Sea Change

by Jeremy Page

  It would be so easy to turn broadside to the storm and let it roll him under, down to where the mammoth skulls are. A home for the fish, they love a good wreck, eels sliding in and out of the cabins, he’s thinking this way, deliriously, without two nights’ sleep, fighting the waves in a dream, it’s as if someone else is now turning the ship’s wheel. He feels disembodied, protected by something, or someone, like the ghostly presence of the old Dutch bargeman has returned, finally declaring himself to take the wheel with his blunt-jawed determination.

  Godverdomme! Krijg nou de pokke! he would growl, damning Guy with disapproval, but saving his beloved boat and his precious cod-liver cargo, and gradually Guy becomes aware that the storm is beginning to blow itself out. The night is arriving, and the waves are losing their power, they’re falling into a more rhythmic pattern. Less foam bursting from beneath, less sound, less wind.

  The spoke of the storm must have revolved somewhere else, for other boats to fight, and in its wake is this smaller sea, almost apologetic.

  He can’t quite believe it. Can’t quite believe many things in fact, that he’s survived, that the Flood can cope with all this, that her old rock of an engine has kept going, that he used a sea anchor against the odds.

  As nightfall finally comes, he is at last able to drop the speed and go out on deck, where he sees it has been swept clean of all the things he’d left out there. He pulls off the string that’s been tying his glasses on all day.

  The water glints up at him in a soft waxy light, the waves no more than long gentle swells now. He stares out at the black void of the North Sea, in awe of it. Humbled by it. The ebbs and flows of the sea have given his life its rhythm - its salt is in his bones and its presence, so enormous and malign, has been a natural filling of the empty spaces his father left, his wife left, his daughter left.

  Above him, the sky is filled with stars, glittering icily in a distance which seems to have no atmosphere. He sees Orion, Cassiopeia, the Pleiades - stars he’s recognized all his life, but here, given a new context, a renewed vividness. There seems to be no barrier between where he is and what’s up there.

  The small figure sitting at the prow of the boat is Freya. She’s huddled up against the cold, but is looking dreamily out to sea. Guy walks calmly towards her, rounding the bulkhead fastenings till he is a couple of feet away. She looks up at him and smiles. He sits down next to her on the cold steel plate of the foredeck.

  ‘That was quite a storm, Daddy,’ she says.

  ‘Yeah, yeah it was. I can’t quite believe we got through it.’

  ‘That dumb sea anchor worked, didn’t it? I couldn’t believe it when you ran out to kick it off the side. You looked so panicky.’

  ‘Cheers.’

  ‘You nearly went in yourself.’

  ‘I know. Did you see what I did with my glasses?’

  She nods, smiling. He looks at her face, how it’s changed over the years, and so shadowed in this light, but he can still see the girl she once was, the four-year-old he loved so much. He can see that face, submerged in this one, still guiding its expressions, even after all this time.

  ‘I’ve missed you more than I thought was possible,’ he tells her, and he hears his voice cracking with a rush of feeling. ‘I’ve been writing this diary about you for five years and . . . I just can’t do it any more. It’s gone wrong. I can’t keep you alive like that. Do you understand?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘What do we do now, Freya?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know,’ she says, sadly.

  ‘I’m going mad,’ he says.

  ‘You’ve always been mad, you silly man,’ she says, her eyes glinting up at him.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says, smiling. ‘But you know, properly mad?’

  She looks at him, kindly, proprietarily, the way that only a daughter can. ‘You need to go to bed, Dad. I’ll look after you and the Flood while you’re asleep. Don’t worry.’

  ‘But I want to stay out here, with you.’

  ‘It’s too cold out here for you. The sea’s too cold.’

  He looks about him, at the curves of anonymous water sweeping past each other - he’s never seen such a huge emptiness as this moment, ever in his life.

  ‘You’ll be here?’ he asks.

  ‘Always,’ she replies.

