Coral Bay by Annie Webb from Transitions One

Coral Bay

Short Story

They say Coral Bay is named after pink coral pulverized into tiny particles of sand. But to begin with when I looked down into the footprints made by my feet I saw no pink. Then when I looked up through my silhouetted palms spread open against the ether, the cove and headland jutting out into the sea and sky had merged into a single vermilion, an enormous frayed-with-scarlet-on-the-edges salmon pink. This repetitive but fleeting daily light made it hard but not impossible to see the smaller particles. My mistake was not to try, not to try to find this permanent rosy minutiae camouflaged within the ephemeral, not to see that the magnitude that hid it also revealed it: detail the consequence of action.

I, Inanna, Queen of Heaven, had not seen how every fibre of my life would be wrenched first because I had to go underground, second because of my love for you, my spouse, whose expulsion would become irreversible. Yet now the pink that was too much about me, still is, but to better avail.

Gale was spoilt for choice. She had too many consorts. She was always in the pink the people said, and though they weren’t entirely right nor were they altogether wrong.     

Gale who dreamt in disaster-movie proportions of the earth opening and floods of mud like volcanic lava opening up the land, asked Denis to cut a water-melon into edible, seedless pieces. Instead he cut a tiny piece of himself off the side of his hand, and was lucky not to loose it altogether. “Where is the pink coral pulverised into tiny particles of sand?” he asked in order to change the subject.             

Deciding to abandon heaven and descend into the underworld I instructed Ninshubur, my female companion to alert the father-gods if I’d not returned in three days. Ripping my most trusted consort, Tammuz, from my side I wandered through a forest so dense I had to part its branches with my hands, until I came to a trap door beneath which lay a deep hole that fell underground further than anyone could see.

Gale had seven children. The oldest and the youngest were boys. The middle was also a boy. Like many mothers Gale sought to please. If others weren’t happy nor was she and if she wasn’t happy nor were they, so she spread a ribbon of congeniality that looped from one person to another and pulled the ribbon tight into a double knot with a pert little bow at the centre. It didn’t always suit her. Gradually the knot began to loosen as knots do till her auburn-rich hair tumbled out of its fastenings on to shoulders unable to shoulder. Then she cut the ribbon altogether and was left without a husband to help her with the seven children.

Her second child helped instead. She worked for a women-only taxi firm, innovative for this seaside town, driving women carefully from one destination to another. She was also high-flying student of classics and feminine mythology who’d never had to tie her hair with ribbons and could give her mother advice,  ‘To liaise with the potency of the underworld’ she said ‘involves a break-up with the old pattern, a break away from being agreeable and kind and good’. ‘Like Aidan?’ her mother joked.

Aidan, her middle child, had found a  magnifying glass. With it he’d stood back from a piece of grass that enlarged became a huge reed. When the detail swelled he used this glass to set fire to a beetle struggling through huge reed grasses that swayed in the dead stillness of the midday sun.

Later he’d crashed his friend’s bike into a tight copse of olive trees on the edge of a stubbly field. The friend’s father, the villagers said, was very angry.

Gale had been dreaming at the time. Some way inland from the waves that rolled into Coral Bay she’d walked down a street in a hill village that glowed with crepuscular gold. A woman on a wooden chair sitting at a wooden table outside the stucco wall of her house was leafing through some black and white photographs. Surprisingly some were of her middle child taken when he was a baby with tyre-like thighs, lying on sheepskin or sitting in a brown plastic bucket with a bracken leaf over his head. The woman led Gale inside the stucco house where she came to sit at her mother-in-law’s feet. She was sorting through dusty baskets of needle and thread. Cotton reels rolled on the floor. There was a strong stagnant smell about her mother-in-law who had spent her life in denial. Gale thought she could hear her father-in-law, whose bisexual nature it was that her mother-in-law had spent all her life denying, say ‘Good work Gale’ between rasping end-of-life breaths that echoed the shore rolling waves of Coral Bay.

After crashing the bike Aidan’s face was held in a plinth with strange squares in tiers like Mondrian scaffolding. Rods were inserted close to his flesh. ‘You must walk through the streets with us’ Gale insisted ‘even though the rods in your body are causing you pain. You will walk and you will talk’, she said even though she felt a silence as incisive as an outline of stairs built for us to reach each other that we never take. Only walking will cure you the doctor said. But those who saw him limp said how cruel his mother was. He would get better and stop his recklessness she said. He would reach nineteen.

