Крис Бекетт: Spring Tide

‘What, and you don’t do the—?’

Josie’s eyes flashed warningly. ‘I haven’t finished, Bob. You’ll get your say when I’m done.’

I shrugged.

‘You turn everything back on to me,’ Josie persisted. ‘I hardly dare to say anything even slightly critical because I know quite well that, even if it’s just me asking you if you could empty the dishwasher sometimes, or if you could turn off the tap properly so it doesn’t drip, I’ll end up getting a two hour lecture.’

And then she stopped, abruptly and, to me, entirely unexpectedly, because her tirade had sounded as if it had enough momentum to continue for some time yet. ‘Okay, I’m done,’ she said. ‘Now it’s your turn.’

Well, naturally I’d been preparing my riposte while she was talking. It was to have been constructed in my now-classic three-pronged format. Prong One: what she said about my behaviour was completely untrue. Prong Two: even if it was true, it was equally true of her and probably more so. Prong Three: she was to blame for my bad behaviour anyway, because she’d pushed me into a position where I had no choice.

It was all very familiar and well-tried stuff, and I could almost have delivered it in my sleep. But, unusually, I found myself hesitating. I couldn’t help noticing, you see, that she’d rather anticipated Prong Three. And more unusually, I couldn’t help feeling she had a point. True, she sometimes did engage in tactics that weren’t so very different to mine, but that didn’t actually alter the truth of what she said. I was self-centred. I was indeed unbelievably self-righteous, ‘unbelievably’ in a quite literal sense, actually, for even I didn’t believe in the claims to righteousness which I habitually made. (After all, if I did believe them, why was I always so desperately defensive?) So not only was Prong Three (her being to blame for my faults) a non-starter, but Prong One (me not having any faults) wasn’t really going to hold water either. And that being so, wasn’t Prong Two (her faults being as bad as, or worse than, mine) a little shaky also? Couldn’t she quite justifiably claim that some of her own apparent bad behaviour was simply a necessary defence?

I opened my mouth to speak, found I had nothing to say, and closed it again. I still felt angry with her, still felt like the victim of an injustice, but I somehow couldn’t find the formula that would clearly establish this to be the case. I stood up and picked up the kettle with the idea of buying time by making another drink. Then I realised that the very idea of one more cup of tea was making me feel sick, and laid it down again unfilled.

‘I don’t know about you, but I could do with a break. Why don’t we take the dog over to the marsh for a couple of hours?’

I was referring to a big saltmarsh, only about six miles from where we lived. It stretches for more than twenty miles along the coast, and is about a mile across at its widest points, with at least another mile of sand stretching out beyond it at low tide. Josie and I and our mongrel Rex had known it all our lives. It’s a strange in-between place that’s neither land nor sea, where you can see larks next to seagulls, flowering plants alongside crabs, and sheep grazing on the banks of creeks where trilobite-like crustaceans meander through the brackish water, as if still living in the Cambrian age. Behind the marsh is the true land where farms and villages sit among green and partly wooded hills. Beyond it is a wide sandy beach, with the waves and surf you find on other coasts. But the sea is so far out that, when you stand at the very edge of the true land, it’s completely out of sight, and there’s only marsh in front of you.

We parked our car and walked straight out onto the partly boardwalked track that crossed the marsh to the beach, Rex bounding ahead of us as usual to find things to sniff, eat and piss on. We’d normally have checked the tides, but with all the emotion and turbulence we hadn’t given that any thought, and had been striding along obliviously for half a mile before it occurred to us that the tide was coming in very fast, and that it was going to be a particularly high one.

It was Josie who noticed it first. ‘The sea’s coming in, Bob. Do you think we ought to turn back?’

By this time the beach in the distance was already covered by sea, along with the outer part of the marsh itself. We’d been so stunned and preoccupied by our own little drama that this entire vista, familiar as it was, had barely impinged on us, other than by providing a soothing background to our troubled thoughts, like a poultice on an infected wound. But now, as we belatedly took stock of what was actually happening in the world beyond our skins, we could see the water rushing in through the creeks all round us, sucking and gurgling as it came.

‘Christ, yes, and we’d better be quick.’ Now I thought about it, I vaguely remembered hearing something about an unusually high tide this weekend. ‘Jesus, look at it! It’s coming closer just while we watch.’

The tide didn’t normally cover the marsh but it happened from time to time, and when it did, the very shallow gradient meant that the sea came in extremely quickly: every vertical inch it rose took it many yards forward horizontally. We called Rex and started back at a jog. By the time we were halfway to the true dry land, the creeks near us were already overflowing. When we finally reached it, we’d been wading for some time through seawater that came well over our knees, holding hands to support one another. Rex had had to swim.

It was actually quite fun, once we knew we weren’t going to drown, and the two of us were laughing like kids by the time we stepped out onto the little strip of grass and shrubs that divided the marsh from the fields. While Rex shook brackish water all over us, we pulled off our shoes to empty them, wringing out our socks and laying them out on a gorse bush to dry. Then we stood and looked back out at the expanse of water that now completely covered our path. It was pretty impressive. Just in the time since we’d parked our car, almost all of our familiar marsh had been submerged, with only here or there a dry patch standing out above it as a sort of low greengrey island.

And right then, quite suddenly, as I was standing there and taking all this in, I realised I was seeing the moon again. I mean I was really seeing it in the way that I’d done in that quarry at fifteen, with my weed-befuddled friends. It was an overcast day and the moon itself was completely out of sight, but the tangible evidence of its presence and scale was right there in front of us. For it was the moon that had covered these two miles of sand and marsh by dragging the entire North Sea towards itself. It was the moon that had forced us to run. It was the moon that could well have drowned us, if we’d got as far as the beach before we noticed the tide.

And that was only the beginning of it. For in fact the moon had formed this entire landscape. This enormous no man’s land between sea and land, on which all those countless living things out there depended, only existed at all because of the moon. All the denizens of the marsh and the beach beyond, the gulls, the oyster-catchers, the crabs, and all the millions of worms and molluscs and crustaceans that waited in the mud for the tides: they were all creatures of the moon. The very bodies of many of them took the form they did because of the existence of that colossal sphere of rock that passed over them day after day, bringing them new nourishment each time by pulling the ocean upwards and letting it fall.

I turned towards Josie. I was so excited by this notion that I’d quite forgotten our troubles for the moment, and simply wanted to share with her what I’d seen. But poor Josie didn’t know that, and I saw her face flinch in anticipation of some new onslaught. We’d become used to moving to and fro between the business of everyday life and our ancient quarrel and she’d simply assumed that our moment of laughter had passed, and that I was starting up the fight all over again.