by Sarah Moss
Dad and the Prof came back while the guys were eating their breakfast and Mum, Molly and I were pushing ours around. Gruel is a thing you can eat without thinking about it as long as you’re very hungry, a bit like white sauce or maybe wallpaper paste. It was the first time I’d seen the boys eat like that and I was impressed. Have mine, I said, really, I’m not very hungry. Mum, are there any of those bannock things left? No, she said, and someone’s going to have to grind some grain if you want more of them for lunch. Or we could just get sandwiches from Spar, said Molly, and grinned at me while the boys started explaining to her why we couldn’t. They were so loud we didn’t hear the bushes rustling and Dad came out saying, what, what’s this about Spar? Just a joke, said Mum, Molly was just teasing, have you two had a good time? We weren’t off on a jolly, said Dad, don’t talk to me as if I were some kid. Setting traps for rabbits, said the Prof, they count as vermin so it’s legal. Not quite authentic of course, they were introduced by the Romans, but it’s something. No, said Molly, not spring traps, they’re cruel. I was waiting for Dad to say life is cruel, get used to it, you’ll be happy enough to eat a stew. Not spring traps, said the Prof, they wouldn’t have had them. Don’t worry about it, Molly, you don’t need to know, we won’t make you deal with them if you don’t want to, but you know they would have killed animals, it would have been as ordinary as going to the shops, death would have been part of their daily normality in a way that we can’t imagine. They’d have brought the kill home and it would have been like getting back from the supermarket, unpacking, take the skin to scrape and the bones for tools, wind the sinews for sewing leather and blow up the bladder for the children to play ball. Some bloody supermarket he’s got there, murmured Dan, don’t fancy the scene in his kitchen. Molly had put down her bowl. Yeah, she said, well, whatever, I’m happy to leave it at the imagining stage, poor old rabbits.
I could see Mum wanting to ask Dad to wash his hands before eating but she didn’t. He ate fast, blindly, his gaze fixed on something near his feet. She watched him. The Prof waved his spoon around a lot and went on talking, Iron Age hunting techniques, flint knapping, someone he knew who’d nearly lost an eye which was why he himself had always been meticulous about goggles, how he thought Iron Age flint knappers might have protected their eyes, evidence for very early forms of surgery and suturing. The shadows were already shorter and sharper than they had been when I got up, the beginnings of another hot day. We were wearing a path between the hut, the fireplace and the tents, and all the rabbit droppings were turning pale and dry. We must have dispossessed the rabbits, and who knew what birds and voles, with our talking and coming and going and our fire. Right, said the Prof, so Silvie, you’ll go with Molly and the lads? He didn’t have the right kind of accent to say ‘lads’. Er, sure, I said, go where? Jesus, Silvie, said Dad, you haven’t been listening to a single word, have you?
We went to the beach. This time the Prof checked that we had the foraging book and knew where to look for edible seaweed and mussels. Low tide, he said, late morning, and I checked before we came that that beach is clean, we could have a real feast this evening. There’s wild garlic, I said, at the edge of the wood. We often ate mussels while camping, but Dad always resisted the garlic. Hungry folk want plain food, he said, the corollary being that if you didn’t want ‘plain food’ you weren’t hungry and so shouldn’t be eating in the first place. Good idea, said the Prof, we can eat the greens as well. See you later, enjoy yourselves. I don’t think he minded at all that the students were having more fun than we could reasonably assume the Iron Age community had enjoyed. I don’t think he’d have minded much about the fruit pastilles.
The others had been going to the beach on their day trips last term and walked briskly at first. There was no path. The sun was too bright in my eyes and already I could feel the skin on my forearms beginning to burn. How far is it, I asked. Half an hour, said Pete, why, you tired? What’s it like sleeping in the hut? Dark, I said. Very dark, even in the mornings. And we can hear each other breathe, all night, there’s no privacy. What about the beds, said Dan, are they really lumpy? Don’t think so, I said, not that I’ve noticed. Mum says they’re doing her back in. Dad had been scornful about Mum’s back. Try getting a bit more exercise, he said, we weren’t never meant to spend our lives sat on our backsides, and no wonder folk have trouble the amount of time they spend sat on them sofas. We did not have a sofa, and Mum’s armchair was one her mother’s friend Eileen had discarded as worn out. What’s it like in the tents, I asked, although I knew perfectly well what it is like in a tent. Cramped and stuffy, said Molly, and light all the time, I keep waking up about when I’d normally be going to sleep at the weekend, I see why they built huts. Swap, I said, you listen to my dad snoring all night and I’ll get up early. Yeah, she said, thanks, no deal.
