By the Shore

by Galaxy Craze

  Twenty-one

  “May, it’s snowing!” I felt Eden’s hand on my shoulder, gently pushing me awake. “May, it snowed last night. It snowed!”

  A dull, flat light came through the closed curtains. I thought I was waking up in London. I lay on my side with my eyes open looking at the windows, at the blue flowers on the cream-coloured curtains that hung to the floor. I thought, I’ll see rooftops and chimneys when I open them. I’ll see the city. Then I remembered I was in my mother’s room.

  Last night Eden and I fell asleep on the sofa in the sitting room. In the middle of the night I heard footsteps coming up the stairs, each step a slow thud. I lay on my back in the dark, my eyes wide open, arms stiff at my sides. I have always been afraid of something, of someone. I always knew something would happen to me, to all of us, and now it was about to. A man with a beard, holding a knife or a metal stick, was coming to kill us. Eden was asleep at the other end of the sofa. I kicked his feet to wake him, but he rolled over. The light in the hall went on and the floorboards creaked just outside the door. I thought, He’s about to kill us. I saw the shadow cross the wall—and then my mother walked in and gently covered us with a blanket.

  I couldn’t get back to sleep. The kitchen light was on. My mother was sitting at the table writing something on a plain white piece of paper.

  “Mum.”

  Her hair hung over her face. There was a brown knitted hat next to her. When she finally looked up, her eyes were red and watery. “Did I wake you?”

  “I have a stomach ache,” I said, looking at the dark window.

  “That’s because you ate all the chocolate. I’ll make you some camomile tea.” She went to the kettle. “Did anyone phone while I was asleep?” she asked.

  “No.” I walked closer to the table, to the place where she had left the paper. It read:

  Dear Rufus,

  I found your brown hat in your room. You must have

  forgotten it, so I’m sending it back to you. I also wanted to

  The rest was scribbled over.

  She sat with me on her bed while I took tiny sips of the hot tea. When she left I closed my eyes and thought, Soon I’ll fall asleep, soon I’ll be sleeping. But there were sounds from the kitchen, the clink of china and the boiling kettle. I heard my mother walking around, the bathwater running. Finally, I must have fallen asleep in my mother’s bed.

  Eden opened the curtains to show me the snow. It was coming down lightly, thinly, against the grey sky. The tops of the trees were white and perfectly still. I stared at it, at the snow slowly falling, floating down quiet as feathers. I remembered the way Rufus laid his hand on my mother’s shoulder, on the small of her back, and I thought, I have never seen anything move so softly, anything fall so softly.

  My mother made boiled eggs and toast for breakfast. We sat at the table and watched the snow. She wiped the table with a yellow sponge. She was wearing the same clothes as yesterday. Everything moved so slowly.

  “Maybe I should phone Rufus about the hat?” She opened her address book that had come undone at the spine and turned through the loose pages.

  “Mum, when are we going to get the Christmas tree?” Eden asked, but she didn’t answer. She was already dialling, pulling each number around. She held the black, serious-looking phone against her ear. I could hear it ring. Ringing and ringing in an empty room. I saw her look up at the clock; it was almost ten. When she put the phone down her eyes went over to the window and I thought, She is imagining Rufus waking up in a cosy flat in London with shells around the edges of a perfectly clean bathtub. Patricia’s flat.

  …

  In London, in the middle of the night, in the middle of December, big lorries come from the country piled high with Christmas trees. One man stands on top and throws the trees down to the man standing on the ground. They land with a thump, and ice sparkles fly from them like light.

  Here, we followed the signs posted to the trees and lampposts that read CHRISTMAS TREES FOR SALE. An arrow pointed down a dirt lane. My mother pulled over on the side of the road and turned the key. “Maybe we should go to London for Christmas.”

  Outside we could see the Christmas trees planted in rows, dark green and lightly covered with snow, waving in the soft wind.

  “Who would we stay with?”

