Phosphorescence (3 page)

‘You are so lucky living up there; I wish I could
get a holiday job like yours, I have to do a lame paper round in Flixby.'

‘Well, come and help me. Sadie will love there being two of us,' I suggest.

And often there is Josh. He seems to be here all the time and Sadie skips up to him when he is standing eating cereal by the Aga or taking the wheels off his skateboard to clean some tiny cog, and she tells him jokes and climbs his legs, with her hands in his, to do a somersault. I feel sad that I have no brother when I see them together, and I almost can't stop thinking about him when I am not there. But he is seventeen and I can tell that he thinks of me more as an extension of Sadie than a fit female. On my third day of looking after Sadie, she comes to greet me at the door dressed for a deluge.

‘I've got my wet-weather clothes on because Josh is taking us to Seal Point and we're having elevenses,' she announces. I grin madly and whirl her into my arms to hug her. This is perfect, just me and Josh and Sadie. Almost before the excitement can engulf me my heart starts pounding. Only me and Josh and Sadie for a whole morning. How will we keep talking? I won't be able to think of anything to say and we will have to shout anyway above the engine and it will take hours to get there.

Josh is on the quay in the boat. It is a very ordinary, grey workboat with ‘Staitheley Sailing School' painted down its side. Josh is checking the fuel tank attached to the large outboard engine. His hands are brown and he has a faded green-and-silver woven plait of thread around his wrist. My stomach
somersaults and I wish I could control myself and not feel like a tongue-tied idiot.

‘I love the seals and the seals love me.' Sadie skips on to the boat and sits down in the bow, pulling three Barbies out of her pocket and arranging them so that they are perched with their heads looking over the side.

‘Can you untie us?' Josh starts the engine while I untwist the rope from the cleat on the dockside and we chug out of the harbour, cutting through the smooth grey water, making slow headway towards Salt Head Island and the seals beyond.

Salt Head is not always an island as you can wade out to the eastern end at low tide. There's a path across the marshes from Salt, with warning notices about the dangers of being caught by fast incoming tides. At the opposite end of Salt Head is the Sand Bar, with its colony of seals.

The seals are a real attraction for tourists, and in Staitheley there are two different businesses running trips out to see them. We are friends with them both, but closest to the Lawsons, two brothers in their twenties who used to babysit me when I was small. I usually get a ride with them if I want to go out round the end of Salt Head. Today their boat is way ahead of ours, and its red bulk is a bright but distant beacon in the heavy flat sea.

Seal Point is a sandbank beyond the island and it isn't really anywhere most of the time because it is underwater, but at low tide it is exposed and the seals from the Sand Bar go and loll there on the warm wet sands. I don't go out there on my own because it is
too far for my small Laser and the currents are dangerous. Dad won't let me, so it feels very liberating to be heading off there with just Josh in charge.

Josh still hasn't looked directly at me and we have been in the boat for ages – at least twenty minutes I should think. Sadie is singing to her Barbies, and I gaze out at the horizon with a totally blank mind.

Josh leans towards me and shouts, ‘Have you heard about the whale?'

‘What whale? Is it a joke?' I shout back, and suddenly the ice between us is broken and we both laugh and begin to talk, and once we start we are so easy with one another I feel I have been chatting to him like this all my life. He tells me that a thirty-foot dead whale has been beached further up the coast and people have got caught by the tide wading out to see it. We reach the seals at lunchtime and the water is so clear that we can see their black torpedo bodies as they zoom beneath our boat to emerge, popping up in the sea, with amiable sleek faces which Sadie is convinced are smiling at her.

‘Look – that one is Starburst. I named him last time when Josh and Daddy brought me. He wants to play with Barbie.' And without so much as a last goodbye, she flings one of her three Barbies into the water.

Josh and I look at one another and the moment is intense before we burst out laughing.

‘Do you live with the Christies now?' Dad asks
sharply at supper one evening a week later. ‘You haven't been here for days.'

I spear a cherry tomato and eat it before answering.

‘They're really busy getting the boats ready. The sailing school's starting any time now and Caroline – I mean Mrs Christie – is doing all the admin for it. It's going to be brilliant.'

Dad puts down his knife and fork with a clatter.

‘It makes life awkward. I would have thought Caroline would realize that,' he mutters. I stare at him.

‘Why is it awkward? I'm good with children. I love Sadie and it's really nice at their house – no one is in a bad mood all the time.'

