It had always been there, the ocean. As a child, I’d stayed with my grandparents in Cornwall, or my mother’s family in Trinidad and Tobago. During the turbulent years of my twenties in London, when there was no ocean, I would console myself with long walks along the Thames, or the Regent’s Canal or around the ponds in Hampstead. Then, on moving to Brighton, the sea became a daily fixture in my world.

I ran in Brighton. I ran in Hove. There was rarely a run that wasn’t at least partly spent watching the ocean melt into the sky at the earth’s curve. There were fast, angry 5K runs, done at a furious pace after a bad day at my desk. There were slow, anguished 10Ks, run straight into relentless winds coming directly off the Atlantic. And there were long, hot marathon runs, drenched in sweat and longing for the solace of seawater. Once, three years ago, I worried I was getting sunstroke and headed off the path and straight into the sea to cool off. But only as far as my hips.

Even when I left the city and went night-running high on the South Downs, from the very tops of the hills I could still see the blackness of the sea. Without realising it, whenever I ran, I tried to run near water. I ran along the Hudson in New York, shrieking at the other side of the Atlantic during a rainstorm, exhilarated by the churning water as much as the bridges that seemed to be strutting from island to island. And I ran the bay in San Francisco, parallel to the sailing boats and the swimmers, one eye on Alcatraz’s moody shadow and the Pacific beyond. Whatever else I saw, wherever else I ran, however else I felt, the sea seemed to be alongside me, reassuring in the constancy of its presence.

At home, it felt so much part of my experience that for a couple of years I neglected to realise that in all these years of watching the sea, being guided by its definite shoreline, pacified by its glacial calmness and lifted by its twinkling surface, I had never swum in its shimmering waters. Exactly the thing that had entertained me as a runner made me rigid with terror as a swimmer: up close, you never quite knew what you were going to get.

When I finally grasped that looking at the sea a lot was not exactly the same as swimming in it, I felt its urgent pull. I longed to feel surrounded by the salt water, to let it carry me along, to become part of it. I would stare at the horizon, dreaming, then take a huge breath of salty air and let my gaze drift from the swimmers to a boat turning or a dog barking, and think, But when do swimmers breathe? And with that question, the swimming dream would be over.

I had lived in Brighton for nearly five years when I finally got into the sea. It was the morning of my wedding. A morning that, quite frankly, I had never thought would come. During those long marathon training runs, the early starts and the wind-beaten miles, I had made peace with the fact that perhaps marriage wasn’t for me. Through running I felt my body grow stronger and my self-reliance more robust. I actively forged the me I wanted to be, and I felt a weight lift as I grasped how much of my future was entirely down to myself alone. I didn’t have to keep internet dating if I didn’t like it. I didn’t have to keep going to parties just in case I met someone. I didn’t have to keep scouring my contacts for an old colleague with whom there was some unresolved sexual tension. I could let it all go and concentrate on running, my friends and my family. So I did, as relieved to have found my place in the world as I was to realise I didn’t have to keep waiting for someone to join me.

Of course, with that realisation, it was only a matter of months before D, one of my favourite people on earth, a long-nursed and barely admitted crush, appeared on my doorstep, armed with the sort of declaration of love I had previously thought belonged firmly on the other side of my Netflix screen.

It was as if a door had opened and there was an entirely new room in my heart. One apparently infinite and filled with potential. I was in love, and I realised that my interpretation of what that meant had always been wrong. It was no more restrictive than it was the answer to all my problems. Quite simply, I had found the person I had spent several years comparing all potential boyfriends to, and he was all mine.

Two years later, on the morning of our wedding, I did something else I had never dreamed I would: I finally made it into the sea.

The week that we got married, the sun came out. We had all just about given up hope, and then suddenly, the day that the umbrella to match my wedding shoes arrived, so did the summer. The night before the ceremony, I went out for dinner with my family and we walked back along the seafront to the B&B where they were staying, each of us lapping on an ice cream despite it being after dark. Over calzone and slightly too much red wine, I had joked with my brother that I should start my wedding day with a sea swim. Our sister, days from giving birth to her second son, goaded us, telling us to do it for her, then giggling at the ludicrousness of the plan. We laughed back. Of course it wouldn’t happen!