  When he goes in he collapses on to his bunk, still in his wet gear. Instantly sleep is there for him, and he is dreaming of sunlight, blazing down. He’s walking along a dusty track through the desert scrub of Texas. About a mile away he can hear the thin metallic sound of a man’s voice, spilt up and then amplified out of synch on several tannoys, drifting across on the morning air. Freya and Judy are with him. Freya’s excited, full of life, but it’s a life which feels beyond his grasp, as if he’s not quite there. Inevitable, Guy thinks, all this is inevitable, as he is ushered onwards.

  He’s holding Freya’s hand tightly, too tightly, he feels her wriggling free of him and walking on ahead. A path too narrow for them all to walk side by side, so they continue, single file, in funereal fashion, towards the rising clamour of the rodeo. The combined smells of hotdogs and candy and sweet straw and fresh dung begin to wash over them, in waves. The sun is hot and startlingly bright - it springs off the tops of parked cars and pick-up trucks like camera flashes. He reaches again for Freya’s hand, finds it in the crowd, and won’t let go, even though he feels Judy’s presence - like an electric current - holding Freya’s other hand and pulling her away from him.

  He listens to his family in fragments: Freya’s fascination with horses, Judy’s half-hearted answers, but also Judy’s silence towards him, Freya’s instinctive unease that her father’s not seeming to be there, among them. He holds out money, is given some tickets, then more money, a paper plate of deep-fried doughnuts is handed to him, then a coffee in a Styrofoam cup. It does no good, the doughnuts make him nauseous, he drops his on the dirt and sees a snakeskin cowboy boot step round it. He sees ropes slung over galvanized steel fences. Trailers, hat stalls, flags hanging limply in the sunshine, crowded with strings of bunting. Every surface washed by a desert wind that has left them dirtied.

  Judy glares at him, telling him to shake himself out of it, whatever mood he’s in, whatever state he can’t shift, and the tannoy shouts down at him from the top of a bleacher and he looks up towards it like it’s an annoying voice from God and he sees row upon row of people, in hats, in sunglasses, chewing, talking, taking their seats, eating their way through the morning, grinning and laughing and sucking drinks through straws and he feels utterly sick, sick of the people, everywhere, and so alone among them.

  That’s when he hears the cough-like whinny of a stallion from beyond the fences, from the back of a truck it seems, or buried in some deep cave, and he reacts with a wave of startling fright, a wave of horror, and he thinks precisely about loss, about how he can’t imagine a life without Freya. The rodeo swamping him now with its nightmarish reality of garish bunting, announcements, its confusing array of fences, paddocks, rules, corralling him and his family.

  He panics, reaches for Freya, needs to hold her, finds she’s gone. An empty seat next to him, always, now, for the rest of his life, that empty seat to look at, and he can’t see her anywhere, not in all the faces of these people he doesn’t know. Then suddenly he glimpses her, walking into the dirt arena, although it’s not her, it’s her as he remembers, Freya as a four-year-old, in that faded lilac dress she wore. The small trippy walk of hers as she heads across the little patch of dry dirt, the confusion of fear and delight on her face. Horseradish leaves growing through the grit and sawdust. And a dark disturbance enters his vision, the shape of malignity, arriving in the ring, thundering, agitated, a lone stallion which snorts wild-eyed, noticing her. The animal in all its brutish posture and anger. Startled, rushing towards her, its muscles shaking down its flanks, the overbearing weight on its brittle hard hooves. And Freya starts to do her death run - that moment when she chooses not to be with them an
y more - that moment when she decides once again that they will be a family of two now, not three. That awkward little pathetic run and stumble of hers right into the path of the stallion which bridles, but is unstoppable, arriving at the same point as his daughter, their shapes becoming one unnatural form for the merest of moments and Freya is knocked, twisted, in the way he has seen so many times over the years, during the sleepless nights, the image of her falling, projecting indelibly every time he needs to see it and all those times he doesn’t need to see it too.

