by Sarah Moss
The mizzle was lighter than it had been earlier, and the mine-tower stood clear against the sky. It’s pretty muddy on the coast path, I said, I’m not sure a walk would be much fun, my running kit was so mucky I took it off at the door. Do the Penrose walk, he said, Looe Bar, all the lower parts are paved. Emma and I looked at each other. We had not been out together since –, and actually not for some months before, because between Emma’s work and the anaphrodisiac effects of paying ten pounds an hour for babysitting to which Mimi objects anyway it was easier to stay at home. If we’re trying to live more fully, I thought, if we’re trying not to let inertia and mindless economy shape our lives—
‘Thank you, Eli,’ Emma said. ‘You’re very kind. We’ll be back by lunchtime and we’ve both got phones. Mimi’s epipen is in her pocket and the inhalers are in the bag on the hook in the hall. You’ve got your phone?’
He waved it at her. ‘Switched on, fully charged, four bars of reception. Turns out there’s only one service provider in town, good thing I got the right one. Go on. I’m going to teach them to carve. Look in the bag, girls.’
He’d brought two small bright knives, two chisels and some shapely blocks of a dark but loose-grained wood.
He looked up. ‘Unless you’d rather I didn’t, of course?’
I found that I was not at all concerned about knives and chisels. Cuts can be sutured. We all have to learn. As long as the heart beats.
I took Emma’s hand and we set out. The rain had passed out to sea and the sky to the north was blue.
Now, my father said, Rose, did you know I was telling your sister a story? This is about a young man, and his quest for a better way to live. He had just spent the winter in an old farmhouse in the mountains, and now spring was coming and he was on his way west again. West because he started in the east, Rose, and also because in America, the young have been going west for a couple of hundred years.
So, the young man caught a ride out of Bear MountainRidge Farm the next day, and travelled south-west with the spring, trees blooming around him as he went. He was going with a tide of young people who didn’t want the futures their parents had imagined for them and were still – perhaps would always be – working out the reality of what they did want. Not forty hours a week in an office. Not a tie around their necks. Not suburbia. Not a mortgage and a country club membership, not ballet lessons for their daughters and baseball teams for their sons, not wives with girdles under their wasp-waisted dresses. They were mostly young men, the few women travelling as someone’s girlfriend, mostly college-educated, almost all white. He didn’t notice that at the time, though he did notice that there were few Jews.
The communes where he stayed were all different, but after a while they were mostly the same. They all had rules, as intentional communities must if only to distinguish themselves from the unintentional wider world. No meat, no sugar, no processed food. Free love, almost invariably – it was young men making the rules – and sometimes exclusive relationships were forbidden. Children, usually tolerated, sometimes unwelcome: to be raised by their parents, or by the community? Manual labour was often glorified, and at least in theory, sometimes required. If he had stayed, perhaps, if he had settled, given allegiance, he would have come to care about these things as others did, but what he learnt from his restless progress was that people legislate for their own desires and it is the desire and not the legislation that makes the difference. Some wish to lead and others to be led, some to dominate and others to submit.