  She shrugged. “Suzy, Annabel . . . . It would probably be more fun than just sitting around here. There’ll be parties and other people.” Christmas at one of her friends’ flats in London: men in faded jeans and long hair, a piece of incense burning in a red clay dish.

  “I don’t care,” I said. It was getting cold in the car. I put my hands under my legs.

  The ground was covered with the thinnest layer of snow, so thin you could see the shape of everything underneath, even the leaves and the smallest stones.

  “Please, Mum. Can we just get a Christmas tree?” Eden said from the back seat. His voice was soft, and he looked as though he might cry.

  …

  Our tree was small and there was a gap in the side, but at the top baby pinecones grew from the branches, as though the tree were decorating itself.

  “None of the other trees had them, did they?” Eden asked, looking up at us. Everyone wants to have something special, the only one like it, and Eden wanted a Christmas that is really like a Christmas.

  We took the dusty boxes filled with ornaments out of the hall cupboard. Eden unwrapped the Tin Man from its tissue paper— it was his favourite, even though it was missing an arm—and hung it on the tree. I stood on my toes to hang the silver, glittery halfmoon.

  “Mum?” Eden wanted her to hang the tiny white snowman at the top of the tree. She didn’t hear him. She was sitting by herself on the sofa, with one leg crossed over the other, writing words with her finger on the wooden table.

  The phone rang and she jumped, staring at it, letting it ring one more time. When she picked it up she said “Hello,” very slowly.

  “Oh, hello, Mummy,” she said. “Yes we did, thank you very much. I’ve hidden them.” It was my grandmother, phoning from America.

  “Hi, Granny.” My voice echoed on the line; it made me stop talking before I had finished the end of each sentence.

  “The streets are covered with snow; it’s a real blizzard,” my grandmother told me, her voice clean and crisp. I imagined her tree decorated only with tiny white lights and red bows, standing on an oriental rug in her New York apartment, her American husband sitting in a chair, a glass filled halfway with Scotch and ice cubes in his hand, a plate of cheese and crackers on the dark wood table at his side.

  When Eden got on the phone he said, “We have a Christmas tree now!”

  I saw my mother standing by the tree, but she wasn’t hanging any ornaments or even looking at them. Her eyes were drifting somewhere else in between the branches of the tree. I wondered if she had bought us any presents yet. I pulled the phone away from Eden.

  “Can I come to America for Christmas, Granny? I don’t want to be here with Mum.” In her apartment there would be shopping bags on the floor, store-wrapped presents under the tree, her purse with the curved bamboo handle on the kitchen table, a suit jacket with gold buttons hanging off the back of a chair.

  “Next year, May. I hope the present fits you,” she said, and blew a kiss over the phone. It was clothes. Nothing is ever a surprise.

  “Do you think I should put the rocking horse here or here?” Eden asked our mother, holding it in the two different places to show her. But she was staring at me.

  “That wasn’t a very nice thing to say. Why don’t you want to spend Christmas with me?” Her voice shook and her eyes looked glassy.

  “Well, you haven’t been trying to make this a very good Christmas,” I said, turning away from her. “Here, Eden.” I pointed to the spot where I thought the rocking horse ornament looked better.

  She walked over to us, to where we were, moving around the tree, the tree that was everything to us then, the tree that shone and sparkled and s
tretched out its arms for more.

  “I was going to take you shopping tomorrow.” When she said that, Eden got excited and jumped up and down; tomorrow was a gift to him.

  I picked up the robin’s-nest ornament and hung it carefully on a branch near the top of the tree. My mother knelt down, looking through the boxes, and pulled out a glittering icicle. Tissue paper and boxes were scattered around us, I sat down on the floor next to the tree and cleaned the silver bells with my shirt. We were making it perfect, this tree.

  Twenty-two

  The next morning we drove into Shepperton to do our Christmas shopping. A layer of snow covered the fields and roofs but the roads were clear; they stretched out dark and wet ahead of us. Our mother had woken us up early.