I had forgotten all about it by the time I got home and saw my wedding dress hanging on the back of my bedroom door. Eight hours later, I woke up feverish with anticipation, unable to fathom how I might possibly spend the seven hours until it was time to walk down the aisle. No one was even supposed to arrive at our flat for another three hours. I texted my brother on the off-chance, and half an hour later he turned up in his swimming trunks, with his phone and his goggles in his hand.

Within five minutes we had crossed the busy seafront road and were standing on the shore. Me, my brother and my fiancé. My dad, a little bewildered by the non-running turn of events, had turned up too – on the strict condition that he had to be back before his hotel stopped serving breakfast.

The sea was smooth, calm and full like a bath. There were none of the feathery white peaks that alternately frightened and delighted me on breezier days. The sun was still struggling to ease its way through a gauzy layer of cloud, lending the view an Instagram-esque filter, and slightly muffling the noise along the beach. The water didn’t glisten; there was barely a horizon. An opaque greeny grey simply met a slightly glossy blue as the earth curved away from us. There was a boat far out where the two colours met, but it was early, so apart from that we had the sea to ourselves.

My future husband and I stood on the beach holding hands while the others faffed with electronics and towels. It didn’t seem real, this idea that we might just go for a swim as the mist rose from the water and the sun burned through the cloud higher in the sky. It was a morning I’d never imagined I’d have; I was about to do a thing I had never believed I would do; I was a me I had never dreamed I would get to be. He squeezed my hand and nodded at the water.

‘We can’t stand by and watch, can we?’ he said.

‘Sometimes you just have to leap in,’ I answered, stripping off quickly and darting for the water, dragging him by the hand.

My brother giggled. My dad fiddled with his camera, not wanting any part of the madness but not wanting to miss a moment of it either.

We ran at the final few inches of shore, the pebbles of Brighton’s beach pinching and prodding the soles of our feet like a vengeful reflexologist. There was a second’s relief as we hit the water and the shelf of pebbles gave way to the sea. Another second and the temperature hit us like electricity. How did it do that? How could a ring of cold around your ribs hit you behind your eyes? We yelped, we splashed each other, we gasped as it reached our lungs, our hearts. I could hardly breathe, and I didn’t know if it was the excitement, the cold or the terror.

Then, suddenly, we were in. We were swimming. The water was all around us and that electric charge had subsided. In its place was a coolness, a sense of invigoration, as if someone was somehow tweaking the focus on the day, making it sharper and more real. We seemed to be the only ones in the sea, and the sound of our breathing was all I could hear, apart from the odd muffled seagull that seemed cranky about an early start.

We swam out, a cautious breaststroke, aware that we knew nothing of what the tides were doing or where we might be pulled, despite the apparent stillness of the water.

‘We’re in! We’re in! My first time in the sea after living here for nearly five years!’ I whispered.

‘Whaaaat? How could you not have done this before?’ asked my brother.

And with that, he was gone, swimming front crawl into the distance. I glanced around and saw that D was doing the same. Both of them carefully but steadily looping their hands over their heads and pulling the water back beneath and behind them. I swam further out, then turned to look back at the shore.

I thought I knew the seafront inside out. I’d seen it in rain, storms, glorious sunshine and at 4 a.m after ill-advised nights out and gut-wrenching arguments. But I’d only ever seen it from dry land. From the sea, it was as if my home town was in tilt shift. Where once I’d pounded the pavements in January, entirely alone, now I saw a hundred little figures, each making tiny movements of their own. There was our home, one small flat slotted into the buttercream Regency facade of the terrace we lived in. From the land it was huge and solid, but now it looked like a toy, a mere accessory for a doll’s game or the sort of thing you’d lay alongside a model railway.

As I turned slightly, I saw the seafront square where I’d lived years before, and the front door at which D had appeared that happy summer before he even held the title ‘boyfriend’. I looked along the water and saw that he had waited for me a little way ahead, so we swam together a while parallel to the beach. We saw the bar where our wedding party would later be held, still shuttered against the elements. We lay on our backs, holding hands, supported by the salt water, and watched the seagulls overhead as we stared into forever.

