The Sea Held a House

To wake, the sunlight filtered into rippling beams across a yawning face, with the slender shadow of a great white passing over the room, drenched in pale aquamarine. How many can say, with the short, allotted time given to us, they have witnessed the same? The glass separates us from the vast pressures of the ocean blue. But the undulating light passes through us all, illuminating this experience and encoding it into our bones, so that it might live beyond the tenuous cloud of memory, so easily tricked into a dream and forgotten. The truth is plain now, obfuscated later. Childhood passes into maturity and the fantasy gives way to reality, or vice versa.

A thousand volumes coated in the perpetual animation of the sea, the library was the place that caught my imagination and held it. In the mornings, a whale shark would make its slow passage across the great panorama that arched overhead. Pilotfish marked its monumental journey. Blanket forts made with my brother, lit by fairy lights, sandwiched between all the tales and truths of our world. We would engross ourselves in their happy lies for hours, absorbing the fiction through laughter and tears, numb to the wonder beyond the glass. Many scholars of art and science would have paid fortunes to explore the halls of that extraordinary house, many offered, but to us, it was simply a nook or a fortress.

Our father, the architect of the house, was so adamant that no curiosity should penetrate our home, that for many years, the interest in its extraordinary design was hidden from us. Our belief was that all people lived like this, enclosed in the palm of the sea and upon a bed of coral, watching as all the marine manifestations of nature passed by our windows. The revelation about the surface world came up too fast and left us with the bends. We knew that people lived up there, on the land. But to see it, hear it, taste it - our minds spun on an axis hitherto unknown to us. The position of our unique lives took a lot longer to be absorbed. I discovered, later, the many theories surrounding my father. Isolationist. Fatalist. Hedonist. Was he pursuing the perfect design? Was he repressing a sleeping trauma? Had he some vision of the future he kept concealed in his subsea home? The only possibly left unexplored is the life he had made for us.

Much, much later was the privilege of those early years made clear. A privilege, to be enriched by such wonder. To grow so close to our small family. To live in the umbrella of a vast intelligence, one that was so patient with our small, curious minds, and have our understanding supplemented by an endless library of texts. But also a curse. My brother and I were the only children. Our father, the only adult. The first crowd I saw crushed my lungs. The play of adolescents was loud and vulgar. People were so aggressive with their conversation. The world was a desperate place, where the house was so tranquil. We were fortunate to be sheltered from it, but ultimately it was only a delaying action. I think my father saw that, too late. He simply wanted a happy world for his children. He couldn’t see the possibility of it, on land. The inherent misery of the human race was one puzzle too large for him.

I often think of our home. How lonely it must be, sat empty and unlit at the bottom of the sea. Perhaps the fish gaze past its glass confines and wonder where all the humans went. Perhaps it is wishful to imagine the seals have held all this time and now the whole structure has simply been reclaimed by the sea. But then, my father did say it would last a thousand years, if undisturbed. I have no reason to doubt his word. So perhaps it is there still, a hundred hammerheads passing by its translucent corridors, waiting to be occupied again.

Paddy Dobson

17th August 2020