The Moth and the Candle

A small boy walked beside his mother down the busy main street, his left hand shyly clasping a new toy, newly purchased in a cheap shop. It was a bucket and spade, made of stout plastic and bright, cheerful colours. He did not look at it but simply held it tight, as if afraid that it would be snatched away at any minute. She stared out of the café window at him, something approaching a sad smile in her eyes which she could not raise on her face. He stared back.
He would build lots and lots of sandcastles with them, castles to defend, and castles to destroy, castles that would make temporary palaces full of danger and adventure in his tiny mind’s eye. He would do all this at the beach, this Juvenal sculptor and architect, in the lighting shade of the sea. A long hazy afternoon stretched out in front of him and he wriggled with anticipation and delight. The Sea, he dreamed, the Sea.

Delphine hated the sea. It smelled too strong, was too big, too dangerous, too uncertain. Its exaggerations made it an object, a singular thing. In Delphine’s world there was no English Channel, no Indian Ocean, no Baring Straits. There was just the sea. Massive. Implacable. THERE. And she hated it for it. Not because but for the fact of its existence.
She shuddered when she thought of the holidays she was brought on when she was younger, holidays that involved the entire family. There were no shirkers allowed. She did not mind the slightly forced enthusiasm and jollity with which her parents approached these outings. Family holidays, they held, were what families did. But they always behaved as if this was something they had been told once rather than something they instinctively felt. She knew they were doing what they thought was best and despite the noise and sheer work involved in getting her nine (yes, nine!) siblings from A to B without major incident, the holidays themselves were tolerable for the most part. Sometimes they even had great fun, especially when their parents relaxed and remembered that they were human beings.
No, this was not what made her shudder with spasms of unwanted recollection. No, it was the fact that a frequent (and democratically popular) destination was the seaside. Buckets and spades, thick, gooey sun cream, lobster-pink scars of battle, traffic jams of hours stuck in over-heated cars with icy calm, infuriated grown-ups. The ozone tang of the sea swimming into the nostrils, a smell which made Delphine want to retch. She could remember how, as the car inched closer and closer to the car park beside the beach, she grew more and more nauseous, the other children getting excited, until by the time the car door opened and they all tumbled out she would vomit stinging bile onto the cracked tarmac, the hot rush violently surging out of her throat and out of her mouth and nostrils. Her mother would squawk and scold and comfort her in equal measure. Her father would be immediately angry but would inquire if she was any better in a gruff voice and then spend the rest of the day looking after her.
Such was the cycle of events which preceded a day or two spent in misery for Delphine as the rest of her family gambolled and ran, shouting and laughing, along the beach and dived headlong into the cold water to show off. Her parents followed at a distance, gently ambling along, their ankles forming moving barriers to the water which ebbed and flowed around them.
Delphine never wanted anything other than to leave, hugging herself in her misery, ignoring the jeers and catcalls of her brothers and sisters. The hours stretched to minutes, the minutes stretched to seconds and the seconds stretched to eternity. When they finally left Delphine shook with the vehemence of her vow never to return. She always spent the opening minutes of the journey home looking out the rear window of the car and softly cursing the sea as vilely as she knew how.
She had been a little girl then or a very early teenager (she refused to go to the seaside when she hit fifteen. Her parents grumbled but acquiesced.) So it was many years since she had laid eyes on the sea itself. On trips abroad she kept her eyes closed as the aeroplane traversed large bodies of water. She felt uncomfortable in any room with a seashell in it for decoration. Predictably, she lived in the midlands. She wouldn’t let her children take swimming lessons, much to the school’s consternation. Her original hatred of the sea began to blossom and bear bitter fruit. She began to loathe the very sight of water. Rivers, lakes, waterfalls, weirs, dams, puddles, even rain. Drinking water out of the tap was approached with disdain. She showered with a grimace on her face, washing as quickly as she could.
She tried not to think of it. Her irrationality was something built-in, inherent. It bothered her, despite it all. The hatred of the sea was something understandable. It was, after all, something she could avoid. But the metamorphosis of a noxious emotion which had been there for as long as she could remember into a cocoon of revulsion threatened to paralyse her entire life. How long before she began to regard her own bodily fluids with unbearable disgust?
