Sea Triptych

Tideline

I have lived next to the sea all my life.

I have heard the boom of smashed water on sand in December, and I have heard the hush of little waves collapsing in August. I have smelt the different scents of the ocean in all its moods – the living smell of an equinoctial tide, all wilting kelp and the breaths of a million limpets. I have breathed in the salt wind in winter, and swallowed the narcotic air of slow summer breakers.

And as long as I have lived near the beach, the old man has too.

It was the autumn of my fourth year, and with autumn comes the south wind, warmish tides of air from the tropic of cancer, propelling in front of it big white clouds, which are what gather in early autumn in great numbers. ‘Happy clouds’, my mother calls them – big, doughy, matronly clouds, ambling in from the confluence zones of the tropics to throng the skies.

After the warmth and light of September (And it is the light I remember: the sky a dream-struck mother-of-pearl for weeks on end, silky golden fronds pointing upwards, a Bay of Naples kind of light, an amateur watercolourists ideal) came the north wind.

When the wind came – hoarse and thrashing in the thick darkness - it was as if September had never been. There is something nullifying about a storm, especially over the sea, and especially at night – instead of the senses awakening, they shut down completely, leaving you with dead nerves in the teeth of the gale. With no reference points on land and no light to navigate by anyway, the world and its usual compliant angles is reduced to a pitching trough of arcing water and Mandelbrot waves - everything is a derangement of the senses; vision is canted to the diagonal; line of sight is funnelled down tubes of dark water, and perspective is reduced to the blink of jagged moonlight on a serrated wave-train. It is as if an explosion has knocked out not just your ear-drums, but your nose and eyes and hands and tongue, leaving you with nothing but a ringing in all five senses.

Which is when I first saw the old man. It was sometime in November, and I was perched on my father’s shoulders, proudly surveying the sweep of the beach – my beach - and watching a line of surf light up the bay. From my lofty height, I watched the lippy breakers smack down on the shingle, and then suck pebbles back into the splintering foam. The sky was darkening, and the wind was strengthening minute by minute. Two black-headed gulls wheeled in a ring of blue, before clouds blotted out them out. And over to the west, clambering up a dune, was a man.

Not a tall man or impressive man – I could see that my father was much taller– but there was something odd about him that caused my four-year old eyes to widen. He trudged slowly up the hillock, in that clomping, tiring way that all dunes are be faced (It is impossible to look graceful on a sand dune) and stopped abruptly at the top. The rising wind snatched a fragment of song over the sand to me, though all I really heard was one gruff note in a mosaic of wind. I thought that maybe it was God, and told my father so. My father chuckled and said that didn't God have a big white robe and live in the clouds? He probably didn't reek of pollack guts which could be smelt a mile away either (Raising a smirk on his part and an owlish blink on mine).

I asked my father if God lived in those clouds - I pointed at the glowering thunder-heads that were piling up in the west - and he laughed and said no, God lived in nice September clouds, which were on holiday in the Azores. I didn't know what the Azores were, but I did know that clouds were wet, so it must have been a bit uncomfortable for him and all his angel friends. I considered the situation in that extraordinarily sombre way small children have when they think they're being serious. Maybe God decided to take a break from His damp house in the sky and go for a walk along my beach – after all, I liked my beach, and with the single-mindedness of the young, assumed that everyone else in the world did too. So maybe that was Him stooping on the ribbed sand and turning a razor-clam shell over and over, thoughtfully it in His calloused hands, squatting in a storm of his own making. God has come to my beach. That's nice, I thought.

My father told me that the wind was getting up and it would rain soon, and would I mind walking because his shoulders were starting to ache? I was carried off his shoulders – and at the top of the arc, as he lifted me over his head, I was tall enough to look down upon God himself – and placed me on the ground. I removed my mittens and put my hot, gummy palm in my fathers’, and we walked home. I looked back every few paces, watching the hunched outline go into soft focus in the growing mire, and then blur, and then disappear altogether behind curtains of mute rain.

