I will stop now and think…

of how absolutely aquamarine the water was, with the sky fierce under its gauze of alabaster clouds. You were frowning into your book, face earnest with concentration while I languished on the floor of the upstairs deck, squinting up into the sun-bleached air. The breeze was so forceful that the boat swung its blunt face towards the near bank, then to the far side of the channel; when I turned my head to the side and stared at the horizon it looked as if we were moving.

The heat stilled everything. The mangroves glowered at us from the shore. Hawks swirled lazily out of the trees, taunting me, too far away for a decent picture.

Warmth comes back to him first, and wetness. Then the cold. His skin is puckered from the salt; his limbs are numb and swollen like lumps of sodden wood. He flounders briefly, realises his hands are attached to an oar. His armpits ache where it has pressed into them.

He remembers having a vague dream about his tongue swelling to the size of a small amphibian, flopping desperately around in his mouth to find some water. Then he became the amphibian. Then he somehow turned into water, bobbing and plashing, nudging into itself and rebounding gently in pulses. He squints at the horizon with salt-shrunken eyes. Seems to be a long way off. His brain is trying to squeeze out of his skull—possibly so it can wring itself out. Every thought is soggy and takes a long time to drip its way to the surface, exiting via his nose in a warm stream…

On reflex he rubs his nose; his stiff fingers drip blood into the endless ocean. This is bad, he thinks. He closes his eyes and tries to forget about the sun scalding his face and the feeling that he is being dissolved, relentlessly and steadily, by all this impassive water. The ceaseless motion of the waves pushes through him and rolls on towards the beach. Gradually he falls back down, lulled into weightlessness by the pitching water and the sound of the approaching surf. He drifts towards sleep, forgetting that he can’t remember anything.

A few minutes later he thinks to look in the other direction, and sees the beach.

The beach is unknown to him. Nothing in the scraggle-covered dunes or the printless sand suggests familiarity. He lies in the swash for a while, getting his breath back; eventually he sits up simply to distract himself from his muscles screaming, and looks dully up and down the beach. He is the only vertebrate thing in existence for at least ten kilometres on either side—even the inescapable gulls are absent from this dejected stretch of sand.

He sneezes, surprising himself at the sound. It is a foreigner’s sneeze, it can’t be his own… but what sound does he normally make? He massages his aching jaw and licks at encrusted lips.

“I am…” I am who? I am where? He wonders at the void in his memory again, and the novelty of hearing his voice after…he doesn’t know how long.

“I am lost.”

I’m up shit creek, is where I am.

I have some sort of sense of humour. This almost makes him smile—a cracked, twisted contorsion. Panic is building up behind his temples, filling his seared throat. He realises that he can’t remember what his face looks like.

He wakes up again, acutely aware that the sun has torched his skin to blistered perfection, and that his toes are dry. Crispy, in fact. The tide’s gone out and he’s so thirsty he could drink a swimming pool dry. Yes, even a swimming pool filled with incontinent old people and babies. He shoves himself up and lurches towards the dunes, doing a fair impression of a lost zombie wandering over the pale sand. It’s about midday.

Foredunes become hind-dunes become coastal teatree scrub, white sand and spiky leaves underfoot. Now he finds it preferable to mull over his situation, rather than think about how much he wants a litre or five of clear, cold water, from a spring or an icy waterfall or —

He has to stop to pee, and curses his kidneys for being so stupid and wasteful.

What was he doing with an oar, floating off some uninhabited beach? How long was he drifting before he woke up? What happened to his nose? Who the hell is he and how is he going to get across this road without burning his feet off?

The panic starts again, blocking off his throat and squeezing his chest and hitting him sharply with a gutful of nausea, so the blotches swim across his vision and the blank bitumen sways towards him

He’s sitting up with his back against a tree when he hears a muttering like approaching thunder; a sound as familiar as a recurring dream within this weird nightmare. He swallows, only half-conscious of his thirst, and stands up. The pulsating patches swarm across his sight again for a moment; he ignores them and shades his eyes, peering at the wavering horizon.

The road leaps away from him up a hill, flanked by the salty, stunted scrubland as far as he can see. In the opposite direction the land rises to a low peak. He imagines cliffs beaten by the sea and braces himself for a wave of nostalgia, but nothing comes. Something else comes, though, along the road towards him. Something large and fast. He steps out onto the scorching bitumen and does the hot-feet dance for as long as he can take, waving his arms like an idiot.

It’s a dirty white vehicle. It’s flying along at close to one-fifty. It shoots down the hill and groans past him, raising a hot, bitter wind in its wake.

