The Sea Change

by Rossiter, Joanna

  We spent our first month mending the roof with whatever money we could spare, all the while fearing that the parsonage was gathering the very holes that we were patching up in Wilton. Civilian men were scarce in the town and there was nobody we could ask to do the work. In the end, I took shifts in the old carpet factory, making camouflage and tarpaulin for the troops. Whenever a sheet of fabric was found to be faulty, I would smuggle it home at the end of the day to rig up over one of the holes.

  Pete called round on one of those hole-patching Sundays. My mother was working on the back wall while I was up in the loft. We had been informed by the Major that Pete had gone to work as a farmhand less than a mile away near Coombe Bissett, parting ways with the Archams, who had been rehoused in Lavington. I did not know how he had come by our address. He told us in the doorway that, as it was his day off, he had thought to bring some meat from the farm. He had to jam his foot against the door to prevent my mother slamming it in his face.

  ‘You’ve got some nerve showing your face here.’

  ‘Mrs Fielding, I shan’t come in if you don’t want to see me but please let me speak to Violet.’

  I shied back up the stairs at the sound of my name, unsure of what he might say.

  My mother bristled. ‘That depends on whether she wants to speak to you.’

  I wanted to dissolve into the wall with the damp and be gone.

  ‘Vi?’ He leant past my mother and caught my eye.

  ‘I’m sorry. There’s a lot of work to do,’ I replied, glancing up towards the roof.

  ‘Let me help,’ he offered. ‘You’ll be finished in half the time.’

  I shook my head but my mother accepted his offer, rather more quickly than I was expecting. She was so fed up with rain-soaked carpets and damp beds that she was not about to turn down an offer of help, particularly from a competent pair of hands like Pete’s.

  ‘I suppose it’s the least you can do,’ she muttered, standing aside for him in the hall.

  Pete followed me up to the loft and watched as I tried to tack a square of tarpaulin to the back of the first hole. ‘That’s useless, that is.’ He sighed. ‘The rain will pour straight back through. You need to get a man up onto the roof to fix the tiles.’

  ‘Oh, and they’re two a penny right now, are they?’

  ‘I have a friend who could help.’

  ‘How kind,’ I replied, not sounding as if I meant it.

  Pete came up close and held a second piece down while I fumbled with the tape. I had missed his smell – fields and chalk dust and smoking fires – as much as I had missed Imber.

  ‘I heard you’ve found work in the factory,’ he said.

  I nodded.

  ‘I hope you didn’t avoid the Land Army because of me, Vi. The girls on the farm say the factory’s tough as anything.’

  ‘A girl’s entitled to a change of scene,’ I said coldly. ‘And there would be no one around for Mama if I chose farm work. My sister isn’t here any more, remember?’

  He dropped his hands and stood back from me. ‘I wanted to talk to you about Freda.’

  I reddened at her name and hoped the light in the loft was dim enough to hide it.

  ‘She asked a favour of me, that’s all. I can’t be blamed for her going to London.’

  ‘You knew how much it would upset us.’

  ‘But – she hadn’t been herself, not since your father … I thought it would help if she got away for a while.’

  His voice had softened. There was an intimacy in it that alarmed me.

  ‘I saw you dancing with her, Pete.’

  He cocked his head, slowly grasping my meaning.

  ‘At Warminster Camp. I was outside. Looking in.’

  He did not fidget, as I expected him to. He held my gaze.

  ‘Mr Archam told Annie,’ I continued. ‘So we caught a lift to Warminster to see for ourselves.’

  ‘A lad can dance with a girl. It doesn’t have to mean anything,’ said Pete. ‘People set too much store by these things.’

  He took a step towards me but I backed away. ‘Nothing happened, Violet.’

  ‘You’re talking as if you owe me an explanation and you don’t. There’s nothing … We’re not –’

  Pete raised a hand to the hole in the roof, dropping his stare. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you.’

  ‘I’m not hurt,’ I retorted. ‘There’s nothing to be hurt about.’ My voice had wavered so I bit my lip and paused. ‘I’m only sorry,’ I ventured, ‘that you felt you could tell her things that you couldn’t tell me.’

  ‘Whatever Freda’s said …’ He paused. And swallowed, Adam’s apple kneading the length of his throat. ‘Your sister likes you to believe she has secrets. Because they make her feel better about herself.’

  Then he put down the piece of tarpaulin he was holding and walked over to the loft ladder. ‘I’m at Welham Farm near Coombe, if you or your mother needs help … a roofer …’ He trailed off and stepped down through the gap in the loft floor. A minute or so later, I heard the front door open and close. Through the holes in the roof, I could hear his steps on the road.

  CHAPTER 14

  One man shouts into the face of the rubble. He puts his ear to the heap and waits. There’s no answer. He tries again. This time, the other people on the pile begin to murmur and jostle and pick off bricks. Someone must be underneath. I get close enough to the front to hear the trapped voice, barely louder than the buzz of a fly. A woman digging on the opposite side of the pile lets out a shout and we all scramble over. She has grabbed hold of some dust-caked fingers that flex and cement their grip on her hand. I swallow back the thought of the body at sea – fingers like clay in mine. It’s James – or at least the hope of him.

