The Sea Empress Motel is right on the beach. Despite maxims concerning the setting of foundations, the architect, whom I pictured as a brush-cut, glasses-wearing fellow in summery attire, wanted his creation to have sand between its toes and breast the waves. He lavished nautical details on the place: a wrap-around tubular railing painted glossy aqua and a prow–a concrete outcropping from which guests could survey the horizon, the gaudy Florida skyscapes and the waves, which slosh directly below at high tide. The salt water and constant low-level battering have done the building some damage.

My wife Zabba heard about the place from someone she works with in the fabulous fashion biz. She and I needed a break, she said; we needed to get out of the city for a while. Always a good idea, as far as I’m concerned. She didn’t spring it on me until we were inspecting our room–our suite, actually–that her old friend Nibs would be joining us on our long-weekend getaway. Would be joining us shortly, in fact.

“What? Why? And why didn’t you tell me?”
“‘Cause you’d have said no, that’s why.”

She was right about that. It’s not that I have anything specific against Nibs. Our problem might be called mutual negative attraction. But Nibs and Zabba were girls together. Their bond spans forty years and seems unbreakable.

They gave each other those crazy names; crazy names which stuck. Something to do with a song by Captain Beefheart, maybe, or a nougaty candy bar, and a fling with calligraphy, but I haven’t inquired too deeply into that, or any other of their girlish mysteries. Suddenly I was up against the wall of girlishness, of female intimacy. I was going to spend the weekend being the invisible man, the bad man who takes the blame for all men, and the guy who goes and gets things.

“And I want you to promise to be nice, too, because Nibs is in a bad place right now.” The way she said it carried heavy implication: be civil or be in the doghouse for a long, long time.

“Sure, I’ll be nice, don’t worry. What’s wrong with her this time?” Always some crisis or other, in Nibs’ chaotic existence.

“Remember Tom? Well, Tom’s dead.”

What I remembered mostly about Tom was I didn’t much care for him, either. Nibs seemed so happy and proud when she introduced him to me as her husband. “See? Got myself a fella. You thought it would never happen. And he compares pretty favorably with the likes of you, I must say.” Or that’s what I imagined was running through Nibs’ head as she watched Tom and me shaking hands.

Here’s this man, Tom: half a head taller than I am, good-looking, a sharp dresser without being flashy, enormously successful in some arcane offshoot of the movie biz, like sound effects editing. Nibs deliriously happy, and, as a consequence, me rather moody and not inclined to like the guy. And now he was dead. Car crash? Coke overdose? I didn’t even ask. Needless to say, Nibs’ grief was cataclysmic. I could only wonder why I hadn’t heard anything about it before our spontaneous little vacation was decided upon.

My wife and I had a couple of hours left as a couple before her best friend, the new widow, was due to arrive at the motel. Zabba hit the beach. I got in the car and went off in search of a liquor store. Piña coladas and Mexican beer with key lime would be crucial, I thought, in making the next few days bearable. I was picturing a sun-bleached fog in which two women talked and shared emotions while I sprawled on the sand, flopped into the milky-blue water and sloshed around in the short but persistent waves.

The lady who ran the liquor store was tall, angular. She asked me, with a note of concern, whether I was planning to drink all that stuff myself. She called me sugar-pants, and slipped a sample bottle of passion fruit hooch into one of the paper bags. I drank it down before I started the car, threw the empty in the back.

I got lost on my way back to the Sea Empress. I saw my first wild alligator, which looked like a spectacular turd on the dry grass above a waterway. After locating the ocean, I parked by a public pier and walked out to where several numerous black families were fishing. Huge cargo ships were a well-spaced line of traffic in and out of the Port of the Everglades, punctuated by vast white cruise ships. Both types of ship looked overburdened, ungainly, grim. From the end of the pier, by dint of her railings the color of sea foam, I spotted the Sea Empress Motel.

By the time I got back, Nibs had arrived. Only she would have rented a hot-pink convertible. She’d left her bags–three large ones, for three days–in the back seat, unattended. To be nice, I carried them up to the room for her. Or perhaps she intended for me to carry them in the first place.

