by Jeremy Page
Glowing beneath his balcony is the brilliant blue oblong of the hotel pool, illuminated by expensive submerged lighting. Totally still now, its surface looks waxy and false - he can see how the tiles on the bottom have an unusual and constant magnification. It’s beautiful. It seems full of an expectant calm, a silent composure that appears motionless and unreal. A warm scent of palm and tamarisk and bougainvillea is in the air, mixed with the corporate smell of the hotel: soap and carpets, and a smell of wet concrete paths below him, where the terracing has been washed down. Then suddenly, while he’s looking, the pool’s lights go out. It shudders, vanishing into a slippery blackness and, surprisingly, the lights are instantly replaced by a new single illumination: a moon, perfectly reflected on the surface.
Guy smiles, the moon is always a joyous sight. Always. Then he draws the curtain and listens to Judy’s switching on and off of the taps, the sounds of her bottles and tubes being opened and placed down on the shelf, the fast brush of her teeth, the soft plastic tap of her moisturizer lid being put on the sink. It all has the same pace and sound of being back home. She carries it with her, unknowingly, wherever she is. Women are so busy, he thinks, and their busyness is like a fond tune to be listened to over and over again.
He sits in the chair and watches the harsh light of the bathroom cast out in a strange shape across the bedroom floor - they both feel the bedroom should be dark before they go to bed - then he reaches for his Hildebrand’s road map of America. It gives him an oddly tingling stir, just to look at it, to see the long snaking roads of the interstates running up through Florida like a body’s circulatory system, near the edges, rooting out into thinner veins and capillaries that end in nowhere. He senses the sheer size of it, the countless miles of rolling cinema from here to the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles away. Can they really drive that far? It seems daunting. He imagines the mishaps, the wrong turns, the tiredness and the exhilarations, all at points on the map without markings for him yet. Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and that’s only half way. Then he sees where they are, right now, a tiny dot amid the grey crosshatched shading of Miami Beach, and it makes his morale fall a little, it’s so tiny, his place on the earth.
He closes the atlas. It doesn’t really matter where you are, he thinks, the world’s just a series of backdrops.
When he stands he notices Judy’s lying in the bed already, her head turned away from him on the pillow.
He goes to the other side of the room, to the camp-bed the staff have brought in. He bends down and pulls the covers up round the girl who is asleep there, pushing a strand of hair away from her forehead.
She’s nearly ten, and her face is filling out a little, it’s losing the softness of childhood already. He likes to look at her, sleeping, he likes to catch glimpses of dreams as they flicker across her face. Her lips, right now, a small jut to them as if she’s about to speak, a fold of her skin above her nose where she’s pulled her eyebrows together in concentration. A busy sleeper, he thinks, he feels he knows most about her in this state, where her thoughts are so close to the surface.
He kisses her on the cheek and smells the warm toasty smell of her skin.
‘Night, Freya,’ he whispers.
Night, Freya, Guy repeats, quietly, in the soundless cabin of his old barge. He looks at the sheets of paper now covered with his familiar handwriting. Filling in the diary has calmed him, given him a sense of depth and time he didn’t have before, a sense of possibilities and choices. He closes the book lovingly, stretches, a little click in his shoulder, then gets into bed, and switches off the lamp.
Position: Run aground on Cork Sand. 51° 54’N 1° 20’E (approx five miles offshore). 5:50am
As the sun rises Guy’s standing on a sandbank with a coil of rope in his arms. His boat has run aground, sometime during the night. He looks up at the prow, as it sits high as a sluice gate in the wet sand, and he walks away from it, feeling worried and stupid and chastized, paying out the rope till the bank becomes dryer.
‘You beached yourself,’ he says to the Flood, as he hammers a metal stake into the ground, ‘like a whale.’
Now, sitting on the sand, the foolishness of running aground is hard to shift. He stares at the Flood and at the rope as it tightens and slacks. A watched tide will never rise, he thinks, feeling watched himself - his predicament is so embarrassing. And to be on the sandbank - what a surreal place - it’s land, but it’s not - at the highest tides he suspects the water actually closes over it like a giant eyelid. It unnerves him, being on this bank. Its surface is flattened by the tides that overrun it, it’s as solid a thing as any land, able to sink at any point, yet on all the maps across the centuries, Cork Sand, sometimes longer, sometimes more curved, but always there.
