Where to Find Me

by Alba Arikha

  Anita had arrived for their first meeting, at the Chelsea Arts Club in London, wearing black bell-bottom trousers and an orange blouse. “Your mother dazzled me instantly,” my father said. “There was another man who was dazzled too, and I had to get rid of him quickly,” he added, in a conspiratorial tone.

  “How? Who was he?” we asked him.

  He never said, and over the years I wonder whether there even was another man. But even if there wasn’t, it didn’t matter, because my mother had chosen him instead. They had discussed theatre and life until the bar had closed. By the time they parted, “filled with vodka and Norwegian secrets”, my father knew that he would marry her.

  “All my male friends were very jealous,” he told us. “Your mother took our breath away.”

  I looked at my mother, remembering his words. She still took his breath away, I was sure of it. Once, not long before, I had found them dancing in the kitchen. The radio was on, Ray Charles was singing and at one point my father held my mother’s waist, and she threw her head back laughing, her long mane of hair nearly touching the floor.

  Their love was pure, unimprovable. I clapped loudly. “Again!” I cried out. “Dance again!”

  I cannot remember if they did. All I know is that after that summer of 1982, when the shadow of loss altered our lives, their happiness faded into something more muted. And as it faded, so did their fascination with one another. They seemed to have found a more discreet way of communicating their love. Or was it something other than discretion? I worried. Our parents were together, but on either side of the family there was a history of betrayal and tragedy. My paternal grandmother, Anna, had died young. Her husband had remarried another woman he did not love and, by all accounts, had treated badly. After a few years, she left him. My grandfather realized the error of his ways, but it was too late. She never returned, and he became an alcoholic. As for my maternal grandfather, Fredrik had fathered a child with another woman. My mother had never forgiven him. She was still very upset with him. Whenever his name was mentioned, her face turned red.

  Was history contagious? Something told me that it was. A hereditary pattern which spread its germs and spawned other variants of the same condition. I needed to ensure I would be immune to those symptoms. I wanted to create my own permutations, my own history, untainted by its predecessors. Because although my parents had been spared, there was no telling what might happen to them tomorrow.

  *

  “Dip-dip all blue!” my father cried out, throwing me high into the air before I landed in the water, shouting and laughing at the same time, my feet kicking against the waves, small peaks of foam which gathered me in their wake.

  It was a very hot day. Lucie was in the sea with us. She was wearing a yellow bathing suit, and her face was sunburnt. She laughed when I landed next to her. Walter was ill that day, she said – he had some sort of stomach bug. “Actually, I don’t think Walter really likes the sea,” she confessed. “But I do!”

  She rode a wave and looked, for a brief moment, like a young girl cavorting in the water, like us. It made me like her much more.

  “I want to play ‘dip-dip all blue’ too!” cried Ben.

  “All right then,” my father said. “Here we go!”

  “Dip… dip” – he lifted Ben – “all blue!” he said in his booming voice, as he threw Ben upwards and watched him drop into the water just as he had done with me.

  The hoarse cries of seagulls pierced the sky. They flew in a circle above us, flapping their grey wings. A trail of clouds scudded across the blue horizon. Was the heat finally breaking?

  I was about to point it out to my father when an unexpected wave surged upwards and broke over my head, churning me around as I gasped for air. For a few long seconds, everything went cold and dark, and I tried desperately to fight my way back to the surface.

  I succeeded, just in time to see Ben’s body being crushed by the same wave, and we lost sight of his small head.

  I screamed, my mouth full of salt water. The wave wasn’t even that big, and yet its pull was unlike anything I had ever experienced, as if a hand were grabbing me from below. Everyone began to shout and scramble away.

  “Riptide!” someone cried. “Get out of the water!”

  “Go back to shore!” my father shouted.

  “I’ve got him!” Lucie shouted back.

  I saw her dive under, then re-emerge holding Ben, her eyes looking startled and wide.

