Sea Change

by Jeremy Page

  ‘Daddy?’ she says.

  ‘Freya?’

  ‘I liked you catching those fish,’ she whispers, mischievously. Guy smiles, full of an unbounded elation, despite the turbulence of his thoughts. ‘You saw that?’ he says.

  ‘I was watching you.’ Her voice is calm, older than he remembers, coming out to him from the dark like a soft curve of air. She’s carefully picking her words. ‘But you shouldn’t have killed so many of them.’

  ‘I know,’ he says, spellbound by what’s happening. ‘I got carried away. You forgive me?’ He feels the need to ask questions, to keep hold of this voice, not let it drift away.

  ‘Daddy,’ she says, ‘you know there’s going to be a storm tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you think that clumsy parachute’s going to help?’

  ‘I don’t know. What do you think?’

  He hears a faint giggle, then Freya’s voice coming to him as one of her characters: ‘Ain’t no playground you know,’ she says, impersonating the skipper of the trawler he met.

  Guy blurts out a laugh then bites his fist like a madman. He can’t believe this. It’s his turn for an impression - he says, ‘We’re going to need a bigger boat,’ like Roy Scheider in Jaws.

  ‘You’re funny,’ Freya says. It sounds like her voice is slightly further away this time.

  ‘Freya?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You’re still there?’

  ‘I’m always here.’

  ‘It was you in the sea, wasn’t it - when I went swimming, I felt your dress in the water.’

  ‘Yes. It was cold. Your hand was cold.’

  ‘Darling, it’s so lovely to hear you. Do you know how much I’ve wanted this?’

  ‘Why are you upset, Daddy?’ she asks again.

  He stares into the darkness of the room, trying to make out her face against the velvet blackness of the opposite wall. A tiny glimmer of light is coming down the ladder from the wheelhouse, but with each rung it seems to half, and down here in his cabin there’s no clue - it’s like being in a well. He so wants to see her.

  ‘I’m upset because of writing that diary. And I don’t think I can do it much longer. Since I lost you I wanted to believe in something - I wanted to believe that all three of us would have been happy. But I can’t honestly say that’s true any more. I was trying to keep everything together, see, but it’s all falling apart. All over again. I can’t control it.’

  She doesn’t say anything. He has the feeling that she’s no longer with him in the cabin.

  ‘I’m scared, Freya.’

  ‘What of, Daddy?’ she says.

  ‘I’m scared that when I turn on the light, you’re not going to be here.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Shall I turn on the light?’

  ‘I don’t know. Don’t be scared.’

  ‘OK. Thanks, love - you’re good to me. God, I so want to see you. I’m going to turn the light on.’

  He reaches for the pull-cord of the wall lamp to the side of his bed. He feels the small metal bead at the end of the cord and hesitates, anticipating the flood of cold light that will illuminate his cabin. He’s scared, right now, after all this time, to see her.

  Guy pulls the cord and the cabin fills with light and he looks at the emptiness of the room. Empty square space reaching into each corner.

  Position: Not sure. The North Sea.

  As the new day arrives - its light spreading in a greasy unremarkable stain across the sea - Guy is buttoned up in his warmest coat, sitting in the pilot’s chair. He hasn’t slept. He switches off the light in the wheelhouse and his surroundings change from a cosy orangey glow to a grey and shadowed room - all the life drained from it. The windows feel cold and brittle, and the deck of the boat stretches in a horribly damp shape into the sea, covered in a salty dew. The sky promises something awful. A fatigue presses him across his forehead, but he knows he won’t sleep. He knows the storm is imminent. He escaped it yesterday, but he can’t escape it now.

  With a sense of trepidation, he takes the assembled sea anchor to the bow of the boat, fixes its cable, and secures it with rope. Then as a final measure, he attaches a can of engine oil to the anchor’s float, and pierces its lid with several stabs of a screwdriver. He’s hoping an oil slick might calm the water - the manual said it was worth a try. And he’s willing to try anything.

  Below, the water rushes by with a swift noise, like the sea has become a river, sweeping its weather towards him.

