Page 52 of Sunrise By the Sea

‘But! Your hair is important? You not get wet?’

‘No . . . I . . . I didn’t . . . Can I buy you another music book?’

He snorted, too distraught to speak. The piece beside Marisa, the messy ink blots running, was completely washed away now, ground into the mud.

He stormed up the steps.

‘I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry. I thought I explained—’

‘How can you not go outside? Is not real! YOUR HEAD IS LYING TO YOU! IT IS TELLING YOU LIES! DO NOT BE LISTENINK TO IT!’

He was properly yelling now, shaking the sodden ruined paper.

‘DO NOT BE LISTENINK TO WHAT IT IS TELLINK YOU!’

Abruptly he turned and stormed inside, banging the door hard. The motion made the little peaked room above her front door judder slightly, sending water straight down the back of her neck.

That night the discordant music started again; loud, furious, over and over again, never the same, never right, as he tried to retrieve what had gone for ever.

Marisa sat in the bath, feeling back where she started. He hadknownshe wasn’t well. He was completely unsympathetic and horrible about it. Didn’t give two shits as long as he was shovelling her food down his gob every bloody night. And now he was punishing her for messing with a few stupid pieces of stupid paper. When obviously he was the one with anger management issues. Well, sod him. Sod him.

What happened next was almost certainly caused by a combination of things: the kind words of friends like Polly and bosses like Nazreen, and Anita’s hard work, and hernonnabringing fresh ingredients and good food and family back into her life just exactly at the point where she truly needed it.

But Marisa didn’t see all that. She just heard, sitting in the bath, the heavy loud angry music and it stirred something in her. She wouldn’t say it was a good thing it stirred in her; it made her feel angry, because the music itself was so angry. But somehow it fitted; she found it fitted with the storm outside which, even as it had grown darker, had intensified, was now howling through the house, making the lights flicker, pounding rain against the windows and the roof, making the wooden chalet that she loved so much that felt so sweet and secure suddenly feel flimsy and lightweight.

The music rose to a great discordant crescendo, just as the wind howled outside and suddenly Marisa stood up. She felt wild, and furious, and pent up, and full at the same time and as if she didn’t quite know what to do with herself, even through the fury, and she realised that, of all the odd things to feel, this was important; because it was life she was feeling. Not being removed from life, or dull to it, or simply removed. She felt real, passionate, irritating, infuriating life pulsing through her veins, her blood rushing to every part of her, and almost without warning, because her stupid brain could take over and second-guess or talk her out of it or panic, she moved towards the door. She remembered the furious man in the rain, screaming ‘YOUR HEAD IS LYING TO YOU!’

Your head is lying to you. Everything, she felt, in the world was lying to her. That things would be all right. That adulthood would come naturally; that she would grow up, and own her own home and be great at her job and have loads of friends and a buzzing social life and know where she was going in life. And instead she was trapped indoors by her own mind, terrified of her own shadow and desperately, horribly sad.

The music grew even louder, it seemed, following or focusing on the movements of the storm.

And suddenly, she was there. She flung the door open, hard, let it bang against the side, and, before she could think about it, dived into the rain.

She charged up to the end of the street – she’d never even been there before – in her light striped pyjamas, nothing on her feet. She didn’t notice anything; not the water beneath her feet or the mud squelching. Her brain was bursting, her blood pumping and these things overcame her mind, overcame her worried side, her anxiety, and once she felt fully out of range, she came to the top of the road, overlooking the wild sea, the sweeping clouds, the distant lightning, and she found herself screaming at the top of her voice.

Alexei thought he heard something outside in the storm, and stopped playing abruptly. He had been trying to reconstitute the music he had lost in the rain. Of course he knew he should have made copies, he was always being told to take copies and how important it was, but he had got caught up in the moment, been too impetuous. It wasn’t fair, he knew, to blame the poor girl next door. It wasn’t her fault. He realised that. He had been cruel and angry about something else, and taken it out on her, and he absolutely hated himself for it.

He remembered that he had shouted at her and felt worse than ever. Shouting at women wasn’t something he would ever have thought of as part of his make-up and he was heartily ashamed of it now, especially as he knew she was unwell.

He put down the lid of the piano, feeling guilty, and got up and went out into the filthy night.

It was still wild outside and he knocked sharply on the door.

‘Marisa? Marisa? Is me. I am sorry.’

There was no answer from the little lemon house, and he left it a moment or so and tried again. Still nothing. He tried harder, but then realised he had to give up.

He’d absolutely messed it up and she wouldn’t forgive him and frankly he didn’t blame her for not opening the door in the dark to a strange and possibly deranged man. It wasn’t news to Alexei how physically imposing he was; people had been remarking on it since he grew fifteen centimetres in a year when he was fourteen years old. Normally he tried to pre-empt the situation by being gentle. Because he knew, when he wasn’t, he was a more frightening proposition than most pissed-off people would be.

Deeply disappointed in himself, and vowing never to bother her again – and regretful too, both about his missing music, which she hated so very much, but also that he would now lose access to her frankly astonishing cooking– he trudged through the rain back into the little blue house, just in time to miss Marisa, drenched to the bone, black hair plastered down her back, taking big gulps of the electric air, slowly walking down the middle of the road, that was now more like a stream, soaking, freezing, but somehow feeling better than she had in months and months.

Marisa’s bath was still warm as she got back in it, finding herself shaking. But she wasn’t shaking from panic or fear: she was just cold. That was all. A normal physiological reaction to the weather outside. Somehow, screaming into the air had tired her out – but a good tired, a proper full-blown tiredness, rather than the aimless, scrolling confusion of other times, when she was enervated but not exhausted.

The water had felt so good on her face; the wind far sharper and brisker than she remembered; the air bristling but sweet, the vistas so far and so dramatic; nothing to be seen ahead except the occasional brisk sweep of the lighthouse, warning sailors on a night like this to stay well away.

And inside herself, deep down, was a tiny fist of triumph. She had done it! She had gone out! She had broken the seal of the doorway; she had made her way through the desert of sandworms, through the abyss that lay beyond the lemon-painted steps, and she had survived. She had triumphed.

She hugged her knees close to herself in the cooling bath, marvelling that she had managed it, listening, but hearing no more music from next door. However, it had helped.

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