  Position: ? 7:30am

  Like the first morning he spent at sea, Guy is woken by the sound of birds, perhaps hundreds of them, flying somewhere above the boat. But again he is unable to see them. The Flood is surrounded by a total fog, grey in the early morning light, which has lowered on to the sea in an impenetrable bank. He goes out on deck, remembering fragments of yesterday’s epic fight with the waves, and the surreal glimpses of a desert light that has filled his dreams. The North Sea is calm, with a thick glassy quality to the water, as if the storm has left it exhausted.

  He sits on the wheelhouse roof and peers into the fog. Shapes slide about in it in indecipherable distances, ghostly textures of waves, emphasized by the trickle and lap of the water that gathers round the Flood. ‘I forgive you,’ he says out loud, to the sea, and the sea makes a startling sound back, like a sigh, he strains to listen to it, somewhere out in the fog, he hears it again, the unmistakable sound of water breaking along a shore.

  A few minutes later he is sitting in the inflatable dinghy, motoring towards the sound that comes stronger now by the minute. The beach emerges from the mist like a phantom ship, long and low and impossible. Until the moment the inflatable bumps on to its foreshore, he can’t quite believe it’s truly there. Where is he? Denmark? It looks and feels like East Anglia, it has the same smell of wet shingle and salt, but it must be Denmark, or one of the low countries, Germany, even Holland, the storm span him round all day. But he thinks it’s Denmark.

  He climbs out on to the beach and drags the boat up, then stares in both directions to the point where the beach disappears into the mist. The air is clearer here than on the water, but he still can’t see further than a few hundred feet. There’s no one around, no sign of anyone, no footprints or tracks that lead off through the dunes. He sits in the shingle and examines a handful of stones, sees how the carnelian has been rounded over the centuries and, noticing a piece of jasper, he licks it, tasting its cold salt, making it bright red as if he’s dabbed it with varnish.

  Along the shore he sees the skeletal shape of some abandoned machinery. As he walks towards it he sees it’s an old winch, buckled and blackened by age and salt, standing above a length of iron cable. It’s connected to nothing, and sits half sunk in the ground.

  He leans against it and closes his eyes, wondering where he is and thinking about all that has brought him to this place. He remembers floating on his back in the sea, watching that gull flying in circles way up in the sky, heading away from the coast; then the greenfinch, like a crushed flower on the water, how it had made that single oar flap of its wings to try and get away from him, from being saved, how it was still with him - amazingly, it has survived the sea a second time. It nearly died in the water and those mackerel he caught died dancing in the air - we don’t do well out of our element.

  All the waves he’s faced. What was he doing? Where has he been going in this shallow tongue of an ocean that is as lawless and as ancient as any place on earth? If it’s the frontier he wanted, he found it. He found emptiness and, at times he found Freya too. He survived the swim, the shipping lanes and the storm - an angel has been looking after him, no doubt about it. Could it be her?

  The journey and the storm have purged him. Quite literally, he feels on the other side, swept clean, a new blank state. And for the first time in years he feels able to view his life with unparalleled clarity. He thinks of the month that followed Freya’s accident. No one called them, because it was unspeakable, consolation was impossible, it was a mortal wound for the parents, and everyone knew it. They had been marked out by this tragedy. People had kept a distance from them, almost superstitiously. He remembered the fear of going into Freya’s room, every object in there a simple and incisive ambush on him, every poster and toy, a clear sign of a life that was led and a life that was lost. A pair of her socks, drying on the radiator, no need to be put away; a tiny woven handbag hanging off the end of the bed; a crudely drawn outline of an animal in her scrapbook, how she’d rubbed the neck out and redrawn it, the tiny bits of the eraser still there on the paper. Each one of these things was now frozen, belonging to a chapter of his life which was past, and each one of these things would have to be dealt with, somehow. It had seemed insurmountable, either by himself, or with Judy. You just don’t have the facility to cope, there just isn’t an answer, there is no right or wrong way, there is just the unassailable truth that life has stopped but time has not.