As spring advanced, as he approached the far coast, life in these places became more pleasant. It does not matter so much if there are four people to a bedroom when it is possible to sleep outside, in a hammock under the trees, with only a midnight whisper of anxiety about bears. He lay one night between two apple trees in full, pale plumage, and wakeful watched the slow circling of stars and planets like our own. He woke early one morning and walked into a lake as the sun rose, watched the trees’ reflection paint itself in the water holding his body and then swam quietly out past lily flowers taller than his head, his face level with the waterbirds. Bird’s eye view, a forest of reeds. He sat until dawn in a circle of people around the fire, singing and drumming and watching the dancers and the smoke rising into the dark sky. He held a newly born baby while the women helped the mother deliver the placenta, felt new life stir wet and sticky in his arms. He stood at the side of an illegal grave and helped to lower the uncoffined body of a man his own age who had died of untreated tuberculosis in the back of a car on the way to the hospital. He tipped a shovel and saw the dirt fill the folds of a tie-dyed blue shroud, turned away as the man’s friend dropped dust onto his closed eyes, his hollow face. His right wrist was scarred when the sleeve of a loose smock flamed while he was learning to cook fish over an open fire. When his chisel slipped, a man who’d dropped out of medical school had to stitch a gash clear across his left palm. He caught scabies and ringworm, something that was probably dysentery. He taught a child to read. He learnt to make sourdough bread in one place and taught three people how to do it in the next. He learnt his way around a car’s engine. He learnt to weave a hammock. He learnt to mend a roof, to make a cupboard, to build an outhouse and a long-drop toilet. He learnt to milk a cow, to plant a vegetable garden, to harness a horse and cart. He did not learn to fire a gun, but apart from that, he would have made a good pioneer. They were children of the future, given by their parents the Cold War, the atomic bomb, the computer, and they turned their backs, gazed instead on milking-stools, wells dug with spades, bread kneaded by the women’s bare hands. The nineteenth century without the massacres and the railways, the eighteenth without smallpox and the slave trade, the Pilgrim Fathers without the patriarchy and the witch-burning, the olden days. He moved on, and moved again. Whatever he was looking for, he hadn’t found it yet.
a sea star
There are not distinct seasons in Cornwall as in the rest of England. Winter nights are long, with a depth of blackness in the sky and brightness in the stars that I have not seen elsewhere. In summer, light haunts the water and the shore long after the day has gone out west. But it is rarely uncomfortably cold or uncomfortably hot, and usually raining a little. Camellias bud and blossom around Christmas, snowdrops and daffodils come mingled either side of the solstice, fuchsia and gorse foam here and there in the hedgerows at any time. Now, in February, there were violets, cow parsley, buttercups, wild garlic on the air below a south-facing slope. I held Rose’s hand as we picked our way through the mud towards the cove. Her boots were too big and twice already she’d put a sock down in the mire; Emma had been right to insist on the washing machine. I turned to see Emma balancing along the edge of the grassy bank above the path, gorse flaming behind her. I strained ahead to see Miriam stride determinedly alone and determinedly competent, her jeans splashed to the thigh with mud.
‘Did you use to do this,’ Rose asked. ‘When you were little?’
‘Do what?’
She gripped my hand harder. ‘Slither.’
I do not remember many springs. I remember summers, we boys daring and goading each other into the water and then staying there, jumping waves and diving for stones, until we were blue and our teeth chattered. Then we would sit on the rocks until it got boring and we went back in the sea. We used to try to catch crabs, I remembered, and I wore jeans and wellies, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t midsummer.
‘I think I was always muddy. Or wet. A bit of slithering probably didn’t make much difference.’
‘You were always on the beach. Every day.’
She’s heard the stories. My perfect seaside childhood, my unimaginable freedom, my school where there were two teachers, one of whom still liked to wield one of those springy metal rulers against the upturned palms of naughty boys, and from which we could go home unescorted for lunch.
‘We weren’t, you know. You get used to having the beach and you don’t go all that often. The grown-ups went every day, I think. My mother did. But s
he’d lived most of her life away from the sea and she never got used to it.’
Rose skidded and grabbed me. ‘Not before she died.’
‘Not before she died.’
Miriam had stopped on our skyline, where the top of the steps down to the cove began, and I pulled out my phone and took a picture of her there, before she looked round, frowning out to sea with the mist in her hair.
The tide was out, just past the turn, and so the sandy beach stretched south beyond the cliffs that enclose the cove and the rock pools were full. I let Miriam go down the path first, trusting her – showing that I trusted her – to manage the mud-slicked slope and the log steps slippery with winter’s rain, the long fall onto the black rocks below. The breathing and beat of the waves returned to its place in me. The top of the beach is covered in boulders and I hung back; the girls are agile enough but the shoreline is not Emma’s natural habitat. She took my hand to make the last stride. The wind off the sea ruffled her hair.
‘Miriam?’ I called. ‘Mimi? Listen, you can go anywhere you like on the beach, but don’t go round the rocks into the next cove, OK? The tide’s coming in now and the next one gets cut off in the first hour. And there’s no way up the cliff from it.’
