by Cynan Jones
COAST
David gave an abrupt flick with the handle of the knife and the limpet prattled off the piling.
Many times he’d done this, but each time felt the mixed sensation of apology and surprise at the morbid, expressive putty of creature set into the shell.
It did not look appetising and was not; but ‘I am an old man,’ David joked to himself. ‘They are plentiful, and I neither have to run, nor – which I’d surely have to were I fishing – pray.’
He felt, every time, the further surprise, newly, at how a thing that had taken on such ancientness to look at from outside was so bright within.
The pad of his thumb around the smooth inside; the coarse surface on his fingertip. Of all the artefacts he and his wife had collected from the beach he’d take a limpet shell for wonder.
The day seemed indecisive. The breakers of the outgoing tide smushed and drew. Sand martins spun from their tunnels in the cliffs.
Every so often there was a ticking pitter-patter as the low breeze rattled the dry seaweed.
There had been another August storm.
It had washed the sand from the foundations and fallen rubble of two houses that had recently gone onto the beach, and from the skeletal groyne that stretched into the sea.
Against the shifting contours of the shore, the pilings of the old sea defences looked ancient and immoveable. Pitted and barnacled and hung with algae.
David considered that the principles, of how to build a structure to hold back waves, were the same principles his team had used to build footings for the pipeline, all those years ago. Before they had a train to carry water to the city.
That had been his life. The engineering of support. Holding things back. Or holding things up. His wife, Helen, joked he should have designed bras.
He took a few more limpets. Where they were gathered into a family circle on the pilings, he could not take them. He never could. But he was even more conscious now of how it must be for one of a loving group to be knocked off the rock.
That was the hardest thing. Trying not to think of them, his family circle.
At least for the limpet everything seemed fine until that sudden tap from nowhere.
He stood and helped himself to a small diamond of liquorice from the tin he carried. The flavour sat well with the salt air.
He was patient with the stiffness in his back, knowing it would loosen as he walked.
The bright collecting bag was full enough. Helen was right. More sensible to use the gaudy colours now their eyes were going. He’d conceded this the third time he’d lost his grey canvas sack against the stones.
‘You don’t need camouflage for limpets.’ She had a point.
As he headed off the beach, David stopped to watch the sand martins stall and speed along the brow of the collapsing grey cliff.
He had been amongst those who had torn down the nets the council put up some years ago to stop the birds nesting. Contributing to erosion, so they claimed! There was a whole ocean to hold back, but they opted to stop the half-ounce birds.
How long ago was that, he asked himself. Thirty something years? I was Leo’s age, back then.
David came up what the sea had left of the steps. The tidal defence panels to either side were bleached grey, had the compact, matted look he imagined the pelt of a seal must have. That they were moulded from re-formed blades of decommissioned wind turbines seemed right.
First, he thought, a myopic attempt to harness Nature, now a hopeful bid to hold her back. Let’s see how that goes. Some things you can stop, he thought, other things you can’t.
He turned a final time to nod to the beach. Remains of other buildings showed strewn through the sand. And as he looked out over the flat sea, he saw the flash at the horizon. The limpets clickety-clacked as he set down the bag and unbuttoned his pocket for the binoculars.
‘Well, look at that,’ he said out loud. He’d seen the bergs go by a few times now, and every time felt the same gentle shock as seeing the inside of a shell.
There on the horizon, a trio of tiny boats, and behind them, towed, an iceberg,
Of all the things, he thought. They must have brought that through the storm.
He’d promised himself he’d go and see the Dock a few hours up the coast but hadn’t yet. Wouldn’t now. Instead he’d traded in the promise. Don’t let this thing get the better of you until you see the giant city berg go by, when finally it does. Imagine the size that one will be! They’ll need a fleet of tugs . . .
There is a magnificence to the idea, he thinks. They’re breaking from the ice cap anyway. Why let them melt into the sea?
Like limpets, they’re a ready crop. With a bit of effort.
David emptied the bright bag into the dry old sink and turned off the radio. Helen did not like quiet. At least, did not like quiet when she was alone in the house.
If he’d been out, he could follow her through the rooms she’d been in, clicking off the radios the same way they used to follow the kids as toddlers, picking up the toys they’d dropped. He chided her fondly.
Decades ago he’d brought her music, on Compact Discs. Something you could actually hold, give. ‘It’s not the same,’ she’d said. ‘It makes me have to choose what I want to listen to. Anyway. It’s the talking. I like the talking.’ She was fine with quiet when he was there.
That was another thing he made himself not think about. In the tougher moments he imagined her rattling about the empty house like a wooden ball. Taking a radio to bed.
*
‘Leo!’ His son was early. ‘Look at you!’
David scratched the paddle of driftwood round the inside of the desalinator, cleaning the evaporation chamber.
‘How’s the beach?’ asked Leo.
‘I saw another iceberg!’
