Canvey Island (10 page)

We ate by firelight. Linda told me that as a child she would collect shells of ormers, cutting the fish out of the shell before her mother cleaned them with a hard brush, beat them to make them tender, and then cooked them in a slow oven.

When we looked up at the sky she told me that, as a girl, she had imagined the clouds as animals. They could be an upturned bull, or a seahorse, or the crest of a grebe. Sometimes they could be human; detailed outlines might contain her father's nose or remind her of the sweep of her mother's hair. She would make stories out of the sky.

As she spoke I tried to make up my mind which of her eyes to
look into. The one nearest to me was brightly lit and had its focus upon me but the eye further away had a darker intensity that suggested rather than spoke, containing secrets she would rather keep hidden. Every half-minute I switched my concentration from one eye to the other because each was telling me something different. The nearest told of hope; the furthest kept saying, ‘I do not trust you. I cannot believe what you are saying to me. Don't hurt me as I've been hurt before.'

We talked until it was nearly morning. Then, when we were drifting off into sleep in the tent, lying side by side, Linda asked casually, ‘Have you got them then?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Well, let's.'

‘Now?'

‘What are you waiting for? Come on,' she smiled. ‘It's what you want, isn't it?'

I tried to avoid her eyes because I knew it would excite me too soon and so instead I looked back out of the tent at the sky beginning to lighten and at the water tower with its hard red brick and its desolate nothingness. I remembered seeing that someone had scrawled on it:
British by Birth. English by the Grace of God
. I wondered who had written it, and why, and I thought of the sea again, and of stemming the flood, stopping the surge, and I couldn't quite believe that this was how I had been conceived, and that everyone did this, everyone, Vi and Dad, that woman and her husband in the electrical shop, the postman, the teacher, the doctor, my God, everyone. I thought of people on the bus going home to make love, in bedrooms, on sofas or in the backs of cars, of illicit lovers booking cheap hotels and lying behind drawn curtains on hot summer afternoons, of people in woodland or in the hollows of cliffs, finding themselves and each other saying, ‘At last, this is what I have found; this is what I have been searching for, now I can breathe again.'

I dreamt of Linda's body and of the sea, and everything we had done together. I don't know for how long we slept but the light was still pale when we woke.

‘Where do unremembered dreams go?' Linda asked. ‘What happens to them? Are they lost for ever?'

‘Perhaps we dream them again and again until we remember them.'

The beach was deserted and Linda swam naked, pushing away fronds of seaweed, golden brown, pink and emerald green. As she swam I tried to imagine what our future might be like and how different it could be from that of our parents.

I could hear my mother's voice in my head, the sound of her singing.

Star light, star bright
First light I see tonight
I wish I may, I wish I might,
Have the wish I wish tonight …

I wondered if I loved Linda as much as my mother and if this love between us was more important than anything else in the world. Was it a betrayal and a forgetting, or the finding of a new life? What did it mean to love like this?

Linda came back and dried herself, her leg supported on a rock, unembarrassed by her nakedness.

She smiled. ‘All right then?'

‘More than all right.'

Perhaps this was what ‘good luck' meant. Perhaps Linda was my reward for everything bad that had happened in my life.

In our togetherness we had separated from the world. I couldn't work out what the feeling meant, of being happy and yet somehow trapped at the same time, in a place that was ours alone. I couldn't even work out whether I liked the feeling or not but I knew I didn't want it ever to stop.

I don't suppose any family's normal but Martin's thought the way they did things was right enough. Funny that, because his dad was a moody old bugger, his aunt was a snobby cow and his uncle was stark raving bonkers.

But I stuck with him because he was quiet and serious and I felt safe. Besides, he always encouraged my painting. Everyone else thought it made me a bit weird. They couldn't understand why I didn't want to get a job as a secretary and get married but I'd seen what that had done to my mother and I didn't want history repeating itself in my own family: married at sixteen, a mother at seventeen, abandoned at twenty with no money and hardly any prospects. I wasn't going to be mucked around like that so I went to Southend College of Art where I was free to be whatever I wanted to be.

I don't think anyone at my art school was sane. They were a mixture of neurotics, misfits and exhibitionists, putting on events with situationists and surrealist musicians, making giant sculptures out of crashed metal and loops of string or creating the kind of performance art which almost always involved one of the girls taking her clothes off. Even the act of going for a walk could be considered a work of art if it was done in the right way, but it couldn't be any old walk, you had to ‘
dérive
', which meant getting a map of Paris and following it strictly even though you were actually walking in Southend.

I found myself working with painters who thought they were already part of the St Ives School and film-makers who wanted to
be Truffaut or Antonioni. They introduced Martin and me to foreign movies –
Le Soupirant, La Jetée, L'Avventura
, anything with ‘le' in the title and a whole load of voiceover – and we all took dope and drank Noilly Prat and couldn't imagine we'd ever get to thirty.

I started to mix flowers and wildlife into the paint and play around with the texture of the surface of the canvas, adding in plaster of Paris to bulk up the whites, blowtorching areas of darkness to create deep blacks. I showed Martin paintings by Joan Eardley, telling him I wanted to be able to paint like her, and we travelled up and down the coast so that he could look at the patterns of erosion as I tried to capture the light.

‘One thing. I'm never going to do a job where I have to clock on or off,' I told him. ‘This is my clock, the moon and the stars, what else do I need? I can tell the time by the way the sun falls and the moon rises.'

In the past, every time I looked at the sea I felt that anything was possible; there would always be a tide to take me away somewhere else, where life could be different and begin again. But now I wanted life to slow down, even stop, because I could be with Martin and we were easy with each other. I didn't have to worry about anything any more. I was loved.

