The Pre-War House and Other Stories

Jetsam

‘Most of our DNA is actually obsolete… composed largely of sequences for dead genes — for the fins we once had, for webbed feet, for a tail that had thrashed.

‘Three hundred millennia on, our blood is mainly, stubbornly, salt water.’

ALISON MACLEOD, ‘Pilot’

Beside a crumbling cliff path, an old house faces the creeping sea. An upstairs window has been opened a crack, and a breeze enters, shifting the heavy curtains and stirring the musty air. Daylight penetrates, illuminating treasure and junk and teeth and bone.

Down the corridor, the sunless back bedroom has space rocket wallpaper and ‘JULES VERNE’S EVER POPULAR BOOKS FOR BOYS’ on dusty shelves.

Downstairs, the kitchen radio has been left on. The breakfast things are still out. There is a china cup on the table, used by the nameless dead. There is sand in the butter and driftwood in the sink.

The rising tide approaches the cliffs.

He is in a stifling classroom, pushing at the painted-shut windows. There are fingermarks on the warm panes and in the sun-softened putty. His skin feels grubby in the heat. His tired eyes, blinking behind thick lenses, feel gritty in the dry air.

He has his back to his students, who yawn when he talks about the demise of the Phoenicians, the Sea People; they are bored by the collapse of empires. They could not care less about the ancient art which he holds in his hands, these faded fragments of another world. A bead of sweat runs down to the corner of his mouth and he tastes its salt.

On his way home, he stops at a second-hand bookshop. On a shelf near the back, he finds Victorian pornography — photographs of pale women, naked except for their hats and laced-up boots, staring into the camera so that when he gazes at them, they, long gone now, gaze back. He puts the book back on the shelf but his hand lingers on the bare and disintegrating spine, the dust of old leather clinging to his fingertips. He leaves with a brown-paper bulge in his pocket.

He peers through the window of the deserted charity shop, squinting through his own reflection, eyeing the cast-offs. His mother used to bring his father’s old clothes here — jackets whose arms were too short, shoes whose soles were wearing thin. His father, finding his things missing, would go down to the charity shop and fetch them back. She would find his wretched shoes in the hallway again, like something thrown into the sea and washed right back onto the beach, lying forlornly at her feet.

He moves on, towards the collapsing cliffs and home, pausing on the doorstep to sniff at the sea before going inside.

In the fusty hallway, he slips off his shoes. On the wall, there is a ship’s clock and a family portrait of his ancestors in sepia. He comes from a long line of Cornish tin miners, who worked deep below sea level, in the cold, in the dark, in torchlight. The mines were always in danger of flooding, of being reclaimed by the water. His father was the first not to go into mining. The tin miners — and their language — have all but gone now.

He rinses the china cup and picks the sand out of the butter. Before supper, he takes a walk on the dunes, on this peninsula which is an ophiolite — he is walking on the ocean floor. The sand is dry and hot.

There are centuries-old skeletons in the dunes — the remains of sailors who washed ashore, lay unclaimed and were anonymously interred above the high-water mark.

When ships are wrecked, his mother said, mermaids claim the drowned sailors. The sailors become mermen. She touched his cheek with cool fingers and leant close to kiss him, smelling of sea salt. He imagined these shipwrecked sailors sinking down with hopeful smiles on their faces, anticipating dewy eyes and cool hands and the kiss of life. But what, he wondered, if the mermaids did not want them?

He was born here, pushed out of the womb with a residue of amniotic fluid in his lungs.

His father was an archaeologist, coming home with traces of ancient graves on the soles of his boots, and souvenirs in his pockets, Palaeolithic treasures: necklaces and bracelets, snail shells and ivory beads, teeth and bone. His father was interested in stone-age art and cave paintings — the handprints and fingermarks made by humans reaching out through the cave walls to the spirit realm; images of spirit animals, and part-human, part-animal figures depicting men in altered states of consciousness (experiencing weightlessness and bleeding from the nose) travelling to the spirit world.

He remembers his mother’s exasperation at the prehistoric dirt his father walked into the house and into the carpet, the fragments of anonymous skeletons he left on the kitchen table, his absorption in his work and his squirming with excitement over dead things. He remembers her cursing the damp walls which crumbled in her hands, the damp nooks and crannies where the silverfish thrived, the beams salvaged from the seabed rotting in the ceiling, and the sand which just kept coming in.

He remembers her at bedtime, her weight shifting on the edge of his mattress. He remembers Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, in which Captain Nemo takes a walk on the seabed, through a submarine forest and submarine coalmines and the flooded remains of Atlantis; and Round the Moon, in which men travel with dogs to the lunar continent and finish up in the sea, and the illustrations were of scuba divers and submarines. He remembers the wounded dog: ‘They had merely to drop him into space, in the same way that sailors drop a body into the sea…’ He remembers the rhythm of her reading and her breathing, her voice rising and falling, her chest rising and falling, and her reaching the end of the chapter and closing the book without marking the page, and in the morning she was gone. He remembers her cool touch, her cool kiss, and salt.

