Things become calm when they reach the auto-route. They drive the whole day; cities shine in the distance; juggernauts form an endless caravan. Way beyond the vast simmering fields a thunderstorm is in progress. Soon, it too is passed. Vincent wants to sleep, but sits poised like a sentinel behind his father who, tired as well, fiddles with the radio stations to stay awake. Evening starts at an apex in the sky and descends onto the world. Yellow headlights soften oncoming cars into velvet. Vincent hears his parents’ voices and an indicator clicking. He senses deceleration. The car turns right, then stops at a line of vehicles waiting to be let into the port. A man in a uniform is ambling from car to car. Vincent’s father lowers his window and the man announces that the night sailing has been cancelled due to stormy seas. They are allowed to use the facilities in the company building; he hands out vouchers for baguettes and drinks.
‘How bloody ironic,’ Vincent’s mother mutters.
It takes Vincent a moment to understand what she means. His mind goes back to this morning on the beach. As with every day he was in the sea, swimming underwater for as long as his lungs could hold out. He recalls how soft the colours were, and the feel of his fingers along the sand. He plunged upwards to gasp the air, and just as he was about to submerge again, heard his name called. His father was on the beach waving his hands in the air. The rest of the family were standing in a line beside him.
‘We mixed up the dates of the sailing. We have to leave now!’ his mother explained. Her sunglasses softened the anxiety in her eyes, but did not hide it completely. The others were already on their way to the hotel. Vincent got his towel and scuffled up the baking sand, watched by the bronzed tribe with which they had spent the last fourteen days. In the room, they emptied out wardrobes and gathered up toothbrushes like cutlery after a meal. Soon they were hauling their suitcases down the stairs. At reception, their father, in oversized Bermudas and a frayed t-shirt, threw out crinkled notes and checked his pockets for coinage. He did not have enough. As they ran to the car and squeezed the suitcases into the boot, Vincent did not understand if the manager had let them go, or if they were escaping. His mother struggled with the map, his father whistled unhappily. Setting off, the car park’s melting tar made it sound like they were driving over tiny animals.
They wait out the night in the car and Vincent, glad not to be sitting in the middle, presses his head against the window. His brothers doze off and his little sister is quiet in the front on her mother’s lap. Beyond them, the lights of the forbidden ferry sparkle against the dark sea. The wind picks up and buffets the car. His parents are awake but not a word passes between them. Ropes beat against flag poles. The low hum of the dock sounds like night itself.
At dawn, the noise of cars and revving motorcycles replaces this sound, and Vincent leans forward and taps his father’s shoulder. As if still asleep his father turns the key and their Toyota lurches towards the ferry’s open bow. When they drive up the ramp, a bellowing crewman directs them to within an inch of a juggernaut’s trailer. His father yanks the key out of the ignition and his mother tells everyone to take care crossing the vehicle deck. Petrol and salt fill Vincent’s nostrils and the bedlam hurts his ears. They follow a stream of passengers to an open door and climb the narrow staircase. Then they walk down a corridor, his mother calling out the numbers on the doors until they are standing in front of the cabin they will all have to share because the sailing is over-booked. They go inside and choose their bunks, but the space is too enclosed and this puts everyone in bad form. After quickly unpacking the things they need for the evening, they troop upstairs to the cafeteria. Most of the seats are already taken and the place is thick with Gitane smoke. Their mother finds them a table next to a throughway. For a while the doors are in constant mid-swing and Vincent eyes the passengers bursting through like clowns in a circus; but soon he tires of how loud and clumsy they are, and the ridiculously obvious comments they keep coming out with.
The ferry sets sail.
‘I want to go outside,’ he says, getting to his feet.
His father comes with him.
The squalling wind makes Vincent wish he had put on long pants. He watches the froth churned up by the propeller and then he stares into the distance at the point where the waves become lifeless like a snapshot, squeezing his eyes half-shut to focus better on the actual moment of this occurrence. For several minutes his mind empties of all other thoughts, and he feels like he is stepping inside a room that is totally his own.
Back in the cafeteria, a cleaner in a blue apron and transparent gloves is dumping leftovers into a bin on wheels and slotting trays into a rack attached above it. A cup of cocoa is waiting for Vincent, beside it, a misshapen croissant. When he is finished eating, he sneaks into the video game section with his brothers and plays a few games until a narrow-faced man in a white shirt sends them out. They get their father, who tells the man that he might as well let the kids play the games, but the man says they have to be fifteen and makes a swishing movement with his hand. They try the cinema where a film is running about a nuclear submarine; the room is tiny, but the screen is huge. They sit back with their heads resting on the tops of the faded velvet seats, and it is like being in the car again, driving through the evening, as the submarine pulses towards them. On either side of him, his brothers sleep, but he keeps watch; until they arrive safely home he will do so.
It is four o’clock in the afternoon. His mother is feeding his little sister with a bottle.
‘The sea is getting choppy again,’ his father announces, glancing out the window.
