My dearest Pearl,

I do hope this letter finds you, and finds you well sweet girl.

I was sitting on my verandah on Sunday morning, flicking through the paper when all of a sudden, in grainy black and white under my gardening gloves, there you were. I would recognise those eyes anywhere. It would seem that your life as an artist is an incredible success, though I’m not at all surprised. I knew from the few times I held you when you were born that you were capable of magic things. I remember marvelling at your green eyes that looked as wise as an old owl’s when you were just a newborn. I knew then you’d do something extraordinary with your life. I said to your father, on more than one occasion, that you were the calmest baby I’d ever seen and a baby that calm, would do nothing but make beautiful things out of their days. And here you are doing just that.

I hope you don’t mind, but I called the newspaper office in the city and they gave me your contact postal address. The lovely receptionist there told me yours is still a silent world and so I’d be best writing you a letter. You know honey, to be honest, I wish I could just shut myself up sometimes too and do nothing but listen and take in what’s around me. I think you must know so much about the world that the rest of us who talk too much don’t.

Pearl, I do have a habit of chatter, especially when I’m nervous and that doesn’t change whether I’m talking on the phone, over my roses to the postie or writing a letter.

Thing is love, I have never stopped thinking of you. In all I’ve learned, I understand that sometimes there are cuts so deep, they can’t ever heal properly. It will sadden me always that your father and grandfather could never come to see eye to eye. And after the loss of your mother, well, their rift only deepened. Your Da was never the same. Try as we did, he demanded your grandfather and I leave the two of you be. While I begged and pleaded with your father to try and tie our worlds together, your grandfather could be an old mule at times and dug his heels in and wouldn’t budge. Neither of them would have it; they were as stubborn as each other. It was easier for your Da I suppose, to keep his grief to himself than to let us share the weight of it, forcing him to face the awful absence of your enchanting mother. And enchanting she was dear, that girl could sing raging seas to sleep I’m sure. She had your father under spell, that’s for certain. He didn’t know how to be himself after she was gone. I was so worried for you both. But that’s all he wanted; life in that house by the sea with you and that’s that. When days turn into months that turn into years and phone calls go unanswered and letters get returned, after a while I suppose some mightn’t realise how much time has passed…though I never forgot. A mother never forgets a day without her child. I etched each day of your father’s silence in my mind like a prisoner keeping tally on their cell wall. It’s taken a long time but in the many years that have passed between then and now, I suppose I’ve learned to accept your father’s decision to deny us your guardianship. When we found out, I went out into my garden as mad as a bee and broken as an empty eggshell, but your grandfather tried to convince me that your father had his reasons.

After we lost your Da, your grandfather fell suddenly ill and although I got some good years with him, he just couldn’t recover. It was a stroke. He fought the good fight, but God rest his soul, though he did his best, he’s with your father now and I hope, in peace. So I find myself a widow. It’s a strange thing being alone after being someone’s somebody for near forty years Pearl. I catch myself watching your grandfather’s favourite reading chair by the window, expecting him to just be there, licking his middle finger and pressing it to his thumb to turn a page. But of course, he’s not. I figure though, I don’t need to explain that to you at all, love. I know you’ve had your own path to walk with loneliness and silence in your life.

I suppose underneath it all, the purpose of this letter is to tell you that any time you feel like taking a drive, I’m an old lady with a big house who would dearly love the company of my granddaughter with the owl eyes. There are two teacups in my cupboard that I bought at the markets last week. I was thinking of you actually as I wandered amongst the cluttered colourful stalls and suddenly, there they were. Dusky pink roses on robin’s-egg blue china, with matching saucers. I would love to one day use them for us to share a pot of rose leaf tea. And I have a bottle of brandy I keep under the sink if you’re so inclined. It just tastes like nectar when you mix it with steaming rose leaves.

Any time you hanker for a drive to the coast, you just drive on into my old drive way here. And don’t worry about letting me know you’re coming, or not having too much to say. I’ll do enough talking for the both of us.

With much love,
Nana

P.S. I’ve enclosed directions, to help you find your way.

