Hemispheres

by Stephen Baker

But the boat was his?

  Not after he lost it at cards, it wasn’t. It was a decent bit of kit, mind. Four square sturdy metal tub, an ocean-going trawler with all the fishing gear ripped out. Dave reckoned he used it to run cheap snout and brandy over from South America into the Falklands. Kind of latter-day smuggler.

  Sounds like bullshit to me, Yan.

  Aye, maybe it was. But that old fish hold was still brimming with the sweet earthy scent of tobacco. Makes me want to spin a bifter up right now.

  You can’t. Not in here.

  I know.

  See, the idea was to just run south around Cape Horn and make landfall in Chile. Somewhere on that long coast north of Punta Arenas. But we reckoned without the weather, and now it’s driving us south and east into the Southern Ocean. I begin to conjure up a cigarette between my cold fingers and the door rips open again with a splash of Antarctic air.

  Vamos! yells Fabián Rodriguez. A squeal of static, a splurge of Spanish, and a soft rock tune starts among the spits of white noise. Not my taste, says Fabián, but it’s the best I can give you.

  Jesus wept, complains Joe. Is nothing sacred? Do we have to drown listening to this shit? Give me some decent music Fabián. Gene Vincent, some rockabilly. Something with a bit of fucking twang.

  Unfortunately we can’t receive redneck America this far south Joe, says Fabián, with his expressionless face. Otherwise I would be delighted to oblige you with some hillbilly shit.

  Rockabilly man, not hillbilly.

  Fabián has a sly smile flitting across his face. He loves to needle Joe, already. The cigarette bursts its sweet cargo into my lungs, and I swim with pleasure, think about the radio waves lapping around the earth.

  Wavelength and amplitude. Radio waves, sound waves, ocean waves, the longer the wavelength, the deeper the note. South of Cape Horn the ocean circles the planet endlessly, never makes landfall. A wave can travel for ever, a hundred years and a thousand times around the planet, sucking the wind’s breath since before you were born and bloating up into a monster. And the immense wavelength of the Southern Ocean creates a sound, a single enduring note beneath the percussion of wind and water. Impossibly deep, too deep for the ears, but you can sense it in your spine and your piss and the base of your skull. It can be sensed by Joe Fish, swimming over the charts, by Horse Boy, grimly thumbing his pages, by Dave, quivering on the bench, and by Fabián Rodriguez, twiddling at the radio. It can be sensed by me, hauling on a tiny cigarette. It is the sound of despair.

  Suddenly the boat lurches to port, springs back again, as a rogue wave tilts her over. Dave shoots across the wheelhouse and slides down the opposite wall, groaning. He isn’t badly hurt. Horse Boy flicks over another page, the movement of a moth’s wing.

  She’d better not crack Dave. She’d better not fucking split, says Joe, the coal of a cigarette jammed between his teeth.

  She’s solid Joe, he says, but I never had her in seas like this.

  The seas are growing by the minute. You’ve seen an October storm at Hartlepool, the waves coming in off the North Sea. Green and grey and intricately muscled, exploding on the breakwater. Well this is something else, another order of magnitude. The water isn’t grey and green but black. An absence of colour. Sculpted from coal and glittering with a million sharp and shifting facets.

  I’m going to turn her into the wind, I yell. We’ll have to try and ride it out. Going to capsize if we stay quarter on. Won’t make any headway, but at least we can stay afloat.

  I remember snatches of the next forty-eight hours, before the wind dropped and we ran before it like ocean birds, glimpsing South Georgia like a row of rotten teeth on the horizon. I fought sleep grimly, keeping the boat head on to the seas.

  There’s a cycle to it. Megahertz and cycles per second. Rapid eye movement and slow wave. The boat wallows in a sunless deep, a smooth glacial valley, and the hills are singing with landslide. And you glide across shimmering waterlands until the scarp slope looms and hurls you upward through sea meadows and crags and arêtes and the air is shrinking and your ears are popping. And a mudslide screams around the bows and swamps the deck and the boat disappears until there’s only a wheelhouse standing alone in the middle of the Southern Ocean. The air thin and cold and the ranges of water unfurling to the rim of the world. The curvature of the earth, that narrow girdle.

  You wait.

