by Jeremy Page
Guy realizes someone on a neighbouring yacht is trying to catch his attention. She has a sheet of paper in her hand on which she’s written a message. Through his binoculars he sees it’s a woman in her forties, wearing a colourful sarong, looking at him with a mixed expression of relief and apology. Sweeping her hair back from her face she smiles and points at her message. It’s a mobile phone number. Guy lingers for a second, unsure what she wants, trying to gauge whether she’s in trouble or not - she seems quite relaxed really, but she points to the number again and mouths Would you call me? in an exaggerated manner.
Finding his mobile and switching it on, he keys in her number. There’s a brief delay before he sees her raise her own phone, then a sudden immediacy of her voice in his ear.
‘Hi, you were miles away,’ she says. ‘Am I disturbing you?’
He feels the need to explain. ‘I was listening to music.’
‘Oh, OK. Well, sorry,’ she says. ‘You have a lovely boat.’ She has the slight trace of an accent. Possibly something Scandinavian.
‘Thanks.’
‘Is it old?’
‘It’s a Dutch coaster - pretty old.’ Is this all she wants? ‘It used to carry cod livers, or cod-liver oil, at least that’s what I was once told.’ It’s odd to have this exchange, so suddenly but at a distance, with someone he’s not met, and it’s strangely rude to keep looking at her through the binoculars - as if he has some kind of advantage. He wants to tell her that he likes her sarong, that its colourful print of birds of paradise belongs to another palate entirely than the rest of the estuary’s mud greens and browns.
‘I was wondering,’ she says, ‘whether you might be going to the quay - it’s just my daughter’s there, on our dinghy, and it doesn’t look like she’s coming back soon. We had an argument.’ A thought occurs to her, ‘In fact, can you see her?’
‘What does she look like?’
‘She’s tall, not quite as tall as me, with brown hair, lots of it, in curls - she’s pretty.’
He looks at the few people milling about on the quay and car park and in the terraced garden in front of the pub. ‘Ah, the fountain’s still there,’ he says, seeing an ornamental bricolage fountain of a whale, made of broken ceramic pieces found in the estuary.
‘The what?’ the woman says.
‘Oh nothing - just a fountain I remember. I came here once before.’
‘But Rhona is not there?’
‘I don’t think so.’
Looking back at her, he sees the woman has half-turned away from his gaze. She’s leaning against the transom and is absentmindedly playing with a knotted key-ring, twisting it round her fingers. The phone’s still held to her ear, but it’s as if she’s forgotten about it now. He waits, looking at her in more detail, how her dark hair seems to have a red henna tinge growing out in it, pinned back by a simple tie, exposing her cheek and neck. Can a face be sad, he wonders, thinking that her face - yes, it looks sad. The line of her jaw perhaps, a little thin for her age - maybe she’s an anxious person.
‘I’m Marta,’ she says, quietly.
‘Guy,’ he replies, then he watches her chin lift as she turns towards him, and smiles. Caught, watching her, he waves back, too enthusiastically, and immediately offers to take her to the quay on the Flood’s dinghy. She accepts, and hangs up.
‘Well,’ Guy says. ‘That was strange.’
Coming alongside the sailing boat on the inflatable, he reaches up to grab one of the thin aluminium rails. Marta appears above him, tall but foreshortened by this perspective. She looks at Guy, glances away, then returns her gaze more strongly. He’s struck by how pale her eyes are. When she smiles he sees a broad row of strong teeth, and a single canine at the side, quirkily angled.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she says. ‘She’s always doing this. It’s her unreliable age.’
Guy imagines the daughter from Marta’s description of curls. A head filled with crazy direction. He wants to tell her he knows what it’s like - to have a rebellious daughter - but he can’t. She wasn’t.
‘Yes,’ he says, simply.
Marta begins to climb down on to the dinghy. He guides her plimsoll on to the rubber arm of the inflatable then reaches up to hold her hand. It’s a tricky manoeuvre. Her hand is dry, her fingers are strong in his. He sees a cross-stitch of blue capillaries at the back of her knee.