-

He had been travelling around Europe for six months before he strayed from the worn and well-beaten backpacker trail to find himself in a small fishing village in the north of Ireland. The day of his last uni exam, his duffel packed and waiting for him in the car, he handed in his test paper and drove himself straight to the airport leaving his old out-of-rego Datsun in the car park, keys in the ignition. When he should have been wearing his graduation gown, he was boarding an Irish fishing trawler called Maeve to try his hand at a fisherman’s life.

Stepping ashore again after four months at sea, he was as wobbly as a calf on new legs as he tried to walk himself to Declan’s where he rented a tiny room upstairs. The damp had seeped into his bones. His hair was long and unkempt, his hands worn, his face chapped and ruddy from wild weather and sea salt. The sky turned from silt to charcoal as the sun set somewhere behind steely clouds. He rubbed his hands together for warmth. It was his birthday. He fancied himself a pint of stout and a bowl of thick stew and rye before sitting by the fire in the smoky warmth of the pub.

As he approached the old heavy red door, his stomach growling and his eyes burning, he heard her voice. Low, sweet and clear, slow, smooth like honey in the sun, his ears pricked and his head filled with emerald light. A rush of prickly goosebumps swept over him and he immediately thought of the lads on the boat, taunting him at night about the songs of sirens in the sea, faces and bodies from the heavens, singing to sailors to warn them of rocky shores. Stay away from that there side of the boat lad, they said. If you’re to fall overboard, that’ll be the end of you then and there. You’ll never feel dry land under your feet again if those mergirls get their hands on you.

He pushed open the door, instantly swallowed by the clatter and din of the pub as meals were served and jugs were poured. The voice was gone. He glanced at the small makeshift stage, empty but for a microphone, stool and guitar cradled in its stand. He glanced around but that’s all there was to hear; the racket of the pub and the local boys after their rugby win. He ordered himself a meal and stout and sat in the corner, rolling a smoke and cupping his hands around the lit ember for brief warmth. He was rubbing his eyes, thinking about how much he was looking forward to sleep when suddenly he was awash in it, floundering in the honeyed-voice and emerald light.

Her skin was alabaster and milk. Her jade eyes glittered under long tendrils of hair the colour of fire. She strummed her guitar, tapping her foot against the stool she sat on, her ruby lips grazing the microphone as she softly sang husky spells in words he could not understand.

The sight of her engulfed him with the heat and urgency of a match-head struck alight.

She’s a sea witch, they all said. Cast a spell on you, she will. She’s had more men than hot dinners, lad, you’re looking for nothing but trouble with that there lass. She’ll eat you up and spit you out, you limey fool.

Fool he willingly was.

-

For her tenth birthday, he gave her the ocean.

He woke her at dawn just as the sun climbed over the edge of the world and threw ribbons of gold across the sky. Gingerly he lifted her from her bed, a sleeping queen from her earthly lair. She was warm and malleable in his hands, laced with the scent of lingering dreams. He inhaled the sea and wondered where she was in the world behind her eyes; from very young she had been a vivid dreamer. He remembered having to hide his shaking hands from the girl, all of five at the time, when she recounted her dreams of a rainy night in an Irish fishing village, right down to the stinking stained red carpet at Declan’s and the smoky warmth of the air. When she was seven, she sat at the breakfast table still half asleep and thanked him for her oats in Gaelic. At nine, she came home from school humming the tune that was, lifetimes ago, his undoing. He had asked her what she was singing and she smiled at him sweetly saying it was nothing, something she’d made up. When she was first born, he thought she would be the buoy to keep him afloat. He knew that afternoon though, that it would only be a matter of time before history repeated itself and he would inevitably lose her too. It was in her blood. She’s a sea witch… she’ll eat you up and spit you out, you limey fool.

That was the day he decided.

He wrapped her in the blue woollen blanket from her bed and carried her through the house. Still asleep, she instinctively wound her arms around his neck, her tresses of flame-coloured hair falling across her face. He winced as he looked down at her obscured profile; she looked so much like her mother as she grew up that he often couldn’t bear the sight of her. He pushed open the screen door and carried her to the top step of the verandah. Easing himself down, his knees cracking, he sat with her cradled in his arms, a weight against his heart.

