Coasting Chapter 1

Letter 1

The sea still wakes me.
It has been three days and still it succeeds in invading my mind. Each time there is a moment in the dark, a second or two in which I am almost certain that the interior of Neptune House has become the last bastion of calm upon Earth and worse, that the sea is on the cusp of calling my name. Does that sound strange to you? Does that set in motion wheels of worry? Quite why I should be concerned that Earthly mechanisms have come to know me personally I do not know and perhaps you might be thinking that I have lost my mind. I like to assume not or else how am I to make sense of myself, of what I did, of what it meant to you? Besides, that sound, that immense consummation of air, in and out like the exhalations of some sleeping giant, has always reminded me of my childhood and there is a comfort to be had in that.
I have been thinking of the beach hut that my parents had here? The nights I spent here as a child. I used to watch my brother, curled like an animal, pale in the dark so that he held all the appearance of a fossil, chalky and pallid and freshly turned loose of the soil. Even then I loved the sound of the sea. Is it possible to become so focussed upon a sound that one can literally turn oneself inside out with it? I find myself laying the dark, listening to the expansion and contraction of the house, straining my ears, struggling to divine some sort of meaning, some kind of pattern. The sparrow-rush of water against glass begins to sound like a million tiny claws, as if something is demanding an entrance. Usually the house answers back with an old man language of its own, a lexicon of ancient timbers that suffer like dinosaur bones and threaten to pitch the whole sorry mess into the sea. But sometimes I could almost swear that there is something different in the reply. Sometimes it is almost as though the sea has found a voice for itself as it scrabbles at the land, as if to implore ‘Don’t leave me’ when all the while it is the sea and not the land that is leaving.
From above it would have been all there is. Have you ever thought about that? I often picture it. A measureless and pitiless and rushing mass of grey, bleeding away to where the horizons are flecked with ice, to where the majestic curvature of the Earth conceals a definable edge, an island desolate and terrible, composed of volcanic rock spewed from the belly of the Earth aeons ago and thrashed by the resentful sea ever since. Each wave more powerful than the last, hoarding the shingle like a thief.
And the life there. God, if you could visualise that, strip the animate from the inanimate, leave behind only the tunnelling denizens of the coast. The insects. The soft-shelled invertebrates. Translucent like x-rays. Their chemistry set organs pulsing away like automata.
Forgive me. I am restless with the night and the uncertainties that it contains and these things need writing down. They need remembering because these are the things that are always leaving us. These are the things that are always packing up and moving on or else waking in the early hours and springing forth upon silent heals, leaving only ambiguity and a cold vacuum in their wake. Such are the things that I find myself pondering. As if those things that are as unattainable as galaxies in the night are somehow brought into being by the simple act of a thought, of a wish thrown out against the face of all probability.

