The Sea Inside

up their skirts; unsupported by the water, they might fall over at any moment. But the withdrawal must stop at some point. Soon normality will resume, and the earth and the moon will go on turning, tugging the sea between them. Some days, in late autumn, the fog is so thick that the sea and sky merge into one. There may be hundreds of birds around me, but I only hear their squawks and peeps. Unseen ships moan like lost whales.
    Winter closes in, sweeping the mist away with Arctic winds. The air is so cold it seems to crack the tarmac. My fingers turn raw and crab-like; the colour of summer has long since faded, leaving brown islands on the back of my hands. It’s time to start wearing two hats, as well as two pairs of gloves. Shoulders hunched, I push my bike along the beach, knowing full well that the water will be even colder. At this nadir of the year, people ponder the wisdom, or not, of getting out of their cars. For me it’s all a question of getting in.
    I stand over the water, and wonder why anyone would want to enter it. The surface is pressed flat by the cold. Slow and viscous, it wrinkles like setting jam. An oily sheen spreads over it. Rafts of usually active herring gulls float as if frozen into place. Everything has slowed to a glacial pace. Later the sea will ice up at the tideline, like the salt around the rim of a good margarita. In the summer, the water expands with the warmth; now it physically shrinks with the cold. Checking the coast is clear, I pull off my boots and my clothes and wade in without thinking.
    I push through the waves with ice-cold hands. From above, I must look like a clockwork frog. My animal heat retreats with each forward stroke; I reach out as if to warm up the water. In summer, my body settles in comfortably; now everything is taut, demanding the conservation of its core.
    I line up to the distant markers where cormorants perch. I’ve reached my limit. I turn back to the beach, scrabbling like a goose to find my depth once more. Naked on the sea wall, I give a little dance, singing to myself. If ‘ecstasy’ means to stand outside yourself, then I feel happier than I have ever been. Everything stripped away; everything renewed. Just me and the sea.
    In the wan light the sun is diluted and dumbed. I struggle to put on my clothes, shivering as if the whole world were shaking, rather than me. My feet leave suspended puddles on the concrete, each toeprint in three dimensions. There are red threads from my towel caught in the cracks from earlier visits. I tug on my socks. Back home, I’ll shake out the sand and weed as evidence of my folly.
    The cold becomes a kind of warmth. My fingers burn as the feeling returns, like they did when I was a boy, home from school and holding my hands too near the gas fire; by winter’s end my knuckles will be cracked and bleeding. With my heightened senses, I smell the lanolin in my woolly gloves. When I manage to scrawl in my notebook, its pages held down with an elastic band, my nose drips onto the ink, turning it into Rorschach blobs. My body complains of the lack of sleep. The prospect of tea and toast and a warm house never seemed so alluring.
    Yet with all this self-imposed torture comes an intense, capillary clarity. Perhaps it’s just the blood pumping back to my brain, but I feel as if something had been wiped clean. I’m ready to start again. I feel in the world, not just of it, even though sometimes, in the mist, I think I must be still dreaming.
    Winter is a lonely season. That’s why I like it. It’s easier to be alone; there’s no one there to notice. In the silence that ascends and descends at either end of the abbreviated day, there’s room to feel alive. The absence makes space for something else. I must keep faith with the sea. Swimming before dawn, it is so dark that I have to leave my bike light on so I can see where I left my clothes. Once the waves washed them clean away, leaving me to wade after them.
    The sea doesn’t care, it can take or give. Ports are places of grief. Sailors declined to learn to swim, since to be lost overboard – even within sight of the shore – and to fight the waves would only extend the agony. You can only ever be alone out there.
    People have died here, in these suburban waters. In the cemetery of Netley’s military hospital, planted as an arboretum to blunt the edges of death, there’s a gravestone carved in solid Cyrillic characters, a memorial to three Russian sailors from the