By the Shore

by Galaxy Craze

  Nineteen

  The sky was heavy and white when I woke. I thought, Maybe it will snow today, maybe it will snow. The other girls lay asleep around me, curled under blankets, as still as fallen stones. I lay on my back, looking up through the window at the bare branches of the trees, at the feathery hands of the evergreens. This is what it feels like to wake up next to strangers: as though you are waking up in a very cold room.

  I remembered the crying sound from last night and listened for it, but it had stopped. Small birds, winter birds, landed on the thin branches of the trees, then sprang away. Everything seemed so clear against the white sky that it almost stung my eyes, but I stared and stared as though it were the first time I had ever seen anything clearly.

  I sat up slowly. I had fallen asleep in my tights, and now my thighs and the back of my neck were damp from the heat. I pushed the blankets away from me and stood up. The skirt that I’d lent to Barbara lay in a pile of clothes by the side of her bed. Taking small steps on my toes I walked over to it. Being quiet is difficult, it’s like holding your breath. I picked up the skirt—it smelled of cigarette smoke and perfume—and stepped into it, put on my patent leather shoes, picked up my bag. Barbara was asleep on her bed, her face half in the pillow, her straight blond hair falling around her. There were two black marks, small thumbprints, under her eyes from where her mascara had rubbed off.

  I put my hand on the doorknob and held it very tightly. My head felt as though it were full of water, and I thought that I might fall down. I remembered that Mrs Whitmore had hung my coat in the peach-coloured room by the front door. I wanted to say goodbye to her, to thank her. When I looked at the Snoopy clock on Barbara’s desk it was half past six. My mother was supposed to come at eleven. That’s when all the mothers were supposed to collect their daughters.

  The door handle made a small clanking sound, and I heard someone turn under the blankets. I froze, holding my breath, until she was still again. The only sound in the room was their breathing, slow from sleep but steady as a distant wind.

  The air outside was cold. I could almost see my breath hanging thin as a moth’s wing in front of me. I stopped by the side of the road to pull up my tights. It was quiet; the windows of the houses were dark. In the morning light, I saw the ditch by the side of the road. “Mind the ditch! Mind the ditch!” rang through my head like a bell. I put my hands in my pockets and walked down the narrow road, past the old brick houses and the cottages that looked like loaves of bread.

  I passed a low white fence and walked close to the gate, looking for the cow I had heard last night. I stood on the fence watching; the cows grazed quietly together. The wind blew around my neck and face, lifting my hair from my shoulders. The ground was damp beneath me, and when I stepped down the mud sloshed against the sides of my shoes. I walked down the lane until I reached a crossroads and a small wooden sign posted on a telephone pole, PUBLIC FOOTPATH TO VILLAGE. An arrow pointed left.

  There was a faint trail through the field from where people had walked, flattened down and darker. I had never been this way, but I wasn’t worried. I followed it as though it were the only lighted path on a dark night. You can let the world take care of you if you give yourself to it. The pale wheat field spread out on either side of me, and the air smelled of leaves and fresh water. Along the sides of the field, brambles grew crooked and cracked, in bunches. I could see the tall pines and old oaks in front of me and thought, Soon my path will end at the woods. But there was another sign, just before the woods began, and a wooden gate that closed with a rope around a post. The sign said TO VILLAGE CENTRE. It pointed through the trees.

  I walked into the woods and saw the narrow path winding ahead of me. It was made of earth, fallen leaves, and dried pine needles. The leaves, some almond-shaped, some the shape of raindrops, and others as large as a handprint, felt soft underneath me. The path was overgrown in places with dark red thornbushes that caught the cloth on my coat and pulled at my tights. There were a few fallen trees right across the path and with both feet together I jumped over them. The trees became thinner, and I walked out into another, smaller field and saw the clock tower in the village.

  In front of the tea house I opened my beaded change purse. It looked as though there were clouds behind the windows. I counted seventy-two pence. A bell chimed above me as I pushed the door open. It was warm inside and smelled of oatmeal. There were a few people sitting over steaming plates of eggs and mugs of tea. I sat down at a square table against the wall.

