Neptune's Ruin

The smell of cleaning products pervaded his nostrils and the floor squeaked excessively underfoot as Larry made his way down the over-lit corridor, amazed at the accuracy of the desk nurse’s instructions.

“Second floor. Room 225. They haven’t gone to lunch yet so he should just be in there”. Larry hoped he would be, the idea of scouting around an old people’s home searching for a father he had seen in nearly thirty years filled him with an onerous dread and was almost enough to make him turn on his heels before his quest had even begun. He had no idea what his father would look like now and nightmare visions of a stilted conversation with a complete stranger who inadvertently answered to the name Jim were beginning to gnaw away at his already well-chewed resolve. He jabbed at the button for the second floor and the doors slowly closed in front of him. He would have preferred to take the stairs, ideally running up them two at a time in an effort to stave off the idea that a place like this lay inevitably in his future too.

Despite most of the doors being closed as he passed, Larry kept his gaze fixed in front lest he caught a fleeting glimpse of life nearing its conclusion: an old woman being fed some homogenised paste or a man far too old to walk being helped into a pair of soft brown slippers.

Room 219 and Larry turned the corner with trepidation, he could see the entrance to 225 now and the door was already open.

Come on faster, you can do it. Through the waves.

Larry reached the edge of the doorway and froze, keeping out of sight of whoever might be in there. Walking away had been easy, walking back was difficult. Living alone on the other side of the world had been simple for Larry, but here in this place, just beyond the door where he now cowered, life had moved on without him. During every business deal he’d made, every woman he’d slept with, every hangover he’d sworn off, here, life had moved on too. What would his father look like now? A part of him longed for that familiar bone-crushing hug that his dad had always given without meaning to. The old bear, or rather, old walrus, as everyone had called him, never knew his own strength.

Row, row harder. Faster. Come on. Through the waves. You can do it.

The ball in Larry’s stomach had started growing the moment he'd walked through the terminal door at Tullamarine Airport, it felt so big now, Larry thought he would collapse under its weight. He should leave, he told himself. If he turned around now, he could go back, back to his life, the life he had created miles away. Miles away from the sea, from the rocks, from the memories.

Come on, pull him in. He’s getting away. Pull.

“Is that you, Paula? What is it today?” That voice. There it was. Weaker in timbre and croaky from lack of use but Larry could hear the confidence it had once rung with and it cast him back.

Pass me the line now. Don’t let it tangle.

“Come in then”, came the faint echo of a more powerful call that nonetheless had an immediate effect on Larry and he stepped forward involuntarily. The words hadn’t been intended for him but he could no more disobey them now than he could will his heart to stop racing.

Let’s show that old Greek windbag who the real kings of the oceans are.

He turned the corner and stepped into the stifling warmth of the square windowless room. Everything within was a simple shade of brown from the plastic veneered furniture to the woollen blanket covering the single bed along one wall. In the centre of the room, an old man in brown slippers to match the room sat motionless, his pale skin and grey hair providing a contrast to the pastel hues. This had to be the wrong room. This gaunt collection of bones propping up a thin canvas of skin couldn’t possibly be his dad. It couldn’t be. Those enormous shoulders which had once reeled in terrors from the ocean floor couldn’t now be those two spindly masts jutting up like a badly pitched tent.

We roar our challenge to the winds, to the seas, to the skies.

Then Larry saw them. The hands. Still huge but now they were just laying there in this old man’s lap, resting palms up against those brown woollen trousers, the scars and calluses softened with age. Hands had hauled thrashing sea beasts over the side of their boat and dragged nets a hundred feet wide. What could those frail, weak hands do? They probably couldn’t even open a tin of tuna, let alone land a net full of it.

Pull him in, dad. Don’t let him go. Heave.

“What is it today, Paula?” The old man asked with some trepidation and Larry realised his silent presence was the cause for his dad’s perturbation. Still, Larry stood there, staring at his father and his father sat there staring at the wall. With a click of his neck and a growing sense of temerity, the old man turned his head and asked, “Paula, is that you?”

That’s when Larry saw the clouds of opaque glass that had come to rest over both pupils, eclipsing the deep blue irises which had once held the oceans. The light of the sun on the waves no longer reflected in those eyes. Jim lived in darkness now in room 225 on the second floor of the Gentle Wave home for the elderly.

