Sea Change by Jeremy Page

table. ‘I mean, out here, aren’t we all without attachment? You know, no anchor? Aren’t we all like him on his purple armchair?’ A single teardrop falls surprisingly on to the table, landing in a perfect crown shape. It takes Guy a moment to realize where it’s come from. He wipes both eyes with his sleeve. ‘Yesterday, you know what I found, floating - I found a greenfinch, on the sea - it was drowning in front of me and I was the only person in the world to see that.’ He looks up at Steve. ‘How did you feel out there - sitting in that thing on the sea?’
    Steve feels obliged to answer. ‘I don’t know,’ he says quietly.
    ‘Je-sus Christ!’ the skipper says. ‘What’s up with you, man?’ he says to Guy, not meanly, but without understanding what’s going on. ‘You shunt be out here,’ he says.
    But Guy meets him head on. ‘You’re wrong. This is exactly where I should be.’

    The meal is over soon after that. Guy asks to leave and the men slide off the bench to allow him to get out. He’s embarrassed for being emotional, but despite what’s happened he notices himself standing more upright, less cowed than he had been when he arrived on the trawler. He’s been honest. He’s not intimidated. Some of this must have conveyed itself, because all four men come out on deck to see him off, and the skipper gives him a quarter bottle of Danish Gammel Dansk liquor. He warns Guy it tastes like ear-wax.
    ‘You take care,’ the skipper says, because he has to voice something and the others aren’t up to it, but at the boat’s side it’s the man called Alexie who unexpectedly reaches out to take his arm. It’s not to steady him - it’s to hold on to him. The other men are looking down into the forward hatch at this point, and Guy looks at Alexie’s thick-skinned hand clasping his forearm, while the man reaches into a pocket of his jacket. He pulls out a tattered photo. It’s of a dark-haired girl, about sixteen, sitting at a bus stop. The anonymous boxy shapes of a European city suburb fill the background. The girl is very overweight, with a round smiling face and deep dimples in her cheeks.
    ‘Is daughter,’ Alexie says, quietly.
    Guy examines the picture, at its moment of captured happiness and the plump daughter that has emerged from this scrawny man. She’s holding a bag tightly to her thigh and has a sequinned purse in her other hand.
    ‘Where is this?’ Guy asks, pointing to the city behind her.
    ‘Gone,’ the man says, inexplicably. He points to a scar on his chin and shakes his head.
    Guy looks on as Alexie folds the photo back into his pocket. Alexie glances back at Guy and nods, once.

Position: Near Cork Sand. 51° 54’N 1° 20’E. 8:35pm
    ‘Are you dead?’ he asks, gently, nudging the greenfinch with his finger. It flaps a wing in fright, then lies still again.
    ‘Right,’ Guy says.
    It hasn’t moved all day. It lies unbalanced in the corner of the box, wings awkward, beak slightly parted. A grey film of skin covers its eye like a cataract.
    A few minutes ago he’d heard the trawler’s engine start. He’d watched it move off down the line of the bank, leaving behind a thick cloud of diesel smoke, its gantry lit up like a Christmas tree and a pool of bright floodlight on its deck. He’s struck by how late it is, and how suddenly dark the North Sea is growing around him. It’s deeply unsettling, the speed nightfall arrives offshore.
    Guy looks at the postcard he managed to steal from the trawler’s notice-board, which he’s pinned behind the wheel - the tiny picture of Aurlandsfjord and its oppressively brooding mountain in the distance. The hytte they’d stayed in had been warm, built without fuss, with a Scandinavian sense of resilience and self-belief which had put them at ease. They’d slept in bunk beds and, through a precise square window in the door, Guy had watched the top of the nameless mountain on the other side of the fjord - its broad far-away back,