Foamborn

“All things begin and end in Albion’s ancient Druid rocky shore.”

(William Blake, ‘Milton’)

“Kurt Cobain lives in Bognor. And so does Jesus.”

(Anonymous, a wall by Bognor beach, c. 2005)

That's the thing about living by the coast, you’ve got an expanse of sea and sky, they glory themselves to you whether you’re a visionary poet or a bunch of teenagers who’ve spent the night downing alcopops on the shore. Blake wanted to annihilate the self so that his true imaginative vision could exist; we’re here just getting annihilated.

Behind us is the gate to our mate’s house, the welcoming floor we’ll bed down on, if we sleep at all, the rug stretching out big enough to accommodate an entire party. Before us, the sun edges back onto the horizon, over a shushing sea, a flood tide coming in, and in, and in.

I'm drinking two litres of premixed Malibu and pineapple juice straight from the bottle, taking great swigs, yo ho ho. With hazy eyes and darkness, the stony south coast of England could be a holiday destination, a place of escape, or maybe even the scene of the second coming. I’m in fancy dress - Gogo Yubari from Kill Bill, white shirt, schoolgirl skirt, homemade meteor hammer bouncing off my collarbone.

You’re wearing the Incubus hoodie, one of only two tops you own. Your hair, unlike the beach, is sandy, unkempt, falling in flicks. You’re unkind to yourself about your snub nose - short bridge, rounded tip - all your features have this kind of broadness to them which earns you an aura of authenticity. Here, at sixteen and led more wholeheartedly by instinct, I just believe. You will not let me down.

It’s my privilege to be able to reach into the past, the present and the future of this moment, proceeding and receding like the undulating swell. We've known this moment is coming but like the tide, our courage ebbs and floods, expectation holding us back, waiting for the drag of alcohol. It’s me who finally makes it happen.

‘You wanna head?’ I motion down the beach.

‘Yeah,’ you nod.

So we walk - an unstable path across stones as big as two fists clasped together, away from the group, the scattering of our friends, worse for wear and too pebbledashed to notice us go. We leave the party behind and follow the coastline down toward Felpham’s Vale, Blakean territory, a more mythical seascape.

An unexpectedly powerful wave rises and breaks against us; I yelp as the water covers my feet, foams between my toes. We don’t run. I take your arm like someone who needs support, though I don't need it - any excuse for contact (it’s you who is already middle-aged, though we don’t know it). Albion sleeps - the street hides behind the houses and the lights are out. There’s no moon, but our faces are lit by a faint glow, perhaps some kind of phosphorescence in the water.

You’re telling me about the tiny fragments of songs you like to clip out and collect - tiny musical treasures. The little voice break in Santeria. Just that millisecond. The percussion that sounds like a monkey in Could you be loved? I hear that you hear music the way I do, and that you too are reading between the lines, finding electricity in the asides, the in-between moments, the fills. We both hear you say ‘Could you be loved?’

You love it all without hierarchy, without shame - your unpretentiousness running clean through everything. Me, the one with a meteor hammer slung around my shoulders? You can tell who’s the showy one, the one more likely to lean into artifice. You, though - even when you’re performing, you’re not performing.

You’d been playing guitar at the party, cross-legged on the stones while people threw requests at you. You taught yourself from nothing, a natural musicality I’m only just beginning to understand after more than a decade of instruction. You hear music and it works its way from your brain right into your hands.

You write songs where the sounds come from tapping the fretboard and drumming on the body, you write songs heavier than Slayer, you write dumb comedy songs about blow up dolls in cans - you’ve got an absurdly good falsetto and a non sequitur sensibility learned from nights in, getting stoned and watching the same two Eddie Izzard and Bill Bailey shows on repeat.

You’re funny, and your kindness runs as deep as the English Channel.

We’re still walking away, tracing the shoreline deeper into imagination, and yes, I have imagined this moment, before and after it happened. The waves wash over our feet. I’m shivering but the air is so fresh, like it’s pure oxygen bright in my arteries, dizzying me, while grey clouds swag on the deep.

‘You know Aphrodite was supposed to have been born from the waves, from the sea foam,’ I say. ‘That’s what her name means. Foam born.’

You raise an eyebrow. ‘I did not know that. That’s beautiful.’

‘Sounds it - until you find out that the god Cronus, well he overthrows his dad, Uranus, chops off his schlong, and throws it into the sea. That’s where the foam comes from.’

You laugh but with hesitation, guilty for calling it beautiful. I’m nervous, trying to show off, trying to get your attention with some knowledge I think is little known and impressive. I’m not as bad with this as I was the year before, or the year before that, but still, I’ve got you caught up in the moment, nervous too, unsure how to follow. Wrapped up in myself, I don’t understand your self-consciousness. ‘Weird,’ is all you say.

I look back, resting my cheek on your shoulder, smell of salt air and sweetness. Our friends can’t be seen any more, can’t be heard, their miniature forms eroded by the darkness many breakwaters ago.

‘Undeniably,’ I say.

‘Bit like you.’

‘Mm hm.’

We turn, almost nose to nose, too close now for anything else to happen.

That’s the thing about living by the coast, you’ve just got the sky and the sea, they give themselves to you whether you’re a visionary poet on a prophetic mission or a tired, amateur writer, scrapping together words in the small hours which might help to resurrect a memory that was but is no longer shared, to realise some truth from a greatness once known, which is - every moment - washed away by the tides of time.

I brush away the hair which has fallen across your eyes.

The real first kiss, the first I love yous, are out there in the sea.

Blake resurrected Christ on these shores to annihilate his sense of self, but I hadn’t read that yet when I was sixteen, wouldn’t know about it, just like I didn't know how to help you. But let that tide ebb; these are the moments born from the foam; the very beginning.