Our suite looked like an orgiastic crime scene. Women’ clothes were strewn all over the place. I pictured the two girlhood friends, girls no longer, applying preliminary coats of sun lotion, trying on various bathing suit and sundress combinations for each other’s approval. I deposited Nibs’ luggage on the bed in the suite’s second bedroom, stacked beer bottles in the fridge, pulled on surfer shorts and knocked up a seriously strong round of piña coladas in paper cups. I went out on the deck-like terrace and, after a minute or two, picked out my two weekend companions in beach chairs under coconut palms, with brilliant-green, round-leaved shrubbery for a backdrop.

The word “forever,” spoken in Nibs’ siren-screech, hit my ear as I approached clumsily with the drinks. The women fell silent, watched me without expression behind their sunglasses as big as movie screens. I was intruding. I handed out paper cups.

“Hi Nibs. I’m terribly sorry about Tom. But I’m glad you could come. I’m glad you’re here. You look beautiful. Both of you do.”

Nibs slowly rose from her beach chair. She’s a tall woman. She put her arms around my shoulders, hugged me in tight. I felt her breasts, wet and cold from a recent swim, against my chest. She went further: her crotch pressed in, with some grind to it. Then I felt piña colada spilling down my back, flowing cold into my shorts.

Nibs pretended to be horrified and apologetic. As badly as I wanted to pour my drink all over her hairdo, I held it out as a peace offering. I was dealing with a woman recently bereaved; they tend, understandably, to erratic behavior. “Bottoms up,” I said. “I’ll go make us some more in a minute. Right now, I’m in the mood for a quick dip. ‘Scuse me, ladies.”

I heard, “Aw, ain’t he a dear?” as I ran down into the surf.

I counted off fifty strokes before diving down, eyes open, to grab sand at the bottom–a childish habit, proof I went all the way down. I came up slowly, surfaced, looked back at the beach, at my wife and her old friend. I was hundreds of feet from the shore, but the women weren’t looking for my head in the water. I swam in an arc and emerged from the waves on the other side of the motel, where there was an outdoor shower.

Up in the room, I turned on the TV and fixed myself another piña colada. I might’ve taken a swig or two from the bottle. I sat on the chair with my tropical cocktail and watched part of a dance program, then I sliced up bitter little limes and went back onto the beach with three cold Mexican beers in paper cups.

“He’s trying to get us drunk,” said Nibs.

I didn’t have to try too hard. Twelve beers, a big can of pineapple juice, a half-pint of pearly, unctuous, heart-stopping coconut cream got together and went down with a quart of rum before you could say yo-ho-ho. At sunset, not trusting ourselves to drive or be driven, we took a stroll and had dinner at a place called Le Beache Combeur. The tables were all outdoors, over the water, under dripping mangroves and banyans. Waitresses and patrons tossed congealed French fries, hamburger scraps, salad remains and saltines overboard to be slurpingly devoured by monstrous tarpon that haunted the bay. I’d never seen a tarpon before, except under a heavy coat of varnish in a bar on Broadway. I thought of them as rare, exotic game fish–tough, elusive adversaries for barrel-chested men straining at dangerously bent fishing rods–but there they were, sliding by like elongated gray ghosts, sucking down garbage like goldfish.

Back at the Sea Empress, the weeping started. Midnight had come and gone; the three of us were slumped in chairs out on the deck, following the lights of ships leaving and entering the harbor. Nibs whispered, “Tom took me to Catalina on our first date. In a seaplane. Wasn’t that special?”

Then came the womanly waterworks, the wailing and choking and sobbing and hugging and patting. I went into the room and got undressed: I unvelcro’ed my shorts and let them fall. Then I fell on the bed. I don’t know how long I got to enjoy unconsciousness. The door opened. One person bounced and rolled on the mattress, then another. I wasn’t, I recall, exactly pleased to be jolted awake to headache, parchedness and nausea, but almost immediately two female bodies overwhelmed me.

