She drops the facts down on the table like bombs. The others grin as she laughs, and Michael especially finds her story just as hilarious as she does, and says so: he says the portrait is nearly ridiculous; the young operator, the good student, the one who sees through her educators, who despises them because they have disappointed her; who moves beyond them, as she thinks, at twenty-two years old, and he giggles as he says it, which of course sets Caitlin off again, and back and forth it goes. It takes the two of them almost five minutes to properly get a handle on themselves.
This laughter is appropriate to Caitlin’s character, appropriate to her secrecy and to the horror that she moves among as a native. She sometimes looks like a steam engine, or a complex motor-apparatus, sucking in fuel and venting steam and smoke, chained in some lightless pit, laughing and laughing at her own aggressiveness, at her presumption. She was so young then. The laughter is appropriated by Michael, who understands it, and who can describe and metabolise it (and here it has a secondary character—Michael can respond with laughter of his own, but he could not begin to laugh), and it is shared in its full weight and import by Sally, who is the only one at the table who can locate and diagnose it with specificity, although he could never explain this to the others, and he does not laugh himself. His laugh is compressed inside him, along with a good deal of his other automatic expression (Ella might say his authentic opinions, or his authentic self, which would be another overreach and not at all accurate).
His laugh is there but it is a frozen, static thing underneath his expressive surface. Like any unconscious and expressive movement that is frozen (exactly like a freeze-frame in a video: un-staged, an artefact of chance, an arbitrary point in a continuous process), his laugh looks something like a scream.
Caitlin is unaware of this strange likeness between her and Sally; she has never seen so much of a glimpse of it, although she has noted that Sally is an oddly fucked-up guy at various points during their friendship. He is not secretive in any way that makes sense to her, so he does not ping in her various diagnostic systems.
Simone has seen it in the man that she loves, and has in fact seen it on the surfaces of the paintings she has made of him, and it is one of the few things in creation that can trigger a genuinely vulnerable and compassionate response in her.
But we will return to Sally, and to his strange, frozen laughter.
-
The next of the friends to talk about their early years is Beth, the only one who did not attend the art school with the rest. Beth says that she studied theatre, which is news to everyone here except Caitlin, and which elicits noises of disbelief. Was she an actor? She says that she was, or at least she started off studying acting. She was only superficially good at it, which she understood early. Her teachers told her that she should stick with it, that her natural talents could be honed and brought out and that with effort she could make a career of it, but she remembers thinking to herself: ‘No. I have seen the people here who are good at this, and I’m not like that’, so she dropped out and applied to study business, where she lasted for a year or so before dropping that too, because she hated it. She spent a year doing nothing, comfortably jobless, staying with friends or with her parents. When she was asked she called it a gap year, but it was more accurately a year of emptiness, of non-thought. She became lethargic and uninterested in the world. She saw friends now and then, and walked around the city centre, and tried (and failed) to build up some image of herself in her mind. The image was a blank: she was a blank person, with a blank face and a vague sound of rushing wind at her centre, as though her chest was really an aperture through which the world escaped, without her consent. She read books and forgot what she had read. She went to bars and restaurants alone, and got drunk. She dressed herself up to make herself desirable. Probably this was effective, although she has no memories of any romantic or sexual encounters.
But this only lasted for about a year, and it was when she was young, so nothing in it was terminal, and she knew this too. She was never in genuine danger. In some sense she was a tourist, though the blankness in her thoughts, the rushing wind, the lethargy; all of this was real enough.
Eventually she decided that she needed to work, or study, or something (get married? Join the army?), and she spent a week writing up job applications for low-wage work around the city centre. Many of these came back positive—she interviewed for work as a receptionist, and a personal assistant, and as an usher in one of the grand old theatres in the capital. The choice was not a difficult one. She found herself back at the theatre, in an oversized polyester uniform, smiling graciously, bringing patrons to their seats. She found herself selling them drinks from the five bars that were scattered around the great and ancient Deco theatre, found herself picking up rubbish after the shows, found herself asking people to stop talking, or stop using their phones, found herself (sometimes, rarely) calling to security on a malfunctioning radio, and asking them to remove drunks and other aggressive patrons.
She also found herself happy, which came as a surprise—it emerged out from the blankness as if it had been there all along, sitting just beneath the blank surface of her face. The strange sounds of air moving remained, although as she was now happy they didn’t bother her, or even really register in her mind.
What was the source of her happiness? She liked the people that she worked with, she liked the stability of the work, the predictable shifts, she liked being good at it—she was the one the others looked to to solve problems, because she was practical and level-headed, and because she had a strange tiredness in her that people misunderstood as maturity or wisdom. She enjoyed all of this. But what made her happy was really the theatre, and its ancient power to transform people. She thought it might even be love. She loved the proscenium arch, she loved the serried rows of plush seating, built with its rake that allowed every patron an equal view of the stage, a democratic, perhaps even a republican gesture. She thought of older buildings in white marble, she thought of city walls and skies on fire, and the great, reaping slaughter of the sons and daughters of the polis. Beth has a grandiose streak, something like Caitlin’s laughter and highhandedness, but softer, less brittle, easier. She loved the pomp of the building, its gesturing at and fondness for all of the spent rituals of the past; she loved the booths with their gilt gold decoration, the waistcoats of the staff, the vaulted ceilings and the chandeliers, the discretion of the management, and the players, who she loved more than anything else, the end result of the whole transformer system, the ones for whom all of this elaborate framing was arranged, performing each night, bringing the words of the scripts and the treatments into life and movement, into specific history (she thought, watching the performances night after night, from the wings, telling patrons to stop talking, to get off their phones), into specific history because into specific performances. The performances could be good or bad, but all of them had their specific character, and all of them spoke to the continuation of art in time, to its dignity and its very great beauty, even when they were poorly managed, poorly conceived, even when they were vulgar or ugly.
What made her happiest was the fidelity of the theatre to the small dignity of the lives of its audience. The space behind the arch that would be a mirror to them; that would work its dramatic address, and that would affirm for each of them that yes, they were alive, and that others were alive once, and that still others would be alive later, and that each of us has our struggle and our dignity, even when we are poorly managed, vulgar, and ugly.
This was the shape of her thinking—not at all like the trained, pointed thoughts of the others while they studied—Beth came to these over the course of years of distant and non-specific happiness. They suggested themselves to her like shadows thrown from the light of her joy. They suggested themselves in the electrical silence before the actor spoke her line, and in the soft murmuring of the audience before the curtains come up, and in the soft light and the shadows of the whole building on those evenings, the yellow light of the chandeliers, the stalls and the gallery, the programmes and the overpriced ice creams and snacks and alcohol.
