Ebb Tide
His back twinged lightly as he took the last stride to the top of the dune. The water was smooth like still satin and it drew him now as it had always done. He eased off his shoes and socks and stepped into water crimsoned by a sun that sat on the horizon like a great communion wafer. The sea rippled under his steps, each fold reaching into shadow as he walked along the tide’s edge.
It occurred to him then for the first time that every significant journey in his life had been a westward one, apart from the returns from his birthplace here to that town that he now called home.
He had travelled the world by ship and plane, on road and rail but had always followed the light and never into the dark. The pattern was unplanned. It just happened that way. Or so it seemed. He wondered that this fact had never occurred to him before but was then distracted by a late flutter of plovers that ‘tooied’ along the strand. He knew again the gleeful wonder he had felt when Danny had shown him that first nest on the marsh, and he winced at the memory of how he had broken the mottled yellow egg with his lips as he tried too hard to blow the yolk through the other side.
Other memories glittered across the years. The challenges and the chases. The hunting of crabs. Skimming stones. Lifting rocks. The daring dives into shallow water. The joyous wash of summer waves that lifted body and spirit and rested you roughly down on the firm shore. The sweet discovery of soft skin behind the breakwater. Baking dry under a too hot sun on scorching sand before the rushing back to the soothing cool of the sea.
He recalled the castles in clouds that sat off shore for a week, daring you to venture out and explore. The speculation on driftwood origins. The mystery of foreign words on strand line bottles.
Had he ever been happier?
The barking of dogs filtered through the years and gentle yelling, and velvet laughter. The living dreams that were never fulfilled, that left a vacuum in the heart.
The blinding light of Christmas mornings when the sea was silver and Black Pike shook off his brooding face to smile, green and yellow, across the bay. The fresh spring breeze bringing the sweet aroma of heather from the island, and that puckered skin on arms and thighs and flapped hair that shone like burnished bronze, then. And the autumn days marked by the clinging smell of salty wrack.
‘Here again?’ a voice said.
‘Have we met before?’ he asked.
‘Not directly.’
‘But you know me?’
‘In ways.’
‘You know my family?’
‘Among others.’
‘Do you live here?’
‘In a manner of speaking.’
‘Not a visitor?’
‘I’m always here.’
He felt no need or desire to question or challenge her. The voice neither enquired nor threatened; emotionless yet comforting, reassuring. Though free of accent it had the sound of belonging, of rightness and fitness.
‘I love this place,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘I always come when I’m in town.’
‘I’ve seen you.’
‘My family are here, what’s left of them.’ He looked across the bay, then along the shore. ‘There’s an enchanting timelessness about the sea, isn’t there? The shoreline changes yet nothing goes away. These rocks seem so much smaller than when I was a boy but they cannot have eroded so much, can they? But they are still here. It’s strange to think how a millennium ago this sand was rock too, that that stone is still here, reduced to this coarse softness. I often wonder if each wave has its own separate identity. If it breaks, dissolves, disperses, slips back, travelling out to form again and revisit at a later time? If it recognises this coast. If it remembers me.’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised.’
‘One wave took my friend…Donald. He was nine. The sea kept him for four days before it gave him back.’
‘I heard about that.’
‘I often wondered if the same wave that took him brought him back.’
‘Perhaps it did.’
‘There’d be a kind of poetry in that.’
‘There would.’
He bent his knees, slowly spread his fingers wide, turned his palms upward below the surface, examining the whiteness and the lines.
‘Shall we go?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
They turned and long shadows stretched to and from the dune, and silhouettes slid down the last of the sun’s face.
The tide ebbed leaving firm flat sand to receive the first mark of the dawn.
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