Ties that Bind

I’m going to tell you the story Da told me, and he says he got it from his own Da, Bill Verling. I don’t remember him – he died when I was about two – but Da swears up and down that Granda always spoke about what he saw that night in awe. Granda wasn’t known for having much of an imagination, so I really do believe he saw something. But he wasn’t really a man for words and Da isn’t either. Da’s starting to get forgetful and he’s getting sicker too, so he’s asked me, as the writer in the family, to set this out in words so it doesn’t get lost to time. I’m doing my best here to keep my promise. Whether you believe it or not is up to you.

– Francis Verling

It was well before dawn. Bill woke and was out of bed in the same motion. The fire had somehow not gone out and the dying red embers gave the small house a sickly look. It seemed fitting, he thought, for a place that had seen so much pain in recent years. The bed he shared with his wife Anya was shoved into the left-hand corner furthest from the door. She had never liked the box bed he had inherited from his parents before their marriage – being enclosed by wood on all sides made her wake screaming in the night.

And so Bill had built a freestanding thing from salvaged wood; the two-room home was small and it took up valuable space but he reasoned that a happy marriage was more valuable. And when the children came, first Rebecca and then Leon, Bill, a fisherman by trade but handy at working wood, had fashioned a cruder second storey for the box bed so they both had space to keep warm at night. He cast an eye toward it in the other room, the lower compartment shut tight while Rebecca slept, the upper one open and empty, never to be filled by Leon again.

With a sigh, he ran a hand over his eyes and pretended for a moment that he couldn’t see the empty cradle at the foot of their bed, the little blanket still laying there in a heap from that terrible night when the infant Robin had woken squalling, then screeching, then finally turning blue and falling silent forever. Neither Bill nor Anya could face touching the little bed. Without ever agreeing openly, they had decided that if they never spoke about the baby then, in a way, he was not truly gone.

Robin hadn’t even been buried a fortnight before they lost Leon to the sea. He had been out on the boat with Bill’s brother Frank, who slept in their loft. It was a freak wave. Bill had watched it happen from the window, stood there paralysed as he saw the surging waters rise up and over his son. Nothing could have been done but Frank, unmarried and doting on Leon as if a second father, couldn’t forgive himself. Some three weeks later he had taken a rickety dinghy out into deep water and offered himself to the sea as penance for a sin he hadn’t committed. And so in less than two months the little house on the shore of Cork Harbour had gone from an oasis of light and laughter to a void of numbness and silence.

Anya was rolled into a tight ball. She tended to sleep fitfully now and seldom woke refreshed. Bill reached out to brush an errant lock of auburn hair away from her face but caught himself; better to leave her sleep, now that she had settled. Rebecca, forced from gaiety to maturity at the age of fourteen, would be there if she woke crying again. Bill needed to be out with the tide to have the best chance of catching anything, maybe even some eels if he was lucky. They had been less frequent in recent years but still fetched a good price.

A lump of hard cheese masqueraded as his breakfast while he dressed quickly and quietly. He was looking forward to the sharp crisp shock of the morning air as he walked along the jetty. It was good to feel something, anything, as he spent the hours waiting on his lines and nets while listening to the gentle crash of the waves on the rocky shore and the gulls wheeling overhead.

Not one soul stirred in the harbour. It was cold, a deep cold, and in the silver moonlight it looked like the very stars and clouds were frozen in place. The constellations looked wrong, he thought absently. Shouldn’t they be lower in the sky this close to dawn? Even the wind was wrong. There wasn’t even the trace of a wake from an overnight steamer coming in from Plymouth or Swansea. The silence was unnerving. As he stepped down into the skiff he felt like he’d stepped into the moment between moments.

“God protect me,” he said quietly as he picked up the oar and braced it against the rotting wood pier. “For the sea is big and my boat is small.” He wasn’t sure he believed in God any more. But it was all part of the ritual, and if nothing else he needed those little moments to get through the days. His hollow prayer said, he threw his head back to look at the stars while the boat bobbed out into the open water. They still hadn’t moved. Scratching his nose absently he sat up and rowed out to where the shoals normally wandered, wondering if he had simply woken far earlier than usual.

Dropping an anchor where he knew there was a mudbank not far beneath the surface, Bill tossed out his small net before readying the stout pole he’d inherited from his own father. He had had some education in his younger days, had ambitions of life in a city like Cork or Liverpool rather than the backward rurality of Ballybrassil, which felt half a world away even from the quays at Queenstown just a few miles west.