I woke up before the women did. I slid from the tangle and went outside for a walk on the beach. Before setting off, though, I took a swim. I felt unpleasantly sticky and smelt alien to myself. The water was warm, the dawn rosy-red behind purple-gray clouds. It looked as though I were flowing into a huge papaya-colored sea-shell, a conch. The tide was at lowest ebb; the white sand was littered with detritus from the sea. I started picking up shells and found a pretty little red, dead fish with bulging black eyes. The fish’s pink belly was grotesquely distended. Leaning over for a closer inspection brought on a dizzy spell and the urge to vomit. I saw a pair of fine, whiskery antennae protruding from the dead fish’s mouth: the little greedy-guts had fatally engulfed a shrimp almost as big as he was.

Back at the motel, barely glancing through the bedroom door at the two nude women, I got a sharp knife from a drawer in the kitchenette. On a table out on the terrace, I performed an autopsy on the little red fish. My diagnosis was confirmed: an entire shrimp, dead, bleached by gastric juices, practically sprang from his belly on the first incision. I considered leaving this scientific dissection diorama for the ladies to inspect and evaluate, but wound up hurling both creatures back into the water. I arranged the shells I gathered in what I thought was a female-pleasing manner, went back in to set the coffee-maker in motion and took off on another, much longer, swim.

After what had happened the night before, I thought our next group encounter–I mean me, my wife and her oldest friend–would be hushed and awkward, tinged with shame and guilt. What happened, though undeniable, was something to be forgotten, best left unspoken–alcohol involved, a peculiar set of circumstances and atmospheric conditions. I found the two women sitting at the glass table. They’d unfolded the rainbow umbrella and were musing over mugs of coffee. They’d put on kimonos, which must have sprung from one of Nibs’ big bags. These robes, unfastened, fluttered in the breeze. I muttered good morning on my way into the room for a hot shower. Nibs stopped me by wrapping her arm around my leg. She patted my ass in a proprietary manner. She said thanks, without any of the usual sarcasm, mockery and implicit criticism. Suddenly I felt ten feet tall. Surveying the sea, the horizon, the beach, I was a man with two wives: a tribal chieftain, a god. But I knew I’d better keep the feeling strictly to myself. With a stone face, I kissed my wife and then her friend.

We made plans for the day: we’d go for a drive, in Nibs’ rental car, because it was splashier. The ladies wanted to visit a castle near the Everglades. The castle was built by a runty Eastern European man who thought it would be a good idea to quarry immense blocks of coral by hand in a hot, humid climate and build himself a fortress home in the middle of nowhere, among alligators and snapping turtles. Nibs said he did it to soothe the pain of thwarted love; she read the story in a magazine.

I drove; my wife and her oldest friend sat in back, as though I were their chauffeur and not the husband of one, lover of the other. I had on loose, thin, cream-colored pants and a worn T-shirt. I drove and stole glances at my women in the rear-view mirror. Nibs’ husband had died. She was feeling empty, crushed, cast adrift in the unpredictable ocean of life, but her friend was beside her, holding her hand, brushing the hair out of her eyes.

Two girls, eleven or twelve years old, sitting on grass, away from the rest of the world in a clump of bushes or trees, in a park on the edge of a Midwestern town. Two girls making plans for the future, which for them is concrete, definite and subject to certain iron rules they are just then devising. We’ll both get married when we’re twenty-four, in June. Our wedding-dresses will be white with pearls sewn on. We’ll each have three children–two girls and a boy apiece. The names for these six children are a matter for much discussion, then the intimate conversation turns solemn. A blue jay sends a screech downward. The trees around the girls bend slightly in a breeze; the leaves show both their shades. “If one of us dies…” The two girls swear they’ll raise the other’s children to adulthood, should the need arise. What about the husband, then? Should the widower be turned loose to marry again? Married, perhaps, to somebody hated and unthinkable like the big bossy blond girl in Mrs. Archer’s class who thinks she knows everything? The girls agree that this must not be allowed to happen. “What if one of our husbands dies?”

Everything had been worked out in advance. There were no children to raise. Sad, perhaps, but that’s the way it worked out. Having children must be more frightening for women, I thought, than it is for men. Have children, however, is what women are supposed to do. Women expect to have children; it’s expected of them. What’s the equivalent for men? Go to war? Get a job? Get married? I couldn’t remember making any binding deals with my friends in junior high. When we looked at our first girlie magazines, our thoughts were not of tuxedos or jobs or children.

