Sea Change (6 page)

‘Look,’ the skipper says, reappearing in the doorway, ‘we’re about to have us a fry, so why don’t you join, yeah?’ He looks at Guy questioningly.

‘Ain’t nothing special,’ he adds.

They sit crammed round a curved Formica table that’s bolted to the floor on a single aluminium leg, sharing two plastic benches. A fourth man has joined them in the galley - a dark scrawny man named Alexie who doesn’t speak much English. He hasn’t looked at Guy once. The skipper’s in a high mood, he’s passed round bottles of cheap French beer and is generally taking the piss out of the deckhand who’s not Karl or Alexie. Steve, his name is.

‘So Steve comes in, he’s carrying this inflatable armchair he’s found in a skip right, like one of them you get in a posh swimming pool, with one o’ them things on it . . .’

‘. . . drinks holder,’ Steve mutters.

‘Yeah, OK, drinks holder, and he puts it down there, right in that corner, like there’s room for it in here. It don’t even work! The bloody thing’s got this puncture which he fixes ’stead of doing the rig, anyway, he fixes it and then he spends - bloody hell, how long did we have it - he spends a week sitting on it each night like some rock star.’

‘We reckon he had piles,’ Karl says.

‘Right! Piles!’ the skipper bellows out. ‘I’d forgotten that. He sits on this thing, with his piles, it’s purple too -
purple
- I gotta hand it to you you took one
hell
of a lot of stick, din’t ya? You and that blow-up friend of yours.’

‘I didn’t have piles,’ Steve says, readily falling into the role of the bullied.

‘So you have said, my friend, on so many occasions,’ the skipper chimes back, stroking his chin for comic effect. He has two tobacco streaks of ginger in an otherwise grey beard, which grows high up on his cheeks almost to his eyes.

‘What happened to it?’ Guy asks.

‘Tell him, Skip,’ Karl says, his eyes glinting darkly.

‘Feck me, this is funny,’ the skipper says - he almost cannot speak. ‘You gotta know Steve here ain’t that bright, are you, Steve, ain’t no one said you’re bright, have they? Well, we got this calm day like we had yes’dee and we said to him, “Reckon that thing’ll float with you on it?” Like who’s gonna fall for an obvious prank like that?’

‘Steve did,’ Alexie says, in a thick foreign accent.

‘Right, he did. He climb down the ladder with this blow-up armchair on his back an’ he just sit in it, in his boxers, on the sea - well it nearly sink but it does work, right. Then we only go an’ start the feckin motor don’t we . . . !’

‘. . . and we’re all waving at him off of the side,’ Karl says. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Steve manages.

‘. . . and you’re this - ah bloody hell -’ the skipper gasps, ‘this little armchair in the sea. This little
purple
dot!’

The size of these men, round the small table, in the cramped galley, it’s oppressive. Through a small oblong window the North Sea gently bows - Guy can hear the water slap against some deep metal flank of the trawler - it feels like he’s left his freedom elsewhere. Occasionally he sees glimpses of the
Flood
, un-piloted, another world away. He can’t really remember leaving it, it seems so long ago, though it’s only a couple of hours. The air in the galley is smoky with cigarettes and the fried fish which they’d eaten, simply, in battered strips. They’d had it with oven chips which the solemn Alexie had brought to the table with a pinny tied round his waist, though no one seemed to find that strange. Guy can see the head of the fish, cast to one side near a microwave, looking sadly back at him.

‘So you ain’t told us,’ the skipper says to Guy, the remnants of his bullying tone still lingering, ‘what you’re doing out here?’

‘Well, I live on the
Flood
, in the Blackwater estuary. I’ve come out to sea.’

‘That’s it?’

‘For a while.’

‘Ain’t no playground, you know.’

‘I know.’

‘You get a forty-yard swell it’ll roll that. You have a ship’s bell?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s the sound you’ll hear the moment it tips. Believe me you don’t want to hear that bell. Taken ballast?’

‘Some. Several hundred-weight of flint.’

‘Don’t look like it. She’s sitting high.’

‘And I have a piano,’ Guy says.

‘A piano! That’s about as much use as his blow-up purple friend!’

‘At least it’s heavy,’ Karl says, unexpectedly, ‘I mean, it’d be like having extra ballast, right?’ he says to Guy, afraid of the skipper.