  Ravindra has lost interest in the rescue. He is walking vaguely away across the wreckage. I shout after him, his name still not fitting on my tongue. He doesn’t turn, even though I know he heard me, fed up – I can tell – with being unable to make himself understood. I try again.

  He calls back in Tamil, and points wearily towards the fringe of the town. Nothing more. I nod as if I understand. But beyond that we’ve run out of the words we never had. Pressing his hands together in an upright prayer towards me, he says one last thing. There’s little point in a proper goodbye. I lift my hand, vaguely, and he’s gone.

  The voice under the bricks grows into a moan. More and more debris is removed. The fingers become ecstatic, grasping at the sun until all the veins are taut and purple. Soon, we have made a large enough hole to pull at both arms. The crown of a head emerges, then eyelids sealed shut by the dust. It’s a boy – barely ten or eleven years old – reborn from the rubble. His lips are parted slightly as if he were in the midst of speaking when the walls fell. The man who first called for help buries his head in the boy’s chest. A woman pours water over his mouth, holding it high above him and letting it bounce and splash off his face. He barely has enough energy to drink, mouth opening and shutting, like the gill of a fish.

  Everybody wants to be close to him and hold him as if he were their own. Hands clutch at the warmth of his skin, and I find I am reaching towards him too. I grasp at his heart – feeling for myself its frantic, living beat.

  The sun burns. There is no shade, only ruins. A few buildings remain standing – frozen ghosts whose hollow windows gawp inwards, in awe of their own survival. I tread on old doors and iron roofs and tell myself he isn’t under them. Even the dead are in hiding. It was easier to search for him on the beach where the wave had laid out the debris for all to see. Here, it has been more covert, hiding its victims under slabs and beams and mountains of dust.

 
The paper orders from the dosa stall are still in my grasp. Moving from the rubble where the boy was found, I cut a path towards the centre of the town. I need to find someone who speaks English.

  In the part of the village that is furthest from the sea, more men and women emerge, each lifting hands to heads at how little has been left behind. One woman stops beside a pile of dust and, sinking into the silt, starts to weep. Another man digs beside her. I want to tell him to stop: he’ll only unearth the worst. James would know what to do if he was here. He would have begun to peel back the town’s layers in search of survivors. If only it was him looking for me: he’d root me out like one of his postcards and maybe we’d stand a chance of making it, the two of us. But things fall apart in my hands.

  It started a month ago in June. Near Kerman, halfway through the overland trail. But sometimes, looking back, I wonder if it had been going on for longer. We had picked up eight passengers in Istanbul: two New Yorkers called Jeannie and Curt, an Australian named Rob, then David, Clara and Sue, who were all from the Home Counties, Erik from Sweden and Marc from New Zealand. Marc paid the least for his seat: he was on his way home and, after burning all his cash in Europe, bargained his way into the van with smiling ruthlessness. The final price was barely enough to cover his share of the petrol. James took an instant dislike to him. He wore his hair short and dressed anonymously in black and navy blue, even in the desert heat. Once on board, he was warm and affable and seemed able to sway the trip in any direction he pleased. It was his influence – his insistence on so many detours – that James grew to despise. James – eager to reach Kashmir – was cajoled into making a three-hundred-kilometre diversion to Shiraz so that Marc, and the rest of the van, could see the ruins at Persepolis. Secretly, I was grateful: there was a whole treasure trove of drawings to be made from the slim pillars that led to nothing and the walls that held millennia-old etchings in their stone. It was a must-see on the overland trail, as significant as Arafat, claimed Marc.

  ‘We can’t keep diverting. We have a route we’re trying to get through,’ James told him flatly. We were driving to Kerman at the time and the Pakistani border remained open only for short periods. The nearest town to the border, Zahedan, was nine hours away, and we were yet to stock up on supplies. It was a desert drive, which required two days’ worth of food and water. Up to this point, we had meandered off the route whenever the name of a town took our fancy. Guesthouses had been easy to find in the cities and we had camped in tents near villages in between. We’d grown a taste for spontaneity, which, James feared, would stop us reaching Pakistan.

  ‘You came here for an adventure, didn’t you? Nobody cares how long it takes,’

  ‘We were very open about the itinerary. If you were so desperate to go there you should have joined another group.’ I had not heard James use that tone before. We had treated everyone on board as friends so far, not as paying customers. He was usually so laid-back.

  ‘Alice,’ Marc said, turning to me. This was his first mistake – to draw me into it. ‘You want to see the ruins. You told me so yourself. Tell James you want to go.’

  James shot me a glance from the steering-wheel. I hurried to read what was in it – anger that I liked the idea of Persepolis, hurt that I had talked about it to Marc.

  ‘She’s an artist.’ Marc turned to James. ‘I’ve seen her sketches. Think of the drawings she’ll make of the ruins.’

  James kept his eyes on the road. ‘There are eight other people to consider.’

  ‘We all want to go,’ persisted Marc. ‘Jeannie, Curt and Erik agree. So do the others.’

  ‘It does sound like an impressive place,’ added Clara, from the second row of seats.