Because of a discussion held by two little girls, if only in my imagination, and because another man was dead, I was doing what a man’s supposed to do with a woman with two women.

There was a billboard for an alligator farm, then a hamburger stand, then the Coral Castle. Tickets were expensive. The coral blocks, though massive as advertised, looked like cement. The coral furniture the little Latvian had laboriously hewn and carved was uncomfortable. His sculptures of heavenly bodies were crude and childish. On the other hand, just outside the coral outer wall were a mango tree with unripe fruit dangling from the branches and a pineapple plant with its tiny, perfectly formed product offered up on a spray of green as though to heaven.

People stared at us in the restaurant that night. The waiters and waitresses took turns approaching our table to ask if everything was all right. It felt like everyone in the joint knew what we’d been up to the night before, and what we’d be doing later on. I drank more wine than was good for me, or my wallet. I recall flirting crudely with Nibs. I might have indulged in an under-the-table grope. I think I even asked a perky blond waitress if she’d care to join us swingers at the motel on the beach when she knocked off. We had liquor there, I told her. We could order adult entertainment to be beamed into our suite. The manager of the restaurant, a big ex-Captain of the Football Team kind of guy, came over to ask if there were any problems. He said they’d run out of wine for the evening.

There was no adult action at the motel that night, except for me throwing up as soon as we were safely back in our suite. After I got the bathroom back in order, feeling much better, I announced to my two ladies that I was up for a revitalizing moonlight swim. I’m sure I appeared buffoonish as I stripped and exited the suite to face the black, briny deep gloriously nude and alone. Neither of them said, “Take care you don’t drown, honey.”

The water was warm, lovely, a mother’s embrace. I swam towards the never-ending stream of overloaded cargo ships. I thought I could reach one before the hammerhead sharks got me. The Chinese sailors would toss me a rope, haul me aboard, and I’d be in Kowloon or Sydney in a few weeks, all embarrassment left behind.

Sober, shivering, shriveled, I found the door to the suite’s other bedroom locked from inside. My two wives were in there, sleeping–wrapped, perhaps, in the safety of each other’s arms. I didn’t knock or make a fuss or bellow to be admitted to the harem. I showered and fell asleep in the other bed, with the TV on.

Strange, muffled screams awoke me. It sounded like a cat, or a small ape, drowning nearby. The screams weren’t coming from the TV, which was on mute, or from the orgy chamber from which I’d been excluded. They were coming through the wall, from the room or suite next door. The door to the other bedroom clicked open; out popped two well-rested women in bathrobes.

“Well? Put on your pants and go see what’s the matter.”

Out on the deck, I heard whimpers, snorts, disbelieving yelps. I rapped with two knuckles, then knocked, pounded. The door opened a crack. I looked down into a pale, wrinkled face; fine white matted hair; a nightgown from an earlier age clutched at the bosom by a crabbed, liver-spotted hand. The old woman didn’t, or couldn’t, speak. She moved away from the door. I went in and saw a robust bald man lying face-up on the double bed, his eyes and mouth agape, staring at nothing, shouting silence.

The old woman–his wife, now his widow–took my hand. “This wasn’t supposed to happen,” she said. “We came down here because of me. The doctor said only a month or two. I have cancer. We just wanted to take one last trip together.”

She didn’t let go of my hand until the ambulance came. Even then, she didn’t let go.

Matthew Licht is an underground filmmaker and the author of The Crazy House Gag and the detective trilogy World Without Cops. His latest book of short stories is The Moose Show (Salt). He lives in Italy.

Cold.  As bitter and as brutal as you can imagine. We needed those skins more than ever this year and the temperature was continuing to drop steady and fast and without any sign of a let up.

I’d been awake since the moment I could feel my own breath falling back across my face like shards of shattered glass. The bag I was in had a hole at the bottom which I’d managed to wrap my toes away from, but when I came to with a shudder I was sure I felt my wee sister sucking on them thinking it was her own thumb.

She was quiet; head to toe, her fair blonde eyelashes dusted over with frost.

