Sea Change

by Jeremy Page

  The motel is full of guests, and as Guy lies on the bed, alongside Judy, he can hear the mixed noise of family life through the walls, like the sound of water in the pipes, energy constrained, channelled. Some children are up late, they’re going wild a few doors down, and Guy imagines each square space of motel room between himself and them, each block filled with its own addition of sound, its own scene of men and women lying on beds, while the clamour of the children increases. At least it sounds lively - he’s been afraid of silence for the last two days, but the excitement of overheard family life contrasting with his own sombre room hardly needs drawing attention to.

  Judy lies close to him in the bed, but there’s been no touch between them. She’s on her side, resting her head on an arm, looking towards him with eyes as dark as charcoal.

  She’s just asked how easy it might be to change the flights. He has no idea, and out of stubbornness he’s insisting they go on, all the way to the Pacific.

  ‘Clearly that can’t happen, now,’ she says, whispering so that Freya won’t hear. Guy looks up at yet another blank ceiling in his latest motel room.

  ‘What if I want to go on?’ he says, obstinately.

  ‘Then you’re going alone. Look, I don’t expect you to find this easy, but at least treat this with maturity. I don’t want unpleasantness, and I think there’s a way forward for us all.’

  He doesn’t like her planning for him - it clearly won’t be in his interest.

  ‘You sound like it’s all worked out.’

  ‘To some extent, I think it is.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘We separate.’

  Guy accepts that, the waves of tiredness finally hitting him to the extent that he feels nauseous. She’s a chameleon, adapting her argument to his mood, outwitting him at every turn. He thinks she’s been waiting for this moment, this insomniac weakness where there is no fight left in him, where the events of the last couple of days cease to have any logic.

  Judy lies back. Pathetically, he goes to hold her, to remind himself that her body, its intimate collections of shapes and smells, its history of their relationship which is remembered in every last part of her, is still somewhere he can go to. But she pushes him away, gently.

  ‘Do I even get to know the reason,’ he asks, ‘for all this?’

  ‘Let’s not rush to put labels on what’s happening,’ she says. ‘The past was good, but there can’t be a future. You know that.’

  ‘Actually, I didn’t,’ he says. ‘I thought we’d done all the changing. I thought we were just going to grow old together.’

  She doesn’t answer, carefully sidestepping his route into sentimentality. He waits for her to talk again, but she doesn’t, and his mind seems to dim and lurch forward to that inviting realm of sleep that he so craves, so needs, without it there’s no clarity in all this, and that’s all he gets, because his thoughts spring back at him, newly positioned with alarming proximity, and he knows he’s awake, really awake.

  For the second night he doesn’t sleep. He stares at the ceiling, which is featureless, then at the soft gauzy shadows of the motel room. Leaning against the TV is the photo from the restaurant. How ironic, that the picture captures a moment when a man who plays guitar has come between them. Judy’s breathing comes at him regularly, relaxed, and Freya mutters something incoherent from her dream. Gradually the other pockets of noise in the motel complex fade out, and he is left with a wide empty silence, the sound of Judy’s shallow breathing, and of Freya shifting uncomfortably in her sleep. An hour or two passes. He moves over to Judy and strokes her back - feeling the gentle curve of her where the knuckles of her spine dip below the surface, becoming a crease where they join her pelvis. He holds her briefly, burying his nose in the warm towelled smell of her T-shirt, and then in the peppery curls of her hair, the scent of her he’s known so long. Her head generates a heat, always, which radiates while she sleeps. Her bum is like a hot polished dinner plate, round and large because she is curled up - her skin feels as smooth as glazed porcelain there. And she stirs in her sleep, straightening and moving away from him.

  He has a fantasy of tapping Freya on the shoulder, waking her up with a finger over her lips to stop her speaking, coaxing her into the car, then driving, bleary-eyed, towards Mexico, his conscience clear but his heart muddled with disaster. He worries the fantasy, till he begins to see them racing the old hire car down some dusty desert track, while Judy points them out to a state trooper from high up on a cliff. A tell-tale glint from the trooper’s Lone Star badge, then two more as he raises his mirror-shades, puts the rifle to his eye, a shot rings out and the film of Guy’s great escape is over, as he slumps, bloodied, across the wheel.

