‘The first person to see the sea wins 50p!’ I yelled, as we rounded the small town of Hollym and made the approach to Withernsea, the lighthouse shifting into view.
‘You don’t need to shout,’ my daughter Effie said from the passenger seat. ‘I’m right here.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I just wanted you to know that the first one of us to see the sea wins 50p.’
‘Why?’ she asked. ‘What’s in it for you? If you see it first, you don’t win anything.’
‘You’re missing the point,’ I said, though I don’t think she was. I think I was. Because I am her father, I was expecting her to be excited about reaching the coast. To react to the sight of it as I would. I was forgetting that the way I responded to the sea wasn’t the way that most people did.
*
The 50p pledge had been something my mother always did whenever our family took a trip to one of the resort towns on the East Anglian coast. Withernsea-sized places like Frinton, Clacton or Walton-on-the-Naze. As we’d near our destination, it became her way of keeping us four kids engaged, when mobile phones hadn’t been invented and reading led to motion sickness and carrier bags sloshing with warm vomit. For me though, it was something special. Hearing my mother’s words, I felt activated, as if she’d released the safety catch on me. I didn’t care about the 50p, it was her next promise I was waiting for.38
‘The second person to see the sea sits in the sea!’
If I saw it first, I kept that information to myself, leaving the glory to my younger brother Ben, who could always be relied upon to go for the money. What I wanted was second place. When my mother yelled her 50p promise, my whole body clenched. Readied itself.
‘I see it!’ Ben would shout when he spotted the shimmer of water on the horizon, immediately reaching his arm around our mother’s headrest and clapping his hand, ready to receive his coin.
‘I see it too!’ I’d say, hot on his heels and keen to answer before Becky or Robert could, not realising that they couldn’t have cared less. Then, for the time it took us to reach the seafront I would simmer with anticipation, desperate to get into the water. It’s stupid I know; I was always going to be allowed in the sea. We all were, that was the whole point of my parents dragging us out of the house and squeezing us all into the car. But I wanted that confirmation, the certainty that, yes, I was going to be allowed to sit in that sea. And not just that, I wanted a guarantee that I would also be allowed to swim, bob, lay back and float in it. The moment we hit the beach I stripped off, yanked up my trunks, then launched myself across the sands and into the water with the hot-footed urgency of a dehydrated man bounding towards a mirage. When it came time for lunch, I would run back to the spot my parents had chosen to lay on beach towels, grab a sandwich then take it back into the water, where I’d stand and eat it while the sun roasted my sea-salted body until it resembled a rose-pink ham. The next few days were always miserable and sore, soundtracked by my sobs as I lay on the sofa in my underpants, my mother basting my livid skin with aftersun lotion. 39
‘I did warn you,’ she’d say, but I would have none of it. Just like I have never been able to learn from hangovers or eating at suspect-looking fast-food vans, I have always committed to the sea with the same level of reckless enthusiasm. And while it came with risks and sunburn, I wanted Effie to commit to it in the same way.
*
‘But can you see the sea?’ I asked her.
‘No,’ she said flatly, and in fairness, neither could I. No one could. The geography of Withernsea is such that you only see the sea when you are almost upon it, its appearance somehow always sudden, as if it has crept up on you rather than you on it. When we finally reached the promenade and slowed to find a parking spot, I took an involuntary deep breath, remembering the excitement I’d felt when I first heard the news that we’d be moving to Withernsea. When I went on to learn that our house would be just a short walk from the beach, I reacted as if I’d been plucked from a famine and introduced to the extravagancies of the American fridge. Looking at the sea then, as Effie and I pulled up in the car, it was clear that, while the landscape had changed a lot over the decades, my feelings for it hadn’t.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Who are you saying hello to?’ Effie asked.
‘The sea.’
‘Right …’ she said, rolling her eyes as she stepped out of the car.
I’d made big promises to her during the drive over from Manchester, chiefly that this would be fun. That we’d scavenge the beach for fossils and crabs, build a sand sculpture, then grab fish and chips and eat them in a shelter on the promenade 40while we watched the tide come in. And as we ate, I planned to tell her about my years there, repeating the overblown local legends of the lost villages lying out at sea. What I’d hoped was that I would be able to share Withernsea with her, show her the beach and all the things about it that were special to me, then get to watch her fall in love with it too.
This was the summer of 2016 and a time of change for both of us. I was newly divorced from her mother and Effie was about to commence her final year at primary school. She was ten at the time, almost eleven. That doubtful age, the tipping point when childish enthusiasm was giving way to cynicism and self-consciousness. Once she started high school, she’d be lost to me, and there was no way I’d have been able to convince her to be seen in public holding my hand, let alone a fishing net and a candy pink bucket and spade.