  He has a shower in the tiny cubicle forward of the saloon, sliding the roof light open to let the steam out. And as he stands there, looking up at the thin stream of iron-smelling water coming from the showerhead, and the pale grey square of the sky beyond, it is like a surreal rain is falling on him, and he wonders whether he might faint. Sleeplessness has done that.

  He goes back to the pilot’s chair and sits at the wheel, looking at the map of the North Sea. There’s nowhere to go, no direction any more, except back, he supposes - but there’s no chance the Flood could outrun the storm now. This is the end of the line for him. With every minute the weather is worsening.

  ‘Where was I?’ he says out loud, finding his last entry in the diary.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he answers.

  In the morning he goes into the en suite and stands under the rigid force of water gushing from the showerhead for as long as he can take it. Hot Texan water, full of its own right to be vital and strong, rushing on to the back of his neck and down his arms, wrapping him in a false vigour.

  Judy is sullen, carrying an injured air, as though she is the one who hasn’t slept. She avoids Guy, spends a long time in the bathroom, and seems to have taken a sudden interest in the map, where they are, how far they still have to go perhaps. In contrast, Freya is bright, and keen on finding out breakfast possibilities and discussing routes.

  ‘Ah’m gonna go out an’ shoot me a ra-coon,’ she says, as Calamity Jane, ‘and you can have its foot for a key-ring, coz I already got me my gator claw,’ which she produces from behind her back. An alligator’s claw as a lucky charm, but bringing them no luck when it came down to it. She knows something’s wrong with her dad. She’ll make a natural partner for a man one day, Guy thinks.

  Judy doesn’t ask how he feels or how he slept, but she does ask if he’s all right to drive, the suffering of the night must be as clear as day. He’s unsure himself, but gets into the driving seat regardless, resigned to this westerly direction which he doggedly wants to protect. And then they drive, once more leaving a place on the earth which has the feel of a scarred spot, a lightning strike of pain and discord between them, occurring there, vanishing in the rear-view mirror. They drive, west as always, through a Texas which seems as wide as a continent. He knows their route across America should begin to rise up here, becoming a lovely positive arc into New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. Drawn across the map it would have the shape of a smile, a warm smile of well-being. They should be crossing America with the naturally curving grace of a line strung between the two points of arrival and departure. But instead the curve seems to be turning downward, as if running out of energy as it falls. Flying on one engine, he thinks, almost deliriously, they’re bound to crash. But where? Where can they go?

  Guy has no idea where the Flood is now. It’s in the centre, heading east, but the waves are growing, and as their direction veers he has to turn into them. He’s in the approaching grip of the storm, that’s all he knows. He opens the window - Spin me round, my darling, he shouts to the rising wind, then wonders whether he’s above the Dogger Bank yet, that wonderful trackless part of the North Sea, so curious in the shipping forecast. They dredge mammoth skulls from the seabed here, covered in thick black peat.

  On the charts Dogger is a simple square shape, the first of the areas not to have a coast to call its own. It belongs to the sea, but with its oddly comic name it seems friendly, unlike the areas going north like Forties or Viking, names that in thems
elves seem full of waves and danger.

  Faced with such a dismal view of the mounting sea, he has a pang of homesickness for the damp calm of East Anglia. He misses the wet prismatic light of England. The clouding scent of wet woodland. The feel of a sodden tree trunk, the cloggy odour of fallen leaves, the smells of his own estuary at low tide, of its wrecks and repairs, its stink of mud and rust and oil.

  Closing his eyes, Guy imagines the woods along the shore at the Tide Mill anchorage. He gets fleeting images of his dog, Banjo, rummaging through the pinecones, gathering several into his mouth and trotting busily beneath the trees. He remembers the feel of his shoes slipping on the mats of fallen pine-needles, and a breeze stirring - splitting into a thousand threads of sound as it’s combed by the trees before settling, without substance, around him.

  It’s a special place. Woods are special. Guy’s mother used to love them - used to love touching the trees and looking up at the wide span of branches, her mouth slightly ajar with open-eyed awe. Looking for permanence, always. He remembers how she would take a detour in the car, stopping it when the road passed through a wood, just to hear the sound of it, how she’d wind down the window and theatrically breathe it in.