  Other fantasies jostle for space, of Phil, sitting on a transAtlantic flight, his artificial leg resting on his lap because his stump is beginning to swell, the poor sod, how he massages it, full of self-pity; of the wet black bears of Georgia sniffing outside the door, getting hungry; and all the mariachi players in all the world in all the badly fitted charro suits and still, still, he doesn’t sleep.

  At about four in the morning, he gets up and quietly leaves the room to stand on the porch. His hire car sits patiently, as dumb as a horse tied to the rail. The air is cool and empty, the distance beyond the lot looks liquid black and pure to him. Inviting. He walks there, passing the cars and over a small wire fence till he’s standing in an area of barren scrub. Looking into the blankness, he can’t see any signs of habitation. No houses, no lights, but the land is full of a thick sound of insects. It smells different to him, too, it smells of dry stones and woody plants with small leaves. It’s magical. He gives in to it, fascinated by the night’s soft contour of undefined, limitless space. Dogs bark distantly, their calls answering each other in plaintive avenues of sound, and a lonely voice mixes with them, from far away, the long drawn call of a coyote.

  On one side of this nothingness a ridge of bare rocky cliffs stretches away, as smooth as dough, bone grey in the night. Ink-black crevices and holes puncture the rock, like the buttons on a leather armchair. A warm dry scent of dust and cooling sand rolls down towards him, and he senses, for the first time since they started this journey, that here is a smell of endlessness, a frontier, the intoxicating smell of the desert.

  As Guy looks out there, into this fragrant empty night, he sees a kind of freedom. He sees a place where he might be, alone, his life stripped down bare, an empty page. And he imagines a time when he might someday disappear, journeying to find escape, into a wilderness.

  Position: Storm

  Guy hurriedly gathers the diaries for the last five years, seals them in a watertight bag and ties the package to the polyurethane life-ring under the bench seat. With more string he ties the arms of his glasses together round the back of his neck so they won’t blow off. He tries to clear his head by having a large gulp of the Gammel Dansk. It really does taste like ear-wax. Then he faces the storm, trying not to panic, dressed in his zipped-up wet gear, staring through the wheelhouse glass at a sea the likes of which he’s never seen before, a surging of waves that by the minute seem to be rising and breaching in utterly unpredictable patterns, as the wind begins to howl, begins to batter the windows, making the puddles already collecting on deck shiver with anticipation.

  He touches the brass-ended central king spoke of the wheel for luck.

  Then he increases the Flood’s speed to full, and turns the wheel toward each wave that arrives, trying to hit it in the middle, head on, the bow sinking and cutting into the wave at the last minute to give a brief moment, a solid groove of the sea where the boat feels level and stable. The sheer weight of the barge, as it cuts into the waves, sends a bright foamy spray over the bow which seems to hang suspended in the air, before it travels quickly across the deck at a constant speed to hit the wheelhouse in a wide slap of cold water. The wipers are on full, but hardly able to keep the view clear.

  Above him, the clouds are dark grey and low and seem to be much calmer than t
he sea. Despite being part of the same storm, their true force is elsewhere. There is no rain. No lightning. But no escape either, just a narrowing gap between the rising sea and the lowering clouds where the Flood must find some room to manoeuvre. It’s too much, Guy says, his mind focused on every rising ridge of water that appears in front of him, spinning the wheel as best as he can to meet the unpredictable edge that snakes in ominous approach. Each wave, as dead in colour as grey flint, but glowing with a strange green translucence near their tops where the water is thinnest. You get a forty-yard swell it’ll roll that, the skipper of the trawler had said, and Guy tries to gauge the length of these waves as the crests sweep by the side of the Flood, hugely fast now, with marbled patterns of foam stretching back across their receding slopes. Each one passing a wave he will never have to face again, but a ceaseless flow of new ones arriving, sometimes head-on, sometimes coming sideways at the boat. And a new disturbing noise adding to the rushing noise of the storm - the sound of the ship’s bell, beginning to ring of its own accord.