As he waits, he thinks about his diary. For five years he’s written about Judy and Freya, even though neither are in his life any more. Every night, how they’ve grown as a family. It’s such a regular part of his routine it’s been more real, at times, than the life they all had, when they were together. Freya has become tall for her age, has few friends at school because she lacks that edge that makes girls popular, is interested in nature. Like him. Judy’s changed too. In his fictionalized version of her she’s become a little famous, oddly; after singing in a local folk and festival circuit for years without being noticed, she’s beginning to receive letters and emails and phone calls, and now they’ve flown to America to go to Nashville of all places, to record some backing vocals for a movie soundtrack. All a bit far-fetched, now he’s thinking about it.
So it had felt good, last night, to write about himself and Judy, arriving in Miami. He remembers how he’d described the moon magically appearing to float on the pool in Miami Beach. A nice moment, he thinks. Moments like that, they’re unforgettable. It had been a balmy night in Florida, and he felt its balm now, on the sandbank, like a remembered dream which gave you hope and company for hours to come. It’s a wonderful thing to write. You can reclaim the things you lost.
The advancing tide reaches the stake he hammered in. He unties the rope then goes to the boat, wading into the water by the prow. This will be tricky, he thinks, moving gingerly along the side until the depth falls away disconcertingly into a deep channel, forcing him to swim to the boarding ladder. There are currents and bars and deep holes where the fish crawl into; the entire geography of this place feels dangerous.
He puts the prop into reverse and gradually brings up the speed. The Flood groans, injured, slides awkwardly to one side, then all the movement stops. He hears the engine straining against something thick and unyielding. He cuts it. Behind the boat the sea has the churned-up honey colour of fresh sand.
After re-starting the engine he unclips the inflatable and drags it on to the bank, making sure he’s tied it to the front of the Flood. He digs under the thick shadow of the prow, forming a sticky pool around the front of the boat. Several times his foot or arm sinks into this fresh quagmire and he thinks he could be sucked into it, deep under the crushing weight of the Flood, which might just slide over him.
At the point where he has exhausted himself, at the point where his efforts to shift a sixty-ton boat from a bank of sand is most futile, the Flood glides away from him, as if he’s just launched it from the yard, into the open channel. He yells for joy - for the sheer achievement of it, and collapses backwards on to the inflatable arms of the dinghy. The line attaching it to the Flood snakes across the sand, then he feels a lurch as the boat pulls the dinghy off the bank, with him on it, into the sea.
When he’s in deeper water, with Cork Sand just a thin membrane of solidity a few hundred yards behind him, Guy lowers the outboard, starts the engine, and comes aside the Flood’s ladder. After a few seconds he’s in control again, in the wheelhouse, totally exhilarated. He did it. He bloody well did it.
That’s when he sees the fishing trawler, a few hundred yards off, steering in a wide curve towards him. Oh Christ, Guy says, knowing the only reason it would be heading h
is way is they think he might be in some kind of distress.
It stops, some distance away, and he sees some men come out on deck to face him. Guy waves at them, then decides it might be best to cross over to it in the inflatable, in case he needs to explain himself.
The trawler’s called the Indomitable. As Guy approaches it on the dinghy he smells its stink of engine oil and fish oil and wet metal, and he sees its hull is deeply pitted and stained with rust the colour of dried blood. Two men lean over the side to greet him, amused. Both are heavy-lined with short hair and thick necks. They could be brothers. Guy’s helped up a rope ladder and pulled over the side by his armpits and put down on the wet old wood of the deck.
‘Not there,’ one of them says. ‘There.’ He points along the planking. Guy moves away from some coils of cable, chain and loose D-shackles. The working deck is littered with bright nylon ropes, netting, links of metal, winch handles and plastic buckets and crates. ‘Mind the cables,’ the man says, then moves off to look down an open hatch.
