Halocline

The church opened up like a forgotten, long-buried chapter of an old story. The words were not just letters on a page- they were people now. They breathed, and spoke to each other, and smiled as the visitor walked through the open doors. He was a brief part of this long tapestry of struggle, of pain, of straining for truth and reckoning with glory. As a child he remembered being brought inside by his parents and sitting next to them on the pews, enamoured by the sunlight which shone through the panes of glass, those martyrs and nameless faces brought into stark relevance as shadows on the stone floor. The vicar would deliver his sermons with sincerity and a piercing, yet loving gaze. His arms outwards. The congregation attentive and yet somewhat indifferent. As if the truth that was being espoused could not coalesce with the bitter, downcast soul of the community's collective experience. The depths of purpose stunted by the forsaking waters of self-abandon.

Two waters which meet, yet continue apart.

He hadn't walked into this church since then. Some years had passed, twelve to be exact, and the new faces which greeted him looked overjoyed to see someone they didn't recognise. He nodded and smiled meekly, making his way to the nearest corner towards the back, far behind from the pews closer to the front, where he sat with his parents as a child. There was no one he recognised, including the vicar who was making his way to the front, a once older, forthright presence now replaced by a seemingly younger, more adventurous spirit.

This was probably the only place he had not revisited in his hometown since his parents had died. After his father's death at seven, he remembered sitting in his living room, by his mother, as night after night became a ritual of wine-induced hibernation, her body slumped in the darkness, illuminated sparingly by the television set. He would fall asleep next to her, sat upright, a guardian of her external world, whilst her inner world slipped like cold sand through his helpless fingers. Breakfasts stopped being made. A lift to school became less commonplace, and he would walk alone, huddled against the rain. That period of time, which seemed to stretch and wrap itself around his own perceptions, was hard for him to really remember. Their shared loneliness hung in the dreadful air like damp.

Sometime after that, his mother began to rediscover herself through the mire of that grief. She returned, hardened, yet more whole than before. An external warmth to protect the world from her inner iciness. The empty bottles scattered across the floor, weathered rescue attempts, became less and less common, until the faint aroma of cheap wine faded into the periphery, before disappearing altogether. The brief childhood he was permitted was still unobtainable, but he traded it willfully for life to return to which was once dead, long before it was buried. Once the familiar strains of their old life returned, the Saturday days out in the city and the walks through the large wood outside of the estate, when the once neglected routines repossessed their armour of normalcy- hope returned too. The arduous, unthinkable turmoil which had crushed- but not conquered- acted itself as a defence against the temptations of cynicism. Life meant something if even death could not smother it.

Then, his mother died too. The reasons didn't matter. A phone-call, his teary-eyed grandmother at the door, the vacant space where his mother's car was usually parked, a policeman's hand on his shoulder, his useless body guided from one place to another, his belongings on a new bed in a new room, his life under a new sun, in a completely deeper climate of pain. All of these dominoes fell into each other, and all he could do was ride them and watch them fall. The sudden lack of agency, ripped from his hands, was like a trading back of his childhood. But now, his parents were gone, and there was no one left to be a child for.

He remembered standing at the funeral, his mother's gravestone next to his father's, under a stunning blue sky, and feeling nothing as the world around him seemed to weep.

It wasn't long after that, when he was 18, that he left his hometown. His uncle on his father's side offered him a place to stay, away from the only world he had known. Driven by unintelligible motivations, he took the offer, and told his grandparents one evening, plainly, whilst they sipped tea and gave deeply concerned gazes to one another. His uncle could even get him a job, helping him with labouring in the business he owned. They said little and spoke volumes. In the night, he heard his grandfather sit outside his bedroom door, and what sounded like muffled prayers crackling through the wooden frame. He could sense rather than hear the tears falling soundlessly onto the carpet.

And then, a week later, he took the train to Blackpool to meet his uncle, a new life of sorts, or at the very least, an attempt to redirect his future away from the tyranny of his past. It felt as if to stay was to succumb to a sure trajectory, an unfolding of himself which, whether wholesome or destructive, would not be his own. His grandparents hugged him tightly on the platform, promising to visit and call as much as he needed them to. It was only when the train pulled away, and he saw his now surrogate parents wave longingly at his departing carriage, that a quiver of emotion registered in his heart. A momentary spike upwards on a blank, straight line. A brief raindrop in a vast, and dormant sea.

