Ian St. John was a tugboat captain. He lived on the lip of the Irish Sea, 10 leagues west of Liverpool toward Wales.
On Summer evenings, when the tide would go way out and expose the boroughs of liminal creatures, Ian would walk down among them, darkening with the evening’s chromatic progression. Yellow to gold to deep orange. Magenta to violet and then deep, luminous blue. Deep, heavy blue; resting on the black, churning ocean.
A light flicked on behind him. Ian looked back up the beach. At its top, straddling the crest of a grass-flecked dune, stood his cottage. Yellow sodium light spilled from its windows, dripping gold into the churning bowls of sea. A play of shadow alerted Ian to the movements of his wife, already cooking dinner, flakey cod in cream sauce tucked within an embracing pastry. They’d been eating together for fifty years. The corners of his mouth creased into a smile as he remembered them. Her cooking had certainly improved.
She orbited the kitchen like a distant star, revealing herself to the world through negative light, blocking the sodium lamp as she rotated rhythmically, habitually, cyclically, day after day. The druids of Anglesey could have used her to chart the seasons. Like a celestial body her movements were majestic, slow, and inexorable. A foundation on which life could flourish. He thought of her old arms — forged and worn with love — they had coddled children, scrubbed lavatories, and danced the foxtrot in Blackpool.
Cooking smoke poured from their tin chimney. Black tendrils coiled toward the blackening sky.
The sun’s residual glow slipped beneath the waves. Darkness.
Light.
From across the bay. Strange light. Green laced with vivid gold, the light of chandeliers through glasses of champagne. Ian could hear them tinkling. He took a few strong strides forward into the tidal exposure. A Mississippi steamer resolved into view; its magnolia wood paddle flicking the frigid Irish Sea into the sky. Champagne rain fell, intermixing and overflowing the sodium-gold pools.
Ian felt a pull at his stomach.
‘A steamer?’
The old dreams came back, as they did at least once a day, flying hurtling towards him from his youth.
Kathleen running along the docks.
Her vivid red hair burning against an overcast sky.
***
They used to dream, on February nights under smokestacks, of talking one of those Cunard Ships to America. America with her wide spaces, her red deserts, and scorched Indians. Kathleen had talked about fashionable balls in New York and New Orleans. Ian had dreamt of leaving the Atlantic altogether. Of going all the way to California to work in the movies. A place where he could use his mind to spin dreams instead of his back to unload boxes.
One night at the music hall Kathleen had danced especially close to him. Step-step-step/Step-step-Step. Warmth on his skin, closer and closer till the diminishing barriers between them burst into flames under a willow in Stanley Park.
Ian and his dad were fixing a leak in the ceiling when Kathleen’s father came to inform them, she was pregnant. Ian stopped going with Kathleen to the pictures. Her dad got him an apprenticeship on The Grassgarth, a tugboat, bringing in those big liners they used to dream of boarding.
***
Ian took another step down the beach.
The golden steamer pulled closer too, its light blocking out the stars. On its deck, Ian could see fashionable men and women tinkling laughter from sparkling eyes. The voices were not Liverpudlian. There were English accents, but they made up just one tile in the mosaic on display. Scottish, German, French, Congolese, Indian — American voices rang out. Every kind of person was on display. The vessel bubbled with laughter.
***
There had been very little laughter in the three months of Ian and Kathleen’s marriage. One night they were dancing schoolchildren, the next they were working parents. Kathleen only smiled when she’d pick up Ian from the docks. At first Ian thought she smiled for him.
The work was hard, and the winter was wet and cold. Nevertheless, things were looking up. They moved into the apartment next to her parents and bought a crib made of Oak. It was heavy, dark and solid. One day Kathleen asked Ian if he still wanted to go to America, he laughed and said he wished he could. Ian began going to the pub with his captain and crew mates. Kathleen stayed at home and knit baby clothes with her mother. At the top of her mother’s stairs there was a little round window. It looked out onto Liverpool harbor. In the twilight mist she could see the liners pulling in and out. She’d stand there in the blue-gray light, transfixed at the cusp of the top step, till her mother called angrily for the fourth or fifth time.
