The Sing of the Shore

by Lucy Wood

  The room was small and bare and white. Once, a piece of plastic, or maybe a wrapper, caught on the window and flapped in the wind. Mary closed her eyes. When she opened them again it had gone. The walls smelled like fresh paint and she lay there, breathing it in. This was how it was meant to be: the quiet, the sea somewhere outside the window. She slept deeply and for a long time.

  One lunchtime she woke up from a nap and Vincent wasn’t there. ‘Vincent?’ she called. ‘Are you back?’ She was hungry. She tried getting out of bed but as soon as she put any weight on her foot it wrenched and gave way. She sat back down. It grew slowly dark. Finally she heard the front door open and a few moments later Vincent came in. His hands were cold but the tops of his cheeks looked very hot.

  ‘It’s late,’ Mary said.

  ‘It was work,’ he told her. ‘I overran doing the Millers’ garden.’ He brought her tea and a sandwich and straightened the covers. He sat next to her and switched on the radio. He turned the volume up high.

  After a while he said, ‘Do you ever think about it?’

  ‘What?’ Mary asked.

  ‘It was your parents’ and I …’

  Mary must have moved suddenly because a shot of pain went through her foot. ‘Why are you talking about that?’ she said.

  ‘I just thought about it today.’

  ‘We said we wouldn’t,’ she told him.

  Vincent nodded. He turned and patted her pillow so that it was more comfortable. ‘I should have checked it all out,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t check.’

  ‘We said we wouldn’t go over it any more,’ Mary said. All that was done with now. She hadn’t thought about it for a long time.

  Vincent was late back again the next day, and the day after that. He fell asleep straight after dinner but woke up through the night, his legs and arms moving restlessly.

  The following morning he was gone before she was awake. Mary’s breakfast was on the bedside table. She drank cold tea and ate cold toast. The phone rang. She got up and put her foot carefully on the floor. There was a dull ache but she could stand. She walked slowly through the house. The phone stopped ringing. The message light was flashing red. The kitchen was clean and quiet. There was another unopened letter from Vincent’s company on the table.

  She went out and turned towards the living room. The door was closed. It was never closed. The phone rang again and she went back into the kitchen. She watched it ringing for a moment, then picked it up. ‘Hello?’ she said. She nodded slowly, said a few words, then put the phone down. Vincent hadn’t been showing up for work.

  She opened the living-room door. The room was full. Every shelf, every inch of floor space, every chair, was covered with things from the beach. The hub-caps were stacked in tall piles, like coins. There were fruit crates, balls of rope, a bag overflowing with what looked like computer parts. There were fishing buoys – some orange, some green, some bleached to no colour at all. Sheets of plastic leaned against the window, casting a warped light. The room smelled stale, but also humid. Water droplets collected and rolled down the walls.

  She went over to the window and looked out. Vincent was standing near the edge of the water, on the far side of the beach, staring at something. She closed the living-room door, put on her shoes, tied them carefully over her ankle, and went outside. The wind was picking up again. The tiles clacked. The palm tree was frayed. There were bin bags stuffed full in the porch and more along the side of the path.

  She went down to Vincent and slipped her arms around his waist. He put his hand on her hip.

  ‘It was just there,’ he said. ‘I came down and it was just there.’

  Mary followed where he was looking, past the rocks, and over towards the water. At first she thought it was another rock. It towered up next to the cliff. Then she saw dark red metal. There was some kind of writing painted on the side. It was a shipping container, almost the size of the house, draped in seaweed and barnacles. It was padlocked. The metal was thick and corrugated. One side was bent inwards, like a chest when someone is holding their breath.

  ‘I thought it was going to be different,’ Mary said. She held Vincent tighter and leaned into his back.

  ‘Maybe by the morning …’ Vincent said.

  But they both knew it would still be there in the morning. It was, perhaps, unmovable.

  They stood there, together, watching it.