  And the boat explodes from the sea bucking like a horse and shaking off the furious water with great sighs and whipcracks from the steel. But she doesn’t have time for breath before the ground drops away into nothing and her feet are skittering on the edge and we plunge down the screes in a tangle of limbs and sea is sky and down is up and we drown in air and breathe ocean until she points her bows up and we emerge into a sunless deep and the boat wallows.

  That’s it. Megahertz and cycles per second. Once is terrifying and a thousand times is numb. Rapid eye movement and slow wave, while sleep grips your eyelids with unrelenting teeth and you roll and smoke cigarette after cigarette in unending rhythm.

  Don’t stop reading, I shout to Horse Boy, who is still crouched on the floor, braced against the leaps of the boat. Water, wind, chaos, batter at the wheelhouse with lumpen fists. We’ve taped the door shut to keep the sea out, but water is squeezing through the gaps like shameful tears.

  What’s the book? I yell. He’s been reading it since the Task Force, on the slow limp southward, and it’s the first time I’ve asked him about it. He shouts something back and I only catch a single word. Crime.

  What, Agatha Christie? It was the vicar, with a pickaxe, in the ladies’ bogs, I bellow.

  No… Punishment, I hear, above the crunching water.

  Do you want to know what happens? I shout, mischievously.

  The boat submerges at the top of the swell, which rises momentarily over the windows of the wheelhouse. Water squirts through the cracks. I see Horse Boy mouth the words fuck off. The boat bursts clear.

  Keep reading it anyway. It’s about redemption. Redemption for a man who’s committed a terrible crime. Do you think that’s possible? No matter how ugly the deed?

  I’m talking to myself. He can’t hear, doesn’t even look up. Keep reading it anyway. If you stop, we will drown.

  There’s water in the fucking hold, we’re going down. Joe bursts into the wheelhouse, drenched. She’s riding lower in the water man. Can’t you feel it?

  The steel structure moans in agreement. There’s no way she’s going to survive this. She’s taking too much punishment, too many stresses. Before too long the boat is going to disintegrate. How long will we last when that happens? A minute or two in the water perhaps, or a long slow plunge inside the boat.

  We can pump it out, yells Dave, I’ve done it before. Water gets down there through the hatches and the companionways. Doesn’t mean we’ve sprung a leak.

  Aye, she’s fucking burst, snarls Joe. It’s pouring in somewhere, mark my words.

  Whatever, shouts Fabián. Get the pumps working. It will give us more time.

  They duck below. Their eyes are yellowed and there are bruises all over them from slips and falls when the boat thrashes about. The deep note of the sea underneath us all like the deep bell of a cathedral baying in the murk.

  Jonah said this was his worst nightmare. I remember him talking about it one stoppy-back in the Cape when the cards had gone away but the whisky had stayed out. Talked about the fleet lost off Scilly back in the seventeen hundreds, the flagship plunging towards the bottom, stern windows still burning green in the phosphorescent depths and the hands of the admiral’s little daughters clawing at the glass. Partial to a bit of gothic horror, was Jonah. But when he talked about taking that dive towards the seabed in some old tin can, the pressure building and the metal screaming and the rivets popping, you could see the sweat springing from his pores and the terror in his eyes and that was real enough.

  They were white, those little hands. Muslin falling away from the forearms, white as a pelagic bird.
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  And I drag up from near sleep to a bird hovering at the glass, almost pattering against the window. Tiny and dark with a pale rump and ghostly crescent moons on the upper wings. It hangs there like a bat, flimsy legs dangling beyond the end of its tail, knit together with hollow bones sharp and white as ivory needles.

  Wilson’s storm petrel. See, I’ve still got it, even here.

  These little beauties are super-abundant, the commonest seabird on the planet, but most of us will never see one because they’re deep ocean wanderers, from the Subarctic to the Southern Ocean, from the Davis Strait to the Weddell Sea. Their bubble and our bubble don’t often coincide. When they’re feeding they walk on water, tiny feet treading the swell, pattering like black moths on the ocean. And here we are, in the trough between two monster waves, in the trough between two heartbeats. The man in the wheelhouse and the bird at the glass. The tiny black eye like a miniature planet, the strange little tubular nostrils. One of us is found and one of us is lost. One is solid and one is frail as wastepaper. One is everything and one is nothing. We study each other just for a moment until the boat rides up on the surge and the petrel is plucked away into the storm. It becomes part of the wind and the sea and is lost to us.

