by Jeremy Page
Originally the barge would have been a male space, solitary and smoky, the way men tend to make things, probably messy too. What was once the cargo hold stretches in a low flat shape in front of the wheelhouse, painted white. The hold is now mostly a saloon. It has too many chairs. Despite all the time Guy’s lived on the barge, he’s never managed to lessen their number.
It’s been his home for nearly five years, moored to a stretch of quay on an empty part of the Blackwater estuary, in Essex. The only buildings there are a few isolated houses, some fishermen’s sheds, and the Tide Mill Arms. The Flood’s one of several houseboats, some are more wrecked than others, and the whole anchorage has the oily scent of a shipyard, mid-repair, a place where boats have been scuppered and salvaged, wrecked and neglected. There, the Flood sinks into the mud twice a day, and the rest of the time it floats, soaking up the brackish water into its hull like a sugar cube. The estuary feels like the sea and looks like a river, and is neither, it’s both inlet and outlet, flooded and drained, it’s always a contradiction. That’s his home. Empty, strange, big-skyed.
Right. Where are you? he says, unfolding his maritime map on the floor of the wheelhouse and running his hand over the nonsensical tree rings of the seabed depths below him. IMRAY Passage Chart C25, the Southern North Sea, it reads, full of underwater cables, pipelines, explosives dumping grounds and wrecks. There are rippled contours of sand and gravel banks, England continued, hills and sloping meadows down there. He can just about work out where he is - although the nearest feature is appropriately vague, a depth mark of eighteen metres. Not much to look at, his spot on the world. He gazes at the coast of East Anglia on the map, with the muddy mouths of its estuaries, like mythical eels sniffing the ocean, and its complicated filigrees of saltmarsh and creeks, swelling with water twice a day and somehow, implausibly, holding the North Sea back.
The maritime map’s not particularly interested in his own stretch of quay, other than recording its depth as an anchorage, but has made more effort to record the tricky deep-water channel that snakes out to open water. Channel is Variable is the warning there, and he’d felt it last night, practically bumping his way between the mud and sand and gravel till he’d rounded the final navigation buoy at the mouth, which had seemed the end of a journey whereas in fact it was the start. The start of the sea. The flat-drained river water had given way to a subtle ocean roll, the thick chug-chug of the engine had risen and fallen in line with the swells, and the breeze itself had seemed to promise a new emptiness, a blank slate.
He’d arrived in this place, if it can be called a place, just before midnight. He’d cut the throttle, lifted the inspection hatch in the corner of the wheelhouse and climbed down the steep metal ladder into the engine compartment, and by torchlight he’d held his hand above the manifold, feeling its heat, shining the bead of light on the gasket seals and then the piston heads. After that he’d rinsed his shirt in the sink, then hung the shirt on a peg in front of the wheelhouse. All that time he’d tried to ignore the sheer quietness, the sheer absence of this place, since his engine noise had gone. He’d played the upright piano in the saloon, loudly, he’d made an omelette, he’d drunk a bottle of wine, and surprisingly, he’d slept. And just before dawn he’d woken, listening to all those crying gulls, to find the North Sea vanished into this eerie calm.
He places a kipper in a shallow pan to poach, then makes a paste of anchovies, a drop of Tabasco, a spoonful of cream and some horseradish. He grinds this with a pestle, then tastes it. Lemon required, which he squeezes. The smell of the fish rises from the pan - under the glaze of the water he can see its skin becoming a dark honey colour.
He checks the greenfinch, which he’d put in a box on the worktop. It’s sitting in the corner, collapsed and waterlogged, with its beak laid out on the cardboard.
When the kipper is lifted out on to a plate, he sits a knob of butter on top, and watches it gradually slide down one side. His mouth waters. And then he thinks of a surprising addition - he suddenly fancies it - several raw onions which he cuts in quarters and quickly blanches in the fish pan. He’s never had raw onion for breakfast before, but he’s at sea, so what the hell.
He crunches into one of the onions after sliding it into the anchovy paste. It’s sharp, then sweet, and surprisingly juicy. The paste is dry and dark and curiously smoky. Urged on, he starts to pull apart the fish, working along the crease of the spine, exposing the hair-like bones and pulling them softly through the flesh, a job he’s always loved doing. Hurry hurry leads to worry, that’s a thing his mother used to say, doing the same thing when he was a child. Pray to St Blaise, she’d also say, so you won’t get a fish bone. The kipper gives up its meat in precise oily sections, leaving a skeleton like the ones drawn in cartoons, the one a cat finds in a metal dustbin, and a case of skin which Guy rolls to one side of the plate like a surgeon, with the flat of his knife.
After he’s finished, he looks at his plate. It seems suddenly poignant. What was it they found on the Mary Celeste? A half-eaten meal and a broken rail?
