Sea Change

by Jeremy Page

  ‘Are those your sketches?’ Guy asks Rhona, over the table.

  ‘She’s good, yes?’ Marta comments proudly. ‘Especially the charcoal ones.’

  It gives Guy the excuse to study them - he’s been intrigued since he sat down. Most of the drawings are of Marta, in various positions around the boat, and they reveal glimpses of a woman he’s not yet seen: sitting at the end of the bed, massaging her toes with thumb and forefinger; lying on the bed, looking tired, her wedding rings taken off and put to the side on a fold-out table; gazing out to sea, shielding the sun’s glare with her hand, in the same way Guy had first seen her do. And that’s the moment he spots a sketch of himself and Marta, standing this morning on the slipway. It’s been pinned to a shelf. ‘Is that me?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes,’ Marta replies, drawing her breath in as she says the word. In the sketch he’s angling his head up towards Marta - he seems more eager than he remembered being.

  ‘I’m flattered,’ he says to Rhona, thinking she’s studied him, his posture and expression, she’s judged him already. And she’s tacked it to the shelf deliberately within his sightline, knowing he’d be sitting opposite it this evening.

  Next to it is a photo of a man. He’s stocky, standing in swimming trunks and goggles, on a craggy rock ledge which slopes into the sea. It looks like Scotland. So this is the man Howard, Guy thinks. The man who’s not being talked about, although his presence is everywhere.

  ‘Ro’s just dropped out of art school,’ Marta says, a little aggressively.

  ‘I haven’t decided yet.’

  ‘But you have, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Faced with a rising bluntness from her daughter, Marta acquiesces. ‘It’s just a waste, that’s all, love.’

  ‘Spoken like a mother.’

  ‘Spoken like a friend,’ Marta says. ‘Remember, I made a few wrong decisions when I was your age, I do know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘You mean having me?’ Rhona says angrily.

  ‘Of course not!’ Marta’s stung by the accusation. ‘Of course not. I mean giving up.’

  ‘Mum - you’ve never given up. Don’t be so hard on yourself.’

  ‘Ro. I don’t want to lose you. That’s all.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Did you hear me?’

  ‘I don’t know why you say these things. You’re not going to lose me.’

  ‘Ever?’

  ‘Ever.’

  ‘I just needed to hear it.’

  ‘Don’t upset yourself. Why d’you have to say these things?’

  Marta’s suddenly embarrassed this is taking place in front of Guy. ‘It’s a fault of mine,’ she says, apologetically. ‘And a fault of this boat, too - it brings out the worst in us.’

  ‘. . . and the best,’ Rhona says, expansively. Abruptly she stands and puts her arms round her mother, kissing her tenderly on the neck, their moods shifting quicker than Guy can follow. He looks at Rhona’s arm round her mother’s shoulder, a tableau of a grieving couple, somehow, a churchyard stance, by the grave.

  And as they hold the hug, Guy gazes down Rhona’s body, at the twist she’s forced into by the table edge, giving it an erotic curve, accentuating her slightly raised thigh and the flatness of her childless waist.

  Back on the Flood he’s surprised by how chilly it feels. It’s early September, the estuary had felt strangely warmed as he’d returned on the inflatable, a calm stream of black ink, but in his saloon it’s as damp as a cellar. All it takes is a few hours of not being on board and these boats take on the true cold of the river. He scrunches newspaper into tight balls and places them in the cylinder of the wood burner, a seventy-year-old cast iron furnace that came with the boat. He drops in the kindling, then a couple of seasoned quarter-logs, before replacing the hotplate at the top. He sets the flue from zacht to matig, its medium setting, then allows more air in at the bottom as the firebricks will be damp.

  It’s the first fire he’s had since spring, the ritual is comforting. When he lights it, always just with the one match, he pats the curious nameplate on the front for luck. ETNA SUN 1028, it reads, with a raised steel outline of two men carrying a molten ingot between them. This more than anything is his sign that autumn will arrive soon and, sitting in front of it, as the fire begins to roar, he watches its light flickering across the surfaces of the room, giving it an underwater shimmer of life and movement it doesn’t ordinarily have. It seems to emphasize how alone he is on board. A big space with big shadows, full of an empty presence.

