Drift by Culturenet

drift

Cliff Forshaw David Kennedy Simon Kerr Christopher Reid David Wheatley

A Humber Mouth Special Commission 2008. First published in 2008 by Humber Mouth Hull City Arts, Central Library, Albion Street, Hull and the University of Hull, Cottingham Road, Hull. This edition copyright ÂŠ Humber Mouth 2008 and the University of Hull. Copyright of individual poems and stories resides with the authors. Copyright of individual photographs resides with the photographers. Humber Mouth 2008 acknowledges the financial assistance of Hull City Council and Arts Council England, Yorkshire. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written consent from the publisher or contributors who hold the copyright. Requests to publish work from this book must be sent to the copyright holders.

Contents 4 6 7 8 10 12 13 14 15 16 18 20 21 30 33 37 39 42 45

At the Embarkation Point........................... In Search of the Tenderer Thorns............... Low............................................................. A Fret.......................................................... The Truelove............................................... Crossing the Equator, 1892......................... Sperm Tooth................................................ Authentic Victorian Mermaid..................... A Kilnsea Chorale....................................... Readâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Island............................................... Avocet......................................................... Charms of Lost Villages............................. Sea Views.................................................... from Out of Reach...................................... Field Trip with Voices................................. At Filey Brigg............................................. Futures........................................................ The Lord Paramount Looks Seawards........ Flotsam.......................................................

David Kennedy David Wheatley Cliff Forshaw David Wheatley Cliff Forshaw David Kennedy Christopher Reid Cliff Forshaw Christopher Reid David Wheatley David Wheatley Christopher Reid Simon Kerr David Wheatley Cliff Forshaw David Wheatley David Kennedy Cliff Forshaw David Wheatley

At the Embarkation Point What happens here? River falls into river and river falls into sea. Is there more? There is surface and there is depth. Is that the story? It is one story and a way of beginning it. Are there others? Bows cut the waters open and the waters close. What else can you tell me? Voyages vanish into voyages like water into water. Yes, I know there are voyages. Dreams that cancel themselves; lines that change in the writing. Can you say more? Nerves that run from Hessle Road and Syke Street, from Blue Bell Entry. Are all voyages the same? No, many do not return. Who are you? I am the keeper of the names. How do you remember them? I stand here on the lowest step where the water laps. Would I know any? St. Romanus, Kingston Peridot, Ross Cleveland. Are there others? 6,000 lost fishermen and counting. What can I do here? Remember what the sea does.

Which is? The sea sifts and the sea sifts, washing its vast ossuaries. What does the sea remember? Itself. What else can I do here? Find a way to write it. after Le Livre des Questions by Edmond JabĂ¨s

In Search of the Tenderer Thorns Wait for the change in the tide where the Ouse meets the Trent and the Humber is born. Sound your foghorn once and slip down the jetty, where a tethered goat flicks its ears in the breeze and skitters a volley of piss in your general direction. These parishes, their runnelled fields all alluvial warping and tillage, secrete their tidal glue round your feet, and the scabby-legged cockerels in the bend of the road have spied you, Phrygian caps a red shock of sedition. Follow them twice round the mulberry bush and into the churchyard: follow the late poet squire of Yokefleet’s cigarette tip in the distance like a will o’ the wisp across the ‘fructuant marsh’, and stumble into the arms of a barman out beating the bushes on pressgang duty for the Tuesday night darts team. Stand everyone at the Hope & Anchor a drink, and that grass, that mistcircled grass on the dyke, cock an ear for its whisper under the jukebox and the farm dog barking half a mile down the road. Have you come about the interview for church warden, someone will ask. Are you that pigfeed salesman, someone will ask. No pigs around here, or hadn’t you noticed. Plenty of moles though. Match on tonight then? That island out in the estuary, what is its name, the island out where the freighters pass and the avocet dips and wades: it’s a trick of perspective, you’re on the island, you’re in the nature reserve, you’re already drifting out to sea with the estuary mud; there is no island and never was, the goat has progressed to chewing its tail, you slip back on board, sound the foghorn again and disappear into the chaos beyond the last high tide. And a couple of pound coins in the change, love, for the condom machine in the jakes, and a packet of crisps. Where the Ouse meets the Trent and the Humber is born, that swaying grass, that mistcircled grass.

Low Muddy tongues staked with timber, dark gantry, the guillotine of the Tidal Barrier, the resonant iron of walkway, handrail, and then it all crouches down to stone, where even the giant fish peep-show of The Deep is much less like sharkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fin than sinking ship and the whole low land seems to be going down. Up the estuary, steel harps on its theme: only connect. Here an iron will determines to let no water sunder us, bolts low land to low land; tenses chords against the sky.