She sits at the bow, too close to the edge, facing him. ‘I’m ready,’ she says.
‘Good,’ Guy replies, bringing the revs up. ‘Holding on?’
She nods. ‘Did you arrive this morning - I didn’t see?’
‘Yeah, on the tide.’ Again, he hears a faint trace of an accent which is not quite English. A clipping of the vowels and a lilting intonation, inside the words, that must be Scandinavian.
She looks at the Flood past his shoulder. ‘Where from?’
Guy’s struck by her steady gaze, her eyes are such a pale blue and one - the right one - watches him a little more inquisitively than the other. Maybe it’s the angle of the sunlight catching the iris. But it gives her a mixed expression.
He decides to tell the truth. Or close to it. ‘I’ve been out at sea for the last couple of nights - making the most of the good weather,’ expecting it to be the start of a general boat talk of tides and conditions. But she doesn’t fall in with it.
She seems suddenly thoughtful. ‘Yeah, the sea,’ she says, quietly.
As they approach the cement slipway she gathers the rope in her hands and sits, eager and helpful while he drops the revs and tilts the outboard. He imagines how they might look, the two of them, just another man and his wife coming in to shore - the dinghy’s assertion of intimacy and familiarity is disconcerting and comforting in equal measure. It had been lonely out on the North Sea, he has to remember that. It was intense, and this, in comparison, feels calm. Calming.
Marta scrambles out of the inflatable’s bending shape and manages to plunge a foot straight in the water. Uncomplaining, she merely looks down, as if very used to that kind of thing, and begins to drag the boat forward. Guy gazes at the water as it shallows to an inch, then less than an inch, where it finally becomes clear and transparent rather than the usual mud grey of the estuary. The edge of the sea, in such a fragile meeting as this, always reminds him of childhood. Squatting with a crab line and plastic bucket. A fascination between the two elements of water and shore that never passes.
He ties up the boat while Marta watches, and they walk up the slipway, walking close to each other - the inflatable’s bubble of proximity still with them. Ten years earlier he had stood on the same patch of quay with Judy. It had been late at night, after the gig at the Rushcutter’s, and Judy had just done an impulsive thing - she’d walked up to the pub’s ornamental fountain, where the water sprang out from the bricolage whale’s spout hole, and had put her face into it. She’d drenched herself, cooling down after singing for an hour-and-a-half and, when she’d come out of the water, she’d looked drained, ironically, with her dark hair flat to her head and eyes that looked big and emotional and starry.
‘I could do that again,’ she had said.
‘You’ll catch something.’
‘It felt really good on stage, didn’t it? Didn’t you feel good?’
‘Oh I don’t know, it took me a while ...’
‘. . . yeah, yeah. But we did all right, as a band, didn’t we? Especially the second half - I really forgot what I was doing, I just felt carried, you know?’
She’d kissed him, and looked earnestly in his eyes, still a hint of the performer in her, the woman he’d just been watching by the mic. ‘What I think we should do, Guy, is travel across America, you know, go to Nashville and Memphis and the Mississippi Delta. We’d love it, wouldn’t we, with all that music in every state. Country, bluegrass, moun’ain moozic, the blues ...’
She had a lovely enthusiasm about her back then.
‘Promise me we’ll go, Guy, sometime.’
‘Across the States?’
> ‘Listening to the music.’
‘OK, I promise.’
For the entirety of their gig he’d felt the presence of the pub’s bar, with three men leaning against it, somehow in opposition to him. Men, with their pints, representing something hardly tolerant of what he was, a man playing piano - it had reminded him of going to music lessons as a child, with a virginal-looking satchel - it had always felt vaguely shameful. Plus the looks they’d given Judy while she’d sung. He knew all too well that to pass the time they’d indulged in their own fantasies about her, enjoying the open opportunity to gaze at her in detail. That at times all three of them would have undressed her denim skirt, imagined her dirtily, bent her this way and that to suit themselves. It’s what men do.
