6/100, the this and that of it.

The light here comes at you like a mirage. For while, living here had the texture of a dream, surely it wasn’t real, the it being the light, the white Victorian houses stretching for miles along the promenade and the sea being just right there; not a car drive or a train ride away, just out the front door and walk down to it. Some smells still catch me unaware, more so the last couple of weeks as winter tentatively gives way to spring. A fool’s spring they call it and I’m happy to be a fool for this, for the damp earth near the brook running down the hillside, carving stone in its wake, one morning there was steam rising from the water and the surrounding plants, then snowdrops followed by daffodils and crocuses now and walking home after parent’s evening last week I grabbed Estella’s hand. Suddenly, a scent I didn’t know, heavy and thick on the air, too much almost, certainly if were to be synthesised and bottled it would be cloying, sickening, but there in the newly dark crisping evening, it was arresting. We walked backwards to find its source. The streetlights here are scant, the light pollution gone, and I miss it, I miss the cloud of light all night long and berate myself for loving the manmade more than the natural as if it’s a meaningful distinction now. It’s hard here to see into other people’s gardens in the dark. I put my phone torch on and found yellow flowers: mimosa. Difficult, I think, to grow in Scotland, but here, so south I’m nearly tipping into the sea, happily flowering in February.

The cloud splits across Beachy Head, long grey slants hitting the sea. It might be raining. The weather here closes in quickly. The children play down by the water. I know little about tides or when they will be high or low. I’ve bought a poster to help with this. It’s pretty and possibly inaccurate. It’s also not arrived yet. We take our chances. Two months ago Estella was afraid of the sea. I don’t blame her. The shingle beach here slants dramatically, it’s not easy to run up or down, the waves are often large, the tide, unpredictable. She is right to have a fear of it. Three months in and they play happily by the water now, occasionally checking its height or running from a stray wave. Raised by the north sea, the boys were always like this. Aged one and two they’d each stand and roar at the sea, doing nothing to dispel myths of Viking forebearers. Today, in this light making everything uncertain and shifting, I sit with coffee and a book as they run along the waterline searching for driftwood we spotted further out, Estella in their wake. The boys have an innate understanding of each other’s bodies, at 17 months apart they fed together, napped together, often shared a bed when unable to sleep, and make no mistake, they don’t like each other half the time or seventy percent of the time or more even but they understand each other’s physicality in a way I’ve rarely seen, old couples perhaps have it. I watch them wrap their arms around each other’s waists as they run before pulling apart, bending to pick up stones. Sometimes their changed scale leaves me breathless. At one point they both fitted on my knee at the same time, their legs entwined, and it wasn’t difficult for them to nap like this, or for me to too, under them and so so very tired as I always was then. I found their baby clothes before the move. Washed them, packed them away, still can’t pass them on, that they ever fitted them seems incomprehensible. Every mother says it, as if dazzled by the obvious but really how were they ever so small and worse, how did anyone expect I could look after them.

And how we came to be here seems to be a mirage of its own. The first time I saw this light, I’d sent them all away to Scotland. Space I said I needed, the first time I’d ever asked for anything I really wanted. What I meant was space in an unattainable sense. It was a vacuum I was after more than anything else. I’d been ill for a year, hadn’t been alone in 9 years, had been working for two on The Last Days. My father had died two weeks earlier. I just needed something to simply stop. They went on a train north, I went south. And the light was white that day I arrived here, just after midsummer. I’d come to believe I was being guided by the dead. It still doesn’t make sense, still, I believe they did. I walked along the full three miles of the beach and three miles back and it wasn’t enough. I walked up the cliffs onto the hill, I walked around the old town, I walked back down to the sea, walked back along the beach where the children now are running along the same beach, their changed scale still as incomprehensible as the fact of being here, and of being safe here is, as equally incomprehensible as the fact of other children being unsafe elsewhere is, as they turn and run back to me with the wind whipping their words into it, the fact of the world being both this and that is an awful, awful lot.