Aklo on the Beach
(published ‘Ocean Gypsy’ 1993)
The Ocean was a whitewash upon a billowing blue skin.
Aklo stood at its edge, delving the stunted sea-snakes of his bare toes in the umber loam. Grit became uncomfortably engrained under their helmets, causing them to wriggle almost without his volition, yet feeling delicious in the warm mulch of the beach.
“You know she never existed.”
The one who had spoken to Aklo was nameless. Counsellors required no definition: personalities were mere impediments to gaining empathy with their subjects. And, after all these years, the Counsellor knew Aklo better even than she knew herself. Aklo was a handsome man, whilst the counsellor was sexless, deemed a ‘she’ for convenience of reference. In a different world of circumstances, she would have been a beautiful woman.
Now, far from the city, where Aklo worked as a clerk in a tanning factory, they had turned for a re-enactment of Aklo’s holiday romance: one that had occured two seasons ago: his one break with tradition, having persuaded his counsellor to remain behind in the city. Sometimes men had to break loose and live an unwatched life. And, on that occasion, Aklo had fallen in love for the first and only time: with somebody or something called a ‘she’ that had emerged from the ocean.
“I told you she was a dream - now you can come back with me and get on with the rest of your life.”
Aklo nodded sadly. The breeze brushed his hair with an invisible hand. He turned towards the rearing cliff behind: not that they had come that way to reach the beach, for their rowing-boat had trenched the shingle nearby: a shape of dark shadow in the increasing coastal dusk.
But what was that? Aklo pointed at the boat, drawing the counsellor’s attention from the hypnotic rhythm with which oceans could still imbue the mind. A creature was evidently sconced inside the boat, since he had caught the fleeting glimpse of a flailing fishtail - as if its owner could not control that part of its body. A flinch. A flurry. Both the fishtail and Aklo’s heart had such words in common.
He felt his neck where the love-bite stung, even from two seasons ago: a double puncture which kept him awake at night with dreams that he knew he wasn’t really dreaming: perhaps dreams without any dreamer at all. The twin ruptures were weeping a moist undertow of thin blood. His eyes often seeped tears of that consistency, especially upon waking from the ownerless dreams. Yet today was no dream. Today was real. Today was make-or-break-time.
The counsellor tried to restrain Aklo from immediately running towards the rowing-boat. She knew that, if this were all a dream, such an action would be the easiest way of waking: and she had interests in Aklo staying asleep or, otherwise, she might end up not having existed at all. Despite possessing a seamless memory of her past, almost from birth’s door itself, she could now have no confidence in its reality. The city. Aklo’s tanning factory. Her counsellorship. All things could be thrown into doubt at a moment’s notice.
Her single dread was that a creature had stowed itself in the boat whilst they were otherwise engaged: mooning at the ocean or picking crustaceans from the cliffside scree or trawling the waves with skimpy nets or laying lobster-pots in deep rock-pools or giving each other salty kisses that did not stir the loins but simply gave comfort and companionship between a man called Aklo and a sexless one called nothing.
And if that creature within the boat indeed proved to exist, one with huge fishtail and a woman’s perfect breasts and face of sweet glory - the very creature that Aklo had described falling in love with two seasons before - well, then to put it bluntly, all bets were off.
As she watched Aklo slowly approach the boat, across the squelchy, star-strewn beach and eventually disappearing behind a curtain of night-spray, she found herself waking fitfully through the fucus and spume of her own face to see that twin lachrymals had turned to bone in Aklo’s mouth. She could not feel her squirmy toes. An oar was sticking into her back like a fin, as his real kiss was lowered to her mouth... skirting the neck towards the breasts... and then below.
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