The walls shuddered. So close, you could see the waves from the window. The gray masses of water being pressed up along the cliff and shooting three, four meters in the air, to the top of the roof, where they seemed to pause for one brief, ghastly moment in order to eye us, their prey, before collapsing back into the sea. The end game. The whirlwind of snippets in my head, the age-old questions: where are we going to live? Who will take care of us? An all-embracing what now? But I also knew I would be disappointed if it didn’t happen now — I was tired of dawdling, of pacing the waiting room until the doctor returned with the verdict. Downstairs I heard the vacuum cleaner, my mother trying to undo at least a little of the ravages the movers had left behind. The state in which she left the house behind, I realized, would determine her memories of it. The arrangement and cleansing of that which is doomed to perish is a crucial act, a paradoxical expression of how to live.
A premature brand of disaster tourism had begun. Heads popped up from behind the bushes to observe our evacuation. It was impossible for them to get any closer to the house without standing right at the window, so they watched from a distance, sometimes with binoculars. We were the house that wouldn’t last long now, we were the sea reclaims its own and we were also, as the headline in the Norwich Evening News put it: CASTRUM’S LAST HEROES. One caption read that this, it was rumored, was the house where former porno star Eve LeSage lived with her son. By the time the Sun latched onto the juicy story — SEX GODDESS LOSES HEARTH AND HOME— we were no longer available for comment; they had to use old pictures along with their story, my mother on her back with Wills Horn on top. A team picture from the year our second XV won the championship. In it, I am kneeling at the front, my arms resting on one knee. A circle has been drawn around my head. Selwyn is standing behind me, his arms crossed, beside him you see Leland wearing his scrumcap. Bailey and Dalrymple have just burst out laughing — it’s a cheerful photograph. I had no idea who had been accommodating enough to pass it along to the paper.
In the same way my mother did her vacuuming, so I performed my duties that evening in the Whaler. I played as though the sand were not being washed away from beneath our house at that very moment, I sang as though no block of basalt lay on my heart.
‘It’s gonna happen now, isn’t it?’ Leland said when I took a little pause between sets.
There was no stopping Miss Julie Henry. Her empathy went beyond the bounds of decency; I could picture her deflowering me in the walk-in cooler. Leland asked where I was going to sleep. First at Warren and Catherine’s, I said, we would spend the night there, after that we weren’t sure.
The hotel was busy, a crowd had been drawn by the spectacle of the storm, the waves shooting up meters above the jetties. I took off earlier than usual and ran to Kings Ness. The tempest had now thickened to more substantial stuff, I had difficulty making headway. Torrents of rain. Salty globs of foam were being blown across the land, grains of sand and grass and leaves lashed me about the ears. The sky was open and clear. Over there the dark contours of the house. I stormed into Warren and Catherine’s. The three of them were sitting around the lamp.
‘It’s still there!’ I shouted.
As though something had fallen to the floor and shattered.
‘Take your shoes off,’ Catherine said.
I slid up to the table.
‘Your shoes!’ Warren said.
I went back to the dark vestibule and kicked them off. A glass was waiting for me, the windows rattled in their frames. The substance in my glass was pungent and brought tears to my eyes — I had learned to drink beer in rugby canteens, but whisky was new to me. A hard and unrelenting master. I couldn’t quite get a hold on the mood around the table, I was locked out of the circle.
‘We’ve been talking about it, Ludwig,’ my mother said. ‘Warren and Catherine have offered to let you stay here for a while until things are a bit clearer.’
I didn’t say a word. I waited.
‘I’m leaving for London early tomorrow morning,’ she went on. ‘I don’t know exactly how it will work out, I want to talk to some other lawyers. Warren agrees that this is a case that might go all the way to the European Court of Justice. Because it’s about — a kind of protection. How did it go again, Warren? The right to defend your home? A basic human right, that’s what you said, wasn’t it?’
I was too excited to pay attention. I asked Warren for a torch; he handed me a Maglite heavy enough to brain a cow. The light blazed a trail for me through the bushes. I moved towards the edge and stopped about ten meters from it. The waves were slamming against the cliff with the dull, punishing blows of a heavyweight. A haunted house, lonesome and forlorn. It made you feel the kind of pity you might feel for a mistreated pony. My eyes fixed on the darkened house, I ducked down in the bushes to get out of the wind and bid welcome to my memories. It was cold, so I crouched down further. Hissing fountains came rocketing up from the depths. Scuds of rain were whipping down on me. It must have been past midnight, I had visions of our house as a ship, of the listing and the floating away, of how it would forget us on its journey.
Then a voice, my name. LUD‐WIG! I stood up. Stinging needles in my flesh as the blood started flowing again. A beam of light close by, Warren, his spectacles dotted with rain. He screamed, ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING?’
‘I WANT TO WATCH!’
He stood there for a moment, looking, shouted CAREFUL! and moved back towards the house, shoulders hunched up around his ears. Waves broke over the edge, white shapes scaled the cliff like enemy soldiers. Foam flew through the cone of light from the streetlamp. I couldn’t take my eyes off the water’s rise and fall, the towers collapsing one by one. Even if the house survived this, its eastern wall would be badly damaged, the water must be in the front room already. Sometimes I thought I detected motion, the shiver that came before the collapse into the depths — an illusion. The house was still standing, perhaps it would be spared! A twinge of absurd hope. I ran and screamed at the wind, the sky — I was the loneliest, oh joy, the loneliest of all! I danced like a demon in the beating rain. A noise made me stop, I pointed the torch at the house. The groaning of a nocturnal animal, an inexpressible pain. With amazing lightness the house spun low on its axis and slid moaning, screeching, into the chasm. The music of my nightmares. A sound like an underground explosion — then it was over. I stared agape at the void where the house had been standing just a moment earlier. I had never experienced such lucidity. A chosen one. At this very moment, even as I had the thought, things were going as they had always gone on, first a house, then no house — true erosion wasn’t about losing a house but about time; I had seen time in action, the being, the not-being, the glorious indifference. I fell to my knees and clawed at the earth, let it run through my fingers like a farmer. Cold rains washed over me, on the back of a whale I traveled to the ends of the earth, nothing remained hidden to my eyes.
That was how I’d always imagined it, the slow-motion image of a house sinking into the depths, like the opening up of the earth’s crust, but that was not how it was. It tilted and disappeared into the turbulence below. Strangely enough, the version I actually saw never supplanted the imaginary version. Even now they exist side by side in my head, they are both equally real. Sometimes I have to tell myself oh no, that’s not how it went.