In a house called Kia-Ora, the last tenant had left a clothes peg, a knitting needle and a blue mirror, like a mermaid’s moonlight flit. Our winter let, this fish-box of gutted rooms, flipped by tides upon a rocky shore, the frost already at the gate. We ate off tea chests, made a bed of straw, then slept in the window that first night, September 1994, to watch the sea snarl at us like guard dogs on the end of a rusty chain.
Our first storm threw caution to its winds. We listened to breakers threshing oil drums from Tyneside, boat sticks, lobster pots, ship’s furniture, a chandler’s-worth of rope, telegraph poles, railway sleepers, whole pine trees lathed of their skins by rolling salt. Next morning, the horizon was a jagged edge as waves unfurled like ballroom carpets over the stone pier.
October’s sun rose on dropped wind, peeled its orange rim off the world, the North Sea like a Sunday painting, dawn in salt on the window glaze, frost rind slowly visible on thistle cupulae, the low tide dubbed over skerry crusts blackened and slippery. The skyte of giant kelps, sea belts, tangles and furbelows, edges and tips which lipped and flicked like carp in summer ponds, or rudd at the evening’s hatch. No cold blue winter sky quite yet, only hushed reds stained the yellow of piss on snow. Stilled white boats rode eight furlongs off Muckle Carr, two perfect swans low-flying south, nailed to the paper sky.
Harry next door came across for his coal shovel, overburdened by the news: A woman’s missing, aye, he said. Since Sunday. They’d had to break into her house before, once ago, aye, overdose or summ’t. Her, he said, never went near pub.
Harry, aged seventy-seven, born next door in this house his father had built in 1902 with stone he lugged from the quarry. A long-shore widower, Harry said you could spot the ones who wouldn’t go in the pub. Looked like death, they did, when they followed the dog along the sea path. No good that, keeping it in thyself. The sea was no friend of Harry’s. He’d learned the electrical trade instead of hauling net on his father’s herring boat. The only sea in Harry’s ears came from a D-Day shell on Omaha Beach, two shattered drums and a face like it saw bodies on every other tide. When I set off after driftwood, pushing Harry’s barrow, he had to say it: Aye, an’ yer might find her what’s miss’n, washed up wi’ the wood if wind shifts t’Sooth.
A yellow Sea King out of Boulmer hovered half a mile out, tail swinging like a weather vane as the wind shifted east and the sea gouged at rock like a cat biting between its paws. Luxury foam bulged on the tideline, heaped into creeks till a fox of wind set it into a brown flight of sheep, breaking from the fold. Above a rim of crushed horizon-yellow, a black sky screwed down like a fruit press. Gulls bent into crow bars against the brunt.
A blurred photograph of the missing woman appeared in the weekly Gazette. We’d stowed our lobster pots away for the winter that morning, in the outside bog with the jerry cans and driftwood. The lobsters had moved out into deeper water a week before the first storm. Till then, the inshore gullies had yielded them reluctantly. Half a dozen dogger crabs in a good week, a 14 oz lobster for the bonus. Even Harry had let his bait go to bad, shot with maggots, over-salted. The lorries were out gritting lanes by night. Coach trips filled the village pub some afternoons. Trees were bare, stripped of dead leaves already. The sea tight under bleached candescent suns. The overflow iced solid, drains clogged in frozen hair, puddles like toenails of ice.
She lived alone in one of the coastguard’s cottages. Five feet seven inches, brown hair greying at the sides. Nobody knew what she’d been doing when she disappeared, sometime after 10 p.m. on Saturday night. Today the sea was table-flat, red tinged from a sleepless night. A lazy day. You could drop off the horizon, never be seen again on a day like this, one sharp edge of a cube. No shags on the long rock, no gulls on the pier. Glass pools and new shiny furrows caught the sunlight, made a mud sea, white glints like stacked plates, a thousand seagulls following the plough. From our distance, in the low slanting light, we saw a cotton field in the light’s trick. In the same way, who dared see anything in the photograph? Perhaps her mother had taken it with a handbag camera, free with five coupons off the soap. She might be standing anywhere, dutiful and featureless. It could be yesterday, or 1950. She might’ve been her own remains, a face beyond a salted window.
The clocks went back. I missed the sunrise. The first day of winter fledged on a calm sea, a bed sheet under yellowing blue sky. The bereavement sea on a sensitivity card; sad, loss-white gulls in gentle soul-shaped flight. Rest in Peace rocks. Ezekiel 36:16 on a paper scroll in the grass, dropped there by a walker.
Night fell at six o’ clock now, muffling out the sea, my watch cut short by double glaze, a riot shield, undertaker’s glass. Behind drawn curtains, you couldn’t guess the sea was there, just fifty yards off. It might have been a brass plaque, on a wall behind the curtain, in memory of the lost, the drowned; or coffin rollers, an incinerator pit, or simply nothing, the bottomless dream itself. Was this how Harry saw it, as the village waited for one of their own to come ashore? You couldn’t help but feel a tension seething, tide-like, around the house. I ran from room to room trying to find its beginning. The cats flew in two directions as I careered into Alice’s study. One astonished face beside a screen, but the cats decided to run with me, and Alice laughed and joined us. We all ran outside, flattened against the darkness, and there was Harry in his slippers, mossing out to the coal shed to feed his fire, one shovel at a time. He saw us pale as moons. Aye, he said, did yer see, man? They took a body oot the sea this afternoon. The life-boot an’ the helicopter. Aye, tha’s aboot reet. They coom up, them bodies, seven o’ ten days after.
