seals #2

Billy was just a puddle of incomprehension. The rocks should be raucous with seals. He’s been here many times, he had slept and sung in this very cave with his pals, and each and every time they’d been overwhelmed by the busy racket of the seals packed along the shoreline. Yet as he looked out along it now there was only the sound of the hushing waves. The sound of all his punctured hopes leaking away.

He had been so certain and clear that this was the very day. Molten rocks cooled and formed and split and slipped in geological time for the sole purpose of bringing him and Ellen and Danny to this point in time and space. The signs had come together splendidly, and all that was left was to simply act out the Fates’ decree and ask Ellen to be his very own.
 It would happen in the cave, with a good fire burning and throwing ancient shadows to the walls. Wee Danny would be curled there perfectly safe and asleep aglow beside them. And then, with the plaintive sound of the seals and the sea echoing in the cave he would reach over and take her hand, and ask her. It was an image so potent in his head that it felt like a journey’s end.
 
He has known Ellen most of his life. They had grown up in the same tenement close. He could never quite pin down the magic moment when his feelings deepened towards her, and not for the want of trying to conjure up a lightning bolt moment. It was some time in fifth year at High School was as near as he could get.
She had always seemed quite shy and would never say much, and there was an invincible aura around her that he could never unpeel. For years, he could never make the connection he wanted, for all his gift of the gab.
Then one day he found out she was pregnant. It was to some Yankee-Doodle-fucking-dandy on a night out over the water in Dunoon near the Naval Base and he surprised himself the way his temper popped like a sulphurous lava bubble when he heard about it.
 He picked an actual bloody-knuckled fight with his best friend. He lost his centre and thoughts wouldn’t hold, wouldn’t follow one after the other. Impotent to control his lurid imaginings he had become unhitched and felt insubstantial to his surroundings.
 He couldn’t fathom whether the anger was at the American sailor for having humped and dumped her after only that one night; or at Ellen for not being quite the girl he’d made her out to be, that she’d be so gullible to fall for this American Dream. Maybe, and this truth did come eventually, it was really at himself for having danced around her like a shadow play all this time.
 Whatever. He couldn’t settle and his vanishing point appeared on the horizon and he headed straight for it. He moved away.