Walking out to Sea

He and she are on a buoy. They are floating in the sea holding onto
a circular rail at the top of the buoy. The rail is painted red in
thick matt paint. The buoy is painted matt red and matt white. There is
rust around the rivets that join the metal sheets of the buoy together.
The rust is heavy and red. The buoy moves gently up and down. It is
floating in the sea. It floats a little lower than normal due to the
weight of the man and woman holding on to it.

It's easy to see how their predicament occurred. They were walking, the
couple. We can assume from the proximity of their bodies and the
intensity of their conversation, that they are a couple. The couple
were walking across the fine yellow sand of the beach at low tide. The
sand on the beach is distinctly yellow. Not the translucent white
tropical paradise sand of a south-sea island. Not the solid red sand
that looks like it was formed by the attrition of buildings. Not the
golden sand that a resort would boast about. Certainly not pebbled
shingle, black coal dust or estuarine mud flats that could be the beach
at any other place. The yellow sand defines this place. The underlying
geological history, the years of erosion and sedimentation, groins and
breakwaters, ebb and flow all define this beach's sand. These factors
also define its gradient and shape, its deceptive eddies and creeping
tides. They define this beach at this moment with the tide only halfway
in.

The couple were walking out from the land. They walked perpendicular to
the land, down the shallow slope of yellow sand towards the sea. They
were talking. Do we know what they were talking about? We don't. There
was a breeze, another factor in the creation of this beach at this
moment. The same breeze that trickles grains along the beach and piles
them up out to shore took the couple's words away. If we speculate we
could say that the man said something and the breeze, the trickster
breeze, took the man's words and turned them upside down before he
brought them to the woman's ears. She heard a different story to the
one being told. The words were no fault of the man's. We could
speculate at this.

Whatever was said, or wasn't said, at that moment on this beach, the
couple took to arguing. Their words were like a storm themselves. It
didn't much matter which of them had started saying what. The storm
swallowed them both and blew them along the beach in a gale of
discontent. The gulls that pick among the shoreline cried for them. The
gulls flew up and fought battles in the sky for them. They caught
updrafts, climbed above, and dive-bombed each other. They plucked the
morsels in each other's claws, scattering it. The food was lost to the
beach and spoiled. When the man and woman saw this, they saw the gulls
had draw the battle for them. They took comfort that they had never
gone that far. But they had gone too far already.

The man and woman stopped by the buoy, the buoy painted red and white
in matt paint with rust growing on its topside and barnacles growing on
its underneath. The buoy was resting on the sand bank that it marked.
Unsupported by water it lolled on its side, a great chain folded
slackly into the sand. The couple moved to be in the sun, sat on dry
sand, leant against the buoy's iron mass, felt it settle back in the
hollow the exiting water had carved around it.

At some point, hours ago, the volume of water around it had lost the
urge to keep it upright and it was poised, unsupported, waiting for the
slightest fluctuation in the surroundings to determine which way it
should rest. In falling, some of the barnacles that encrusted the red
and white stripes of the lower half would be splintered and burst. In
this way, twice each day, the survival of the barnacles would be
decided by a gentle push from the current.

The sun warmed the hearts of the man and woman. The warmth splashed
across the iron hull of the buoy and its population as if it was a new
colour. The couple wished they could see the warmth but instead they
felt it in their hearts and across the fragile membrane of their skin.
From their place beside the buoy the man and woman both saw the dipping
horizon, satin sheets fluttering in front of them, until their
impeccable motion became stillness in the distance. Their whole world
became a yard of distinctive yellow sand and an eternity of grey-blue
water. The gulls, peaceful and a little resentful, settled on the wave
tops and oscillated while they picked at their own feathers.

There had been an oil slick here once. It had come ashore on unnatural
waves, driven by a wind that drove the mischievous breeze away. The oil
had lapped over the high-tide line and filmed the sand with viscous
bilge. The older gulls still remembered the incident, the inability to
fly, the sad flapping in stickiness and the unpalatable shellfish all
lingered in their preening. They had not forgotten the oil, but they
had forgotten, or it was not part of their genetic memory, the forests
that had once been on this beach, that had fallen, putrefied,
compressed, liquefied and turned to oil deep below.

The couple could not understand why the birds pecked at themselves with
such harsh movements. The woman climbed to her feet and threw stones
into the water. She may have been trying to scare the filthy birds
away; maybe she was trying to stop their self-mutilation. When she
rose, she could see they had become an island. She watched the river
swirling behind her. Then she watched the sea in front of her. Their
marooning was complete. Where they had walked and argued was a
bridgeless torrent of water. She was both calm and fearful. She did not
tell the man immediately but continued to throw stones into the
water.

This was how the woman and the man, a couple, were to be found clinging
to a circular rail welded to the top of a red and white buoy, floating
below its normal waterline, above a bank of yellow sand. They had
walked in small steps, insignificant individual steps that had,
together, brought them to the middle of a swelling sea.