Seahorse (14 page)

Tell me where you came from. How you survived.

They looked at me with eyes like ancient raindrops, reflecting the sea and everything it carried within its waves.

Once, instead of turning into the guestroom, I continued to the back of the bungalow. Nicholas had left the door open. He was lying in bed,
his clothes draped on a chair. Light streamed in through the window, falling on his skin, white as foam. I stood at the door, the threshold rising beneath my feet. He was awake, watching. He raised his hand and beckoned me in.

I crossed wordlessly, the floor cool under my bare feet. It wasn't cold, but I shivered, and my mouth was dry, as though I'd run for miles. He edged to the side; I climbed the bed and lay on the space he'd freed for me. Between us, an inch, no more, and yet it felt like the widest canyon—I couldn't reach across with my hand. Perhaps it wasn't expected of me. Better it stayed still. Unmoving. Until guided.

Until he turned slightly, his breath quick and close on my ear, my cheek.

“I'm thirsty,” I blurted. I don't know why, my words formed of nervousness.

He reached to his bedside table, to the jug, tipped it to his lips, then moved his face over mine. When my mouth touched his, it was like kissing an ocean.

The air blue, flecked in dust, the sound only of our breathing.

“Wait,” he hissed, “wait.”

I had reached below, tugging away the sheet entangled around him. He placed his hand on my chest, spreading wide like a fan from rib to rib—I could feel my heart thump heavy against it as he pushed me back on the bed. He glanced down, laughing, “Although I can see why you're in a hurry…” I turned my face to the side, smiling but self-conscious.

“There's no need to be embarrassed…” He lowered himself, and pressed his hips into mine. I could feel him through the sheet. This time, no words, just a low moan escaped my lips. I could sense this pleased him.

He placed his face on my cheek—an unexpectedly tender gesture—and said, “Why don't you relax…”

I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. The smell of him, sweet and salty, the sharp tang of sweat.

Hesitantly, I raised my hands, this time, placing them gingerly on his waist. I dared not go any further. He was running his tongue over my lips—“Don't kiss me”—and I struggled to stay still, wanting, more than anything in the world, to disobey. It was endless, this dizzying circle, a burning, lilting loop. While in a daze, I realized he was loosening the knot of my shorts, but he didn't slide his hand in immediately, allowing it instead to linger, to smoothen, caress.

When he finally held me, it was a shattering, somewhere in my chest. A weeping.

Yet not in a way that he could tell.

If there were tears he could not see them.

And my gasps were taken for something else.

Only then was there a sense of something like liberation, an absence of the touch of guilt. My fingers dug into his waist. He moved over me like a wave, not needing to touch me for longer. I shivered, arching, everything around me falling away, until all that was left was his closeness with no particular weight, no particular shape.

After I washed, I returned to find him lying on his back, the sheet cast aside. He was slick and silver. I would not, could not, know how to proceed.

When I reached closer, he placed his palm on my shoulder.

I looked up at him, his eyes kindled like ash.

He took my hand and placed it on him, his inner thigh, and leaned over kissing me, tugging on my lower lip.

I was open, as ever, to instruction. To instinct. I felt it might never happen, that I could not make him reach where he made me journey. Too clumsy, I thought in small, rising panic, I am insufficient. I moved quicker, trying to find some secret momentum that I must learn and perfect. Until, finally, his fingers clasped at me, coiling into my hair.
His mouth fell open in a wordless gasp, his chest rising and falling in quick shallow breaths. A long while later, he opened his eyes, now soft and distant, pools of peaceful lead. He smiled and said my name, “Nehemiah.”

Seahorses are strange creatures.

Upright, they glide, rather than swim, moving with the current. In lieu of scales, their skin stretches thinly over strong bony plates, intricately patterned in stripes, spots, swirls and speckles. Translucent yellow, electric green, liverish red, orange in love. They mate for long, if not for life.

Somewhere in China, they're dried, and powered, dipped into soup, and whisky, believed to bestow everlasting virility and youth.

They belong to that rarest of fish families marked by male pregnancy.

And, most marvellous of all, they dance.

A ritualistic courtship at dawn. They entwine their tails and float in unison, spinning gracefully through the water. They change color. They dip, and rise, coordinated ballet partners in a routine long and exhaustive.

On several occasions, Nicholas and I tried to catch a glimpse of this—especially if we'd been drinking late into the night.

“It's four in the morning… shall we stay up for our piscine lovers?”

Although, maybe they were shy, or, as I offered, not really in love, for we never saw them dance.

“It's a myth.”

Perhaps they only danced in the sea.

I've often wondered what happened to the pair in Nicholas' aquarium. Whether he returned them to the resourceful shop owner in Chandni Chowk. If he gave them away to a fellow fish enthusiast in the city. And if he did, to whom? Whether they did or did not survive.

I could ask, I suppose, at the concert for which he'd sent me a ticket.

It was a fortnight away. And I still hadn't decided whether I would attend.

Instead, I drifted. Around me, the London autumn slid into the beginning of winter.

The trees stood bare-branched and barren. Theatrical against the sky, all arms and fingers, reaching out in grief of epic proportion—Elektra mourning Agamemnon, Medea for Jason, Hecuba for Polydorus. And always the wind, the tragic wind.

“It's the best we could do,” said Santanu apologetically, when he showed me the room.

