Free Sea Change by Jeremy Page

is at a dangerous point near the mouth of the deep channel. He goes in to start the engine, but at the wheel he suddenly does a strange thing - impulsively, he switches the cabin lights off. Following that, he extinguishes the red and green navigation lights on the bow and wheelhouse roof. The Flood vanishes.
    He puts his coat on and climbs on to the wheelhouse roof. Parts of the coast can be seen, quite close: the sodium-lit glow of the Harwich docks, appearing like an orange chemical fog underneath the high pylons; the fragile glimmer of a seaside town, its promenade stretched either side of it in a single string of streetlamps, as if the town’s suspended on a cable and the top of a church in its centre, its flint castellation and copper-work spire floating above a tower which seems to have been rubbed away.
    Guy listens, aware that he’s at the limit - the absolute limit - of where the noises of the land can reach. These are the furthest sounds that England transmits - a low growl of machinery from the docks, in uncertain waves, and a distant car-alarm, quietly unanswered.
    But a third noise rises nearby - the sound of a ship’s engine, churning the sea like it’s ploughing soil. He feels its reverberation before he sees the ship itself, a vast cargo-container vessel turning through sixty degrees a couple of miles away and, although its hull and sides are completely blank, the superstructure is brilliantly lit. Along its deck he can see containers, each one the size of a lorry, stacked five high and eight deep in smudged pools of multicoloured light, at this distance they’re like a pile of a child’s wooden bricks.
    New angles of the ship reveal as it continues to turn and he begins to hear odd discords, clanking sounds, the groans of steel settling and shifting as they come up through the sea underneath the barge.
    Guy watches, mesmerized, as the ship completes its turn, establishing it within the notch of water between the navigation markers that will bring it to the Flood . It comes straight towards him, darkly menacing, the bow and sides as high as a cliff, blind with its sheer bulk, unstoppable. It’s unstoppable , Guy says out loud, and another word occurs to him: inevitable. He knows its meaning now, and piece by piece the superstructure and deck of the ship begin to disappear as the huge bull-nosed bow rises in perspective in front of it, a giant anvil it seems, lifting out of the sea like a Greek colossus to club him down.
    This is his moment, Guy knows, and he reaches out into the thick nothingness between him and the giant ship and he asks for her, he asks whether she’s here with him, with him now. You are, aren’t you , he says, and his voice sounds like two voices - one, so full of acceptance, the other, so afraid. Oh no , he says, oh God not now . And then he grabs the top of the wheelhouse, bracing pathetically, as the cliff edges of the container ship overhang, bear down, then slide enormously alongside the Flood in an impenetrable solid shadow. Above - way above - the single illumination of the ship’s name, painted on the bow, wide and glowing wings spread like an angel, and he thinks he hears a shout, an alarm coming from someone on deck, a man at watch who is seeing the unseeable.
    The Flood is tipped to the side by the bow wave and the cargo ship seems to bend in the sky, leaning away briefly, then returning as a huge steel wall. He hears something fall and smash from the saloon table, he wonders about the greenfinch, sliding from one side of the box to the other, and he smells the passing ship - its ocean stink of diesel and grease as the engine noise grows and finally roars by and the sea bursts into a beautiful cascade of rising foam. It’s like a firework sizzling all around, a simple celebration it seems, in that instant, of his survival. And gradually it recedes - the sound, the danger, even the sea itself, till all that’s left are the last soothing bubbles of the ship’s