Sea Change (7 page)

He knows he must write his diary.

Dusk has fallen too rapidly. Some of the cars out there have been caught out too - he can see their headlights being switched on miles away in the distance. It gives the road a new sense of length and absolute flatness which is amazing. Already, on their first interstate, to be driving into one of America’s infinite vistas, he’s a lucky man.

On either side of the road is a simple verge, a long chain-link fence which dips and lifts as the car speeds by. Beyond the fence on both sides are dark channels of water, with heavy clumps of sawgrass floating in heaps, moving and rising in soft swells which makes him think there’s a life to that water he can’t quite fathom. For as far as he can see the Everglades are utterly, relentlessly flat, without light or any sign of life, and it stinks of a musty green vegetation.

How deep is that water? How far down do you have to go before reaching something more solid? He wonders. It’s as dark as a sea out there. The Everglades have the texture and look of iron filings, stretching to the horizon. He thinks he can see hundreds of birds there, rising in a thermal plume at the edge of the world, but it’s probably a trick of the light.

Judy’s been quiet. She’s been looking through the window and has angled her head to rest on the glass. Guy knows the mood well - that little tilt of the head, as if she’s letting her thoughts drain - it’s her dreaming time, when she begins to let go.

Freya’s in the back, listening to her headphones. The music player’s a fairly new gift, for her ninth birthday, and Guy’s already regretting the little bubble of silence it puts his daughter into. He was surprised at the speed with which she took it up, her willingness to listen to it for hours on end. A step towards independence, a privacy which he remembers so well, a fascination with himself too, when he was her age.

Both his women, in their individual spheres of thought. It suits him. He pretends he’s alone in the car - that he’s crossing America with his own set of glorious possibilities. An impression begins to take form, of meals he might eat, lonely women he might look at along the counter of a diner, encounters, that’s what it amounts to. Encounters and reinvention, it makes him almost giddy, and he looks at the passing swamp with a renewed sense of liberation - a desire to stop the car and wade out there, feel the sawgrass and the unmentionable things that lurk in the water that would be oddly warm and tropical.

The tin-tin-ta-ta of a slow beat is all he can hear from Freya’s stereo.

‘What are you listening to?’ he says.

Freya doesn’t answer. Or doesn’t hear. Each time she puts the headphones in, taking a step into her own world, he follows her with this question, reaching out to her as if to say don’t go too far, please, not too far.

‘Freya,’ he says, looking at her in the rear-view mirror.

‘Some of Mum’s stuff,’ she says, casually.

‘Who is it, honey?’ Judy says.

‘Alison Krauss,’ Freya replies. Judy nods appreciatively with a little pursing of her mouth - it’s a gesture which annoys Guy, in fact, has always annoyed him. It’s an affectation and she doesn’t have to do that here, but still she does.

Guy pushes down the pedal, imperceptibly, and begins a slow acceleration to seventy-five, imagining a valve opening somewhere in front of them, a release of fuel deep down in the dark metal innards of this strange car, unknown to his passengers. It makes him complicit with the machine. It makes him feel good. He eases back on the pedal and looks out across the swamp. The glow of his dashboard lights reflects on his window, but beyond that, there’s only darkness. What lives out there, he thinks, what horrid bodies slip by each other in that ink? Immediately he pictures the alligators, sliding past one another in the black night, their bodies even blacker, log-like, segmented, unblinking. He hates the way their legs jut out, their four-fingered feet so un-relaxed, like the taxidermist’s already stuffed them.

‘Don’t drive so fast,’ Judy says.

‘I wasn’t,’ he says, guiltily.

She looks at him and grins. ‘We don’t want to go off the road here,’ she says.

He smiles. ‘I was just thinking that myself,’ he says. ‘I’m not keen on meeting the gators.’

‘It’s great, isn’t it?’ she says, ‘all this nothingness. It’s like someone’s just rubbed the world away.’

She’s speaking quietly - it’s just the two of them, because Freya’s still listening to the stereo. It’s like they used to be before she was born. Alone in a car travelling through the night, sharing a private moment. Both of them are enjoying this now.

‘Are you tired?’ she asks.

‘I think I could drive all night if we had to. And we might have to,’ he adds, lightly.

