(2016)The Tidal Zone Read online

  The Tidal Zone

  Sarah Moss

  Contents

  Title Page

  things that didn’t happen

  you can imagine it

  the arithmetic of staying alive

  in hospital time

  hours over the sea

  arts and crafts

  flock of birds

  the rumble of the approaching train

  here, already

  a parent whose mind

  magic raven

  a country before the revolution

  burning

  echolocation

  a room for telling bad news

  her body made a mistake

  unforgivable lists

  sometimes something he later thought

  at the hearth

  the year pauses, turns

  the way out

  with paper umbrellas and sparklers

  the strange singing of the seals

  history with ethics

  a matter of mitigation

  or maybe like

  places where our feet cannot walk

  object constancy

  another half-millennium

  a note just too high to hear

  still

  transmuted

  every time you ice a fairy cake

  an effect realised

  everyone to be buried

  azure and purple and gold

  whatever he was looking for

  put your bloody shoes on

  wherever you want singers

  before it was too late

  suddenly the scent of citrus

  represent our generation

  a work of natural history

  if I could stop light

  time passed

  idiosyncratic economies of guilt, absolution and cultural pressure frankly reminiscent of the medieval church

  watching the kiddies like that

  the sense of doom

  a fire alarm in your head

  outlive

  premonition

  a Christmas scene

  simile for fudge ice-cream

  clinical observation

  start again

  algorithms for seeing

  all just fantasy and self-congratulation

  waters of the River Creuse

  the massed ghosts of England

  you don’t want to leave

  whatever he was looking for

  a sea star

  angels in rage

  where we are

  myths about which we know nothing

  now I am about to stop writing

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Sarah Moss from Granta Books

  Copyright

  things that didn’t happen

  Once upon a time, a woman and her husband lay together, and the man’s seed navigated the hollows and chambers of his wife’s body until it came home. Cells began to divide and re-form, as they do, and something new was made. As the weeks went by and the woman began to feel odd and sick, the new thing took shape: a comma, a tadpole, eventually the bud of a brain and a spinal column. Suddenly, in the shallow darkness of a summer night, a heart completed itself and began its iambic beat. The heart beat while the new thing grew a head and arms and legs, while it began to flutter and then to turn in the seas of the woman’s womb. For a long time the creature floated free, tumbling and kicking, learning to listen to the rumble of voices, to dance to music coming from the bright world beyond. When the woman swam, letting the water carry her swelling body, the growing being drifted and spun within her. When she walked the small thing was lulled by the percussion of her footsteps and the constant thrum of her heartbeat against its own, the engine of the ship bearing it on. But as winter passed and the sun strengthened on the ground where the woman walked, as the snowdrops and then the daffodils pushed through the earth and began to open apple-white and yolk-yellow, the creature found itself cramped. The walls of the womb seemed to close on its arms and legs, to wrap even its ribs and behind, and soon the being was pushed down, its head held in the woman’s bones and its hands and feet gathered in. The woman no longer swam. She walked less than she had, and she and the little stranger began to be sore and cross. At last, one bright April morning when white clouds drifted high in a blue sky and leaf-buds beaded the tired grey trees, it was time for the woman and the new thing to part, a painful work that took many hours, into the cold night and through the next morning, which the woman and her husband did not see because they were in a room with no windows, awaiting the child’s birth. The heart had been working for months now and it kept going, sometimes fast and sometimes slow, but always beating the same rhythm. Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. When the child was born there came the ordinary miracle of breathing, that terrible moment when we are cast off from our mother and from her oxygenated blood, when we have never taken a breath and may not know how to do so, the caesura in the delivery room. She breathed. The music of heart and lungs began, and continued, and no-one listened any more.

  The child was a girl, but the most important thing about her was that she was herself. She was someone new, someone who had not been before and so, like all babies, she was a revelation. She throve in her mother’s arms all through that summer, watching the shadows of leaves on the parasol that shaded her new skin from the sun, watching her own hands drift and dance. She learnt to smile, to look her father in the eye and smile. By concentrating hard, she learnt to close her starfish fingers around the things she wanted to explore: stones, buttercups, the silk edge of her blanket. Suddenly, one pale night, she learnt to roll over in her cot, and although it took her a while to learn to roll back, she began to work on lifting her heavy head. And all the time her heart beat, carrying the blood she needed to grow and learn around her changing body. All the impossible intricacies of her biology worked, and only in rare moments did anyone think to wonder at the astonishing processes of lungs and gut, of kidneys and brain.

  By the time the next spring flowers came, the child was learning to walk. Her father took her to the park, where she held onto a bench surrounded by purple crocuses and then confided herself to the earth and the air, launched herself across the grass in four staggering steps to his waiting arms. She was finding her words by then: Dadda, bird, more, no. She learnt to hold a crayon and make her mark, to bat away anyone trying to feed her because she wanted to do it herself. She did not need to learn to dance, because she could already do that.