He kissed her forehead and still she slept.

- Pearl?

She didn’t respond.

He recounted her favourite tales of his oceanic adventures and all the caverns and bays and quays he had seen, yet still she slept.

He rocked her slowly, back and forth.

He bequeathed her the ocean, her kingdom, her realm… and still she slept.

He fell silent.

Her mother’s name sat on his tongue like a slice of lemon rubbed in sugar.

As the sky flushed rose in the light of dawn, he drank in the sight of her milky translucent skin, the luminous bloom of indigo veins under just under the surface; rivers and streams of sea and salt mapping the way to her heart. He leant down to her ear and whispered his plea for forgiveness. She stirred, mumbled and slept on in his arms. Stony-faced, he loosened his grip on her and stared out to the horizon, searching the sea.

He had heard her through their child’s whisper.

- Mo chuisle.

My pulse.

His eyes glazed and wild, he breathed in his sleeping child’s breath and said all he could say.

- I’m coming.

-

It was a storm that woke her. Just before the thunderous sky blanched with dawn, she came pummelling up out of her tangled bed sheets with a start, gasping for breath. Through her window smeared with rain, she watched the sky falling in sheets across the ocean, amidst spears of lightning that left scars on the horizon.

Her heart slammed in fits against the cage of her chest.

She awoke on that morning knowing before she had placed her feet on the icy hardwood floor, that her father was gone. She had dreamt of him adrift in a scarlet sea without any clothes but for a string of black pearls around his neck. With metallic fear in her mouth and a cavernous pit opening in her stomach, she stumbled down the hallway disoriented and confused. She scurried into the kitchen, rubbing her eyes, trying to rub away her nightmares.

Something ugly and frightening wound up her legs and coiled around her stomach, striking at her heart.

The kitchen was cold and silent; last night’s dinner dishes sitting clean and dry in the dish rack. Her eyes scanned the lounge room frantically, as she struggled to breathe. The fireplace was cold and dark. Their canvas treasure-collecting bags were empty and hanging limply by the door. She wrung the cotton of her nightshirt between her hands and called out for her father.

The silent reply was deafening.

Turning back down the hallway towards her father’s bedroom, she chewed on the inside of her cheek until she tasted the tart flavour of her own blood. She watched her hand curl around the handle of her father’s bedroom door. As it opened, she felt herself slowly disconnect from her own body and begin float apart into weightless pieces.

When her eyes rested on her father and focused on his body, still, lifeless and scarlet in his bed, her face twisted and contorted into a silent scream. Saliva ran down her chin. She stood motionless in the centre of the room, the image of her father burning a negative film strip into her mind. The ocean raged, tossing silver, listless and angry. His lips were blue. She trembled violently as she tried to walk towards him but could not move. She wanted to scream, to purge, to empty herself but her throat had closed, rendering her silent. She squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her fists. She rocked on her heels, trying to call for her father with a voice that would not forgive a sound.

For as far back as her memory reached, she remembered that her father had always been possessed by water. He dreamt of turquoise rock pools and underwater caverns filled with indigo light. His eyes were the colour of the deepest spots in the bay.

From a very young age, her father told her with damp eyes that her mother had died bringing her into the world. She asked a lot of questions, but none that her father answered.

What did mama smell like?

What was her favourite song?

Did she like birthdays?

What about flowers, what was her favourite flower?

Did she have honey in her cinnamon tea too?

His eyes would just glaze over like frost on glass, making her feel as though no matter how hard she tried, her arms could never be strong enough to pull him back from where he would go when they talked about her mother. So, she just kept to asking the questions she knew her father would answer, and mostly he had an answer for everything. When she wanted to know why the ocean didn’t just fall off the Earth into outer space, he told her that whitecaps were really actually the bows of white ribbons mermaids used to tether the sea to the ocean floor. During winter, he’d take her walking barefoot along the beach when the sky was ash and the water was silver. They would each carry a canvas bag and collect treasures the ocean left behind. He had an answer for everything she discovered and held up for his inspection. A fan-shaped pink scallop shell was the pendant from a mergirl’s necklace. A long piece of driftwood was used by sea-nymphs to scratch a whale’s underbelly. A pebble worn smooth from the stroke of water was a missing piece from the wall around Atlantis. He had an explanation for everything.

