1963, Scotland
The sound pounds at everything that has ever stalled you, that you have feared. In your winter boots, you feel the vibration of the sea’s insistent thrumming. The North Sea has no regard for you. Its spray blurs your eyes. You stand, legs apart, rooted to keep your body and easel upright. The roar, the shushing of all human sound, is riveting. Clad in a thick gray pullover, a donkey jacket with collar up, your wool hat pulled down, your jaw is as square as a boxer’s, so says your mum back in England. The morning you will die, August 15, 1963, it will be rainy and windy, a day much like this one. Audrey will be at your bedside and will drive back to your home with your mum. Together they will scatter your ashes on the beach here, in Catterline. Now you breathe hard though your nostrils. You push through a headache and a dull pain in your breast that radiates down your arm. You must beat the sea before your vision begins to fail, before you lie on a hospital bed painting gifted red flowers.
From Makin Pier that juts into the water, you confront sky, shore, and sea. The early March sky is steel-colored. You paint wide strokes across your four-by-six-foot board to layer in the immense horizon. You strike mauve verticals through this sunless expanse. The shore, just behind you and curving up ahead, is narrow and dark. You slash lines of ochre and blue-gray onto your board. One swipe masters the sea’s power. Another captures the sky’s fractured light. The final one soars upwards in pure joy. There is nowhere else you would rather be.
Each force is driven by a push and pull. The sea tumbles towards you in monstrous rolls of blue, black, and white. With a quick stiff brush, you capture the fighting foam and then are blinded momentarily by it. A fierce gale thrusts you backward; you lunge forward. You cannot let it win. With a palette knife, you layer white into the sea on your panel. With the butt end of your brush, you dig ragged scrawls into the painted shore.
Nothing rests. Sea creatures, any that can survive this raw cold, cry out. You stand back, size up what you have done, take a gulp of hot tea from your banged-up thermos. A mighty towering wave charges the side of the stone pier and rocks your easel. You reel back and your hip hits the concrete wall. Your jacket gets soaked, your cheeks sting from the wet. As you straighten up, your thigh stiffens, and your left arm feels numb. “Bash,” you will tell Audrey later about how you painted today. “I bash at painting like a beast and barely finish anything.”
Read the full story at https://www.press53.com/issue-211-short-fiction#Wolfson