The growing uncertainty in the old man’s voice began to morph into a fear of the unknown only the blind can truly understand.

Finding his voice at last, “No”, Larry rasped as the word crawled its way out of his throat. “It’s me, Larry, your son. Do you remember me?” Larry had spoken the words with the enthusiasm of a trite conversation starter but by the time they had left his mouth, they’d garnered the tone of a genuine question.

We are the master of the waves and of the winds.

The old man still said nothing and continued gazing blankly in Larry’s direction.

“Dad, that is you, isn’t it?” Larry asked in a final, desperate attempt to negate the inevitable realisation that the frail old creature in the wheelchair in front of him was the same who had once bellowed his defiant challenges to Neptune, the God of Seas.

“Who is that? Are you allowed to be here? I’ll call the nurse”.

“No, dad. Don’t do that. It’s me, it’s Larry, your son. I’ve come back to see you. I know I’ve been away a long time but I’m back now. I wanted to see how you are, how you’re doing.”

“Larry?” The word fluttered around the old man’s head like a loose sail beating in an ocean gale.

“But you left. You’re gone. Sylvia said you were never coming back.” The piercing irony of that statement cut Larry deeply and he closed his eyes for an instant as he felt the muscles of his face tense.

“No, dad no”, he finally managed “I’ve come back to you now. It’s me. Really me.”

“My Larry? My boy Larry. Back at last!” A crack of a smile on that overly large face. “I always told her you’d come back to me one day. I knew you would. She’s been strangely quiet recently. Hasn’t spoken to me for days now. She comes in sometimes, I think, and just sits there in the corner not saying a word. Strange girl. Very lovely though. So sweet! But here you are, my Larry. Come back to me.”

“Yeah, dad, yeah, I’ve spoken to Sylvia”, Larry blinked away the water that was accumulating in his eyes and thanked the involuntary collaboration of his dad’s blindness.

“That’s good. You always were a good boy, Larry”.

Larry stepped further into the room while Jim continued staring blankly at the empty doorway.

“Did you see him?” Jim finally broke the silence as he spoke to the air.

“Who?”, Larry asked, perplexed.

“Him, next door. I’ve told him about you but whenever I mention you he laughs. Says that you’re never coming back. Even told me I don’t have a son one time. Well, we’ll show him, won’t we? Come on, boy. Let’s go.”

Jim’s frail hands reached down to the metal runners around the wheels of his chair and he tried to push himself forward. The breaks were on but even if they weren’t Larry wasn’t sure the old man would have the strength in those arms to propel himself.

As he spoke, Larry had absently wandered round the back of his dad’s wheelchair and laid his hands on the warm plastic handles.

Come on you wet and watery deity. Is that the best you’ve got? We’ll take you. Jim and Larry are masters of the waves now.

“I’ve already seen him, dad,” Larry said with the reassuring conviction of a practised liar.

And a gentle wind began to blow across the bay.

“You have?” Larry could hear the excitement in his dad’s voice as he started pushing him towards the door, “What did he say, eh?”

The wind grew, gathering strength as it raced across the waves, drawing in the hot air and the cold air into a brewing maelstrom.

“What did he say?”

“Well, I told him who I was, and that of course I was real. I told him I’d come back for my dad. That I would never leave him again.”

And the storm broke. It thundered across the waves, boats rocked and pulled against their moorings, sails snapped taut and billowed with the power of the oceans.

“I told that old scoundrel that I’d come back to take my dad fishing just like we used. That I was going to take the king of the waves out again. I told him that we’d show him who the best fishermen in these waters are and that’s just where we’re going, dad.”

“Ha ha. That told him but we can’t really, can we, Larry?”

“Yes, we can, dad and that’s just where we’re going. We’re going fishing”.

The tides of the ocean ebb and flow in you.

Heart pounding like the first time he’d try shoplifting, Larry pushed his father’s wheelchair into the lift and hit the large green G. Were they going to try and stop him? Could they? Jim was his dad after all. Did the fact that they shared blood somehow give him authority to break the law and take this man away? Was he even breaking the law? Was taking your father away from an old folks’ home kidnapping? Christ! Is that what I’m doing, Larry asked himself. What was he planning to do? Larry didn’t know but he was trusting to the spirit of the ocean like they always did.

The waves will take us where we need to be.