The next field had cows in it. No way, said Molly, they weren’t here last time, I’m not going through there. Mostly when cows kill folk, I said, it’s because someone’s dogs have bothered the cows, they don’t just attack innocent bystanders, you know they’re herbivores. I don’t care, she said, I’m not going into that field. You can walk in the middle, said Dan, we’ll protect you, they’ll have to trample our bodies into the mud to get you. Nope, she said, not happening. So there were some barbed-wire fences to negotiate, which is harder to do in a linen tunic than in jeans, and then a river, which meant a diversion through the sand dunes where it is remarkably easy to get lost even when you know the sun is in the south-east and you are on the east coast and that means as long as the sun is in both your eyes but bothering the right one more you will soon come to the water. You’re so good at this stuff, Silvie, said Molly, I suppose your dad taught you. No, I thought, I just know the approximate shape of this island and that the sun rises in the east and I didn’t need to be taught either of those things, but I said mm, it’s his kind of thing. Jesus it’s hot, said Dan, does anyone have any water? Can we stop in the shade for a bit? Molly, of course, had a plastic bottle of cola, warm and unpleasantly sticky, though by then even the west side of the dunes had no shade. We’ve actually managed to lose the sea, said Pete, can you imagine what Silvie’s dad’s going to say when we explain that there aren’t any mussels because we couldn’t find the coast? Molly giggled. I stood up and slithered through the sand and sharp marram grass to the top of the dune. I can see it, I said, funnily enough we just keep heading east, it hasn’t moved. I’m so hot, said Dan, the first thing I’m going to do when we get there is swim. The tide’s out, I said, the first thing you’ll have to do is walk about half a mile to the water, and even before he replied I wished I hadn’t said it. Know-it-all. OK, he said, rub it in why don’t you.
When we came to the beach it looked more like a desert, the sea itself a fiction on the horizon. We all took off our moccasins as soon as we were past the last of the sharp grass. Mine were wearing through. Molly’s toenails were painted sparkly blue. I was intrigued to see that Dan’s feet were even hairier than his legs; Dad’s were the only male feet I knew and they were as smooth as mine. Without talking about it we headed straight out towards the sea, towards the place where the hot sand began to cool and to ripple under our feet. At the edges of the bay I could see rocks where there would be mussels. Later, I thought, mussels and seaweed, I don’t think you get samphire on a beach like this. Not now. Our shadows on the sand were those of the Iron Age, and I remembered Doggerland, the name archaeologists gave the human settlements now under the North Sea. Once people had chased deer across this land, had camped, had carved figurines in bone and wood, in taking off their clothes dropped brooches and buttons which had not moved when the sea came creeping, when the tide rose and did not turn. You used to be able to walk from the marshy lowlands of Denmark to the Northumbrian forest. You used to have stones and grass under your soles all the way.
Around us the earth flattened out, the green detail of the land receding although we were still on it, out on England’s blurred margins. You’d think
a coastline more definite than a land border but it’s not so, not when you walk the watery edge at the turn of the tide and cannot say if you are on dry land, exactly. Do you know, said Dan, the British coast gets longer the more you measure it? We tried one day in the first year, they brought us to the beach and gave us tasks and questions and that was one of them, measure the shoreline, and of course the harder you try the more of it there is, round the rock pools and up and down every slope and after a while we realised it’s infinite, the edge of an island is infinite. I suppose that was the point. It wasn’t much of a point, said Molly, and as I recall it was bloody cold and there was nowhere for the girls to pee. No poetry in your soul, said Dan, that’s the problem with girls, they’re always thinking about where to pee. Molly kicked water out of a rock-pool at him and I said, my voice coming out surprisingly high, so would you be thinking about where to pee if you had to squat with your trousers round your ankles every time. It was one of my father’s themes, the way women allow their inferior plumbing to shape their relationship with the Great Outdoors. Actually, said Molly, it’s no harder for girls to pee than boys, the problem isn’t biology, it’s men’s fear of women’s bodies. If we were allowed to pull our knickers down and squat by a wall the way you’re allowed to get your dick out and piss up the wall there wouldn’t be a problem, it’s just the way you all act as if a vagina will come and eat you if it’s out without a muzzle. Hey, joke, Dan said, I was joking, don’t get upset. That’s the problem with boys, said Molly, they’re always telling people not to get upset. Vagina, I thought, she just said the word out loud. In front of boys. Children, children, said Pete, do you think the sea’s actually out there or are we just walking to Norway? Denmark, I said, actually, and it’s too hot, this isn’t a beach it’s a desert, the mussels are going to be cooked before we ever get to them.
