Morgan Wallace continues her contemplative tour diary, on and off the road as saxophonist in Fat Dog.

Tenerife, End of the Road, Galicia : The Sleep and The Water

Tenerife 04.09.26

The water

I don’t think I’ve ever felt the weight of moving water on top of me like this before. I’ve been aware of the scale of it, seen the heaviness of it falling off a waterfall. But this different, like something alive, a shout, or a hot breath pounding down on top of my head. 

Lots of other people are doing it. Spanish people are doing it too and they must know the limits. We stand in the shallows, or never more than a metre past my standing depth, which expires a lot faster than everyone else’s anyway. 

Chris, like an Antony Gormley Ironman, is firmly planted at the point where I start to float. I remember in Margate a few weeks ago the head of the Ironman cresting and falling underneath the waves. He wasn’t moving at all, the world was moving around him, but the sea sets the landscape and so his head became the one ducking and rising. Just the eyes looking straight out to the wind farm, the nose and the mouth lost under the water. Usually Chris can be stationary enough, a point to rest my arm on like the side of a swimming pool when my shallows run out. But he can’t whether these waves.

Joe told us the waves were big here. I thought we’d felt it on the beach in Puerto De La Cruz as we were swimming over them whilst they rolled in. But they were rolling then. Here at this cove a 45 minute walk out of the city they are different. The sand is black and stuck to my legs. And the waves are smashing, smashing us and themselves. 

We dive into them as they come, getting carried into shore. I try to jump facing away from the coming wave and let it carry me from behind. I manage to catch most of them like this so they propel me upwards and I can sit on top, but one catches me, taller than I imagined. Now I am on the other side of the movement, the water barrelling down on top of my head, pushing me down not up. No seconds pass, I am out of the water and then I am one with it instantaneously. 

I become badly drawn, my legs at a strange angle, my arms in a weird place. An odd tangle of limbs out of proportion with myself, and this force pushing me into the floor. My arms are flapping instinctively. It’s the instinct to reason with whatever creature is sat on top of you, to hit it or fight it, but there is no perception here. It’s not an animal it’s just a weight. I haven’t felt this before and I didn’t fill my lungs up. Time stretches and I’ve got no idea how long I’ll be on the floor. And then suddenly it’s gone and it’s lapping again. I stand up in the shallows, composed of something slightly different now, made more of the salt and the tide that has just ran through me.

More tries. More successes and more takedowns. Everyone always stands back up eventually, but you can’t believe it when the fury of the rush is over your head. One blink and the water is on us and my skull is being slammed into Jed, four-armed four-legged monster. Just freeze frames like a stop motion animation of limbs frozen in one position and then the next. 

I see a huge one rolling in, and swim towards it trying to get on top. I open my mouth wide to gulp the air in before the air vanishes. The wave accelerates into me, crashing quicker than it should do and with no warning. It pours into my open mouth faster than I can cut off the instinct to breathe. Black rocks whipped up from the sand catch in the gaps in my teeth and a neverending salt floods into me. No up or down just current. 

I stumble out of the water and feel myself sloshing internally. I pour more water into my throat, from my bottle this time, diluting myself further to try and get rid of the salt. I lie down in defeat on the sand, watered down and less solid than before. 

Town

Back in the town we walk around the tat shops. 4 shops in I realise that the bikini top which was draped over my arm has vanished. I retrace my steps back to the first shop and find it lying on the ground. I was eyeing up a black t shirt with ‘Diva Girl Tenerife’ diamontéd onto the front, and take my return to the shop as a sign to try it on. 

In the changing room I tip my head forwards to tie up my hair. As my head is upside down I feel the subtlest aching throb between my eyebrows, the feeling left after someone punches you in the nose. Then something wet is pouring out of me all over my hands. I look down quickly expecting my hands to be covered in a nosebleed. But this is clear water, salt water. 

The T shirt fits horribly and I hand it back slightly wet and rush out of the shop a bit shaken. I tell the others in the bar down the street about how the water came out and they try it, tipping their heads forwards under the table. The water pours out of them too. A dull ache loading for one second before, and then the saltwater. There is more to come I know it. I think of when my head was pressed into the ground and I felt the current within my skull. It wasn’t just pouring in, there was a rip current inside moving around a microcosm. I could feel the tides. I don’t know what corners the ocean got into from its turning. 