“But there's this…” I said, pointing to the window overlooking a small patch of garden, framed by a silver oak, leaves glistening in the rain. “Its perfect.”

In there, I met students, revised their assignments, and offered, for what it was worth, handbook advice on craft.

The ones who dropped by brimmed with questions, their faces marked by intent judiciousness. I marveled at their devotion; I didn't remember being as driven or committed as a student. Had things changed so much so quickly?

No. I stand corrected. It had been
years
since I left university.

On the weekends, I'd often meet up with Santanu or Eva, accompanied, sometimes, by Tamsin. They took me to places they thought I might enjoy—an open air play in Regent's Park (rained out right after Olivia declared her unsought love for Cesario), a new tapas place in Islington (the prices as incendiary as the sangria), a walk through Highgate Cemetery (where, for the life of us, we couldn't find Marx), and several art exhibitions. To the Tate, where we were utterly unmoved by Rothko, and the National Gallery, where we stood captured by Caravaggio. His Ragazzo morso da un ramarro. A painting of a youth—voluptuously androgynous—starting back in alarm as a lizard
concealed in succulent cherries sank its teeth into his finger. His red, full lips pouting in pain, in pleasure.

One Saturday afternoon, Eva and I were strolling down Whitechapel Road after we'd been to see a show at the Whitechapel gallery—artwork by an immigrant British-Indian artist. Heralded, in the catalogue as an “extraordinary contemporary illusionist”, and we could see why. Smashed mirrors and perpetually spinning antique globes, a singing bowl, a rocking-horse unicorn, and tea cups in magically balanced towers.

“Oh,” said Eva, “Tamsin would like this.”

We were standing under a tree of faces.

Made of fiberglass, with branches ending in waxy molded heads of fantastical creature. Manticores, winged bird-women harpies, crown-headed basilisks, a multitude of dragons, Japanese kappa, and seven-headed naga snakes.

“And look,” I pointed, “the Hindu bird-lion Sharabha… he looks ferocious…”

Eva giggled. “Also known as Santanu in a bad mood.”

After coffee and cake in the gallery café, we stepped out, hoping to take advantage of a break in the incessant rain. When we reached a junction, curving around an isolated traffic island, I stopped abruptly—

“Is that a winged horse?”

A statue perched on a slender black plinth at the edge of the roundabout.

“That's a dragon…” said Eva.

The creature was painted silver, with details of its wings and tongue picked out in scarlet. Its clawed paws held up the cross and shield of Saint George.

“I think they're a dozen of these around London… they mark the old boundary of the city. Although…” she tilted her head, “it could be a horse… if it weren't for the scary tongue and teeth…”

Eva laughed, “Is this research for a story? My writer friends ask me the strangest things…”

Yes, I replied, it could be.

“Not that I know of… there's the Wellington Arch near Hyde Park Corner… you know, with the angel of peace descending on a chariot of war… but I don't think the horses are winged.”

No, they weren't. I'd checked.

“What about the British Museum? Bound to be something there…”

I told her that was exactly where I was headed.

“I would've come along, but I'm meeting Tamsin for drinks… let me know if you find any.” She wished me luck, and with a light hug, and a wave, she was gone.

A quick survey of the sky—overcast, overwhelming odds of more rain—and I abandoned my plan to walk to the BM; taking instead the Circle Line up to King's Cross. Even with the summer long ended, and the bulk of tourists long gone, the tube was crowded. This was a city that never emptied. The carriage was crowded with souls journeying underground, across the Thames, or the Styx. Perhaps they were the same river. I watched people staring blank-faced ahead, or peering resolutely into small shining screens, smiling to themselves, their fingers tapping, scrolling, flicking. The rush hour special to Hades. Stuffy, even while the temperature dropped outside. Which was why I preferred standing near the end of the carriage, next to the sign that politely requested passengers to “Keep the window open for ventilation.”

Wedged in the corner to my left, a boy no older than twenty, with his hair clipped short along the sides and left to grow out, wavy and loose, on the top, like a musician from the '60s. I took secret sideway glances at his slender features moving in and out of traveling shadow. His mouth a Dionysian ruin, his hazel-green eyes fixed steadily on something unfathomable on the floor. Hard not to notice—the steep fall of his cheeks, the freckles lightly drizzled across his nose. Repeatedly, he
settled his hair. Somewhere along the red line, a large group of passengers stepped off. Including him. Leaving the corner empty.

The carriage rocked back and forth, hurtling forward into the tunnel. Somewhere, a child wailed, shrill and merciless. A man stood by the door holding a bouquet of white lilies, a picture of hope. Further down, above the neatly bunned blonde head of a woman, a poem hovered delicately like breath—

You took away all the oceans and all the room.

You gave me my shoe-size in earth with bars around it.

Where did it get you? Nowhere.

You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence.

I took the note out of my pocket. Often, I held it in my hand, turned it over, to smooth creamy blankness, and back again. The ink remained as inscrutable as ever.

Winged Horses.

I'd done what anyone else would do. A Google search. Which had thrown up a number of scattering references. The mythical Pegasus, born from Medusa's head, after she was slain by Perseus, the humpbacked horse of a Russian fairy tale, a pub in Basildon, Essex, the definition of a Thestral on Harry Potter Wiki, a book of poems by a Bulgarian writer named Lyubomir Levchev. Compelling stuff, I'm sure, but leading nowhere.

Perhaps, that afternoon, something might be illuminated.