  The Life of a Wave

  All waves begin as nothing more than a wrinkle, called a cat’s paw – a crease in the surface of the water caused by a gust of wind.

  You’re lying on a blanket on the hot sand and shadows move across your eyes. Above you, there is the sky and in it there’s a hard, white crescent. You reach out and try to cram it in your mouth. Sand scratches your elbows. The blanket smells sweet and dusty and there are small stones under it. Something is drumming somewhere. It’s deep and regular and it sounds close one moment and far away the next. You can’t see it. You rock and kick your feet but you still can’t see it. You roll onto your side. The drumming comes through the ground and into your ear.

  A shadow moves and grows bigger and your father sits down next to you. Heat radiates off him in waves. There’s a lot of bright orangey hair on his legs and neck and when you pull on it he sucks in his breath and says, ‘He’s trying to kill me.’ His hand is hot and damp when it unclenches your fist. You try and grab again. You want him to come closer but he’s holding something and now he’s looking at that instead. It’s another body. It’s red and blue and he’s pulling it over himself. The sun beats down. He sweats and breathes heavily. Sometimes he grunts. He pulls the rubbery legs up over his knees and his elbows fly out. Your mother says, ‘Merl, mind the baby.’ She puts down her book. Your father swoops towards you, except it’s not your father – it’s some kind of dark bird. There’s no skin, there’s no hair. It slips and creaks under your fingers. It smells hot and burning and you cry out because he’s disappeared.

  In the night he stumbles into your room to quieten you. His face looms, then turns away, like the moon’s does. Sometimes he paces the house and your eyes follow him as he crosses from room to room.

  He shows you the sea from your window. He lifts you up (‘By God,’ he says, ‘your heart’s going about a thousand times a second’) and there is a glimpse of it in the distance. It glints and it’s different to the sky and that is where he always goes. He holds you for a long time, until he lets out a shout because you’ve peed down his wrist.

  The deep galumphing noises are the same as the ones in his chest.

  Your mother goes away for the day and your father looks after you by himself. When you cry he gives you a chamois leather to hold, and you clutch it, gumming the soft corners. You fall asleep. When you wake up you’re on the beach. You reach out and grab for him. There’s a dent in the sand where his surfboard has been, and footprints disappearing down towards the sea.

  This is the story that’s told: an hour passed and then another. You slept and then woke up and the friend of your father’s who was watching over you, knowing nothing about babies, bought you an ice cream which melted over your legs. You were taken to the lifeguard hut and someone put a jacket over you. You clutched the chamois leather. Eventually your father came back in, wet and dripping, elated: the waves were glassy, he caught a tube at the end. When the lifeguard handed you over your father blinked, laughed, then slapped everyone on the back. He’d completely forgotten you existed.

  The wave grows as it comes into conflict with the surface tension of the water. This is called the capillary wave.

  You grow up with a language you think everyone knows: lumpy, crumbly, clean, hollow, walling up. You know reef breaks and shore breaks. You know of faraway, gigantic waves: Waimea, Mavericks, Pipeline. To you they are as strange and magical as Lapland. You know that to drop in on someone, to steal their wave, is the worst crime. In town, when your mother says that the two of you could drop in on her friend, you scream and won’t go in the do
or.

  When you stand at the edge of the water the waves tug and hiss at your feet. They break suddenly; rearing up then smashing down, like the jars you throw as hard as you can at the recycling centre. Your father wades in ahead of you and, after a moment, you follow. Seaweed wraps around your toes. Something sharp hits your ankle. You’re in over your waist. Cold water flushes down your trunks. You turn and look back. There’s your mother on the sand, holding your baby sister. They look small and far away. You take another step forwards, then turn back again. Everything onshore looks different. You hardly recognise it. You wave, and someone waves back, distantly.

  You find an injured crab and bring it home in your pocket. You put it under your bed and bring it crisps and grapes. After a few days you forget to check. When you look again, the crab has died. The smell stays in the room for weeks.

