Drift, p.1
Drift, page 1
Caryl Lewis
* * *
DRIFT
Contents
1: Strandline ♦ Traethlin ♦ Alkhatu alsaahiliu
2: Gharb ♦ West ♦ Gorllewin
3: Drift ♦ Drifftio ♦ Almaghzaa
4: Hikma ♦ Wisdom ♦ Doethineb
5: Squall ♦ ’asfa ♦ Tymestl
6: Storm ♦ Storom ♦ Easifuh
7: Shell ♦ Cragen ♦ Alsudaf
8: Boat ♦ Cwch ♦ Qarib
9: Boathouse ♦ Marfa ♦ Storfa
10: Light ♦ Golau ♦ Daw’
11: Fire ♦ Tân ♦ Hariq
12: Dunes ♦ Twyni ♦ Kuthban
13: Hikaaya ♦ Stori ♦ Story
14: Host ♦ Mudif ♦ Gwesteiwr
15: Chwedl ♦ Myth ♦ Khurafa
16: Adre ♦ Home ♦ Bayt
17: Harbour ♦ Harbwr ♦ Mina’
18: Gofyn ♦ Enquiry ♦ Tahqiq
19: Longitude ♦ Khatu altuwl ♦ Hydredd
20: Needle ♦ Nodwydd ♦ ’iibra
21: Dwfn ♦ Deep ♦ Eamiq
22: East ♦ Dwyrain ♦ Alsharq
23: Dŵr ♦ Water ♦ Ma’
24: Cyfaill ♦ Friend ♦ Sadiq
25: Shipwright ♦ Saer llongau ♦ Sanie alsufun
26: Map ♦ Kharita ♦ Map
27: Confession ♦ Cyfaddefiad ♦ Aietiraf
28: Luck ♦ Lwc ♦ Hadh
29: Llwybr ♦ Route ♦ Tariq
30: Cantre’r Gwaelod ♦ Drowned City ♦ Medina Maghmoura
31: Gogledd ♦ North ♦ Shamal
32: Favour ♦ Ffafr ♦ Muhabaa
33: Fever ♦ Twymyn ♦ Hima
34: Huriat albahr ♦ Môr-forwyn ♦ Mermaid
35: Porth y Wrach ♦ The Witch’s Gate ♦ Qaws alhajari
36: Hebrwng ♦ Escort ♦ Murafaq
37: Launch ♦ ’iitlaq alqarib ♦ Bwrw’r cwch i’r dŵr
38: Axis ♦ Mihwar ♦ Echel
39: Ffarwelio ♦ Farewell ♦ Tawdie
40: Tide ♦ Llanw ♦ Almadu
41: Gweddi ♦ Prayer ♦ Duea’
42: Watchtower ♦ Y tŵr ♦ Burj almuraqaba
43: Cove ♦ Kuf ♦ Cildraeth
44: Sail ♦ Hwylio ♦ ’abhar
Acknowledgements ♦ Diolchiadau
About the Author
Caryl Lewis is a multi-award-winning Welsh novelist, children’s writer, playwright and screenwriter. Her breakthrough novel Martha, Jac a Sianco (2004) is widely regarded as a modern classic of Welsh literature, and sits on the Welsh curriculum. The film adaptation – with a screenplay by Lewis herself – went on to win six Welsh BAFTAs and the Spirit of the Festival award at the 2010 Celtic Media Festival. Lewis’s other screenwriting work includes BBC/S4C thrillers Hinterland and Hidden. Lewis is a visiting lecturer in Creative Writing at Cardiff University, and lives with her family on a farm near Aberystwyth. Drift is her debut novel in the English language.
For my mother. Who was right.
Gobaith
’Rwy’n ofni’r distawrwydd sy’n dyfod,
Distawrwydd didostur y sêr;
Fy mhobl na fynnwch ymwared,
’Rwy’n meithrin eich marw’n fy mêr.
Ac eto ni allaf beidio
chredu’n fy nghalon ddofn
Fod yr hen fynyddoedd yn amau
Ac yn loetran o gwmpas rhag ofn.
Hope
I fear the silence that’s coming,
The merciless silence of stars;
My people who refuse deliverance,
I nurse your death in my bones.
And yet, I cannot but believe,
In the deepest places of my heart,
That the old mountains are undecided,
And linger on to play their part.
