Sea Change Read Online Free PDF

his foreshortened body disappearing into the green water, the pale bend of his long legs, his mammalian feet spaced wide apart on the bottom rung. This is it, he says, sinking himself in till his nose is level with the surface. The sea ripples around him and then he hears the cries of sea gulls - this time sounding like a warning as he swims, away from the boat, one arm following the other, his head down, a breath after every four strokes, one minute, two, ten minutes, more, perhaps for half-an-hour. Maybe more. His arms grow heavy and the joints in his legs begin to ache. He becomes warm, then he goes cold, then he gets warm again, knowing this decision is a foolish thing to undertake and missing a voice of someone else telling him just what he can and cannot do. It’s hard to give up on authority, especially where there is none.
    When he finally stops swimming he turns on his back and floats, staring up at the sky. It’s a deep empty blue, and it seems so high he has a moment of vertigo - suspended as he is in this taut line of nothingness, no above, no below. The water laps cold in his ears. His skin is numb.
    It’s the first time he dares to look back in the direction of the Flood . He sees it, but it’s frighteningly far away, like a sketch of a boat, clog-shaped but without detail, and his first thought is to panic - this is just too far, just too stupid a thing to do. He wasn’t prepared for this, not yet.
    The panic fills him, naturally, before he controls it. No, this is what he wants. This is part of the whole process, to find these moments, to be in a place where there is nothing, to be drawn to emptiness, to stare at the naked sea with an unflinching eye.
    And gradually he adjusts. He thinks about the water which is lifting him, funereal, to the cloudless sky. He can hear fragments of the sea: tiny drips and lapping sounds. He sees things he hadn’t at first noticed: a soaring bird moving in circles at least a mile up, each circle completed it glides further away, to do another ring. Eking out some terrible hold on life up there.
    Floating this far away from the Flood , he feels disembodied, both of them in some kind of weird orbit, both adrift. It gives him clarity. Clarity to view his last few years like a frayed rope, each strand of it working itself loose from the thing it had once been, each strand still with the curled shape of the life it was once part of. Now unsupported, weakened, unravelling.
    Searching for the Flood again he notices it’s turned. Will it drift further and faster than him, because it is so large, or is their distance a constant thing? He doesn’t know but he senses, instinctively, that he is wanting to return. But instead he forces himself to swim the opposite way, further from the barge and, within seconds, he knows it’s wrong - Don’t - he hears, he actually hears it, a soft quiet word spoken in his ear and he stops, quickly, struggling to raise his head from the water to hear it again. There is nothing. But then a growing presence, close by, the belief that something is floating next to him, a solidity in the water, a tiny shape that gives him comfort. He smiles, not daring to reach out or turn towards it. Hi , he whispers, we’re a long way from home, aren’t we? And he hears no answer. He reaches out with a hand, feeling with his fingers the cold water, and briefly he experiences the merest of touches, lighter than the brush of seaweed, like he’s felt a child’s dress in the water.

    Reaching for the ladder, he thinks he might not have the strength to climb back on board, and again he has a sense of vertigo, below such a high blue sky which seems impossibly distant up there, without cloud or vapour of any kind. Just the stark vertical wall of his barge, with its relentless geometry and ancient steel skin to stop him falling.
    He nearly hadn’t made it. Swimming back, his arms had been heavier, and the boat hadn’t seemed to grow any closer. It had played games with