Covehithe by China Miéville

A trip to the Suffolk coast takes on a new urgency when Dughan decides the time is right for a night-time adventure in this exclusive story from China Miéville There were a few nights in Dunwich, where the owner of the B&B kept telling her guests they were lucky to have found a room. Walking Dunwich Beach, showing his daughter wintering geese through binoculars so heavy they made her laugh, the man was glad they were not in Southwold or Walberswick. They were not so hemmed in by visitors. Each evening they had fish and chips or pub grub. Each night after she had gone to bed he hacked into next door’s wifi to check his messages and monitor the forums. On Thursday night he woke her. It was not long after midnight. ‘Come on lovey,’ he said. ‘Keep it down. Let’s not get anyone else up.’ ‘I hate you,’ she said into her pillow. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Come on. Don’t bring your phone.’ There was not much on the roads. Still, Dughan took them roundabout ways, through Blythborough, on the A145 towards Uggeshall, past still diggers where roads were being widened. ‘Where are we going?’ the girl asked, only once. She hunkered; she wouldn’t ask him to turn up the heating. Wrentham was on the western rim of the security zone. It went north along the A12, south on the B1127 to Southwold. Within it, in daylight, fields were still worked, for animal feed, and roads mostly open, but those were, legally, indulgences not rights; the area was, in the absence of an official escort, no-go after dark. Exceptional laws applied in that little triangle, the coast a 6-mile hypotenuse, its midpoint Covehithe. Dughan stopped by a pub garden south of Wrentham. He opened the door for his daughter with his finger to his lips. ‘Dad,’ she said. ‘Hush,’ he said. It was overcast and windy, shadows taking them and releasing them as Dughan found a way through undergrowth to the boundary ditch. They were both quiet as they crossed it. Holding their breath. Beyond, they walked eastward on the edges of the fields. ‘Dad, seriously, you’re crazy.’ He had a torch but did not turn it on. When the moon came out enough he stopped and took bearings. ‘They’ve got guns,’ she said. ‘That’s why shhh.’ ‘What’ll they do if they catch us?’ ‘Feed us to wolves.’ ‘Har har.’ They went still at the sound of a helicopter. The beam passed by half a field ahead, so bright it looked solid. The air smelt. They could hear echoes. Dughan avoided the hamlet where until recently locals had lived, which had been requisitioned, with only minor scandal. They could see lit windows. They came instead at Covehithe from the north. He stopped her by the roofless ruin of the church, pointed, heard her gasp. She stared while moonlight got past the clouds to the holed and broken walls, onto a low newer church inside the nave of the old. He smiled. When eventually she was done looking they continued through the graveyard. There was nothing at all frightening about the graves. This close to the waves the land felt, as the girl said, misbehavicious. A good word to make her feel better. In the leafless trees of this region were cold, random and silent flares of light. Touch the soil, as Dughan did, and as his daughter did too at the sight of him, and it felt greasy, heavy, as if someone had poured cream onto loam. ‘Which way are we going?’ ‘Careful lovey,’ he said. ‘The ground here…’ ‘How do you know it’s tonight?’ For a while he didn’t answer. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Bits and pieces.’ He looked over his shoulder the way they had come. ‘Ways and means.’ ‘What if they find out?’ She pointed at the cottages. She rolled her eyes when he said nothing. They continued on the road past a sign forbidding exactly this last short walk, on tarmac so old it was becoming landscape. Perspective was peculiar. The smell should have been sappy and muddy and of the sea. ‘Look!’ His daughter gasped. The road stopped abruptly, rag-edged, fell into nothing. He watched her inch forward. ‘It goes right off the cliff!’ ‘The sea’s taking it all back,’ he said. ‘There used to be a lot more coast here. Careful.’ But she had lain responsibly on her stomach at a certain proximity and put only her fingertips and eyes over the tarmac rim to look down its sheer crumble at the beach. ‘Is it still going?’ she said. Her voice was faint, she was dipping her mouth below road-level. ‘Being eaten?’ Dughan shrugged. Waited till she scootched back and turned to him, shrugged again. He told her they would know within two or three hours if anything was going to happen. He did not say it was only hints and whispers he had to go on, trawlings from bulletin boards. Two names he knew, erstwhile colleagues, both announcing they’d be near Ipswich next week and did any of the old crew want a drink? The latest codes were beyond him, but that query and the night’s sudden burst of encrypted chatter had been reasons enough to move. So, he said, checked his watch and sat with her at the decomposing road-end. He was cross-legged, she with her chin on her knees, hugging them. She kept looking into the sea. The noise of it lulled them as if it were designed to. There was no light but the moon and those occasional sourceless mineral glows. Somewhere some insane bird, not a nightingale, was singing. All their layers could not keep them warm. They were shaking hard when, after less than an hour, Dughan saw movement on the beach. He motioned for his daughter to stay still and looked through his binoculars at lights jouncing on the shingle. Three sets of headlamps stopped, overlaying each other, illuminating the sea and a strip of the shore. ‘It’s them,’ he said. ‘They’re setting up. They must’ve…’ The girl could tell his excitement was not wholly enthusiasm. ‘They’ve… we’re on.’ He could make out nothing beyond the headlight gaze, and hear nothing but waves. He recced once more but they were not observed. This cliff-top was out of bounds and they, intruders, were alone. His daughter kept watching the water. Dughan wondered if she would complain or ask how long or anything, but she did not. Twenty minutes later, it was she who pointed, who first saw something in the sea. There were no helicopters now. Nothing so noisy. No downcast beams to light up what was coming, breaking water, way off the coast. It was only moonlit. A tower. A steeple of girders. Streaming, and rising. The girl stood. The metal was twisted. Off-true and angular like a skew-whiff crane, resisting collapse. It did not come steadily but lurched, hauling up and landward in huge jerks. After each a swaying hesitation; then another move higher, and closer. The lights on the beach went out. Flame ignited at the tower’s tip. Sooty sepia guttering lit the shaft. The sea at its base spread flat and fell away from suddenly rising intricate blockness, black, angled and extrusioned. As if a quarried wedge of the seabed itself had come up to look. The towerwork was on a platform. In the glow of the thing’s own flame they saw edificial flanks, the concrete and rust of them, the iron of the pylon barnacled, shaggy with benthic growth now lank gelatinous bunting. It was coming at the Covehithe cliff. Under its stains and excrescences were more regular markings, stencilled warnings. Paint remnants: an encircled H. Another step – because these were clumsy steps with which it came – and all the main mass was out of the water and raining brine. It waded. Each concrete cylinder leg a building or a smokestack wide. The two on one side came forward together, then those on the other. Pipes dangled from its roof-high underside, clots of it fell back into the sea. It wore steel containers, ruins of housing like a bad neighbourhood, old hoists, lift shafts emptying of black water. A few waves-width from the beach, it hesitated. It licked the air with a house-sized flame. ‘P-36,’ the man said. ‘Petrobras.’ One of the cars below turned its headlamps back on. The rig shied. Dughan hissed. But the lights quickly dipped and after a moment he said, ‘It’s probably ok now.’ The platform was at the level of their cliff-top. Now the girl understood its strange ungainliness. On each side, its supports merged at their base, into two horizontal struts, so it moved like a quadruped skiing. What must have been ten feet of water lapped at the struts like a puddle at a child’s shoes. The rig facelessly faced north and slide-stamped along the shoreline. ‘Quick,’ the man said. They took the cliff-edge path, a hedge to their right, the oil platform’s tower lurching beside them above its leaves. ‘Went down 2001,’ Dughan said. ‘Roncador field.’ ‘How many people died?’ ‘When it sank? No one.’ ‘Have you… is this the first…?’ He took a moment to stop, to turn and meet her eye. They could hear the flame bursts now. Its straining metal. ‘I’ve never seen it before, lovey’ he said. The path descended. She had been too small when her father left to imagine stories of his exploits, to be proud or afraid. All she remembered were his returnings, an exhausted, careful man who lifted her on to his lap and kissed her with wary love, brought her toys and foreign sweets. When later she had asked him what he had done on those trips, his answers were so vague guilt had hushed her. She did not ask about his injuries. The rig was slowing. The smell was stronger and the ground, the air juddered, not only in time to its huge steps. Dughan stopped at the last path-end trees. He and his daughter hugged the trunks and watched the oil rig sway in their direction. He held her hand. The girl watched him, too, but he showed no signs of angst, no flashback, no fear.

Posted by on April 22, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.