Several times I saw the old man over the next few years, and I begin to discover the nature of his existence. Firstly, he was not God – my increasing years began to infuse me with the cynicism that overtakes us all, in the end – and anyway, God (If he existed) lived Up There and this one definitely lived Down Here, in a disused rail-way carriage that was permanently parked on faded sleepers behind the dunes. Sea Kale and chard grew between the slats of the railway line. Little cairns of stones and shells surrounded his encampment, and in summer, a bird-shit streaked blue plastic tarpaulin was strung out between the railway carriage and two upright poles to form a sort of droopy canopy. It looked like saddest thing in all the world, and the mottled surface and hanging folds of the plastic when unfurled looked like a permanent flag of defeat.

The old man had a liking for washed-up artefacts, and I did too, but his collection was better than mine (Not that I cared, I told myself, although I did – I was poised between the tail-end of childhood, with all its eagerness and interest and forthright views, and sullen, quiet adolescent, where to be overt was tantamount to enthusiasm, and enthusiasm was analogous to being deeply and irretrievably uncool).

Pride of place in my collection was the unspeakably sad little skull of a tern; Arctic, Common, Roseate or Little, I never did find out. Second place was given to a perfect circle of milky, worn glass, like a blue eye filmed over with a cataract. I had a secret library hidden under a spider-haunted floorboard that could be eased up with a penknife blade, which was full of shells (Various, organized roughly by species, size, colour and condition), dried husks of bladder-wrack, driftwood corroded down to its ribbed heartwood, continental – and on one occasion, African – soft drink bottles or cans, the glass faded to a pearlescent glow, the labels of the cans faded like relics in a desert from before an apocalyptic war, cuttlefish cartilage, the beak of either a small octopus or a squid, and the anterior teeth of a small shark, probably a dogfish. I had bottles of muddy seawater containing trembling anenomes on star ascidian and limpet encrusted rocks, a small tank with four translucent shrimps which jetted across the sand when startled, and an ancient, depressed looking Blenny which my father had named Oblomov, which peered myopically out from behind its submerged home and only moved – tiredly, like a fat man roused by the doorbell – when I bought it a handful of beach fleas.

The old man, however, had a piece of sheet metal in the shape of a teardrop, I guessed bronze, which the sea-water had discoloured and tarnished to a million lustrous shades of blue and green and even purple, which all ran together like oil in a puddle. I had never seen anything like it. One night, I decided to steal it.

I devised my plan at home, selloptaping a Halfords torch to an aging Canadian Farmers Union (Owned by my grandfather and given reverentially to me when he retired to a condominium just outside Toronto; it was a totem of the soil, this cap; the beating sun, noisy machinery and the vast skies of Ontario, and was worn by me on days when I felt daring and brave, or, paradoxically, worried or uncertain), laying out a sheet of paper in military style on the carpet, carefully drawing diagrams, escape routes, numbered primary, secondary, and tertiary retreats, equipment lists (Torch-hat, waders, gloves, pen-knife, unfortunately bright blue balaclava), and so on. My little sister watched owlishly from the top bunk, kicking the heels of shoes with soft clunks against the side of the bed. “What’s that for?” she asked, pointing with a sticky pink finger at the hat. I sighed loudly, took a pompously deep breath, and explained its various merits, but by now she had stopped listening and was playing with my balaclava, so I threw some Lego at her. After she had run off crying, I breathed a self-righteous lungful, consulted my finalised plan gravely, and marched off down the stairs.

I walked down the lane in the dusty rays of a late July day. Little winds criss-crossed the road at ankle height, and a mulititude of dust spires wound round my legs and spun through gate posts. The air was lit with drifting motes of pollen, salt particles, road mica, and the dancing dust. It was nudging six o’clock in the evening, and the air was warm and languid. A sound carried for miles, as I discovered when I experimentally kicked a dusty pebble down the road, each bounce raising a clipped “Tshck!” from the warm asphalt. Rufus, my neighbours aging labrodor, raised his sorrowful eyes from the tired grass. The only sound was the wash of wind over the machair. I walked along the lane, then veered right past a small pond, capped with the Capuchin domes of coot's heads, then down to the sea.