            Ereshkigal, Queen of the Great Below, was holding a funeral for her husband in her lapi lazuli palace. Determined to witness it I declared myself at the first of the seven gates. Ereshkigal who wasn’t pleased said I must come ‘naked and bowed low’. A judge sat at each of the seven gates. At each one a piece of my regalia, mostly in hues of anticipatory green threaded through with gold, was removed.

  In their three-verandered, white arched house at Coral Bay, Denis, not her husband, hit the top of the triangle between Gale’s legs with his un-metaphorical sword. She’d first come across it in a wood where a profusion of double-winged dragonflies of shot silk sapphire had played in dappled woods and over falls plunging to eddies and roars of churning rivers. “How it glints in the sunlight”, she’d laughed, “How it sees into the riverbed of me, clanking against sunken pebbles and slashing through the tangle of green hair-like weed”.

Suddenly the door to their bedroom creaked open by half an inch. Gale only imagined her mother, dead now for ten months, standing before them as they made love. An eerie but promising light streamed in as the door seemed to burst stretching further open into their room from the landing, ‘within the Scilly Isles is Ben Alligin. Within the south west is the north. Within sun-attracting flat-land islands are mountains which cast shadow’, Gale thought she heard her say. Hers too was a wall that burst open, but Gale, like many daughters would never know exactly which way or how.

In a dream again her father, dead ten years, appeared. ‘I’ve not seen you for precisely one year’ he said and Gale cried bitter tears, for he’d had a stroke and didn’t know who she was. Nor could he remember her child, his granddaughter for whom he’d lavished dollops of vanilla ice-cream on strawberries piled thick in a bowl of cherries standing too high on a table for the child to reach.

When the skies were jay-blue Gale dipped her feet into the azure waters of Coral Bay. They were cool but only just like the dragonflies of shot silk, and their tickling was washed away by hosts of butterflies. Whites turning into horses hooves pummelling the contours of her perishable body. Headfirst she plunged into the foaming waves, headfirst into Uranus’s spume. Her son was not Chronos, nor was she Gaia, and though young lovers stood fondling neck high in the waves they were not immortal either, and knew little of the passion in age. Zeus did not rally with her, but here in Uranus’ water Gale’s splash was subsumed and Aphrodite rose for all. It occurred to her – as if it were surprising others also made love - that everyone bathing except young ones, had given or received the fertile foam from or into their bodies. Strange tokens harvested in private.

But where was the pink coral, her children asked in unison, that was pulverised into tiny particles of sand? Its whereabouts they said was known by the father of the boy whose bike Aidan had smashed through lack of care.

By then Gale had been bought by a piece of kitsch on a market stall. By the sun and the pounding waves on her battered body. By the crunching of dry sun-kissed seed pods under her feet. By goat-bells and bleating kids running sideways on sheer rock.  By dragon-iguanas scurrying under rocks. By almond and apricot trees and tree-shrews running sideways along eucalyptus branches like squirrels.

Why had Gale, irrespective of ants and cockroaches in their Coral Bay kitchen, cut the ribbon she’d so carefully threaded? A long line of tiny ants bore down on the drop of water-melon juice that fell from the fruit Denis had tried to cut, and huge ones on the marbled terrace devoured the insides of a cockroach squashed by his sandaled sole. Matter submits to the given Gale saw with horror and if it is not devoured it rots, ferments or decays.

Ereshkigal’s rage could not be assuaged. She killed me slowly piercing my dead body with needles, hanging my corpse on a peg till it turned to a slab of rotting meat.

 ‘Why did she leave us?’ my stewards and stewardesses had asked Ninshubur as they crowded round the trap door where I’d descended. Ninshubur answered, “To change the house and roads we’ve built with our own blood is comparable to tearing ourselves to pieces. Evil is resistance to the life-urge. If Inanna had submitted to this principle of evil she wouldn’t be Queen of Heaven. She would have let us down. Remember. She would not have approached such dismemberment unless her pain was already severe”.

                        When Gale’s husband, knocked off balance by a taxi roaring round a corner, had dropped the simple white lace blouse he’d bought her into the gutter, it’d been trammelled under crunchy dry seed-pods by his recovering feet. They bore down on the pristine gift, grinding more dirt and seed-dust into the lovely, love-longing threads of lace. From the window Gale’s heart had missed a beat. She would have smoothed his knotted thread-forged brow more entwined than lace, and rubbed balm into the heart of his sleeplessness. But it was too late.  “You’re spoilt for choice” people said to her, and though she could hear his voice, ‘I’ll not fight for you” through a yawn, “nor will I laugh for you”, through a half-sardonic sneer he tried to hide, she saw herself as a bereaved woman, lost, whose husband had drowned at sea while the oblivious sky deepened with setting and swallowed up snippets she’d have told him about her day.