On the other side of the cabin my father and elder brother lay in a shared bunk.  The top bunk had been smashed when my elder brother had fallen through the slats during one particularly violent storm and it had never been mended properly.  My father was always saying that one day we’d fetch back more than we needed to survive and be able to get a new boat. I used to draw my dream boat on my pad with a pencil I’d snuck out of school.   Hadn’t been back to school in a while and no one had come knocking for the pencil either.

I jack-knifed my way out of the bed, this grumpy silver caterpillar, my concealed limbs all metallic and crunchy and went to the porthole wiping the condensation away with my mitt and searching for a sun that had never shone in my lifetime.  The waters were still.  A vast black vat of inedible liquorice polluted with factory wastes, nautical debris, the token pram and plenty of jetsam – the frozen blue excrement of which doing little to break down  in the period since the final flight over the dock. Every piece of matter glinted – a beacon to mans’ excessive and devastating consumption in the blood moon.

In the distance I made out the dark ominous shapes of some of the towns that lined the shores of the opposite bank of this unfathomable lake, fires burning in their windows, the greedy, tricky eyes of the freemason.  The coals where luminescent with raw white heat, each one a sun and bringer of life. They shone bright but brought little warmth to those born and bred on the other side. Through telescopes they sneered.

The boat eddied on the frozen lake. There was a let up and the dull moan of the tyres on the dank dock was as good as any cockerel in our lives. It was time to set sail and hunt this sea of rubbish.

We cast off, all hands on deck, eight hands smothered in threadbare fur mitts.  Sometimes it was less painful to be the hunted.

The lake brought us food, it brought us shelter and it brought us currency to barter with amongst ourselves.  Their waste was our gain.  Their waste was their folly too; entertaining as it must have been to see us dressed in their hand me down waste papers and cardboard boxes.  All of this was our armour against the darkness that settled from tree to wave and scarecrow in-between. Their waste brought the eel, the ultimate treasure to us all.

Our ears were deaf with the roar of the furnaces with which they burnt any hegemonic detractors.   We signed to each other, our lips sewn shut and a vow placed in our hearts only to speak when the sun returned.  Though I had misgivings, it meant more than just this orange stuff of legend rising through the skies.

We signed and we listened to the low frequencies the boat made as it cut its path through all the rubbish.  There was plenty to differentiate the scrape of a long sinewy piece of rubber from an unwanted factory conveyor belt along the hull from the tough scales of the eel.  Every once in a while a bright white floodlight would play across the tides of refuse and the eels scarpered to a greater depth.  We had to learn to be shrewd and hunt between the gaps in the rays that the others fired across the waters with the sole objective of illuminating our plight and frustrating our efforts as we toiled with all these scraps of red and plastic and tin and blue and carbon attached to our bodies; us the people of their bins.  Funny to see a man who looks like a tatty armadillo scrimmaging through the  islands of trash, his hands and face muddied with low grade engine oil and drained of any ounce of pride and dignity as he scampers from one end of his stinkpot raft to the other cursing his and his families being.  Runaway rat, runaway plastic rat with tissues as eyes and plugs as teeth and jump from your sinking ship.

It wasn’t long before we hit our first and only school of eels that night.  They hung around the buckled goal posts of the old rugby fields, coiling their hard bodies around these glistening tusks of ivory and staring us down with their dead grey eyes  They snaked their way through the engine block of the old green-keeper’s tractor buried amongst the rusting clubs and its tappits sparked once more.  We heard the grumble and the roar.  With their tails they dragged the green sprinklers out of the water and pushed them towards us thinking it may confuse.  Little did they know.  Just because we hadn’t plotted this course deliberately or otherwise before didn’t mean we didn’t know that eels no matter how sly and cunning always displayed the same wily trademarks.  Thank whoever once reigned over us that they hadn’t learnt or they had no desire to evolve due to their nasty overzealous plenitude.  I was glad my mouth was shut because my elder brother and father would not tolerate me saying things about the slime we had to skin for nightwear and eat to fill our bellies.  I hated their coils curling amongst my intestines.  I hated the way their bodies struggled as we placed them in our mouths and swallowed and then the way the tail darted down my throat its barbed like head with those fungi invested gills bound for my stomach and travelling at such a velocity I feared that one day it might actually puncture it. Oh, I secretly prayed that we might evolve and be able to eat and digest the parts of planes innumerate amongst this sea.  My sister secretly prayed that she’d develop such a hunger that all that may famish it was the bodies of the others.  She signed it to me one night as I slept, but I saw her through my eyelids. I saw how she motioned with her mouth biting and chewing her way towards their land and not stopping there until an almighty belch scared the sun out of hiding. No-one knew what my father and elder brother thought.  We presumed knots and best fishing practices as they were older and had lost sight of childhood.