The neverending day

The afternoon of the waves and the tshirt shops slowly begins to bleed into the neverending day. We are playing in Tenerife around midnight, off stage around 1am. Lobby call is 2:55am, so sleep is an interesting idea in that amount of time, more just lying in the dark. Still I think it’s important to bookend things. I lie alone in the dark not sleeping to try and forge a full stop in my mind. At 3am we drive to the other side of the island back to the airport and by 5:45am we are sat on the plane to Luton.

I shut my eyes as the plane runs along the run way. The plane keeps running. Time passes and then too much time passes and I open my eyes and look out the window. It’s pitch black and the plane is still driving along the ground and the unseen tarmac. I keep staring at it but the blackness only opens out onto more of itself. The plane is still running on the runway, it’s been ten minutes or so. No one seems to mind. I wonder if all of the water has come out of my head yet. Everyone is slacking, no one awake to make things work properly. And now we have an infinite runway. The airport must be miles behind us, this new runway that refuses to finish taking us somewhere else. All the time the engine barrelling forwards and the blackness outside the window agreeing with it. Everyone going along with this, nodding off with their heads at weird angles, I am the only person noticing on the plane. I am the only one noticing the runways refusal to finish.

Eventually I feel the gentle pull on my spine telling me that gravity is changing positions. It’s to my left now, and we are in the air. But nothing else is done to change the scene, no ear pops as a transition at all. It is a half committed effort to believability on the quiet underside of the neverending day.

The sun rises with us throughout the plane ride and we land in Luton at 10am. It’s time to get in the van and drive to End of the Road festival where we’ll play that evening.

Flight to Spain 19.09.26 (two weeks later)

On the plane one of the others folds his arms on the tray table and lays his head down trying to sleep. He jerks up. The water is coming out again, clear water not a sneeze, pouring from that hidden place in his skull. It’s been two weeks now. Most of it got shaken out during the Tenerife weekend. 

‘I just have so much water in my head’ he says. And I remember curiously how it actually happened to him before we went in the ocean. It’s funny it was never just to do with the sea

Galicia

These past few weekends sleep has been staggered. Getting a moment where you can, creating lots of fractured minuscule days or one longer day that doesn’t seem to end at all. After dinner, a 45 minute nap and then an 11:30pm lobby call to take us to the festival. This is actually the last festival of summer, the real end of the road, it feels slightly unwritten.

I walk out of the venue and there is a huge grey-brown rectangle in-front of me. It is a wall but rectangle feels more accurate to describe it, it has no depth or realism, it’s simply a block. A shape in the darkness blocking everything that could be in view, all corners consumed, a piece of space that’s still loading. 

I look up to the stars and they’re not as bright as I would expect for the fact we’re in the countryside. All though I guess I don’t know where we are in too much detail.

The venue is a huge air hangar type building, all grey and corrugated iron. I reel back from it stepping further away to try and see more of the stars. 

Inside there are a thousand or so people. Lights flash in the hangar, like light from a TV in a neighbours house flashing down the street, reverbed and separate, splashing out in an irregular rhythm when the brighter colours appear. When you walk inside you are walking over carpet for a very long time and the stage doesn’t get any closer. An endless living room stretching towards a vague unreachable crowd. I think they might still be blurry from up close. But I don’t try to reach the centre. I am looking for the stars, stepping back and back with my neck tilted and my head resting on my back. There is nothing much to see.

I stand on the car-park-ground in the dark. Dillon is out here far away, I watch the light of his cigarette. He goes in. Chris and Jed come out, and run towards me like the gardener in Get Out. They circle back in too. Michael and Joe appear for a cigarette and then disappear. It’s like watching a time lapse in real life. I stand still. The stars should be shifting slowly from side to side over head too, but they stand still with me.

I could go into the hangar but there’s no one in there anyway, just the crowd who can’t get any closer. I watch the cigarettes and the silhouettes. It’s peaceful out here. I could blend in with the tall walls around me, just a shape enclosing this picture, the final scene at the end of the summer. Looking at lights through a gap in the metal doors, and another gap in the stage curtain. Just a neighbour watching the tv glow splash onto the concrete.

Pasta

Two days later back in London Erica asks us what our favourite bit of the summer was. I think back to the singing glasses or the sea in normandy that stayed shallow forever, walking and walking into the waves. It doesn’t seem like just one piece of time, summer. All of these places now inaccessible again locked up in memory as the season changes. Maybe the sea wouldn’t be shallow forever now if we went back.

The pasta is really good, and the summer is over. The album will come out two weeks later and the new season will begin.