When I hadn’t returned after three days Ninshubur tried to set in motion my instruction to rouse the gods. The stewardesses put on their grass skirts and painted their faces orange like flames. The stewards put on their loin clothes and painted their faces brown like logs, and with loud wails drummed a slow lament round a huge crackling fire. First Ninshubur went to Enlil, the highest god of the sky and the earth, then to Nanna, my father the moon god. Both shook their heads and said they would not meddle in the ways of the underworld. Not until the underworld had become a way in their mythology.

Gale had looked after her seven children seven days a week while her husband made pots. She’d tried not to bother him even if she was tired because he was busy turning pots and painting the ones that weren’t plain terra cotta and the more she did things alone the less she needed him. When she’d told him that, climbing out of the marital bed, he’d smashed a pot, pieces of the baked earth flying forcefully against the white wall leaving sandy red indents.

Only Enki, the god of waters, heard Ninshubur’s plea and the drumming of her companions. He took two little mourners who would save me from the dirt under his fingernails and put them on the table in front of him. “When we offer what we hold dear, what we’ve paid much to gain” he said “we don’t know at first that our loss will be exchanged for what we desire”.

The same group of village men who brushed off the red-brown dust and repainted Gale’s walls stood by her in the kitchen when her husband left. The mortar like loving care that had filled the spaces between each member of the family, wrapping them in safe arms at night, fell out for good.

From some dark tunnel far away Ninshubur heard my voice, ‘Even in this depressed place where I have felt inertia in the heart of matter, a small shoot  unfurls. The state of ‘not caring’ is the strongest of all.  In it I can receive and accept anything, even pain’.

Gale  wished she was a goddess. Then she could have descended to the place where there was no feeling. But unlike Inanna she couldn’t not care. Not at first did the hollow appear, but then sure as a meteor-made cavity one fact would not go away. Gale’s family of nine was eight, the sickening thud of this fact getting louder not quieter as time went by, the idea of returning to how things were popping up over and over again as if ‘how things were’ had been as they should be, and could be reached by taking a single step backwards, though that single tiny step now was wider than the Wide Sargasso Sea.

The two little mourners set out to save me, taking with them the malt bread, the melon, mango and water, the sustenance of life, that Enki had given them. When they found Ereshkigal groaning, they commiserated with her over the pain of childbirth and the death of living things. So grateful was she for their empathy she handed over my corpse almost with regret.

Luckily Gale didn’t need to pack the hollow with shot-silk creatures. They were there already flashing their azure and sapphire on fibrillating double wings as they gravitated upwards out of the yawning chasm.

As I couldn’t be restored to life for nothing a price would have to be paid and a sacrifice made. I had to offer what I held dear, what I’d paid so much to gain. Tammuz was my most beloved consort. He had extolled my body as if it was the earth he walked on. We had been inseparable. Sometimes I couldn’t respect him for losing himself in me, but that wasn’t why he had to go, and as Ereshkigal had looked on me with the eyes of death, so I now on him.  Dreaming of his downfall the unsuspecting Tammuz beheld demons with menacing lion’s paws like talons glinting in the sun. They saw where my eyes fell and pounced on him. Still he wouldn’t believe it.

On the mottled surface of Gale’s marbled terrace the battle was always on against ants and the indefatigable sun, and though weathered the body was as relentless as the sun that sought to crush it like juice from out an orange. Her son was running with his friends again. Denis’ hand had healed and she spun as the universe itself on his sword that rent the veil across the dragonflies that danced through turquoise and robin-egg blue.      

Tammuz sister interpreted his dream and saw it was impossible to flee. She volunteered to sacrifice herself in his place, but I decreed instead they should each spend half the year in the underworld. Enlil and Nanna pleased that a path had been forged as a way in their own overground mythology clapped their hands with Enki.

It was now early evening and the sun was going down behind a headland that jutted out across the Bay. Gale could see it over the trees as she had on the night of the scarlet sunset when Denis had cut himself; when no one could see the particles of pink sand nor the cuts both smaller and greater than desire that pierce the wall between us and the flying creatures of azure. And does not grow over like the wound.

Further along the road Gale found a new path surrounded by flowerless gorse and grass-hoppers jumping from one pebble to another that led down to the Bay. Here, where it was possible to believe past and present could occur simultaneously with only a fine wall between them, it was possible also to feel a presence. Of the goddess herself.

