Sea Change (22 page)

She snaps the compact shut and stands.

‘I think it’s best I go out for a while. I’m going to listen to the guy playing guitar.’

And with that, she leaves him, leaves him in the middle of this strange little shack, the room as wooden as a coffin, somewhere at the end of a very long road and a very long day, but feeling entirely without a sense of time or place. So bewildering, that his entire friendship, relationship and marriage to Judy should arrive at this haphazard place, so completely unfamiliar to them both, and that it’s here a moment of such enormous significance should happen. When it comes down to it, there’s no sense, no plan, no shape to things. They just occur. They occur and then you carry on, because time carries on, you change, you adapt, you just have to.

He imagines how she must have walked across that warm patch of grass to the back of the plantation building, the world changed for her too, irreversibly, but still a resoluteness in her which was alarming. Both of them, dealing with the same crisis, which ironically should bring them together. But is she alarmed too, or does she already have a warped sense of relief ? He imagines her going back into the room where the man is playing blues guitar, how they’d welcome her and make space for her at the table, honoured by her interest, discovering that she is a singer, that she can add to the evening. It’s sickening, that he’s left here in the shack, with Freya asleep and so vulnerable, so innocent in all this, while Judy eases herself into a social world of strangers playing music into the night. She’s a coward.

Guy doesn’t know what to do. There’s no sense in drinking that bottle now, he knows that much, and he can’t concentrate on anything else but what he has to do now, how he has to act, the things he has to fill his head with. It’s terrible.

He sits at a table and opens the road atlas of America. It’s so important, suddenly, that he knows exactly where this place is, this little damned spot of the earth which will change his life. He finds it by following the orange latticework of roads he drove down an hour or so ago, passing through the junctions with his finger, remembering how he had felt, driving the car, so late at night, so responsible for dragging them further than they’d wanted to travel today. He remembers views over dark fields, a casino complex lit up with neon and flashing lights, all gaudy and inviting, a couple of large wooden crucifixes set by the road in front of a floodlit church. All of those things, he’d seen in his previous life, though he’d not known it then, his life which had been one thing, and now it was another.

He finds where they are staying, after a while, between two anonymous crossroads. That’s all it looks like on the map. A few miles to the west is the looping thick blue swirl of the Mississippi, flowing north to south. They are close to it tonight, perhaps a ten-minute drive, nothing more. It dissects the continent as an unavoidably clear divide between east and west. He looks down at it, sadly, feeling very lost, thinking they didn’t even make it half-way, they didn’t even get that far.

Guy realizes he might have been crying. Writing tears the life out of him, it makes him a husk, he thinks. He lies on top of his bed, full of doubt. Family grows, it strengthens, it ripens, then sometimes it splits - the result of some forgotten weakness in its make-up. Couples get together, they blossom, then they destroy each other. It feels almost natural, but it never is. Judy will always leave him, he knows it, and Freya, she will go too.

Lying on the bunk in the dark he tries to conjure their faces, tries to colour the room with remembered scenes where they were all together and happy, and he sees fragments of East Anglian sunshine, the glint of an estuary between trees, the feel of long wet grass in a water-meadow. The past seems shifting and unreliable, it’s shadowed, but memories arrive with unexpected intensity, of colours, of specific touches. They seem more vivid now than ever before. Damp bricks on a farmhouse wall, separated by a powdery mortar, Freya’s multicoloured dresses - their hems brushing through the bending stalks of long summer reeds, her legs in woollen tights, pulling them up at the knees, Judy squatting down and pinching Freya on the nose, to make her laugh. That crease of a worry line, between Freya’s brow, though she was too young to worry about anything.

Yet mixing with the airy East Anglian blend of salt and water and sunshine, is now a huge presence, the murderous call of the sea, promising a new sobriety in his life, a seriousness he never thought he would be cut out for. Solitude, unwanted. And then there is Marta’s face, appearing curiously alongside the other visions, worried for herself and for her daughter, seeking companionship everywhere because that’s what she’s lost. You know, he says to her, I can’t do it, I don’t want to fill the space of your dead husband. Did he say that? Did he tell her that before she left? He can’t remember properly - it’s too recent to feel reliable about what happened.

