Wrecking (Part Three)

3/3

I head away from the beach, my shadow a bad limping monster in moonlight struggling to keep pace. I stumble up cooled dunes not knowing where I’m going. I want to continue, to run, to journey away and away until I have no fear of turning back and seeing something I recognize, or something new I am ashamed of.

I want to stay out all night, to punish myself possibly, I’m not sure. I keep replaying moments in my head as I walk aimlessly and trace holding patterns in the stones underfoot. I want to stay out longer than him, I want to endure. I want to contract pneumonia and see you all through the breathing apparatus of an intensive care ward. I will be held down in white and made to work through machines, I want to feel that sympathy and love, feel that you finally understand, feel that you forgive all I have done, for there is so much.

Walking, shaking, crying, I feel like all the toxins from the past week have waited until this precise moment to attack my body from the inside. A list of complaints: I’m sweating, nauseous, listless, aching, my joints feel like they’re seizing up, my head stings, I cannot focus in the dark.

I keep limping away from the house. The sound of the breakers is my anchor as I walk a parallel path to the shore, clambering over groynes and rocks. I see decay everywhere, in wooden huts slowly imploding over time and pieces of boats left like bone on the beach waiting to fossilize. In a mind’s eye I see oil rigs standing solid and sturdy like stilt walkers. Like the war of some world’s monsters, which world I am not sure, for I am no longer sure I am part, no longer sure I am connect. No longer sure I want or deserve to be. Is that the north or the Irish sea? I think about shipwrecks and ships and nuclear waste left to drift and rot beneath a sheen surface, awaiting treasure hunters and riptides to surface them.

The dark is blue grey and surrounds like elusive gas. It is unconstant and shifting, revealing glimpses and shapes and memories of things before recoiling and whisking them away, wrapping them up in some half remembered embrace.

The hot steam of embarrassment I felt rising up beneath my skin on the beach, crimson and claustrophobic like drunkenness, is beginning to fade as I feel the cold beginning to penetrate me. Seeping in viscous and conscious, seeking out the gaps, the weaker parts of me; the back of my knees, my hip, the arm I broke when I was fourteen. Through all of my scars.

What would it say about me if I turned back now? I have abandoned him, cowardly and shamefully, but now I return. Not out of a sense of regret and that I have done wrong and have returned to apologise and make right, but because I’m cold and lost and feel I have twisted an ankle. The moment plays back like a stuck dvd, I shake my head and change my angle across the beach, trying to shake it off, but it remains, like a hangover or a fly buzzing around something it knows is soon to be carrion. With this amount of self hatred and loathing for my own actions I should feel regret, yet I do not. I am a mould, a spore living and sucking off others, but I had no other choice. I know, that within me there was no option of joining him in that primal howl, that strange stand, joining him bent double and screaming at lights overhead like an untransformed werewolf. I felt neutered, unable, transparent. His moment of final power and self control, of actualizing some deep and sudden realized resentment into action and word, merely stripped that same power and ability from me. His willingness, his final and total sublimination to his fate are what gave him the impetus to finally challenge that fate, me? I am pristine and golden and umblemished. I know that there is nothing destined to happen to me, my own careful sense of self preservation and control has seen to that no end. I have been careful to never give too much away, never remove or lend out any sense of me, for fear that what I need to subsist could somehow be lost. But now, stumbling across a Norfolk beach in the middle of the night, how far has that really got me? I have shed layers like a snake does skin, and allowed others to think they have reached some kind of core, whether they think they have found it, pierced it, tamed it or understood it is immaterial, the fact that I – always needing to be one step ahead, secretive and with that extra knowledge – knew the truth was enough. I feel like a poker player with extra aces tucked within my sleeve, yet as I watch the game go on around me, whilst I never give anything away, I will never win the big hand, never clean up like others do, because despite the advantage I know only I possess, I will never risk putting anything down on the table to test it. My own carefully cultured fragility is not the lie I have crafted, but reality, and I am as transparent as I fear. Maybe everyone else knew that all along, and the only one I fooled was myself? I thought I could create myself impervious and stronger, but in that moment on the shore I saw myself cast in glass rather than stone, fragile, decorative and mute.

Out on the water there are lights of distant boats and rocks. The hovering lanterns of night fishermen far out to sea. The spots of light move like the water is solid ice, and they are drifting, frictionless, from some push a million years previous.

Sitting down, I crane my neck up and try to see the outlines of clouds in silhouette above me. Black on black. Cast against a slippery mercury moon they appear a huge omniscient mountain range originating from the other side of the world. Watching them, I wonder what he is doing now. Whether he is angry, disappointed or more likely bemused. Is he sitting in front of the fire with a bottle of Laphroaig? Or still there, knee deep in salt water, screaming and yelling and punching triumphant fists out. Is he walking slowly after me, following my haphazard trail through the stones? Is he calling search and rescue, the coastguard and the police, finding me with flashing lights.

I realize that even now I have turned this, like the whole weekend, into something about me, I have twisted it, turned it, and pointed it in on itself. I am the snake eating itself from the tail.

Desperate for something else to do, to think about, I trace overlapping lines on the shore, stooping and picking up stones in the dark, looking to find ones that will skim.

Wanting to stay out all night, I last probably two hours before I am beaten and return back to the house. It sits dormant and dark, with no sign of life. Even now, I cannot go inside. Fear of what awaits me; rage, indignation, indifference, all hold my steps outside. For the first time, I wish I had one of his cigarettes to smoke. I pace a while, quiet, and then decide to sleep in the car. I curl myself up into abstract shapes, trying to find a position where all my limbs can come to rest, coiling my jumper into a spare pillow and sucking on mints found in the glove compartment. I try to sleep, but my mind moves in circles, and all I can hear is the sea through glass, and I try to focus on that, if nothing else, as the beginnings of rain gently land on the car’s metal shell.