They would climb the great sandy cliffs back up to their weathered timber house and make hot chocolate in a battered old pot on the stove. She would often muse what life would be like if it were the three of them; her father would listen. It was easier for them both when she just filled in the gaping blanks.

For as much as she desired any scrap of her mother’s existence, she refused to complain about her father’s silence. She reasoned that sometimes for some things, you must just run out of words. His muteness about her mother was balanced by his attention that left her feeling like a flower basking in the warmth of the sun. He made her porridge with the perfect amount of brown sugar and cream. He could spend a whole Saturday tirelessly reading her stories of Lady Guinevere, Little Red Riding Cap and Cindergirl. He painted hopscotch squares on their dirt driveway and would surprise her on his return from trips to town with packets of sunflower seedlings or brightly coloured ribbons and buttons. From timber scraps he built her a tree house with a bright purple door and once helped her to sew a doll from an old pillowcase and stuffing. He sat and read the paper while she combed his hair into pigtails and plaits when she was trying to learn how to braid her own thick crimson curls to keep them out of her face. He never let her want for anything.

But, she knew things.

Even though her father’s eyes crinkled at the edges when he smiled, she saw that the warmth of his face never reached their centre, which remained a frozen, glacial place, sealed off and impenetrable. On those same afternoons when they collected treasures along the shoreline, she would offer her arms to steady his uneven step. Or she would hold her breath politely without any expression on her face, so she wouldn’t hurt his feelings or have to tell him that his breath smelled as awful as the watery-looking stuff they used to clean the oil lantern at home together. She knew he cried in the shower when he thought the groans of the old plumbing hid his sobs. And late at night, when he thought she was tucked up in bed, she knew he would stumble down to the edge of the ocean with a bottle in his hand and throw his arms up in argument at the inky water and glittery sky. Even from her bedroom window, she could see his shoulders heave.

Only once had she gone snooping through his room, looking for any sign of her mother that might somehow have been left behind. She found an old chest at the bottom of her father’s closet, filled with vials of pills and typed letters containing words she could not understand. She rifled through the contents and found an old worn photograph, faded and leeched of its colour as though time was slowly erasing it altogether. But the image of her mother was so vibrant and familiar it slapped her in the face. Although faded, her hair was the colour of rubies in the sun, her eyes so green they reminded her of cough medicine. Silver bracelets hung on her pale arms. Her mouth was the shape of a rosebud, scarlet and sweet-looking. She held the photo up to nose and studied her mother. They had the same spattering of freckles across their cheeks. She squinted her eyes and willed the photograph to take movement and shape so she could see her mother smile, tuck a strand of fiery hair behind her ear. As the afternoon sank to dusk, she sat in her father’s closet, staring at his unmade bed and imagining her parents lying there, awash in beams of syrupy sunlight falling from the sky through the window.

The dress she wore to his funeral had real black pearls for buttons that ran like a suture from the nape of her neck to her belly button. Every time she played with them, she imagined she was running her fingers over a long nubby scar on her chest, rough and bumpy, ugly with loss and pain. She imagined undoing the buttons to find that it was just as expected inside – an empty bloody mess. When her fingers grazed across each pearl button, she heard not a heartbeat, but the sound of ocean as though she was holding in invisible shell to her ear.

For a brief while, there was talk of grandparents she had never met. But when they never came, her new parents arrived.

They cut her out of her life by the sea and pasted her into their city home, into their city lives a million miles inland and away from the water of the bay. Her new life bore her no meaning or made any sense to her at all; she might as well really have been made of paper and card.

