“Aha! Serves you right for sneaking a bite,” he said, laughing.
“What happened? Are you all right?” It was Catherine’s voice. I didn’t have any strength in me to reply. Time had flowed backwards, from my pained lower jaw towards the invisible centre of the nervous system, where everything comes together.
THE SANDMAN IS COMING
SHE WAS WEARING A STRAW HAT with a wide brim, her thin arms at her sides. The little girl, who was holding her hand, was wearing beach sandals decorated with a large bright-pink sponge flower that concealed the strap. She walked a bit unsteadily. She didn’t look up at her mother or at the sea, but down at the sand, as though she were scrutinizing it. Something caught her attention, and she stopped in her tracks and crouched down, still holding on to her mother’s hand. Her mother had to quickly thrust her right foot forward to keep from being yanked backwards. This brought a shadow over her face.
There were clouds passing overhead, so the sun was not as hot as it could have been. I was sweating anyway. In the distance, where the milky sky seemed to melt into the white sand, the halo of sun made my sleep-deprived eyes tingle. It was a weekday afternoon, and there was almost no one around. Apart from the three of us, there was only an older man walking his dog along the shore. It was a puppy, maybe a Shiba, with a black crease between its eyes, and it looked so friendly and playful that the lead was probably unnecessary. I drew the girl’s attention to the dog. She watched as it played in the water, leaping back on to the beach every time a wave approached, then she turned her eyes upwards to me.
“Drink water?” she asked.
“Who?”
“Doggy. Doggy drink water?”
“Hmm. I’m not sure about that. Do you know what seawater tastes like?”
“Tastes salty. Miss Yoko says so.”
Miss Yoko was probably a teacher at the nursery she’d started attending that spring. All our conversations proceeded under the assumption that I knew everyone she knew.
“Right. Well, I don’t think he’d really gulp it down or anything. He’s just getting his nose wet.”
“If doggy drink seawater, then doggy get thirsty.”
Her mother, who had been listening to our conversation, managed a smile that seemed like a smile. In a voice that was quite like her daughter’s, despite being an octave lower, she said that when she was a little girl, she always thought it strange that fish didn’t get thirsty. Then she turned to me and said, wasn’t it odd she’d forgotten about that? She wanted me to say something back, but I refrained from the platitude of how it must have been the fresh sea air that had just caused her to remember. If she’d been someone else, the breezes and smell of the sea might have had the effect of letting her relax. But I knew better—I knew she hated the sea and stayed away.
I wasn’t being considerate. Filling the gap between emotion and action with “consideration” or “thoughtfulness” was the attitude of someone who tried to be all things to all people, someone whose actions were part of a pattern. My actions were thoughtless, and if praise came my way for that, I’d be grateful and encouraged. On the other hand, if someone were to respond to such praise by saying, “Oh, it’s nothing”, I’d want to walk the other way. The idea of doing for others what you want done for yourself is, when I think about it, moral and gracious, and I may be well-disposed to it, but it’s also a self-pleasuring act. Not doing to others what you don’t want done to yourself is no different perhaps, but in this case, given what I knew, I thought it best to keep my mouth shut.
She was the much younger sister of a close friend of mine, and I’d met her the summer after my first year in university. From the first day when she wrapped her sticky hand around my little finger and let me lead her along the beach near her parents’ house in Boso, we almost always hung out together, with or without her brother. I wouldn’t go as far as to say she felt like a sister, but she definitely felt like a niece. I was twenty and she was six, and that was eighteen years ago. She was just a couple of years older than the little girl staring at the sand in front of me now. Of course, there is a world of difference between a four-year-old and a six-year-old, and back then the six-year-old talked to me all day long, her mouth and hands constantly moving as she played on the beach, building sandcastles that were taller than she was. To keep them from getting washed away by the tide, she’d build further up on the beach, where the sand was hard and she needed a metal spade to dig it out. She’d be completely engrossed in building a castle and the entire town that surrounded it. My friend was still healthy then, and he and I would help by digging the moats. She’d get quite dirty from the wet sand, but she didn’t care at all—she just played and played till the sun went down.
Every summer holiday after that, even after she’d become old enough for cleavage to start showing, she would slip into the navy blue swimsuit she wore in the school pool and come with us to the beach. She’d talk passionately about that first sandcastle we built, and as though it were a ritual—or an obligation—we’d build another one. She once overheard me telling her brother that I thought it was funny for a girl to be so interested in such a thing, instead of, say, swimming or tossing a beach ball—or flirting with boys. She responded by saying that there had to be a sand festival somewhere, like the snow festival in Sapporo, and that there had to be a sandcastle world championship, which she definitely wanted to enter. She spoke softly, which led me to question how serious she was, but there was strength and determination in her eyes. I’ve never forgotten the expression on her face. For several summers after that, she would invite her brother and me to the beach to help her build sandcastles—although it was also to give her brother, who had been spending more and more time in the hospital, a rare day out and the chance to breathe some sea air. She’d make photocopies of European castles, and would even draw rough designs in a sketchbook. Her favourites were the old châteaux of France, and she would study the castles of the Loire valley in travel guides, using them as a model for her own turreted replicas. Once I suggested that if we were going to build a castle, we should build a model out of cardboard—it was a waste to build a castle from sand and have it crumble before the night was through. She resisted this suggestion stubbornly. She said that watching as something you’d worked so hard to build came crashing down at high tide was one of the things she enjoyed the most.
