Jenn Ashworth - Cold Light

They found the holdall on Heysham beach a week or so later. In the bag there were jars and trays and empty ice-cream tubs with their lids tucked inside them. He’d been collecting for a while. There was a net. This was a scientific trip. He was researching. He wanted a specimen. I can only think it was the urgency of the approaching National Geographic deadline that prompted him to sneak out that morning – that, and his fear that the flasher would strike once again.

However he did it, he was out there. Say it was five in the morning, nearly six. Cold, and still dark. He parked at the very northern side of the bay – just before a golf course that would have been as deserted as the promenade at that time. He picked a good place. The buildings along the seafront are nursing homes, office space and an old church with plastic sheets bolted over the leaded glass in the windows. The car was parked haphazardly. He hadn’t driven in years, and I think he would have been excited.

He was happy on the water even though he’d timed the tides and forgotten about the winter mornings, the lack of sun and would have had to wait. It was a useless time for measuring the phototropic zone and he would have resigned himself to that and smiled at himself with his eyes closed. There are signs all along Marine Road from the Midland Hotel to Bolton-le-Sands and as far up along the coast as I’ve wandered. A litany of warnings: channels, treacherous tides, mud-flats, hidden rocky outcrops. He would have seen them.

And then? Barbara thinks he overbalanced, or fell asleep in the boat which turned and tipped him out. She thinks he might have beached it somewhere and got out to wade over the flats in search of ‘those creatures of his’. That’s possible. I heard a whisper – something else they tried to keep from me – that when they brought him to the hospital he was barefoot. Perhaps Barbara was right and Donald was wading.

When Barbara talked and poured coffee and lied to our visitors in the kitchen, I sat in the shed, smoking and watching them through the dirty, paperback-sized window. It wasn’t right, what she was saying. I was sure, even though I’d never know. I could see it.

Say the reason he was barefoot was because he took off his shoes and socks to pull the boat through the mud on the shore at Morecambe and into the shallows. Yes, it was cold, but he’d have put up with numb feet before he’d have slathered clean socks and shoes with the grey slime sticking to his soles. Barbara was hot on that sort of thing.

He’d have started the outboard, or perhaps just let himself drift on the water while he waited for it to get light. It was slow – cloudier than he’d expected. He might have cut the engine because he wanted the quiet, or wanted to get rid of the wake in the water that would have disturbed whatever it was he was looking for. He had the black and white disks with him, but knew even before he got out of the car that the water was too churned for that. I don’t think he minded so much. I don’t think he was interested in the light any longer. Not that kind of light. But he went out anyway – looking for something else, and expecting to be lucky.

Say he let the boat drift and settled back in it, lying back as if the damp bottom was a mattress. Hands behind his head and face to the sky, listening to the noise of the water slapping the sides. Maybe he did fall asleep – the rocking, and being awake so early. Maybe not. There was the thermos, which he didn’t leave in the car, and a cold black ring of coffee on the counter top at home. Barbara had wiped it away and blamed me for it before she realised he was gone.

I like the idea of him hunching over the lid of the thermos. Holding the cup between his knees and struggling to keep the flask steady with both hands so that he could pour. Burninghot black coffee so laden with sugar the liquid could hold no more – there’d be a film of it in the bottom of the plastic cup. The smell of it along with the sea, the rotting weed, the sticking mud. Very alert, after all that coffee. Not likely to make a mistake. And the weather that morning was dry – the wind was light. He would have been able to hear, very clearly, the plop and splash of a tail or a fin breaking the surface of the water and disappearing before he could turn his head.

He looked around – scanned the mechanical rakes and pinsized figures back on the exposed sands to his left. The horizon was tilting and shifting like a cock-eyed spirit level as the boat rocked and almost too far away to see: the first shift of cocklers, getting ready before it was quite light. He was too far away to hear them shout to each other in their own language. The machines rumbled – they sounded like cars, not fish. Maybe he thought about the sound a seabird might make as it straightened its neck and hit the water, and while he thought he held himself perfectly still, moving only his eyes and waiting for it to re appear. He waited until he realised no bird could dive so deep and stay under so long. He’d have been excited. A mind full of milky blind eyes, softly glowing tentacles and the Sea Eye . He tipped away coffee and screwed the cup back onto the top of the thermos when he heard it again – a deliberate splash to his left followed by a nudge and a muffled knocking on the underside of the boat.

Donald would not have been afraid.

He stood up, reached for his net, the sea lurched and he went in.

The facts are the facts, and there are few of them. However it happened, the earth sucked the tide and him back in that afternoon and a tug fished him out of the mouth of Heysham Port.

It’s a frightening, ugly place to hang around. The sky, which even out of the City is still and flat and grey, is cut into by the massive metal shadows of the tankers and the jetties and the black and white lego-block building – all you can see of the power station. There are tubes and towers and filters that you don’t see and they are using gallons of sea-water to cool the waste, and sucking the water out of Morecambe Bay and filtering the sand and the fish and the weed out of it, and then forcing it through the turbine condensers and spitting it out again, into the bay, warm as a bath. You don’t hear a thing – the station works in its own bubble of silence, tucked between a golf course and a caravan park and a nature reserve and the people who work there won’t live there and the horns of the freight carriers boom across the water and can be heard over to the north if the air is still enough. You don’t see any of this happening – this frantic sucking and cooling and making. It’s quiet, where Donald was washed up, although the fishermen complain that fish caught in the out-flows from the power station are halfcooked because of the raised water temperature. I don’t think that can be true. It was a toss-up, you see, whether it was drowning or hypothermia that got Donald in the end. The water’s so shallow in the bay, you can walk across it, some days.

And I was at school, standing outside the library with Chloe and Emma and fighting over his paperwork. Barbara had already noticed the car was gone and called the police. I think she knew what had happened before the police came because Craig had already rung and told us about the boat. He’d had his breakfast – eggs and HP Sauce – and he wanted to double-check with Donald before reporting the theft. Donald had a bad chest and so had never learned how to swim.

All through that January, I was helping Donald with his application – rereading his drafts and advising him about grammar. They already had us practising our personal statements for our Record of Achievement with the careers advisor – one session a month each, to discuss our GCSE options and think about future careers. It was easy enough to translate the kind of tone and language I learned there into the reams of hand-written pages Donald referred to as his ‘accompanying documents’. I worked at night, in my room, until the thing was ready to be typed up. I think some of it got into my head. I had nightmares about being trapped in a deep-sea submersible, and drowning.