Sea Change

by Jeremy Page

  ‘Lady,’ the man says, ‘don’t buy it.’

  Suddenly there’s a single laugh and they all notice a second man, his head face down on the counter behind a nut dispenser, a cigarette burning from a hand which hangs nearly touching the floor. ‘Leave ’em be, Glynn,’ the second man says, and laughs again, though he doesn’t lift his face. Guy sees an odd angle of the man’s cheek, hot and sweaty and covered in insect bites.

  The man behind the counter smiles, revealing a shiny set of false teeth, possibly the whitest thing in the shop.

  ‘You want coffee?’ he says to Guy.

  Guy takes the coffee outside and stands for a while by the chain-link fence that borders the swamp. Through its diamond pattern of wire the darkness is absolute. A bird is sitting through there, by the side of a dark channel of water.

  Some large and impossibly leggy insect flies near him, attracted to the acidic lights of the gas station, and he moves instinctively back to the car. Inside, it smells of the journey they’ve been having, their breath, the warmth of the seats. This car is his friend already. Men love their children and dogs and a little less they love their wives, but they always have a special thing for their cars.

  He sits there, drinking his coffee. If he gets the chance, he’s going to talk to Judy tonight about his suspicions. Maybe suspicions is too hard a word, and too alarming, but there have been changes in Judy, changes lately that need to be mentioned. He doesn’t want to get to Nashville so completely unprepared.

  Through the windscreen he spots the insect again, as it spirals awkwardly up towards the lights. It looks like a clump of hair you might pull from a shower trap. Near the roof it touches a wire grill built into the light’s casing and bursts into fire.

  He sees the others coming out of the gas station. He feels his life returning, the blood and marrow of it, the comfort of family.

  The girls get back in the car and Freya shows him the gator foot she now owns.

  ‘Freaksville!’ she says, making Judy laugh. ‘Drive, Dad.’

  He pulls out of the station, all of them in good spirits, in the same car, in the same seats, but a little closer to one another now.

  Judy reaches for the radio, tunes in to a selection of local stations, before settling on something which turns out to be Seminole Nation radio. It’s full of gaming adverts for the casino, then more adverts for airboat trips.

  She switches it off. ‘Want a song?’ she says.

  ‘Yoo-betcha,’ Freya says, enthusiastically.

  Judy undoes her belt and half turns in her seat:

  ‘Before you were born, Freya - in fact, before this man was in my life too, I had a boyfriend in Amsterdam. I used to get the coach to Harwich and cross the North Sea on a ferry - waste of time that was, as it turns out. But I did it a lot - he’d never come to England, never did in fact.

  ‘But the best thing was coming back, for me, on that ferry. It was a night crossing and I used to stand up on deck, whatever the weather, crossing the sea and waiting for the moment I smelled the shore. I used to smell it before I saw it. So this is the song I wrote, about standing on the deck of a ferry, crossing the North Sea from the Hook of Holland to Harwich, one night. This is how it starts:

  On a windy quayside, in a warm rain

  The smell of cigarettes and leather

  Never

  Leaving him.

  He has the look of a man

  In another man’s jacket,

  He’s frayed at the edges.

  Never

  Leaving him.

  He has the smile of a man

  Who leans on the railings.

  Looks down at the rain on the water

  Ought to be

  Leaving him.’

  Guy leans back in his chair, humming Judy’s tune. The cabin is silent. It’s late, and his shoulders and back ache with the writing. Night-time ferries, even now, crossing the seas in a blowing gale, lonely figures standing on deck by the ship’s rail. Right now.

  He never did know much about Judy’s ex-boyfriends, other than there were quite a lot of them. The Amsterdam boyfriend - Allan his name was - he used to surface from time to time, but Guy didn’t learn much about him. She had no pictures. He has some ideas of how it must have been, Judy so young her skin was thinner, bluish-white below the eyes, a creamy shine at the top of her cheeks, her hair shorter, sitting in a suede jacket smoking roll-ups in his flat in the Grachtengordel. Good sex probably, plenty of it, it would have taken a lot to go through that sea crossing so often. He wonders whatever happened to him? What happens to those ex-boyfriends, those impossibly cool guys living in loft spaces, with their leather jackets and their pockets filled with the right brand of cigarettes? Maybe Judy, or the girlfriend who replaced Judy, or the girlfriend who replaced that girlfriend, maybe they all told him to grow up, and now he has, encouraged to do so by all those rejections. Maybe he’s boring and middle-aged now. Maybe he fell in a canal. The point being, Judy had been Allan’s, Judy became his, Judy is someone else’s now. It’s clear. We borrow.

