The sunset, the pier, and the tranquillity of the sea are playing second fiddle to the spectacular murmuration of starlings captivating Carol’s attention. Thousands are swirling, expanding, and contracting in an irregular freeform extravaganza of patterns.  

Jim sits next to Carol, on the Brighton seafront, but he feels he might as well be in another part of the world. Apparently, their sensory inputs are the only remaining touch-points in the Venn diagram representing their conscious universes.  

It hadn’t always been this way, so he prods, 

“Can we talk?” 

“About what?” 

“Us?” 

A silence ensues, until she sighs, 

“There’s no ‘us’ anymore.” 

Jim knows this. There’s a gaping void where laughter, warmth and trust had once lived, and that’s why they need to talk. They seem to process reality in a fundamentally different way. For him life is like film appreciation, whereas for her it’s as if she’s a photo-editor cutting up every scene into little bits. 

Each snapshot of the murmuration is a separate shape in her mind: a kidney; an amoeba; a cloud; skull; embryo; mobius or hedgehog. Each has its own association, feeling, or link to experience. A cultural lingua-franca that permeates art, taste and all understanding, that is obvious to her. 

For him the transitions and movement of the starlings are the essence. It’s a process in action like iron filings being influenced by the movement of nearby magnets causing each grain to stand up or lie down. The underlying dynamics are the fascination. How do they avoid each other? What are the rules of the dance of attraction and withdrawal? 

He wonders whether their differences can be traced to his background in sciences and hers in arts. He wants to understand. 

“Okay. Can we talk about the ‘us’ that once existed?”  

“What’s the point?” she counters impassively. “Enjoy the starlings and the sunset.” 

“Yes Dear.” 

He bites his tongue, knowing ‘dear’ was the wrong word to use, but he’s hurt. 

As he stares, he appreciates how the murmuration possesses a whole which is greater than the sum of each of the starlings. Once they’d been more than the sum of two individuals. They’d been a couple that bounced off each other creating possibilities, and energy, but now their co-existence seemed to subtract from each other. 

It felt like they were constrained by destiny, circumstance, and understanding. Caught like zombies in their own ‘danse macabre’, each feeling a victim.  

After a while he breaks the silence again. 

“What do you want to do next?” 

“Do you mean tonight, or in our relationship?” 

“Tonight. You didn’t want to talk about us.” 

She lets out an involuntary sigh, fatigued rather than pained.  

“No. I didn’t think there was an ‘us’ to talk about.” 

“Always precise.” He mutters not attempting to hide his pique.  

“What do people normally do at the seaside?” She asks as if in desperation. Jim feels as if she’s wiping away his enthusiasm with a damp cloth. 

He remembers childhood days attempting to prise shellfish from the rocks. Trying slowly meant they’d hang on even tighter, but if you did it quickly you were sometimes successful. He decides to try and spice things up a bit. 

“Well, there do seem to be a lot of tattoo parlours these days.” 

It draws a smile, but not one charged with generosity, as she proposes, 

“Something like ‘It’s love Jim, but not as we know it’?” 

Her sarcasm makes her genuinely smile. He loves it when she smiles, and this is enough to forgive her for the moment. 

“Very funny, but I was thinking of something like two planets orbiting one another each bearing a heart. They’re drawn together by some inescapable gravity, strong enough to keep them close, but not enough to bring them together.” 

She looks at him and concedes,  

“You know Jim, sometimes you can still surprise.” 

She smiles again. A definite twinkle in the eyes, this time with a softness that hasn’t been seen for years. A reward for trying.  

Jim freefalls from the safety of the handhold he’s managed to carve out, 

“Do you know what made me fall in love with you?” 

He hears her initial shocked intake of breath, and then panicked breathing.  

“It was the way you spat cherry pips when we sat in Petworth Park.” 

She guffaws and grins at him,  

“You’re mad! I’d forgotten that.” 