Suddenly the detail of simple familiarity seemed superfluous as an assurance of security. Deviations have already been carved out, beckoning like dragonflies disappearing from an imprint made on solid air deeper and denser than Persian blue from the other side of a fragile membrance. Beckoning like myths that change us forever.

I, Inanna, reinstated to my rightful position, never need descend again. Order is restored. My diamond tiara set with a single central sapphire looks fiery, bright. Ironically it is cold.  Some diamonds are formed when meteorites crash to the ground, others when stars have died and pepper our solar system as star-dust, too tiny for us to see, but the one that sparkles above my forehead, three million years old, was mined from the deepest centre of the earth and born in crushing heat.  As of diamonds fraught with impurity prone to absorb and reflect light, this one glints the best with colour.

                        The strata round this coast Gale learnt were formed in flow-bashed rock, solidified glass once stretched out by lava-flow. In pink-white granite, large crystals formed by slow-cooling magma had shrunk and fractured in searing heat. The forces which compressed the earth’s surface and pushed up mountain ranges through fine folded bands of light and dark rock had split the coarse-grained granite with huge magnesium insertions, ‘impregnating matter’, Gale’s daughter would have said. These were the forces of the powerfully dark but not dolorous dolerites of which one determining one caused others to pale in significance.

                        Gale once ‘spoilt for choice’ still had it all but not all ways. Why was the clear and forceful surge still an impasse against the vermilion sky? Because in its blurring of past and present into an indefinite future, losing yesterday, the sun that set was as painful as the similed sun that didn’t rise. 

Casting her eyes over and away from the azure waters that had turned metallic scarlet and away from the salmon vermilion Gale bent down to take a closer look at a smaller flash of colour that had appeared beside some grey. They were right she saw when they said Coral Bay was named after coral pulverized into tiny particles. Stretching seaward between pebbles, prawn-coloured sand formed distinct lines with grey, simultaneously separate and inseparable, rippling down to the welcome and endless opening of a sour salt sea. The sunset tinted cyclamen all it touched, bending any alternative colour to itself. When her children finally saw the coral they said it was orange not pink.

Though I, the Queen of Heaven, was afraid, I can no longer smoothe over differences as if they did not exist to render them indistinct. No longer can I blur over edges of colours which are definite or keep up the pretence of blissful blendedness.

The lines between the two tone sand moving with flourish would not merge, blur or even overlap. Cutting and sharp, closed to compromise and non-malleable, they told of the discovery of what we desire through what it is painful to do. The white blouse had been sullied. Though the detail had been found, Gale had gone down like Inanna, or at least as closely as any mortal could, to destroy the losing of it again.

Behind her suddenly sprang the man, the geological expert, whose son needed a new bike.  As he advanced Gale slipped on seaward grazing her thigh, shocked to see him brandishing a rusty knife. When he saw her trembling he stopped but only just. His dagger wasn’t the dolerite that’s the strong side of the two-edged sword we walk, the bursting One. She’d already got the bike fixed she told him. Mumbling he turned to leave. When he’d gone she was still shaking, this stark reality, this show of violence, her own descent. In rejecting so called goodness to find it again comfort was turned to unease. The  father of her children, her only ally, to foe.

Yet when she looked back at the rippling lines of variegated sand between the pebbles there was no sign of cruelty in the impeccably separate curves flowing seawards. Only an outward show that that which has been pulverised, that which has delved, dissected, even damaged and destroyed, also delivered.

On his way up the path Gale’s would-be attacker held out his hand to another man who was walking down. But it was Denis and he didn’t claim the hand for shaking. Instead, whether Denis bumped into him or pushed him, the man had fallen and Gale saw him crumpled up on the rocky ground. Denis didn’t wait.  He was striding across the beach towards her and she, grateful, pleased and emboldened all at once was thinking, her descent hadn’t been courageous at all.

Yet if she could find her voice she’d make up for that and tell her daughter (the taxi driver and espouser of break-ups of congenial patterns) that as she was slight she’d been testing for arms strong enough to hold.

    “Because I am no Persian, Roman or Greek goddess, and because a beautiful but indeterminate light touches space too lightly, a sharp and sinuous line must carefully be drawn. Vermillion shoots across the sky with the pain of dead things that cannot die.  They could for Inanna. The delicate double-winged shot silk dragonflies fluttering between joy and confusion fight, like us, to rise. They are the minutiae, the particular, in a greater scheme where I cannot cruise self-made in the rose-tinted, sunsetted harmony of sky without the cutting curve of enfolding arms continually expanding”.