‘Whatever,’ the skipper says. ‘Mate of mine skippered one of them barges ’cross the sea - he don’t like that flat bottom they’ve got so he floods the hold full of water for the ballast. Thing is, it’s a calm hot day and he gets thinking about all that water in the hold so you know what he gone and did? He tied up the steering and had himself a swim - up and down the hold, doing lengths, right across the North Sea.’ The skipper slaps the table, satisfied with his story. ‘Fingers,’ he says to Alexie, ‘more beverage.’

New bottles are handed out. Guy’s had three or four already, the galley feels like a theatre set to him, like he’s a character in a scene, a dream of a scene where he doesn’t know his lines.

‘I’m drifting,’ he hears himself saying, not really knowing whether he’s talking about being on the
Flood
, or being in this strange smoke-filled galley, in a filthy trawler off the side of a North Sea sandbank. He thinks of the sandbank, low and lethal and sober out there. Others like it, waiting to rise out of the sea unexpectedly. Should he be more aware of them? How come they don’t just get washed away, like everything else?

He’s silenced the skipper with his abrupt change in mood.

‘You drift away,’ the skipper says, unconvincingly.

‘I was just thinking,’ Guy starts, unsure what’s to follow, ‘that I haven’t thought about her, my daughter, for a couple of hours. That’s strange for me.’ The other men look back at him watchfully, their arms flat on the Formica table. ‘I mean, out here, aren’t we all without attachment? You know, no anchor? Aren’t we all like him on his purple armchair?’ A single teardrop falls surprisingly on to the table, landing in a perfect crown shape. It takes Guy a moment to realize where it’s come from. He wipes both eyes with his sleeve. ‘Yesterday, you know what I found, floating - I found a greenfinch, on the sea - it was drowning in front of me and I was the only person in the world to see that.’ He looks up at Steve. ‘How did you feel out there - sitting in that thing on the sea?’

Steve feels obliged to answer. ‘I don’t know,’ he says quietly.

‘Je-sus Christ!’ the skipper says. ‘What’s up with you, man?’ he says to Guy, not meanly, but without understanding what’s going on. ‘You shunt be out here,’ he says.

But Guy meets him head on. ‘You’re wrong. This is exactly where I should be.’

The meal is over soon after that. Guy asks to leave and the men slide off the bench to allow him to get out. He’s embarrassed for being emotional, but despite what’s happened he notices himself standing more upright, less cowed than he had been when he arrived on the trawler. He’s been honest. He’s not intimidated. Some of this must have conveyed itself, because all four men come out on deck to see him off, and the skipper gives him a quarter bottle of Danish
Gammel Dansk
liquor. He warns Guy it tastes like ear-wax.

‘You take care,’ the skipper says, because he has to voice something and the others aren’t up to it, but at the boat’s side it’s the man called Alexie who unexpectedly reaches out to take his arm. It’s not to steady him - it’s to hold on to him. The other men are looking down into the forward hatch at this point, and Guy looks at Alexie’s thick-skinned hand clasping his forearm, while the man reaches into a pocket of his jacket. He pulls out a tattered photo. It’s of a dark-haired girl, about sixteen, sitting at a bus stop. The anonymous boxy shapes of a European city suburb fill the background. The girl is very overweight, with a round smiling face and deep dimples in her cheeks.

‘Is daughter,’ Alexie says, quietly.

Guy examines the picture, at its moment of captured happiness and the plump daughter that has emerged from this scrawny man. She’s holding a bag tightly to her thigh and has a sequinned purse in her other hand.

‘Where is this?’ Guy asks, pointing to the city behind her.

‘Gone,’ the man says, inexplicably. He points to a scar on his chin and shakes his head.

Guy looks on as Alexie folds the photo back into his pocket. Alexie glances back at Guy and nods, once.

Position: Near Cork Sand. 51° 54’N 1° 20’E. 8:35pm

‘Are you dead?’ he asks, gently, nudging the greenfinch with his finger. It flaps a wing in fright, then lies still again.

‘Right,’ Guy says.

It hasn’t moved all day. It lies unbalanced in the corner of the box, wings awkward, beak slightly parted. A grey film of skin covers its eye like a cataract.

A few minutes ago he’d heard the trawler’s engine start. He’d watched it move off down the line of the bank, leaving behind a thick cloud of diesel smoke, its gantry lit up like a Christmas tree and a pool of bright floodlight on its deck. He’s struck by how late it is, and how suddenly dark the North Sea is growing around him. It’s deeply unsettling, the speed nightfall arrives offshore.

