Is there anything more beautiful than the full moon shining

Is there anything more beautiful than the full moon shining

After three days at sea, it was a relief to get my lifejacket off of me. I gathered up the rest of my tackle and finished rinsing off the deck, paid the lads and told them I’d be up after them to the pub. It was almost dark; the other bigger fishing boats were still clearing up their own decks. I was a bit stuck in my thoughts, looking down on the harbour, my hands against the rail of the boat. Below me, a streak of diesel oil had spread out from where the bilge pump had emptied the last of its load.

Did she really mean it the other night? So it was my fault, was it… You do your best for them but still you end up sleeping on your own. The one before Susan had no class at all. And I should have seen it coming with her. Like mackerel skies, she just meant trouble. But Susan, real style, dressed to the nines, high heels and tights with no ladders and perfume that didn’t burn my nostrils. I suppose I was getting spoiled, the way she fussed over me, filling me a hot bath before we went off to the restaurant, and that fancy talcum powder she bought me which I won’t be able to go back for now. Who knows, maybe she’ll relent – realise it takes two to tango.

After the restaurant that night she pulled over out of the blue and suggested we take a walk on the West pier. ‘Jaysus don’t I see the stretch of it when I go out fishin,’ I protested. And this is what I mean by style; she said: ‘there is something at the end of the pier I want to show you.’ Me thinking of course she fancied doing it up against the granite wall, it being mid-July and close to midnight, no one about but us.

We walked along the massive granite blocks on the high wall and all I could think of was the dogshit in the dark if I didn’t watch my step. Half-way to the light tower at the end she stopped and wanted to sit down on one of those wooden benches kept together all those years with layers and layers of blueish paint. She opened her bag and I thought to myself ‘she wants to give me a present, I betya, not an engagement ring but something sentimental, like, to mark our time together,’ because she had mentioned the six-month mark back in the restaurant as I was trying to cut a mouthful of T-bone steak and not making much progress and me thinking of how I needed to sharpen my gutting knives back in the shed before taking the boat out again. But all she did was hand me a fag and we lighted up, looking out on the fishing boats moored on the moonlit sea.

She started talking then about her father and how strict he could be at times helping her with her homework in primary school and when he said ‘No that’s’ wrong’ he’d sit her up on his lap and get her to read it out again slowly, holding the book with both her hands and his right hand would land on her knee and slowly slide up her thigh and if she stopped he told her to keep reading and I groaned aloud and thought, fuck, do I want to hear this. We smoked two and I couldn’t help noticing how she was drawing hard on that second one when she started on about some grand old dame who had come into her hairdresser’s wanting a lavender perm and how she had to show her three magazines before the lady with the dosh settled on a blonde-dyed wave and we both laughed at that.

I wasn’t in a talking mood, reminding myself to get that mechanic to have a look at the boat’s engine which had stalled a few times on the way back the other week. Hadn’t happened since but they’re the ones to watch and they catch you unawares some night on your way back to port and then what the fuck?

We had reached the light tower and I says to myself no…, don’t think she’ll want that now but maybe no harm in trying, they change their mind sometimes when you start a bit of roaming with the hands up and down their back but I’d have to catch her first as she was yards ahead of me, standing at the end of the pier looking out to sea. I strode over to her right side and then I could see the tears in her eye and she said, not to me in particular, ‘Is there anything more beautiful than the moon shining over the sea?’ I looked out on the low moon rising and I suppose, yeh, it did look nice, the way it cut a straight channel in through the mouth of the harbour and all I could think to myself was ‘Jaysus, she’s gone all soft on me, not lookin’ good now the way things are going, is it? The one before was like that; it lasted only three months though she fought back, that one; even ended in fisticuffs. Jaysus, they hook you in, then after a while they get all mothery and start talking about babies.

After we got back to her place we smoked a few and finished another bottle of wine she had in her fridge which only made her story of wanting to open a flower shop sound all the more grandiose. She went on a bit about how much she loved flowers and their smell or scent as she put it. In her bedroom afterwards, she looked all relaxed and delicate in her rosy nighty and her thin white arms doing herself up in front of the mirror. I could never get over the amount of bottles and tubes and creams on her dressing table and shelves. Next thing she turns to face me all serious looking, saying she wants to finish the course she started in counselling. All I said was ‘you’d be better off sticking to the flower shop idea if you ask me’ when she went all quiet on me. Then she got herself all hyped up about the course, saying how important it would be for her to finish it. Seeing her arguing so forcefully and waving her hands about like that made me want to tame her, change tack, touch her knee of something. I reached out but she brushed me away with that thing she said: You don’t really care for me, do you, thinking only of yourself always… Fuck that! That really angered me. Wasn’t I just after saying I’d help paint her living room as well as the bedroom? I shouldn’t have hit her, not like that, splitting her lip. So this is all my fault? Feeling sorry for myself I was after I left, thinking of the way we’d walk back slowly sometimes from the pub, arm in arm. She liked that and I suppose I did too.

All these things were niggling me on deck, thinking I’d have to sleep in the back of the van or on the old couch in the shed by the quay where I stored my power tools. At last I shook out of it, locked the cabin door and started walking up the hill to the pub. Fisherman’s Lane was quite dark; no streetlamps here. I could barely see ahead with the dark shadow below the granite wall as I shouldered along. Out on the bay, things still looked bright enough by the light of the waning moon. A few more days and we’d be out fishing again. That felt good.

It struck me later that I probably knew Susan better than she did. You just have to keep on the right side of her. I called her from the phone box outside The Cod’s Head, saying I was really sorry about the other night, it would never happen again and would she not come down for one so I could show her off to the lads, how proud it felt always to have her with me, seeing how beautiful she always looked when out on the town. I joked that I even missed the talcum powder she got me. I must have hit the right note and she started to come round but then she murmured something, remembering the split lip. I said not a bother, she’d be grand. Didn’t she have some make-up to cover up that kind of thing?

Ends