A Fret The coal merchant shoulders a nimbus of smuts down a street that insists you’ve been here before and recognise the urchin, you, that sits and stares at his shoes in an open front door. Don’t buy it. The air is thick with the sloughed skin of dead selves: they fall and settle, a load too imperceptible to shift, but sickly and adhesive, mute and subtle. Let them not expect grief. You dodge and move through liquid fixities of past and present, steer by a river whose mud banks leave you tidal, shifty, bogged down and imprisoned. The sonic boom of the afternoon roar from the stadium tracks your footsteps, blows a dull wound in the boulevard’s thin air, and your pulse thuds to its drumbeat, win or lose. On the up this year then? Play-off places, blip, slump, plummet, dead in the water: the mustard cuts like fog. Cut your losses, a can kicked into the nearest gutter. Here the last of empire has meandered past the fag-end of the North Sea fleet to a scrap yard sculpture park whose remaindered Edward VII accepts a vain salute

from a yawning Ford Fiesta’s bonnet. The December sun is a lazy eye. No vistas you can raise will open it and you thirst for the liquid dark to bleed it dry, and so comes evening and beer in a backstreet pub by the bridge, where you bank the coal fire down and a dog sips a pint, and onto your tab goes a Schlenkerla, the ‘hobbling man’; and fog on the way home, fog all round so I can’t see you who are a shadow away, and there are no shadows and there is no ground underfoot for me to feel give way, and what kind of weather is this when all I want, all that I imagine, touch and see finds not loses itself in all I cannot grasp, in a fog drifted in from the sea?

The Truelove In 1847 a young married couple Memiadluk and Uckaluk arrived in Hull aboard a local whaler, the Truelove. The following year they set sail for their home on Baffin Island. Uckaluk died following an outbreak of measles on board. There are casts of their heads in Hull Maritime Museum and on the Humber near the spot where they landed. Among the dreams of hulks, Inuit voices still ring in the ship’s bell: Memiadluk and Uckaluk, this couple off the Truelove, strange honeymooners stuck in Hull. After the outbreak on board, alone, on a trawler’s whaleback, he rode the cold whale-roads back home. What’s left could be death masks: the eyes in their heads are closed, cast in plaster like dirty Newfie snow. Now, down by the Humber, another pair of heads fetch up, in battle-ship grey beheaded on a bollard that might as well say Greenland or bust.

Theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re a long, long way from home, that Esquimaux lad and his lassie, blind to glass case or estuary, pondering, since 1847, Jonah, whalebone corsetry, what the preachers tell of Heaven, this place called Hull, what they warn of Hell.

Crossing the Equator, 1892 We left Barry on July 21st and crossed the equator on August 18th, which was just a month after. On the night two men got dressed up, 1 as Father Neptune the other as his wife Trident. Oakum wig and whiskers with a tin, cut into a crown, they also had the barbers with them. They pretended to come over the side and shouted out ‘Ship ahoy!’ and they rigged a platform and a large tub of water and had lighted lanterns all round. Us 3 apprentices, the sailmaker and 2 ordinary seamen were to be shaved as we had never crossed the line. We shook hands with Father Neptune and his wife then set on the edge of the tub and was then lathered with grease, Stockholm tar and pig-shit and scraped off with a big wooden knife and daubed on our heads. We were then put clean into the tub with all our clothes on and wet through with buckets of water but we was all right again next morning except being a little greasy and a extra washing day. The next Tuesday was my birthday. I got a sausage roll from the cook also a bread pudding and another roll from the first mate, but my next birthday I hope will be in England as the voyage will only last 12 months…

Sperm Tooth Becalmed, we had little to do but watch ice grow. It crept and clenched to form, horizon-wide, a lid beneath which whales, our old companionable foe, wantonly hid. That white spell would have gripped and crushed our vessel like a walnut shell, had not the captain sent down men with saws to hew a dock, a jagged trench or puddle, where we must wait and pray. No wind to bear it away, the stench of blubber thickened, coating throats and sickening stomachs. Stiff with grease, my beard refused the razor. Under that curse of peace, I took up a sperm tooth and a sail needle, enthused to try some scrimshaw work â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Britannia, say, or Amphitrite side-saddle on a seahorse, or just my wife in her new crinolines. Nothing appeared. The tooth lay, greasy too, athwart my hand. I pondered it like an obstinate problem in geometry: a warped cone, flattened here and bulging there, defying me with a beauty of its own; epitome of laws I was not yet fit to understand.

