The Sea, The Sea

They walk in single file along the promenade. An army of two. No one else is around. She strides ahead of him with her head down. She has a fleece jacket tied around her waist. He walks with a stick and with every step he forces its ferrule down at the patches of concrete between the litter and the waste matter and pushes off at an angle so that it forces him into a sort of diagonal tacking motion both against and with the wind. She stops at the shelter and waits for him to catch up. She hands his bag to him. He settles in the shelter and fusses with his blanket and ensures that the bag stays upright and puts his book down on the slats of the seat. She clambers across the rocks. She pauses at the point where the boulders give way to shingle. She loosens her fleece, and lays it down. The clouds reflect the sea, the sea the clouds. She is quickly greyed-out in the distance of his vision. She flounders down across the stones to the strandline, stones rattling in her wake. She almost slips on a patch of kelp that waves in the wind, with the sand flies fussing in each leaf.

She gazes at the shearing plates of clouds. The higher ones are tracking over the others, travelling at twice the speed. She bites her tongue. Deliberately. Absent-mindedly. Deliberately and absent-mindedly. Needles of pain shoot up her sinuses.

He punches the bony undersides of his forearms, to attempt to keep awake. He feels the dull, bruised resistance well up, and his eyelids droop open.

He watches a colony of sanderlings twittering up and down the shoreline, probing for spineless food, ebbing and retreating as the tide grows and decays, pattering like horizontal raindrops. At this distance, they are tiny vertical shadows.

She breathes in and swills the taste around. It’s as if tiny buds of the sea had frozen then shattered and melted in her mouth.

He removes a cheese and onion sandwich from its wrapper and chews and chews and pulls out a stray piece of onion from between his teeth then swallows it whole and imagines it all sinking deep down into the Victorian plumbing of his guts and imagines his bowels ejecting the remains and sweeping them out through the pipes and crumbling brickwork into the shifting, treacherous, turbulent, poisonous ocean. The clingfilm wraps around his fingers and he screws it into a ball and throws it at the grating in the gutter at the side of the road.

He picks up the book and holds it in one hand, against the subdued backdrop of the ocean and tries to focus on both, one in each eye, and fails then tries to focus with both eyes on the letters of the title and fails then puts the book back down and stares right out to sea, past her, past the wading birds, past the furthermost ring of the drainage pipe, seeking to focus purely on the patch of clear sky at the very tip of the V at the horizon and fails.

He feels his eyelids drifting down, scraping against the rogue particles of sand that have flown like insects into his eyes.
She holds her binoculars up to her eyes. The cold metal stings against the puffed-up skin.

He closes his eyes then opens them and looks down the beach towards her but she doesn’t turn round.

She watches an oystercatcher. Impaling the smoothness of the sand. A gaudy show-off with bright orange trousers. A thing draped in feathers. Everything covered. Nothing to give any sign of ageing. Every peck a sort of rape.

She kneels down amongst the seaweed. Ruffles a piece of bladderwrack. Picks it up. Shakes it. By the balls. Flicks her thumb against the rough hem of the bladders. Feels the glutinous smoothness of the flotation chambers. Squashes hard. Feels the viscous goo squeeze over her fingers.

She lets her hearing dive into the churn of the leading wave. She listens to the rinse of pebbles. They knock and clash against each other like tiny compacted bells, the growth and decay of their sound as short-lived as a sound could possibly be. Almost as short-lived as a stillborn infant.

She feels the bite of the wind heat-stinging her skin with particles of sand, leaving the patches of sunburn in-between feeling cold. She feels it easing out the goosepimples. She reaches down to stroke them. They feel like the skin of some wise, ignored, neglected lizard, basking on a hotter wall on a hotter day in a hotter country.

He smells her perfume wafting up the beach and the curls of fragrance fizz into his nose, twisting like ribbons of kelp, and they ferment and cloy to a fused block behind his eyes and stay there.

She feels the texture of a flat stone against her hands, rough as a callus on her foot. She skims it against the breakers. It half-buries and erupts from the water seven times, the frequency diminishing as the sound dies away.
She shivers, and turns to pick her fleece jacket up off the rocks. He is looking down at his tartan blanket, not asleep. Not watching, either.
She lifts her hand. She smells the spilt-salt odour of the squashed seaweed. She licks her hand. Kippers.