Where a runner sees the world in close-up, with time to view each passing tree’s leaves as they fall, each yellow road marking as it fades through the seasons, each dog truffling treats from the roadside, I realised that a swimmer sees the long shot. A ball thrown across a beach, a seagull swooping for an unwatched doughnut half a mile away, a rumbling lorry meandering by as if being pushed by a four-year-old.

There was a coolness, a stillness to these moments as we felt the water lapping us and watched our city from afar. My breaths were still deep from the effort, and my skin tingled from the salt and the chill. The sun began to break through the clouds, and after about half an hour, we realised we should be heading home. I stepped out of the water and gazed back at the scene laid out before me. I was glad it was today that I had made the leap. I had held my heart back for long enough. I now felt a visceral urge to seize everything life was throwing at me and live more intensely than I ever had.

Days later, as my new husband and I sat in a Parisian bar, two glasses of pastis on the small circular table between us, we discussed that magical swim. It had felt so exactly the perfect thing to do at that precise moment. As we chatted with the confidence of the just-married, we decided we would keep it up.

‘We should become regular swimmers!’ I declared with the sort of elaborate hand gesture that four days on the Continent and just as many glasses of liquor can encourage. I could see it so clearly; we’d be that magical couple who swam in the sea every day. As the pastis fug thickened, I felt delighted with myself that our swimming plan was decided, and casually mentioned working on my front crawl with the same confidence with which I’d discussed how we’d never fall out over Christmas plans, never look at our phones in the bedroom and always chat about literature over dinner. I was going to be so good at being married.

Days passed in a haze of museums, oysters and nauseating hand-holding in endless cafés. We kissed on the Eurostar home, and I told the bored taxi driver that we were on our way back from our honeymoon, trying to eke out every last minute of the magic. When we got home, we knew exactly how we wanted to begin post-honeymoon life: heading for the sea. Our suitcases were left unpacked, the salty butter and the bottle of Pernod we’d purchased that morning hastily chucked in the fridge, and we scampered to the beach to feel the water as soon as possible.

But this time it was colder than before. Yes, the sky was blue over Brighton, but over us, in the sea, there were low, dark clouds gathering. We laughed with shock at how different, how much more hostile, it felt. Neither of us really wanted to admit that this wasn’t the homecoming we’d hoped for, so we stayed in the water trying to work out if the clouds were heading in or out. Wind whipped up out of nowhere, blowing my hair across my face.

‘It’s so much colder than last week!’ I yelped, determined not to be the one to admit that the honeymoon glow might be fading.

‘I know – it’s made my wedding ring look enormous,’ replied my husband, holding out his hand to show me how loose it was on his shrunken finger.

With that, a huge wave hit him from behind and, almost in slow motion, the ring flew off into the sea.

For a few seconds we just stared at each other, not quite able to take in the fact that less than a week since he had put it on, his wedding ring was almost certainly lost for ever. Suddenly the bad weather didn’t seem like the worst thing to have happened since our return.

‘Oh my God,’ he mouthed at me.

‘What do we do?’ I replied frantically. ‘Where can it be? Everything’s moving …’

‘Stay there. I’ll run home and get my goggles,’ he said.

‘Okay, I won’t move. I’ll try and find it with my feet.’

D ran up the beach towards our flat. I saw him head behind the iron railings to our front door, wrapped in only a towel. The minute he slipped out of sight, the wind whipped up even higher, causing the sea to froth around me and surge below. I tried to stay in the same place, but swells kept knocking my legs out from beneath me. I tried to grasp with my toes, searching in the sand for anything that could be a ring. Again and again I would find a lump, convinced I had it, then lift my foot to my hand under the water only to see that it was a small shell, or a bottle top. Never a ring.

A couple of minutes later, the sky was almost entirely dark, a dirty layer of cloud lying low above me. The sea was similarly dark – no green or blue was left, only swirling sand and churning opaque water, throwing me from side to side more violently with every passing moment.