He was seven years old when the Russians launched a dog into space. Lying in bed at night, surrounded by space rockets and distant planets and desolate moons, he imagined those bewildered canine travellers: Satellite with his broken skull and Laika who could not come home.

His mother had left behind most of her things, amongst them a record player, and singles which he played too slowly so that they sounded like a man singing love songs sadly underwater.

His father bought a television, on which they watched the first Doctor Who, and Stingray, and Jacques Cousteau documentaries.

Alongside his father’s archaeology magazines, diving magazines appeared, one of which carried a transcript of Cousteau’s ‘Homo Aquaticus’ speech predicting men with gills. He learnt about partial pressures; oxygen toxicity and nitrogen narcosis; the altered states of mind experienced at depth: trances and hallucinations, confusion — the diver thinking he is surfacing when in fact he is diving deeper — and stupor. The deep sea sounded awesome, a wonderful and terrible place, full of hazards with beautiful names, like exotic flowers: embolisms, emphysema, hypoxia and cyanosis.

He was fascinated by the equipment which his father kept in the shower room and in the cupboard under the stairs: the stiff wetsuit, the steel aqualung, the lead weights.

His milky wrists and ankles were inching out of his clothes, and his toes made holes in his socks, poking through, like something amphibian shedding old skin. His eyes bulged at the girls, who had also grown, and who had wiles, which made him think of physical appendages like tentacles, full of something sticky and poisonous.

He watched his father walking into the sea and swimming out until he disappeared beneath the surface of the water. Longing to follow him, he swam instead along the shore, and lay on the beach, burying himself, pushing his fingers into the sand, the bones deep and cold.

His father emerged with nose bleeds and loot, struggling up the beach with his tank and his souvenirs: shells and coins; brass portholes, clocks and bells; a china cup with a worn gilt rim — the spoils of shipwrecks, and jetsam (which sounded like a semiprecious stone — amethyst, topaz and jetsam). They went home with salt on their lips and in their hair, with sand between their teeth and their toes and under their fingernails, with the sea in their ears and their nostrils.

Frogmen found Atlantis, or the place where it had been, off the coast of Florida, and the Doctor found it south of the Azores, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. And spacemen landed on the moon, walking on the lunar surface as if they were walking underwater, with the sound of their own breathing in their ears.

There was a girl. They spent a lot of time lying on the dunes. This girl would always make him think of sand. They lay there at the start of a storm, gazing up at the inky darkness as the rain began to fall. He goosepimpled beneath her cold hands. She tasted of salt.

She left him, and once again he found himself alone at the edge of the sea, where dysphoria and chlamydia bloomed.

His father had begun to start sentences he couldn’t finish, forgetting the beginning before reaching the end, stopping in the middle, an ellipsis floating from his lips like air bubbles underwater. On his way to the charity shop to fetch back clothes he had not had for years, his father hummed the love songs his wife had left behind, and when he returned, empty-handed, he went looking for her in the kitchen.

Meanwhile, the Russians were searching for Atlantis off the coast of Cornwall, and the British were looking for it at the bottom of a lake in Bolivia.

The light is going. The sand has cooled. The tide is coming in.

He always thought she would come back.

He walks home in the dusk, treading carefully, with skeletons beneath his feet and driftwood in his hands. He has a migraine coming on. He still has his father’s old scuba equipment but his migraines bar him from diving.

He puts the driftwood into the kitchen sink. There is something on the radio about an ancient Middle Eastern library, found remnants telling of the antediluvian world and fish creatures which spent their days with the humans but belonged to the ocean and went there at night, and one day did not return.

He climbs the stairs and gets into bed, lying on sandy sheets with second-hand books beneath the mattress. He closes his eyes and colours swell, bleeding tentacles, becoming sea anemones. He breathes deeply. Eventually, he falls asleep. When he wakes in the night, the sea is pounding the cliffs, like someone thumping at the door, wanting him.

He wakes again at dawn, gets up and goes downstairs. He can see, through the kitchen doorway, his unused supper things still out on the table. He can hear, on the radio, the shipping forecast, the strange language of the sea — moving slowly, moving deep, losing its identity.

He opens the door to the shower room in which his father’s black neoprene wetsuit still hangs. He touches it, smells it.

In the understairs cupboard, he finds the cool lead and the cylinder with its dregs of old air.

He struggles down to the beach and over the sand, the tank heavy on his back. The tide is out but turning. He makes his way to the edge of the vast and shifting sea, where life perhaps began. Between the hazy sky and the hazy sea, he can see no horizon. Salt water laps over his feet. He steps forward, leaving webbed footprints in the damp sand. He wades deeper. The sea worms in beneath his wetsuit, getting in at the neck. (An early-morning dog-walker glimpses his head resting on the surface of the water like a buoy. A wave rises between them.) He sinks down. (When the wave falls, there is nothing there but the stone-grey sea, and daylight touching its surface. She walks on, beneath the crumbling cliff path and an old house facing the creeping tide.)