The Last Wave

by Gillian Best

  ‘200 free, 100 fly, IM relay.’

  ‘Impressive,’ she said, though she didn’t seem particularly impressed.

  ‘Do you… I mean, are you a swimmer?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘What’s your race?’

  ‘I don’t race.’ She picked up a coppery pebble and considered it. ‘I just swim, it helps me… think.’

  ‘Me too, or, well, it helps me to stop thinking.’

  ‘It’s cleansing.’

  ‘How often do you go to the pool?’

  ‘I’ve never been in a swimming pool in all my life.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Loathsome things, pools. Cold, dead. Utterly devoid of life. But the sea, well, that I go in as often as possible. Which isn’t so often anymore, but as luck would have it, I’d planned on going in today.’ She pointed to her bag. ‘I was about to head out when you arrived.’

  She gave me this conspiratorial look and suddenly I felt nervous. She must have known who I was. Maybe Iris or Harriet had figured out I’d planned to come up here and phoned to tell her. But I hadn’t left any traces.

  Martha stood up and whipped off her trousers and shirt to reveal a swimming costume not that different to mine: a dark blue Speedo but with a more modest cut in the leg. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that. Part of me wanted and assumed she’d be a grandmother and act like my granny on Iris’ side of the family. It was like, even though I knew she was a swimmer, I couldn’t quite picture it. I guess I thought she’d wear something more Mumsy.

  She pulled her cap and goggles out of her bag and stuffed them under her shoulder strap. I smiled because I did almost the same thing, except I tucked them under the bum of my costume. Then she did something I really hadn’t expected. She pulled off her hair.

  She put her hands on her hips. ‘Coming?’

  I must have looked really shocked.

  ‘Chemo,’ she said, rubbing the stubble.

  I looked away. I wanted to know details, but it hardly seemed my place to ask.

  ‘I don’t have my suit on,’ I said.

  ‘But you have it with you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She held her towel out with open arms, as if she were going to hug me. ‘Come on then, get a move on.’

  I changed with my back to her, facing the promenade and the short wall that separated the elevated pavement from the pebble beach.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked, when I’d changed. ‘It’s the same as the bush in your front garden.’

  She smiled softly. ‘Myrtle,’ she said. ‘It’s commonly found near the sea.’

  With that, she set off toward the water. Just before I got my feet wet I stopped.

  ‘It’s not that cold.’

  ‘I’ve never been in the sea,’ I said.

  She closed her eyes, shaking her head. ‘Don’t worry. It feels like coming home.’ She held out her hand for me, and I took it, and together we waded into the glassy water.

  It didn’t feel anything like home and it was incredibly cold. The water I was used to was not warm, but it was nothing like this. The sea burned and it felt different, smoother against my skin. The ground shifted underneath my feet and though instantly I couldn’t feel my toes, I knew I was touching slimy, disgusting things: fish shit for one, probably human shit as well, and certainly urine. I watched her lick the insides of her goggles, adjust the strap so it sat in the sweet spot below the top of her head, put her hands over her head as she dove headfirst into what I now considered to be one giant toilet.

  I shivered, wanting to get out, desperate for a hot bath or even the chlorinated confines of York Hall – itself not the cleanest place I’d ever been but, in comparison, gleaming with high standards of hygiene.

  Martha didn’t look back. She didn’t look anywhere really. Her body moved through the water with speed and efficiency. It was good to see and made me feel connected to something – my family maybe – in a way I never had before. My cousins on Iris’ side of the family were all really nice, but they were all girlie and gushing, not keen on sport of any kind, opposed to sweat or any activity that might wreck their makeup or blow outs. But here was a woman who seemed to happily forego all of that.

  I pulled my latex cap down over my ears and fastened my goggles, licking them as she did on the inside to keep them from fogging up, then, trying not to think about anything at all, I dove into the water and swam flat out.

