Sea Change

by Jeremy Page

  ‘You come far?’ the owner says, looking over his glasses.

  ‘England,’ Guy says, as Judy says ‘Nashville’.

  ‘Right,’ the man says, humorously.

  ‘I mean we came from Nashville today,’ Judy explains.

  ‘I gathered that, mam,’ the man says, sliding a ledger to Guy. ‘You put your paw-print there,’ he says. ‘We got some rooms out back we done up.’

  Guy walks with the others over the grass with a key in his hand, following a vague direction towards some outbuildings.

  ‘This is amazing,’ Judy says, conspiratorially. ‘I can’t believe this place - did you see the moustache on that man?’ Guy’s heartened by this, heartened that it’s probably going to be a good place to stay after all.

  They pass a collection of old farm trucks, some gleaming silver Airstreams, and find their key fits a small wooden shack with a back porch and two rooms inside.

  It doesn’t take long to get Freya to sleep - she’s half gone already, but Guy’s become oddly energized by this strange shack, with its dense wooden sound, its creaking floor, gingham curtains against the windows and thin single beds. Places like this make travel worth the effort. But he’s also secretly glad to know he’ll be in his own bed tonight, while Judy sleeps on the other side of the room. He’s been awkward in her company, has felt it all day, as if their silent argument has been forming relentlessly, to the point where now it seems impossible that he might share a bed with her.

  His plan is to open a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and pour her a glass on the back porch - the moon is up and the cotton field beyond the yard glints silver. They can sit and drink like teenagers, hearing the insects and getting through the bottle. There’s a rocker on the porch too, painted white - he’ll let her have that. They can drink till some sort of balance is restored. An old fellowship between them.

  Judy is sitting half-on, half-off a chair, with her overnight bag opened by her feet, while Guy finds the bottle. Her long hair hangs over the bag and he gets a glimpse of the things inside - the familiar objects that make her who she is. A comforting sight. He can see how tired she is in the way she leans. She has her sandals off, and her feet have a tragic look of dust and dryness - the toes look stubby and without direction, and the skin on her heels is almost cracked. Parts of our bodies age at different rates. But as he goes to place a hand on her back she straightens, looks him in the eye, and says, ‘You damn near broke Phil’s jaw.’

  Guy stops, caught mid-room by her.

  She stares at him, expectant, though he knows it’s not the moment to say anything. He needs to sit down, needs to find some sort of room for manoeuvre. It was the cheek in any case, he thinks, he didn’t even hit the jaw.

  The possibility of any number of questions Judy might ask at this point fills him with horror - all of them naturally bend towards a complete exposé of their failing marriage, and yet this silence, this complete disregard for his feelings - it’s the first blow, and he has a real sense that he’s now involved in something way too advanced. He had made the assumption that he’d caught this thing early, but maybe he’s very wrong. Maybe she doesn’t have any feelings for him at this point. That would be terrible.

  ‘Honey,’ he begins, already knowing how weak and pathetic his voice sounds.

  ‘You don’t have to explain,’ she interrupts. ‘Phil’s already done that.’ She sits motionless, in a red-patterned dress which hangs limply to her body, draped in a sad fold between her legs. He remembers that dress the day she bought it - how she wore it in an orchard. He has a photo of that.

  ‘I’m not going to deny it,’ he says. This gives him the moment to sit down, but as soon as he’s done that he suspects it might be a mistake, to face her, sitting. He wants to drink that bottle - he wants to drink with her - offer her the chance to go back on what she’s said and never mention it again. But there is another force, too, the one which tells him that to live a lie like that would be nonsense, and no alternative at all.

  ‘Are you having an affair with him?’ he asks, sickened to say the line so many thousands have said before him, a line he never imagined he would ever say.

  ‘Yes,’ she says.

