Sea Change

by Jeremy Page

  Learning how to punch someone properly had been a lesson from Guy’s father. In great detail he’d been told a punch is not really a product of the arm, but begins further away than that, in the swinging of your body, near your waist in fact, till the shoulders are already rolling with a momentum which naturally carries all that force and weight, the arm continuing and adding to it with explosive energy, the fist instinctively tightening into a little block of wood, into a terrific blow.

  ‘If you’ve ever got to punch a man,’ his father had said, ‘for God’s sake do it right. ’Cause there’s only one thing worse than punching someone, and that’s punching them badly. You hit someone, you’re trying to break bones in them. Got it?’

  After the lessons in pugilism, his dad would want a wrestle. They’d be on the bed or occasionally in the back garden, and Guy would get his dad in a weak-limbed headlock and listen as his father huffed and groaned and pretended to suffer like a bad actor. He always knew, even in his earliest memories, that his dad was putting it on, could easily get out of the headlock, and was over-emphasizing Guy’s physical prowess.

  ‘Good one, lad, now try and pull me down,’ he’d say, and Guy would look at his father’s face, just a few inches from his own, in the curious pocket of their interlocked bodies, look at that spiky moustache and the furtively untrustworthy eyes trying to carry this whole act off - the act of a father proud of his son - and Guy would dig his fingers into some soft part of his father’s flesh and he’d see his dad react, surprised, irritated even, irritated that he could fool so many people in his life as a salesman, but he couldn’t fool his own son. And Guy would feel a force rising somewhere and realize he was being flung. The world would spin over, his father’s face free now and passing like they were on some kind of fairground ride, and Guy would land on his back, winded. ‘Maybe next time,’ Conrad would say, or something like that, the residue of a fatherly tone still ringing false in his voice.

  And Guy wonders about his father, possibly still on the road even now, a new car and an updated suit, with smaller lapels, but still keeping the wheels moving because he can’t face being still. Are you still selling cameras? Or did your clients see through that game a long time ago - who exactly do you think you are, to be selling them these intricate Japanese machines, who are you to tell them how to frame their family memories, when your own album is blank?

  He hits the mackerel shoal in the early afternoon. He’d seen it a few hundred yards off on one side, and had steered the Flood to cross its path: a rising, pitted boil of the sea as the fish darted and breached and dived in a frenzy. The gulls had spotted them also, folding their wings and falling into the sea in dirty ragged shapes, paddling clumsily in the water and lifting off with bits of silver fish held in their beaks.

  As the Flood reaches the same point, he drops the revs and lowers in his mackerel line, pulling it with a soft long-armed motion through the wheelhouse window. The fish have dived again, but the lures - brilliantly gleaming strips of feather and foil - are irresistible. He feels the stabs on the line in quick succession, of the hooks being taken, of the line itself being wrapped around the flashing tails, and he cuts the engine and pulls the gear up, stepping out on deck to do it. In the moss green light of the water he sees tiny particles of light suspended around his line, which is pulled taut into the deep shadow at the side of the barge, and then the first glimmering shapes of the fish, compliant, confused, lifting through the shades of the water like treasure from a well, their backs a camouflaged grid of dark blue bands.

  There are seven on the line, full, fit, muscular fish with strong glistening backs and bright terrified eyes. He lifts them clear and admires them, hanging, metalled and varnished by the light, stunned by the air, before lowering them on to the deck where they flap and bounce and dance with panic across the boards, too many of them, too wild a sight, as if they’ve fallen from the sky. Unprepared, and with one already freeing itself from the lure and flipping over the side, he pulls them off the hooks and flings them into the wheelhouse where they arc their backs and hump their way into the corners. He drops the rig in again, and even as the line is falling there are more hits on it, interruptions in the descent as the fish grab the lures and run.

