The Sea Inside Read online

  This is a place with its own rules. Its performers enter and leave the stage left and right, from wading birds pecking at the mud to slow-moving tankers pulling into the refinery to be suckled dry of their tarry cargo, and flat barges bearing turbine blades on their backs like sleek grey cetaceans. But they’re all dwarfed by the estuary’s most evident yet oddly ignored actors: container ships and car carriers.

  Registered in Kobe, Panama or Monrovia, their names aspire to a Western status – Lake Michigan, Austria, Heritage Leader – while their sides are proprietarily stamped Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, Wallenius Wilhelmsen, or with the anonymous initials – NYK, EUCC, CMA–CGA – of commercial states. Apart from the fact that they float, there’s little to associate these giants with the romantic notion of a vessel. Rather than roaming the seas, they’re locked into rigid routes. They accomplish in days journeys that James Cook took years to traverse. They’re standardised to the width of the Panama Canal: ships made to fit a world made to fit them. They might as well have been chopped off the production line. Their cantilevered prows look down on everything else, but their square sterns appear wrinkled, as if they were papered-over hardboard.

  No one rhapsodises over these maritime pantechnicons as they come and go on their migrations. No one celebrates their arrival after heroic journeys to and from the other side of the world. They are filled. They are emptied. They move in between. No one stands on the quayside to wave them off. There are no Royal Marine bands to see them on their way. No bunting, no ceremony, no joy or sadness, just a slipping away. They embody a shrinking world. Half as big again as Titanic, they sail down the same waterway with bland indifference, lateral tower blocks so huge that, as one waterside inhabitant tells me, they cut off all electronic signals as they pass by. Their sides dribble with rust; the sea will get them in the end. They are ghost ships, devoid of life, save for shadowy figures seen through letterbox slots let into their flanks.

  A life at sea? Their ill-paid crews might as well have signed up to a sweatshop. Since the decks are too dangerous to walk, the men remain within the metal hulks, themselves contained. Yet these ships carry almost everything we consume. Top-heavy, stacked with blocks like toy bricks, fifteen thousand tonnes of steel, four hundred metres long, sixty metres above the surface and another ten below, they ride high in times of unequal exchange. As one captain says, ‘We take air to the East.’ In better circumstances they sit lower in the sea, a plimsoll line of the global economy. At the end of their journey they will be unloaded by bestriding cranes onto railway trucks. In turn, others take on shiny new vehicles shelved in multistorey stacks like factory-farmed chickens, from which they are driven into the bellies of the floating car parks and out the other side to Singapore.

  But then, this is a city of the sea, built on reclaimed land; even its railway station platform is composed of cement and shingle embedded with shells. Meanwhile those same ships bring back invasive species on befouled hulls or in their ballast, Japanese seaweeds and Manila clams; to marine biologists, this is probably the most ‘alien’ estuary in Britain, with new organisms arriving every year.

  In the nearby National Oceanographic Centre – an oddly industrial-looking complex itself, mounted with telecommunication masts, and flanked by long refrigerated sheds that contain sample cores of the earth’s archival depths, every three metres representing one hundred million years – I study the Admiralty Navigation Charts of these commercial waters. Pulling great plasticised sheets from chest-high cabinets, I pore over maps that have turned the world around to show the importance of the sea to the land, rather than the other way about. Atlases display the waters around our coast as blank blue expanses, but here all the contours and depths are laid out, along with their utility to men and women at sea.

  The shore from which I swim, for instance, is labelled, unappealingly, ‘East Mud’. Nearby is a ‘Swinging Ground’, along with a ‘Hovercraft Testing Area’ and ‘M.O.D. Moorings’. Buildings, houses and roads have vanished, to be replaced by sites selected only for their relevance to the sea. Church spires and ‘Tall Buildings’ become landmarks, identified by bald details: ‘House (red roof)’. Through Southampton Water and into the Solent and the Channel beyond, a martial arena is mapped out: from the benign ‘Dolphin Bank’ to the treacherous shallows of ‘The Shingles’; from ‘Radar Scanning’ and ‘Foul Area’ to ‘Firing Practice Area’, ‘Submarine Exercise Area’, ‘Explosives Dumping Area’, and ‘US Base’; the reverberations of seismic global conflict brought to placid inshore waters. They are designated training grounds for the closed installations scattered along this coast, like the military port at Marchwood, busy sending ships laden with materiel to foreign wars and bringing back the broken remains. After the Falklands war, the bodies of eighty men were stored in its cargo shed.