But his father’s death in a fight over a gambling debt had put paid to any dreams he’d had, and so with Frank he had turned to eking a living from the sea to support their mother and five younger siblings. He had worked for a time on bigger ships, as a sailor and later a ship’s carpenter, but after his marriage to Anya he had chosen to stay closer to home, and would happily make that decision again.

Listening to the gentle waves lapping against the side of the battered skiff, he sat back and waited. The patience might have driven another man to drink – and God knew he had seen it happen more than once down the years – but he had always enjoyed the solitude, and these past weeks being on the water had been fresh and wholesome compared to the oppressive sadness of home. His mother would have said he was moping. Losing six children had made her hard to the point where she would not even acknowledge their names. Bill could scarcely keep the names of his children out of every waking thought.

He wrinkled his brow. None of the constellations had drifted and there was no sign whatsoever of the sun breaking in the east.

Then came a flicker of light at the heart of the Plough, a single yellow star shimmering while everything else stayed static. The flicker became an ember which seemed to be plunging toward the earth even as it grew outwards in every direction. The sky erupted and tore asunder, and through the gaping hole in space blazed an infinity of light that blew away the clouds and was as warm as the sun.

Shading his eyes as his white knuckles gripped the side of the boat, Bill fought the urge to scream in panic. Wincing at the pain the light brought he saw through the hole a vast palace of impossible geometries unlike anything he had ever dreamt possible. It was ragged and irregular, like fire kindling that had formed a tower out of happenstance rather than according to any plan. Wide terraces sat on top of narrow ones and it was in a constant state of flux as new floors were added and others expanded or contracted. It faintly throbbed as if with a heartbeat of its own.

High above him the clouds were still being blown into oblivion but he felt no wind on his face. The water was smooth and solid as glass under his fingertips.

The light waxed and waned as a hollow noise bubbled up from all around him. A single bright yellow spark flew out from the shifting palace and dropped like a perfect pearl into the sea. It disappeared beneath the surface with a meaty hum and with it went the hollow noise and the blazing portal high above, replaced by dead silence and stillness. Bill scrambled to get his oars in place for a desperate row to shore but they simply bounced soundlessly off the water. “God, if you’re listening, I could do with a hand right about now,” he muttered as it occurred to him suddenly that perhaps he could run home.

But with one foot over the side all thoughts of escape evaporated as the ball of light came barrelling toward him under the water. He had just enough time to realise it was at least twice the size of his skiff before it burst through the surface and hit him. He felt himself flying through the air but he wasn’t moving. The light was like a warm blanket hugging him tightly and for the first time in he didn’t know how long the tension in his chest eased, his brow relaxed, and he felt at peace. The light dissolved and reformed into skies of orange, yellow, and bright blue. It was the same harbour, the same stars, but an inescapable feeling of being out of time in a moment that could last forever.

The skiff had stretched to about ten times its length. At the far end sat a figure clad in a ragged, ill-fitting coat and torn trousers. He had a brimmed hat pulled down over his face and his cupped hands were held out in front of him as if begging for alms.

“Hello?” said Bill. The figure didn’t move at all.

Bill stood up and, instinctively bracing himself against waves that were nowhere to be found, made his way down the skiff. No matter how many steps he took the figure seemed to get no closer, until he felt the sensation of flying without moving and suddenly found himself kneeling in front of the man. And it did seem to be a man; there were definitely unkempt whiskers protruding from a chin that was barely visible under the hat’s brim.

“Hello,” said the man in a warm baritone. Bill realised with surprise that he had been expecting some drunken squall like the other beggars he’d met over the years. “I appear to need some help.”

“Uh, I don’t have any coins,” and even though he knew it was farcical he made a show of tapping his clothes up and down. The man laughed with genuine amusement.

“I seek alms of a sort, true, but nothing so base as money.” He pushed the hat back and looked up, and Bill found himself staring into the face of his dead brother.

“Frank…?” he stuttered. A flicker of confusion passed over the man’s face and he ran a hand gently over forehead and cheek.

“Ah,” he said. “So this is how you see me? Interesting.”

“Who are you? Why do you look like my brother?”

Not-Frank looked pained as sadness crossed his eyes. “I met him,” he said after a pause, “if that is the word you would understand best.” He thought for a moment. “Yes, perhaps that is the best way to describe it. And it would explain why you can see me.”