Her children, Jack, Michael and Aishling, all noticed something but they couldn’t understand it. Maybe their Dad could explain it to them but he was up in heaven with God and the angels. So they were left to creep around the house, hoping not to upset Mummy who saw what they were doing and felt terrible tears well up. Delphine began to walk the local by-routes, passing sage old drumlins covered with feltish green furze. She traversed the Esker Riada, an ancient route way still valid, muttering dilatory incantations under her breath, leaving all reason behind. The mud and grass stains on her shoes stuck to her story like glue to the binding of a new book. Every day she walked, further and further each time, long winding perambulations of peripatetic misery. It was when the walks were over a year old, the trees, bushes and hedgerows as familiar as old friends, that she began to talk out loud. At first they were just little injunctions to herself, reminders to do the messages or to avoid minor pitfalls. “Must pick up the milk” or “Don’t forget to buy biscuits for tomorrow” or “Oops, mind the fence”.
Slowly, but slowly, they built upon one another. The conversations that emerged became full-blown dialogues with another interlocutor at hand. They were, for the most part, merely paste boards for difficult problems or personal worries. She spoke with an imaginary psychologist about Michael’s dyslexia, she argued with her dead husband regarding Aishling’s lack of interest in sports. She would turn to face these interlocutors, her mind granting each the requisite amount of autonomy necessary for it to be a live conversation. They made objections she had prepared for, asked questions she knew the replies to, their criticisms answered. There were doppelganger extensions of Delphine’s consciousness.
Happily the walks turned out, happier and happier, almost ecstatic. Her monologues had turned to dialogues with only the barest murmur of attention. But they changed themselves. Autonomy became independence. The voices grew stronger, grew to become other than those she had dreamed them as. Strangers appeared beside her, offering to help her over a stile, chattily commenting on the arrival of the blackberries among the sharp rise of thorns that occasionally punctuated the journey. Increasingly though they did not speak. As each alley, by-way, mud path, boreen, street and field became saturated with ghosts, all voices and faces and claustrophobic tangles of limbs whirling on the edge of her peripheral vision, she descended even more into an apprehensive, breathless reality of flickering shadows, primal words and uncertain helplessness.
She feared herself now. She would stay in the house, waiting for the children to return from school, to drive away the shades and shadows with their raucous noise and cheerful shouts. Until then she was rigid with terror. She thought and thought on it, her mind accreting building blocks yet only forming around one centre, how to stop this. How to breathe. How to get out.
Until she glanced in a mirror and saw the pale, trembling reflection of someone she once knew, her descent gained pace. But as soon as that shocking visage stared back at her she resolved to snap out of it. Shadows and Shades? Ha! Tricks of the light and stupid, self-indulgent day dreaming. She went as far as she dared with her reasoning. It brought crumbs of comfort, small but plentiful. She wished she could really speak with her husband. Memories of him floated around the house, not wraith-like but as a series of stop-motion pictures. There was laughter, shouts, squeals and whoops to go with the more hushed tones of affection and excitement.
She smiled as she touched the couch. It was a pretty battered, old-fashioned item, much the cheapest looking piece of furniture they had owned. But Kevin had always refused to get rid of it. She knew why but could not resist sometimes suggesting buying a new one. His response was always vehement rejection of the very idea! Wistful with half-forgotten memories, she ran her hand over its worn fabric. She closed her eyes, feeling then as now his strong hands clasp hers, moving to caress her arms and tighten against her firm skin, his embrace moving her against him sinuously, sinfully, slowly. She could hear her breath shorten at the sudden, intense pressure of his sex entering hers, his strength and hardness burning inside her. Slowly, gently, building to paroxysms of joyful breathlessness as his muscles shifted and moved like eels in liquid amber. They both came in shuddering climax, unified in the most intimate love.
That was their first time. They had not been virgins but that night had surpassed both their imaginations and brought them into something unbreakable, further and closer than they had ever thought two people could.
All night they had lain there, on that couch, until the grey twilight signalled what had happened was over.
They were wrong though. It did break. He had died, whimpering and coughing, drowning in his own blood as his lungs failed, lashed between the broken steering column and the shattered windscreen. He had lain in that roadside ditch for hours. The right wheel of his car had hit a patch of black ice and skidded uncontrollably into the bole of a large oak tree, flipping over and ending up at the bottom a large ditch.
He died thinking soft, desperate thoughts of her, trying to call out her name between gritted teeth as the ruby-red flecks of pleural blood tumbled and killed. She would never know this. No matter in any case. She remembered. She remembered.