They had gone to the slipway, further from the noise of the pub, where the sober business of the estuary at night had charmed them - the curl of water lapping the bottom of the cement slope, the popping of mud below him, the passing of a small red navigation light half-way across the water.
‘I’m going to get us a boat,’ he’d said, promising her a sunlit future of his own, imagining something with a cabin, with Formica tables and quirky cupboard spaces, with a musty interior and a salt-washed exterior. The smell of Calor gas and fried eggs. In fact, not so dissimilar to what he had now, his barge, yet this was ten years ago, before Judy and he decided to have a child, before buying the Flood, before the sea came back to his days with its relentless advance of waves and tides, its absence of paths. All this to come, all to go, as if the estuary’s cycle of water and flow could usher in and then remove all the things they had been, all the things he’d now become.
Guy leans against a low brick wall while Marta crosses the shore to the Falls of Lora’s dinghy. Her back has a soft curve to it, a shape of caring, and when she stands by the little boat she leans on to one leg, indecisive. He watches her hand rock the thin gunwale of the boat, and her plimsoll sinking slowly in the mud. She’s thoughtful.
He finds the young woman he thinks must be Rhona in a small open-air swimming pool, set among the bushes behind the pub’s garden. She’s doing lengths down the centre, swimming breaststroke, with her head underwater. Each time she ends a stroke a mass of light-brown hair wafts in forward momentum around her head, before being swept out straight behind her once more - it has the hypnotic motion of a jellyfish. There are leaves floating, the water smells of old pipes, and Guy watches her, her pale limbs as they ripple under the surface, listening to the quiet gasps of air she takes every three strokes, each time sounding a little shocked.
Midway across the pool she suddenly stops and lies motionless, face down underwater. He sees her hair gather in a cloud around her head. He studies her in detail, looking at how her back rises along the surface of the pool while her arms and legs hang down. She’s entirely still, not breathing, not moving. Transfixed, he begins to count under his breath, and at twenty she still hasn’t moved. It’s alarming. Everything becomes still, the trees round the pool, the sounds of the quayside behind him - it all fades away. Finally, he takes a panicked step forward and that’s the moment she kicks forward, taking a huge breath and swimming once more.
At a turn, she breaks her stroke and glides, on her back, to one side. She turns her glassy face to him and smiles, a little cruelly, delivers a breathless ‘Enjoying the view, are we?’ before casually diving into the deep water with a glistening, blithe curve of belly and legs.
Ah shit, he thinks, stung by her accusation. He shuts his eyes - is he so used to his own company that he can only stumble into rudeness at every turn? Even though he had been, enjoying the view, that is.
When he opens his eyes he sees her, at the far end, holding the side, now with her mother leaning down above her.
‘You can’t be mean to our new friend,’ Marta says, as much to Guy as to her daughter.
Rhona glances at him, assessing his connection to her mother, but offering no apology.
Marta laughs out loud, a bright girlish laugh, and ducks her daughter’s head under with her foot. ‘Stupid girl!’ she says.
As he slides the inflatable back to the water he senses Marta coming towards him.
‘So sorry for my rude daughter,’ she says. ‘It takes her a while to warm up.’
‘It’s OK. Actually, I’m sorry too, I think I was staring.’
‘Well, she’s pretty,’ Marta replies automatically.
‘I didn’t mean that. I meant her swimming. I thought she was in trouble.’
Marta reacts like she hasn’t heard. ‘She’s - she’s deciding whether she can bear another night on the boat. Had enough of it, or of me, or both.’
‘Right,’ Guy replies, a little wary of Marta’s confessional tone.
‘You learn a lot about someone, being cooped up with them. Even your own daughter.’ Marta laughs - again that girlish ring to her voice. ‘Truth is, I’m no sailor. Howard’s the sailor. My husband.’