She picks up a stone; a round one, this time. She makes as if to throw it. She turns round. He is gazing at his feet. She throws it in his direction. The stone bounces a safe distance away but within earshot. He is gazing at his feet.

He closes his eyes then opens them and looks down the beach towards her but she doesn’t turn round.

She gazes at the groynes, exposed by the tide. Untended ruins now. Like gap-toothed remains. Like gap-toothed remains in the ruined gums of an old man pulling his blanket up around him in a shelter and gazing out to the cold, slurrying, pale, relentless sea that moves his shit around every night and day. She sees every stump reduced from what it was - posts that had towered above and held cross-spars high enough to run under now decaying down into the sand. Things without structure any more. Revealed, then covered back up by a sort of migration of sand, building up and eroding back down. A full set of seasons in half a day. Growth and decay. Growth and decay. Nothing beside remains. The only type of groin she’s ever likely to see again.

He scrunches his eyes up tight and peers at his blanket and the tartan squares seem to come up and surround his eyes and he hunches his shoulders and the odour of urine and chip wrappers fades and he smells nothing but sand and sea and candyfloss and his mother’s perfume and the damp coat of a black Labrador.

He watches the oystercatcher and recognises the same one as last year from the brown mutant scuff of feathers beneath the right wing and he sees it vainly scratting around for food in what seems the implacable inertness of the sand and thinks that every stoop seems to contain perhaps a hint of slowing down and every stab of the beak seems a sort of cry for help, a plea for deliverance from this ritual.

He reaches for his thermos, for the cold comfort of lukewarm tea, and he unscrews the plastic cup and places it to his ear and he hears nothing but her feet rearranging the patterns of the rocks as she looks for displaced sea-creatures and he releases himself from her private world, lowers the cup and pours in the familiar polluted mixture of milk and sugar and old leaves that he drinks down without waiting for the steam to clear from his spectacles and the fetid brew swills around inside his stomach like the turbid, restless, all-encrusting sea.

He picks up the book and riffles the pages against his ear to makes his own private sea breeze then puts it down again.

She runs her teeth across her tongue. She tastes the salts of her own blood, leeched out and coating the inside of her incisors.

She lowers the binoculars and looks far out to sea. She tries to refocus. She fails. It feels like the tide has to turn before she’ll be able to. She raises the glasses to her eyes again, and zooms them in, and ensnares a crab, scurrying up and down the rotted wood of the breakwater, trapped inside the single projected circle of the binoculars like a prisoner in a rock-pool. Even magnified, everything around her seems smaller than before.

He punches the soft undersides of his upper arms, to attempt to keep warm and each blow keeps time with the inrushing waves and each seventh blow is heavier than the others but with each strike he feels nothing, except the marshmallow absorption of his own skin beneath his fists.

He feels the depressions of the slats in the seat against his backside and imagines himself sinking through them, sliding in splinters on to the promenade, and sinking through the grating, sinking deep and travelling down through the sewers and returning from the waters clean and agile as a porpoise.

She watches the sun set early. As ever, a cloud sneaks out above the horizon before it lowers itself fully. Like a thick warm woollen muffler that the sea is putting on before the sun goes sucking down. She turns to walk away, and spirals of heat carve up her tendon. She hobbles up the shingle. She carries the sound of the sea with her, deeply embedded in her tinnitus, a permanent memento, like a conch-shell stuck to the side of her head.

He watches her striding over the pebbles, the receding waves muted into greyness behind her, throwing her into sharp relief. He closes his eyes then opens them when he feels her breath near to his face.

“Tell me; tell me honestly, please: you know him; you’re his father. He’s not coming back to me is he?”
“No. No, he’s not. I’m sorry.”
“No. Right. Let’s get you home. Or would you prefer to go to the pub?”
“Yes. Yes, I’d like that. I’d like to go to the pub, please. If you don’t mind. Thank you.”
“OK. Let’s go.”
She helps him up, and they move away, arm-in-arm, both limping, back along the empty promenade.