‘Ah, that’s a nice boat. You got a nice boat,’ the other man says. ‘I’m Karl - is it a coaster?’
‘Yeah, Dutch.’
‘Dutch,’ he says. ‘That’s good.’
‘Used to cargo cod-liver oil. I was told that.’
‘Yeah?’ the man says, not particularly interested. A sound of machinery turning in the hold has taken his attention. ‘That’s a lot of cod livers.’
Guy laughs, politely. ‘I’m Guy,’ he says.
‘Yeah. Karl,’ the man says again. ‘Go on in. Mind the cables.’
Guy goes towards the wheelhouse which is much larger, much more robust, more steel than his own. This boat’s built for anything the sea can throw at it. The dents, the roughness, the sheer welded plating of its structure unnerves him - he’s out of his depth here. Each rivet and join has a stain of rust like the trawler has wept with pain. This boat has been smashed about by a sea he hasn’t yet witnessed, and the Flood, in comparison, it’s like a pleasure boat.
‘You in trouble?’ the skipper says, greeting him with a cold heavy handshake.
‘Not really,’ Guy answers. ‘This morning . . .’
‘. . . that’s OK, we saw what you was up to,’ the man says, turning to his instruments. The pilot’s seat is surrounded by readings and gauges, of computer print-outs and flat screens for sonar and shoal finders.
‘We had us a busy night. How old’s your boat?’
‘1926.’
‘Crossing to Holland?’
‘No.’
‘Could do, today, good all the way to the Hoek,’ the skipper rubs his beard hard, bangs on the window and points at something on deck. One of the others acknowledges him and kicks a brush away from being on top of a hatch. ‘Not going to Holland then?’
‘No,’ Guy answers.
‘Don’t go too far then, sir,’ the skipper says bluntly, looking straight at him for the first time with small blue matter-of-fact eyes.
‘Right then,’ the skipper says, ‘one minute.’ He leaves the wheelhouse by the opposite door and shouts something at the slower of the two men. Again Guy hears a grinding noise coming from the hold.
The wheelhouse is a formidable male space. It is metal and salty and there are wires and switches and knives and ropes. The only decorative touches are some banners hanging from the roof and a notice-board covered in postcards. Ijmuiden, Dieppe, Whitby, others, further afield, some naked girls lying on a Caribbean beach, their breasts covered in oil and sand grains, another beach, another two naked girls, this time bending over. Beach Bums, the logo reads, pleasantly. There’s a picture of the skipper with a dead pike lying across his arms, like a roll of carpet - it seems like the man fishes when he’s not fishing. And a picture of a Norwegian fjord which catches Guy’s eye. He recognizes the photo as Aurlandsfjord - a place where he had been once, with Judy. Even though the postcard’s wrinkled with damp, he’s amazed to make out the small hytte where he stayed, that winter night, and the local bar where they’d had a disappointing and overpriced meal.
‘Look,’ the skipper says, reappearing in the doorway, ‘we’re about to have us a fry, so why don’t you join, yeah?’ He looks at Guy questioningly.
‘Ain’t nothing special,’ he adds.
They sit crammed round a curved Formica table that’s bolted to the floor on a single aluminium leg, sharing two plastic benches. A fourth man has joined them in the galley - a dark scrawny man named Alexie who doesn’t speak much English. He hasn’t looked at Guy once. The skipper’s in a high mood, he’s passed round bottles of cheap French beer and is generally taking the piss out of the deckhand who’s not Karl or Alexie. Steve, his name is.
‘So Steve comes in, he’s carrying this inflatable armchair he’s found in a skip right, like one of them you get in a posh swimming pool, with one o’ them things on it . . .’
‘. . . drinks holder,’ Steve mutters.
‘Yeah, OK, drinks holder, and he puts it down there, right in that corner, like there’s room for it in here. It don’t even work! The bloody thing’s got this puncture which he fixes ’stead of doing the rig, anyway, he fixes it and then he spends - bloody hell, how long did we have it - he spends a week sitting on it each night like some rock star.’
‘We reckon he had piles,’ Karl says.
