Read The Sea Inside for Free Online

keeping one eye on my marine companion. His curiosity satisfied, he turns towards the open water and sets off, popping up at intervals as he works his way upstream, before finally moving out of sight.

    Back home, I walk around the house in the dark. I know its rooms as well as I know my own body. I catch myself in the mirror on the landing, hung so that my mother could check her make-up before coming downstairs, her necklace in place, just as my father always wore a tie. Now I look in it and wonder who I am.
    I step outside, under the frost-sharpened sky, and a watery array: Pisces, Aquarius, Capricornus, Delphinus, and Cetus the whale; a starry bestiary (as if infinity wasn’t frightening enough already) of ancient patterns created by minds yet to be overwhelmed by the images that fill our waking day. They fall in slow motion – Orion’s brilliant grid, Betelgeuse’s dying watch-jewel, the Pleiades’ nebulous cloud – seen in the astronomer’s averted vision, as if too big to look at directly. They seem unchanging, but they represent cataclysmic explosions, speeding into oblivion, collapsing into themselves.
    The nearness of the sea opens up the sky. I hold my binoculars shakily to a three-quarter moon, its cold face forever turned away; to Sylvia Plath, it seemed to drag the sea after it ‘like a dark crime’. Once, out in the garden late at night, I watched an unusually bright meteor flashing orange, red and white. As it fell to the horizon, its tail streaming behind like a medieval illumination, I heard it hiss and fizz.
    Far off in the city centre a clock tower chimes. Inside the house, things shift and fall. Floorboards creak like a ship. It ticks with the ebbing heat as it falls asleep. I lie in my narrow bed, listening to the sound of the dark. A vague rumbling drifts over from the docks, godless, twenty-four-hour places where the black water ripples with sodium traces. Turning off my bedside light, I hear someone call my name, as if the night won’t leave me alone. Evenings I once spent drinking and dancing and taking drugs are now filled with a heady emptiness. Late at night, I think there’s some animal stirring in one of the rooms, a bear cub being licked into shape. And sometimes I wake in the early hours to hear my mother washing up downstairs, even though she died six years ago.
    The house has its own history, plastered over, extended, reduced, rising and falling with fashion like the hemlines of a woman’s skirt. The lawn where I lay as a teenager, reading
King Lear
on a hot midsummer’s afternoon although I’d rather have been listening to
Ziggy Stardust
on my cassette recorder, has long been overtaken by meadow grass. Somewhere deep in the bushes is the chain-link fence that first marked these plots parcelled out on the heath by a 1920s developer. If you can age a hedgerow by the number of species in a given stretch, you can date a street by its styles and details. Things here were once more empty: open coal fires rather than central heating, a hot-water geyser that exploded into blue life over the old enamel bath, and a bare electric fire hung even more dangerously overhead. No telephone, no fitted carpet, no double glazing; children spilled out of doors.
    Then the view was open to what lay ahead, and a shop stood on each corner of the crossroads: a grocer’s and post office combined, where you could buy postal orders while your luncheon meat was sliced; a butcher’s shop with tiles and sawdust and bloody lumps of offal; a hairdresser’s with its oval helmets that made their occupants look like astronauts, preserved in permanent lotion; and a brown-painted cubby-hole of a shop run by a lone elderly lady which sold only sweets and was rarely if ever open. All gone now. Here, as elsewhere, suburbia has disappointed its utopian dreams. Bramble finds its way into every crack.
    At the bottom of the garden – beyond the summer house whose interior is festooned with ancient spiders’ webs, each