The Sea Change
Prologue: The Sea is Never Full
PENGUIN BOOKS
Joanna Rossiter grew up in Dorset and
studied English at Cambridge University before working as a researcher in the House of
Commons and as a copywriter. In 2011 she completed an MA in Writing at Warwick
University.
The Sea Change
is her first novel. She lives and writes in
London.
For Bill, who, when the pages were blank, saw only opportunity. To Imber – for
giving so much, so quietly.
Prologue: The Sea is Never Full‘But you can say, you can guess, that it
is you yourself, your own roots, that clutch
the stony rubbish, the branches of
your own being that grow
from it and from nowhere else’
Rose Macaulay,
The World My
Wilderness
Kanyakumari, India, 1971
It is there before we know about it. Being
born. A Persian rug, unrolling. Our wave, heavy, like death.
‘Up! Up!’ a voice shouts from
outside the guesthouse. It doesn’t belong to James. ‘It’s
coming!’
Where is he?
Stone. Bone. Think hard and then harder.
That’s how it hits the shore. It takes the beach in one breathtaking gulp, palm
trees dominoing down and fishing boats scattering as easily as the seeds of a dandelion.
Streets fuse into the flesh of the water, like new limbs, new skin, until it morphs into
a moving city. Trucks and tuk-tuks roll over and over like shirts in a washer; houses
are picked up whole. Then, with sea-soaked hands, the water sets itself alight. Flames –
blinding and orange – buoy themselves forward on black, black, mirrorless liquid.
One man runs. And is outrun.
It’s not James. James isn’t on
the beach. James gets away in time. He went, before it came, to pick up breakfast. I was
going to meet him on the beach. I was late, faffing about in the room with our luggage,
remaking the bed. I don’t know where he is. I don’t know where he is but I
was going to meet him on the beach. The beach. And then it came. He’ll have
thought better of it. He’ll have gone up the hill to get us some
lassi
instead; he’ll come running up the stairs any second now. He’ll be here. And
safe.
It’s about to hit the guesthouse. I
don’t have time to think about how thick it is. I just feel its thickness beneath
me. You’d
think that it would strike you once, hard in the face.
And then it would be over. But it isn’t like that. Instead it arrives and leaves,
advances and retreats, bringing more of itself each time.
Our room is about to go under. I reach for
Mum’s letter on the bedside table – it can have everything else. Then I take the
stairs two at a time. James’s last packet of Player’s No. 6 is probably
pregnant with saltwater by now. He could have gone straight up to the roof, forgetting
to fetch me. Please, God. The staircase is inking up with water, like mercury rising
inside a thermometer. Furniture and luggage froth up from the ground floor. Everything
keeps moving, stirring; nothing is still.
Guests on the floors below reach out into
the rising wreckage as I climb the stairs, eyes hollow with what is brewing beneath
them.
‘My husband. Have you seen my
husband?’ The word feels new and unused, still fresh out of its packaging.
‘What’s the husband’s
name?’ asks the landlord. We’re on the roof now.
‘James. It’s James,’ I
say, as if it will help.
‘It’s going to take us!’
blurts the American whose room is on our floor. He’s still in his dressing-gown
and his eyes are glued to a block like ours across the road, which topples and is
carried off. But our building stays standing, sacrificing its organs – curtains,
windows, cabinets and beds – until we’re left teetering on its bones.
I’ve gone back to the stairs but the
landlord is standing in my way.
‘Madam.’
‘What are you doing?’ My voice
is hoarse and high. ‘I need to go! Let me go!’
‘Please, madam. It is not
safe.’
I tuck the letter – still in my grasp –
beneath the padding of my bra. Then I push past him to the stairs. I’m level with
the water now, and looking. Outside the window, all the inanimate
things
– the cars, the trees, the boats and the barns – have been brought to life, rolling and
writhing in the sea. But there are no human faces – not even a body. These it keeps
hidden from sight.
I shout his name. I shout it again. The
water is goaded, and rises – I can’t get back to the roof. It’s ripped my
feet from the floor and forced me through the window. Down the rabbit hole I go. Like
Mum used to say when I stared into space too often and for too long.
Alice is down
the rabbit hole
, she’d mouth in code to Tim. She was always afraid that I
wanted to get away. There’s no choice now. It’s taking me. Not forwards,
like I expected, but backwards. Out to the ocean; towards home.
The water feels magnetic: the more I strain,
the more it pulls.
Did I not tell you this would happen?
Mum would say.
Didn’t I warn you not to go away with him?
As if James himself were
responsible for my being dragged out to sea.
The shoreline depletes. I’m flailing
about, trying to grab hold of the horizon and drag it towards me but it’s drifting
further and further away. I can’t keep this up for much longer. It’ll only
take another wave. Send another. Anything but drowning. After a while, there’s
just breath. The sea’s lungs swell in time with mine until I find I can’t
keep its rhythm – chest quivering into a frantic staccato. Every bit of me aches. So I
rest. For a second. It’s enough for the water to pull me under. I resist its
muzzle but it’s no use.
There is noiselessness underneath. Nothing
but the push and tug of the sea. A giant swell of ocean, colder than the rest, swarms
below. I let go of my muscles, my fists. I give in to lightness.
Wiltshire, England, 1971
Pete used to say that a place isn’t
everything: people can make a home out of a cardboard box, if you give them half a
chance. He didn’t understand why I clung to Imber as if it were a lost soul. But
perhaps if he were here with me now, standing in the dip of the church doorstep, I would
see something give way in that flint face of his.
The earth has run its fingers all over the
church. Clots of moss bloom in green seas on the roof. Ivy has prised open windows and
doors and clawed at the fissures in the stonework. Nesting birds leap up at the smallest
of movements – mistaking every sound for a bullet. As I step into the porch, they splash
through the glassless windows and ghost through the air above the nave. So immersed is
the stone in creepers and lichen that it is as if the church is Nature’s own
creation; born from the ground like a new breed of tree.
The sight of my mother’s note on the
door stills my breath. The rain has had nearly three decades to invade the ink but,
sheltered as it is by the porch, I can still read its message as if it had been written
yesterday.
We have given up our valley where many of us have lived for generations,
entrusting it to you for the sake of the war. Please take good care of the
church in our absence; to us it is more than stone and glass. We shall return
one day and thank you for treating the village kindly.
I often wonder whether, if my mother had known
the fate of our village, she would have written something different on the church door.
Would the words have come less easily? Or would she have gone on believing, blithely,
that our sacrifice was worth all those unborn memories? The ones we would have reared in
the cottages, in the fields, in our very own nook of earth.
Today is the first time I have been back in
twenty-six years. It should have felt like any other day: the same wrestle with the
alarm clock; the same small battles with Tim about when he last heard from Alice, and
who is to blame for the gold- not silver-topped milk bottles outside the door. Except I
woke early, unsure of whether I had slept at all. I slipped off before the alarm and
left him asleep in bed. Outside the house, the light was still threadbare.