The haul was good.  Their poor, callous faces as they saw the weighted skins of their brethren dragged behind the boat lifting their playpen tractor and all these jangling clubs screaming to the surface.  I worried the haul was too big for the raft for when it landed and they tried to escape turning the deck to a slimy patina of turgid mouth infested seaweed on which for us to comically roll.  The deck we found ourselves on near caved in!

My father, undeterred, was jubilant for there were more than enough skins here to last another moon cycle, maybe two or three and he clapped his hands and skipped round the tank we now housed these eels in allowing them to dry out naturally for better flesh and a higher gauge of skin and stop thrashing. And then the floodlight hit us, setting the deck ablaze and allowing the eels to see through their dead eyes at who we really were.

My father continued his dance of success and he lifted my sister upon his shoulders and baffling to me she clapped and taunted the others who hid behind the light and my elder brother blew kisses of all things too! But, I heard their laughter across the waves of garbage and above my families claps of joy.  I heard them and it followed me to sleep that night.  A night where no one complained of the cold but me, a night where aghast at what I opened my eyes to nearly tore the stitches from my mouth.

We had our skins alright.

My father, older brother and little sister were inside the bodies of the eels who’d escaped that tank, their chest cavities blossoming with nowt but their faces peering out at me silent; my wee sister, the strangest of flowering buds and I felt something starting at my toes.

Bruce McClure is a writer and DJ based in London. He runs independent music label Seed Records. He is a former member of performance art collective Le Couteau Jaune.

From The True History of the Working Class (chris-mccabe.blogspot.com), a blog written between March and July 2008.

I thought that to end this blog I would have to walk the route of the buildings that remain, from Barking Abbey via the Cross Keys pub to end at Dagenham Ford works. Ford’s the oiled Mordor of the local economy, symbol of inter- and post-war progress, hope, regeneration – towers turreted above Dagenham Heathway, the Thames as moat – demanding faith from the people through the automatic power as provider. That the route would be formed through what remains of Dagenham’s marshland and village past towards its great modern enterprise – felcher of Thames water – funnelling the hilltop. But to see Dagenham is to get out of Dagenham, to look back towards the towers.

This happened almost by chance yesterday as the three of us – Sarah, Pavel and me – left for a day out to Rainham Marshes. We took the 103 bus from outside Dagenham Civic Centre towards the War Memorial at Rainham. After six years in Dagenham – leisure options brick-locked between two local pubs – it was hard to believe that just five minutes beyond Dagenham East tube (District Line’s lush stripe of green) there’s this village, quaintly English – The Albion family pub, Norman church, gargantuan Tesco Extra – the July sun soldering us silent to the very fact that this is here. Shoreditch, Liverpool St, has been our release for when the bricks have pressed down too much – Romford as a one-mouth pocket of air – but here is English
Essex-London, just a bus ride from where we live.

As usual we haven’t planned the route, the marshes not signposted – I walk into a newsagents to ask for directions. The shopkeeper – shaded and cool amidst reams of white – shakes his head and explains that it is very complicated to get to and despite a left leg in plaster he reaches for a map on the top shelf to show me the route. The marshes – Rainham, Aveley – spread over half a page of folds like an X-ray of lungs against the swallowed toothpicks of the A13. He advises that we go to Purfleet by taxi or train and walk along the Thames from there.

