‘It’s so much colder than last week!’ I yelped, determined not to be the one to admit that the honeymoon glow might be fading.
‘I know – it’s made my wedding ring look enormous,’ replied my husband, holding out his hand to show me how loose it was on his shrunken finger.
With that, a huge wave hit him from behind and, almost in slow motion, the ring flew off into the sea.
For a few seconds we just stared at each other, not quite able to take in the fact that less than a week since he had put it on, his wedding ring was almost certainly lost for ever. Suddenly the bad weather didn’t seem like the worst thing to have happened since our return.
‘Oh my God,’ he mouthed at me.
‘What do we do?’ I replied frantically. ‘Where can it be? Everything’s moving …’
‘Stay there. I’ll run home and get my goggles,’ he said.
‘Okay, I won’t move. I’ll try and find it with my feet.’
D ran up the beach towards our flat. I saw him head behind the iron railings to our front door, wrapped in only a towel. The minute he slipped out of sight, the wind whipped up even higher, causing the sea to froth around me and surge below. I tried to stay in the same place, but swells kept knocking my legs out from beneath me. I tried to grasp with my toes, searching in the sand for anything that could be a ring. Again and again I would find a lump, convinced I had it, then lift my foot to my hand under the water only to see that it was a small shell, or a bottle top. Never a ring.
A couple of minutes later, the sky was almost entirely dark, a dirty layer of cloud lying low above me. The sea was similarly dark – no green or blue was left, only swirling sand and churning opaque water, throwing me from side to side more violently with every passing moment.
I pushed wet, salty strands of hair back from my face and spat out the water I was swallowing as it splashed into my face, its grit catching between my teeth. I could just about see D leaving the flat, closing the gate behind him. This time he was a blur, and even as he neared the water’s edge I couldn’t hear what he was saying over the noise of the rain hitting the waves. He ran back in towards me and grabbed me.
‘You’ve moved so far along,’ he said. ‘We’ll never find it.’
I was no longer anywhere near parallel to the front door. The water had pushed and pulled me. Its strength, what it was capable of without me even realising, sent terror trickling down the small of my back.
‘Quick, dive,’ I gasped. Even as I said it, I knew I didn’t really want him to. I wanted him above the water where I could see him, hold him. But he ducked down, desperately grasping, searching for anything that caught the light as a band of gold might. Again and again he submerged, returning again and again with shells curled in endlessly frustrating curves, or just fistfuls of hardened sand. Eventually I threw my arms around his neck and begged him to stop. The tide was coming up the beach fast, and the water that had been chest height was now up by our necks. I was shivering, my teeth chattering. The sea had turned, the ring was gone. The dream was over.
Between sobs, I told him it didn’t matter, that the ring clearly hadn’t fitted properly, that it wasn’t meant to be. Eventually we surrendered it to the sea and staggered home, cold to the bone and silent. The ring was lost for good, and my confidence in the water seemed to have been dragged out with it.
Two days later, we returned to the jeweller’s to buy a replacement ring. A bell tinkled as we pushed the shop door open, and we stood in the entrance holding hands like sheepish schoolchildren. The staff who had helped us a couple of months ago all looked up in synch, then down to our hands, before stealing quick glances at each other.
‘Was it the sea?’ one of them asked.
‘Or a river?’ said another.
‘Here, or on the honeymoon?’
A single tear started to roll down my cheek.
‘How did you know?’ I asked.
‘It happens a lot more than you think,’ said the kind woman who had helped us choose our original rings. ‘But it doesn’t make it any less upsetting.’
We nodded feverishly, D’s shoulders relaxing as he realised he wasn’t the first, and was unlikely to be the last, to lose a brand-new wedding ring. Before long he had been refitted for a second, slightly smaller ring, and the episode was behind us.
Except it wasn’t. Because I was still angry with the sea. I knew it was ridiculous; the solemn metal detectorists and their regular dawn patrols made sure I was reminded almost daily that we weren’t the only ones to have lost something precious to the deep. And I knew we could have lost a lot more.