  He pulls up five more and throws them, again, on to the floor of the wheelhouse. This time he follows them in, sitting above them in his chair and looking down at their wild shapes flooded with exhaustion and fear, the blood-red fringing of their gills panting in vain as they think about dying. He has a surprising and overwhelming feeling that he’s being watched, that this moment of the dancing fish flapping in each corner of the wheelhouse is not just his experience and his experience alone. He looks about him, unnerved. The fish settle slightly in their death throes, then start up again as he gets off his seat to put the music back on. He plays it loud, very loud, accompanying him as he sets about clubbing the mackerel on the jamb of the door. Occasionally they even jump in time with the beat of the music, all eleven of them, leaping in strong twists of their backs, one flies out of his hand, slippery and full of energy, straight out of the door and into the sea. He doesn’t care.

  He guts and cleans them in a bucket of seawater and then he fries two, with butter, in a large pan he’s set on deck on a Calor gas ring. He cooks them quickly and eats them hot, just the oily flesh above their medial lines, ignoring the tails and the belly meat. It’s a richly oiled taste of salt, sea air and fried juices, and he throws the remains over the side, and it’s only at that point that he realizes the weather is deteriorating.

  In line with the shipping forecast, the barometer is losing pressure as the low deepens. How had they phrased it - the low was losing its identity. That’s a strange way to say it. Such a magnificent force as an Atlantic pressure system, all wrapped up in godly ocean vapours, swinging round the top of Scotland’s bare rocky coast, only to lose its identity. Into what?

  He tidies up as flurries of the storm begin reaching the Flood. Rain comes in thin bands out of the dreary air, stinging the glass of the wheelhouse in uncertain bursts. There are no birds in the sky now, and the sea has lost all its reflective quality. It streams past in flat pewter grey, in meanly curved waves that are low but fast, belonging to a weather system which is somewhere else still, far away, beyond the horizon.

  Guy gets into his wet-weather gear and makes sure the hatches and skylights of the barge are fastened shut. He makes more food and ties it to the handle of the saloon, along with a flask of fresh coffee and the bottle of Gammel Dansk the trawler skipper gave him. He’s going to need a proper ocean drink, he suspects. On the bottle’s label he reads a curious Danish inscription: Gør godt om morgenen, efter dagens dont, under jagten, på fisketuren. He wonders what it means. Drink in the morning, at lunch, all day if you have to, when you’re out fishing, with God’s blessing, something like that. The language has the feel of a warning.

  He lifts the bench seat behind him and looks at the inventory of his safety gear - flares, a raft, ropes, lights, first-aid box and lastly, the life-jacket itself, lifeless in there, he can’t imagine the dire circumstances of having to put that round his neck, water sloshing around his legs perhaps, he doesn’t want to think these things. He closes the bench and faces the sea.

  He notices gas rigs in the gloom, several miles off, their girders and platforms and accommodation quarters looking half-constructed and fragile against the darkening sky. How they manage to stay rigid in all this seething movement seems impossible; welded steel and fastened cables surrounded by supply vessels, warning buoys and guard ships, all rising up and down in the swell. And as he gets closer he sees how dark it is becoming, by the lights that shine on the platforms themselves, and the ragged flames of gas flares burning at the top of the derricks. Clear white light, like the light on a film set, burning on to the production platform, with warning signs and gangways illuminated in shining precision. He thinks he can see men up there, in bright rubber coats, performing inspections, although he’s not close enoug
h to be sure. But he imagines the living quarters, brashly lit and cheaply equipped - TVs and DVDs and fixed plastic chairs, a smell of chips and sugar, a world of men, surrounded by porn and machinery and high-pressured gas, coaxing this prehistoric vapour into pipes and tanks, containing it, but only just.

  Through the binoculars he studies the rigs, standing on the seabed with jointed legs and a mosquito’s poise, the thin needle of their drills merely pricking the rocks below. He steers the Flood well clear of their exclusion area and, with a touch of alarm, notices how high the swell is rising up and down each of the platforms’ legs in turn.

  Have they seen him? Has anyone noticed the old Dutch coaster that’s lumbering through the sea, its engine grinding in the water and its wheelhouse rocking as the waves tip it playfully from side to side? He doubts it. The sea hides everything in its constant movement.