I pushed wet, salty strands of hair back from my face and spat out the water I was swallowing as it splashed into my face, its grit catching between my teeth. I could just about see D leaving the flat, closing the gate behind him. This time he was a blur, and even as he neared the water’s edge I couldn’t hear what he was saying over the noise of the rain hitting the waves. He ran back in towards me and grabbed me.

‘You’ve moved so far along,’ he said. ‘We’ll never find it.’

I was no longer anywhere near parallel to the front door. The water had pushed and pulled me. Its strength, what it was capable of without me even realising, sent terror trickling down the small of my back.

‘Quick, dive,’ I gasped. Even as I said it, I knew I didn’t really want him to. I wanted him above the water where I could see him, hold him. But he ducked down, desperately grasping, searching for anything that caught the light as a band of gold might. Again and again he submerged, returning again and again with shells curled in endlessly frustrating curves, or just fistfuls of hardened sand. Eventually I threw my arms around his neck and begged him to stop. The tide was coming up the beach fast, and the water that had been chest height was now up by our necks. I was shivering, my teeth chattering. The sea had turned, the ring was gone. The dream was over.

Between sobs, I told him it didn’t matter, that the ring clearly hadn’t fitted properly, that it wasn’t meant to be. Eventually we surrendered it to the sea and staggered home, cold to the bone and silent. The ring was lost for good, and my confidence in the water seemed to have been dragged out with it.

Two days later, we returned to the jeweller’s to buy a replacement ring. A bell tinkled as we pushed the shop door open, and we stood in the entrance holding hands like sheepish schoolchildren. The staff who had helped us a couple of months ago all looked up in synch, then down to our hands, before stealing quick glances at each other.

‘Was it the sea?’ one of them asked.

‘Or a river?’ said another.

‘Here, or on the honeymoon?’

A single tear started to roll down my cheek.

‘How did you know?’ I asked.

‘It happens a lot more than you think,’ said the kind woman who had helped us choose our original rings. ‘But it doesn’t make it any less upsetting.’

We nodded feverishly, D’s shoulders relaxing as he realised he wasn’t the first, and was unlikely to be the last, to lose a brand-new wedding ring. Before long he had been refitted for a second, slightly smaller ring, and the episode was behind us.

Except it wasn’t. Because I was still angry with the sea. I knew it was ridiculous; the solemn metal detectorists and their regular dawn patrols made sure I was reminded almost daily that we weren’t the only ones to have lost something precious to the deep. And I knew we could have lost a lot more.

I was also hurt, and scared. I had never felt the rage of an ocean turning against me before, and that half-hour had left me more frightened than I had been in years. To feel the water swell and churn beneath me, to see something as solid as gold simply vanish with what felt like a vindictive sleight of hand, had left me with a knot of anxiety I had no idea how to unpick.

In all honesty, seeing our flat flooded a week later was not the best cure. We went to bed happy after a lovely weekend, and were woken at 3 a.m. the following Monday by a huge thunderstorm playing out in the skies above us. Sleepily I snuggled up to my husband, who mumbled something about how crazy it sounded out there. For nearly an hour we lay in a silent embrace, unable to fall fully asleep while the storm raged on. After a while, I became convinced that there was a strange, echoey chill to the bedroom. I could hear what sounded like a single drop of water dripping. But there were no taps in the room; none were even within earshot. Eventually curiosity got the better of me and I swung my legs around to get out of bed and investigate. As I did so, both my feet hit several inches of water.

At first I was horribly confused. Where had it come from? There was no leak, no drip from above, yet the entire room was filled with water, at least ankle deep. My husband sat bolt upright at the splash, splash, splash of me crossing the room to the door, then leapt out of bed himself when he heard me scream from the living room. It wasn’t just the room that was filled with water, but the entire flat.

As the electrical storm grew ever more violent, the thunder cracking what seemed like inches from us, the water continued to rise. I pulled on a pair of leggings and a T-shirt and ran outside to call the emergency services.

On the street, a fleet of fire engines raced past the front door. The lightning was hitting the sea with a viciousness I had never even imagined, let alone witnessed. Several people were out in the road, looking in despair at the water filling their homes too. I tried to call again and again, only to be cut off by the severity of the weather or the busyness of the number I needed. Eventually I begged the emergency services to come and help us, screaming with terror as further claps of thunder from directly above rattled the pavement I was standing on.

