Submergence by J. M. Ledgard Page A

beyond negotiation. You cannot wish yourself immortal any more than you can bid the apples come in May, or the leaves stick in October. A terminal illness at least gives you a chance to say goodbye to your family, friends and acquaintances. A violent death is something else. It is a maelstrom. Its waters turn quickly, they spiral down, the sky is blotted out and there is no time to make a phone call or take a bow.
    He wanted to lay out his memories on the sand like photographs; to leave a message for the world and take a lesson from it. But he was turning, he was going down, the whaleboat was splintering, the waters were freezing. The flotsam people clung to in life, which kept them afloat in the world, were fictions found in stories. He reached for them. He recited the Lord’s Prayer.
    They pushed him into deeper water. It was almost up to his waist. Look how the dirt is lifting in filaments from your feet, he said to himself, the filth is lifting, and he glimpsed himself, it was difficult to describe, underwater, in a stovepipe hat, a whaler thrown overboard, sinking to the bottom, an eel roped where his intestines had been, with, in the grainy distance, a whaling vessel going down, in imitation of the slave ship Danny described, perhaps, except with a hawk nailed toits mast, the archangelic shriek silenced … thy will be done, in earth as it is heaven.
    They took their hands off him. He looked out over the sea. Submarines go across. They keep to the shallows. There were many things he had not properly imagined. Death was one, the ocean was another. It was fitting, comforting even. The earth really was the ocean. Danny had taught him another way of looking at things, how being made of saline solution, a jelly with pin-like bones, he was yet alien to the greater part of the planet that was saltwater. He looked up. He glimpsed a gull. They lifted their weapons. He had no strength left. He hated them, and was ashamed of himself.
    ‘ Allah u Akbar !’
    There was a burst of gunfire. He fell into the sea. The bullets went into the sky. He was on his knees in the water. He thrashed forward. He cried out and pulled off his soiled kikoi and washed himself between his legs. His tears moved the fighters. One of them waded after him and took off his own headscarf and wrapped it around him, so that he would not be naked when they carried him back to land.

    She was a morning person, he was not.
    His phone rang before dawn. His first waking word was a profanity. ‘Yes? Who is it?’
    ‘I’m heading down to the beach for a swim. Will you join me?’
    ‘At this hour? In the snow?’ He sat up. ‘OK,’ then, ‘I shan’t swim.’
    ‘See you downstairs,’ she said cheerfully, and rang off.
    It was the first light of a clear day. The patches of ice were all covered up. The snow came up over their boots. There were boar hunters in the woods; gunshots could be heard coming from the direction of the church and the village. The pines were rimed with salt, the holly berries shoneblood red. On the beach the snow gave way to spindrift and then to the return of long breaking waves. He carried towels and an extra sweater. He was uncertain if she would actually swim. He did not know her travels had taken her in the opposite direction to him, that her voyages had moved her closer to the Inuit and further from the Carib.
    The sand was firm. Their footsteps filled with water after them.
    ‘This is just the place to have a dog,’ he said. ‘They could run for miles.’
    ‘I don’t like dogs.’
    His heart sank. She was harsh. What was he doing on the beach at this hour?
    When he was a boy, the family priest, an Irishman, had told him: James, there is never a moment in a life when a selfish heart is satisfied.
    He wanted a country life. He wanted a cottage. He wanted a garden. He wanted gundogs and horses. Perhaps it was a feint, a way of dealing with his career. What did he need?
    She caught his fallen expression. He was a spy, but utterly