  One afternoon, after sitting on the sea wall watching the birds, I was about to ride home when I saw a strange shape moving down the water. It sat low on the surface, matt black, absorbing the light around it. Escorted by three tugs, the nuclear submarine – HMS Tireless, a ‘hunter-killer’ here on a ‘friendly visit’ – glided slowly south, powered by invisible force. I could see figures on its conning tower, and others walking the length of the vessel. They looked precarious to me, moving down its rounded back with no restraining railings to stop them rolling off; they might as well have been strolling on the back of a whale. As I watched, two of the crew reached its high tail fin and from the vessel’s stern pulled out a white flagpole that stood there, as though it were a parade ground. It was being prepared for its descent.

  Soon, somewhere off the Isle of Wight, it would submerge into the English Channel, and travel six thousand miles beneath the surface of the Atlantic to the Falklands. Nuclear submarines are so efficient that they can stay below for three years or more. In Scotland, a taxi driver told us how he’d worked in Faslane, at the submarine base. He said that the submariners’ mail was habitually screened for any possible bad news from their families which might cause them upset. Even if their loved ones had died, there would be nothing they could do about it – there’d be no return to shore.

  The driver spoke in a matter-of-fact manner of men going mad at sea, losing their sanity in the confines of a metal tube where they might not even have their own bunks, but be forced to share beds in sequence with their mates. He said one man had appeared in his civilian clothes, carrying a bag, saying he was ready to go home now.

  One morning I arrive at the beach to an extraordinary sight, so unexpected it causes me to screech on my brakes. The water has disappeared, to be replaced by mud flats. It’s as though the plug has been pulled on the estuary, and an entirely new landscape has appeared. In the extreme spring tide, the channel has been reduced to its absolute minimum, so narrow you might almost stroll across to the forest.

  Posts rise out of the mud like dead men’s fingers, ready to pull me down as I try, unsuccessfully, to walk out to this new world. The birds have it all to themselves. Even the crows have turned their backs on the human world in which they scavenge and are off in the distance, bathing with the waders.

  The tide itself is weather. The weak sun tries to burn off the mist, but it only gets colder. There are astonishing effects in the sky, reflecting the sealessness below. It’s like being in an eclipse. Perhaps the river Solent is about to return to its antediluvian state, or perhaps this is the precursor of a freak tsunami. Or maybe the sea has relocated to the sky, as it was once thought there was another ocean over our heads. One medieval chronicler related how a congregation came out of church to find an anchor snagged on a gravestone. Its line ran taut to the clouds, from which a man descended, only to be suffocated by the dense air as if he were drowning.

  Huge yellow buoys which normally float from chains that anchor them to the sea bed lie slumped like giant beach balls, left behind after a day’s play. At the dockhead, ships’ flanks are indecently exposed, as though someone were looking up their skirts; unsupported by the water, they might fall over a
t any moment. But the withdrawal must stop at some point. Soon normality will resume, and the earth and the moon will go on turning, tugging the sea between them. Some days, in late autumn, the fog is so thick that the sea and sky merge into one. There may be hundreds of birds around me, but I only hear their squawks and peeps. Unseen ships moan like lost whales.

  Winter closes in, sweeping the mist away with Arctic winds. The air is so cold it seems to crack the tarmac. My fingers turn raw and crab-like; the colour of summer has long since faded, leaving brown islands on the back of my hands. It’s time to start wearing two hats, as well as two pairs of gloves. Shoulders hunched, I push my bike along the beach, knowing full well that the water will be even colder. At this nadir of the year, people ponder the wisdom, or not, of getting out of their cars. For me it’s all a question of getting in.