Sweating, he stares after it, incredulity and disappointment biting him like ants. He watches it decelerate, turn smoothly and wheel back towards him.

As it stops, some weird reflex makes him look up and feel grateful.

The horizon has burned itself into her vision like a brand. When she closes her eyes at last, she sees a watercolour print in inverted colours: expressionless sky and furious sea, meeting like lips pressed together in eternal disapproval. The binocular strap eats into the back of her neck like one half of a noose. She doesn’t even know why she’s still looking. Her searching went beyond futile hours ago.

Still, she can’t rest. She opens her eyes again, stomach cramping with hunger and fear, twitchy nervousness jerking through her overtired limbs. She gets up and paces the small deck. Waves slap at it with small half-hearted shoves. The hull doesn’t respond, doesn’t even shiver. It’s sunk so deep into the liquified sand that nothing will move it until the tide properly returns, and that is probably hours away.

Bursts of wind play in the shallows, blowing fine spray towards her salt-crusted face as she finally comes to a stop and slouches down in the stern. She wants to contemplate the pattern of random colour spots in the balding carpet, but the images rush over her, squeezing out the stink of bait prawns going off, the sporadic screaming of gulls, the shaking of her hands. Her life is over. Or unrecognisable, at best. Her gut lurches again. Impulsively, she grabs the bait packet and slings it out towards the cloud of gulls. They contract around it and the whole thing drops to the sand somewhere outside with shrieks of triumph and rage. Pale fury and dull terror pinch her limbs but she is disappearing into hours ago.

The grinning mid-morning sun. The incessant motion of the boat, gentle at first, then nauseating. The constant tension pawing at her, biting her concentration like a cat feigning playfulness. It had been like that for months, a knife-edge hostility glinting at the edge of every conversation. The shadow in his eyes when she’d spoken his own words back to him. She’d finally caught up, but it was as if he were a different person now. She knew that she certainly was. How had this trading of places occurred? Had he given his life for hers in some private intercessional bargain? Was that how his God—now hers—worked?

The lines were snagging infuriatingly; fish he deemed worthless were tossed back. She bit the disagreements off her tongue, throat full of that ever-present, expanding silence that had been steadily engulfing the all of the word-bridges they’d built. She tried to find a neutral entry but his sullenness was sharpening into spearpoints. They cast and cast again without speaking.

A squall was building behind them, but they were so engrossed in their own storm that they gave it only cursory glances and went on casting, snapping lines and reeling in empty hooks. His swearing intensified as the wind flung his line sideways, the boat plunging in the growing swell.

We never prayed, she thought. We never asked, what makes you think we’ll be given anything now? She suggested they head back, but he snapped at her and insisted they stay another twenty minutes. Anger growled softly in her chest. Fine then. Keep losing if that’s what you want to do. She broke down her rod and went and sat in the stern, hugging her knees to her chest as the wind rose to a bellow. Her hair whipped in her eyes and a wave slammed its salty fist into the port side, spraying them both as if it were a warning shot. He lurched but regained his footing, winding in with bent rod and furious concentration.

You’re going against him, she thought. All of this last year. Since you stopped trying to listen. From the corner of her eye the swell roared into towers and fear finally cracked her self-righteous disapproval, but it was too late; the boat vaulted skywards and pitched down with a concrete-demolishing slam. A hand of spray closed over him as he toppled into the swarming, kelp-thrashed deep.

She squeezes at splinters from the useless oar she’d flung. She’d been irrational and he hadn’t surfaced. Or maybe he had, but the rain clawing at her face had washed any possible sighting back into the bucking waves. The wind had yowled salty and stinging as she shouted and searched, clawing through snarls of gear for the lifejackets they only ever wore in bad weather. Then she’d heard, first in parallel and then louder and deeper than the wind, the sirens singing at her to turn and go home.

She could have stayed longer. The radio didn’t work. There was nothing she could do. She could have attempted the flare gun.

Perhaps she should now. The thought of movement washes over her as she dissolves into sleep.

Months before it took place, I saw us standing on a beach. A few hundred meters away was the place where the waves had buried and uncovered me, too late for you to grasp.

Over the edge of the world, the setting sun shone out of a new land made from cumulonimbus and unfathomable truth. We stared at it side-by-side for the first and last time, my scarf flicking like a kite-tail. Behind us, the drowsy mumble of café music and the occasional panting of passing joggers was skewered by the sly chuckles of ravens. Leaves skittered in the hoarse breath of a dying winter. I shivered in my jacket; the denim on my legs was too thin and the desire to be home was suddenly too insistent. We shook hands and parted.