I waited until I was sure the old man was foraging for watermint and dandelions which flourished by the canals, growing by the rich water, teeming with algae and run-off nutrients, kept anti-septic and healthy by the salt wind, and invaded his campsite.

I crept over to his washing line, a length of thick-gauge nylon, originally used for snaring Conger, and unstrung the hanging metal. It was oddly, even unnaturally warm, with that human warmth that all bronze has, and I untied the knot that had been threaded through a bore-hole at the top. Spangled bluish lines radiated out from the hole where the metal had splintered and scratched from the drill-bit.

“Nice, isn’t it? Found it in the winter tide of ’87. Wicked sharp at the edges, but I sanded it off into its present form. How are you? My name is William”.

Beneath the canopy was the old man. Two beady blue eyes scanned mine, and never has the phrase, ‘Beady blue eyes’ been used with more accuracy – they were twin bolts of sapphire, uniformly one absolute definition of colour: flawless, unblemished blue. Framing them was a blockish, hewn sort of face, barked with age and whiskers and chasmic wrinkles. He looked quietly pleased.

“So you like it enough to” – a grin flickered like a shoal across his mouth – “... steal it?” Rogue syllables darted between his broken teeth like little fish. He smiled brightly.

“I’m really rather pleased, you know. Most people think I’m a little... eccentric. Certainly not worth stealing from. Who wants to steal from a man who smells like Pollack guts?”

I stiffened slightly, and memories skittered along neural pathways. He had fixed his eyes on mine with that last comment, and they had lingered there for an uncomfortably long time. There is no-way he could have heard what my father said, three or four years ago. He must have been perhaps two hundred yards distant. And yet there was a curious suggestion to his voice, an insinuation that this was not guesswork.

He looked at his mangled tennis-shoes for a long time.

“I am a perceptive old bugger. I hear things when other people hear only the sighing wind, or the little chattering voices inside their heads. Seldom do we really think. But who would understand an old man who, admittedly, does have a certain tang of expired fish?” He smiled sadly.

I stood without a word. What could I say?

He raised his eyes to the distant and watched the waves flicker.

“The birds. The little slender sea-horses. The hermit-crabs. They are as close as I have to neighbours, nowadays. Take the metal. I can find more”. He smiled, turned around, and shambled off into his carriage. A few seconds later, I heard a click, then the beginnings of water in a kettle growing restless with heat. I heard the click of a teaspoon in a jar or cup. I heard the faint creak of wicker under stress, then nothing at all. I clutched the sheet metal to my chest, and walked away into the breeze.

Three weeks later, I was sitting atop the highest dune, knees tight around two ears of ryegrass, perched on top of sandy shoulders that were not my fathers but nearly as familiar. I had not seen the old man during that time, and I felt guilt creep into my head and take up lodgings. I had come to return it to the sea. I don't know why. It just seemed the right thing to do. I stood on the shore and hurled the driftmetal into the waves. It thrummed through the air, and hit the water. Bubbles crowded and slopped round its wake, and within a minute, both metal and bubbles had disappeared. I returned to my dune and watched the waves whisper down the length of the bay. High above, a cormorant floated in the late summer sky. It spiralled down and pierced the water at the exact point where the metal had sunk, presumably hunting the shoals of mackerel that strayed into the shallows. I didn't realize until I saw the same bird winging inland, its beak cross-hatched with mackerel, that cormorants also have bright blue eyes.



Fairlight

There is a bench perched on the lip of a cliff, and on it sits a seven-year old boy. Below the bench is a slope of chalk, and beyond that the sea. Around the legs of the bench are shallow bowls of sand and soil, and out of each grows little fronds of kale and purslane. The boy kicks his legs heels back and forth against the little trench excavated by the heels of dug-in boots. He is holding a hermit crab, which peers suspiciously up at him. Out of his pocket juts a rib of driftwood, worn down to cords of heartwood.

