Common Ground

The rocks that a seal could belly up onto with ease, if not grace, would just as easily have ripped through the half-inch of neoprene and opened up her flesh to the cold salt. The seals knew how the waves worked, knew exactly when to launch themselves out of the churning foam. They flailed up, bodies streaming bright beads of water, then landed with a grunting slap of blubber. They sneezed the water from their muzzles, one by one, and barked dismissively at her, so clumsy in their element and unable to even reach her own.

Ten or twelve metres out, before the waves began to chew and suck at the rocks, she flexed her fins slowly to keep herself upright and worked the mouthpiece out from between her lips and gums, feeling the water sting where the snorkel had stretched and cracked the corners of her mouth.
The sun was low, over her shoulders, in its final lemon-drop descent. In half an hour or so it would begin turning the whole sea into copper and gold, falling faster and faster into the water until its reflections would be all that was left. She’d have to be back out before then, though. She couldn’t feel the sun’s warmth, only her own body heat leaching slowly out past the thin layer between skin and suit, then out into the hungry water around her. The seals squirmed up to their chosen basking places, the water already evaporating off them so that their shining flanks became first moiré-patterned, then velvet. The youngsters had long lost their fluffy cuteness, their snub-noses elongated, their pelts slick with oily secretions. They aged like dogs, wild dogs. The tourists wouldn’t want to take one of these home and keep it in the bathtub. They scrambled together, already rehearsing future battles, needle-teeth gripping at each other’s necks, trying to tumble each other from the rocks.

Tourists. She’d slipped back into calling them that already, with the same secret sneer, though she knew she was a long way from belonging here herself. The fact that she came from a town that could have been the larger, rowdier twin of Douglas, with its smell of horseshit, burnt sugar and seaweed, bacon-and-eggs wafting from the kitchens of the Victorian boarding houses lining the promenade, stood for nothing. Never mind that she too had grown up in household where the calendar was divided not into Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter but Peak, Mid and Low, the uneven seasons that revolved around a too-brief summer in which every day had to earn enough to keep them through five or six days-worth of the winter, when takings would be down and the heating would be on. It counted for nothing in Douglas, small enough to have been insular even if it hadn’t been on an island, with the long grey miles of sea between it and the nearest city. She’d expected – no, not to be accepted, not to come waving her own back-home credentials like a secret password into island life – but for it to have made things easier, at least. Common ground. Instead people spent the first few months asking her when she was going home, then the next few months wagging their fingers playfully and telling her she’d be on the first boat out when the season was over, when the rain became near-constant rather than occasional and, if stories were to be believed, farmers shot themselves up in the glens rather than sit through another day of under-subsidised racking sleet.
“Honestly,” she’d complained, in that first week. “They were going on about it, all of them, as if I was some wanker from London without the first idea… I mean, I have told them, about home, but they just sort of glaze over.”
“Mmm.” He flicked through the local paper, his ‘Tolerant’ expression beginning to slip slightly as he reached the piece on planning applications she’d skimmed through that morning.
“And it’s not like home,” she continued. “I mean, its not like any of them even work the season. Shops. Banks. Thingy, the English teacher from the college. But they still think they’re qualified to explain the whole bloody situation to me, the blah blah blah, all in baby talk because obviously I live in fucking fairyland and think I’m going to commute in on a bloody horse-drawn tram in December.”
“Right.”
“They’ve got no idea. No idea.”