  I stand over the water, and wonder why anyone would want to enter it. The surface is pressed flat by the cold. Slow and viscous, it wrinkles like setting jam. An oily sheen spreads over it. Rafts of usually active herring gulls float as if frozen into place. Everything has slowed to a glacial pace. Later the sea will ice up at the tideline, like the salt around the rim of a good margarita. In the summer, the water expands with the warmth; now it physically shrinks with the cold. Checking the coast is clear, I pull off my boots and my clothes and wade in without thinking.

  I push through the waves with ice-cold hands. From above, I must look like a clockwork frog. My animal heat retreats with each forward stroke; I reach out as if to warm up the water. In summer, my body settles in comfortably; now everything is taut, demanding the conservation of its core.

  I line up to the distant markers where cormorants perch. I’ve reached my limit. I turn back to the beach, scrabbling like a goose to find my depth once more. Naked on the sea wall, I give a little dance, singing to myself. If ‘ecstasy’ means to stand outside yourself, then I feel happier than I have ever been. Everything stripped away; everything renewed. Just me and the sea.

  In the wan light the sun is diluted and dumbed. I struggle to put on my clothes, shivering as if the whole world were shaking, rather than me. My feet leave suspended puddles on the concrete, each toeprint in three dimensions. There are red threads from my towel caught in the cracks from earlier visits. I tug on my socks. Back home, I’ll shake out the sand and weed as evidence of my folly.

  The cold becomes a kind of warmth. My fingers burn as the feeling returns, like they did when I was a boy, home from school and holding my hands too near the gas fire; by winter’s end my knuckles will be cracked and bleeding. With my heightened senses, I smell the lanolin in my woolly gloves. When I manage to scrawl in my notebook, its pages held down with an elastic band, my nose drips onto the ink, turning it into Rorschach blobs. My body complains of the lack of sleep. The prospect of tea and toast and a warm house never seemed so alluring.

  Yet with all this self-imposed torture comes an intense, capillary clarity. Perhaps it’s just the blood pumping back to my brain, but I feel as if something had been wiped clean. I’m ready to start again. I feel in the world, not just of it, even though sometimes, in the mist, I think I must be still dreaming.

  Winter is a lonely season. That’s why I like it. It’s easier to be alone; there’s no one there to notice. In the silence that ascends and descends at either end of the abbreviated day, there’s room to feel alive. The absence makes space for something else. I must keep faith with the sea. Swimming before dawn, it is so dark that I have to leave my bike light on so I can see where I left my clothes. Once the waves washed them clean away, leaving me to wade after them.

  The sea doesn’t care, it can take or give. Ports are places of grief. Sailors declined to learn to swim, since to be lost overboard – even within sight of the shore – and to fight the waves would only extend the agony. You can only ever be alone out there.

  People have died here, in these suburban waters. In the cemetery of Netley’s military hospital, planted as an arboretum to blunt the edges of death, there’s a gravestone carved in solid Cyrillic characters, a memorial to three Russian sailors from the frigate Prince Pojarsky, who drowned here in 1873. In the nearby pub, an outbuilding once stood as a temporary morgue for bodies pulled from the water by the coastguard, their corpses laid out on tables while next door people drank their pints of beer. My elder brother, working on a trawler off the Isle of Wight, once watched as the net pulled up a body, one of two men who’d decided to strip off at midnight and go for a swim. The fishermen kept the bloated corpse netted off their bow until the police arrived; it is bad luck to have a body aboard a boat. Like those unswimming sailors, I can’t reconcile my love with my terror. I know full well what lies beneath me as I push out from the wall and into the water; and yet I still fear what it might contain.

  One day, with the sea swollen by a near-full moon, I get the feeling I’m not alone. I’ve just turned back from my farthest point when I’m startled by a sudden whoosh. Directly behind me, barely a yard away, is a huge head with shiny dog-like eyes: a large grey seal, fat and full-grown.

  I back off, shocked at the sight. I knew there was a seal colony just along the Solent – I’d seen grey and harbour seals there, lounging on the mud flats, so blubbery and lazy that algae grew on their backs where they spent all their time basking in the sun, raising their hind flippers in the air to keep them warm on chillier days. From a distance, they look quite cute. But coming face to face with one in the water was another matter. Weighing up to eight hundred pounds, grey seals have sharp claws and teeth that can cause a serious infection, Mycobacterium marinum, otherwise known as seal finger, which may result in the loss of affected digits.