Once through the swing gate, each passer-by paused below my window. To wipe dog egg off a shoe, cup hands and light a smoke, drop a tissue, point a camera. But always, at some point, looking up at the house for sale behind them. Behind, because they always stood and faced the sea. ‘For Sale’, only it had been five years on the market. Our landlady and her aunt had quarrelled over the asking price and the division of spoils. A dream view in a postcard village, famous for its smoke-house kippers. A drab and shabby house on private links protected by the National Trust, behind a padlocked five-bar gate. Roof shot, no insulation, unheatable, corroded metal windows, cracked pebbledash, a yellow front door you never opened. Their Kia Ora, our Shangri-la: we had an open fire in the parlour, straw mattress, no furniture, just boxes and a five-quid peach-coloured sofa from Loot which we’d strapped to the Land Rover roof and driven home from a thousand-acre housing estate in Newcastle.
Glen passed my window, a dozen times a day. Duffel coat and schoolboy hair, ex-hotelier, simplified by a stroke. Sometimes his sister kept him company, but she preferred to walk the dog alone, a chapel spinster, waxed jacket, tartan skirt, marching by like her life’s task was to ring the Inchcape Bell. Once, they stopped together out front. She took Glen’s comb from his duffel-coat pocket and ran it through his hair as he made a suffering face for me to see. Glen waved up at me each time he passed. Sometimes he’d wave at a blank window, or it was so salty he didn’t know if we were in, or which room he should wave at. If it was cold outside, he made exaggerated semaphore just to let us know, rotating arms which hugged and strummed his flanks. He had a word for everyone he passed, usually about his stroke six years ago, how stopping work and taking the sea air had saved his life.
A widower collected driftwood in a handyman’s cart with pram wheels. Took it bad, him, Harry said. Dooz’n’ mix, avoids pub, he. I watched him push his bodge at dusk like it was his wife’s hearse. Black cap tight and low, looked neither right nor left. As darkness took over, the sea sounded like a city at night, hum-visible through the deaf glass, when all these widowers must have wondered, more than once, if jumping in would make it stop.
On 5 November, a fog rolled in from Forties, Tyne and Dogger, screening sea from house. There was nothing in the paper about a body. The day was warm but from the east. They said, according to Harry, that the cold was there, in front. You could see them coming, the calm, cold days; slow bulks on the horizon, the seagulls all at sea. Harry said a Polish trawler ran aground once. The whole commie crew legged it across the fields in the dark, were never heard of again. The villagers looted the boat. It broke free and sank, but the captain’s chair washed up below the house and Harry nabbed it, stuck it by his hearth. Come through, he said, I’ll show it yer if yer not busy. Kettle’s on.
It was in the Gazette the following Friday.
MISSING WOMAN’S BODY IS WASHED UP
… on a County Durham beach. Jennifer Pauline Jobling, aged 47, was last seen on Saturday 16 Oct in the village of Craster …
She’d gone a long way, staying with the tide as far as Seaham. The tide ran south and today the wind pushed against it. The body Harry saw had been a practice dummy. I watched a sheet of white board skit along a wind-lane, following the course taken by the lobster boat. At one point it lifted clear and somersaulted corner-to-corner for 200 yards. The low tide ruffed white over slippery rocks covered in truncheons of seaweed stem, its own push no match for the wind.
Scant timber washed up in a north-east wind, none at all in a westerly. The signboard from the castle came ashore below the house. Someone must have sawn it clean through, then dragged it 200 yards to the cliff edge and toppled it over into the sea fifty feet below. Some boat sticks came in, split middles discarded in the harbour after a hard launch just across the way. The puddle at our gate enlarged, dug out by nobbled treads on the farmer’s pick-up. He dropped bales twice a day for the sheep, counting his raddled ewes. The grazing hardened. Dead crisp packets whipped against the fence and into the sea. The sheep went far and wide, beyond the headland, rarely near the house now the grass was yellow. Shags deserted the shoreline, keeping to the Carrs at low tide. Anglers’ lanterns burned all night now the codling were inshore and taking peeler crab. Oystercatchers bradawled the inland mud for lobworms, running all the way in pairs. These were dark mornings and we rose before the sun now. I’d drop Alice at the station in the dark, an early train to Newcastle. Two calm hours of flat sea before a red sun became lost in the drizzle of grey sacking clouds. Mid-morning, a wind drove them back to harbour and the horizon was a dark, indigo bar.
