Sea Change (26 page)

She goes, leaving the door open, a politeness in that gesture about not wanting to shut the door entirely on him, not quite. It gives him the slightest glimmer of hope, but he knows it’s no consolation. She doesn’t want to be followed.

After a few hours on the motel couch he knows sleep won’t come to him tonight. It’s just not possible, given the nature of their talk and the feeling that something so ugly and of enormous proportion is growing between them. Once such allies. Its presence is there in the room, like the smell of death, something that can’t be disguised. God, he’s tired. Already this business is demanding a new stamina, a kind of constant attention within him to be wary, to be on guard, to prepare for all discussions, all eventualities, all hurtful. He was stubborn to insist on sleeping in here, given the perfectly good bed that’s unused next door, but he’s determined not to be seen as the one who has to leave the family room. Yet it’s odd to try and sleep while Judy’s there on the bed. If anything,
he
should be on the bed - he is the wronged party here - surely he deserves the bed. He paid for the room, he did all the driving, he’s long and the couch is small, but it’s his for the night, and for some reason it seems fitting. The men always take the couches.

Judy’s impenetrable shadow on the bed is a troubling one. He imagines she is full of potential actions now - of zipping up cases and writing him aggressive notes and new ways of standing, too - stances where she will have a rigidity to her posture, waiting for him to back down, the kind of thing that up to now he’s only seen her do when she faces someone they both have issues with. Well, he’s the enemy now, of sorts. She’s a dark reservoir in that bed, of private thoughts and agendas, and he just doesn’t know the depth of it, or the depths of her.

And his mind turns to the thing that he’s been trying to ignore, unsuccessfully, all day. Freya.

Asleep, unaware, still so much the child, though she’s on the cusp of adulthood. This will damage her - will bring out in her a seriousness he knows will not suit her - will not make her attractive among friends. She takes trouble badly, seems to accept it like a punch and wears it like a bruise, she’s like him in that respect.

Freya is still with them, but this night, she’s on the far side of the room and she can’t be seen among the shadows, and he feels his daughter’s absence with a sense of panic. Freya, alone, beyond his reach - it’s something he’s never before considered happening. His daily protection of her, his daily right to be with her, it’s so natural - yet here, he’s on the verge of losing it, or more precisely having it taken away. Where will she live? Who will she choose? Judy and the ridiculous one-legged guitar man, or her father, tinged with a hint of tragedy even now? Whatever the outcome, a compromise, a splitting of her identity before it’s properly formed.

The couch is bloody uncomfortable. It begins to break his body quietly and efficiently in the night, starting with his neck and spreading down one side. He ends up moving the cushions on to the floor and trying to lie on them there. He gets a moment of relief, but then discovers a draught, and a mushroomy smell from the carpet which is old and unclean and inescapable.

The morning arrives with a grey stealth which begins to illuminate the room. He looks at the chart of fire precautions pinned to the back of the door, which he reads from top to bottom - he’s wild with his lack of sleep. A song, a trashy song from the eighties, playing out in his mind over and over again while the room gradually gets lighter. Still a calm place, still time for an hour or two’s sleep, but sleep is not coming. He sees a picture of cacti in a false desert sunset materializing on the wall near the bathroom. It shines at him like an omen, a call to the desert, to endlessness.

Guy slides open the door of the wheelhouse and looks out into the night. The clouds have mostly cleared, surprisingly, and the bone-coloured glow of a moon he can’t yet see shines across the sky. The stars look silent and icy above him, more like a winter sky than anything he’s seen all summer. Perhaps the seasons advance quicker out here? It’s much cooler now outside than it was before. He walks along the deck and looks out at the sea, passing in front of him in terrible blackness. Full of a coiled movement, rocklike in its depth and sheer presence. A single wave breaks menacingly alongside, bursting with a seething sound which rushes away into the night, leaving behind its ocean breath of salt and air.

When he turns back to face the wheelhouse, he sees the silhouette of someone sitting in there. He knows it’s Freya, on his seat, but the shock of seeing her, like this, so unannounced, strikes him with amazement. It’s very dark - the whole deck is only palely illuminated by the starlight, and before he left the wheelhouse he’d turned the lights out inside, so the shape of his daughter is hard to separate from the rest of the shadows around her. But it’s undeniable. It’s true. It’s Freya.

