The Fatal Dance by Berndt Sellheim

Author:Berndt Sellheim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: 4th Estate
Published: 2021-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

She wakes with the low boom of surf so close that it runs up beneath her; not water itself, but the feeling, the sound. Lori sits up, wraps the thin damp towel about her shoulders. The sound has shifted with the rising of the dark, and now, the ocean turned silver black, it speaks of shadows that prowl the waters, headland to headland in the molten break. The towel does little to keep her warm, and she pulls on a T-shirt, then rummages in her backpack for her jeans and a jumper. The wind is up. There’s a change coming, the air spotted with rain.

The last surfer has paddled in, and he pauses at the shore to peel off the top half of his wetsuit, letting it dangle from his waist, so in the half light it could be skin dangling from a flayed torso, and the phrase comes back to Lori out of the gathering darkness: Dance, Vitus, Dance. She starts, a short circuit of electrical horror running through her, as though all the world’s pain is lifting from the mercury sea, ready to drown them all in a tsunami of death.

She gets to her feet and slips on her thongs. The sound of music comes distant from the pub, mangled by the boom of the surf. It’s a different band now, thrashing their instruments. The anguish of the lead’s wailing lament, as though he’s torturing the guitar, sends a shudder of relief through her: it isn’t the surf that has turned dark nor a world that’s abandoned her; more that the band is rubbish. This place is still hers.

She considers, briefly, returning to Bay Street, looking again for a hotel to stay in, but then she remembers the information centre, the people, the man, and her head is so heavy she plonks herself back onto the sand and eats a handful of nuts, drawn from a pocket in her pack, then pulls out her extra jumper and her rain jacket, the one Mada gave her. Strength regained, she shoulders her backpack and stumbles along the beach, around the rocks, away from the surf club and into the shadows, where the low coastal shrubs might offer her shelter up beyond the tidemark, where she might dig a small place in the earth to protect her from the howl of the wind.

Soon she can’t hear the pub at all, only the surf’s plosive suck and boom – collapsing waves and the dull roar of a cosmos unceasing. She fashions for herself a kind of bed, in a hollow made from shrub roots, and, after wrapping herself in her waterproof jacket, she cradles her head on the towel. Closing her eyes, she pretends that she can sleep, and, in pretending, falls into a pattern where both sleep and waking are uncertain, bouncing through dimensions: dreams reaching into the landscape, landscape into dream, night and wind reaching into her soul. She dreams she is back there, at the bonfire on the sand so many years ago, and all John’s friends are at the bonfire, but he is not.

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