She was an usher for three years, give or take, and then she was a floor manager for another two years after that, responsible for a team of around twenty others, and then she was offered one of the junior theatre manager roles when the woman who had previously had the position divorced her husband and left the country. She thought about it long and hard. The theatre had asked her expecting her to say yes, so this was a surprise to them. She couldn’t explain it clearly but she felt like her happiness at the theatre would be destroyed by taking on this position. At the same time, she was making basically no money, and living in shared accommodation that she quietly despised, and the job had a salary—not a good one, but nearly double what she was making as a floor manager—and all the other perks of full time employment. Still, something inside her stopped her from accepting. It was the same thing that had told her that she would never be an actor. If she had to comment on it she might call it her truth, or her intelligence. Another person might call it an angel, but Beth would never use that word.
The management at the theatre, increasingly puzzled, told her that of course they loved working with her, but that they needed to fill the position, and that she would need to let them know by the end of the week. It was a Tuesday, and she told them that of course she would do so, earlier if she could. She did not apologise for the delay, or even mention it. She felt strange, hot, transparent.
That night, during the performance (a musical, not a play, unusual for the theatre, one of the old standards, perhaps Oklahoma, or Porgie and Bess), she was called on to run one of the hospitality packages that the theatre offered as ticket add-ons to its wealthier clients—in this case, the package included one-on-one service in on of the private suites scattered around the theatre’s labyrinthine floorpan. Beth was one of only a few of the staff trained to do this, and she enjoyed the shifts because the patrons often gave her tips, which could sometimes be more than her salary for the evening. On this particular night she was lost in her own thoughts about the promotion, and her patrons were two older men, a couple, chatty and pleasant. She did her best to emerge from her reverie, to be a personable and accommodating host, and was eventually, despite herself, genuinely charmed by this couple of wealthy older gentlemen. She found herself not thinking about her job at all, chatting and joking along with her patrons. Eventually she found herself telling them about her current predicament, and about her strange reluctance to move up in the theatre hierarchy. They both listened with interest, and then started thinking about the problem with complete seriousness and earnestness. One of them, the older of the two, asked her if she wanted his advice, and she said that she absolutely did. He told her that she should work for better money, in another job; that, if his open experience was anything to go by, her love of the theatre and her deep and strange happiness would find their truer expression from a position of comfortable affluence, and that the management job in this building was a trap and not worth considering. He said it smiling, but firmly, and she did not immediately respond. Then she said that she had no idea what she could do, and he told her that she was obviously sharp and could probably do anything, but that she should look into logistics and shipping, which was what he did—that if she wanted he could probably set up an interview in his own company, and that the money started good, but that it got very very good if you stuck at it. She asked him what he made, and he laughed and said that it was more than he really knew what to do with. So she asked him again: ‘What do you make?’ He looked at her directly and his smile changed slightly. He said ‘I make around four hundred thousand pounds a year,’ and she quickly agreed that this was enough that her happiness and her love of the theatre would be properly insulated; in fact would be completely safe. Then he said ‘Why don’t you give me your email address and I’ll have someone contact you,’ and she did, and as she did she saw that strange blank year in her life, saw her blank face and her empty cavity-chest; and she saw them as what they were, which was fantasies, mean and thin performances, puppets, or simulations, with less than zero concrete reality in our world of theatre and striving and poetry and commerce, and she saw or felt those strange discomforts of her youth dissolve into smoke and wind. It made her grin like an idiot, which pleased to two gentlemen no end, and they tipped her very handsomely at the end of the evening when they all said their goodbyes.
The next day she was contacted by the office of the man from the suite, and offered an entry position in his company, which she agreed to on the spot. The theatre management were a little perplexed when she told them about this, but they were also completely understanding—people come and go all the time in these professions—and told her that if she ever needed work in the city that they would always have her back, that she was always welcome, though she was also given to understand that her one chance to break through into the echelons of management had been extended and rebuffed, and that any further work in the theatre would be strictly among the menials. She thanked them profusely and sincerely for everything that they had done for her, and she spent her last nights working in the building in more or less active mourning for the building and everything it had given her over the years. Then, on her final day, she bought herself what she thought of as a professional outfit (it turned out that she had a pretty good sense for this), and prepared to begin what she thought of in specific terms as her new life.
This meant that she was a new person, with a new set of interests and frameworks for understanding the world. In the first weeks and months she was aware that these were still nascent (that in fact in some sense she herself was still nascent), but felt no anxiety about this. The frames and the new self would emerge in good time, they would coalesce naturally, there was no need to force anything. In some way, she realised, these things had nothing to do with the job or with the salary; all of that was second order. What were they then? What were these frameworks? Over time she found that they included furnishing an apartment and not sharing her living space. She found that they included owning an expensive sewing machine and expensive chef’s equipment that she didn’t get much chance to use, but which each formed some vital composing architecture in what was developing inside her. On this rock shall I build my church.
For several years she had very few real friends. She got along well with the people she worked with in the office, and she saw her old friends from the theatre now and then, and she went on dates sometimes, and sometimes she threw herself out into the city with a sort of abandon—she went to art shows, the films, to musicals and plays, alone and oddly opened-up and sensitive to the world, waiting for someone to speak to her. She did not recognise that she was lonely, because so much of her mind was taken up with the excavation of herself in sewing machines and nice cooking equipment, in art prints and pieces of expensive furniture; but she became quietly reckless in her pursuit of connection with other people.
She began to hook up with men that she didn’t like much, who were themselves lonely, and unaware of the fact, and who thought that risky sex would somehow free them from this, like a spell. She allowed herself to enter into this fantasy with them, and inside it she found herself face to face with some truly repulsive personalities. She also found herself getting attached to people who were practiced at making use of attachment in more or less violent and cynical ways. All of this gave her life a superficially interesting shape, because she was often managing the large emotions of various hookups and their feelings of being wronged, but it was also sad and exhausting. Once or twice it was dangerous—one of these men, convinced that he had been lied to or cheated somehow, started to come by her apartment to yell at her through the door, and once tried to kick it off its hinges when she told him to leave.
After a couple of years of this she decided (it was like a light getting switched off) to stop dating completely, and did not share intimate touch with another person for nearly four years. This was when she began to get interested in cosmetic surgery. By this time she had set up her apartment more or less as she wanted it, and, although there was always room to improve on a sort of micro-level of distinctions and choices, she was pretty happy with it. Instead she found herself preoccupied with her body and face. One of her many apartment ‘pieces’ was an old-style makeup mirror with exposed light bulbs around its frame, the type that Cabaret performers use in films, and she spent many hours watching herself in this and thinking about what she wanted to do. She made very, very certain to do her research. She found a surgeon who was ungodly expensive, but who was also famed for their good work, for making alterations that were basically invisible.