Gerallt Lloyd Owen
1
Strandline ♦ Traethlin ♦ Alkhatu alsaahiliu
THE COVE HAD ALWAYS called things to it. Her father would blame the jutting headland, saying that it slowed the tide so that it brought forth its offerings. Her mother used to say that it was something much more than that. That the sea would show you what you needed it to, in its own time, and that the only thing you could do was wait. There would be driftwood, of course, bleached white; tangles of fishing nets and constellations of starfish so dense they’d thicken the waters with their numbers. There had been bodies, too, seal-grey and ashen, gently nudged to the sands, the victims of storms and shipping lanes or broken souls who had trusted themselves to the deep. Their pockets would be checked for change, before they were dragged to the dune-swamped church. There they’d be placed in paupers’ graves, each wooden cross marked with which tide had brought them in, as if the sea’s giving and its taking away made any difference.
Nefyn stood, holding her breath, the dark pools exposed by the slack-water glistening around her, the limpets gasping for the tide. She listened as the sandpipers and plovers, stark in winter plumage, questioned the dawn moon with their cries. She hadn’t been able to sleep for weeks, her tiredness making her feel as if she were drowning. She exhaled, her breath billowing into the blue stillness. From here she could see the curve of the coast. The warm glow of lights over the sleeping village a few miles to the south, and to the north, the sharp angles of the military base, unnaturally rigid, magnified somehow by the weight of rain in the sky.
She turned, pulled her coat around her, and walked barefoot along the beach in search of today’s offerings. The strandline lay just out of reach of the water, a fragile trail that traced the coast, configured and reconfigured at each tide’s turn. An ever-present collection of disparate things brought temporarily together. The glass cabinets in the cottage were full of specimens she had collected over the years, shells and whelks, egg cases and seeds. So now she would only bring home the most remarkable things, knowing she would have to sacrifice a beloved object for its place. Her feet found footholds along the shingle beach, her soles impervious to its grit, having walked this way since she was a girl.
The cove was deep, the steepness of its rise making sound move differently, voices reverberate more, making light linger a little longer. You could not hide anything from the sea; the cove itself was evidence of this. The waves had sought out and worn the softness of the coast away in their merciless quest to expose its hidden shape. Her father had dared build a boatshed at the foot of the cliffs and spent his life launching his boat from the beach, searching for whiting and mackerel. Watching him, Nefyn had learnt to see through the water. To calculate where the stone arch of Porth y Wrach on the headland met the pool where the mackerel idled in August, and to recognize the glassy surface of blue water where the whelks sheltered in winter. To read the bay’s hidden language. There were no boats today; the alarms had been sounded and flags raised. Everyone knew the consequences of straying into The Range whilst the military tested their drones. The bay would be closed for weeks at a time and when it was, Nefyn could do nothing but lie sleepless on her bed, listening to the distant thunder of munitions, each strike awakening in her a new depth of dread.
When the military had first come to claim and divide the sea, her father and some of the other fishermen had tried to tell them that the fish moved with the seasons and that leaving them a portion meant nothing. They had claimed to understand, before imposing stricter and stricter conditions, frustrating the fishermen into giving up. Their number dwindled after that, the community scattered. The carcass of her father’s boat lay in the boatshed, under a tarpaulin skin. Her brother forced to work on other people’s boats on the north coast for weeks at a time before returning home exhausted, only to leave again after just a few days.
Nefyn’s eyes flickered upwards to the cliff and the cottage as a light pierced the gloom. Their home clung precariously to the cliff edge above, the sea digging deeper, undercutting the land on which it stood, tipping the house slowly towards it. Her brother would be up now, moving around in the cold, pulling his jumper over his head. Making tea.
Nefyn stopped, her dark eyes scanning the strandline, the daylight growing around her. She bent to pick up an urchin, its paper-thin form luminous in the blue light. She examined it in her fingers for a moment. Its surface was punctured with lines of perforations like the plates of a skull. Her father would say that the tide took the foolish, the reckless and the unlucky. Nefyn had often wondered which one he had been. Her mother had already left them by then, before her father had ventured out to sea on the cusp of a storm. He was found underneath his boat, his body tangled in fishing lines, blue and bloated, his breath whisked away. Perhaps he had been unlucky, she considered, or perhaps the sea had tried to show him all she could and had finally run out of patience.