He cautiously walks back along the deck, keeping hold of her shape among the glint of reflections of the sea that shine on the windows. There seem to be layers in there, of water and movement, and among them he keeps losing her, and by the time he’s at the doorway, she has vanished.

He puts the lights on and the honey colour of the wood springs forward at him with real intensity. His wheelhouse, empty, with the padded benches and the loose cushion with its faded river scene embroidered by someone he’s never met. His own friendly space, so familiar after these five years of living on the
Flood
. It’s been a good home. Controls and gauges - for weather, knots, depth, direction, all you need to navigate, where there is essentially no map to follow. The gauges, set in their brass mountings, recording oil and wind and water and magnetism and pressure both inside and out - they seem at once idle and watchful, forever busy but here right now, neglected. He sees a dark patch of wood above the hatch handle made by the grease of hundreds of hands, all of them naturally pushing in the same place. And he sees the sight of his impending emergency - the bag of food hanging from the door, the fastened hatches, the untidy and possibly incomplete apparatus of the sea anchor, the imagined scenes of an approaching catastrophe.

He calls her name but all he hears is the thin sound of his voice in the emptiness of the boat. He checks the saloon, the cabin, the toilet and shower-room, the cupboards, thinking he’s losing his mind and feeling a presence, everywhere, that he didn’t feel before. Eventually he goes back to the wheelhouse. Deliberately, he tries to absorb his mind with the complicated business of assembling the sea anchor. It turns out to be very frustrating and intricate, and he never quite manages to dispel the feeling that she’s there, with him, as he’s putting the anchor together.

‘Maybe you’re here? Are you?’ he says, stopping to listen to the silence around him.

He attaches two iron hoops, either end of a tapering canvas bag about ten feet long, like an airfield windsock, then fixes that to a float and chain. It’s fiddly. The book has complicated diagrams of trough lengths and wave height and cable spans for ideal deployment of the anchor ahead of the bow. There seems to be a whole science to this thing, but the purpose has a simplicity: if the engine’s not up to keeping a direction against the waves, the
Flood
can be held on the right course by this cumbersome dragging anchor, like a horse has its rein. At least, that’s the theory.

When it’s finished he sits back to admire the contraption. It resembles a giant squid, curled round on the wheelhouse floor. He feels calmer, and no longer feels haunted by a presence he can’t explain. He’s preparing for the storm, and he’s thinking clearly. Impulsively, he gets his mobile from the cupboard and switches it on. It bursts into life in his hand with a series of chattering beeps - the screen glows back at him in a precise glare, full of battery and life and ridiculous can-do optimism. Any number in the world, its childlike belief, each number on the keypad fringed with a halo of perfect blue light. I’m ready, it’s saying to him with shameless self-belief, with no awareness at all that out here it’s lost, without signal, beyond communication.

Guy climbs down the ladder into his cabin to lie on the bunk in the dark. He must rest. He’ll need his strength. He listens to the busy sounds of the
Flood
, of the metal creaking in distant corners, of the joints in the woodwork stretching and relaxing, the wheelhouse glass as it trembles in the frames, then the sounds of water passing outside - a smooth flow brushing the outside of the steel. He listens to all this and knows there will be no chance for sleep tonight. Instead, he concentrates on his breathing, taking long inhales and letting them out gradually, and as he’s doing this he becomes aware of that second set of breaths again. From the other side of the cabin. The shallow calm breaths of a child, following his, keeping time with him. He listens, by holding his breath, but hears nothing. Then softly, from a few feet away, Freya whispers to him.

‘Why are you upset?’

Guy feels enveloped by an instant cold sweat. He’s immediately, intensely awake. He strains to listen to the room, but can only hear the other noises of the boat.

‘Daddy?’ she says.

‘
Freya?
’

‘I liked you catching those fish,’ she whispers, mischievously. Guy smiles, full of an unbounded elation, despite the turbulence of his thoughts. ‘You saw that?’ he says.

‘I was watching you.’ Her voice is calm, older than he remembers, coming out to him from the dark like a soft curve of air. She’s carefully picking her words. ‘But you shouldn’t have killed so many of them.’

