Side A Fiction: “Whirlpool” by Mark Wagstaff

Whirlpool

The seaside painter paints what he sees. For tourists who scour the old town shops for authentic memories of their happy days at the beach. Who pay extra for signed and framed, to support artisan crafts. For friends, to settle small debts, though everyone knew these pictures never gained value. As presents, a quaint tribute to abiding tolerance. For himself, or so he thought. When he entered competitions. When he submitted to the artless eyes of exhibition judges. Because he’s the painter. A feature of the old town. Alongside the ropemaker, the hobbyist fortune teller and the lady from the city who sells vintage clothes. He fills a precarious space for local color, so the town elders think the place is hanging on. That standard enjoyments and franchise outlets haven’t taken over completely. Like the Bottleneck font announcing the ice cream parlor or the art deco public toilets, he’s a scrap of a past worthy of preservation, for now.

He paints the sea in all its moods, though only fine days sell. He paints the men who haul the boats through shingle walls to the breakers. The tall net huts that conspire like witches in gravel fields under the cliffs. The boats in blue and red that stink of fish, on rich days. Intricate ways between the stones, trapped pools, the drifts of furbelow flung from the tide. His cottage, bought in more generous times, is floor to ceiling with paintings. He doesn’t know who’ll have them. He likes to think someone might.

Long ago he’d paint in the wild, his easel askew on the beach. But attention, once polite, grew boorish. Then he took photographs, close ups and panoramas, to pin in his studio, to work unseen. To reproduce faithfully. To give, as expected, reality, brushed flat. Now he saw the huts, the cliffs, and went home to paint. All so familiar he had no need of prompts. Each different sky was the sky. Every rockpool unique, with all others. The sea in its moods was fair or gloomy, high or waning. Sometimes he repainted old pictures, moments remade as nostalgia. A past, abiding amongst the stout trail of each brushstroke.

Of course he made no money. He sold a few things. Taught classes. Took handouts. Had a deal with a local pub for paint-and-ale tours that came to nothing. Designed postcards. Wrote a few lines for local listings. Offered himself as a judge for carnival floats. Declined a little each season. Felt time in his bones.

After storms was good for pictures. The sea, frothed and careless. Scattered debris. Nets inflated and boards strained loose. A wildness that intercepted flags, that strung clouds ragged. The spark of hawsers against the jetty. Gulls ravishing renegade winds. With sensuous eyes, he imagined, in the moment, gathered pictures: commissioned, displayed, the nonpareil of his work. Exceeding stilted mythic scenes and drunken Venetian palazzi. The erudite canon of a master in plain sight.

So caught with seeing what might be, the woman and boy edging the shore made an offensive intrusion. Their attitudes muddy, their relation to sky and water hopelessly routine. Their movements—as the boy ran and the woman hauled after—a churning, futile waste. They demeaned the elegance of tides.

No sailor, he distrusted old salts with their tall-masted tales. Their trawlers had engines. Their navigation came pre-pack. He despised blistered buffoons on yachts worth more than his house. He keened softly for neoprene women who butterflied beyond the jetty, to surf, momentary argonauts, soaked and heuristic. He dressed for the coast. Fixed in a nautical town, he kept proper with baggy cargos—stacked with pockets, ribboned by paint—a woolen in maritime colors, a jacket, patched and leaking turpentine. He gave what people expected. But the woman and boy, in chemical fabrics of upland cities, warped the horizon. When she pulled out a phone and directed the boy to some nonsense of splashing around, the painter turned away, kicking stones that stung through worn leather. The woman would buy a puffy coat, a haircut, a takeaway meal. She wouldn’t think to buy a painting.

Wind pressed the headland, picturesque air describing acrobat gambols. The painter saw—as though bristled with smoke—air strike the cliff and somersault. Like pudgy cherubs blowing the quarters of antique maps, the wind was disposed to mischief. He might have made something of that. A fabulist painting. A canvas of unfeasible fiction. But that would distort his oeuvre. It wouldn’t sell. Cantankerous imagery: what good would it do? While the cliffs held pale anemones, lilac and candid, calling the familial wind. Studies of flowers in shivering modesty worked at small scale. A certain type of customer would be charmed.

His intention to climb the path through the bracken, arrested by noise at the shore. The boy in the water, chopping breakers. The woman tracking his every move on her phone. He didn’t want to draw toward them, yet attitudes—the boy, slapping waves with his palms; the woman, poised to freeze each splash—framed them in precise and empty ritual. A near-classical subject, if he could recall which one.