  Guy remembers his mother in a flowery jacket and cheap wellingtons, a smell of old rubber about her, while he wore a bright orange anorak and hunted for any tree he could climb, his hands and knees already dirt-green and scratched by the bark. He’d be seven or eight, the golden age of childhood, but already then without a father, running in quick darts between the trees, occupied by the desire to climb, while his mother walked dreamily behind him.

  Other times they’d sit on grassy banks by the side of the road, blowing dandelion heads or trying to find a four-leaf clover. We’ll find one today, she’d always say that, it was a kind of mantra for her, and Guy would pretend to be casual about looking for it, but really he was determined to be the first, determined to be the man of the occasion, solving all, the one who’d bless them with the luck she so often wished for. What exactly this luck was, Guy hadn’t been sure, but he remembers the sight of the clover, its springy bright green parting with his fingers, so often a clover with four leaves, until he moved the plant and the heads would seamlessly separate. Got one, he’d cry, every so often, to raise his mother’s spirits, but the look of instant unbridled pleasure on her face - taking ten years off her for a glowing second - upset him, even though it fascinated him to see her younger like that, glimpsing the woman she had been.

  He realizes now, too late, how lonely she probably was during those times, walking in the woods or sitting on the verge by the car, how aware she would have been that a man wasn’t there with them.

  Strangely, Guy smells a faint whiff of cigarettes, and he opens his eyes mistrustfully. It must be a trick of his breathing, like tasting a bonfire in the back of your throat long after the fire has gone. But its eerie evocation of his father’s secretive habit unsettles him, briefly. A father’s presence is a shifting, long-lasting one, taking many forms. It lingers, like an anxious stink that remains in a shirt, however many times you wash it.

  There’s a marshy area he remembers, too, where the path has been partially boardwalked as it passes a mire of rushes and pools of thick oily water. In spring it’s a busy place, full of damselflies and dry-cased beetles crawling up the stems. The bright young spikes of the bulrushes burst out of the mud, but at this time of the year, things would be dying back. The reeds and grasses would be bleached by the sun and spent by such overreaching growth. The bulrush heads would be burned brown and crumbling, they’d have the soft gripped look of church bell ropes.

  Daffodils grew here, emerging each spring out of nowhere, in wide banks of brilliant yellow, so many of them the ground seemed to have an extra sunshine to it, emanating in a haze above the flowers. They were so plentiful he was always constantly corralled into dead ends in their labyrinth of flower walls when he tried to get through. He remembers how he’d snapped one of the heads off to put in his pocket, it had made a hollow tugging sound, and the cut stem had had the peppery green smell of a salad.

  He’d been there with Judy. They hadn’t been married long, and Guy had been enjoying the sight of her, lying there on the fallen trunk of a beech tree, in dappled sunshine. His wife, peaceful, but already with a closed-eyed look of her own secret world.

  Beyond her, a small woodland pond was filled with lily pads. Guy, Judy whispered, look. When he turned he saw her entire body had become rigid with an effort not to move. A tiny patch of light flickered by her eye, seemed to bend, or fold, and he realized a butterfly had landed on her cheek. Judy stared skyward, unblinking, the only thing that moved in all this world had been the rhythmic folding of the butterfly’s wings, each time, its lampshade pattern of orange and gold vanished into a thin black velvety line, a second closing eye it seemed, momentarily, next to hers. Guy and Judy had been transfixed. The butterfly had possibly mistaken the brown of Judy’s iris, almost green in that light, for the centre of a flower. The ribbon of its thin uncurling tongue was touching her eye, in the corner, where a glisten of moisture shone like glass.

  ‘I can’t believe this,’ Judy said, ‘can you see it?’

  Guy nodded, mesmerized by the sight.

  The butterfly continued to dab the eye, unravelling that impossible tongue, uncurling its tip in the moisture, and as it did this, the tongue brushed an eyelash. With an unavoidable reflex, Judy blinked and the butterfly lifted upwards, without weight, into a slow papery dreamlike flight.

  They watched it leaving, dappled by the woodland patterns, till it was just another fleck of the sunshine, a falling leaf, a trick of the light.

