Sea Change

by Jeremy Page

  He’s silenced the skipper with his abrupt change in mood.

  ‘You drift away,’ the skipper says, unconvincingly.

  ‘I was just thinking,’ Guy starts, unsure what’s to follow, ‘that I haven’t thought about her, my daughter, for a couple of hours. That’s strange for me.’ The other men look back at him watchfully, their arms flat on the Formica table. ‘I mean, out here, aren’t we all without attachment? You know, no anchor? Aren’t we all like him on his purple armchair?’ A single teardrop falls surprisingly on to the table, landing in a perfect crown shape. It takes Guy a moment to realize where it’s come from. He wipes both eyes with his sleeve. ‘Yesterday, you know what I found, floating - I found a greenfinch, on the sea - it was drowning in front of me and I was the only person in the world to see that.’ He looks up at Steve. ‘How did you feel out there - sitting in that thing on the sea?’

  Steve feels obliged to answer. ‘I don’t know,’ he says quietly.

  ‘Je-sus Christ!’ the skipper says. ‘What’s up with you, man?’ he says to Guy, not meanly, but without understanding what’s going on. ‘You shunt be out here,’ he says.

  But Guy meets him head on. ‘You’re wrong. This is exactly where I should be.’

  The meal is over soon after that. Guy asks to leave and the men slide off the bench to allow him to get out. He’s embarrassed for being emotional, but despite what’s happened he notices himself standing more upright, less cowed than he had been when he arrived on the trawler. He’s been honest. He’s not intimidated. Some of this must have conveyed itself, because all four men come out on deck to see him off, and the skipper gives him a quarter bottle of Danish Gammel Dansk liquor. He warns Guy it tastes like ear-wax.

  ‘You take care,’ the skipper says, because he has to voice something and the others aren’t up to it, but at the boat’s side it’s the man called Alexie who unexpectedly reaches out to take his arm. It’s not to steady him - it’s to hold on to him. The other men are looking down into the forward hatch at this point, and Guy looks at Alexie’s thick-skinned hand clasping his forearm, while the man reaches into a pocket of his jacket. He pulls out a tattered photo. It’s of a dark-haired girl, about sixteen, sitting at a bus stop. The anonymous boxy shapes of a European city suburb fill the background. The girl is very overweight, with a round smiling face and deep dimples in her cheeks.

  ‘Is daughter,’ Alexie says, quietly.

  Guy examines the picture, at its moment of captured happiness and the plump daughter that has emerged from this scrawny man. She’s holding a bag tightly to her thigh and has a sequinned purse in her other hand.

  ‘Where is this?’ Guy asks, pointing to the city behind her.

  ‘Gone,’ the man says, inexplicably. He points to a scar on his chin and shakes his head.

  Guy looks on as Alexie folds the photo back into his pocket. Alexie glances back at Guy and nods, once.

  Position: Near Cork Sand. 51° 54’N 1° 20’E. 8:35pm

  ‘Are you dead?’ he asks, gently, nudging the greenfinch with his finger. It flaps a wing in fright, then lies still again.

  ‘Right,’ Guy says.

  It hasn’t moved all day. It lies unbalanced in the corner of the box, wings awkward, beak slightly parted. A grey film of skin covers its eye like a cataract.

  A few minutes ago he’d heard the trawler’s engine start. He’d watched it move off down the line of the bank, leaving behind a thick cloud of diesel smoke, its gantry lit up like a Christmas tree and a pool of bright floodlight on its deck. He’s struck by how late it is, and how suddenly dark the North Sea is growing around him. It’s deeply unsettling, the speed nightfall arrives offshore.

  Guy looks at the postcard he managed to steal from the trawler’s notice-board, which he’s pinned behind the wheel - the tiny picture of Aurlandsfjord and its oppressively brooding mountain in the distance. The hytte they’d stayed in had been warm, built without fuss, with a Scandinavian sense of resilience and self-belief which had put them at ease. They’d slept in bunk beds and, through a precise square window in the door, Guy had watched the top of the nameless mountain on the other side of the fjord - its broad far-away back, impossibly high, smooth and glistening with snow in the moonlight. Its Arctic glimpse had frightened him a little. How remote it had looked, framed by the window as if it was a picture, but out there, so close.

