Sea Change Read Online Free Page B

trying to lift its head from the water, with a feeble paddling motion of its wings.
    Guy runs to unclip the gaff and he plunges the metal tip into the water cruelly short. The bird has a tiny beak which sticks above the surface like a twig. Hold on, he says, to the bird, wait for me, he adds, meaning don’t die, not now, not now when you’re so close to being saved, don’t die in front of me. And by hanging down from the sea rail, off the side, he’s able to touch it, just, and he sees how impossibly wet and dark the bird looks, how absolutely close to death it is, yet as the gaff nudges it, it still tries to escape, making a single oar stroke with its wings which plunges its head, briefly, underwater.
    After five minutes he has brought the bird to the side of the boat, where he can reach down to gather it in his hand. Its body feels weightless, like a palmful of wet leaves, like nothing could live in it any more, and he sees that it’s a finch, a greenfinch, driven offshore by some sudden gust, or by the shadow of some magpie or crow. Had it been trying to reach his boat, with its last effort, or had they drifted together in coincidence? And as he holds it a simple truth strikes him: you remember the things you save; you cannot forget the things you lose.

    The Flood is a ninety-foot Dutch coastal barge, built in the Voorhaven yard in Scheveningen in 1926, and till the seventies it freighted cod-liver oil between the three Hs of the North Sea: Hamburg, Harwich and Hoek van Holland. At least, that’s what he was told when he bought it. The boat’s main feature is the wheelhouse, which sits higher than anything else on the deck, with glass windows on all four sides and a ship’s wheel in its centre as tall as a man’s chest. The wheelhouse is spartan, always bathed in the white ozone of the sea, with a swivel chair bolted to the floor and bench seats behind, wooden mullions, a door either side giving access to the deck and an ornamental ship’s bell which Guy had engraved with the word Flood .
    Originally the barge would have been a male space, solitary and smoky, the way men tend to make things, probably messy too. What was once the cargo hold stretches in a low flat shape in front of the wheelhouse, painted white. The hold is now mostly a saloon. It has too many chairs. Despite all the time Guy’s lived on the barge, he’s never managed to lessen their number.
    It’s been his home for nearly five years, moored to a stretch of quay on an empty part of the Blackwater estuary, in Essex. The only buildings there are a few isolated houses, some fishermen’s sheds, and the Tide Mill Arms. The Flood ’s one of several houseboats, some are more wrecked than others, and the whole anchorage has the oily scent of a shipyard, mid-repair, a place where boats have been scuppered and salvaged, wrecked and neglected. There, the Flood sinks into the mud twice a day, and the rest of the time it floats, soaking up the brackish water into its hull like a sugar cube. The estuary feels like the sea and looks like a river, and is neither, it’s both inlet and outlet, flooded and drained, it’s always a contradiction. That’s his home. Empty, strange, big-skyed.
    Right. Where are you? he says, unfolding his maritime map on the floor of the wheelhouse and running his hand over the nonsensical tree rings of the seabed depths below him. IMRAY Passage Chart C25, the Southern North Sea, it reads, full of underwater cables, pipelines, explosives dumping grounds and wrecks. There are rippled contours of sand and gravel banks, England continued, hills and sloping meadows down there. He can just about work out where he is - although the nearest feature is appropriately vague, a depth mark of eighteen metres. Not much to look at, his spot on the world. He gazes at the coast of East Anglia on the map, with the muddy mouths of its estuaries, like mythical eels sniffing the ocean, and its complicated filigrees of saltmarsh and creeks, swelling