The Horse

It is the end. It is the beginning.

Photo by Fethi Benattallah on Unsplash

I am working on a short book. I thought I might offer you an extract here. The story is told by the same character from two very different times in their life, in alternating chapters, one from the current day and one from the past. I’d be interested to hear what you think.

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Hope you enjoy

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It is 1978.

I am out beyond the breakers, swimming way out, far from the safety of the shallows, rising and falling in the slow motion bounce of a thousand mile surge where cold-blooded ocean creatures stalk their prey, my legs dangling into the deep darkness, the distant dunes coming in and out of view, far out of my depth, vulnerable and quivering, lost in the oceanic uncertainty, carried out further and further on the current so the treeless hills grow smaller and only the pummelling sun holds fast.

Above me seagulls are sailing the offshore winds that carry the shouts right past me into the vast emptiness of the horizon. On the beach my parents are shouting and running along the shoreline, then there is nothing but the turquoise ocean, then they are back casting animated furious gestures beckoning me to return, then nothing but the frothy sea, then they are back, face to face, shouting at each other as I rise and fall and rise and fall in the frothy salty mountainous heaves of the mighty Pacific.

Then out of nowhere comes a commotion of snorts and splashing that break the rhythms and I turn and see a horse where no horse should be, out here, a horse swimming by to who knows where, its powerful head and soaking mane sparkling with sea water in the pelting sun, its legs and hooves shimmering below the glassy surface, its eyes wild and furious, and the thought rises that my parents are calling to this horse, calling it back to the safety of the beach so that it won’t drown and sink into the deep dark folds of time forever more.

And with that thought, that they are calling to the horse and not me, just like that my breathing turns rapid and shallow and I am drenched in panic and the relentless ocean soaks my flagging reserves and I know there are no boats coming, no hands reaching, no strong arms pulling me aboard to escape this oceanic loneliness, there is nothing but flailing and descending into the void as the cold deep beckons me to join the endless march deathward and I am tightening and gasping and splashing and sinking.

But my chin is pushing upwards toward the sun and my legs are kicking for all they are worth and my bare hands are grasping and gripping and grabbing at anything and then out of the blue comes this horse and I’m knocking against its flanks and reaching and there is its mane and I am holding and heaving and sliding across its back and I wrap my arms around its neck as it swims through the ocean like it’s trotting across the heavens and suddenly I am pulsating with searing relief as the horse takes a nonchalant turn toward the beach and carries me back to my life.

And there we are, the gorgeous black horse and I holding on for dear life, standing on this wild beach like a living statue, shimmering and sparkling in the sun, impervious to the shouts and curses that blow beyond the horse and I as we are buffeted by the blustery wind.

And there I am being wrenched down from the horse and dragged down the beach by my father. And there is the horse now casually cantering away, past my brother and sister, who stare in embarrassment and disbelief, following the horse with their small heads as it trots past all the families huddling amongst themselves, thankful they are not us, watching the spectacle as we gather our towels and cool box and bits and pieces like fools, our faces firmly facing forward marching toward the car in which we drive away looking at nothing but the road ahead.

It’s as if we cannot open our eyes, as if we are being propelled along, as if we are in a film, or a novel, and have no choice but to perform these roles, pushed around by circumstance, as if we are not creatures with free will but merely matter tumbling along in an avalanche of unbidden happenings that will batter and shape us into the people we eventually become.

And all I can think, as my father drives in silence and my mother sits staring at the road ahead, saying nothing, absolutely nothing, and my sister and brother lean away from me on the back seat under their damp towels, each looking out the side window, is what if I hadn’t reached that horse’s mane? Or if the horse hadn’t passed so close in that endless ocean? Or if I hadn’t gone and swam out beyond the breakers just to see what it was like to escape the beach and get some relief from the endless tension, to get a view of all the families dotted between the dunes and surf, with all their impenetrable surely wonderful relationships, if I hadn’t swum out there to see those families and wonder how it was, this life, for them?

And as we drive toward home the silence is volatile, volcanic, a portent of something unpredictable and yet oh so predictable. Our little pressure cooker car, filled to the brim with family, driving along the summer roads past all the other cars, each a sovereign world unto itself, while our car, straining at the seams under all this heavy silence is ferrying the one that will be blamed, although we are all to blame, there is one of us for whom the bell tolls, for whom the fingers are waiting to point and upon whom the silence will finally erupt.

And in this film, this novel, this seemingly inescapable role from which none of us can escape, that one is me.

And finally our car drives through our wrought iron gates and beneath the ornamental gum and umbrella trees that line the driveway and then stops beside the house and there we sit in still silence except for the simple sound of a lawn mower on this summer’s day coming from a neighbours garden that sounds like a small plane flying away to some place better.

My father gets out of the car and my mother gets out of the car and my brother and sister get out of the car and they all walk toward the house in their swimming outfits looking vaguely ridiculous and my brother turns to glance at me with a look of warning and lustful pleasure while I stay in the car waiting and hoping for a horse to appear from nowhere and carry me away.