At this time in her life Beth was making money, but not enough that she could be considered even vaguely wealthy, or even really comfortably middle class. This meant that, in order to afford these various minute and invisible procedures, she would have to save her earnings for months, even years. She did this happily. She entered into a strange email correspondence with the surgeon, first through her assistants, but soon with the specialist herself, wherein she discussed the specifics what she wanted done. She expressed these in terms of the effects once the healing was complete, but also in terms of the anaesthesia, the cutting and sewing, what would be removed and what might be injected; in terms of her supine body, her non-reaction, the intrusion into her skin of the thin cutting blade and the tip of the needle.
The surgeon was at first confused, then bemused, and finally enthusiastic in her replies to Beth’s emails. She (the surgeon) asked herself: ‘Is this a strange case of surgical addiction, some sort of addiction prior to the actual procedures? Is this compulsive behaviour?’ And then she answered herself: ‘no,’ and thought no more about it, which was certainly not very professional.
Beth’s researched and over-precise instructions to her surgeon bore fruit—the surgeries that she commissioned were in fact basically imperceptible, and she was very happy with the results, in exactly the same way that she was happy with her sewing machine, her kitchen knives, her mirror and her income, her comfortable distance from the theatre building. The third time she went under the knife she asked the surgeon if she could take some video of her while she was unconscious, and the surgeon agreed, with only a half-second pause. She was sent the footage in an email from the surgeon’s assistant, after she organised payment. She did not watch it herself until she had fully healed, and afterwards would request the video every time she went back. At the present time she has six of these. If you asked her what she liked about them she would say something about the light on her skin, and the way that it made her glow, white and cold, as though she had been filled up somehow with pure electricity.
Meanwhile, her career continued apace. She worked in the company owned by the two gentlemen from the theatre for three years, give or take, and then left with good references when another company offered her a better position with a better salary. This is what people do, she thought. This is how people operate. And she was right.
If you took a vertical slice of Beth’s life at this time (and this was the exact point at which her history would intersect with the others) this is what you would see: a quiet woman in her early thirties, with a nearly infinite well of personal calm, and an apartment that is like an unfinished portrait. A body that is like an unfinished portrait. A body that is like a heavy sack of buzzing electricity. Small, invisible scars. A collection of objects and clothes chosen with care over a long period of time. A freezing November sky around her, bright and crisp, and nothing beneath her feet but rushing wind and sunlight. The prospect of upward mobility. An infinite capacity for retreat; as though the apartment and the clothes and the mirror and the knives that she has bought for herself form some vast Eastern Winter territory into which million-man armies might march and be lost and abandoned and decimated and massacred by exposure and disease and privation, and out from which the survivors will reemerge like bloody, weeping ghosts; left to disappear forever and be forgotten by the doomed polities and shattered republics that had made such poor use of them.
She met Caitlin at an art opening that she attended on a whim (she chose at random: the art show or a film; it was utterly by chance that she went with one and not the other), and they got talking in a halting, circular way. At first Caitlin thought that she was also in intelligence, perhaps even here in the city for that work. Beth laughed and didn’t really know what to say. ‘I manage shipping schedules! I manage warehousing.’
Caitlin introduced her to Simone, who was also there, and their conversation was easier, lighter, freer. Simone said almost immediately ‘You should come to my show next month and meet the others’, which Beth did. They all liked her a lot, Caitlin included, though Caitlin had some strange reservations. Something about the empty space of the apartment, its infinite capacity for retreat, the impossibility of forcing a confrontation. Beth could refuse, and smile, and make enough money, and get by with the surgeon and the videos of her unconscious body.
The friends did not know about the videos, or about the touch of the knife, but Caitlin marked something of their trace in the other woman’s manner and also in her eyes, and they troubled her. But this reticence was an artefact of Caitlin’s aggressive, forward-postured, broadly concrete character, and she was self-aware enough not to hold it against Beth at all.
-
Beth doesn’t say any of this, or at least she doesn’t say it in these terms. She tells them that she worked in a theatre, which she loved, and that then she went into shipping and procurement, which made her life better along basically every metric. They all nod along to her story. Then there is silence for a couple of minutes, and out from the semi-darkness around the table someone suggests that they all head down the secret path to the beach to watch the sun sink into the sea. This person (it does not matter who it is) says ‘Perhaps we will see the green ray.’ Everyone agrees that this is a good idea, and that they can continue the conversation as they make their way down to the beach. Someone says that they are all too drunk to drive and everyone giggles before the general acknowledgement that they actually are way too drunk to drive, and that it would be a stupid way for them all to die, piled into the SUV and driving off the black rock cliffs of sunlight island.
So they walk. They are careful to lock up the house, and careful to put one of the two sets of keys back in the key safe in case Parvel arrives while they are out. Someone says they should leave a note out for him explaining where they are, and someone else says (with the lightest hint of scorn) that he’ll be fine, that all their stuff is there, that the car is in the driveway, that there is no possible way that Parvel could confuse or misinterpret the situation, and that they don’t need to worry about things like this. This sets off another round of general giggling and agreement, and then they all set off together in a tight knot. The summer evening air is pleasant on the skin. The orange-sodium street lamps flick on along the freeway just as the friends leave the driveway gate. It is not yet dark enough for their light to be visible on the tarmac and concrete. They stand out pleasantly yellow against the pink and orange sky like mock suns.
Ella makes a general announcement that the drivers on this island are maniacs and that it would be better if they didn’t walk on the actual road because no one slows down at all for corners, so instead they troop along double file on the footpaths. Michael, who has taken the lead, arm in arm with Beth, starts to tell them about his years since art school, about what he did for work.
He has been an editor for years, both freelance and full time for various publications. That actually he has never had another job. He has never made much money, but has made it work in various ways at various times—‘loans’ from family, a few partners to split bills with over the years, stints of better paid work here and there. But he doesn’t really have another skillset, would know what to do with himself starting again. How long has he been with the magazine? Nearly two years. Before that he worked for a publisher that they all know. He says ‘They used to be good, but these days it’s all just pay to play, they’ll take whatever,’ which gets a general murmur of disgust and support for his distinguishing sensibility. In fact all of them already know this. Michael’s work history is not mysterious or particularly interesting to the people here. Beth, from beside him, asks what kinds of things he made in art school, and he goes a little stiff and says that he made paintings and drawings, but that he was always meant to be a writer, and that he nearly failed his degree by the merit of his studio practice; it was only his theoretical and contextualising essays that saved him from this fate.