You would not believe how long I lay in bed composing these letters to you. Often there is little other reason to get up, especially when I remember what I did, what I am missing, what I have done to you. It is only when I stop that it all catches up with me. You can only outrun these things for so long. Isn’t that what you said? Sooner of later it catches up with you.
Quite why I should write to you like this eludes me. I am not even sure that these will be letters that I will post to you, but you gave me this notebook and so I have a duty at least to fill it, to try to explain myself. I am no longer certain that I feel anything of what I once did. The fact that you were against me coming here only compounded that. Yet you did not try to stop me, did you? Or at least you didn’t try very hard. Perhaps even you knew that it was for the best. I had no realistic choice. When that letter arrived, the government’s so-called Notice of Intended Re-education, you didn’t ask me to stay. I think you knew deep down what staying would have meant, what they would have done to me at that camp. Nobody leaves those places. At least not as the person they were when they went in. Wasn’t that what you said?
There were reasons for coming out here of all places and yet when I try to picture them, form them into some sort of coherent narrative, my ability to explain myself grows cloudy. My ability to form any kind of explanation has always been somewhat tenuous, but deep down there is the echo of an answer, rebounding inside of me like a hard and tiny stone dropped into a well. My memory of events as they transpired seems incredibly fragile, but what I am certain of is that the impulse had been whispering in my ear for months. An idea, secretly nursed in the small hours. Get away. Stay away. This place has become a nagging space that refuses to be filled, like the swim bladder of a fish perhaps, that part that keeps me upright. My proximity to water has become something akin to magnetism, something primitive and primordial in the bones, that reminds me of toothache. Like a compass that no longer reads True North but instead only points me in the direction of the things I am deficient in. It is as though a part of me, primitive and primordial, never left the ocean at all and still feels the pull of every tide. In some ways you could say that the seeds of my actions were always there, hard and impenetrable but primed to germinate given the right circumstances. What I am virtually certain of was that the pregnancy and all that came after was only the impetus.
I remember the last time I was here. Seven years old. The geography of my life entirely unmapped. I remember the sight of the bottle green ocean, a riot of movement. In my mind my father rises from his deck chair, crosses the garden and gives me one last look before entering the house. That memory is almost certainly a self-concocted dramatisation. That sequence, however is the last thing that I clearly remember. Animated in my mind like old cine-film, flickery and overexposed until the sunlight seems to slip around him, dress him in halos and coronas. It exists in its own right, preserved and snowballed into something more momentous like the speck of dirt at the heart of a hailstone. And where might you have been then? How far from that scene were you? I find it hard to imagine that you even existed back then, but you must have been somewhere upon this Earth. You would have been no more than eight or nine yourself. A contented child. Your life a lump of clay, waiting for a hand to shape it into something marvellous.
How strange that those older memories should be superseded by newer ones, constantly overwritten. Something is always lost along the way and those memories are tinged now with sadness and regret. We loose the innocence of earlier times and so we go on in this way, accumulating melancholy.
It is best to never go back. Isn’t that what they say? The country of childhood is a kingdom of vapours and tears and mist obscures all that once held true.

I have to stop myself thinking of where we had planned to be. There is little point in yearning for those things that are impossible to put right. I wonder sometimes if you do the same. Are there moments when even you cry? I used to think that you did but you became adept at hiding it from me. Even after I told you what I intended to do you remained resolutely composed. Stoical would be the wrong word for that term at least describes courage in the face of something that you had a right to be courageous about. Your face showed little emotion. Like a rock, I thought, one composed entirely of anger all the way through. You know, I mentioned that to my counsellor before the Notice came. I said if one were to open you up, crack you like a piece of flint perhaps, they would find an almost pure seam of rage, a bright streak, like Uranium, persistent as radiation and like both of those things, never truly gone, always there, always shedding a fundamental component or two.
A half-life. That phrase just popped into my head without invitation. Isn’t that what we have been living? Half a life?
I keep questioning myself? How did this country end up in such a mess? A totalitarian government and a cowed populace too scared to open its mouth. Why did I have to set myself against them and all they stand for so comprehensively? The answers do not come easily. Somebody had to do it. Somebody has to keep alight the very basic idea that we still contain a collective conscience. Do you know what though? There is only one answer that makes sense and that is “Why not?” That’s the bastard question. That’s the cold and crushing thing.
I once read a magazine article about a planetary alignment that coincided with a solar eclipse. An observatory in America was inundated with crowds hoping to get a look through the telescopes. Instead of being jubilant, the astronomers noted that most people seemed fearful. The same two questions were asked again and again: "What does it mean?" and "What's going to happen?"
People are always looking for reasons and consequences, for patterns and answers where there are none to be found.
Sometimes I suffer the illusion that I need to learn every piece of information about a subject in order to fully understand it, in order to become a fully rounded human being. A form of craziness in the face of the unachievable takes hold of me like the restlessness that comes from a fever, or the conviction that one’s limbs are not sitting quite right. The forest behind my Uncle’s farm. Do you remember it? In the autumn we used to build fires, him and kipper ourselves with wood smoke. He taught me Indian smoke signals and I memorised every message. Just as I memorised the many and varied explanations as to why women like myself seek a termination of their pregnancy.
Your father gave the most succinct answer I have heard.
Sometimes they just do.