He removes all his clothes, folds them neatly on deck, and climbs down the stepladder into the sea. He winces with the cold as his feet touch the water - it’s not summer out here any more. He takes another step down and touches the bottom rung, below which there is nothing. Clinging like that, to the sheer metal side of the barge, the Flood seems enormous, its skin an animal hide of blotches and dents and paint and over-paint.
Looking down he sees his foreshortened body disappearing into the green water, the pale bend of his long legs, his mammalian feet spaced wide apart on the bottom rung. This is it, he says, sinking himself in till his nose is level with the surface. The sea ripples around him and then he hears the cries of sea gulls - this time sounding like a warning as he swims, away from the boat, one arm following the other, his head down, a breath after every four strokes, one minute, two, ten minutes, more, perhaps for half-an-hour. Maybe more. His arms grow heavy and the joints in his legs begin to ache. He becomes warm, then he goes cold, then he gets warm again, knowing this decision is a foolish thing to undertake and missing a voice of someone else telling him just what he can and cannot do. It’s hard to give up on authority, especially where there is none.
When he finally stops swimming he turns on his back and floats, staring up at the sky. It’s a deep empty blue, and it seems so high he has a moment of vertigo - suspended as he is in this taut line of nothingness, no above, no below. The water laps cold in his ears. His skin is numb.
It’s the first time he dares to look back in the direction of the Flood. He sees it, but it’s frighteningly far away, like a sketch of a boat, clog-shaped but without detail, and his first thought is to panic - this is just too far, just too stupid a thing to do. He wasn’t prepared for this, not yet.
The panic fills him, naturally, before he controls it. No, this is what he wants. This is part of the whole process, to find these moments, to be in a place where there is nothing, to be drawn to emptiness, to stare at the naked sea with an unflinching eye.
And gradually he adjusts. He thinks about the water which is lifting him, funereal, to the cloudless sky. He can hear fragments of the sea: tiny drips and lapping sounds. He sees things he hadn’t at first noticed: a soaring bird moving in circles at least a mile up, each circle completed it glides further away, to do another ring. Eking out some terrible hold on life up there.
Floating this far away from the Flood, he feels disembodied, both of them in some kind of weird orbit, both adrift. It gives him clarity. Clarity to view his last few years like a frayed rope, each strand of it working itself loose from the thing it had once been, each strand still with the curled shape of the life it was once part of. Now unsupported, weakened, unravelling.
Searching for the Flood again he notices it’s turned. Will it drift further and faster than him, because it is so large, or is their distance a constant thing? He doesn’t know but he senses, instinctively, that he is wanting to return. But instead he f
orces himself to swim the opposite way, further from the barge and, within seconds, he knows it’s wrong - Don’t - he hears, he actually hears it, a soft quiet word spoken in his ear and he stops, quickly, struggling to raise his head from the water to hear it again. There is nothing. But then a growing presence, close by, the belief that something is floating next to him, a solidity in the water, a tiny shape that gives him comfort. He smiles, not daring to reach out or turn towards it. Hi, he whispers, we’re a long way from home, aren’t we? And he hears no answer. He reaches out with a hand, feeling with his fingers the cold water, and briefly he experiences the merest of touches, lighter than the brush of seaweed, like he’s felt a child’s dress in the water.
Reaching for the ladder, he thinks he might not have the strength to climb back on board, and again he has a sense of vertigo, below such a high blue sky which seems impossibly distant up there, without cloud or vapour of any kind. Just the stark vertical wall of his barge, with its relentless geometry and ancient steel skin to stop him falling.
He nearly hadn’t made it. Swimming back, his arms had been heavier, and the boat hadn’t seemed to grow any closer. It had played games with the distances, as if someone was pulling it across the sea with a magnet. The exhaustion had crept up on him, played tricks with his mind, made him think that there was something he feared, a few strokes behind him, nearly at his feet, reaching out for him. He knew what it had been. It had been the thought of giving up. Keeping that behind him - that’s what had kept him going.
He stumbles on cold numb feet across the deck into the wheelhouse, then down into the saloon, where he wraps himself in towels. His fingers are blue and wrinkled like a drowned man’s. In the bathroom mirror he notices how the sea has given his expression a startled, frightened look. His eyes are wide and glistening along the lids as if he’s been crying, and his stubble seems to have grown, in the hours that he’s been out there - each hair has become the point of a mini thorn in his skin.
He looks at himself in the mirror like he’s a stranger. He’s not unattractive, he’s never been fat, but he’s a little unkempt. His hair is dark brown and naturally curly and getting a bit too long and prone to looking windswept. He’s never been able to do anything other than let it grow. Let the others be neat. He wears glasses, not at this moment, but he can see the marks they’ve left over time across the bridge of his nose. He’s had the same pair for years - with thick horn-rimmed frames. Without his glasses he looks shocked, as if he’s just been slapped, he must be so used to them. His eyes seem calm today, but so often they tend to be emotional, a little too ready to give his feelings away, he’s always been told that. He tries a smile, then a grin which looks ridiculous.