  We know now that the first time the music stumbled, the child was five. She had started school that autumn and by spring was reading fluently, beginning to take over her own bedtime stories, although still uncertain about numbers and frankly not interested in learning to write. She was playing tag with her friends in the square of concrete that passed for a playground, running and shouting under a watery sky, her skin warm and her cheeks pink while the supervisors pushed their hands deeper into their coat pockets. Her feet slowed. Her muscles tired. Not enough oxygen, not enough sugar. Not enough light. Fear. Her lungs sucked hard and could not make a vacuum, could not pull in the air her blood needed. And yet by the time her mother arrived, by the time they had the child lying down in the room behind the receptionist’s desk, she was fine, was pink and cheerful and distinctly annoyed. They’d given her the inhaler they kept for forgetful asthmatics, they said, they were sorry, they hoped it had been the right thing, only it had looked just like an asthma attack and look, it had worked. The child’s mother knelt at her side, having been called from work took out her stethoscope and listened to her daughter’s chest, to the free flow of air, to the percussion of her heart. There was nothing wrong. Asthma, she said, is over-diagnosed in children. Perhaps some virus, some passing disturbance, one
of those things. And perhaps she was right. Perhaps it was not a warning that nobody saw.

  After that, the child wheezed, sometimes, with a cold. It was nothing much, not often. Not, her mother said, asthma, not really, although yes, worth keeping an inhaler around, no harm to use it when the girl was uncomfortable at night.

  The second call was louder. You knew that, of course; there are three warnings, three chances to stop the bad thing happening, although if we succeeded in doing so there would not be three, there would not be a story at all, only another in our unthinkable collection of things that didn’t happen. The child had been swimming in the sea off the island of Kalymnos. The water was cold. At first she had been reluctant, chilly, afraid of the waves, not wanting the salt water over her fair head and in her ears and her nose, but gradually, hand-in-hand with her father, she had edged herself deeper into the Mediterranean, squeaking as the water gripped her knees and thighs and stomach but then learning to jump and mock the breakers on the sand and to let the smoother waves lift her body and set her back on her feet. There we go, up and down, swooping and landing. Her hand was blue with cold and slippery with sunscreen and sea but her father held on until the four of them were bobbing adrift, awash, afloat where the sirens sang, until the child’s mother lost her nerve, wanted the air in her children’s hands again and the ground beneath their feet, and she was right because the child was still knee deep in the wine-dark sea when her breathing began to sound in her chest, to make a strange call. Mummy, she said, Mummy, and her mother took her hand and hurried her up the beach to where the inhaler, unused for months, lay at the bottom of a handbag. Here, she said, sit down, lean forward, you remember how to do this, and in half an hour they were all going for ice-cream. It is a strange moment for any body, for any arrangement of blood and skin and bone, leaving the water, cold water for hot air. Anyone’s heart might miss a beat, might not know if it is on land or sea. Anyone’s lungs might be surprised. Perhaps she did have asthma, after all. Lots of people do.

  The third time, the girl was growing up, living between longing for and dismay at her own adulthood. She was as tall as her mother and heavier, more rounded, a less provisional presence in a room. She was clever and brave and stubborn and she didn’t dance any more but she read and she wrote. She had joined Amnesty International and Greenpeace and the Green Party. She said patriarchy and hegemony and neoliberalism, several times a day. She put streaks of blue in her hair and enjoyed baiting her teachers by wearing mascara: but Miss, you’re wearing makeup. But Sir, aren’t you just inducting us into a world more interested in policing women’s sexuality than giving us knowledge?

  They found her on the sports field. The PE teacher found her on the sports field, had looked out and noticed a huddle of clothes under a tree when everyone was supposed to be in lessons, and wondered what was going on. She was unconscious but making, he said, odd noises, her breathing like someone trying to saw through cardboard with a blunt knife, and before he’d had time to call the emergency services the noises stopped. The breathing stopped.

  He did the right things in the right order. Pulled out his phone, pressed the 9 three times, pressed ‘speaker’ and laid the phone beside the girl among the dandelions while he rolled her onto her back, checked her mouth for obstructions, tipped her head back, the seconds dripping now like honey, held her nose and blew into her mouth, watched to see the chest rise and it didn’t, not much, but since he knew how to do this and not how to do anything else he kept going. As he’d been taught, he sang in his head for the rhythm as he braced his arms and found the opening of her ribcage, felt her bra under the heel of his hand as he forced her bones down into the earth. Nellie the elephant packed her trunk and said goodbye to the circus. There was not much space between the girl’s breastbone and the cold grass: easy, at first, to press a third of its depth. Ambulance, he said. School. Unconscious, not breathing. Doing CPR. Off she went with a trumpety-trump. More breaths.

