Excerpt: Capricorn's Moon

Do you accept the conditions? she heard the voice within her and it was faint from all the times she'd had to promise it into silence because it never seemed to approve of anything she did or had done for a while, because she had forgotten about the deep soul search that had brought her so close, forgotten it now in the great longing for a love that could be all hers, that would not leave, not die, not abuse… that would be as father and mother to her in ways her parents had never been, that would be as sister and brother, that would be everything she had ever wanted and missed and not had, the be all and end all of a life’s worth of searching.

She closed her eyes and what she took as her soul’s longing answered yes.

Are you sure?

Yes! She opened her eyes and the face from the dream swam into focus against the deep blue sky that smiled on her body where it lay golden brown against the pale yellow of towel and brilliant white of sand, basking in the glow of afternoon sun that felt so good but could never be more than a poor substitute for the warmth of the love that she ached for, that she knew she deserved, that she had had glimpses of, and that had always vanished in the mirage of an endless desert that described the barrenness of her twenty-two years. As it did now.

She closed her eyes once more, and her heart with it. The voice, the promise she had taken from it, even the conditions, all were mirage. As usual. Sighing audibly now, she shifted her position slowly, slowly turning onto her left side, then all the way over until she was lying on her belly. And between the long sighs she brushed away the small whisper that asked if she would really sell her soul for the dream. Brushed it away as she brushed away the teardrops that squeezed from behind tight shut lids, as she brushed the sand off her arms, as she brushed the bikini straps off her shoulders after untying them, as she brushed the…

She felt it first, a slight shifting of sand beside her, and the sound that accompanied it was as if the sand was answering her sigh for sigh. Her eyes popped open and she turned her head to her right and there, lying on a bright red towel placed right up next to hers, smiling into her eyes were the eyes that belonged to the face that had haunted her since the dream.

You, she breathed.

You, he teased, and reached across her. Is this your tanning lotion? He held the cocoa brown plastic bottle up for her to see.

Yes, she nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

May I? he asked and it was an obvious rhetorical question because he was already spreading the lotion over her back. And she felt that he did not spread it so much as he massaged with it, he caressed with it, he made love with it. And her eyes closed and her body sighed, yes, yes, yes. And the small voice that had scarcely reached her consciousness such a short time earlier, and the questions and the conditions it had irked her with, and the love longings of her unfulfilled lifetime were a thing of the past as she succumbed to the pleasure of his warm hands on her shoulders and on her back and on the back of her legs, and to his fingers teasing the upper and lower and outer and inner edges of material whose sole purpose it was to keep her decent on this public beach. And yes and yes and yes…

And late, late as the sun lost its heat and the breeze cooled the white sand and the soft murmur of surf turned first to a muted roar and then to the thunder and crash and doom that signalled high tide, she regained a sense of herself and the other, of the public beach, of the crashing tide — and she flinched and moaned and pulled away from him, and he looked at her and drew back, sat up again and asked: Do you want some fish and chips? And she nodded, content to let him go for a moment, and he kissed her shoulder and stood up and brushed the sand off his legs. He swept up his towel and shook the sand off that as well and rolled it up, squatted down again to unzip the bag that she just now noticed waited on the sand below his towel and placed the rolled up towel in it. Then he stood up again with the bag in his right hand, and walked away from her.

Are… She bit her lip on the question she had been about to ask and watched him vanish in the direction of the concession stands. In the direction of the change houses too, an unkindness mocked within her. This voice she knew well, this voice unlike the other, she had never in her whole life managed to silence. This voice, she sometimes felt — as if she could foretell her own future — this voice would one day be the undoing of her, unless she could tame it, beat it into submission like the other. But she had never been able to — beating didn’t work and ignoring, which had been surprisingly successful with the other, had only succeeded in rendering this one more strident, more invasive, more persistent.

But was he coming back? the question not trusted to voice, but manifesting itself in the way teeth dug into lips. Oh ye of little faith, she chided herself in the biblical way she had been taught; she used the words without thought, as people do who have been brainwashed into thinking, being, speaking in prescribed ways. He’ll be back. Have you no faith?

No. Again she didn’t trust herself to speak the words. Not now, not when she was so close. And, and… And the face and the body and the doings were exactly as in her dreams, and was that not proof that it was meant to be? Their meeting was meant to be, twin souls merging at last. Had he not agreed it was meant to be?

She looked at the emptiness of where he had vanished and saw now that except for a few signs of life the beach had emptied itself of bodies eager for sun, and she felt the growing denial in the breeze that was no longer a welcome coolness, and she heard the surf and the surf was louder and more urgent and instead of a rhythm of life that signified two bodies merging and coming to satisfaction and to conclusion and to the end of desire, the surf pounded and thundered the portent of doom, narrowing the expanse of beach, of the land, of the life of it, and why had she thought that just then, and where was he… And as the beach shrank under the driving surf so did her spirit, her body feeling chilled now, waiting for the fish and chips and soul and body that were surely on their way to her now, and her eyes refused to look now as she searched in her bag for a shirt that would warm the body that had begun to feel the old shrivelling sensation that she remembered from her childhood and teenage years and indeed, all the years of her life, the shrinking into the self that begins from the first abandonment of the father because the mother discovered the secret that was not to be told, and of the mother because she could not forgive the intimacy that the daughter had experienced with her husband, even though the daughter was only eight, even though it could not have been her fault, even though…

She shivered now into the long, full-sleeved red and black checkered man’s flannel shirt she had thought to pack even while deriding herself for thinking of such a shirt on such a day, and she lay back and still refused to look across the shrinking sand and she blinked back the tears that wouldn’t be held and she shook herself and told herself not to be a fool, did she want to be seen crying, by him, if — no, when — he returned with the fish and chips, and with himself, oh god, please, please, please… and even as she tried to keep the feelings at bay she curled up the foetus of her, under the lack, the unattainability of love, and the fear of living and living and never owning it — life, love — never experiencing it as ongoing, as something that lasts, and as something that reaches beyond the reality of abandonment.