Authentic Victorian Mermaid They fetch up here, scuttled to ledges, beached on pediments, among scrimshaw, harpoons, a whaler’s bow, a carved baleen seat. Bony Leviathans ghost hugely through tall ships, sails; this gallery’s a tail-flick, the next’s speared by a narwhale’s horn. Your thoughts turn krill: the floor’s a humpback, the stairwell spirals up inside a blowhole’s spout; you’re Jonah in the belly of the beast. Then boked back up to shore. Strange creatures. You can’t hear — no sirens sweetly singing — but see the black nightmare-maid’s screech. (Check spatulate fishtail, witchy fingers, stitched sealskin.) You’re face to face with a scary Victorian freak snarked on that gob of tiny fish-hooky teeth.

A Kilnsea Chorale The Kapellmeister of Kilnsea confronts his mutinous choir. He has a new cantata that he wants them to sing, but they have a composition of their own that they’re in the middle of now, and they’re not about to interrupt it: a chorale of absolute din, a multitude-part white-noise polyphony, almost unhearable upwhelming basso-profundities supporting a shoving and tumbling scrum of unresolved counterpoint with, at the top, a foamy descant, all ecstatic shatters. They won’t stop. But the Kapellmeister is patient. His cantata can wait. It may even be improved, if he listens with care and can catch and steal whatever it is that gives the racket its seeming power and purpose, and can slip it into the neat score on his desk at home.

Read’s Island Henry Kirke White, Christian soldier, onward went from south to north bank in the Winteringham Packet, wrote from this spot ‘surrounded by a drove of 14 pigs, who raise the most hideous roar every time the boat rolls’, stood his ground on the perilous flux in search of an unborn island. Old Warp Lane: the tugs approaching these days switch now this way, now that in a left-right left-right two-step of indecision before its shifting sands. In the pub between cement works and Humber there is much talk of the manufacture, distribution and correct use of cement. But here nothing is set in, never mind stone, in water.

The man from the RSPB is inspecting a sluice pipe. Monitoring of vegetation and invertebrates. The avocets heckle excitedly. At low tide the distant cattle dip a tentative hoof in the water. The lost grass no heifer will find. When its uncemented moorings come loose the island lurches a yard downstream. One of its forty-three deer, noticing, takes a step in the opposite direction and is for that moment the one unmoving thing in the river. The island sinks. Bubbles in wallpaper. A previously unrecorded shade of brown. A pair of antlers poking through a sandbank in the Tyne, the Clyde, the Severn.

Avocet Dip dip dip, fussy-insistent, an avocet’s beak. Enough is never enough: why can’t you savour your food? This man in the hide has been here ten hours among avocets, oystercatchers and redshanks: he knows why. Thumbnail-sized black frogs sprinting, which is to say inching along the path don’t know but still come tumbling into the rushes where the rabbits come too. Safe at last! Which is to say ready to die at an avocet’s beak, the frogs that is, who understand nothing. Hawks come for the rabbits, and they too understand nothing, the rabbits, dying, devoured. The hawks on the telegraph pole understand

when a train of thought has gone on long enough. Dinner is served, the white rumps by the ditch announce and the vegetarian hawk can go without. More than that they can take or leave. Understand? You they’re not bothered with. Strictly speaking your sandwich isn’t part of the food chain. In fact you’re not here. Beak goes down, tail up, beak tip up too. Superb. Solder this basin of twilight, freeze-frame each lucky-dip splash. Except ten hours is enough. The wellingtoned twitchers have flown. (I know a good pub.) But it’s never enough. First there’s a marsh to be drained. Splash. Dip dip dip. Slurp. I’ll drink to that.

Charms of Lost Villages Thanks to a prank of God the fine folk of Ravenser Odd no longer sleep under the sod but mingle with herring and cod. Frismersk and Saltaugh dead turned rudely out of bed must sleepwalk till Doomsday led by ferry lights overhead. Ladies of Orwithfleet who used to be so discreet troll down the village street in a seaweed winding-sheet. From Turmarr to Sand le Mere what the fishermen fear is that corpses will swim too near and theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll net a nose or an ear. Wherever the tide misbehaves opening and plundering graves the only way anyone saves himself is by hiding his bones in the waves.