A branch snapped, broken off in a sudden gust of wind. Delphine’s hair flew about her face as she stared wildly at her suddenly incomprehensible surroundings. A large clutch of trees swayed, their heavy verdant branches seeming to advance at her, threateningly. She drew back in alarm, her left arm rising instinctively to defend herself against an unseen enemy. But another sound tolled creepingly. Delphine stood still for to her that sound meant she was where she had sworn bitterly to herself never to be. She turned to see what had been a long time without her.
A bright green sea rose and fell, tympanic, almost waving to her in a mocking greeting. Thick soapy foaming water fell upon the bounding wave crests. Hush, hush, hush the slapping of heavily cavitated water onto thick agglutinated sand. Delphine’s left leg began to shake. She blinked. The water lapped at her ankles, the cold of it tingling, mixing with the coarse rasps of salt and sand.
Horror on horrors. She saw the line of the shore. Michael and Jack roared playfully and threw handfuls of wet sand at one another. They laughed and laughed. She screamed warnings at them, to get clear of the water but they did not hear her. She waved her arms above her head, frantic, frantic. They just waved back at her. A plangent voice, hoarse and high with exertion reached her. A little girl was lying low in the waves, treading treacherous water, swallowing as little as she could, the water cutting off her screams.
MUM! HELP ME MUM!
Delphine froze in her mind. Her outer limbs trembled, branches in an unforgiving breeze. She could hear something living on the desperate edge of the world, a woeful shout, full of suffering and need. There was nothing to be done. It was decided. All these things she saw, had seen, left her no choice, it was a spectator not an agent she felt herself to be.
MUM! MUM! HELP!
She fell to her knees, praying incoherent gobbets of words which lay all around her, scattered to the surf which moved back and forth, regardless. Her own childhood hit her with a sickening force. Other mind images swarmed into focus, aching dramatic canvasses covered over by accumulated memories of the pleasant and the banal. Blood-sharp pictures drew themselves out, lines of form and function outlined in nightmarish detail…posit…an infant face down in a paddling pool, body blue and dark black at the joints where the blood collected, pink little flowers resting alongside the bas-relief of every parent’s personal catastrophe…posit…a young man who dived into a canal to try and save his drowning dog. The animal died first, followed by its master. His febrile limbs tangled in the long, choking weeds which rose from the canal bed like grasping fingers from hell and bound him tight, his face hanging agonisingly just below the surface, a strange sense of surprise written on it…posit…an elderly woman lying in a pool of blood, water and faeces, all her own, her face under the water which is turreted by the filthy liquid. Her hip bone is snapped out of place, the bath overflowing as a neglected tap pours more and more water over her dead back…posit…a young girl, little more than a baby, swallowing lungfuls of cold, salty water, her screams muffled by the contemptuous waves. Her head sinks from view, her fingers clenched in utter terror, every movement now the result of external forces for the internal engine that drove this little girl had been shut off. Her tiny body sinking below the snot green sea…posit…the utter feel of the wet sand crumbling between her fingers, tears rolling down her cheeks as she sang the desperate, regretful song of the lost, the dispossessed. The boys played no more. They just stared at her, as if she was a stranger who had intruded on their game and spoiled everything. She cried and cried. They walked away.
They disappeared, leaving her alone in her grief. A careful pit of darkness opened up with little dots of shifting lights. Delphine found herself reaching for these ephemeral points, trying to grasp them, to hold on to what little she knew of the stars in heaven.
After they had told her of Aishling’s drowning and the mysterious, inexplicable disappearance of the two boys, Delphine went mad. For some years she was all too scrupulously certain of things which were not true in any sense. She had been under suspicion at first but the authorities eventually gave up their suspicions and left her to her despair. She never knew what happened.
One day she worked up the courage to go to that small seaside resort where she had been on holiday as a child. She had seen the small boy through the window. She knew that it was not Jack nor Michael but he reminded her of them both in a odd sort of way. The urge to see her family again was too painful and too great. She paid the bill and left. When she reached her house she pulled on some walking shoes. She went to the garage to get something. She did not intend to walk far.
She walked slowly, breathing gently, remembering softly, storing as much as she could and drinking in all around her. She found the field she sought.
As she walked across the roughly patterned surface, she saw a small puddle which reflected the field and its surroundings. At first, she could see the faces of Aishling, of Jack, of Michael and of Kevin all reflected on its surface. She stood over the pool of water and as the sun faded in the west she could make out the figure of a small boy on the surface, as clear as light, walking towards the beach….