Hemispheres

by Stephen Baker

  Aye, I know, I say distractedly. I’m only just getting a divorce meself.

  Oh. Right.

  Dan, yells Mahmoud. He boots the floater and it lands in the sea.

  You’ll have to wade in, says Raz. People are waterproof, after all.

  I grin at her. Plodge over towards Mahmoud with my hand in my pocket around the lighter. It’s empty. The fluid must have evaporated away. It’s been months since that night at Billingham House. The ball’s bobbing on the waves, slowly drifting away from the beach.

  Right, I say. I take my shoes and socks off and roll my trouserlegs up. Mahmoud laughs. Maybe the social will never ring and maybe the police will never turn up. I know the development’s stalled because of the recession. Maybe there’s no safety net after all, like Yan said. Don’t get old in this country.

  I wade into the sea, my feet white as dead things under the water and splinters of seacoal between my toes. It’s hellish cold. I’ve half a mind to hurl that old brass lighter out as far as I can, but then I don’t. Yan said talismans don’t work. I drop it back down into my pocket but I know I’ll never fill it up with fire again. Not even once.

  One morning the daylight nudges me awake and I walk out of the door into the dog-barking, baby-crying dawn, pregnant with rain.

  Down at Seal Sands hide I sit in the comfortable darkness for a few minutes. The smell of creosote, cracks of light winking between rough-hewn planks. Finally I rise, knees clicking quietly, and crack open the long shutter. Light floods into the hide but there’s no epiphany, no slow-burning sunrise igniting the river. The light is white and constant and sober. Outside there are long expanses of wet mud glittering like melted chocolate and separated by fronds of water. A sharp scent of earth. And the chemical industry still hovers on the brink and the familiar shapes are dark and damp like exposed formations of wet rock and the long low humming underneath it all is just a quiet breathing.

  I raise the bins and scan the flats. Plenty of waders feeding out there, pattering the shining surface with a tangled cryptography of footprints, punctuated by the looping casts of invertebrates. There are tiny pale sanderling and burly knot, nervous redshank with heads bobbing. But the dunlin are in for the winter and it’s them I’ve come to see. Dunlin roving across the mudflat, worrying at the surface with bills like black dibbers. Standing still with one foot tucked for warmth into the soft belly fur. Nervous and mousy and neck-twisting to scan for danger. Dumpy and dowdy like harassed mums in the shopping centre. Sleepy, with the black button eyes blinking, hunched up with heads withdrawn, shuffling and reshuffling their scalloped backs like restless drifts of leaves. Drab and beautiful, familiar and alien, overlapping without touching. Mouse-grey dunlin, mudcoloured and ordinary. There are thousands of them.