Sea Views I Contempt clattered over the roof-tiles, gravel thrown up from the beach. Spray splattered like spit across the window pane. The man stood, glaring out of their son’s old bedroom window, at the monstrous waves breaking over the cliff and his house. Emptier Nest Syndrome: Cliff’s abandoned bedroom had been stripped bare, carpet and under-felt ripped and rolled up, furniture heaved to the front of the house. Extreme weather warning: Winds gusting to Storm Force 10. His wife was downstairs, taking refuge in what had been her posh dining room, watching TV. She did not want to watch the sea anymore, had said she was tired, needed a distraction from the storm. There was bravery to be found in facing their fate alone. He didn’t want to hear any more about her dreams of seal suicide bombers blowing the house to kingdom come, or her ridiculous fairy tales about the tiny crab and that stupid conch shell. Better that she watched TV, though how she could hear what the Eastenders were saying over the shrieking of the wind and the pounding of the waves was beyond him. The volume of the TV was as nothing to the roaring North Sea and the whipping NorthEast wind. 100-mile-an-hour gusts. Potential structural damage. Row upon row upon row of waves: a roiling froth of fitful nightmares, a stampede of giant white horses charging the shore. The man’s arms were folded tight to his chest so he could feel the thud-thud-thud-thud of panic beat in the bones of his wrist, under his watch. He had sandbagged the backdoor and the vents, spread towels on the windowsills. There was nothing more to do but watch, and wait, and will the sea back with all his might, like King Canute. It was a dirty war they had to fight. He knew what dirty wars looked like: he’d fought for his country. Coldstream Guards. Done three tours in the Northern Ireland. They were fighting a

Low Intensity Conflict with the sea, losing battle after battle with the waves. Perfidious Albion: this England under their feet betrayed them, this useless boulder clay that fell away day after day after day – in the same way his country’s will to fight for him fell away. Two hundred and eleven feet of their land eroded away in fifteen years. East Riding Council would not defend them. Sea Views – their holiday home business wrecked – having to demolish the chalets one by one, sell off the caravans at knockdown rates. The government would not defend them. Their neighbours could not help. Coverage of their case on TV didn't stop the cliffs collapsing. The East Riding of Yorkshire has the fastest eroding coastline in Europe. The underlying problem dated back to the last Ice Age. The coastline was formed 100,000 years ago from the moraine the ice sheets scored up from further up north and smeared down over the chalk to form a ridge known as ‘The Binks’. From Flamborough Head to Spurn Point the coastal cliffs weren’t made of rock, but of a layer of glacial sludge twenty to fifty metres deep in places. Their home was doomed. To lose hope, to fear you will lose everything, to succumb to that fear, was against his nature. But it had happened. The sea was cruel. The sea was merciless. Attacking like an ancient god, like Neptune enraged, determined to destroy all mortal heroes. They needed protecting. Other people had erected defences, privately, illegally. Wooden groynes. Rock groynes. Concrete groynes. Concrete sea walls. Rock armouring. Revetments. If only the Coastal Protection Authority had let him build his own tyre reef. That had been his plan. A rubber reef, to deflect the waves from this small stretch. It was low-cost. Environmentally friendly, well sort of. The Americans had tried it and it had worked for them! It was his right to defend their home. If an Englishman’s home is his castle then a Yorkshireman’s home must be his chapel! Is nothing sacred? Surely a soldier has a right to defend his own home! He’d argued that at the planning meeting till he was red white and blue in the face and red white and blue in

his language, but they wouldn’t give him planning permission. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight the seas and the oceans. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender. What happened to the Blitz spirit? The British electorate binned it when they betrayed Old Churchill that’s what: every man for himself! A journalist had covered the story: the headline in the local rag read: Rubber Rock scheme hits the Rubber Rocks. Some people had no sympathy! If they’d just allowed him to do something, anything, to defend himself. Instead the Environment Agency threatened him with legal action; instead DEFRA wrote landmark strategies entitled, Making Space For Water; instead the council spent coastal protection funding on typing two-hundredpage-long reports full of hollow-tipped bullet-points stating the bloody obvious. o The majority of the coastline in the East Riding – open countryside, scattered hamlets, farmsteads, tourist holiday parks – is to be left unprotected, and as a consequence, twenty permanent dwellings will be lost to coastal erosion in the next fifteen years.

II Over the stormy sea and the TV, you hear the crab in the Queen Conch shell: Tonight is the night, my deary. The TV is on maximum volume so you can answer out loud without him upstairs hearing: ‘You never give me any credit.’ Credit where credit is due, Deary. Do you want to save your husband and your son? ‘You know I do.’ Then make an offering of yourself. You nod. The crab sounds like your late father, with a bit of Jim thrown in. You first heard the crab talking to you seven

