Windswept

‘Do we have to?’ Caroline whispered as they bundled soggy towels into carrier bags.
+++++‘Shhh,’ Angie said, her eyes flicking to where Gladys’ arthritic shoulders hunched over the breakfast washing-up. ‘Beth! Joanna! Mandy!’ she shouted into the hallway. ‘You ready yet?’
+++++‘Have you got everything?’ Gladys said. ‘Costumes? Squash?’
+++++‘I think so,’ Angie answered, ignoring how Caroline’s eyes shifted heavenwards. ‘I’m not sure we need costumes.’
+++++‘It’s a beautiful day,’ Gladys protested. Just then, sunlight streamed through the silted-up window, illuminating the seashells littering the sill. Beautiful, if only the long grass weren’t flip-flopping frenetically one side then the other. ‘We’d all swim whatever the weather,’ Gladys added.
+++++‘And we hated it,’ Caroline muttered as Gladys returned to clattering the crockery.
+++++‘Shhh,’ Angie said. ‘Girls!’ she shouted as she shoved the bottle of urine-pale orange squash alongside the towels, managing to rip the plastic.
+++++‘Where’s Pete?’ Caroline asked.
+++++‘Fishing.’
+++++Beth appeared in the doorway, her feet in plastic sandals and turned inwards. The plait, which had been put in three days ago, wisped in spun-sugar strands. Angie ought to undo the plait and brush and wash the hair. The elastic band would need to be cut out. Beth would fidget and cry while the tangles refused to unknot. It was too much trouble. Not as if anyone they knew would see them. Angie was shocked by the thought, that her normal routines of hygiene arose not from an inner sense of rightness, but from concern as to what people thought.
+++++‘Fishing?’ Caroline asked Angie.
+++++‘Where are the others?’ Angie asked Beth.
+++++‘Upstairs.’ The end of Beth’s plait was sucked between her front teeth.
+++++‘Tell them to come down.’
+++++‘They don’t want to. Where’s Daddy?’
+++++‘You’re still hanging round?’ Gladys’ voice interrupted.
+++++‘Fishing,’ Angie repeated.
+++++‘Don’t know what he wants to go fishing for,’ Gladys said.
+++++He’d woken Angie early with a damp kiss. ‘See you later,’ he said, before adding, ‘You will tell her won’t you?’
+++++She’d watched through sleep-drugged eyes as he pulled on yesterday’s clothes then stepped round the mattress strewn with slumbering girls. ‘Don’t catch anything,’ she said, but he was gone.
+++++‘I’ll get them,’ Angie said now.
+++++They’d been in the house long enough for the days to blur and for the bright cleanliness to have subsided into chaos. Sand gritted between the sheets and in the towels; it trailed up the stairs.
+++++The two girls were heads-together, stomachs-down in Caroline’s bedroom, their slender bodies forming a graceful V.
+++++‘We’re going to the beach!’ Angie said, her enthusiasm emerging false and harsh.
+++++‘D’we have to?’ the girls sang in unison.
+++++‘You’ll enjoy it when you’re there.’ She remembered, long ago, adults saying that sort of thing to her.
+++++‘No we won’t,’ they said.
+++++‘Yes you will.’ She thought how fragile authority was, how little power she had, given they were too big for her to lift.
+++++‘Come along now!’ Gladys’ voice erupted behind her.
+++++The girls scrambled to an immediate stand, as Angie wondered what made her mother’s instructions so compelling.
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The moment Angie opened the door, the sun disappeared. Crossing the sand-swept road, wind whipped the plastic bags in mad arcs; Angie’s hair stung across her eyes.
+++++‘Christ!’ Caroline muttered.
+++++‘Christ!’ Beth mimicked back.
+++++‘Beth!’ Angie admonished.
+++++‘What?’
+++++But how to explain to a five-year-old not to use a word that adults around her used all the time?
+++++Beyond the line of rough grass and tiered shelves of pebbles, the beige expanse of sand continued on and away in a narrowing ribbon, interrupted only by the fissured wood of wave breakers. The grey of the sea merged with the sky on the horizon. The beach was empty except for a woman and her dog.
+++++‘No one else mad enough,’ Caroline said.