  On the foredeck one of the inflatable boats is working loose. We lashed them down hard before the weather closed in, but some of the lashings have come adrift. Dave squints at me through bloodshot eyes.

  We need those boats Yan. Can’t get ashore without them. We can’t just run up on the beach like the Vikings.

  We’re going to lose them pretty soon. Better than drowning out there trying to secure them.

  There’s a harness and lanyard. We could rig someone up to the safety cables. You couldn’t get washed overboard.

  I look at Joe.

  Fuck off, he says, then shows me a clenched fist, looking at my hand, which is extended, flat.

  Paper wraps stone, I say, briefly enfolding his fist. Joe rolls his eyes.

  I’ll go, says Horse Boy, looking up from Crime and Punishment, for the first time in hours.

  He works his way slowly forward along the deck, towards the bows. We remain focused on his receding figure, with the boat pitching and rolling and the ocean swinging alarmingly behind him. A couple of times the sea comes over and he crouches down for stability, disappears under, and then emerges again as the boat bucks clear. I’m holding on to his book. It’s served us well and I’m not going to break the spell.

  I flick to the end and skim through because I’ve forgotten. Forgotten how Sonia follows Raskolnikov to prison, all the way to Siberia, waits for him all those years until they let him go. It makes me shiver. Faced with that mute and unconditional love I’d put my head down in her lap and beg for her forgiveness. But then maybe I’d slap her dumb fucking doughy face away and run to the hills.

  Horse Boy makes it to the bow, bends to fumble with the lashings. It takes an age to secure the inflatable with wet rope and numbed hands. But now he’s working his way back towards us along the centre of the deck. He is there as the boat crests a sickening wave and wallows right under. The sea swamps the entire bow, the rails and the deck disappearing below the water. And all we can see from the wheelhouse is Horse Boy, facing us, standing up to his waist in water, with a thousand miles of Southern Ocean howling around him and another thousand fathoms beneath his feet. He hangs on to the lanyard, and as he looks at us his mouth opens in a scream of terror. We think it’s a scream of terror, but then he shows his teeth and he’s laughing wildly. He stands alone like a figurehead in the middle of the ocean, laughing like a lunatic and raving incoherently at the storm.

  Fabián and Joe Fish emerge from below, smeared with oil, but their teeth are glittering in their beards.

  We’re fucking dry boy, roars Joe. There’s no leak, we’re fucking dry.

  I’m starting to fall apart. The vibration of the sea shaking me to pieces, the deep note beneath the storm. They’ve lashed me upright at the wheel with spare electrical flex. It stops the crazy bucking of the ship flinging me about inside the wheelhouse. I’ve already smashed a hand against the deck. Tobacco is running low and I’m shaking and I’d do anything to stop that sound. Begin to think that the flex is holding me together.

  I grapple with the radio, turning the volume to max, bringing it into competition with the storm and the vibration.

  And there’s a woman’s voice, big and meaty and almost masculine, jumping straight to your head like a jolt of raw vodka, cold and crystal clear. I don’t know the singer, don’t understand the words, but Fabián tells me later that she’s Mercedes Sosa and that the song is called ‘Las Golondrinas’ – the swallows. And the song puts swallows in my head. Swallows racing gleefully above the chimneys of an Argentine town and storm petrels pattering above the Southern Ocean. The voice of Mercedes Sosa is infused with joy and with regret – infused with life – and the deep drone of the ocean no longer matters. And I know in that moment that nobody is lost, that redemption is possible for everybody. Whether we are convicts in Siberia or lost on the Southern Ocean. Birds are over the sea, and they are calling to us.

  4. Snow Bunting

  (Plectrophenax nivalis)

  There are gulls blowing over the house, their shrill barking tangled with the alarm’s electronic yelp. Five minutes ago they were over the sea but now they’re headed for some damp playing field inland. I’m quick to hit snooze but Kelly stirs and turns over.

  Dan, she murmurs. Drops back into sleep, her breath dark and muggy. I place my hand on the lump of her back to feel her lungs fill with air, expel it again. And then I unpeel the tangled covers and lever myself from the bed.