  He takes that calmly, always so bloody good in a crisis, but he feels the heat of it and the utter awfulness, the utter finality. He doesn’t quite know what he says next. He doesn’t know if he says oh or nods his head - he’s thinking he must ask those formal questions, like when you’re told bad news from a doctor, questions like how long have I got and is there anything I can do and have you told anyone else, and all these questions seem to be way too considerate, way too understanding. He realizes he wants to help her, even now, when she’s telling him this awful thing, because she’s in a tricky spot and he’s always the one for her in situations like this - but he knows that he truly doesn’t understand, and the only question that really should be asked, the only question worth asking is why. Why with a man like Phil?

  Her mouth tightens and she says, ‘I’m surprised at you, Guy, that a grown man should punch a man like he’s in a street fight. That’s no way to be, whatever the provocation.’

  Guy listens, scalded. It’s amazing, the effortlessness by which she can turn things. What provocation indeed! But again she steals the moment. She gets up and touches him on the shoulder, and says, ‘I’m sorry, really,’ very quietly. He cannot move. Doesn’t know what to say or do. She may have rehearsed this moment a thousand times, and she’s played it magnificently, not letting him in at all. They are strangers.

  She squats down by her open holdall and pulls out a small bag of make-up. He looks at her from behind, at the tiny ridge of her knicker elastic sticking through the dress, girdling her bum in a complimentary contour. At the tiny blonde hairs along the edge of her shin, the sandals with the flower buckle she bought in Florida, the tiny scar on her ankle she got on that barbed wire fence on the marshes. He wonders whether he’s already barred from that dress, from touching her, from all that she is? Is she a foreign land now?

  She puts on a little make-up - a gloss, she used to call it, and he sees her take a sly glimpse at him with her compact mirror. He thinks of the night before, at the stolen reflection in the brass coal scuttle by the fireplace. And he knows that that glimpse of her in the compact mirror, distrustful and wary, is another one he will remember all his life.

  She snaps the compact shut and stands.

  ‘I think it’s best I go out for a while. I’m going to listen to the guy playing guitar.’

  And with that, she leaves him, leaves him in the middle of this strange little shack, the room as wooden as a coffin, somewhere at the end of a very long road and a very long day, but feeling entirely without a sense of time or place. So bewildering, that his entire friendship, relationship and marriage to Judy should arrive at this haphazard place, so completely unfamiliar to them both, and that it’s here a moment of such enormous significance should happen. When it comes down to it, there’s no sense, no plan, no shape to things. They just occur. They occur and then you carry on, because time carries on, you change, you adapt, you just have to.

  He imagines how she must have walked across that warm patch of grass to the back of the plantation building, the world changed for her too, irreversibly, but still a resoluteness in her which was alarming. Both of them, dealing with the same crisis, which ironically should bring them together. But is she alarmed too, or does she already have a warped sense of relief ? He imagines her going back into the room where the man is playing blues guitar, how they’d welcome her and make space for her at the table, honoured by her interest, discovering that she is a singer, that she can add to the evening. It’s sickening, that he’s left here in the shack, with Freya asleep and so vulnerable, so innocent in all this, while Judy eases herself into a social world of strangers playing music into the night. She’s a coward.

  Guy doesn’t know what to do. There’s no sense in drinking that bottle now, he knows that much, and he can’t concentrate on anythin
g else but what he has to do now, how he has to act, the things he has to fill his head with. It’s terrible.

  He sits at a table and opens the road atlas of America. It’s so important, suddenly, that he knows exactly where this place is, this little damned spot of the earth which will change his life. He finds it by following the orange latticework of roads he drove down an hour or so ago, passing through the junctions with his finger, remembering how he had felt, driving the car, so late at night, so responsible for dragging them further than they’d wanted to travel today. He remembers views over dark fields, a casino complex lit up with neon and flashing lights, all gaudy and inviting, a couple of large wooden crucifixes set by the road in front of a floodlit church. All of those things, he’d seen in his previous life, though he’d not known it then, his life which had been one thing, and now it was another.

  He finds where they are staying, after a while, between two anonymous crossroads. That’s all it looks like on the map. A few miles to the west is the looping thick blue swirl of the Mississippi, flowing north to south. They are close to it tonight, perhaps a ten-minute drive, nothing more. It dissects the continent as an unavoidably clear divide between east and west. He looks down at it, sadly, feeling very lost, thinking they didn’t even make it half-way, they didn’t even get that far.