Wind, bunched against the cliff, picked his loose threads. The jacket, the Fair Isle, his trousers stiffened with ochre and blue, bought from the brief jubilee of a sale. His wardrobe indebted to paintings. At first it was all for the meantime. When he entered contests. When he scraped the acquaintance of rancid sots of critics. The sea would carry him to weightier canvas, richer colors, his days at the shore the formative time of his legend. But he found no release and made no money. Now, he could only invest in what he saw.

Her accent, the piled streets of the big city. An industry of words, quick together, that hung against the bay like fast-running squalls. She directed the boy this way and that. He seemed to have no language but curious, arch laughter, as though he’d seen the future and found it absurd. He swam in ordinary clothes. That didn’t seem strange.

“Go back. Go out and back.” Breathless, quickfire. “Here comes a big one. Break it down.”

Windmilling arms tore waves that knitted behind him.

“Push out. Go big. Big splash. I’ll dub the sea noise.” Demanding action, her movements were dainty. Feet planted across two flattened rocks, barely a step each side, the phone steady before her face, one eye half-closed. “Can you hear the bells? I hear the bells.”

Close enough to see sweat cord her hairline. As though to shout and flick the screen was exertion. Even that weather, she seemed overdressed, stilted above the swash. Unlike the boy, whose vibrant dissonance amplified his laugh as he carved through the tide.

“Big effort. Big effort. Big effort. Get the bells ringing.”

Gulls shrieked. Magpies that roosted the cliffs swung long, loose curves across the waves and back to town. Wind jangled ropes and spars. The net huts released men’s curses. No bells to ring. Not the Church of Our Lady, hard by the strand, its bell tethered fifty years. The boy tried to pirouette, his head ducked under, laughing.

“’Scuse me. I’m getting your shadow.” The woman’s voice pitched high.

He didn’t know she was talking to him.

“Your shadow. Dogging my shot.”

Lazy, reluctant sunlight picked bare the clouds. Walls rose. Objects grew depth. Each stone stretched an oval of shade. His form stained the sand.

“It’s creepy,” she explained. “It breaks the frame.”

“Frame?”

“What’s here.” She tapped the screen. “People want dancing. This slick down here mucks the framing.” She sighed. “It’s where you’re stood.”

Di Chirico laid shadows at blind corners, in forms of unease. Even when he stopped believing that, he still did it. The painter stepped back, his shadow draining from the pixels. “He’s a good swimmer.”

The boy’s arms whipped the swell to fine spray.

“He dances.” She grumbled as though they already failed to have this conversation. “Air and water. Earth and fire. He nature dances.”

“Fire?”

“Haven’t got that yet. He wants to, for real. No filters. That’s it,” she shouted. “Big tip over. Dolphin-style.”

“Must be awkward, in those clothes.”

She made a sharp, stinging sound. “Well he can’t do it naked.”

Bound with the odd propriety of strangers, they watched the boy’s upper body attempt moves of light and air, while he churned the billowing water. In its good-natured, morning-after state, the sea’s uncanny patience boosted his limbs, braced his shoulders, shaped him as a sparkling flamboyance.

The painter never spoke with friends. They knew him better than words. And his debts to them hemmed any conversation. He had a certain projected manner he used with potential customers. How well his work would dress their walls. How fine their taste, to see that. He could advise on position, décor, light, as proxies for the value he couldn’t deliver. Real art, skilled art, always repays, he’d tell them. But the painter couldn’t speak with women as women. Once, he played the brash artist, for rewards of pitying warmth. Now, foxed at the edges, scratched and poorly-varnished, he saw young women take up sharper prospects, while women his age were already invested. He hoped this woman would take his laughter to acknowledge he’d been foolish. “No, of course not. I mean he swims well. In those clothes.”

“He dances.” Grazed from her teeth, the words bit. “Big twist around. Twist it. Twist it. Big whoosh. Hands in the air. Smile. Smile. That’s gold.” She shuddered. “Mind my elbow.”

“Sorry.”

“I got to keep steady. This is authentic, yeah?”

Onshore breezes looped his fingers. Muscles yearned to draw, to finesse, to slake weary desire. “Authenticity is important.”

“You know, do you? That’s it. Up and right around. Again. There’s too much spray.” A slight articulation to her stance. A fraction of height. A bite at proximity. “Smack the water away from you. It’s all sudsy.”

“I strive for the authentic.” Maybe he had, when fresh canvases stacked in the hall. When the forms of each day achieved composition.

“You a creator?”

