allowing the islanders to survive with a quality of life, somewhat comparable to the mainland.
There was no sign of habitation between me and the sea - only the endless grey stone walls. I decided to make my way down for a swim. This proved to be not the easy task I assumed. Getting over loose stone walls was not something I had done since a child, and I discovered there was a knack required. After my first stumbling attempt, I approached the wall at the rear of the next small field, by firstly scanning along the profile. I was searching for a combination of low height and large stones. I thought of the man who had struggled to construct this pointless structure. I imagined the weight of some of the larger rocks. Tired sore muscles would not have been soothed by a deep massage from his wife, when he got home eventually that night. I smiled at the thought of my own expectation, after such an arduous day's labour. Sorcha runs a bath and pours in some scented bath salts I step in and let the scented water soothe my aches away. I can feel her fingers, warmly touch my shoulders, then deeper they press, releasing the pain from the depths. My eyes close and the dreams hover over my wakefulness. Dreams of always being like this, ever happy, ever pampered by the one I loved. I don't want this to end. This is surely my heaven on earth. But my eyes open and the grey stone wall is there before me. It is low and the base rocks are big and sturdy- easy for a foothold from which to launch my body, sprightly, over the obstruction.
I am in another field. It is no different from the first. Soon I have traversed many fields. I can now hear the soft swell of the sea against the weed covered rocks on the shore. It is a welcoming sound. It is inviting. I am back in my warm bath and the hands caress my chest and down to my thighs thrillingly. I want more but the image fades. The more I yearned for it, the more it was gone. I realised that I was excited and felt embarrassment. These are private not public moments. I look around but there are no observers. I leap over the last wall at the water's edge and quickly strip off, naked. The dive into the dark water is rushed and awkward. The splash is loud and upsets the quiet of the morning, but there is none to hear. The water is cold. The shock makes the mind go blank for a brief moment. I feel my excitement subside, and it is replaced by a great sense of well being, as the icy water banishes frail human feelings. I swim frantically, trying to force my body to acclimatise to the extreme, as I know it must. I dive under water and open my eyes to the dark world of floating seaweed. My movements are now more serene, as the water becomes a cool balm on my skin. I revel in being naked as I swim. I am now pure. Remove clothes and man is just another animal. It is the clothes that differentiate between us and nature. We hide our wild origins in fancy fabrics and styles, but underneath there is still the same animal.
The water is now almost warm. I swim in slow graceful movement, like that of a whale, as it arches its back to slowly descend in a sweet curve, mapping out a beautiful sine wave, as it makes its way across the ocean. My body arches, descends and rises in gentle regularity. I am at ease. There is no thought - just doing and being. Would I could die like this. No wants or desires, fears or expectations, anxieties or pleasures. The search for the happy death ends in feelings like this.
I lay on the sharp, uncomfortable rock, to let my body dry in the early morning sun. The slight pain on my skin was good - like an atonement or penance. It helped banish more thoughts of Sorcha from my mind. I wanted to rid myself of those lingering good memories, just as I wanted to purge the really bad ones. I had to force myself to forget the awful pain, of betrayal and let down, of her infidelity. I could not accept that she could destroy our world at such a whim. There was a bizarre desire in her to do things that would irrevocably destroy. That wildness was what had attracted me in the first place. It was exquisitely sexy. It was like playing with a tiger, who at any moment could devour you whole. The constant fear of ending was always there in our relationship but I never really expected it to happen.
I shifted my body onto my side and felt the pain once more. It ridded the uncomfortable feelings that were seeping back to pollute my well-being. It helped banish them, but not as much as the sight of a figure approaching in the distance. I scrambled up, scraping my legs in the process. I cursed silently, and stumbled towards my clothes. Clothed once more, I felt dignified again. My feet had scrapes that were oozing blood, so I bathed them in salt water. They stung but the salt had stemmed the flow. I was dabbing at the cuts with an old tissue when I sensed someone looking at me. I looked up and was surprised to see the figure silhouetted against the morning sky. I recognised the top half profile of the body. There was now no door to frame it.