I am so sick of Dad looking gloomy. I think he might be ill. He used to come home with things he had found to show me and with stories about everyone in the village and lists of things that needed doing. He was the person the old ladies would ask about fixing a gate or putting up a noticeboard, but now he is morose and silent and he doesn't call Miss Mills back when Mum tells him she telephoned to ask him about the date of the next Parish Council Meeting.

Mum looks at him across the table and her eyes are hard.

‘Come on, Richard, lighten up,' she says.

Dad pushes his plate away and gets up. He puts on his coat and goes out, calling Cactus to follow him into the dark. Sighing, Mum takes both her plate and his to the sink and I am left, looking at the last two
tomatoes in the bowl in front of me, alone at the kitchen table.

‘I've got to go too,' I mutter, ‘I'm babysitting,' and I rush out of the door.

At the moment I really don't like being at home. It is so silent: Mum is always sighing or just lying on the sofa with no lights turned on, and Dad is always out.

Tonight when I arrive at Josh's house to bath Sadie and put her to bed, the noisy chaos of the Christie kitchen envelops me like a warm embrace. The telephone is ringing, Neoprene the African grey parrot is singing a nursery rhyme Sadie has taught him, and Josh is practising guitar chords, settled deep in the sagging sofa beneath the kitchen window. Caroline answers the telephone as I arrive, but she finishes her conversation and comes back to the table, pushing wisps of wild hair back from her face, which is pink and friendly as she smiles a welcome to me and carries on her conversation with Ian. He is smoking a cigarette, his chair back from the table, and he has managed to get himself looking very relaxed in what must be an uncomfortable position for a tall man, on a small kitchen chair, stretched out with his ankles crossed miles in front of him. They are talking about the advertising brochure for the sailing school.

‘I think we should have a picture of Josh and you on the front,' Caroline says, teasing her husband, ‘wearing stripy T-shirts or smocks and looking nice and nautical.'

‘No way,' Josh interrupts. ‘Put Dad in the picture
with Neoprene. Sailors should have parrots, shouldn't they?'

Ian laughs and suggests, ‘Maybe you, Caroline, wearing your bikini, might attract more clients?'

Even though Caroline is not the bikini type, she doesn't seem to be offended in the general laughter and the phone rings again. Sadie picks it up.

‘Hello. This is Sadie's house. I'm five and they're all Loony Toons here. Who is that anyway?' she warbles before anyone else can grab the receiver.

My family life is small and contained, just Mum and Dad and me. Dad is away so much at the moment, or about to go. I keep on tripping over his bag, and Cactus looks upset whenever he sees it out again.

‘Well, you're never here, so how does it affect you?' I ask Dad, after he moans that I have spent three evenings out of four with the Christies this week. ‘The only person at home any more is Mum.'

Dad is taken aback. ‘Well, the Trust has huge planning meetings at this time of year.' He shifts in his chair by the fire, dropping his newspaper on to his chest, stretching out his feet. I have to look away when I notice he is wearing his horrible, old-man slippers. ‘There's a lot to plan for this year, but as soon as the days are longer I'll be back on the marshes.' He smiles an end-of-conversation smile and turns back to his paper. The door to the kitchen clicks shut, and from behind it come muffled sounds: the flump of the fridge door and the clatter of a pan as Mum begins to clear away supper, the click of her heels on the stone floor. I open the door to join her, and I
catch her, red-eyed, crying. Her quiet, secret crying makes me uneasy.

‘What's the matter, Mum? Why are you unhappy?'

She shakes her head and manages a sad, small smile.

‘I'm not, love, I'm fine,' she insists. ‘I've just got backache.'

Frankly, I'm not surprised. She must do her back in completely. Even though everyone else in Staitheley wears sensible shoes, Mum is never out of proper heels unless there is an actual flood to prevent her. She still wears urban shoes and clothes, even after all these years on the edge of the sea. I've never seen her in slippers and her wellies are fifteen years old but they still look brand new.

‘It's probably your shoes,' I suggest, wiping dishes and placing them back in the cupboard.

‘Yes, I expect it is,' she agrees quietly, ‘I'm sure you are right.'

Mum is sad and quiet now, but she used to be happy, I think. She says she has no one to talk to but fish, and it's true that if you draw a circle, with our house as the mid-point, more than half the circle would be in the sea. When I was small I played on the quay every day, fishing for crabs, and I didn't know any other children in the village, so I did everything with Mum, and that's when I can remember her really laughing and happy. But I remember that even when I was small, I was always waiting for the day when I could go off across the marshes with Dad, and Jack, my grandfather, and Mum never wanted to do that.
She really wanted a life in a town with a garden and a road outside leading to friends and shops, not a small seaside house with markers to show the height the floods might reach, and a creek full of mud and salt water outside the back door. Mum feels hemmed in by the sea, and Dad feels free. That's how different they are. I think I am somewhere in the middle, which makes sense, I suppose.