She turned but didn’t come back. Her voice came faintly on the wind. ‘OK, Dad. I won’t.’
Emma lifted her face to the breeze, so her hair breathed behind her. ‘You really know this bit of coast, hm?’
‘The rocks and tide don’t change.’
I used to know the turning of the tide the way I knew the rising and setting of the sun, somewhere in my body. It didn’t mean I never got caught – I remembered the next cove because there was a beguiling cave there and Petroc and I had had to wade back around the cliffs more than once – but we never got caught out. Miriam had made her way far out over the rocks, ignoring the pools and taking herself out to the water’s edge. Weak sunlight played on a patch of sea to the west, but most of the waves were a grey that fitted exactly into my mind.
‘Come on, Rose,’ I said. ‘Let’s see what we can find in the rock pools.’
I’d brought the net and the bucket and spade that still live in the back of the car along with bottled water and the spare tyre, as if at any moment as we putter around the Midlands we might need to make a sand sculpture or study a miniature green crab. Rose took my hand as we stepped over the rocks, her rainbow-striped wellies bright and sweet on the slate and brown seaweed. Take them off, I wanted to say, let’s feel the stone and the slime under our feet, but it was February and I was an idiot. Ahead of us, Miriam sat down, her knees tucked under her chin, and gazed out to sea. The patch of sunlight had spread and the low mist shifted enough to show two ships coming off the Atlantic into the lanes of the English Channel.
Rose squatted down, stirred a pool with her finger. ‘Are those sea enemies?’
I squatted beside her. They look like nothing, like leeches or tumours, until they open like flowers. ‘Anemones. Yes. You don’t need to touch them, but if you swish the water a bit, they might open.’
She gazed into the water.
‘We should start on the lower shore,’ I said. ‘It’s a spring tide, a big one, so it goes out further than usual and there are more things to see. We can come up with the tide.’
We gave Miriam a wide berth, her own tidal zone, and came down a stretch of sand between the rocks.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Just stand a moment and listen.’
Waves. A gull. The tumble of stones.
She stood obediently, but peered into the nearer pools.
‘OK. Now, do you remember that it’s like looking for birds, the longer we can stay still and pretend to be part of the rock, the more things we’ll see? And some of the things are very tiny, so we need to look really really carefully?’
‘I know. I’m good at looking carefully.’
I looked carefully up the beach as we squatted down. Emma had sat on a stone just below the path, not even really coming onto the beach at all, and was intent on something in her gloved hands, which would not be a shapely piece of driftwood or an unusual shell but her phone.
Rose leant forward. ‘Is that a plant?’
I peered. ‘It’s another anemone. A beadlet anemone. There are lots of different sorts. That green one’s called a snakelocks. Can you think why?’
I taught her to trail her fingers gently through the weed, as if stroking someone’s hair, and to ease away the pebbles on the bottom of the pool as carefully as you might open someone else’s post. Disturb no-one, leave no trace, although of course you cannot see a thing without changing it. I showed her the tip of my finger.
‘There. Asterina phylactia. A sea star.’
A sea star, a miniature starfish, scarcely bigger than the stone of Emma’s engagement ring and patterned with a tiny mosaic in bright terracotta and pale green.
She bent over my finger. I could feel her breath on my cold hand. ‘Is it an animal?’
‘Not exactly. They’re sometimes called cushion stars. Probably a bit more like animals than plants. They lay eggs.’
I turned my finger. ‘Can you see, they have a sort of ridge between the top and bottom? And they’re not so pretty underneath.’
‘I think there might be something under that seaweed.’
She was right. A spider crab, invisible until they move, and in the next pool we found a seven-pointed starfish and then a squat lobster almost too big for the bucket.
‘Wait. Put the starfish back first, just where you found it. We don’t put two creatures in the bucket at the same time.’
‘In case they don’t like each other?’
I nodded.
‘How would you know?’
‘That’s the point,’ I said. ‘You can’t know. So you don’t do it.’
She cupped her hands around the starfish and lowered it gently. ‘Bye bye. You can go home now. What if they like each other?’
‘You can’t know that either.’