  My father grabbed Ben’s limp body and struggled with him to the shore, to my mother who began to scream, “Ben! Ben!” Two lifeguards rushed over and laid him on the sand. His eyes were closed, his face was green and it made me want to vomit.

  A crowd gathered round him, their bodies glistening wet from the water.

  One of the lifeguards turned Ben’s head to one side and began to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

  Nothing happened.

  I dug my toes into the sand, feeling my heart pounding against my bathing suit. I even held my breath, just to feel what my little brother was going through.

  The thought that he might die was inconceivable.

  My father was standing by my side; he was dripping wet, and I could hear him breathing heavily. I closed my eyes. It was too awful to bear.

  But then there was a sound, and I opened my eyes and saw that Ben was throwing up half the sea, and the lifeguard was now holding him upright. Everyone clapped, and my mother, who wanted to hug him, had to be restrained.

  “He’s going to be fine,” the lifeguard declared. “But we still need to take him to hospital.”

  “Leon!” my mother cried out. “He’s alive!”

  We all hugged each other, and my mother began to cry.

  “Where’s Lucie?” I suddenly asked. “She saved him!”

  My mother stopped crying immediately and clasped her hand to her mouth. We called out her name. “Lucie! Where are you?”

  But only the sound of the waves gave any clue to her whereabouts.

  Lucie had dived in to save Ben, and all that time we had assumed that she was standing with us.

  My mother went pale. “Lucie,” she said hoarsely, grabbing the lifeguard’s arm. “Our friend Lucie was in the sea with my son – she saved him. She went to get him and she’s still there, in the sea.”

  She began to tremble from head to toe. My father told us to stay there while he drove to the hospital with Ben. He looked utterly distraught. “I’ll be back as quickly as I can,” he said.

  I ran towards my mother, and we held each other tightly as the two lifeguards walked quickly towards the sea, now ominously calm. The sky was cloudless. The sun was shining. The seagulls were gone. The ambulance drove away with Ben, its siren wailing in the distance. Another one arrived, and more lifeguards. My mother and I stood on the beach, on the pebbles that hurt my feet; I had lost my shoes in the commotion. A few people remained, out of concern and sympathy. Or was it? I wondered. They said a few words to us, but I can’t remember what or whether I answered. The only thing I do recall is that the girl who had drowned two summers back was mentioned. “Do you remember that poor lass? This is a dangerous beach,” a man said. “I’m not coming here any more.”

  My mother and I said nothing. We didn’t want to think of the other girl, only of Lucie. We just stared at the wide, glittery expanse and held hands tightly, quietly. “Someone needs to tell Walter,” she said finally.

  The lifeguards were gone a long time. When they came back, looking exhausted, they shook their heads, looked at my mother and said that they had done all they could, but hadn’t been able to find Lucie. “But that doesn’t mean anything yet,” said the lifeguard. “And a helicopter’s on its way.”

  Soon enough, it arrived and began to circle the beach, its engine roaring above the sands.

  I looked at my mother. Her face seemed to have shut down, her
emotions sealed away somewhere distant and unreachable.

  It frightened me. Everything frightened me.

  My world was crumbling, piercing my heart like the rocks had pierced my skin. How would Walter react?

  They had to find Lucie.

  They had to.

  She had saved my brother and had drowned instead of him.

  Instead of Ben.

  I clutched my mother’s hand. Her fingers felt brittle, as if they might break. I’m not sure how long we stayed on that beach. I watched as the sun became paler, colder. “Find her, find her, find her,” I repeated to myself.

  Ben was being kept in hospital overnight – just to be safe, the doctor said.

  My mother had gone to stay with him.

  Walter was in our kitchen, smoking his pipe. My father was sitting opposite him, drinking.

  Neither of them spoke. There was nothing to say.

  We all knew what had happened. None of us said it, but we knew. The helicopters wouldn’t find her. No one would find her.

  Only the sea knew where she was.