Being her age had been challenging for me, a time when life suddenly transitioned into something complicated and unfathomable. While I was still happily playing with toys and being excited about morning cartoons, my friends began getting girlfriends and were no longer so inclined to read superhero comics with me or go scrumping in the orchards near my house. I was aware that the world was shifting quickly around me and that I wasn’t keeping up with it, which left me feeling unsure of myself, unbalanced. I lost the confidence I’d had as a young boy and in its place a shyness developed, which made me fold up into silence when confronted with casual conversation or the unfamiliar girls who had started to appear on the perimeter of our friendship group. I’d felt abandoned and rudderless, not maturing at the rate that other kids seemed to be. The way I dealt with this discomfort was to begin throwing myself into the river. 41
*
The town of Haverhill where I spent my early years was bisected by Stour Brook, an offshoot of the much larger River Stour, which runs through the centre of East Anglia before reaching the Essex coast and losing its identity to the North Sea. For want of anywhere better for us to congregate, my friends and I did much of our childhood socialising on the banks of the Brook. Up until high school I’d enjoyed being around open water for the simple fun it offered. The splashing, the swimming, the throwing in of large rocks in order to enjoy the deep and satisfying sploosh as they disappeared beneath the surface. But when I stopped being able to relate to my friends, the river would become my coping mechanism.
One summer afternoon during the late 1980s, I was sitting on the bank with my friend Stephen and his new girlfriend Leanne, the three of us lighting matches and absently flicking them into the water, enjoying the sound as they sizzled then watching as they floated away on the lazy current. We’d been doing this for a while when something overcame the two of them. A mutual shift in attention away from our shared activity and towards each other. A private act that excluded me. I’m not sure what initiated it. Maybe it was the heat of the flames or the sensual hiss as they were extinguished by the river, but pretty soon the two of them were red-faced and kissing and I was left feeling itchy and out of place. My reaction to this was sudden and instinctual as I exited stage left, hurtling towards the water as if someone had hoisted me up by the belt and collar then tossed me into it. My body hit the narrow strait with such force that the water briefly parted, splashing up the banks and spattering the two of them. They stopped kissing immediately and, once their shock had 42died down, they began laughing. Stephen picked up his matchbox and the two of them started flicking lit matches down at me while I batted them away and into the river with karate chops and high kicks, water sloshing from my hands and feet.
‘Hyah! Hyah!’ I yelled from the river, miniature kabooms of sulphur appearing all around me. ‘Hyah!’
The awkward situation had been diffused, I was at the heart of the fun again and absolutely no one was horny. It wasn’t planned, but I recognised a good idea when I saw one and repeated this move the next time things became difficult for me on the riverbank. Here, it became my reliable go to. It wasn’t always kissing that spurred me into action, sometimes it was a conversation I wasn’t mature enough to understand or an uncomfortable discussion about puberty and developing bodies. And I didn’t always jump into the water either. Often, I would simply get up, turn away from the group and wade slowly into it, up to my middle, as if possessed by a force ordering me to do so. Or else I’d stand bolt upright and keel over like a felled tree, slapping painfully against the surface with a concussive, interrupting boom.
Over time though, my desire to enter the water became an independent compulsion. I didn’t always need the stimulus of a bad time, my proximity to it would be enough. Faced with a river, a lake or even a good-sized pond I found that it was all I could do to hold myself back, the impulse to leap in becoming as powerful as hunger. If I was lucky, my common sense would wrestle with the drive to throw myself in and I could get past the danger without getting drenched. But it was an impulse that transformed my early teens into a sequence of watery encounters, featuring gripped railings, riverbank trembles and inevitable walks home in squelching trainers.43
I would go on to disgrace myself during a three-day school trip to the Lake District, when my class hiked up a crag and we encountered a deep recess in the rocks, filled with glimmering, glass-clear water.
‘It’s so pure you could drink from that,’ our guide told us, as he led my teacher, Mr Guyton, and the rest of the class around the pool of water. Each of them carefully picking their way around the slime-covered edge as they continued their ascent. I held back though. Shooting looks at the water. Admiring the shimmering beauty of its still and unbroken surface. Before I really knew what sexual desire was or why my knees would give way at the sight of a woman in short shorts, I knew what wanting to throw myself into water was. So, I did that. Fully clothed and weighed down with hiking boots, I balled myself up and flew, crying out as I destroyed the perfect surface, the water seeming to fizz as I sank and it rushed past my ears. The brilliant cold shocked my body. When I rose, gasping for air, I saw that my classmates were laughing and that Mr Guyton was panicked and furious, slipping clownishly on the buttery rocks as he frantically scrambled towards me. Revelling in this response, I spent a good five minutes paddling around, slapping the surface in an effort to make it look as if I couldn’t get out. Mr Guyton roared at me from the bank and, finally, grabbed one of my hands, heaving me out and onto the rocks.