  Anna, the woman whose shop it was, walked over to me. Her skirt swung below her knees, a gypsy skirt, with little silver bells on the belt.

  “What would you like, little one?” She was Scottish. Her wavy reddish hair was pinned in a loose bun on the top of her head. My mother liked her; they were the same age. She had a little boy who was three years old, but she wasn’t married.

  “Can I have a cup of tea and a scone with strawberry jam, please?”

  I cut my scone in half and buttered both sides, then spread the jam thickly on top. I poured milk in my tea and lifted the warm cup to my lips. Suddenly, I had the feeling that someone, someone who didn’t like me, was watching me, and it made my stomach tight. I moved my eyes around the room, but no one was looking at me. I crossed my legs under the table and thought, The girls are probably just waking up. Emma and Pauline are telling them that I don’t really know Jet, and they are sitting wide-eyed with their hands over their mouths, laughing.

  “Is everything all right then?” Anna asked. There was something in her eyes that made it hard to look in them.

  I nodded quickly. Then she put her hand on the top of my head. It felt warm, and the feeling in my stomach melted.

  “Do you think it will snow?” I asked her. She looked like she would know. She looked as though she could tell by looking at the leaves.

  “A wee bit,” she said, smiling at me. “I think it will snow a bit.” She stroked her hand over my head and went to clear the table across the room.

  I walked home along the side of the road close to the tall beech hedges. I passed the dark brick wall that surrounded the school. The windows were dark; there was no one inside. I passed a sign that read CHRISTMAS TREES FOR SALE and said in a singsong voice, “It’s almost Christmastime.”

  From far away I could see the whole sky and the tops of the trees reflected in the puddles, but as I walked closer they turned into muddy brown water.

  My legs looked thin, and my knees seemed strange and knobby to me, but I liked the way my black patent leather shoes looked against my navy tights. I kept looking down at them as I walked.

  I stared up at the trees, at the cool wide sky stretching out and out. I was alone on the road, but I wasn’t afraid. I stood up straight and walked quickly ahead, as though I were being pulled closer and closer to the place where someone had said God might be.

  Twenty

  When I got home my mother was standing in the kitchen, wiping down the inside of the cupboard. Eden sat on the floor by the stove, holding a saucer full of milk up to the cat’s mouth.

  “May!” She started when she saw me. Eden looked up at me from the floor, his eyes opening wide.

  “What are you doing back so early?” Her hand was on her chest; she had dropped the wet cloth on the floor. “Is everything all right?”

  I thought, I’m still in the same clothes that I left in. Suddenly I had the feeling that I had forgotten something, that I had left something behind at Barbara’s house or lost something in the pale yellow field.

  “I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep,” I said. My fingers stung from the cold, and I tried to close my hands together into a fist to warm them.

  “How did you get here?”

  “I walked.”

  There was something in her face; her eyes were moving towards me, looking closer. “It’s a long way. I would have—”

  “I wanted to,” I told her.

  There were cereal boxes, jars of jam, Marmite, and packet
s of tea on the counter.

  “May, was the party fun?” Eden called up to me. He sat on his knees with his feet tucked under him. He was wearing striped overalls. Our grandmother had sent us matching ones.

  “It was all right,” I told him.

  He waited a moment, then shrugged. “Oh,” he said, in a low voice, and moved his hand down the cat’s back, holding his fingers lightly over its coat. “May?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “What do you want for Christmas?”

  I sat down—I still had my coat on—and placed the palms of my hands on the table. The wood felt warm and soft against my hands and I thought, Anything would feel warm against my hands right now, anything.

  Outside, the sky was white and heavy. It looked as though it might suddenly fall.

  “I should tell him that it’s going to snow soon. He wanted to leave before it snowed, in case he got stuck.”

  “Tell who?” my mother asked. She had begun to put everything back in the cupboards, lining the cereal boxes up neatly next to each other like books.