Out from the darkness behind him Simone says sharply that the tutors at the school they went to were simply too stuck on the dominant paradigm at the time, that the couldn’t see outside of it to what Michael had been trying to do—actually she says, the tutors were mostly scared; scared of the unstoppable changes that were shaking art education to its foundations when they studied; the tutors wanted more than anything to see themselves as in control of that change, or to see that they had something to say about it, that they could frame it in an interesting or insightful way, and they needed sacrificial objects like Michael to shore up this project. She says that Michael had painted some very interesting pictures when they were studying together and that it’s a shame that he stopped.
For a couple of minutes the only sounds are the footsteps on the gravel and the buzzing of the evening air. Then Michael says that he doesn’t need her to defend paintings that he made nearly fifteen years ago, and that they were shit, and that it’s ok and there’s no reason to launch this sort of defence from this far in the future. Nothing is accomplished. Simone listens to him and doesn’t say anything, a rare display of tact. Beth says ‘Okay then tell me about the writing,’ but even as she says it she realises that she and everyone here is tired of this conversation, and with an unspoken understanding no one says anything more until the reach the pathway down to the beach. Beth squeezes Michael’s hand and he squeezes hers back, and the atmosphere lightens perceptibly.
Michael is an editor, but he is also a writer, and the friends like his writing. It is easy enough to like someone’s writing in a noncommittal way, and god knows that the circles that they move in are inundated with ‘good enough’ writers with a good enough command of the forms and the correct terms of address, and an overdeveloped sense for hedging and self-preservation that lets them stay in print and in the graces of the various powers that be in art-adjacent publishing. Michael is not one of these—he has things to say, and his reviews and essays are often surprising and genuinely pleasurable to read. He has a sense of humour and an enormous store of personal venom at his disposal. He likes young artists (pre-graduation artists mostly), and outsider artists, and classical literature. He likes writing that moves easily between the general and the hyper-specific. His positions on all of this are not infinitely plastic. The writing he does for himself is intensely private—he shows it to his girlfriend, who, he thinks, understands it, and sometimes publishes excerpts in this or that magazine or gallery; always short fiction, always a fragment of something larger. These are obsessively polished, self-contained, and have the efficacy of a steel splinter or a finely-calibrated lensing apparatus. Which is to say that they are directed, effective, sharp, wounding (mostly wounding to Michael, it has to be said), and, as Caitlin likes to joke, impossible to un-deploy once they’re out in the world. ‘Autonomous Kill Vehicles’ is her term of endearment, which makes him chuckle, but also strikes him as oversimplifying the thing slightly. A story can be like a slow morning, or like a song. Splinters and spikes and suicide drones are types among many; effective, but only part of the thing. But it’s not important to say this. Caitlin loves Michael’s stories. She talks often about their composure and their distinction and good taste. Simone calls them sexy; Sally calls them ‘a breath of fresh air’; Ella contents herself with saying that she likes them, which is true. Beth doesn’t give feedback, but always asks him to send them on to her as soon as she hears that another has come out. When is he doing a novel? Maybe one day. In the meantime he works as an editor, and fights forlorn, inconclusive battles with other editors that none of them know, over who to champion and who to tear down, and about how best to accomplish both of these, how public each needs to be.
He has actually written several novels, but not even his partner knows this. The first few he deleted in an excess of youthful grandiosity and pique. There are a couple more on his laptop that he has not yet destroyed. Perhaps one day he will cut them together into something that he considers worth pursuing. The difficulty, he thinks, only to himself, is the complexity. Easy enough to put together a story or even a novella like a little gem, every facet polished, everything throwing everything into its proper relief, every reflection catching as it should. But this level of control is simply not possible past a certain point, unless the distinction can be made automatic; and this, of course, can only be done via total surrender and total immersion.
Michael is capable of both of these, but he is not (yet) capable of living with their consequences as realised in a specific piece of writing or art. He can let go, but he cannot see himself in that state without a feeling a paroxysm of fear and disgust. Can you change yourself to police the output of that automatic expression? You have to change yourself at the source. Michael is a believer in therapy, but as a sort of operative technology, capable of sculpting unconscionable and ungraspable things into more manageable forms before any conscious striving.
Michael is also a great believer in kindness, and in gestures of kindness. In a real way he is dependant on them. When he squeezes Beth’s hand back it is to say something like ‘one day I’ll be able to show you a novel that I’ve written, one day the novel will be good enough to show you.’ He lives inside a strange territory where published positions and pronouncements can be fatal to those the people that make them, and he has to make them nonetheless, without hedging and without saying nothing. His partner and his friends form a sort of umbilical, extremophilic system that lets him stay down there with the barbarians, brittle thing that he is. They let him develop his store of venom free from the spectre of ridicule, which, in his world of ego-forms (and never having taken any true plunge or leap of his own), he understands to be not too far from self-destruction.
Eventually they arrive at the turn off from the freeway, a narrow stair that cuts down the cliffs and terminates in the small sandy beach. The stairs down are unlit and nearly invisible in the twilight. As they make their way down they catch the drifting sound of voices from the darkness below, men speaking Italian, loud and animated. None of them say a thing as they descend. Eventually they reach this other group climbing up the stair towards the light. The strangers stop talking immediately when the realise that they are not alone. The two groups shuffle past one another and a few of the friends give muted buena serras as they pass, which are acknowledged with nods and nonverbal vocalisations. None of the faces are visible down here.
Eventually they arrive at the small sandy beach, which they realise is actually a little cove surrounded by the cliffs of two sides, and perfectly framing the sun as it drops into the sea. It is exactly the time to watch the evening transition into night. They sit on the sand and watch, and Sally and Simone begin to kiss one another, deeply and in tight embrace. The others watch the sun, and say nothing.
It drops below the sea. The colour in the sky persists for almost fifteen minutes afterwards. Then Beth says that she wants to swim, and that the water will be warm, and she strips down to her underwear and walks into the water, which sets off an amused murmuring from the others present. They begin to remove their clothes. Ella and Simone strip nude, the rest stay in their underwear. They follow Beth into the water, and kick out, away from the shore. They stay in for about twenty minutes, and in that time to sky turns dark purple and the surface of the water glows softly with its residual light, and with the sharper lights of the streetlamp above, which beam down over the cliff edge and are picked up at the edges of the low waves and the breaks in the swells that move along the surface.