EVERY NOW AND AGAIN, I could hear the sound of tyres on the rough asphalt of the highway, which ran along the breakwater. On afternoons when there was not much traffic, the sound of the tyres carried further than the sound of the car engines. This drone was overlaid with the sound of waves, and it reached my ears as a low harmony. I called out the little girl’s name—it incorporated one character from her mother’s name—as though I was her father. She turned to me, removed her hand from her mother’s and grabbed mine. It was small and round like a juggler’s beanbag. Her other hand was covered in sand. We walked along this way, her mother now in front of us. In places where there was nothing that looked interesting enough to pick up, she’d dig her sandals into the sand and drag them along, tracing our route with two clumsy lines. Every now and then she’d turn around and look at what she’d created, and sometimes the wind would blow and sand would get in her eyes. When this happened, she’d lift my right hand as it held hers, and use the back of it to rub her eyes and face. Maybe she did this because her free hand was dirty—or maybe it was easier than letting go and using her own hand. It made me think I had to have done the same thing myself—walking along with my parents and using one of their hands to scratch my face. The little girl repeated the action a few times, then, possibly because it wasn’t effective, let go and scratched her cheek with her own hand. She ran ahead of both her mother and me, and walked in front of us. The beach was probably new and unusual for her. It was totally different from the pristine sandpit at her nursery—there wasn’t even any dog or cat mess to worry about there.
The little girl then walked on the gravelly sand near the shoreline, th
e water coming up to her ankles. Her mother told her to be careful, not to squat, the tide was coming in, but enticed by the prospect of a seashell, she promptly forgot and squatted and soaked the white underpants that were poking out from under her flower-patterned yellow dress.
“Don’t worry,” her mother said. “I’ve brought a change of clothes. But don’t grab those seashells. You’ll cut yourself.”
Pieces of glass that had washed up on to the beach had been worn round and smooth by the sand and the sea, so they weren’t a concern, but some seashells were broken in ways that left them with sharp, serrated edges that could really hurt a little girl’s soft fingers.
“I should never have given her that sakura-gai seashell I found at my parents’ house,” the girl’s mother said. “As soon as I gave it to her, she asked me where I’d got it from. You know, it looked so fragile, I thought it would crumble if I held it too tightly. Remember when I was a girl? There were sakura-gai everywhere, you didn’t have to look very hard to find them.”
When she was a girl… When was that? How many years ago? How old would she have been? I remembered that she’d collected seashells in a wooden box that was for keeping insects. The thin, translucent fragments looked like they’d just fallen off the delicate fingers of a pubescent girl. She’d lined the box with cotton wool and arranged the fingernail-shaped shells as though they were examples of manicure treatments. I found myself glancing at her fingers.
“Anyway, as soon as I told her where the seashell had come from, she insisted on coming here. I was in such a rush when I was packing the bag, I forgot the plasters.”
“Telling her to be careful because you forgot the plasters doesn’t seem fair…”
“It sure does,” she said, and laughed. When she laughed, her lower jaw thrust forward a little, and her protruding lower lip became more noticeable. Her dimples, which were less like hollows and more like little canyons, were as I’d always remembered. Her daughter had inherited her mother’s features.
“I think there’s a convenience store on the side of the main road. Why don’t I go and buy some there, if you’re worried about it?”
“There’s no need to do that. But thanks.”
She said “thanks” in a peculiar way—truncating the word and flinging it at the person who’d done her the kindness. In general, it’s difficult to say “thank you” without making it seem like you’re hoping for more. Her “thanks” was an exception to this, and I realized that I hadn’t heard it for a long time. I’d spent the three years before her brother died living abroad, and we hadn’t seen each other during that time. She’d graduated from high school and, after giving up on going to university for financial reasons, had attended a technical school for surveyors while working part-time. When her brother told me that her studies included producing plans and blueprints, the image that came to mind was her favourite Maruman sketchbook, with its orange and green cover, in which she used to draw her sandcastle designs. In fact, according to her brother, she had no interest in real building sites—it seemed she loved her involvement at the abstract stage, but not further. This seemed a pretty self-limiting attitude for a creative person, but there was no doubt that she meant it sincerely.
However, towards the end of her first year at this technical school—a time when I thought she’d be developing her skills—she dropped out and got married. It was a quick decision, and her parents had barely any time to object. Her husband was an architect, who had been an occasional lecturer at the school. He was ten years older than she was, and he’d spent years living on various islands, supervising the construction of seawalls—his speciality was flood control. I don’t know how he explained his background to her, but she’d always been a bit of a dreamer and he reeled her in easily enough, persuading her to leave school. They moved to the island of Oshima, but as soon as she got pregnant, he suddenly started taking frequent trips to the head office on the mainland. She began to sense the purpose of these trips, and when she realized that this behaviour would not change after the baby was born, she put an end to their relationship, just as quickly as they’d got married in the first place. I knew about all this because my friend had kept in touch, writing to me from his hospital bed that it seemed his sister was operating on a different wavelength from her husband—she liked sandcastles, he liked reinforced concrete. I didn’t know about the divorce until I received the official notice of my friend’s death, though. I called her after I returned to Japan, but I never mentioned her ex-husband, and she didn’t say a word about him either.