  You lose your chamois leather. You look everywhere for it, then crawl and hide under the table. Your mother asks what’s wrong. A few minutes later your father comes in from the garden. His voice is louder than usual. His eyes don’t quite meet yours. He leans down to you – his face is huge, it crowds out everything; it’s flecked with golden stubble and bits of soap and shaving nicks – and then he presents the chamois with a flourish. You take it slowly. It’s damp and it smells strong and different and there’s wax around the edges.

  Your mother reads you a book about the moon. You can’t stop thinking about it. You get up at night and look at it out of your window – sometimes you can see the face clearly, sometimes it’s sly and shadowy and you can’t make it out at all.

  When he waxes his surfboard you stand behind and watch. He leans down and scrapes the old wax off. The flakes curl onto the ground like bits of grey snow. Then he wipes the board down with a rag and a bottle of something called turpentine. When he’s finished you’re allowed to rub on the new layer. The block of wax is shaped like a lady’s you-know-what.

  When he puts on his wetsuit it’s your job to pass him his zip. The zip is very long and he can’t reach it by himself. You do it carefully and solemnly. It is your task alone.

  Finally, you’re given a lesson. It’s so windy that you can hardly carry your end of the board across the beach. The waves don’t look that big from the car park but as soon as you step into the water they seem to tower over you. Spray stings your face. The board knocks against your shoulder. You can’t even climb onto it. You finally get one leg on it and then you slip off the side. A wave flips the board and knocks it against your neck. ‘Move forward,’ your father shouts. You can hardly hear him over the wind. ‘Move forward.’ His main teaching technique is to say the same thing, just louder. ‘Where?’ you ask. Another wave hits you and you roll under, swallowing what feels like lungfuls. Your throat and stomach burn. You come up retching and try to climb on again. The board seems huge and awkward now that you’re on it. The waves are relentless. Your father is talking to someone who’s just about to paddle out. They shout and laugh. They talk about yesterday’s waves. He nods to someone else. He knows everyone. The waves don’t knock him off balance; they seem to pass through him, glistening. You fall off again. The board thwacks you across the arse and you rip off your leash, trip, half-running, half-wading back into shore. Your father picks up the board and starts to follow you. Behind him, a perfect set develops. He turns to watch it. You know what he wants – he wants to go back out and catch them. He looks at you. You fold your arms and demand to be taken home.

  In the summer he hoses off the salt and leaves his wetsuit dripping on the line all night. By the morning it’s dry and stiff and ready to put on again.

  Water particles in a wave don’t move forward: the wave moves through the water particles, which stay in exactly the same place – these are called rolling particles.

  In the winter, you watch him break ice off his wetsuit before he puts it on. You’re in the steamy kitchen, eating breakfast and playing slaps with your sister. He chips away the ice from his hat, his gloves, his boots. His leash is an icicle. You shake your head and turn away.

  You catch him phoning in sick to work. You should have left for school already but you’ve forgotten your PE kit and have to go back. He isn’t sick but he’s been working ten-hour shifts at the warehouse, coming in late smelling of sweat and dust. He puts the phone down and unbuttons the top of his shirt. He sees you standing there and something passes across his eyes – not fear exactly, not exactly distaste. You see yourself suddenly as an interloper: skinny, buck-toothed, always hungry, a rash of coppery freckles on your forehead. ‘I forgot my bag,’ you tell him, holding it up for evidence. He nods, watching you carefully, then his bear paw comes down and ruffles your hair, boom, boom, kneading his fingers into the back of your neck.

  You decide you will be an astronaut. The moon seems very still. Nothing up there would drum and knock you off your feet; you would just float, silently.

  You find a mouse behind the fridge. The cat must have brought it in and then lost it. The mouse has made a dusty nest and had five babies. You put them all in a shoebox and keep them in your room. The first few days you dig up worms but the mice don’t seem interested. You switch to cheese but they don’t eat that either. After a while you forget about them, and when you remember and open the box, they’re all dead.