  Suddenly the Flood is rocked, violently, and as Guy bolts up the ladder to the wheelhouse the boat is rocked again, throwing him against the side of the hatch. Immediately he knows what has happened. A ship has passed, nearby. Too close. Through the windows he can see the wide streak of its wake in a pale scar across the sea.

  Going on deck, he realizes the Flood has drifted into the shipping lanes off Harwich and Felixstowe, where the heavy cargo ships have to snake in a single deepwater cut between the sandbanks. He can see freighters and container vessels and ferries, illuminated with their own constellations of lights, their superstructures bathed in cold white fluorescence, sliding magically across the dark.

  From the line of marker buoys he can tell the Flood is at a dangerous point near the mouth of the deep channel. He goes in to start the engine, but at the wheel he suddenly does a strange thing - impulsively, he switches the cabin lights off. Following that, he extinguishes the red and green navigation lights on the bow and wheelhouse roof. The Flood vanishes.

  He puts his coat on and climbs on to the wheelhouse roof. Parts of the coast can be seen, quite close: the sodium-lit glow of the Harwich docks, appearing like an orange chemical fog underneath the high pylons; the fragile glimmer of a seaside town, its promenade stretched either side of it in a single string of streetlamps, as if the town’s suspended on a cable and the top of a church in its centre, its flint castellation and copper-work spire floating above a tower which seems to have been rubbed away.

  Guy listens, aware that he’s at the limit - the absolute limit - of where the noises of the land can reach. These are the furthest sounds that England transmits - a low growl of machinery from the docks, in uncertain waves, and a distant car-alarm, quietly unanswered.

  But a third noise rises nearby - the sound of a ship’s engine, churning the sea like it’s ploughing soil. He feels its reverberation before he sees the ship itself, a vast cargo-container vessel turning through sixty degrees a couple of miles away and, although its hull and sides are completely blank, the superstructure is brilliantly lit. Along its deck he can see containers, each one the size of a lorry, stacked five high and eight deep in smudged pools of multicoloured light, at this distance they’re like a pile of a child’s wooden bricks.

  New angles of the ship reveal as it continues to turn and he begins to hear odd discords, clanking sounds, the groans of steel settling and shifting as they come up through the sea underneath the barge.

  Guy watches, mesmerized, as the ship completes its turn, establishing it within the notch of water between the navigation markers that will bring it to the Flood. It comes straight towards him, darkly menacing, the bow and sides as high as a cliff, blind with its sheer bulk, unstoppable. It’s unstoppable, Guy says out loud, and another word occurs to him: inevitable. He knows its meaning now, and piece by piece the superstructure and deck of the ship begin to disappear as the huge bull-nosed bow rises in perspective in front of it, a gian
t anvil it seems, lifting out of the sea like a Greek colossus to club him down.

  This is his moment, Guy knows, and he reaches out into the thick nothingness between him and the giant ship and he asks for her, he asks whether she’s here with him, with him now. You are, aren’t you, he says, and his voice sounds like two voices - one, so full of acceptance, the other, so afraid. Oh no, he says, oh God not now. And then he grabs the top of the wheelhouse, bracing pathetically, as the cliff edges of the container ship overhang, bear down, then slide enormously alongside the Flood in an impenetrable solid shadow. Above - way above - the single illumination of the ship’s name, painted on the bow, wide and glowing wings spread like an angel, and he thinks he hears a shout, an alarm coming from someone on deck, a man at watch who is seeing the unseeable.

  The Flood is tipped to the side by the bow wave and the cargo ship seems to bend in the sky, leaning away briefly, then returning as a huge steel wall. He hears something fall and smash from the saloon table, he wonders about the greenfinch, sliding from one side of the box to the other, and he smells the passing ship - its ocean stink of diesel and grease as the engine noise grows and finally roars by and the sea bursts into a beautiful cascade of rising foam. It’s like a firework sizzling all around, a simple celebration it seems, in that instant, of his survival. And gradually it recedes - the sound, the danger, even the sea itself, till all that’s left are the last soothing bubbles of the ship’s wake.

