by Lucy Wood
The hole is already deep enough but we keep digging anyway, just more slowly. Neither of us stops. But after a while I say, ‘That’s deep enough now,’ and then there’s nothing else to do except stop. We stand up and put the tree in the hole and I hold it upright while Gina pushes the sand back around it and stamps it down to keep it in place.
We stand there, not moving, watching the tree.
‘Does it hurt?’ Gina asks.
Usually I would say something about primary versus secondary lesions – I know all about them from the care home. I would talk about how Mr Samuels, who has been in the home since before I was born, has a gold earring so that, if he’d ever drowned at sea and washed up in another country, he would have had enough money to pay for his own burial. But I don’t feel like saying any of that.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It hurts.’
The sand blows around us. It’s cold and dark. The lights of a fishing boat move past in the distance. I am the first to turn to go. I brush the sand off my hands and start making my way across the dunes. Gina follows me, then, just as we’re almost back on the path, she darts away and runs up the side of the highest dune. She runs slowly, fighting against the toppling sand, the way it falls back under her feet. Then she’s at the top. I wait on the path. The lights of our bungalows glint in the distance. They look as small and far away as the boat. I think of the sandy streets and the shiny clumps of sea beet. The shortcut down the alley. The cracks in the wall of Gina’s front room. I think about those lungs – how they rose up, so full of air, that it was impossible to imagine they didn’t really work any more.
Above me, Gina spreads her arms out wide. I look once more at the lights, then I run up the sand and stand next to her. The rows of trees are somewhere behind us. I spread my arms out just as Gina starts running down, and I run too, flying so fast that sand rises up everywhere and we are lost in it; it whirls and kicks up and it’s in my eyes, my mouth, it’s so loose under my feet that it seems as if there’s nothing there.
Gina is ahead of me. She’s running so fast that I lose sight of her – one moment she’s there, the next she disappears in a scatter of sand. I see an arm, a leg, her pale hair streaming as she moves away, and I am right behind, I am almost right behind, as the dunes below us creak and shift and catch in the wind, like they always do, like they’ll always keep doing.
Flotsam, Jetsam, Lagan, Derelict
Mary and Vincent Layton lived in a small house that overlooked an empty beach. The beach was wide and rocky – there were rocks the size of doors that had been thrown up by the tide, and smaller stones that banked up in drifts. Rows of low, dark rocks radiated out across the beach like the hands of a clock. These were the worn-down layers where the cliff used to be, before it had been whittled down to its bones.
Their house was painted white, with a porch at the side and a garage at the back. There was a road behind it. In front there was the cliff – still being worn down, still being whittled – but they’d been assured it would not affect them in their lifetime.
They’d moved in over the summer. Finally everything was sorted and in order: their work had reached its natural end point; finances were tied up; their children were married and settled. There were no loose ends. They’d been together for a very long time – they could hardly believe how long really – but now, finally, there were no loose ends.
Vincent had found a job to fill his weekday mornings, doing gardening work for people around the town. Sometimes Mary would go and help but more often she would walk along the cliffs or the beach, or just sit looking out. It was quiet and everything else seemed very far away. There was no TV, no mobile signal. They didn’t have to think about anything at all.
One morning Mary was out walking when she saw something glinting further down the beach. She made her way towards it. Clouds hung low in the sky – they were pale, almost yellow, like eyes that were old or tired. The rocks were slippery and she walked carefully – if she fell and broke something then that could be it, and all the work, all the years of planning, would be for nothing. She avoided the places with wet mossy weed, and stepped instead on the fat brown ribbons, which creaked softly under her shoes. It was still early. She’d always woken early but now, instead of lying awake in bed, she got up and came down to the beach.
She crossed the rocks and stepped down onto the sand, which was coarse and flecked with colours. Sometimes it looked bronze. Sometimes it looked silver. It always felt cold, even in the sun, and she often wondered how deep it was.
The glinting thing was half-buried. It was a plastic bottle; one of those small water bottles with ridges all around it. The plastic was tinged blue and the top was sticking up amongst all the stones and shells. It didn’t look right. It didn’t look like it was supposed to be there. She crouched down, scraped up a handful of sand and pressed it over the top of the bottle. Then she dug up another handful and did the same, until it was completely covered. She stood back and looked. There. She couldn’t even tell where it was any more. And later, the tide would take it away for good.
The next morning there were five bottles strewn across the rocks below the house.
Mary stood on the path looking down at them. It was mizzling. The beach seemed flatter and washed of colour, except for the blue of the bottles. She went down the path and over the rocks. They were rectangular five-litre bottles and the plastic was thick and shiny. She collected them one at a time and put them in a pile, then turned and looked back at the cliffs, across the sand, and out at the sea. There was nowhere for the bottles to go. They were too big to bury, and there were too many of them. The tide wouldn’t reach that far for hours. She thought about putting them behind one of the big rocks, but she would probably still be able to see them from the house. And, even if she couldn’t see them, she would know they were there.
