Alison Moore - The Pre-War House and Other Stories

He was fascinated by the equipment which his father kept in the shower room and in the cupboard under the stairs: the stiff wetsuit, the steel aqualung, the lead weights.

His milky wrists and ankles were inching out of his clothes, and his toes made holes in his socks, poking through, like something amphibian shedding old skin. His eyes bulged at the girls, who had also grown, and who had wiles , which made him think of physical appendages like tentacles, full of something sticky and poisonous.

He watched his father walking into the sea and swimming out until he disappeared beneath the surface of the water. Longing to follow him, he swam instead along the shore, and lay on the beach, burying himself, pushing his fingers into the sand, the bones deep and cold.

His father emerged with nose bleeds and loot, struggling up the beach with his tank and his souvenirs: shells and coins; brass portholes, clocks and bells; a china cup with a worn gilt rim — the spoils of shipwrecks, and jetsam (which sounded like a semiprecious stone — amethyst, topaz and jetsam). They went home with salt on their lips and in their hair, with sand between their teeth and their toes and under their fingernails, with the sea in their ears and their nostrils.

Frogmen found Atlantis, or the place where it had been, off the coast of Florida, and the Doctor found it south of the Azores, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. And spacemen landed on the moon, walking on the lunar surface as if they were walking underwater, with the sound of their own breathing in their ears.

There was a girl. They spent a lot of time lying on the dunes. This girl would always make him think of sand. They lay there at the start of a storm, gazing up at the inky darkness as the rain began to fall. He goosepimpled beneath her cold hands. She tasted of salt.

She left him, and once again he found himself alone at the edge of the sea, where dysphoria and chlamydia bloomed.

His father had begun to start sentences he couldn’t finish, forgetting the beginning before reaching the end, stopping in the middle, an ellipsis floating from his lips like air bubbles underwater. On his way to the charity shop to fetch back clothes he had not had for years, his father hummed the love songs his wife had left behind, and when he returned, empty-handed, he went looking for her in the kitchen.

Meanwhile, the Russians were searching for Atlantis off the coast of Cornwall, and the British were looking for it at the bottom of a lake in Bolivia.

The light is going. The sand has cooled. The tide is coming in.

He always thought she would come back.

He walks home in the dusk, treading carefully, with skeletons beneath his feet and driftwood in his hands. He has a migraine coming on. He still has his father’s old scuba equipment but his migraines bar him from diving.

He puts the driftwood into the kitchen sink. There is something on the radio about an ancient Middle Eastern library, found remnants telling of the antediluvian world and fish creatures which spent their days with the humans but belonged to the ocean and went there at night, and one day did not return.

He climbs the stairs and gets into bed, lying on sandy sheets with second-hand books beneath the mattress. He closes his eyes and colours swell, bleeding tentacles, becoming sea anemones. He breathes deeply. Eventually, he falls asleep. When he wakes in the night, the sea is pounding the cliffs, like someone thumping at the door, wanting him.

He wakes again at dawn, gets up and goes downstairs. He can see, through the kitchen doorway, his unused supper things still out on the table. He can hear, on the radio, the shipping forecast, the strange language of the sea — moving slowly, moving deep, losing its identity .

He opens the door to the shower room in which his father’s black neoprene wetsuit still hangs. He touches it, smells it.

In the understairs cupboard, he finds the cool lead and the cylinder with its dregs of old air.

He struggles down to the beach and over the sand, the tank heavy on his back. The tide is out but turning. He makes his way to the edge of the vast and shifting sea, where life perhaps began. Between the hazy sky and the hazy sea, he can see no horizon. Salt water laps over his feet. He steps forward, leaving webbed footprints in the damp sand. He wades deeper. The sea worms in beneath his wetsuit, getting in at the neck. (An early-morning dog-walker glimpses his head resting on the surface of the water like a buoy. A wave rises between them.) He sinks down. (When the wave falls, there is nothing there but the stone-grey sea, and daylight touching its surface. She walks on, beneath the crumbling cliff path and an old house facing the creeping tide.)

‘Can anyone find a corner to fill?’

My mother’s phrase, my mother’s voice, my mother’s hands stacking the plates. My mother’s phrase on her sister’s lips; twin voices, twin hands. My mother is gone, but Aunty Frances fills a corner. She says I can help her home with her dishes; she’ll run me back afterwards.

Dad says, ‘Wait until the end. You can’t leave halfway through.’

Aunty Frances mutters something under her nicotine breath. I don’t catch it, but I can almost see it — an acrid fog hanging on her lips. Dad turns away. He doesn’t smoke, and hates the stench which will cling to him, particles lingering on his skin and in his hair like tenacious burrs. He will change, he will wash; but still he will catch a waft, or he will think that others can.

She smuggles me out. She says a wake is no place for a child. In the passenger seat of her car, I stiffly embrace the precarious load teetering on my narrow lap, travelling anxiously with breakables rattling beneath my fingertips. When we reach her house, she takes these empties and leftovers from me and carries them less carefully inside. Her hallway smells like smouldering flowers. She puts the dishes down on the kitchen table. ‘Did you try these?’ she asks, pointing to a tray of sampled and abandoned savouries. I shake my head. She feeds me some. ‘Pakora. It’s Indian.’

She asks if my father ever talks about his trip to India.

I didn’t know he had been.

‘We went together,’ she explains. ‘We worked on the same magazine. I was a features writer.’ My father is a photographer. She takes my hand and tours me around her living room, showing off her colourful tapestries and carved wooden boxes and statues.

I ask her about the elephant man on her mantelpiece.

‘That’s Ganesha,’ she says, ‘remover of obstacles and patron of learning. His father, Shiva, was commanded to cut the head off the first thing he saw, which unfortunately was his own son. But then he saved Ganesha’s life by replacing his lost head with an elephant’s.’

I am appalled by this image of a father who listens to the voices compelling him to do such heinous things, and the bodged repair which maybe he hopes nobody will notice. Head? What head?

‘Would you like to try some Indian tea?’ she asks. She boils up milk with herbs and spices, and we drink the chai from small, hot glasses.

The train journey from Bombay to Surat takes about six hours. I sit on a hard bench, writing notes. Beside me is an Indian man who reads over my shoulder and stops me every now and again to correct my spelling of the names of the places we pass through. Beside him sits his mother who peels small oranges and includes me when she shares out the segments. Later, the son moves to the opposite bench to let his mother lie down, and she lies with her head on her shawl at the far end and her bare feet resting on my thigh.