Dark, Salt, Clear by Lamorna Ash

Author:Lamorna Ash
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

It is only later that I realise Don’s gruffness, his slamming hand on the table, is not an attack, but an attempt to harden me into a shape so I can handle the sea and survive its difficulties. I am too lost in my own head to recognise this just yet on that Thursday morning.

Instead, I retreat into myself, endeavouring to dull my senses with an anaesthetic of my own design. The strong cocktail of drugs required to induce a general anaesthetic work by reacting with the membranes of nerve cells to suspend responses like hearing, sight and awareness. And yet, there is still debate over what actually happens in the areas of the brain that are numbed in this way. Scientists conjure up various visual images in an attempt to describe what it may be like – a total eclipse in the brain or a slow setting of the sun across the mind. Which horizon line do you disappear behind, then?

After taking a seasickness pill I pull open the heavy wheelhouse door to be met by bracing sea gusts. I stand alone with my hands planted on the rail that skirts the wheelhouse balcony as I did on the very first night I spent at sea. The crew are hosing away dead fish on the deck, kicking them under the railings with their heavy boots and into the water to be feasted on by seabirds. I wait until the last few birds have got their fill and the men have returned to the galley. There is no one else here now. The whole outside world is empty, unmarked.

I don’t know if loneliness has always looked like the sea on a colourless day, or if before that afternoon I just hadn’t had the image in my head to describe it, but ever since then, whenever I have felt at my most alone, I see that flat stretch of ocean once again, feel it rise up and cover me over.

I look down into the water. The phantom bottom of the ocean is called the Deep Scattering Layer and comprises an entire ecosystem of small fish and plankton that rise and fall each day. It was discovered accidentally in 1942 when an American coastal boat trying out its sonar read from its equipment, alarmingly, that the bottom was not 3,600 metres, but only 450 metres. After checking the sonar a few hours later and finding the seabed had sunk back down, they realised that the dense layer it had picked up was in fact a moving body of fish. In the ship’s log, the captain wrote of the sounds they recorded from the Deep Scattering Layer: ‘Some fish grunt, others whistle or sing, and some just grind their teeth.’

I watch the gulls make their circuits of the sky, noticing how often they seem to travel in pairs, describing figures of eights between themselves. When they reach the stern of the Filadelfia, they abruptly split and race one another long port and starboard before joining once more at the pointed prow of the ship.

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