I saw a glitter on the water, a flash of light. The current was taking me into it, out of darkness.
Electric light.
A lamp... high above the water... on a lamp standard.
I hadn’t realised how far I’d lost hope until the knowledge that electric lamp standards didn’t grow in mid-ocean hit my brain like a more friendly blow on the skull. Lamp standards equalled land. Land meant life. Life meant swimming to the lamp standard.
Simple.
Not so simple. It was all I could do to stay up. All the same, the current that had floated me from darkness to light continued its benign work, taking me towards the lamp standard, but slowly, casually, indifferent to its flotsam.
Two lamp standards.
They were above me, on top of a wall. I bumped eventually into the wall, no longer able to see the lights on their tall stalks, but knowing they were there. I was in shadow again by the wall but, looking back, I could see little lights everywhere, bright, unmoving, a whole forest of lamp standards.
The wall was smooth and slimy, without handholds. The water carried me along it slowly, sucking me away and slapping me back against it, while I kicked fearfully and with insidiously growing feebleness to stay up to breathe.
I tried shouting for help. The suck and slap and gurgle of the eddies smothered my voice. When I took a deep breath to shout again, the salt water rushed into my mouth and set me choking.
It seemed ridiculous to drown when I could actually touch land, while the swell lifted me against safety and pulled me away again, while ten feet above me there was a dry place to walk.
I lived by luck. Lived thanks to the designer who’d built a staircase into his wall. One surge of water lifted me into a sort of hollow in the smooth cliff and the retreating ebb all but floated me out again. Almost too late I thrust my arms and hands against slippery concrete, desperate not to be dragged away, waiting... waiting... for the water to lift me again into the hollow and knowing it was the last chance, the miracle of deliverance if only I had the strength.
I rolled with the water into the hollow and pressed my body onto a sharp step; felt the tug of the receding swell and rolled against it, using the killing weight of shoes, trousers and jacket as anchor. With the next swell of water I rose to the step above and lay there immobile, head and shoulders out of the water, legs and feet still submerged. The next wave achieved for me one more step up so that I was lying on the slope of stairs, feeling hard land embrace me as if in forgiveness, as if saying, ‘All right, then, not yet.’
The stairs were inset, parallel with the wall, the seaward side being always wide open to the water. I crawled up one step more and simply lay there, exhausted, shuddering, frozen and concussed, with almost nil activity going on in the brain-box. My feet, still in the water, lifted and fell with liquid rhythm and it wasn’t until one wave slapped over my knees and tried to float me out again that I sluggishly realised that the tide had to be rising and that if I didn’t climb upwards I would be back where I’d come from with no strength for another fight.
I slithered up two steps. Three steps. At the top, as I looked up, stood a lamp standard.
When some semblance of strength oozed back I continued crawling, pressing myself against the inner wall, cravenly frightened of dropping off the open edge back into the sea. True nightmares weren’t about falling off buildings, I thought, they were about falling off steps built for embarking onto boats.
The endless-seeming climb ended. I slithered onto hard dusty flat dry road-surface, crawled weakly to the lamp standard and lay full length beside it, face down, one arm hooked round it as if to convince myself that this, at least, was no dream.
I had no idea where I was. I’d been too busy trying to survive to worry about such minor details. My head throbbed. When I tried to work out why, memory got lost in a fog.
There were footsteps approaching, grittily scrunching. For a shattering moment I thought the people who’d thrown me in had found me again, but the voice that spoke above me carried a different sort of threat, the heavy resentment of affronted petty authority.
‘You can’t lie here,’ he said. ‘Clear off.’
I rolled onto my back and found myself staring straight into the eyes of a large purposeful dog. The dog pulled against a leash held by a burly figure in a navy uniform with a peaked cap and a glinting silver badge. The dog wore a light muzzle which looked inadequate for the job.
‘Did you hear what I said? Clear off.’
I tried to speak and achieved only an incoherent croak.
Authority looked displeased. The dog, an unfriendly rottweiler, lowered his head to mine hungrily.
Trying again, I said, ‘I fell in.’ This time the message reached its target but with moderate results.
‘I don’t care if you swam the Channel, get up and clear off.’
I made an effort to sit up. Got as far as one elbow. The dog warily retreated a step, leaving his options open.
‘Where am I?’ I said.
‘In the Docks, of course.’
‘In the docks. Where else?’
‘Which docks?’ I said. ‘Which port?’
‘What?’
‘I... don’t know where I am.’
He was far from reassured by my obvious weakness. With the dog at the ready, he said suspiciously, ‘Southampton, of course.’
Southampton Docks. Why Southampton Docks? My bewilderment grew.
‘Come on. Get going. No one’s allowed on here when the dock’s shut. And I can’t stand drunks.’
‘I hit my head,’ I said.
He opened his mouth as if to say he didn’t care if I’d been decapitated, but instead said grudgingly, ‘Did you fall off a ship?’
‘I don’t really know.’
‘You can’t lie here, all the same.’
I wasn’t so sure I could get up and walk and he must, I thought, have seen it, as he suddenly thrust down a reaching hand to be grasped. He pulled me vigorously to my feet and I held on to the lamp standard and felt dizzy.
‘You want a doctor,’ he said accusingly.
‘Just give me a minute.’
‘You can’t stay here. It’s against orders.’
Seen at level height, he was a truculent-looking fiftyish individual with a large nose and small eyes and the thin grim mouth of perpetual wariness. He’d been afraid of me, I saw.
I didn’t mind his manner. To be a nightwatchman in a dock area was to face dangers from knaves and thieves, and a man lying where he shouldn’t had to be treated as a hazard until proved to be harmless.
‘Do you have a telephone?’ I asked.
‘In the guardroom, yes.’
He didn’t say I couldn’t use it, which was invitation enough. I let go of the lamp standard and tottered a few shaky steps, lurching sideways off a straight line and trying hard to behave with more sense than I felt.
‘Here,’ he said roughly, grabbing my arm. ‘You’ll fall in again.’
‘Thanks.’
He held my sleeve, not exactly supporting me but certainly a help. With feet that seemed hardly to belong to me I made a slow passage down a long dock and arrived finally at some large buildings.
‘This way,’ he said, tugging my sleeve.
We went through tall iron gates in a high fence and out onto a pavement. A car-parking area lay ahead, followed by a low wall, with a public roadway beyond that. No traffic. I tried looking at my watch to see the time and hit a slight snag: no watch.
I peered feebly along the road in both directions while the nightwatchman fed a key into a lock, and I found I was looking at a recognisable landmark, somewhere I’d been before, an orientating building telling me exactly where I was, if still not why.