Then they emerge, one by one, like spirits, and lie on the sand. They dry themselves off with their clothes, and one or two of them make happy sounds about the night and the warmth and the smells of the sea, and they get dressed again and head back to the stair back up to the freeway, which is now utterly black, and which swallows them up entirely when they enter. Each steps across the threshold alone and disappears from view in a single instant; there, and then gone.
This laughter is appropriate to Caitlin’s character, appropriate to her secrecy and to the horror that she moves among as a native. She sometimes looks like a steam engine, or a complex motor-apparatus, sucking in fuel and venting steam and smoke, chained in some lightless pit, laughing and laughing at her own aggressiveness, at her presumption. She was so young then. The laughter is appropriated by Michael, who understands it, and who can describe and metabolise it (and here it has a secondary character—Michael can respond with laughter of his own, but he could not begin to laugh), and it is shared in its full weight and import by Sally, who is the only one at the table who can locate and diagnose it with specificity, although he could never explain this to the others, and he does not laugh himself. His laugh is compressed inside him, along with a good deal of his other automatic expression (Ella might say his authentic opinions, or his authentic self, which would be another overreach and not at all accurate).
His laugh is there but it is a frozen, static thing underneath his expressive surface. Like any unconscious and expressive movement that is frozen (exactly like a freeze-frame in a video: un-staged, an artefact of chance, an arbitrary point in a continuous process), his laugh looks something like a scream.
Caitlin is unaware of this strange likeness between her and Sally; she has never seen so much of a glimpse of it, although she has noted that Sally is an oddly fucked-up guy at various points during their friendship. He is not secretive in any way that makes sense to her, so he does not ping in her various diagnostic systems.
Simone has seen it in the man that she loves, and has in fact seen it on the surfaces of the paintings she has made of him, and it is one of the few things in creation that can trigger a genuinely vulnerable and compassionate response in her.
But we will return to Sally, and to his strange, frozen laughter.
-
The next of the friends to talk about their early years is Beth, the only one who did not attend the art school with the rest. Beth says that she studied theatre, which is news to everyone here except Caitlin, and which elicits noises of disbelief. Was she an actor? She says that she was, or at least she started off studying acting. She was only superficially good at it, which she understood early. Her teachers told her that she should stick with it, that her natural talents could be honed and brought out and that with effort she could make a career of it, but she remembers thinking to herself: ‘No. I have seen the people here who are good at this, and I’m not like that’, so she dropped out and applied to study business, where she lasted for a year or so before dropping that too, because she hated it. She spent a year doing nothing, comfortably jobless, staying with friends or with her parents. When she was asked she called it a gap year, but it was more accurately a year of emptiness, of non-thought. She became lethargic and uninterested in the world. She saw friends now and then, and walked around the city centre, and tried (and failed) to build up some image of herself in her mind. The image was a blank: she was a blank person, with a blank face and a vague sound of rushing wind at her centre, as though her chest was really an aperture through which the world escaped, without her consent. She read books and forgot what she had read. She went to bars and restaurants alone, and got drunk. She dressed herself up to make herself desirable. Probably this was effective, although she has no memories of any romantic or sexual encounters.
But this only lasted for about a year, and it was when she was young, so nothing in it was terminal, and she knew this too. She was never in genuine danger. In some sense she was a tourist, though the blankness in her thoughts, the rushing wind, the lethargy; all of this was real enough.
Eventually she decided that she needed to work, or study, or something (get married? Join the army?), and she spent a week writing up job applications for low-wage work around the city centre. Many of these came back positive—she interviewed for work as a receptionist, and a personal assistant, and as an usher in one of the grand old theatres in the capital. The choice was not a difficult one. She found herself back at the theatre, in an oversized polyester uniform, smiling graciously, bringing patrons to their seats. She found herself selling them drinks from the five bars that were scattered around the great and ancient Deco theatre, found herself picking up rubbish after the shows, found herself asking people to stop talking, or stop using their phones, found herself (sometimes, rarely) calling to security on a malfunctioning radio, and asking them to remove drunks and other aggressive patrons.
She also found herself happy, which came as a surprise—it emerged out from the blankness as if it had been there all along, sitting just beneath the blank surface of her face. The strange sounds of air moving remained, although as she was now happy they didn’t bother her, or even really register in her mind.
What was the source of her happiness? She liked the people that she worked with, she liked the stability of the work, the predictable shifts, she liked being good at it—she was the one the others looked to to solve problems, because she was practical and level-headed, and because she had a strange tiredness in her that people misunderstood as maturity or wisdom. She enjoyed all of this. But what made her happy was really the theatre, and its ancient power to transform people. She thought it might even be love. She loved the proscenium arch, she loved the serried rows of plush seating, built with its rake that allowed every patron an equal view of the stage, a democratic, perhaps even a republican gesture. She thought of older buildings in white marble, she thought of city walls and skies on fire, and the great, reaping slaughter of the sons and daughters of the polis. Beth has a grandiose streak, something like Caitlin’s laughter and highhandedness, but softer, less brittle, easier. She loved the pomp of the building, its gesturing at and fondness for all of the spent rituals of the past; she loved the booths with their gilt gold decoration, the waistcoats of the staff, the vaulted ceilings and the chandeliers, the discretion of the management, and the players, who she loved more than anything else, the end result of the whole transformer system, the ones for whom all of this elaborate framing was arranged, performing each night, bringing the words of the scripts and the treatments into life and movement, into specific history (she thought, watching the performances night after night, from the wings, telling patrons to stop talking, to get off their phones), into specific history because into specific performances. The performances could be good or bad, but all of them had their specific character, and all of them spoke to the continuation of art in time, to its dignity and its very great beauty, even when they were poorly managed, poorly conceived, even when they were vulgar or ugly.
What made her happiest was the fidelity of the theatre to the small dignity of the lives of its audience. The space behind the arch that would be a mirror to them; that would work its dramatic address, and that would affirm for each of them that yes, they were alive, and that others were alive once, and that still others would be alive later, and that each of us has our struggle and our dignity, even when we are poorly managed, vulgar, and ugly.
This was the shape of her thinking—not at all like the trained, pointed thoughts of the others while they studied—Beth came to these over the course of years of distant and non-specific happiness. They suggested themselves to her like shadows thrown from the light of her joy. They suggested themselves in the electrical silence before the actor spoke her line, and in the soft murmuring of the audience before the curtains come up, and in the soft light and the shadows of the whole building on those evenings, the yellow light of the chandeliers, the stalls and the gallery, the programmes and the overpriced ice creams and snacks and alcohol.