Guy looks at the postcard he managed to steal from the trawler’s notice-board, which he’s pinned behind the wheel - the tiny picture of Aurlandsfjord and its oppressively brooding mountain in the distance. The
hytte
they’d stayed in had been warm, built without fuss, with a Scandinavian sense of resilience and self-belief which had put them at ease. They’d slept in bunk beds and, through a precise square window in the door, Guy had watched the top of the nameless mountain on the other side of the fjord - its broad far-away back, impossibly high, smooth and glistening with snow in the moonlight. Its Arctic glimpse had frightened him a little. How remote it had looked, framed by the window as if it was a picture, but out there, so close.

He remembers how the following morning had felt so crisp and still, and how the boots he had left outside the night before had been covered in a hoar frost so thick it seemed they’d turned into crystal. Even the laces, like long bright spiky pipe-cleaners. There was more frost growing along the log joins of the cabin - increasing in depth almost while he looked at it, making tiny cracking noises, and a row of icicles hanging from the porch, pure and smooth and with a drop of water at each tip.

He’d run his fingers along the rail of the balcony, the frost scooping up so fluffily it seemed to have no substance at all, and when Judy had come out they’d stood under the icicles and let the drips fall into their mouths, like a couple of kids. The water had splashed cold and messily on their lips, forcing them to blink, and it had tasted of wood.

They’d been giddy that morning, not because of the excitement of travel, or because of the curious wooden cabin, but because during the night they’d reached a decision: that they’d start trying for a baby. It was a decision they’d made in hushed whispers, even though there was no one else on the hillside, both of them crammed into the lower bunk bed.

‘Should we start now?’ Judy had asked, her eyes glinting in the dark.

‘How do you mean?’

‘With the business of procreation. The messy stuff.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Neither do I.’

Around them the cabin had sighed and creaked in the cold mountain air. Guy had shivered, totally in awe of Judy’s willingness to change, to carry a life, to embark upon such a journey with such simple poise.

‘Should we wait? I mean - let it settle with us?’ he’d said.

‘Maybe,’ she’d whispered, sliding her hand delicately across his belly.

‘Maybe not,’ he’d said.

The next morning, Judy had kissed him - refreshed by their momentous decision and filled with a certainty they could now face anything. Her lips had been as cold as the ice.

‘Some people actually live here,’ Judy had said with renewed wonder, looking out at the dark huddled hamlet of buildings next to the fjord. ‘It’s unbelievable to think this is what they call home. How do they do it?’ Wood smoke was rising, mixing with a freezing mist around the houses. On the other side of the fjord the mountain rose like a terrifying trackless tower of granite. It was incredibly bleak.

‘They drink,’ Guy had said.

He steps out of the wheelhouse and climbs on to its roof into a complete and overwhelming silence. The air feels gritty and confused - warm bands of it pass by, wedged apart by cooler layers. Small waves roll forward, each wave just a smudge now, vanishing into an obscuring twilight.

The sea smells strong. It reminds him of a song Judy had written: about the smell of the coast, drifting across the water while she’d stood by the rail of a night-time ferry. She’d composed it after crossing the North Sea from Hoek van Holland back to Harwich. Not so far, in fact, from this place. She’d been on deck even though it was a freezing night, stood there wearing a chunky Aran jumper while she faced the wind. Below her was the cold vertical drop of the boat’s side, which had seemed an absolute in a sea full of dark coiling movement. The water had been black and undefined. It had both frightened and exhilarated her. She had marvelled at how the boat slapped the backs of the waves and scarred them white, making a surging scattering sound. That’s where she’d been when suddenly she’d smelled cows and pasture, an unmistakable warm scent of farmland, carried by the wind. It had come and gone like a phantom, a thing without connection to any reality, then gradually she’d begun to see the low dark coast of East Anglia, or rather, had realized there was a long unfilled patch of the sea where no stars were shining. This empty blankness could only have been land. Then she’d seen lights - thin strings of lights along a road, a dusting of streetlamps around a harbour, and as the boat had veered, inexplicably the lights had vanished, wiped away by an unseen part of the coastline which must be passing before them.

All this she’d put in her song, a beautiful song about being on the fringes, smelling the land like a cherished memory. He remembers it now, imagining the homely smell of East Anglia on the cold sea air as if he’s back there and, briefly, he experiences the muddy scent of heathland, the green fragrance of woods and gorse, of cows in their sheds, their sweat and breath mingling with the sweet straw and mixing now with the cold damp breath of the North Sea itself, so far away, not so far away, him and Judy in their moments of wonder and awe, partially fictional, separated.