  As the Flood breaches each crest, the wheelhouse is lifted high into the air and he sees, briefly, a rugged unknowable landscape in the gloom. He looks in awe, then the wave passes underneath, and he hears the iron of the boat groan as it tips forward and the engine over-revving as the propeller momentarily lifts clear of the water. When this happens he feels the loose-jointed swing of the wheel when the rudders turn in the air, before the Flood sinks back, the bell ringing with alarm as the propeller bites into the back of the wave.

  And when the boat slides into one of the calm dishes of the troughs, he hears sudden intimate sounds, of bubbling, the sounds of a frightened sea in the middle of the storm.

  It’s during one of these lulls, when several waves had collided to wipe each other out, that he runs out along the deck towards the bow. The wind springs at his face as wet as the sea, and on either side of the boat he’s aware of grey sloping waves rising almost as high as the deck, marbled with streaming white foam like streaks of fat. The lenses of his glasses are immediately covered in water. The deck’s never seemed so long, so perilously tipping and rolling from side to side, and just as he reaches the prow a surge of water hammers the front, knocking him and the boat still, almost pitching him straight off his feet, then a wall of spray rises magnificently in front of the bow, as if off a harbour wall, and slaps him hard with its cold rain.

  He grabs the windlass and for a second everything is blurred and drenched, he knows the Flood is turning, a few more like that and the waves will hit from the side and roll him - he must act quickly. He tears the securing line off the sea anchor and tips the contraption in, punting eighty-feet of cable off the side too, with his foot, into a wave that rises up like it’s come to seize him, unawares.

  ‘Not yet!’ he shouts, and the wind takes the shout away and he loses its sound entirely.

  He runs and half slides back to the wheelhouse as the wave streams by with a deafening gush, the same speed as him, and he throws himself at the wheel, turning it hard to counteract the pitching of the boat, while things fall from shelves downstairs, the bell rings, and the inflatable dinghy bangs against the davit behind him, and he sees the sea rising almost up to the scuppers on one side, it can’t hold, he can’t hold this for much longer.

  The engine is too slow, the waves are now too fast, each time he aims towards the crest of one he knows the engine can’t climb it, and he’s been relying on luck that the wave will pass and the one behind it will be something he can turn at. So far, luck has been with him, but luck is not enough, and he imagines that sea anchor cable paying out, even now, to eighty feet, the canvas sock inflating underneath the water, then straightening in front of the boat and through the smeared windscreen he sees the cable suddenly spring tight at its cleat, and he knows the anchor is out there, skewered through the tops of two waves each time, like a giant needle and thread that might just hold, might just keep him pointed at the waves that are coming for him, one, several, maybe thousands out there that have the power to drown him.

  Guy waits, intent on that cable at the far end of his boat. He tries to lower the revs, but fears that might make things worse, the engine has been his only ally so far - so he brings the speed up again. The cable seems to slacken, twist and spring to one side, then pull taut again.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ he mutters, his teeth clenched like a drowned man’s, already, he has no idea what to do. Maybe that anchor will pull him under, he’s only just thought that, it seems odd to put something into the sea that will attach the boat to anything, when suddenly he senses a new motion to the barge, something he hadn’t really expected, an extra aid to his effort to keep straight.

  It must be working, it must be, and he slaps the wheel and wipes the steamed-up windscreen glass and stares out to sea and all he can imagine is that the anchor is down there, eighty feet in front of the boat, holding him with godly strength.

  Every so often an unearthly wall of water rises impossibly in front of the bow, forming in the gloom like a world tipped on its side, gathering, then rolling upwards and towards him and he feels the old barge lifting without weight, dreamily, then rushing forward into the sinking sea and he’s pitched almost out of his chair and on one occasion he shouts ‘HOLD ON!’ and instantly he remembers saying the same two words to Freya, years ago, at the beginning of a fairground ride as the long metal safety bar was lowered in front of them.

