Sea Change (3 page)

Guy does everything to avoid the mouth that lurches at him. He shouts a manic
wharr!
at it and the horse bridles, pulled up by phantom reins. For a moment he sees it impossibly tall, reared up, its onward momentum held at bay then, falling forward at him, scaring itself and rushing by in a skittish, terrified dash. The stallion has thundered past, close, a shuddering dark shape of hair and solid curves, in the middle of it he had seen part of the head, tossing violently as high as his own head, the white of the horse’s eye stretching, blurred, into the carpeted hair of its cheek. He’d seen a filthy tobacco stain of wetness, around its eye socket. And then the glisten of saliva, a thin strand of it, looping through the empty air after the horse vanished, with a snake-like motion, twisting as it fell. Guy has been stamped on; his foot feels shattered, leaving a hot sensation in his shoe, and he smells the stallion’s unmistakable odour, a dark musk of outside fear which holds his jacket like a grip, even now.

He looks for the others and cannot see them, the way things must wipe away after a hurricane and, instead, he sees a glimpse of the horse as it trots away, an oddly feminine gait to it, much less fast than he thought it had been. He stares at the ugly raised stump of its tail, so like a bend of old rope, and the dry waxy folds of its backside.

An awareness floods him, quite suddenly, an overwhelming sense of strength surrounding him and he knows his body is at its centre, capable, intact, and with an arm which feels entirely disembodied from himself he reaches out into the blue nothingness that engulfs him and he literally sweeps Freya up in one curving motion which has her suddenly held to his face. She stares deeply into his eyes, trying to find a father’s answers. He stumbles, wounded but invigorated, to the tree, and tries to push Freya up into it while Judy shouts something from near to him, or not so near, he’s not that sure, and the tree almost comically seems to grow higher out of his reach as if wanting to be no part of this and Judy is shouting a warning again and Guy turns this time to see the stallion, once more, circling faster now, building a new momentum, still throwing its head up at imaginary riders. Guy hears an ugly rasping
huh
noise across the field and he stares unbelievingly as the animal stumbles into a light-footed trot, coming at them. Judy must distract it, he thinks, she must wave at it and split its target so its run will miss them all. But she doesn’t. The hooves begin to hit the ground faster, an accelerating rhythm of one after the other, then in unison, bucking the front part of the stallion higher in quick shaking jerks, as the head lowers, swinging from side to side, until he sees the length of hair stretching down its back.

The second charge has more purpose. Guy screams at the horse, finds himself taking a rash leap towards it, and for a second he is across the animal’s neck, lifted up, moving across the ground - he sees the grass blur as his separation from the others increases. A glimpse of the horseradish leaf, then of his daughter standing as rigid as a small scarecrow, white with fear, whiter than he’s ever seen her before.

He falls forward from the stallion and seems to be overrun, run over, slipping down the animal’s front under its head and his cheek becomes smeared with a great wipe of wetness from hair or skin, and then the relief to be falling, to be separate from the horse at least, although he sees it in terrible closeness, even the swinging motion of its throat, brushing him off, and the hardness of the animal getting even harder and more solid as he falls beneath it. Soft marshy ground here and the stallion’s front leg punches into the mud like a steel piston right by his face and Guy gets splattered by drops of soft wet mud and is then alone again.

The field has a kind of stunned silence to it as Guy lifts himself on to one elbow and sees the oak tree and Judy and Freya still standing a little way from it. Judy, wanting to run to her husband, holding herself back to be with Freya. Both of them look so relieved, so happy in this little instant, it’s a sight which fills him with love, their care, their absolute loyalty. The others are safe. He must have been brave, leaping at the horse like that, and perhaps it balked as a result, at the last minute; the danger’s over now. He looks at Judy, and surprisingly they smile at each other. It’s a strange moment, but it’s really there, a warm smile between them, no sense of panic or recrimination or anything other than sheer relief.

He lifts himself up, a little groggily, and limps towards them. It’s actually a surprisingly little distance to be together again, and he hugs them, he’s winded and defeated but he was their best chance, and then he looks for the stallion, knowing he’s now acting instinctively, without caution. He’s declared himself - he’s declared that their life came before his. It’s given him a wonderful sense of rightness, to be thinking this way.

