Fearne felt herself reddening again. Her mother seemed to want to steer whatever discussion they had towards talk of her burgeoning sexuality. Got any boyfriends? Kissed anyone yet? and once, mortifyingly, Ever masturbated?
She exited the shower and dried herself quickly, then dressed before her mother reappeared to pry more about the curves and bumps that were making themselves known in her body. She felt pulled in too many directions at once. Sometimes, she would come to, as if from a trance, to find herself playing with dolls, or reading a comic aimed at children much younger than she. She’d push these things away from her, guilty, embarrassed, but sad too, as if acknowledging that in her resting state she wanted to remain a girl; hormones seemed to be taking the decision out of her hands.
At the window she peered into the distance and wished the sea closer. Her mother said, when she was a child, the tide hardly ever went out beyond the old, weather-bleached groynes. But in the last decade or so, the waters around the coast had steadily retreated, and the shape of the island had changed to the point where all the maps had to be radically redrawn. Doom-mongers talked of fatally damaged eco-systems, unlikely to repair themselves again. The concept of four seasons already seemed like some nostalgic joke.
Where are you, Dad? she asked herself, craning her neck to look up and down the front. She wondered if he was off beachcombing. That irritated her, because he knew how much she loved to do that, and they’d spent many happy hours in each other’s company trying to outdo each other. She wondered, not for the first time, if there was some trouble—some serious trouble—going on between her mum and dad. Over the years there’d been some nasty back and forth, but it had mostly been hot air. They loved each other, she was watertight sure of that—although she couldn’t for the life of her understand what it was about her mother that secured such devotion. No, his departing like this must be connected to his work. He’d said as much, hadn’t he, before they set off? Busy, busy, busy. Lot on my plate. No rest for the wicked. Any heartache lost to the easy roll call of clichés.
They ate outside at one of the restaurants that boasted an extension on the esplanade. It was too cold, but her mother insisted. Under a canopy that flapped alarmingly they ordered clams and swordfish and hot, garlicky lobster tails.
“How are the fishermen finding this if the sea is receding? Where are the boats?”
“Maybe it’s from the freezers,” her mum explained, hoovering up a fantail of opaque white flesh.
The salt on the back of Fearne’s hand was like the smear of dust transferred to a fingertip upon handling a moth. She dipped her tongue into it.
“Don’t do that,” her mother said. “That salt…you don’t know what’s in it.”
The waiter was a young man with high cheekbones, a half-mask of light stubble and a tattoo in burgundy and ochre that peeked out from the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt. He kept yawning and rubbing his eyes. Her mother allowed Fearne a diluted glass of the white Burgundy she was washing her bivalves down with. Each time she heard a boot gritting on the pavement she lifted her head in case it was Dad, but he didn’t appear. Her mother flirted with the waiter, her chin slicked with butter. Fearne wanted to be in her room listening to music through her headphones, reading her book, anything else.
“Do you live around here?” her mother asked the waiter. Fearne turned her face away.
“Yeah, just up the road in Mapleton. But I’m aching to get out. I’m busting a nut. I don’t trust the power station. I don’t trust the sea. This place is a ghost town and nobody here realises that yet.”
“What’s wrong with the sea?” Fearne asked. Her mother arched her eyebrow, evidently amused that she’d engaged with another human being, and a boy at that.
“It’s like a tsunami, only in super slow-motion. Tide goes out. Comes back with interest. I don’t want to be around come that reckoning.”
“Oh don’t be so apocalyptic,” Mum said. “Guy your age. You shouldn’t be worrying about stuff.”
“Yeah well,” he said, “I’ve been here all my life. I’m not just a tourist.” He seemed about to say more but he pressed his lips together and collected plates instead. “How was the meal?”
“Lovely,” Fearne said. “What’s wrong with the power station?”
“Nothing,” said the waiter. “Guy my age? I shouldn’t be worrying about stuff.”