One day no one greeted Ian at the dock. He walked alone through the soot-black labyrinth of streets, skipping the pub. When he got home his mother-in-law was standing in the parlor. She held up a tear-stained letter.
‘Ian,
I can’t live the life my mother and father built for us. The house they made with love has become my prison, a maze too humdrum to escape from — it puts me to sleep before I can even try.
Ian, are you still there my love? Is the boy I knew still dancing behind those beer glassed eyes? Your voice used to crack with dreams when we whispered about taking the ships. But now, when I bring it up, you laugh without joy.
I’ve made the decision for us both. I’ve taken our savings and boarded The Queen Mary. By them time you read this we’ll already have set sail. Forgive me, I couldn’t tell anyone, or you would have laughed and put me back to sleep.
Meet me and the child in New York, we’ll wait a year for you. If you don’t come by then we’ll go south. To Charleston or New Orleans or even your dear California.
Come, and we’ll build our life our way. Don’t come, and I’ll mourn the boy I loved.
Kathleen St. John’
Ian fell to his knees, wrists falling on the bare floorboards. Kathleen’s father handed him his coat and a ticket for the next ship to New York.
***
Cold foam splashed his ankles. Ian looked down and saw himself standing in inches of water. How had the time come in so quickly? The Mississippi steamer was very close now, its champagne light growing ever more vivacious. He could see the passenger’s faces.
[‘Strange’ rumbled his subconscious, ‘no crew members.’]
Their faces were beautiful and young. Clear skin, straight teeth, and firm flexible bodies.
His heart skipped a beat.
Blazing like a lighthouse by the aft railing was a mountain of red hair, done up into a monstrous ginger cake. The hair descended onto an alabaster nape which in turn spread and curled into womanly shapes before disappearing under green velvet lace. A young boy, three or four years old tugged at the woman’s dress, lifted his carnival mask, and called to his mother.
Ian gasped. It was the face of his father, long dead, made young as he’d only seen in photographs. He was the spitting image, except for his hair, which was strawberry blonde.
Ian called out but a wave caught him in the mouth. He was up to his chest in the sea now.
The woman whirled around at the stifled yell, her hand reaching for her mask, tugging at the corner…
***
…at the corner of 15th and Broadway, Ian stepped off the streetcar. The city buzzed with life. Motor cars and newspapers whirled around the block. Vegetable vendors crammed next to stockbrokers and glamorous ladies writing plays. Black men blew horns. The street was an ocean of hats churning to the jazz music that emanated from subterranean clubs.
And towering above it all were the buildings. Like Cathedrals stood on end they soared, blasphemously toward heaven. Each window a little life, each flicking lamp a little dream. Ian had never felt so alive. He was nearly crying with happiness, the future spread out before him, all he could build and be. He’d love Kathleen and raise their child in the sun. He’d build a house on a lake with his own two hands.
But he could not find Kathleen.
No one on Ellis Island had any record of her. Ian spent weeks in the archives, sifting through mountains of immigration forms. He went to all the places they used to talk about on the docks in Liverpool. He ran around Broadway, the Metropolitan Opera, and Central Park, startling a fashionable young woman every half hour or so by bursting into tears, screaming “Kathleen!” and trying to hug her from behind.
A month passed. Then six. Ian’s telegrams home to England became ever more unhinged. In desperation, and considering what she’d written in her letter, he took a southbound train.
He ran out of money on Bourbon Street, halfway through a bottle of Jack Daniels. Drunk and broke he lived in squalor, watching the tugboats move in and out of New Orleans Harbor.
Lost in the shuffle, fallen through the floorboards — Kathleen — no record whatsoever. It was maddening. She had vanished.
Eventually the police arrested Ian for Vagrancy. The deported him back to England in February, almost exactly a year since he’d arrived in America.
Ian’s family rallied around, as did the crew of The Grasgarth. Kathleen’s parents gave him some money to restart his life, but it hurt them too much to see their son-in-law. They moved away from Liverpool not long after.
