[Quicksand is a non-Newtownian liquid…]
You.
Not the stupid woman in the Costa queue and not the damn seagull. Choosing is all I’ve left to do now. Got to get this right. Kelp coloured eyes and fingers that gyre my hair like currents.
Just that.
You.
Breakwater sand. Flat and membrane tight. I set my pace. The air was savage in my chest but it felt good to run and the sand flashed gloss-to-matt, gloss-to-matt beneath each footbeat. A line squall trailed a mile offshore and left a rim of moon, printed like the mineral ellipse of a lost barnacle.
Oh it can happen. A boy from the middle of a city in the middle of an island can feel the pull of the sea, can line his dreams with the creak and lumber of deep water, can wake from the light-slanted shallows of sleep and decide today I save the seas.
And you just laughed! At first. Cheeky shit, called me Plastic Man and bought me yellow Y-fronts, to like wear over you’s trackies, Bruv. Lookin’ criss! Two years of life-tides rising and falling had to pass before we came to share our plant-based, polymer-free lifestyle. Now we pillow talk ways to free the seas of microplastics.
The other night I said you know that there’s a patch of floating plastic in the Pacific that’s three times the size of the whole of France, Man. Your head was on my shoulder. Your eyes were closed but your lashes, dark-curved as mussel shell rim, twitched when I spoke. It’s northeast of Hawaii. All the plastic gets trapped in a gyre. That’s this current where the water in the north is goin’ one way and there’s like another current in the south goin’ the complete opposite way. I drew a picture in the air with my free arm, tracing wide and wobbly circles for each current. They’re calling it the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, innit. You didn’t open your eyes but you groaned, Fam…Can you see it from space tho’? Like the wall of China? I said not yet and you said is it.
Seagulls scattered as I ran. Long before I even got near they took a few skippy steps in their giant pink wellies, opening wings, umbrella-sudden and thumping up into the air. One landed a good distance ahead, pointed its beak to the sky and let out this wild, gulpy cackle. As I ran closer I saw the surf churned carcass of crab by the gull’s feet. It watched for me for a second. Tilted its head, jerky like hip-hop, eyeing the crab. It took a step. It took another. Then it snatched the crab before I got too close.
But then it stumbled. Fell sideways, like gripped by something. It barked alarm. One wing flapped, flashing the white, structural backstage of flight feathers, slapping the damp sand to puddles. I reckoned it was tangled up in an old fishing line or maybe the sand-sunk abandoned net of a trawler.
I slowed down and took out my phone. Because that’s what we do now, isn’t it? You’ve seen those videos on our socials, we both have, where the surfer/diver/fisherman rescues the sea turtle/whale calf/seal from the plastic hazard about to maim/strangle/poison it and captures it all on their phone for the whole world to watch, like and share. I popped my camera app.
It’s all right, buddy, it’s all right. I’m not gunna to hurt you, Bruh, I said, edging closer, knees a little bent, both arms outstretched Line of Duty style. The gull faced away, stretching forward, lurching onto its chest, extending and flapping one wing in wide and wobbly circles, desperate to be sky-borne. But the more it struggled, the tighter it was trapped, shrieking and coughing as I came close.
[…that changes its viscosity…]
So herring gulls are bigger than you’d think, when you get up close. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s wing was longer than my arm. Its beak was thick, dirty yellow and tool-sharp. I took off my fleece thinking I’d throw it over the gull’s head. I stepped forward. The sand felt wetter and softer. Bright cold water filtered and filled my trainers and I wondered how much I really wanted this vid. I took another step and threw my fleece, leaning in to grab the gull. As my weight shifted I sank fast, now calf deep in the wet silt. I lost my balance. I dropped the phone. I leaned back onto my other leg and sank up to the knee. Shit man! This wasn’t in the script.
The bird let out this jittery, whining scream. It wriggled. It flapped. The fleece slid off. As soon as it saw how close I was it thrashed, neck and one wing straining. Sand crept cold up my quads. I tried to wade forward, but went in deeper. I tried to raise one knee, then the other, but the sand held me down. Jealous and tight.
I gotta go. No choices. Expected. It’s a work thing, I told you. Why don’t you come, if you’re that bothered? Hotel’s nice, right on the beach. Then you left the room.
I can’t lie, it was a nice hotel. The kind that smells of essential oils and home roasted coffee, where someone has thought outside the box about every little detail. Romantic probably, with the right person. But I had Adelaide.
She knows we’re together, right? You asked but it wasn’t really a question so I said Oh my days. I said, she came to our flat warming and you said yeah, on her own.