He lived and worked with his uncle for 5 years, and quickly accustomed to this new life of long days working with his hands, being blown by the sea breeze, and assaulted by the sun and rain alike. His social circle was of mainly people his uncle knew and had developed himself in his trade, often quietly observing and drifting in between conversations, sipping cold beer by the beach, stumbling home with his uncle early every Saturday morning. There were times that his mother and father would feature in conversations between him and his uncle, but it became more and more rare as time passed on. Fragments of conversations on some intensely alcohol-fuelled evenings often resurfaced the morning after, like an endangered mammal from a hole in the ground, but they were left there, an act of preserving its sanctity as well as their own embarrassment. It became a predictable routine, but one which was welcomed by him. His grandparents called, and visited fairly often, but he never returned home in the entire ten years. They would walk on the beach together when they visited, ice creams in hand, his uncle playing the jester to an often unwilling audience. When there was time alone with his grandparents, they would steadily, tentatively, try and approach the beast that none of them dared awaken, try and caress it out of its slumber, will it to life without aggravating its burst open, ravenous heart. Sometimes it worked. Other times, they left darkened and dripping in the creature's wet blood. And he would bathe in it as they left.

Life continued like that for a long time. There were a handful of times where his youthful, yet mysterious edge magnetically drew members of the opposite sex to him, and he went with it, like the dominoes falling, one receptive glance and a smile away from another page turning in his tapestry. They never lasted long, and he wasn't interested in them lasting longer than they needed to. One young woman, Elisa, leaving for the last time from his single room at his uncle's house, wrote down her experience, to catalogue it, to carve meaning out of its plain, yet malleable foundation. She wrote: 'Clear, blue eyes, a powerful, unmovable heart. If eyes were windows to the soul, those clear windows reveal not a lot at all. Unless, all there is behind is nothing.'

When it reached near the end of the 5th year, he received a call from his grandmother one evening, where the subject of the conversation quite quickly rose to the surface. She held back tears as she said that she was missing him. She missed not seeing him where he belonged, she said. Christmas was coming up, and she wanted to invite him back home, at least just for the Christmas period. At first, he didn't say anything, and tried to bring to his lips what was unclear and distant in his mind. There was a small but significant tumour of guilt which he suddenly felt, and he gave into this too. He managed to get time off work for a couple of weeks, with the help of his uncle, and took the train back a week later, his bag packed next to him on his seat.

The first thing that struck him as the train pulled into his hometown, and his grandparents picked him up and brought him home, was how little had changed. The dilapidated walls, the grey skies, the merciless swing of the resilient northern spirit. Everything which had remained permanent in his mind mostly aligned. By the 23rd of December, he had walked around and visited the key places of which he had felt drawn to come back into the presence of. The graveyard, only the second time he had visited, this time his feet crunching through the snow, rather than the land enshrined by a pulsating sun. He stood, alone, before his parents, the words on their gravestones half-obscured by blankets of white, and the thin mist of tears in his eyes. Words were spoken that floated down like the flakes of snow, slowly dancing and sinking into the earth. He shuffled as close as he could to them, his hands on the solid stones. A shivering bridge of life between motionless, unwavering death.

Time here seemed to slow down. The days passed like unwilling, disobedient children, clinging to the final hours of each day, yearning for that final hour of 12 to tick to the yet unborn figure of 13. He spent his few days walking around, shielding against the snow, rediscovering this wasteland of white, with burning, smouldering eyes. The woods he used to walk around with his mother, his childhood home, the high street, all the places which were now being breached and intruded upon by his adult self. Each step he took was another drop of memory bleeding into his environment.

By Christmas Eve, drained and seemingly aged a century, he spent the day with his grandparents, shielded inside from the elements. By the evening, when they were fast asleep, he poured himself a large Baileys and sat alone downstairs. As he saw the hanging bells on the Christmas tree, it struck him that he had forgotten one place he had not yet revisited. The local church where his parents used to take him, so long ago.

-

He sat and listened to the sermon, and watched as the vicar danced his dance, sung his song, talking of the hope of the world and the hope of Christ, in a world where hope was imprisoned within naivety. It was us, the vicar said, who has contained hope within its prison, and Christ wants to show us how that hope exists. In the real world. The congregation observed, yet also participated in this strange ritual of humility and discipline.

He imagined the world the vicar was talking about, coming and sitting down, as a person, next to him. Making his way down from the pulpit, a final remnant of kingship. Putting his arm around him. Yet occupying different, and irreconcilable spaces.

This world of hope, which was constant, whether it was true or not, met his world and stood apart. They shook hands, but they couldn't share the same space. He listened and felt the depths, the profound density of this world which was being presented to him, with all its grief and blood, its joy and transcendence, echoing from his childhood. His world was different. There was grief and blood, sure, but they were a currency which could not buy the hope which was being offered. Not yet.

That kind of exchange took time. These oceans of truth, side by side, together, vast masses of density and power, occupying this same brutal, indifferent earth. Perhaps, time itself can change the weight of these things. In time, the silent, immovable intensity of the world proposed to him would invade, leaving him sinking, finally, to its bed. And the world he had been taught to hold onto would sink with him.

As he left the church, walking back to his grandparent's house, snow began to fall again. Every step was a new imprint in this salt of heaven, and the path he had made followed him all the way back home.