Sea Change (5 page)

‘Hurry up, lover,’ she whispers. She closes her eyes and yawns, and as he unlocks the door for her she curls round the frame, disappearing into the darkness of the room.

‘I don’t even know what day it is,’ she says, wearily, from the shadows. ‘It’s good though, isn’t it? It’s good to be here.’

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘I’m excited.’

‘Me too.’

‘We’re on the edge of things. It feels like there are going to be good things whichever way we turn.’

It settles them to talk like this, to exchange bland statements, to know they’re in agreement. She kicks off her shoes and walks flat-footed towards the en suite, humming a quiet song under her breath. He recognizes the tune as
Tidal Joe
. It’s been years since he heard that one from her - she doesn’t sing those sea-shanty tunes so much now, they’re too breezy for her. As she’s aged, her singing has changed in a way he hasn’t quite understood. Her voice has sought new things, has flattened towards minor keys he never used to associate with her. So it’s good to hear her humming, here, one of the old ones. It’s always a good sign.

While Judy prepares herself for bed in the en suite, he sits in an easy chair by the window. Only then does he feel the inevitable flood of images and sensations from the long day. Of how cold it had been standing outside their house at four this morning, the engine of the taxi running, a thick plume of exhaust emerging, and when they’d sat in the car, the heater on too high, the smell of a man’s car. Then the tired, resigned feeling in the airport, the inevitability of being processed, followed by the loud ozone drone of the plane, the sheer noise and light of it. The excitement of seeing America for the first time - low and sunny and below them a line of cars’ windscreens glinting like a vein of mica in the earth - and the hit it had given, like a coffee, which had quickly tipped into weariness.

Glowing beneath his balcony is the brilliant blue oblong of the hotel pool, illuminated by expensive submerged lighting. Totally still now, its surface looks waxy and false - he can see how the tiles on the bottom have an unusual and constant magnification. It’s beautiful. It seems full of an expectant calm, a silent composure that appears motionless and unreal. A warm scent of palm and tamarisk and bougainvillea is in the air, mixed with the corporate smell of the hotel: soap and carpets, and a smell of wet concrete paths below him, where the terracing has been washed down. Then suddenly, while he’s looking, the pool’s lights go out. It shudders, vanishing into a slippery blackness and, surprisingly, the lights are instantly replaced by a new single illumination: a moon, perfectly reflected on the surface.

Guy smiles, the moon is always a joyous sight. Always. Then he draws the curtain and listens to Judy’s switching on and off of the taps, the sounds of her bottles and tubes being opened and placed down on the shelf, the fast brush of her teeth, the soft plastic tap of her moisturizer lid being put on the sink. It all has the same pace and sound of being back home. She carries it with her, unknowingly, wherever she is. Women are so busy, he thinks, and their busyness is like a fond tune to be listened to over and over again.

He sits in the chair and watches the harsh light of the bathroom cast out in a strange shape across the bedroom floor - they both feel the bedroom should be dark before they go to bed - then he reaches for his Hildebrand’s road map of America. It gives him an oddly tingling stir, just to look at it, to see the long snaking roads of the interstates running up through Florida like a body’s circulatory system, near the edges, rooting out into thinner veins and capillaries that end in nowhere. He senses the sheer size of it, the countless miles of rolling cinema from here to the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles away. Can they really drive that far? It seems daunting. He imagines the mishaps, the wrong turns, the tiredness and the exhilarations, all at points on the map without markings for him yet. Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and that’s only half way. Then he sees where they are, right now, a tiny dot amid the grey crosshatched shading of Miami Beach, and it makes his morale fall a little, it’s so tiny, his place on the earth.

He closes the atlas. It doesn’t really matter where you are, he thinks, the world’s just a series of backdrops.

When he stands he notices Judy’s lying in the bed already, her head turned away from him on the pillow.

He goes to the other side of the room, to the camp-bed the staff have brought in. He bends down and pulls the covers up round the girl who is asleep there, pushing a strand of hair away from her forehead.

She’s nearly ten, and her face is filling out a little, it’s losing the softness of childhood already. He likes to look at her, sleeping, he likes to catch glimpses of dreams as they flicker across her face. Her lips, right now, a small jut to them as if she’s about to speak, a fold of her skin above her nose where she’s pulled her eyebrows together in concentration. A busy sleeper, he thinks, he feels he knows most about her in this state, where her thoughts are so close to the surface.

