Part Two of the serialized novella Ebbed Tide by Byzantia Harlow
featured image: Mudlarking along the River Thames
PART ONE
Dawn glistens off thickening mud, as the silver river recedes, post flood. To level, to fall. To trail its dregs within stagnant pools.
Frenetic seabirds peck through rocks, while a wooden jetty gently rots.
Ebbed tide reveals a temporary hinterland, held in the Greenwich foreshore. But bloom of algae, swept up the seawall, warns all, that time can crawl. That waters can creep once more.
The Meridian of the world runs above, cutting through Observatory Place. An imagined line, signalling beginning and end, in time and space.
Silhouettes forage through the sludge, beneath a skyline of jumbled histories. Like Persephone, hunters visit the underworld, clad in gum boots, in search of mysteries. Crossing East and West, wielding shovels, to mine. To dredge lost treasures from the muds of time.
A woman of twilight years, squelches through the dank, to place her plunder within a cavern of missing bricks along the floodbank.
Her collection of curiosities span historical divides.
Uncut garnets gleam like pomegranate pips. Halfpennies stamped with King George. Victorian pipes scratched with Masonic glyphs. Tudor dress hooks from an unknown forge. A spoon bent back on itself by the tides.
A passing boat pulls wake over shallows, revealing a dazzling lure.
Which catches the rummager’s eye.
In well rehearsed gesture of trowel, she makes sure.
Extracting a metal statuette, which she extends to the skies.
A couple dancing, perfectly preserved from neck down.
Beheaded by untold tragedy.
And left to drown.
The lovers are bound in timeless embrace.
Blind to each other, searching. Unrecognisable in perpetuity.
Six of Swords, Tarot Card by Byzantia Harlow
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I witness this excavation from the wharf above. Recalling Hades, those souls of the dead, who sipped from oblivion’s waters, and slipped into unconsciousness.
Turning my back on the timeless river, I walk past a memorialised ship, and crossover into the present – it’s busy streets and bustling markets.
A tourist group stalls before me, forcing my eyes level to a muscular nape, poked through with blue ink. The image tattooed is all too familiar. A haunted woman, ferried towards the unknown, by a shrouded man. Six swords from her past, carried forward.
I weave my body through the crowd, and on to its destination. Arriving at a grand entrance, smeared grimy with pollution. A buzzer admits me.
The city’s murmur is extinguished behind the door, like a snuffed flame. The foyer where I wait seems suspended, as if trapped in a period of mourning. Stifling quiet, punctuated only by a grandfather-clock, pummelling silence.
Tick… tock… Tiny steel hands intent on an unrelenting march towards the future.
I’d been sensitive to sound; ever-since turning blue aged two.
I was as flimsy fabric, twisted in the fist of Fate – left crushed, grasping.
Beings beckoned me forth in tinny tones, as life seeped out of me.
Destiny decided to ball me up and discard me. But something loosened its grip, easing the flow again.
When I returned, reverberations remained a bridge back.
Death’s trace was left on me. Its strange seed, lay dormant many years, before fruiting unexpectedly.
“Hello! It’s this way!”
A voice recalls me to the moment, the sort of voice that drapes its truth in pleasantries.
I’m gestured into the feigned intimacy of a business room attempting domesticity.
Beckoned to sit on a neutral sofa.
“So, how can I help?” the stranger asks, pointing pen at pad avidly.
I contemplate this :
A fitful despair is growing within me, threading like roots, twisting around my heart. It’s cracking me apart. I’m hoping you can bind me together before I disintegrate.
“To find out whether I’m going mad” she eventually drags from my lips.
Her expression, though tightly controlled, allows a faint crease of amusement to escape around the eyes.
“Why do you think you may be mad?”
I’m adrift. I can’t locate myself within my tragedy.
“I believe I can predict the future… and communicate with Spirits. It started with a dream about a song. Then there were signs. Now a tarot card is haunting me…”
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INTERMISSION
The rectangle evokes a terror in me. It’s face down, but before I flip it, I’m sure. Revealing its image confirms my suspicion. A boat moving through turbulent waters, a woman ferried by a man, six swords. I wonder how it has come to lie here, across the house from the rest of the pack, up the stairs, in the spare bedroom?
Carried in mouth of slinking cat, laid like offering, for an absent guest?
Placed by myself at the height of hysteria… and then… subsequent amnesia?
Something more sinister, otherworldly at play?
Perhaps I unleashed something ungovernable when I split the deck that first day.
I attempt to escape my fears in sleep, but as I’m succumbing, their visions engulf me.
