It was curious. At times, especially in the middle of the day, she thought the sea was talking to her. Walking along the beach, the breeze touching her pale face, she heard the waves saying, ‘Sara, Sara, we are waiting for you’ as they rushed eagerly towards the shore. She would stop walking and stand still. ‘Stay, Sara, stay.‘ She heard again.
She came to the beach at every opportunity. Especially when the children were in school. Usually, she’d end up sitting on the sand, staring outward. She’d watch the boats moving slowly across the horizon, going from Seabury to Eastbourne. Eventually she’d fall back onto the sand as the breeze crept up her thighs.
If she’d known she’d never have married Jim. She’d loved him once but the sheer tiring boredom of life in a small seaside town had killed off her love. Sometimes she found it hard to love her children. She wanted at times to get away. Find some excitement. The sea symbolised her desire for flight, continuing onward seemingly without end. It led she thought to the East, to golden lands beyond Europe.
Nowadays, they hardly made love. He was always tired when he got home after working in Canary Wharf until seven each day. He hardly spoke, but sat in front of the TV devouring the meal she’d cooked him. He rarely even looked at her, exhaustion biting into his face. At the weekend he went off to play golf with his friends.
In this state, neglected, unhappy, she began going off to London one day each month. She’d leave the children with a friendly neighbour, catch the train and in just over an hour be in Waterloo. Once in London, she’d wander around. A few times she got picked up and was taken for a drink or a meal. Once in a while she went back to the man’s place and there enjoyed brief lovemaking. It gave her respite from her unforgiving loneliness.
But always she returned to the sea. It seemed, she needed to hear its rumbling, insistent voice calling her. She only truly felt alive when she was near the sea, luxuriating in the repetitious movement of the waves, the salt flung into the clean, cleansing air.
They found her lying there one day. The water had washed over her, settling on her happy form. Her arms were flung wide; salt filled her hair, stiffening her clothes. The sea had filled her lungs. Rigid, she was manoeuvred onto a stretcher and carried up the path to the top of the cliffs. Seagulls darted around incessantly. A terrier barked, hiding behind its owner.
In the half-light, as night descended, occasionally local people, strolling across the beach, thought they saw her. Lit up by a strange inner glow, her hand gently touching the waves as if holding a lover’s hand, they thought they saw her release her incorporeal grip and lay back in the sand and sigh. Then, and only then, did her ghost seem at peace.
A Sea Dream.
She noticed the basking shark was wounded,
weeping vaginal blood.
The tall man in a fedora whispered as he passed,
and she blushed.
The horizon was a hazy green line dipped in red.
She had been there since morning
searching for love,
and found it
from a six-pack merman offering solace
as he rode on the silvery
back of a ray.
As he approached, the sun at his back,
she moaned and threw out her arms
like a supplicant.
Complete at last, the sand grasping at
her shoeless feet, she sank
towards the earth’s distant core
using her arms as uncertain ballast.
She awoke with a shiver
brushed away the sand
and headed back home.
The shark had turned belly-up,
scavenged by seagulls.
Another day-dream enjoyed in the
empty hours between lunch and dinner
between her third cup of tea
and fourth cigarette,
her children snoozing in
the back bedroom. Half-slumbering
in a town barked at by bothersome seagulls
where an unencumbered sun
set on a postcard shoreline.
Planning the rows of petunias to be
planted by the hedge,
making shopping lists,
writing novels, never to be published,
staring out of her windows at the sea
she waited for her husband’s return,
tedious evenings of T.V.
and coition under the brightly coloured duvet.
The waves that overwhelmed her, flooding her senses,
were her own. The man
in the fedora had made her smile.
Stanley Wilkin

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