She thought about the last time she’d been home, helping her Mum swab out one of the bathrooms after she’d had a hen party from Manchester there all weekend. Smashed glass in the bath, Blue WKD stains on the bedlinen. Trying to sneak three extra into the room on Saturday rather than pay fifteen quid each for a bed.
“And then they go on about it being polyester,” Mum had grumbled later, stuffing an armful of duvet covers into the machine. She put on the whining, sneering voice. “Urrr, it’s all static on me hair. It’s like sleeping on fucking clingfilm.” She straightened up. “What do they expect? Fucking thread count for them to piss in and bleed on and god-knows-what?”
The ‘No’ bit of the ‘No Vacancies’ sign was wedged in the back of the drawer somewhere and every time she went back there she felt suffocated by guilt. Sometimes she didn’t even want to speak, because even her voice was different now. Not that she’d tried to change it, when she’d gone to uni. Not consciously. But ten, eleven years away, at the other end of the country. And yes, she’d got tired of people shrieking with laughter and asking her to say things for them like she was some sort of performing monkey, so there probably was a bit of it that was deliberate. She wasn’t bloody Lady Haw-Haw or anything. But she’d smoothed off the bumps, the lumps. She could be from anywhere now, she knew. Found herself picking up other people’s accents at parties. A radio voice, tuning in and out. Key 103. Galaxy. Classic FM. She could even sound like she was from here, where people spoke with a twang of Scouse, a hint of the old Gaelic even when it had fallen from their tongues two generations back, a slight lilt that could be Irish or Scottish or even a tiny bit American. There wasn’t so much a local accent as an accent of all the places the locals had been, had traded with, had emigrated to and phoned back from. As though once the old Manx language had been washed away from the island all these other versions of English been brought back in on the returning tide, curdling in its pools and whispering in the water. She could let the dial spin loose on her vowels and sound as though she’d been here all her life.
“Look, if you don’t like it there, you can always get another job.” He shuffled the paper back into itself and folded it by the side of his plate.
“What, in a hotel? A little B&B? Carry on the family tradition?”
“No, not like that.” He looked up at her, his eyes darker than usual in the sharp light streaming through the windows, his hair still sleek and wet after his shower.
“Lots of things. Freelance, even. Work from home.”
“Doing what?” She was being petulant, she knew, but she didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want him to set out all his perfectly reasonable-sounding solutions one by one as if he was lining up miniature soldiers on the table.
He sighed as he stood, pushing his chair back from the table, but she turned away to the sink before he could come towards her.
“You’ll be late,” she said. “You’d better head off.”
“Right.” He looked at her. His eyebrows twitched into a cartoon diagram of ‘Worry’. She stepped forward and kissed him, lightly, tasting mint and marmalade.
“I’m fine. It’ll be fine.”
“We’ll talk about it tonight, yeah?”
“Mmm.”

He’d be home by now, if he ever came home on time. No reason to think he’d have started doing that all of a sudden though. Maybe the first few days. Spring. Coming home as the sun set. She’d spent most of those early days in the garden, hacking back at the brambles that had dug their roots in under the half-collapsed walls and reached out their long spined arms across the grass from writhing thickets four foot deep. She’d never had a garden before, had no real idea of what she was going to do with the ground once she’d cleared it, but it felt good to do it. Good work, outdoors work. Pulling up roots and replacing them with her own. Raking up the ground, grass seeds. Feeling like one of the pictures in the museum, stocky island wives posed in their Sunday best as if that was what they’d have worn for a job like this. Already antique, documented out of curiosity in sepia and silver and glass. Handfuls of fine seed spilling dry onto the soil.
But the brambles had grown back before the lawn had a chance to – not into the thickets, because she stumped them back every few months now, clipping them to the ground with the pair of evilly grinning secateurs that were sharp enough to take off a finger. She’d not got the roots out, scared that she’d undermine the wall even further, and the brambles thrived here when grass seed and the trays of busy lizzies she’d brought home from the Shoprite would not. Only the ones in pots had got on at all and flowers in pots didn’t count, did they? Her Mum has flowers in pots down the steps of her B&B, even though people kept nicking them and smashing them against the walls. She could have had flowers in pots in London.

They’d flown over for the funeral. London to Manchester, Manchester to the island. She’d never seen his mother’s house before it became his house – their house – had only met her once before the wedding and then at the ceremony when she’d sat quiet and aloof in a red skirt suit far smarter than Mum’s flowery two-piece. Not a hair out of place and yet the bright colour and sharp lines managed to make its wearer seem all the more pale and insignificant looking. She wondered now whether the old woman had been buried in it, imagined its red polyester-mix enduring in the grave, still glowing slightly as her body crumpled tidily into dust within its folds. She didn’t remember seeing it when they’d come to the house to sort through his mother’s clothes, bagging them up, one for the Cancer Research, one for the PDSA, since he couldn’t decide which she’d have wanted them to go to.