She was an usher for three years, give or take, and then she was a floor manager for another two years after that, responsible for a team of around twenty others, and then she was offered one of the junior theatre manager roles when the woman who had previously had the position divorced her husband and left the country. She thought about it long and hard. The theatre had asked her expecting her to say yes, so this was a surprise to them. She couldn’t explain it clearly but she felt like her happiness at the theatre would be destroyed by taking on this position. At the same time, she was making basically no money, and living in shared accommodation that she quietly despised, and the job had a salary—not a good one, but nearly double what she was making as a floor manager—and all the other perks of full time employment. Still, something inside her stopped her from accepting. It was the same thing that had told her that she would never be an actor. If she had to comment on it she might call it her truth, or her intelligence. Another person might call it an angel, but Beth would never use that word.
The management at the theatre, increasingly puzzled, told her that of course they loved working with her, but that they needed to fill the position, and that she would need to let them know by the end of the week. It was a Tuesday, and she told them that of course she would do so, earlier if she could. She did not apologise for the delay, or even mention it. She felt strange, hot, transparent.
That night, during the performance (a musical, not a play, unusual for the theatre, one of the old standards, perhaps Oklahoma, or Porgie and Bess), she was called on to run one of the hospitality packages that the theatre offered as ticket add-ons to its wealthier clients—in this case, the package included one-on-one service in on of the private suites scattered around the theatre’s labyrinthine floorpan. Beth was one of only a few of the staff trained to do this, and she enjoyed the shifts because the patrons often gave her tips, which could sometimes be more than her salary for the evening. On this particular night she was lost in her own thoughts about the promotion, and her patrons were two older men, a couple, chatty and pleasant. She did her best to emerge from her reverie, to be a personable and accommodating host, and was eventually, despite herself, genuinely charmed by this couple of wealthy older gentlemen. She found herself not thinking about her job at all, chatting and joking along with her patrons. Eventually she found herself telling them about her current predicament, and about her strange reluctance to move up in the theatre hierarchy. They both listened with interest, and then started thinking about the problem with complete seriousness and earnestness. One of them, the older of the two, asked her if she wanted his advice, and she said that she absolutely did. He told her that she should work for better money, in another job; that, if his open experience was anything to go by, her love of the theatre and her deep and strange happiness would find their truer expression from a position of comfortable affluence, and that the management job in this building was a trap and not worth considering. He said it smiling, but firmly, and she did not immediately respond. Then she said that she had no idea what she could do, and he told her that she was obviously sharp and could probably do anything, but that she should look into logistics and shipping, which was what he did—that if she wanted he could probably set up an interview in his own company, and that the money started good, but that it got very very good if you stuck at it. She asked him what he made, and he laughed and said that it was more than he really knew what to do with. So she asked him again: ‘What do you make?’ He looked at her directly and his smile changed slightly. He said ‘I make around four hundred thousand pounds a year,’ and she quickly agreed that this was enough that her happiness and her love of the theatre would be properly insulated; in fact would be completely safe. Then he said ‘Why don’t you give me your email address and I’ll have someone contact you,’ and she did, and as she did she saw that strange blank year in her life, saw her blank face and her empty cavity-chest; and she saw them as what they were, which was fantasies, mean and thin performances, puppets, or simulations, with less than zero concrete reality in our world of theatre and striving and poetry and commerce, and she saw or felt those strange discomforts of her youth dissolve into smoke and wind. It made her grin like an idiot, which pleased to two gentlemen no end, and they tipped her very handsomely at the end of the evening when they all said their goodbyes.
The next day she was contacted by the office of the man from the suite, and offered an entry position in his company, which she agreed to on the spot. The theatre management were a little perplexed when she told them about this, but they were also completely understanding—people come and go all the time in these professions—and told her that if she ever needed work in the city that they would always have her back, that she was always welcome, though she was also given to understand that her one chance to break through into the echelons of management had been extended and rebuffed, and that any further work in the theatre would be strictly among the menials. She thanked them profusely and sincerely for everything that they had done for her, and she spent her last nights working in the building in more or less active mourning for the building and everything it had given her over the years. Then, on her final day, she bought herself what she thought of as a professional outfit (it turned out that she had a pretty good sense for this), and prepared to begin what she thought of in specific terms as her new life.
This meant that she was a new person, with a new set of interests and frameworks for understanding the world. In the first weeks and months she was aware that these were still nascent (that in fact in some sense she herself was still nascent), but felt no anxiety about this. The frames and the new self would emerge in good time, they would coalesce naturally, there was no need to force anything. In some way, she realised, these things had nothing to do with the job or with the salary; all of that was second order. What were they then? What were these frameworks? Over time she found that they included furnishing an apartment and not sharing her living space. She found that they included owning an expensive sewing machine and expensive chef’s equipment that she didn’t get much chance to use, but which each formed some vital composing architecture in what was developing inside her. On this rock shall I build my church.
For several years she had very few real friends. She got along well with the people she worked with in the office, and she saw her old friends from the theatre now and then, and she went on dates sometimes, and sometimes she threw herself out into the city with a sort of abandon—she went to art shows, the films, to musicals and plays, alone and oddly opened-up and sensitive to the world, waiting for someone to speak to her. She did not recognise that she was lonely, because so much of her mind was taken up with the excavation of herself in sewing machines and nice cooking equipment, in art prints and pieces of expensive furniture; but she became quietly reckless in her pursuit of connection with other people.
She began to hook up with men that she didn’t like much, who were themselves lonely, and unaware of the fact, and who thought that risky sex would somehow free them from this, like a spell. She allowed herself to enter into this fantasy with them, and inside it she found herself face to face with some truly repulsive personalities. She also found herself getting attached to people who were practiced at making use of attachment in more or less violent and cynical ways. All of this gave her life a superficially interesting shape, because she was often managing the large emotions of various hookups and their feelings of being wronged, but it was also sad and exhausting. Once or twice it was dangerous—one of these men, convinced that he had been lied to or cheated somehow, started to come by her apartment to yell at her through the door, and once tried to kick it off its hinges when she told him to leave.
After a couple of years of this she decided (it was like a light getting switched off) to stop dating completely, and did not share intimate touch with another person for nearly four years. This was when she began to get interested in cosmetic surgery. By this time she had set up her apartment more or less as she wanted it, and, although there was always room to improve on a sort of micro-level of distinctions and choices, she was pretty happy with it. Instead she found herself preoccupied with her body and face. One of her many apartment ‘pieces’ was an old-style makeup mirror with exposed light bulbs around its frame, the type that Cabaret performers use in films, and she spent many hours watching herself in this and thinking about what she wanted to do. She made very, very certain to do her research. She found a surgeon who was ungodly expensive, but who was also famed for their good work, for making alterations that were basically invisible.