She studied at a private school, her spare time filled with music lessons, art lessons and tutors. She didn’t have any friends, her silence and muteness misunderstood as strange and cruel. Her weekends were rigorous tours of museums, galleries and art house cinemas, dragging her shoe-enclosed feet from one place to the next.

She went to a speech therapist, a psychologist, a psychiatrist and counseling groups. Families Coping with Autism. Working Together to Understand Silence. How We Grieve. How We Help Our Loved Ones Grieve. She put shapes together on boards, drew pictures with crayons and sat on couches, flanked by her paper parents.

People told her she was so lucky to have such a wonderful new life.

But still, she would not speak.

She began to feel each of her pores slowly close, her whole body gasping for fresh salty air, aching for the fresh scent of the sea. Without words, unusual and rare gifts seemed to be the way her new parents favoured interacting with her; a French lace parasol, an antique birdcage filled with moonflowers. No sharp objects. One particular day she came home to find the latest offering waiting for her in her catalogue-designed bedroom; a hardcover first edition on the art of illusion and magic. She flicked through it idly, recognising the names of famous magicians and illustrations of star-painted boxes being sawn in half. The book fell discarded from her hands, its old spine cracking when it hit the floor. The last thing she wanted was an explanation for how and why people disappeared.

The counselling sessions increased from once, to three times a week.

But still, she would not speak.

Over time, she developed an insatiable craving for salt. She stole handfuls of salt sachets from her school canteen and carried them around in her uniform pockets, sucking on them all day long. Each night at dinner, she would inconspicuously sneak multiple pinches of gourmet salt flakes from the crystal dish on the dining table. Slowly she would cover her meal in a layer of sea salt thick enough to disguise the flavour of her food, leaving only the tangy taste of the ocean on her tongue. One afternoon she bought boxes of cooking salt home from the supermarket and snuck them into the bathroom, locked the door and ran herself a salt bath. She lay under the water; her hair fanned out around her face, staring up at the distorted world above the surface, her eyes burning. She gulped down mouthfuls of the salty water, trying as hard as she could to imagine the bathwater that had travelled through concrete and copper piping was drained straight from the sea.

Soon, the sessions were worked into her every day schedule. She continued to draw with crayons and make shapes with pieces of felt and building blocks. She daydreamed of lining up the wooden blocks and chopping them with a swift karate slice of her hand, splitting the world in two and letting the innards ooze out.

But still, she would not speak.

At night, she did not sleep. She wandered around the confines of her paper castle in the dark, opening the windows and leaning over the glass and chrome balcony, searching for the bay. Slowly, smudges of purple appeared under her eyes. Although she saw sunlight every day, her face became pallid and sallow. Even with the organic botanical hair products that lined the shelves of the bathroom, her hair began to rapidly fade from its once fiery hues to the colour of dull brick.

Suddenly, the sessions stopped.

A new age of pills and serums and tonics began; capsules and casements of rainbows.

Red, purple and green with every meal.

Gold before bedtime.

Six times a day.

She was exhausted, thirsty and so weak for her want of salt water that she unclenched her firsts, uncurled her toes and…

Just.

Let.

Go.

She toppled and tumbled headfirst into the promise and lure of golden sleep at the end of each day’s rainbow.

Night and day came suddenly in great heavy waves. She was a puppet being pulled in and out of a dark box to perform and sleep, perform and sleep. She felt as though she was wading through her life underwater, dragging the heavy rusty wreckage of doomed ships around her ankles. Occasionally she looked up and peered at the world through the surface, warbled and warped, in waves and blurs, wondering what it was she’d forgotten.

But rainbows are rainbows because they’re full of colour and magic, painting promises of prettiness amidst storms and floods.

And slowly, it began to happen.

She stopped encrusting her food in sea salt crystals and craving salt every time she saw, felt or yearned for water. Her nights spent searching the silver clouds for a path to the sea dissolved like a puddle of salt water in the sun, leaving only a chalky residue behind that blew away like ashes in the wind. The puppet show days bled into nights bled into days.

She slowly began to forget.