She was standing, hands on hips and legs apart. I didn't know what to say, and she was not forthcoming. We stared at each other for a long time, then gesturing to my wounds, I mumbled something about the rocks being sharp. She seemed to laugh and turned around and continued on her way. I kept my eyes fixed on her, as she expertly bounded over the stone walls and gradually disappeared from view. She was gone. Her presence had been fleeting but it had left me unsettled. It had been totally unsatisfactory. We had not exchanged any words and her laugh was almost condescending. It had a slight sneer to it, that annoyed me and disturbed me. Why could she not just say hello, or some inane comment on the weather like a normal person? Why had she made her way down to the exact spot where I was swimming? I looked around and there was no obvious path leading to where I was, nor was it a particularly good bathing place. She must have wanted to come here. Yet, when here, she made no effort to communicate. Still, annoyed though I was, I had a faint sense of expectation and excitement about the encounter. How quickly emotion can change - calm, pain and excitement!
The walk down to the village was a walk through a surreal landscape, blurred by my sense of everything being good. I had a serene feeling that allowed me float along, blissfully unaware of my bodily movements. The sea and the land took on that hazy hue that make those romantic continental films so captivating. The water had, by now, a deep blue colour, reflecting the azure dome of a cloudless sky. The morning light cast long shadows, and the stone walls bulged in darkness to one side, the black highlights making them almost lifelike - snaking along the contours. Against the azure-reflected sea, the lime green grass of the fields stood out boldly, framed by the dark outlines of the stone walls.
There was a depth, that was unfathomable, to the intensity of colour of the little patches of field. Each could have held its own universe, separated for eternity from its neighbour, by the grey stone boundary. For an insect, perhaps, the field in itself is a relative infinity of space. I placed myself at the level of an ant, and thought of how far my comparative size might see the extent of one of those small fields. A few quick calculations, and I saw that the boundary was not really that far in his world. I had to reduce myself to the size of a bacteria, to get some sense of the distance required of infinity. But even then the analogy began to crumble. It was not the size that mattered, but the ability to travel. A bacterium could travel just as far as an ant, as an uninvited passenger. What makes infinite distance, is the impossibility of reaching the boundary and for all living things, it is life itself that is the constraint. We can set off, for the far reaches of the universe, but we will surely die before we ever leave our own neighbourhood. So there is no point in trying. Better to make the best of our near environment, and be as happy as we can.
But perhaps science may yet let us escape the prison of the near. Einstein showed that the faster one travels, the slower time becomes. This seeming paradox may yet allow us to search into the far domain of our world - we may yet reach the stone wall boundary! But to have this effect, I would have to travel somewhere near to the speed of light - three hundred thousand kilometres a second! Such a speed would tear me apart or would it? Einstein claimed, that if the speed were uniform and in the same direction, then I would have no way of even knowing I was moving.
I thought of my slow walking pace, and realised that, caught up in my thoughts, I was completely unaware of moving, but it was not that kind of a
wareness that Einstein meant. He meant that there would be no intimation at all of my great speed, because everything I perceived would be travelling at the same rate. I thought of the many times on a long haul flight at night, window shutters pulled down and the lights out - there is, then, so sense whatever of the eight hundred kilometres an hour speed of the plane, cruising at high altitude. Even now, I am travelling at over forty kilometres every second, as the earth orbits the sun on its gravitational path. Neither, do I feel the movement of the earth on its own axis. So at the moment I am moving in three ways: the slow ambling walk, the faster rotational movement of the ground under my feet, and the really fast whole movement of the planet on its way around mother sun. I am aware of only one movement, in real time. Over the length of a day I am aware of the earth's rotation as it sets the sun on its trajectory across the sky. Over the time interval of a year I am aware of the earth's movement about the sun, as the sun rises lower and lower on the horizon. Each movement has its time, but then