On the Broken Shore

by James MacManus

  The sea had become his world. By day he would swim out half a mile or more and dive as deep as he dared, seeking old wrecks in channels around the sandbanks where fish gathered in glittering shoals.

  In the murky half-light below water the shifting currents around the wrecks would swirl sand from the sea floor into ghostly shapes so that it was perfectly possible to believe that long-departed sailors still haunted the ships on which they had once sailed. The bones of the dead had long since crumbled into the sandy detritus of the seabed, making all the more real the human forms created by current and tide.

  Maybe, thought Leo, there was some logic behind the old myth of Davy Jones’s locker, whoever Davy Jones was. Sailors from medieval times had mentioned him in hushed whispers – a satanic spirit roaming the seas welcoming those who slid through the waves to a watery grave.

  More and more he took to the water at night, revelling in the liquid silver world created by moonlight. When the moon was down and the skies clear he would lie back, arms outstretched, and float, looking up at all those stars and trying to remember which formations made up Orion’s Belt or the Bear.

  Only 3,000 stars are visible to the naked eye, he had learnt at school, but from the sea at night there seemed a billion of them clustered overhead, casting a luminous glow on the water. He avoided storms, learning quickly how to decode the signals in the waters around him: it was easy by day because the sky always gave warning, but at night a storm could blow up around the Cape in minutes.

  Leo could tell from a change of current and a strengthening tidal pull that bad weather was brewing well before the waves heightened and the winds began to blow harder. He was always ashore bedded down in a shallow scoop among the dunes when the storm broke. However, he would stay in the water for the occasional night rainstorms that spattered long silver needles into the calm dark sea. Then he would float on his back with his mouth wide open and drink the best water he had ever tasted.

  It wasn’t just the ghosts of past mariners that haunted the seabed. The ocean was a noisy place. Leo could clearly hear the hum of the big underwater power and communication cables that snaked along the ocean’s floor, some to cross the Atlantic, others turning south and north to link with communications centres and power plants up and down the coast.

  Worst of all was the sonar, long bursts of sound that rippled through the water, usually in the hours before dawn, from a US Navy ship trialling submarine-detection devices, sometimes over 100 miles away.

  Inaudible to the human ear, the sonar was torture to the whales and seals, whose acute auditory senses were thrown into painful disarray by the acoustic attack. Seals would flee the area of any sonar activity, and would often make straight for land even if there were humans close by. The whales had no such option. Caught in a web of hydro sonic sound beamed on frequencies that penetrated the very core of their being, a pod of whales would be driven into a frenzy, diving down to the ocean floor and cannoning off the seabed to the surface, then diving again.

  In his second week at sea Leo watched from 200 yards offshore as three whales beached themselves north of Wellfleet in a desperate attempt to flee the noise that was destroying their auditory sense and their means of navigation. Two floundered in the shallows while the third drove himself with huge exertion up on to the beach and lay there quivering.

  It was not long before teams of yellow-jacketed emergency services personnel had taped off the beach and covered the whale in wet blankets. A tractor was brought in to tow all three mammals back into the water. Those in the shallows were gently pulled back to sea, towed by the tractor on a bed of rubber blankets. No sooner had the rescue teams regained the beach than they turned to see the whales once again in the shallows, flailing their tails to lever themselves towards the shore.

  By now the falling tide meant a four-hour wait before a second effort could be made to return the beached whales to the ocean. It was a pointless exercise, as many among the rescue teams knew. All three whales expired of shock and exhaustion before the tide turned, and were trucked away that night to be delivered to the incinerator.

  The only time Leo ever felt in any danger was once when returning from a long and exhausting swim a mile offshore following a flock of seagulls in the hope of finding fish. He got caught close to the beach in a rip tide, one of the well-known and widely feared currents along the Cape coast that can take an inexperienced swimmer from the warm shallows and drag him to his death in deeper, colder water.