‘It’s OK now,’ he says, and then he says, ‘where is that thing?’ and he sees it trotting in a wider circle, collecting itself, the bastard, getting its breath back.

‘The horse is so strong,’ he says, absurdly, to the others, and he looks at the animal as it shakes itself down again, as if shaking off the memory of the man who’d briefly hung on its neck.

The first attack, yes, that was terrible, but the second one, I won that, he thinks. It’s been scared off. Learn your lesson, and as he looks at the horse now he wonders how long it had taken to better this animal. It hadn’t been agile. When it came at them, it didn’t even try to deviate from the run. There was no disguise to the direction. It was determined, but it was really just a blatant show of bullying aggression and force.

There was an element of sport too, to have faced this thing. The stallion’s runs had been brief and had clearly taken their toll. It had seemed petrified, even as it ran at them. Disorientated. He sees it across the field, breathing too quickly, its snorts and whinnies almost overlapping themselves. He imagines its great lumbering heart jerking rapidly and beyond its limit, and he wants it to die.

‘I think it’s over now,’ Judy says, calmly, bringing his attention back to being with them. She’s holding him tenderly and he notices she has the book of poems back in her hand, she’s picked it up, in itself that smallest of gestures must mean the danger has now passed. The stallion has proven its point, it can go back through the gate to be with its family, if there is one, it can receive their gratitude and adoration if that’s all it needs. He sighs with relief, and crouches down to take a breath, and to make himself equal with Freya, to be on her side, her support and friend. Freya comes to him, so upset, so terribly small, her love for horses shattered, and he holds her, feels her warmth like it’s the most precious substance the world can offer, which it clearly is. She whispers to him in a dry voice that she wants to go home now, can they go home now, and he smiles and says yes, let’s go. And as he holds her and nestles into her neck he hears Judy’s dead calm voice whisper
Oh no, oh dear God no
and Guy doesn’t even look, he just pushes Freya away, pushes her to get behind that tree, that great solid tree, Freya can run round that trunk all day - the horse is too frightened to keep this up for long, and Guy has his daughter safe behind that commanding oak, at least, when the stallion begins to face him a third time. When he turns to confront it he discovers he now has a stump of wood in his fist, it’s not a branch but it’s heavy. The block of wood has been by their feet all along, but only now he’s realized it’s in fact a pretty good weapon. He can use it like a brick to club the horse on the jaw. Maybe break a tooth, or he can try and jam the corner of the log into the eye. He’s capable of anything. He’s seen this animal up close, knows where the patches of skin might be softer. He’s earned an understanding of this danger, and a right to be cruel.

Guy has made this fight his own now, and the stallion knows it too, preparing itself, its head swinging in small movements from left to right. Perhaps a horse cannot see absolutely straight ahead, he thinks, abstractly. He knows that whatever happens at the end of this run the horse will lose interest, will stand panting in the pasture with total indifference and he and Judy and Freya will be able to walk calmly back to the gate as if nothing happened. He’ll be able to brush the mud from his jeans, wipe the sweat from his palms and internalize the fear as his own, protect them, make light of what’s happened. He sees its eye and flash of hair across the head, the spot just high of the mouth he will dig the log into. Guy braces himself for the arrival of the force as the animal canters at him, knowing instinctively that the tiny colourful disturbance at the edge of his vision is wrong, a wrong thing, his daughter, abandoning the tree in a reckless dash. She’s stumbling in little trippy steps across the grass in what seems to be a crazy intersection towards the stallion. Guy hears a simultaneous panicked shout from Judy and he knows this next second, this next momentous second, could become the worst moment of his life, the worst moment any man would ever have to witness, and he’s struck rigid with the sudden overwhelming effort of keeping the impossible from happening, the effort of keeping these things apart.

II

The North Sea

Position: 52° 01’.5N 1° 47’.5E

Just savour this feeling, he thinks. Hold on to it. He can hear the crying of seabirds, perhaps hundreds of them, echoing across the water, but he can’t spot where they are. He imagines the sound coming from terns or gulls, with slim greased white throats and softer greyer wings. The colours of sea and cloud.