‘Right! Piles!’ the skipper bellows out. ‘I’d forgotten that. He sits on this thing, with his piles, it’s purple too - purple - I gotta hand it to you you took one hell of a lot of stick, din’t ya? You and that blow-up friend of yours.’
‘I didn’t have piles,’ Steve says, readily falling into the role of the bullied.
‘So you have said, my friend, on so many occasions,’ the skipper chimes back, stroking his chin for comic effect. He has two tobacco streaks of ginger in an otherwise grey beard, which grows high up on his cheeks almost to his eyes.
‘What happened to it?’ Guy asks.
‘Tell him, Skip,’ Karl says, his eyes glinting darkly.
‘Feck me, this is funny,’ the skipper says - he almost cannot speak. ‘You gotta know Steve here ain’t that bright, are you, Steve, ain’t no one said you’re bright, have they? Well, we got this calm day like we had yes’dee and we said to him, “Reckon that thing’ll float with you on it?” Like who’s gonna fall for an obvious prank like that?’
‘Steve did,’ Alexie says, in a thick foreign accent.
‘Right, he did. He climb down the ladder with this blow-up armchair on his back an’ he just sit in it, in his boxers, on the sea - well it nearly sink but it does work, right. Then we only go an’ start the feckin motor don’t we . . . !’
‘. . . and we’re all waving at him off of the side,’ Karl says. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Steve manages.
‘. . . and you’re this - ah bloody hell -’ the skipper gasps, ‘this little armchair in the sea. This little purple dot!’
The size of these men, round the small table, in the cramped galley, it’s oppressive. Through a small oblong window the North Sea gently bows - Guy can hear the water slap against some deep metal flank of the trawler - it feels like he’s left his freedom elsewhere. Occasionally he sees glimpses of the Flood, un-piloted, another world away. He can’t really remember leaving it, it seems so long ago, though it’s only a couple of hours. The air in the galley is smoky with cigarettes and the fried fish which they’d eaten, simply, in battered strips. They’d had it with oven chips which the solemn Alexie had brought to the table with a pinny tied round his waist, though no one seemed to find that strange. Guy can see the head of the fish, cast to one side near a microwave, looking sadly back at him.
‘So you ain’t told us,’ the skipper says to Guy, the remnants of his bullying tone still lingering, ‘what you’re doing out here?’
‘Well, I live on the Flood, in the Blackwater estuary. I’ve come out to sea.’
‘That’s it?’
‘For a while.’
‘Ain’t no playground, you know.’
‘I k
now.’
‘You get a forty-yard swell it’ll roll that. You have a ship’s bell?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s the sound you’ll hear the moment it tips. Believe me you don’t want to hear that bell. Taken ballast?’
‘Some. Several hundred-weight of flint.’
‘Don’t look like it. She’s sitting high.’
‘And I have a piano,’ Guy says.
‘A piano! That’s about as much use as his blow-up purple friend!’
‘At least it’s heavy,’ Karl says, unexpectedly, ‘I mean, it’d be like having extra ballast, right?’ he says to Guy, afraid of the skipper.
‘Whatever,’ the skipper says. ‘Mate of mine skippered one of them barges ’cross the sea - he don’t like that flat bottom they’ve got so he floods the hold full of water for the ballast. Thing is, it’s a calm hot day and he gets thinking about all that water in the hold so you know what he gone and did? He tied up the steering and had himself a swim - up and down the hold, doing lengths, right across the North Sea.’ The skipper slaps the table, satisfied with his story. ‘Fingers,’ he says to Alexie, ‘more beverage.’
New bottles are handed out. Guy’s had three or four already, the galley feels like a theatre set to him, like he’s a character in a scene, a dream of a scene where he doesn’t know his lines.
‘I’m drifting,’ he hears himself saying, not really knowing whether he’s talking about being on the Flood, or being in this strange smoke-filled galley, in a filthy trawler off the side of a North Sea sandbank. He thinks of the sandbank, low and lethal and sober out there. Others like it, waiting to rise out of the sea unexpectedly. Should he be more aware of them? How come they don’t just get washed away, like everything else?