‘It was an accident,’ I told him, as I sat emptying water from my boot. ‘I fell.’
‘People who are falling,’ he said, his lips thin and white, ‘do not generally yell “Cannonball!”’
I would go on to ‘fall’ from rowing boats, off bridges, over the fence and into a river during a trip to Cockley Cley medieval village. Back in Haverhill I found any excuse to lose balance 44on the banks of Stour Brook so I could stride through the water and marvel at the sight of my limbs beneath the surface, appearing as if they’d been trapped in wobbling, mulch-coloured jelly. Then I’d slop my way home, reeking of stagnant water, to decant globs of frogspawn into our tropical fish tank, where they would cause contamination and death.
‘What is wrong with you?’ my father would ask, scooping angelfish corpses from the water with a small hand net. I’d struggle to reply, too busy wondering if I was small and flexible enough to squeeze into the tank.
In what seemed like an effort to channel my water compulsion into something positive and athletic, my parents booked me onto a canoeing course during the summer of ’89, where I was taught how to roll my canoe upright should I be unlucky enough to overturn it. I was then let loose at a water park and rowed my way out to the middle of a lake to test out my new skill, capsizing and righting my canoe over and over. Churning up the water like the wheel on a paddle steamer.
‘What is wrong with you?’ my mother asked, learning of my behaviour when she came to pick me up.
‘I’m clumsy?’ I’d said, deciding that I needed an answer to this question, even if it wasn’t a very good one.
‘Well, you’re definitely something,’ she’d said, likely trying to recall if she’d managed to concuss me as a baby during a crucial developmental stage. What she feared, I think, was that she had another problem child on her hands. In the twenty-first century we’ve found kinder ways to address matters like this. Kinder words, certainly. My elder brother Robert, for example, had been fond of dangling himself from road bridges and pissing onto traffic as it hurtled along beneath him. At the time, this was treated as delinquency, but our family now recognises 45it as a symptom of his undiagnosed ADHD. For my part, I have been told that my urge to risk drowning at every opportunity was a localised form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but I never saw it that way. I didn’t think something bad would happen if I didn’t submerge myself. That my loved ones were at risk or that the sun would explode if I wasn’t up to my eyes in a canal. It was more of a desire to return to the water and enjoy something I’d discovered about myself when I was in it. What had started as a way of avoiding awkward situations and getting attention had evolved into something special for me. At first, I had required an audience to feel this sensation but as time went on, I found that I only needed the water.
There were days when I would wander off into the Suffolk countryside alone, following the course of Stour Brook in search of broader, deeper stretches where I could lower myself into the water and listen to the babble and plop as it slipped past me and all the other obstructions it encountered on its journey to the sea. I’d hold my hands out at my sides and try to stand as still as a rock, enjoying the force of the current, the unstoppability of it, as it crashed into my palms and leapt over them in small, glassy waves. I soon developed an awareness that, for me, there was solace and sanctuary in the water. It was a space I could escape to, a changed environment with a different set of rules to the land. Up to my neck in water, I felt shielded. Not warm or cold but pleasingly, protectively numb. At that depth there was also an equality; we’re all the same if we go deep enough, just bobbing heads, our bodies foreshortened and obfuscated. I found that I liked myself better when I was in wild, open water and this was why, on the day we moved to Withernsea, the beach had been my first port of call. 46
*
While my parents were busy sifting through cardboard boxes and unpacking essentials, I slipped away to the cliffs with our dog, Daisy, a gangly Labrador/whippet cross. We headed down the weathered concrete steps that led to the sands, my steps hurried, keen to acquaint myself with the place where I planned to spend most of my time. I let Daisy off her lead and watched as she gambolled away across the wet sands, her long legs making her look coltish and uncoordinated at first. But when she reached the sea, she looked as if she belonged in it, becoming giddy and joyous. She hurled herself around in the shallows, biting at the waves and spume, running in wild circles as arcs of water whipped from her tail. I wondered if this was how I looked to other people when I encountered water. Not graceful or amusing, but wild and demented. It didn’t bother me in any case, my overriding feeling as I watched her being one of envy.
Before we’d made the move to Withernsea, our whole family had taken a trip there to get the measure of the place and we stopped for a snack in a seafront café, where my mother soon got chatting to a talkative, elderly woman. She’d been sitting at the table next to ours and became too intrigued by our jarringly out-of-town voices to let us enter her orbit without investigation. After some small talk about where we were from and why we were in town, the two of them got on to the topic of the sea.