He kisses her on the cheek and smells the warm toasty smell of her skin.

‘Night, Freya,’ he whispers.

Night, Freya, Guy repeats, quietly, in the soundless cabin of his old barge. He looks at the sheets of paper now covered with his familiar handwriting. Filling in the diary has calmed him, given him a sense of depth and time he didn’t have before, a sense of possibilities and choices. He closes the book lovingly, stretches, a little click in his shoulder, then gets into bed, and switches off the lamp.

Position: Run aground on Cork Sand. 51° 54’N 1° 20’E (approx five miles offshore). 5:50am

As the sun rises Guy’s standing on a sandbank with a coil of rope in his arms. His boat has run aground, sometime during the night. He looks up at the prow, as it sits high as a sluice gate in the wet sand, and he walks away from it, feeling worried and stupid and chastized, paying out the rope till the bank becomes dryer.

‘You beached yourself,’ he says to the
Flood
, as he hammers a metal stake into the ground, ‘like a whale.’

Now, sitting on the sand, the foolishness of running aground is hard to shift. He stares at the
Flood
and at the rope as it tightens and slacks. A watched tide will never rise, he thinks, feeling watched himself - his predicament is so embarrassing. And to be on the sandbank - what a surreal place - it’s land, but it’s not - at the highest tides he suspects the water actually closes over it like a giant eyelid. It unnerves him, being on this bank. Its surface is flattened by the tides that overrun it, it’s as solid a thing as any land, able to sink at any point, yet on all the maps across the centuries, Cork Sand, sometimes longer, sometimes more curved, but always there.

As he waits, he thinks about his diary. For five years he’s written about Judy and Freya, even though neither are in his life any more. Every night, how they’ve grown as a family. It’s such a regular part of his routine it’s been more real, at times, than the life they all had, when they were together. Freya has become tall for her age, has few friends at school because she lacks that edge that makes girls popular, is interested in nature. Like him. Judy’s changed too. In his fictionalized version of her she’s become a little famous, oddly; after singing in a local folk and festival circuit for years without being noticed, she’s beginning to receive letters and emails and phone calls, and now they’ve flown to America to go to Nashville of all places, to record some backing vocals for a movie soundtrack. All a bit far-fetched, now he’s thinking about it.

So it had felt good, last night, to write about himself and Judy, arriving in Miami. He remembers how he’d described the moon magically appearing to float on the pool in Miami Beach. A nice moment, he thinks. Moments like that, they’re unforgettable. It had been a balmy night in Florida, and he felt its balm now, on the sandbank, like a remembered dream which gave you hope and company for hours to come. It’s a wonderful thing to write. You can reclaim the things you lost.

The advancing tide reaches the stake he hammered in. He unties the rope then goes to the boat, wading into the water by the prow. This will be tricky, he thinks, moving gingerly along the side until the depth falls away disconcertingly into a deep channel, forcing him to swim to the boarding ladder. There are currents and bars and deep holes where the fish crawl into; the entire geography of this place feels dangerous.

He puts the prop into reverse and gradually brings up the speed. The
Flood
groans, injured, slides awkwardly to one side, then all the movement stops. He hears the engine straining against something thick and unyielding. He cuts it. Behind the boat the sea has the churned-up honey colour of fresh sand.

After re-starting the engine he unclips the inflatable and drags it on to the bank, making sure he’s tied it to the front of the
Flood
. He digs under the thick shadow of the prow, forming a sticky pool around the front of the boat. Several times his foot or arm sinks into this fresh quagmire and he thinks he could be sucked into it, deep under the crushing weight of the
Flood
, which might just slide over him.

At the point where he has exhausted himself, at the point where his efforts to shift a sixty-ton boat from a bank of sand is most futile, the
Flood
glides away from him, as if he’s just launched it from the yard, into the open channel. He yells for joy - for the sheer achievement of it, and collapses backwards on to the inflatable arms of the dinghy. The line attaching it to the
Flood
snakes across the sand, then he feels a lurch as the boat pulls the dinghy off the bank, with him on it, into the sea.