Night in abundance. The nights here are of such a pitch of Faustian darkness that if I were to stretch out my hand I swear I would feel the brush of its velvet folds as an icy pain in my fingertips. It is all one thing, neither beginning nor ending. In the dark like this, these rooms seem alien things, as if the lack of light alone has stealthily rearranged the world outside.
It does not take long to become accustomed to the voice of a building. Neptune House is like a hollow shell. The repetition of wind and rain has become an echo of white noise, channelled and condensed by the interior space. If I were to listen carefully, if I were to place an ear to the wall I would not be surprised to hear the sea rushing towards some greater ocean.
I do not like this place. It is too old and it stinks of other people’s lives, of relaxation, of holidays. This is about as far from a holiday as one can imagine. I can get used to almost anything. The lack of respect. The scarcity of a secure future. But the cold. Let me tell you about the cold.
It is not unusual to wake here to find a skein of ice coating the inside of the windows. Nor is it unusual to wake in the night and swear that your extremities are no longer your own, that they are not in fact sculptures, perfectly formed yet alien and unfamiliar. The chill runs within the bones. On those nights I could quite easily imagine my blood, thick as engine oil, slowed into lethargy, working against my heart like treacle. On those nights it seems cold enough to crack stones.
Yesterday the temperature dropped further. Over the last few days it has gone from just above freezing to just below and vice versa. It has done this several times this week already and each time there is a collective holding of breath, as if this act alone, carried out in numbers, can raise the temperature by a requisite number of degrees. There is a thickness to the rain now. I can hear it in the rooms above. A syrupy drumming that betrays the very definite presence of ice. I hear it at night, gently infiltrating the house like an army of malignant mice. You wake and the first challenge after emptying the buckets is to find where it has found a new and unguarded entrance. I have stuffed newspaper into the cracks between the window frames. Rags above the cornicing. But still it finds a way in.

I find myself marvelling at how quickly these things have changed. The state shrugging off the thin veneer of civilisation, the illusion that it actually cares about those who are neither rich nor powerful, like an old coat. All too easily I might add. There have been times when it has all seemed so unreal. A game perhaps that all else are privy too except me.
Do you remember the noises in the night before I left? The screaming and crying when the vans would come and take away another undesirable. They were the sounds of violence and retribution, of a society coming unstuck at the seams like a stuffed toy. All the vital insides spilling out and running away or shattering under pressure like glass. I would wake and you would comfort me. How long would you lie awake like that? Did those sounds in the street outside mean to you what they meant to me? Did you ever wonder if they were coming for us? There were bullroarers and musical instruments as if the whole thing was a cause for celebration. Those religious groups who took to the streets in their orgies of self-flagellation as if God himself agreed with what was occurring. The Securitatae rounding up those they labelled as Domestic Radicals. The worst thing about it was that nothing was ever said in the morning. The building-supervisor, the shop-keeper over the road, the street cleaner, none of them would see or hear or even speculate as to what it was that had gone on beneath their noses. It was almost as if a kind of lethargy had fallen upon us all. A paralysis that prevented us from seeing the wrong turn we had taken.
Perhaps it really is all a joke. Conceived in the godhead of an obscene and capricious deity, a divine being possessing of a genocidal shrewdness and old-testament cruelty.

There were three checkpoints on the way out here, as you said there might be. The papers you gave me saw me safely through, else I would not be writing this now. The Securitatae manning them seemed more bored than suspicious of a woman travelling alone. They waved me through without even checking my papers. The third was manned by a local militia. I didn’t recognise them by their uniforms, which were ill matching at best, but they insisted on me buying a “permit” to continue my journey. I saw little point in arguing with them. They didn’t appear to be armed but there were four of them and only one of me and I have heard horror stories of what those militias are capable of given the toxic brew that results when boredom is mixed with absolute power. I handed over a small bundle of notes and a permit was hastily produced, laminated but obviously put together on some desktop printer. They waved me on my way, promising that the permit was only valid for a one-way trip. You see how these things spring up? This too is terrorism in its own little way, but of a form that the government turns a blind eye to. People are led by example and ingenuity is a hard thing to extinguish.

