A Sighting
by Harriet Sandilands
From where I was sitting on the rock, it sounded like applause. I coughed the sand out from the back of my throat and looked up towards the parade where the applause had come from. On the boardwalk a head of back-brushed white hair, a blue Disney T-shirt and pleated white tennis shorts. Shhhhht! She hissed at me. I realised I was still humming. Shhhht! She clapped simultaneously, sending what I thought were quite mixed messages. I searched for her eyes through the hazy sunset, lifting a flat hand to my eyebrows in an unintentional salute.
She jabbed her finger at the horizon and with her other hand made an undulating gesture, as though she had a snake-shaped puppet on her hand. She jabbed again at the horizon, this time a little angrily I thought, jerking her head up in the direction of a conic yellow buoy, shouting something at me I didn’t understand.
Now freed of the notion that she was a fan of my singing, I followed her finger out to sea. Apart from the yellow buoy I saw nothing. I looked back to see if she might inadvertently give me another clue. Instead, she rolled her eyes skyward. I think she tutted.
My mouth was very dry and so, to retain moisture, I pursed my lips shut and thought about how I could avoid letting on that I hadn’t seen what she was pointing at. But that made her really cross and she started involving her whole body in the task of drawing my attention to whatever it was she had seen. She wriggled and writhed with her whole self in the manner of someone trying to explain to an extraterrestrial what a woman is, alternately stroking her waist and shaking her hips, punctuating the performance with decisive little pokes at the offending horizon.
As a child I saw a ghost. The thrill of this is obvious – an impossible man glimpsed out on the deck of an old warship, as though submerged in time. My mother, who was with me, claimed not to have seen anything at all. I have since learned that children nonchalantly straddle worlds, while adults balk at the thresholds. The underlying terror of seeing a ghost is not so much fear of the spectre itself, as the unsettling idea that you have seen something that no-one else saw, which means you have probably lost your mind. Sea monsters are only scary in that they lurk at the very limits of imagination.
I was aware of the woman still willing me towards her line of sight from the boardwalk. Her persisting desire to catch my eye thrummed in tiny vibrations across the sand. Eye contact, I learned from an early age, is usually the beginning of the end. I didn’t turn around. Like a toddler who hides simply by clamping their eyelids down, I childishly thought the woman might forget I was there altogether and release me from the game, if I ignored her for long enough.
Shhht! Shhht!
My stomach sank, a little lead anchor thrown to the bottom of the ocean, landing on the bottom in a small muffled thud.
I considered making a facial expression that would suggest I’d seen it. I’ve faked it many times before. We have to pretend to survive. Two seagulls fought each other for the remains of a washed up cuttlefish a few feet away.
But what face would I make? And what if it was the wrong one? The face appropriate for a shark fin would be one thing – perhaps accompanied by a silent scream. But the face for a floating turd would be quite another. Lying was too risky.
I scanned the beach again to see if there was anyone else around, but there was no-one. Even the two seagulls had taken off, their wings leaving a trail of gentle moans on the salty air. I felt desolate and deeply alone. My stomach sank further into my groin and my heart took its place in the pit of my belly. Desperate to distract myself from this feeling, I started humming again. My tail twitched in discord.
They say that the loneliest feeling of all is when you feel isolated, even in the company of another. This is how humans preempt their break-up stories or explain why they turned to Buddhism. But the saddest thing about this situation was that the loneliness I felt was not my own. I had caught it and mopped it up, absorbed through some kind of osmosis between me and the Disney T-shirted maniac on the parade. Maybe it was the melancholia of the tune I was singing, or the way the light reflected off the water in a million little rhombus shapes, or the fact that we were the only living things as far as the eye could see, or the fish could swim.
Just occasionally you can show all of yourself to someone. Peel back the scales of your skin to reveal the purest pearl of your existence which has been rolled and rolled from many grains of grit, misunderstanding and long stretches of deep blue quiet. It is almost always a stranger to whom you can entrust this pearl, just momentarily, just once or twice in a lifetime. Someone who will never see you again, who may doubt that they ever saw you at all, but who – in that moment – demands the absolute truth of you, for your own sake and for theirs.
So, I hauled myself off the rock and writhed back to the water across the sand, thirsty, gulping at the ocean’s cup, my tail thrashing and flashing in the sunlight as I swam away, knowing she was watching every move.
BIO
Harriet Sandilands is a writer and art therapist living in the “magic mountain” of Montserrat in Northern Spain. Her stories and poetry have most recently been published in Porridge, Litro and Talking About Strawberries All Of The Time. Her short poetry collection Amiss (a series of poems which omit the letter e) was published by Palabrosa in 2023, when she was also long listed for The London Magazine short story prize. Harriet was last year’s headline act for International Poetry Day in her home town Manresa, reading a series of “postcard poems” from the pandemic and beyond. She co-facilitates writing workshops under the umbrella Write Where You Are and almost always remembers to write down her dreams first thing in the morning.
