Sea Change (12 page)

At his insistence, they’d eaten stonecrab claws out of the shell at the local raw bar, all three of them grimly silent while they cracked the claws open, under a reed canopy that striped their bodies with its shadow. And a coconut had fallen from the top of a nearby palm tree, landing on the ground with a soft hollow thud. Picking it up after lunch, he’d almost expected it to be warm, it was so freshly delivered.

He doesn’t want to wake Freya, so he tries to carry her, asleep, into the motel room. It’s an awkward reach into the car, and Guy’s surprised at how solidly heavy Freya is when he slides his arm beneath her legs. He pulls her to him and her head falls against his shoulder. She breathes loudly and her cheek is clammy, there’s a smell about her which reminds him of the child she once was, so hot in the skin. That malty smell, the dusty smell of her hair. He carries her, like that, while Judy looks on, amused, till he lies her down on the cot bed. Guy steps aside for Judy to take the shoes and socks off, and pull a blanket over her, and while he waits he still feels his daughter’s heaviness in his arms, a dead weight of flesh and compliance which makes him uneasy. He wants to wake her, to make sure she’s really there.

Judy busies herself, unconcerned by the new surroundings, into the routine of getting her bottles and unctions into the bathroom. She doesn’t seem to notice the interior of the motel room at all, but when she goes through to the bathroom, she whispers the room is nice. ‘We’ve done a lot of driving today, haven’t we?’ she adds.

He feels it, in the slight whirr his thoughts are in, the need to unravel the sense of motion and concentration he’s needed for the past few hours. It takes its toll, and he’s disorientated.

The walls are covered with the trappings of a home - prints of river views, a sunset off Sanibel Island and, oddly, a picture of a Western Star American Eagle truck. The wallpaper has an orchid print on it, the bedspread has a tattered fringe which hangs down to the carpet. Imitations of a home, but not a home at all, it’s a place which holds no one, leaves no mark, is just for the passing through, where people barely unload their suitcases, have brittle rows, or sleepless nights, crash out on the bed, lean back against the wall with the TV remote in their hands. He’s impelled to do exactly that, too, to sit back and flick channels on the TV, get a glimpse, even there, of other people’s worlds to soothe his own.

Judy takes a shower. Every so often he hears the water splashing on the tiled floor - she’s messy when it comes to washing - and he hears her singing a few bars from a country song he recognizes. That’s a calming sound, surely, he thinks, to hear your wife sing. But again he feels strangely unsettled. Those thoughts he’s been having, about how temporary everything appears, they won’t be silenced, and he has that same nagging worry, a persistent numbness of thought which won’t let him through, a cushioning he can’t get beyond.

He looks at his reflection in the TV’s blank grey screen: slightly distorted, watched, captive, like a reflection you see in a well, you want to snatch it back from being lost in there. He presses the remote and the TV springs to life with a lot of colour and sound and it takes him a few seconds to get it mute. He watches it like that, with the camera slowly panning across the shining floor of a shopping mall, a female presenter smiling and fawning over a man in a tight suit. She touches his arm when he makes her laugh. They’re being excessively polite, and a bit flirty. Other channels flick by, weather and sport, then sport again, graphics spinning and laying down images on each other, such a brightly lit place, America, on its TV.

Then a film, a western, it’s strange to watch it here rather than back in England, where westerns have always belonged for him. It’s lost its distance and as a result the film looks unreliable and false. But he continues watching, it’s calming, it doesn’t rush by. The pocket of dry desert light is settling, Utah, laid out in such grandeur, it’s across America right now, at the end of a long road that begins right at their door. The horses stop walking, a little dust of brown and red sand settles around their hooves. A brim of a hat is pushed back, a decision made about which way to head in a country without paths.

‘You all right, Guy?’ Judy says from the other room, too loudly, drowned out by the shower.

He gets off the bed and walks slowly past Monument Valley, a god in a god’s landscape. A step further and he’s in the en suite, which is surprisingly bright and tiled from floor to ceiling. He stands by the sink and looks at his reflection - too red, he might ask her for some of that cocoa butter he knows she has. He quite likes the smell.

She’s the other side of the shower curtain. He can see her pink body made grey by the plastic. The steam fills the air and it smells of iron and pipes.

‘Fine,’ he says. ‘Little weary.’

