Canvey Island by James Runcie

sea; so far that I could hardly see her and I tried not to panic or show my fear that she might drown. I saw other people walking their dogs, or children running into the waves, unaware of the power of the tide. Sometimes Iwanted to stop them all, or call out, ‘Come back, come back!’ but I knew my fear would frighten them.
    And then, as Linda painted, I studied the currents and read about the moon, torn away from the outer crust of the earth billions of years ago like an orphaned child unable to return to its parent, longing to come home. Together, I decided, we would be sea people, Martin and Linda, water-creatures of the night. She told me how, in some societies, food was laid out to absorb the rays of the moon so that it would have the power to cure disease and prolong life.
    â€˜Scoop up the water,’ she would say, ‘the moon is in your hands.’
    Together we tried to imagine what it might be like to emerge from the shadow of the world, to travel through the belt of film surrounding the earth’s sphere, to see what there was beneath the clouds of Venus and walk on the moon’s surface. We would wander through the desolation of buried worlds and future planets.
    When we sat by the water she would recite bits of poetry that she had learnt by heart.
    Flood-Tide below me! I see you face to face;
Clouds of the west – sun there half an hour high – I see you also face to face
.
    I told Linda I had thought of becoming an oceanographer, recording light penetration, pressure, salinity and temperature; registering the slow changes in deep waters, dropping a sounding line a thousand fathoms to find the starfish clinging to it. I would measure the flow of currents and the height of waves out at sea from trough to crest. I would work out the length of fetch, the distance the waves had run under the drive of a wind blowing in a constant direction without obstruction. The greater the fetch, the higher the waves. I knew that the fetch the night my mother died could have been as long as six hundred miles.
    I didn’t know if Linda would ever understand how much it haunted me. No matter how close we were, even then, when our love was at its height, I was afraid that there would always be something unspoken, a gap that could never be closed.
    I could not believe how elated Linda made me and yet, at thesame time, I was frightened of becoming so used to the feeling that I would not be able to live if it was ever taken away. It would be like losing my mother all over again.
    Perhaps Linda was right not to trust the intensity of it all. For I knew that, however good it was, this was a love that didn’t belong to everyday life. And then I realised that when I went to university I would be unable to live either with or without Linda. If we were still together, loving as we did, then I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything else, everything would be her, and when she was away from me and I was supposed to be studying, I would be afraid of something terrible happening to her: illness, accident, even death.
    I would spend all my hours fearing the loss of love, the return of absence.

Linda
    I knew it couldn’t last but I kept hoping I was wrong. I couldn’t accept that if Martin left for university then he might also be leaving me.
    First he began to dream and be moody. Then he started to criticise me. Little things at first, like the fact that I hardly ate anything and that, when I did so, I did it too slowly. He thought the way I arranged my body when I sat on a settee showed too much of my legs, that I said too little, and that my paintings were just a bit too weird. It got to the stage where nothing I could do was ever quite right. I even wondered whether he was being irritating and critical deliberately, like he was trying to put me off him, so that I might be the first to end it all and he wouldn’t have to do it himself.
    The night before he left we were walking on the beach