Title: A High Point On A Sea Of Low
Author: Juanita Dark
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: The Talented Mr Ripley
Summary: And then the boat was gone. There was nothing there.
Disclaimer: I feel I must apologise to Ms. Highsmith who is at this moment spinning in her grave. Mr Minghella gets my props, though.
A High Point On A Sea Of Low
Listing.
The boat kept swaying from side to side, and every so often Ripley would glance up at the sky and find the sun a high impossible dot, stringing clouds behind it like the tail of a kite. The light would hurt his eyes making him close them, and he'd move closer to Dickie – who was as warm and untroubled and dead as Ripley was the opposite.
The screaming gulls were what finally made Ripley lift this head - and then, he'd had to move Dickie's arm from his shoulder first. The boat had been drifting (he hadn't cared for how long) each wave on wave making him think of music, cascades of piano notes, his fingers falling on the keys – each note eliminating the other with a decaying but resonant harmony.
The gulls were strident reminders that he was closer to shore. He was always closer to shore. He had hoped once that he and Dickie would drift to an island somewhere and be alone together. Forever. But that was not to be.
He waited.
When he finally felt strong enough he lifted the bloody oar – that had struck Dickie beside the ear so cleanly earlier with a brutal lack of concern for his beauty or his vanity. Naturally, the oar seemed heavier now – or maybe he was weaker, and his smashings against the bottom of the boat sounded briefly like the smashings at the bottom of a barrel, the echoes against the walls of a glass house. When he finally made some headway the water poured inward bringing up with its level the fragments of the underside.
For a moment Dickie's hair wafted like seaweed against the surface of the water fighting its own immersion and the flickers of sunlight reflected there. One of his eyes was still slightly open yet not wide enough to capture Ripley. Never to capture Ripley.
Ripley took the ring from the smallest finger of Dickie's left hand with no small difficulty. Harder still was the removal of the jacket – which, in retrospect he should have tried to remove before opening a hole in the bottom of the boat; his tugging left Dickie's arm turned upwards, an empty gesture of something threat or plea.
The boat was listing again and the gulls above him were starting to sound interested in what transpired below. As the level of water rose, it lifted Dickie suddenly, shifting the angle of his head. What stuck out now for Ripley was the half-closed eye not entirely escaping form the clumps of blood-matted, blond hair. That kind of blue against red against something else.
He stepped off of the boat, swimming beside it for a time, then turning it over so that when it finally sank it would take Dickie beneath with it.
He remembered that when it did so he was watching it from nearby rock formation that jutted (favourably or unfavourably – time would tell) into the sea. The sun had sunk lower and the world seemed darker somehow and yet infinitely capable of projecting promise – all of which, he supposed, would be denied to him all over again.
He was shivering; and he'd pulled at Dickie's jacket resting on his shoulders – everything wet through – not conscious that he was pulling it closer, pulling it on entirely, one sleeve after another.
And then the boat was gone. There was nothing there.
A gull flapped down to land on the rock farthest from him, rubbing its beak thoughtfully with one webbed foot. By then he had already slipped Dickie's ring onto his smallest finger, and moved down as close to the water as balance and common sense could take him. His face swayed in the waves below him, the sun an impossible world away behind him – where he must go.
His shirt still held small specks of blood that he closed his jacket around – not large enough to be telltale but not small enough to escape detection. He wiped a hand across his chin, thinking, logically, blood must be there too, but his fingers – those of his right hand – came up clean.
The gull struck it's beak on the rock making an incongruously hollow sound.
Turning he and found the shore closer than he'd ever imagined.
- fin -