  “Come on, you two, let’s get a move on,” she had said, standing over us in her beige coat, while Eden and I tied our shoes. It made me confused, and I had to tie them again. “I want to get there before the crowds,” she said, but really she just wanted to leave the house.

  The High Street was a hill of shops. My mother parked at the bottom, near the bank.

  “I just have to pop into the bank first,” she said, as we got out of the car. The clouds were moving quickly above us, leaving plain blue sky behind them.

  “I’m going shopping by myself,” I told her. I opened my hands to feel the wind blow through them, but there was none.

  “May, can I come with you?” Eden asked, looking up at me. “I have ten pounds.” I had money too; our grandmother sent it to us for our birthdays and for Christmas with instructions to buy our mother something nice.

  “Where should I meet you?” our mother asked us. I looked up at her, but I could hardly see her. The sun was in my eyes and her face was getting lost in the blue sky, in the rushing clouds.

  “We’ll take the bus home,” I said.

  “All right.”

  I saw my mother start to run across the street, but she stopped in the middle of the road and looked back at us. I heard the horn of a car and then the short squealing sound of brakes. I thought, Now I’ll see her fall, straight down, the way a tree falls, the way a ladder falls. When the car stopped my mother was still standing, right in front of it, her coat touching the bumper. She waved and mouthed, “Sorry,” to the driver, then came running towards us.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to pick you up later? I’ll meet you somewhere.”

  But Eden and I had already started up the hill, towards the shops.

  We looked in every window of every shop, even the hairdresser and the newsagent, just to see. Shepperton was the biggest town, and everyone from the villages did their shopping here. When we asked our mother what she wanted for Christmas, she had said, “Socks.”

  We passed a shop full of glass bottles with silver tops and soaps wrapped in cellophane and ribbons. It smelled of lavender inside. The women in the store looked like my grandmother, hair brushed down smooth, a hair band or combs holding it neatly back. I spent a long time smelling the soaps and creams. Eden picked out a tall cloudy green-glass bottle. Everything had little silver and purple tags describing what was inside; this was lilyscented hand cream.

  When we came out of the shop, carrying our bottle of lily hand cream in a white paper bag with bluebells printed on it, the sun was coming out and the streets were becoming full. A woman who looked like Barbara’s mother walked out of the men’s outfitters carrying two shop-wrapped parcels. I held Eden by the wrist as we passed a group of teenage boys and girls standing outside the record shop, smoking cigarettes. One of the girls, with dyed red hair, held her hand on her stomach, laughing.

  We stopped at the café and bought watercress sandwiches and two bottles of orangeade and sat at a little round table. The sun came in bright through the windows. I heard the voice of an old man behind us say, “It’s a warm day for December.” It was a warm day for December. All the snow must have melted by now.

  We looked in the bakery window. It smelled of sweet buns. “Which is your favourite?” Eden asked me. I pointed to a yellow fairy cake with a pink flower on top. I thought I saw Jolene inside the crowded shop. I pushed my face closer to the warm glass, but when the girl turned her face towards us it was somebody else, a girl I’d never seen before. I remembered walking slowly down the corridor at school, running my finger along the lines in the bricks. When I looked back at the cakes I wasn’t hungry any more.

  “We’ll get something later,” I said, and started walking to the top of the hill where the stone church sat, old and alone, in a garden. There was a tall Christmas tree by the church decorated in coloured lights. People sat on benches with the tops of their prams down. Eden and I walked around the tree; it would never fit in a house. The ground was damp from where the snow had melted. Two boys, a few years older than Eden, ran around the tree hitting it with sticks. They both wore matching brown jumpers and had thick brown hair and freckles. There was something about the older boy’s mouth; it looked as though he were biting something hard.

  We walked back down the street. It was getting cooler now, the clouds coming in. People were looking up at the sky, to see if it would rain.

