Sea Change

by Jeremy Page

  When it’s properly dark, about nine o’clock, Freya begins to complain. ‘I don’t really want to go much further,’ she says, politely, wary of a growing atmosphere she doesn’t grasp. The air in the car is getting brittle and charged.

  ‘OK,’ he says quietly, knowing he’s pushing them all too far. ‘I’ll stop when we see a place. I’m sorry it’s been such a long day.’

  ‘Me too,’ she says. ‘Thanks for doing all the driving.’

  He smiles weakly at her. An unexpectedly huge rush of emotion hits him, a welling of feeling which has been mounting all day - it floods him, but he can only understand it in fragments, it’s so consuming. His responsibility, his care, his deep love of Freya. All this hits sharply, and he thinks he might cry, just pull over on to the shoulder there and cry, while Judy sits silently in the back, so close and yet so distant.

  The lights of a motel approach, and he turns in without asking the others. He will make the decisions now. He’s damned if he’s going to listen to Judy on this.

  He parks right by the office and gets out immediately, but it’s only once he’s in there under its punishing fluorescent light that his tiredness overtakes him. He catches a reflection of himself in the darkened windows and he’s shocked at how worn out he looks. Bleary, impatient and old - this is the cost, he thinks, this is how it’s going to be from now on.

  He pays for two rooms, next to each other, and drives the car over the lot to park in front. He opens both doors, but says nothing about who will sleep where, knowing that Judy will be trying to work it out, trying to second guess him on this. It’s rattled her. Guy sits on the edge of one of the beds and then lies flat across the mattress. He can hear the others bringing in some of the luggage. He looks up at the ceiling and says one thing to them - a thing that he only learned himself about five minutes ago:

  ‘We’re in Texas.’

  Freya’s asleep within minutes, in the first room they went into. Judy’s moving around, trying to keep quiet, and Guy just stands, grabs her wrist, and takes her to the room next door. She immediately sits on a chair, by a small table. He sits on the bed facing her.

  ‘I won’t let you ruin things for Freya,’ she begins.

  ‘If there’s someone who’s ruining things I think we both know who it is,’ he replies, instantly. He’s not going to stand for her trying to turn things on him. She did that last night and it’s not going to happen again.

  ‘I don’t want to talk tonight,’ she says, wearily.

  ‘Then you’ll listen,’ he says.

  His abruptness is working. She sits there quietly, drawn in, mouth firm and chin set. He feels a pang of guilt for being harsh, but pushes it aside. He doesn’t know where to start.

  ‘Where do I start?’ he says. He gets no response from Judy, she’s not there to help him. ‘Why are you doing this terrible thing to us? To all of us?’ She remains quiet, retaining the air of being scolded. ‘I can’t just accept it, you know. You can’t just tell me outright that you are having an affair and expect me to ...’

  ‘. . . I expect nothing.’

  ‘Right.’

  She looks at him, her eyes a little watery, but filled with a defiance that’s easily a match for anything he might say.

  He stumbles. ‘Why are you . . . why are you talking to me like this?’

  He looks away from her, and notices the room for the first time. It’s small with ochre walls and brown carpet, designed for softness, comfort and could be anywhere in the world. A television faces the bed - its dumb lead-grey eye looks watchfully back at him, he can see his reflection in its lifeless blank screen - how tense he looks in the arms and shoulders - and sees how he’s become curiously distorted by a subtle curve. They should provide curtains to hang over these things - TVs have become bigger, and so have their dead reflections.

  ‘Jude - this is crazy. I can’t believe this craziness.’ He’s already sounding inarticulate. Worse, defeated. ‘I never thought we would be in this situation. Did you? I mean, we are in a situation, aren’t we?’

  She nods, rather than say anything. But even that gesture seems guarded. There’s just no way in. This kind of quietness in her, it’s dangerous, because it draws him into saying too much.

  ‘Are you going to speak?’ he asks, regaining his anger.

  The anonymous motel room seems designed for this kind of night they’re having. Characterless, presiding over them with complete indifference. It unsettles him.