It is surprising how little has changed here and yet the changes are there. They are of a more fundamental nature and are reflected in people’s attitudes. A shift in morality, a propensity to resist trusting fully in one’s neighbour. In this way the changes are internal rather than anything immediately tangible but they are there. You just have to scratch the surface. The houses for instance. Those I passed on the approach to the coast seemed just as they had before save for the addition of padlocks and bike chains on the gates. Heavy curtains over the windows. Small additions momentous in their significance. I became convinced that I had somehow taken a wrong turn amongst the miles of country lanes that marked the approach to the coast. With the fog to keep me company I could have been travelling either way. North towards one of the larger towns, making my way through the heath before catching site of the lights on the headland. Or perhaps south, racing to catch a ferry to Norway or Denmark. It made no difference. In one sense I have left civilisation.
I listened to the radio as I drove. The news, the constant propaganda, the impenetrable mantra of the shipping reports: a meteorological shorthand that betrayed the coming of harsher weather. When I parked the car the smell of the marshes was almost overwhelming. I had forgotten how pungent they are. The salt-water muddiness, the odour of layers laid down by successive tides. They are something to get used to like the smell of silage or creosote and the smell of them again was comforting. It reminded me of just how long it has been since I have visited the coast. I didn’t fancy going straight on to the house then so I wandered the dunes, half walking, half stumbling. Made my way over to the beach. The sky hung heavy. January darkness rose from the horizon and as I crested the rise it was as if a sack had been lifted from my head.
The beach was an eclipse of cinders. Grey sand, storm-conquered and naked. Clouds marched the horizon, bruised and immense like a pantheon of ancient gods passing judgement. The sea flowed like oil, sensuous and undulating in the suggestion of bodies moving beneath sheets, a boiling chaos that left a stain upon the shingle with every wretched assault. Explosions of spray enveloped the coast road.
I found the stump of an ancient tree and I suppose I must have sat there for some time, aware only of the impossible vastness of all the possibilities at hand. I tried to imagine you there with me, sheltering me from the wind in the crook of your arm. Eventually I decided that such conjuring was pointless and quite possibly deleterious to my well-being. I suppose I might also have cried a little. I remember standing for a while and examining the sea, mesmerised by its lull and lurch, by the micro bursts that were blurring the horizon. The sea and sky were conjoined in some bizarre Siamese mutation. Each the image of the other and all the more inseparable for it. There were flashes of light where the waves broke. Geometric shapes that could only have been ships, greyed and indistinct on horizon. With the town wrapped in preternatural darkness, with the hills beyond black and starkly impressive in the gathering evening, it was possible to pretend that everything was the same, that nothing fundamental had changed.
Later I must have gathered my things and moved on. I did not have much with me aside from the bag you helped me pack and I had the address of Neptune House in my pocket of course, written down, folded and refolded so many times that the writing was barely more than a ghostly impression.