‘I love it, Guy, I just love it,’ she says, girlishly. She still has that lovely inflection in her voice, that illusive crystal quality which makes you want to hear more. When she sings with that in her voice, she’s amazing.

‘I was just thinking,’ she says, ‘when we’re in Nashville, you should spend some quality time with Freya. Get to know her.’

‘I do know her.’

‘You know what I mean. I’ll be busy and I don’t want you two getting frustrated.’

‘We won’t.’

‘Get her kitted out like a pageant queen.’

‘OK.’

‘And you need to buy yourself a Stetson.’

He feels calm in this pocket of his family - the three of them, cocooned, surrounded by miles of water and dark swampy death. But he’s rattled by her mention of Nashville - not that he can put his finger on why that should be. He senses the malign unknowing shape of it like an interruption, a thing which is gathering form, an awareness that life has its surprises plotted out already. And we rush towards them, regardless.

‘Want to stop?’ he says. He’s seen a gas station lit up like an island in this dark sea, and is already slowing the car down.

He pulls off the road into the station and when he cuts the engine there’s an immediate silence followed by a flood of insect noise, a wide humming that fills the air above them. It’s a hot night and the cement of the forecourt has a baked dry smell, the smell of foreign airports, and the lights strung under the canopy have a sick blue glow to them.

Freya gets out, stretching, pulling the earphones from her ears.

‘You tired, Dad?’ she says.

‘Not really,’ he replies. She looks out towards the endless swamp.

‘God, what a place,’ she says, then heads towards the shop. She’s already as tall as her mother, and has a thickness to her legs Judy’s never had, a gift from him, his size, coming out in her. Maybe she’ll be one of those women who are just too big for men to deal with, too strong. But maybe not. There’s a clumsiness to her which is endearing, after all, and she’s always had a friendly expression, it will get her places.

Judy gets out of the car too, and gives him a small kiss on his neck. ‘
Mon brave
,’ she says, ‘where the hell have you brought us?’

The shop is poor and wooden and there are too many things in it. Above the counter is an old painted sign of an egret or heron taking wing, draughted with great care once, and written above that a slogan saying
Welcome to the Sovereign Miccosukee Seminole Nation
. He’d seen a similar sign along the road about half-an-hour before, but it’s news to Judy and Freya. He sees them look at the sign, then look at the man behind the counter. He’s small and dark featured, with a thin face and a wide dry mouth, and is looking their way. It’s not clear if he’s sitting down or standing up. Behind him is a rack of Indian crafts, basket weaves, beads, dream catchers from various Indian nations, but it’s the pile of alligator feet that attracts Guy. In a large basket near the counter, there must be a hundred of them, dried, polished and heavily scaled, with twisting claws like the hands of an Egyptian mummy. It gives the place an eerie voodoo look, and the entire shop has a fungus smell which might be coming from them.

Freya has seen the alligator feet. She picks one up and has a close look at it, turning it round in her own hand like a devil’s handshake.

‘Good luck,’ the man says, ‘that is if you like a gamble.’ The man has long hair swept back over a pair of thin sloping shoulders. His head seems too big for his body, as if something’s eating him from within. ‘You like gamblin’, miss?’

‘Sometimes,’ Freya says, warily. Her voice sounds wholesome and polite and out of place.

‘I used to,’ the man says, ‘used to a whole lot.’

‘Do you want it?’ Judy says. Freya’s unsure, being corralled by adults into making a decision. ‘I’ll get it for you.’

‘There are CDs here,’ Guy says. Judy looks to where he’s pointing and sees a rack selling Indian chants, sacred songs and dances.

‘They ain’t nothin’,’ the man says.

But Judy’s interested. A collector of music. She picks up a CD with an Indian woman on it, sitting cross-legged on rush-matting.

‘Lady,’ the man says, ‘don’t buy it.’

Suddenly there’s a single laugh and they all notice a second man, his head face down on the counter behind a nut dispenser, a cigarette burning from a hand which hangs nearly touching the floor. ‘Leave ’em be, Glynn,’ the second man says, and laughs again, though he doesn’t lift his face. Guy sees an odd angle of the man’s cheek, hot and sweaty and covered in insect bites.

The man behind the counter smiles, revealing a shiny set of false teeth, possibly the whitest thing in the shop.