She’d seen it then, in his face as he straightened up and looked out of the window towards the sea. The homesickness which passed over his face so fleetingly in London seemed to change everything about him now that he was here. Here, and having to leave again. It changed the colour of his eyes, the shape of his mouth. His arms hung askew, one hand still clutching a cardigan, the other dangling limply in the air.
“Funny, to miss it when I’m actually here,” he’d shrugged, turning as she laid her hand on his arm. “I thought. Well. And now Mum’s not here either. I didn’t think I would.”
“Didn’t you?” She’d tried to keep her voice light. Down the glen the sea was an unreal band of blue above the trees, as though the window was looking out onto a re-touched travel agents’ poster. She knew what he was about to ask her, why he was trying to keep his voice light. She’d seen it in his face a hundred times, a thousand, as he woke from sleeping or slipped away into a dream. When he’d asked her to marry him it had been a complete shock because this was the question she’d been expecting ever since they met, ever since he first started talking about his home in a way she could never imagine talking about her own. She’d been expecting him to ask her almost daily for the past few years, every time he threw himself exhausted onto the creaking leather couch after getting home from work, every time he paused, still inside her and stared suddenly into her eyes as if surprised to see her there below him on the bed. She looked at the sea as if it might tell her what to say, as if it would send her the right words.

This was worth it, she told herself. Her legs, immobile below her, began to quiver back into themselves again, in a series of shudders. Back round the point, then up the iron ladder to where she’d left her kit bagged up and weighted down by rocks. Then the ungainly awkward unpeel of the suit from skin, hopping around one-footed and hoping there was nobody on the cliffs above perving on her through binoculars as she dragged her knickers up over damp marble thighs. Every time she pushed it a little bit more, stayed in a little longer. Being back in the car was fine, the heater on full blast and the sea crackling out of every pore. It was the in-between she dreaded.
She spat into her mask and wiped it round again, refitted the rubber around her face, feeling the strange backward breath through her nose as the vacuum took. They were ignoring her now, eyes half-shut. They’d tolerate her in the water beside them but that was it. It wasn’t like on the telly, swimming with dolphins, all toothy grins and the sex play that people mistook for frolics. Seals were different. Mermaids with black hair down their backs. Wolves. Their bulk built for insulation and murder.

“Seals, love?”
Her mother had straightened up slowly, carefully, waited for each vertebra to click properly into place before she risked another breath.
“Yeah.” Another six hours before bed. She’d already ticked all the topics off the mental list she’d prepared in the taxi. Minor health-related issues. Relatives. Neighbours. If she was going to avoid the other list, the one that included Takings, Damp Patch in Hallway and What The Doctor Had Really Said, she had to think of something else.
“In the sea. You know. With a wetsuit on, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
They’d looked at each other. She broke eye contact first.
“And is it safe, then, these seals? Do they bite?” Placatory. Polite.
“ ‘Course it’s safe.” Course. Coarse. Not obviously. Her voice slipping too far back, the dial spinning, trying to latch onto the appropriate signal. She pegged the last pillowslip onto the line, chucked the coat-hanger peg bag back into the plastic crate. There were patches of blue between the clouds and the wind was fierce, tearing. Island wind, almost.
“Well, I wouldn’t fancy it. Great big things. Not much of a swimmer, anyway.” Mum paused, turned. The back wall loomed dark above her. You could see where the gutter needed fixing, where that damp was getting in. “You must have got that from your Da.”
The familiar reflective glance. She could feel the overlay of his features settling gently onto her own, little ticks and crosses marking the bits that matched.
“Right.” She didn’t want to sound sceptical, or annoyed.
“Well. Well, let’s get in. This wind. Bloody perishing.”
She followed Mum through the back door. As it shut behind her the eye-peelingly salt chill had been  cut off instantly by the blast of warmth. Washing powder. Bacon grease. Plug-in air-fresheners in Lily and Geranium. The click of the kettle going on. Six hours before bed.