Vincent, utterly bored, pretends to feel sick and asks his mother for the key to the cabin. Although usually sure of his direction, he loses his way in the maze of corridors below deck, and is about to go back to the cafeteria when the ship lurches and a cabin door opens, staying his step. The cabin is even tinier than his family’s, with the cover pulled over the porthole and a light glimmering above a mirror like a fog. Into this light steps a woman who is wearing nothing but a tiny pair of underpants that cannot hide the thick strip of hair underneath them. Her brow puckers slightly when she sees him, but she does not cover herself. Her arms are thin and her breasts look like small skulls, but her face is directly from the fashion magazines his mother used to bring to the beach. She reaches out and softly closes the door.
Inside their cabin, Vincent stares at himself in the bathroom mirror, looking at the person the woman must have seen, but the harder he looks the more difficult it is to imagine what went through her brain other than a short pulse of electricity without any thoughts accompanying it. When a knock comes to the door, he is convinced it is her, but his family are waiting in the corridor. They sidle in past him, his siblings hauling themselves onto their bunks, and his parents falling into the faded white armchairs near the porthole. Vincent has a lower bunk; he sits on the edge motionlessly. His brother’s foot dangles from above, beating time against the iron frame, and his little sister cries and kicks for a while then falls asleep.
‘Is everything all right, Vincent?’ his mother asks.
It is dark now and he must have been asleep. His mother has just put on the reading lamp.
‘Did I wake you?’ she asks, about to open her magazine.
He does not reply, just looks at her from his bunk.
The magazine lies open on her lap; she says she feels a bit nauseous and her eyes shine. The ship rocks like a gargantuan cradle and his siblings breathe in unison. His father is staring into space. Vincent says he is going back upstairs for a while.
‘Don’t go outside,’ his father says like a man talking in his sleep.
The cafeteria is mostly deserted. A fluorescent light blinks above the shuttered counter. The cleaner from earlier is talking to the white-shirted crewman with the narrow face. At a table near the back wall, a young woman is hunched over. Her black motorcyclist’s jacket looks like misshapen armour and her hair is tied back with a blue scarf. She stands and opens a door to the elements. Without knowing or asking why, he walks quickly along the rows of empty tables and follows her outside. The wind thunders against his face. The woman is leaning over the railing. Her hair, now untied, blows in ropes around her head; she presses herself forward and retches. He stares at her buckled form as she sucks in air. Slowly she turns and her eyes catch his.
‘You not cold?’ she asks pulling her arms in a V across her chest and squeezing once. He shakes his head and watches her tie the blue ribbon back around her hair. She waits a moment, almost smiling. He tries to keep eye contact, to experience the image of him that she is seeing, and to slip beyond it into the thoughts in her brain, like into a room where he can see what he really is. In the water, dappled by the ferry’s lights, he suddenly makes out a submarine’s conning tower. He tells the woman − her eyes widen slightly; she shakes her head and says something he wishes he could understand, then goes inside. He follows her through the cafeteria, but when she turns he stops and knows he has to leave her now.
On his way down the stairs, he thinks he can hear the submarine scrape against the hull of the ferry. Again he gets lost. Music drifts like a smell through the cracks of a cabin door. He waits outside it, listening to her night-time radio, the voices in a language he cannot understand, until she turns it off and sleeps. Then he goes back to his cabin and lies in the darkness, feeling the sea press against the metal of the ship like thoughts against a mind.
They hardly have time for breakfast before disembarking. The sky is sombre and the sun has lost its heat. They drive past fields that resemble green sponges. Vincent watches the road: the slow lorries, the lone walkers. They stop for sandwiches in a pub. A man at the bar looks at them and their sun tans in sly bemusement. The woman serving seems in a bad mood.
School will start up again in a few days. The thought hurts Vincent. But a part of him is beyond it, and this makes him glad. He continues watching the road; now he is able to recognise some landmarks: the railway line, the river bridge; but his eyes are getting heavy… He has just nodded off when his mother screams, brakes screech, and there comes a slap of impact. Seconds later, they are getting out of the car. The day is bright for a moment despite the rain, then everything darkens again, and they stand breathless, gaping at a dairy lorry nestled in the hedge. The grown-ups talk and the children say nothing. Through gritted teeth, the driver of the lorry seeks acknowledgement for the lucky escape he has just had. Vincent’s father nods. He missed a stop sign, how could he have missed it, he shakes his head, then nods again, yes, he missed it. He has driven non-stop for two days, he says, palms facing upwards. The silver tank shines like the gills of a fish. Milk starts to trickle from under it.
‘Well, don’t cry over spilt milk,’ Vincent’s mother says grimly as they set off with their drenched suitcases. The house is two miles away. They march intobaleful headlights and past fields that are dark like a sea. They have not gone far when a man who does not speak stops and gives them a lift.
In the house, his mother turns on the lights, and his father puts on the heat. Vincent goes upstairs to his room. There are clothes still on the floor from the morning they left, and upturned schoolbooks on the table. He pulls the curtains in order not to have to look outside. Downstairs nobody is speaking but the television has come on; they want to see if the crash is on the news. For a moment he thinks of the woman in the cabin, like he used to think of saints a year before, praying to her almost, to the calm miracle of her body. This is the change, he thinks. It blots out school. It blots out home. For a lifetime he can wonder what she said to him, because she saw it too, the submarine.