  Almost every week in the summer season the Cape Herald carried a report of a rip-tide fatality, always involving a visitor, usually a middle-aged male. As the safety leaflets distributed to every hotel and guest house pointed out, the way to survive a rip current was to swim across it, never against it.

  By then Leo was a much stronger swimmer than most summer visitors to the Cape. But he was tired when he was caught, and found himself unable to break out of the current. Usually the powerful flow of water, created by shifting sandbars in the shallows, was no more than thirty yards wide, but he found himself in a far broader current which was moving much faster than the falling tide in the surrounding water.

  He surrendered to the rip and lay on his back, floating out to sea. For the first time since he had been washed overboard from the Antoine he felt afraid. Death had lost almost all meaning in his new existence, because in his rational moments he believed himself to be trapped in a dream after death. But the fear of drowning as the rip sucked him into the deep water came as a powerful reminder of his mortality. The bone-numbing cold and his exhaustion had drained him of the energy to swim. But he was alive, and he wanted to live.

  Then a familiar head broke the surface close by, followed by another. The seals vanished as quickly as they had appeared, but when Leo finally staggered ashore an hour later he felt they had given him the will to survive.

  A few days later, through what he admitted was his own stupidity, he found himself in even more deadly danger. He was free diving on an old wooden gillnet boat that had gone down about 100 yards beyond the tide line in thirty feet of water twenty years previously. The boat was half sunk into the sand and much of it had rotted away, leaving the rusting frame of the cabin and a hatchway to a cavernous hold above the seabed. It was a bright day, and sunlight illuminated a portion of the hold, revealing a wealth of marine life among the tangle of rotten timbers and the long trailing fronds of seaweed. Big king crabs scuttled across the sandy floor and darted into bushes of weed, their long antennae poking through the greenery to reveal their hiding places. Leo had twice dived into the hold, spending about thirty seconds inside each time. He swam down the ladders of light to what had once been the bottom of the ship’s hull, circled the sunlit area of the old hold and then kicked for the surface. On his second dive he had surprised and caught a large king crab, using the remnants of a wooden spar to pin it to the sea floor.

  Swimming with one arm and carefully carrying the crab by the rear of its shell, he had taken it to a deserted spot among the rocks and smashed it open. Even after the strong ridged claws had been ripped from the body they continued to snap open and shut for almost a minute before the nervous system finally closed down. Leo wrapped what would be his meal that night in one of the many plastic bags that washed around the shallows and hid it under a tangle of seaweed.

  Emboldened by this success, he returned for a third dive. The sun was setting, and there was little light left underwater. He had just entered the hold when a conger eel twelve feet long appeared from the gloom and circled him in a fast flash of silver, closing to within a yard of him as the circle tightened.

  Leo told himself not to worry. He was being circled by a fish that was simply a long tube of muscle attached to strong jaws. But conger eels are shy, nocturnal creatures, emerging from their hiding places in old wrecks to feed on fish and squid. Only rarely will they attack swimmers or divers, preferring to flee at the sight or sound of underwater intruders.

  As Leo turned, thrashing his legs to scare off
the beast and make a speedy retreat to the surface, it came straight for him, mouth agape, rows of sharp teeth gleaming in the half-light, razor sharp and ready to rip and tear.

  Leo was all too aware of the one exception to the rule about congers’ usually timorous behaviour. They will always attack anything that they feel threatens their young. This had happened to a diver eight miles off the coast of St Andrews in 2004, not long after the Kemps had left Scotland. The 42-year-old scuba diver had been exploring a trawler wreck at a depth of 80 feet when a 250-pound conger clamped its jaws on to his arm and dragged him deep into the hold of the vessel. He was slammed against the side of the ship, and could have been pinned there until he suffocated or bled to death, but with great skill and strength he managed to force the eel to release its grip by squeezing its back with his free hand.