We came at last to the water, to waves smoothing themselves over paper-flat sand. Further out, much further out, there was rising and falling like breathing and white sunlight flashing out but no breaking, no crash. Looks as if you’d have to go miles for a swim, said Dan. I kept going into the water, which at first was warm as blood. Feet, ankles, calves. I hiked up my tunic. Take it off, said Molly. Here, I’m going to. There was nowhere to leave a garment, nowhere dry for a long way. Don’t suppose it matters if it gets wet, I said, but Molly had handed her bag to Pete and pulled her tunic over her head. Her bra and matching pants were the purple of chocolate wrappers, and there was pale hair poking through the lace of the pants, uncontainable. Her belly was rounder than mine, a pale curve dented by her belly button. I suddenly wanted to touch. I looked away. She splashed past me. Dan and Pete looked unconcerned, as if they saw women half-naked in public every day, but I saw Pete glancing away and then back and then away again. Molly, up to her waist, reached round to unhook her bra from behind in a way I’d seen on TV though not, for example, in the girls’ changing room. She threw it to Dan, who fumbled, caught a strap, stood there with it dangling from his finger. Careful with that, I thought, can’t have been cheap, matching and all. She pushed her shoulders back, closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sky, as if offering her breasts to the sun. Bigger than mine, smaller nipples, already an outdoor colour; she had done this before. She opened her eyes and looked back at us, watching her. Come on, she said, you all said you were too hot. Come on in, the water’s lovely. We get the message, Moll, Dan said, you’re gorgeous, nice tits. As if it was mildly tiresome of her to undress for us, as if it was boring to look. He yawned. Yeah, all right, why not, he said.
Male bodies, Dan’s furred with dark hair, a thicker seam straight down from his navel, Pete bare as a piglet. Boxer shorts. A pink mushroom peeping at Pete’s thigh. I remembered whispers from girls at school, it were that big, though my own fumblings in the park with Simon from the year above had been strictly above the waist and not, really, apart from the novelty of the thing, very exciting. It was Molly I watched, Molly’s breasts lifting and falling as she jumped what waves there were, water beading on the curve of Molly’s shoulders, trickling down the narrow pathway of her spine between the plaits dark with the North Sea. Dan and Pete splashed her, leapt away, egged each other out into deeper water.
I stood there, thigh deep, feeling the small wash of waves against my knees and the heat of the sun hammering my back and head, an armful of coarse brown cloth clasped to my chest while the three older and braver than me disported themselves.
It got hotter. The tide must have turned but it seemed that nothing was moving, that our walking back towards the land made no difference to where we were. Sand ground between my toes, clung to the down on my legs. I could feel it beneath my fingernails, in the damp under my arms. I licked sweat off my upper lip and had sand on my tongue and between my teeth. The beach underfoot had hardened in ridges, like walking over bones. My head ached. We went in single file, Dan then Pete then Molly then me, feet following step after step, step after step. Water, I kept thinking, water, but I knew we didn’t have any. I chewed on my tongue to make my mouth water but it didn’t work. I could feel my heartbeat in my head, thick blood thudding against my skull, behind my eyes. There was a stream at the end of the dunes, unbelievable as a happy ending. We kept going.
We returned to the camp mid-afternoon, our two bags of mussels already giving off a worse than fishy smell. These bags are going to stink, said Molly, hefting them over a stile, we’ll all get ill, though I suppose then we can go back to the world of indoor plumbing and ice-cream. Dan caught my eye. Girls and toilets, he murmured, what did I tell you?
Mum came out of the hut as we arrived. I thought she had been sleeping, or maybe crying; she had a private look on her face and could barely open her eyes in the sunlight. There you are, she said pointlessly. I’m going to the stream, I said, I’m all hot and sandy and I need water. Molly had folded in the shade of the big oak, lain back and closed her eyes. Don’t drink the stream water, Mum said, here, there’s spring water in the jug.