  Position: Moored. 52° 01’.15N 1° 21’.36E. Anchorage off the Rushcutter’s Arms, in the River Deben estuary

  Soon after daybreak, as soon as it had been safe to steer, Guy had brought the Flood into the River Deben estuary. The low coast had reached out to sea in the shape of two embracing arms, welcoming him back, it had seemed, to calmer water. Water that smelled of water, rather than the sea. He hadn’t slept much, and had been glad to see the familiar river landscape of woods, fields and damp brick houses. An estuary, like his own, but not his own.

  He’d been to the Deben before, though not by boat, so he had had to steer carefully through the wide stretches of the estuary where the channels and gravel banks unbraided in long ribbons, the river becoming undone by the sea. But although it was new to him, he had an overwhelming sense of recognition - the glass-flat water of the high tide bringing him in, stiffened by the breeze along the deeper channel, the thick mats of saltmarsh in complicated blocks on either side. It had the texture and deep rich smell of his own estuary, forty miles to the south, but where his estuary curved along the quayside of the Tide Mill anchorage, here it had narrowed and, where there is the long strand of the oak wood at his own mooring, here was the Rushcutter’s Arms, the pub where he came ten years ago, with Judy and the other members of their band, Fergus on the fiddle and Cindy at the drums and Phil on guitar. There, that spot on the slope of the pub car park, where they unloaded the gear, Phil in some ludicrous cowboy shirt the rest of the band hadn’t sanctioned.

  ‘Do you think Phil’s gonna piss about all day?’ Judy had said, as they watched him unzipping his guitar case in the car park and pretending to shoot the gulls with it, machine-gun style.

  ‘Probably,’ Guy had replied, ‘he’s good at it,’ and on seeing Judy’s surprisingly genuine concern he added, ‘He’ll be fine, once his nerves are gone. He plays the guitar well and that’s what he’s here to do. Play.’ She needed this kind of assurance, every so often.

  They’d only known Phil a few weeks - he worked in a music shop near Fergus’s work, and had only just agreed to join the band after impressing Fergus with his guitar skills one lunch time. Judy had thought he was a prat and didn’t want him in the group. She thought he didn’t really share their country-folk taste and was probably in it for reasons she hadn’t figured out yet. That’s ironic, considering how it would all turn out.

  ‘Have you seen his shirt?’ she’d said.

  ‘Yes. I’ve seen the shirt.’

  They’d looked at the others through the windscreen: at Fergus holding his fiddle case, standing huge and bearded and slightly bow-legged on the gravel, rubbing his stomach when he laughed, with one of his shapeless cable-knit jumpers on, and Cindy, his wife, as thin as a reed, with long sensitive fingers and eyes the colour of browned apples.

  ‘What are we doing here?’ Judy had said, mischievously. ‘I don’t think we belong in a band.’

  ‘Just what I was thinking,’ Guy had replied.

  ‘I’m just a bank manager’s daughter,’ she had said.

  ‘Well - that’s as good a reason as any for joining a band.’

  He’d smiled at her, before looking up at the pub sign - a picture of a brawny man gathering reeds by the water, a long curving scythe across his arm, and Guy looks at the same sign now, over the estuary, moored at last.

  Without the sound of the engine, the relieving silence rises up through the boat, the gentle swell of the estuary, the cubes of empty space in his wheelhouse, his cabin, the saloon.

  ‘One two three four,’ Judy whispers into the mic, alarmingly close now, from the stereo speakers in the wheelhouse. He’s playing the rehearsal CD his band recorded, ten years ago, as practice for their gig here at the Rushcutter’s. He hasn’t heard Judy’s voice for a long time. It’s so lovely. So lovely to be coming to him from before, before anything bad happened to them. He hears innocence in it. She’s bringing the band into one spirit, and then he listens to himself playing the piano, kicking off the jaunty intro to Tidal Joe. Within three bars Fergus has joined in on the fiddle, helping the piano with a messy rhythm before Cindy starts playing a muffled beat on the snare and Phil does a looping bass line on the guitar. It sounds really fresh to Guy, now, as he listens to it, waiting for Judy’s voice to come in once again. He hears an oyster-catcher, caught on the CD, calling from one of the creeks with an off-tempo pic-pic-pic, just before Judy sings The boat smells of diesel and pots full of crab, a cheeky male inflection in her voice, evoking a sea-shanty, then she softens into the song proper, slowing the whole band down with a lilting rhythm that occasionally catches them out.

  It’s so evocative. They made that CD on a sunny autumn day. Fergus had set a huge jug of coffee on the trestle table at the back of the garage next to a fruit bowl filled with greengages, picked from his own tree. Fergus had been in a great mood. Picking fruit did that to him. He liked to provide.