  ‘I thought I was here to listen,’ she says.

  ‘Don’t be smart.’

  She shrugs, dismissively.

  ‘You need to listen all right, you need to listen to yourself,’ he says, trying to be smart himself, but feeling foolish, feeling he’s losing so easily.

  ‘We’ll find a way, Guy,’ she says with surprising tenderness, or at least the hint of it. He brushes it off with an impatient pah sound. He won’t be so quickly dealt with. He looks around, exasperated. Now the room seems laid out for an argument, scene for a fight. It strikes him poignantly, and he yields towards it, wanting to share how he’s feeling with Judy - he wants to tell her how alone this is making him feel - she’s been his sounding-board for so long. But he knows confidences like this just can’t exist any more.

  They look at each other. Stalemate. It’s like they’re playing some kind of game - as though someone’s told them to wait in here and not talk.

  ‘Why the two rooms?’ she asks.

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘We’re not going to get anywhere if we fight.’

  ‘Believe it or not, I don’t want to fight. But you’ve stung me and the poison’s still there, in the system.’ He’s being too flowery. He mustn’t lose her here. He tries another tack. ‘Why Phil?’

  She looks away and lets out a quiet sigh through the little slot her mouth has become. ‘Let’s not talk about him here.’

  ‘Isn’t he exactly who we should be talking about?’ Guy’s on the attack again - he must keep the heat down - she’ll shut him down the moment he goes too far.

  ‘He’s kind to me,’ she says, quietly, conceding, damning Guy with the implication of his own possible failings. What exactly are his failings? She is all dead ends and dark secrets, and he’s a fool to be groping his way forward - even his right to be asking these questions appears to be in doubt. And Phil - his presence seems to be there in the room with them, skulking, cowardly, yet strangely arrogant, offering a hand to be on Judy’s shoulder, and her accepting it, it’s like she’s possessed. This is Judy sitting here, he has to remind himself, the woman whom he knows most about in all the world. He knows every inch of her skin, he knows the precise shape and weight of her arms, the tiny rough patches of her elbows where she applies the moisturizer, the back of her neck where the hairline grows - where it occasionally has to be shaved by the hairdresser - the widened shape just high of her hips, the memory of childbirth there, forever. The shortness of her shinbone, the shapeliness of her calf muscle, which hangs like a breast when her knee is raised. Her thin tapering fingers, the skin in that place slightly darker than the rest of her, and her childlike toes, slightly clenched in, always. These are his details, just as he is a familiar landscape to her, mapped over the years till it’s indelibly part of both of them.

  ‘How long?’ he asks her, unimaginatively. She replies with a slight shake of her head, a cool liquid glaze over this moment which gives nothing away.

  ‘We need to talk about Freya,’ she says.

  That shuts him up. Its cold assertion of widening this situation out into a public field, its suggestion of finality, of practicality - this is an advanced conversation they are having. Here’s Guy wanting to discuss the whys and wherefores, the moral dimension to the betrayal he’s unearthing, and Judy’s just not interested at all. It’s a fait accompli. She wants to talk about who Freya will live with.

  ‘We will need to sit down with her and explain what’s happening, ’ Judy says, a little recklessly, implying Guy will sign up to
the situation without question. She sees her mistake, and makes half a plea. ‘Let’s not make this messy.’

  This time it’s Guy who plays the silent card. Judy waits, in no hurry, her father’s bank-management skills showing through - she’s a businesswoman, after all this, it’s a new revelation to Guy and, predictably, it’s he who backs down first.

  ‘Judy,’ he says, ‘I’m still in love with you.’

  The start of so many cherished moments between them, a word that usually unlocks her, but here, it’s the end. She gets up, stretching her back as if she’s been in there for hours, and walks calmly towards the door.

  ‘I’m not sleeping in here,’ she says, flatly.

  ‘Is that it? Our discussion’s over?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So what am I meant to do?’

  ‘You paid for the room. You may as well use it.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going to.’

  ‘No? Where do you think you’re going to sleep then?’

  ‘In there. In the same room as Freya.’