They say Coral Bay is named after pink coral pulverized into tiny particles of sand. But to begin with when I looked down into the footprints made by my feet I saw no pink. Then when I looked up through my silhouetted palms spread open against the ether, the cove and headland jutting out into the sea and sky had merged into a single vermilion, an enormous frayed-with-scarlet-on-the-edges salmon pink. This repetitive but fleeting daily light made it hard but not impossible to see the smaller particles. My mistake was not to try, not to try to find this permanent rosy minutiae camouflaged within the ephemeral, not to see that the magnitude that hid it also revealed it: detail the consequence of action.

I, Inanna, Queen of Heaven, had not seen how every fibre of my life would be wrenched first because I had to go underground, second because of my love for you, my spouse, whose expulsion would become irreversible. Yet now the pink that was too much about me, still is, but to better avail.

Gale was spoilt for choice. She had too many consorts. She was always in the pink the people said, and though they weren’t entirely right nor were they altogether wrong.     

Gale who dreamt in disaster-movie proportions of the earth opening and floods of mud like volcanic lava opening up the land, asked Denis to cut a water-melon into edible, seedless pieces. Instead he cut a tiny piece of himself off the side of his hand, and was lucky not to loose it altogether. “Where is the pink coral pulverised into tiny particles of sand?” he asked in order to change the subject.             

Deciding to abandon heaven and descend into the underworld I instructed Ninshubur, my female companion to alert the father-gods if I’d not returned in three days. Ripping my most trusted consort, Tammuz, from my side I wandered through a forest so dense I had to part its branches with my hands, until I came to a trap door beneath which lay a deep hole that fell underground further than anyone could see.

Gale had seven children. The oldest and the youngest were boys. The middle was also a boy. Like many mothers Gale sought to please. If others weren’t happy nor was she and if she wasn’t happy nor were they, so she spread a ribbon of congeniality that looped from one person to another and pulled the ribbon tight into a double knot with a pert little bow at the centre. It didn’t always suit her. Gradually the knot began to loosen as knots do till her auburn-rich hair tumbled out of its fastenings on to shoulders unable to shoulder. Then she cut the ribbon altogether and was left without a husband to help her with the seven children.

Her second child helped instead. She worked for a women-only taxi firm, innovative for this seaside town, driving women carefully from one destination to another. She was also high-flying student of classics and feminine mythology who’d never had to tie her hair with ribbons and could give her mother advice,  ‘To liaise with the potency of the underworld’ she said ‘involves a break-up with the old pattern, a break away from being agreeable and kind and good’. ‘Like Aidan?’ her mother joked.

Aidan, her middle child, had found a  magnifying glass. With it he’d stood back from a piece of grass that enlarged became a huge reed. When the detail swelled he used this glass to set fire to a beetle struggling through huge reed grasses that swayed in the dead stillness of the midday sun.

Later he’d crashed his friend’s bike into a tight copse of olive trees on the edge of a stubbly field. The friend’s father, the villagers said, was very angry.

Gale had been dreaming at the time. Some way inland from the waves that rolled into Coral Bay she’d walked down a street in a hill village that glowed with crepuscular gold. A woman on a wooden chair sitting at a wooden table outside the stucco wall of her house was leafing through some black and white photographs. Surprisingly some were of her middle child taken when he was a baby with tyre-like thighs, lying on sheepskin or sitting in a brown plastic bucket with a bracken leaf over his head. The woman led Gale inside the stucco house where she came to sit at her mother-in-law’s feet. She was sorting through dusty baskets of needle and thread. Cotton reels rolled on the floor. There was a strong stagnant smell about her mother-in-law who had spent her life in denial. Gale thought she could hear her father-in-law, whose bisexual nature it was that her mother-in-law had spent all her life denying, say ‘Good work Gale’ between rasping end-of-life breaths that echoed the shore rolling waves of Coral Bay.

After crashing the bike Aidan’s face was held in a plinth with strange squares in tiers like Mondrian scaffolding. Rods were inserted close to his flesh. ‘You must walk through the streets with us’ Gale insisted ‘even though the rods in your body are causing you pain. You will walk and you will talk’, she said even though she felt a silence as incisive as an outline of stairs built for us to reach each other that we never take. Only walking will cure you the doctor said. But those who saw him limp said how cruel his mother was. He would get better and stop his recklessness she said. He would reach nineteen.

