Sea Change (29 page)

A wave strikes the
Flood
with venomous power, rolling on to the barge as high as the wheelhouse and the boat reacts in a stunned fashion, floundering for a moment, gathering itself against a series of punches and pressures it’s unable to deal with. The spokes of the wheel strike Guy’s hands as the rudders are caught. Curves of the sea lift up at his side, coiled like cobras, watching him, before striking the wheelhouse glass. The glass must hold, Guy knows, or he’ll be blinded. And for the first time he notices water around his feet, a few inches deep, sliding from side to side on the boards and running across the inspection hatch to the engine compartment. There’s no time to bail it, but its presence makes him fear there’s more water in the boat, in its dark corners, sloshing around near that steaming machinery below the floor. If the engine goes he will have no chance.

For the rest of the day the rolling sea comes at him ceaselessly, wave after wave, the
Flood
pitching head on as best as it can into the direction of the swells, but each time, just the merest imbalance in the water sending it sliding one way or the other. Sometimes as the boat tips he sees the water almost lapping into the wheelhouse door, pooling against the scuppers as calm and unmenacing as a duck pond, then, miraculously, absurdly, the
Flood
keeps returning to a righted keel.

When the rain eventually comes it lashes down straight, turning the view of the sea into a misty haze of steam and water. It’s as if Guy can only look at the waves through a gauze now, as they come without warning, lurking there in front of the bow, waiting their turn. And he sees little silver flashes coming down in the rain and he realizes fish are falling on to the boat too: tiny sprats and sand eels, like drops of molten lead hitting the deck, being stunned, then swept, mad-eyed, back into the sea when the boat tips.

Guy knows that both he and the
Flood
are now way beyond their limit. The sea has been too mountainous, too fast, he’s been acting out of sheer exhausted adrenaline all day, aiming for the cresting water like some diabolical game. The waves have breached across the bow, their weight pressing the old barge deeper into the sea as they land, yet somehow the boat carries on, and so does he. The thought of that ocean beneath him, all round him, indifferent and murderous, it’s too much.

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 any 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?