Sea Change

by Jeremy Page

  ‘No.’

  ‘I swam away from the boat, till I really didn’t know whether I’d be able to get back. I think I was trying to get lost. The sky was so high and blue and I don’t know how long I swam for, and I’m not pretending I wasn’t scared being in there, being so disorientated and cold and thirsty, but I just didn’t want to do anything else. I just swam.’

  Marta looks down at her hands, silently.

  ‘And eventually I came back. I was trying to find something out there, something I’d missed. You know, it’s like looking over the edge of a cliff - it makes you face up to things. And I think I did find something. I think I found my daughter, Freya.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had a child.’

  ‘Marta, I don’t have a child. My child died - Freya died.’

  Effortlessly, without moving, new tears begin to fall down her cheeks. ‘I’m so sorry, I had no idea,’ she says. He holds her hand.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he tells her.

  ‘Except, it’s far from OK.’

  He agrees. They smile at each other.

  ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’

  ‘You didn’t know, and I’m glad you did ask. I’m glad you know now. Freya died five years ago. It was an accident - a one in a million accident.’

  ‘Oh, Guy.’

  ‘So you see, I am here for a reason. I’m here because of her.’ Guy looks around at the saloon of the Flood. So much empty space on this boat, surrounding him always, like a numbing insulation he can’t break through. When he was younger, space meant nothing to him - it was a neutral thing, just a separation between one thing and another. But all that has changed since the people he loved left his life. Now, he looks around and sees a different kind of emptiness. It’s an emptiness where there should be someone, or an emptiness where there once was someone. When he looks at a chair now, he imagines the person it should be supporting; when he sits at a table, the other side of the table is a blank wall to him, as powerful as a mirror, reflecting the half a life that he now lives. He tells all this to Marta. He tells her about the times he has reached out into that emptiness to try and recover what it once held. And he tells her that he’s never known a space more absent than the space where a child was.

  They sit quietly after he’s finished talking. He feels closer to this woman than he has to almost anyone over the last five years.

  ‘I understand.’ She smiles, bravely. ‘Guy,’ she says, cautiously, ‘when you say you found your daughter, what do you mean?’

  ‘Being at sea?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She came to me. She came to be with me.’

  ‘Thanks. Thanks for telling me that.’

  ‘I don’t often get the chance to tell anyone how I’m really feeling.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘So thanks for listening.’ He’s light-headed, literally light-headed after removing this burden. He can’t remember the last time he told someone about Freya. Even saying her name out loud seemed strange.

  ‘But, Guy. That was a stupid thing to do, swimming away from the boat like that.’

  ‘I know. But somehow, a life without getting to the answers doesn’t seem real enough.’

  ‘Funny isn’t it?’ she says. ‘We’re both here to get away from the ghosts, aren’t we? Or maybe we’re bringing them with us.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says, quietly. ‘I have this way of dealing with it. It’s something I’ve been doing pretty much every evening since my life changed.’ Marta looks at him, expectant. He remembers giving that look himself, just after Freya’s accident, how he searched everything and everyone for an answer. ‘It’s nothing miraculous, but it helps in the quietest way - I write a diary.’

  If anything, Marta looks a touch disappointed.

  ‘It’s not an ordinary diary,’ he says, not convinced he’ll be able to explain it at all. He begins badly: ‘When Freya was born, and she was that little warm squashy body all covered in vernix, with an ancient screwed-up face, she, she became everything - instantly. I loved that. I loved handing my life over like that, being less important, and then learning about her - this thing that’s arrived in your life, complete with her own character. You know, seeing parts of her mind emerge, how she viewed the world. But when that was taken away, I just didn’t want my old life back at all - the one where I was the end of the line - it felt like becoming a kid again, after being a dad. I didn’t want to give up on that really beautiful, really simple thing of watching a life grow - so I - this sounds so hopeless, Marta - I have tried to carry it on, tried to write a future for her.’

  ‘By making up a diary.’

  ‘Yeah. She’s grown up in it. She’s nearly ten now.’

