The Sea Inside

won’t leave me alone. Evenings I once spent drinking and dancing and taking drugs are now filled with a heady emptiness. Late at night, I think there’s some animal stirring in one of the rooms, a bear cub being licked into shape. And sometimes I wake in the early hours to hear my mother washing up downstairs, even though she died six years ago.
    The house has its own history, plastered over, extended, reduced, rising and falling with fashion like the hemlines of a woman’s skirt. The lawn where I lay as a teenager, reading
King Lear
on a hot midsummer’s afternoon although I’d rather have been listening to
Ziggy Stardust
on my cassette recorder, has long been overtaken by meadow grass. Somewhere deep in the bushes is the chain-link fence that first marked these plots parcelled out on the heath by a 1920s developer. If you can age a hedgerow by the number of species in a given stretch, you can date a street by its styles and details. Things here were once more empty: open coal fires rather than central heating, a hot-water geyser that exploded into blue life over the old enamel bath, and a bare electric fire hung even more dangerously overhead. No telephone, no fitted carpet, no double glazing; children spilled out of doors.
    Then the view was open to what lay ahead, and a shop stood on each corner of the crossroads: a grocer’s and post office combined, where you could buy postal orders while your luncheon meat was sliced; a butcher’s shop with tiles and sawdust and bloody lumps of offal; a hairdresser’s with its oval helmets that made their occupants look like astronauts, preserved in permanent lotion; and a brown-painted cubby-hole of a shop run by a lone elderly lady which sold only sweets and was rarely if ever open. All gone now. Here, as elsewhere, suburbia has disappointed its utopian dreams. Bramble finds its way into every crack.
    At the bottom of the garden – beyond the summer house whose interior is festooned with ancient spiders’ webs, each dangling white drop holding a mummified fly – is a crumbling potting shed. Recently, a sudden hailstorm caught me out in the garden, and I dived into the shed for shelter.
    It was the first time I’d set foot inside the place for months, maybe even years. The roof was rotten and yawning to the skies in two places, as though a bomb had hit it; everything was decaying with lost summers and long-dead flowers. A pair of deflated bikes stood stacked against the tilting walls. Plant pots tottered in towers. Bamboo canes which once guided sweet peas to the sun gathered in the corner, the twine still wound around their knotty rings. The entire edifice was slowly decomposing. As I stood there, still in the silence save for the rattle on what was left of the roof, the hailstones poured in through the holes like sand in an egg timer, threatening to fill the interior with granulated ice.
    Behind the shed a high privet hedge, blowsy like green clouds, hides an alleyway where my brothers would collect grass snakes, slithering in a bucket. Hedgehogs still shuffle out of it at night, leaving paths in the grass. At the end of the cutway, across the road, lies what is left of the common, a narrow, tree-filled valley dipping down to a stream, from where I hear the call of a tawny owl at night, drifting over the roofs, as if it might be caught by a satellite dish.
    One afternoon my father, working on his much-manured vegetable patch, called to us to see a slow worm on the lawn; it must have slithered out from the compost heap. For some reason, I picked up a spade and drove it down on the lizard, slicing it in half. I remember being surprised by the blood that oozed out of the bisected reptile.
    What had I expected? Did I think it was one of my rubber toys? Fascinated and horrified by what I’d done, I stood there, staring stupidly. I still regret it. On only two other occasions have I been personally responsible for the death of an animal. One was a hedgehog that I once found with a growth on its eye like a bloated pale pea. I drowned it in a bucket of water, holding it down, feeling its tight-balled body open and close, briefly. The last was rather more recent.
    I first saw it out of the corner of my eye, a white blur on the beach. After I’d swum I saw that the bird was still there.
    It was nothing unusual: a black-headed gull. As I walked towards it, it ran off rather than took to the air. Then I saw its wing tip hanging, obviously and dramatically broken. Had a