Kk 8

All that silence said

I smelt vinegar, and thought I was at home. My father always brought us back fish and chips for supper on Fridays and he loved to soak his in vinegar – the whole house would stink of it all evening. I opened my eyes.

It was dark enough to be evening, but I was not at home. I was in a cave, but not my cave. I could smell smoke too. I was lying on a sleeping mat covered in a sheet up to my chin. I tried to sit up to look about me, but I could not move. I tried to turn my neck. I couldn’t. I could move nothing except my eyes. I could feel though. My skin, my whole body throbbed with searing pain, as if I had been scalded all over. I tried to call out, but could barely manage a whisper. Then I remembered the jellyfish. I remembered it all.he old man was bending over me, his hand soothing on my forehead. “You better now,” he said. “My name Kensuke. You better now.” I wanted to ask after Stella. She answered for herself by sticking her cold nose into my ear.I do not know for how many days I lay there, drifting in and out of sleep, only that whenever I woke Kensuke was always there sitting beside me. He rarely spoke and I could not speak, but the silence between us said more than any words. My erstwhile enemy, my captor, had become my saviour.When he sang to me it was like an echo from the past, of my father’s voice perhaps – I didn’t know. Slowly the pain left me. Tenderly he nursed me back to life. The day my fingers first moved was the very first time I ever saw him smile.

Every day now I was able to see more of where I was.There was nothing rudimentary about it at all. It looked more like an open plan house than a cave – kitchen, sitting-room, studio, bedroom, all in one space.I could see the dark gleam of metal pots and pans lined up on a nearby wooden shelf. There were other shelves too lined with tins and jars, dozens of them of all sizes and shapes, and hanging beneath them innumberable bunches of dried herbs and flowers.  At nights he would roll out his sleeping mat across the cave from me, up against the far wall. I would wake in the early mornings sometimes and just watch him sleeping. He always lay on his back wrapped in his sheet and never moved a muscle.

Kensuke would spend many hours of every day kneeling at the table and painting. He painted on large shells but, much to my disappointment, he never showed me what he had done. Indeed, he rarely seemed pleased with his work, for just as soon as he had finished, he would usually wash off what he had done and start again.