  ‘And you do this every day?’

  ‘Every night. And I’m still with my wife in the diary. We split up three months after the accident, but in the diary, she never left me. I wanted to see how it might have turned out, you know, if things had been different.’

  ‘But how can you possibly find that out?’

  ‘Well, you make it as real as you can. It’s not like moving chess pieces over a board, you have to use everything you knew about your family, all those moods and moments of stupid laughter and the times when you’re all strangers to each other, and you bring in all the random things that can happen too, you give each other colds in winter, you lose your keys, you forget to buy things at the supermarket, the boiler breaks down. I wasn’t very good at it in the early days. It just seemed made up. But I’ve got better. It’s as if I’m no longer writing it at all.’

  Marta listens kindly to his enthusiasm.

  ‘If you want to know what we’re up to, right now, we’re travelling, the three of us, across America from Florida to California. I made this promise once, that we’d cross America, listening to its music. I made that promise right here, in fact, at the Rushcutter’s Arms.’

  ‘How far have you got?’

  ‘We drove to Nashville last night. You see, Judy, that’s my wife - she was the singer in our band. She had a really great voice. In the diary she’s actually had some success, I gave her that. She’s got some backing-vocal work at a studio. The next entry I write will be about the place where we’re staying, in Nashville.’

  ‘But you’ve never been.’

  ‘No. Marta - I know it’s all made up, I’m under no illusions about that, but it helps, really. It helps to have these things alive, whenever you want them.’

  ‘But you have to believe in your own life, too, surely.’

  ‘I do. I really do. Like swimming the other day, just being out there on the North Sea, in the nothingness - it’s made me think how glorious the world really is. Just swimming and looking up at that high blue sky, feeling the water - there’s even this sound of the gulls I’ve been listening to - have you heard it? I’ve never actually seen the birds that are making it, but it’s the most amazing sound.’

  ‘So what happens when you finish the diary?’

  It halts him. He’s never considered that before. He’s always felt the diary might ease itself away from him, like an illness receding, till he wrote less of it and one day didn’t need to write any more.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he says, full of ambiguity. ‘I’ll only know what to do when I get there.’

  ‘If,’ she says.

  ‘Yeah. If.’

  ‘Does it have a title, this diary with no end?’

  He laughs. He’s talked too much about it - he can’t tell whether it’s done any good. But the thought of giving his writing a title feels surprisingly attractive to him - giving it a name would be the first step in parcelling it up, defining it, possibly separating it from spreading into all parts of his life.

  ‘Maybe you could give it a title,’ he says.

  Marta smiles warmly at him, perhaps a little drunkenly. ‘I’m going to go now, Guy,’ she says, in that quiet flat voice of hers. ‘You’re a good man, you’ve been lovely to me. You should be happy, Guy.’

  ‘Both of us should
,’ he says.

  ‘You know, in Icelandic we would say Ég segi allt ljómandi.’ She laughs. ‘It’s sweet. It means everything’s shining.’

  She stands, putting out her hand to stop him getting up. ‘Please, don’t come out on deck. I’ll see myself off.’

  He hears the brass rollers of his wheelhouse door sliding open, her sandalled footsteps on the planks, and the knock of the dinghy as she climbs down into it. He thinks he hears her oars, moving calmly and rhythmically in the night for a long time, the only sound worth listening to.

  The space she leaves behind feels unresolved. He pours himself another drink - he’s quite light-headed now, but it’s not numbing him, not giving him the anaesthetizing quality he wants from it.

  The diary is a vast unanswerable object, filling his room. He takes it from the desk and sits with it in Marta’s chair, reading the passages he wrote about their night in Nashville.

  He turns to a new page and poises the pen above the paper. There’s a reason paper’s white, he thinks, it has the colourless look of a cloud, it’s a fog, dense and impenetrable and easily misleading as you head into it.