  The ride was a giant octopus shape, covered in multicoloured flashing bulbs, that would turn and spin and send each seat towards the edge before bringing it back at great speed. Freya was four, only just old enough to be let on, and as the ride began - a slow gliding motion - she was already giggling with anticipation.

  ‘I’m not scared, I’m not scared,’ she said, and then said ‘Faster, faster,’ as the seats began a gentle acceleration towards the edges, for a moment hanging above the onlookers, then being sucked back in reverse, spinning, making a complicated pattern among the other riders. It was balletic at this speed, but Guy remembered hearing a new gear engaging, almost a surge in electricity which flickered the lights, and a flat male voice overhead saying ‘Come on now, that’s right, let’s fly,’ and the speed had picked up, powerfully, sending them lurching to the sides, spinning them - he heard Freya yelling with delight, then the forces of the ride pushing her voice back into her as he felt her gripping his hand, her small thin body sliding from side to side on the slippery plastic seat, the centrifuge pressing him against her at certain points so strongly it was everything he could manage not to crush her. His small child, in the arms of that metal monster, he had wanted it to stop, return them to how they were. The crowd had been a blur to him, whizzing past, then every so often he’d been suspended above them for the hold of a second, enough to look at a face below, and it was during one of these hiatuses when he had seen Judy, beneath him, almost close enough to touch. Her face was illuminated by the unnatural shine of the light bulbs that encrusted his seat - she had seen him in the timeless eddy where they shared the same concern, that the ride was too fast - like a look shared in the eye of the hurricane. Then the forces had risen again and he’d felt the mechanical pressure building up to lurch him away and Freya had screamed unpleasantly in his ear and a strand of saliva was flung from her mouth, the saliva transcribing the same looping movement of the ride, and she laughed again and screamed ‘FASTER!’ one more time, and he had become happy, he was with her in the blur of lights and smells of diesel and candyfloss and he screams back ‘HOLD ON!’

  A wave strikes the Flood with venomous power, rolling on to the barge as high as the wheelhouse and the boat reacts in a stunned fashion, floundering for a moment, gathering itself against a series of punches and pressures it’s unable to deal with. The spokes of the wheel strike Guy’s hands as the rudders are caught. Curves of the sea lift up at his side, coiled like cobras, watching him, before striking the wheelhouse glass. The glass must hold, Guy knows, or he’ll be blinded. And for the first time h
e notices water around his feet, a few inches deep, sliding from side to side on the boards and running across the inspection hatch to the engine compartment. There’s no time to bail it, but its presence makes him fear there’s more water in the boat, in its dark corners, sloshing around near that steaming machinery below the floor. If the engine goes he will have no chance.

  For the rest of the day the rolling sea comes at him ceaselessly, wave after wave, the Flood pitching head on as best as it can into the direction of the swells, but each time, just the merest imbalance in the water sending it sliding one way or the other. Sometimes as the boat tips he sees the water almost lapping into the wheelhouse door, pooling against the scuppers as calm and unmenacing as a duck pond, then, miraculously, absurdly, the Flood keeps returning to a righted keel.

  When the rain eventually comes it lashes down straight, turning the view of the sea into a misty haze of steam and water. It’s as if Guy can only look at the waves through a gauze now, as they come without warning, lurking there in front of the bow, waiting their turn. And he sees little silver flashes coming down in the rain and he realizes fish are falling on to the boat too: tiny sprats and sand eels, like drops of molten lead hitting the deck, being stunned, then swept, mad-eyed, back into the sea when the boat tips.

  Guy knows that both he and the Flood are now way beyond their limit. The sea has been too mountainous, too fast, he’s been acting out of sheer exhausted adrenaline all day, aiming for the cresting water like some diabolical game. The waves have breached across the bow, their weight pressing the old barge deeper into the sea as they land, yet somehow the boat carries on, and so does he. The thought of that ocean beneath him, all round him, indifferent and murderous, it’s too much.