Chapter 16

16

SEAGLASS

1980

I cried in the dark for what felt like hours, and I banged on that door until my knuckles bled. I was never afraid of the dark before then, but I have been ever since. I don’t think that’s childish or silly. I think it’s completely logical to fear what you cannot see. Our mother was sleeping off a vat of cheap wine she’d drunk alone at lunchtime while I was locked inside the cupboard under the stairs. She’d taken a pill and put in earplugs to drown out the sound of her children—so it was only when Nana came back from walking the dog that anyone heard me crying. Her face was one of horror when she finally found the keys and unlocked the cupboard door. Lily was banned from roller-skating for two more weeks, and it was Nana’s idea that Rose and Lily should be further punished by having to take me to the beach on my fifth birthday.

The following week, after a breakfast of pancakes with hot chocolate sauce, that’s what they begrudgingly did, both holding one of my hands so that I could swing between them.

“And do not take your father’s camcorder. I’ve told you before, it’s not a toy. If you get sand in it and it stops working, I’ll never hear the end of it,” said Nancy, waving us off at the door.

“Okay!” yelled Lily, already marching down the causeway with the camcorder tucked inside her backpack. She held my hand as we headed for the beach, until she thought Nana and our mother could no longer see. I remember her grinning in my direction. Her smile had holes where the tooth fairy had stolen her teeth, a bit like the piano with its missing key.

“You’re five now, Daisy. And I think you’re old enough to play with Rose and me more often,” Lily said. Rose frowned, as though hearing this for the first time. “Would you like that?”

I nodded. I would have done almost anything to get them to like me more. The age gap between them at nine and ten was minimal, but the years between them and me always seemed vast. I would often watch them playing clapping games, tapping their hands together, faster and faster, while chanting strange rhymes. There was one about going to a Chinese restaurant, to buy a loaf of “bread bread bread.” It made no sense to me, but I longed to be a part of it anyway. I had tried several times before to keep up with their big-girl games, and it rarely ended well. I was permanently covered in scratches and bruises, and my nostrils were frequently overcome by the smell of Bactine.

We played with an old skipping rope until Lily got bored, chanting the rhymes their friends had taught them, and they had taught me. I didn’t know what half of them meant, but I learned the words through repetition and a desire to join in, just like all children do. I remember my favorite rhyme we used to chant and skip to:

Lizzie Borden took an ax,

She gave her mother forty whacks.

After she saw what she had done,

She gave her father forty-one.

Lizzie Borden got away.

For her crime she did not pay.

Rose loved that rhyme. Those skipping games on the beach were one of the few childhood activities at Seaglass that required all three of us: two to swing the rope, one to jump.

“Let’s play the mermaid game instead. Do you want to go first?” Lily said, with her hole-filled smile.

They buried me in the black sand until my face was all they could see. Then they made a sand-shaped mermaid’s tail and decorated it with seashells. They left me there for over an hour while they built sandcastles nearby. Our family seems like a sandcastle to me now, quick and relatively effortless to build, and even faster to wash away, as though it never existed. I can remember nothing solid about the relationships we had with one another, nothing substantial that couldn’t be obliterated in a mere moment by a cross word or the crash of a wave none of us saw coming. I remember hating both of my sisters for the first time that day. Really hating them. I couldn’t move—the sand was too heavy where they had buried me beneath it. My face was burning in the hot sun and I was crying, until Conor came along. He had two yo-yos that year, and could do all kinds of clever tricks with them, both at once. I heard him talking to Rose before I saw him.

“Did you know that Seaglass was one of the properties used in the Second World War to look after evacuated children?” he said.

“No, how do you know that?” ten-year-old Rose asked, sounding genuinely interested.

“I read about it at the library, and now I’m writing about it for my school newspaper. I’m going to be a journalist one day. Children would walk here to this stretch of coast, all the way from Plymouth. A long line of them carrying their little suitcases over the hills and sand dunes, to escape the bombings in the city, leaving their parents behind.”

“Conor, help me!” I yelled.

He looked amused at first when he spotted me stuck in the sand with my mermaid’s tail of shells. But when he saw that I’d been crying, he dug me out at once and pulled me up.

“It was just a joke,” said Rose, looking at Conor, not wanting him to think badly of her.

“Yeah, don’t be such a crybaby all the time,” said Lily.

