The Way of Light on Water

It started the moment that they were alone in their room, but Catherine felt it coming earlier at the check-in desk when he smiled politely at the receptionist telling them about the hotel’s history. They’d gone straight to the bar, neat suitcases pulled behind them, to meet the bride and groom. For all his charm over coffee she knew that his mind was whirring, seeking out the best ways to puncture the magic woven into the weekend.

“Ghosts,” he said, “Probably just a way for them to justify the ridiculous prices they charge for being a hotel in the middle of nowhere. Here’s your bill Mr Hardy, there’s the three pounds for that bitter coffee you had when you arrived and you’ll see here the 50% surcharge for the haunting you received when we rattled a tin tray outside your door at four in the morning.”

“Mark, don’t start. I know this isn’t your thing, but this week isn’t about you. It’s about my baby brother and his future wife. They love all this stuff, and the place is beautiful. I don’t believe in ghosts any more than you do, but that’s no reason –“

“No reason is right.” As he carefully hangs his shirts in the old oak wardrobe and she has a sudden petulant desire to rush over and crumple them on the floor. Instead she lazily throws her own clothes onto a shelf and sits down to read the itinerary for the weekend. There is early morning yoga, craft sessions making decorations, music and writing workshops and a night time walk through the haunted forest to get through before the wedding by the lake. She holds on to the information, knowing that as soon as he sees it he will have something clever to say about it all. She loves his cleverness, from the day they met their relationship had crackled with challenge and debate, but at moments like this the belligerence of his logic was exhausting. She loves him, but she equally loves her brother who ambles gently through the world, trusting in magic and providence.

“I’m going for a run, I’ll be an hour or so.” Mark is in training for the marathon. He’s raising money for medical research and she’s proud of him for it, admires his adherence to the training. Catherine smiles as he stretches his lithe long legs in preparation for his run and plugs his iPod into his ears.

“I think I’ll just stay here and read for a bit, so we can sort out about dinner when you get in.” She knows Mark can’t hear her, knows the volume of his music is deliberately set to block out conversation, and so she sits back in the armchair, still clutching the wedding plans. Catherine reaches round to pull her long hair into a clip and picks up her book from the night table beside her. Cracking the spine but not looking at the pages, she thinks about her brother, Nick.

Nick is younger than her, enough distance between them for polite suburban circles to murmur about accidents, but her parents always laughed it off and said if that was the case, he was a happy accident. Catherine always thought that was a perfect description of her laid back brother. He bounced through school, neither popular nor unpopular, never distinguishing himself but never falling behind either. Catherine was at university by the time he started high school, and she would return home to see him still buoyant with smiles at a time when she herself had been plagued by bullies and weekend homework. She doesn’t remember feeling any bitterness, and remains glad he has kept his boundless energy and interest in the world.

Their lives took them in different directions; Catherine built a career, met Mark and married him ina tasteful ceremony on a beach in Costa Rica, a place where their paths forked. One of her favourite photos from the wedding is of Nick tugging at the collar of his suit, his thick dark hair falling in his eyes as he looked past the wedding party to the surf breaking on the beach. After the wedding, he left his suit with their parents and took off into the world. It was nearly three years before he returned, but through all that time he regularly sent Catherine postcards, filled with cramped writing detailing his latest revelation or inspiration. People never stopped marvelling that Catherine and Nick were brother and sister. Catherine would stand there, tailored clothes and sleek blonde hair pulled back, while they looked across at her brother with his faded jeans and riot of dark curls perpetually falling in his eyes and laugh. No one ever said anything unkind, but she felt like the butt of that joke. She let people laugh because she knew that underneath it all, he was still the little boy begging for more stories before bedtime to allay his fear of the dark, and she was still the one that wove the magic that protected him from monsters.

They went for dinner that night in a nearby country pub that Mark had found whilst out on his run. One of the things she always loved about him was his ability to charm anyone he met – his was not the easy grace of her brother, but he had an old fashioned air of good manners that made everyone warm to him. So it was in the pub, and before they’d finished their after-dinner coffees Mark had engaged the locals in conversation about the ghosts at the hotel.

