Looking Up: The Sound of the Sea

The ups, downs, challenges and triumphs of a prison leaver’s journey

Lisa, eyes closed, fur collar buffeted in the North Sea breeze, hummed a sad tune. Jason, arms tight round her waist, nuzzled her neck, Lisa’s Dior perfume fragrant and enticing. The sea below them was restlessly lapping the stony beach, its fingers curling languidly round boulders, teasing pebbles, stroking shingle.

‘What’s that tune Lisa? It sounds familiar.’

Lisa sighed, pulling him closer. ‘It’s a hymn, used to sing it in schools years ago at assemblies. One of my mum’s favourites, she hums it all the time but she can’t remember the words now though, sadly. Don’t think anyone sings hymns at school anymore. Did you have them?’

‘Aye; with the music teacher drowning us all out with the piano.’

‘One of the teachers from that school wrote it.’ Lisa pointed out a red-bricked primary school, hiding amongst the seafront houses, two swings in the playground swaying. Jason took Lisa’s hand. 

‘Let’s go down the beach for a souvenir.’

The high cliff walls of Cullercoats Bay sheltered them as they trod along the stones, Jason pocketing a fist-sized pebble, blue-grey, with a band of cream. The sky, gun-metal, was lightening as the sun rose, Lisa squeezing Jason’s hand, smiling uncertainly.

‘This has been amazing Jason. I mean… I don’t usually do this kind of thing.’

‘Me neither. Couldn’t believe my luck you wanted to see me again.’

Lisa laughed, blond hair whipping round her face. They kissed again, deliciously, Lisa’s cool hands under his jumper, stroking his back.

‘I wish we could stay another day…’

Jason smiled. ‘There’s a long weekend coming up, can you come down to my place?’

‘Sorry, I need to keep close to mum. I don’t trust them care workers. Let’s just come here again.’

Jason nodded, feeling foolish. Gone were the days when women would fall at his feet and wallet.

‘What was that hymn called?’

‘Oh… er, “I Listen and I Listen.” There’s a plaque up there about it. Local celebrity that teacher. The BBC used to play it on their Sunday Services.’

Jason looked across the bay, sky and sea merging at the horizon, a single entity. They walked back to Lisa’s BMW, Jason waving like a teenager as she drove away, the tide turning behind him, suddenly alone, pacing slowly back to the Bed and Breakfast to pick up the car he’d borrowed from Sue.

The traffic through Newcastle was atrocious, Jason taking wrong turns left and right, not wanting to use any Sat/Nav., his irrational fear of being tracked driving him to use an AA road Atlas instead. At last, a road marked ‘Durham City Centre’ opened up, Jason lurching through narrow roads lined with a hotchpotch of shops and ancient pubs, a one-way system slowing him to a crawl. Like a prisoner on exercise, he found himself creeping round in circles past the same point until he shot impatiently towards a riverside car park, escaping the rush hour melee. 

Durham’s ancient Cathedral towered cliff-like above him as he paced along the bank of the River Wear, the church’s enormous stained-glass Rose Window gleaming like an eye as he rounded a bend beside the roiling waters, Jason climbing a flight of concrete steps to the Kingsgate pedestrian bridge, taking a deep breath before heading for the Cathedral on its opposite side, the bridge busy with bustling students and the occasional lycra-clad jogger. The Cathedral’s gigantic round window gleamed with an inner light, hypnotic, all-seeing, colossal in scale.

Jason had seen it once before, as he’d arrived at Durham prison after the riot at Frankland, years previously. The bells had been ringing then, a Sunday morning service in full swing as Jason stepped out of the van, cuffs clinking, trying not to wince as his assorted injuries gnawed at his beaten body.

He paused halfway along the bridge then turned, scanning the hillside. There – squatting amongst the houses – was the old jail, as welcome as a toad in a carrycot. 

Blank walls, camera poles and the fort-like crenellations of its outbuildings. Just above the modern wall peeped a row of white barred windows, the new seg unit he’d been in for weeks, where Jason had watched, from those very windows, the people walk to and fro across the bridge he now stood on. He sighed, wondering if he was now being watched in turn.

Two young women walked by, glancing at him, making him uneasy; Jason suddenly realising how weird he must look, staring blankly into space. He shuffled away, back along the riverside path to the car park, a cold, windowless bunker, dark at noon. He pulled one of Sue’s baby blankets around him, shivering, Lisa’s scent still drenching his skin, the stone in his coat pocket still wet from the sea.

Frank Cotton, a nom de plume, is a writer, artist and former resident of HMPPS