            Ereshkigal, Queen of the Great Below, was holding a funeral for her husband in her lapi lazuli palace. Determined to witness it I declared myself at the first of the seven gates. Ereshkigal who wasn’t pleased said I must come ‘naked and bowed low’. A judge sat at each of the seven gates. At each one a piece of my regalia, mostly in hues of anticipatory green threaded through with gold, was removed.

  In their three-verandered, white arched house at Coral Bay, Denis, not her husband, hit the top of the triangle between Gale’s legs with his un-metaphorical sword. She’d first come across it in a wood where a profusion of double-winged dragonflies of shot silk sapphire had played in dappled woods and over falls plunging to eddies and roars of churning rivers. “How it glints in the sunlight”, she’d laughed, “How it sees into the riverbed of me, clanking against sunken pebbles and slashing through the tangle of green hair-like weed”.

Suddenly the door to their bedroom creaked open by half an inch. Gale only imagined her mother, dead now for ten months, standing before them as they made love. An eerie but promising light streamed in as the door seemed to burst stretching further open into their room from the landing, ‘within the Scilly Isles is Ben Alligin. Within the south west is the north. Within sun-attracting flat-land islands are mountains which cast shadow’, Gale thought she heard her say. Hers too was a wall that burst open, but Gale, like many daughters would never know exactly which way or how.

In a dream again her father, dead ten years, appeared. ‘I’ve not seen you for precisely one year’ he said and Gale cried bitter tears, for he’d had a stroke and didn’t know who she was. Nor could he remember her child, his granddaughter for whom he’d lavished dollops of vanilla ice-cream on strawberries piled thick in a bowl of cherries standing too high on a table for the child to reach.

When the skies were jay-blue Gale dipped her feet into the azure waters of Coral Bay. They were cool but only just like the dragonflies of shot silk, and their tickling was washed away by hosts of butterflies. Whites turning into horses hooves pummelling the contours of her perishable body. Headfirst she plunged into the foaming waves, headfirst into Uranus’s spume. Her son was not Chronos, nor was she Gaia, and though young lovers stood fondling neck high in the waves they were not immortal either, and knew little of the passion in age. Zeus did not rally with her, but here in Uranus’ water Gale’s splash was subsumed and Aphrodite rose for all. It occurred to her – as if it were surprising others also made love - that everyone bathing except young ones, had given or received the fertile foam from or into their bodies. Strange tokens harvested in private.

But where was the pink coral, her children asked in unison, that was pulverised into tiny particles of sand? Its whereabouts they said was known by the father of the boy whose bike Aidan had smashed through lack of care.

By then Gale had been bought by a piece of kitsch on a market stall. By the sun and the pounding waves on her battered body. By the crunching of dry sun-kissed seed pods under her feet. By goat-bells and bleating kids running sideways on sheer rock.  By dragon-iguanas scurrying under rocks. By almond and apricot trees and tree-shrews running sideways along eucalyptus branches like squirrels.

Why had Gale, irrespective of ants and cockroaches in their Coral Bay kitchen, cut the ribbon she’d so carefully threaded? A long line of tiny ants bore down on the drop of water-melon juice that fell from the fruit Denis had tried to cut, and huge ones on the marbled terrace devoured the insides of a cockroach squashed by his sandaled sole. Matter submits to the given Gale saw with horror and if it is not devoured it rots, ferments or decays.

Ereshkigal’s rage could not be assuaged. She killed me slowly piercing my dead body with needles, hanging my corpse on a peg till it turned to a slab of rotting meat.

 ‘Why did she leave us?’ my stewards and stewardesses had asked Ninshubur as they crowded round the trap door where I’d descended. Ninshubur answered, “To change the house and roads we’ve built with our own blood is comparable to tearing ourselves to pieces. Evil is resistance to the life-urge. If Inanna had submitted to this principle of evil she wouldn’t be Queen of Heaven. She would have let us down. Remember. She would not have approached such dismemberment unless her pain was already severe”.

                        When Gale’s husband, knocked off balance by a taxi roaring round a corner, had dropped the simple white lace blouse he’d bought her into the gutter, it’d been trammelled under crunchy dry seed-pods by his recovering feet. They bore down on the pristine gift, grinding more dirt and seed-dust into the lovely, love-longing threads of lace. From the window Gale’s heart had missed a beat. She would have smoothed his knotted thread-forged brow more entwined than lace, and rubbed balm into the heart of his sleeplessness. But it was too late.  “You’re spoilt for choice” people said to her, and though she could hear his voice, ‘I’ll not fight for you” through a yawn, “nor will I laugh for you”, through a half-sardonic sneer he tried to hide, she saw herself as a bereaved woman, lost, whose husband had drowned at sea while the oblivious sky deepened with setting and swallowed up snippets she’d have told him about her day.