  The hardest thing was not being able to see. I was used to the comfort of the black line at the bottom of the pool guiding me forwards and back as I zipped up and down the lane, but here there was nothing to show me the way, and the water – the sea – was in motion, throwing me off course. I felt the tug of the current in places, in others the water’s temperature changed dramatically: my feet, kicking just below the surface felt warmer but my hands went deeper and when I felt a patch of cold water it was difficult to avoid recoiling. I struggled to keep my stroke correct, thinking of all the days spent doing technique drills with my coach.

  When I turned my head to the side to breath, salt water got in my mouth. It was inevitable no matter how hard I tried to not swallow any of it, and when I did I thought I would be sick.

  Swimmers – at least, swimmers like me – have a habit of saying some pools are fast and some aren’t. Fast water or slow, it was something we said to each other at meets. It’s a slow pool, we’re stuffed. Or, this is a fast pool and we’re going to dominate. Psychological bullshit, but in a competition you need to take advantage. To me, it always felt as if some pools and the water they contained, either wanted you or didn’t. In the sea that day with my grandmother the water felt slow because I was working against it, trying to cut a straight path forward. I didn’t realise that the water was something you entered into a negotiation with, that you had to work with it in order to get where you wanted to go.

  I followed Martha as she swam in the direction of the sea wall. There was something really nice about just going forward without stopping and turning around every fifty metres.

  It reminded me of a film clip I’d seen somewhere of a runner in Africa. The sun was high and the ground dusty. In the distance there had been mountains covered in a smattering of green. It looked hot. The only person in the frame was this runner and he wasn’t in a race or doing a marathon or anything – he might have been training but it wasn’t the way I’d imagined you might train here: he wasn’t surrounded by a coach, or teammates or anyone. It was just him running across this semi-desert landscape. It was his face that made the deepest impression. He was serene, blissful. Sweat poured down his face but he wasn’t straining and it didn’t seem like this was hard for him because if it was he was certainly enjoying it. He was a man running because it felt good and he knew what his body could do.

  That’s how Martha and I swam that day. My birthday, the day I was christened by the sea.

  We didn’t stay in for too long, under half an hour, and when we were finished and sat on the beach in our dry clothes, hair dripping, noses running, she handed me a pebble.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, not sure why she’d given it to me.

  There was a window of opportunity then for me to have asked questions and got the answers to things I had been wondering about for years, but I couldn’t ask her. I didn’t have the nerve and I enjoyed the comfortable silence we shared as we looked at the sea, lost to our own separate thoughts. I wanted to tell her that I was her granddaughter but the way she was with me made me think she already knew. And I didn’t want to ruin the moment by asking her why, if she knew who I was, she had never come to visit.

  It didn’t seem like she wanted to talk. She stared out at the sea and I didn’t understand what she was looking at, because nothing was happening. The water was flat. The sun was shining. It may as well have been a painting.

  She sighed and pushed herself up to standing. ‘This is the hard part,’ she said, offering me a hand.

  We walked back to her house and I caught her
looking over her shoulder a couple of times to catch the last glimpse of the water. Maybe it was something I’d inherited from her, something that skipped a generation. Maybe there was water in our veins because it felt like I was tearing her away from it and that the moment I left she’d be back there on the beach, watching the sea.

  The salt on my skin dried up as we walked and it felt like a light sunburn peeling off and I thought that maybe it was some kind of protective outer layer that I had shed so that now I was a fully-fledged member of her club. I wanted to ask but preferred my own version of things.

  Back at her house she called for my grandfather as she opened the door. There was no reply and even though she didn’t say anything I could tell she was nervous. She excused herself to check on him and went upstairs, leaving me to make myself at home in the lounge.

  Their living room was pretty bog standard: brown sofa, beige accessories, floral wallpaper that looked as though it had been put up sometime in the 70s. It felt like a grandparents’ house. There were pictures on the mantelpiece and I went over to look at them, hoping I might get a sense of who they were – she and John – and who their friends were, and when I saw them I knew why she hadn’t asked me who I was.