“People around here,” her mum continued (Fearne recognised the drawl that alcohol lent her voice), “and I’ve heard them, still talk about the sea as if it should be placated. As if we should be sacrificing our first-born sons or daughters. Flinging them piecemeal into the waves, like rubby-dubby. Like chum. What do you think of that?”
“You don’t have to worry,” he said, smiling at Fearne. She felt her cheeks burn. “Your daughter is no child.”
“She’s my little girl,” her mum said, archly. “She always will be. My baby.”
For a moment Fearne thought her mother might cry, but she cut it off with another gulp from her wine glass. Thirteen years old. On the cusp. Like this place. Her hips were becoming wider, like the bay. Her breasts were swelling, like the ocean. She felt something like the tide pulling at her insides. Childhood was something she had wanted to escape for so long, but now that time was here, she feared it. She wanted infancy back. The comfort and simplicity. The lack of confusion and doubt.
It grew so dark that it was impossible to see the sea any more. Her mother finally paid the bill and they retreated to their room, but not before Fearne had to experience the ignominy of her mother’s offer to the waiter of a nightcap when he finished his shift.
She said goodnight and closed the door on her mother before she became morose and began to tearfully list her regrets, a recurring process that took hours and usually the best part of another wine bottle.
Fearne quickly pulled on her pyjamas and scrambled under the duvet. It was cold in the room; frost was spreading across the windowpanes. It was more like the Sahara here these days; hot afternoons and bitter nights. She switched on the little portable TV and turned down the sound. News items showed boats stranded in motionless seas where slob ice had turned the water to sludge. She wished she had the shell so she could trace its patterns with her fingertips. Though sleep was some time off, she felt on the edge of a terrible dream. Every surface was hard and flat yet refused the weight of her gaze. Her view slid away and would only hold when it met that uncertain, treacly shift of thickening water.
Things moved within it, agonisingly slowly, black mouths agape in a bid to swallow oxygen that was no longer there. Now sleep was settling, but she had not recognised the shift from wakefulness. She dreamed of creatures beyond the limits of vision regurgitating the brittle bones of animals they had eaten, the slurry of waste filling the seas, condensing them like cornflour added to gravy. Everything was cold and brittle. She thought of the waiter, but even his wolfish beauty was mottled with bruises of frostbite.
She touched herself in the night and she was like a cast of sand, fragile, friable. She was scared to explore more forcibly in case parts of her caved in. At one point, when sleep was secure inside her, she tried to cry out but her throat seemed filled with ice.
Unable to find sleep, she crept into her parents’ room. Her father had still not returned. Her mother was snoring, and in last night’s clothes, make-up smudged on her face and turning a patch of the pillow the colour of tea. She saw that the wardrobe was opened and feared that her father had returned while they were asleep to pack his things and abandon them. Even as she moved towards the crack she knew that would not be the case; he would never do that, no matter how bad things became.
There: his suitcase. She felt guilty to have doubted him. She went to it and pulled it open, not worried about the racket she was making; after wine, her mother could sleep through noise that would have alarmed patients in a hospital for the deaf. Her relief was short-lived, here it was: evidence that her dad had been treasure-hunting without her. The base of the suitcase was gr
itty with sand. Within it sat objects he had acquired. Intricately patterned shells and polished stones and odd pieces of bleached wood.
She took a handful of them back to her bedroom and studied them in the moonlight. They were strange, jointed things; strange globular things. They hinted and haunted, and she fell asleep with their smooth hollows beneath her fingers, and dreamed of buried skeletons scrabbling through the soil for a gulp of air.
She was wakened by the sound of seagulls shrieking outside the window. She watched a pair wheel around a woman trying to fend them off from the baguette she was carrying under her arm. Last night’s trinkets seemed ordinary now. Whatever mystery and magic the night had suffused them with was gone. She still could not identify them, though, in this hard, unflattering light.