She picked the bottles up awkwardly, holding one under each arm and the rest against her chest, and carried them over the rocks. There was a car park at the other end of the beach which had a bin in it. She crossed the beach and went over to the bin. It was overflowing and there were extra bags stuffed with rubbish on the ground underneath it. She put the bottles down by the bags and turned to leave. The wind knocked one of the bottles over and it fell with a hollow thud. Another one blew back towards the sand. Mary watched it moving. It made a scraping sound as it skidded against the gravel. She picked the bottles up again and carried them back across the beach. She walked up the path towards the house and unlocked the garage. There was a shelf against the back wall and she put them on there, lining them up neatly in a row.
She locked the garage and went inside. Vincent was in the kitchen, making lunch. She went up behind him and put her arms around his waist. He smelled of bonfires and paint. His waist had thickened over the years. So had hers. Sometimes their bones clicked. She leaned into his warm back. He reached his arm around and rubbed her hip.
‘Our daughter phoned,’ he said. He took four slices of bread out of the bag and put them on plates. The kitchen was small and white and clean. There were white plates in the cupboard, a few white mugs, two bowls and two glasses. They had got rid of almost everything.
‘I didn’t think we’d given her this number yet,’ Mary said.
Vincent put cheese in the bread and cut each sandwich in half. He wiped the crumbs up carefully. ‘Something’s happening with Jack again.’
Mary watched as Vincent got up the last crumbs with the tip of his finger. He passed Mary her plate and picked up his own.
‘Let’s eat these in bed,’ Mary said. They could do things like that now. They could close all the curtains and afterwards they could sleep until dinner if they wanted to. There was nothing to stop them.
The next morning she took her usual route out of the house and along the path down to the rocks. Before she opened the gate she stopped and scanned the beach. For a moment she thought she saw something glinting and her heart began to beat faster than usual. But it was nothing. The beach was clear and
empty. She undid her hair and let it stream out. She started humming. There were shallow pools among the rocks and they rippled in the wind.
She took the long way round, past her favourite rock, which was covered in a dark sheet of mussels.
Her boots crunched on the stones. She passed heaps of seaweed that must have been pushed in by the tide. Some of it was orange, and some was blue, and there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of tiny blue and white shells.
She reached down and picked up some of the seaweed. She liked the way it popped under her hands. But it wasn’t seaweed. This was stiff and tough and fraying at the edges. She dropped it and looked at the other piles. They weren’t seaweed, none of them were – they were heaps of twisted nylon rope. She crouched down and picked up one of the shells. The edge of it dug into her finger. It was a fragment of plastic. All along the tideline, as far as she could see, the beach was covered in small, sharp fragments.
She turned quickly and went back to the house. The wind knotted her hair into clumps and she tied it up tightly away from her face. She looked through the cupboards for the bin bags. There weren’t any left. She went into the garage and found the bucket, which they used to clean the car and the windows. She took the bucket down to the beach with her, knelt in the damp sand, and started picking everything up – rope, plastic, translucent strips of polythene. After a while she stopped doing it piece by piece and scraped up entire handfuls. When the bucket was full she stood up and stretched her legs. Her back was stiff and there was a faint, dull ache in the joints of her hands. She carried the bucket back to the house, opened the garage and emptied it onto the floor. Everything spread in a tangled heap. She locked the garage and went inside.
Vincent was pouring drinks. ‘Where’ve you been?’ he asked. He kissed the soft skin on the side of her neck.
‘Just my usual walk,’ Mary said. She took off her coat.
‘You missed lunch,’ he told her. He emptied crisps into a bowl and passed them to her.
Mary looked at the clock. Her stomach was empty. When she reached into the bowl the salt stung her fingers.
There was a letter on the table. The envelope was thick and cream-coloured and headed with Vincent’s old company’s logo. It was still sealed.
Vincent saw her looking and went over to the table, but neither of them opened the letter.
‘Why are they writing to you?’ Mary said.
‘I don’t know.’
‘I didn’t think they needed to write to you any more.’
Vincent took the letter and put it in the drawer underneath the phone. The white kitchen and the white lights made his skin look almost grey. It was Mary who’d first persuaded him to take that job, even though he hadn’t wanted to. There were other things he’d wanted to do. She held his hand. Their fingers laced between each other’s. Vincent reached over and picked something out of her hair – it was tangled in and it took him a moment to loosen it. It was a strip of blue plastic. That night, when she was getting undressed, she found another strip caught in the cuff of her shirt.
The next day she got up early, took the bucket and went straight to work on the beach. She picked and sifted until her knees throbbed and her hands felt like they were about to seize up. The more she picked up, the more she saw – there were ring pulls, tin lids, bottle caps, tags, rusty springs coiled under stones, watch batteries, translucent beads that she could only see if she squinted, hidden among the grains like clutches of eggs. There were bits of Styrofoam that were exactly the same colour as the sand, and bright specks of glass.
The sun slipped down lower. The tide came in. Finally she stopped and stood up. She’d only covered a few square metres.
When she went to bed there were bits stuck to her feet. When she brushed them off they scattered across the floor and fell down between the boards. She got up and tried to pick them out without waking Vincent. He murmured and reached for her. She got back into bed. Bits of plastic blew in on a draught under the door.
