Tabitha Lasley - Sea State

For Mum, with love and gratitude

Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.

J ANET M ALCOLM ,
T HE J OURNALIST AND THE M URDERER

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,

Men were deceivers ever;

One foot in sea, and one on shore,

To one thing constant never.

W ILLIAM S HAKESPEARE ,
M UCH A DO ABOUT N OTHING

There was one girl who came out to our rig. She was only nineteen. One night, she was playing pool in the rec room. She was wearing hot pants. Word got round, and the rec room started filling up. And up. And up. Soon, it seemed like every lad on the rig was in that room, sitting there, watching her play pool. She didnt get disciplined, she hadnt done anything wrong, but her supervisor did. They said, You should have told her, you should have let her know she cant do that here. That was your job, to tell her that, and you didnt do it. As for the girl, she never came back. That was her first trip offshore. And her last.

WHERE S HOME?

I was looking at his mouth as I said this. Id never heard an accent like his before. It was a bit like mine (a guttural Liverpool k; some of the same distended vowels), but with a northeastern melisma that turned module into mod-joo-al, sure into shower.

His lips were thin, yet gave the impression of fullness. They looked soft and malleable. His mouth was bracketed by two deep grooves that ran from either side of his nose to his chin and vanished when he smiled. I resisted the urge to insert a finger into one and push up, to see it disappear. As his lips parted and he prepared to speak, I saw the narrow gap between his teeth.

Stockton, he said.

ON THE ROAD WHERE MY MOTHER LIVES , THERE IS A BLACK SPOT where people sometimes die. They call it the Bends. The area is semirural. Modern tract housing bisected by expanses of green. Markers of real countryside. Passing places, farm tracks, concealed entrances. The Bends are wide, with a lazy camber that invites speeding. One night, we were driving down the Bends, on the way back from Club Kinetic, and we crashed. It was November and it was raining. My boyfriends car was a cheap little hatchback with slender tires, and as he took a corner too quickly, the wheels lost contact with the surface of the road. The car slid across the tarmac like a blade over ice, tumbling through a metal gate, a fence, a hedgerow seamed with barbed wire. I watched the hedge rushing up to meet us, illuminated in the headlights glare, and thought that this time I would die.

We had crashed twice before, and I had a very clear sense, in those twirling, elastic seconds, that I was now out of chances. The boys in the back told me later that they thought I had died. They saw my head, in its blue Fila bucket hat, hit the roof three times and drop towards my sternum, the stem of my neck flopping ominously. But as the car came to rest in a ditch, and my boyfriend barked at his passengers to get out, get the fuck out, because beneath the bonnet the engine had started to smoke, I sat up and bit down. Between my molars, I could feel something like grit. Glass, smashed to a fine grain. I tried to open the door, but the barbed wire had wrapped itself around the car as we rolled, like twine around a spindle. I rattled at the handle, panic unfurling in my chest, and saw I was alone.

By the time Id scrambled out of the door on the drivers side, my boyfriend was almost back at the Bends. The car no longer looked like a car, but a pumpkin. The roof was crushed, the chassis splayed around the middle. There was no glass left in the windows or windshield. On impact, the steel had simply crumpled. I stared at it, too shocked to cry. How was it all five of us had walked away unharmed? Divine intervention. There could be no other explanation.

Except we werent unharmed. The substance of the crash clung to me. For a long time afterwards, whenever I closed my eyes, I would see it: the veering headlights and bright spot of hedgerow, approaching far too fast. It still lurked beneath the waterline, and sometimes, when I was driving, Id see it unfold in front of me. The car slipping out from under my control. Futile screech of brakes. Spiraling gravel, grass, birds, sky, soil. Black. Things ending with a crunch. Bone on concrete, slowly pooling blood.

Accidents happen when a few causal factors combine. An intersection of unlucky coordinates. Bad weather. Curving route. Young driver. Old car. The music didnt help: loud and propulsive enough to make him put his foot down. It was an old house tune (old even then, and this was twenty years ago) but its couplets had the cadence of a nursery rhyme, or a childs prayer.

When I go to bed at night, I think of you with all my might.

I love you. Fool.

Remember? Relate.

In some ways, he was the most instructive of all my boyfriends. He was two years older than me, at a time when that made a difference. He taught me things. His gospel relayed a frank and austere world I knew little of, but his lessons stayed with me forever. Some, I passed on to other people. He taught me how to lace trainers so the knots cant be seen. How to tie an anorak in the middle so it still looked girly. He taught meI still dont know how he knew about thisto put the soles of my feet together when I came, to intensify the pleasure. He taught me about hardcore, house musics bastard cousin, which came with a breakbeat and a looming sense of doom.

He tried to teach me, with limited success, how to fight, how to throw a punch. He told me every boy must resign himself to being beaten at least once in his life. He administered several of these beatings himself, but he also received one, when a troop of unknown boys picked him up and carried him shoulder high through the train station, as a triumphant football team bears their captain around the pitch. Once inside, they dropped him onto the platform, stamped on his ribs, and kicked him in the head. It was an unprovoked attack, an outpouring of tribal fury, and he accepted it without shame, without looking for reasons or seeking recompense. He knew the reasons. It was his cosmic bill come in. A tax on his maleness.

I love you. Fool.

He grew into one of those rare men who actually enjoy physical confrontation. To him, chancing on the opportunity to brawl was like finding a tenner in the gutter. A minor stroke of luck that would nevertheless alter the course of his day, setting it on a cheerful, upwards trajectory.

One morning, about a month after the crash, I sent him to the shop for rolling papers and Fanta. He returned twenty minutes later, looking pink in the face and exhilarated, as if hed just been for a run. His white Ellesse tracksuit was soaked in blood. What have you been doing? I said, as if I even needed to ask. The blood wasnt his, he explained, it belonged to someone else. At any one time hed have several separate grudges going, and hed spotted a boy he was feuding with, standing near the Rotary Clubs yuletide float. My boyfriend took a bottle out of the trash, crept up behind him, and hit him over the head with it. It was brilliant, he said. Everyone was watching. Father Christmas had ringside seats! He ended up in Altcourse prison, where he flourished, like a green bay tree transplanted to its native soil.

Remember? Relate.

My sentence. My sentence was longer. I did remember, every day. I believed it was my own silent prayer (a wordless plea for benediction, uttered in a basal layer of my brain) that saved us. I refused to learn to drive for a long time. I hated getting in cars with anyone, even my mother, who drove everywhere at a ponderous twenty-eight miles an hour. That night, I found out fear is the strongest elixir. Whatever synthetics are coursing through your bloodstream, whatever chemicals have commandeered your limbic system, they will be neutralized. I was drugged when I got into that car, sober when I clambered out. And Ive never forgotten that moment of gliding transition, the terrifying quickness with which conditions change. One minute, you have four wheels firmly on the tarmac. The next, youre turning cartwheels through the air.