How Lovely

The baby, and she was a baby, no more than eight or nine months old, was sitting on a towel, eating sand. She was a beautiful little thing, the first curls coming in, her tiny feet resting sole to sole. A few metres to her left, a girl who must have been her sister was squatting, digging judiciously, the hole big enough for her to hop in and out of as she dug. She was completely focussed on her work, salt-water matted hair dried in strings across her freckly forehead. Occasionally, a wave would sidle up the shore and threaten to fill her hole with water and she would quicken her digging, heaping wet sand onto the dam wall she had built.

Penny watched. She was sitting quite close to them, very close to them actually, almost sharing their big picnic blanket. She didn’t know why, she was simply there. On a chair, at least, which was going to make getting up easier. The thought was fleeting, a willow’s bend, a wisp, before Penny looked at the picnic blanket again and wondered where she was. She looked at her feet, tucked into the warm sand, and thought they looked very strange. She looked at the children again and wondered whose they were. One thought after the other, willows, wisps. The children were very pretty. Lovely curly hair. Penny looked at her feet again and wondered why they were covered in sand. Always wondering, Penny muttered to herself, and the words slipped and slid around her face with the briney air. She must have said the words out loud, because a baby was looking at her. A baby, Penny thought, how lovely. What was it doing there, sitting on a blanket all alone. But there was another child, Penny saw, a little girl digging a big hole in the sand, big enough for her to hop in and out of. How fun.

Penny had children. She knew that. She knew a lot of things and all of these things she knew, the words and names and ideas, they fluttered and flapped, tiny moths with their dusty wings, hiding in the dark, in the corners, the recesses, slippery dippery little things. They had been disrupted, the moths, or were they more like bees, buzzing and furious and sucked from their hives at some point, sucked into vacuums and voids, where nothing had structure, where gravity did not exist to allow for knowledge to be laid down like slabs and built upon, so it became immovable, known. Sometimes the moths, or were they bees, sat still in plain sight, quiet and calm, and Penny would reach out a hand, try to touch them. But they were never still for long. The wings fluttered, the walls slid, Penny watched. Children. Children, Penny, she said out loud, watching the baby’s sandy fist. She had children. She closed her eyes, fished in the gloom, found his face. Within reach, always. A big old tree, a shitty old motorcycle, she could still see that too, that stupid thing, clapped out and rickety. A knock at the door at 3 o’clock in the morning, John’s unbearable fury. (Where was John?) He had been lovely, tall, skinny, a silly little beard, just beginning to grow into himself, a sapling, a willow’s bend.

After him, clots and clumps and ideas, those moths always sat still. John – where was John, actually, he loved the beach – would find her in bed, crying, but he had told her it was all normal, his patients had miscarriages all the time, it was just the body getting itself in order. Penny hated those words: miscarriage, the body, order. The next one, he had said, the next one will take. The next one didn’t take, nor the one after that. John – where was he? He loved the beach. – stayed positive. After the fifth one – Penny counted them by scratching a little tally on the pantry wall – they stopped trying. The pantry wall was somewhere nearby, it must have been. Just around the corner perhaps, four strokes and a slash down the middle for five, not far from the shelf with flour and the baking powder which the shop down the road never had enough of, although it always had mangos, big trays of them and they smelt like heaven. John always said, it’s okay, we have… Penny frowned. We have… but there was a wall there, now, and Penny couldn’t get past it. She had someone, they had someone, a silhouette, a shape-shifter, could be anywhere, could be anyone. But a mango, Penny thought, a smooth mango with its soft flesh, how you could press their golden rumps right up to your nose and inhale. Penny smiled.

A cry, carried on the air, as a seagull wheeled down to land on the shoreline. The girl glanced at it. The baby watched it. There was a clump of seaweed the sea was relentlessly trying to reclaim with each wave and the seagull poked its redcurrant beak in amongst the slimy, salty innards. Penny watched. Hello, she said, and the seagull’s beady eyes flashed in the sun. Don’t feed the gulls and it was her father’s voice, out of nowhere. She looked around the cavern of her skull, which contained everything she had ever known, this big, black nothingness with its wings and walls and wisps. She did know a great deal of her life lay beyond the walls. But she was used to them now. There were so many of them, moving and sliding, stopping Penny from getting anywhere. Some faces stayed within the walls, resolute. Her mother’s face, her father’s. Her son’s. John’s face. But all of the other faces, she saw them, but they never came into the room. They never stayed. They were too late. She looked at them, she tried to hold them, but they refused to stay with her. Like woodpeckers on concrete, they couldn’t imprint and they would get so frustrated, so tetchy. How dare you not remember me? They didn’t know that sometimes, not even Penny herself stayed.

Movement caught her eye and she glanced up. A dog and a surfer were walking towards them. The baby watched them, fistfuls of sand momentarily forgotten. The surfer looked at the baby, then at the little girl in her hole, then at Penny. He smiled at Penny and Penny smiled back. The dog moved towards the baby but the man called him back. They kept walking. The baby watched them go. Penny had a dog, he was a lovely thing. She looked around for him but he must have gone home. Red. His name was Red. She smiled warmly at the moth that had sat still. Where’s my dog? She asked the baby, but the baby was impassive. You’d like Red, she said, he won’t bite. He only bites snakes, Mum says one day he’ll lose a fight but he hasn’t yet. She said these words out loud, she knew that because she could hear them on the air, they sound different to when they’re just in her skull, shooting between the canals and cavities. And the baby was watching her, gimlet-eyed. After much consternation, the baby made a very loud sound and Penny smiled.