  Guy realizes he might have been crying. Writing tears the life out of him, it makes him a husk, he thinks. He lies on top of his bed, full of doubt. Family grows, it strengthens, it ripens, then sometimes it splits - the result of some forgotten weakness in its make-up. Couples get together, they blossom, then they destroy each other. It feels almost natural, but it never is. Judy will always leave him, he knows it, and Freya, she will go too.

  Lying on the bunk in the dark he tries to conjure their faces, tries to colour the room with remembered scenes where they were all together and happy, and he sees fragments of East Anglian sunshine, the glint of an estuary between trees, the feel of long wet grass in a water-meadow. The past seems shifting and unreliable, it’s shadowed, but memories arrive with unexpected intensity, of colours, of specific touches. They seem more vivid now than ever before. Damp bricks on a farmhouse wall, separated by a powdery mortar, Freya’s multicoloured dresses - their hems brushing through the bending stalks of long summer reeds, her legs in woollen tights, pulling them up at the knees, Judy squatting down and pinching Freya on the nose, to make her laugh. That crease of a worry line, between Freya’s brow, though she was too young to worry about anything.

  Yet mixing with the airy East Anglian blend of salt and water and sunshine, is now a huge presence, the murderous call of the sea, promising a new sobriety in his life, a seriousness he never thought he would be cut out for. Solitude, unwanted. And then there is Marta’s face, appearing curiously alongside the other visions, worried for herself and for her daughter, seeking companionship everywhere because that’s what she’s lost. You know, he says to her, I can’t do it, I don’t want to fill the space of your dead husband. Did he say that? Did he tell her that before she left? He can’t remember properly - it’s too recent to feel reliable about what happened.

  She had looked so lovingly at him. All he had to do was to accept it. But he hadn’t. And he wonders why not. He wonders why we can’t take the choices in life that could make us happy.

  Out of simple exhaustion, Guy falls asleep, and immediately he is dreaming about Freya. Something about her, yes, uncovering, Freya’s face, happily walking towards the horseradish plant. The touch of her hand in his, now, just there, he can feel it again, how cool it is, how small, tightly fitting within his own. He holds her and walks forward, calmly, away from where they are. He walks, listening to her happily chatter away, her voice the sound that sunlight makes.

  And suddenly he’s awake again. It’s the early hours of the morning. Something very real is bothering him, something there in the room - the shape of something nameless, a change in the air. He lies in his bunk motionless, wondering what it might be, listening to the sounds of the estuary outside, the trickle of water never ceasing its movement, the sound of air stirring in the trees on the river shore, and then he listens to his own breathing, which still has the sound of sleep to him.

  Gradually, softly, he hears another person breathing a few feet away. He strains to hear it, makes sure it’s there, yes, there is someone in the cabin with him. The breathing is calm and steady, but more shallow than his own, and with a quicker rhythm. He holds his breath, hoping to hear more, and is surprised to hear the other person holding their breath too. When he breathes out, the second breath comes a second later, like it’s an echo of his own, and for the first time he’s certain who’s in the room with him.

  ‘Freya?’ he says, in the dark, ‘You’re there, aren’t you.’

  There’s no response. Guy reaches up for the wall light and switches it on. He looks across the cabin and sees he’s totally alone.

  Position: The wheelhouse. Deben estuary. 5am

  Quickly, without fuss, within ten minutes, he has readied the Flood for leaving. It’s dawn, and the tide has risen with a soft shine that’s brighter than the sky. The water seems like a new element, like mercury, unnaturally flat and shimmering. It’s flooding into the creeks and saltmarsh holes and cracks as if the sea is surrounded here by a giant porous verge. This giant rip in the texture of the soft East Anglian soil, gathering in and expelling out, the way all things appear in this part of England.

