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.