  Judy’s had enough of this. ‘Suit yourself,’ she says.

  She goes, leaving the door open, a politeness in that gesture about not wanting to shut the door entirely on him, not quite. It gives him the slightest glimmer of hope, but he knows it’s no consolation. She doesn’t want to be followed.

  After a few hours on the motel couch he knows sleep won’t come to him tonight. It’s just not possible, given the nature of their talk and the feeling that something so ugly and of enormous proportion is growing between them. Once such allies. Its presence is there in the room, like the smell of death, something that can’t be disguised. God, he’s tired. Already this business is demanding a new stamina, a kind of constant attention within him to be wary, to be on guard, to prepare for all discussions, all eventualities, all hurtful. He was stubborn to insist on sleeping in here, given the perfectly good bed that’s unused next door, but he’s determined not to be seen as the one who has to leave the family room. Yet it’s odd to try and sleep while Judy’s there on the bed. If anything, he should be on the bed - he is the wronged party here - surely he deserves the bed. He paid for the room, he did all the driving, he’s long and the couch is small, but it’s his for the night, and for some reason it seems fitting. The men always take the couches.

  Judy’s impenetrable shadow on the bed is a troubling one. He imagines she is full of potential actions now - of zipping up cases and writing him aggressive notes and new ways of standing, too - stances where she will have a rigidity to her posture, waiting for him to back down, the kind of thing that up to now he’s only seen her do when she faces someone they both have issues with. Well, he’s the enemy now, of sorts. She’s a dark reservoir in that bed, of private thoughts and agendas, and he just doesn’t know the depth of it, or the depths of her.

  And his mind turns to the thing that he’s been trying to ignore, unsuccessfully, all day. Freya.

  Asleep, unaware, still so much the child, though she’s on the cusp of adulthood. This will damage her - will bring out in her a seriousness he knows will not suit her - will not make her attractive among friends. She takes trouble badly, seems to accept it like a punch and wears it like a bruise, she’s like him in that respect.

  Freya is still with them, but this night, she’s on the far side of the room and she can’t be seen among the shadows, and he feels his daughter’s absence with a sense of panic. Freya, alone, beyond his reach - it’s something he’s never before considered happening. His daily protection of her, his daily right to be with her, it’s so natural - yet here, he’s on the verge of losing it, or more precisely having it taken away. Where will she live? Who will she choose? Judy and the ridiculous one-legged guitar man, or her father, tinged with a hint of tragedy even now? Whatever the outcome, a compromise, a splitting of her identity before it’s properly formed.

  The couch is bloody uncomfortable. It begins to break his body quietly and efficiently in the night, starting with his neck and spreading down one side. He ends up moving the cushions on to the floor and trying to lie on them there. He gets a moment of relief, but then discovers a draught, and a mushroomy smell from the carpet which is old and unclean and inescapable.

  The morning arrives with a grey stealth which begins to illuminate the room. He looks at the chart of fire precautions pinned to the back of the door, which he reads from top to bottom - he’s wild with his lack of sleep. A song, a trashy song from the eighties, playing out in his mind over and over again while the room gradually gets lighter. Still a calm place, still time for an hour or two’s sleep, but sleep is not coming. He sees a picture of cacti in a false desert sunset materializing on the wall near the bathroom. It shines at him like an omen, a call to the desert, to endlessness.

  Guy slides open the door of the wheelhouse and looks out into the night. The clouds have mostly cleared, surprisingly, and the bone-coloured glow of a moon he can’t yet see shines across the sky. The stars look silent and icy above him, more like a winter sky than anything he’s seen all summer. Perhaps the seasons advance quicker out here? It’s much cooler now outside than it was before. He walks along the deck and looks out at the sea, passing in front of him in terrible blackness. Full of a coiled movement, rocklike in its depth and sheer presence. A single wave breaks menacingly alongside, bursting with a seething sound which rushes away into the night, leaving behind its ocean breath of salt and air.

