Sea Legs
by Phoebe Demeger
13.05.2020 | fiction | 5 minute read
I’m gaping like a trout, trying to hook my lips around my straw. She’s talking at me; I’m working on holding her gaze, meaning I can’t see my drink, and other people’s elbows keep coming at me from the shadows, interrupting whatever privacy we had to begin with.
When she tells me she’s ending it with me, my mouth slams shut. My organs turn to liquid and slop down the legs of my jeans, soaking my cuffs. A heavy key grinds in my throat. In an instant, the noun that was us has burst wide open and now I am adrift.
Eventually I excuse myself, slip silverfish through the sea of elbows and vomit myself out onto the streets. Tendrils of haze from the smoking area grasp at my clothes; I shake them off, step out of their embrace into the cold.
I want to be alone, to luxuriate in it. No chance. We’re a few hours out from last orders and the boardwalk is already crammed. Drunks and seagulls alike run amok, screeching and scavenging for chips.
I miss the dark pulse of the club, though I’m craving its antithesis: peace.
I pick my way through the dried seaweed and dogshit down the steps to the beach. The pebbles crunch underfoot. Step by uneasy step, the distant shouts of town recede, replaced, slowly, by only the stones, and the sea.
I take out my lighter. Her lighter. She gave it to me at the start of the night. She’s not getting it back.
We came here on our second date. And what. It’s the main beach. This is no special, secret spot. It certainly doesn’t belong to us.
I spark up, cup my hands around the flame. I imagine my face illuminated in the dark, like a witch in a cave, or a lighthouse beacon, calling to the sailors out at sea. My bonnie lies over the ocean. Something like that.
I like the light here. This sweet, salt spot between the streetlamps and the moon. Time settles down, takes a breath, suspended.
I smoke. Breathe in, breathe out. Twice more. Then:
“Spare us a cig, love.”
A sharp voice, the colour of silver, comes through a crack in the night.
Over the curve of a dune there sits an old woman, gazing out to sea, her shoulders stacked and slightly hunched, with a picnic blanket draped over her bottom half. Her hair, dark as a mouth, hangs in loose curls about her neck.
She glances my way as I stumble down the bottom of the dune. She waggles a gnarled finger. “And don’t give me that ‘this is my last one’ bullshit.”
I smile, extend the pack to her, a sucker for a foul-mouthed old lady.
She sticks a cigarette between her lips like a lollipop, looks up at me expectantly. I oblige, leaning down with the lighter. She sucks her sphincter lips together, inhaling what seems like more than a lungful. “I really shouldn’t,” she grins, suddenly a teenager. “It doesn’t agree with me. But fuck it, right? Having a good night?”
I take a drag myself. “Not so much.”
“Didn’t think so. Why else would you be out here?” She pats the pebbles beside her. “Come sit.”
I’ve nowhere else to be. I nestle my bum into the stones by her side.
We smoke together in silence.
“Rough night,” she says after a time, whether to me or herself. “Good to sit and take stock, once in a while. We’ve got our health. We’ve got the view.”
I nod, then add “Yes”, realising she’s not looking my way.
I take another drag. “You live around here?”
She half-turns to catch my eye, then waves an arm vaguely out to sea. The moonlight catches on her sleeve. “Out there.”
I say nothing. Right now I’m just grateful for her company.
After a time, time tips. The quietest of dawn blushes begins to tease the sky behind us.
I take out two more cigarettes and hand one to her, along with the words “I got dumped tonight”. They sit grey and flat in my palm like a stone.
“I did wonder,” she says. “You’re sporting a particular sadness tonight.”
She tightens her lips as she smokes, then softly empties out her lungs in one great wet breath.
“Young love. First love. The best kinds, and the worst. That’s why you’re out here with the flotsam. You’re still to get your sea legs. God knows I’ve gotten mine.” This last with a twinkle. She goes on. “I’ve drowned my share of lovers, dived for pearls in the wrong shells. You make your mistakes and you ride the tide. It’s up to you – the pair of you – to figure out if a storm is worth weathering.
“You fuck?” Her tone unchanging, she breezes past my startled splutter.
“Sometimes.”
“You dance?”
“Barely. Two left feet. You?”
“No. But I do swim.” She raises herself, ever so slightly, unbending her elbows. “Fancy a dip?”, indicating with her head towards the waiting sea.
“Now? You’re joking, right?”, I say, though I’m genuinely not so sure. “It’s past midnight; it’s freezing!”
“Well, at least we’ve got the place to ourselves.”
She wrenches back the blanket from her legs with a theatrical flourish. She’s wearing a pair of flippers, cartoonishly large, and a sort of wraparound pair of leggings. In the less-than-half light, her outfit is hard to make out; I can’t tell if it’s silk or a suit of armour.
I look back at her face. She’s holding my full gaze.
“Dance while you can. Don’t mourn until you have to.”
We’re so close to town. The nightlife marches doggedly on. I’ve been to this beach many times before. But tonight I am in purgatory. I’m drunk and sad and I’ve smoked too much, and it suddenly doesn’t seem all that unlikely that this woman is a witch, or a fairy godmother, or some ancient mermaid whom I’ve summoned with a distress beam I didn’t even know I’d used. Or maybe, like me, she’s just going about her night.
I stub out my cigarette. One little push, just to check. “You’ve got the whole ocean, right? Why come here? Why this beach?”
She smiles, a proper, warm smile this time. “It’s the bright lights. I’m like a baby turtle; I need something to aim towards. Plus, I like the people.”
It’s almost dawn. Soon the spell will be broken. I creak up onto my feet, dust the ash from my lap. “Are you going to be OK out here?”
“You go, I’ll head home soon enough. I’m going to sit and watch the waves a little longer.”
Her eyes are resting on the sea, where the light is beginning to pick out the very tops of the waves, pinching them like baby skin.
I don’t know how to end this. I’d rather stay, but I have storms to weather elsewhere. I cough; I’ve been largely silent all night, and my throat is dry-hot from the smoke. I settle for: “Thanks for keeping me company.”
“Likewise.”
I leave her then, and make my unsteady way up and over the dune.
Halfway across the beach, I turn back for a final glance. I don’t expect to see her there – I can see the boardwalk now, and it would be incongruous for the two to exist in the same space – but I’m still surprised that she’s able to have disappeared from view so quickly.
I scan the horizon, just in case. Then – there, a dark smudge amongst the glimmer of the early morning waves. When an arm materialises out of the shape and slowly waves in my direction, I know it’s her.
She turns back out to sea. Like a dropped pebble, her head dips under the water, followed by her cresting back, and finally the fluke of a tail. Then off, under, away, out.
The sun has risen by now, more or less. It’s early; she’ll still be asleep, over in her flat on the east side of town, the morning rays dancing over the landscape of her bed.
I’ll head home too, rest up for a few hours, then head over and see what can be salvaged. And when I wake, my skin will feel slightly tougher. My voice stronger, curled up in the shell of my throat. My legs ready to kick back against the tide.
about Phoebe (she/her/hers)
By day, Phoebe Demeger (she/her) is a bookseller, and by other times of day she is a writer of short stories and a thinker of thoughts. Now based in South London, she spent the first three years of her life living by the sea, and would like to return there someday.
twitter: @Phoebe_Or_Not
instagram: @phoebe.demeger