When I hadn’t returned after three days Ninshubur tried to set in motion my instruction to rouse the gods. The stewardesses put on their grass skirts and painted their faces orange like flames. The stewards put on their loin clothes and painted their faces brown like logs, and with loud wails drummed a slow lament round a huge crackling fire. First Ninshubur went to Enlil, the highest god of the sky and the earth, then to Nanna, my father the moon god. Both shook their heads and said they would not meddle in the ways of the underworld. Not until the underworld had become a way in their mythology.

Gale had looked after her seven children seven days a week while her husband made pots. She’d tried not to bother him even if she was tired because he was busy turning pots and painting the ones that weren’t plain terra cotta and the more she did things alone the less she needed him. When she’d told him that, climbing out of the marital bed, he’d smashed a pot, pieces of the baked earth flying forcefully against the white wall leaving sandy red indents.

Only Enki, the god of waters, heard Ninshubur’s plea and the drumming of her companions. He took two little mourners who would save me from the dirt under his fingernails and put them on the table in front of him. “When we offer what we hold dear, what we’ve paid much to gain” he said “we don’t know at first that our loss will be exchanged for what we desire”.

The same group of village men who brushed off the red-brown dust and repainted Gale’s walls stood by her in the kitchen when her husband left. The mortar like loving care that had filled the spaces between each member of the family, wrapping them in safe arms at night, fell out for good.

From some dark tunnel far away Ninshubur heard my voice, ‘Even in this depressed place where I have felt inertia in the heart of matter, a small shoot  unfurls. The state of ‘not caring’ is the strongest of all.  In it I can receive and accept anything, even pain’.

Gale  wished she was a goddess. Then she could have descended to the place where there was no feeling. But unlike Inanna she couldn’t not care. Not at first did the hollow appear, but then sure as a meteor-made cavity one fact would not go away. Gale’s family of nine was eight, the sickening thud of this fact getting louder not quieter as time went by, the idea of returning to how things were popping up over and over again as if ‘how things were’ had been as they should be, and could be reached by taking a single step backwards, though that single tiny step now was wider than the Wide Sargasso Sea.

The two little mourners set out to save me, taking with them the malt bread, the melon, mango and water, the sustenance of life, that Enki had given them. When they found Ereshkigal groaning, they commiserated with her over the pain of childbirth and the death of living things. So grateful was she for their empathy she handed over my corpse almost with regret.

Luckily Gale didn’t need to pack the hollow with shot-silk creatures. They were there already flashing their azure and sapphire on fibrillating double wings as they gravitated upwards out of the yawning chasm.

As I couldn’t be restored to life for nothing a price would have to be paid and a sacrifice made. I had to offer what I held dear, what I’d paid so much to gain. Tammuz was my most beloved consort. He had extolled my body as if it was the earth he walked on. We had been inseparable. Sometimes I couldn’t respect him for losing himself in me, but that wasn’t why he had to go, and as Ereshkigal had looked on me with the eyes of death, so I now on him.  Dreaming of his downfall the unsuspecting Tammuz beheld demons with menacing lion’s paws like talons glinting in the sun. They saw where my eyes fell and pounced on him. Still he wouldn’t believe it.

On the mottled surface of Gale’s marbled terrace the battle was always on against ants and the indefatigable sun, and though weathered the body was as relentless as the sun that sought to crush it like juice from out an orange. Her son was running with his friends again. Denis’ hand had healed and she spun as the universe itself on his sword that rent the veil across the dragonflies that danced through turquoise and robin-egg blue.      

Tammuz sister interpreted his dream and saw it was impossible to flee. She volunteered to sacrifice herself in his place, but I decreed instead they should each spend half the year in the underworld. Enlil and Nanna pleased that a path had been forged as a way in their own overground mythology clapped their hands with Enki.

It was now early evening and the sun was going down behind a headland that jutted out across the Bay. Gale could see it over the trees as she had on the night of the scarlet sunset when Denis had cut himself; when no one could see the particles of pink sand nor the cuts both smaller and greater than desire that pierce the wall between us and the flying creatures of azure. And does not grow over like the wound.

Further along the road Gale found a new path surrounded by flowerless gorse and grass-hoppers jumping from one pebble to another that led down to the Bay. Here, where it was possible to believe past and present could occur simultaneously with only a fine wall between them, it was possible also to feel a presence. Of the goddess herself.