‘We can’t come,’ they told me, as I strained to hear against the wind, the sirens, the thunder. ‘If you are able-bodied and can get out of the property, we have to go elsewhere first … We have to prioritise the elderly and the sick … The whole seafront is flooded … We will get to you when we can.’

I listened helplessly, awash with fear and exhaustion. For the second time in a week, wind and water whipped my hair across my face, stinging my eyes, the strands catching in my mouth.

Once I was sure that the fire service had all our details, I resigned myself to returning to the flat and trying to save whatever we could from the deluge. We discovered that the water had crept in silently underneath the door to the back yard, flooding the flat in minutes, leaving the carpets sodden, ruining hundreds of books, turning years’ worth of accounts to illegible mush, wiping treasured photographs of their images and destroying countless electricals. But we still had each other.

After hours spent bailing the water out, we stood in the kitchen with a takeaway coffee, trying to laugh at the situation with friends who had come over to help. As I sat on the countertop – the only dry seat in the house – I saw a copy of a book I had ordered while in Paris, ready for our return: Swim Smooth. It was a large, almost magazine-sized paperback, and it was so wet that I was able to take an end in each hand and squeeze it so that a full mug’s worth of water oozed out in a thick, noisy trickle.

Our wedding was only a couple of weeks ago, but already everything I had ever felt about the sea had changed. I’d ordered that book in the spirit of optimism, seeing the sea as a wonderful ally I was about to get to know better. Now it was the enemy. Thief of rings, wrecker of homes, menace to married life. I hated it.

I had become more afraid of the sea than I knew it was possible to be. Where once I had longed to relive the sense of freedom it had given me as a child, now I wondered if I’d ever go in it again. On top of that, I was furious with it for its unpredictable moods, its slippery menace, and with myself for not being strong enough to fight it.

Later that week, as we sat in a local takeaway, part of our daily routine now that we were rendered semi-homeless by the flood, I tried to articulate my rage to my husband. He understood how sad I was that he had lost his wedding ring, but seemed a little perplexed by my taking it so personally.

‘It’s like it hates me!’ I muttered into the laminated menu. ‘Why does it want to ruin the start of our marriage? It’s supposed to be the happiest summertime of our life and I feel like I’ve spent most of it rotating my paperbacks around the terrace to dry them quicker.’

‘It doesn’t care,’ he replied sadly. ‘You can’t pick a fight with an entire element.’

I stared at the illustrations of noodles and bit my lip. Maybe he thought I couldn’t pick a fight with an element, but I was damned if I was going to let myself be beaten. I had tasted the terror of not being able to swim properly and I didn’t like it. I knew from past experience that we choose the selves we want to be.

The grit was in the oyster now. It was the sea versus me, and I would throw everything at this fight, so determined was I not to be deemed the loser.

CHAPTER TWO

Summer

Within the month, I had booked us on to a one-day open-water swimming course.

D was keen to be supportive – we’d been married only a few weeks, after all. But I could tell from his special face of gentle and considerate listening that when he saw me, he now saw a powder keg needing to be handled with the utmost delicacy and diplomacy for fear of damaging explosions. Woe betide the being who dared to suggest I couldn’t accomplish something I had set my mind to. He had long ago learned this, most notably when he texted me as I was halfway round a horribly hilly half-marathon, suggesting that I didn’t have to finish if I didn’t feel up to it. When he saw me later from the crowd and waved in support, I flicked a V at him and called him a wanker for not believing in me.

‘Of course I’ll come too,’ he said. ‘It will be fun.’ I didn’t miss his slightly pale smile. It was a look not dissimilar to the one my sister would give me when I suggested we swapped clothes. He is a glasses wearer, and has an uncanny habit of being able to tilt his head to the perfect degree, blocking proper eye contact and rendering him inscrutable.