The lift pinged and the doors slid open. Three nurses in flat blue uniforms and iron-on grins were there to greet them.

“Going for a walk, Jim?” one of them asked casually, never expecting an answer. They stood aside as Larry wheeled Jim out of the lift. He could feel the sweat breaking out and running down his back. Jim was stealing his father and they weren’t going to stop him.

Outside, Larry helped Jim into the passenger seat of his hired Toyota and tried to stow the wheelchair in the boot. After several failed attempts to collapse it, he gave up and just put it onto the back seats still open.

Fifteen minutes later they were down in the port. It was smaller than Larry remembered and the word port no longer seemed an appropriate description for the meagre collection of wooden fishing boats moored to the concrete jetty.

Lifting Jim from the car, Larry went to place him in the wheelchair but Jim stopped him, insisting he could stand now, at least for a while anyway. Larry was amazed at how light his father was and thought he could probably have thrown him up and caught him just like the giant fisherman used to do to him as they made their way down to the boat in the mornings. Placing the old man on the ground, Larry held his hand to steady him. Those hands. He felt the bones in them this time. Bones in those hands. He’d remembered them as two immense powerful meathooks covered in a rugged impenetrable skin; tanned and roughened by endless days of relentless toil out to sea. The ropes they threw over the side had cut and burned Larry’s little fingers, and as he touched the smooth skin of his father’s hands he remembered those giant leathery palms sliding over his own to take the strain. Hands that could wrestle a giant eel yet were gentle enough to slide an unwanted catch back into the water.

Stronger than the waves. You can’t best my dad. None of you can, spirits of the waters.

“Where are we, Larry?”, Jim asked earnestly.

“Can’t you tell, dad?”, Larry said with a smile, the most sincere and free he’d given in years. “Smell the air”, he continued “You’ll remember soon enough”.

With the air of a free man taking his first breath of free air, Jim inhaled. As the salty sea air assailed his nostrils, Larry saw something of the old vigour reclaim his father, maybe he stood a little taller or perhaps it was Larry who shrank a little. Stronger now, the sea breeze was blowing away the cobwebs of age which the nursing home had been weaving around him for years.

“We’re down by the harbour, aren’t we, Larry? Our old harbour, where you and me used to go,” he spoke with absolute certainty that paid no homage to the years that had ravaged the old man’s mind and body.

Larry looked around at the scant collection of boats bobbing on the waves.

“Yup, we’re in the harbour dad. Our old harbour and we’re going to go fishing again.”

The familiar sounds of the harbour trickled into Jim’s overgrown ears like the first drops of water after the thaw. He heard the lapping of the water against the sea-soaked hulls, and above them, the cacophonous screech of the gulls. Standing motionless inside his withered old frame, Jim’s mind reeled in memories long forgotten, the countless hours spent repairing nets in this port, unloading the day’s catch and bartering with the other traders. Like the crashing of waves on a stormy beach, the familiar sounds of the port flooded the old man’s mind. Jim could almost see the waves as they gently sploshed against the concrete of the jetty and then retreated, occasionally a brave splash of salty water would reach up beyond its limits to flop noisily on the flat stone surface before trickling back to join its family.

“Come on, dad” Larry said, closing the car door.

“But we have to go back to the home, Larry. What about my lunch? Paula will be waiting for me”.

That’s the best catch of the day. That just for us. You keep it safe down there, boy.

“Not today, dad. No more of the old nurse’s food for you. Not anymore. Today, we’re going fishing. Just like we used to. We’re going to catch the biggest fish in the ocean and have it for our lunch. It’ll be a lunch fit for kings just like we used to have, just like mum …” Larry's mouth ran dry as his words ran away from him, “used to make,” he finished reluctantly deflating like an old balloon.

Once again looking at Jim, Larry was relieved to see his inadvertent stumble onto the painful memory of his mother hadn’t caused his father to regress.

“You mean we’re going out on the water?” Jim said. His eyes may not have worked anymore but from where Larry stood they were burning bright as lighthouse fires.

“But how, Larry? We haven’t got a boat. I’ve no idea what happened to Neptune’s Ruin.”

“What do you mean?” Larry asked as he cast around the harbour. “Of course, we’ve got a boat. She’s right here.”

“She’s still here? After all these years? Our old boat?”

“Of course she is,” Larry said, eyeing a suitable looking little rowboat tied off nearby.