days ago but silly you thought it was the conch talking. The crab called out your name from inside the Queen Conch shell: Helen. Helen. Helen. You’d warily approached the conch shell, picked it up and held it to your ear. Conch is pronounced ‘Konks’ Jim tells you, not ‘conch’, Dumbo. (When I see an elephant fly: Jim had bought you it in Florida when you’d taken your little FluffyWhiffy-Cliffy to Disneyland.) You’d expected to hear the hiss of the sea on sand, the folding of waves on land that you get from shells. Instead, you’d heard your name. You’d dropped the shell. Weirdly, it had bounced off the carpet like it was made of rubber, like the rubber sex toy you found in Jim’s home office and said nothing about. Ever. Clumsy bitch, the crab says. So, you pick up the conch, stare into the dark slit between the pink lips. ‘The Queen Conch is also known as the Pink Conch,’ Jim had told you once upon a time... You see a small crab snapping pincers in the darkness and recoil. You shake the shell to get the horrible little monster out. Stop it, you silly cow! This is my home. Stop it now! You can hear my voice because the shell makes it bigger. You stop shaking the conch and apologise. Make yourself a cup of tea and sit down, my deary. I have something to tell you. You obey. My name is Carcinus Maenas, the crab says. I am an emissary of his Lordship, the Sea, sent to tell you to leave your house. ‘What?’ You are, the phrase is, all at sea. You must leave your house. The Sea wants to redevelop the seafront. In exactly one week’s time, under the cover of a massive storm, He will send in a demolition crew of navy elephant seals from the Pacific to reclaim this area. ‘Seals?’ Yes, Deary. The fate of your house is sealed. When the

navy bull seals attack the house with their demolishing trunks, you will be forced out into the last caravan you possess, living in your own driveway like refugees until that tarmac strip is consumed by His might. Do you want to live like me – a crab that has lost its shell? ‘No.’ Understandably, at first you will not believe the crab. You go to the doctor, get some pills to stop the voices. He is very sympathetic. ‘Very understandable in your situation, Mrs Foreshaw,’ Dr Jones says. ‘You’re under a lot of stress. These will help. Minimal side-effects.’ But his pills do not help, and the crab is very insistent, has such an insidious call, talks about how your husband is wrong – that King Cnut, Cnut not Cunt or Canute, walked out into the waves not to hold back the sea in a show of power, but to abase himself before the power of the sea. You cannot ignore the way it clicks its pincers, the conch amplifies the click-click-clicking. Then cometh the morning of the seal suicide bomber: a bull elephant seal leapt in through the kitchen door, trunk swinging wildly, barking: Die, human scum! It tries to detonate its back-pack, but it fails to go boom. Mother of Satan! the seal aar-aars, and flops out of the house. Dinner time, you break down, and tell Jim about the suicide-bomber seal, confessing about the crab in the conch and the warning; dinner time, an admission of madness. ‘Christ-and-anight, woman, as if I don’t have enough on my plate!’ Jim goes and shakes the shit out of the conch shell, but finds no frigging crab. He drives to his local, The Neptune, to get pissed. You cry for hours. The crab takes pity on you. Deary, stop this drowning in grief, it says. There may be a way to stop the Sea. You stop your weeping. ‘I’m listening.’ If you throw yourself in the waves, make yourself a sacrifice to Him, that might appease His wrath. ‘You mean kill myself? I mean, give your life freely as a gift to quell the Sea,

Deary. It has worked in the past for the Greeks. ‘I don’t want to die.’ Why die a thousand deaths? Why erode away? Think of it as Nature taking its course. You are an old woman with no one to mother. Your son has left home, yes? ‘Cliff has flown the nest, yes.’ Your life has no meaning. But you death…you are insured? ‘Jim insured me.’ Then your death has more meaning then your life, Deary. Your husband, and your son Cliff, can cash your life insurance, live the good life afterwards. ‘I don’t want to die.’ I know you don’t want to, but you need to, this very night.

III All Jim Foreshaw could do was watch as a thirty-foot swell, a tidal wave, blew in from the North Sea, rolled into a breaker in the shallows, thumped into the cliffs, hurdled up over the top, athletically energetically engulfing the house in pure force. Cliff’s old bedroom window imploded with the weight of water; daggers of glass flew at him and hit him in the face. Staggering back, all he could see was red. He fell to his knees, screaming, thrashing in the freezing cold water. The sharp, burning pain in the cold, cold water was too much to bear and he passed out… When he came to, there was a light, a tunnel of shivering light, shining into the bedroom from above and the whumpwhump-whump of helicopter blades gyring. His fingers numbly went to the dull throb in his face. There was a huge hole where his nose had been. The sea had cut off his nose despite his face. He scrabbled around the floor, frantic to find it, and thanks to the search-light, grasped up the bloody pulp that had been his nose. He went to the window, waved to his rescuers. I’m all right. The search-light was a Night Sun on a Coastguard Sea King. It flicked from him to illuminate more saviours than he ever dreamed of. The Royal Engineers had come to the rescue! Go on lads! There was a whole corps of sappers pile-driving steel rods into their last section of back garden; a green crane was dropping reinforced concrete armour over the cliff to shore it up, child’s play to keep the sea at bay; camouflaged concrete trucks poured out tonnes of quick-dry cement. And there was help out to sea as well. The Sea King Night Sun flashed out to reveal hulking great shadows out there to be frigates, destroyers, an aircraft carrier. Her Majesty’s Royal Navy was patrolling the shore, using the steel bulk of the ships to disrupt the huge waves and shelter the army from the worst of the storm.