She’s switched the taps off and is bunching her hair to one side of her neck. He can see her wringing water out of it.

‘You think Freya’s having a good time?’ he says.

‘Course. You worry too much about her. You’ve always worried too much about her. She just needs some space, that’s all.’

‘You think she’s all right?’

‘Yes, I think she’s all right.’

‘You think we are?’

‘Guy,’ she says, then says nothing more.

She pulls the curtain to one side, making a loud shuttling noise with the metal rings. She stands there, flattened it seems, against the tiles behind her. Her skin is flushed and still dripping with the streams running off her, as if some of her life might be draining away in front of them.

She’s unashamed to be naked, so brightly lit-up before him, it seems a challenge for some reason, even her breasts have a challenge to them, in this view, pointing at him with such unblinking expression. Dumb eyes staring at him, one just a little bigger than the other, like a half-a-wink that knows something he doesn’t. It makes him smile.

‘So should I get my own towel?’ she asks, cheekily. He hands her a big towel which was hanging on a rail, and watches, a sense of disappointment, as she wraps it, almost twice round her body. She doesn’t look thin, but she’s small, it always surprises him when an ordinary object like a towel can be so big on her.

‘Come here,’ she says, quietly. He steps towards her and they share a ridiculous embrace, her standing in the bath, while he’s on the wet floor, still in his shoes and clothes. The damp curls of her hair touch his cheek, and she whispers, ‘You’re a big, soft, stupid man,’ in his ear, before nibbling his lobe.

When they kiss her mouth is wet and slippery as if she’s just come out of a swimming pool, she hasn’t even dried her face. It reminds him of the times they’ve spent, swimming, floating, in rivers, in lakes, in the sea. Good times. Her eyes are so wet it looks as if she’s been crying, and it checks him, makes him worried that she’s about to say something alarming. But instead she undoes his shirt, deliberately and slowly, pretending to be fascinated by each button, and automatically he reaches round her and feels the shape of her body through the rough dry bobbles of the towel. The dip at the base of her spine, so accentuated, never fattened or changed in all the years he’s known her. The bones of her shoulder blades, so thin, like the bones of a bird. In places, there’s so little to her, where can her lovely voice come from?

He pulls the towel off her and lifts her from the bath and the room seems incredibly small for him, for them, for the thing they’re thinking of doing. Bright too, like a laboratory, but neither of them are bothered by that.

Aware of the lack of space they settle for the floor - like being in a small boat, they’re seeking the most solid thing around. But the floor is cold and wet and it takes an effort to get over that. A series of inconveniences and obstacles, it appears, to stop them, sober them. But Judy is determined. She’s already pulled most of his clothes off and is awkwardly climbing on top of him. Her skin is hot and it sticks to him, unpleasantly. Her hair is wringing wet and cold on his face, he wants to shut his eyes and brush it away, but both of them are also getting lost in their routine, the one which has evolved over so many years, the lack of shame, the sense of naughtiness, and never getting used to the intimacy, the sheer rudeness of it, between them, with no one else around. Which is not quite the case here, because they can both hear Freya’s breathing from the bed in the other room, and it only seems to add to the occasion, makes them act younger, more rash, a couple of teenagers on the floor of a strange bathroom, where they shouldn’t be, doing what they shouldn’t be doing.

Guy looks up at his wife, at the crease of concentration between her brows, it’s the same expression he’s seen on her when she’s behind the mic on stage, during a heartfelt part of the song, she’s such a committed performer, always. He looks beyond her to the underside of the sink, sees a bodged repair there to the pipe work, imagines the last person to be in his position was the frustrated man who tried in vain to fix the faulty plug. An odd sense of company for him now. And he sees Judy looking down, relieved, beyond him, the weight in her face falling forward a little.

‘I’m going to take another shower,’ she whispers, holding back a giggle.

Later, after they’ve got ready for bed, Guy has an idea. It’s about that coconut he put in the car. He steps out of the motel room and gets it from behind his seat. He sits on the step and whittles away at the green husk with a penknife, but can’t get into the nut itself. Judy joins him, offering to help, finding a corkscrew from the room, but it’s no use. They want to do this, they don’t want to be beaten. Finally Guy squats and jams the nut down on the corner of the kerb, his body bent in the aspect of his primeval ancestors, till the nut splits satisfactorily. They drink the warm watery milk in the cool Florida air, cooler here than where they’d been, they’ve driven into a different climate.