  “My father.” Lines curved through the pale wood table like mountaintops.

  “May.” I heard my mother walk towards me. “I can ask him to stay if you want. He’ll stay if you want, darling.” Her voice was soft, but I couldn’t answer. I held my breath and it stung in the middle of my throat.

  I thought, You should never have to ask, you should never have to ask.

  “No.” I shook my head, and my hair fell over the side of my face. My wool coat felt like a shell on my back. There was a feeling in my stomach as though I had swallowed three small stones.

  I heard my mother pull her chair close to mine. The table blurred in front of me, and she wrapped her arms around my shoulders. That’s what made me fall. My head fell onto her chest and my shoulders rose and fell, rose and fell. My breath sounded loud to me like gasps and there was a pain in my chest, a choking feeling. I wanted him to leave, and knowing this is what pulled inside of me. It was like letting the brightest purple kite fall down from the sky.

  …

  My father wore a velvet suit back to London. Annabel was going back too. She had two cardboard boxes filled with the “objets” she had found at the jumble sales and markets. We walked outside to the car, which was already on and running, warming up. The air smelled of car fumes.

  “I’m going to send the children’s presents express post from London; it’s the first thing I’m going to do after I get my vitamin shot from Tim Greenburg,” Annabel said. There was a rush about her today; she flipped her hair from her shoulders. She wore a red cashmere body suit that zipped up the front and tall leather boots.

  My mother pulled her cardigan tightly around herself. It was cold and the wind blew, suddenly sweeping in, then was gone again. Eden held on to the battery radio. He was listening to the news. He wanted to know if it would snow. It had only snowed once before in his life, when he was four years old.

  “Did I like it?” he asked us. He wanted to hear stories about him and the snow.

  “Yes,” my mother said, but she wasn’t looking at him. She stared at her feet, at her socks, which hung loosely off the ends of her toes. She wasn’t wearing shoes.

  My father looked up anxiously at the sky. I saw his brown case in the back of the car, ready to go.

  “’Bye, babes,” he said, bending down to kiss me. It was early afternoon, and the sky was still bright above us. I moved one cheek towards him and then the other. When he kissed my mother goodbye on the cheek he said, pointing his finger at her, “You’re missing out.” He was talking about the wine bar.

  “Lucy, you must come to Suzy’s New Year’s Eve party. You’ll end up rotting away here,” Annabel yelled to my mother, as she stepped in the car.

  Driving away they looked like a couple, dressed up, going to the city. The city where people walked quickly down the street in raincoats, carrying umbrellas and new shopping bags, past a row of Christmas trees for sale, past clothes shops and cake shops, where streetlights shone on the damp streets. Something was happening in London tonight: a Christmas party, coins of gold light and red sweaters.

  …

  As we walked up the steps to the front door, my mother said, “We should buy a Christmas tree.” She swung her hands out in front of her and breathed in deeply.

  “Now?” Eden asked. His head bounced up like he couldn’t believe it. “Today? Right now?”

  “Yes,” she said. A cold wind blew across us, and my mother shivered.

  “As tall as May?” Eden jumped ahead up the steps to the front door.

  Inside the house it seemed dark, as though it were suddenly the end of the day.

  “Should we get our coats, Mum?” Eden asked.

  She walked towards the stairs but stopped suddenly and stood looking at the grey-blue stone floor.

  “Mum?”

  “What, darling?” she touched the back of her neck with her hand.

  “When are we getting the Christmas tree?”

  “In a minute.” When I was younger I really believed that a minute meant one minute, but now I knew it could be hours. It could even be days.

  “Mum?” Eden said again, looking at her. She stood very still, as if she were trying to hear something.

  Eden let out a loud breath and dropped his shoulders.

  I looked up at the ceilings, which were high and curved, and wrapped my arms around myself. It was as cold as a church. I started to walk towards the stairs, but my footsteps sounded like a laugh underneath me and I stopped. We were quiet and standing still, each of us turning slowly inside our own rings, as lost and alone as the planets.