+++++‘Come on, it’s not that bad.’ Angie wondered why it was always down to her to jolly everyone along, how it was that people adopted roles then failed to cast them off.
+++++She spread out a towel, battling against the snatching of the wind, weighing down the edges with stones. The towels had started hospital white and came with instructions that they were not beach towels. They were now grey and heavy with ingrained sand.
+++++Rubbing her bare calves against the cold, Angie felt overwhelmed by exhaustion, as if the sharp sea breeze were drawing energy from her, like salt drawing moisture from the air. Her skin was tight with goosebumps. The air stank of salt and seaweed. The keenness of the wind belonged in April, not July. Each year the weather somehow knew which two weeks and which location to save up all the wind and rain for. She pulled the sleeves of her bobbled jumper down over her hands.
+++++The girls had wandered off, their narrow shoulders hunched into the wind.
+++++‘What’s in there?’ Caroline asked, pointing at one of the bags whose plastic billowed ready for take-off.
+++++‘Sandwiches. Mum made them this morning.’ Angie pictured herself watching helplessly as Gladys sliced cheese, then beetroot – which Gladys had read was terribly good for you – unable to explain how there was not the remotest possibility that Beth or Joanna would eat beetroot, nor the red-stained bread. She wondered just how close – literally – to starvation they would have to be.
+++++‘Don’t see why we can’t go back for lunch,’ Caroline said, lying back so the worst of the wind skimmed over her.
+++++‘She doesn’t sleep well, gets tired. Finds having the girls around a strain.’ Angie forced out the explanation that, of course, Caroline knew. Yesterday the rain had driven them all indoors, driving them all to screaming point. ‘Besides, the girls are happy.’
+++++Joanna and Mandy were walking, heads and hands together. What did they find to chatter about so endlessly? Beth had trailed half the way then stopped and was sitting on the sand, her bucket and spade beside her. It was hard for her, Angie knew, seeing Joanna run off with their cousin. But it was good for Joanna to have a girl her own age to play with. How to balance one daughter’s needs against the other’s?
+++++‘I’ll go see Beth’s okay,’ she said.
+++++Stones speared the tender arches of Angie’s feet. The sand was cold and she thought how she’d never liked the way it got stuck between your toes.
+++++‘Shall we build some castles?’ she said to Beth.
+++++Beth shrugged in a don’t care way picked up from Joanna.
+++++‘Well I’d like to.’ Angie adopted her best lying tone, as she thought how little she’d ever enjoyed digging sand. She hugged her arms across her chest. Surely the wind would get bored eventually and blow itself out.
+++++‘Alright then.’ Beth sighed, ceding her mother a grudging favour.
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The sink was full of them. ‘One for everyone and two for me,’ Pete said. They were grey and flat and sixteen dead eyes stared upwards.
+++++‘Cheaper to buy fish,’ Gladys said.
+++++‘Wouldn’t be fresh like this,’ Angie said in that overbright voice which she seemed to be stuck on.
+++++She rinsed water over them. The smell of the sea filled the kitchen; it was everywhere, like the sand, like the tang of salt. Her hands reached into the cold water and she felt the slimy rubber slipping between her fingers. She placed one on the bread board. The knife was dull and the serrated edge tore messily into the flesh. Her heart leapt as the fish flapped. Just a reflex, she told herself. Not really alive. The insides were a gory mess of grey/blue tubes and red blood.
+++++‘How long’s dinner?’ Pete asked.
+++++
+++++
They were sitting elbow to elbow. Beth wriggled beside Angie on their shared seat.
+++++‘Don’t,’ Angie said as Mandy and Joanna set the table wobbling.
+++++‘What’s that?’ Mandy poked a finger into her fish.
+++++‘Fish,’ Angie said. ‘Your uncle Pete caught it.’
+++++‘I don’t like it,’ Mandy said.
+++++‘You haven’t tried it. And you like fish.’
+++++‘I don’t.’
+++++‘You liked it from the fish and chip shop.’
+++++‘That was proper fish.’
+++++‘This is proper fish,’ Pete said. His face was chafed red by his day out at sea.
+++++Angie cut into the blackened lump on her plate. The non-stick on the pan had long ago been scoured away.
+++++‘More trouble than it’s worth,’ Gladys muttered.