Martin was still working in the machine shop, welding and cutting, preparing for university. One night he even took me round the factory and we did it with rolls of sheet metal around us. It was unusual rather than romantic but that was Martin all over. Always wanting to do daft things like kiss my knees or hold my hair up to the light or drink from the same drink with it in both our mouths at the same time.

‘Why are you like this?' I asked.

‘Like what?'

‘Even when you're happy you look like you can't quite trust it.'

‘Do I?'

‘How often do you think about your mother?'

‘Not so much as I did.'

‘And why is that?'

‘You know why,' he said.

‘One day,' I said, ‘you'll tire of me.'

‘Never. I'll always love you. You know that.'

‘That's what people say when they're getting rid of someone. “I'll always love you.” It means you're dumped.'

‘But I mean it. Nothing matters except this.'

‘You have a life to lead, Martin. Don't ruin everything by making this count for too much too soon. It frightens me.'

‘And what are you frightened of?'

‘Of loving you too much. Of loving you so much that I can't get back.'

‘You won't ever need to get back, Linda …'

‘I need to protect myself.'

‘Don't you trust me?' he asked.

‘Of course I do,' I said. ‘I just don't trust myself.'

When I wasn't at the machine shop I read everything I could about the threat of the sea. I learnt to read its lessons, studying the changes in texture of pebble, shingle, sand and rock. I looked at washed stone, studied watermarks over the grain of driftwood and the wet backs of pebbles scaled by time. I wanted to be like those smugglers who could always tell where they were by scooping up a handful of pebbles, knowing by size and feel from which beach they came.

I played with them like cherry stones:

Army, Navy
Medicine, Law
Church, Nobility,
Nothing at all
.

Linda picked me up from home and together we rode round the island on her Lambretta, the smell of Manhattan perfume blowing back in my face, sweet and fresh, not cloying like Vi's or powdery like my mother's.

Like my mother's
… The smell of Linda was my first infidelity to her; now I preferred the scent of my girlfriend to anything else. My
girlfriend
. I had never been able to imagine using such a word.

That summer she swam far out to sea; so far that I could hardly see her and I tried not to panic or show my fear that she might drown. I saw other people walking their dogs, or children running into the waves, unaware of the power of the tide. Sometimes I
wanted to stop them all, or call out, ‘Come back, come back!' but I knew my fear would frighten them.

And then, as Linda painted, I studied the currents and read about the moon, torn away from the outer crust of the earth billions of years ago like an orphaned child unable to return to its parent, longing to come home. Together, I decided, we would be sea people, Martin and Linda, water-creatures of the night. She told me how, in some societies, food was laid out to absorb the rays of the moon so that it would have the power to cure disease and prolong life.

‘Scoop up the water,' she would say, ‘the moon is in your hands.'

Together we tried to imagine what it might be like to emerge from the shadow of the world, to travel through the belt of film surrounding the earth's sphere, to see what there was beneath the clouds of Venus and walk on the moon's surface. We would wander through the desolation of buried worlds and future planets.

When we sat by the water she would recite bits of poetry that she had learnt by heart.

Flood-Tide below me! I see you face to face;
Clouds of the west – sun there half an hour high – I see you also face to face
.

I told Linda I had thought of becoming an oceanographer, recording light penetration, pressure, salinity and temperature; registering the slow changes in deep waters, dropping a sounding line a thousand fathoms to find the starfish clinging to it. I would measure the flow of currents and the height of waves out at sea from trough to crest. I would work out the length of fetch, the distance the waves had run under the drive of a wind blowing in a constant direction without obstruction. The greater the fetch, the higher the waves. I knew that the fetch the night my mother died could have been as long as six hundred miles.

I didn't know if Linda would ever understand how much it haunted me. No matter how close we were, even then, when our love was at its height, I was afraid that there would always be something unspoken, a gap that could never be closed.

I could not believe how elated Linda made me and yet, at the
same time, I was frightened of becoming so used to the feeling that I would not be able to live if it was ever taken away. It would be like losing my mother all over again.

Perhaps Linda was right not to trust the intensity of it all. For I knew that, however good it was, this was a love that didn't belong to everyday life. And then I realised that when I went to university I would be unable to live either with or without Linda. If we were still together, loving as we did, then I wouldn't be able to concentrate on anything else, everything would be her, and when she was away from me and I was supposed to be studying, I would be afraid of something terrible happening to her: illness, accident, even death.

I would spend all my hours fearing the loss of love, the return of absence.

I knew it couldn't last but I kept hoping I was wrong. I couldn't accept that if Martin left for university then he might also be leaving me.

First he began to dream and be moody. Then he started to criticise me. Little things at first, like the fact that I hardly ate anything and that, when I did so, I did it too slowly. He thought the way I arranged my body when I sat on a settee showed too much of my legs, that I said too little, and that my paintings were just a bit too weird. It got to the stage where nothing I could do was ever quite right. I even wondered whether he was being irritating and critical deliberately, like he was trying to put me off him, so that I might be the first to end it all and he wouldn't have to do it himself.

The night before he left we were walking on the beach and Martin stopped to pick up a pebble and throw it into the sea. I thought at first he was nervous about leaving home and that he'd be all right once we were in the Monico. Dave's band was playing, after all. But Martin said he wanted to talk. Then I could tell it was bad because he started to speak slowly and he couldn't look at me.

‘I have to leave,' he said. ‘I have to do more than this.'

‘I know.'

‘And I'll need to concentrate. I might not be able to see you as often as you want.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I have to understand: the sea, floods, water …'

‘Stopping it, I know. But it doesn't mean you can't come home, though, does it?'