Sea Change Chapter One
The bus reached the top of the hill, the land to the left suddenly dropped away and John pressed his face against the dirt-streaked window to look out. The fitful sun that was breaking through the cloud made the sea shimmer. The bay curved round and on the far side rose again into a towering cliff. Between the land and the sea a chaotic scattering of houses looked as if a giant’s hand had picked them up and simply dropped them down the cliff side, letting them rest where they fell.
This is the most beautiful place that I have seen, John thought. I didn’t know that places like this really existed, not in my world of suburbs and school and parks, all neat and tidy. This place is different, this is smugglers and stormy nights when the sea crashes and roars outside your window like a wild animal, pacing around, waiting to get in. This place is secret caves and hidden passages, gnarled fishermen and eccentric artists, this place is where I am going to be spending the next three weeks and already I love it. No-one knows me here other than my sister. Maybe I can lose myself here, forget about what happened at home, forget that I have to go back there when the summer term starts.
Maybe, he thought. But John knew that what had happened at home, he had brought with him.
The bus stopped at the top of the village and John scrambled his rucksack out of the door and onto the side of the road. A boy who looked a couple of years older than John sprawled across the bench next to the bus stop, chewing gum and staring at John with blank eyes.
“Hi” John said.
The boy said nothing, just stared for a moment or two longer. Then he looked away and spat his chewing gum into the grass at the side of the bench.
Just like them, John thought. I can see it in his eyes. In the way he’s sitting, his deliberately casual pose that sneers I own this place, I own you, and I can do whatever I want. He’s just like them. John looked around for the turning by a church, shrugged his rucksack onto his shoulders and set off to follow the directions that his sister had given him to her shop, not looking back.
As the road dipped towards the sea the houses started to lose the dull sameness of the twentieth century and become a higgledy-piggledy squash of older houses and fishermen’s cottages. Every building was different, and they all looked to John as if at any moment they would slide off down the hill and collect in a heap at the bottom. Many of the doors were painted in bright colours, sea blues and meadow greens, a contrast to the walls which for the most part were a flaking dirty white.
John passed a pub called The Porpoise, and heard voices and laughter from inside, caught the warm and beery mysterious pub smell. Every few metres, small alleyways or flights of steps squeezed their way in-between the houses and shops, but where they led to was hidden by the twists and turns of the stone and by the shadows. You could get lost here, John thought. He felt as if he was being watched, and he turned around a couple of times but could not see anything other than the buildings and the dark gaps between them.
The sun had slid down behind the cliffs, and dusk stole into the village. The temperature had dropped as well, and John shivered into his coat, still used to the dull sleepy warmth of a day on train and bus. He walked a little further and found the opening of the narrow alley that Laura had described. It was right next to a faded shop with bandy-legged tables outside, stacked with books in various stages of decay. Night seemed to have come on faster there than elsewhere in the village, the high walls of the houses blocking out what little light there was left.
John could not see the other end of the alley, and after a few steps he reached a point where he could not see the road that he had just left either. Another alley branched off to the side. John hesitated, trying to remember directions. The air felt cold suddenly, and he could no longer hear any other sound in the village. A mist was creeping up from the flagstones and wrapping itself around John’s legs.
Which way, John thought to himself, straight on or up here to the left? Come on, just make your mind up. Then his mind was made up for him, and he hurried straight on, walking so fast that he was almost running. For a moment he had thought that a voice had come from the side alley, a voice as dry as paper that whispered this way, this way. But as he came out onto a street of shops, most closed for the night, metal shutters down over dark windows, he shook his head, embarrassed. You’d better get used to the sound of the sea, he thought, to the whisper of the waves, or you’ll be jumping at shadows all the time you’re here.
One shop’s windows were still glowing warm with light, and as he approached he saw the hand painted sign, Crystals and Candles. Before he reached it, the door opened, and a woman with long dark hair looked anxiously out into the street.
“Laura!”
“John!”