“Any girl who can spit a cherry pip farther, and more accurately than I can, is worth a second look. And you talked at length about the paintings that Turner made at Petworth, oozing sunsets, and joy in the natural world. Your enthusiasm for life shone through.” 

“So, I could have looked like the back end of a bus, but as long as I could spit with military precision and talk about Turner, you’d have fallen in love with me?” 

“More or less… it takes all sorts, you know!”  

Carol shakes her head in bemusement, but at least she’s sort of smiling, as Jim gently nudges her with his shoulder, and challenges her, 

“Your turn. What made you fall in love with me?” 

She studies her hands and takes a deep breath. Hesitantly she asks, 

“Do you remember when you first came in the café you asked for a bacon sandwich with brown sauce?” 

“Nothing unusual in that is there?” 

 “But you wanted me to draw a smile with the sauce on the sandwich, so that you knew you were eating a happy sandwich.” 

“Poor old pig. He’s been slaughtered, but as long as it’s a happy meal.” 

“There were a lot of blokes who wanted to proposition or embarrass me, but you just wanted to make me smile, Jim.” 

“I still do, Carol… I still want to make you smile.” 

She looks away, continuing the conversation, 

“Occasionally you do, Jim, … but we can’t go back.” 

“Why not?” 

“Because we just can’t…because too much has happened.” 

For a moment there’d been light, but the dark matter is taking over again. Briefly it had seemed their separate universes could possibly merge again, but now they’d drifted back into their separate parallel trajectories.  

Jim looks inward and stares up at the mountainous watershed that separates their pools of consciousness. At one time, early in their relationship, it was as if the two pools had been two eyes either side of a nose, looking out onto a shared world. The nose, although there, was ignored, and they could communicate with even the most oblique references, jointly recognised in their peripheral vision. Nowadays all they could both see was the nose and the shadow it cast over their worlds. He garners his mental energy and resolves to continue trying. 

“Why do you think the starlings do it?” 

“Because it’s fun, I expect. I imagine it must be exhilarating.” 

“Like going to a disco and boogying away.” 

“Exactly. Like a dance at the end of the pier, Jim.” 

“But that’s a lot of energy to use up if it’s just fun.” 

Carol studies her hands again, and suggests, 

“Perhaps they’re trying to send a message. Each shape’s a pictogram in a language we don’t understand.” 

“How frustrating. All that signalling and the gormless humans are unable to comprehend.” 

Carol grimaces, and shrugs as if stating the obvious, 

“We can’t understand each other half the time, so what chance do we have with the birds?” 

Apparently not even light can escape from black holes, but Jim feels he must try. In theory, black holes can be gateways to time travel, but again today he’s tried prodding and probing around in their dark matter but can’t find a way back. 

The only two topics of conversation left: starlings and the sunset, are drawing to their natural close. Run aground on the sea front amongst the discarded junk food and the menacing sea gulls Jim’s running out of ideas. 

“What message do you think they’re trying to communicate, Carol?” 

Her shoulders tensed again, and she spat under her breath, 

“Just shut up will you.” 

He left a few seconds silence, but he couldn’t resist, 

“If that’s what they’re saying I’d rather not understand.” 

He’d summoned a storm cloud, and she glares at him. She enunciates syllabically as if talking to an idiot, 

“You just don’t know when to give up, do you Jim?”  

No, he thinks, I don’t.  

He looks away towards the burnt-out ruins of the West Pier and lets the tears well up.  

The sun reaches a critical point and peeks over the horizon for the last few moments before disappearing. Jim imagines that angels perched on the pink and orange clouds might still be able to see a further horizon over which the sun was still shining, but for him and Carol light is becoming a memory as the starlings return to their roosts.

Mark Holman-Lisney’s writing is rarely let out into the wild, but he has been published in a few journals and competition anthologies. Often accused of daydreaming, he believes the key to a happy and contented life is to aim low and miss, and therefore is grateful if readers find his writing entertaining or thought provoking.