Ian focused on his work. He quit drinking. He met a girl, and they got their own place. They had children and 50 years of steadily improving dinners. Eventually he sold the Grassgarth and bought his own plot of land, right on the water. He built a cottage with his wife, sons, and daughter — with their own ten hands. It overlooked his favorite stretch of fine, extending beach...
***
Extending her arm, the red-haired woman pulled the masquerade from her face. It was Catherine. Ian had known this from the second he spotted her, but reason had demanded disbelief. It was Catherine, just a few years older than when he’d known her. She had filled out and grown even more beautiful. She had become as glamourous as she’d talked about. This was the way he’d dreamed of her, how he thought she’d be when he ran into her on Broadway or Bourbon Street — or standing at the railing of every passenger liner he tugged into port for the next fifty years.
She smiled warmly, as if she’d been expecting him. She turned their sons head toward the old man and pointed, the boy’s eyes lit up. He waved.
The sparkling passengers had formed a crowd now. They called out to Ian, motioned at him with fine, dry clothes. They pointed movie cameras in his direction.
Ian looked back up the beach. From the dim silhouette in the doorframe Ian could discern his wife, calling him to dinner. The light from the golden steamer made her hard to discern. He turned around.
A rope splashed into the water ahead of him. The light from the ship was becoming ever more vivaciously yellow — vivid, electric, garish, lurid. Boogie-woogie rung from the gallery; voices shouted in hysterical pleasure. The beautiful faces cheered him on, Catherine had broken into a full smile, a tear rolled down her cheek.
Ian found it easier to tread the water. He looked down and saw his young muscles restored. His veins crackled with energy, and the sea was no longer cold but brisk. Life and passion raged within him again. He kicked toward the rope; the ship burst into applause. The band started a triumphant jazz-march, his son jumped up and own in circles, Catherine bent down over the side and extended her hand down to him. Champagne sunlight formed a halo around her beautiful red hair.
Catherine reached down…
Ian reached up…
The second his hand caught the rope it wrapped itself around his arm. He moved to try and free it but the rope tangled his other arm as well. Ian looked up in alarm. The crowd screamed with laughter. Catherine was crying, her face now rouged with bruises. They blackened and spread. Her cheeks and eyes hollowed, the tears gushed freely. The little boy shuddered and fell to the floor, spasming and shrieking. The crowd doubled over in guffaws as the boy shrunk like a raisin, water pouring out of him, smaller and smaller till he was a bloody lump, shrinking still, shriveling and shriveling into nothingness. Kathleen cried even greater tears, tears the size of her entire eye, so steady she no longer had eyes but twin geysers of bursting water. The tears soaked her face and it swelled and stiffened, waterlogged. At last, she stopped crying and her face turned to dust and was splashed away by and errant wave. Only red hair on an empty skull remained. The laughter reached a hysterical crescendo. Ian cried a brittle, old man cry as the rope dived beneath the surface. Down under the hull it dragged him. Even under water he could hear their cursed, manic laughter, their schizophrenic jazz. Through the water the champagne sunlight had turned the color of insanity: a screaming yellow/green — it turned the sea into an ocean of puss.
Ian opened his eyes to the stinging salt water. To his horror he saw that the vessel was glass bottomed, and that he wasn’t alone. Above him countless other bodies writhed in their rope constraints, kicking furiously up into the transparent hull, choking, drowning, trying to get to the air above, to the air and the food and the champagne and the clothes and the women and the little movie cameras spinning dreams. Thousands of kicking feet pushed the ship forward, no other crew was necessary. The paddle was just for show.
Just as the drowning, desperate faces looked up, the hysterical, beautiful faces looked down. Laughing and pointing they screamed in delight as Ian tried to swim for the surface.
Faintly, almost as though it wasn’t there, Ian could see the shadow of his wife striding in circles. He thought he could hear her voice, worry creeping at its edges.
The cameras kept rolling.
Charles Bradbury 10/05/21