The bird watched me with a wicked coral-rimmed lime eye. The pupil kept swelling and contracting. Then it opened its beak just a crack and did this guttural cluck, a low gow, gow, gow. There was a smell to it, all fishy-marine and something else, warm, dusty, hot-blooded. It called again, loud now. Gitow! Gitow! Jerking its beak up each time. I felt my pulse jump, my chest tightened below my collar bone.
Get out! Yeah, I hear you buddy. It’s all right, it’s all right. Just chill, buddy. We’re gunna get out. Just gunna get my phone, call for help, yeah? The phone lay where it had landed, by the body of the crab, the screen a shining rectangle of sky. I had no idea if it even still worked. Sand and water splashes had settled in perfect domes across its face. As I reached forward for it, I sank up to my crotch. Water soaked through my shorts, touched my balls. The shock of it caught in my throat and when I coughed, my bum went under.
I made a grab for the phone. The seagull lunged at my hand, keening, head tilted, beak snapping. It lunged again and as it did the leg under its free wing worked loose. One washing-up-glove-pink foot slapped firm sand. There was splashing, screeching. I covered my face. And then it was out, staggering on the sand, hopping, flapping and fussing its sodden wing. It ran, it shook, then it took off, climbed with each wing beat and then over the water it called, that long laughing, howling call. The soundtrack of gritty beach-side chips and greasy dockyards everywhere.
Adelaide had wanted to run with me. When we got a taxi back to the hotel she’d said so are you eating at the hotel tonight? I said I don’t know, I might not bother. I pigged that many biscuits. She tucked her marmalade-rind hair behind her ear for the ten millionth time that day and it sprang back like a weed. Persistent. Nothing as sweet as the client’s free biscuits, eh? Can’t stand gingernuts, me. I’m starvin’. She took out her phone, started scrolling and said yeh well, if you change your mind let us know, eh? But I knew I wouldn’t so I said I might just go for a run. Work off that sugar. Adelaide put away her phone and said hey that’s a plan. Beach run? I’d be well up for that. Ring me, yeh? I said I’d call her before I left and then I didn’t.
[…in response to vibration..]
The sand had reached my navel when the phone rang. The screen lit with a slide bar and one word. Adelaide. Quite often, I didn’t bother to answer when I saw her name but now I was lunging and rutting like a striker on a headshot. My hands scrabbled for the phone, but only fragments and crab and sand rammed the cracks under my fingernails. Just out of reach. The phone was still set to silent and its vibration sent tiny circular ripples through the water that pooled beneath it with each pulse. Just a few inches closer. Quick! The screen went black. I screamed. I pounded the sand and that made it worse.
Adelaide gets her way. She’s that person who never takes no for an answer. When she wants something she’ll lobby, she’ll pester and hassle, form strategies and plans, explore every path to her desired outcome, overcome or obliterate every possible obstacle. She is a gyre. It makes her superb at her job but as a human being she can be totally hard to tolerate. She brought a bottle of Bollinger to our housewarming and you thanked her but said to me later so what’s that about? She knows I don’t drink, innit. And it was chill, like for drinking now. It was meant for you and her, Jaanu. Who does that? But I said allow it. She was just being nice. Probably didn’t think and you clucked your tongue and said throwin’ shade on me. Bare rude. No emotional intelligence, that sket.
When I didn’t pick up, Adelaide did what she always does, hung up on my voicemail and rang back straight away. The phone lit up again and I stretched for it, but the grasp of the sand was steady by then and up to my ribs. I shivered harder. I watched as the texture of the silt below the phone changed, slippy-cement grey to glass-glossy gunmetal. Then the phone tilted and slid under.
We argued before I left, you and me, as we often do. We argue about little things that don’t matter because we can’t argue about big things that do. Big things like why I’ve told my family about us, but you’ve told yours I’m your flatmate and when I ask you say it’s just until your grandad passes because Dadaji likes you and that but he just won’t get it. He only wears a kufi and his thobe out every day and he’ll only speak Punjabi outside our house cos’ve stuff like this. Then I say stuff like what? And you never answer but I know you mean stuff like us because somewhere in the depths that the light can't find and the tide never touches you think we make god angry. So we stop, afraid of the weapons we might choose if we fight about faith.
And because we argued about something stupid, about the hotel and whether Adelaide fancies me or not, you didn’t come, and if you’d have come, we’d have run together and if even I was the one who fell in the quicksand, you’d be the one on the firm ground with a phone and an attitude saying you gotta kotch, Jaanu. You’s making it worse. Why you gotta be so extra? We just call up the coastguard and they’ll come and get you out, obvi.
I believe that.
