The Silver Dark Sea by Susan Fletcher

Author:Susan Fletcher [Susan Fletcher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-02-05T05:00:00+00:00

Kitty and the Jellyfish

Dawn, eight years ago. On the dark, reflecting sand of Lock-and-Key there were wading birds and small, translucent crabs that skittered, and hid. The sea had left its marks – ridged, compacted sand. She felt it, in the arch of her foot. When she pushed down, the sand seemed to whiten with her sudden weight.

A woman with midnight hair. She had twists of scarlet in it, and her hair was long – down to her waist. She wore a long, red dress – last night’s dress, for she had not slept or been to bed – and she had to lift her hem as she walked down the wooden steps. She knew nothing of beaches. She had never walked on a low-tide beach before and so she crouched at rock pools, bent down for shells. Her shoes were hooked on her fingers; she swung them as she trod over the mirrored sand.

Her name was Katherine, and the night before she had danced in the fields for midsummer’s night. A local man asked her why have you come here? To Parla? He’d been handsome – tall, a shy smile. The cider had made her bold so that she’d looked him in the eyes and said to meet you, perhaps.

That was the start of a story. What a fine start, too – bold, so that the listener might widen their eyes and say really? She said that? And Kitty smiled, as she walked – at her boldness, at the Parlan man who’d thumbed the hem of her red dress as if red was not a colour he knew. She picked up a stone that was perfect, sea-round: this will always remind me of now.

And this: a jellyfish. Near the water’s edge she found it – sitting fatly and symmetrically, as if it had been placed there. Blue – but not an earthly blue; it was milky, opaque, lunar in some way, and its skirts were lined with a darker shade. She trod around it. Is it still alive? Can it survive, on sand? If not, should Kitty lift it up and carry it out to the sea? She considered this, but did not. Instead she thought, wistfully, it is just how things are … and she crouched beside this creature, gluey and round like an eye.

I’ve never seen such a life as this … And as Kitty crouched in her backless dress, she realised that she wasn’t really meant to – no human eye was meant to see this jellied globe of life. It was designed for depths. It was meant to clench its way through a darkness that she would never know of, and perhaps only an hour ago it had been doing just that – rhythmic, beautiful. An hour ago, where had she been? In a hay barn with a man called Nathan Bundy – and no jellyfish was meant to see what they had done.

It amazed her, as the whole island had.

Kitty had come to Parla

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