“I hate you both!” I said, then stormed off to get my armbands. “I’m going to swim to America and I never want to see either of you ever again.” When Lily laughed, it only made me more determined. The tide was coming in, and I think deep down I knew I’d probably only make it to the little rock island half a mile out, but I thought I was a good swimmer. And with my orange armbands, I felt invincible. I looked at Rose, who was the eldest after all, but she just stared down at the sand.

That was when Lily picked up the camcorder again.

I watch now in horror, along with the rest of the family in the present, as five-year-old me starts to swim out to sea. It reminds me of when we watched Titanic together, knowing that the film couldn’t possibly end well. I see myself getting smaller and smaller, doing my own variation of doggy paddle, where sometimes I threw in a lopsided backstroke, which involved rolling over for a bit of doggy paddle now and then to see where I was going. Only Lily and Rose had been sent for swimming lessons.

When I was halfway to the rock island, I got scared and turned around. Rose was at the water’s edge, yelling something I could not hear. Conor was waving his arms, and even Lily appeared to be a little worried, beckoning me to come back. They all looked very small and far away, and I decided maybe it wasn’t a good idea to swim to America that day after all. I tried to head back toward Blacksand Bay, but the sea had other plans.

I was dragged sideways first. Then backward. Then one of my armbands came off when a wave crashed over me. We’d been warned about the dangerous undercurrents in the bay when the tide was this distance from the shoreline, but I was too little to understand the consequences of ignoring them. Fear is something we have to feel to learn and learn to feel.

The harder I tried to swim toward my sisters, the farther away they seemed to get. The ocean was suddenly very loud inside my little ears. It dragged me under. I remember the panic and the pain. I felt as though the cold water had stolen the air from my lungs and I couldn’t breathe; then the sea and sky folded in on each other and on me. I was drowning in blue. Then life turned black.

Rose pulled off her clothes, dumped them on the sand, and ran into the ocean wearing a red swimsuit. She was only ten, and she knowingly risked her own life to save mine that day. Things were different after that. Once Rose knew I was broken, I became something she wanted to fix. An injured bird in her imaginary cage. She dragged me back to shore, then performed the CPR that cracked two of my ribs, and Lily filmed the whole thing.

It feels like an out-of-body experience as I watch myself coughing up water and see Nana and my mother running onto the beach. The film stops then, but I remember the paramedics doing their best to cross the causeway, and I remember seeing Conor and Rose holding hands as I was carried away from them all. He wrote a story about her for his school newspaper after that, the headline read: Local Hero Saves Her Sister’s Life. It was the first time that I understood that friendships can change a person. True best friends bring out the best in you.

I was in hospital for two weeks while the doctors prodded and poked me. Routine tests revealed my broken heart, and things were never the same again. The first night, when my family had all left and I was alone on a scary ward, I was grateful that my bed was next to the window. The moon was bright that evening, and it meant that I could see cloud creatures, even though the sky was black. They danced across the shy moon, but the shapes they made no longer resembled ponies or dragons. Only monsters. Monsters don’t always hide in the dark. Some walk around in broad daylight, happy to be seen by anyone foolish enough to look in their direction.

My mother blamed herself for my broken heart. I have always known that deep down, but never quite understood why. Something she did while pregnant with me, perhaps? The doctors said my condition was so rare they still didn’t know what caused it. Nancy spent days sitting by my bedside or in waiting rooms. She tutted and sighed and flicked through the free magazines, looking for competitions to enter. Nancy rarely read anything except a TV guide.

I remember when the doctors said that I was well enough for the whole family to visit. My sisters gave me homemade Get Well cards; Nana brought me a bottle of lemonade and a box of chocolates filled with only toffee pennies because they were my favorites. Dad sent “all his love” from a concert hall in Vienna. Apparently there were no flights back to the UK that week. Lily wore a new dress and her very best smile for the occasion. She was the last one to leave my hospital bed, and rushed back over when they were all about to go. Everyone waited in the entrance to the ward while she whispered something in my ear before kissing me on the cheek.

“Good girl,” said Nancy, happy that her favorite daughter was trying to make up for what had happened. She has always been a firm believer in fraudulent feelings. She presumed Lily had apologized and didn’t hear what my sister had really said. None of them did, but I’ve never forgotten it:

“I wish you had drowned.”