When he’s in deeper water, with Cork Sand just a thin membrane of solidity a few hundred yards behind him, Guy lowers the outboard, starts the engine, and comes aside the
Flood
’s ladder. After a few seconds he’s in control again, in the wheelhouse, totally exhilarated. He did it. He bloody well did it.

That’s when he sees the fishing trawler, a few hundred yards off, steering in a wide curve towards him.
Oh Christ
, Guy says, knowing the only reason it would be heading his way is they think he might be in some kind of distress.

It stops, some distance away, and he sees some men come out on deck to face him. Guy waves at them, then decides it might be best to cross over to it in the inflatable, in case he needs to explain himself.

The trawler’s called the
Indomitable
. As Guy approaches it on the dinghy he smells its stink of engine oil and fish oil and wet metal, and he sees its hull is deeply pitted and stained with rust the colour of dried blood. Two men lean over the side to greet him, amused. Both are heavy-lined with short hair and thick necks. They could be brothers. Guy’s helped up a rope ladder and pulled over the side by his armpits and put down on the wet old wood of the deck.

‘Not there,’ one of them says. ‘There.’ He points along the planking. Guy moves away from some coils of cable, chain and loose D-shackles. The working deck is littered with bright nylon ropes, netting, links of metal, winch handles and plastic buckets and crates. ‘Mind the cables,’ the man says, then moves off to look down an open hatch.

‘Ah, that’s a nice boat. You got a nice boat,’ the other man says. ‘I’m Karl - is it a coaster?’

‘Yeah, Dutch.’

‘Dutch,’ he says. ‘That’s good.’

‘Used to cargo cod-liver oil. I was told that.’

‘Yeah?’ the man says, not particularly interested. A sound of machinery turning in the hold has taken his attention. ‘That’s a lot of cod livers.’

Guy laughs, politely. ‘I’m Guy,’ he says.

‘Yeah. Karl,’ the man says again. ‘Go on in. Mind the cables.’

Guy goes towards the wheelhouse which is much larger, much more robust, more steel than his own. This boat’s built for anything the sea can throw at it. The dents, the roughness, the sheer welded plating of its structure unnerves him - he’s out of his depth here. Each rivet and join has a stain of rust like the trawler has wept with pain. This boat has been smashed about by a sea he hasn’t yet witnessed, and the
Flood
, in comparison, it’s like a pleasure boat.

‘You in trouble?’ the skipper says, greeting him with a cold heavy handshake.

‘Not really,’ Guy answers. ‘This morning . . .’

‘. . . that’s OK, we saw what you was up to,’ the man says, turning to his instruments. The pilot’s seat is surrounded by readings and gauges, of computer print-outs and flat screens for sonar and shoal finders.

‘We had us a busy night. How old’s your boat?’

‘1926.’

‘Crossing to Holland?’

‘No.’

‘Could do, today, good all the way to the Hoek,’ the skipper rubs his beard hard, bangs on the window and points at something on deck. One of the others acknowledges him and kicks a brush away from being on top of a hatch. ‘Not going to Holland then?’

‘No,’ Guy answers.

‘Don’t go too far then, sir,’ the skipper says bluntly, looking straight at him for the first time with small blue matter-of-fact eyes.

‘Right then,’ the skipper says, ‘one minute.’ He leaves the wheelhouse by the opposite door and shouts something at the slower of the two men. Again Guy hears a grinding noise coming from the hold.

The wheelhouse is a formidable male space. It is metal and salty and there are wires and switches and knives and ropes. The only decorative touches are some banners hanging from the roof and a notice-board covered in postcards. Ijmuiden, Dieppe, Whitby, others, further afield, some naked girls lying on a Caribbean beach, their breasts covered in oil and sand grains, another beach, another two naked girls, this time bending over.
Beach Bums
, the logo reads, pleasantly. There’s a picture of the skipper with a dead pike lying across his arms, like a roll of carpet - it seems like the man fishes when he’s not fishing. And a picture of a Norwegian fjord which catches Guy’s eye. He recognizes the photo as Aurlandsfjord - a place where he had been once, with Judy. Even though the postcard’s wrinkled with damp, he’s amazed to make out the small
hytte
where he stayed, that winter night, and the local bar where they’d had a disappointing and overpriced meal.