  He remembers how the following morning had felt so crisp and still, and how the boots he had left outside the night before had been covered in a hoar frost so thick it seemed they’d turned into crystal. Even the laces, like long bright spiky pipe-cleaners. There was more frost growing along the log joins of the cabin - increasing in depth almost while he looked at it, making tiny cracking noises, and a row of icicles hanging from the porch, pure and smooth and with a drop of water at each tip.

  He’d run his fingers along the rail of the balcony, the frost scooping up so fluffily it seemed to have no substance at all, and when Judy had come out they’d stood under the icicles and let the drips fall into their mouths, like a couple of kids. The water had splashed cold and messily on their lips, forcing them to blink, and it had tasted of wood.

  They’d been giddy that morning, not because of the excitement of travel, or because of the curious wooden cabin, but because during the night they’d reached a decision: that they’d start trying for a baby. It was a decision they’d made in hushed whispers, even though there was no one else on the hillside, both of them crammed into the lower bunk bed.

  ‘Should we start now?’ Judy had asked, her eyes glinting in the dark.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘With the business of procreation. The messy stuff.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  Around them the cabin had sighed and creaked in the cold mountain air. Guy had shivered, totally in awe of Judy’s willingness to change, to carry a life, to embark upon such a journey with such simple poise.

  ‘Should we wait? I mean - let it settle with us?’ he’d said.

  ‘Maybe,’ she’d whispered, sliding her hand delicately across his belly.

  ‘Maybe not,’ he’d said.

  The next morning, Judy had kissed him - refreshed by their momentous decision and filled with a certainty they could now face anything. Her lips had been as cold as the ice.

  ‘Some people actually live here,’ Judy had said with renewed wonder, looking out at the dark huddled hamlet of buildings next to the fjord. ‘It’s unbelievable to think this is what they call home. How do they do it?’ Wood smoke was rising, mixing with a freezing mist around the houses. On the other side of the fjord the mountain rose like a terrifying trackless tower of granite. It was incredibly bleak.

  ‘They drink,’ Guy had said.

  He steps out of the wheelhouse and climbs on to its roof into a complete and overwhelming silence. The air feels gritty and confused - warm bands of it pass by, wedged apart by cooler layers. Small waves roll forward, each wave just a smudge now, vanishing into an obscuring twilight.

  The sea smells strong. It reminds him of a song Judy had written: about the smell of the coast, drifting across the water while she’d stood by the rail of a night-time ferry. She’d composed it after crossing the North Sea from Hoek van Holland back to Harwich. Not so far, in fact, from this place. She’d been on deck even though it was a freezing night, stood there wearing a chunky Aran jumper while she faced the wind. Below her was the cold vertical drop of the boat’s side, which had seemed an absolute in a sea full of dark coiling movement. The water had been black and undefined. It had both frightened and exhilarated her. She had marvelled at how the boat slapped the backs of the waves and scarred them white, making a surging scattering sound. That’s where she’d been when suddenly she’d smelled cows and pasture, an unmistakable warm scent of farmland, carried by the wind. It had come and gone like a phantom, a thing without connection to any reality, then gradually she’d begun to see the low dark coast of East Anglia, or r
ather, had realized there was a long unfilled patch of the sea where no stars were shining. This empty blankness could only have been land. Then she’d seen lights - thin strings of lights along a road, a dusting of streetlamps around a harbour, and as the boat had veered, inexplicably the lights had vanished, wiped away by an unseen part of the coastline which must be passing before them.

  All this she’d put in her song, a beautiful song about being on the fringes, smelling the land like a cherished memory. He remembers it now, imagining the homely smell of East Anglia on the cold sea air as if he’s back there and, briefly, he experiences the muddy scent of heathland, the green fragrance of woods and gorse, of cows in their sheds, their sweat and breath mingling with the sweet straw and mixing now with the cold damp breath of the North Sea itself, so far away, not so far away, him and Judy in their moments of wonder and awe, partially fictional, separated.

