J Read Free

in clusters, like dandelion spores.
    Little by little the sea claiming him.
    This morning, to Kevern’s relief, Densdell Kroplik didn’t put in an appearance, so he could sit and fret without company. The very seagulls, smelling his anxiety, kept their distance.
    He was a tall, skinny, golden-mopped man (though his hair was thinning now), who moved as though apologetic of his height. He was considered, for all his strangeness, to have kind eyes. He unwound himself on to the bench and looked up at the sky. ‘esus Christ!’ he exclaimed, the moment he was comfortable, for no other reason than to pit his voice against those he heard in his head.
    Better a voice he could control than a voice he couldn’t. He was no visionary, but there were times when he would mistake the sound of a seabird or the distant laughter of fishermen – he didn’t doubt it was a mistake – for a cry for help. ‘Kevern!’ he thought he heard. The two syllables pronounced with equal lack of emphasis. His dead mother’s voice. A sick woman’s voice, anyway. Quavering and reproachful, having to make itself heard above a jealous, jostling multitude of cries, detached from the person to whom it had belonged. ‘Key-vern!’
    He hadn’t been close to his mother so he guessed this was a trick of longing. He would have liked her to be calling him.
    But he recognised a danger in granting this primacy to his imagination: would he know the difference if one day someone really did cry out for his help?
    He was not happy, but he was as happy here in his unhappiness, he accepted, as he was ever going to be. The sea confers a grandeur on the smallness of man’s dissatisfactions, and Kevern Cohen gratefully accepted the compliment, knowing that his dissatisfactions were no bigger than most men’s – loneliness and sense of lost direction (or was it the sense of never having had direction?) – of early-onset middle age. Nothing more. Like his father before him, and he had felt a deeper bond to his father than to his mother, though that wasn’t saying much, he turned and carved wood for a living – spindles, newels, candlesticks, bowls, lovespoons for the tourist industry which he sold in local shops – and turning wood was a repetitive and tedious business. He had no family alive, no uncles, nieces, cousins, which was unusual in this part of the world where everyone was as an arm joined to one giant octopus. Kevern was joined to no one. He had no one to love or be loved by. Though this was to a degree occupational – like the moon, a woodturner turns alone – he accepted that it was largely a fault of character. He was lonely because he didn’t take or make calls on his utility phone, because he was a neglectful friend, and, worse, an easily dismayed, over-reflective lover, and because he was forty.
    Falling in love was something he did from time to time, but he was never able to stay in love or keep a woman in love with him. Nothing dramatic happened. There were no clifftop fallings-out. Compared to the violence with which other couples publicly shredded one another in Port Reuben, his courtships – for they were rarely more than that – came to an end with exemplary courtesy on both sides. They dissolved, that was the best way of putting it, they gradually came apart like a cardboard box that had been left out in the rain. Just occasionally a woman told him he was too serious, hard-going, intense, detached, and maybe a bit prickly. And then shook his hand. He recognised prickly. He was spiny, like a hedgehog, yes. The latest casualty of this spininess was an embryo-affair that had given greater promise than usual of relieving the lonely tedium of his life, and perhaps even bringing him some content. Ailinn Solomons was a wild-haired, quiveringly delicate beauty with a fluttering heart from a northern island village more remote and rugged even than Port Reuben. She had come south with an older companion whom Kevern took to be her aunt, the latter