  In school you learn that to be an astronaut you must not only be top of the class, but also fit, strong and mentally resilient. You start doing sit-ups every morning. You sit in your tiny wardrobe, very hunched and still, for half an hour every day.

  One Saturday morning your father takes your sister down to the beach for her first lesson. She has your old wetsuit and your old polystyrene board. You wait in the house. You can’t settle to anything. You walk down to the library, where your mother works. She’s laughing with the other librarian about some graffiti a kid has left in a Where’s Wally? book. She shows you but you don’t crack a smile. You grab the first book you see and walk home. You pace the house. When you hear the car you run upstairs and lie on the bed with the book. The doors thump shut. There’s no other sound – no talking, no laughing. You turn the pages without reading them. Then your sister laughs and your father squirts water at her with the hose. You close the book slowly.

  You can do twenty sit-ups, and you can sit in the wardrobe for an hour – any longer than that and your hips cramp up.

  He misses the school play. You’ve been cast as a servant and your sister is Juliet. Your sister is secretly in love with Romeo – a boy called Jackson who wears henna tattoos. The seat next to your mother is empty. She puts her coat and bag on it. Halfway through, there’s a noise at the back of the auditorium and your father comes in with dripping hair. ‘Did I miss much?’ he asks. He has a black eye. ‘Someone dropped in on me,’ he whispers loudly. Everyone has to stand up as he moves down the row. His hair drips onto the floor. Your sister flushes, almost forgets her lines. ‘Is that your dad?’ Romeo mouths.

  Your sister stops her surfing lessons. The wetsuit and the polystyrene board are sold.

  You can spend two hours in the wardrobe. The time seems to fly by.

  His black eye takes two months to disappear. First it’s purple, then green, then yellow. Your mother says he deserves it, then gently holds a bag of peas on it for a few minutes every day.

  Things always seem to happen when your father is out in the water. For example, your sister falls through the downstairs window. You were chasing her around the house because she used your telescope without asking and now, somehow, it’s broken. She wasn’t even looking at stars – she was trying to see if she could spy on her friend on the other side of town. There’s a lot of glass but not as much blood as you might expect. When the ambulance comes everything goes very quiet. You’re too old to do it, but you hide under the kitchen table. The ambulance doors shut and everyone leaves. The house is dark. When your father comes home he opens the door and calls out, then he switches on the lights, hums, cleans off his wetsuit and hangs it on the line. He turns on the radio to a
station you don’t recognise. He sings along. He opens the fridge, heaps food onto a plate and eats with his hands: tearing bread, wiping sauce with his fingers. You crawl out. He jumps and bellows, almost chokes on a slice of cold chicken. You explain where everyone is. It takes him a while to understand. He hasn’t noticed the broken window. The calm glassiness in his eyes slowly fades. He sits down and rubs his jaw, then drives you both to the hospital.

  The next time he goes in your rabbit, Millicent, is run over by a motorbike.

  Another time a swarm of bees comes down the chimney and gets trapped in the living room. A bee catches in your sleeve and stings you on the wrist, even though you were trying to help it. The sting swells to the size of a planet.

  ‘How?’ your father asks each time. ‘How has it happened?’ You don’t know it yet but what he means is: how can life, this other life, have carried on so drastically without him, while he was just drifting on his board, a basking shark slipping under him like a submarine?

  Each time he paces the house. No one speaks to him. Everything has been taken care of without him – he has not-helped, he is not-needed. He frowns and mutters to himself. He looks around but no one looks at him. He mutters again. Then, suddenly, he runs out. He takes the box of bees, which your mother stunned with smoke while wearing a snorkel, and leaves it at the bottom of the mean neighbour’s garden. He draws rude, elaborate pictures over your sister’s cast. He digs a grave for the rabbit under the buddleia, puts on a suit, and conducts a service: prayers, hymns, a soaring eulogy that speaks of her kindness, her penchant for cereal and how she stared at herself, almost smiling, in the glass of the oven.