I was also hurt, and scared. I had never felt the rage of an ocean turning against me before, and that half-hour had left me more frightened than I had been in years. To feel the water swell and churn beneath me, to see something as solid as gold simply vanish with what felt like a vindictive sleight of hand, had left me with a knot of anxiety I had no idea how to unpick.
In all honesty, seeing our flat flooded a week later was not the best cure. We went to bed happy after a lovely weekend, and were woken at 3 a.m. the following Monday by a huge thunderstorm playing out in the skies above us. Sleepily I snuggled up to my husband, who mumbled something about how crazy it sounded out there. For nearly an hour we lay in a silent embrace, unable to fall fully asleep while the storm raged on. After a while, I became convinced that there was a strange, echoey chill to the bedroom. I could hear what sounded like a single drop of water dripping. But there were no taps in the room; none were even within earshot. Eventually curiosity got the better of me and I swung my legs around to get out of bed and investigate. As I did so, both my feet hit several inches of water.
At first I was horribly confused. Where had it come from? There was no leak, no drip from above, yet the entire room was filled with water, at least ankle deep. My husband sat bolt upright at the splash, splash, splash of me crossing the room to the door, then leapt out of bed himself when he heard me scream from the living room. It wasn’t just the room that was filled with water, but the entire flat.
As the electrical storm grew ever more violent, the thunder cracking what seemed like inches from us, the water continued to rise. I pulled on a pair of leggings and a T-shirt and ran outside to call the emergency services.
On the street, a fleet of fire engines raced past the front door. The lightning was hitting the sea with a viciousness I had never even imagined, let alone witnessed. Several people were out in the road, looking in despair at the water filling their homes too. I tried to call again and again, only to be cut off by the severity of the weather or the busyness of the number I needed. Eventually I begged the emergency services to come and help us, screaming with terror as further claps of thunder from directly above rattled the pavement I was standing on.
‘We can’t come,’ they told me, as I strained to hear against the wind, the sirens, the thunder. ‘If you are able-bodied and can get out of the property, we have to go elsewhere first … We have to prioritise the elderly and the sick … The whole seafront is flooded … We will get to you when we can.’
I listened helplessly, awash with fear and exhaustion. For the second time in a week, wind and water whipped my hair across my face, stinging my eyes, the strands catching in my mouth.
Once I was sure that the fire service had all our details, I resigned myself to returning to the flat and trying to save whatever we could from the deluge. We discovered that the water had crept in silently underneath the door to the back yard, flooding the flat in minutes, leaving the carpets sodden, ruining hundreds of books, turning years’ worth of accounts to illegible mush, wiping treasured photographs of their images and destroying countless electricals. But we still had each other.
After hours spent bailing the water out, we stood in the kitchen with a takeaway coffee, trying to laugh at the situation with friends who had come over to help. As I sat on the countertop – the only dry seat in the house – I saw a copy of a book I had ordered while in Paris, ready fo
r our return: Swim Smooth. It was a large, almost magazine-sized paperback, and it was so wet that I was able to take an end in each hand and squeeze it so that a full mug’s worth of water oozed out in a thick, noisy trickle.
Our wedding was only a couple of weeks ago, but already everything I had ever felt about the sea had changed. I’d ordered that book in the spirit of optimism, seeing the sea as a wonderful ally I was about to get to know better. Now it was the enemy. Thief of rings, wrecker of homes, menace to married life. I hated it.
I had become more afraid of the sea than I knew it was possible to be. Where once I had longed to relive the sense of freedom it had given me as a child, now I wondered if I’d ever go in it again. On top of that, I was furious with it for its unpredictable moods, its slippery menace, and with myself for not being strong enough to fight it.