+++++‘Did you have a good day?’ Pete asked.
+++++Angie chewed the oily fish and swallowed. ‘Yes. Lovely.’
+++++‘I was talking to a woman in the post office,’ Gladys said.
+++++‘Oh yes?’ It wasn’t like her mother to make casual acquaintances.
+++++‘They’ve rented a place further along. Lovely house apparently. I said I’d go round tomorrow.’
+++++‘Oh,’ Angie said. Pete’s foot nudged hers beneath the table.
+++++‘I might book in for next year.’
+++++The silence stifled. That foot nudged again and Pete coughed. Despite not wanting to, Angie looked up at him.
+++++You are going to tell her? It was written all over his frowning face. Never again, he’d been hissing all week.
+++++‘Actually Mum,’ she started.
+++++‘Bigger than here,’ Gladys said. ‘But no more expensive.’
+++++‘We were thinking…’ she continued, feeling tension tighten neck to toe.
+++++‘So if it looks alright I might ring the landlord.’
+++++‘…next year, we might do our own thing…’ Her body was stretching long and thin.
+++++‘Book early. Own thing?’
+++++Angie looked from Pete to Gladys, aware of Caroline watching. The whole of her was an elastic band stretched taut.
+++++The girls had abandoned eating and were kicking one another under the table.
+++++‘Oww,’ Beth said.
+++++A stinging kick landed on Angie’s ankle.
+++++She felt it as a physical force, as suddenly the tension gave and she was standing brusquely and saying, ‘Fine,’ in a tone which meant the opposite. Her mind flashed a vision of sweeping plates off the table, instantly replaced by the picture of clearing up the mess. She couldn’t even snap properly!
+++++She walked out of the kitchen and along the sandy hall to the front door. She could hear the voices behind her – what’s wrong? – I don’t know – where’s she going? The door crashed behind her, but she refused to turn and check whether the stained-glass picture of blue sea, yellow sand and orange sun had shattered.
+++++
+++++
The sand stretched out flat and endless. Angie clasped her arms across her front, wishing she’d stopped to pick up her jacket.
+++++The sun had deigned to emerge, but it seemed such a pale and watery thing, unable to stand up to the bullying of the wind. The horizon curved with the sea dropping off its edge. A woman walked her dog.
+++++Angie walked.
+++++And walked.
+++++She walked until she was too tired to go further and then she sat on the damp stones. Time passed. The sun began to sink, smearing the sky pink, and she thought how if she sat long enough the tide would come in and wash her away.
+++++Feet scuttled across the stones and a body thumped behind her.
+++++‘Sorry,’ Pete said. She continued gazing out to sea. ‘About the fish.’
+++++She failed to play her part and echo back sorry too.
+++++‘And sorry I deserted you today.’
+++++She wondered if he would keep fishing for things to apologise for and if eventually he’d hit on one that mattered.
+++++His hand rubbed her goosebumped arm. It seemed an age with neither of them speaking.
+++++Eventually she said: ‘She’s lonely, you know. Since Dad died.’
+++++‘I know.’
+++++‘And she loves seeing the girls but can’t cope with their energy.’
+++++‘I know.’
+++++‘And it’s the only chance Caroline gets to go away, and we’d struggle to afford a holiday ourselves.’
+++++‘I know.’
+++++‘And she’s my mother.’
+++++They continued breathing in the salt and seaweed, listening to the erratic clawing of the waves against the stones.
+++++Pete shuffled closer, and she felt his jacket slipped over her shoulders. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We should get back.’
+++++He held out his hand to help her up, and they walked back slowly along the windswept beach.
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Over the last five years, Sarah Evans has had dozens of stories published in magazines, competition anthologies and online. ‘On such a night’ was a runner up for Bridport 2008. ‘His Mother Tongue’ won first place in the 2009 Legend Writing Award. ‘Afterwards’ won first place in the Oct 2010 Writers’ Forum monthly competition. Several of her stories have appeared in Earlyworks Press anthologies, and recently she read from ‘The Chose’ at the launch event for ‘Ways of falling’.

Sarah has a Diploma in Creative Writing from the Open University and helps run a weekly writers’ circle in London. She lives in Welwyn Garden City with her husband.