  The frames were a mix: some brass, others coloured plastic, and some just plain glass, but the person in them was the same. My face stared back at me over the course of my life, captured in a series of photographs. I didn’t recognise some of them from when I was younger, but the more recent ones were familiar. They were taken on my birthday. In two of the really early ones you could see candles and cake but the weird thing was that my mums weren’t in any of them.

  ‘He’s fallen asleep,’ Martha said, from behind me.

  I hadn’t heard her come back downstairs and she startled me.

  I picked up the picture of my last birthday, my thirteenth, when we’d had a pool party, even though Harriet had hated the idea. The snapshot was a close-up of my face but you could see the edge of my swim cap across my forehead and there were the marks around my eyes from the goggles I had been wearing and which were, at the time of the pictures, around my neck. I had the stupidest look on my face, this big, goofy, toothy smile that made me look a lot younger than I was.

  I held it out to her and didn’t even know what to ask.

  She bowed her head slightly as though she were ashamed. ‘Your birthday,’ she said.

  ‘I know, but you weren’t there. I mean, I don’t even know you.’

  She bit her lower lip. ‘Are you hungry?’

  ‘You knew who I was this morning, when I rang the bell, didn’t you?’

  ‘I could make sandwiches?’

  ‘Harriet doesn’t talk about you or him,’ I said, jerking my head toward the ceiling. ‘She gets really, really cross when I ask about you.’

  ‘Tomato and cheese? Or we might have some chicken if you prefer.’

  ‘I don’t get it. Why do you have these? Who gave them to you and why don’t we ever see you?’

  She went over to the sideboard and opened a small drawer, handing me an unframed photo. ‘This one’s my favourite.’

  It looked like one of my first swimming lessons. I didn’t seem to be that old, maybe two or three. I’m in a bright orange bikini – something I would never wear now – and Harriet is holding me on my belly, swooshing me through the water. I’m looking straight ahead but she’s looking over her shoulder at the camera. The weird thing is, I didn’t think she could swim. She’d never been in the water as far as I’d ever seen and anytime I wanted to go to the beach over the summer holidays she refused. She wouldn’t even go for a picnic, so to see her with me in the water even if it was just a swimming pool didn’t make much sense.

  ‘Why don’t you ever come visit?’

  Martha smiled and motioned for me to follow her into the kitchen. ‘I’m sure you don’t want to hear about that, especially not on your birthday.’

  ‘If I didn’t want to hear I wouldn’t have come.’

  She opened the fridge and took out a bunch of lunch things: cheese, salad cream, lettuce, tomatoes, sandwich meat.

  ‘I thought you didn’t know about me,’ I said.

  She took a loaf of bread out of the cupboard and smiled at me. ‘I’ve always known about you.’

  ‘Then why have I never met you before? Why don’t you even come visit, or phone, or, I don’t know, anything?’ She was so calm about it, like she didn’t see how this was a huge problem.

  ‘It’s a long, complicated story.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘But it’s not for me to tell. You should ask your mother.’

  ‘You don’t think I tried that first?’

  She chuckled.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘You’re just like her.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Harriet.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘She can be quite… How should I put it? Determined?’ She sliced up the cheese and tomato and said, ‘Salad cream?’

  I shook my head no. ‘Could you just please tell me what happened? What did we do wrong?’

  ‘Nothing, dear. You did nothing wrong.’ She put the top slice of bread on the sandwich and wiped her hands on her trousers. ‘I suppose we’re all to blame. Your mother, me, John. It was one of those things that happened and we ignored it until it got so difficult that we didn’t know what else to do but continue to ignore it.’

  ‘Come back with me. To dinner, tonight.’

  She handed me a plate with my sandwich and shook her head. I followed her to the table and we sat down.

  ‘I don’t think your mother would appreciate that.’

