The Sing of the Shore

by Lucy Wood

  When you walk past the beach on your way into town, your eyes scan the water. There are many small, dark dots drifting out the back. It’s hard to tell which one he is. There he is, no there, no there, no there.

  The drag of the water against the seabed begins to slow the wave down.

  You bring home a girlfriend. She has waves in her hair and a nose that broke and healed crookedly. Over dinner, your father is loud and animated. The light shines on his orange hair; his skin looks darker, more golden. He stands up to speak and moves his arms in wide, expansive gestures. He presses more food on everyone and makes them all laugh. There’s roast chicken and he pulls the skin off in sheets and rolls them delicately – usually you both do it. He looks over at you. You don’t do it. You eat quickly and ask to be excused. Just as you’re getting up he launches into a long, complicated anecdote about you – the time that you locked yourself out of the house and tried to get in through the roof hatch. The mean neighbour saw you and phoned the police. Your girlfriend laughs in all the right places, but this actually happened to your sister, not to you. No one mentions it. You roll your eyes and say, ‘Yeah, good one, Dad.’ Then you go upstairs with your girlfriend and into the wardrobe. It’s good that you got so much practice in that cramped space. You hear your father calling to you, and you both sit there, silently, the light striping you through the slats, your underwear slung over your old bears and books and space rockets.

  You get up late and come home late. By the time you’re up, he’s already left for work. By the time you get back, he’s asleep, sometimes on the sofa, his head tipping up against the cushions, his mouth slightly open as if he’s about to speak.

  His wetsuit drips on the line. It has a rip down one side and the gloves are fraying.

  You are applying for courses in astrophysics. They are competitive and far away. Your girlfriend tells you to stop worrying. She takes off her shirt. She closes your books. When the exams come you race through the papers, writing essays, ticking multiple choices. You don’t look up. You reach the final section. It doesn’t seem familiar. The questions are strange and unfamiliar. You haven’t revised for this – there is a whole section you haven’t revised for. You put down your pen. You look up.

  Your father is having some trouble at work. He has to go in at weekends, and in the evenings. There’s something wrong with the accounts, there’s talk of cutting back, redundancies, but he doesn’t want to talk about it. What he does want to talk about is the rumour of the fifteen, maybe twenty-foot wave that’s going to hit the coast in the next few weeks. He’s going to try and ride it. He asks if anyone will be coming to watch. Your mother will be away, visiting friends. Your sister shakes her head. You’re about to do the same but then you stop yourself. Exams were a long time ago, the summer is dragging. You have nothing to do except wait. You say that you’ll go. Your father glowers – his whole body darkens and seems to fill the room – he glowers like he does when he wants to disguise being pleased.

  On the day of the wave you can hear the sea from the front door. He packs the car and puts the board across the front seat. You sit in the back, behind him, like a little kid. Your father talks non-stop, almost babbling, about angles of approach, velocity, the height of the drop. When you get there, the car park is full. There are surfers everywhere and lots of people with cameras. He gets out, unpacks and gets changed. He’s still talking. He puts on his boots and gloves. You do up your coat. He locks the car and you follow him down the beach. The waves are huge already – they’re dark green and they break like thunder rolling. Your father turns back and looks at the car. Something in his face reminds you of the time he thought there was an intruder in the house and he came out carrying a rolling pin. Or the time he was cornered by that weird dog down the road and it was crawling towards him. ‘It’s big,’ you say. He nods, staring out at the water. ‘You don’t have to do it,’ you tell him. He turns and looks at you, then back at the car. Then someone waves at him and calls him over and the next moment he’s gone – he’s gone so quickly you don’t have time to pass him his zip. You see him laughing, slapping someone on the back. Someone else does up his zip.