‘People are funny about swimming here,’ the old woman had said, explaining that not many people looked at the coast of Withernsea with a sense of longing. The water closest to the coastline is coloured by the eroding clay cliffs, giving it the murky quality of under-milked tea. ‘They worry about sewage,’ 47she said, adding that some holidaymakers tended to look at the sea and picture the source of its colour to be a huge undersea soil pipe, belching a continuous stream of hideous turds into the waters. So, they shied away from venturing into it, out of the fear that they’d emerge as filthy as a seabird caught up in an oil disaster.
‘It isn’t dirty though,’ the woman assured us. ‘It’s just full of clay.’
I thought this sounded like a pretty neat definition of dirty water, but for someone wired like me it was never going to be a problem. The fact that no one else was in it was part of its charm. What could be more of a luxury than your own private sea? This was how I’d seen it on that first day, this expanse of water, no one in it but my dog. And shortly thereafter, my dog and me. I took off my trainers and socks then ran into the water. Clothed in jeans and a t-shirt but still shocked by the jolting cold of the North Sea, which even in July tends to greet bathers with more of a slap than a kiss.
My mother had always taught me to acclimatise to the sea in stages. First to put my feet in, then my hands, before wading in at intervals. Knees, hips, chest, shoulders, pausing at each step to centre my breathing and swat at my body with handfuls of water, dowsing myself. Adjusting. I dunked my hands, filtering the water through my fingers and watching it fall like bands of fogged, amber glass. When I looked down though, I couldn’t see through it at all, my legs appearing as if they’d been severed at the knee and that I was miraculously walking the rust-coloured surface on stumps. Everything below that point was a mystery. I could have been entirely safe or millimetres away from being savaged by flesh-snipping crabs. But I felt no threat or concern. Being in the North Sea had given way to 48something I’d felt in rivers before, but never so strongly: an even deeper sense of cradling comfort. I absorbed the smell and the grit, the way it made my body bristle with activity, the saltwater shimmying into my pores, thrilled at the knowledge that I’d later get to enjoy the sensation of it crisping and tightening on my skin as it dried. Even though, to the sea, I was insignificant, I felt like I fully existed when I was in it. Alive in a way I never felt on land. I wanted more of that and before long I was up to my chest, my pockets filling with sand and seaweed. I knew that I was in too deep but also that, for me, there had become no such thing.
When Daisy and I arrived home a couple of hours later, soaked and guilty, my mother just looked at us and sighed, no longer bothering to ask what was wrong with me. Knowing that what I’d done had been inevitable.
‘Dry the dog off and get changed,’ she’d said, turning to fill a drawer with cutlery. ‘There’s a box of clothes in your room.’
For the rest of that summer, I repeated this pattern, exploring the coastline and testing my mother’s patience. Never fully dry, always leaving a trail of sand and damp footprints behind me. So, it was a relief to her when September rolled around, and it became time for me to attend college in Hull.
I hadn’t been quick to make new friends. In fact, I made none. I’d turned up with new clothes and a curious accent, hoping this would do the work for me and draw people in, too shy and self-conscious to reach out to others and risk rejection. When this didn’t work, I chose to reject other people, convincing myself that loneliness was a considered choice I’d made. I kept my head down in classes and left the campus at break times to walk the banks of the Holderness Drain, a grim man-made river that ran past my college, and toy with the idea of 49throwing myself into it. I knew that this was not a sustainable plan, so each morning, as I headed along Withernsea promenade to catch my bus to Hull, I would think of ways to improve my situation. If I could find a means to become more confident and forthright, to reinvent myself, then people might be drawn to me. But more often than not, I would become distracted from these thoughts by the sea. Scanning the surface for the sight of an old man who I’d see swimming in it each morning.
Regardless of the weather he’d be out there, his bald, white head bobbing along like a lost football. Occasionally he would disappear under the curl of a wave and I’d hold my breath, wondering if I might become the sole witness to his death. But then he’d emerge, his mouth yawning for air, arms powering forward. He’s got it made, I thought, enviously. He knows exactly who he is. Over the weeks I learned that I could use this man like a timepiece, so reliable was his progress through the waters. If he was level with the fishing lake, I was making good time. If he was nearing the lifeboat station, I was in danger of missing my bus and needed to pick up my pace. Then, sometime during that first winter in Withernsea, I looked out for him and found that he wasn’t there. I didn’t think too much of it at first, but after I didn’t see him for a few more days I mentioned him to my mother.
‘Oh, he died,’ she said, having heard about his fate from one of her colleagues at the pottery works. ‘It was quite sad. They found him on the beach, just lying there in his trunks.’
I should have recognised the sadness in this, but I was too distracted by what I saw as a job opportunity opening up. I didn’t think about how this man’s life might have ended. His legs perhaps snagged in a fishing net, dragging him to his doom. Or that he might have ended his days by being struck 50in the temple by a trawler. When I considered his absence all I saw was a sign that read ‘Situation Vacant’ and a way in which my compulsion towards the water could finally have an upside.