She went to wake her mother, but thought it would be much nicer to do it with croissants. Checking her money, she dressed and slipped on her shoes. The bakery was part of a row of shops set back from the road behind a narrow buffer of parking spaces slowly being adopted by weeds. There were no cars. She saw someone move behind the large window of the bakery, a ponderous figure now collecting up the display of cakes, pastries and tarts arranged lovingly on silver trays and bone china platters. Salt caulked the corners of the windows. Drifts of it created brackets at the foot of the door. The name on the awning had been bleached to invisibility.
She reached the bakery just as he was flipping the OPEN sign around to CLOSED. He saw her and stood aside to let her in. The bell tinkled and she was put in mind of icicles dropping to the path at the angry slam of a door.
“Oh,” she said, “am I too late?”
“No, no,” he said. His lips were chapped and there were shrouds of dry, white skin on his fingertips. Sleep was collected in the corners of his eyes like sticky wads of pollen. “I have a couple of customers in the morning, but that’s pretty much it. I was going to shut up shop and get on with my jigsaw puzzle.”
“I just wanted two croissants,” she said.
“Two croissants it is, young lady.”
She breathed an internal sigh of relief when he pulled on a pair of latex gloves to handle the bread.
“Holiday?” he asked.
“Kind of. My dad’s taking photographs for a magazine. It’s his job.”
“Nice. Although nothing much to photograph here, wouldn’t you agree?”
She nodded her head. “It’s for a geographical magazine, I think. Rugged coast.”
“Everyone’s leaving,” he said, appearing not to hear her. He placed the croissants in a paper bag and tenderly twisted it shut. It was warm in her hands. “It used to be a busy little place, this. But now all the windows are getting boarded up. People are trying to sell their properties. The sand and the salt are coming. It’ll bury us, you watch. We’re all going to sleep.”
“You’re still here.”
“Not for long. Business is terrible. I’m going to be out by the end of the year. I can retire, at least. I’m going to go north and help my brother. He keeps bees. Makes his own honey.”
She felt bad now that she had not ordered more food, but she only had so many pennies. He took them from her now and let them cascade from his dry fingers into the open mouth of the cash register. For some reason she thought of sacrifices.
“Seaside towns die when the sea disappears,” the man said, his voice edged with sorrow. For a moment she thought he might start weeping. “It’s kind of the point, isn’t it? ‘I do like to be beside the seaside’ and all that. What have you got without the water? It’s just a walled-in desert, it’s little more than a sandpit.”
He walked her to the door.
“Mind how you go,” he said.
“What is it?” she asked, impulsively.
“Sorry?”
“Your jigsaw puzzle. Is it a big one?”
“My yes,” he said. “Ten thousand pieces. I’ve been working on it since New Year. A picture of the harbour at Antibes.” He stared out of the window at the denuded skyline. “A lively harbour. A place with real get-up-and-go. I miss the sea,” he said.
“I’m sure it will return,” Fearne said, but she could offer no logical reason why.
It seemed like a good moment to leave; she didn’t like the mild horror that had arisen in his face at her words. She glanced back once she’d crossed the road and descended, by way of the stone steps next to her guesthouse, to the sand. He was stock-still by the window, as if stricken by the salt he had warned her about.
Her mother was not on the terrace; a glance up at their room confirmed that her curtains remained shut. She was about to head inside, eager to surprise her with the warm croissants, when her attention was drawn to a set of footsteps in the sand stretching off into the distance where the sea gleamed like a line of silver thread. She recognised immediately the tread of her father’s boots, that and the size of them. Claude Hopper, Mum called him. And she would tease him by saying: If only it were true what they say about men with big feet.
The footprints moved away from the low sea wall in a large arc, as if he had been on his way back to the guesthouse only to be diverted by something at the critical moment. Perhaps he had seen something worthy of his lens; a sea bird of some sort, or an unusual play of light on the scenery. She decided to follow the prints, determined to find him and give him some grief for leaving her with her mother for so long. If she left it any later, the prints would be erased by the incessant dance of sand heated loose by the strengthening sunshine. She experienced an unpleasant image of her father becoming lost should she fail to track his prints properly, mummified by the salt winds driving in from the north.
Bit morb-o, she thought, in her mother’s voice, and shuddered. Bit morb-o, my little pineapple ring.
