Then it is footfalls pinging in the dark, mine and his, his and mine, spiraling down through the dark, dank, sea-spattered brickwork, grey harbor glimpsed in chinks and gaps, until at last I emerge, alone, huffing, into the tarpaulin-shrouded boatyard with its towering piles of timber, raw mast and spar and decking, giant spools of canvas, rigging, the boats themselves up on blocks, waiting for spring. Skeletal creak and twang, clank of winch, soughing of wave, that is all; not even a laugh: he has evaded me, again.
Such a long walk it is, back up the hill, to the remains of my shopping, which I’ve dumped in my pursuit: the salmon stiff with cold, egg yolks stuck to the cobblestones, onions muddied but salvageable. Lurking then around the door of my father’s shed I hear at last the hot, reassuring breath of the bellows; he is working again, on his rightful work, that is what I think, creating his glass. His glass ocean. I do not try to enter. I am distracted anyway, with puzzles of my own.
• • •
What a peculiar thing it is, this admiring and being admired. For me especially. After all, I’m an anomaly. Not like other girls my age. Though I don’t know it.
If I knew others my age, I’d know. But I don’t. They aren’t where I am. Very few girls like me, out there on the streets.
I am otherwise and elsewhere.
• • •
As I am still young and ignorant, this is not yet painful.
• • •
It is he who comes to me, in the end. I return from marketing one day to find him crouched like a small, brown animal, very still, in the deep bruise of shadow at the corner of my father’s shed. With his northern knack for colorless ubiquity he has very nearly succeeded at blending in there, though the windy flap-flap of the buttonless knees of his plain-woven knickerbocker pants gives him away, so that I hear before I see him as I round the corner out of Bridge Street; but then I do see him, with his eye pressed up to a gap in the wall of my father’s shed.
• • •
He with his mischievous sneer, his eyes the color of water, of sky, of no color at all. He will press me up against the brick walls and half-timbers in the alleys, between the market stalls where the sellers hawk their marrows and crockery and bolts of cloth. We will linger together in the recessed doorways and cobbled yards until the housewives chase us out, brandishing their buckets and their brooms; or in between the higgledy-piggledy pews in ancient crumbling St. Mary’s Church, where the ossified finger bone of the saint herself reposes on a cushion inside a glass and silver reliquary. Many times we’ll gaze upon it with a kind of silent, half-mocking awe, then run away, giggling, jostling, tickling each other nervously in the armpits, on the ribs, around the belly. We’ll fear the saint is judging us, perhaps; touching us, unbearably, with luck, or with madness.
His eyes the color of ocean, of air, of no color at all. His indistinctness a distinction. It is so easy to lose him. With his help I will continue the exploration of who and what I am and who I might become, until he decides that he is done with me again, and disappears until next time.
Until next time. Whenever that is, it all will have changed by then—next time, the when and where of it, all will be up in the air, and myself, too, back arched against the ancient bricks, unseeing of the future.
• • •
He saunters as if being caught spying at my father’s shed is nothing.
What’s doing in there? This nonchalantly said.
I am openhearted, unaccustomed to spies.
He’s making, say I. Making glass.
As if this, too, is nothing to marvel at. This as well as the strange yet tender experiment we are about to launch upon, by which we will create, with fumbling hands and lips, the outlines of each other, and ourselves.