Inside the gloves her hands would be white, bloodless. She gripped the bottom rungs with her palms, not trusting her fingertips, hooked an elbow over the next bar to take her body’s weight. A last-minute bank of cloud had scooted over the horizon, a thick band of red balanced on the surface of the water. The snorkel swung from its clip, clattering on the ladder as she pivoted round, back to the wall to get her feet in their plastic fins up onto it. Bum on the next one, feeling the scrape of rust and barnacles snagging against the neoprene. Backwards up the steps like a bumpety-bumpety toddler in reverse until she was out onto the concrete, prising her bloodless feet out of the fins, walking oddly until she got used to the lightness of her legs now that there was no resistance to be pushed against, got used to heaviness of her arms now that there was nothing for them to float on. She’d left early this afternoon, whisking past the receptionist like she was on her way to a meeting. Her feet in high heels, clicking over the tiled marble floor. Thirty denier tights, polyester woolmix suit, briefcase swinging by her side. She’d felt like one of the clip-art people they put in the artists’ impressions to make the discreetly walled-in semis with too-small windows and reproduction-original features look lived-in, to make the tidily landscaped boxes look like homes.

In the summer there would be basking sharks, open-mouthed settees floating slowly through the water. Dolphins, too. Boatloads of tourists, of course. She’d have to work out the timing, work out when it would be quiet. She’d not swum last summer. Too busy in the garden. Well, that was a losing battle. Then she’d seen them, one day they’d come up here for fish and chips, looking down from the castle. Five brightly masked heads bobbing amongst the black.
“I didn’t know you could swim with seals,” she’d said.
“Well, you can.” He grinned at her. “Don’t know why you’d want to. They’re just big dogs with tails really.”
“All dogs have tails.”
“Not here they don’t. Haven’t you heard?”
“That’s cats.”
“Cats. Dogs. Monkeys. You never seen a Manx monkey with a tail, have you?”
She’d pinched his arse. “Good point. So it’s only the seals that have tails.”
“Only the seals,” he agreed.

“Hello love.”
“Is that you?”
“ ‘Course it is.” Obviously. He sounded half asleep. Worlds away.
“Having a nice time with your mum?”
“Great.”
“Good.” The great and the good. Grating away.
“How about you. Been up to much?”
“Not much. I got that fencing panel you wanted. They called to say it had come in.”
“I could have picked it up on the way back from the airport. If you’d said.”
“No, it was no trouble. I was going out there anyway.”
“Yeah?”
“You sound like one of the kids when you say that.”
“Yeeaaahhh?” she drawled.
“That kid’s sister. She’s been missing too much school.”
His voice was heavy. “O’Neill’s already been out there but they thought I should go too. Put in an appearance.” One of the girls who’d died had been in his tutor group. He sounded far away, too far away. She didn’t know what to say.
“Parents are in a bloody mess. Mother’s tranked up on something. She says she doesn’t want to leave her on her own.”
“The mother?”
“The kid.”
He sighed.
“It’s only been a few weeks,” she began.
“I’m fine,” he snapped.
“I never…I know.”
“I went to school with him. Steve. The dad.”
“I know. I remember.”
“Right.” Something brushed the receiver. “Well, I’ll get on with the fence then. Whilst it’s still light.”
“It’s okay… I mean… I can do it.”
“Don’t be daft. It’s no bother.” His voice changed. “She’d be pleased, you know. You getting the garden sorted out.”
“Good.” Was it a compliment? My dead mother would be pleased with you? She’d never been very pleased when she was alive, after all.
“ ‘Course she would. She’d be thrilled.
“Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Okay. See you then.” I love you, she thought, but the words didn’t make it onto the line.