A man trudges up the path, grunts an acknowledgement, and walks on. The boy lifts himself off the bench – seasoned ash, cut into eight slats. The seat is worn to a grey sheen from the shifting of bodies and the blasting of winds. Each plank is secured with four rivets, and each rivet is mottled with ochre rust and lime lichen. The boy watches a gull circle, then walks downhill.

There is a pathway that runs down towards the salt marshes and the main road. The path veers left at first down a woodland ride. The path is hemmed in by pleached trees, but at this time of year, the tunnel is covered in fruiting hawthorn spurs. The boy picks a sloe off a branch, brushes off the powdery bloom and pops the bitter berry into his mouth.

At the bottom of the path is a car-park and a tarred shed, open-fronted with blackboards resting against either shutter. At the counter is a man with a beard stained the colour of flax. But that is not what the boy looks at.

Sitting by the left back wheel of a Ford Orion is a little girl, her head canted downwards between her shoulders.

The boy walks over and squats down awkwardly. What is wrong, says the boy. From within the cavern of limbs, a tiny voice says: I can’t find my brother.

Where is your brother, says the boy, and this time the girl raises her head a bit and says: I don’t know. My Mum shouted at him and he shouted too and ran back to the car and I asked my mum could I go back to the car too and she shouted at me so I followed him but he’s really fast and when I got to my mum’s car he wasn’t there so I now I don’t have anyone at all.

It’s okay. It’s alright, says the boy.

The little girl wiped her nose with her forearm, and looked critically at her shoes.

My shoes are wet.

I know, says the boy.

And so are my socks.

Yes, I can see that.

Will you stay with me until my brother comes back, says the little girl.

Yes. I mean, if you want me to. He fumbled in his pocket for a moment, unclenched his palm, and on it sat a coiled whelk shell.

Here. This is called a hermit crab.



Pelagic.
 

I have walked the beach in November.
On sift-water sands near Dymchurch
My ice-broken footsteps
On the black and tan dunes.
Tanker on the summit of a cooling tower.
Sub-sun sealight mounting the flanks of Dungeness.
Tar-board shinglesong on the walls of Prospect cottage.
Seven ceramic seahorns in the cast of a tusk of root bole.
One gull skull in a wash of machair.
Sandsprint bones.

I was.

Rootwater
Shootwater
Fly-catcher & archer.
Flaxlight and dust
Rustbark follower.

You were.

Sprint-air
Haunt-wing
Skylark & swallow.
Leanlight and breathshot
Cloudspat drifter.

I was.

Arc-sea.
Wave-train.
Goby & blenny.
Tideline and benthos.
Athletic waters.

You were.

Arch-limb
Vein-thin
Head & heart.
Lungwater and coppertongue
Short-shout.

I am.

Rootwater thief.
Marine-snow sleeper.

You are.

Air-dark ellipse.
Spent-lunged passer.

You were.

Going.

You are.

Gone.

Young Old Man.

Today I was caught picking up conkers on the way to University. Caught by two parties, actually - one a mother and child, and the other a pair of multiply pierced and tattooed young people who were obviously much cooler than I am. The mother looked at me with a mixture of pity - as if I'd suffered extensive brain-damage through some terrible mishap and was reduced to slouching around town slack-jawed picking things up and muttering distractedly under my breath - and distaste, as if I was fondling, shall we say, a dead Magpie and cooing over it.

The second party were obviously trying quite hard not to laugh. I railed at this, actually, but since I am not very tall, genetically scruffy, and shaved off my homeless beard, I am not a very imposing figure, not that I necessarily was pre-beard.

All of which made me think (As I strode indignantly along, sucking furiously on a cigarette and stomping more than was strictly necessary) that said conker actually meant more to me as an adult (I use the word with caution) than as a child.