“I don’t understand.”

The beggar drummed his fingers on his lap for a second or two. “Did you perchance see an orb just now? A bright yellow ball of light?”

Bill nodded.

The man clapped a hand to his chest. “That was me.”

“I saw… I don’t know. What I saw. I can’t explain it. It was like a huge hole opened up in the sky. That sounds mad now that I say it–”

“But not wrong. I had not expected somebody from this world to see it. I had no idea that any of you could. What a treat this is.” And the beggar man laughed then, the sharp explosive laugh Bill knew so well from years of his brother laughing at bad jokes, before catching himself. “Forgive me. I see I have caused you unhappiness. I. Seldom have the opportunity to speak to temporal beings. I forget myself.”

He sighed.

“Where did you come from?”

“Somewhere… else. That you could see it at all is extraordinary. Your kind must have great untapped potential. But for another day. Suffice it to say I came here from somewhere you cannot go and where I was no longer welcome.”

“What did you do?”

“I was trespassing. Some entities in the universes take this very seriously, you know. And now I appear to be stuck in this realm.”

Bill’s mouth gaped and closed. “I don’t… I don’t understand. Why do you look like my brother?”

The beggar man paused for a moment. “After I crashed into the water my mind was filled with so many images of this world, of the people who live in it. Of the people who have died in it, in these waters, just these waters alone around us. So much pain. So much loss. If I could have wept for them all I would have. But I do not know how. It is beyond me. But I could hear them, feel them, understand that they were trapped against their will. And while I could not weep, I realised that I could do one thing for them.”

“What?”

The man stood up and gripped Bill’s hands tightly. “I could set them free. And so I have, so
I did.”

“I don’t understand.”

The beggar smiled. “There are worlds beyond worlds, spaces beyond spaces. I cannot see them all, no matter how far I travel. Something was blocking those souls, like a locked door they could see through but not pass. I simply opened the door and let them through, to wherever it is they needed to go. Your brother was among the last to go. Hence–” and he gestured to his face, then shrugged. “He didn’t want to go.”

“Why?”

“He was trapped in a cycle. Repeating the same moment over and over. Overwhelmed by guilt.”

“Suicides don’t go to heaven,” Bill said.

The man shrugged. “Then perhaps I have annoyed a deity or two.” He smiled. “Not the first time, but I cannot abide allowing such…” and he waved a hand around searching for the right word, “…such barriers. Energy must flow. It needs to be free.” He squinted at Bill as if seeing right to the heart of him. “I see it in you. Loss. I sense why you mourn. I feel such pain all around me in this world. It has trapped me here. I am bound to it.” He shook his head sadly.

“Bound?”

The beggar nodded. “You, I think, cannot see the energies around you the way I can.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When I look at you…” The man stopped and tilted his head to one side in perfect imitation of Frank. “Perhaps if you could see as I do,” he said to himself. “Yes,” he said more strongly. “Take my hand.”

Shaking his head in bewilderment, and convinced he must have hit his head on the dock and started seeing things, Bill reached out and took it. The man’s hand was uncalloused and warm. A curious tingle spread from his palm up Bill’s arm and suddenly flooded over him in a cold, refreshing blast like a winter’s wind catching him in the face. He closed his eyes tightly for a moment and when he opened them it was not just his brother’s face he saw but something shining beneath the surface, something only the vague approximation of a face but emanating kindness and understanding.

A bright yellow light like lightning rippled from him to Bill, but in return, creeping down Bill’s arm and wrapping around the man’s chest was a thick black cord like a hawser. It had sunk into the man’s core and as Bill traced a hand over it, the strange, untouchable thing it was, he found it pulsing out from his own heart. The cord had wrapped around him in chaotic loops, and spun off into the distance. Looking along it back to shore he found with horror that it stretched all the way back to his little house, with one pulse travelling slowly out of him back to shore and another one undulating along the cord right back to him.

Another blast of cold winter air overtook him and when he opened his eyes the black cord and lightning had gone. “What did you just do?”

“I let you see through my eyes for a moment. Any more would have killed you, I expect.”

“What, what was that black line?”

“Pain,” the beggar said, and Bill realised that he had been glowing faintly the whole time. “Grief. It ensnared me as I landed. I suspect I thought you were another lost soul looking for release. Your brother thought of you as he departed this world. And so we have become bound.”

Bill rubbed his palms over his eyes and scraped his fingers through his hair. “I don’t understand. Who are you?” he asked eventually.