*
‘I’ve near forgotten how to cook them,’ Helen said, looking at the lamb chops.
‘From the new-farm,’ Leo said.
‘Just because you didn’t want to eat our limpets!’
Leo smiled.
‘It’s good to have it. Sheep. Milking cows. And they gave us chickens to look after ourselves.’
‘Chickens!’
Leo smiled again.
‘Our group of accommopods,’ he said. ‘We have a veg patch too.’
‘You’ll be running black market lamb chops up and down the country soon. No more of this bland stuff those superfarms grow. In the city’s soil.’
David looked at his son. A cohesion had come to him. When he’d left a few years past for work at the reservoir there’d been a jerkiness about him. A need to go. Always a mechanic, this one. Ruth, on the other hand, was a carer from the start. Had more time for living things.
It was no surprise when Leo took a job with the Water Train. The scale of the thing, the awesomeness of transporting that much water; the science of it! Leo looked strong, like he was stepping towards a life he understood.
‘And, you didn’t bring Cora! Afraid I’ll steal her from you? How did a grease monkey like you pull a woman with her brains? What is it that she does, again?’
‘She’s a thermo-fiuctuationist.’
‘What’s a thermo-fiuctuationist?’
‘What’s a grease monkey?’
‘I guess I’ll just grill them,’ Helen said, staring at the chops.
*
Having got used to living without red meat, the smell of the cooking lamb brought on a temporary insanity. David had to stand outside.
The windowsills were heavy with lumps of rock and fossils. The strange curl of an ammonite.
‘So you’re not going to move?’ said Leo.
Most people had opted to take the government relocation money.
‘Careful what you wish for. These lamb chops. You might find us bunking in with you.’
‘Dad,’ said Leo patiently.
David looked at the bleached log of driftwood riddled with shipworm, the tunnelled shells embedded in the wood. He and Leo had carried it u
p from the beach last time he was here.
‘Can non-workers move in?’ asked David.
‘Family, yes. In certain circumstances.’
David found he had to turn away from Leo then. He hadn’t been able to imagine Helen having to stay with Ruth, as Ruth would want. Couldn’t imagine her happy in the city. With Leo, she’d have space, and scale. And chickens, he tried to cheer himself.
The sun had not come out as it had threatened it might earlier, but a pleasant wind blew across the land bringing an earthy, wheaten smell that made the sea seem further away than it was.
‘I’ve watched the sun rise over this beach all my life,’ David said. ‘Why would we move, now?’
‘So you don’t drown in your beds,’ said Leo.
‘It’s fifteen, twenty years away. We won’t be here for that.’
‘One big storm, Dad.’
He looked at Leo gently. Leo was looking out over the hundred or so metres of grassland to the far-out tide and the remains of the buildings on the shore.
‘They’re like the sunken farmhouse we can see. When the reservoir is very low,’ Leo said. ‘Like now.’
‘Tell me. While your mother’s busy. These attacks?’
‘We’re fine. It’s weird to see the guards. But we’ve not had any trouble. It’s down the line the attacks are happening, really.’
‘Like on the pipeline, early days,’ David remembered.
‘Your footings are still there, you know.’
‘Built to stay.’
David’s engineering sense was in his brain, his son’s in his hands.
‘Do they know,’ David asked, ‘who? Is making the attacks.’
‘Angry people,’ Leo said. ‘No one properly organised. They don’t think. Yet. They should go for the dam if they had any sense.’
*
Leo reached out to the bowl of salt, put some directly on his tongue. ‘Do you hear it, from here? The Water Train?’
‘Don’t be duzzy,’ Helen said.
David put down the stripped chop.
‘I fancy we do sometimes, with the sea calm and the wind in the right direction. Now we don’t have to shut our ears against the bloody turbines.’
The air had unfilled when they shut down the wind farm out on the sandbanks, the horrible whine dropping from the sky around the ocean.
They had not realised how much they had come to brace themselves against the sound until it was suddenly gone. The same had happened when the air traffic more or less stopped.
‘Tell me,’ David said, ‘have you heard from your sister?’
‘I’ll see her soon,’ Leo said. ‘We’re going to the city for the weekend, when the shifts work out. Cora and Ruth get on. We’ll try and time it so Colin is away.’
‘You’re not a fan?’
‘I can’t believe she’s with him still.’
Leo had balanced a pyramid crystal of salt on the tip of his upraised finger and it caught in the light of the window behind him with the brightness the iceberg had held on the sea.
‘What did we do wrong, to raise a child who moves into the city?’
‘You fed them limpets,’ Leo said.
*
‘Give Cora this.’ David passed Leo the brooch.
‘Dad!’
‘Bronze Age, we think.’ It was beautiful. It seemed to throb despite the dullness of the metal.
They found more and more things now, now the rising sea chewed away more broadly at the low clay coast.
‘Take it,’ he repeated to his son.