His sister ran out of the shop, caught him in the middle of the street, and gave him a hug that took all the breath away from him. She smelt of spices and candlewax.
“I was getting worried about you. It’s coming in dark now and I was thinking oh, he’s missed the bus or something, why didn’t I go and meet him, poor thing is probably lost and mum and dad will go spare - “
“I’m fine,” said John. “No worries. And I’ve got my mobile, you know. I would have called if there’d been any problems. If you were worried, you should have given me a ring.” He didn’t want Laura fussing, because fussing destroyed the fantasy that he was a grown-up, able to cope with anything, and that no-one would think of him as a child who had to be looked after. That was one thing that he was coming here to get away from.
“Mobiles?” Laura made a face. “Bad for your brain, John. All that radiation, I don’t want to be the one responsible for boiling your brains. After all, it’s not like you’ve got much to spare. But look at you. You’ve -”
“Grown. I know,” John said, laughing.
“Sorry,” Laura grinned and ruffled his hair. “Now I’m acting like Auntie Val, aren’t I? I’ll be knitting you balaclavas next. My little brother, all grown up. I remember changing your nappy and -”
“Don’t start that again. You look well Laura, you really do.” Except she didn’t. There were dark smudges under her eyes, and a dullness in her eyes instead of the sparkle that John remembered. She’d lost weight too, and she hadn’t needed to. When Steve had left her, he had taken part of her away with him.
“Let me just switch the lights off and lock up, we’ll get down home and I’ll make you a nice cup of tea and something to eat,” she said. “You must be tired? Hungry?”
“I’m all right,” said John. “Not that hungry right now, to be honest. Had a sandwich on the train, some crisps. And a Mars Bar.”
“Ok, we can eat later. I’ll get some fish and chips or something. Fish and chips ok?”
“More than ok. Perfect.”
Laura darted back inside the shop, and the windows went black. She came back out, jangling keys, and locked the door.
“Not far, we’re just around the corner. To be honest, I could have had the flat above the shop but it was just too small.”
When John saw the house, he realised that the flat above the shop must have been very, very small. Laura stopped and pulled a long key from her bag. She rattled it into the lock, twisted and turned a couple of times, and then the door creaked open. “This is it,” she said. “Home for the next few weeks.”
John followed Laura in, and thought he’d just stepped into a crooked house in a fun fair. Mum and Dad’s tidy semi was hardly a mansion, but compared to Laura’s cottage, it felt like it. A narrow hall opened out on one side into a tiny living room, and on the other to a kitchen with a small table in the middle, and just about enough room for a chair at either end.
“Kitchen,” said Laura, throwing one hand that way, “front room, telly’s in here.” John saw the television. It looked as if it had not been switched on since it was used to watch the moon landings. There was no Sky or cable box in sight, but that was no real surprise. Laura had never really approved of watching TV. She took him through the front room and out of a door in the far side.
“Bathroom, toilet, in there,” she said, waving at a small door to the left that John had thought was a cupboard. “And our rooms are up here.”
In front of them a set of wooden stairs spiralled upwards. “Mind your head.” John ducked as he walked up the stairs, sticking to the widest part of the treads. “This is yours,” Laura said, opening a wooden door at the top of the stairs, “’fraid I have to come to and fro through it to get to mine.”
John looked around. There was a bed on one side, next to the window, and an elderly wardrobe. John couldn’t tell if it was the wardrobe which tilted to one side, or the floor. There was a window in the far wall, over the bed. John climbed on to his bed and leaned on the windowsill to look out.
“Wow.”
“View all right for you?” Laura asked.
“You never mentioned this.”
She smiled. “Thought that it would be a nice surprise.”
John watched the white lines of waves racing towards the breakwater, the calmer water inside the harbour. A man in orange oilskins stood up in his little fishing boat as the engine belched black smoke and the boat rocked its way out of the harbour.
“It is,” John said. “It is.”
