I came back to that place three days later and he, the man Jethro, was still there – or had come back again, I don’t know which.
As I sat down, he passed me some shortbread to share with him, and we sat there and watched the waves a while.
After a bit, he pointed out a big house to me far to our right, on the cliff top, which was full of light and colour and music.
‘You know, I used to always want to be in there,’ he said quietly. ‘I used to sneak in the back door, pretend to be a Somebody. I’d convince them for a while - I can do a pretty good act,' he smiled, 'and they’d welcome me in, we'd drink champagne, swing in the hammocks.’
I watched the movements in and out of the house; it looked warm, inviting; I thought i'd like to wander up there.
‘But somehow,' he sighed, 'somehow they’d always discover, find out my real name, and turn me out again – I’d have to come back here.'
There was a long pause, a deep and heavy silence.
‘This is my desert place, you know,’ he told me, ‘ – this bench. Here I’m always on the outside, I don’t belong - not anywhere.’
I nodded. I felt it; you could hear the noise, know you weren’t wanted there.
‘But one day,’ he continued, his voice distant, ‘one day I’d had enough. I couldn’t get back in no matter how hard I tried, I had nowhere else to go. It was night, I was tired, and I stayed; I just sat here. And the ocean,' he indicated the navy expanse spread out in front of us, lined with wild white surf, an alive thing, 'there it was like a great black pool, swallowing up everything inside itself. I wanted to run, to hammer on the door of the safe house to make them let me in, to conjure up images to hide it, to plug up the hole with some kind of chocolate-sweet relief… but for the first time I didn't run, i looked into it. And I waited.’
He paused again, and I tried to imagine the sea at night. It looked so calm now, but in the dead of night I could imagine that it could be frightening, isolating, horrific.
‘I felt abandoned,' he whispered, 'lost, nothing made sense. In the black pool I saw my aloneness, the meaninglessness of it all, my own fragility. I wanted to hide, to scream... but somehow I stayed. The people were gone; the lights in the house went out: there was just me and my mortality here, me and the night.
It was the longest night I have ever known; I thought it would never end. But there, in the morning, in the grey dawn with the sun rising white on the waters, there was the deepest stillness, the stillest silence… There was peace.’
‘Isn’t it lonely, out here?’ I asked at last, slightly afraid of the answer.
He laughed again, as he always did, and waved up at the house again. ‘Do you really think they’re not lonely in there? We’re each of us alone, that’s the truth of it; and yet we’re all of us connected, more than ourselves, part of a bigger story being told… And look, here come my friends,’ he nodded towards a group, a rabble of oddballs, strolling towards his bench, chatting; they waved at him.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘Losers, weirdos, freaks…’
I blushed.
‘Like me,’ he said firmly. I couldn’t realize until I made this place my home, until I gave up knocking on that door up there. Oh, I can walk in there now; I have done. The walls don’t hold me out any more. But here is the place I want to be… you can learn to love the desert place, I think; to choose it. There’s terror in the beginning and darkness in the night but in the morning there is peace…’
