Promenade

Illustrated by Ella Clayton.

There is something beautiful in the dark water. It aches for him. He feels its pull wherever he goes. It is dark and it is quiet, and it is waiting.

* * *

Horace Turnbull was thirteen, spotty, and terminally bored. He had a dark port wine stain spreading from forehead to left cheekbone, before it curved down to his pasty, dull neck. His hair was rather lank and his heart perpetually heavy. He spent much of his time alone at the aquarium.

The water was soft bliss that flowed over his hand, dipped in when the guards weren’t looking, and the small bites of the angelfish nibbled as they swam up to see this strange, white thing in their midst. He held those feelings close to him, and held his season pass even closer. He loved the silence of the place on a Tuesday afternoon, when he’d wander over after school—never with someone. That would take all the fun away. He simply wanted to be by himself in the dark caverns, the glass-plated tunnels, the information boards plastered with white text and blue backgrounds. It was the only thing that made him happy.

* * *

He is standing on a cliff and staring at the black. He wishes he’d brought a torch.

* * *

Horace first saw her at fifteen. He had a friend by this point: Dan, from Number 33, who was equally carbuncular and equally obsessional about The Who, but who failed to appreciate the loveliness of the oceans, which meant that Horace was still drifting about the aquarium by himself, like forgotten plastic on an empty shore. And it was today, 13th April 1972, when he saw that she was there. And he knew in an instant she was there for him. 

Gloria.

Long, grey body, dappled with white patches and sharp, spiked slashes of gills. Almost flat, excepting the points at head, tail and fin. But the eyes—oh, her eyes. He recorded them in detail on a scrap of paper when he got back, just in case his mind chose to steal those eyes from him.

He pressed his nose to the glass and stared into that deep, shining black, so deep he felt himself falling into her and did nothing to catch himself.

Horace was in love.

* * *

This black is not the right black. Not satiny enough, too many breaks of white, illuminated by a scudding moon. The black should be the pure dark of sleep, of the night, heavy and rich like fruitcake, darker than the space inside your head. He thinks that he should wait for when the sea can capture that dark. But there’s no time like the present.

* * *

Gloria disappeared in glorious June, 1975. Mere days before Jaws came to Southport, and when it did, the head of the aquarium, Thomas Pewterschmitt, took three paracetamol and prepared to face the board. 

Horace walked in that day and saw the tank empty, spotless, without even a drop of water to show him where Gloria had once been. She was gone. The sign next to her was still there, with its printed information about size, species, age. Horace gave it only a brief glance. He knew the words off by heart. His heart felt lighter than air, drifting right up out of his ribcage, and he felt numb.

A security guard was having a fag next to the angelfish, and tapped the ash into the tank.

‘Where’s Gloria?’ asked Horace.

‘Who?’ said the guard.

‘Gloria. The shark.’ 

‘Oh. That. Got rid of it. Probably chucked it back in the ocean, I shouldn’t think. Ha!’ And he tapped more ash onto the angelfish. Horace watched the grey powder drift to the bottom. Then he walked away and began to think.

* * *

He is shivering. It is odd. He shouldn’t shiver. It’s a warm night in June. Horace had told him that. The man was begging, he registered distantly, probably still drowsy from the cosh on the head. Somewhere in the distance, Dan is in the car, light and radio on, smoking the man’s cigarettes tetchily, waiting for Horace to come back so he could roll a joint.

The port wine stain shone dark in the moonlight.

Horace was staying silent. There was no need to talk. 

Curving his hand around the man’s neck, he hauled him to his feet, and chucked him back in the ocean, I shouldn’t think. The man let out a cry, which faded into a heavy thud and splash, and Horace was smiling.

He felt the ache and the pull of that dark water, enjoying its silence, heightened by the noise of John Peel in the background. The water is waiting for him. There was something beautiful in that water. 

There were eyes so deep he’d never stop falling.

He was searching the water for them, and for a trace of the man. No sign of either. Just the sea’s dark mirror, silence, and a promise of a fin, glinting pale grey in the moonlight.