The Seafarer

Photo by BEN ELLIOTT on Unsplash

Outside the Seafarer Inn, where the lonely or unhappily married—though often both— conducted their hushed rendezvous, the ocean coughed up its white-tipped spittle. It lay sprawled on the shore before retreating, leaving a momentary imprint of capillaries. Catherine shifted and felt the back of her thighs unsticking against the wooden chair. He looks like a brachiosaurus, Phoebe had remarked. At twenty years her senior, with an alarmingly bulbous forehead and lumbering limbs, Hugh did resemble a brachiosaurus. In his Lit Theory class, they studied the “abject.” The “Other.” The “taboo.” When she put her hand up, it felt like she basked in the sun’s favour, the way Hugh looked at her—feverish and furtive. 

The first time Catherine brought Hugh to her flat, they tried to cook together. They were a nervous orchestra of bumping wrists and shoulders, standing side-by-side at the stove, offering oh sorry’s and here you go’s over a bubbling pot. She felt shy and warm under the orange stove light. She wondered if he was looking at her with that honest, unnerving gaze. Feigning interest in the saltshaker she glanced to her left slightly. He was chopping carrots into careful circles, his egg-shell freckled knuckles walking backwards with every slice of the blade. Hugh’s hands were the first thing she noticed about him. At the start of the semester, he wrung them tightly together whenever he spoke, as if to squeeze out the awkwardness. But when he started teaching, he was excitable, triumphant in his knowledge being reciprocated and challenged. Catherine worried what he would think of her flat. It was filled with things that resembled a home but not a life. A small family of succulents, foldable tables, stick-on mirrors,

books hauled in a suitcase—and one Phoebe Crewe, her flatmate, who had been unceremoniously thrown out just before dinner time. You’re supposed to unpack, you know, she would comment.

Hugh caught her eye. 

“What are you thinking of?” The pan sizzled. 

“Getting takeout.” 

In their distraction, dinner had become inedible.

The night Phoebe moved out, Hugh explained that octopuses have three hearts.

Catherine and Phoebe grew up together. They had been friends before they had any idea who they were or what the world was—when they said words like later and slow down and I promise without grasping what they fully meant. For years they met, every morning, barefoot and sweaty, atop a tree between their houses, eating plums and feeling the juice drip down their elbows, waiting for the day to waste.

Around the time she lost her front tooth, Catherine told Phoebe that her father hated her. Catherine remembered nudging the gummy crescent with the tip of her tongue—she couldn’t understand hatred the way a child cannot understand nostalgia, but she had known it just the same. After that, she tried to hate herself the way he did because being hurt out of hate made more sense than being hurt out of love—she decided that the two operated on similar frequencies, and like old radios, they could get mixed up. Catherine tried to explain to Phoebe that her father wasn’t a bad person, and nor was she. It was like putting two good peaches in a basket—their rotting became inevitable. You’re starting to look like a rotten peach, was Phoebe’s constant protest. 

The two moved in together when they got into the same university. Their flat had old, rickety doors that shuddered in the wind and creaked when opened. None of them had locks except the front door. On the day of the move, Catherine found Phoebe—gloved and goggled— installing a lock on her bedroom door. 

“There. Nothing can get in unless you let it. I promise,” said her knight in swirling sawdust. A slam came from the neighbouring flat and Catherine flinched.

“Hey, look at me. I’ll wear a bell, OK? You’ll never have to listen for me. You’ll hear me coming.” Phoebe never actually wore a bell, but she hummed and sang wherever she went.

Blame It on the Smoothie when the blender was on and Singin’ in the Rain when she showered.

Hugh had found Catherine lying on the bathroom floor. He took off his coat and slipped it under her head, then pressed his face on the ground next to her.

“She got the job. The one in London.” Catherine was examining a strand of brown hair on the bathmat. It trembled between her fingers as she spoke.

“I don’t know what to do without her. I don’t know what to do with myself.” 

Hugh tucked his knees behind her and bracketed her with his body. 

“I don’t think I’m a good friend. And she’s my best friend.” 