  *

  The weather changed the day after Lucie disappeared.

  The clouds turned black. Sunday black. The heat dropped and the rain came down. The possibility of finding her became increasingly unlikely as the rain continued and a gale-force wind of 70 mph whipped up the foam-crested waves. In the middle of the night there was an explosive noise followed by a flash of lightning. I ran to the window: shapes were illuminating the sky, like neon branches. I rushed back to my bed. I was frightened. Ben woke up shouting. I heard my mother comforting him. “It’s only the thunder, my angel, it’s only the thunder.”

  It was calmer by morning. I went into the garden and looked around me. The landscape I had loved had been altered, stripped of its beauty. The sea and its briny smell, once the panacea for all my childhood ills, had turned dark and foreboding. Now, even the air reeked with the tang of disappearance. I could envision Lucy’s body being tossed by the waves, crashing against rocks – her skin scorched, blistered, ripped apart.

  How long had it taken her to die? Had her body started to decompose under the water? Would they ever find her?

  It was a terrifying thought. Only a few days back, this shy and innocent woman had been sitting with us at our kitchen table. Now she was no more.

  Our house felt different too, like a station does after the last train has departed: empty, forlorn. And the press had found out: Lucie’s face stared at us from the front page of the local paper. “After Little Wilma Fathers, Lucie Canton: Are Our Beaches Safe?” was one of the headlines written in large, bold letters.

  A television crew showed up at our house unannounced, as did a few journalists. The phone rang off the hook. Articles were printed, mentioning my father and Lucie, “the theatre director and the famous French actress”.

  All of us longed to flee and return to London. But we couldn’t. We were stuck. My father tried to calm us. “She might still be all right. One never knows,” he said.

  Did he really believe it?

  By the next morning Lucie was still alone at sea. I read up on riptides and rip currents and sneaker waves. Lucie was sand. A grain of sand: pale, soft, warm, insoluble.

  Maybe my father was right. Maybe she was still alive. Maybe she had managed to clamber over the rocks and swim ashore. Maybe she had found shelter somewhere.

  “Let’s call Cristina and Peter,” I overheard my mother tell my father. “They should come over. They’re good with this sort of thing.”

  “They’re Trotskyites,” said my father. “Radical Labour Trotskyites. How does that make them good at anything? And what ‘thing’ are we talking about here, and why do we need to see anyone at all?”

  “Come on, Leon, you know what I mean,” my mother answered wearily. “Peter’s been grieving all his life.”

  “It was a bit different, wasn’t it? He didn’t even know his father…”

  “It’s for the children,” my mother insisted. “This is a very, very difficult time for them, and Ben loves your sister. I think it will be a good idea. And Salisbury’s not far. They could get here quickly.”

  “And their children? What if they show up with those insufferable twins of theirs?”

  “They won’t. Not under these circumstances. And they’re not insufferable. They’re just boys.”

  “Fine. Give them a ring, then.”

  I didn’t know much about my Hellenic past, except that my great-grandfather had been born in an Epirus mountain village, somewhere near the Albanian border, and had emigrated to the UK in the 1880s. My paternal grandmother had died young when my father and his sister Cristina were children. His father had raised them alone. The Greek connection, tenuous at best during their lifetime, now disappeared altogether. My father, despite his Mediterranean features and Greek surname, knew very little about his ancestors. Nor did he seem to care, and neither did Cristina, who, with her husband Peter, was a politically committed, prominent Labour activist, deeply involved with various causes, including the Palestinian one and its promotion as a democratic, secular state. They were both members of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign and believed the state of Israel should be eradicated from the map, a viewpoint my father didn’t share, although my mother was dabbling with the thought of joining the campaign as well, not because she necessarily believed in the cause, but because she found her life too cushy and wanted to give more to the oppressed around the world. “So give your clothes away and join the Anti-Apartheid Movement or the United Democratic Front, a much better cause,” my father had retorted. “South Africa needs us more than the Palestinians. Solidarity is not only about shouting radical slogans like Peter and my sister do. It’s about doing something about it. Apartheid in South Africa can and should be eradicated, but not Israel.”