  Soon the rigs are passed and Guy’s aware of the breadth of the North Sea again, in every direction a heaped sense of water that rises and dips in unpredictable patterns. It feels shifting, illusionary; several times the Flood rises and he can look across the surface of the swells for miles, and then he is taken down, lower it seems, than the level around him, where the sound rumbles in at the boat, caught in a dish of the waves. There, he hears a sound of creaking and deep groans which he can’t believe are coming from the boat and can’t be coming from the sea.

  Guy looks to the north, where he’s still heading, and sees lightning flashes illuminating the horizon with a ghostly pallor. Each time they ignite, he tries to make out the cliff edges of cloud above them. If the storm comes at him, he hopes it will be tomorrow. Facing the waves at night would be terrible, if not impossible. And as if in heavenly answer, the swell does seem to subside as the light begins to fall. The waves lose their bite - the sound of the wind blowing round the corners of the wheelhouse lessens, and again he is struck by how quickly the sea lets go of the daylight - within half an hour it’s almost completely dark - and he remembers the light falling near the Inner Gabbard bank while he watched the trawler, before he headed for the shipping lanes off Harwich. Less than a week but another world away, already. A different sea.

  He lowers the revs of the Flood to just above an idle. This way he can keep the bow pointed at the weather, but nothing more than that, he doesn’t want to push the engine - he might need to run it all night and all tomorrow too. Maybe more. Tomorrow’s a daunting prospect. Even now, he has the sense that the sea to the north is coming for him, the waves overriding each other. It’s so alive, out there, beyond where he can see.

  He locks the steering and, when the Flood is balanced, he opens the inspection hatch in the corner of the wheelhouse and slides down the metal ladder to perform checks on the ancient Kromhaut engine, noting its pressures and levels and the general sound of the piston heads as they tap and rise in a chattering rhythm.

  Enclosed in the engine compartment, the noise of its hotly turning insides is an alarming sound. It reverberates unpleasantly in the cramped space, bound in by damp thwarts and brackish iron plate. A sheen of dark oil grime covers everything, smelling hot and wet and slightly salty. How can this engine work? he wonders, not for the first time. Hosing and valves and pipes snake away from this beating heart, each one capable of a multitude of possible breakdowns. Its metal is as hot as a stove, yet curiously still too, welded into itself in a thickened patina of iron and paint and grease. It’s more like a rock, really, sitting there in the hold of the boat, a dark block of granite.

  The Flood is already tipping more than he expected, it must have slid from the direction he set and is hitting the swells at an angle. He quickly scrambles back up the ladder into the wheelhouse and trims the heading. So he’s learned one thing - he can only be away from the wheel for a matter of minutes.

  Looking out beyond the bow he can see the restless patterns of the waves in the gloom. Every few minutes the motion of the swell changes as the waves cancel each other out - the Flood at these moments feels calmed and steady, giving him just enough time to go forward this time, through the saloon, to a store room he rarely ventures into.

  Built right beneath the bow, it’s a small space, lit by the greasy light of a battery lamp, with curved iron walls where the welds and bolts of the Flood’s hull are exposed. In five years he’s shoved a lot of things in here, and the sea has tumbled them further into a horrid pile of wood and metal and cardboard and fabric. He tries his best to gather the tarpaulins, push a deckchair away from him, and drag out a length of cable with his foot that seems to have bound everything together. What he’s looking for is a strange object, a thing he only kept because he liked its curious name, something he never thought might have to be used one day. The Flood is beginning to roll again - he can feel the pressure of the waves building, and from inside the store he hears them slamming the bow on one side, each one reverberating like he’s inside a tin drum.

  After he’s trimmed the direction again he runs back to the store and, miraculously, finds what he’s looking for almost immediately. That’s great, he thinks, knowing it’s really only the start of his worries. On the way back to the wheelhouse, dragging the canvas sacking and iron hoops and chain through the saloon, he takes a heavy weather manual from the bookshelf. Back in his chair, at last, with one hand on the wheel, he finds the chapter he’ll need: Assembly and Deployment of a Sea Anchor.

