Fleet ‘Epilogue’

She could see their forms shiver and shimmy. She stepped closer. Her self belief was not unsurprised by what she was seeing: two people bound together by time, place-and not a little love.

The wind whispered again, hushing her doubts aside  as she stepped closer towards them. She could see through their opaqueness: the edge of the lagoon, and the grey-blue waters still and quiet under a fresh western sky. Beyond, and stretching behind them, was the beach itself, like a great arm separating sky and sea, past and present, now and then.

They turned as if they could see her, he beckoned her towards them both. His eyes full with belonging, his hand waving, almost urgently.

She walked again, closer, and yet closer, leaving Cassie whimpering further and further behind.

She walked past them, they flickered and faded as she went by, and as she looked at the gravestone, standing and yet tilted, deep in long grass and covered with tears of moss, lichen and split into a mosaic of cracks and fissures. She reached out and touched the cold, wet, damp stone and rubbed the green fur of centuries, away from the inscriptions and read:

‘Mohune, Emily, b. 1746 d. 1796. Mohune, John, b. Unknown,d.1796.’

She read further, and in doing so, dared not to look at the two figures standing behind her, but feeling them step closer, she read on:

‘Life giveth and taketh, returning all who live to the beckoning sea, waste not your days, and heed the wind, for your chime of hours, is what is left to be.’

She felt a mere whisper, a breath of wind behind her back. She turned slowly fearing what she might not be able to see.

John and Emily stepped back from the gravestone. They had walked from the wreck, left the wounded and broken, the bloated dead that lay strewn across the beach, their bones shattered, their organs pummelled, their bodies abandoned beneath the unforgiving skies, across the  breached and storm -battered berm.

It was too much, knowing they had each other, but others had lost their own  lives, slipping through the storm that had separated what was alive to that which never would be. One to the past, the other to a future neither would remember.

They walked up the beach, to the edge of the marram grass, across their spiky crests, to the dunes that rippled and fell until they came into the lee of the wind, and the pathway that led them through the silver birches and bristles of Scot’s pine, through sheltered oases of silence  towards the nestling church.

‘I’d not remembered this,’ she said,’Our names must be here, unless this is finally the now where we both belong.’

He held her tightly, he couldn’t let her go again. He pointed at the figure still peering at the gravestone. Fading now, she was a mere grey smudge upon the stone, a shadow or pall that seemed to collapse into the gathering darkness.

‘She might,’ he nodded as if only talking to himself, ‘I mean she might remember us before she too turns upon this way again.’

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