  Inside the girl’s body, the teacher knew, inside her brain, cells were dying. Oxygen levels are reduced in exhaled air. Pressing on the chest, even hard, even this hard, does not move much blood. Her face and lips were turning blue. Keep on singing, keep on pushing down. Nellie the elephant. His arms tired. Harder. He heard sirens now on the road, blue lights coming across the field, a car bouncing over the grass. Said goodbye to the circus, off she went. Car door left open, engine still going, a woman in a green boiler suit. Blue plastic gloves on her hands. Running figures, an ambulance. We’ll take over now, well done, and he stood to make room, stumbled. They knelt at the girl’s side, four of them: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, bless the bed that I lie on. A helicopter now hammering the sky, bending the trees.

  *

  Suddenly, your heart began; suddenly in the darkness of your mother’s womb there was a crackle and a flash and out of nothing, the current began to run. Suddenly you began to breathe. Suddenly, you will stop, you and me and all of us. Your lungs will rest at last and the electric pulse in your pulse will vanish into the darkness from which it came.

  Put your fingers in your ears, lay your head on the pillow, listen to the footsteps of your blood.

  You are alive.

  you can imagine it

  There are no premonitions. The fact that you are eating a barely acceptable sandwich or devoting unjustifiable intellectual energy to your latest contribution to a social networking site doesn’t mean that you are not in the interval between losing everything you take for granted and finding out that you have lost it. In the era of instant communication, that interval still exists. Even as you read this, someone, a police officer or a teacher or a colleague, the person playing the angel of death in the script you didn’t know you were following, may be taking a deep breath, remembering the workshop on Sharing Bad News, as he or she prepares to dial your number and say the words we have all imagined, the words with which we torture ourselves, as if thinking about this possibility, admitting it to our minds, will keep it in the realm of nightmare and fantasy. There’s been an incident. Imagining things does not stop them happening. Nor does not imagining them. People, mostly parents in the school playground which, of course, one of us still had to attend twice daily for Rose, said, ‘I can’t imagine what you and Emma must be going through.’ It is exactly as you imagine it, I said. When you read accounts of ordinary lives disrupted by sudden disaster, by the ice on the road or the sleepy lorry driver or the plane falling from the sky or the angry young men with military hardware and nothing left to lose, when you shiver and turn the page, it is like that. You can imagine it. What you imagine is correct. This is not what they, the parents, wanted me to say.

  There is no irony, either. The fact that you are turning your face to the spring sunshine dappling through a bluebell wood or heading out for a coffee you have awarded yourself in the middle of the afternoon for no reason other than your own pleasure does not mean that the angel of death will swoop. There is no angel. There is no script. Enjoy the bluebells when you can because they are not symbols, just flowers. They have no power.

  I was not, as it happens, eating a sandwich, although it had begun to cross my mind that I would soon do so, and nor, for once, was I lingering on the internet over the floorplans of houses we might have been able to afford if we had joined the property market ten years earlier than we did. I was working, by which I mean that I had my laptop open on the kitchen table and I was reading a large book that was mostly pictures of the design and building of Coventry Cathedral. I was keeping laptop and book away from the puddle of jam Rose had left on the table when we set off for school, which I had promised myself not to wipe until I stopped for lunch, and from the cup of cold milky coffee that Emma had made and not drunk before the rest of us were up, which it was possible that I would leave on the table until her after-bedtime return to make a point that I could not quite articulate even to myself. I had been for a run between dropping off the girls and settling to work and I had to remember to keep moving around as my legs stif
fened.

  I wasn’t thinking about the bombing of the old cathedral. That would be too neat. I was trying to think about the tapestry. I’ve heard the guides talking about the tapestry to herds of grey-haired people in cardigans and sensible shoes, the sort of people – fate willing, I will become one myself – who take guided tours of cathedrals on weekday afternoons. The tapestry, the guides say, is the biggest one in the world. It is foreshortened from where you stand, but if we took it down and spread it out, it would reach all the way past the choir stalls and the chairs. As if Graham Sutherland had been hoping to win a global competition for square metres woven. I was wondering how to say that the tapestry announces as you walk through the doors that despite its modernist garb the Cathedral, finished in 1967, is in the tradition of English Arts and Crafts. That while it looks unfamiliar, unecclesiastical, to eyes accustomed to stone floors and gothic windows, to marble effigies of local squires, this building is a more conservative reassertion of vernacular and even local tradition than most of its peers in France and Germany. Hand-made, artisanal, another articulation of the English suspicion of the machineries of mass-production which began in our green and pleasant land. It was one of the less pressing problems across Europe in the aftermath of that war, what to do about the smashed churches. To rebuild, as if there could be a return to the old ways, as if it were possible to resurrect what had been lost. Or to leave the broken ruins as a memorial, or memento mori, as if we could never return to and never forget what was lost, as if the condition of mourning were to be made permanent. I was experimenting with ways of explaining some of this without sounding pompous, and wondering how much I was allowed to discuss beyond the material of the building and its contents. I was trying to remember not to write a book, and – suddenly, as how else? – my phone rang.