  The seal and I regard each other, equally surprised. He’s twice my size, clearly a mature male. He raises his grizzly head, lugubriously. I’m not sure what he intends to do, but I’m not going to wait to find out. Kicking out with my feet to persuade the animal to keep its distance, I make for the shore – only to discover that the great beast has followed me, swimming beneath the surface. Scrambling onto the safety of the sea wall and reaching for my clothes, I look down at it.

  I was right to be apprehensive. Up close, it is even bigger, almost magnified by the clear water. It looks more like a manatee as it hangs there, puffing away quite quizzically, all whiskers and wrinkles, trying to work out what I am, this pale, unsealish creature. I hurry to dress, keeping one eye on my marine companion. His curiosity satisfied, he turns towards the open water and sets off, popping up at intervals as he works his way upstream, before finally moving out of sight.

  Back home, I walk around the house in the dark. I know its rooms as well as I know my own body. I catch myself in the mirror on the landing, hung so that my mother could check her make-up before coming downstairs, her necklace in place, just as my father always wore a tie. Now I look in it and wonder who I am.

  I step outside, under the frost-sharpened sky, and a watery array: Pisces, Aquarius, Capricornus, Delphinus, and Cetus the whale; a starry bestiary (as if infinity wasn’t frightening enough already) of ancient patterns created by minds yet to be overwhelmed by the images that fill our waking day. They fall in slow motion – Orion’s brilliant grid, Betelgeuse’s dying watch-jewel, the Pleiades’ nebulous cloud – seen in the astronomer’s averted vision, as if too big to look at directly. They seem unchanging, but they represent cataclysmic explosions, speeding into oblivion, collapsing into themselves.

  The nearness of the sea opens up the sky. I hold my binoculars shakily to a three-quarter moon, its cold face forever turned away; to Sylvia Plath, it seemed to drag the sea after it ‘like a dark crime’. Once, out in the garden late at night, I watched an unusually bright meteor flashing orange, red and white. As it fell to the horizon, its tail streaming behind like a medieval illumination, I heard it hiss and fizz.

  Far off in the city centre a clock tower chimes. Inside the house, things shift and fall. Floorboards creak like a ship. It ticks with the ebbing heat as it falls asleep. I lie in my n
arrow bed, listening to the sound of the dark. A vague rumbling drifts over from the docks, godless, twenty-four-hour places where the black water ripples with sodium traces. Turning off my bedside light, I hear someone call my name, as if the night won’t leave me alone. Evenings I once spent drinking and dancing and taking drugs are now filled with a heady emptiness. Late at night, I think there’s some animal stirring in one of the rooms, a bear cub being licked into shape. And sometimes I wake in the early hours to hear my mother washing up downstairs, even though she died six years ago.

  The house has its own history, plastered over, extended, reduced, rising and falling with fashion like the hemlines of a woman’s skirt. The lawn where I lay as a teenager, reading King Lear on a hot midsummer’s afternoon although I’d rather have been listening to Ziggy Stardust on my cassette recorder, has long been overtaken by meadow grass. Somewhere deep in the bushes is the chain-link fence that first marked these plots parcelled out on the heath by a 1920s developer. If you can age a hedgerow by the number of species in a given stretch, you can date a street by its styles and details. Things here were once more empty: open coal fires rather than central heating, a hot-water geyser that exploded into blue life over the old enamel bath, and a bare electric fire hung even more dangerously overhead. No telephone, no fitted carpet, no double glazing; children spilled out of doors.

  Then the view was open to what lay ahead, and a shop stood on each corner of the crossroads: a grocer’s and post office combined, where you could buy postal orders while your luncheon meat was sliced; a butcher’s shop with tiles and sawdust and bloody lumps of offal; a hairdresser’s with its oval helmets that made their occupants look like astronauts, preserved in permanent lotion; and a brown-painted cubby-hole of a shop run by a lone elderly lady which sold only sweets and was rarely if ever open. All gone now. Here, as elsewhere, suburbia has disappointed its utopian dreams. Bramble finds its way into every crack.