The day before had been a Sunday, and I’d come to this seaside town—the first time in a long time—to mark the second anniversary of my friend’s death. I’d spent the night drinking with his parents and his hometown friends, and I’d taken today off work, and so his sister, now a woman, invited me to come for a walk on the beach with her daughter. I was still wearing my mourning suit, everything except the jacket and tie. I remembered how my friend had written that when his sister was pregnant, and for a while after the baby was born, she used to spend all her time by the sea. Since the divorce, however, she stayed away, and she’d even stopped visiting her parents, whose home was on the coast. In fact, she’d made the radical decision to move with her daughter to an inland city. This was the first time they’d been back in months.
The little girl began wandering down the beach, away from the man with his dog. Sometimes she’d stop and squat, entranced by something in the sand and picking it up. I couldn’t tell if it was seashells or something else. The petal-like pink sakura-gai would be washed clean by the waves, and buried in the gravelly sand.
“I’m going over to her,” I said. “I’m a little worried about the waves.”
There was a pile of charred wood on the sand, where someone had built a fire. I stood next to it and, keeping my eyes on the little girl, I took off my shoes and socks. I tried to roll up my trousers, but ended up losing my balance. As I stumbled about, suddenly I heard my friend’s sister gasp from behind me.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, turning around quickly.
“It’s my earring. It’s gone. I must have dropped it somewhere.”
She tucked in her chin and tilted her head like a little bird, and with both hands removed the earring from her other ear, and showed it to me. It was a simple thing, several thin fragments of gemstone layered on top of each other to create a petal effect. They were of such an unobtrusive design I hadn’t noticed them earlier.
“Did you have it when we came down on to the beach?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe.”
“Well, we can try retracing our steps. It’s not going to be easy, though. The colour of the earring is so subtle, it’ll blend in with the sand. But let’s go back and look.”
I ran down to the little girl and explained that Mummy had dropped something and that we needed to help her find it. I took her hand and then the three of began our search effort. As luck would have it, the little girl had been dragging her sandals all the way along and it was easy to see the path we’d taken. The area we had to cover was therefore confined, which meant that we actually had a chance of finding the earring. We were bending over, eyes concentrating, hardly saying a word, as though we were in a competition to see who could find it first. As we got away from the shore, there were fewer shells and more rubbish and dry seaweed. We used sticks to poke around, and to stir through the sand where our three sets of footprints crossed each other. Sometimes our sticks would knock into each other, as though we were in battle, and sometimes this would prove so funny that we’d break out laughing.
“You think this is anything like the treasure hunt on the Magdalen Islands?” my friend’s sister asked out of the blue.
“What? Where?”
“You wrote to me about it? In a letter from France?”
“Did I?”
“Well, it was a letter to my brother actually. He let me read it. He thought you might want him to share it with me. Sorry if he shouldn’t h
ave…”
“Heh. It’s a bit late to apologize now.”
“It sure is,” she said with a smile. “You wrote something about sandcastles too. Do you remember that?”
I did have some memory of writing to my friend about those islands. I hadn’t gone there myself—an acquaintance, who spent every summer in Nantucket, “the whaling capital of the world”, had told me stories about his visit. The Magdalen Islands are part of Quebec, and there are two ways to get there: you can either take a boat from Quebec City or Montreal down the Saint Lawrence River out into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, or you can cross over to Newfoundland from New Brunswick and take a ship that goes via Prince Edward Island—which is where Anne of Green Gables is set. The economy of the Islands is mainly centred on fishing and tourism, and each summer they hold a treasure hunt, which is based on local history, as well as a sandcastle competition. My acquaintance had taken part in both. The treasure hunt had a generous prize, but he said the sandcastle contest was much more fun and “just crazy, man”. There were these wonderful intricately constructed sandcastles—“they’re just huge”. They’d been holding the competition for decades, and there were several different categories—for children, adults, families, and according to theme. But unlike the Sapporo snow festival, where you could build anything you liked, everyone had to build a castle.
My acquaintance entered the “hard labour” category where a team of adults had to build a castle that was at least a metre high in the space of a day. Planks and containers could be used, but no adhesives, just water. The teams had practised together just for the competition, so the standard of the constructions was really impressive. My acquaintance showed me photos: a Tower of Babel with five or six vaulted layers supported by columns; a phantasmagorical castle, covered in Gaudi-inspired elements that looked like threadworms; a soaring Machu Picchu citadel. I thought there was no way people could build things like that just by picturing them in their heads, and my acquaintance said that teams were allowed to bring designs with them.
The Bear and the Paving Stone Page 7