His boat is fifteen miles offshore, but the North Sea is strange today: it’s completely calm. From where he’s standing, the water sparkles quietly up at him with a thousand pinpricks of light, each one from a miniature sun scattered in a line across the sea. In every direction it stretches as a single glassy object, without any swell or current, to a horizon which is a pure line, like a child’s drawn it, the simple curve of the earth. And the air is so fresh and so perfectly still, filled with its own sea light, it’s as if it could be bottled and brought back to the land - where it would sit on a shelf, shining.

Guy has been standing on the deck of the
Flood
since dawn, watching the water, occasionally looking for basking sharks through his binoculars. He hadn’t expected this. September can be a stirring month.

Just in front of the boat he notices something floating. It looks like some glorious beetle on its back, with a shell wide open. But it’s not. It’s a bird. He watches, amazed, wondering whether it’s alive or dead - these things always have the appearance of being in both states. Then it moves, trying to lift its head from the water, with a feeble paddling motion of its wings.

Guy runs to unclip the gaff and he plunges the metal tip into the water cruelly short. The bird has a tiny beak which sticks above the surface like a twig. Hold on, he says, to the bird, wait for me, he adds, meaning don’t die, not now, not now when you’re so close to being saved, don’t die in front of me. And by hanging down from the sea rail, off the side, he’s able to touch it, just, and he sees how impossibly wet and dark the bird looks, how absolutely close to death it is, yet as the gaff nudges it, it still tries to escape, making a single oar stroke with its wings which plunges its head, briefly, underwater.

After five minutes he has brought the bird to the side of the boat, where he can reach down to gather it in his hand. Its body feels weightless, like a palmful of wet leaves, like nothing could live in it any more, and he sees that it’s a finch, a greenfinch, driven offshore by some sudden gust, or by the shadow of some magpie or crow. Had it been trying to reach his boat, with its last effort, or had they drifted together in coincidence? And as he holds it a simple truth strikes him: you remember the things you save; you cannot forget the things you lose.

The
Flood
is a ninety-foot Dutch coastal barge, built in the Voorhaven yard in Scheveningen in 1926, and till the seventies it freighted cod-liver oil between the three Hs of the North Sea: Hamburg, Harwich and Hoek van Holland. At least, that’s what he was told when he bought it. The boat’s main feature is the wheelhouse, which sits higher than anything else on the deck, with glass windows on all four sides and a ship’s wheel in its centre as tall as a man’s chest. The wheelhouse is spartan, always bathed in the white ozone of the sea, with a swivel chair bolted to the floor and bench seats behind, wooden mullions, a door either side giving access to the deck and an ornamental ship’s bell which Guy had engraved with the word
Flood
.

Originally the barge would have been a male space, solitary and smoky, the way men tend to make things, probably messy too. What was once the cargo hold stretches in a low flat shape in front of the wheelhouse, painted white. The hold is now mostly a saloon. It has too many chairs. Despite all the time Guy’s lived on the barge, he’s never managed to lessen their number.

It’s been his home for nearly five years, moored to a stretch of quay on an empty part of the Blackwater estuary, in Essex. The only buildings there are a few isolated houses, some fishermen’s sheds, and the Tide Mill Arms. The
Flood
’s one of several houseboats, some are more wrecked than others, and the whole anchorage has the oily scent of a shipyard, mid-repair, a place where boats have been scuppered and salvaged, wrecked and neglected. There, the
Flood
sinks into the mud twice a day, and the rest of the time it floats, soaking up the brackish water into its hull like a sugar cube. The estuary feels like the sea and looks like a river, and is neither, it’s both inlet and outlet, flooded and drained, it’s always a contradiction. That’s his home. Empty, strange, big-skyed.

Right. Where are you? he says, unfolding his maritime map on the floor of the wheelhouse and running his hand over the nonsensical tree rings of the seabed depths below him. IMRAY Passage Chart C25, the Southern North Sea, it reads, full of underwater cables, pipelines, explosives dumping grounds and wrecks. There are rippled contours of sand and gravel banks, England continued, hills and sloping meadows down there. He can just about work out where he is - although the nearest feature is appropriately vague, a depth mark of eighteen metres. Not much to look at, his spot on the world. He gazes at the coast of East Anglia on the map, with the muddy mouths of its estuaries, like mythical eels sniffing the ocean, and its complicated filigrees of saltmarsh and creeks, swelling with water twice a day and somehow, implausibly, holding the North Sea back.