When I was a child, the only things I cared about were essentially Lego and the pursuit of Monster Munch. Oh, there were things like family and the embryonic flickers of an interest in writing and stuff like that, but no, pretty much the only things I clutched close to my heart were making extravagantly beweaponed space ships - or failing that, gluing torpedeo tubes and lasers onto my sister's Sylvanian Family toys; everything is improved with a weapon of mass destruction taped to it, even Kinder Egg toys - and Flamin' Hot Monster Munch. God, how I loved Flamin' Hot Monster Munch. I would've mugged the most hazel-eyed, tousle-haired hobbity toddler for a pack of them. Still would.

Conkers were fun in the playground - I eventually found that the basic boiling-conkers-in-vinegar hardening process could be reinforced with a superglue glaze; risky, seeing as UHU Superglue is one of the most lethal substances known to man; I once glued a Spitfire to my forehead by mistake and went around with the imprint of the RAF on my forehead for some days afterwards - but there the buck stopped. Once you'd demolished your opponent and had been carried round the playground by squeaking minions, lordly declaiming your mastery of the fruit of the horse-chesnut, you'd sort of reached the end. Anyway, conkers were only about for a little bit of autumn, and then you had to go back to pretending to be Sonic The Hedgehog and tormenting the weakest or indeed most ginger of the group.

I am aware all of this makes me sound like one of those children who motored around the playground solo making whooshing noises while the other children shunned them in case they, you know, bit them or something. Nothing could be further from the truth; I was a sensitive, cornflower blue-eyed and radiantly blonde and charming child with, admittedly, a terrible, terrible haircut.

Anyway, the ginger kid in question was, I promise, pathologically insane and continues to be a dangerous person to this day - I believe he has diverted his mania into Manga these days, which is at least mildly reassuring, even though I believe Manga is for lonely, lonely people, more so then Leonard Cohen and heroin, even - and the hair colour is in this case only relevant for reasons of categorization, obviously.

Now, on the other hand, there is something deeply satisfying about a shiny, organically tough horse-chesnut. Or walking around a corner just as the sun comes out. Or pulling your hood over your head when it rains and being encircled by warmth. Sometimes just being is enough - life is a litany of experience and moments, obviously, but sometimes, the walking to and the ending of is reward in itself, at least for me.

I often walk around the lake by the broad after or before a seminar, and I seem to be the only one that does so. Again, there are other people about - joggers, buzzing like metal wasps with their ipods on full blast - and a sprinkling of dog-walkers, generally bowed old boys with equally rheumatic wheezy dogs ("Come on Stanley, wheeeee" "Woof woof, wheeeee, bark bark") and upright middle-aged ladies with expensive highlights and Hunter wellies - but I appear to be the only one who sits on a bench with a coffee and cigarette and book and ruminates a bit. I cannot begin to calculate the ammount of kindly walkers that have almost certainly pitied me, sitting on my bench with a notebook open on my lap and a moorhen tutting at me behind a frond of bullrushes. One day I may bring a sign with me and hang it over my resident bench, bearing the legend, "I have friends, I certainly like a drink, I am on this bench by choice, I have not had a crisis, familial or otherwise. You concern is appreciated, but I promise, without cause. Thank you".

It is possible I am reading into this too much.

Music for the end of summer and the beginning of autumn.

It has rained a lot lately. Norwich is almost entirely flat, except for two hills, one of which I live on, and one of which is almost alpine by Norfolk standards, two and a bit miles to the north-west, crowed by the mossy burren of Mousehold Heath and a big retail park. And the world's most dangerous crossroads - a four-way hellmouth of implausibly wide roads, frothing joker-faced drivers, and nano-second timed traffic lights - just enough time for you to take one ill-advised step before the Multipla horde crushes it to the texture of a rillette.