Faster than the speed of sound, the third of the forces to the rescue: three RAF Typhoons, the new Euro-fighters, roared inover the waves to deliver their payloads of laser-guided concrete groynes. He was crying tears, blood, and snot, but his house had been saved, this little piece of England had been ably and bravely defended. ‘Thank you, lads!’

IV Crab and Queen Conch in her cardigan pocket, she found Jim bobbing face-up in three feet of black water, unconscious. Her hand went to the hole in his face. Blood bubbling in the hole – chest rising and falling – he was still breathing! She tried dragging him out of the bedroom, but the seawater would not help her, rushed away, a cold, cold stream, out the door, down the stairs. Do you hear that bellowing? the crab asked. The seals aar-aar coming! ‘I have to save him.’ Then you know what to do, Deary. You know what to do. Another huge wave hit the house, deluging the bedroom, drenching her. The house lurched like a ship foundering on the rocks. The power went out, delivering her into darkness. ‘I will save him,’ she told the crab, shivering, and let go of her husband. I will save him. She fumbled her way to the slippery stairs and holding on to the banister, squish-splashed her way down in the dark. I will save him for the memory of a young soldier who fell for me when I was beautiful. She went out the front door, round the side of the house, into the teeth of the howling storm. I will save us all from the sea because true love is sacrificing yourself for others. Crouching low, buffeted back by salt-spray, she marched to the cliff top. Do it. She hurled the conch shell into the waves crashing halfway up the cliff, and then leapt to join it, down into the seething white surf below.

The sea was freezing, ice jellyfish stinging her all over her body, as she plunged down beneath the waves, an offering, freely given for Jim, and her little Cliffy. The cold, cold darkness stung her eyes to blindness so she closed them. She curled into a small ball. The sea gathered her like an infant, pitched her up, over the cliff face, and dashed her to pieces on the walls of her own house. The storm did not abate.

from Out of Reach [Two students are living in the disused lighthouse on Spurn Point, one researching local birdlife, the other writing a thesis on the poetry of Philip Larkin.] MCDONALD [Enters reading from a notebook.] Sparrowhawk 2, Stock Dove 1, Skylark 9, Meadow Pipit 21, Rock Pipit 2, Blackbird 4, Starling 50, Chaffinch 3, Goldfinch 2, Lesser Redpoll 20... [Yawns theatrically.] MCALLISTER Where’ve you been? The Land of Nod? MCDONALD Ravenser. MCALLISTER Odd. MCDONALD [Spells it out.] Ravenser Odd. MCALLISTER What’s that all about? MCDONALD Some days on the shore I can just make out what you might think was a buoy or the snout of a whale but it’s, you’ll never guess what – Where?

MCALLISTER

MCDONALD Beyond the end of the spit. What?

MCALLISTER MCDONALD A village under the tide.

MCALLISTER Where Danish pirates lie in wait. MCDONALD That inch by inch slid down the long slide – MCALLISTER Where coffins floated down the main street. MCDONALD It’s all still there. I’ve seen it. MCALLISTER

You bet.

[Pause.] MCDONALD No sign of Perdue? MCALLISTER Divil the bit.

MCDONALD Odd. Very odd. MCALLISTER That’s what I said. Any sightings? MCDONALD There was a whinchat. MCALLISTER A bird of passage. MCDONALD Also a whitethroat. MCALLISTER Her long white throat. I saw that. MCDONALD Of course you did. In the Land of Nod.

Field Trip With Voices Filey Brigg 1. Under the Cliffs A tiny stunned green star: freshwater newt washed out of the cliffs by rain. “Saltwater shock — needs to rehydrate.” Drop him in a bottle of store-bought still; watch as that outstretched skydiver floats the leg-long half-mile to our feet. Later, we put back a tiny jade trinket or a god, dead-still, in a rain-wet niche. 2. Soul Music Catch wind-snatched boom-box; spray flicks break across some crossover flava-diva’s groove; keep your booty in neutral, feet unsure to tap on the tumbled rocks of what some say’s a Roman quay. Dogs shake themselves free of sea; children taste the fishy fingers of the spray; the elders stare out where water’s cut by light, wait a beat, then one scatters ashes as wind turns, bears off that track’s slick power-build to its middle eight.