And then I hear the back door slamming and shouting coming through the kitchen window, and then no sound at all and I am straining to listen with all my being and it’s almost a relief when another shout and another retort and the crash of something thrown or knocked over comes sailing into my ears.

A full blooded hollering erupts that abruptly stops with only the sound of a lawnmower to fill the shocking silence. And I feel myself being drawn towards the house. Something is calling me. Something dark and raw and incomprehensible. And I think that maybe I can stop this avalanche, me, the flawed one, the destroyer of days, the condemned one with nowhere else to go but toward the house, maybe I can stop this unstoppable avalanche of events. Maybe I can hold up my hands and some magic will happen and our eyes will open and the film will end and we won’t be those people we are becoming.

And so I get out of the car in my swimming shorts with my towel over my head under the relentless sun beating down upon me and I walk toward that cherry red door, slammed against the world, behind which who knows what is going on, and I am breathing the same shallow panicked breaths as in the thousand mile swell of the deep ocean, and I reach out to turn the handle and open the door and there in front of me on the kitchen floor are my parents shipwrecking themselves on the rocks of their own fate. Screaming words that can never be unsaid, throwing fists that can never be unthrown, deafening each other in the Great Family Explosion that ejects all their unspoken words out into the universe like a geyser of demons as tears upon tears glaze our faces like sticky buns and the terrible truth of it all breaks our hearts.

It is the end.

My life is collapsing around me as I stand in the kitchen doorway pissing in my swimming shorts on the very same day I was rescued from drowning by a black horse that came out of nowhere to carry me back to my life so that I might be here to witness this unexpected yet so predictable catastrophe.

It is the end. It is the beginning.

And in this fateful moment as my life is exploding into tiny shards some part of me is grabbing at all the broken pieces and pushing them deep into the chambers of my heart so that for years and years to come I can feel the pain and confusion that forever slices through every single moment of this day.

It is the beginning.

It is the moment that will eventually become mythical and puzzling and enigmatic, that will turn into folklore and be forever retold, forever reworked by each of one of us in this room, the moment that flipped the world from sailing familiar seas to being lost in unchartered waters, the moment from which we can never return.

It is a long time ago and the beginning of what we have all become.

And there you are, a long, long time later, looking at me and smiling and asking me to tell you about that moment so long past and I shake my head for I have no idea how to tell you that moment has never ended.

And I have no idea how to tell you this story is just another story in the never ending stories that we tell ourselves, that we tell each other, stories we tell on grand scales that change the path of history, and stories we tell in quiet whispers that reach only a few ears amongst the few.

I have no idea how to tell you that this moment, this terrifying private moment was prescient to what the world would become, has become, that this small story can be told on a grand scale about all of us, not just a small boy pissing his swimming outfit and glazing his face with tears, years and years ago, but all of us, the whole world, for now we are all witness to the chaos of truths and lies and contradictions and violence and disruption and crises and impending collapse that comes from anywhere and everywhere at all times and is so normal that the hyper-anxiety of that terrifying private moment has become the daily bread for all of us.

And I have no idea how to tell you how frustrated I am that we keep telling these stories. The dangerous and divisive and violent and thoughtless and oh so carefully thought through stories that will end in nothing, literally nothing, but one stupid ego ridden maniac screaming that he, for it is always a he, that he has finally plundered everything.

No wonder I stood there pissing into my swimming shorts. I was witnessing the momentous collapse of my life in the Great Family Explosion, perhaps I knew I was also witnessing a portentous foretelling of the great collapse of all things. Perhaps I found out right then and there on that fateful day that the world is held together by love and compassion and selflessness and kindness and without those things there is only chaos and madness and catastrophe and death.

And even though I have no idea how to tell you all of this I do tell you and you laugh at me and say, “But you’re a writer, all you do is reduce the wonder and majesty into chains of words strung together to make your little stories,” and you laugh and I smile and shake my head and laugh too because you’re right and because I love your infectious beautiful soul.

“So what happened then,” you ask, “after the Great Family Explosion,” and you laugh at the expression and you say it with bulging eyes because it was so long ago and I seem so much older now.

So I tell you that the Great Kitchen Storm ended as abruptly as it started, and then my mother and my brother and my sister and I were suddenly in that car, still in our swimming outfits, covered in blood and tears, and we drove away from my father, the only father I ever knew, and away from that house, the only house I ever knew, and away from that town, the only town I ever knew, and away from that country, the only country I ever knew, and away from that life, the only life I ever knew. And I tell you that soon afterwards tickets were purchased and luggage was packed and there were airports and aeroplanes and eventually a strange new place appeared before us, a place that wasn’t anything like the old world, a place that we now had to call home. A place that seemed devoid of horses. But not devoid of stories. Oh no. Not this place. This place was the wellspring of stories and lies.

And then I tell you there is plenty of time to tell this story, there is no hurry, that I’ve said so much already and you laugh and smile and I smile and pull you close. It is time to sleep.

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PART 2 -