“You are a good friend.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know Phoebe doesn’t tolerate bullshit.” He had a point. “And I thought I was your best friend.”

“You’re funny.” 

Catherine felt warm and snug. Hugh pressed his face into the back of her hair.

“Did you know octopuses have three hearts? I found out today and got quite worried. I thought, what if their babies died—or if they lost a tentacle—or got a divorce—they would feel the pain three-fold.” 

Catherine listened, bemused. 

“But then they would also feel love three-fold and hear the resounding pumps of each heart every time they were shy or enthusiastic or hopeful. It’s the proverbial “The more you have, the more you stand to lose”, which reads like a warning against rapaciousness, but I don’t think you can be greedy for love. So I think it means octopuses have to be brave. They have to be brave lovers.” 

“Innit.” He prodded. 

“Hugh, stop talking.” Catherine turned and kissed him. 

Hugh’s wife was a marine biologist. It meant she spent a lot of time with the unknown, had a coffee mug that said You Begin by Beginning, and brought to the dinner table mindboggling titbits of facts like a blue whale’s heart is the size of a Honda, or, if an electric eel can generate enough electricity to power eight lightbulbs then how many eels would it take to power two hundred and fifty lightbulbs? Catherine imagined Mrs Hugh Morris as a straightforward woman, a reliable mother, and a competent colleague. One who knew how to safely dispose of used batteries, so it would not harm the ocean. One who remembered to change the smoke detectors every decade. One whose box of baking soda under the sink was her Swiss Army knife—used to wash salads, bathroom tiles, and her daughters’ tennis uniforms. She must love Hugh for his ability to reenact Shakespeare for their daughters. Hugh once told Catherine that, in desperation—when unbrushed teeth hung in the balance—he launched into a one-man rendition of Julius Caesar, Act Three, spasming and convulsing like a fish, in exchange for the girls’ cooperation. “ET TU, BRUTE?” They chanted with him, little socked feet drumming on the edge of the toilet seat. 

Catherine imagined that later, his wife would say something like Hugh, that’s twisted and pinch the soft of his abdomen. A means to an end, Marie. A means to an end, Hugh would reply, crouched over the sink, awkwardly dwarfing everything. 

A particular tenderness came over Hugh whenever he spoke of his daughters. His finger would hover over their apple cheeks as he swiped through the photo album, generous and unguarded with his anecdotes. The girls inherited Hugh’s freckles, but their dark eyes were unfamiliar and arresting all at once. Catherine never saw a single photo of Marie. On nights spent in Hugh’s home, if he did not stir after the third poke at his jugular, she would creep out of his nesty embrace and wander down the hallway, careful and curious as a spy. The walls were lined with pictures of the girls only. Some of the same images lived in his phone. In the dark, she felt them multiplying, bivouacking through the living room like a quiet occupation. 

She slipped back under the covers, resting her head on his chest, going up, going down. 

“They’re haunting me,” she told his chest hairs. 

“Hmm?” He stirred and blinked. 

“I said do you want tea.”

He mumbled and got up and five minutes later returned with a steaming cup on a coaster.

“I put in a cinnamon stick the way you like.” 

Catherine took it out before sipping slowly.  

In her An Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva said that the abject refers to what does not respect borders, positions, rules. The paper was all amniotic fluid and faeces and corpses—the rejected parts of one’s identity, the used-to-be’s. Catherine felt her skin prick as Hugh continued his elaboration of the reading. She thought of the parts of herself that no longer belonged to her. She wondered how much of a person could become the abject until they were completely subsumed. And if the abject had to be cast off like dead weight on a sinking ship, what would be the first to go.

That summer, Catherine started her job at the mortuary. 

Hugh was drunk when he told Catherine he had once wanted to become an architect. They were splayed out on the shore of the beach, trousers rolled at the cuffs. Beer bottles were half-buried, their condensation darkening the sand. Legs spread, Catherine was pawing for stones and inspecting seashells. The moon bounced wildly on the waves, its edges blurry, almost liquid. Hugh moulded the sandcastle; he used the edge of his keys to shape symmetrical nooks, an empty bottle to form pillars; he somehow even hollowed out windows in the two arches that bifurcated—

“How the hell are you so good at this?” 