  Very consciously, he looks at his pen, poised there - at the dark vein of ink in its centre. Since he started this sea journey, the level of ink has shrunk by half an inch as it’s unravelled into the long inflected line of his writing. He wonders about the ink left in that pen. What it will reveal to him.

  It’s late at night and they’ve all come back from the bar where Judy and Phil did their set. They’re in the rented house Phil has organized - it’s a small clapboard bungalow about ten miles from downtown Nashville, in a rundown district that looks threadbare. Guy’s in the front room, it’s around three-thirty, he thinks. He’s been drinking Jack Daniel’s. Soon the night will tip towards morning, he can already feel that heaviness across his forehead which means he’s deeply, deeply tired.

  In the other corner of the room is a strange object: Phil’s artificial leg. It leans casually against another chair, as if that’s all that remains of the man. Could they make the shade of that pink plastic any more lifeless, he wonders? It gets painful, that leg, after a long day. Phil has the habit of sitting down, rolling up his trouser, unstrapping the apparatus and massaging the loose stump of flesh he has below the knee.

  So Guy’s been sitting getting quietly drunk in this chair, just him and the leg, while from another room he hears the occasional sound of a guitar. A guitar and two voices, trying out new chords. Phil’s demonstrating techniques on his new instrument, anticipating key changes and going half-a-step higher a beat before he should. That kind of thing. Judy’s voice has deepened, it sounds lazy, a little breathy, whereas Phil’s, if anything, seems to be a touch lighter. Both of them are speaking in hushed tones. They think he’s asleep. It’s affected them, being in Nashville, it’s making them act rashly.

  After the club Guy had driven them across town in the rental car. For as far as he could see, the lights at the interchanges were winking amber, a road without impediment, urging him on, giving him the glimpse of escape. Yet there was Phil in the backseat and now, the car is parked on the front yard of the bungalow. He can see it through the window, its familiar shape reminding him of the days already spent in it driving from Florida. They become friends, these hire cars, they carry you and they carry the whole journey with them.

  Guy tries to concentrate. He can’t allow his thoughts to get unfocused. He has to keep on guard here. It’s gone silent in the other room. He glances at the floor - it’s an old wooden one, and it will creak if he tries to move, he knows that and they probably know it too, so he sits there, staring at the grim plastic leg with the fittings Phil must know so well, wondering why it’s gone so quiet where the others are sitting. You’re a damn fool, he thinks, indulging in such a fantasy, a damned fool. And even while he’s thinking this chastizing thought he sees, along the length of the corridor, a polished brass coal scuttle by the fireplace. How could he have missed it earlier? It has a shallow convex surface, and in it he can clearly see a reflection of his wife and Phil, sitting side by side on a small red corner sofa. The guitar is lying on the floor by their feet, alongside a flash of bright red, which must be Judy’s new headscarf. Guy squints in the effort to see it clearly. The two people have been given a distorted metalled appearance in the reflection, a sepia glimpse of them, as if caught in another time, but it’s a potent tableau nonetheless.

  Phil’s hand appears to be moving forwards and backwards, possibly on the sofa, but just as possibly on Judy’s leg, which remains unmoving. Then a slight bend to the image, and Judy appears to sink in towards Phil. Guy watches this, entranced, but with a growing anxiety that this is something very important, something he must try and remember in all its detail. Every single part of it he will look back on and try to recollect. But even while he is watching it he’s not entirely trusting of what he sees. Just a twisted reflection. How can that have any kind of surety? It’s nothing. It’s the drink. It’s the middle of the night. But an angry curl of doubt is growing in him, hardening like wire, a tightness which is stretching through his body. He’s come a long way to see this. Drunk, in a chair, incapacitated, while something startling emerges in the next room, something which has been forming for however long, on the fringes, across the phone calls, in the glances. He is struck by a sudden rising of panic, almost a sickness, that now he has to act.

  He thinks, naturally, powerfully, about Freya asleep in the other room, and on an impulse he moves. The floor creaks immediately, and as if the sound sent a ripple of alarm through the house, he sees Phil and Judy change posture in the reflection. A new distance created between them, and it’s in that gesture - in that single gesture - that he knows.