  There are hands over your eyes and your girlfriend says, ‘Guess who?’ You say you have no idea: then, when she takes her hands away, you pretend you still don’t recognise her. Her smile falters. For some reason you think of those mice in the dark box. You smile and kiss her fingers. You slip your hand into the back pocket of her jeans. You watch the waves. The results came in this morning and you’ve failed an exam. You haven’t told anyone. You’re not sure exactly what you’ll do, but you guess you’ll take up another course instead – there’s ones in business or IT that look OK, at the same place your girlfriend is going, which is probably better anyway, it’s probably much better this way.

  It’s impossible to tell how big the wave is until you see your father begin to paddle into it. It rises higher and he rises with it. Then he’s up on his board and dropping. For a moment you lose sight of him in the speed and tumult. The roar is almost deafening. Spray hits against your face. The moon is thin as a bone. You see him wipe out for the first time.

  While the base of the wave slows, the top rushes on, becoming steeper and more unstable. In a green wave, this top is glassy and smooth, like a mirror.

  In your office at your work placement, there’s a lot of paperwork to get through. It seems so much, it’s like an impossible wave. Sometimes, when you work late, you look out of the window and see the moon and the stars in the yellow-black sky. All the telescopes at observatories around the world will be looking up at this exact moment: Arecibo, Coonabarabran, Jodrell Bank. They are as magical and far away as Lapland. You unpack the food your new girlfriend has made you – cold chicken, tomatoes, bread – it’s delicious. You’ve only been with her for two months. You count down the minutes until you can see her.

  One night you’re driving in the dark on your way to her parents’ house. She’s already there. You haven’t met her parents yet. You’re spending the whole weekend. It’s a long drive and you’re running late. There’s a meteor shower scheduled which is going to start at any moment. You keep driving. You glimpse something bright falling in the rear-view mirror. You don’t stop. You’re not even halfway yet and the roads are busy. The meteor shower is about to peak. You’re very late now. You pull over, stop the car, and get out.

  When you visit other people’s houses – friends from university, from work, your girlfriend’s parents – what you notice is that their fathers are usually there. They are in the kitchen or in the garden or in the garage with drills and paint. They sit and try to talk to you, and you become strange and tongue-tied. ‘Uh,’ you say. ‘Pardon?’ They are not rushing around because the tide and the swell and the wind have all come together to make the best possible conditions at an inconvenient time. They are not out chasing anything.

  Sometimes, when you’re half-asleep, you think you can hear the sea. Sometimes it’s the wind in the roof. Sometimes it’s your heart beating. Sometimes it’s the sound of the motorway in the distance, that restless, relentless thrumming.

  Your sister is having a baby. You go and see her and touch her stomach. You can feel the foot sticking out in there. She’s grown her hair long and has a dog that lies across her feet. At first you play with the dog a lot, but it always does the same things and soon you get bored and ignore it. The dog seems to understand and shuffles away. There’s a scar on your sister’s arm from where she fell through the window – it feels like a long time ago, but also not very long ago at all. She craves meat even though she’s a vegetarian and you break her in, you roast her a chicken and show her how to peel the skin off in sheets and roll them up. ‘You look just like him when you do that,’ she tells you.

  The wave collapses under its own weight. It topples and begins to break.

  He has an injury. You phone up and he answers and speaks in a subdued voice. ‘Pardon?’ he says all the time. ‘What?’ He’s always had terr
ible surfers’ ear, where the bone, after long immersion in cold water, begins to grow to try and stop the water getting in. He was once told his ears were about fifty per cent covered, but now it’s more like sixty-five. ‘Your injury,’ you shout. ‘What is it?’ It turns out that he hurt his back hanging out the washing in cold weather and he hasn’t been in the sea for months. ‘Months?’ you say. He passes the phone to your mother.

  You pull in out the front and go inside. The house is tidy, spotless actually. There’s no surf kit on the line. There’s no wax or turpentine anywhere. Over the years he’s had a few accidents and injuries: the black eye, a cut leg, a broken wrist, concussion, but nothing stopped him going back in before. You pace the house, crossing from room to room. Finally you find him upstairs, in his bedroom, where there’s a new TV. He’s sitting up watching it. ‘Hanging out the washing?’ you say. He shows you his new favourite programme. It’s about people who buy old crappy cars and then do them up so that they look new. ‘They made that one turn out alright,’ he keeps saying. ‘They made that turn out alright, didn’t they?’