- - -

There is a knock at the window. I wind it down and try to think when it was I finally slept. My body is twisted, stuck and complaining. He stands in an ancient overcoat, – probably found from somewhere deep within the house- a dressing gown and sunglasses, clutching two mugs of coffee and a cigarette. He passes the coffee through the open window like a drive in meal.

“Cheers” I croke.

“Clement today” he says, as the wind lifts up corners of his coat and gown to reveal pale hairy legs.

He is the only living thing I can see, the wind is pulling the waves sideways and maybe the gulls have sought shelter. The coffee goes down hot and bitter and burns tastebuds and removes skin on its way.

“You want to get in?” I say.

We sit and drink coffee together in silence. We let the wind blow in through the car’s open windows, our hair flapping and rushing air in our ears like we are standing atop high buildings.

With each moment grows the weight of the unsaid again. A crushing and claustrophobic balloon growing out of the dashboard.

“Sorry about last night” I say

“S’alright” he says.

“I didn’t mean to leave you there”

He takes a long drag. “I must’ve looked a bit strange” and shrugs “I don’t blame you”

“sorry” I say. Again.

“Nah”

“It needed to happen” I say

“It did” he nods.

“I’m not sure what though.”

“Huh?”

“Not sure what needed to happen”

He takes an age. “Well. Something did. Maybe we should take that, stop worrying what it was.”

“I suppose” I say.

He doesn’t reply this time. I don’t feel a piercing relief of pressure, but still, somewhere, air is being released, vented, let out slowly. I finish my coffee.

“I didn’t want you to be alone” I say.

“We’ve both got to start getting used to it.” He says, winding the window up and down now, fiddling like a bored pupil in class.

“But still, I wanted-“

I never get any further. I can’t dredge out the words. Somewhere I know that whatever has just happened, the whole weekend, in there is as much truth as I am going to glean. There is no more and nothing left to give. Finally I give in and sigh, “What are we going to do now?”

“I don’t know” he says, “I half feel like going home”

“Me too”

“Is that really sad” he says, “that we could only make it a night?”

“What I really want to do” I say “What I really would like to do. I’d like to get an axe and cut down that house. I’d smash it up and hack it into pieces. I’d cut it and rip it and turn it into driftwood and matchsticks, then I’d pile the whole lot up on the beach.”

I drain my cup and taste coffee grit between my teeth. I am on a roll.

“And in the pile would be wood and bits of furniture and photographs and blankets and all that crap. And I’d cover the whole lot in petrol and burn it all. Just to have the biggest bonfire on the beach. Then I’d watch. I’d sit and watch it all burn down, until the tide came in and took it all away and washed everything back to being clean. That’s what I’d do really. If I could.”

“If we had some petrol” he says

“And if we had some petrol” I say

“Or an axe” he adds.

“Or an axe”

I can see it in my eye, I think he can too. And we contemplate the thought of it for a moment, the chopping, piling, burning thought of it. Because we both know we will never do it, and the thought is the closest we’ll get.

We go back inside and finish off the last of the bacon for breakfast. We drain our few remaining beers as we gather our things and pack the car. I see all the stuff I’ve brought to remind me, to remind us, of the past, being stuffed away into the bottom of bags and rucksacks. I see, being shoved into his bag, bottles of pills and medicines.

Just before we set off, he asks if he can drive. I pause, is he too weak? Could he fall asleep at the wheel? Is his eyesight what it was? Can he drive on all that medication? I consider saying no, but I hand him the keys.

“Something else” I say, and I fish in my pocket, and give him one of the stones I picked up in the night.

I settle back down in the passenger side and unfurl the various maps we have scrimped together. All out of date and with pages missing they are barely a help, still listing places and features long since torn down, or failing to list roads and towns that have rose up since their creation.

I imagine the key turning in the ignition and him leading us off under my unsteady direction. I trace imaginary routes on the paper maps, and think of everywhere we could go. I imagine a future laid out horizontal like a road, of funerals and eulogies and solicitors and suit hire. We drive away from the house for the final time, it remains, itself an achievement. I wonder how many more things for him will become final, as the days get closer how the mundane will become all the more extraordinary, and I wonder if this is the last time he’ll see the sea. As the tracks and verges turn alphabetical, B roads to A roads, my mapreading is less required and I put my head against the window and let pale sun rest on my cheeks.

Ahead are parties and and solicitors and finally a funeral. I look back across the car; he squints into the incoming low sun with determination, his hands grip the wheel and he shifts gear as if it is he and his force of will that moves the car rather than petrol and hydraulics and pistons and pressure.

I do not profess to know him best, or speak with any such authority to create a eulogy for him, but It is how I would like to present him, in overcoat and pyjamas, cigarette clamped in mouth like Clint, window open and music blaring, dragging a Peugeot and a too tired friend across England, all possibilities open in his mind.

It is how I see him now when I think of him.

“Don’t you worry” he says, “I’ll get us home”

I allow my eyes to close against the glass of the window, feeling the vibration of the engine and the road beneath gently work through my skull like a massage. A bonfire on a beach burns imaginary behind my eyes.

I will let him take me this far, let him drive the pair of us because regardless of how long or how far we go, soon he will not be able and then I know, finally, and with such dread it dissolves holes within me, it shall be my turn to be strong.

Authors Note:

‘Wrecking’ is the ancient and once commonplace activity of looting the valuables that drift to the shore from nearby shipwrecks. Today, beachcombers still like to refer to themselves as ‘Wreckers’.