Penny looked out at the water, flashes of light, soft sighs. She liked water. She had always liked water, even when that kid around the headland had drowned and her mother forbade her from swimming for an entire summer. Mum. Mum, she said. I’m here. I’m right here. Come and find me. Her house must be near here, she suddenly thought. This was her beach, of course it was, there was the pine tree, there was the pier. In a rush, she knew where she was. She looked at her feet again, then her legs. She hoped she wasn’t late for dinner, her mother always worried. Where was her mother? Her mother had probably asked her to watch this baby. Penny sighed. She was always being asked to watch babies. One day, her mother always said, you’ll have some of your own. Penny wasn’t sure if she even wanted babies.

The baby had rocked herself forward onto all fours and was wobbling a little, to and fro, her nappy barely contained by the hot pink lycra of her swimming costume. An awful colour, Penny thought, so brash. Who had chosen that awful colour. So brash. The baby lurched forward suddenly, a little uncertain on the sand, but finding her rhythm as she moved. She crawled a few metres and stopped, sliding her feet under her bottom so she could sit back up and continue eating sand. Then she did again: lurched forward, crawled, slid her feet under her bottom and sat. The process gained her a metre or two every time. From her hole, the older girl suddenly looked up, eyeing off the baby.

‘Stay.’ She said, loudly, as if the baby were a dog. The baby smiled at this and tipped forward onto all fours again. A game. She took off again, but the older girl wasn’t watching anymore. She was crouched down, moving handfuls of sand, eyeing off both the waves that had become a little louder as a wind had picked up, and the seagull that had been joined by a friend.

Strawberry jam, Penny thought suddenly. Would the young girl like a sandwich, perhaps. Penny loved strawberry jam. Her mother’s, in particular. She was sure she had packed some sandwiches, she always packed sandwiches for the beach. She looked around to ask her mother, but couldn’t see her anywhere. Her mother didn’t really like the beach, she reminded herself, remember your birthday by the sea, your ninth birthday it was, when Dad nearly drowned and cousin Judy got stung by a bluebottle? Penny smiled. Ah yes, she said, out loud perhaps, I remember that. Her mother never went back to the beach after that day. It’s always taking people, Penny. Her mother’s voice.

Penny looked out at the water. The sun had passed its highest point and was now sitting low and fat in the sky, bouncing lazily off the water. But the wind was making the water short-tempered. Penny shielded her eyes. Where was she, anyway? Why was she on a beach? Penny frowned. Her mother must have let her come down alone, but where was John? He loved the beach. Did her Mum know John? Yes, they must have met, John must have come around for cake. Where were they, then? And then, the panic, quick and cold, wet. Where was she? Where was she? This can’t be all of her, surely, this wisp, this fragment on a chair, on a picnic blanket, on a beach, the wind whistling. She had come apart, somewhere, there had been a split, there must have been a split. She turned to a young girl who was digging a hole, not too far from where she sat, on a picnic blanket, on a chair, on a beach.

‘Where’s the rest of me?’

The girl paused in her digging and looked up. ‘Huh?’

‘Pardon, not huh,’ Penny murmured. The girl returned to her digging.

There was a shout. Penny turned to see a woman running across the sand. As she got closer, Penny could see her terror on her face.

‘Lily,’ she was screaming, ‘Lily, your sister!’

Lily. The name got sucked into the vacuum. Penny cast about for it, but it was gone.

Penny watched as the woman ran past the girl in the hole – why was she in a hole? – towards a baby who was, by now, sitting right where the waves whooshed up to shore, their frothy white hems breaking over her chubby knees. Why was a baby sitting so close to the water, Penny wondered. Oh dear. Her father could swim very well, he should have come over and helped. She looked around for her father, but couldn’t see him. Perhaps he didn’t know where she was. But she had told him, hadn’t she? Perhaps this woman could help her find him and then she could tell him where she was.

The woman looked at Penny and there was a hint of exasperation in her eyes, around her taut mouth. That was familiar, Penny suddenly thought, that look, that pull of skin. The baby was annoyed at being stopped and flapped her arms, squawking like a bird, but the woman clasped the baby to her hip, her side, hoisted her away from the whispering sea. After a moment, the woman exhaled slowly, closed her eyes, then opened them and smiled. She looked Penny in the eye and Penny wondered if she knew her. Probably from school. Penny was a primary school teacher, she knew that. Husband John, dead son, primary school teacher, house by the beach. Mangos, strawberry jam, Mum hated the beach. Penny knew all of those things, sometimes all at once, sometimes not at all.

Eventually, the woman reached out and touched Penny’s arm, and said, ‘Okay Mum, come on, let’s get the kids home.’

Oh, thought Penny. Yes. Of course. Perhaps she would know, then. ‘Where’s John?’

The same blink, the same smile. ‘Dad’s dead, Mum, he died ten years ago. You’re at the beach with me, Bec. And my kids. They’re your grandkids.’

The list of facts, ticked off, one after the other. She had said them a thousand times before. Penny was sorry. She knew she couldn’t remember. John, the pantry, the clapped-out motorbike, strawberry jam, mangos, the cavern of her mind. She knew it all even when she didn’t, even when she came apart.

‘Oh,’ Penny said, and she followed her daughter, her feet in the warm sand. She watched her feet until they reached the road and then she looked up. A woman was standing at a car, looking at her. Penny knew the look, expectant, hopeful, terribly, terribly sad. So she knew this woman, then. She smiled politely as she got closer to the woman, motioned at the two children, the baby on her hip, the young girl with the sun-streaked hair.

‘Are they yours? They’re lovely. Aren’t you lucky.’

The woman closed her eyes, briefly, then opened them and smiled. When she spoke, her voice was bright and patient. ‘Mum, it’s me, Bec. I’m your daughter. These are your grandchildren. Let’s get in the car and get you back home, okay?’

As they drove away, Penny saw her house out the window. She tapped the window. ‘But that’s my house. Can you take me home? My parents will be waiting for me.’