She had looked so lovingly at him. All he had to do was to accept it. But he hadn’t. And he wonders why not. He wonders why we can’t take the choices in life that could make us happy.

Out of simple exhaustion, Guy falls asleep, and immediately he is dreaming about Freya. Something about her, yes, uncovering, Freya’s face, happily walking towards the horseradish plant. The touch of her hand in his, now, just there, he can feel it again, how cool it is, how small, tightly fitting within his own. He holds her and walks forward, calmly, away from where they are. He walks, listening to her happily chatter away, her voice the sound that sunlight makes.

And suddenly he’s awake again. It’s the early hours of the morning. Something very real is bothering him, something there in the room - the shape of something nameless, a change in the air. He lies in his bunk motionless, wondering what it might be, listening to the sounds of the estuary outside, the trickle of water never ceasing its movement, the sound of air stirring in the trees on the river shore, and then he listens to his own breathing, which still has the sound of sleep to him.

Gradually, softly, he hears another person breathing a few feet away. He strains to hear it, makes sure it’s there, yes, there is someone in the cabin with him. The breathing is calm and steady, but more shallow than his own, and with a quicker rhythm. He holds his breath, hoping to hear more, and is surprised to hear the other person holding their breath too. When he breathes out, the second breath comes a second later, like it’s an echo of his own, and for the first time he’s certain who’s in the room with him.

‘Freya?’ he says, in the dark, ‘You’re there, aren’t you.’

There’s no response. Guy reaches up for the wall light and switches it on. He looks across the cabin and sees he’s totally alone.

Position: The wheelhouse. Deben estuary. 5am

Quickly, without fuss, within ten minutes, he has readied the
Flood
for leaving. It’s dawn, and the tide has risen with a soft shine that’s brighter than the sky. The water seems like a new element, like mercury, unnaturally flat and shimmering. It’s flooding into the creeks and saltmarsh holes and cracks as if the sea is surrounded here by a giant porous verge. This giant rip in the texture of the soft East Anglian soil, gathering in and expelling out, the way all things appear in this part of England.

A thin breeze has arrived with the tide, lifting up from the water with the smell of wet salt and, gazing down the length of the channel, he watches the brightness of the sky, above the beckoning sea, filling with wisps of salmon-pink clouds.

He tunes in to the shipping forecast at 5:20am. A comforting voice, the voice he’s listened to all his life, even when he was a child.

Good morning and now the shipping forecast issued by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, at 05:05 on the fourteenth of September . . .

... he remembers being ten years old, a dark winter’s morning, tuning his first radio into the BBC long-wave. A child eavesdropping on the world of men. Hearing a man’s voice, so calm and authoritative, but speaking about storms and waves, of winds veering and backing, of spray crashing over the bows of a trawler, chains and cables straining in the pitch of a violent sea, somewhere in Malin or Hebrides, blocks of the ocean with no fence to them, but overseen by this gentle English man, who faced the wrath of the ocean, the plummeting gauges, the rising seas, with complete assurance . . .

... there are warnings of gales in Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, Humber, Thames, Dover . . . the general synopsis at 01:00. Low, Hebrides, 992, losing its identity. Atlantic low moving rapidly east, expected Fastnet 990 by 01:00, tomorrow . . .

... he’d imagined that voice, speaking from the calm soundproof cube of a London studio, the meteorological report squared precisely on the desk, the steam from a coffee rising on the side and, the furthest point where the voice reached out to, a wave-drenched trawler man, in dirty yellow oilskins in a wild ocean gale, grabbing the radio and holding a wet ear to its crackling, God-like message.

... Forties, south or south east, becoming cyclonic in Viking and Forties, 5 or 6 increasing 6 to gale 8, perhaps severe gale 9 later. Showers and rain, good becoming moderate or poor . . .

A long way north, Guy thinks, looking at the
Flood
’s barometer. Those warnings are coming from the trackless parts beyond Scotland, but his area, Thames, is mixed, too. He watches those clouds again, losing their pinkish bloodstain, turning in squally vapour several miles away. But he’s decided, the light is growing, the estuary is losing its meditative shroud of darkness, and it holds nothing for him now. He must leave.