  He does a strange thing then. He picks up Phil’s artificial leg, and walks with it like it’s a baguette he’s just bought at the bakery, feeling the rigid plastic weight and shine in his grip, into the other room.

  ‘Here,’ he says to Phil, holding the leg out.

  Judy is curled into the other corner of the sofa, nursing her own drink. Her red scarf is on the floor. Innocence discarded.

  ‘Let’s go to bed, Judy,’ he says. ‘It’s late. We’ve got a long drive tomorrow and you must be exhausted.’ It’s like a line from a film.

  ‘I’m a bit beyond tiredness,’ she says, conceding, but not quite looking him in the eye. And then she does, uncompromisingly, a level look of her calm green-brown eyes. ‘You’re right,’ she says, ‘I think it’s time we all went to bed.’

  Phil holds out his arm and for a second this confuses Guy. Does the man want to shake his hand for some reason? And then he realizes: Phil wants his leg.

  ‘Oh. Yeah,’ Guy says, handing the leg over. An interesting transaction, that, to give a man his leg back. Phil doesn’t strap it on. Instead he rises unsteadily on his other leg, and Judy and Guy help him from either side, Guy thinking how ludicrous all this actually is, to be helping the man.

  It’s not a long way to Phil’s bed, and Guy’s thankful for that. At the doorway Judy peels off to go to the bathroom. Phil reaches for a crutch in his room and starts to move about in there, putting some sidelights on, and Guy is left awkward and large in the doorway.

  Guy goes to his room and sits on the end of the bed, the spot for thoughts his whole life long. That’s where he sits when he and Judy have any kind of discussion, and in this way he feels he’s preparing for it, right now, however late it might be.

  But by the time Judy is out of the bathroom, Guy has gone back to the lounge. It’s quiet and very empty. He looks at the red sofa as if it’s a guilty thing. An object tinged with shame, part of the betrayal it encouraged, how dare it sit there in the corner as if nothing ever happened.

  Phil’s door is closed. It would be easy to go to bed now, Guy thinks, but he knows just as well what would happen - he’d just lie in turmoil, until the morning, while Judy no doubt slept. Instinctively - and getting a perverse pleasure from it - he gives Phil’s door a quie
t knock. Too late now, Guy thinks, wondering whether Phil might, in fact, think this knock is coming from Judy. He hears the rubbered foot of the metal crutch take two steps across the room, then Phil opens the door.

  Before the door is even fully widened, Guy has thrown his punch, putting every ounce of his weight behind it, straight into the side of Phil’s face, where he sees a fantastic moment of sheer alarm registering the split second before his fist strikes, followed by the enormous wide-eyed shock of Phil’s expression as he falls to the floor.

  Phil stays on the floor, crumpled like a heap of clothes to be washed, fully accepting it. Guy says nothing, and doesn’t bother to close the door as he walks back to his room.

  Position: Anchorage in Deben estuary. 11pm

  Guy stands at the wheel and starts the Flood. Immediately the engine growls heavily beneath him, vibrating the floor and rattling the windows in the frames. He steps out on deck, preparing to cast off from the mooring buoy, and feels the whole boat is shivering with expectant life, with possibility and direction.

  But it’s getting on for midnight. Where, realistically, can he go? The estuary is two directions of the blank nothingness this side of England is famous for: go upriver, and you end at a collapsing notch of thick mud where the Flood would be grounded; or go the other way, to the open sea, with its sandbanks and endless water, its gathering storms and lethal swells, a wilderness out there waiting for him. In this darkness it would be ludicrous, even if he knew the river.

  Writing tonight’s entry in the diary has shocked him. He knows now why he’s been dreading the trip to Nashville so much. An affair, after all this time. He should have listened to Freya - she has instinct in bucketfuls. And he wonders, really, why he’s doing all this to himself. You make it as real as you can, that’s what he told Marta. You give the diary every chance to surprise you, and as a result, you have to take what comes.