Later that week, as we sat in a local takeaway, part of our daily routine now that we were rendered semi-homeless by the flood, I tried to articulate my rage to my husband. He understood how sad I was that he had lost his wedding ring, but seemed a little perplexed by my taking it so personally.
‘It’s like it hates me!’ I muttered into the laminated menu. ‘Why does it want to ruin the start of our marriage? It’s supposed to be the happiest summertime of our life and I feel like I’ve spent most of it rotating my paperbacks around the terrace to dry them quicker.’
‘It doesn’t care,’ he replied sadly. ‘You can’t pick a fight with an entire element.’
I stared at the illustrations of noodles and bit my lip. Maybe he thought I couldn’t pick a fight with an element, but I was damned if I was going to let myself be beaten. I had tasted the terror of not being able to swim properly and I didn’t like it. I knew from past experience that we choose the selves we want to be.
The grit was in the oyster now. It was the sea versus me, and I would throw everything at this fight, so determined was I not to be deemed the loser.
CHAPTER TWO
Summer
Within the month, I had booked us on to a one-day open-water swimming course.
D was keen to be supportive – we’d been married only a few weeks, after all. But I could tell from his special face of gentle and considerate listening that when he saw me, he now saw a powder keg needing to be handled with the utmost delicacy and diplomacy for fear of damaging explosions. Woe betide the being who dared to suggest I couldn’t accomplish something I had set my mind to. He had long ago learned this, most notably when he texted me as I was halfway round a horribly hilly half-marathon, suggesting that I didn’t have to finish if I didn’t feel up to it. When he saw me later from the crowd and waved in support, I flicked a V at him and called him a wanker for not believing in me.
‘Of course I’ll come too,’ he said. ‘It will be fun.’ I didn’t miss his slightly pale smile. It was a look not dissimilar to the one my sister would give me when I suggested we swapped clothes. He is a glasses wearer, and has an uncanny habit of being able to tilt his head to the perfect degree, blocking proper eye contact and rendering him inscrutable.
Earlier in the week, I had called the organisers of the course, which was based at the Brighton Swimming School, keen to know whether it would be okay that I wasn’t great at front crawl. I reassured them that I was fit, and a strong breaststroke swimmer, and they told me that as long as I could do ten or twenty lengths, I would be fine. The description of the course on the website sounded so perfect – a morning in the pool refining technique, lunch over a talk about the tides, then an afternoon in the sea under careful supervision. It all seemed so innocent, so manageable.
It wasn’t that I knew I couldn’t do ten or twenty lengths of front crawl. It was more that I had never really tried. I knew I could do a few strokes; I definitely remembered doing that in swimming pools at gyms or on holidays over the years. I had just never tried to do it consistently, for any length of time, or with any sort of regulated breathing. What I needed, I told myself, was some focus, a few pointers, a bit of motivation. After a full day of tips and hints I would surely be on my way to a life of sea swimming!
Yes, I was sure of it. And D, staring stoically out of the window as I repeated my thoughts to him the evening before, almost certainly agreed with me.
The course began at 8.30 a.m. on the other side of Brighton, but we had to be there even earlier, as we were due to hire wetsuits for the open-water part of the day.
It was a gorgeous morning. The sky was entirely clear and the air was warm even as we left the house just before eight. As we waited fifteen minutes for a bus, slowly marinating in our own sweat, D remarked on how lucky we were with the weather. I think he might have mentioned it again as I grumpily hustled us into a taxi, now clammy with the stress of it all and really quite bored of the delights of a warm day.
The heat was the sort that, unless you’re merely stepping from an air-conditioned car to an air-conditioned building, seems to warm you from the inside out. The sun was still too low for it to be piercing; instead, I simply felt as if I’d been lightly microwaved for perhaps thirty seconds. Too warm, tacky to the touch, with thighs that felt bigger than they ought to as they nestled against each other on the faux-leather taxi seat. By the time we made it to the pool, there were beads of sweat all along my hairline, and those at the nape of my neck were now trickling down towards my back.
