globes mirror dusky-dawny clouds between them and the evening star is steady and bright. “I am not afraid,” she says aloud. Of you, of life. Of the straight line of a dying ray.
* * *
The sea-moon sparkle starts a silver dance that runs from the dark horizon straight to her gut, and Ata sits up to face it.
His arm, strong, solid-muscled, and a big hand, wraps around her shoulders and pulls her closer. His warmth seeps through jersey layers, through her ribs, and spreads with her heart.
For a moment she is afraid to look for a face, and just holds on. His other arm encloses her and his breast beats, slow as the climbing moon, against her back. She stays there and listens — to his breath against her ear, sweet against salt, syncing heart-surf rolling. She is sure she can feel the floor shaking beneath her, the slap of the tide vibrating up through black rocks and damp wood. She hears him.
The stars are aligning, waves rising,
random rainbows conspiring.
What kind of light to bathe in? Wash face with?
To warm earth’s pot, feed hungry souls …
Tonight. Tonight.
Ata stretches a hand to his features — a silky thick neck, small ears, proud cheekbones. She feels sleep take her. In her bed. Fumbling with her notebook and pen, waking for moments—1:00 a.m., 2:00 a.m., sweating against pillows, dew-points between breasts. When she can’t sleep, she writes. All she remembers is his words.
It will soon be dawn, with fire-stoked horses thundering
to the humming sky of crickets.
I will see you run. And I will run with you.
That morning, while Ata ate a dripping mango over the sink, she felt him come up behind her and touch the small of her back, light as a current of air. He kissed the side of her neck, inhaled the steam of bitter cocoa, boiling with bay leaves, cinnamon, and nutmeg, and said it reminded him of his childhood.
“You are from the islands,” she said. But then he was gone.
She sits waiting on the deck, again with her notebook and pen, blinded by the morning light bouncing off the sea. As the sun soars, she watches and writes. A reef protects the little cove below and the skirt of waves changes the direction of smaller waves within it. Leopard-spot shadows of clouds shift on the wider ocean, always changing. What would happen if the sea stopped swirling?
Ata looks for the elders in the sky she has heard about, Taino and the African ancients she had glimpsed at sunrise. The bent nose of an elder cloud’s face changes to an open-mouth laugh. They, the pink-rimmed shift-shaping seers glide. Temporary, they say. Everything is only for a while. Seems, is what you see in the sky, in beauty and ugly, when no one else knows why. Morning’s dew is drunk by the greedy sun, which started off stroking the day so gently. Dissipate. Re-create. What fate is fixed by new minutes slicking, time dripping by?
When she closes her eyes against the startling white page — green and red mixes with black, the slimy paint of Camp Swampy. She gets up and goes inside for a towel and water, starts down the wooden steps along the rock-face, to the little jetty below.
The wind feels so good on her bare breasts and the rush of it up against the cliff, under each foot, as she descends. The height, the thrill — that you could fall onto sharp rocks far below — is that what Fraser will feel, before he falls into a deadly sleep?
Now the shudder of water against wood under her feet is real. She casts off her bikini bottom and stretches naked on the edge of the jetty. Glancing around to check for fishermen or whelk hunters on the rocks, she realizes she should always do this before stripping. Shrugging off the second of caution, she dives in, parting pencil fish that float like blades of cut grass on the surface.
She doubles back to the air bubbles popping where she entered. Warm patch, cold patch. She flips and paddles through them, never letting her feet touch the seaweedy ground. Choppy waves push and pull her. A gentle current sucks slowly outward, beyond the reef.
He glides around her, a bulk against her back guiding them to warmer, softer water, near the deck. So easy, her arms float round him, lips of salt and sweet. Easy fluid love, nudging. Sea swell pushing, pulling — he enters her. Fire and ice. She hangs on to the edge of the jetty, twisting and spinning with him. A water-drumbeat in her belly, snaking ripples through them.
“Let’s take flight,” he whispers.
She sighs and sinks …
SLEEP, THE LOVELY TOXIN, wins more often. Fraser feels it fighting with the viperous poisons, clamoring for his blood. He feels every viral cell breeding, slowly. And when he can’t bear it he asks for painkillers.
The nurse has them ready and passes them to Ata. She places the white pills on her friend’s limp tongue and guides the water to his lips. He squeezes his eyes as he swallows and waits for them to settle in his stomach.
Scrolls of architectural drawings and sketches of the church lie around Fraser, on his bed. “It is so slow. Dr. Turner says it should take about two weeks, two whole weeks. I have much to do though, while I can.”
He wouldn’t change his mind. Ata had passed Greek Goddess on her way out as she was coming in. The crease in her brow now permanent, her eyes puffy, and she shook her head. His mother has insisted that she won’t visit him, nor will his father, not while he chooses to kill himself. She had kept to it for the few days so far. Marriette had come and shouted at him again, about his selfish, spoiled, and extreme ways. Alan’s sign didn’t help. The drugs would get better, his lifestyle could change, he could live an “almost normal” life — he had heard it all and said he never lived a “normal” life so why would he want to live “almost normal”?
The painkillers are starting to dissolve and Fraser opens his eyes. Ata is still standing there. She looks darker to him. A waterproof sheen on her skin and sparks in her wild hair. “Tell me.”
“I started to write.”
“Good. What are you writing about?”
“I met someone, Fraser, the most beautiful man and I … I made love with him.”
“What!” Fraser struggles to pull himself up on the bed. “You okay? Someone broke in, rape … you okay?”
“No, no, shh, not like that. I’m okay. I guess I must have let him in…”
“You crazy! I always know you crazy!” But he relaxes back down.
“He has the most beautiful heart, and gentle soul. Instinctively I knew he wouldn’t hurt me.”