The old masters cleaved to one singular creator. “I paint.”

“Big wave. Get up. Get over.”

The boy resurfaced, his laughter defiant, like he taught the water a lesson.

“Mind out. You can see what I’m doing.”

But the woman’s fixation, the boy’s acrobatics, mystified him. “He dances?”

“Further back. That’s it. Ring the bells.”

“Bells?”

“Look.” Some vast offense swung her shoulders at him. She thumbed a site on her phone. “This, yeah? How we do. I’m a creator. See it.”

Years ago, he bought a clever phone, for business. A drunk from the shipwrecked bar said his daughter could build a site. A storefront. To catch enquiries. A gallery space more reliable than fickle dealers. It looked good. Professional. Never brought much business, but it was something. A statement in the world. Then the girl went to university. Moved away. She showed him how to update the site, but he was too involved with her voice to hear what she said. He paid to keep it alive for a time. But money was tight.

Video loops like bricks in a wall, strung between large numbers. In water, earth, and air, the laughing boy.

“This.” Her touch animated the screen. “He’s done me proud with this. A community this deep deserves respect. What we’re doing. Creating content. So watch your shadow.”

“Is that hundred thousands?”

“Should be millions. We’ll get there. When we do fire. He rings the bells.”

“Bells?”

“Views. Likes. Money. Do you live in one of them caves?”

Robotic, he turned to the cliffs. Walkers laced the heights like ragged sentries. One raised a stick, pointing out to sea. “People like this?”

“More we do the more we get.”

The boy struck further. Still shrieking. Still punching the tide. But diminished, his impetus electrolyzed in water. Once, twice, waves caressed his hair. The caring sea, protective of its treasures.

“Come forward,” she yelled, the phone at her face. “I can’t focus out there.”

The boy waved and twirled and stayed distant.

Wind raking the catch delivered a swell to pierce the tide, to goad rocks to join water with jubilant motion. Below the waves, displacement became rotation. It might fail but if it took, an abscess would draw water under itself, funneled against rocks that sparked its momentum. From years of service to the sea, the painter knew how the tumult quickened. Once, he tried to paint it, Japanese style. A failed canvas.

Without moving her feet, the woman leaned outward, attempting to gain the angle to bring everything clear. “That’s gold. That’s gold. Bring it in. I’m getting all sky.”

The boy danced and danced. Losing strength. Losing heat. Gaining momentum. His arms above the breakers the blind commands of a tyranny in its swamped power.

The painter opened his clever phone. He could paint this day. It was terrific. The streaming sky, the wind apparent in shattered clouds, gulls hinged on the sunlight. The boiling sea, its serpentine muscles shoaled from the undertow, coupling with itself to form new tides. In the mess of contrary water, the smooth, clean funnel. Contradictions resolved in harsh gravity. The dancing boy, arms outstretched, energetic, resounding. Sweeping the bladed water, dancing against its caress.

The image slapped down. His phone a window in the sand.

“You don’t. This is my channel. I worked hard for this.” Her aim steady against the water. Her eyes a brilliance of sea-glass. “You don’t take someone’s thing. I’m a creator.”

“I paint. This is a good picture.”

“My picture.” Spray silvered her face. “People don’t paint. They don’t do painting. I’m a six-figure community. I’m the creator of the boy that nature dances. You do a picture, everyone knows you got it from me. They’ll laugh at you. Bet they already do.”

Some worm moved inside him. “The urge to represent is old as time. A photograph is the surface. Paint goes to the infinite, ahead of you. It can’t be caught with your camera. I put a new object in nature. I create.”

Her lips curtained glittering teeth. “You mean: ‘It is because I say it is.’ That’s garbage. I show what happens when someone dances on the world. That’s authentic. I create.”

“It’s indiscriminate.”

“It’s real. No self-righteous theories.”

Then they were jostled by shouting men, colliding in space, carving the air. Someone grabbed his shoulder with the urgent, burning embrace of a lost brother. Someone grasped the woman and tipped her around.

The flash of a boat cut the laughing tide.

The boy never stopped dancing.

Mini-interview with Mark Wagstaff

HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?