I couldn’t bear to put my feet back into the wet sandy moccasins and picked my way barefoot down to the stream. I had imagined I might bathe in it, had perhaps seen myself reclining like Ophelia, hair flowing, but of course it was far too shallow. I glanced around, took off the sweaty, sand-crusted tunic and left it in a heap on the grass. I remembered Molly’s purple lace and looked down at my washed-out, once-white cotton pants and a bra whose ‘flesh tone’ might have been convincing on a trout. It won’t show through your school shirts, Mum had said. When I grow up, I thought, when I get away, I will go out and buy myself pants in emerald and turquoise and scarlet and I will wear them with bras that are orange and lime and what Mum calls shocking pink. I will have lipstick and thin tights and high heels, I will have cowboy boots like Claire’s Aunty Sue. I stepped into the stream, balancing on the stones. The moorland water was colder than the sea had been, its pull faster. I turned and waded upstream, remembering a peaty amber pool up past the rowans. A breeze came down from the moor and breathed on my belly and chest. I kept slipping on slimy rocks, knew the water wasn’t deep enough to cushion a fall. If I knocked my head, I thought, I would lie here and drown, they would find me in my wet undies, blood wavering like weed, but I kept going, my mind now full of the image of myself sitting in the pool which had become rounded and deep, dappled with leaf-shade, where my arms could lift and float tanned by the rusty water.
When I got to the place I’d remembered it was barely knee-deep and not particularly near any trees, and the water so dark I couldn’t see what I was sitting on as I lowered myself, but I sat there anyway in oozy mud, the roots of long-dead trees poking my bottom, knees sticking up with the waterline below my navel. I tilted back uncomfortably, the pool not wide enough for me to lean, but the water stroked my sunburn, soothed away the itchy sand. I crossed my legs, tucked my feet under my thighs where the mud was slick and cool, felt cold water filter through my knickers and right inside me. I looked around again and struggled to undo my bra the way Molly had undone he
rs, hands behind my shoulders, let it lift away from my shoulder blades, felt my nipples harden like hers as I leant forward and dipped them in the cold marsh water. I touched them, watched the shape of my breasts change. I splashed my face, closed my eyes and saw my blood’s rose-red in the sun. I thought then about what might be around me, folded in the peat, what other limbs might be held in the same dark water, what other eyes closed, and that’s where I was when Dad and the Prof came striding over the heather. They were carrying dead rabbits hanging from strings tied around the back legs, the mouths dribbling blood onto the turf and haloed with flies. The water wasn’t deep enough to hide in, not even to cover my breasts which were after all barely large enough to qualify, and though I scrabbled with the bra straps behind my back I was too late, couldn’t do it. Dad apologised to the Prof, maybe the second time I’d heard him apologise to anyone ever, and sent him on. When he’d gone, Dad put down his rabbits – their eyes still bright, I noticed, and no obvious traumatic injuries – and hauled me out of the water which he didn’t need to do, I would have got out when he told me to. Cover yourself, he said, eyes averted in disgust, where are your clothes, and with a hand twisted through my hair dragged me stumbling through the heather and reeds back to where the tunic lay in the sun. Put it on, he said, you should be ashamed of yourself, I’ll not have my daughter a little whore, and only when I had covered myself and turned back to face him did he take off his Iron Age leather belt. Stand against that tree, he said, a rowan not much taller than me, the trunk against which I leant my forehead no wider than my face, and as his arm rose and swung and rose again, as the belt sang through the sunny air, I thought hard about the tree between my hands, about the cells in its leaves photosynthesizing the afternoon sun, about the berries ripening hour by hour, the impalpable pulse of sap under my palms, the reach of roots below my feet and deep into the earth. It went on longer than usual, as if the open air invigorated him, as if he liked the setting. I thought about the leather of his belt, the animal from whose skin it was made, about the sensations that skin had known before the fear and pain of the end. Itching, scratching, wind and rain and sun. About the flaying, the tanning. Pick up those rabbits, he said when he had finished, and don’t let me ever catch you stripping again, lying around naked like that, waiting for one of those lads I’d say, and don’t you imagine I won’t do this again as often as it takes, as long as you’re living under my roof you’ll behave yourself or else, do you understand. The belt swung from his hand. What are you standing there for, did I not just tell you to get the rabbits, are you wanting more, believe me you can have it if you are.