  The moon is almost full. It’s very pale, very yellow. He says that when he hears the waves now they sound like windows smashing. ‘OK, Dad,’ you tell him. ‘OK.’

  You catch him bending down to clip the lawn, his back strong and flexible, his arms stretching out. He reaches up to the top shelf in the kitchen and twists when he backs out of the driveway in the car.

  Your girlfriend rings you. Her voice is different – higher, she’s talking faster, she’s trying to tell you something important. Your hands start to shake. You think you know what she’s saying. ‘It’s definite,’ she says. ‘I did the test twice.’ She cries and then starts to laugh. You do the same. You definitely know what she’s saying. The room suddenly feels very small. You get up and look out of your old bedroom window. By God, your heart is going about a thousand times a second. Maybe this is what going into space feels like.

  The wind direction is good, the tide is right, the swell is small but likely to pick up. You pack the wetsuits and the boards in the car, get your father and drive him down to the sea. You park up and look out. He buries his chin into his chest. The skin around his jaw seems looser, there’s more weight across his stomach and face. He’s still a big man but the extra weight seems to diminish him somehow, as if he’s slowly disappearing. He watches the sea, leaning back in the seat, holding one hand in the other. You tell him your news. He sits there, staring out. ‘Was I …’ he says. Then he stops. ‘I’ll have to find a new chamois leather,’ he says. There’s a shaving nick on his face, golden stubble, bits of soap. You tell him he should go in. He shakes his head. He looks tired. ‘There’s going to be a few waves coming,’ you tell him. He shakes his head again, but you get up and go to the boot and start taking everything out. You get ready. After a while your father gets ready and you both walk down to the water. You stand there. The waves seem so much bigger down here – you’d forgotten that. They seem to tower over you. They boom and snap. Neither of you move; you just stand there, holding your boards. ‘Bit small,’ your father says. You reach out and pass him his zip. He passes you your zip. When you step into the white water he carries on, paddling out until he’s nothing more than a dark dot.

  A wave comes in. You climb onto the board and slide off. You try again and it flips over and thwacks you across the arse. The wave knocks into you and pushes you down. The board jolts away and gets dragged in the backwash. Something sharp hits your ankle. Cold water flushes down your wetsuit. You look back at the beach. Everything onshore looks different and far away. You hardly recognise it. Another wave comes in, and then another. You climb onto the board and start to paddle. The white water is coming, it’s pounding into you, and then the board is lifting and you’re going, you’re shooting forwards and you get one knee up, then half-stand, shakily. For a moment you’re above the noise and the tumult. Everything is pushing and pulling but you are suspended, still: a force, for a moment, that is unacted upon. Then you fall off, roll, and come up retching. Your throat and stomach burn. You stand up and steady your board. You look for your father. He’s still drifting out the back, even though a set has just washed in. The wind is picking up. Another, bigger set develops and breaks but he leaves those as well. With each wave that passes he disappears, appears, disappears, appears. ‘Catch one then,’ you say. ‘Why don’t you catch one?’ He leaves another one. Someone next to him catches it, but the wave flattens out halfway in and leaves them floundering. Still your father is out there, waiting. He leaves another wave, and another. He’s watching them as they form; none of them are right yet, none of them are exactly right. You don’t know it yet but he’s waiting for the best one, the one that will be perfect. The one that will bring him in right in front of you, finally, in triumph.

  Standing Water

  So there’s these neighbours that live out past the quarry, down a rough track that goes nowhere and then stops at the edge of a slushy field. It’s low ground out there, and it rains more days than it doesn’t, giving the place a bottom-of-the-well kind of feel. The nettles grow to neck height.