Here come Larry and Jim, unsinkable in Neptune’s Ruin.

Larry walked Jim closer to the water, helped him down into the boat and quickly climbed in after, taking care not to rock the boat any more than absolutely necessary. Despite not having set foot in a boat since he’d left all those years before, Larry was pleased to find his sea legs returning to him almost instantly as he settled down and positioned the oars in the rowlocks. In all their sea adventures, Larry had only actually rowed a few times, his dad’s powerful shoulders had worked like a steam engine and it had always been Larry’s job to navigate while Jim rowed. A few pulls on the oars and Larry was exhausted; he declared triumphantly to Jim that they were far enough out to sea now to cast their line and catch a whopper for their dinner.

Scanning briefly around the boat, Larry found a length of line and looping it once around a rowlock placed one end in Jim’s hand and held the other himself. Touching those hands again, Larry was shocked to feel how smooth they were. Like greased baking paper, they couldn’t grip the line.

Bow before us, you so-called god of the depths.

Reaching overboard, Larry plunged his hand into the seawater and flinched momentarily at the cold. He rubbed a little of the salty brine into Jim’s hands and swore he could feel them grow stronger as they clenched the line now.

These mighty hands will hold back the oceans. Flee before us you moistened deity.

“No rods for us today, eh dad. We’ll do it the old fashioned way. Hook and line just like we used to, so hold on tight. Don’t let it get away.”

“You can trust me, Larry. When did I ever let a catch get away?”

These hands could pull the Kraken up from the depths of the abyss.

Larry gave a tug on the other end of the line and thus began the most gentle tug of war the port had ever seen.

“You’ve got one, dad. Careful now. Pull him in.”

As Larry teased the rope away from Jim, the old man made a desperate attempt to heave it back, determined not to let their catch of the day escape. Larry let his father take in some line, before once again teasing it out. Eventually, Jim landed his prize and Larry assured him it was carefully stored in the wooden chest where they had always kept the best catch of the day, the one that was especially for them.

No more than ten metres from the jetty, Jim gazed out over the open sea.

“She’s dead, isn’t she, Larry?”

Startled and assuming his dad was still talking about their triumphant catch, Larry took a few moments to realise the truth of what the old man was saying.

“Yes dad,” he said eventually, finally allowing a tear to run down his check unfettered. It made its way down his cheek to his mouth and tasted salty.

“How did you know?”

“She told me.”

“Who, Sylvia?”

“No Larry”, Jim replied calmly. “Sylvia’s dead. The sea, the sea told me about her. That’s who took her. It wasn’t your fault Larry. You couldn’t have saved her. It’s time to let it go now.”

Tears rolling unchecked down his cheeks now, Larry sniffed as he began to speak, “but it was me who suggested we have a race. We should never have been that far out. I made her swim that far, she was scared. She kept telling me to stop, to go back to the shore. She was begging me, dad. Begging me to head back but I wouldn’t. She was older than me, she’d always been stronger, quicker but not that day. I was faster than her. I could beat her at last,” almost shouting now, Larry continued his confession. “Why didn’t I stop? Why didn’t I go back? I could have saved her. But no, I wanted to win. I had to win that day. It was going to be the first race I’d won. I wanted to tell you. I needed to tell you that I could beat her. That I could be the best.”

“It wasn’t you Larry, you know it wasn’t. It was that thing in Sylvia’s brain. It had to happen sooner or later and it happened while she was swimming with you,” the echo of Jim’s booming voice drove back the lapping of the waves and for a time was the only sound Larry could hear.

“It wasn’t you Larry, it never was.”

The words, the explanation, they were nothing new to Larry but they cascaded through his memories washing away the guilt he had carried with him all these years. The dam was breached, it came crashing down and for the first time in over thirty years, Larry hugged his father. The frail arms of the old man still held their bone-crushing strength and Larry felt the air pushed once more from his lungs and with it the guilt he’d held all these years.

“She struggled, Larry. She put up a good fight. She had to for me and for you, we were all that was left, but the sea was stronger, the sea is always stronger. In the end, she succumbed to the watery embrace, she’s at peace now, Larry and you can be too.”

“Come on boy, let’s get back and you can cook that fish up for us.”

“Yes, dad. Come on. Let’s go back.”

We are the masters of the waves.