  …

  As I walked upstairs I saw my mother, through the bars in the banister, walk down the hall towards the back of the house.

  Eden and I went to the kitchen. We cut thick pieces of bread and made butter-and-cheese sandwiches. We stood up while we ate, and I thought of all the things the girls would say about me. When we were done, Eden said, “May, what are you going to do now?”

  “Nothing.” I started walking out the door.

  “Oh.” He held the crust of his sandwich in his hand.

  “You can come in my room if you want,” I told him.

  We put the radio on the floor and found the programme we liked. It was playing the usual songs and some rock ’n’ roll Christmas carols.

  “Are you tired?” Eden asked me. I was lying on my side thinking about Barbara’s house, about Emma and Pauline standing side by side. What I was really thinking about was myself, and why I wasn’t afraid.

  I thought about when we were dancing and the way that Mr Whitmore looked. It made me laugh out loud.

  “Why did you just laugh?” Eden asked.

  I did a forward somersault on my bed. Eden watched; he liked to watch me. I did another one. I could feel my face flush.

  “Do you want me to teach you the new dance I learned?”

  He nodded.

  “Stand up and turn the radio up!” I said, jumping up.

  I did the Bus Stop while he watched, but then another song we liked came on the radio and we both danced in our own way. I stepped from side to side, snapping my fingers, and Eden jumped in the air and spun around. Our faces were turning red and we had to take off our sweaters. Outside it grew darker and darker. Then we had a spinning contest. I won. Standing in the middle of the room with our arms stretched out at our sides, looking up at the ceiling, turning and turning and turning, then collapsing on the floor while the room spun around us. And the whole time I was thinking, What’s wrong with me? Why aren’t I afraid?

  We couldn’t find our mother. Eden and I went from room to room looking for her. Then we decided to look downstairs.

  “But we have to go in the dark,” I told Eden, and he made a shivering sound. We put our socks and sweaters back on because we knew it would be colder downstairs and started down the narrow pitch-black staircase. Eden held on to the back of my shirt. I wasn’t scared, even though
it was dark, because I knew it was only seven o’clock. The house moved around us as we walked through it, back and forth, like an old ship.

  “Mum! Mummy!” Our voices sounded strange and hollow against the stone walls downstairs. When there was no answer, we became very quiet as we walked from room to room. Then we found her, curled on her side, asleep on the bed in the room that Rufus had stayed in. We watched her from the door. I remembered once when I woke her up she said, “I wish you hadn’t woken me. I was having the nicest dream.”

  “Don’t wake her up,” I said to Eden, as he started towards her. “Let’s have a race upstairs!” We raced to the hallway and up the stairs. I won.

  In the kitchen, I poured milk into a speckled blue-and-white pot and put it on the stove. We pulled the tin down from the top shelf and took two Penguin bars out, one each. I mixed chocolate syrup into the warm milk. We went to the sitting room, walking very slowly, with our hands wrapped around the mugs and the Penguin bars in our pockets. We turned on the lights and stood by the side of the telly turning the knob—it was stiff and ticked like a clock—from programme to programme. ITV was Parliament, BBC 2 was a programme we called How to Build a Bridge, but BBC 1 was Top of the Pops.

  “It’s Top of the Pops!” I said, jumping up and down.

  “It’s Top of the Pops!” Eden said, jumping up and down. It was warm in the sitting room and full of music, glitter, and lights from the telly. When we knew the words to the songs, we jumped up and sang along with the girls and boys who were dancing and waving their hands in the air on the show.

  That’s what we did for the rest of the night, sat on the sofa watching telly and during the adverts we ran down the hallway, leaping and skipping to the kitchen, where we pulled a chair to the cupboards and stood on it reaching far back for the hidden sweet tin.

  Once, when we were sitting on the sofa unwrapping the foil from our third Penguin bars, we heard what sounded like a footstep, a creak in the doorway. We both jumped, thinking it was our mother, covering the chocolate with our hands. But when we looked, peeking out of the doorway, there was no one there. It was just the house making noises.