‘You want coffee?’ he says to Guy.

Guy takes the coffee outside and stands for a while by the chain-link fence that borders the swamp. Through its diamond pattern of wire the darkness is absolute. A bird is sitting through there, by the side of a dark channel of water.

Some large and impossibly leggy insect flies near him, attracted to the acidic lights of the gas station, and he moves instinctively back to the car. Inside, it smells of the journey they’ve been having, their breath, the warmth of the seats. This car is his friend already. Men love their children and dogs and a little less they love their wives, but they always have a special thing for their cars.

He sits there, drinking his coffee. If he gets the chance, he’s going to talk to Judy tonight about his suspicions. Maybe suspicions is too hard a word, and too alarming, but there have been changes in Judy, changes lately that need to be mentioned. He doesn’t want to get to Nashville so completely unprepared.

Through the windscreen he spots the insect again, as it spirals awkwardly up towards the lights. It looks like a clump of hair you might pull from a shower trap. Near the roof it touches a wire grill built into the light’s casing and bursts into fire.

He sees the others coming out of the gas station. He feels his life returning, the blood and marrow of it, the comfort of family.

The girls get back in the car and Freya shows him the gator foot she now owns.

‘Freaksville!’ she says, making Judy laugh. ‘Drive, Dad.’

He pulls out of the station, all of them in good spirits, in the same car, in the same seats, but a little closer to one another now.

Judy reaches for the radio, tunes in to a selection of local stations, before settling on something which turns out to be Seminole Nation radio. It’s full of gaming adverts for the casino, then more adverts for airboat trips.

She switches it off. ‘Want a song?’ she says.

‘Yoo-betcha,’ Freya says, enthusiastically.

Judy undoes her belt and half turns in her seat:

‘Before you were born, Freya - in fact, before this man was in my life too, I had a boyfriend in Amsterdam. I used to get the coach to Harwich and cross the North Sea on a ferry - waste of time that was, as it turns out. But I did it a lot - he’d never come to England, never did in fact.

‘But the best thing was coming back, for me, on that ferry. It was a night crossing and I used to stand up on deck, whatever the weather, crossing the sea and waiting for the moment I smelled the shore. I used to smell it before I saw it. So this is the song I wrote, about standing on the deck of a ferry, crossing the North Sea from the Hook of Holland to Harwich, one night. This is how it starts:

On a windy quayside, in a warm rain
The smell of cigarettes and leather
Never
Leaving him.

He has the look of a man
In another man’s jacket,
He’s frayed at the edges.
Never
Leaving him.

He has the smile of a man
Who leans on the railings.
Looks down at the rain on the water
Ought to be
Leaving him.’

Guy leans back in his chair, humming Judy’s tune. The cabin is silent. It’s late, and his shoulders and back ache with the writing. Night-time ferries, even now, crossing the seas in a blowing gale, lonely figures standing on deck by the ship’s rail. Right now.

He never did know much about Judy’s ex-boyfriends, other than there were quite a lot of them. The Amsterdam boyfriend - Allan his name was - he used to surface from time to time, but Guy didn’t learn much about him. She had no pictures. He has some ideas of how it must have been, Judy so young her skin was thinner, bluish-white below the eyes, a creamy shine at the top of her cheeks, her hair shorter, sitting in a suede jacket smoking roll-ups in his flat in the Grachtengordel. Good sex probably, plenty of it, it would have taken a lot to go through that sea crossing so often. He wonders whatever happened to him? What happens to those ex-boyfriends, those impossibly cool guys living in loft spaces, with their leather jackets and their pockets filled with the right brand of cigarettes? Maybe Judy, or the girlfriend who replaced Judy, or the girlfriend who replaced that girlfriend, maybe they all told him to grow up, and now he has, encouraged to do so by all those rejections. Maybe he’s boring and middle-aged now. Maybe he fell in a canal. The point being, Judy had been Allan’s, Judy became his, Judy is someone else’s now. It’s clear. We borrow.

Suddenly the
Flood
is rocked, violently, and as Guy bolts up the ladder to the wheelhouse the boat is rocked again, throwing him against the side of the hatch. Immediately he knows what has happened. A ship has passed, nearby. Too close. Through the windows he can see the wide streak of its wake in a pale scar across the sea.