Mum says the sea is a fair-weather friend and a cruel enemy, and she is right. Every day the turning tide is a reminder of Dad's older brother James, drowned when he was fifteen and the boat he was sailing with his best friend, Ian Christie, was swept out and around Seal Point on a rip tide, and further into a storm where it capsized, tossing James far out into the cold, roaring sea. Ian was picked up by the lifeboat, but it was a week before James's body was found, carried miles down the coast by the powerful currents. Not having any brothers or sisters, I can't properly imagine what it would be like to lose one, but when I am with Grandma and I find her looking at the photograph of James smiling, holding up a huge sea trout he caught on his fourteenth birthday, sadness runs through my veins like ice.

I know because Mum told me that the reason why Dad doesn't talk to Ian Christie is that he has never been able to get over his brother's death. Dad was only twelve, and tagged along with James and Ian wherever they went. He could so easily have been with them that day, but he was at home with Grandma. I don't think he can forgive himself for that either, or that's what Mum says. It's funny,
because Mum talks to me about this, and tells me what she thinks Dad and Grandma feel about it, and what she thinks Jack might feel, but none of them ever say anything about it themselves. It is a secret that everyone knows.

The next afternoon I walk across the marshes to my grandparents' house. Ever since I was little I have spent a night there every week, but these holidays I've been too busy and my old familiar routine has disappeared. I have been feeling a bit guilty about not seeing them, but Grandma hugs me and smiles and I know I don't ever have to apologize because she is glad to see me.

Jack, my grandfather, white-haired, gruff, but kind, and with a big moustache, has always lived on the marshes, and now he is nearly eighty. He has been a fisherman all his life and he is still out setting mussel and lobster traps on every tide. He has caught every kind of fish there is to find in these waters and he is famous in all the villages around here for bringing in a catch on tides when most people wouldn't dare leave the harbour.

‘He's an old fool,' snaps Annie, my grandma. ‘He has no need to be out there in all weathers now. He could come and help me in the garden, but he's always got a boat to mend or an engine to restore.'

I love Grandma's house, where the kitchen is warm with the scent of clean laundry and baking, and there are tins in the cupboard by the window always full of the flapjacks and cakes she makes. In the telly room, which Grandma calls the drawing room, a high shelf around the walls gleams with
pearl-pink lustre china, and there is a box of toys kept behind the sofa for visiting children; in other words, mostly for me. The toys in it are battered and faded survivors from Dad's childhood, growing up here on the marshes with his two older brothers, John and poor lost James. It makes me sad to see them gathering dust, unplayed with in the box, so I always get them out when I am at Grandma's.

I have developed a ritual with the toys. I separate them into the groups I think suit the three brothers or what I know of them. In Dad's lot, for example, I put all the animals: the lead donkey with the carrot in its mouth, the cattle and the sea lion with its bucket of fish. Of course, there aren't many wild sea birds in a children's farmyard collection, but there are a few trees and the odd tiny painting, on scraps of crumpled paper, of a garden or a field. I add all these things, and I like to think you could get a sense of Dad and his connection with nature, when you look at the toys I give him. In James's pile I sort all the little boats and their fishing nets, the miniature lighthouse and the tiny toy ice-cream van. Anything with a connection to the sea, because all I know about him is that he loved being on the water, and even that is more something I know in my head, because no one ever talks about him to me. I feel sad when I think of James, so any random black toys tend to go in his pile, like the plastic alien that appeared in the box one day, and the model Batman figure. Dad got the Bart Simpson model that came out of a cereal packet, and I gave John the McDonald's plastic car. When James died, John, the oldest of the three, was
nineteen, and the tragedy made him closed and silent. He would not go on the sea again, no matter how Jack shouted and blustered and tried to persuade him to help with the boats. John moved away when he left school, to landlocked Germany, and began working in electronics. So his toys must be the cars and tractors, the engines and wheels and dynamos in the wooden box. I line them all up, and then, because I don't know what else to do, and I am not interested in them at all, I make myself play with them and I vroom them around the room until Grandma finds me for tea and says, ‘Aren't you a bit old for those toys now?' But I like them because they give me a secret entrance into the past.