MW: This one goes back to childhood. One of my favorite books as a kid was The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by the great fantasy writer Alan Garner. In Garner’s work the landscape is a character, its moods, its likes and dislikes shape human actions and the circumstances people have to deal with. It’s a reminder the ground we stand on is living. As a kid I lived by the sea and in semi-suburban settings. Not a wild landscape, but enough hides and hollows and bits of scrub woodland to conjure some adventures. I’d go out alone, around those fields and woods with Garner’s mystical earth magic in my head. Looking into holes in the ground and gnarly old trees, hoping to find some marvel. What I didn’t understand then was that those books were teaching me how to experience things—the shapes of things, their composition, their relation to the landscape. Teaching me how the physical world fits together, where it sticks tight and where it cracks apart. The senses of a writer need to be open to the smell of earth, the touch of a breeze, that terrifying way the shadows of clouds consume the landscape. Because people and their actions have to sit within that frame. You need to understand where your characters are and why that location matters. That’s what I learned.

HFR: What are you reading?

MW: Perhaps interestingly, given that first answer, right now I’m reading A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin. Of course it has that somewhat puffed-up language one finds in fantasy (the petals of a flower look like embers because they recall a time the islands were afire thanks to the deeds of some fiendish individual—that sort of language). Yet the book has a distinct philosophical underpinning, around power and the proper moment to deploy power. In Le Guin’s world, the power of the wise is in their ability to refrain from action, until to act becomes the least-worst thing to do. And the power of these wizards derives from a vast system of naming the world, which is why true names are held secret. For this power, language is the most formidable weapon.

HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “Whirlpool”?

MW: Coastal towns in Britain—not the big industrial ports, but those which are smaller and somewhat faded—often have a reputation for being rather artsy-craftsy. One walks along a street and there’ll be a pottery studio and a shambolic store selling carved driftwood and, almost certainly, an art gallery wall to wall with seascapes. The people who live in those streets are the type who tend to describe themselves as quirky or eccentric. People who view creativity from an artisan standpoint, as molders of physical materials. Their lives are always financially precarious and, arguably, culturally narrow. Set alongside that is a whole other iteration of creativity. Digital content creators, forever seeking a new angle, a new response, a new way to get paid, to ring the bells. A painter might paint a hundred views of the sea and—possibly—sell those to a hundred people. A content creator might shoot a video on a beach, upload it their followers, which could be a million people or a billion people, but then the beach is done. They need quickly to find something new. As the two creators bicker on the beach what, perhaps, becomes apparent is that both approaches are legitimate and neither makes much objective sense. Perhaps the most interesting character is the boy, the nature dancer. So far as one can tell, he enjoys what he does and most likely doesn’t need to be watched to enjoy it. Unlike everyone around him, he has the least interest in the condition of the sea. We look from the painter’s perspective, because these people are on his patch. But each character is in their own creative world, constrained by what they understand creativity to be.

HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?

MW: Here comes the commercial. I’m fortunate to have a new novel Mascara due to be published in June 2025 from respected UK indie Cinnamon Press. This is something of a flashy thriller, a post-modern tale of politics and mayhem, if you will. If anyone wants to review Mascara I can get a copy to you, I’m that shameless. I’m also a member of the—probably very small—club for people who’ve won the 3-Day Novel Contest twice. I won the 39th contest with Attack of the Lonely Hearts and fairly recently won the 46th with a sci-fi AI roadtrip caper So We Blush Less When The Phone Rings. That should be published by the good folk at Anvil Press in Vancouver later this year. And if you’ve ever wondered about taking part in the 3-Day Novel Contest, I say Do It. If you throw the whole three days at the thing, you’re going to end up with around 100 pages of something that you can develop further if you wish. It’s worth it for that. I was asked to do a blog about it a few years ago—it’s on the writing.ie site with a picture of me, freezing cold and grumpy in a New York hallway late at night.

HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?

MW: Telling stories is the most egalitarian of what we consider to be the arts. Telling stories requires no laboratory, no conservatoire, no special equipment. Anyone can tell stories, it’s not some elite, behind the curtain thing. And the telling of stories enriches our lives and our communities. A story helps us to understand ourselves and to understand people who are not us. As long as a writer’s words exist, their voice exists and those voices are forever in conversation. We need to listen to voices that seem strange to us. To voices that make us uneasy. We need to make sure our children get to hear every voice.

Mark Wagstaff’s work has appeared in The Write Launch, Rockvale Review, Ginosko Literary Journal, and Solstice. He won the 39th Annual 3-Day Novel Contest with off-kilter romcom Attack of the Lonely Hearts published by Anvil Press. Mark’s latest novel raucous teen thriller On the Level was published in 2022 through Leaf by Leaf, an imprint of Cinnamon Press. And Cinnamon Press will publish Mark’s new novel Mascara a post-modern tale of politics and mayhem in 2025. More: markwagstaff.com.

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