  ‘Did you get a good look at it? I want to know what it was.’

  ‘A Marsh Fritillary,’ Guy had said, later that evening, sitting in his armchair at their house, after looking through one of his wildlife books. ‘It’s rare.’

  ‘How rare?’

  ‘To have been licking your eye - I’d say it was pretty much unique.’

  ‘It was amazing, wasn’t it? I mean, really amazing. I could have stayed like that forever. All I could see were those soft wings, closing like that.’

  ‘Could you feel it?’

  ‘No. It did touch my eye, didn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Judy falls silent, satisfied that the moment was perfect and needed nothing more. And Guy had realized it had become her moment, already, part of the myth she felt she needed to create about her own life, that her life traded in beauty.

  ‘Mind if I do some practice?’ Judy had said.

  ‘Go ahead. Need me on the piano?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You looked lovely, you know, with that butterfly on you.’

  ‘Thanks. I felt like an angel.’

  Guy had been left in the living-room, by the fireplace, looking at the ugly helmeted heads of garden beetles, listening to the sound of his wife doing singing practice in the room upstairs, the room where he hoped, one day, they might have a child.

  Guy wakes, startled, realizing he must have finally nodded off, his feelings of calm immediately interrupted by the very real sight of the grey sea advancing at him, parting either side of the bow. It seems like something has vanished from the world. Life and the clutter of living things, just where have they gone?

  He looks at the time, still early, then checks the barometer’s continuing fall and, momentarily, feels the day itself might be reversing, the light is fading so rapidly.

  It never had a chance to shine, not today.

  The road becomes full of traffic going his direction. Cars and trucks of all sorts, covered with a dizzying array of religious, Texan, confederate and cowboy bumper stickers, all of them heading west in a crowded stream. He slows down, becomes familiar with the rear of the car in front, while Freya asks what’s going on. Guy doesn’t know, but he soon finds out. It’s a rodeo, he says, as they approach a wide banner fringed with bunting strung across the road. It’s big, he adds. Frey
a gets excited, winding down her window and watching the country roll by. Cattle glance back at her, from the other side of a ranch fence, with a knowing look.

  ‘Will we go?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes,’ Guy replies, automatically, seizing the occasion, any occasion to make this journey intentional. From outside he smells a warm dry smell of earth and grass.

  ‘You want to go?’ he adds, looking at her.

  ‘Is it cruel to horses?’ Freya asks.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

  ‘I don’t want it to be cruel to the horses.’

  ‘No. Neither do I.’

  It takes them a while to find somewhere to stay - most places are full - but a shabbily painted motel on the edge of town still has a room. Just the one room. He’s not interested to know the name of this place or just how far across Texas they have driven. That can be Judy’s concern, as they drive further and further, away from airports, towards a dead end which is Mexico.

  Guy goes into the motel room. It’s the same as all the others they’ve stayed in. My spot on the earth, he thinks: vacant, pending. He lies on the bed and puts the TV on and watches a programme about the building of a railroad.

  They eat Mexican food that night, in a small restaurant next to the motel. Guy’s feeling very strange with the lack of sleep, and the restaurant is oppressively crowded with trinkets, strings of multicoloured tasselled fabric, pottery watermelon slices and model donkeys. Painted faces on coconut shells peer down at him with peasant grins. Sunny, brown faces. It makes him shudder, to think of Mexico so close out there, filled with a wide sun-drenched life and, pocketed here, in such gaudy colours.

  The tables are small and the food, when it arrives, is huge. Guy digs in to every dish, meeting his tiredness head on with the decision to overeat, embarking on a pointless game to uncover the patterned design of the plates. He thinks there are pictures of rural scenes, under the beans and the tortillas. He eats a pork stew, deliberately chewing the chillies, though they burn his mouth badly. A guitarist comes to play at the table, in a sombrero and charro suit, and a waiter gathers them together roughly, then takes a picture. Somehow, the photo is printed off and presented to them midway through the meal. He looks at himself in the photo, grinning next to a grinning mariachi player, all of them grinning, it’s grotesque.