Hugh never spoke about his parents or his upbringing, but when Catherine told him about hers, he got very angry and upset the way only a person who had lived the same could be. He explained that as a boy he loved Legos. It was the feeling of holding a home within his hands. He remembered that at first, he would build the set according to the blueprint, then he started drawing his own. The process was numerical and soothing: fifty-two pieces for the deck, thirty-six for the patio, eighty-nine for the walls and sidings, and the rest fit perfectly as the roof and chimney. He figured out how to use the little blocks however he liked. Beneath his excitement was a tremor of nervousness that shook his voice and made him talk very fast without pausing between words as if he was explaining something he was not entirely convinced of himself.

In high school, he drew more plans—holiday houses, camping pods, recreational parks, penthouses with a mezzanine—and applied for an architecture degree. The people on his course were surprisingly abstract for those aspiring to reify drawings and lay concrete. They asked questions like So what story is this building meant to communicate? Or Forget what you want me to see, how do you want me to feel? 

“I realised that I wanted to build people out, instead,” he said. “Everything I drew up was like a self-portrait of my supposition and insecurity. I didn’t want anyone living in that. I told my academic tutor that letting people see my plans was like stripping naked and asking them to pick an organ then question me why they chose it.” 

His academic tutor suggested that he switch to an English degree.

“Do you still have any of the models you built?”

“I took them all down. I never liked anything I designed.” 

Catherine saw her, and knew immediately, that it was her. 

It was Saturday, Catherine was eating porridge at the campus cafeteria and thinking about human suffering. She was trying to make an argument about the vicissitudes of pain and how distance from pain is ultimately the clearest affirmation of happiness. That all experience was experience and all sensation was sensation—some were merely scapegoated for better clarity and hierarchy. 

She first recognised the smell of her shampoo. Bamboo with a hint of jasmine. And something else she could not place. The other tell was the two jumping beans clinging to her sides. 

“Did you like our song, mummy? Do you want to hear it again?” 

“Yes, it was brilliant. But no, sing it later at home so your dad can hear it too.” 

The woman—Marie, it was certainly Marie—got a call. 

Dry, cakey lumps were forming in her porridge. Catherine could not look up. She listened to Marie’s conversation for signs of marine biology, baking soda, Shakespeare. The strain on her neck was involuntary and painful. Once she had a scrape on her back but could not bear to lift her shirt to examine it until weeks later when it grew sore and porous. The line between knowledge and acknowledgment was dangerous; it was where she hovered at that moment.

“I really need that window fixed. Hire someone. I don’t care. I need it dealt with. No. You said you’d do it yesterday, but it was raining and too cold. The day before was sunny, but then the light was in your eye. Hire someone before one of your daughters catches a cold.” 

In her periphery, mother and daughters were an aurora borealis of colourful shadows that flickered and warped. Her head was swimming. The porridge was too close to her face.

When Catherine looked up, they were gone. The scent she could not name was cinnamon.

Cinnamon. It lingered in the air, cruel and deliberate.

Hugh was deeply unsettled by Catherine’s new job. They were in her bedroom, folding laundry. 

“Surely the library could use an assistant. Or the town hall. Or courthouse.” He sounded angry and strangely suspicious.

“But I like it there. Did you know the word for cadaver, came from the Latin word ‘cadere’? It means ‘to fall.’ I think that’s beautiful, don’t you? You don’t die, you fall. Like a petal or an eyelash.” 

Truthfully, Catherine had become obsessed. During her breaks she slipped into the autopsy room and pulled out the drawers. The cool cocoons glided open with a cloud of air. A sickly-sweet scent chased after it and ran up her nostrils, tickling the space behind her eyes.

Carefully, she pressed her ear to the clammy chests of the bodies, listening for blood.