The point is, when the land is as flat as it is around here, and pock-marked with strands of wan trees, mainly poplars and sad little elms, nothing drains. Things that get wet stay wet for a very long time. My front garden has been squishy for over a week now. The garden path is turning into a rectangular strand of Rannoch Moor. The only thing that seems to enjoy the rain are the Garden Spiders - those bulbous, tawny-coloured ones, each with a white cruciform blaze on its abdomen - which have strung up webs like silk awning from every surface. Each strand is spangled with dew-light in the morning and is bright and lovely and easily avoided, but by evening is rendered entirely invisible and makes walking up to the front door an excercise in limbo. Still, few things are more entertaining than watching a guest perform a mad spastic dance in the front room, squeaking frantically, after realizing that they are liberally coated in spider web and are probably the new target of an exceedingly large and miffed garden spider.

Rain does different things to different people. Generally it makes me brood at the window, hands knotted behind my back like the shade of Peter Cushing. But this time around - probably because the persistant damp and me being struck down with flu basically turned me into an unshaven hermit for the best part of a week - it made me listen to lots of old music and read lots of old books, wander about in my head and rummage in dust-boxes and thought of the tails of summer and the beginnings of autumns that weren't quite so wet - some of them weren't wet at all - and put them together as a playlist.

Making a playlist is my kneejerk reaction to peaks and troughs. Each playlist is a bit like making a very exact, very subtle, very responsive puzzle - each placed piece turns a remembrance or a smell or a quality of light in my head. Each song has to compliment the others but not be identical to it. Each song has to lead you down a path somewhere and hopefully give you some kind of destination that is natural and progressive to its beginning.

This all sounds very muso, and I don't mean it to be. The best way to think of it is just another kind of story.

The inspirations for this playlist for me were a handful of the following:

* Being clonked over the head with an oar by mistake by a friend of my parents while boating on a big pond in August when I was four, maybe five. I remember seeing Great Crested Newts flitting under the amber water. That, and a big bump on the back of my head.

* Trying to run on a black-tarpaulin sheathed hay-bale in the manner of a running machine. And failing. Falling off was fine, being crushed underneath said bale was not.

* Drinking a strange blue energy drink and eating Discos on top of an abandoned tank-trap in a valley in Northiam in the dog days of summer, or having haphazard BBQ's in that same place in the pissing rain, each one of us druidic with our hoods up, blue cordite smoke unwrapping from within the hood as we puffed on our Lambert & Butlers. The very particular scratches on the legs and forearms from cornstalks.

* Sitting on a bench on what is probably my favourite place in the world, The Firehills near Winchelsea, on an fiendishly foul November afternoon, with the sky nothing but a boiling pan of shredded clouds and fucking great ball-bearings of rain smashing into your raincoat. If you sat very still at a very particular angle then it was possible to be completely circled by warmth and bone-dry while the gale whirled around you. The slightest twitch to the left or right and you'd get a mouthful of blasted sea-spray and rain to the face or a jet of frozen wind down the sleeve, and that was part of the fun.

* The public bar of The Rock pub near Chiddingstone in Kent. We moved when I was eight, but the bar-tenders, locals, the lot of them are friends with my parents and have been, as far as I can see, more or less from the year dot. Some friendships are rooted in the bone, and some familes are outside of the blood. The Rock has a paved, slightly uneven brick floor and low oak beams that are slightly warped through years of rising beer fumes, pipe smoke, the braying laughter and spittle of a certain kind of Kentish local and the steamy exhalations from a hundred dynasties of damp dogs - some of them quiet working-dogs, some elegant and docile Dalmatians with peanut-sized brains toted by ladies from Tunbridge Wells with spotless Hunter Wellies who would cautiously circumnavigate a puddle in their shining Range Rovers in the pub car-park after a hearty Ploughmans and maybe a half of IPA on a drizzly Sunday afternoon.


What you take from it is up to you - suggestion and insinuation are much more fun than dictation, after all.

http://open.spotify.com/user/trade_winds/playlist/4FJrndb8FPw44jmRXZ77KT

Love, Nick.