  This is his home, he thinks. He’s made it for himself and it’s all that he is, really. There’s the spot in the galley where he wedges the wooden grinder between the worksurfaces when he’s making coffee; there are his cup-hooks, placed at his own arm-length from the sink; there is a shelf for his oil and salt which he can reach from the cooker. It fits him, this boat, after five years. It’s full of his measurements: his arm-span, his stride, his preferred routes from table to chair.

  He thinks warmly about his last entry in the diary. That road he described across the Everglades - what a place. He remembers how he wrote about the sawgrass floating eerily on either side, in the dark bottomless swamp, and the glint of his dashboard lights reflected off the side window. Then the curious gas-stop with its random collection of souvenirs and stranger collection of people, how his family felt as they walked in - vulnerable, out of their depth, but together. The strange insect which looked like something pulled from the shower trap - these things appear now as if he has seen them in a film. A film of his own life, but not quite his own life - a life made complete by imagining just how it might have been. If.

  They pull into a motel forecourt off the interstate in northern Florida. It’s been a long day, too long, and they’re arriving late. Guy’s face is burning from the sun they had in Everglades City earlier that day. He has the redness many soft-skinned Englishmen get, that makes him look unhealthy, just a little bit too cooked. It had been his idea to go to Everglades City, for no other reason than it looked an odd dead end on the map, his map, the map which by now he’s almost able to draw out himself. And it turned out to be a strange place too, with an extensive grid plan of roads cut into the mangroves waiting for a city which never, in fact, arrived. They’d taken a boat cruise round the islands, spotting the exotic pink of Roseate Spoonbills in the distance, and watched desperate-looking racoons hopping among the mangrove roots, their fur muddy and spiky. Freya had loved the boat, she loves all boats, and had taken it upon herself to spot the first manatee, not that they saw any. Judy had stood with a scarf tied round her head to stop the wind, and had produced a pair of large sunglasses Guy had never seen before. Her lipstick had looked glass-bright in the sunshine, every inch a star.

  At his insistence, they’d eaten stonecrab claws out of the shell at the local raw bar, all three of them grimly silent while they cracked the claws open, under a reed canopy that striped their bodies with its shadow. And a coconut had fallen from the top of a nearby palm tree, landing on the ground with a soft hollow thud. Picking it up after lunch, he’d almost expected it to be warm, it was so freshly delivered.

  He doesn’t want to wake Freya, so he tries to carry her, asleep, into the motel room. It’s an awkward reach into the car, and Guy’s surprised at how solidly heavy Freya is when he slides his arm beneath her legs. He pulls her to him and her head falls against his shoulder. She breathes loudly and her cheek is clammy, there’s a smell about her which reminds him of the child she once was, so hot in the skin. That malty smell, the dusty smell of her hair. He carries her, like that, while Judy looks on, amused, till he lies her down on the cot bed. Guy steps aside for Judy to take the shoes and socks off, and pull a blanket over her, and while he waits he still feels his daughter’s heaviness in his arms, a dead weight of flesh and compliance which makes him uneasy. He wants to wake her, to make sure she’s really there.

  Judy busies herself, unconcerned by the new surroundings, into the routine
of getting her bottles and unctions into the bathroom. She doesn’t seem to notice the interior of the motel room at all, but when she goes through to the bathroom, she whispers the room is nice. ‘We’ve done a lot of driving today, haven’t we?’ she adds.

  He feels it, in the slight whirr his thoughts are in, the need to unravel the sense of motion and concentration he’s needed for the past few hours. It takes its toll, and he’s disorientated.

  The walls are covered with the trappings of a home - prints of river views, a sunset off Sanibel Island and, oddly, a picture of a Western Star American Eagle truck. The wallpaper has an orchid print on it, the bedspread has a tattered fringe which hangs down to the carpet. Imitations of a home, but not a home at all, it’s a place which holds no one, leaves no mark, is just for the passing through, where people barely unload their suitcases, have brittle rows, or sleepless nights, crash out on the bed, lean back against the wall with the TV remote in their hands. He’s impelled to do exactly that, too, to sit back and flick channels on the TV, get a glimpse, even there, of other people’s worlds to soothe his own.