3. Brigg End of the spit, dogs, kids, rags of wet tissue: outfall, shit. End of chat. 4. Guillemot What stops the chat is someone spots that dead bird on a rock. Then the beach is littered with “Guillemots, razorbills, and that’s a little auk.” Twenty, thirty, forty plump twists of black and white along that stretch. The naturalist squats to check: “No broken necks … what you’d expect if they’d been caught at sea, ripped free by fishermen from their nets.” He thumbs feathers back to skin for wounds, below for shot. Nothing: it’s a mystery. Photographs one or two in situ, is on his mobile to the RSPB.

5. Roman Signal Station Digging down, they found some bones, but no larger animal skulls or feet, which they take to mean the meat was slaughtered elsewhere, carted here to a garrison of single men. Nothing else came to light, except much later tiny bones of mice, shrews, voles, compacted into pellets, which must mean that while land and sea swapped places and the Roman pier just sank, there was nothing here but that tower crumbling on the edge of the spit, and, staring down from its walls through whole dark ages, only (swoop, shadow, flit) owls, owls, owls.

6. Rain What’s new and wet’s all still seeping in: drips, drips, down to beach “…the oolithic shore.” Pipefish, gutweed, velvet swimming crabs. We have guys who know it all on hand: the geologist talks sediment, striations, rock; the naturalist gives us weed, nerve, feather; the archaeologist mentions Romans, bones. We point at stuff, get the low-down, get its names. I’d like to know about the earth, the sea; the names of things and how they live; why the land I live in’s rumpled just so; where and why the past keeps poking through. That was the first day of the rains. Next day, and the next, it kept it up, worrying gutters, soffits, roof, insinuating dark patches in ceiling, walls. Monday morning, woke to floods. Went out to work, got soaked. Flooded basements, backed up sewers, offices sealed off, the server down. I’d meant to find out just why those birds had fallen from the sky. Never did, but, looking up, was struck by just how dark the heavens had become.

At Filey Brigg Here melted the ice-age assassin’s weapon leaving only its glacier’s dross to point the promontory’s finger of gritstone. Here sea and shore grew impacted like a sideways-on tooth, the very rocks capricious, erratic. I have lost all perspective. Only the green sea’s heave could turn these crosshatched cliffs to a plumb-line. There is no telling how far down the screaming gannets will dive. The Roman signal station on the point has seen the hordes coming. Its fires are out. There is no time for escape. Its rodent bones are owl pellets, barbarian mice gnawing at the ablative absolute. Razorbills and guillemots in their dozens have fallen dead out of the sky, propped eyeless in rockpools. I trace the clotheshorse folds of their wings, hung out to dry.

Their breasts and wings are untouched. Only their cause of death takes flight, and the sewage outflow’s sunken capstan gushing through scarves of loo-roll steers our ship of fools safely onto the rocks. A group fans out on a shelf. They are scattering ashes. Sheen for sheen the brightness missing from a dead auk’s eye but all around me catches the waves’ green surge, is thrown upwards with them, breaks on nothing at all and scatters like ashes.

Futures I Bull weather and bear currents turn all hands out to shorten sail, send lads aloft to loose the mizzen royal and take it in; as much as squalls at 1 a.m. December 1st; determine how the stars will look far from home.

II â&#x20AC;&#x153;Catched a shark when we was at the equator and I have got some of its teeth. Also got an empty ostrich egg to fetch home which was given me by a Cape Town baker.â&#x20AC;?

The cadence of a voyage through blunt water, sea-spat, wind-flung. In ballast to Iquique, 78 days, all sorts of weather. Seven weeks working the cargo and nothing to see, only sand and rocks, but 90 ships laid up and 6 lads from Hull. “Dear Father and Mother... I haven’t had a day of sickness since I left the Land of Puddings.”

III Tonnages pushed and pulled across the expanses. The globe bound tight with knots of credit. Futures decided by horoscopes cast for cinders and cement,

how the profit looks 20°13’S 70°10’W. The globe wound tight with young lives aft under the break of the poop riding out blank pages of frail calm or, at night, marvelling at the walls of heaven, studded and sparkling like a shell grotto, coming down to the sea. From Humber out, 120 days or more, 100 years and more, the voices are moored. Spasms of weather. Fog boils in the sea’s grate. Listen: the voices come towards us treading water.

The Lord Paramount Looks Seawards The Lord Paramount of the Seigniory of Holderness may claim any cetacean washed up on the coast from Spurn Bight to Flamborough Head. In 1825 a beached sperm whale was taken to Burton Constable Hall, where its skeleton was displayed, inspiring passages in Thomas Beale’s The Natural History of the Sperm Whale (1839) and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). In 2007, the reassembled skeleton was exhibited in the Great Hall of Burton Constable. “… in Yorkshire, England, Burton Constable by name, a certain Sir Clifford Constable has in his possession the skeleton of a Sperm Whale… Sir Clifford’s whale has been articulated throughout; so that like a great chest of drawers, you can open and shut him, in all his bony cavities...” Moby Dick.