‘Dad, is it mean, to go rock-pooling?’
Miriam had stood up and was making her way back towards us. I waved.
‘It’s probably more benign than a lot of what people do.’ The specimens we’re admiring, for example, all contain significant levels of flame-retardants, PCBs and heavy metals. ‘And the creatures we’re looking at – well, you can tell that they can be scared, but I doubt they have much by way of memory. We just treat them very carefully.’
Miriam came nearer. ‘What have you found?’
‘A shy sea star,’ said Rose. ‘And a frightened lobster.’
The tide came, nudging our feet, taking the lower shore back into the sea. The girls moved onto the sand, Miriam directing Rose in the irrigation of a complex of sandcastles and fortifications. I went up the beach to Emma, now pacing the sand.
‘Are you cold?’ I asked.
She swung her arms. ‘A bit. Sat still too long.’
‘You could have come rock-pooling.’
She glanced at me. ‘I know, I could. I just don’t have the patience, you know that. Looking at tiny things and putting them back.’
Patience, I wanted to say, like other virtues, is mostly a matter of habit.
She blew into her gloved hands. ‘What did you find?’
‘Tiny things. We put them back. The girls enjoyed it.’
‘Sorry, Adam.’
What did you find, I wanted to ask, anything good on Twitter? Anything more important than a shy sea star and a frightened lobster? I turned to look at the girls. At home, they hardly ever collaborate peacefully, require frequent adult intervention and peace-keeping.
‘We could probably have an actual conversation,’ I said. ‘I’d say we’ve at least twenty minutes before the tide gets to them.’
She took my arm. ‘Do you think if we didn’t talk about them or about money we’d have anything to say?’
‘There’s always the NHS,’ I said. ‘You could tell me how it’s being wilfully destroyed by right-wing bureauc
rats and I could wonder whether to point out that not only are people not dying on the streets in France and Germany and Denmark and the Netherlands but actually living longer and healthier lives than we do even though they have contributory healthcare systems. And then I could decide not to because you’ll only get angry.’
Shut up, I thought, shut the fuck up, a rare chance to talk, to feed our starveling marriage, and I start with the passive aggression. And how far away is Miriam, in the cold? I could cover that distance in less than a minute, if I had to. A beach, in some ways, is easier than a house, because I would see if she collapsed.
Emma touched her head to my shoulder. ‘We could talk about the summer. Plan a holiday. We could think about the garden. We were talking about currant bushes, last year. Next door has strawberries and tomatoes, the girls would like that.’
Three plants in a three-storey ceramic pot that cost more than it would to take a taxi to Waitrose and buy an armful of their finest. It’s not the point, I know. The girls would see leaves, buds, flowers, small green fruit becoming less small red fruit. Patience. It’s too easy to romanticise my own childhood, remembered afternoons perched in the fork of a plum tree heavy with fruit, the brandy smell of windfalls broken by their fall and rotting, attended by wasps, in the sun. Nostalgia is the enemy of intelligence. I did not have libraries, theatres, museums, trips to London, flights to the Mediterranean. I did not require the frequent attentions of a consultant in allergies or respiratory medicine. How could I wish anything other than what we had, since the slightest variation of the past, the slightest indulgence in fictional time-travel, would tamper with our extraordinary luck? If Miriam’s breathing had stopped in the presence of people who did not know what to do (me, for example), if the ambulance had been a minute or two delayed by traffic or a paramedic being on the loo, if the day had not been cold enough for mild hypothermia to protect her brain, if if if. And then I think of all the ifs on which we all depend: all the times we’ve been caught in the traffic jam behind an accident on the motorway, and if we had left ten minutes earlier, if we hadn’t gone back to check that the central heating was off, or on the other hand, if the people ten minutes ahead and now unaware of the fire brigade sawing open their cars as blood drips onto the concrete, if those people had gone back to check the heating, had decided that after all they might want their hiking boots – we cannot live like that. One story at a time. One time at a time. In this one, we are on the beach and Emma wants to talk about whether to plant tomatoes and Miriam and Rose are watching their channels fill with water, their sand buildings blur and slide.