  Peter’s father James had been killed at the age of twenty in the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. His mother, Claire, had been pregnant with Peter at the time and returned to England a broken woman. The repercussions of this attack, both in the world at large and within his own family had a strong impact on Peter. Spurred on by his mother, who had laid the blame firmly at Israel’s door and had struggled thereafter to make ends meet in her native Kent, Peter came to view Israel as the prime reason for all their ills.

  When he turned twelve – at which point Claire had found a good job as a librarian – she took her son to visit his father’s grave at the Ramleh War Cemetery, in the Judaean Hills. “We need to find Plot 7 Row G,” she told him.

  Peter was the one who found it, and he felt deeply moved to see his father’s name inscribed on the headstone: “James Francis Betts, Private Rifleman, Royal Artillery 1926–1946”. He claimed it instilled in him a desire to become a voice for the oppressed around the world, although my father argued there was more to it: “At first he believed in it for the right reasons. Then, when he became older, it turned into the wrong reasons, like a vendetta.”

  In the early ’60s, Peter left for South America, where he spent two years with Voluntary Service Overseas, an experience he described as “seminal”. In 1968, as a King’s College student, he wrote his first pamphlet entitled, The New Apartheid: Plot 7, calling for a national boycott of Israel. The pamphlet gathered numerous signatures, including Cristina’s, which is how he met her, and Peter contemplated interrupting his studies in order to devote more time to Plot 7. But his mother thoroughly dissuaded him, explaining that James would never have wanted his son to abandon his university studies in favour of political activism.

  By then Claire had long since remarried a notary from Kent, with whom she had two more children, and politics were relegated to a distant past for the now plumper though still attractive Mrs Plendon from Tunbridge Wells. But for Peter the seeds of dissent had been sown: his half-siblings had a loving father, and he didn’t. His mother, whose grief had defin
ed his younger years, who had cuddled him at night so tenderly, was now happy and seemed to have forgotten the battle for James’s memory, which she and Peter had forged together.

  In truth, the ghost of his past never left him. As I grew older, I wondered whether his ongoing battle for justice wasn’t a way of regaining his mother’s love rather than honouring his father’s memory. To this day, I don’t know. What is clear is that the story of James Betts, murdered by Zionist radicals on a hot day in July, was a tragedy which left a mark on our family. Despite Peter’s “terribly tiresome activism”, as my father called it, I don’t believe any of us was able to view the politics of the Middle East with an impartial eye. If my uncle didn’t entirely persuade us of the unmitigated evil of the Israeli regime, he certainly came close to it, and made sure we, just like him, would never forget: Peter kept a meticulous record of what had happened on that fateful day of 22nd July 1946, in a large folder which contained several articles and photographs of the hotel before and after the event. There was a picture of his parents on their wedding day: his mother, wide-eyed and demure; his father, young and boyish-looking, smiling at the camera, his arm round his bride’s waist. There were clippings about the 6th Airborne Division, which James had belonged to, and a letter from his mother Winifred to the Nottingham Evening Post, written shortly after her son’s death. Entitled “Goodbye My Golden Son”, I found it more heartbreaking than any of the other paraphernalia Peter regularly brandished when we went to visit.

  In 1977, Cristina gave birth to twin boys. Night feeds and nappy-changing curtailed their various activities, and the folder was momentarily shelved, especially because baby James was unwell for a while. They weren’t sure why, but then he recovered quickly – “a strong boy, just like his grandfather once was”.

  Once the twins had started nursery school, Peter, who was by now teaching English at the local university, picked up where he had left off, although by now “Plot 7” had assumed a more generic name, which also involved South Africa and any cause he thought was worth fighting for – of which there were many.