“My Mum told me it was a young girl, worked as a servant back when it was a big country house, got seduced by Lord whatever-his-name-was and he knocked her up. She got kicked out in the middle of winter, gave birth in the woods and froze to death. She’s supposed to haunt the back stairs up to what was the Lord’s bedroom, trying to make him recognise his son.”

“No no, that’s not it. I heard it was two brothers both in love with the same woman who poisoned them both so she could run off with the butler –“

“No no, the butler was her brother and they killed him –“

“My guess,” said Mark as he paid the bill, “was that some poor unsuspecting tourist was driven mad by tales of love below stairs and died trying to prove them wrong.”

“That’s good,” the landlord said, “you could have some kind of mysterious ending to make you wonder if he was pushed.”

They left the pub laughing, and Catherine forgot her earlier irritation at Mark. She loved him best when she saw him in company; from a distance his expensive shirts and traditional short back and sides would make him seem - in Nick’s words - “too tucked in.” But his quick wit and unfailing good manners built a bridge and he belonged wherever he was. When they were close to the hotel and walking past the lake, she turned and kissed him. They were still kissing when they heard Nick somewhere in the darkness telling Susie all about a young man plucking the moon from the sky for his lover, only to lose his grasp and have it shatter as it hit the bed of the lake and then drown trying to collect the pieces.

“That brother of yours could do with a science lesson on what happens to light when it hits the water I think.” Catherine smiled, but dropped her hand from his as she walked back to the room.

Later, when she closed her eyes she saw the moonlight shimmering on the lake and drifted easily into sleep. She awoke hours later to the dark and unfamiliar room and sat up with a jolt. A chill pervaded the room and she pulled the blankets up to her chin. Mark didn’t stir as she sat, staring into the darkness. She felt a fear she couldn’t name, like a forgotten nightmare. She thought of Nick and all the nights when as a child he would wake up in the middle of the night screaming. The monsters would recede when he woke, but the terror would cling to him like his sweaty pyjamas and Catherine would be well into a story before he stopped shaking. She sat and shivered until eventually she got out of bed and crept over to the cupboard to find an extra blanket. The door opened with a whisper and she turned abruptly. From the moonlight seeping through a gap in the curtains she could see Mark sleeping and she laughed to herself. She thought of yesterday’s joke about hotel staff manufacturing ghosts with tin trays and knew what he would say about her jumping at shadows, but as she slowly closed the cupboard there it was again, the whisper.

“- has to go. Someone has to go.”

She returned to bed but now the blankets felt hot against her skin and eventually she gave up on sleep and sat in the armchair as the sun rose. When Mark awoke, she told him she was up early to attend the yoga class and handed him a coffee as she left.

Despite the early hour, there were plenty of people at the class.

“Morning Mum,” she smiled. Her Mum looked nervous, like many in the wedding party she’d come out of a sense of obligation to the bride and groom and she seemed self conscious in her new jogging bottoms.

“Morning love. I can’t say I’m sure about all this, but Susie and your brother swear by it, keep trying to get me to go with them to their class and telling me it will be good for my back. I’m not sure how tying myself in knots is supposed to help, but I thought since it was your brother’s wedding...”

He was always “your brother” when her mother talked to Catherine about Nick. She was never sure what that meant – if anything - or when she first noticed it.

“Don’t worry Mum, they won’t make you tie yourself in knots. You’ll like it.”

As the class progressed, Catherine relaxed and the tension of the night before left her. When she closed her eyes the image of the moonlight on the lake returned to her, and she smiled as she thought about her brother’s stories. Then it happened again, the whisper.

“Someone has to go. Someone –“ Catherine was face forward on the yoga mat and felt her neck click with tension as she looked around. She couldn’t make out where it had come from, or who had said it, and then the yoga teacher gently turned her head to the floor again.

“Face down, relax.” She said as she walked past and Catherine only felt the heat of tension rise in the cords of her neck and across her shoulders.