Laura ran out for fish and chips while John unpacked and they sat at the kitchen table and ate it straight from the paper. Laura talked about their mum and dad, about the house, about people she hadn’t seen for some time, about her shop, about everything except Steve, or about what had happened to John. School was never mentioned, school was left untouched.
John thought, once or twice, that he might mention it, but every time that he did his stomach turned to ice, and he felt as if he were back there in that narrow corridor with the slam, slam, slam of locker doors and the copper taste of fear and humiliation. Laura would be sweet about it, he knew, kind and sympathetic and protective. But that didn’t make it any better, not one bit. So he didn’t bring up what had happened to her, and she didn’t bring up what had happened to him, as if by a mutual agreement that they didn’t want to spoil the pleasures of the present with the sadness of the past.
He watched television for an hour or so after tea, but the journey had tired him out and his eyes were dropping. John stumbled up the stairs and into his room. When he was ready for bed he peered out of his window one last time. The moonlight made the tops of the waves sparkle. He was about to let the curtain drop closed when he saw movement down in the street, a sliding shadow. After a moment he realised that it was just a black dog padding along, sticking close to the wall on the far side of the street, on its way out to some nocturnal canine adventure. He let the curtain fall, and snuggled down into the soft warmth of the duvet, and he tried to think of everything apart from the past, but like every night, he could not, and lay there instead probing away at the memory like a loose tooth.
Looking back, it seemed to John that what had happened was a natural thing, as inevitable as the sun rising, that could no more be avoided than you could stop the earth turning. At the time though, it was just another day to get through, head down, eyes downcast, looking for no trouble. But always finding some.
The morning had passed without incident, and John had managed to spend the lunchtime in a quiet corner of an empty classroom, reading. He had long persuaded his mum to allow him to have packed lunches rather than school dinners; it meant that he could eat anywhere, and wasn’t forced into a daily routine of confrontation in the dinner hall, thick dirty fingers stuffed into his meal, his chair pulled from under him, worse. He often spent break times with two or three others, Ben and Paul and sometimes Alex. They were not really friends, but had become united by their common enemy. It was a strange relationship. They offered each other support, but at the same time felt a resentment towards each other that was borne out of shame.
John knew that they all thought the same thing: if I was stronger, I wouldn’t be in here with you. If I wasn’t afraid, I wouldn’t be in here with you. I look at you, and I don’t like what I see, because I see me. But they didn’t say any of this, and there were many times that they were glad of each other’s company, even if sometimes this was just because it lessened their chances that they would be the one.
Alex was the odd one out of the group of odd ones out. John and Ben and Paul were just too bookish, or too slightly built, or like Ben stammered when nervous. They weren’t disliked by the rest of the school, just generally ignored. Alex though was different. He had a habit of talking to himself, quiet mumbling that made no sense to anyone else, and even in class he would twist and fidget the whole time, a boy in perpetual motion, shrugging and finger clicking and sniffing and drumming his feet. Then there was his stare. Alex would look at you for too long, too intensely, as if he had access to some secret knowledge about you. It annoyed everyone, and regularly prompted violence against Alex, but he would not stop. Everyone agreed that he could not stop. Alex was too distant, too strange, to be liked, but John felt sorry for him, and ashamed too. Ashamed that he and Alex had something in common.
It was getting near the start of afternoon classes, and he realised that he didn’t have the book that he needed for English that afternoon. He wandered down to the long narrow corridor behind the classrooms. It was lined with lockers, from the wooden swing doors at one end, to the locked external door at the other.
John took the book from his locker, and was about to close the locker door when someone closed it for him, with enough force to make it slam shut and then bounce open in his face. John stood very still, not looking round. He didn’t have to look round. He knew who it was. Then sleep came took the memory from him.
He woke once in the night, his heart thumping. He had dreamed of a voice, old and quiet, whispering close to his ear, and John fumbled for the light switch in panic, thinking that he could still hear the voice even though he was awake. But then a dog barked somewhere out in the streets of the village, and John found the switch, and there was nothing but the distant sound of the seas.
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