Sometimes she would hear a whoosh, and her heart would freeze. But it would be a door opening, or the wind. Catherine studied their blue veins. She could almost picture the lives these once-people, once had. The little boy with bruises nestled in the crook of his elbow was probably sick and needed frequent IVs. The woman’s thick, raised veins and the scar from an ACL surgery suggested she had once been an athlete. Catherine stared at the cold silver table where the woman’s thigh should have been. A surfer then, maybe. She held the weight of their palms and replayed their lives in her head. There was something meditative about studying death. Something anticipatory, like grief.  

“No, I don’t think it’s beautiful.” Hugh was refolding her shirt. It stubbornly kept creasing awry. “I wish you’d just call a spade a spade.” Catherine searched his face for anger but found that he was pleading.

“OK. Well, it’s a job. And a job is a job.” She waited for him to respond, to disagree and gesture wildly with his arms, to give something, anything, away. He stayed silent and kept on folding her laundry into tidy rectangles that he stacked into a big, tidy rectangle. 

She searched his face again, but he was unreadable. Her eyes started to burn so she stared down at her camisole. In her mind’s eye, she could see him—Hugh, who always wore flannels completely buttoned up save for the top one, who reminded her of soft September sun, who made her buttered toast and put her tea on coasters—it scared her to not know him, to know there was a deeper part of him she could not access.

“What is it? Tell me.” 

“I don’t have a say.” His face was scrambled. “It’s your job.”

“You’re—you do. You do. Please.”

There it was again—the nervousness, the panic that tugged at his lower lip, the dawning realisation of how much can still go wrong flattening his features. Yet, despite it all, hope was writhing to the surface for Catherine because this was the closest she had ever gotten to him, to dredging up whatever lurked terrible and decayed at the bottom. She pressed her hand to his cheek and he lurched as if she had struck him. 

“Sorry. I’m sorry.” The pile of clothes had collapsed and unravelled. Hugh bent to restack them.

“It’s not your fault.” Guilt churned her stomach as she straightened out a pair of jeans, consciously avoiding brushing her hand against his.

Hugh took her hand and touched it to his face, holding her in his gaze.

The purple on her nails was peeling from her constant picking. Hugh had left his keys at her flat by accident. By now Catherine was familiar with the opportunities presented by accidents. 

She hesitated at the doorway, rubbing her fingers over the raw, frayed edges of skin around her nails. The house seemed to know she was alone. The door shut with a click and she was left to sift through their drawers and bookshelves—each discovery promising to wound and thrill her equally. 

In their bedroom, they had separate drawers. Hugh’s was filled with thick, heavy books which made its lower contents inaccessible. Marie’s had a layer of diaries and notepads and lists, but underneath were things of sizes and shapes that spoke with a different voice and seemed to belong to someone with an altogether different handwriting. A coat of undisturbed dust covered the surface of the drawers, it seemed to say They have a mutual agreement: she won’t look too closely, and neither will he. 

Catherine imagined running into Marie here. Oh hi, she would say. Marie would be silent, her features pinched with confusion but only for a second. Then there would be recognition, not from identification, but from finally understanding her own intuition. It's me, I’m the girl your husband has been sleeping with. Don’t worry, I’m no homewrecker. I’m more like a habit he can’t shake, a hair in your soup, a misheard word—you can pluck me right out. 

She moved through the house, her reflection flitting across the marble tiles in pockets of light, then dissolving into shadows. Catherine startled when she passed by the sink mirror, thinking she had seen someone else. Someone else with a jaw and eye-sockets. She stood there, staring, breathing in unison with the figure, until she recognised herself again. 

Their fridge held a cascading display of prepacked lunch boxes, fruit pots and homemade sauces. Tucked under the juice boxes were a pile of rainbow-coloured sticky notes that made glitter-penned declarations like You OCTOPI My Heart! and I SHELL Always Love You. A magnetic whiteboard clung to the refrigerator door, keeping score of a Home Record. Tally marks lined up beside each one of their names. The ink was slightly scratched but fresh. Whatever the contest was, Marie was in the lead. Reaching out, Catherine smudged off Marie’s most recent count. She rubbed her index finger against her thumb, rolling the ink into tiny, gritty pellets. The stain left faint blue traces around her fingerprints and her hand felt damp and heavy. Quickly, she uncapped the nearby marker and redrew the tally mark. 