Mark was out running when she returned to the room, and she dressed quickly and went down to breakfast. She wasn’t hungry, but she wanted the noise and clatter of the dining room to surround her, insulate her against the whispering silence. When she got there, Susie was talking earnestly to her Mum about signing her up for yoga classes when they returned from their honeymoon and Nick was wolfing down a cooked breakfast. Catherine poured herself a coffee and sat beside him.

“Good class. You alright? Good time last night?” Catherine held her mug close to her chest and listened to her brother talk about the previous night, how he and Susie had smuggled food from the dining room to make a picnic and sat on a blanket by the lake.

“Weren’t you cold?” she asked.

“Nah. My wise old big sister always told me stories keep you safe and warm, we were fine. Plus it was really hot last night, didn’t you think?”

“Less of the old, Mister.” She smiled and laughed to cover her confusion. She remembered now the heat of the evening as she and Mark had walked back from the pub and wondered how she could have felt the chill undertones of the night at all.

Catherine threw herself into the day’s activities and over the course of the day, convinced herself that the night before had been nothing but a bad dream. She was stressed and tired from work, she thought - a bit run down, no wonder she felt the cold last night. The writing workshop had been all about the local legends, and Mark used it to embellish his tale of the doomed tourist. Even Nick and Susie, who she knew watched TV shows like Most Haunted with the terror of the most genuine believers, laughed easily at the joke. Catherine felt like the only person to see the spite in it, and she left him in the bar with her Dad and Susie’s brother while she changed for dinner.

The voice returned in the shower, and even the blast of her hairdryer couldn’t erase the goosebumps raised on her clammy skin. She could hear the sound of the band rehearsing downstairs filter through the window and she opened it wide to let the music fill the room. As soon as he entered, Mark closed the window and walked into the bathroom while she shakily put on her make up. The sound of the water hitting the tiles in the shower wasn’t enough - she knew it wouldn’t be - and she opened the window again.

There was a bonfire at the barbeque with enough heat and crackle to combat the frigid sigh that had been haunting her, and Catherine relaxed again. Mark told funny stories and people she’d never even met before congratulated her on what a handsome and charming husband she had. Later on in the night, she went to retrieve a cardigan and met Mark heading across the garden on her way back.

“They’re starting on their stories again, love. Ghosts and doomed lovers and all that crap. Fancy nipping back to that pub we went to last night for a drink?”

“But it’s Nick’s wedding. I told you, this is about him and Susie and if they want to sit around a fire telling ghost stories then that’s what we’ll do. He saved for a year to make it to our wedding, and the least you can do is –“

“The least I could do would be nothing, Cath. I think what you mean is that you want me to sit and smile and listen to all their crap. Just because it’s their wedding doesn’t mean I’ve checked my brain at the door, you know.”

“But we should be there for Nick, someone should go –“

There it was again, the cold passing through her this time in a rush to be gone. She turned at looked at him as he stood there – for all his sophistication, he was nothing more than a sulky teenager. Looking him in the eye she said,

“Someone has to go.”

She turned towards the party and shrugged off her cardigan as she walked – it really was a warm summer night – and smiled into the silence as she looked at the moonlight hitting the lake, imagining the stories she could share.

The Wall

Behind mind-made, cobwebbed bricks I cower

From an element beyond my power.

Through strip-lit office gossip I seethe –

Wire pulled shoulders make it so hard to breathe.

Does it help to talk? Spaces in between

Words fall through cracks, forgotten or unseen.

The whisper of a stopped secret unsaid;

Smiles smother screams that echo in your head.

Pour a cork-popped liberal glass; ease sorrow

Then, skull skin to porcelain tomorrow

That ruby release dances on eyes

Tired of tears. Grape and grain aren’t your allies.

Magazines say sport helps – they shriek upbeat

Advice, as if being quick on your feet

And running to stand still causes clouds to break.

It won’t. Your bones will match your heart and ache.

So, I watch movies where morals glisten

Like muscles; sweating seen evil. Listen:

In hard times we need heroes to hold us

And Mark Wahlberg has very broad shoulders.