I sit, an indistinct bundle, swaddled in cloths, within a wooden boat. A fog, dense with suffering, creeps forward, enveloping. Six swords, corpse cold within the hull, the only cargo. A perilous load, battle stained, still charged with a lingering impulse to pierce, to scupper my escape.
A man, unknown to me, oars rhythmically upon cool water.
He is ferrying me towards obscurity. Along the Lethe.
My worries evaporate as we glide into the abyss.
I am forgetting myself.
The persistent bleat of a smoke alarm retrieves me to the warmth of my bed.
I seek out the ungodly dirge. Silencing it.
Another shrieks. Fumbling downstairs, I locate the second device and pacify it.
Then the kitchen lights begin to flicker. On and off.
Some urgent message tapped out in morse.
Before I am plunged into a void.
And a chill fear, originating at my heart, spreads its fatigue over me, until I’m sapped of all vitality.
A worn radio buffers through white noise, searching for signal.
Voices emerge from the past. Thick accents in lost dialects sound an SOS for a vessel in distress. The radio searches once more, before settling. A song spills out.
Seabird, seabird fly home…
The bulb flickers on, to reveal the wall in front of me, dissolving like thawing snow – transforming to a shimmering kaleidoscope. Within its misty portal, half-formed images appear and recede. Projected by an unseen hand, zooming in and out of time.
The air thickens with oleander. Mournful wails, drifted through miles, reach out to me.
Far off echoes. A foghorn sounding it’s call from the dead.
The orb on the wall morphs to a ship’s porthole.
As a water line seeps across it, on diagonal, like flooding ink on blotting paper.
My lungs fill with ice. Cerulean swirls obliterate me, as the sea drowns my cries.
The blue fades paler and paler until I’m screaming onto a blank wall again, close enough to kiss its surface.
The tear in time has repaired itself.
On waking, I decide the events were mere fantasy, conjured by a sleep deprived mind.
I go for a walk outside, choosing a familiar route, in hope of a way back to reality.
But I’m stopped dead in my tracks.
By a rectangle, charged like a mine.
Laid in my path.
Blue background, swathed in white filigree.
I turn the card knowingly.
Sodden from a recent downpour.
The image bled, but still distinguishable.
The Six of Swords.
Again.
________________________________________________________________________
PART TWO
I walk into a dusky vignette, illuminated solely by a molten mass of wax. Red, white and black lumps, pool and congeal into some primal horror at the centre of the table. I wonder what future it foretells.
The air is foetid with Patchouli.
Points of fire flicker, exposing flash of crystal ball, chunk of quartz, gleam of bell, slither of gold edged cards.
The room reveals itself slowly, like a mystery, as my eyes adjust to the conditions.
The man opposite me is overflowing, his corpulence spilling over a sparse wooden chair, straining to support him. Late sixties, grey wisps hung in halo around his head, glimmering in the light. Pallid skin etched deep by past miseries. Head heavy as if under hypnotic trance. An inanimate puppet, save for the unrelenting fidget of fingers, throwing glint of jewelled ring around us.
I had heard the best Mediums were overweight.
The frequency of death is very dense. It pulls at the flesh of the living, dragging it down, causing it to sag. Vast energy is utilised to meet Spirit half way, which must be built, through twitch of body, tone of voice. A lot of sickness gets absorbed.
After contact is made, a little sweetness revives the aura, like a wilting flower.
His blue shirt is dusted with biscuit crumbs, sugar crystals ablaze like constellations in a night sky. Head down, hands conducting apparatus on the table ceaselessly.
Momentarily, swollen fingers settle onto the brass bell. Yet to meet my gaze, he swings it.
“Calling in Spirit… We ask for protection and guidance… Take me to my anchor point… asking those spirit side to step forward now…”
His voice is hollow, with elongated cadence that seems artificial. Words clinging around his tongue too long.
Simpler to call back the dead than retrieve uttered words perhaps.
“I’m getting a male energy around you. He’s showing me a black stone. He’s still earth side. Can you take that?”
I nod, unconvinced by this generality.
“I need you to confirm out loud. It builds energy, helps me reach Spirit. You gave it to him to protect him. Can you accept that?”
“Yes I can take that” – thinking, who hadn’t I given a tourmaline to?
“I see a brown jug, with a man’s face. A bearded man. It holds nail clippings, hair, wax…. an enchantment. It’s being pulled up… from the bottom of the ocean. Covered in barnacles. Hasn’t seen light for many years…”
“No. I don’t understand that”.