I pledged that, just like the old man, I would swim in the sea every day and in doing so I would become a person that people noticed and respected. Mysterious, driven and muscular. Someone else’s bobbing football. Their reliable timepiece. I let my imagination run away with itself, thinking of all the awed ways I’d be spoken of by fascinated passers-by.
‘I heard he was training to swim the Atlantic.’
‘I heard that he swims every day in tribute to his great love, lost at sea.’
‘I heard that he was a merman.’
Not wishing to waste any time, I took myself down to the beach early one grey December morning, a towel under my arm, determined to make a good show of this. I chose a spot that was close to our house but far enough away from the bustle of the town centre that I wouldn’t have too much scrutiny. I wanted some privacy while my body was still skinny and ill-defined, not planning on becoming a more public figure until the sea had assisted my physique to resemble carved stone.
I stashed my clothes and towel under a rock near the cliff face and waded into the shallows, determined not to ruin the moment by girlishly squealing or shivering too visibly. Not to break my stride by following my mother’s acclimatisation regime as I moved into the freezing brown waters, just wanting to appear natural and of the sea. After all, private as this was, anyone could have been watching. A poet looking for inspiration. Or maybe a beautiful woman who understood the powerful intensity of brooding male souls. So, I advanced through the waves and as I got deeper and the water closed in 51on me, my mission abruptly became about something else. It was tougher than I had expected, the sea so much colder, and I had to fight to move, my limbs seizing up from a sharp, gripping pain. Bear traps, I thought. It’s like swimming through bear traps. The frustration of this tapped into a store of suppressed anger and my progress through the water stopped being an exhibition or a route to a new self and turned into a battle. I didn’t care about an audience, focusing instead on the negativity that rose as I pushed my feet off the sands and launched forward, driving my arms down and pushing against the tide. I found myself thinking of my stockpile of personal embarrassments and my inability to cope with the basics of life back on land. Of all those ways I’d responded to uncomfortable situations over the years, my goonish behaviour and the awkward silences that often followed it, how unpalatable my obvious yearning for friendship must be to the people at college. I processed an accumulated litany of small, crushing moments that, once I allowed them all to descend into my serious sixteen-year-old head, threatened to capsize me, and, if they did, I wasn’t sure I could right myself. What’s more, I wasn’t sure that I’d want to. It was a while before I noticed that I was swearing as I moved. Not pacing myself. Not knowing how. Just getting angrier as I kicked and crawled. Angry at myself.
‘Fucking shit fuck …’ I spat, the cold shocking my lungs into breathlessness, making me lightheaded as I sprayed salt and sand through my teeth, swallowing mouthfuls of freezing sea water as I moved. Swearing and gasping. ‘Ffucking fffuck …’
From the beach I must have looked like a toddler having a tantrum in a bathtub, but I didn’t care. It felt too important to stop. My shoulders threatened to dislocate. There was a new and piercing sharpness in my chest, but I kept on going, daring 52my body to give up completely so that I wouldn’t have to go back to the land. I pushed harder, allowing myself to pause and sink every now and then. To drown just a little before resurfacing and pressing on once more, enjoying the feeling of being somehow powerful but also small and vulnerable. There was a strange relief in the knowledge that I give could give up at any moment and the sea would just accept me. Tidy me away. I would wonder later if this was what had happened to that old man. If he had started out the way I had then realised he’d reached his time and decided to give in, letting the sea pull him down. I hadn’t reached that point yet, but until I did, I fought. Tantrumed.
‘Fucking shit fffuck …’
When I finally burned out, I didn’t let myself go under. Instead, I rolled onto my back to lie on the surface. Drifting, panting, sucking for air. Icy water flooded into my ears with a slurp that made me shudder. My head froze. I imagined my body turning from blue-grey to alabaster white, pictured myself laid out in a fishmongers’ window, but when I held up my hand to look at my skin it was red and flushed, the blood having raced to the surface. If anything, I looked heated. Boiled. Steamed. But I was numb and painless, robbed of feelings in both my body and my head. I stared up at the petrol-blue sky and the seabirds darting across it; determinedly not looking back at the land, where my problems still existed. After a while my breathing steadied itself and I stopped shuddering, allowing my body to bob about on the rolling waves, wondering if this would be the moment I’d decide to stay in the water forever. No, this moment. Maybe this one. But when practical thoughts kicked in and I began to fret about the potential long-term effects the water temperature might have on my genitals, it was clear that 53I was thinking of a life beyond that day. So, I started the slow process of paddling to shore and heaving myself back onto the beach. Not transformed but different. Not cured but better.