The day of her funeral was Dreadnought-grey. Coasters on the horizon, some bright red and blue, the sea at rock-face like washing suds, Christmas emptiness about the grass and muds, the puddle a broken side window, single shatterings too thick to prize out, its ridge-backs frozen in. The village had been invited to ‘open house’ at Keeper’s Cottage, the incumbent widow’s sixtieth birthday. Two women in black were there, up for the funeral of Jenny Jobling, her last hours served with port and sloe gin. She’d gone to Lesbury to talk to the vicar, left him at seven-thirty, walked the seven miles home, in the dark through cold wind and rain, then jumped into the sea below her cottage. The New Year, still weeks away, was already poised to grow over this bare patch of time.
A shower of frozen salt-grit pecking on the window woke us Christmas Day. It turned to snow, powdered the mud. A robin stabbed at the cat food. Harry said: The postman delivered her cards, man. Whose cards? Her, her what come oot the sea. The snow passed like a Christmas wedding. New Year’s Day slammed gates, rained in your eye and made side flares of your trousers. On the Hough, a wind to slit the dead woman’s cards open.
Eastern snow, yellow January skies mid-morning, till on a white foam sea waves looked like mountain ranges, foam and snow tumbling off walls, sleet driven horizontal, gulls frenzied along the spume line. The cat watched ice run down the window, his paw always tentatively drawn. He preferred to configure it thoughtfully before touching the glass and failing to connect with what he didn’t recognise. Like it was his first invention, he’d never seen snow before. Likewise, the sea was just a noise in our eyes. The cat might see in the dark, but like me he couldn’t see through a blizzard.
The full moon held steady in a gale, high over the puddle first, the puddle water running like roach fry fleeing a pike, darker when the wind lulled, silver-swiped when the gale dived across it. The sea stretched silver like the puddle. I could see the horizon at midnight. Ships passed through it. I could see a coaster’s rivets a league offshore. You could follow gusts for a hundred yards. The sea became the moon. I could jump into the moon. I cut the picture of dead Jenny Jobling from the Gazette and stuck it to the wet window.
In February, the rough sea was like a great slice of veined fat. The ‘For Sale’ sign disappeared one night, the gate blown flat off its hinges, face down in the mud. The game that afternoon was to kick the football off the cliff edge, into the gale, then watch it snatched back and fly by, spinning uphill behind us for a hundred yards. Just putting a hat on knocked your teeth out. A wind to split the cat in half, the salt skinned your face, our knees trembled. It took two to shut the door or fetch the coal, and walking with the storm behind was like being under arrest, frog-marched into a whirlwind. And in the night, again, we heard fragments of the village join the corrugated roof of the woodshed to escape over the fields like Polish mariners as waves pounded across the village.
In the clean-up days, we joined the wader count, collecting bodies for the ranger, counting guillemots and razorbills, washed up in their emaciated thousands. We stacked them into the fish boxes which had come ashore with them, and as we did so we heard the bleet of lambs below the Hough on the westerly, a spring wind, and saw a fox passing in a quandary. The curlews walked from rock to rock again, the west wind blew the sea flat, sounding like the all-clear after an air raid. A school of dolphins jammed the wind lane off the Carrs, rolling in pairs, wearing the new sea on their backs. Driftwood burned blue from the drying salt.
The first day of spring, and Harry had one bad night in every two. He said the daffodils wouldn’t appear till it was summer everywhere else. The wind blew off the land now, making desert waves, mackerel-backs of sea. It threw vapour like smoke in shots across the surface, and the sun cast milky rainbows, colours flashing as they moved. The plughole gurgled constantly.
Dunstanburgh Castle re-opened. National Toast, as Harry called it. It was a human world again. The visitors returned, as if from hibernation, still unsteady on their feet. The first weekend a woman with blood on her hands ran to our front door. Her son had slipped on the rocks. An hour later, another woman ran through the gate shouting for help, past our house, away along the sea path towards three people half a mile away.
Then one mild afternoon a third woman ran, this time from the castle. As she passed my window, her face was hard and white and grim. She returned in a car, with the castle keeper’s wife, behind a four-wheel-drive ambulance, and you could tell by the lack of urgency. Two lads, laying their lobster pots off the rocks for the first time that year, stood and watched it all the way. In the yard, Harry and I stood side by side. Harry said the salmon were running close, up along the gullies. He wouldn’t mind betting there’d be a net or two going out the night. Then the ambulance returned and he shut up. John the keeper was already dead, a man I waved to as he passed each morning, walking the mile and a half to the castle, swinging one of the sticks he carved himself, his jacket freshly waxed, his trout bag with its flask of tea and sandwiches.
Next day, canoeists were driven back into harbour by a shift in the wind. Lambs huddled in the lushest grass. A cold wind, still vicious enough to slash open weak shirt collars and race up ungloved cuffs. The foam remained unspent.
On Easter Saturday, the farmer sprayed nitrogen pellets over two women pushing babies. No driftwood on the spring tide, yachts instead of coasters, fox droppings of bunny fur, radishes pushing through. Harry buried his onion sets, pushed deep or have them blacken in the wind. This was no renewal. A stillborn, shrivelled month, the long struggle into a short cold summer. Harry faced his seventy-eighth year in the same window. I was forty and the novel was dust. Alice had finished her dissertation. Then a man with a cold knocked on the back door. He said he was a writer too, had watched me typing in the window several times in winter. I said I’d kept his seat warm, when he said he’d come to buy the house.