  A thin breeze has arrived with the tide, lifting up from the water with the smell of wet salt and, gazing down the length of the channel, he watches the brightness of the sky, above the beckoning sea, filling with wisps of salmon-pink clouds.

  He tunes in to the shipping forecast at 5:20am. A comforting voice, the voice he’s listened to all his life, even when he was a child.

  Good morning and now the shipping forecast issued by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, at 05:05 on the fourteenth of September . . .

  ... he remembers being ten years old, a dark winter’s morning, tuning his first radio into the BBC long-wave. A child eavesdropping on the world of men. Hearing a man’s voice, so calm and authoritative, but speaking about storms and waves, of winds veering and backing, of spray crashing over the bows of a trawler, chains and cables straining in the pitch of a violent sea, somewhere in Malin or Hebrides, blocks of the ocean with no fence to them, but overseen by this gentle English man, who faced the wrath of the ocean, the plummeting gauges, the rising seas, with complete assurance . . .

  ... there are warnings of gales in Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, Humber, Thames, Dover . . . the general synopsis at 01:00. Low, Hebrides, 992, losing its identity. Atlantic low moving rapidly east, expected Fastnet 990 by 01:00, tomorrow . . .

  ... he’d imagined that voice, speaking from the calm soundproof cube of a London studio, the meteorological report squared precisely on the desk, the steam from a coffee rising on the side and, the furthest point where the voice reached out to, a wave-drenched trawler man, in dirty yellow oilskins in a wild ocean gale, grabbing the radio and holding a wet ear to its crackling, God-like message.

  ... Forties, south or south east, becoming cyclonic in Viking and Forties, 5 or 6 increasing 6 to gale 8, perhaps severe gale 9 later. Showers and rain, good becoming moderate or poor . . .

  A long way north, Guy thinks, looking at the Flood’s barometer. Those warnings are coming from the trackless parts beyond Scotland, but his area, Thames, is mixed, too. He watches those clouds again, losing their pinkish bloodstain, turning in squally vapour several miles away. But he’s decided, the light is growing, the estuary is losing its meditative shroud of darkness, and it holds nothing for him now. He must leave.

  Just to start the engine, to hear its sturdy old revolution beneath him, imagining its thickly greased piston-heads rising in obedient order, then the gushing sounds of the propeller screw, deep at first then rising as it bites the water, makes him feel restored. Motion is the answer to most
things. He rings the ship’s bell, just once, and sits down at the wheel, reads the inscription of Voorhaven, 1926 on its nave-plate, and touches its brass-ended central king spoke for luck. Then he brings the revs up and the Flood turns into the current of the tide, a long, heavily blunt shape building up pressure against the flow.

  ... inshore waters for Great Britain and Northern Ireland, valid for the following twenty-four hours issued by the Met Office at 06:00 on the fourteenth of September. General situation low, just north of Scotland, losing its identity. Atlantic low will move into the Irish Sea and extend into the North Sea. Strong to gale force winds will affect many coastal areas.

  Enough of the bad news. The Flood pushes forward through the calm water, the shores inching by, the nearby moorings passing much quicker, his boat sending a measured wake that rocks the other boats, a single wave of it pressing up against the Falls of Lora now, the merest of touches, the only sign of his departure in a patch of water which will hold no memory of him. Even the damp shape of the Rushcutter’s, with its brawny man still grasping the reeds on its sign - a final glimpse of it - being swallowed into a gap between the trees as the estuary bends and removes it from view.

  His last sight of the anchorage is of the fisherman at the back of the cuddy, still watching his rod. Guy tries to see the man’s face, but the rain peak of his oilskins is pulled too low. So long, old chap, nice to have seen you, in fragments.

  The deep channel twists like an eel, but is well marked, and in less than an hour he has come alongside the diesel barge that’s tied to a pontoon near the mouth of the estuary. It’s a strange sight - two fuel pumps on a floating platform, with a modern kiosk between them, lit by a harsh fluorescent light. An attendant has just opened it. It’s a young lad, coming out briskly to take the mooring ropes and tie them to the cleats.