The Patchouli is clinging to me like an encroaching shadow, cast by something sinister. I wonder what the scent is covering? I imagine this man leaves a trail of it. His presence lingering on, like a disease.
“Some things will resonate in time. Bear it in mind. I’m like a receiver, I have to give what I get. This man with the stone… It’s you that needs protection, not he… Spirit’s showing a well, within a desert. He draws to you, energetically, to rejuvenate. You have a golden aura. To some it is blinding, dear. He’s placing a black veil over part of you, to bear the light. He doesn’t see all your brilliance. Spirit’s asking you to take off the veil, to shine at full capacity. Can you take that message?”
“Yes. Yes….. I suppose!” I snap irritably.
The man opposite raises his head, revealing milky eyes staring fixed upon oblivion.
”Now I see someone in water. He’s calling for help, but you can’t hear him. You’re waving to him as he drowns. You will experience a loss. That which joined you once, will part you.”
Rubbish. I think. Another charlatan. He probably isn’t even blind.
”The vision is as sharp as a sword. This is set in stone, not written in sand.” He warns.
I jump from my seat, slamming his fee onto the table.
“There’s more. Spirit tells me you have the gift. They communicate with you… through dreams, objects… There’s a song. I’m being shown a tarot card…”
I’m half way through the front door, choking down fresh air, as he calls to me
“Spirit will move you, when the time is right…”
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PART THREE
I meet eyes with my therapist, concluding she finds me mad.
“What is this desire to predict the future?” she asks “could it be an attempt at control?”
As we hold each other in contemplation something occurs to me.
“Are you Spiritual? ” I ask.
“Perhaps we should explore why this may be important to you?” Her attempt at deflection.
“Something nagged at me, go to therapy, like a splinter. Until I picked your name from a list, on a whim. Now, I know. It was preordained. We’ll both get answers today. Spirit is clever, lessons are never one sided.”
Becoming visibly uncomfortable, her steely demeanour is disrupted, small beads of sweat forming about neat temples.
“There’s a young girl around you. You lost a child, it’s why you became a therapist, you wanted to heal yourself. I’m seeing roses, Rose… No that’s not her name… It’s a month, the time when roses first appear… June. You named her June. For your favourite month. And you’ve laid the best of June’s roses from your garden on her grave these past eight years.”
Blood drains from her cheeks until she’s pale as a sacrifice herself. Face distorting incredulously.
“Just the other side of a thin veil. That’s how close she is still. She sends you ladybirds, they swarm the roses you leave, but you don’t notice. She knows you need real proof. She’s showing me a paper you carry, laminated, you kiss it every night. The last thing she gave you. It’s with you now. She’s suggesting you open your wallet and show me.”
Trembling hands tear into her jacket pocket.
Part of me is pleased to have proven her wrong, to so easily undo her composure.
She pulls out the cherished votive of her nightly liturgy.
A ladybird, clumsily rendered in red and black crayon.
Drawn in a child’s hand.
Grief is the presence of love undirected, I think.
“Look out for ladybirds” I offer.
Part of me is terrified to know for sure I am not mad.
To be continued…
About the author
Studio Portrait
Byzantia Harlow (b. 1986) lives and works in London. She received her MA Painting from The Royal College of Art, London and her BA (Hons) Fine Art from Central Saint Martins.
Solo exhibitions include ‘Take What Resonates’, Harlesden High Street, London (2021) ; ‘Lunar Water’, Platform Southwark, London (2019) and ‘From the same source I have not taken’, Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix, London (2018).
Harlow’s work investigates the intersection between true experience, constructed encounter and embellished recollection. Her long-term interest in alternative societies, groups exploring the spiritual or supernatural and unconventional healing practices informs current work. For Harlow, every determination of an event is the balance between cynicism, or acceptance of the mystical. Blending the natural and the supra-natural, the work asks the viewer to take a leap of faith, to follow Harlow through the labyrinthine structures of sculpture, of social performance, and of constructed narrative. The artist is opening the door to both possible enlightenment and potential (dis)illusionment.
Alongside her art practice Harlow works as a Psychic Reader using a Tarot Deck she created. She will be exhibiting her deck within an upcoming solo show at Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix this year. Her Project ‘The Silver Stream’ on Soho Radio explores the artists’ theoretical concerns in collaboration with invited guests.
Byzantia Harlow, image – durational performance within ‘Lunar Water’ 2019
Part One of Ebbed Tide by Byzantia Harlow
Previously on CREATRIXmag by Byzantia Harlow:
