He went on the walk every day. You left the house through the sliding doors at the front, crossed a garden of tangled shrubs and plants and, when you reached the cliff edge, you pushed your way through a bush and there was the hidden entrance to the path. You followed the cliff edge for a long time, the sea sleeping way below, that rustle as it rolled over in its bed, that sigh. Eventually you were forced inland, through a forest of twisted black trees and green grass, and it was this forest that delivered you out on to the headland. It was sixty feet high, but still the spray came vaulting over the edge, a fright every time because you couldn’t hear it coming, it was like someone jumping out from behind a door. He found a flat rock near the edge and sat and watched the wind lift clouds of fine spray off the top lips of the waves.
One day Aunt Yvonne followed him out. He heard her as a movement in the grass behind him and didn’t need to turn. He’d known that, sooner or later, she would come. She sat down next to him and locked her arms round her knees.
He’d been thinking, and now he turned to her. ‘When my mother died, where did she go?’
‘She went into the ocean.’ Yvonne took his hand in hers. ‘She loved the ocean. It was in her blood, just like it’s in yours.’ She lit a cheroot and suddenly the world smelled like the inside of a cupboard that hadn’t been opened for years. ‘When you go back to the ocean,’ she said, ‘all the bad things you’ve ever done, they’re washed away. You’re purified, cleansed, ready for the next life. You know that skull you found?’
He nodded.
‘Remember how pure and white it was?’
He remembered.
‘Well, that’s what the ocean does,’ she said. ‘Takes out all the dirt, all the stains of having been alive.’
‘You mean, like a washing machine?’ he said.
She laughed. ‘Just like a washing machine.’
That night, in his room, he took the bird’s skull and held it under the lamp. Aunt Yvonne was right. There was only pure white bone. No trace of anything else. Slowly he raised the skull to his nose and sniffed. There was no smell. He wished he could dive down to the ocean bed and watch his mother’s soul rising from her pure white bones. But it struck him suddenly that he could no longer remember what she looked like. He wouldn’t have known how to recognise her.
During the second week, the weather changed and all the pale colours he remembered from two years before came back. The yellows, the whites, the eggshell-blues. Yvonne began to paint again. After their dawn swim together, she would retire to her studio in the east wing of the house, her hair wrapped in a twist of bright silk, a box of cheroots under her arm. Once he heard the click of her studio door he knew he’d be alone till noon. There were no rules for how to use the time; she expected him to make his own. He filled the first days searching the dunes for shells and skulls or curling into their soft hollows with a book. He was lying on his back one morning after swimming, one hand draped against his belly, the other bent behind his head. His trunks had slipped down and the sun seemed to tug on his blood, he felt his penis swell and push against the damp wool and then, like someone in a trance, he didn’t know what he was doing and yet he knew what to do, he built the hot sand into a mound beneath his towel and, turning on to his stomach, began to rub himself against the mound, his legs like scissors, his eyes tight shut, and then that part of him seemed to leap, the sun’s red through his eyelids vanished, he saw green, cool green, water fathoms down, the gloom inside a wood, the stalks of plants, and the breath came out of him ah-ah-ah-ah-ah like something tumbling down a flight of stairs. When he opened his eyes again, the air was blue glass, and a man in a tall hat and a black coat stood on the sand, between him and the ocean. The man raised his stick in greeting, then walked on. Nathan watched until the man grew thin and warped in the fierce air, then he let his breath out and stood up, legs shaking. As he rinsed his towel in the ocean he wondered who the man was. Could he be one of the strangers Dad had talked about?
Walking back to the house that afternoon, he looked up through the bushes and saw Yvonne standing on the verandah. She wore a dress that was as green as an empty bottle of wine and her hands were smeared with red, he thought for a moment that she’d hurt herself, then he knew that it was just paint. She was leaning forwards from the waist, her head straining on her neck, as if her house was an island and she was scouring the horizon for a wisp of smoke, as if she was hoping she might be saved. He stood below her, unseen. It was a still day. All he heard was one gust of wind passing through the chimes like something breaking slowly, beautifully, inside her. He entered the house through the back door and began to prepare some sandwiches for lunch. ‘Well,’ Yvonne said, when she walked into the kitchen a few minutes later, ‘at least they won’t have paint on them for once,’ and he smiled at her over his shoulder and, if it was a stranger that he’d seen on the beach, well, he thought, at least I didn’t talk to him, at least nothing happened.
The next day, towards sunset, he knocked on the door to her studio and walked in. Aunt Yvonne stood in front of her black easel, palette and paintbrush in her fists like sword and shield, her body concealed inside a pale-blue tent. She always worked with the windows open and, that evening, a wind had lifted off the ocean. Nothing in the room was still. Everything fluttered, flapped and rattled. The dried flowers, the drawings on the walls, her hair. The effect was less one of walking into a room than of suddenly finding oneself travelling at high speed in an open car. He had to shout to make himself heard.
‘Yvonne?’
She waved him over. When he was standing beside her, she jabbed at the easel. ‘What do you think?’
He looked at the picture. Lots of white and blue balls, trapped between lines. At first he thought of noughts and crosses, and then he realised there weren’t any crosses. Then he didn’t know what he thought.
‘What’s it supposed to be?’ he asked her.
‘It’s whatever you want it to be.’
‘Don’t you know?’
She shook her head. ‘Have you got any ideas?’
He looked at the picture for longer, then he looked at the others, stacked in piles against the wall. In some of the pictures there were lots of balls, in others there was only one: a white ball on a blue background, for instance; a red ball on grey. He thought he understood these better. He went back to the picture on the easel and suddenly he had it. ‘It’s moons,’ he said, and felt sure that he was right.
‘Moons,’ she said. And folded her arms across her chest and tilted her head on one side. ‘Moons,’ she said again and, walking round to the back of the picture, she wrote MOONS on it, and the date. There was her grin and then there was his. Hers wide and delighted. His still uncertain, but slowly becoming less so.
September came and still the weather held. Nights when even a single sheet seemed too heavy on his skin. Yvonne took to sitting on the kitchen floor with the fridge door open and a tall drink clinking in her fist. He could tell that time had passed by looking in the mirror; his blond hair had bleached almost white, his nose was powdered with freckles and he could see pale half-moons in the bays between his fingers. He felt his weeks with Yvonne had washed everything clean out of his head. It was almost as if he’d gone to the bottom of the ocean too, he could imagine what that was like now, he could almost imagine his mother there. His head felt like the gull’s skull he’d packed so carefully in his case. It felt empty, picked clean, pure. Leave it outside and it would whistle in the wind. Drop it into the sea and the fish would swim through its eyes and ears like a game. He could hardly remember what he was returning to. On the drive back down to Moon Beach, Yvonne reminded him.