  The eel seized Leo by the ankle, dragging him back towards the depths of the hold but leaving both his arms free. The fight that followed was over very quickly. Leo twisted down and punched the creature hard on its snout, then pushed his thumbs roughly where he thought its eyes would be, and the fish released its grip.

  Leo felt no pain as he surfaced, but he knew he would be bleeding. He had been under for just over a minute, but it had felt like a year. He regained the shore in the twilight, limped to the cover of the rocks and wrapped the deep lacerations on his ankle in seaweed. He removed the dead crab from the plastic bag and used that to bind the seaweed to the ring of lacerations on his foot. With its high iodine content seaweed was an excellent medical dressing. He had once read a paper by a marine scientist at Swansea University in Wales that claimed traditional harvesters of seaweed along the coast never bothered to dress their cuts or grazes, as they healed quickly without treatment.

  Leo knew had been lucky. Had the conger clamped on to his leg higher up it could have severed veins or even a main artery. The shock and immediate loss of blood would probably have killed him. At the very least the beast would have torn off a chunk of his calf muscle. As it was, the pain kept him awake that night and left him limping the next day as he scavenged as usual along the foreshore at dawn, scooping up molluscs revealed by the retreating tide before the arrival of flocks of waders.

  He took great care on these shoreline food hunts to keep as far from human presence as possible. If anyone on the beach happened to see him at sea, he would be just another black dot amid the waves, another seal head. And if illegal overnight campers emerged from their sleeping bags among the dunes in the first glimmerings of dawn, all they would see was a mad naturist treasurehunting along the shoreline in the distance.

  When he was ashore during the day he hid deep in the dunes or among seaweed-covered rocks close to the water. He kept clear of all boat traffic but the frequent flash of sunlight on binoculars aboard fishing boats told him that the local fishermen were still looking for something or someone in the coastal waters. Once or twice he thought he saw Buck’s gillnet boat working up the coast, but the possible sighting of someone he had known so well standing on the rear deck was like an abstract image, unattached to any emotion. Not so the dreamlike visions of Julian swimming among the waves and underwater, his long hair streaming behind him. The dreams wove their way through Leo’s mind whether he was asleep or awake. Julian never talked to him, never looked at him, but he was there in the sea around him and on the shore at night. He was with him when he awoke and began hunting for breakfast of birds’ eggs or mussels, and still with him when he fell asleep exhausted in the dune grass at night. He had found Julian. With that knowledge came a feeling of inner content that Leo had not known for years, maybe ever.

  The strength of the big storm that hit the Cape in the fifth week of his new existence took Leo by surprise. He had watched the weather worsening for thirty-six hours as the wind shifted to the north-east. It grew colder and he could sense the falling barometric pressure as the low system moved in. To his surprise his pod of twenty seals seemed more agitated than usual by the changing weather, and had moved from Wellfleet down to Monomoy Island the evening before the storm broke. They joined several hundred grey and harbour seals who sought shelter overnight in one of the many lagoons formed by shifting sandbars. The next morning, as charcoal clouds scudded across a dark sky, the whole group began swimming from the calm waters of the lagoon into the steepening waves of a slate-grey sea.

  They had left the lagoon almost as a unit, seemingly acting on some secret order, moving through the water with military precision and a clear sense of purpose. Leo was puzzled; usually seals would seek the shelter of a rocky foreshore in rough weather. Now they were heading out to sea, clearly with a distant destination in mind. He followed, struggling to keep up with the rearmost seals, diving into the waves and sliding through them as they did, never raising his head to plot a direction. Every time he fell behind he would find seal heads around him, seemingly pointing the way forward.

  Then he lost them in the mist of spindrift and spume. Exhaustion rather than the cold slowed him down. Feeling his strength failing, he turned on his back and let the sea carry him. He felt like another piece of driftwood being tossed around on the waves. Metal drums, wooden fruit boxes, lobster-pot marker buoys, assorted planks and waterlogged bales of what looked like hempen rope floated briefly into his path before being snatched away by the wind and tide.