  When the waves die down again he makes the last series of checks, out on deck, walking the length of the barge with a heavy-duty torch to look for damage. Luckily, the waves haven’t breached the bow yet, but he still checks the fastenings and ropes and anchor housing and bow thruster in case the wind and roll of the boat has moved anything. He also checks the inflatable dinghy, making sure there’s plenty of fuel in the outboard and the chains to the davit are secure. Satisfied, he climbs on to the roof of the wheelhouse and looks out at the sea. The wind has dropped, and he hears the water more clearly - it seems to gather round the boat as if it has noticed him, in a choppy motion that feels welcome. The waves are smaller now, busily sweeping past with their own individual characters, some rising briefly and nervously, being swept aside by larger, more robust rolls of water. The Flood has been magnificent, he thinks. He’s miles and miles from shore, there are no lights on the horizon, no sign that man has ever lived or is alive at any place; the sea and the sky are alone as having no lasting touch of man upon them. His world is this boat. There is nothing else.

  Position: Eighty or so miles offshore? Guess about 53° 56’N 1° 42’E. 9:30pm

  Although they’d travelled half a continent to reach it, crossing the Mississippi had been disappointing. The bridge had appeared too suddenly, and then a high safety barrier and a heavy lattice of girders virtually obscured any view of the river. What they saw were the briefest of glimpses of a wide, impossibly long stretch of water, way beneath them. That was all.

  They had entered another state, Arkansas, relentlessly flat, and their journey had suddenly seemed to lose its sense of purpose. Guy had been wrong about the morning. Those feelings of optimism hadn’t lasted. A trick of the coffee, he reflects as he drives, making everything so unbelievably positive. His mood had sunk soon after leaving the plantation, whereas Judy’s mood - if he had any gauge on it - had brightened. It really did seem that admitting the affair the previous night had been cathartic. In her view she’s no longer betraying me, he thinks, because she has said as much.

  The sheer recording his mind is doing is exhausting, and has given the day an epic, stretched dimension that is in itself disconcerting. Just this morning, he’d been eating those rolls on the back porch of the shack, and yet that feels like it happened a few weeks ago, a scene from a play even, strangely lit and full of improbability. A lunch, too, where they’d stopped off at a family-run restaurant, specializing in home-fried chicken. Guy had walked in to discover the two men who ran it, a father and son, were both disfigured by burns on their faces, tending to the serving dishes of vegetables, corn, chicken and coleslaw
in a dimly lit part of the room. Judy and Freya had noticed, and become quiet about it, and Guy had gone to pay for the food and stared right into the man’s eyes - they peered back at him as though through a mask.

  He’d taken the food to the table and they’d all eaten in comparative silence, worn out by the travel and unnerved by the restaurant, and Guy had looked at the elderly man shuffling back to the kitchen, as if he was a ghost. It’s all unreal, he’d thought, and was thinking it again right now, sitting behind the wheel while the road rolled endlessly by. Louisiana, passing without event. A westerly direction. Scenes from the day, recurring to him now, while the daylight faded. The heat at noon as he’d climbed out of the car to stretch his back. A slight click of his vertebra as he leant from side to side, a comforting feeling. Relieving himself at the corner of a cotton field, his warm urine falling on to dry stalks and dry dusty red earth. Freya collecting cotton buds from the plants a few rows away. How she’d held the cotton tufts to her face like a beard. Judy, biting her nails in an unguarded moment, then tying her hair back in a swift professional motion, the hair twisting obediently to her fast-working fingers. Her reliance on wearing sunglasses, her three cups of coffee at lunch time. His entire family - that unit he so easily took for granted - had felt threadbare.

  At times he’d looked to America itself, passing left and right, to give him a shot of inspiration. But America was flat here. Just another hundred or two miles of the same. And as a result he’d driven them hard today, driven and driven with few stops and no plan in his head. Driving west, that’s the plan, as it always was, the family might be falling apart but the journey continues, stubbornly, towards a bright and fantastical California which waits like an advertising hoarding. Pacific surf, rolling in, dazzling light, a living dream.