still and cold beneath me.
I squeezed your hand. But your hand was gone.
‘Reed.’
You were gone.
The bed was empty and the blanket drawn back.
‘Reed?’
I searched Jorne’s dwelling, but you were nowhere to be seen, not even in the Room of Things. I ventured outside. It was eerily quiet, just past dawn, and I had to shield my eyes from the low sun after having spent so long inside. I walked the perimeter of the dwelling, calling your name and feeling foggy and elsewhere. There was no trace of the storm, and the forested hills were bathed in searing light. At the rear wall I stopped. There was a nook beside the kitchen window in which you kept your surfboard.
But your surfboard, like you, was nowhere to be seen.
I FOUND YOU at your usual cove. The storm had dragged a fleet of smooth, rolling waves in its wake, and as I staggered down the rocks to the beach, I saw the shape of you move beneath the water. My feet touched sand, and you emerged. Your hair, face and torso glistened in a film of sun-bright seawater, and you slid effortlessly upon the board, bobbing as the waves passed beneath. You smiled, my lungs emptied, and I waded in.
The water was warm and as high as my chest when I reached you. My cloak swirled in its currents. Flushed and dripping, you looked down at me with no trace of the agony that had contorted your face the night before.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘How do you feel?’
You gave a nervous laugh.
‘Incredible.’ You turned your palms and inspected them. ‘Everything feels new. Slower, somehow. Deeper, clearer. What did you give me?’
‘A kind of medicine to help your blood.’
Your eyes glittered with reflections from the sun-dappled water.
‘Well, whatever it was, it worked.’
You glanced behind at a swell in the water.
‘Watch out,’ you said, paddling round to face it.
‘What do I do?’ I said. The sea rose above us, cresting with froth.
‘Go under.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, now.’
You ducked your board and I followed you through the curved face of the wave. The world disappeared, replaced by a roaring, dark maelstrom and the taste of salt. My body was lifted from the seabed and I floundered, weightless. Then, with an almighty kick I emerged from the wave’s rear face, back into the world.
Crashing back into the sea beside you, I inhaled and made a noise. It was a whoop. I had never whooped before.
Finding that my legs no longer reached the bottom, I kicked to keep afloat. You grinned at me.
‘Fun, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I replied, pulling a straggle of weed from my hair. ‘Yes, I believe it is.’
‘I can explain it now,’ you said, turning to the horizon. ‘It’s not about connection at all. It’s the opposite.’
‘What do you mean?’
You paused, giving your board an affectionate stroke as you thought.
‘You spend your whole life thinking you’re this thing, this unit sitting in the middle of everything else. You think it’s all for you, that you’re important somehow, that even though the sun and the Earth and the stars and the planets have all been around a lot longer than you, and will be after you’re gone, they’re somehow here just for you. Everything’s here to support your little life. And then you get in the ocean and float on a plank, and the sea lifts you up and crashes you down without a thought, and it reminds you.’ You turned back to me. ‘It reminds you that you’re nothing. You’re just a speck floating around in it all, and nothing matters. So it’s disconnection, not connection. Does that make sense?’
‘Like I said before,’ I said, ‘you could spend a thousand years explaining it and I still wouldn’t understand.’
Another grin.
‘That may be true. But I don’t have to explain it, do I?’
‘What do you mean?’
You rolled from the board and pushed it towards me.
‘Try it.’
‘You can’t be serious.’
‘Go on.’
The board drifted into my arms, and bobbed in the water’s playful slaps
‘But I don’t know how.’
‘You’re an erta. Work it out.’
You looked over your shoulder.
‘There’s one coming,’ you said, swimming past me. ‘I’d get on if I were you.’
‘But I can’t… I mean, what if…?’
‘Just hop on.’
I hopped on. The board wobbled—there went another unusual whoop—and threatened to tip me back in. My eyes glazed as I felt gravity’s equations run across the surface of the shifting water.
‘A little further back,’ you said from somewhere ahead.
‘I already knew that,’ I said, adjusting my position. ‘There, that’s better. I understand now,