  ‘Who cares? It’s my birthday.’

  ‘It’s not as simple as that.’

  ‘Yes it is. You just get on a train.’

  ‘I wish it were that easy.’

  ‘It is,’ I pleaded. ‘It really is.’

  ‘Your grandfather threw your mother out of this house, years ago. Well before you were born. And he doesn’t know how to apologise. It’s not in him to admit that he’s wrong. And your mother can’t forgive him. And she can’t forgive me for not standing up to him when I should have.’

  ‘Why? I mean, why did he throw her out?’

  She took a bite of her sandwich and chewed slowly. ‘There was more than one reason.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘He threw her out because he didn’t approve of her relationship. With Iris.’

  ‘Iris is really nice. He’d like her if he got to know her. You would too.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You do what?’

  ‘Know her and like her. Quite a bit. She’s a lovely woman.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘John… Well, it’s different now that he’s…’

  ‘Now that he’s what?’

  She lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘Now that he’s getting on in years.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Neither did your mother.’

  ‘You’re not making any sense.’ I didn’t want to be rude because we’d only just met, but she was so irritating. ‘Why can’t you just tell me what happened? Maybe we can fix it.’

  ‘It’s not ours to fix.’

  ‘It’s our family.’

  She looked like she was going to cry, so I tried to calm down. ‘But it was so long ago. Doesn’t he miss her? Isn’t the saying blood is thicker than water?’

  ‘In this family, Myrtle, water binds.’ Martha reached across the table and took my hand. ‘The sea holds us together.’

  ‘But we’re not together!’

  ‘We’re connected, you and I. The sea did that.’

  ‘No it didn’t, the train did. I did.’

  ‘It’s a shame you didn’t come earlier, before John started to… unravel.’

  I pushed the plate of untouched food away from me and stood up. ‘I don’t understand any of this! So they had a fight, that was ages ago. Can’t they just get over it? Or apologise or something?’<
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  ‘I wish it were as simple as that, but they’re both stubborn, pig-headed and prefer sheer bloody-mindedness to anything reasonable. John was horrible to your mother and for her to forgive him would take something from him that he’s not able to do anymore.’

  ‘You’re as bad as she is. She won’t talk about you, won’t tell me anything about her life here. Nothing.’

  ‘I know,’ Martha said.

  ‘No you don’t. You had a family.’

  ‘You do too.’

  ‘It’s not the same thing.’ I had an idea and turned toward the stairs. ‘Maybe you just think he won’t apologise, but maybe he will if I ask him.’

  ‘Myrtle, don’t,’ she said.

  But I didn’t stop. I heard her get up when I got to the bottom of the stairs and then when I was a few steps up, I felt her hand on my arm. Her grip was strong.

  ‘Don’t. He’s sleeping. Don’t disturb him.’

  ‘Let go of me,’ I said, wrenching my arm away from her.

  ‘Please don’t do this to him,’ she said, in a tone of voice that wasn’t as light and breezy as it had been moments before.

  I turned around and she looked scared and upset.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re doing.’

  ‘I’m going upstairs to ask my grandfather for help.’

  ‘He might not be your grandfather when you get there.’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘What, like he’s all of a sudden going to be someone else?’

  ‘Come back to the table. I’ll put the kettle on and…’ She sort of slumped against the wall. ‘I’ll try to explain.’

  I did as she asked. I waited at the table while she made the tea and brought a plate of biscuits over.

  ‘Myrtle,’ she said. ‘John, your grandfather, has dementia. Do you know what that is?’

  ‘Alzheimer’s?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes. At least, that’s what I think he has. I can’t be sure because he won’t go to see the doctor.’ She looked at her hands and picked at one of her nails. ‘So, even if he were to want to apologise…’ She looked up and tried to keep her composure. ‘Even if he wanted to, there’s a good chance that he wouldn’t be able to remember why he was apologising. And, I couldn’t be sure he’d even remember your mother.’