I sat on the sand for a while afterwards, composing myself and rubbing my limbs with a towel to encourage blood circulation. Unable to stand. But I knew that I wanted more and, aching and exhausted from the strain on my weak, overused muscles, I went back to the sea the following day. And the next. Never thinking of it as exercise or therapy, more of a way to exorcise my compulsion. But it had become something else too, a daily act of survival. Every time I stepped into the sea after that first determined swim and made it back out again it felt like a victory over death. Nothing about what I was doing was a matter of audience approval or opinion anymore; I either survived or I didn’t.
I kept this up for months, defying weather and tidal temperament each day, discovering that, while I didn’t have the kind of body that would get ripped simply from bobbing about in the water like a bath toy, it did improve the way I felt about my life on land. I would eventually sign-up to a different college and click with a group of friends, develop a greater interest in music and girls and visit the beach less and less, not needing it so much. And over time my relationship with the water began to shift. The occasions when I did enter it were often marred by incidents that seemed designed to push me away.
Swimming one late summer afternoon, I was caught unawares by a sudden wave that knocked my glasses from my head and into the sea, where they immediately sunk. Without them, I am practically blind. Take them off and anything further than the end of my nose is transformed into a dappled and confusing blur, leaving me helpless and vulnerable. 54I panicked, wildly raking my hands through the waters and clawing at the sucking sands beneath them, hoping to snag my glasses before they were pulled down and disappeared forever. My fingers met with nothing but seaweed and unseen slime, and after about ten minutes of desperate searching, I decided to give up and make my way home. I was just scanning the beach, trying to work out where I’d left my clothes when a man called out to me.
‘Need help?’ he said, and I squinted in the direction of his voice to see him heading towards me, pushing along what appeared to be a large, industrial lawnmower. It turned out to be some sort of motorised seafood harvesting machine, which vacuumed the shallows for shellfish. The man had been watching my desperate searching for some time and it had eventually become too unbearable for him to not intervene. I explained what had happened and he offered to comb the beach with his contraption, hopeful that my glasses might be scooped up in his net. I stood back, squinting through the shrinking light at his fuzzy outline as it passed back and forth between the groynes, my hope dying with each fruitless sweep. When it got too dark to carry on, he helped me find my clothes. I thanked him then began getting dressed, glowering at the blur of the sea as I tied my laces.
‘Fuck you,’ I said.
‘Shush,’ said the sea, as it dragged itself across the sepia sands. ‘Shush.’
The next time I entered the water, I left my new glasses on land and, perhaps because I didn’t see it coming, was struck between the shoulder blades by a large piece of driftwood. It landed like a shocking punch and I staggered back onto the beach to catch my breath, a baseball-sized welt growing in the 55middle of my back and a new and lingering sense of resentment rising whenever I looked at the sea. The blow had felt direct and determined, a punishment for my absence and neglect. Of course, I knew it was nothing of the sort. The sea is not capable of feeling hurt or giving a fuck; it is in a permanent state of not being able to give any fucks at all. I had entered it expecting pleasure and an identity, but I’d done so at my peril and had suffered for it. To the sea, beating me with a piece of wood was nothing personal but for me it seemed like that and, consciously or not, it drove me away. My great love had become aloof and colder than ever. So, we broke up and I decided to see other waters.
Without the sea to turn to, Withernsea had little to offer me. Every opportunity there that didn’t involve being in the water was slowly being consumed by it. I saw nothing but a grim future for me, so I left town and spent a couple of years studying sculpture in Barnsley, where I began plunging myself into the River Dearne. During the summer of ’97, when the heat became unbearable and the stretch of river I favoured grew too busy with locals driven mad by the rising temperatures, I took my towel and wandered the edgelands, looking for somewhere more private. After traipsing a while, wading through tall grass and avoiding the wild horses roaming the fields that sloped down from a disused coal mine, I found what looked to be a good place at the bend of a river. I didn’t bother undressing, I just jumped off the bank, feet first, not knowing or caring how deep it was, still calibrated to the depth of the sea. The water was inky black, it could have been one-foot deep or one thousand for all I knew, but I went in regardless, spearing it with my heels. I sank for a long time then clawed my way through the darkness and back up to the air. Small flies flitted about on the 56surface, bothering me and zipping into my ears and mouth, but it provided the respite I needed from the heat and I eased back, lazily floating. I’d been there for a while, when a group of teenagers appeared at the bank and looked down at me, bobbing about in my t-shirt and jeans. I grew nervous then, convinced that they were about to do something bad from up there. Cause trouble. Maybe start throwing dirt and rocks. But they stayed silent, regarding me with still and curious interest. Finally, one of them called down to me.
‘What you doin’ in there?’
‘Cooling down,’ I called back, bracing myself for the first missile to land.
The boy smiled and shook his head, turning to his friends. There was a long pause and I waited for something to happen. For them to suddenly snap and do something terrible to me. Eventually the boy spoke.