The man smiled. “I am but a humble traveller, though I find myself destitute, a beggar of sorts. That is how you see me, is it not? Your mind has filled in something that it does not fully understand.”

“What could somebody who can come from the stars need from me? I’m only a fisherman. I have no money. I can barely read.”

“Money, luxury, these mean nothing to me.”

“Then what could you possibly need from me?”

The soft glowing light around the man flickered and began to fade. “I used what power I had to come here. I am…” he waved his hand around again as he thought, “…like a lamp that has run short of oil. Or a steamer that has seen the boilers go out. A starving man desperate for a morsel. A spark from somebody else would be enough to set me on my path home.”

“Home?”

The beggar raised his eyes to the stars.

“What do you want from me?”

“To be set free.”

“I don’t know how to do that.”

“You need to set yourself free. Your thoughts have trapped you, as your brother’s trapped him.”

“I don’t know how…” He sank to his haunches and let himself fall until he was sitting. “A dad shouldn’t live longer than his children. Have you ever lost a child? And you want me to, what, just forget about them?”

The man shook his head and looked appalled. “Oh no, nothing of the sort.”

“If I’d been a better man maybe I could have done something.”

“Done what?”

“Saved them.”

“How? How could you have saved them? I see you replay it over and over in your mind. I know what happened.”

“If I’d been awake when Robin–”

“You could have done what? Her passing was beyond your control. Your son’s likewise. That was beyond anybody’s control.”

Bill sat and blinked for a moment, then whispered, “Did you see him? Leon, did you see him?”

The man shook his head. “No. I felt his presence in the waters, yes, but more like what you would call an echo.”

“So he had gone… on?”

The man smiled. “He had had a good life, he had felt love, compassion, joy. He had no reason to stay bound to this plane.”

“But Frank did. He had a reason to, what did you say, get stuck?”

“Your kind cannot, I think, quite comprehend the complexity of it but that is as close as I can describe it in this language. Sorrow. Guilt.”

“But you said nothing could be done.”

“I did. And yet real or imagined, guilt has the same effect. If joy is levity then guilt is a crushing weight trapping everything and everyone under it. I have seen it in every universe. It needs an opposite force to balance it.”

“What’s that?”

“Hope.”

Bill stared at his feet for a time. “You know more about it than me then. Can’t you just fix it?”

The man shook his head. “I find guilt is strongest when somebody wishes they could make amends with someone who has passed from their world. It becomes a loop, like sand in an hourglass that keeps turning.”

Bill furrowed his brows. “So I have to … break the hourglass?” he said hesitantly.

The man laughed. “Well put. Not what I had in mind but exactly right.”

“And this will, what, let you go as well?”

The man rubbed his chin in a curiously human gesture. “Hope is the most powerful thing in the universe. A single spark of it will let me take my leave of your world. The longer I am here the more difficult it will be for me to leave.”

“Then what do I need to do?”

“Ah, therein lies the rub. I need your help but it must be of your own free will. And if I tell you then it will not be real, and it will get neither of us anywhere. However,” he said looking Bill up and down and extending an arm to pull the fisherman to his feet, “I suspect you already know what you need to do, don’t you?”

And, to his surprise, Bill was nodding. The man smiled at him and the world flashed a brilliant white before Bill found himself standing on the jetty, his skiff moored securely as if it had never left. He walked back along it toward home, relieved by the gentle sting of the cold air. There was still no sign of life in any of the nearby little ramshackle houses.

Looking back out into the harbour there was no trace of the man from beyond the stars, though he could feel the tug of that hawser cable between them. He opened the door quietly, lifting it slowly to stop the hinge creaking. His wife had not moved and the low embers in the hearth still glowed. A cold pang of sorrow ran through him at the sight of the cradle but this time he found he could stand to look at it. He knelt and laid a rough, sea-blasted hand on the knobbly wood and took in the rumpled sheet, the faint dip in the straw bedding where a tiny body had slept for far too short a time. He closed his eyes and let his forehead lower gently until it rested on the edge of the cradle and he released a breath he didn’t know he was holding.

“Bill?”

Anya was sitting up, blinking in confusion. He gathered himself up and sat next to her on the bed. Taking her hand slowly and kissing her on the cheek, he whispered “we need to talk about Robin”. As they folded into one another the room filled with the light of something unknowable passing overhead, and for the first time they allowed themselves to weep.