She forgot the wind and wild ocean skies. She forgot how to be a treasure hunter. She forgot about sea queen necklaces and ocean tethers. She didn’t remember how to listen for mermaids singing or how to dance barefoot in the sand.

And while she still didn’t utter a word, it seemed that finally her paper parents had given up trying to force her.

She used cover-up under her eyes and swept bronzer onto her cheeks. She cut off her hair and had it straightened.

Her memories of her seaside home withered and dehydrated like a fish stinking and decaying in the sun.

She listened to her paper parent’s applause.

Rainbows reigned.

Seasons dripped, melted and froze into each other.

Gifts flowed; a vintage green VW, a light-filled unit with plenty of wall space, an easel, cedar floorboards and a potted magnolia garden.

But not even little golden pills could stop the tidal waves at night. Filled with sea monsters and tentacles, smothering and suffocating, they quelled and crashed over her when she lay in bed. In the moments before her world was coated in the golden balm that attached weights to her eyelids and smothered her mind with sleep, she felt as uneasy as if she were on a boat at rough sea. Although daybreak burned through the trappings of her hazy sleep like morning sun clearing away fog, all day long she found herself fastening her pace to escape the tentacles clawing and biting at her heels, threatening to smother and consume her.

She swallowed rainbows.

She grew up.

She studied psychology and art, caring less for the chemicals of the brain and more for the chemicals that helped her to peel back the top layer of canvas and crawl into a world at the mercy of her fingertips. She wore all black and ruby stilettos. She went to art school and specialised in abstract charcoal; ashes and dust and not a drop of the sea. She smoked clove cigarettes and wore silver jewellery and painted the nails of her charcoal-stained fingers the colour of violets. Without speech, she navigated her way through the world with a curl of her lip, a shake of her hip, and an arch of her brow. She imagined her voice was a creature that had rotted away, leaving only its shell behind; a lump of coal, a black pearl. She swallowed rainbow after rainbow. She seldom smiled. She moved into her unit that she decorated with bowls of black cherries and midnight canvasses. She went to exhibitions and drank martinis and lured beautiful creatures into her bed to grind against her and dare her to feel something, anything at all.

But nothing was as good as the gold at the end of the rainbow.

With their doe eyes and bleeding hearts, they pined for her; Silent Beauty. Her reputation of formidable silence was honey to the bees. On every morning-after she would sit at her vanity, one black pearl at her throat, and smoke a clove cigarette staring at her reflection. Looking at herself was like peering through windows into the rooms of an empty house. She threw their poetry in the bin, deleted their messages from her voice mail and barely bothered to remember their names. She craved each new beginning that came from another beginning’s end. She painted her rosebud lips velvet red and accepted gifts of long weekends in wine country villas. She drank Moet and lined her eyes in black and never once recalled that she was the girl who once knew how to read the tides or pick seedlings for a sea garden.

On her birthday, she inherited the old house by the sea. She sat on her antique chaise lounge in her unit, and chain-smoked, staring at the deed in her hands. Holding it over the bulb of fire from her lighter, she watched it smoke and burn, flaking into charred black pieces and floating to settle on her cedar floorboards. As the paper surrendered to the licks of the flame, she licked her lips imagining the waves in her head being consumed by fire, the songs of the sea fizzling and writhing in agony. She left the pieces where they fell. She felt the air suck and whistle through the gaping numb hole in her middle as she walked away, leaving the mess for someone else to clean up.

Silence ensued.

She opened her own gallery.

She travelled.

She burnt herself from the inside out with anything she could inhale or ingest that kept the tidal waves and strangler tentacles at bay.

She opened another gallery. Flashbulbs popped, headlines ran and Silent Beauty bloomed into a persona that was ravenous, insatiable and unstoppable.

Red and yellow and pink and green, purple and orange and blue.
I can sing a rainbow, sing a rainbow, sing a rainbow too.

Entrapped in the golden balm, without which she could not sleep, she spent the nights plummeting violently towards the ugly lecherous tentacles waiting just below the surface. She gripped fistfuls of her bedsheets and bit her lips against the sensation of sea serpents writhing in her veins, yet still she continued to fall. Each morning she woke up just as she was about to watch herself hit the surface of the sea, glassy and flat and as hard as cement.