Just to start the engine, to hear its sturdy old revolution beneath him, imagining its thickly greased piston-heads rising in obedient order, then the gushing sounds of the propeller screw, deep at first then rising as it bites the water, makes him feel restored. Motion is the answer to most things. He rings the ship’s bell, just once, and sits down at the wheel, reads the inscription of
Voorhaven, 1926
on its nave-plate, and touches its brass-ended central king spoke for luck. Then he brings the revs up and the
Flood
turns into the current of the tide, a long, heavily blunt shape building up pressure against the flow.

... inshore waters for Great Britain and Northern Ireland, valid for the following twenty-four hours issued by the Met Office at 06:00 on the fourteenth of September. General situation low, just north of Scotland, losing its identity. Atlantic low will move into the Irish Sea and extend into the North Sea. Strong to gale force winds will affect many coastal areas.

Enough of the bad news. The
Flood
pushes forward through the calm water, the shores inching by, the nearby moorings passing much quicker, his boat sending a measured wake that rocks the other boats, a single wave of it pressing up against the
Falls of Lora
now, the merest of touches, the only sign of his departure in a patch of water which will hold no memory of him. Even the damp shape of the Rushcutter’s, with its brawny man still grasping the reeds on its sign - a final glimpse of it - being swallowed into a gap between the trees as the estuary bends and removes it from view.

His last sight of the anchorage is of the fisherman at the back of the cuddy, still watching his rod. Guy tries to see the man’s face, but the rain peak of his oilskins is pulled too low. So long, old chap, nice to have seen you, in fragments.

The deep channel twists like an eel, but is well marked, and in less than an hour he has come alongside the diesel barge that’s tied to a pontoon near the mouth of the estuary. It’s a strange sight - two fuel pumps on a floating platform, with a modern kiosk between them, lit by a harsh fluorescent light. An attendant has just opened it. It’s a young lad, coming out briskly to take the mooring ropes and tie them to the cleats.

‘Hi,’ the lad says, brightly. ‘You’re the first. Shouldn’t really open till half-six, but that’s just a shit rule.’

‘Cheers,’ Guy says. The boy has a strong Suffolk accent. ‘Fill it will you? And I’ll need water. What else is there?’

‘Kiosk ent got nothing. There’s stuff in that shed.’

While the boy fills the
Flood
’s tank, Guy takes the greenfinch to a spot on the bank where he can release it. There, he squats in the rough grasses and the mats of reeds washed up by the high tides. It smells of fish and oil and hay and, as he opens the flaps of the cardboard box, he looks along the stretch of shore at the gulls standing on the stones and mud, hunched in the early morning coolness. The greenfinch startles itself, flapping to a corner and staying there. It won’t last the morning on this bank, with those gulls.

Guy closes the box again. ‘Looks like you’re off to sea again,’ he whispers. ‘Till you’re better.’

On the way back he visits the shed and picks a bag of greengages, some plums, a dozen eggs and a jar of marmalade, dropping the money for them into a wooden chest with a padlock on it. He looks out through the doorway at the long clog-shaped profile of his boat, tied to the platform. It’s like a whale, he thinks, unbelievably big compared to the rest of the boats in the estuary. It’s a fine sight, tied up by its ropes, in the fresh morning air.

‘Nice food,’ Guy says, walking back to the
Flood
. The pontoon has a slightly swinging motion to it. The diesel hose pulses like a dark vein as it fills the tank, and the pump registers the litres in a series of soft clicks.

‘You goin’ up the coast?’ the boy asks.

‘I’m going out to sea.’

‘Yeah? What for?’

Guy looks calmly back at the lad. He shrugs, and the boy smiles.

‘My gran would call them swimmer’s clouds,’ the lad says, giving a single nod at the sky.

‘Meaning what?’

‘Meaning go out in a boat, you come back swimming.’

‘You serious?’

‘Half.’

The lad finishes filling the tank and goes to the kiosk to print out the bill. Guy follows him. Inside, there’s a CD playing and a smell of instant coffee. ‘See that village,’ the boy says, as he takes Guy’s card, ‘that’s the absolute worst village in the whole world.’