‘Well done,’ he congratulates himself. ‘You made it back.’
After night falls, he stands at the ship’s wheel, looking into the blackness of the North Sea which, for a moment, appears like a hole, without depth or end. Before he came out here, he had thought the sea was all about sunlight, but it’s not, it’s about darkness. It presses towards him, large as a desert.
He notes the barometer and battery levels, checks for leaks from the pipes, then opens the rear hatch and climbs down into his cabin. Guy already feels a great deal of time has passed since he came out of it this morning. The air has a trapped quality, left over from last night. His bunk is shadowed and messy and next to it is the desk where he sat up late last night, on a creaking chair, writing in the diary under the piercing light of an anglepoise. He sees the open book now, with his neat handwriting going across the pages, and is a little wary of approaching. The final few sentences on the page look overwhelmed by the whiteness of the paper that follows them. Writing calmed him last night, but what can save you at night can destroy your day. That’s something he needs to remember.
Guy knows this is the time he must make up a new entry in the diary. By now it’s unavoidable. He feels the familiar mix of emotions: the fear of the empty pages, where they will lead tonight, the excitement that, for a time, he will be able to lose himself in a dream of his own creation.
He’s written every evening for the last five years, since his life changed irrevocably. And thinking this way, he’s able to begin, knowing he can no longer imagine his days passing without doing it.
Guy stands behind the art deco hotel in the soft warm night air of Florida. The pool he looks at is out of this world. It has the appearance of an iceberg - lit from within, with water pouring round its edges in a smooth silky curve. Further off, palm trees and bougainvillea stand in the shadows, and small curved columns of water leap surprisingly from concealed nozzles set in the lawn. Somewhere beyond the grounds, beyond the palm trees, is the Atlantic Ocean - he’s felt its breath in cool shallow waves that come in bands across the night air.
He’s mesmerized by the pool, can hardly take his eyes from it, but sensing an approach he looks up to see Judy walking towards him on the other side. He’d sensed the familiarity of her walk before he’d seen her. For a moment it looks as if she might be rising up through the pool itself, magically, without breaking its surface. A lady of the lake, miraculously dry, holding two cocktails in her hands. His Judy, small and birdlike, with dark hair brought to one side of her neck and gathered in a low tie. A bag hanging diagonally across her chest. She comes to him and passes one of the drinks, a margarita, with beads of cold water on the outside of the glass.
‘I can’t believe we’re here,’ he says. ‘Are we here?’
‘We made it,’ she says, dreamily, and it does feel like a dream, to be standing there at all, after such a long journey from England, with the rush of images from the last twelve hours being held back by the slightest of pressures. The sheer exhaustion has made him relax, made him at ease with being here, by the luxurious pool in a night which is so fragrant and alien to him.
‘Well, to us,’ she says, simply, raising her cocktail for a toast. They clink glasses, and he takes a sip of the ice-cold liquid, feeling the crusty edge of the salt on his lip. ‘Here’s to travel,’ she adds, grandly, always one for finding a hint of the melodramatic. ‘Being here, right now, I think we could just set out and drive all night, don’t you? Drive as far as we can, having cheap coffee at roadside diners, till the sun comes up.’
He’s taken by the thought. They’re abroad, they have the right to leave themselves behind, back home. They could be anything here.
‘I’d like that,’ he says. Her eyes have darkened with tiredness. They shine at him mysteriously. She’s beguiling to him, even after these years, there’s so much to learn about her, still. ‘You look nice,’ he says, captivated by Judy in this Floridian warmth, how utterly familiar she is, yet also changed, subtly, by the travel. Her edges are softer.
Later, he and Judy travel up to their floor in the soothing motion of the elevator, and he imagines the thick heavy cable pulling them up through the building into a darkness he can’t see. A distant whirr of a turning wheel at the top of the shaft, covered in axle grease, and at some point, the ghostly pass of the counterweight. These things, just inches beyond him. The smell of electricity and heated rubber in the elevator, and in the hallway it opens out into - the smell of all hotels: dry, carpeted, layered with the scent of polish and warm light bulbs.
They walk along the corridor on a deep carpet which is patterned with wavy blue bands - a child’s drawing of the sea - that seems to stretch further than the building is wide. Judy sways with the drink and with her own tiredness, and he can feel her pressing against his arm and the heat in her bare shoulder which she always has when she’s been up too long. A kind of warm flush which precedes sleep. When they reach their door, she leans against the jamb, patiently, while he finds the key, looking up at him with a shy smile which gives him a surprised thrill.
‘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.