  Fergus and Cindy had only just moved into the house - a former warden’s cottage on an island in the Blackwater estuary. To get to it you had to wait for low tide, before driving across a length of stone and seaweed causeway which was simply known as the Hard. It was an enchanting place. As you crossed the causeway, with the slick flat mud on either side, you saw the island from the seabed’s perspective - rising from the estuary, girdled with a dirty high tide mark, and capped with a green mass of trees and hedges.

  It was a great sight to see Fergus wrapping himself round the fiddle, as if he might accidentally snap it in two, with strings fraying as the bow sawed the notes, a far-away grin on his face and a gimlet tooth glimpsed between his lips. Cindy would stare at him, amused, both of them wearing similar clothes as if they were brother and sister dressed by the same mother.

  Fergus and Cindy, Guy and Judy, the two couples of the band - Phil must have felt isolated having just agreed to join them, Guy considers, remembering how nervous Phil always seemed, stringing and restringing his guitar, smoking too much, reluctant to take his jacket off, ever. The key makes a shift in the song and the sound of Phil’s guitar lifts to the front. That was good, Guy thinks, how Phil naturally brought the plucking forward, creating his own space in the melody. Yeah, Phil was a good guitarist, Guy thinks reluctantly, shame he was such a fool in so many other ways.

  ‘That’s nice,’ Fergus says on the recording at the end of the track, not out of ego, but because the music always affected him. ‘Yeah,’ Phil adds, in his East Anglian whine.

  Guy lets it play, thinking something might reveal itself across the years. There’s a lot of silence a
nd some things are said he can’t make out. The sound of a band between tracks is a peculiarly expectant space - isolated notes, the twists and squeaks of tuning pegs - it’s music unmade, unmachined. Cindy tries a few beats of the rhythm again, and Phil does an abrupt and fast riff on the E string, then starts to tune it even though it’s already in tune, turning it down a quarter of a tone, turning it up again, settling where it was. He wants to drop tune it already, the clown. Guy remembers how Phil loved to pluck the string then pull back the headstock to bend the note. Do that too often and you can snap a guitar. A show-off. Guy can hear someone pouring out coffee and he thinks it might be himself, now standing at the back of the garage, and he remembers distinctly how he’d eaten one of those greengages and watched how Judy was sitting, on a Lloyd Loom chair by the microphone, in a dark bomber jacket, with her legs crossed once at the knee and then at the ankle too.

  ‘You OK, honey?’ he hears himself saying on the recording. It’s followed by silence but he imagines Judy smiling warmly at him. Yes, a warmth, that’s what he remembers, ten years ago when things were sunny, with the sunlight pouring in, the hot sweet coffee, the effortless way the music enveloped them all, bringing them together.

  The second track is slower, more folky. It’s one of Fergus’s arrangements from a traditional tune, with a plaintive fiddle and, for this track, no piano. Again Judy sings - she was less trained back then, her voice occasionally mimics the singers she admires, especially the breathing, but already she has that behind-the-beat laid-back delivery, a semi-quaver, no, not even that, something that even a musician might miss, but the tiniest pause that gave her so much more dimension of feeling - yes, that was something she was born with, that was the elusive quality that made her voice so special.

  Guy skips a few tracks and listens to more of the recording from later on that morning. They’re doing a cover of Rainy Night in Georgia, which only gets half-way through before the song breaks down, but in that fragment of it he’s touched by Judy’s lovely voice. It feels odd to drop in on this moment in time, with such voyeuristic detail. She sings about shaking the rain from her sweater - Guy’s favourite line from the song - just before the band stops playing. He skips forward. Another break between songs. This time he hears Phil, he thinks, actually eating from a bag of crisps, even though there was that glorious bowl of greengages, and Cindy had been up since six just so she could put together a moussaka for their lunch. And Guy’s surprised to hear the remains of an argument in the recording. Phil and he have already had a bit of a spat - guitarists are such fidgeters, they should be made to sit like you have to at a piano, it would stop them causing a nuisance, improve their concentration. Phil’s been messing around, spoiling things even before he tried to spoil, and although the rest of the band didn’t care or were being polite because Phil was new, Guy had decided to tell him to keep still for a while. Guy backs up the CD, trying to hear the moment, but can’t find it. But now he’s left wondering about that altercation - it’s a bit of a discovery - that even before Phil was anything other than the band’s guitarist, Guy had known trouble would one day come from him. And Judy had said nothing to back Guy up.