‘I know,’ he says, spellbound by what’s happening. ‘I got carried away. You forgive me?’ He feels the need to ask questions, to keep hold of this voice, not let it drift away.

‘Daddy,’ she says, ‘you know there’s going to be a storm tomorrow?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think that clumsy parachute’s going to help?’

‘I don’t know. What do you think?’

He hears a faint giggle, then Freya’s voice coming to him as one of her characters: ‘Ain’t no playground you know,’ she says, impersonating the skipper of the trawler he met.

Guy blurts out a laugh then bites his fist like a madman. He can’t believe this. It’s his turn for an impression - he says, ‘We’re going to need a bigger boat,’ like Roy Scheider in
Jaws
.

‘You’re funny,’ Freya says. It sounds like her voice is slightly further away this time.

‘Freya?’ he asks.

‘Yes?’

‘You’re still there?’

‘I’m always here.’

‘It was you in the sea, wasn’t it - when I went swimming, I felt your dress in the water.’

‘Yes. It was cold. Your hand was cold.’

‘Darling, it’s so lovely to hear you. Do you know how much I’ve wanted this?’

‘Why are you upset, Daddy?’ she asks again.

He stares into the darkness of the room, trying to make out her face against the velvet blackness of the opposite wall. A tiny glimmer of light is coming down the ladder from the wheelhouse, but with each rung it seems to half, and down here in his cabin there’s no clue - it’s like being in a well. He so wants to see her.

‘I’m upset because of writing that diary. And I don’t think I can do it much longer. Since I lost you I wanted to believe in something - I wanted to believe that all three of us would have been happy. But I can’t honestly say that’s true any more. I was trying to keep everything together, see, but it’s all falling apart. All over again. I can’t control it.’

She doesn’t say anything. He has the feeling that she’s no longer with him in the cabin.

‘I’m scared, Freya.’

‘What of, Daddy?’ she says.

‘I’m scared that when I turn on the light, you’re not going to be here.’

‘Oh.’

‘Shall I turn on the light?’

‘I don’t know. Don’t be scared.’

‘OK. Thanks, love - you’re good to me. God, I so want to see you. I’m going to turn the light on.’

He reaches for the pull-cord of the wall lamp to the side of his bed. He feels the small metal bead at the end of the cord and hesitates, anticipating the flood of cold light that will illuminate his cabin. He’s scared, right now, after all this time, to see her.

Guy pulls the cord and the cabin fills with light and he looks at the emptiness of the room. Empty square space reaching into each corner.

Position: Not sure. The North Sea.

As the new day arrives - its light spreading in a greasy unremarkable stain across the sea - Guy is buttoned up in his warmest coat, sitting in the pilot’s chair. He hasn’t slept. He switches off the light in the wheelhouse and his surroundings change from a cosy orangey glow to a grey and shadowed room - all the life drained from it. The windows feel cold and brittle, and the deck of the boat stretches in a horribly damp shape into the sea, covered in a salty dew. The sky promises something awful. A fatigue presses him across his forehead, but he knows he won’t sleep. He knows the storm is imminent. He escaped it yesterday, but he can’t escape it now.

With a sense of trepidation, he takes the assembled sea anchor to the bow of the boat, fixes its cable, and secures it with rope. Then as a final measure, he attaches a can of engine oil to the anchor’s float, and pierces its lid with several stabs of a screwdriver. He’s hoping an oil slick might calm the water - the manual said it was worth a try. And he’s willing to try anything.

Below, the water rushes by with a swift noise, like the sea has become a river, sweeping its weather towards him.

He has a shower in the tiny cubicle forward of the saloon, sliding the roof light open to let the steam out. And as he stands there, looking up at the thin stream of iron-smelling water coming from the showerhead, and the pale grey square of the sky beyond, it is like a surreal rain is falling on him, and he wonders whether he might faint. Sleeplessness has done that.

He goes back to the pilot’s chair and sits at the wheel, looking at the map of the North Sea. There’s nowhere to go, no direction any more, except back, he supposes - but there’s no chance the
Flood
could outrun the storm now. This is the end of the line for him. With every minute the weather is worsening.