At this time in her life Beth was making money, but not enough that she could be considered even vaguely wealthy, or even really comfortably middle class. This meant that, in order to afford these various minute and invisible procedures, she would have to save her earnings for months, even years. She did this happily. She entered into a strange email correspondence with the surgeon, first through her assistants, but soon with the specialist herself, wherein she discussed the specifics what she wanted done. She expressed these in terms of the effects once the healing was complete, but also in terms of the anaesthesia, the cutting and sewing, what would be removed and what might be injected; in terms of her supine body, her non-reaction, the intrusion into her skin of the thin cutting blade and the tip of the needle.
The surgeon was at first confused, then bemused, and finally enthusiastic in her replies to Beth’s emails. She (the surgeon) asked herself: ‘Is this a strange case of surgical addiction, some sort of addiction prior to the actual procedures? Is this compulsive behaviour?’ And then she answered herself: ‘no,’ and thought no more about it, which was certainly not very professional.
Beth’s researched and over-precise instructions to her surgeon bore fruit—the surgeries that she commissioned were in fact basically imperceptible, and she was very happy with the results, in exactly the same way that she was happy with her sewing machine, her kitchen knives, her mirror and her income, her comfortable distance from the theatre building. The third time she went under the knife she asked the surgeon if she could take some video of her while she was unconscious, and the surgeon agreed, with only a half-second pause. She was sent the footage in an email from the surgeon’s assistant, after she organised payment. She did not watch it herself until she had fully healed, and afterwards would request the video every time she went back. At the present time she has six of these. If you asked her what she liked about them she would say something about the light on her skin, and the way that it made her glow, white and cold, as though she had been filled up somehow with pure electricity.
Meanwhile, her career continued apace. She worked in the company owned by the two gentlemen from the theatre for three years, give or take, and then left with good references when another company offered her a better position with a better salary. This is what people do, she thought. This is how people operate. And she was right.
If you took a vertical slice of Beth’s life at this time (and this was the exact point at which her history would intersect with the others) this is what you would see: a quiet woman in her early thirties, with a nearly infinite well of personal calm, and an apartment that is like an unfinished portrait. A body that is like an unfinished portrait. A body that is like a heavy sack of buzzing electricity. Small, invisible scars. A collection of objects and clothes chosen with care over a long period of time. A freezing November sky around her, bright and crisp, and nothing beneath her feet but rushing wind and sunlight. The prospect of upward mobility. An infinite capacity for retreat; as though the apartment and the clothes and the mirror and the knives that she has bought for herself form some vast Eastern Winter territory into which million-man armies might march and be lost and abandoned and decimated and massacred by exposure and disease and privation, and out from which the survivors will reemerge like bloody, weeping ghosts; left to disappear forever and be forgotten by the doomed polities and shattered republics that had made such poor use of them.
She met Caitlin at an art opening that she attended on a whim (she chose at random: the art show or a film; it was utterly by chance that she went with one and not the other), and they got talking in a halting, circular way. At first Caitlin thought that she was also in intelligence, perhaps even here in the city for that work. Beth laughed and didn’t really know what to say. ‘I manage shipping schedules! I manage warehousing.’
Caitlin introduced her to Simone, who was also there, and their conversation was easier, lighter, freer. Simone said almost immediately ‘You should come to my show next month and meet the others’, which Beth did. They all liked her a lot, Caitlin included, though Caitlin had some strange reservations. Something about the empty space of the apartment, its infinite capacity for retreat, the impossibility of forcing a confrontation. Beth could refuse, and smile, and make enough money, and get by with the surgeon and the videos of her unconscious body.
The friends did not know about the videos, or about the touch of the knife, but Caitlin marked something of their trace in the other woman’s manner and also in her eyes, and they troubled her. But this reticence was an artefact of Caitlin’s aggressive, forward-postured, broadly concrete character, and she was self-aware enough not to hold it against Beth at all.
-
Beth doesn’t say any of this, or at least she doesn’t say it in these terms. She tells them that she worked in a theatre, which she loved, and that then she went into shipping and procurement, which made her life better along basically every metric. They all nod along to her story. Then there is silence for a couple of minutes, and out from the semi-darkness around the table someone suggests that they all head down the secret path to the beach to watch the sun sink into the sea. This person (it does not matter who it is) says ‘Perhaps we will see the green ray.’ Everyone agrees that this is a good idea, and that they can continue the conversation as they make their way down to the beach. Someone says that they are all too drunk to drive and everyone giggles before the general acknowledgement that they actually are way too drunk to drive, and that it would be a stupid way for them all to die, piled into the SUV and driving off the black rock cliffs of sunlight island.
So they walk. They are careful to lock up the house, and careful to put one of the two sets of keys back in the key safe in case Parvel arrives while they are out. Someone says they should leave a note out for him explaining where they are, and someone else says (with the lightest hint of scorn) that he’ll be fine, that all their stuff is there, that the car is in the driveway, that there is no possible way that Parvel could confuse or misinterpret the situation, and that they don’t need to worry about things like this. This sets off another round of general giggling and agreement, and then they all set off together in a tight knot. The summer evening air is pleasant on the skin. The orange-sodium street lamps flick on along the freeway just as the friends leave the driveway gate. It is not yet dark enough for their light to be visible on the tarmac and concrete. They stand out pleasantly yellow against the pink and orange sky like mock suns.
Ella makes a general announcement that the drivers on this island are maniacs and that it would be better if they didn’t walk on the actual road because no one slows down at all for corners, so instead they troop along double file on the footpaths. Michael, who has taken the lead, arm in arm with Beth, starts to tell them about his years since art school, about what he did for work.
He has been an editor for years, both freelance and full time for various publications. That actually he has never had another job. He has never made much money, but has made it work in various ways at various times—‘loans’ from family, a few partners to split bills with over the years, stints of better paid work here and there. But he doesn’t really have another skillset, would know what to do with himself starting again. How long has he been with the magazine? Nearly two years. Before that he worked for a publisher that they all know. He says ‘They used to be good, but these days it’s all just pay to play, they’ll take whatever,’ which gets a general murmur of disgust and support for his distinguishing sensibility. In fact all of them already know this. Michael’s work history is not mysterious or particularly interesting to the people here. Beth, from beside him, asks what kinds of things he made in art school, and he goes a little stiff and says that he made paintings and drawings, but that he was always meant to be a writer, and that he nearly failed his degree by the merit of his studio practice; it was only his theoretical and contextualising essays that saved him from this fate.
