MORNING SERIAL
The Crossing by Dai Smith
NO reason, from any direction of mine at least, appears to lie behind whatever surfaces for me to contemplate.
Yet I can tell, as they are paraded before me, the differences between the memories as they carom the one off the other. Here, what was once incidental, meaningless even, until it became other. There, what I thought to be life-changing, until that altered too.
The speed with which it all floods in does not blur my vision of anything. Each memory retains its particular weightiness of effect at the time of its original happening, the particularity of each staying intact, however trivial, however momentary, however intense in the actual life. And I am not frightened anymore, by any of it, as I once was when the enormity of a near non-existence so closely touched me, and would not, for years on end, cease to trouble me. Awake or asleep.
The kaleidoscope of memory which turns and shifts its shapes within me is a slide show I can almost enjoy since I know how it ends, and begins, and runs over and over again. Here I am being hurtled again down the deck, practically vertical at this point, a sluice of unstoppable seawater throwing me bodily against unknown others, many women and children, nursemaids and babies, grown men and the ship’s crew, all clutching and screaming and clinging to anything.
A half-full lifeboat is tilted precariously over the side of the great ship, threatening to spill its human contents, until it somehow breaks loose from its divots and bumps the ship once, twice, before it smacks with a judder and a self-righting slap into the flat calm of the cold Irish Sea.
Everything stops, or so it seems in memory, or was it just before that, the moment I caught his eye, clear and sure as always, and saw his hands clasped around her waist before he pushed her into the boat which fell. And so I jump. Into the sea, but amongst ropes and haulage gear and rivets, all torn or sheared away as the Lusitania rolls on its side, its four great funnels almost horizontal at the last, and I am swimming away from her.