  We went to the sweetshop at the bottom of the road by the bus stop. We each took a small white paper bag and walked between the glass jars. A pretty young mother with black hair and hazel eyes leaned her arm on the counter, watching her three sons as they knelt down to look in the jars of sweets. “Harry, Jack, and Sam. I love my three boys,” she said to the man behind the counter.

  I knew what I wanted: jelly babies, lemon sherbets, and a rhubarb and cream lolly. We bought Mum a small bag of black-currant-and-licorice sweets and some pear drops; she liked them even though they tasted of nail varnish. We would put them in her Christmas stocking with the socks. There were glass jars of different-coloured sweets everywhere; some were just plain orange, mint and pineapple.

  I walked back and forth on the edge of the pavement while we waited for the bus, a lemon drop in my mouth. If I didn’t fall, it was good luck, like a found penny, something to believe in. I looked around for Eden. He was standing under a tree, his head back, looking up at the branches.

  As the bus drove away from town the streets became narrower, winding through the villages like a black snake.

  Two women sat behind us, talking about their children and who made a better Christmas pudding.

  “Why were you staring at that tree?”

  Eden looked at me. He was chewing on a toffee, his lips wet and pink. He shrugged, swinging his legs under the seat.

  “Can I have one of your chocolate mice?” I asked him. I held the bag with the glass bottle of hand cream on my lap.

  He shook his head, not looking at me, poking through his bag of sweets. “I only have two left,” he said.

  “Give me one,” I said, leaning forward, whispering in his ear because the bus was full and my voice sounded like something about to burn. “I took you shopping, Eden.” I held my hand out.

  Eden looked away, out of the window, but I didn’t move. Finally he gave me one, slapping it down in my palm.

  Behind us I heard one of the women ask the other, “Is your daughter coming over for Christmas?”

  “No,” the other woman said. “I don’t think she will.”

  “Oh. That’s a pity.”

  “Yes.”

  I looked out of the window. We passed a low stone wall. This is what it is like between villages: fields and a farm, a house with one light on.

  “Well, she’ll put something nice in the post for you, then.” This woman had a voice that could turn corners, creep under the door to find something out, then put it in her purse.

  “My daughter’s never given me a present in her life,” the other woman said to her.

  I turned my head slowly, to look behind me, as though I were scratching my cheek on my shoulder.

  She had a small face and grey hair, tied in a bun. Her back rounded over and her shoulders came forward, piercing through her cream-coloured cardigan lik
e two sharp rocks. But it wasn’t because she was old that her back rounded over. Deep in the hollow of her chest, she was safely keeping the rest of her heart, the last red stone of it. Oh, I thought, and the words went through my mind slowly, that’s what happens to the heart, that’s what can happen.

  Then it was our stop. The bus doors opened and the air blew in, damp and smelling of the sea.

  Eden and I walked home along the side of the road. A few cars passed, slowing down when they saw us. I remembered a glass box that I had seen somewhere. It was big enough to keep little things: rings and hair clips. In between the glass were pressed, dried flowers with long thin blue and purple petals.

  “Tomorrow I want to find something else for Mum,” I said to Eden. He was walking towards a row of branches that were growing straight up from the ground, like rods; on the top were dark red bulbs. They looked like something from another time. Eden stood looking up at them, the way he had done at the bus stop.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m trying to see the leaves breathing.”

  …

  We hid our mother’s presents in the back of my wardrobe.

  When we walked into the kitchen, it looked as though we were going to have a party. There was a wooden box filled with clementines on the table, IMPORTED FROM SPAIN stamped on the side; a wedge of Brie surrounded by water crackers, on a blue-and-white flowered plate; and a Christmas cake in a tin. Like a party, I thought, just like a party.

  “Did you two have fun without your mum?” she asked, in a silly voice.

  Eden ran to her and wrapped his arms around her legs. “Did you find the Lego rocket set?”

  “The Lego what? What’s that? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that,” she said, teasing him.