“Home record,” Catherine repeated as she walked, pressing against each window carelessly, as if checking out the view below. Using her palms, she pushed gently at first, then harder gradually, teasing out any hidden fractures. Her breath left little round footprints that shrank and evanesced as she pressed against each pane. The windows were all fine. Sturdy.

But Catherine kept searching. She felt the sort of anxiety that sought confirmation, not comfort. 

She found it in a corner of the bathroom, under the ventilator fan. A web of cracks spread to the middle where it gave out to hold a piece of the sky. Suddenly she was aware of the queer drop in temperature in that room, the draught that stole in through the crack. 

On that windowsill there was a seashell. The same one Catherine picked out for the sandcastle. Perched on her toes, she picked it up and scratched its ridges, feeling it’s miniature crests and valleys. It made a dull scraping sound. 

She pressed her lips to it, tasting salt. She put it back. 

It laid there like a consolation prize.

Marie had taken the girls to the spelling bee grand finals that morning. 

“Grand finals? That sounds so intense.” Her words melt into his open mouth. 

“Very.”

“Why didn’t you go with them?”

“Why did you want to meet here?”

“What?”

“Here, the Seafarer. The house is empty.”

“Because it’s Switzerland.”

Hugh rested his forehead against hers, their warm breath mingling together.

“Want to know what the winning word was?” 

“What?”

“Squawk.”

“No.”

“Marie said it was a real nail-biter.” 

He kissed her again. They fell backwards onto the bed and Catherine felt herself start to go very fast and things around her went even faster until all the lines blurred and there it was: the hunger within her like a hand reaching out, a hand you can shake and bite but never feed.

Afterwards, the setting sun cast horizontal rays through the shutters, and if the world was black and white the light would seem to paint them both as criminals. Catherine studied Hugh’s face, beatific and bashful. On the bedside table lay a notepad with Seafarer printed at the top of every page.

 “Seafarer,” she sounded the word aloud. Elongating every vowel as if she could push the letters apart and find behind them a secret meaning, a voice that would swear to her You are here. You are still here. You are supposed to be here. In a haze, she picked up a pen and scribbled underneath:

Safe error. 

Then: 

Saviour. 

Hugh shifted and reached for his glasses. He leaned against her bare shoulder. 

“Say farewell,” he suggested, moving to peck her on the forehead and slide into his boxers. She felt the mattress heave as he got off to walk to the bathroom, slow as inevitability.

She saw him again a few years later between the fresh produce and confectionary aisles. 

She was back in town for her father’s funeral, and grief, as she knew it, was most effectively soothed by time and chocolate cookie dough. The scene resembled a Surrealist painting: everything looked comically small next to him, his head poked above the tops of the shelves as he browsed, like something held in an enclosure. He was pushing a shopping cart brimming with juice boxes that came in half-a-dozen, a week’s worth of fruit cups and two steaks—frozen. Blues and purples peeked out between the groceries: two bouquets. She shook her head, fondly exasperated; she would mention this to Phoebe tonight. 

His hair looked freshly washed and fell softly over his eyes. He wore the same flannel that, she could recall, smelled of sand and shampoo. It was still so precious—almost magical. Her face was hot with tears. 

If he turned around, he would see her clad in all black, standing as still as a picture cut out of another time. She began to walk away. 

Faintly, she heard the shopping cart squeak to a halt. Her step faltered for an almost unnoticeable moment, and she kept walking.

On her drive back home, she passed by the Seafarer. It stood looming and lonesome, curtain-drawn windows glowing like squares of muffled sunsets, its doorstep awash with salt, shimmer and secrets as the waves fold and unfold. She remembered the time he took her in his arms and they swayed to the tuneless melody of the sea, pressed together. Until the rest of everything else fell away and it was just the warmth they held between their bodies. 

The highway curved in front of her and the Seafarer shrank smaller and smaller, retreating into memory.

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Edited by Hania Ahmed, Creative Editor