There was nothing she wanted this morning. She dropped the urchin, listened as it rolled away. She could hear the tide turning, the undercurrents quickening. The sugar kelp which she hung in a ruffled belt on the cottage door had not dried out in days, meaning that this stillness could not last much longer. Something was changing. She could feel it. She turned and walked back up to the cottage, knowing that a storm was near.
2
Gharb ♦ West ♦ Gorllewin
IF HE LAY STILL enough, for long enough on the narrow bed, he could keep himself just below consciousness so that hours would blur into days, and days would fold into weeks, without him being aware of the four walls which held him. He could feel his muscles wasting, his flesh seemed loose about his bones, and the little exercise he was forced to take exhausted him. But if he slowed his breathing in this way, his body would become lighter and he’d feel the touch of his fat her’s palm on the back of his neck and he would be six years old again, learning to swim underneath the Mediterranean sky. Angles of blue and white would fill his mind. He would see his body glistening and strong under the scalding sun. Hear his father whispering, ‘Trust me, trust the water, it doesn’t want to harm you,’ then he would feel his own childlike panic overwhelm him as he grappled for his father’s neck, felt himself sinking. On other days, it was the scent of bitter orange that filled his senses, its cloying sweetness drugging him into a welcome stupor, or the buzzing arpeggio of the muezzin’s call to prayer.
When consciousness was insistent, he would sit, his back against the cold plaster, his eyes half closed, pushing back the walls with his mind. Like tracing paper, he would overlay memories of his past on to his present. The back wall was the dappled walk beneath the lemon trees towards the university. Past the café where his friends took black tea. The far wall was the corridor where he had first met his wife, the place where she had scolded him sternly for pinning a notice to the wrong board. His flamboyant begging for forgiveness. The bemused look she had given him. The moment he decided he must know more about it and her. The wall behind him was his office, the bricks his books, the muslin drapes that overlooked the city at a time when no one thought to ask what religion their friends were. This bed. This bed was where they had made love without making love. Her white teeth, the way she swore over coffee.
In this way, every day was a day of resurrection. Adding detail, the footfall on the geometric floor of a souk, the laughter of children outside his flat, the stunned flies of summer. And when sleep did overwhelm him, to a dreamless abyss, he’d wake gasping for air and reach for the compass on the bed beside him, the only possession they had allowed him to keep on religious grounds. Hamza had not prayed for years, although he had not told them this. The compass had been a gift from his grandfather when he had come of age. They had smoked shisha together and he had pressed it silently into his palm. They had sat for a while, nothing but the blue smoke and the sound of the bubbling nargilah. Hamza had opened the case, looked at the names of the sixteen winds marked on it. Held their names in his mouth for a moment. Greco. Levante. Scirocco. Osto. His grandfather had watched him, his aged, damp eyes narrowing as he inhaled the perfumed smoke and suggested to him gently that being a man meant knowing where you were from, knowing where you were going and knowing how to find the qibla in order to pray.
He had little sense of time; the windowless cell put paid to any natural rhythms, the only real indication of day and night the changing of the guards outside his cell in eight-hour shifts. A little less noise at night. He knew their footsteps by now. The older guard called Adley, gaunt and irritated, his resentment at being given such a menial job palpable in the agitated flick of his cigarette. When he learnt that Hamza smoked, he pushed a cigarette under the door, knowing full well that Hamza had no way to light it.
But it was the other one that Hamza disliked the most. The younger one they called Owens. He was broader, fair-haired and thickset, his tongue sharp with ambition, a certain swagger appearing in his gait when unwatched by others. Hamza had seen his type at checkpoints. Asking for papers and studying them for too long, disappearing to talk to colleagues in booths, enjoying any discomfort. Thriving on any expression of impatience you made and punishing you for it even though you had committed no crime. He had seen his type a thousand times, making old women wait, frail and tired in the searing sun, simply because they could. But it wasn’t Owens walking down the corridor now. Hamza lay listening. It was someone else. An older footfall, heavier, soft-bodied, at once urgent and defeated. He waited for the murmur of voices and the metallic sound of the keys to subside. The door opening. Hamza didn’t react. The sound of breathing. A bag being placed on the floor. The weight of the door being locked once again.
‘Hamza?’