  He knows he must write his diary.

  Dusk has fallen too rapidly. Some of the cars out there have been caught out too - he can see their headlights being switched on miles away in the distance. It gives the road a new sense of length and absolute flatness which is amazing. Already, on their first interstate, to be driving into one of America’s infinite vistas, he’s a lucky man.

  On either side of the road is a simple verge, a long chain-link fence which dips and lifts as the car speeds by. Beyond the fence on both sides are dark channels of water, with heavy clumps of sawgrass floating in heaps, moving and rising in soft swells which makes him think there’s a life to that water he can’t quite fathom. For as far as he can see the Everglades are utterly, relentlessly flat, without light or any sign of life, and it stinks of a musty green vegetation.

  How deep is that water? How far down do you have to go before reaching something more solid? He wonders. It’s as dark as a sea out there. The Everglades have the texture and look of iron filings, stretching to the horizon. He thinks he can see hundreds of birds there, rising in a thermal plume at the edge of the world, but it’s probably a trick of the light.

  Judy’s been quiet. She’s been looking through the window and has angled her head to rest on the glass. Guy knows the mood well - that little tilt of the head, as if she’s letting her thoughts drain - it’s her dreaming time, when she begins to let go.

  Freya’s in the back, listening to her headphones. The music player’s a fairly new gift, for her ninth birthday, and Guy’s already regretting the little bubble of silence it puts his daughter into. He was surprised at the speed with which she took it up, her willingness to listen to it for hours on end. A step towards independence, a privacy which he remembers so well, a fascination with himself too, when he was her age.

  Both his women, in their individual spheres of thought. It suits him. He pretends he’s alone in the car - that he’s crossing America with his own set of glorious possibilities. An impression begins to take form, of meals he might eat, lonely women he might look at along the counter of a diner, encounters, that’s what it amounts to. Encounters and reinvention, it makes him almost giddy, and he looks at the passing swamp with a renewed sense of liberation - a desire to stop the car and wade out there, feel the sawgrass and the unmentionable things that lurk in the water that would be oddly warm and tropical.

  The tin-tin-ta-ta of a slow beat is all he can hear from Freya’s stereo.

  ‘What are you listening to?’ he says.

  Freya doesn’t answer. Or doesn’t hear. Each time she puts the headphones in, taking a step into her own world, he follows her with this question, reaching out to her as if to say don’t go too far, please, not too far.

  ‘Freya,’ he says, looking at her in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Some of Mum’s stuff,’ she says, casually.

  ‘Who is it, honey?’ Judy says.

  ‘Alison Krauss,’ Freya replies. Judy nods appreciatively with a little pursing of her mouth - it’s a gesture which annoys Guy, in fact, has always annoyed him. It’s an affectation and she doesn’t have to do that here, but still she does.

  Guy pushes down the pedal, imperceptibly, and begins a slow acceleration to seventy-five, imagining a valve opening somewhere in front of them, a release of fuel deep down in the dark metal innards of this strange car, unknown to his passengers. It makes him complicit with the machine. It makes him feel good. He eases back on the pedal and looks out across the swamp. The glow of his dashboard lights reflects on his window, but beyond that, there’s only darkness. What lives out there, he thinks, what horrid bodies slip by each other in that ink? Immediately he pictures the alligators, sliding past one another in the black night, their bodies even blacker, log-like, segmented, unblinking. He hates the way their legs jut out, their four-fingered feet so un-relaxed, like the taxidermist’s already stuffed them.

  ‘Don’t drive so fast,’ Judy says.

  ‘I wasn’t,’ he says, guiltily.

  She looks at him and grins. ‘We don’t want to go off the road here,’ she says.

  He smiles. ‘I was just thinking that myself,’ he says. ‘I’m not keen on meeting the gators.’

  ‘It’s great, isn’t it?’ she says, ‘all this nothingness. It’s like someone’s just rubbed the world away.’