Earlier in the week, I had called the organisers of the course, which was based at the Brighton Swimming School, keen to know whether it would be okay that I wasn’t great at front crawl. I reassured them that I was fit, and a strong breaststroke swimmer, and they told me that as long as I could do ten or twenty lengths, I would be fine. The description of the course on the website sounded so perfect – a morning in the pool refining technique, lunch over a talk about the tides, then an afternoon in the sea under careful supervision. It all seemed so innocent, so manageable.

It wasn’t that I knew I couldn’t do ten or twenty lengths of front crawl. It was more that I had never really tried. I knew I could do a few strokes; I definitely remembered doing that in swimming pools at gyms or on holidays over the years. I had just never tried to do it consistently, for any length of time, or with any sort of regulated breathing. What I needed, I told myself, was some focus, a few pointers, a bit of motivation. After a full day of tips and hints I would surely be on my way to a life of sea swimming!

Yes, I was sure of it. And D, staring stoically out of the window as I repeated my thoughts to him the evening before, almost certainly agreed with me.

The course began at 8.30 a.m. on the other side of Brighton, but we had to be there even earlier, as we were due to hire wetsuits for the open-water part of the day.

It was a gorgeous morning. The sky was entirely clear and the air was warm even as we left the house just before eight. As we waited fifteen minutes for a bus, slowly marinating in our own sweat, D remarked on how lucky we were with the weather. I think he might have mentioned it again as I grumpily hustled us into a taxi, now clammy with the stress of it all and really quite bored of the delights of a warm day.

The heat was the sort that, unless you’re merely stepping from an air-conditioned car to an air-conditioned building, seems to warm you from the inside out. The sun was still too low for it to be piercing; instead, I simply felt as if I’d been lightly microwaved for perhaps thirty seconds. Too warm, tacky to the touch, with thighs that felt bigger than they ought to as they nestled against each other on the faux-leather taxi seat. By the time we made it to the pool, there were beads of sweat all along my hairline, and those at the nape of my neck were now trickling down towards my back.

The Brighton Swimming School pool is pretty much the most boring pool I have ever seen. It doesn’t have the deluxe hum of a spa, or even a fancy gym. No huge plastic bucket of fun toys for children, no water chutes, nor even a steam room. It’s just a pool, albeit one that is clean and solid. It is where the beach lifeguards are trained, where triathletes ready themselves for competitions, and where children and adults alike are taught to swim. But it is not a place for recreational splashing. It is a pool that means business.

Within minutes of arriving, we were directed to the room where we could choose from the selection of wetsuits for hire. There was a rack of pre-loved suits, each one dangling at a jaunty angle from a wire coat hanger like a discarded snakeskin. D, tall, slim and broad-shouldered, does not challenge the conventional wetsuit silhouette and was off to the changing room within minutes. My body, however, proved more demanding.

Since I’m not especially tall, my figure initially seemed suited to a medium wetsuit. One was held against me.

‘That looks about right,’ said the assistant.

I removed the towel I’d placed around my neck to mop up my nerve sweats and showed the assistant my boobs. And then my bum.

‘But the fabric … will it get round all this?’ I asked anxiously. If you held the wetsuit against me front on, the shape very much matched mine, but side on – well, there was little hope.

A long glance up and down. There seemed to be some sort of maths going on. A distant memory of being taught to read Ordnance Survey maps where the lines ran closer and closer together floated across my mind.

‘I think I should take a large,’ I said, preferring to pre-empt the inevitable verdict.

‘The thing is, wetsuits are supposed to feel really tight. It’s how they work,’ explained the assistant. ‘So if you put this one on and it feels a bit loose, just let me know and you can swap it for the medium.’

I headed to the changing room. For what transpired to be the loneliest ten minutes of my life.

I thought I had known true loneliness. There had been so many Saturday evenings spent with only Danish crime dramas and a bar of Lindt ‘Touch of Sea Salt’ for company. Countless weddings where I was the ‘fun’ one at the table, only to dart home alone and melancholy lest someone expect me to cop off with an usher. And school reunions where everyone compared childbirth stories while I provided a jolly tale about falling over during a marathon training run by way of comparison.

But none of those things were true loneliness. Because the loneliest place on earth is halfway into, halfway out of a wetsuit. And that is where I got stuck.

me