We opt for train and walk through Rainham to the station, past the church and graveyard – EDWARD ROBINSON DIED 1847 AGED 23 – on a bench in the centre of the tombstones a couple (the man, from a distance, seems much older than the younger gothic girl) both shamelessly aroused, she straddled across his legs, negative-vampyric in the daylight at eighty degrees. Iain Sinclair has discussed the Purfleet-Dracula connection (Jonathan Harker as clerk for a property sale on behalf of the never-dead) which only occurs to me now that we’re making our way there.

Past the all-day drinkers outside The Phoenix and over the railway lines to the station. Asking for tickets for Purfleet the man behind the desk asks: Are you sure you don’t want to go to Grays for the same price? I say we’re going to Rainham Marshes and he shrugs, dispensing us tickets for one stop at eight pounds each.

Sarah and me have a personal mythology with this route to the coast, the C2C from Fenchurch Street to the sea (an old Victorian Sunday leisure trip) as after we secretly married at Barking in 2006 we took the train to Shoeburyness and drank champagne by the sea. Monday afternoon: a lone man surfing, a woman with a toddler. The Thames at Purfleet is an intersection as yet unknown, announced at Fenchurch Street as a sign for someone else’s commute, but we descend the station hill towards the Thames and find sprayed by chance our name for each other – NESS – on the gates of SGS Oil and Gas Chemical Services. FOR SALE posts like frozen Powerpoint presentations against the Victorian cobbles of terraces – colours flash like kingfishers in a tophat – a convertible Audi outside, show the work-commute has already been struck upon. Bram Stoker, apparently, did Purfleet once.

The hill draws us down to THE ROYAL HOTEL – the only pub in Purfleet – square white ship moored against the Thames, winking brown and silver in the sun like the scales of a carp. Locals – a man reading a paper with an orange pint, two young women semaphoring talk with pink Bacardi Breezers – look out over the Thames to Dartford Power Station (dwarfed amputee of Battersea) and the webbed silver of the QEII bridge.

This is the second time Pavel has seen the sea and as at Southend – his skin locks the light – he finds this immense breathlessness hilarious. The brick loops of Dagenham a memory, for a moment, he looks to us in almost disbelief at how open a space can be. A bloodblack ladybird specks Sarah’s bra strap, Pavel’s multi-striped seasuit declares SMILE. To the left of us the Stoker prophecy is fact: property developers have raised flats in mock-simulacrum of the Thurrock Council Estate, good-time chalets, leading down towards the marshes.

With Pavel throned across my shoulders, aghast at his own weightlessness, we walk under the trees, tracing a shadow of a bird above that we can’t see until we walk past the leaves and then look up – expecting a hobby, peregrine falcon, kestrel – to see the white wingspan of a gull. Following the river we come to a long low brick hut between clusters of housing with a sign that reads PURFLEET MAGAZINE No. 5.

A tourist board of information tells us that it was created in 1759 and was used to test, store and supply gunpowder for the army up until the M.O.D. sold it to Thurrock Council in the 1960s. As the women at Dagenham Ford marched on Trafalgar Square to demand equal pay as the men, this place had come to the end of its service for the nation. I think of its extra 200 years history at Ford’s and wonder how many men walked from Dagenham in that time to work against the flash expanse of the Thames, when just one spark of fire could have set the whole thing off? As Ford’s coincided with the creation of the Becontree Housing Estate – still the largest ever housing project in Europe – to power the local economy through its titanic turrets (and they still make one million diesel engines every year, fuelled using only the wind that blows over the terraces) just down the river, here, the ammunition was being flatpacked and shipped in mail-orders for the killings of the Second World War. Later, in Rainham Marshes, we see a brick turret made in 1906 that was used as a look-out post to spot submarines coming up the Thames. Dreadnought-spotting, that Edwardian pastime.

Looking citywards – Dagenham wind turbines in static take-off – the Ford works shocked to be near-obsolete before the megalithic sim-cards of Canary Wharf, strobing in epilepsy-inducing stand-by mode. Ford’s productive past absolutely  bound to the Thames for water – for imports and exports – the housing estate latched to the changes in the workings of global finances like a brick pedometer. Perspective is only possible with a centre, as power thrives on size: Ford’s as a museum that still churns out its engined artefacts.