  By the time we reached the turning to Shiraz, James had relented and accepted the diversion. We stopped in a village for water and Tabrizi bread, which the others coated with Spam and mayonnaise they took from the back of the van. James pulled me to the far side of the vehicle while the others ate so that we were out of earshot.

  ‘What were you playing at back there?’

  ‘I – We don’t have to go to Persepolis, not if it’s too much.’

  ‘We do now, thanks to you. I should have known you’d take his side.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  He sighed and looked past me across the sand – as bleak as a sea ahead of us.

  ‘James … what do you mean?’

  ‘You don’t realize how important this is – for me.’

  ‘That’s unfair. I want to finish the route too. We all do. But we always agreed it was about seeing what there was along the way, rather than reaching the end.’

  ‘Sometimes I wish the van would just break down so that they’d all leave. You, me, on a train – it would be so much simpler …’

  He put a hand on my waist and I softened. ‘I’m sorry I said what I did to Marc. You know what he’s like. It was a way of shutting him up for a bit.’

  ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘What’s wrong, then?’

  ‘He said he’d seen your drawings.’

  ‘He asked to see them. We had hours to kill on the Turkish border, remember? Why does it matter, anyway? The whole van has probably seen them by now.’

  ‘I’ve been trying to persuade you to keep hold of them for months and suddenly, since the border, you’ve been keeping them.’

  ‘I was always worried Mum would find them if I kept them at home … but here, it’s different.’

  ‘As if it would have mattered, Alice.’

  I fell silent. Even I couldn’t explain what I was hiding from her. ‘I know it doesn’t make sense,’ I said eventually.

  He leant back on the side of the van next to me. We felt the heat from the enamel seep through our T-shirts.

  ‘Marc asked if we were an item.’

  I looked at him, saying nothing.

  ‘Back in Istanbul. He said you were pretty.’

  ‘He’s with Clara, isn’t he?’

  ‘Not like I’m with you.’

  ‘I would never –’

  ‘I know, I know. It’s just … It’s been on my mind, that’s all.’

  I knew what I should do: I should tell him I loved him, that he was the reason I had come away. The others were just a means to an end – he and I together in India. But the words stalled and became trapped.

  ‘If I just knew where we stood …’ he continued.

  ‘Then what?’ I asked, eyes on the sand. I thought of Alexander the Great throwing his burning torch into the palace at Persepolis: the city dying in his mind before the fire even gathered pace. James didn’t have to hem me in like that. He should have known that I, too, had a torch I could throw – something precious to burn.

  With Kanyakumari in rubble around me, I clench the wodge of orders from the dosa stall. James’s must be in there somewhere. It won’t help me find him but at least I can trace his last movements – where he was when the wave hit.

  ‘Do you speak any English?’ A man lifts his head from the debris and doesn’t reply. I show the orders to him and he frowns. Another man parrots, How are you I am fine, then drifts on his way.

  A third woman reads the first order. ‘It is food, sister,’ she explains. ‘Dosa.’

  ‘How many dosa?’ I ask, holding up my fingers one by one until I reach five.

  ‘Sister, look.’ She casts a hand towards the wreckage, the bangles on her wrist chiming together. ‘There is no time.’ Then she presses the water-logged order back into my palm and, with full eyes, walks on.

  ‘Please!’ I shout after her. ‘Please help me! It’s my husband – he’s gone.’

  She turns and
tilts her head at me, pointing again to the flattened houses beneath her feet and joining a group of men and women who are trying to roll a car off the top of a collapsed building. The under-carriage clasps the concrete stubbornly. I watch as she places her palms on the silver metal above the bumper and heaves herself forward with the rest of them. As if it will make a difference.

  I scrunch up the order in my hand. He was always so curious, wanting to try everything and learn everything – fitting together the nuts and bolts of how a place worked. I would have settled for a packet of biscuits for breakfast but James wanted to search for something authentic.

  ‘You’re not going to lie there all day, are you?’ he’d asked me, half an hour before the wave came. He stood fully clothed in the doorway of our guesthouse room, rucksack slung over his shoulder.

  I lay on the bed, not replying, even though I was awake.

  ‘Come on, Alice!’ He crossed to the mattress and planted a kiss on my forehead. Then he took hold of the sheet and pulled it from me.

  ‘Let me sleep.’ I groaned, pulling my legs up to my stomach.

  ‘It’s a beautiful day outside.’

  ‘It’s always beautiful. And hot,’ I mumble.

  ‘You’re acting like a teenager!’

  I batted him away with a hand. He’d smelt of smoke and old banknotes before we’d arrived here. But once we reached the coast, he went swimming so much that the sea sank into his skin and clothes so that now he smelt of saltwater too.

  ‘What do you fancy for breakfast?’

  ‘Whatever you’re having.’ I spoke into the pillow.

  ‘I’ll get us a few dosa. The landlord was telling me about them. Indian pancakes. South Indian. Can you manage three? Then we can go swimming. A swim’ll wake you up.’

  I sat up and stretched the night from my arms and legs. ‘I’m sorry, nothing changes,’ I laughed, ‘not even on the other side of the world. You go ahead. I’ll catch up.’