Despite the years that have passed, there remains a familiarity with Neptune House that time has failed to erode. It doesn’t particularly feel as though two decades have passed. Do decades feel like anything as they go by? Is there the sensation of wind upon the side of your face as another year slips beneath, a perception of something large and impressive passing?
The building is an ink stain blown upon the sky. There really is no other way to describe it. It squats upon the very last ledge of the world, an edifice of gables and turrets and bay windows, shrunken and wind smeared, crushed between the weight of the sea and the sky above. Sandwiched like a wad of chewed paper into a crack in the world. To describe Neptune House as a fortress would not be entirely inaccurate. There are no other buildings nearby and so the surrounding landscape is a no-man’s land of marsh, heath and scrub.
You will be pleased to know that the rooms here are spacious, with white walls, a high ceiling and a wooden floor. Little else remains from when I was here before although coming up the wide staircase I remembered the banisters, cast in coils like the branches of a particularly sinuous tree. Ancient and writhing. I recognised panelled doors, whitewashed and adorned with moulded copper handles. All the things of my childhood remaining unchanged yet smaller in one way or another, atrophied by the passage of time.
The bathroom is several years past its best, with a black and white tiled floor, a large antique bath and perhaps more importantly the kind of cold that suggests a problem with the heating. In the living area a door leads to a small balcony, whilst the kitchen was probably out of style when it was installed. Dilapidated would not be a term I would use to describe the place. Spartan, definitely, yet there is a curious charm to be found here. When lying on the bed earlier my fingers felt something hard and unyielding beneath the pillow. A pinecone, brown and brittle dry, imbibed with the scent of the forest. Something quivered inside, feathery like the coiled potential of clock springs. Its armoured plates had yet to release their cargoes of seeds. I put it in my coat pocket. It will be a treasure, a souvenir, something to savour.

So how do I even begin to describe the place that I find myself in? You have to focus on the small things and hope that the large things will take care of themselves. It is the small things that are important after-all.
My reasons for seeking a termination for instance.
Do you see me now as something alien and unfamiliar? Have I taken on the countenance of something you could not possibly hope to understand? I would not blame you if that was how you saw me, for I do not fully understand my reasoning myself. I will however, attempt to tell you how I feel.
From above it would all look different. From a higher vantage point, a bird’s eye perhaps or the cockpit of an aircraft, it would all look so simple. But down on ground level the story is far more complicated.
Put simply, I could not live as a subject of this regime and bring new life into it. It would not have been fair to inflict that upon something as innocent and unblemished as a child. I know you will protest that there are many thousands of women who would willingly give their legs for what I have ended, but they do not feel as I do. No human being can claim that except for me. I cannot have a child. Not at this time. Not with the way the government holds itself against women, not with the way it inflicts its bullish masculinity upon us all. By outlawing termination in the way that they have, by outlawing all dissent and protest, by removing the right to vote from those women who choose to leave work and look after their children, by rounding people up and making certain that they are never heard from again, they have simply made control over one’s mind and body the greatest act of protest that one can make. We women have power over our bodies that the men in power cannot control and they hate us for it.
I sometimes wonder if some form of collective madness has not befallen those who lead us. That is a treasonous thought. Sedition when written down. I do not know the various punishments and tortures meted out for crimes such as mine. It seems to me that to even recognise them as such lends them an air of legitimacy. Even still, I would not say these words aloud.
I do wonder why I wasn’t disappeared like so many others, picked up and dragged kicking and screaming into the back of some darkened van whilst those around me tried to look the other way, pretended that this wasn’t how things were done. Instead they sent me that letter, polite enough but terrifying for me in its implications. I’m still trying to figure out why they did that. Perhaps it was some final insult. One last indignity. That too though only hardened my resolve, proved once and for all, if proof was still needed, that I have done the right thing.
I have a conscience. I value free will over propaganda. I chose to end the potential of our child. Except it wasn’t a child at all, was it? I do not expect you to understand or even forgive but there is not a fibre of my being that can equate a cluster of cells with a living breathing human being. The vital element here is time, isn’t it? Another month perhaps, another few weeks and things might have been different. I might have felt something other than total outrage at our situation. But then, in those first few days after the appointment, all I could feel was relief.

There was a power cut a moment ago. I was standing at the window when the lights flickered and finally died altogether. All of a sudden I noticed the footprints on the beach. Two rows, bold and pronounced, already being erased by the waves. For a second I was almost certain that there was someone out amongst the waves. A tiny figure. A swimmer waving, deluged by white horses and brimming foam, lost amidst the surf. Someone was watching from the beach, not moving, just watching.
I write this as though uncertain of what I saw. The image was distorted, half hidden by the inconsistencies of the window and the mist. But there was someone out there. When I wiped the grime from the window the rain came down in obscuring drifts and the image was lost.
Now, the ocean burns and is empty once more.