As we walk towards the marshes, past the council flats, we laugh at the river-view that the state offers but as we talk it through Sarah is right to say: that as the river in flux offers hope and possibilities, to watch it flow whilst having none – land locked by utilities – tantalises the expansiveness of despair. Tea, tabloids, seasons: watching gulls hawk brown stones at low tide.

We reach Mardyke Sluice where three men are fishing over railings – impossible task of landing any decent sized fish over seven foot steel bars – but one ledgers his bait inches from the bullrushes in what must be the greatest cast I’ve ever seen. The skill against the constriction is admirable. Before Rainham Marshes opens out to the new RSPB centre the path narrows to a track of nettles and midge – a bridge over the sluice – then opens suddenly to a gold carpark and Pavel on my shoulders still, laughing at two dogs. His sun hat left behind in a nettle-bush, next to a rain-yellowed polystyrene chip-box.

Access to the marshes should cost us six pounds but the woman at the desk asks where we’ve come from – we say Dagenham – and she lets us through for free.

The land here is ancient, untouched in parts for six thousand years, murmurs under the heat, swarms and stirs an instant relaxation. As we stare at coots (curious), buntings (steroid-magpies) and little egrets (skewed on sticklegs) the potency of the earth beneath us is staggering: this is what Dagenham was, up until the building of the estate. At the base of the Ford works there is a remaining pool of water called
Dagenham Breach (from the breach of the Thames in the early C18th) but the rest of the marshlands have since been built over. Even eighty years ago, before the project towards a cultivated working class began, this is the same marshland that Dagenham – as it is now – was built upon. The freedom felt by the first working class to have a modern (inside) toilet came at the loss of other freedoms.

We feed Pavel facing the water as a group of school children are made to listen to the whispering bullrushes. Tracing the trail to look for wrens and water voles (these marshes has one percent of the population) there is an expectation never sensed in the city, a hushed suspense in every pram-push. As we’ve learned of Dagenham over time – no surprises -  these marshes are not as clearcut as they seem. They have kept, as a kind of museum, the vestiges of their military training camp history – this is the only reason the land has not become a site for property. Looking for creatures the unsuspecting naturist comes across disused firing ranges and paintings of soldiers aiming rifles. A military storehouse declares itself against a sign for DEADLY NIGHTSHADE. Look but don’t touch.

I spot the back of a vole in the stream – wet matted back humping the stream towards land – but it’s too late by the time Sarah looks. The stone crane of the heron – demented airfix – cranks over Aveley Flash in a five foot wingspan. Bizarrely, in a field of square cows there is a Stetson top down in the grass. I climb over the fence to retrieve it – braving the constipated gaze of a cluster of Friesians – and give it to Sarah to wear as we walk. A remaining firing range of metal numbers is now used as a mouse-lookout for the kestrel. Up the path to the RSPB café – avian crockery for sale, a peewit tea-cosy – we stop for tea before starting the walk back to Purfleet Station.

We’ve had such a perfect day – Pavel is thriving, alert, allowing the natural world to customise itself to him – and we’re both much less stressed than those first months of thinking we had to know ‘how’ to grow a baby. He’s leading us forward, at the front of his pram, back against the flow of the river. At Purfleet Magazine a mother scolds her son for playing at the base of the bricks – Don’t play there, there’s broken glass. We walk past a mound of grass with groups drinking, men topless with latte tans, making the most of the heatwave. A crow’s nest at the centre of the grass looks out to the water.

On the grass beneath our feet plastic Union Jacks start to appear, cut free from a sequin decoration from an unknown past occasion I don’t want to dwell on. Sarah takes a photo, even though we want to get back to the pub we saw earlier, The Albion in Rainham. Printed on each flag is just one white word: THANKS.

There is nothing more uplifting than watching Sarah – still wearing the stetson – pushing Pavel back along the terraced ranch of Nicholas Road, Dagenham, with the wicker of the hat crocheting her shoulders with light.

Chris McCabe was born in Liverpool in 1977. His first collection of poems was The Hutton Inquiry (Salt, 2005). His second book, Zeppelins (Salt), will be published in October 2008. He lives in Dagenham with his wife and son.