The nod his wife gave was almost imperceptible. As if she had heard him say, ‘We can’t take things with us, after all. Can we?’
Leo seemed to sense something extra from the brooch. Seemed about to speak.
But, ‘Did you hear the old bandstand has gone into the ocean?’ David cut off whatever it was Leo might have been about to say, indicating out to the peninsula, past the fishing boats rotting away upturned.
‘And you used to be able to walk all the way to Holland from here,’ he noted toyfully. ‘Do you want to take some limpets back with you? Better than that lamb . . .’
Leo still seemed to be communicating somehow with the brooch.
‘You know, they barely move more than half a metre from their home scar all their lives. They have a home scar. Chisel a little place out, limpets, on their rock.’
‘So you tell me every time,’ said Leo, patiently.
The sand martins were flicking by as the evening fell.
‘We used to dance in that bandstand. Before you were born. Your mother and I.’
*
David stood by the desalinator. There had been little sun all day and the water sat murky in the sea tank. Hardly any had worked through into the collecting vat. The dust of the previously scraped-off salt rainbowed a little in the evaporation chamber as the sun dropped.
He sensed Helen near. Did not take his eyes from the white dome, promising himself.
Don’t let it get the better of you. Not until the city berg’s gone by . . .
He imagined the extraordinary sight. A fleet of tugs fanned across the water, a giant chunk of ice.
‘You should have told him,’ Helen said.
There was the endless, comforting sea. He took her hand. Her nails still as smooth as the inside of a shell. Her old skin.
‘Then he’ll just wait,’ he said. ‘Won’t a shock be easier?’
CHAFFINCH
Tap tap. Tap tap.
There’s a bird. Repeatedly. Beating itself against the window of the meeting room, its wings raised viciously, beak open, smashing itself again and again against the solar glass.
We try to ignore it, but it doesn’t stop. It hisses like a reptile.
‘Switch the window to privacy,’ I say. The bird is defending itself from its reflection.
‘He’s trying to destroy the image of himself.’
They look at me strangely when I say this. The select covey of press. Here for facts on the Ice Dock. Given there’s a protest march this afternoon against it.
‘Why do you assume it’s a he?’ asks a skinny, nervous-looking guy. Colin, says his lanyard.
‘It’s a chaffinch,’ I say. ‘The females are more dull.’
I’ve found it a useful thing to do. Say something or behave a way that offsides people. Then, when you tell them something sensible it has the added power of surprise.
I look through the glass partition to the worker pool and can’t help thinking of slow dinosaurs. A cow-eyed herd, gathered placidly and chewing amongst low tree ferns with vegetarian stupidity.
Every now and then someone reaches for a mug. Like they’re picking fruit, foraging amongst felty partitions in the sulphured air, their backs hunched over computers, shirts the grey, pale green and soft pink colours of the skins of wild pigs. All with little socks on.
You can tell a lot about a person from their socks. And their mugs for that matter.
I steer myself away from guessing what underwear everyone is wearing and look up dinosaurs on my selphone. I try to figure out what sort of dinosaurs exactly I’m reminded of. Parasaurs, I find.
Parasaurs (they think) produced low-frequency resonances, rudimentary linguistics rivalling some monkeys. Herding bipeds accumulating in a rigid social hierarchy, with a mid-way intelligence.
Mm.
I have a vague memory of reading somewhere that ninety-nine per cent of species that have ever lived have gone extinct. Or perhaps I heard it on the nature discs. I bought them, a job lot, and the mechanical disc player, from the throwback store. Even the little whirr of the machine is calming. Whhhiiiirrrrrr. Click. Zeeeeeeee.
Last night I watched Emperor Penguins.
They talk in-tow melt rates given the increased salinity and warmer ocean currents and how much of the berg we’re likely to lose but how, even so, the maths support bringing it here and that we were right to not dock-build further north and try to move the water overland.
‘Look at th
e trouble they already have with the Water Train,’ Alan adds, ‘and the increasing attacks.’ He seems to aim that at the Westminster spokesperson, and she tenses in her seat, braced to answer questions.
But Alan nods to Susan and she starts the digigram. The visual looks beautiful. Draws all eyes, as Alan starts the fairy tale. How . . .
. . . The floating ice will come up from the coast (he explains) and be linked to the winch . . .
Tap tap. Tap tap.
Still the chaffinch beats the glass.
. . . Then will move on heated rollers that follow the old bed of the river.
Initially, the rollers will warm the bottom of the berg to create a melt zone. The ice above will push down on that zone, creating friction, causing further heat which will, in turn, itself melt the base of the ice, giving it more fluidity to move. The meltwater will be drained to irrigate points along the route, to help grow food.
On the graphic, the process is exaggerated. Gloriously magnified. Over-size drops riddle down the ice, pooling with the water melted by the downward pressure.
My favourite caption appears then on the screen: Stillicide collected to serve crops.