  Judy takes a shower. Every so often he hears the water splashing on the tiled floor - she’s messy when it comes to washing - and he hears her singing a few bars from a country song he recognizes. That’s a calming sound, surely, he thinks, to hear your wife sing. But again he feels strangely unsettled. Those thoughts he’s been having, about how temporary everything appears, they won’t be silenced, and he has that same nagging worry, a persistent numbness of thought which won’t let him through, a cushioning he can’t get beyond.

  He looks at his reflection in the TV’s blank grey screen: slightly distorted, watched, captive, like a reflection you see in a well, you want to snatch it back from being lost in there. He presses the remote and the TV springs to life with a lot of colour and sound and it takes him a few seconds to get it mute. He watches it like that, with the camera slowly panning across the shining floor of a shopping mall, a female presenter smiling and fawning over a man in a tight suit. She touches his arm when he makes her laugh. They’re being excessively polite, and a bit flirty. Other channels flick by, weather and sport, then sport again, graphics spinning and laying down images on each other, such a brightly lit place, America, on its TV.

  Then a film, a western, it’s strange to watch it here rather than back in England, where westerns have always belonged for him. It’s lost its distance and as a result the film looks unreliable and false. But he continues watching, it’s calming, it doesn’t rush by. The pocket of dry desert light is settling, Utah, laid out in such grandeur, it’s across America right now, at the end of a long road that begins right at their door. The horses stop walking, a little dust of brown and red sand settles around their hooves. A brim of a hat is pushed back, a decision made about which way to head in a country without paths.

  ‘You all right, Guy?’ Judy says from the other room, too loudly, drowned out by the shower.

  He gets off the bed and walks slowly past Monument Valley, a god in a god’s landscape. A step further and he’s in the en suite, which is surprisingly bright and tiled from floor to ceiling. He stands by the sink and looks at his reflection - too red, he might ask her for some of that cocoa butter he knows she has. He quite likes the smell.

  She’s the other side of the shower curtain. He can see her pink body made grey by the plastic. The steam fills the air and it smells of iron and pipes.

  ‘Fine,’ he says. ‘Little weary.’

  She’s switched the taps off and is bunching her hair to one side of her neck. He can see her wringing water out of it.

  ‘You think Freya’s having a good time?’ he says.

  ‘Course. You worry too much about her. You’ve always worried too much about her. She just needs some space, that’s all.’

  ‘You think she’s all right?’

  ‘Yes, I think she’s all right.’

  ‘You think we are?’

  ‘Guy,’ she says, then says nothing more.

  She pulls the curtain to one side, making a loud shuttling noise with the metal rings. She stands there, flattened it seems, against the tiles behind her. Her skin is flushed and still dripping with the streams running off her, as if some of her life might be draining away in front of them.

  She’s unashamed to be naked, so brightly lit-up before him, it seems a challenge for some reason, even her breasts have a challenge to them, in this view, pointing at him with such unblinking expression. Dumb eyes staring at him, one just a little bigger than the other, like a half-a-wink that knows something he doesn’t. It makes him smile.

  ‘So should I get my own towel?’ she asks, cheekily. He hands her a big towel which was hanging on a rail, and watches, a sense of disappointment, as she wraps it, almost twice round her body. She doesn’t look thin, but she’s small, it always surprises him when an ordinary object like a towel can be so big on her.

  ‘Come here,’ she says, quietly. He steps towards her and they share a ridiculous embrace, her standing in the bath, while he’s on the wet floor, still in his shoes and clothes. The damp curls of her hair touch his cheek, and she whispers, ‘You’re a big, soft, stupid man,’ in his ear, before nibbling his lobe.

  When they kiss her mouth is wet and slippery as if she’s just come out of a swimming pool, she hasn’t even dried her face. It reminds him of the times they’ve spent, swimming, floating, in rivers, in lakes, in the sea. Good times. Her eyes are so wet it looks as if she’s been crying, and it checks him, makes him worried that she’s about to say something alarming. But instead she undoes his shirt, deliberately and slowly, pretending to be fascinated by each button, and automatically he reaches round her and feels the shape of her body through the rough dry bobbles of the towel. The dip at the base of her spine, so accentuated, never fattened or changed in all the years he’s known her. The bones of her shoulder blades, so thin, like the bones of a bird. In places, there’s so little to her, where can her lovely voice come from?