  After a month they had reached the same conclusion. That they would put their own end to it. They hadn’t come to this decision hysterically, or out of a series of discussions - it just seemed to be the inevitable and right thing to do. The only talk he remembered having with Judy was about how to do it and where to do it, guided by the practical issues of having to let someone know, after the event. They had discussed this in a kind of emotional shorthand, as if the decision whether to do it or not no longer needed to be mentioned. It was liberating, in a way, to be thinking of such an escape, that they could after all do something about all this untenable pain, that there was an option of a numbing darkness that they could manufacture. It had almost made them giddy.

  Guy had wanted to do it at their house, with a recorded delivery letter sent to their GP, but Judy had felt uneasy about the plan. She hadn’t liked the thought of sending that letter, committing themselves before they absolutely needed to, a decision like this couldn’t be taken in two parts. She didn’t want the immediate transferral to be dealt with by the authorities, either. How do you mean? he had asked her; Our bodies, she had replied, chillingly.

  ‘Fergus and Cindy’s,’ Judy had said, with finality.

  So their plan had been to invite themselves over for a night with their friends. In the early hours they would take sleeping pills, and leave an apology by means of a letter on the table next to the bed, alongside all their instructions. Fergus and Cindy would take a long time to accept it, but they wouldn’t, ultimately, hold this against them. They’d understand.

  On a Saturday evening they had driven to Fergus’s house on the island in the estuary. They had had to wait for the tide to clear from the Hard - the stone and seaweed causeway that connected it to the mainland. They’d sat in the car, waiting for the water to drain off. The seabed emerged across the estuary, and the road began to lift through the water, bordered by blackened seaweed. The sense of finality was immense, that they were leaving the land behind them on the first step of their plan. It was an awful moment, but oddly calming, too, because it was so resolved between them. Judy had been driving, and her hands looked small and pale on the steering wheel.

  ‘I feel all right about this,’ she had said.

  ‘Me too,’ Guy had replied. And they hadn’t said much else. Usually they would have talked about their Sunday plans, but Sunday was a nothingness - it was a blank footstep into a void, arriving by the minute.

  There had been strange pleasures that night. Fergus had made a bonfire, and after dinner he and Guy had sat by it, watching the logs burn down to a softly crumbling glow of embers. Guy was drinking a vintage wine, which he’d brought for the occasion, and was enjoying the hint of luxury it was giving him. A glow, from the fire, from the wine, a feeling of rightness, and a sense that life in that moment was a very vivid thing. All evening he’d had this feeling. Fergus had cooked tiger prawns in chilli and garlic, and their taste had been exquisite. Guy had savoured every last morsel, knowing they were some of the last things he’d ever eat, save for the bit
ter-tasting pills which Judy had somewhere in her handbag.

  Fergus had unearthed some Smithsonian Folkways recordings, and in particular played an Appalachian vocal piece - a plaintive ballad of three men singing to each other, with the sounds of cicadas in the background and the occasional crack of a fire. They’d all listened to it before dinner, but for Guy and, he supposes, Judy, it must have had the feeling of a lachrymosa. God have sympathy on us.

  Guy had brightened after the meal, and he’d entered that exclusively male world that Fergus was so good at creating. They’d sat by the fire, looking at the stars swimming eerily in the rising thermals, and listening to the oystercatchers calling to each other in the creeks, just beyond the garden. It was a magical place. Behind them was the garage where they’d all met, so often, to play their music, Fergus on fiddle, Guy on the piano, Phil on guitar and Cindy on drums, with Judy sitting cross-legged on a tabletop, singing her heart out.

  ‘Good times,’ Guy had said, to Fergus, nodding towards the open door of the garage.

  ‘Yeah, the best of times,’ Fergus had replied. Fergus was drinking beer, and the can nestled comfortably into his full beard every time he took a swig. ‘I go in there sometimes, to listen. It’s like the music’s still in there, in the walls.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ Guy said. Fergus was a lovely friend, big and soft and bearded. What a fantastic person.

  ‘You know, Guy, we’ll have good times again. You do know that, don’t you? I can’t tell you how desperate I’ve felt for you and Jude this month, but all I do know is I’m certain, you know, that we’ll get through.’