At least it was not so cold now. Daylight lifted the temperature to a point where her light cardigan was adequate protection. She was worried about her dad though. He had been wearing his short-sleeved shirt yesterday. If he hadn’t sought shelter by evening, he would have frozen to death.
Stop it, she thought. He’s not a child. He would have found somewhere warm.
Of course he would. And of course he would have called to let them know. The fact that he had not done the latter kept her nagging at the likelihood of the former.
She glanced behind her at the properties along the sea front and tried to spot her mother in the window of the guesthouse. No such luck. Still asleep. She’d be amazed if Mum raised her head before lunch.
From here the guesthouse looked pretty as a button. It was only when you got up close to it that you saw the cracks and the dust and the stains. A bit like Mum, she thought, and laughed. If it had been her guesthouse, she decided, she would have given it a name. Clouds or Dunes or Breakers. Something to suggest the coast and holidays. Something a bit dramatic. Mrs. McKenzie, who owned it, was as dull and tired as the beige towels that hung from the rails in the bathroom. Maybe she had been enthusiastic, once upon a time. But now she could barely muster a smile when she took their breakfast orders.
Something glinted in the sand. She bent down and swept with her fingers until she had unearthed her father’s watch. Now she found it hard to swallow. It was as if the ice from her dream had returned to lodge in her throat. She felt the prick of tears as fear jangled its nails up and down her back. The watch face was scoured opaque, as if the sand had been working it for years. She held it to her ear; it was still ticking. What to do? She ought to go back. She couldn’t understand why, but her father couldn’t have just simply dropped his watch. He must have been attacked. But his were the only set of footsteps around and there was no sign of a struggle.
“Dad!” she called out. Her voice was ripped from her lips by the eager wind, as if it had been waiting for her to say something. She felt a bizarre urge to dig in the sand, convinced that he had been sucked down. She didn’t remember there being any concern about this beach in terms of quicksand, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any hazards.
She was weighing up the pr
os and cons of going on or heading back when she heard her mother calling her name.
“Mum!” She raced towards the figure, waving the watch as she weaved through the sand.
Her mother was carrying a bag laden with food. “We’ll have another picnic,” she said, unaware of Fearne’s panic. “It might not be the warmest day of the year, but even scant sunshine means outdoor eating in my book. Right, peach fuzz?”
“Dad’s gone,” Fearne said. “Look!” She pressed the watch into her mother’s hands. The older woman stared at it as if she had never seen it before, but it was she who had bought it for her husband, for his fiftieth birthday. Fearne reminded her of that but the perplexed look remained.
“I’m tired, grapeskin,” her mother said. “Can’t we just pretend to be having a nice time? Can’t we just eat this bread and cheese and sit in the sand and rub sun cream on each other’s shoulders?”
“But what about Dad?”
“Daddy’s a rock, applesauce. This isn’t the first time he’s gone walkabout. I remember some time in the late ‘80s he went missing for a whole week.”
“But his watch…”
“Maybe he dropped it. It was always a bit too big for his wrist anyway. Sweaty weather. Not concentrating. It happens. Give it to me. I’ll look after it for him. Now, I thought we could nip up to those rocks over there and—”
“No!” Fearne shouted. “I’m going to find Dad. You do what you want.”
“But pumpkin…”
Fearne ignored her and marched after the footprints, clutching the watch more tightly. Behind her she heard the metallic screw top lid easing off a bottle, and her mother sighing as she reclined in the sand.
Rocks crumbled from the headland towards that gleaming seam of silver, like cake fragments on to a teatime salver. She searched frantically for some vertical stripe of colour and movement within the still, horizontal mass but could see none. The leaves on the trees were grey with salt. Then, on to the stripe of gunmetal road curling around the bluff, she saw someone running in a pair of black shorts and a lime-green vest. Even at this distance she could tell it was the waiter from the previous evening. He skipped down a set of steps, the lower risers of which were disappearing into the sand, and began jogging across the beach, presumably back towards the restaurant.
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