  There’s her house, and then, almost opposite, there’s his. They can see each other easily enough – whose car is there, whose lights are on. They can see through each other’s windows. There aren’t any trees. There aren’t any other houses. No one passes by. It’s just the two of them, but they haven’t spoken since the ditch started overflowing.

  The ditch runs along the bottom of the track, and there’s a drain in the middle that serves both their houses. The drain is always blocked. When it rains, the water fills the ditch and starts spilling over. It rushes along the track and over the grass and pools outside their front doors. It happens every month, every week. The drain spits and gurgles and the water gushes out, greasy and rabbit-coloured. It smells like a jug that’s been holding flowers too long – that slick dark bit that gets left around the edges. Sometimes it seeps under their doors. Sometimes it seeps through their walls. In winter it freezes to a gristly crust. In summer midges spawn and dance over it.

  But they never get it fixed. He thinks it’s on her land and so she should be the one to do it – he remembers seeing some kind of clause in some kind of document relating to the boundary line, although he’s misplaced the paperwork. She says it’s closer to his house and so it’s his responsibility – she’s measured the distance and there’s at least four inches in it.

  She puts out sandbags. He buys a stiff broom and pushes the water away with sharp jabs. If they’re ever out the front at the same time they carry on in silence. She swings her heavy grey plait down behind her back. It’s like the pulley on a church bell except nothing chimes. He pulls the hood of his coat down low, so that only the frayed wires of his beard can be seen. Sometimes someone will shake their fist. When their doors slam, they echo across the fields.

  The months pass, and then the years. They watch each other, they know each other’s small routines – how, on Mondays, she leaves the house at eleven and comes back at two, carrying a plastic bag with bread and some kind of bottle in it. How he stays in every day of the week except Sundays, when he goes out early and comes back at midnight on the dot, with dark lines below his eyes. How she never watches TV. How he leaves his bedroom light on all night. How she crushes tins so hard for the recycling that they split in the middle. How he carefully cleans his spades. How she checks twice that she’s locked the door behind her. How he checks that he’s locked his door three times.

  Once in a while she looks out and sees that all his curtains are shut. They can stay like that for weeks.

  Once in a while he smells smoke and sees that she’s having a bonfire; tearing out bits of paper from folders and feeding them into the flames. The cinders land on his van. They’re as big as fists.

  He knows what days she washes her hair.

  She knows what day he changes his bed.

  Sometimes, at night, he thinks he sees a torch glinting around the tr
ack.

  Sometimes, at night, she thinks she sees a torch glinting around the field.

  If a delivery comes for her when she isn’t in, he doesn’t take it. He asks for it to be left outside her door instead. Often it gets wet. Sometimes deliveries don’t seem to arrive at all.

  When he goes out on Sundays, she flattens the gravel outside her house, which his van has churned into divots. She picks up the sharpest bits and puts them on his drive.

  The months pass and then the years. Still it rains most days. The drain blocks up and the ditch overflows and water pools in front of their houses.

  One evening, at the tail end of winter, the rain is coming down as thick and heavy as a tap on full throttle. The gutters pour. The drops are fat and grimy and smear on the windows. She’s inside slicing the skin off potatoes, when she hears something scraping, then a thud. She goes over to the window and glimpses a torch somewhere down the track. The torch goes out. She starts on the potatoes again. The rain drums even louder. She cuts each potato and throws the pieces into a pan of cold water. They sink to the bottom. Something moves in the pelting rain and when she looks up he’s there, outside the window, staring in. His eyes are pale and watery. She puts the knife down slowly. She goes to the door and opens it a few inches. He’s hunched by the wall, wearing his mac and carrying a spade. There’s mud up his legs and his back, and along both sleeves. His hood is streaming. Water runs off the bones of his face.

  ‘Have you got a spade?’ he says.

  She squints out past the door. The light outside is dark brown, almost green, mud-coloured. She can hardly see him through it. ‘Why?’ she says.