Storms - chapter 2

I am releasing a song every month or so for the next little while. Together, these songs will make up an album called ‘Storms’. With each song I’ll release a chapter of a story. Together, the chapters will tell a tale of two childhood friends - Jacob and June. The songs are part of this story. The album and the story each stand alone. But both are expressions of a strange and difficult love. A love that insisted on existing. These words and melodies are the best I could do, even if the love had something else in mind.

2.

The nights are longer here. Moonless. Jacob’s brain is a blackboard covered in code. He sits beside the Leviathan Sea, the water is like skin. It’s unlike any sea Jacob has ever known. There are no waves, no storms. She doesn’t sing, the sea, she only whispers. Tiny whispers of perfect nothingness. Sometimes he can still hear the sea’s song. She sings and he sings along. Singing her sadness to the sun, which is his sadness too. And somehow there is a resolution. He will sleep that night and the dreams of home will come.

But tonight she is silent and if sleep won’t come, then Jacob sleepwalks. Beneath the rainbow cliffs and past the giant white boulders, down into the sawdust valley, never ending, never beginning. The first time he climbed down into the valley, he had to walk with his eyes closed, the vastness and strangeness was too much for him.

But now it is the only thing capable of wiping Jacob’s code-riddled mind clean. It is like a giant duster.

He looks up at a blackboard sky of stars and holds his hand up to the heavens and with his finger joining the dots of light he scribbles in the air a new equation for love. It involves vector motion. Quantum entanglement. Spooky action at a distance.

He was hoping for an inverse relationship between love and distance. Like Gravity, magnetism, heat. Everything else in the universe diminishes with distance. But not love.

The memories chase him, love’s little intergalactic worker bees.

He has a conversation with himself. It is always the same.

Time to move on.

To what though?

What do you want?

I’m looking for something.

What are you looking for?

I don’t know.

You don’t want to know.

Why not?

Because if you knew, you might find it.

But that’s what I want.

No it’s not. It’s the wanting you want. It’s the seeking you love.

Why would I want to want?

Because it’s the best part.

You don’t know me.

I know you better than you know yourself.

The evening is still and the sea is silent and there is no song to distract him from the things he buried in order to forget them. And then like an animal picking up the scent of something irresistible, his mind fixes on a memory. He begins scratching at the dirt in the dark green undergrowth. And there it is. Untouched. Changeless. Standing defiantly between the sand dunes in the gentle sun of an endless winter. As if the wrecking ball of time never came.

Their house.

June sits at her desk writing. She never tires. She sits there day and night tapping away at the keyboard. She stops every now and then and looks out the window at the sea, as if she is finding the words there amongst the waves.

Jacob puts a cup of coffee on the desk beside her. Jimmy is sleeping at her feet and looks up at Jacob with questioning eyes. Is it time?

‘Thanks Creep,’ She says. ‘I’ll be finished soon.’

Jacob knows that she won’t but he doesn’t mind. He likes the sound of the keyboard and the way her thoughts curl up and nestle in her brow. Sometimes he thinks he can see tiny sparks shooting out of her eyes. He watches as she carves worlds out of thin air.

Jacob goes fishing at sunset. That’s when the fish swim close to shore. He walks down to the water with a bucket and fishing rod and Jimmy beside him. He sits on the end of the wooden pier, Jimmy standing guard, the cormorants holding their wings out to dry in the setting sun. He picks mussels from the pillars for bait and casts a line out and sits and waits. There is a storm out at sea, heading directly for him. He predicts twenty minutes until landfall. He waits for it.

First the wind hits him and then the rain. Jacob feels June’s footsteps running down the pier and she comes and says let’s go into the forest behind the dunes, it’s beautiful in the rain. But no fish yet. It doesn’t matter, come on, we’ll have wine for dinner.

The air is thick with earth smell and the trees are bright green, almost fluorescent and the living mountain is teeming with ferns and mushrooms and young blades of grass that poke their tiny heads out of the ground to drink the rain.

June says ‘Look, their mouths are open, Mother Earth is feeding her babies.’

She stops and holds her face up to the sky and opens her mouth and Jacob does the same. They let the raindrops fall on their tongues.

They climb the mountain. She moves faster than him, always a few metres ahead. She turns to him, her hair wet with rain and she stops and waits and then pulls him along for a while until he wrestles his sleeve free and lets her go ahead, so that he can keep watching her. She skips over puddles and jumps off fallen logs, smiling, almost dancing. Jimmy is her shadow, sensing her delight, delighted by it.

Back at the house they light a fire and turn on the radio. They take off their wet clothes and warm each other’s hands and then Julia by the Beatles comes on and June sings along.

Julia, seashell eyes, windy smile calls me,

so I sing a song of love…

Jimmy dances too, bent in half with excitement, turning around in circles and howling, singing along, both of them singing with the same sweetness and longing. Then he lies down beside the fire escargot style, perfectly still except for his eyes which follow their every move. The fire ignites like the fur of a feverish beast.

Their arms are wrapped around each other. Both holding on tight, both hoping for the same thing. Hoping for time to stop. Wishing for different laws of physics. It seems almost possible.

‘Everything is possible,’ Jacob whispers.

June takes a quick deep breath and stops dead still. She looks at Jacob, eyes little lights in the darkness. The eyes of a wild animal deciding whether or not to run.

And then she says, ‘If I said stay, would you?’

After a while Jacob says no. Because he wants to hear her say it.

‘Stay.’

He climbs out of the sawdust valley and makes his way back at the break of day. The Leviathan Sea is full of stars. It writhes ever so slightly in its sleep. Jacob looks out into the pale blue. He closes his eyes. In the distance, there is a storm.

The word is like an arrow. He holds his arms out and waits for it to strike him. He wants to feel it pierce through him. It whistles past.

Stay.