Read I Am Lazarus (Peter Owen Modern Classic) for Free Online

again, but this time there was no sickness, only a sudden sinking and emptiness, as when a small ship lurches and rolls suddenly, so that he waited for the crash and slither of loose objects falling: but there was only the wind and the gulls and the waves breaking below the edge of the hill. It passed, and he started to walk on again up the slope, because it did not matter really. Nothing mattered, he thought, because nothing could reach him while he was inside the glass.
    ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let's go and look at the sea.’
    And really when he saw it it did not matter: it was quite easy to look at the agitated empty pale sea that was faintly touched with lilac feathers under the sunset sky. Except that he would rather not have seen the breaking waves on the rocks at the foot of the cliff. It was quite a high cliff to which the track had led them over the downs. The girl was looking out to sea and smiling with the wind blowing back the short bits of hair round her face.
    ‘It's fine up here, isn't it?’ she said to him.
    ‘No,’ he said, ‘it's the wrong sea.’
    He saw the bewilderment and distress and incomprehension come instead of the smile on her face because of what he had said; and he thought that he ought to try and explain something, but it was impossible because there was nothing but the swinging pendulum with which to explain.
    And at the same time he saw on sunnier cliffs barelegged girls, perhaps his sisters, riding barebacked on ponies with rough manesflying, he saw the bleached gilt hairs on the brown girls’ legs and heard girls’ high voices calling and laughing often.
    ‘You've always been mad on the sea,’ a girl's voice was saying.
    Yes, the sea was the one thing he had always been crazy about. But what had become of those other oceans? What had become of the sapphire blue deep water, the quick, clear small waves on the beaches, the purple submerged peninsulas of the reefs? Now he remembered the steady smooth rush of the sailing boat through blue sunlit water and the satisfactory slap of water on the sides of the boat. He remembered the huge seas marching past the tanker, huge and heavy and whale coloured, marching in manic persistence, the staggering deck, the water bursting endlessly over the catwalk. And for a second he remembered the time on the gun when they brought the plane down at sunrise, and for a second he was that young gunner triumphant and in his glory, the sea lunging pink stained into oblivion past the gun sights. Then he remembered the horror that came later, the freezing, strangling, devilish masses of water, the horror of blazing oil on the water and Shorty screaming out of the flaming water. Then the cold blankness settled again and he could not remember whether he had known these things or what had become of them.
    Now it was this town girl he had met on leave in the city to whom he had to attend. She was a good-looking girl; and perhaps before the glass closed round him he had felt something for her, but now there was just this impossible thing, this effort he could not make He knew he ought to explain something. She was trying to be sweet and kind to him. But he knew he could never do the impossible thing. And just then it occurred to him that he was shaking under his khaki coat.
    ‘What is it, Lennie?’ she asked him.
    ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It's cold standing around. Let's walk into town and get tea there. Let's get away from the sea.’
    ‘Don't you like the sea any more?’ she asked. She was looking at him walking away from the cliff, and biting her lip.
    ‘No,’ said the man. ‘I don't think so. I think I hate it.’
    But then, feeling the hollow, vague coldness inside the glass,,and going away from the sea, there was nothing at all left and nothing mattered at all.
    ‘I don't feel anything about it,’ he said. ‘I don't feel anything about anything.’
    On the way to the town she took his arm and they walked like that for a bit while he thought of