The tide changed direction. I felt it. The barest tightening in the settled silt, an increase in cold pressure against my thigh and stomach and I said the sea is coming.
[…and stress.]
I yelled help! I shouted it until it felt ridiculous and I started laughing. I was alone out there. No one was coming. Come on, you can do this. I’d seen it. On YouTube, or Bear Grylls or somewhere. To get out of quicksand you have to spread your weight. Try to float. That’s it. Come on. You got this. I took deep breaths, blew out loud like Rocky or something. I tilted my hips back and felt the cold syrtis strike my spine. Come on. The seagull did it. You can do this. I arched my back, but my feet wouldn’t lift.
Why didn’t someone warn me? Then I remembered the crisp crackle of the aluminium sign by the dunes, how it flexed under my palms as I leaned on it, stretching my calves before I ran up into the marram grass. Those words in red capitals, DANGER TO LIFE. I didn’t read it. Why didn’t I read it? I guessed it meant the tides, or the currents and that and I wasn’t swimming anyway. I’d dusted the salt powder off on my shorts and my attention snared on a poster that someone had taped in one corner. Save Our Oceans! printed in blue and sealed in a plastic pocket. A plastic pocket! I snorted. Oceans don’t need us to save them, they just need us to stop. To not. Stop doing and needing and making and thriving.
The moon had moved. Brighter now and poised like a blade in the east. My shivers strengthened to spasms. I watched my addled hands dance like water striders in a puddle. My nails like small blue pebbles.
The water was colder than the sand when the waves reached me. Some of them broke into froth, some trailed rainbows of marine diesel. My teeth rattled. I tried pissing to warm my legs. Nothing.
I tried to remember the exact time of the high tide. Someone had written it on a dinky blackboard by the front door of the hotel. I’d been sure it gave me plenty of time for a run on the beach before the tide came in, but I couldn’t remember what it said. An exact time, to the minute, written in chalk, with the date and the temperature and a cheery little emoji thing to summarise the weather forecast. More for ambience than information really. But suddenly it was really important to know because just before then would be the time when I drown. Knowing the time when you die seems very important all of a sudden, like knowing your own birthday. Was it fifteen something?
I keep thinking of that woman in the queue at Costa, mouthing off to the bloke who was waiting for a latte just in front of us. Oh I can tell you, because you’ll get it, she said and she touched his arm. If there is a god he’s going to be very cross with me. It’s an awful thing to say but we only had them baptised because it helped to get them places at St Johns. And then they pressed the white plastic lids on their recycled paper coffee cups and he said what does it matter? God’s a human invention. Synthetic. Like plastic.
So yes, perhaps a god is out there, swirling and sinking and gyre-ground by every faith, milling into ever tinier pieces until one day there will be a tiny microgod in every molecule of every living thing and the world will be saved.
We both want to get married, I think. The law says we can but we don’t because our gods have different names. I said, what’s wrong with a civil partnership? Doesn’t have to be anything to do with god. But you said I don’t want a marriage that has nothing to do with god. So now we’re adrift. Caught between the gyres. Waiting for them to mill us little.
It's coming in faster now. Waves around my neck, breaking against my Adam's apple, breaking over my chin. Waves around my ears, bolts of cold seeping skull-deep. New moon. Spring tide. It’s all brine and bright at the back of my throat. I gag. The salt makes my lips throb hot. I tip my face up, but the water fills my nose in casual, killing laps. It’s a feeling from childhood, like too much ice-cream, that cold pain in my sinuses. I can hear bubbles, such noisy bubbles, and between them this shifting hiss of sand and a rumble. That thunder-hum of deep, deep ocean.
I open my eyes. It stings, then it clears and sometimes it's topaz and olive when a weed strokes my cheek, then it’s glittering rose-grey and amber when the sand and the shells kaleidoscope through the undertow. I raise my hands above my head. Just in case someone is passing. There’s a scent or maybe it's a taste in the water. Like blood and lavender and coins. It’s time to let go, it will be easier. I’ve told myself that so many times. But you pull me. You pull me like the moon pulls the waters and I’m a constant spring tide when you’re near.
No, it won’t be easier. Grief will be as tidal as love and just as restless.
My hands drop into the water. It’s warmer now. Something loosens in me, floats free, slides away. Images drift and curl like waterlogged paper. A sign, a dune, a wild lime eye. God will be very cross with me… I need to find one last thought.
You.
Not the stupid woman in the Costa queue and not the damn seagull. Choosing is all I’ve left to do now. Got to get this right. Kelp coloured eyes and fingers that gyre my hair like currents.
Just that.
You.
DoubleSpeak 