He saw himself as a deep-sea fisherman in the dead silence of the night

Edward O’Shanahan did what he always did before he went to sleep: he held a slice of extra mature cheddar cheese between his lips and he meditated.  Sometimes he would spend ten minutes listening to sad country music on his headphones, having discovered relatively recently that the right sad country song can set a real fire beneath a dream.  But today was Sunday and he resolved never to listen to any sad songs on a Sunday.  

Isla O’Shanahan was sitting at the kitchen table.  She’d always worked later than her husband and he was an early riser.  They’d been friends and work colleagues for four years before he kissed her for the first time, and the first time it was just below her right ear.  The chemistry had been there from the start, but the romance was given voice in a small private nook of an old pub at a works Christmas party.  He’d never met anyone who’d looked at him as calmly as she did.  She had eyes that darted in joyful ways when she spoke, and that winter, whenever she put her coat on the back of a chair, he couldn’t help falling hopelessly in love with the chair.  His heart had nowhere else to go after that party, other than to burst, because he’d slowly filled it up with her kindness and the way she dressed and the way her eyes smiled when she looked at him.  His feelings for her had made a slow, rambling ascent to love.  She moved in with him a month later.  Having spent most of his adult life living alone, it was never a guarantee that he’d be able to make the adjustment to living with someone else, but adjust he did.  He had her best interests at heart and she had his, and in his mind that was a pretty good formula for living with someone.  She moved in at the end of January – two days before the twentieth anniversary of his mother’s death.  They were both 32 years old.      

He saw himself as a deep-sea fisherman in the dead silence of the night and he was fishing for a memory.  He forced himself to imagine sailing out to the middle of the ocean, even though he hated the sea.  The very thought of it made him feel sick.  He could only think of it as a place primed for battleships.   Even the calmest water held no pleasantries for him, either on the surface or below, but in his mind there needed to be fear and jeopardy involved for the memory to be caught.  He was petrified of drowning – he was almost certain he’d drowned in a previous life, given that no experiences in this life could account for it.  But fishing for a deep memory needed depth.  The sort of depth that tossed twenty or thirty years around like it was two or three seconds.  And this is why he went dream-fishing: he was fishing for a memory of his mother.   

He remembered three things about his mother’s funeral.  He remembers sitting on the right hand side of the church. That’s one.  He remembers not being able to look at his grandmother’s hand shaking as it held his hand during the service.  That’s two.  He remembers the police being there - or overhearing someone saying the police were there – and they were there waiting to see if his father would show up.  That’s three.  Everything else is a blank. 

He needed a new memory of his mother, and she had been a good mother.  Something with colour to latch onto.  Something new in the old.  When his father disappeared after her death, he’d taken the suitcase full of photographs.  The few photos that remained contained photos of him and photos of his mother, but there were no photos of him and his mother together.  He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he had nowhere else to go in his conscious mind and that’s why he turned to his dreams.

It took him a bit longer than usual to settle.  The thin slice of cheese poked out of his mouth like a yellow tongue.  His heartrate was in the low fifties and he imagined sinking into the hull of his boat.  He was bobbing in the middle of an unknown glistening blue-back pre-dream ocean, drifting between continents inhabited by unknowable dream people.  He imagined all the memories lying fathoms deep he could bring back to waking life.   He needed to catch something and he needed it to happen sooner rather than later. He ate the slice of cheese and rested into the dream-beginning.  In that moment he was helped onto the boat by a whisper.   

Isla knew what Edward was doing and why he was doing it.  She could see he was fragile at the moment and she worried where his search for a memory would take him.  She feared he’d choke on that slice of cheese one night and she’d feel responsible for it, and she would have to explain to the police or the paramedic or the court why the coroner would have to write cheddar as a cause of death.  She had to remind herself that he’d get through this.  He was searching in part for a reason or explanation that probably wouldn’t come.  He was searching and so was she.  She’d been fishing for one of his memories in her own way and it was due to land on their doormat any day now.  Any day now, any day now, she whispered, balancing on the edge of a dream.