  He pulls the towel off her and lifts her from the bath and the room seems incredibly small for him, for them, for the thing they’re thinking of doing. Bright too, like a laboratory, but neither of them are bothered by that.

  Aware of the lack of space they settle for the floor - like being in a small boat, they’re seeking the most solid thing around. But the floor is cold and wet and it takes an effort to get over that. A series of inconveniences and obstacles, it appears, to stop them, sober them. But Judy is determined. She’s already pulled most of his clothes off and is awkwardly climbing on top of him. Her skin is hot and it sticks to him, unpleasantly. Her hair is wringing wet and cold on his face, he wants to shut his eyes and brush it away, but both of them are also getting lost in their routine, the one which has evolved over so many years, the lack of shame, the sense of naughtiness, and never getting used to the intimacy, the sheer rudeness of it, between them, with no one else around. Which is not quite the case here, because they can both hear Freya’s breathing from the bed in the other room, and it only seems to add to the occasion, makes them act younger, more rash, a couple of teenagers on the floor of a strange bathroom, where they shouldn’t be, doing what they shouldn’t be doing.

  Guy looks up at his wife, at the crease of concentration between her brows, it’s the same expression he’s seen on her when she’s behind the mic on stage, during a heartfelt part of the song, she’s such a committed performer, always. He looks beyond her to the underside of the sink, sees a bodged repair there to the pipe work, imagines the last person to be in his position was the frustrated man who tried in vain to fix the faulty plug. An odd sense of company for him now. And he sees Judy looking down, relieved, beyond him, the weight in her face falling forward a little.

  ‘I’m going to take another shower,’ she whispers, holding back a giggle.

  Later, after they’ve got ready for bed, Guy has an idea. It’s about that coconut he put in the car. He steps out of the motel room and gets it from behind his seat. He sits on
the step and whittles away at the green husk with a penknife, but can’t get into the nut itself. Judy joins him, offering to help, finding a corkscrew from the room, but it’s no use. They want to do this, they don’t want to be beaten. Finally Guy squats and jams the nut down on the corner of the kerb, his body bent in the aspect of his primeval ancestors, till the nut splits satisfactorily. They drink the warm watery milk in the cool Florida air, cooler here than where they’d been, they’ve driven into a different climate.

  When they go to sleep, Judy seems lost to him on such a huge mattress. Again he has the sense that he’s entirely alone, with the TV’s dark grey eye looking back at him from the foot of the bed.

  He can’t quite settle, still. He gets up and goes to the bathroom again, sees the pile of towels messily dumped on the floor where they left them, the scene of a crime, he thinks. He squats down and looks under the sink, bends the metal and eases it into the hook of the casing, the solution which has come to him which escaped the last man to try and fix the drain. He tries the plug plunger. Yes, all working. All restored. Now he can sleep.

  Position: 52° 01’.15N 1° 21’.36E. Anchorage off the Rushcutter’s Arms, Deben estuary. 7:20am

  He’s up early, sifting flour, sugar and salt into a bowl, then preparing a second bowl with hand-hot milk and water, on to which he’s sprinkled a palmful of dried yeast. The yeast sits on top of the liquid in a brown raft of dust, fermenting slowly into a froth which reminds him of the autumnal tides in the Blackwater estuary, when the sea drives in a dark vegetative foam against the river.

  The meal on the Lora comes back to him in fragments. Marta’s way of straightening the simple necklace she was wearing, how she crossed her long hands on her lap, as if not knowing what to do with them, her gestures of politeness and then the occasional sigh, followed by a direct, unflinching gaze. Inward and outward signals. And Rhona, on the surface easier to read. A tease. Spirited, with fewer angles, but ultimately more guarded than her mother. A heavy drinker, too. She’d been flirting, he was sure, but was also sure that he couldn’t trust her.