Keep Your Head Above Water

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I keep thinking this is it. I do my sad little wave, a quick bow. Goodbye, au revoir. Then I turn in my flip-flops and start my brief walk home.

    
Of course the following day I return to the water’s edge. Since autumn has arrived it happens less, but this game isn’t over. I refuse to leave the sea alone; I refuse to commit to King Alfred’s chlorine depths: the stinky changing rooms; kids’ hair in the plughole. There it's all straight blue lines, rubber-capped old ladies and the flailing arms of front crawlers. There I'm a machine cutting up water, a chugging mechanism, hidden behind goggles and cap. Nameless, sexless, meant for movement and breath, there I am the number of seconds it takes for me to touch the concrete ledge of the deep end. I disappear, no longer weighed down by the burden of being somebody. It's for this reason that I tolerate that ugly pool. 

     
Seawater magnetises, hypnotises, pulling me in to where it’s deep and slightly treacherous. Buoyant and serene, it calms my thumping heart and floats me home. Often it’s hard work (the dragging current, those endless bloody waves) but the reward is in the crashing orgasmic flood of the senses. The serotonin kick. 

     
I like swimming far out. But these days I listen to friends who say For fuck’s sake, Clare, be careful.  I chit chat with lifeguards. Check wind speeds on the Web. Never go in if waves break violently on the shingle. This summer I even surrendered my solitude and swam with others - we sped past buoys, circled the West Pier and sank back onto hard pebbles, thighs trembling.

     
The sea has a character and a culture of its own, a world apart from the hectic town I live in. This town doesn’t feel like mine, but down here is – amidst this silent, sturdy society of swimmers, surfers and fishermen. The sea’s an addiction, I know; I'm aware of the risks I run for the high I experience, for that joy peculiar only to open water – the vast expanse, the arctic chill on the toes, sun on face, an unhindered smile. I wonder who, or what, I'd be without it, what shape my life would take. No coincidence, of course, that I started sea-swimming when mum had her last stroke, the one that finally silenced her, that condemned her to unseeable depths somewhere between sky and land. Back then, swimming far out I escaped the world, escaped people, the tick tock of life; I entered her world for a while - fluid, formless and all that quiet. 

     
Sun's out. Sitting here writing I keep one ear out for the waves, and my nostrils still sniff seaweed. This could be the day. Last week the buoys disappeared – no markers now, no edges to swim out to. No yellow globe, slimy with seaweed. Just a cold abyss, a charcoal smudge beneath a cloudy skyline.
     
But I wade into a new experience every day; keep my head above water. Chance it one more time. Before friendly waves turn frosty. Before the last farewell of the season. 

Sea-Swimming

I spent that summer dragging my blue and white dinghy to the seafront, eating hot pizza from the diner, rubbing salt into my skin. It had become almost a minor celebrity amongst my friends. We’d hold beach parties where the dinghy was wrenched across pebbles as guest of honour. We went racing up the Adur and huddled on Hove beach in the breezy evenings, comparing seafaring stories and drinking beer.

     
Out on the waves, I’d watch Brighton dissolve into a spray of blinking lights, sunshine bouncing off Sussex Heights. The Palace Pier became a blue and white haze, tiny cable cars rotating in a blue sky. Inside, however, I felt more like the West Pier crumbling slowly into the sea, inhabited only by starlings, cockles climbing over my limbs. I’d sail as far out as I could go until it was silent, a yellow buoy slippery under my hand. I rowed to forget myself, to forget what lay back at the shore. The last thing I wanted to remember was what was happening to Mum.

      
One afternoon, I went out in the dinghy with a friend. It was a clear spring day; the hottest April we’d known in Britain for years. He took control of the oars as I sank back against black rubber, warming my face in the sun. We sailed out, the only people in the water. Soon we were going round in circles. The oars flapped like broken wings, the tide suddenly against us. After ten minutes of spinning, panic, he eventually regained control and we slunk back towards the shore, shaken and stupid. However, in the distance, a lifeboat was already sailing towards us, a noisy helicopter circling overhead.

     
These were clumsy days. I grabbed life where I could, and fell through its cracks again and again. Thirty-three and sailing about in dinghies. Almost thirty-four and finally learning how to ride a bicycle again. I flew over the handlebars on the cycle path along Hove Lawns one bright September morning, trapped under a tangle of metal; saved by three old ladies with purple rinses. In some people’s eyes, I was practically middle-aged. But I felt like a toddler with a cut knee, wailing for my mother.

      
My vision of life felt crooked, bent out of shape. A part of me couldn't see the point when all it came to in the end was one plastic tube, a ventilating machine and your own flesh and blood too terrified to look you in the eye. So instead, I swam.

     
There was nothing more to be done for Mum to try and make her better, no more hoping, no more reassuring words. And the gruelling years of listening to her say, "If only I could just get up and walk to the television set; if I could just drive to the Post Office; if I could just make myself a sandwich; if I could just have your father back home again" were over.

     
The wheelchair stood empty in the back of her bathroom. The hoist now hung limp above her bed. She was far away now in another bedroom, attached to drips and machines, staring out of a window at robins that hopped about the bird-table and pansies sprouting up from the ground. Which was the bird, and which, the flower, I could never be certain she knew.

      
Her words had left her to a silent fate, a whiteness of language, the two sides of her brain in eerie silence. She couldn’t ask for anything she wanted. Maybe I hoped that finally the ghosts had left her.

     
I do believe that at times during that summer, Hove seafront saved me. Whether crashing bicycles or adrift at sea, lifeboat men booming laughter in my direction; down there, I was in the midst of life, in the belly of colour, light, sound. Some nights cycling home, I’d hear nothing but my own wheels on the tarmac, the sea stretching out before me like a beaten sheet of metal, the moon, luminous, wandering.

      
The ideals of my twenties left me crashing and burning in my thirties. I’d become so tired of the endless bullshit, the friends who sharpened their knives, the disappointing lovers. How many men would pass through my eyes before they’d finally grow dark and tired, before I could no longer see, before the mechanisms of sex ground to a halt somewhere between my vulva and my upper ribcage? Before all that I wanted became too much, too impossible, dreaming even higher, craving even more until I was nauseous, an excess of life in the bloodstream, mainlining experience, unable to deal with its consequences?

     
I didn’t realise it then, but those long summer months of survival down at the beach, flitting from England to Wales and back again, were the preparation for a major change in my life. My ideals had swum away, no religion was going to prevent me from being alone and no lover either. The only thing that closed the gap inside of me was writing. It was then that I understood the world again; it presented itself in colours. I staked my game on it; I put in all my chips. And it was worth it, for those brief seconds when the sky was luminous again and I was permitted to walk on the inside of language. I saw my mother lying before me on her white, sheeted bed, and putting pen to paper, I could articulate my love for her more clearly than ever. Those moments, I was content. The rest was just a ticking clock.