  When he turns back to face the wheelhouse, he sees the silhouette of someone sitting in there. He knows it’s Freya, on his seat, but the shock of seeing her, like this, so unannounced, strikes him with amazement. It’s very dark - the whole deck is only palely illuminated by the starlight, and before he left the wheelhouse he’d turned the lights out inside, so the shape of his daughter is hard to separate from the rest of the shadows around her. But it’s undeniable. It’s true. It’s Freya.

  He cautiously walks back along the deck, keeping hold of her shape among the glint of reflections of the sea that shine on the windows. There seem to be layers in there, of water and movement, and among them he keeps losing her, and by the time he’s at the doorway, she has vanished.

  He puts the lights on and the honey colour of the wood springs forward at him with real intensity. His wheelhouse, empty, with the padded benches and the loose cushion with its faded river scene embroidered by someone he’s never met. His own friendly space, so familiar after these five years of living on the Flood. It’s been a good home. Controls and gauges - for weather, knots, depth, direction, all you need to navigate, where there is essentially no map to follow. The gauges, set in their brass mountings, recording oil and wind and water and magnetism and pressure both inside and out - they seem at once idle and watchful, forever busy but here right now, neglected. He sees a dark patch of wood above the hatch handle made by the grease of hundreds of hands, all of them naturally pushing in the same place. And he sees the sight of his impending emergency - the bag of food hanging from the door, the fastened hatches, the untidy and possibly incomplete apparatus of the sea anchor, the imagined scenes of an approaching catastrophe.

  He calls her name but all he hears is the thin sound of his voice in the emptiness of the boat. He checks the saloon, the cabin, the toilet and shower-room, the cupboards, thinking he’s losing his mind and feeling a presence, everywhere, that he didn’t feel before. Eventually he goes back to the wheelhouse. Deliberately, he tries to absorb his mind with the complicated business of assembling the sea anchor. It turns out to be very frustrating and intricate, and he never quite manages to dispel the feeling that she’s there, with him, as he’s putting the anchor together.

  ‘Maybe you’re here? Are you?’ he says, stopping to listen to the silence around him.

  He attaches two iron hoops, either end of a tapering canvas bag about ten feet long, like an airfield windsock, then fixes that to a float and chain. It’s fiddly. The book has complicated diagrams of trough lengths and wave height and cable spans for ideal deploym
ent of the anchor ahead of the bow. There seems to be a whole science to this thing, but the purpose has a simplicity: if the engine’s not up to keeping a direction against the waves, the Flood can be held on the right course by this cumbersome dragging anchor, like a horse has its rein. At least, that’s the theory.

  When it’s finished he sits back to admire the contraption. It resembles a giant squid, curled round on the wheelhouse floor. He feels calmer, and no longer feels haunted by a presence he can’t explain. He’s preparing for the storm, and he’s thinking clearly. Impulsively, he gets his mobile from the cupboard and switches it on. It bursts into life in his hand with a series of chattering beeps - the screen glows back at him in a precise glare, full of battery and life and ridiculous can-do optimism. Any number in the world, its childlike belief, each number on the keypad fringed with a halo of perfect blue light. I’m ready, it’s saying to him with shameless self-belief, with no awareness at all that out here it’s lost, without signal, beyond communication.

  Guy climbs down the ladder into his cabin to lie on the bunk in the dark. He must rest. He’ll need his strength. He listens to the busy sounds of the Flood, of the metal creaking in distant corners, of the joints in the woodwork stretching and relaxing, the wheelhouse glass as it trembles in the frames, then the sounds of water passing outside - a smooth flow brushing the outside of the steel. He listens to all this and knows there will be no chance for sleep tonight. Instead, he concentrates on his breathing, taking long inhales and letting them out gradually, and as he’s doing this he becomes aware of that second set of breaths again. From the other side of the cabin. The shallow calm breaths of a child, following his, keeping time with him. He listens, by holding his breath, but hears nothing. Then softly, from a few feet away, Freya whispers to him.

  ‘Why are you upset?’

  Guy feels enveloped by an instant cold sweat. He’s immediately, intensely awake. He strains to listen to the room, but can only hear the other noises of the boat.