The Sea Inside

frigate
Prince Pojarsky
, who drowned here in 1873. In the nearby pub, an outbuilding once stood as a temporary morgue for bodies pulled from the water by the coastguard, their corpses laid out on tables while next door people drank their pints of beer. My elder brother, working on a trawler off the Isle of Wight, once watched as the net pulled up a body, one of two men who’d decided to strip off at midnight and go for a swim. The fishermen kept the bloated corpse netted off their bow until the police arrived; it is bad luck to have a body aboard a boat. Like those unswimming sailors, I can’t reconcile my love with my terror. I know full well what lies beneath me as I push out from the wall and into the water; and yet I still fear what it might contain.
    One day, with the sea swollen by a near-full moon, I get the feeling I’m not alone. I’ve just turned back from my farthest point when I’m startled by a sudden
whoosh
. Directly behind me, barely a yard away, is a huge head with shiny dog-like eyes: a large grey seal, fat and full-grown.
    I back off, shocked at the sight. I knew there was a seal colony just along the Solent – I’d seen grey and harbour seals there, lounging on the mud flats, so blubbery and lazy that algae grew on their backs where they spent all their time basking in the sun, raising their hind flippers in the air to keep them warm on chillier days. From a distance, they look quite cute. But coming face to face with one in the water was another matter. Weighing up to eight hundred pounds, grey seals have sharp claws and teeth that can cause a serious infection,
Mycobacterium marinum
, otherwise known as seal finger, which may result in the loss of affected digits.
    The seal and I regard each other, equally surprised. He’s twice my size, clearly a mature male. He raises his grizzly head, lugubriously. I’m not sure what he intends to do, but I’m not going to wait to find out. Kicking out with my feet to persuade the animal to keep its distance, I make for the shore – only to discover that the great beast has followed me, swimming beneath the surface. Scrambling onto the safety of the sea wall and reaching for my clothes, I look down at it.
    I was right to be apprehensive. Up close, it is even bigger, almost magnified by the clear water. It looks more like a manatee as it hangs there, puffing away quite quizzically, all whiskers and wrinkles, trying to work out what I am, this pale, unsealish creature. I hurry to dress, keeping one eye on my marine companion. His curiosity satisfied, he turns towards the open water and sets off, popping up at intervals as he works his way upstream, before finally moving out of sight.

    Back home, I walk around the house in the dark. I know its rooms as well as I know my own body. I catch myself in the mirror on the landing, hung so that my mother could check her make-up before coming downstairs, her necklace in place, just as my father always wore a tie. Now I look in it and wonder who I am.
    I step outside, under the frost-sharpened sky, and a watery array: Pisces, Aquarius, Capricornus, Delphinus, and Cetus the whale; a starry bestiary (as if infinity wasn’t frightening enough already) of ancient patterns created by minds yet to be overwhelmed by the images that fill our waking day. They fall in slow motion – Orion’s brilliant grid, Betelgeuse’s dying watch-jewel, the Pleiades’ nebulous cloud – seen in the astronomer’s averted vision, as if too big to look at directly. They seem unchanging, but they represent cataclysmic explosions, speeding into oblivion, collapsing into themselves.
    The nearness of the sea opens up the sky. I hold my binoculars shakily to a three-quarter moon, its cold face forever turned away; to Sylvia Plath, it seemed to drag the sea after it ‘like a dark crime’. Once, out in the garden late at night, I watched an unusually bright meteor flashing orange, red and white. As it fell to the horizon, its tail streaming behind like a medieval illumination, I heard it hiss and fizz.
    Far off in the city centre a clock tower chimes. Inside the house, things shift and fall. Floorboards creak like a ship. It ticks with the ebbing heat as it falls asleep. I lie in my narrow bed, listening to the sound of the dark. A vague rumbling drifts over from the docks, godless, twenty-four-hour places where the black water ripples with sodium traces. Turning off my bedside light, I hear someone call my name, as if the night