‘Dinnae ower-think it!’ Alec urged, and then repeated himself. I chose not to explain that what I was doing was savouring the moment: a woman in her element, teetering on a needle-point of rock thrust up among a jumble of black basalt that out-faced the heaving sea around us. Below me the cold-coloured water never broke into foam. It flexed and stretched and contracted. It pulled itself down between facing outcrops as though determined to vanish through a sink-hole then surged up gleefully, flicking its tail. It was in no hurry and neither was I but the evening light was losing colour and that blanching was a sure sign of fading day. No instructor would want to be out here in the dark.
I loosened the cuffs of the waterproof jacket that added a layer to the battered old wetsuit he’d provided. Seawater gushed out past my wrists. I poised myself, leapt – an un-timeable gap – and was smothered in crashing bubbles and noise and resistance, then broke upwards into air and the push and pull of the sea. This was what I’d wanted, to be out beyond the little beaches and rock-strewn shores; to be out of my depth but safe; to be gripped by the sea’s power but not at its mercy. I respect the sea. I fear it.
As I relished the swirl of the water around me, I thought of how often I’d stood on dry sand or crunchy pebbles or in the shallows, constrained to watching waves rushing against far-off stretches of rock. This is a coastline where spectacularly large, cliff-lined bays are skirted with clusters of tiny inlets hardly more than finger-holds for the sea. From these little beaches, cobs of dark volcanic rock jut out, pitted like black honeycomb but displaying too the swerving symmetry of lava waves frozen in their tracks millennia ago. In one particular little nook the water just beyond my depth had always looked as though it had a sandy floor and perhaps the swell was manageable there but it was hard to tell. I never took the risk.
This summer – the first without children or young grown-ups – I’d realised I could venture further. I could go coasteering. Someone expert could ensure I didn’t come a cropper out there. Out at sea.
Unlike those massive blue stretches of the far south, our northern Irish sea has no steady colour. It takes its hue from the coming and going of the sun as it parts clouds – to raise – from the dun acres of water far below, shining fields of vivid jade wrapped in the darkest bottle-green. Seen from cliff-tops, these colours display themselves as vast sheets of luminous intensity. One of the attractions of coasteering was that, close-up, they would tilt and rock beneath me like stained glass panels miraculously made flexible. Most wonderful of all, they could be entered. I could be part of those glowing colour-pools. And I had done it. Even if today that brilliance was fitful and we had started later than we meant to.
Alec shouted something, pointing westward. Like me, he was in his fifties. He was portly and easy-going. I felt a pleasant confidence in him, perhaps because he wasn’t a typical coasteering pro. No sprightly young athlete, he was a dogged local man. The two of us had had three outings together. I enjoyed doing what he told me: swim, clamber, jump, crawl. It was a great way to let go of time.
He was indicating now a huge pile of rock stretching further out to sea than anything we’d come on so far. We were separated from it by a broad stretch of open water. In we plunged. Though I seemed to make hardly any progress I relaxed into the rhythmic efforts which would eventually get me to our goal. I stopped now and then to look up at the pale sky; to notice water, brownish and yet transparent; both lucid and richly supportive. It was, bizarrely, like swimming in scentless Guinness.
Anyone will tell you that getting out of the water is more of a challenge than getting in. With one hand I clung at last to a rock – its coating of tiny shells abrasive as a cheese grater – while the sea tugged my body in the opposite direction, straining my arm-socket almost past endurance; but I knew that if I waited calmly the returning surge would lift me forward so I could get a purchase, and hoist myself out. And, with that, I was raised by a wave and deposited on a limpet-covered ledge.
Alec called to me, pointing towards the horizon. “D’ye see oot thair? Whut’s oot thonner? Icelan mebbe? Naethin but watther.” I made my way to him and we gazed across the vast expanse. “A year bak,” he said quietly, “A came here i’tha dairk. Aye. Mad, it waes. An thaim Northren Lichts – can ye picthur it? – big green curtins ower ma heid. Sae far aff.” I watched him wonder at the memory and smiled to think I’d been wrong about night-time jaunts. “We shud be goin in,” he went on, “but, ‘less ye be agin it, we cud take a wee dannther roon tae tha en. It’ll be a while or iver ye get oot this lenth agane.”
We headed towards the seaward edge of the outcrop. He showed me pools fringed with delicate weed and studded with sea anemones, their colours muted and bluish in the failing light. We manoeuvred around the base of the stack, hanging on by fingers and toes. We passed strange deep holes going a few metres horizontally back into the rock. They echoed our shouts. But I couldn’t follow him all the way to the ocean face. It was beyond me. “Go you on,” he said, “tae tha nixt wee bay. Let yersel in an A’ll be wi’ ye afore lang.”
