Devil's Rock - Chris Speyer [45]
When Zaki reached the intersection at the bottom of the hill he should have continued around to the right towards school but he felt an overpowering urge to be alone, and he turned left instead, taking the road that led out of town. He walked past the local moorings. The tide was out and the little motorboats and day-sailors were sitting on the mud, leaning at drunken angles while gulls and ducks searched the silt around them for anything edible. He continued on past the waterside apartments and pubs and then up a small rise, away from the harbour through the scatter of suburban houses on the outskirts of Kingsbridge. He hadn’t meant to skip school; the thought that that was what he was doing hardly entered his head. It took all his concentration to walk steady and upright in a world that had been knocked off kilter. Surrounded by the familiar, he felt totally lost.
After walking for a further quarter of an hour, Zaki reached the top of the rise and the road began to drop back down to the water. The downward slope kept Zaki moving forward, but when he came to the long, low stone bridge with its many arches that carries the road across a branch of the estuary he hesitated. Should he continue on across the bridge? Where was he going, anyway?
To the right of the road a short flight of steps led down to a large old landing stage, evidence of the days when fast fruit schooners traded between Salcombe, the Bahamas, the Mediterranean and the Azores. Now, local people used the stage to store dinghies and yacht tenders. Zaki and Michael had sometimes come here to fish. Being early on a weekday, there were few people about. Zaki descended the steps and sat on the big rough-cut stone blocks that formed the edge of the landing stage and stared out across the water. A woman walking a small dog came up the slipway from the water’s edge. The dog trotted around sniffing busily at tufts of grass and weeds. The woman paused near Zaki. ‘Shouldn’t you be in school?’ she asked. Zaki ignored her. The woman waited, but when Zaki continued to stare into space she tut-tutted, then called her dog and climbed the steps up to the road.
A hole was opening up in Zaki’s stomach, a hopeless, aching emptiness. He had a desperate longing to be anywhere in time except in this moment.
A herring gull alighted a few metres from where Zaki sat. It folded it wings, shaking the feathers to settle them into place. Zaki felt a rising irritation at this new invasion of his solitude, but when he turned to look at the bird his attention was trapped by the glitter of the gull’s eye. He began to gather together some part of himself – something that wasn’t part of his body. He detached this inner self until he was free from physical sensation, and then, riding on a breath, he fled from his body into the body of the gull; fled the aching emptiness and the desperate feeling of loss. Escaped, for a time at least, from his brother’s words.
He stretched his wings, bent his legs slightly for the take-off spring, then launched himself into space. As he climbed upward, wing beat by wing beat, he saw his human self still sitting on the stone edge of the landing stage. He flew fast down the estuary, drawn by the emptiness of the open sea and the desire to be lost among the endless rolling waves.
He passed over lines of boats moored bow to stern, then over the clusters of larger craft on swinging moorings all turning together like compass needles to face the incoming tide. Soon he was flying past the wind-carved, rocky outcrops of Bolt Head and when other gulls called from the cliffs his own gull’s voice cried back, a cry that came from another time, from the time before speech, a cry of pure loneliness. He flew on. ‘Out to sea, out to sea,’ beat his wings, keeping on until the land dropped away from sight behind him. He allowed his gull-nature to take over and lost himself in the thrilling pleasure of flying; gliding just above the water, dipping one wing so the tip brushed the surface, wheeling round then sliding