When they go to sleep, Judy seems lost to him on such a huge mattress. Again he has the sense that he’s entirely alone, with the TV’s dark grey eye looking back at him from the foot of the bed.

He can’t quite settle, still. He gets up and goes to the bathroom again, sees the pile of towels messily dumped on the floor where they left them, the scene of a crime, he thinks. He squats down and looks under the sink, bends the metal and eases it into the hook of the casing, the solution which has come to him which escaped the last man to try and fix the drain. He tries the plug plunger. Yes, all working. All restored. Now he can sleep.

Position: 52° 01’.15N 1° 21’.36E. Anchorage off the Rushcutter’s Arms, Deben estuary. 7:20am

He’s up early, sifting flour, sugar and salt into a bowl, then preparing a second bowl with hand-hot milk and water, on to which he’s sprinkled a palmful of dried yeast. The yeast sits on top of the liquid in a brown raft of dust, fermenting slowly into a froth which reminds him of the autumnal tides in the Blackwater estuary, when the sea drives in a dark vegetative foam against the river.

The meal on the
Lora
comes back to him in fragments. Marta’s way of straightening the simple necklace she was wearing, how she crossed her long hands on her lap, as if not knowing what to do with them, her gestures of politeness and then the occasional sigh, followed by a direct, unflinching gaze. Inward and outward signals. And Rhona, on the surface easier to read. A tease. Spirited, with fewer angles, but ultimately more guarded than her mother. A heavy drinker, too. She’d been flirting, he was sure, but was also sure that he couldn’t trust her.

By the time he adds the bicarbonate of soda and lets the mixed batter rise a second time, his mouth is watering. As a result, he’s impatient with the griddle, not waiting till it’s spit-hot, not greasing the biscuit cutters he tends to use, so the first couple of crumpets he pours are too dense and too brown when he turns them. Gull food. But the next ones are perfect. The batter is soft as he spoons it in, and the bubbles rise calmly, bursting across the top in a gentle honeycomb pattern till they set. He turns them and runs the flat of a knife across their burnt golden underside, such a punctureable skin, with its thin lip where the batter has seeped below the edge of the cutter.

He melts cold butter on to the hot crumpets and, when that vanishes, he adds more butter till discs of it cover the surface, softened, like snow on wet wood. Then he adds honey, plenty of it, rich and dark, a sugary slippery taste in his mouth, hot from the griddle, cold from the fridge, sour from the soda and sweet from the honey.

After finishing up the batter he wraps half-a-dozen of the crumpets in a bag and rows the inflatable over to the
Falls of Lora
. He writes
Thanks for last night
on the bag, and ties it to the aluminium cockpit rail, reaching up in a pirate’s manner, thinking of them asleep, still, somewhere in the boat, Marta in her husband’s cabin, on one side of the bunk even though the whole bed’s hers, and Rhona, no doubt in a mess of bedclothes and hair and an arm hanging off the bench in the saloon. Sexy in her disarray.

Back on the
Flood
Guy makes a coffee, licks the cooled butter and honey off his breakfast plate and looks at his navigation map. The Deben estuary. One of Suffolk’s tongueless mouths, flowing into the North Sea. Time to move. But instead he gets the other map out, the
Hildebrand’s Travel Atlas of America
. As a rule, he doesn’t write the diary during the day - but he wants to see them, right now, he wants a glimpse of what they’re up to. It’s the taste of these crumpets, he thinks, a sugar-kick, compelling him on, he wants to know where to, where is his family right now?

They have just crossed the state line into the north-east corner of Alabama. Somewhere below Chattanooga, driving fast on a back-road, as it dips and stretches like a glorious ribbon in the bright afternoon sunshine. Judy has her window down and her sunglasses on, and has been singing along to a bluegrass CD. It has a great rhythm, when the banjo kicks in, and Guy’s been driving the car like it’s part of the music, trying to get the engine in tempo. Even Freya’s been joining in from the back, for once putting her music player to one side, sitting forward in the gap between the two front seats to be closer to them. It feels good, this sense of well-being, this motion and sunshine too, and an empty road. America is rolling by, under the wheels, their third state already, Florida, Georgia, and now the top corner of Alabama - A-la-ba-ma, he thinks, everywhere that’s on the map round here is in the lyrics of a song.