‘You’re mad, you,.’ he said, a chuckle in his voice, and he and his friends wandered off, muttering amongst themselves.
I didn’t think much of this, and just carried on happily floating, grateful that I’d avoided getting my skull dented by a half-brick then drowning alone in dark water. It didn’t cross my mind again until a few years later, when I was sitting in a pub and fell into a chat with a man who’d grown up in Barnsley. After a while, our conversation worked its way to my swimming spot, and he smiled in the way people do when they’re about to reveal a delicious secret.
‘You were swimming in a flooded coal mine,’ he told me. ‘They’re so deep, you can hide anything in them.’
By anything it transpired that he meant dead bodies, the popular rumour being that this area was full of them. Enemies and love rivals, murdered, weighted down with chains or sacks 57of rocks then tossed into the black river, sinking deeper than any man could dive. What these lads had seen when they looked down at me from the bank was a man apparently happy to paddle around in this dark, watery grave. It was tough to shift the mental image of me back then, stewing in a pool of coal smut and separated, decaying flesh, surrounded by the cloud of the flies that feasted upon it. Tougher still was the realisation that, faced with the same set of circumstances, the news of what was in the water probably wouldn’t have deterred me from jumping in.
After I moved to Manchester and started a family, I became more sensible where water was concerned. While in the heart of the city I still felt the pull to water, but I’d gained a level of control by then. In Salford, where I have worked for the last twenty years, I have the River Irwell, the wetlands and the ship canal with its own rumoured serial killer. A prowler named The Pusher, who is said to lurk around the towpath waiting for his moment to shove vulnerable men into the grim and greasy waters, where they drown and tumble along in strong currents with all the other water detritus until they’re snagged and collected by litter-picking boats. Again, this didn’t entirely put me off wanting to risk a swim but my distance from the East Yorkshire coast helped me realise that what I really wanted was the North Sea. Anything else was just a stand-in.
For several years after leaving Withernsea, my visits back home would become less frequent. I had distracting work commitments to contend with and fewer opportunities to head to Yorkshire. When I did go back, my trips were brief, and I had little time to make the sea my focus. I’d tour around town, catching up with the different members of my family then get in the car and head back to Manchester. But when I was there 58the sea was always a distraction. I’d savour the smell of it that lingered in the air and would often treat myself to a drive along the seafront before leaving town, the way an obsessive ex would take regular journeys past a former girlfriend’s house.
In Manchester, whenever I sat down to write, I found that my words always flowed the best while listening to recordings on Spotify of lapping waters and waves crashing. Generic tracks with titles like ‘Ocean Meditation Sounds’ and ‘Fancy Round the World Cruise’. Still, none of them sounded like the North Sea. I could listen to the shuffle of ebbing tides raking pebble beaches and lazy waves sucking at deep rock pools, but they could’ve been recorded in Margate or the coast of Equatorial Guinea for all I knew. They definitely weren’t from the Yorkshire coast, which made a comforting yet moodily complaining sound. One that I held in my head, a sense memory I could feel. After a period of searching, I eventually came across a short field recording of Whitby from 1958, which I listened to on repeat while I tapped at my keyboard. It sounded right for the most part, the screech of the gulls was familiar, the peculiarly brutal wind that slapped the waves into the north-east coastline. But it still wasn’t right, the sounds punctuated by the out-of-place put-puts of ancient diesel tugs. These bygone sounds and the knowledge that every bird on the recording had died more than half a century ago ruined the illusion that I was listening to the place that I still considered my home.
When I got a call from my mother and learned that Robert had been hospitalised after he was stung on the foot by a weever fish while paddling at my old south Withernsea swimming spot, I found that I was jealous. That was my beach, I thought. Where things happened to me. I felt possessively bonded to it 59in a way that some people feel when an old flame finds someone new, and they are forced to watch their ex enjoying a life they’re no longer part of. I’ve never been like that with people, but I felt it about Withernsea beach. That should have been my foot, my agony, my story to tell. I should have been in a hospital bed, yelling with agony and pressing the nurse alert button to summon more medication, not Robert. I knew that I had no right to feel this way. I’d left town and had flings with other bodies of water, but it was clear that I hadn’t moved on. The North Sea was the real thing, my true love, and I wanted us to try again.
*
Effie and I grabbed our things from the car and headed down the old concrete steps, dumping our bags in a sheltered place near the rock wall. She armed herself with her fishing net and bucket and I led her across the sun-warmed sands.
We spent an hour or so hopping between pools and digging our hands into the heavy, squelching sand to wrench out interesting stones and crack them with a hammer, hopeful of a dinosaur tooth but never finding so much as an ammonite. Then the clouds closed in, blocking the sun, and the changed light painted everything with a blueish, gloomy caste. The warmth of the sun disappeared as if a switch had been flipped and Effie immediately began to flag, our golden seaside adventure now resembling a realist movie about coastal deprivation and false hope.