  She’s speaking quietly - it’s just the two of them, because Freya’s still listening to the stereo. It’s like they used to be before she was born. Alone in a car travelling through the night, sharing a private moment. Both of them are enjoying this now.

  ‘Are you tired?’ she asks.

  ‘I think I could drive all night if we had to. And we might have to,’ he adds, lightly.

  ‘I love it, Guy, I just love it,’ she says, girlishly. She still has that lovely inflection in her voice, that illusive crystal quality which makes you want to hear more. When she sings with that in her voice, she’s amazing.

  ‘I was just thinking,’ she says, ‘when we’re in Nashville, you should spend some quality time with Freya. Get to know her.’

  ‘I do know her.’

  ‘You know what I mean. I’ll be busy and I don’t want you two getting frustrated.’

  ‘We won’t.’

  ‘Get her kitted out like a pageant queen.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And you need to buy yourself a Stetson.’

  He feels calm in this pocket of his family - the three of them, cocooned, surrounded by miles of water and dark swampy death. But he’s rattled by her mention of Nashville - not that he can put his finger on why that should be. He senses the malign unknowing shape of it like an interruption, a thing which is gathering form, an awareness that life has its surprises plotted out already. And we rush towards them, regardless.

  ‘Want to stop?’ he says. He’s seen a gas station lit up like an island in this dark sea, and is already slowing the car down.

  He pulls off the road into the station and when he cuts the engine there’s an immediate silence followed by a flood of insect noise, a wide humming that fills the air above them. It’s a hot night and the cement of the forecourt has a baked dry smell, the smell of foreign airports, and the lights strung under the canopy have a sick blue glow to them.

  Freya gets out, stretching, pulling the earphones from her ears.

  ‘You tired, Dad?’ she says.

  ‘Not really,’ he replies. She looks out towards the endless swamp.

  ‘God, what a place,’ she says, then heads towards the shop. She’s already as tall as her mother, and has a thickness to her legs Judy’s never had, a gift from him, his size, coming out in her. Maybe she’ll be one of those women who are just too big for men to deal with, too strong. But maybe not. There’s a clumsiness to her which is endearing, after all, and she’s always had a friendly expression, it will get her places.

  Judy gets out of the car too, and gives him a small kiss on his neck. ‘Mon brave,’ she says, ‘where the hell have you brought us?’

  The shop is poor and wooden and there are too many things in it. Above the counter is an old painted sign of an egret or
heron taking wing, draughted with great care once, and written above that a slogan saying Welcome to the Sovereign Miccosukee Seminole Nation. He’d seen a similar sign along the road about half-an-hour before, but it’s news to Judy and Freya. He sees them look at the sign, then look at the man behind the counter. He’s small and dark featured, with a thin face and a wide dry mouth, and is looking their way. It’s not clear if he’s sitting down or standing up. Behind him is a rack of Indian crafts, basket weaves, beads, dream catchers from various Indian nations, but it’s the pile of alligator feet that attracts Guy. In a large basket near the counter, there must be a hundred of them, dried, polished and heavily scaled, with twisting claws like the hands of an Egyptian mummy. It gives the place an eerie voodoo look, and the entire shop has a fungus smell which might be coming from them.

  Freya has seen the alligator feet. She picks one up and has a close look at it, turning it round in her own hand like a devil’s handshake.

  ‘Good luck,’ the man says, ‘that is if you like a gamble.’ The man has long hair swept back over a pair of thin sloping shoulders. His head seems too big for his body, as if something’s eating him from within. ‘You like gamblin’, miss?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Freya says, warily. Her voice sounds wholesome and polite and out of place.

  ‘I used to,’ the man says, ‘used to a whole lot.’

  ‘Do you want it?’ Judy says. Freya’s unsure, being corralled by adults into making a decision. ‘I’ll get it for you.’

  ‘There are CDs here,’ Guy says. Judy looks to where he’s pointing and sees a rack selling Indian chants, sacred songs and dances.

  ‘They ain’t nothin’,’ the man says.

  But Judy’s interested. A collector of music. She picks up a CD with an Indian woman on it, sitting cross-legged on rush-matting.