1. A Cabinet of Curiosities Rhino horn, coco-de-mer, shark jaws, tailfins, swordfish swords, sawfish saws, quadrants, astrolabes, a huge “book camera”, manuscripts, microscopes, a Concave Mirror all of Twenty-Four Inches in Diameter, antiquities, dried reptiles, thermometers, fossils, rocks, minerals, shells, the Claw of a Great Lobster, a Tooth-brush from Mecca, the Leg of an Elk two Foot two Inches long, a large Sea-Tortoise from the Isle of Ascension, fowling pieces, a carbine with an extending butt, perfectly balanced forty-bore hair -triggered duelling pistols with silver escutcheon and the motto Ubi Libertas Ibi Patria.

2. Sir Clifford’s Whale The Lord Paramount of the Seigniory of Holderness looks down and oversees these bones brought in by downstairs and scullery staff from their long exile in lean-tos, sheds, from their chilly diasporas in glasshouse and stable, the outhouse earth into which they’d sunk. The head, big as a Ford Transit, has been garaged under tarpaulin for decades. But his Lordship’s vision is more than just this fleshless resurrection the sun shines through; it is the huge skeleton key to reunite drifting land with inconstant sea. His mind ponders how blubber has bubbled off: how bones are bars detaining nowt; how flesh, long on the run, winks through, fugitive as light. 3. Carnival What’s suffered a sea-change here’s the coast itself; turned inside out, all that is solid melts into air. Even this thing now hugely spine and jaw is an idea in thrall to the carnival whose tides hold the whole of Holderness in its maw. Forget the chance encounters of sewing-machines and umbrellas on dissecting-tables, once more Surrealism’s at the service of Revolution and the elephant in this room, though not yet white, is moving there from black. Trace its evolution as the articulated folly of its bones glides from sea through cetology, from a surgeon’s prose to a Merman’s Leviathanic museum. Misrule: now you see it, now it’s gone.

4. Pelagian A rabblement of bones has breached the Hall; something huge and hugely hurt has crawled in from winter â&#x201D;&#x20AC; its great wounded bawl must have foghorned in another world â&#x201D;&#x20AC; and died. Left here, all we haveâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s this x-rayed sprawl. Across the floorboards of this ancient pile, a pile of pitted uncommon bones are spilled; up there on pilastered walls, narwhal tusks masquerade as unicorn horns, meanwhile the portraits (Elizabethan, Jacobean, in jousting armour, classically robed, or a wild Victorian filly riding to hounds) look down on a wrecked ossuary, smile slyly at the carcass of this pelagic meal.

Flotsam An arc of the bay from the pier-head, out where the factory lights flicker: only there do our sightlines cross. All parallel lines meet in time. Only stopped does the trainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s centipede finds its legs, find and lose them, its commuters shed and dispersed. What coast is this, should I ask my eyes or my memory? What catch has trickled to an empty creel for the last trawler afloat? The cracks in the pavement are full of eyes. Something is moving over my skin and will vanish the instant I move. Too ready at anchor, too temptingly the freighter under the window awaits my stowawayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s manifest to sail. My flotsam will require no such preliminaries. Cast on the waters its flux of wanderlust returns on itself, doubled back, delivered. A cormorant drying its wings steps down refreshed from its cross. The sliver of moon is an ill-fitting lid on the jar of our night and the darkened lighthouse has long been in league with the rocks. A laughably happy small dog

fetching a stick no one has thrown redoubles my prints in the sand, kicks through and erases them. I will not sail. Cover all my traces as effortlessly and I will stay for the last train, the last boat to sail and beyond.

Acknowledgements “Crossing the Equator” and “Futures” use material from the letters home of Michael ‘Kick’ Murphy (1876-1896), 3rd Mate on the Castlebank, lost with all hands in the Pacific Ocean. Used with permission of Robb Robinson and the Maritime History Institute, University of Hull. Thanks to Arthur Credland at Hull Maritime Museum and Gerardine Mulcahy at Burton Constable Hall for their time and permission to film or use photographsof their exhibits. The image on page 12 and the photographs on pages 41 and 44 appear by permission of the Burton Constable Foundation. Thanks to Roddie Harris for the photographs on pages 1, 2 and 9. All other photographs are by Cliff Forshaw. The accompanying DVD was filmed and edited by Cliff Forshaw. Cover design by Graham Scott at Human Design, Hull. Printed by V. Richardson & Sons Ltd, Hull.