The Brighton Swimming School pool is pretty much the most boring pool I have ever seen. It doesn’t have the deluxe hum of a spa, or even a fancy gym. No huge plastic bucket of fun toys for children, no water chutes, nor even a steam room. It’s just a pool, albeit one that is clean and solid. It is where the beach lifeguards are trained, where triathletes ready themselves for competitions, and where children and adults alike are taught to swim. But it is not a place for recreational splashing. It is a pool that means business.
Within minutes of arriving, we were directed to the room where we could choose from the selection of wetsuits for hire. There was a rack of pre-loved suits, each one dangling at a jaunty angle from a wire coat hanger like a discarded snakeskin. D, tall, slim and broad-shouldered, does not challenge the conventional wetsuit silhouette and was off to the changing room within minutes. My body, however, proved more demanding.
Since I’m not especially tall, my figure initially seemed suited to a medium wetsuit. One was held against me.
‘That looks about right,’ said the assistant.
I removed the towel I’d placed around my neck to mop up my nerve sweats and showed the assistant my boobs. And then my bum.
‘But the fabric … will it get round all this?’ I asked anxiously. If you held the wetsuit against me front on, the shape very much matched mine, but side on – well, there was little hope.
A long glance up and down. There seemed to be some sort of maths going on. A distant memory of being taught to read Ordnance Survey maps where the lines ran closer and closer together floated across my mind.
‘I think I should take a large,’ I said, preferring to pre-empt the inevitable verdict.
‘The thing is, wetsuits are supposed to feel really tight. It’s how they work,’ explained the assistant. ‘So if you put this one on and it feels a bit loose, just let me know and you can swap it for the medium.’
I headed to the changing room. For what transpired to be the loneliest ten minutes of my life.
I thought I had known true loneliness. There had been so many Saturday evenings spent with only Danish crime dramas and a bar of Lindt ‘Touch of Sea Salt’ for company. Countless weddings where I was the ‘fun’ one at the table, only to dart home alone and melancholy lest someone expect me to cop off with an usher. And school reunions where everyone compared childbirth stories while I provided a jolly tale about falling over during a marathon training run by way of comparison.
But none of those things were true loneliness. Because the loneliest place on earth is halfway into, halfway out of a wetsuit. And that is where I got stuck.
My body was by now clammy all
over, radiating heat as a result of the balmy day, the warmth of the pool environment and the rush of blood created by the prospect of getting changed. I dived right in, plunging my calves into the lower half of the wetsuit, then tried to yank the rest up from the waist. I say waist, but the neoprene was very, very far from there. All I had managed to do was create a baguette-width roll of wetsuit just beneath my hips; an unwelcome arse-shelf. The spongy flesh that made up my haunches was now sitting in a magnificent display of rococo arse-cleavage above the neoprene corsetry. The part of my legs within the wetsuit seemed to have gone cold, possibly as a result of inadequate circulation, while the skin directly above the haunches was becoming ever stickier with sweat, proving an effective braking system for any fabric I tried to pull over it. Where had all of this me come from?
I unravelled the waterproof baguette, letting loose an enormous squeak as the coated exterior of the neoprene popped apart and the arms flailed out from the bulk of the suit. I yanked and yanked until the top half fell forward. I needed to put my arms into the sleeves, but the gusset of the suit was still hanging between my legs at mid-thigh. I yanked at the fabric, trying to pull it up my thighs, desperate to grab a proper fistful of material but trying not to jab into the slick coating with my fingernails. Repeatedly I had to twist my hand to the side and pinch as much as I could between my thumb and the lower edge of my forefinger. Slowly, slowly the suit legs inched their way up my actual legs. With a flourish of frustration, I yanked the body up my torso. As soon as I had done it, I realised my mistake: on account of the crotch still being a few inches too low, the neckline was now sitting across my boobs, dividing them into four, the sleeves dangling from my armpits.
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