She didn’t see herself anymore when she looked in the mirror. She didn’t see the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, she didn’t see colourful promises and magical things. She just saw the grey shell of something that had once might have been. She saw decay, shrivelled and rotting with stench and ugliness.

And then, she met Finnegan on her birthday.

He had eyes of amber and earth. His hands were dry and warm, rough from sanding wood and beckoning seedling blooms from black dirt. He lived on a mountain in a wooden house with a chimney and red curtains. He grew gardens of albino lilies for the city markets; his whole property was dotted with bunches of wild white stars. He first approached her at her exhibition launch on her birthday to ask her if she would look at his work. His scent of dusk and cedar filled her head with warm honeyed swirls. He restored antique furniture; oiling and sanding and nurturing pieces back to their original beauty. Scarlet and gold flowers bloomed amidst violet light inside her chest. When she nodded in silent agreement he gave her a gift; a small heart-shaped brass box filled with earth and a lily seedling.

Her charcoal sticks collected a fine coating of dust. She craved the satiny wetness of oil and acrylic; colours of warmth and hope.

Her hair grew out; long curly tendrils of fire crept slowly down over her shoulders.

He never called her Silent Beauty. He never begged her to moan or beg for him.

He sent her parcels of antiques. Tines from broken music boxes that sang songs to her of twirling ballerinas and wonder. A collection of black crystal necklaces that she draped over her skin, sparkling like glittering pieces of night sky. A peacock feather. Old post cards from Africa and Egypt, Paris and London, that had fluttered around the world, carrying messages of yearning and discovery. She ran her fingers over the blurred worn lettering, wondering of the authors, of the recipients, wondering if any of them had penned their fleshy aching hearts in the faded ink, if they too had scarlet and golden blooms in their chests. She lined her window sills with his gifts. He told her stories of restoring clawfoot bathtubs and vintage baby prams, phonographs and Royal Doulton porcelain. Her whole body throbbed. The first time he slipped inside her, he whispered stories in her ear of oyster shells, hot and silken, that created creamy lustred pearls. His whispering voice sounded like her distant foggy memories of listening to the ocean’s whispers in the ear of a shell.

The sea monsters and lashing tentacles slept. She could see them under the surface, but they were sleeping. The tidal waves lulled to a swell that rocked gently against her during the night. She swallowed fewer pieces of the rainbow. Golden dust gathered in her eyelashes. She slept.

The day before the letter arrived, she was sitting in front of an indigo canvas, mixing paint the colour of persimmons. Suddenly, she felt something form in her stomach and begin to rise through her chest. The feeling slowly solidified to stone, lodging heavily over her lungs between her breasts. She held her hand to her chest plate, a painful ache spreading across her shoulders. She hunched over her easel and breathed loudly through her mouth. She tried to breathe through the building pain but felt like she had swallowed a bowl of chicken bones, lodged at the base of her throat. Gripping the edge of her drawing desk, white-knuckled, her eyes widened as the chicken bones expanded, cutting and slicing her throat. Her eyes watered and her throat burned and the pain left black spots squirming in her eyes. All of a sudden she spat out pieces of salt and bone.

- Mo chuisle.

The foreign taste and shape of the words burned her tongue. She forgot them as soon as she spoke them, distracted by the tears scorching her cheeks. Music swelled and filled her head and began to spill in broken rasps from her mouth, the sound perpetuating the pain in her throat. She tried swallowing pills that burned and boiled, but still she sang and hummed the tune in her head that reminded her of sun and honey. Groggy, her eyes leaking, she sang in a broken splintered voice. She listened to the alien sound escape her throat as the pain slowly subsided. She clutched her abdomen and gently pressed her fingers to the radiant pain between her legs as the thick salty scent of blood filled her head. She nodded vehemently to no one, slumped over on the floor.

