The Island and the Eel

The boys, Si and Chris, are planning to go to the island tomorrow. I aint sure it’s, well, the best idea, but they told me about centre of the island and it’s bottomless pool; a pool full of oddly coloured water and even odder creatures. They told me how a while back a line was set; huge lead anchor, two-inch hook loaded with bacon and limpet flesh, just off the bottom to avoid the crabs. And as they pulled it up, having waded back at dawn, what should greet them but eight feet of conger eel, thrashing about grotesquely in the depths. There it hung, at their mercy for almost a minute, before breaking free and leaving them with nothing but the straightened steel of the hook. So naturally now they’re fixing to return and sit all day like a couple of pint-sized Ahabs. But I’m not certain they should. Clouds have been massing for a while. Gates been swinging above the sand, their knotted clasps chattering ceaselessly back and forth through the bore-holes. It isn’t safe. I ought to tell father. That crimson moon just keeps on swelling.

I ought to tell father, but he is seldom inclined to listen these days. Dave and Jean? they barely know who I am, and besides, to my mind they are both quite ridiculous. Perhaps, just perhaps, I should approach the wicker chair Sebastian always curls himself into - like a bejumpered turd - and whisper the entire plot. He took an interest in this sort of thing. Well, he took an interest before 9pm; before he began decanting gin to his mug, before he began surreptitiously fondling Jean whenever Dave was bested by his bladder and had to leave the room to grunt over the porcelain. Yes in summary I fear I am quite alone in the matter of the island and the eel.

The boys, Si and Chris, talk incessantly about the island - their island.  It’s not much of an island anyway. Just a rocky straggler. Part of the coastline. Flicked paint on a brooding canvas. Them taking it as their own is pretty stupid. Might as well claim Caernarfon bay, all Anglesey even. They’re upstairs at the moment. Snoring away those brothers of mine.  I tried to get some sleep earlier, but that Jennifer thing has a penetrating laugh and the floorboards aren’t up to the challenge. Which incidentally, isn’t the only problem with this house. The location for starters. Right on the cusp. Teetering over the shingle. I told father, told him the decision was foolish. “One black lick and we’re a gonna”, I said, “and if we aren’t carried clean away, then all the windows will be caved in. Do you want that?” I glared right at him, “starfish clinging to your fireplace hoods?” He didn’t say much as I recall. Smiled some and went back to teasing Jennifer.

In the months that followed us moving in I had concluded that the house was actually absurd; a big sweep of brick, coiffured from the prow of the land, its innards an amalgam of faux-Edwardian tat. Mum would have laughed I reckon. Laughed and called him “highfalutin” or some such anachronism.   They liked it though, father’s periodic guests. They gushed over the embossed wallpaper like flies at a ham unwrapping. And, lit by an innocuous coal fire, they could drink absinthe and forget the trials of city life; the school runs, the weekend clamour for babysitters. Check Chekhov, yeah - father’s misguided attempt to divert youth attention towards the dead Russian – had been published a decade ago, yet it’s pulped pages still garnered a certain cache at these monthly gatherings. This was - I deduced later – the catalyst for Jennifer’s unlikely seduction (she was only twelve years older than me after all). Of all his decisions - and there had been some preposterous jewels over the years – she was the absolute worst. This notion however, had not properly cemented in my brain until last January, when I accidently walked in on them at a most inopportune moment. They had commenced, I think, behind some fake Japanese panelling; though by the end their limbs had fully slid free and resembled spilled blancmange. Urgent it was. Inauthentic. Sort of mutually desperate.

I was always stumbling into situations like that. Last year, out on the dunes in a sandstorm, I took refuge in one of the craters. The wind was really something that day, kicking at the flanks of the land, winnowing dandruff from the coarse hair. I was glad to clamber beneath an overhang, let the rushing particles do their thing and lid me up. Then who should I see invading my shelter but Dave and that itinerant little slut DeeAnne. Well, she was clearly not having the best of times, struggling away beneath his clodding hands. They stopped their tussle and stared at me, their eyes accustomed to a trichromatic world of yellow sand, green grass, and grey sky. I was perplexing. Too real after peering into empty vessels. And it seemed for a moment as though my incongruence rendered me invisible. That feeling has festered over the years, but at the time I paid it no heed and merely melted to the storm. And Dave got back on it. Porcine this time; semi-consensual squeals, trotters to the sand.  

Chris, the older brother, has a real thing for that DeeAnne now. Doesn’t understand why he likes her of course, but he’ll follow them brown eyes till he’s dead. She slopes up, black hair coiling on a translucent camisole, having spent the afternoon sinking Bacardi with the lads of Rhosneigr high-street. Teases him till it’s dark sometimes. Si can’t grasp his brother’s affliction. Doesn’t know why Chris doesn’t tell her to piss off when she steals from him, or cruelly pretends to meet them somewhere and doesn’t show for hours. Still, I’m sure he can tell he’s losing him. Losing him to that other world. The island is the only thing that gets them both excited these days. The island and the memory of that thrashing conger. Perhaps I shouldn’t ruin their plans. Tomorrow is their last chance to get back there and snare the beast. After that the tides will come and cut them off. Rush in and bisect understanding. 

Paintings by Matthew Snowden.

http://www.artroom.nepc.co.uk/pics/album/matthewsnowden/matthewsnowden.htm