The Storm Hag (part 2)
2. The Flood
July 2037
Mum taught me to read the signs. When the black-headed gull’s black cap started to turn white means winter won’t be long. When the gulls flock in land to pull worms, that’s bad weather coming in off the sea. When little black storm flies beaded my white school shirt means thunder and getting a soaking. But now the signs are all skewed, the weather has changed quicker than the language of wings and feathers can move.
A call had come in, a wash-up of about thirty birds, gannets mostly, so sick they couldn’t preen and waterproof themselves and so the water will have dragged them down slow. The PCSO’s at the dune-border don’t even check my permit, just nod towards the bodies.
—It’s too bloody hot to work, little Mat says.
—They make us keep on these bloody illuminous jackets on all day, not like any bugger will ever see us, is it? I’m getting bloody microwaved. That’s big Mat.
—There’s a haze, I say, I think the weather’s turning.
—Is it hell.
—Have you seen anything?
—Alive you mean?
—Just the bloody flies.
—How’s the cottage?
—Got a load of drug dealers living in it. Still they pay the rent, all cash mind.
—Little Mat’s going for pasties, d’you want anything pet?
—Just coffee. Ta, see you in a bit.
The barbed wire stretches from the Gare all the way to the bay under Huntcliff now. Kids still find the scramble paths down to the beach to light fires and get wrecked, just like we did. Then the vomiting starts a few days later, like a hangover, but not.
The birds have gathered at the tideline, sand-rolled, almost invisible except for the beacon of their bills and their unspoilt eyes.
There are times even now, I can squint down into my kid-self and slip – so that it is almost harmless, the sand giving way beneath me, and waves diamonding. It’s a kind of haunting, but I’m never certain which of us is haunting the other – me or the sea. It could almost be an early morning when I was up and walking before anyone else, except the sounds aren’t the same. There’s no gull yap and clack or the slap of their wings rising as I get near. There’s no splash and bark of the dogs and the head down hush of their walkers. Even the sound of the water has a slick hollowness about it, a heaviness, that I can’t understand.
The kid me thought I could be a Whale Translator, pretended to the other kids I could decipher their song, thought I could hear the sea speaking to me in the way it would drag its wet tongue through stones. That’s what being the weird, lonely kid does to you, strands you on hope. When the whales beached, I thought I could hear them panicking, a song like a drum, like air on skin. I was baby-drunk on my first beer and thought – Christ – it feels stupid evening writing it now – I thought there was this thing, in the water, a woman, another song under the whales’s voices, angry and raging like bones breaking, like Mum kicking off when I pushed her too far, and she’d say ‘I wish the earth would swallow me up’ and it was that sound – of something coming to feed.
Obviously, there are no jobs for whale translators, it’s long past that, no one wants to know what the whales are saying, no one wants to translate that pain. We can’t go back. We can’t say sorry. In our language or theirs. There are jobs for people clever enough to keep quiet and work at the Freeport like Mia, and jobs for people stupid enough to touch what the sea threw back, like me. A careful, conscientious undertaker of the sea. Mia has a good job. Mia works at the Freeport. She sneaks into the warehouses because it’s the closest to a museum she’ll ever get. She’s seen Atargatis eye to eye, the lady of the sea, with her crown and her thick scaly tail, all meaty scallops carved in stone, that were shaped out of shame. Mia said her arms curved out like waves, like a kid wanting to be picked up. She says the warehouses are like magicians’ boxes where precious things appear and disappear. Things that bear the marks of being broken from where they belong. They should be in museums Mia says, but they are packed with the things that used to be alive.
Mia went to see Atargatis every day for six and a half weeks. She got to stare long enough to ask questions about why she felt the shame for loving, why she abandoned her child to be left in the desert, why she chose to go to the sea. Then the goddess was gone, sold, bargained, exchanged – who knows, and the warehouse got more solid doors and better paid security. Mia was gutted. But she didn’t want Atargatis to be kept locked in a dark room either.
Mia hates her job. Hates how they are constantly testing her to see if she can keep quiet about the dodgy shit going on. Since Atargatis, Mia reminds me of the woman I heard in the sea, and I wonder if they are the same somehow. I don’t know if this means that me and Mia are friends now.
I take swabs from the Gannets, they’re alive with sand hoppers that skitter all over my waterproofs. I can still pretend, if I close my eyes, that I can hear her again – the sound of her giant bones thundering under the sea, teeth clacking, dragging all the shit and poisons up with her massive hands. There is a sound now – that could be a woman – if I was drunk. The wind sounds different, coming in south-easterly, hauling the memory of cold with it, raking up the sand to scour my cheek and slake in drifts along the sand. Mum used to call them the Bucca Boo, you had to leave an offering for them or they’d wreck your boat. They’ve got so many offerings now, but they still itch to wreck something.
Back at Mum’s I sleep in the attic, or not. The skylight is open and I can still hear it though the tide’s gone out, the chaffing, like an old woman breathing. The way my granny breathed before she died. She had COPD. Every breath was like bad weather, wet and choking, like she was fighting for something. This is a fighting sound. Gran thought she lived in a farm, where all her brothers and sisters were still children and she took care of them, and I was the only person she could fit into time. She lived in a home, with all the wash up of her life, all the bits and pieces from all the places she lived stranded here, all mixed up. That’s what was happening to her mind, the sea had wrecked it and only brought back to the surface the stuff that could float. She got scared sometimes, of a sound she heard, a knocking, like the sound crabs drowning in fresh water made. She told me. Mum didn’t believe her. Mum thought it was aural hallucinations. Mum was always finding symptoms. But Gran said she could hear it and she’d always heard things since she was a child, voices in the grass, and now I hear things.
It sounds like a car crash, I saw a car flip over once, it’s the sound of something being crushed. Then the sirens go. The flood sirens scream but it’s too late, it comes in too quick, thick and black and pounding brick. I’ve had dreams of floods before this. Everyone who lives by water dreams of floods. But this is nothing like that. Each time the water hits the house, it’s a punch, like there’s something more than the moon pushing it. No matter how many warnings, no matter how many diagrams and speculations and flood drills, the happening is still a slap of unbelievability.
Mum grabs the cat and comes up the stairs, there’s no time to get out, head for high ground.
We watch the water rise and rise, and I can hear the sound again, the wet, choking, gurgling sound of a woman, she’s striding over the sea wall like it was a safety step, the wet black slick of the sea rising to form her cloak that sizzles out behind her in lace. A storm surge creates a change in sea level. She is rising, ten, twenty foot tall, a wall of woman. Her cloak of water swirls at her feet, sweeping the cobles up. The poor boats, that were grounded when the lads said there was no fishing left and finally believed it. The boats that were sold to rot under tarps in museums and make flower beds out, sunk in soil. The sluice sucked them out, soaked their dried-out timbers, the way the boats used to be drowned to caulk them. The woman sent them spinning at her feet. She holds, just for a moment, risen, and turns her face slowly to the moon, then that sound – choking, gurgling, cackle, she drops – like a trick, the whole tower of water dropping and I hear the sound in my lungs, rip my breath and the wave now a wall of white rising, teeth, all teeth a jaw opening swallowing the buoys and the harbour lights and until all the lights of the Freeport are drowned out.