I enjoyed the chance to watch the sea. It was force made visible by its effects as it pushed broad straps of kelp, fastened to the rocks below the waterline, now shoreward, now seaward, and sent spurts of tide-water steadily making ground over the lowest slabs. If you think too much about it – about how puny you are in a power-filled universe – you’d never do anything. Coasteering is one of those undertakings – like childbirth – in which the only momentum is forward. There’s no opting out once you’re in.
I made my way over a ridge and edged down the other side. Only as I was about to enter the water did I look landward and recognise, with a shock, exactly where I found myself: the nondescript little cove was that particular one from which I had so often looked out, wishing I could get further.
Nobody knew the significance of this place to me. It was where I used to come to cry – or weep, in fact, for only weeping has that given-way-to quality as though something is weeping you. Weeping: for what could not be had, not be risked; for what must be shouldered, not shirked.
On holiday here, I used to leave the house early before children or husband stirred and trudge to this beach because it offered shelter from wind and curiosity. It was a natural place to stop and take stock of the scenery, or the weather. A woman huddled against that rock would not be remarkable to a rare passer-by. There had to be some place where I could lower my guard and give way. I knew weeping achieved nothing except some temporary release. It solved no problem but when it was over I could re-set my will and labour to be un-laboured.
Now I wondered, when I had leant against that rock and wept, was I acknowledging that I was up against something stronger than myself? I stared at the sea’s unending shuffle forward and retreat, recalling how it felt to be shoved onward by it and sucked back. No. I hadn’t been in the grip of a force outside myself. It was something within me. I had been buffeted by some current in myself deeper than I was used to negotiating.
I seemed to see, across the boulder-strewn foreshore, a small figure on that rapidly darkening beach. How extraordinary that my memories were, to her, the life she still had to face. She had looked into the unknowable – which I now knew. To see her from here was to live again her sapping, persistent feeling of being inadequate; of not having what was required; of living at my limit and it still not being enough. To inflict pain deliberately is one thing; to be the cause of pain despite my best efforts had been, for me, a horrific double torture; as though a tyrant had arranged my tormented existence to be the instrument of torment to someone beloved. Who wouldn’t, then, prefer to vanish? Except the appalling mechanism’s calibration would produce in that case an even more dreadful pain: an inadequate wife but his only wife; the children’s only mother; the only, disappointing, daughter-inlaw; hollow; resourceless. That had been me.
Yet, here I was, out in the bay, at last able to look back from that point I’d wanted to reach. The family was intact, in their various locations; some in their graves.
I thought of my mother, in extreme old age, her bright faculties striving against her collapsing body. In the last conversation I ever had with her, days before her death, she’d repeated the words, ‘lamb’ and ‘jam’. I’d probably been the only person in the world who could have understood what she was remembering and trying to share. It was Lamb’s jam factory, where more than eighty years earlier, many of her school-mates were sent to work. They all died of TB, fostered by the damp, warm conditions. Those girls, barely into their teens, had returned to her. Maybe she had been looking back over her life, from its furthest reach, telling over again the immense effects of her mother’s refusal to send her among the boiling fruit and bottling jars, whatever help the money would have been.
I gave my mother, that day, the words she couldn’t supply and saw her glad to have that experience, that loss, surviving in someone else’s mind. We all want to live. One day, further on, I might be like her, looking back to this very moment from an edge I couldn’t, at this point, imagine.
I was chilled from standing. I felt a hand on my shoulder and tears on my face. Alec was inspecting me with concern. “The salt gets in my eyes,” I said.
“Aye, it daes that,” he agreed. There was a pause. “Afore we gae bak A jest want tae remine ye o’ tha basics.” I nodded, not looking at him. “Credit tha watther tae houl ye up an mine yer braithe.”
I turned, surprised.
“Aff ye wurnae tae draw braithe, whut hope wud thair be? An credit tha watther or ye’ll wear yersel oot thrishin an thrashin.”
I gazed at him. Was that it? Breathe. Believe.
“Are we fur tha shore?” he asked briskly.
I nodded. But as I lowered myself towards the water I was, again, that woman on the beach, hearing an inner voice: You can love more than this; panicked at such a demand but then attentive; heeding it as an extravagant invitation, not sadism. What more could I do? Simply accept that what I could do was likely to fall short. When all is expended some other force has to step forward – or not. If the time to drown has come, so be it. If the tide buoys you up, good. Do your part, not more.
“Onlie lukin bak dae ye see hoo far ye hae come,” Alec said. “We’r oot this three oors.”
“Will you bring me here to see the Northern Lights?” I asked suddenly.
“Ye’d venture that?” He laughed, pleased. “Aye, A wull. A wull surely.”