  Down in the kitchen there’s a reluctant light crawling beneath the blinds. I boil water in the stainless pan and then let it bubble on for a while just so I can listen to it plink. Unhurried and reassuring, the companionship of boiling water while dawn grows imperceptibly outside. I bolt my tea and let myself out into the street with stomach growling and feel the latch slip gently back into place behind me. Silent, these modern brick boxes with plastic windows, the same identikit streets all over Stockton. I almost wish myself back at the Cape, with lads on billy kicking off in the bar and ghosts in the stairwell. But the Cape has gone – I’ve driven past the cleared site, the mounds of rubble and buddleia. I’ve never stopped.

  I’ve seen on the forum there are snow buntings down at North Gare. It’s the right kind of weather for them, a biting northeaster coming from the sea with snow behind it. But you need to be patient with these birds. The harder you look, the more they withhold themselves. And just when you’ve given up and headed for the car, they’re all around you with a splurge of laughter, a jangle of keys, conjured from the clotted snow clouds bearing down from Siberia.

  So I’m in no hurry. I stroll down past the breakwater, the Gare itself, butting out into the river’s mouth towards its twin on the southern side. They were built from iron and steel slag, thousands of tons of it from the foundries across the river, back in the old days. South Bank, Grangetown, Lackenby, Dormanstown. You can still pick up chunks of slag on the beach and see the gas bubbles frozen there.

  And then I’m on the beach, strewn out towards Seaton and the dark stump of Hartlepool Headland. A couple of eider and a cormorant out on the water, common gull and yellowlegs. Ice at the sea’s edge, crunching beneath my feet. You can look back along the river here, past the concrete hulk of the nuclear power station and Tioxide and the ghost ships at Able’s, across the Seal Sands refineries to what remains of the Billingham site. And on the southern side there’s Lackenby and Teesside Cast Products, some of it still running and some of it derelict, and beyond it more petrochemicals at Wilton. Wherever you are on the estuary there’s a faint hum, the quiet respiration of all this industry. And when the last plant closes down even that will stop.

  There’s nobody else here. Colour drained from the river, the sea and the sky. Entropy. The sapping of energy. A universe staggering to a halt, unable to ex
pand any more. And the cloud banks keep coming over the North Sea. Leaden and purple and swollen with new snow.

  I’ve come way down the beach so I walk up into Seaton Carew and linger for a few minutes outside a sleeping pub. Jonah’s local, when he was ashore. In summer he’d pad around Seaton with no shoes or socks on, just a tee-shirt and his crumpled tracksuit bottoms, wandering into the pubs and the amusements, frittering away his time. They never discovered what sank her. She just disappeared in heavy weather somewhere in the North Pacific. A freak wave probably, one of them giants thrown up by a trick of wind and water. I peer through the window, half expecting to see him in there, bent over a pint. But only the fruit machines stir in dreams of coloured light, gentle waves washing across the curtains.

  When I come back along the beach there are one or two dogwalkers, faces swollen up with snow, pregnant with weather. And there’s a figure on the foreshore between sea and land, where the shimmering tide moistens the sand. Sanderling are skittering almost to his feet, tiny and pale, legs a blur and bills dabbing.

  I recognize the way he smokes. There’s a thumb and forefinger raise to the mouth, then a quick sucking of breath, the cheeks concave. Pursed lips and a furtive look around like a schoolkid smoking in the bogs.

  Snow buntings, he says, as I approach. Stands his ground, looks at me steady with them mobile grey eyes in the square face, skin sallow like parchment and the hair close-cropped and greying. He tugs the big donkey jacket around him, wings of the collar riding up round his ears.

  I was thinking about Jonah, I say.

  Oh aye?

  An uncomfortable silence. Yan thrusts his hands deep into his pockets.

  Did he ever tell you about the caul?

  I nod.

  What a chopper, believing in that cack. Didn’t do him much good in the end like. I only hope it was quick. That he never went down inside her.

  He smiles tightly.

  Talismans don’t work, he says. There’s no magic.

  Outside the river’s mouth ships are waiting, lights blinking in a hesitant dawn, the shimmering lights of Teesmouth ahead like a winter city, on cooling towers and flare stacks, condensers and refineries. Yan turns and begins to walk away, along the beach. I stumble after him, and suddenly I’m a child again, struggling to keep up with those long legs. After a few steps he stoops and picks something up, brushes it with his fingertips, then rummages in a pocket and shows me a clutch of sea-smoothed glass in his palm. Clear, blue, green, the glass eyes of the sea, with cataracts of salt.