Finnegan took the letter to her in hospital. It had been a mild haemorrhage, but nothing so serious as to cause harm to their baby. She lay in her hospital bed, her hands at her throat, feeling oceans move and swim inside of her. Finnegan stroked her belly and whispered plans of bookshelves and rocking chairs and building block sets. They drank chamomile and honey tea and he traced the veins under her fair skin with his fingertips. When he read her grandmother’s words to her from the smooth paper folded and tied with aqua ribbon, thick globes of salt escaped her eyes, glittering on her cheeks. She wiped them on the back of her hand and suckled them from her skin, her mouth smarting at the flavour of salt water.

On her birthday, as dawn cracked the sky into slivers of crimson light, they drove away from her unit in the city. She rested one hand over her swollen belly and the other on Finnegan’s leg. When they reached the city limits, she threw back her head and crowed. Sensing the first notes of salt in the air, her body slowly shifted and realigned with the ebb and flow of the ocean, pulling her into sync with the tides, the wind, and the moon. She licked her lips and rolled her salty tongue around in her mouth like a boiled candy.

He asked her to read her grandmother’s directions to him as they approached the coast. She smiled timidly and untied the aqua ribbon from the smooth pages she had carried with her everywhere. In raspy tones and husky melodies, she cleared her throat and read from the dog-eared pages aloud.

Just beyond that curve in the sandy road, tucked behind the bowing branches of the frangipani trees, sits an old wooden house. It has a wrap-around verandah that looks at the ocean through open glass windows wide enough to let the sea breeze reach the corners of all the rooms inside. Walk along the fence line and run your hands over the wild hibiscus bushes with flowers the colour of sunset and you’ll come to the little peeling green gate with the tarnished brass latch that has bells hanging from it by strands of ribbon. As you open the gate and walk through, the bells will ring in song announcing your arrival. Under your bare feet, the thick carpet of green grass will be cool and soft. You’ll notice the wild gardenia bushes, the vines of scarlet bougainvillea climbing the side of the house and the hedges of lavender, dense with miniature towers of lilac-coloured buds in clusters reaching towards the sun. You’ll cross the lawn in the direction of three thick logs, worn and smooth and sliced in half, placed to make steps up to the verandah. To your right will be a large double paned window, through which aromas of fresh coffee beans and cinnamon will float. If you pause there on the steps long enough, you’ll realise that the humming noise you can hear is the dragonflies hovering just to be near her when she sees you.

Walk up the steps onto the verandah and lean against the cedar railing. You will be able to smell the sea on the breeze and the sweet incense of the gardenia’s white petals. In front of you will be two dark brown wicker chairs with fern green cushions that are on either side of a vintage wrought iron table with a glass top. On the table will sit two robin’s-egg blue teacups, adorned with pink roses. Steam will be rising from them, curling in spirals and scrolls up into the air.

The sea breeze will pick up, tickling the hairs on the back of your neck and you’ll hear something tinkling, the sound gently leading your eyes to the sight in front of you. For as far as you’ll be able to see from one edge of the horizon to the other, will be every shade of blue you have ever dreamt about, touched your finger to in storybooks, or imagined the shade of Camelot to be. Indigo, cobalt, sapphire, turquoise, sea green – they are all there, enmeshed in each other in a moving, liquid reflection of the sky.

You might not realize how long you stand there staring at the ocean from the porch, until you hear the tinkle of the wind again and you’ll look to your right. Hanging from the corner of the roof at the other end of the porch will be a wind chime made from broken bits of coloured glass, the pieces as smooth as a stone from the bottom of a creek bed, worn soft from the stroke of water. You’ll listen as the uneven shapes of blues, greens and browns sway into each other on the breeze until something white catches the corner of your eye. In the enormous cedar-framed window beside you, crisp white curtains will billow and snap in the breeze. As the wind eases, the curtains will rest like feathers coming down from flight. The wind chime will settle and you’ll notice a little brass bell on a piece of rope hanging by the window. In the peace and quiet, you’ll hear piano notes coming from the other end of the house.

Go over and ring the bell, Pearl. I’ve been waiting for you.

Copyright 2008: Holly Ringland