His voice was hoarse today, his breathing shallow. A silence. Then the sound of footsteps and the cold touch of fingertips on Hamza’s inner wrist. The whip of an arm yanking a cuff over a watch face. Silent counting. A calculation. The fingertips disappeared, leaving only the sting of another’s touch on his skin. He heard the rasping of the silver chain as the Doctor picked up the compass from the bed, held it in his hands. Dragged the chair towards Hamza and sat.
‘I know you can hear me.’
Hamza felt the strangeness of having someone else so near. The Doctor’s chest was noisy, as if his haste along the endless, featureless corridors had unsettled it. ‘I can’t sleep, thinking of you here. Please, Hamza, you have to eat.’ Hamza lay unmoving. ‘Those sores are getting worse.’ The creak of the chair as the Doctor leant closer. The Doctor searched his face for a response. There was none. He lowered his voice conspiratorially. ‘Listen to me. They won’t force you to eat, Hamza. If you die, you’re one less problem for them.’
There was something in this man’s voice that made Hamza think of his father. A silence before the sound of his breathing returned once again.
Hamza had been moved. For years. From Syria to Oman, from Oman onwards. Moved and moved so that he had become so far removed from where he had been, who he had been, that he no longer knew himself. Cells. Trucks. Boats. Each country complicating his story. Travelling further and further until he had almost forgotten himself. There had been other medics, too, who were kind enough, but none like this one. This one was older. Perhaps that was it. He was not a military man either. This base seemed smaller, more remote. After so many years, he had, it seemed, reached the end of the line.
Hamza had not spoken to the Doctor for months, the mistrust in which he held his captors at each base constant and unwavering. But one day, the Doctor had told him how his wife had scolded him that morning for snoring. And it had awakened in Hamza a yearning for the ordinary so intense that it had almost broken his heart. After another visit, the Doctor had left him some cake she had made. He’d kept the guard talking long enough that Hamza could eat it. They had begun talking then. Tentatively at first, both skirting the extraordinary circumstances that brought them together, and keeping instead to generalities. Hamza’s former post at the university in Homs. His parents’ pride at his achievements. The Doctor’s life in the nearby village, his visits to the military base made necessary by its size and lack of facilities. And then, in time, when they were surer of each other, they had argued. Hamza challenging the Doctor’s hypocrisy, his earnest insistence that he lived in a country with a natural empathy towards the colonized, his discomfort at being both colonized and colonizer. His infuriating rigidity and adherence to what he called his duties, his ‘oaths’. The papers he had been forced to sign on beginning his work at the base. His refusal to help Hamza, the ease with which he could have sent word to Hamza’s family if he chose to. Their natural liking for each other. Frustrating. Confusing. And in this way, over time, they had forged a fragile, mutual respect. An almost perfect imbalance.
Perhaps, for Hamza, it was knowing he’d decided to end his own life that allowed him to be more open with the Doctor than he had been with all the others. A certain recklessness of feeling that let him speak. And over time, the glimpses the Doctor gave Hamza – of a life lived – made him grieve his own past life so much that it strengthened his resolve, galvanized his decision to retreat.
‘Hamza, listen to me. You don’t have much time left. I … I wouldn’t presume to ask for your friendship, but …’ Hamza felt a hand on his arm. ‘We have grown closer and I have tried to pull you back. But there comes a point when your body … it won’t recover. Your tests, Hamza, they’re not good.’
The Doctor allowed the words to settle between them, watched as Hamza’s chest rose and fell with a whisper. Their conversations had dwindled over the last weeks, as Hamza continued to refuse food. The Doctor had watched this young man diminish and fall silent as his own inner conflict grew. His cheeks burning with the shame of it. He had tended prisoners before, knew he shouldn’t get involved, but as he watched the four walls pushing in on Hamza, he was soon engaged in his own secret war with him, a war to keep him alive. He would find reasons to visit. Make reasons to visit, but every time he opened the metal door to his concave features, the deep set of his eyes, a sickness would creep to his stomach. At night, the Doctor would lie wide-eyed, a trembling in his core that spoke of a deep, inward grief. On these evenings, his wife, sensing that he was awake, would lay a gentle hand on his arm and turn to watch her husband stare into the darkness in his helplessness, a tear glistening heavily in the corner of her eye.