‘Look! A fish!’ I called out excitably, trying to revive her interest. I pointed out a tiny, sand-skipping creature that looked as if it had just been coughed up by a heavy smoker. She 60obligingly scooped it into her bucket where it plopped down along with a dozen turd-brown pebbles and a collection of seagull-rended crab limbs.
‘No,’ I said, my tone brisk and joylessly educational. ‘You need to leave it where it was. When the tide comes back in it’ll swim away.’
This was the last harsh her mellow could take.
‘I’m cold,’ she said, as she flicked the fish back onto the sands with her spade, shivering and mournful, her fair skin almost translucent. She looked like an image on a campaign poster highlighting child neglect.
‘You said we’d be getting fish and chips,’ she said, sourly.
‘This is better than fish and chips.’
At this, she turned away and began moodily picking her way back to her towel, where it was warm and didn’t smell quite so much like an abandoned fish market.
‘Do you want to swim?’ I asked, calling to her back, and she responded with the kind of disgusted grunt I’d have expected to have heard if I’d just asked her to eat the contents of her bucket.
‘Well, do you mind if I do?’
She knew that I already had my trunks on under my jeans and that any answer she gave me would not only be a cruelty, it wouldn’t make a difference. So, she watched in bemusement as I peeled off my clothes and bounded off into the water.
My behaviour was partly down to bottled-up enthusiasm, but it was also for her benefit. I wanted her to see that it was safe and fun but also that I wasn’t upset by her lack of interest, even though, of course, I was. At the very least I wanted her to understand my relationship with the sea, and more than that, I wanted her to know it was there for her, just as it had 61been there for me. But it seemed to Effie, having seen what was left behind on the sands when the tide went out, the wriggling phlegm-like fish and scuttling crustaceans, the many dead and reeking things, that her father was willingly swimming in cold fish soup.
‘You’re nuts,’ she shouted to me, tugging her towel over her head like a hood as she watched me rubbing cold water over my torso. She cracked the spine of a Harry Potter and settled in to read.
‘Come in,’ I called to her. ‘It’s warm,’
‘Ha!’ she said dismissively, watching the breath spewing from my mouth like the vapour from a freshly boiled kettle. But I’d meant it. When the clouds drew back and allowed the sun to warm the water it felt, to me at least, like a bath. She was missing out but I wasn’t going to fight it, so I laid back in the sea, trying to lock in with the gentle pulse of the waves. More interested in being part of the habitat. Lying like a small island of seaweed or a lump of driftwood baking in the sun, I half hoped that a seabird would land on me, and I thought of this as saltwater filled my ears with that familiar slurp and I floated free.
I’m not sure how long I was out there, maybe five minutes, maybe half an hour, but I became aware of muffled shouting and raised my head towards the beach. Effie stood at the edge of the shallows, calling out to me. I righted myself and shook the water from my ears, feeling the rush of clear, unmuffled sound.
‘Sorry?’ I said.
‘When are we getting chips?’ she called out, skipping backwards as the foam of a breaking wave licked at her feet.
‘Just five more minutes!’ I lied.62
She regarded me moodily then headed back to her book and her towel. It was clear that this was not the fun I had promised her. It wasn’t fish and chips or ice cream. Not sculptures and Jurassic adventures on warm sands. It was organised misery. After all of my big talk about this place, I had a sold her a bum deal, her view entirely unpalatable. I could have pointed out to her that some people would dignify my behaviour as ‘wild swimming’, a hobby where nature enthusiasts gain pleasure from plunging themselves into raw and untampered waters before stopping to post vibrant, ruddy-cheeked selfies on social media. An activity that exists in the hinterland between paganism and Instagram. But Effie had already filed my obsession as a defect and nothing could be done to change her mind. To her the beach looked like one big coffee stain, the waves on the shore like dishwater and, beyond the beach line, stretching out into the distance, the sea as dark and oily as sealskin. And there was her father in the centre of it all. This sad, pale sea creature, churning up the water, too simple to be aware of how miserable his idea of pleasure was. But she had a book and her good sense, so she settled in to read, her own solace and sanctuary, periodically looking up to make sure I hadn’t drowned.
While she didn’t understand it herself, she knew that if I was in the water I was content. But I also know that she worried. Was concerned that if she took her eyes off me for too long, became engrossed in a wizard duel and left me to my own devices, then I could get lost in a daydream, drift off over the horizon and shrink from her sight forever. But if she did lose me to this sea and was confronted by well-wishers at my funeral, she would at least be able to say, with both bafflement and certainty, ‘It’s what he would have wanted.’