Out from the darkness behind him Simone says sharply that the tutors at the school they went to were simply too stuck on the dominant paradigm at the time, that the couldn’t see outside of it to what Michael had been trying to do—actually she says, the tutors were mostly scared; scared of the unstoppable changes that were shaking art education to its foundations when they studied; the tutors wanted more than anything to see themselves as in control of that change, or to see that they had something to say about it, that they could frame it in an interesting or insightful way, and they needed sacrificial objects like Michael to shore up this project. She says that Michael had painted some very interesting pictures when they were studying together and that it’s a shame that he stopped.
For a couple of minutes the only sounds are the footsteps on the gravel and the buzzing of the evening air. Then Michael says that he doesn’t need her to defend paintings that he made nearly fifteen years ago, and that they were shit, and that it’s ok and there’s no reason to launch this sort of defence from this far in the future. Nothing is accomplished. Simone listens to him and doesn’t say anything, a rare display of tact. Beth says ‘Okay then tell me about the writing,’ but even as she says it she realises that she and everyone here is tired of this conversation, and with an unspoken understanding no one says anything more until the reach the pathway down to the beach. Beth squeezes Michael’s hand and he squeezes hers back, and the atmosphere lightens perceptibly.
Michael is an editor, but he is also a writer, and the friends like his writing. It is easy enough to like someone’s writing in a noncommittal way, and god knows that the circles that they move in are inundated with ‘good enough’ writers with a good enough command of the forms and the correct terms of address, and an overdeveloped sense for hedging and self-preservation that lets them stay in print and in the graces of the various powers that be in art-adjacent publishing. Michael is not one of these—he has things to say, and his reviews and essays are often surprising and genuinely pleasurable to read. He has a sense of humour and an enormous store of personal venom at his disposal. He likes young artists (pre-graduation artists mostly), and outsider artists, and classical literature. He likes writing that moves easily between the general and the hyper-specific. His positions on all of this are not infinitely plastic. The writing he does for himself is intensely private—he shows it to his girlfriend, who, he thinks, understands it, and sometimes publishes excerpts in this or that magazine or gallery; always short fiction, always a fragment of something larger. These are obsessively polished, self-contained, and have the efficacy of a steel splinter or a finely-calibrated lensing apparatus. Which is to say that they are directed, effective, sharp, wounding (mostly wounding to Michael, it has to be said), and, as Caitlin likes to joke, impossible to un-deploy once they’re out in the world. ‘Autonomous Kill Vehicles’ is her term of endearment, which makes him chuckle, but also strikes him as oversimplifying the thing slightly. A story can be like a slow morning, or like a song. Splinters and spikes and suicide drones are types among many; effective, but only part of the thing. But it’s not important to say this. Caitlin loves Michael’s stories. She talks often about their composure and their distinction and good taste. Simone calls them sexy; Sally calls them ‘a breath of fresh air’; Ella contents herself with saying that she likes them, which is true. Beth doesn’t give feedback, but always asks him to send them on to her as soon as she hears that another has come out. When is he doing a novel? Maybe one day. In the meantime he works as an editor, and fights forlorn, inconclusive battles with other editors that none of them know, over who to champion and who to tear down, and about how best to accomplish both of these, how public each needs to be.
He has actually written several novels, but not even his partner knows this. The first few he deleted in an excess of youthful grandiosity and pique. There are a couple more on his laptop that he has not yet destroyed. Perhaps one day he will cut them together into something that he considers worth pursuing. The difficulty, he thinks, only to himself, is the complexity. Easy enough to put together a story or even a novella like a little gem, every facet polished, everything throwing everything into its proper relief, every reflection catching as it should. But this level of control is simply not possible past a certain point, unless the distinction can be made automatic; and this, of course, can only be done via total surrender and total immersion.
Michael is capable of both of these, but he is not (yet) capable of living with their consequences as realised in a specific piece of writing or art. He can let go, but he cannot see himself in that state without a feeling a paroxysm of fear and disgust. Can you change yourself to police the output of that automatic expression? You have to change yourself at the source. Michael is a believer in therapy, but as a sort of operative technology, capable of sculpting unconscionable and ungraspable things into more manageable forms before any conscious striving.
Michael is also a great believer in kindness, and in gestures of kindness. In a real way he is dependant on them. When he squeezes Beth’s hand back it is to say something like ‘one day I’ll be able to show you a novel that I’ve written, one day the novel will be good enough to show you.’ He lives inside a strange territory where published positions and pronouncements can be fatal to those the people that make them, and he has to make them nonetheless, without hedging and without saying nothing. His partner and his friends form a sort of umbilical, extremophilic system that lets him stay down there with the barbarians, brittle thing that he is. They let him develop his store of venom free from the spectre of ridicule, which, in his world of ego-forms (and never having taken any true plunge or leap of his own), he understands to be not too far from self-destruction.
Eventually they arrive at the turn off from the freeway, a narrow stair that cuts down the cliffs and terminates in the small sandy beach. The stairs down are unlit and nearly invisible in the twilight. As they make their way down they catch the drifting sound of voices from the darkness below, men speaking Italian, loud and animated. None of them say a thing as they descend. Eventually they reach this other group climbing up the stair towards the light. The strangers stop talking immediately when the realise that they are not alone. The two groups shuffle past one another and a few of the friends give muted buena serras as they pass, which are acknowledged with nods and nonverbal vocalisations. None of the faces are visible down here.
Eventually they arrive at the small sandy beach, which they realise is actually a little cove surrounded by the cliffs of two sides, and perfectly framing the sun as it drops into the sea. It is exactly the time to watch the evening transition into night. They sit on the sand and watch, and Sally and Simone begin to kiss one another, deeply and in tight embrace. The others watch the sun, and say nothing.
It drops below the sea. The colour in the sky persists for almost fifteen minutes afterwards. Then Beth says that she wants to swim, and that the water will be warm, and she strips down to her underwear and walks into the water, which sets off an amused murmuring from the others present. They begin to remove their clothes. Ella and Simone strip nude, the rest stay in their underwear. They follow Beth into the water, and kick out, away from the shore. They stay in for about twenty minutes, and in that time to sky turns dark purple and the surface of the water glows softly with its residual light, and with the sharper lights of the streetlamp above, which beam down over the cliff edge and are picked up at the edges of the low waves and the breaks in the swells that move along the surface.
Then they emerge, one by one, like spirits, and lie on the sand. They dry themselves off with their clothes, and one or two of them make happy sounds about the night and the warmth and the smells of the sea, and they get dressed again and head back to the stair back up to the freeway, which is now utterly black, and which swallows them up entirely when they enter. Each steps across the threshold alone and disappears from view in a single instant; there, and then gone.
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| Blue Moon, 2025 |
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