On the day before the rubbish collection Mary took their bin bag from the kitchen and put it by the side of the road. She’d bought a new roll of black bags, and she took them down to the garage, unlocked it, and went in. The room was full. A fetid smell rose up, like something in a ditch that hadn’t drained away. The floor was a teeming mass of boxes and crates, ropes, plastic bottles, wet shoes, chipped and broken toys. There were reams of greasy netting with tins and plastic beads and pen lids caught in them; and a heap of oil cans and rubber gloves and mouldy bits of fabric. In the far corner there was a pile of sand and a sieve. Sometimes things looked like sand, but they weren’t sand, really.
She stood in the middle of the garage and looked around. There was so much of it – it was piled halfway up the walls. She gripped the roll of bags. What she needed to do was fill each one and then leave them out for the collection. Then, by tomorrow, it would all be gone. She went over to the edge of the pile and started filling the first bag. She filled it quickly, tied the top and started on another, breaking up the boxes and crates, not stopping until everything in the garage was cleared. It took a long time. When she’d finished she dragged the bags outside one by one and put them by the road. A car drove past and slowed down, looking at the vast, toppling pile. Her cheeks burned. But they would be gone by the morning.
Vincent was waiting in the hall. ‘We’d better go,’ he said. He was buttoning his coat.
‘Go?’
‘To the Gleesons’. They invited us, remember?’
‘I don’t remember,’ Mary said.
‘They said we should go over.’
‘Why?’
‘I suppose to have a drink. Talk.’
‘Talk,’ Mary said. ‘About what?’
Vincent leaned down and tied his shoes. ‘I guess they want to get to know us. Where we lived before, what we’re like, what we did.’
Mary leaned back against the wall. ‘Before?’ she said. She could still smell the rank saltiness on her hands. It was probably on her clothes. She took off her coat and her shoes. She slipped her hand up the back of Vincent’s shirt. ‘Let’s stay in,’ she said. His skin was creased and soft. She knew each bone of his spine.
Vincent phoned in for them and they spent the evening listening to music and eating leftovers from the fridge, with the radiators turned up high.
The wind picked up and surged all night. The tiles clattered like bits of stone falling off the cliff. Hail chipped at the windows. Mary lay awake listening to the waves hitting against the beach. She thought about the bags out on the road. The palm tree scratched against the wall. She sat up suddenly. Where would it all go, after it had been collected? It wouldn’t really be gone, would it? It would just be somewhere else. It would be somewhere else, instead of here. Maybe, eventually, some of it would end up back on the beach. Her heart beat hard, almost painfully. She couldn’t think about that. She’d done what she could. Eventually she lay back down and closed her eyes.
She slipped out early the next morning, while Vincent was still asleep. There were two messages from their daughter on the answerphone. The red light flashed slowly.
When she opened the front door it hit against something. She pushed harder but it still wouldn’t open more than a few inches. There was something on the other side – she could almost see it through the letter box. She shoved harder and the door finally opened. There was a pile of wet netting slumped against it. She pushed it away with her foot and went out. The grass was strewn with rope and shoes and tins. Some of the bin bags had ripped open, some had tipped over and come untied, some had rolled down the path and burst. Plastic had been flung across the road. There were bottles and strips of cardboard caught in the hedge; packets flapped on the ground like injured birds. There was a rubber glove pressing against the downstairs window.
Mary stood in the middle of the garden for a long time. Then she turned, picked up her bucket, and walked slowly down to the beach.
The sand was churned; stones had been flung around into
new trenches and drifts. Water trickled off the cliff in thin streams, as if a cloth were being wrung out. Mary looked across the rocks, deciding which way to go first. There was something bright further ahead, on the other side of the beach – a row of something that she couldn’t quite make out. The rocks on that side were taller, more jagged. She didn’t normally go that way. The early-morning sun flashed on whatever it was. They looked like discs. Mary closed her eyes but still saw the shapes on the backs of her eyelids.
There were no flat places to rest her feet so she just kept going – stepping quickly from rock to rock without giving herself time to lose balance. Finally she could see what they were – it was a mass of hub-caps, piles of them, like a stranding. Some had been thrown up on top of the rocks. Others were cracked in half. Her heart beat hard again. There were so many of them. More were washing in and rolling at the edge of the tide.
She left the bucket and picked up as many as she could, tucking them under her arms and holding a stack in both hands. Then she turned and made her way across the rocks. She would leave them by the path, then go back for more.
She was almost on the sand when she slipped. She reached out with her foot but found nothing. The hub-caps clattered down. She stretched out her arm but still there was nothing, then her wrist twisted against the ground and something rough grated against her cheek. The stones and the sand were very cold.
When Vincent found her she’d managed to drag herself so that she was almost on the path. He leaned her against him, taking her weight, and walked her slowly back to the house, lifting her with each step.
‘What have you been doing?’ he asked. He gently prised the hub-cap out of her hands.
She couldn’t get out of bed. Vincent brought her breakfast on a tray in the morning, then, when he got back from work, he made lunch and they ate together, sitting propped up on the pillows. He brought in the radio and rubbed her swollen ankle while they listened.