Suddenly the detail of simple familiarity seemed superfluous as an assurance of security. Deviations have already been carved out, beckoning like dragonflies disappearing from an imprint made on solid air deeper and denser than Persian blue from the other side of a fragile membrance. Beckoning like myths that change us forever.

I, Inanna, reinstated to my rightful position, never need descend again. Order is restored. My diamond tiara set with a single central sapphire looks fiery, bright. Ironically it is cold.  Some diamonds are formed when meteorites crash to the ground, others when stars have died and pepper our solar system as star-dust, too tiny for us to see, but the one that sparkles above my forehead, three million years old, was mined from the deepest centre of the earth and born in crushing heat.  As of diamonds fraught with impurity prone to absorb and reflect light, this one glints the best with colour.

                        The strata round this coast Gale learnt were formed in flow-bashed rock, solidified glass once stretched out by lava-flow. In pink-white granite, large crystals formed by slow-cooling magma had shrunk and fractured in searing heat. The forces which compressed the earth’s surface and pushed up mountain ranges through fine folded bands of light and dark rock had split the coarse-grained granite with huge magnesium insertions, ‘impregnating matter’, Gale’s daughter would have said. These were the forces of the powerfully dark but not dolorous dolerites of which one determining one caused others to pale in significance.

                        Gale once ‘spoilt for choice’ still had it all but not all ways. Why was the clear and forceful surge still an impasse against the vermilion sky? Because in its blurring of past and present into an indefinite future, losing yesterday, the sun that set was as painful as the similed sun that didn’t rise. 

Casting her eyes over and away from the azure waters that had turned metallic scarlet and away from the salmon vermilion Gale bent down to take a closer look at a smaller flash of colour that had appeared beside some grey. They were right she saw when they said Coral Bay was named after coral pulverized into tiny particles. Stretching seaward between pebbles, prawn-coloured sand formed distinct lines with grey, simultaneously separate and inseparable, rippling down to the welcome and endless opening of a sour salt sea. The sunset tinted cyclamen all it touched, bending any alternative colour to itself. When her children finally saw the coral they said it was orange not pink.

Though I, the Queen of Heaven, was afraid, I can no longer smoothe over differences as if they did not exist to render them indistinct. No longer can I blur over edges of colours which are definite or keep up the pretence of blissful blendedness.

The lines between the two tone sand moving with flourish would not merge, blur or even overlap. Cutting and sharp, closed to compromise and non-malleable, they told of the discovery of what we desire through what it is painful to do. The white blouse had been sullied. Though the detail had been found, Gale had gone down like Inanna, or at least as closely as any mortal could, to destroy the losing of it again.

Behind her suddenly sprang the man, the geological expert, whose son needed a new bike.  As he advanced Gale slipped on seaward grazing her thigh, shocked to see him brandishing a rusty knife. When he saw her trembling he stopped but only just. His dagger wasn’t the dolerite that’s the strong side of the two-edged sword we walk, the bursting One. She’d already got the bike fixed she told him. Mumbling he turned to leave. When he’d gone she was still shaking, this stark reality, this show of violence, her own descent. In rejecting so called goodness to find it again comfort was turned to unease. The  father of her children, her only ally, to foe.

Yet when she looked back at the rippling lines of variegated sand between the pebbles there was no sign of cruelty in the impeccably separate curves flowing seawards. Only an outward show that that which has been pulverised, that which has delved, dissected, even damaged and destroyed, also delivered.

On his way up the path Gale’s would-be attacker held out his hand to another man who was walking down. But it was Denis and he didn’t claim the hand for shaking. Instead, whether Denis bumped into him or pushed him, the man had fallen and Gale saw him crumpled up on the rocky ground. Denis didn’t wait.  He was striding across the beach towards her and she, grateful, pleased and emboldened all at once was thinking, her descent hadn’t been courageous at all.

Yet if she could find her voice she’d make up for that and tell her daughter (the taxi driver and espouser of break-ups of congenial patterns) that as she was slight she’d been testing for arms strong enough to hold.

    “Because I am no Persian, Roman or Greek goddess, and because a beautiful but indeterminate light touches space too lightly, a sharp and sinuous line must carefully be drawn. Vermillion shoots across the sky with the pain of dead things that cannot die.  They could for Inanna. The delicate double-winged shot silk dragonflies fluttering between joy and confusion fight, like us, to rise. They are the minutiae, the particular, in a greater scheme where I cannot cruise self-made in the rose-tinted, sunsetted harmony of sky without the cutting curve of enfolding arms continually expanding”.