Guy thinks he should get back to the Flood now. Its empty cubes of silent cabins feel a lot less complicated in comparison.
‘Don’t worry,’ Marta says, brightly, ‘I’m going to have a day of it,’ she adds, affectionately. ‘You must get back to your music.’
He takes the opportunity, and begins to slide the grey rubber inflatable into the water.
‘But you’ll come to the Lora for dinner tonight, won’t you? We’ll cook for you. What do you think?’ She gives him a broad smile, again looking at him with a direct, simple appeal. He’s caught off-guard.
‘OK - yes, of course.’
She laughs. For some reason neither of them are making the effort to move away. ‘So I should let you go now!’ she says, cheekily.
‘All right. I’ll go now,’ Guy says, deliberately staying. He’s intrigued by this woman’s mix of confidence and vulnerability that seem to exist in the same glance. And the unnervingly innocent look of her eyes. Her daughter’s eyes are much quicker and darker.
Marta leans to one side, like she had done by the dinghy, and whispers to Guy, ‘You know what she’s doing now?’
‘Who - Rhona?’
‘She’s watching us. Don’t look.’
‘Where?’
‘She does it,’ she says, almost proudly. ‘She’s a nosey girl.’
‘Am I acting suspiciously?’
‘She’s going to quiz me about you.’
‘Really? Well, stick to the truth and we’ll be OK,’ he says, wondering why he’s flirting, and glimpsing Rhona on a bench under the Rushcutter’s Arms sign, wrapped in a towel. Her hair hangs limply on one side of her head. She turns away and he looks at the youthful span of her collarbone, spread below her neck like the wings of a bird. Then she looks back, raising her eyebrows in a questioning gesture.
Marta is looking beyond him, out into the estuary. He sees strands of grey hair like stiff fuse wire where the dye has grown out. ‘The thing is,’ she begins, sadly, ‘I hate being on that damned boat too. She’s right. I hate everything it’s ever meant.’
As Guy motors back to the Flood he watches Marta calmly walking towards her daughter. Marta is tall, and there’s a hint of a stoop in her shoulders which suggests an apology of sorts, for being so. He didn’t ask her about her accent. Danish or Norwegian, he thinks. She must be in her mid-to-late forties, and the daughter, she can’t be more than twenty-two. Rhona’s hair is already beginning to spring with curls, as it dries, and the mother’s hair might once have been like that too, but is now cut straighter and shorter. Expression reigned in. They have a similarity of posture too, the way they sit at the garden table - they both push a shoulder forward - that kind of detail has a lot of charm. He wonders if they’re conscious of it. He sees them looking and he raises a hand, not quite a wave, but something close to it, a gesture he’s not fully understanding himself - it feels like a handshake, and he smiles, falsely, because he’s suddenly feeling alone.
The truth is he’s always felt on the edges of other people’s lives. Even when he was a child he’
d felt this way. He remembers being six, possibly seven, having to wait in his father’s BMW each morning, looking at the strange details of its dashboard, at the controls he didn’t know the purpose of, waiting for his dad to emerge from their small pebble-dashed house. The front door would be open, although Guy could only see shadows inside, as his dad collected the last few items of his luggage. Guy would sit in the car, with his school uniform on, ignored.
The time would be getting late, when suddenly his dad would walk briskly out of the house with a disarmingly apologetic smile on his face, crunching the gravel in his good conker-coloured shoes and his shirt only tucked in on one side, putting his suitcase of clothes next to his salesman’s stock-bags of cameras and films in the boot, then slamming the boot and getting into the car and even while he was sitting down, he would already be taking a cigarette from a packet and pressing in the dashboard lighter. Guy’s mum hadn’t even known her husband smoked, and Guy would just sit there, in total awe of his dad’s brazenness, in awe of his dad’s ability to change identity at the flick of a switch. To light up, take a first deep puff, even while the car was still on the drive.