  As he grew weaker, he lost the energy to do anything more than kick his legs out in vague imitation of a frog. He tried to reason with himself. He was not mad, and still had the remnants of a rational mind. It was tempting to succumb to the belief that he had died and was in purgatory, cast upon the oceans to expiate his sins through suffering before entering the afterlife cleansed of his worldly vices. But he was not a Christian; still less did he subscribe to medieval theology. So answer the question, he said to himself: what are you doing trying to swim through a storm with a group of seals, who have in any case vanished into the vastness of the ocean around you?

  Answer came there none. He didn’t know why he had left the safety of the island. He had been impelled by a strange desire to do as the seals did and since they had chosen to move from what would soon be a storm-battered coast he had simply followed. That would have to do.

  Leo was shaken from his semi-conscious state by the thump of a heavy object slamming into his side. He doubled up with pain and reached out to fend off his attacker, only to find himself clinging to a substantial panelled wooden door, complete with a brass knob and knocker. It was large enough for Leo to lever himself up on to it and use it as a makeshift raft.

  Of all the flotsam in the ocean, he thought, I find a front door, presumably from a container full of furnishings swept off the deck of a cargo vessel and broken open by the waves. It was made of teak, he guessed, like the trunk that had ended Julian’s life.

  Whether he slept or lost consciousness he did not know, but he became aware of a brilliant night sky and a calmer sea. The door was no longer climbing the waves and slamming into the troughs, shaking every bone in his body, but was rising and falling rhythmically in a long, sweeping swell. He had survived. Famished and thirsty, he drifted back to sleep.

  The sound of a motor engine close by woke him. He was still sprawled across his front-door raft, clinging to the door knob and knocker. He raised himself on to an elbow and craned to see over the wave tops. A trawler had heaved to 400 yards away, its bow anchor taut in the strong swell left behind in the storm’s wake.

  Beyond the trawler Leo could see a coastline a mile distant. A boat was coming towards him: a small launch. A man in the bow was looking through binoculars in his direction. The other crew members were shouting something and pointing towards him.

  Leo levered himself up into a crouching position. The men in the launch were wearing lifejackets and oilskins – they were probably crewmen from a trawler based at Chatham or Falmouth. The man in the bow had exchanged his binoculars for a coiled rope attached to a buoyancy ring. He waved at Leo and shouted something unintelligible.

  This wa
s Leo’s chance: he could be on board that boat in minutes. They would wrap him in a blanket and give him a steaming mug of chocolate laced with rum. He would be back in harbour in an hour, back on land, back home. Back with Margot and Sam. Back in the Dark Side drinking his vodka-laced health drinks with Sandy. Back fighting for his job at the Institute. Back with Gloria.

  He rolled off the raft, hearing a faint shout as he hit the water. He duck-dived and swam as strongly as could, down and away from the approaching launch. He swam till his lungs felt as if they were on fire, and then, digging deep into the reserves of endurance built up over the past five weeks gave two more hard strokes before breaking the surface. Between the rise and fall of the waves he could see the launch circling the wooden door. They were looking for him, but the big rolling swell made it difficult for them to see him. And he didn’t want them to. He didn’t want to go back. He didn’t want to surrender the freedom he had found in the twilight world he now inhabited, half man, half sea creature.

  Finally he had realised his childhood fantasy, the secret and impossible ambition that had haunted and driven him at every step of his life. How he had longed when walking the beaches near Mornington to run into the sea and shed the skin of humanity that clothed him, to turn his back on the species into which he had been born and become something else, a breathing sea creature, a seal, whale or dolphin, anything that gave him the freedom to escape and find a gypsy life at sea.

  While he was growing up he had fallen asleep at night with that dream in his head. He imagined himself in that magical place where the sky met the ocean, an Elysium in which the sea would free him from the drudgery of school, the endless sibling bickering at home, the angst of teenage life.