One+Summer

One summer … there is a plateau of grey sand and a fuzzy, pubic line of seaweed marking the outgoing tide. I am broken on a towel, wet belly coated with grit, sunglasses crystallising the light, my flabby flanks reddened with burn. You are sitting some distance away, reading a book. Your knees are drawn up, your shoulders hunched. You are alone in the author’s world. We have not argued, so much as quietly disagreed. But our relationship that summer has been a creaking boat that has lurched from one quiet disagreement to another. Our child stands before me, shielding the sun with his long body. He is sculpted, slim and naturally balanced, the colour of candles. A khaki cap rests on his head. He is shivering despite the heat; the water is cold and has tinged his sweet, articulate lips to blue. When I watch him, I feel as proud as I feel scared because children are at the core of creation and they carry unwittingly the twin axioms of parental responsibility and love. Then I wonder from where he found the urge to grow, how he knew about stretching and searching and believing, becoming like he is. ‘Dad,’ he says to me. ‘Is this the sea that God split?’ He knows from previous experience that I will sit dumbly and he will have to explain further; yet his faith in me is uncompromised. ‘There were people escaping from soldiers and the desert,’ he says carefully. ‘Because it wasn’t promised. Then they came to a sea, which stopped them. So God split the sea for them to get through.’ ‘Moses?’ I ask. ‘Joshua!’ he counters, amazed by my foolishness. ‘And the soldiers followed them but when the soldiers tried to go through, God put the split back together and they all drowned.’ He smiles. The story has made him happy. ‘Then what happened?’ I ask him. ‘The people found the place that God promised,’ he tells me matter-of-factly. ‘And the blood of the drowned soldiers made the sea red, so now it’s called the Red Sea.’ ‘Right.’ ‘I suppose someone buried the soldiers in a big graveyard,’ he continues. ‘Actually, a really big graveyard, or maybe lots of graveyards.’ And once again I have this sense that the rest of the world has stopped, ceased to revolve or be, and we are here together, sorting the whole stupid thing out. ‘Did God make all the world?’ he asks. I look up again and see this wonderfully inquisitive face, a wrapped towel, shining eyes, and the blue perfect sky as clean as brushed oil. ‘Yes He did,’ I answer. ‘And it only took Him seven days.’ He is briefly silent, then suddenly flops in the sand and makes traces with his toes. ‘Seven days,’ he repeats. ‘That’s pretty amazing. There’s so much in the world and God made it all.’ ‘He liked to be kept busy,’ you say, and I wonder if you have been listening the whole time. ‘Did God start by making the sea?’ you ask. ‘Yes,’ we say, and we are shocked to realise that our answer was simultaneously spoken. I have never understood where this fascination for God and Godliness has come from. So many questions are asked about this thing that, truth be known, I have no real or abiding faith in. ‘Is Heaven past the moon?’ I retreat into the safety of answers that cannot be verified. ‘It’s so far that you can’t see it.’ ‘Past all the blue?’ ‘Yes,’ I sigh, ‘past all the blue.’ ‘That’s so far away. Does it take long to get there?’ ‘Yes … I suppose so.’ ‘Because it’s past all the clouds?’ ‘Further than anything. The farthest point.’ And another, earlier time, when I am cursing the battle-lines of ants that scuttle along our kitchen bench. He says: ‘It’s all Adam and Eve’s fault, isn’t it?’ I look at him curiously. ‘What have ants got to do with Adam and Eve?’ He takes a deep breath and explains. ‘Adam and Eve did something bad about apples, so God sent snakes and ants as punishment.’ It is a simple reconciliation of ideas that defines his world. But I cannot believe in a god or the goodness of any supreme being, not since one summer … when I remember the rolling surf of the morning, the way it curled over and tossed out huge tunnels of spume, deep green dragons that lashed and fizzed and spat dangerously. ‘It’s rough,’ you said to me. You had a creamy dab of sunscreen left on the tip of your nose so I kissed it and felt bubbles of liquid on my lips. ‘It’ll be okay,’ I answered. ‘I’ll hold him until exactly the right moment. It’ll be fine.’ Because the child was there too, seven years old and still in love with God, dinosaurs and backyard trees that act as castles. If he was scared, he did not show it. Instead he lifted his foam board from the wet sand and ran his finger around the decorative red swirls. ‘Just one more wave,’ you told me. ‘Then we should go get some lunch.’ So I walked silently into the ocean, the child holding my hand hard, gulls wrenching the quietude from the air. I remember the first cold rush of water, the rip tying our legs with loose weed and kelp fronds, a quick confusion as we ducked and lost the horizon. I can see us slicked by the furious water, being smacked down and bounced like the timber from old ships through the back of a wave. My shout was a hosanna to the seas. Feeling the swell lift and regather, we turned quickly and the child scrambled onto his board, paddling furiously then watching as I lifted him high and let him go. The next wave loomed, all shadow and power, as sleek as a cat’s back. I saw a flash of red break left towards the end of the beach, the foam churning into wash and then there was a thundering humbling noise around me. But no board. No child. That awful moment, life on pause. So I ran and plunged and shouted madly for him, dipped my hands greedily into the green ocean like a sailor scooping for jewels. I flung the waves and weeds back to the sky until at last I saw his white floating feet and then fingers, strangely luminous as they fluttered in the tide. I dropped to him, picked him up, shook him and urged him towards life, God’s life I prayed, then I swivelled him onto the sand and pumped his thin brown back for a purging gush of seawater. My tears fell onto his silent chest as I waited and wondered, too frightened to contemplate any moment beyond the present. He lay like a stone on the beach, smooth and solitary and plainly a thing of beauty. I remember then that people arrived and he was quickly transported away, a prize in the upturned hands of these volunteer pallbearers. Only then did I chance to look at you but I saw nothing and you said nothing, nothing but tiny unformed whispers to yourself and yourself only. His official and legal death occurred two days later. A doctor told me that he must have hit his head; there was a ragged contusion over his left temple that I had failed to notice. ‘A sharp edge,’ the doctor said. She was fat and in a hurry, and I hated the way she looked at me. I knew what she was thinking; sharp edges belong to fathers. We must defeat them. Fathers must unite and rid the poor, scraping universe of all sharp edges. If they do not, then clearly they have failed. I went back to the beach exactly a month later and waited for the lowest tide. There were small black rocks scattered haphazardly about like drowned rats, and one larger rock near the shore. It had jutting sides and gleaming points. A child travelling with uncontrolled force could smash his skull on a rock such as this. If he did such a thing, the child would slide gently into the shallows and water would creep mercilessly into his lungs, filling him as surely as a vase of flowers. If he was lucky, his responsible father might get to him on time. If not, he would die: bleeding, injured, a sad monument to the ineptitude of his parent. Horrible days followed, days where we slid tentatively into each moment and sat, stupefied, filled with cold hard lumps of hurt. A first child should not die, says the myth: he should be especially alive because in his face are photographs of me, my own eager youth, the stamps of my heritage and knowing of myself. When they laid him regally in his child-white coffin I became angered by his stillness and I yelled at him to speak, to wave and show me it was a game of pretend like we always played. When they spoke soberly of love and loss I drifted away like the tide that killed him and wished that when we had walked together into the crashing waves, we might have spoken because it was the absence of final words that ripped at me most. After the service I remained confused: why did it take his death to make me realise how much I loved him? Parents tolerate their children, energise them, pat them and encourage them, watch and compare them, cajole, will them to sleep, but show their love? Not until those children leave, and we quickly, wistfully learn to love their memories and each tiny imaginary glimpse of what those children might one day have become. One late summer day you found me packing toys, shovelling them into anonymous cartons. ‘Put them back in the cupboard,’ you said to me. ‘I prefer them in the cupboard.’ I looked at the treasure trove of plastic soldiers, jigsaws, bug-eyed aliens, a snapped kite, bags of Lego. There was a painted rock with a ribbon around it, a goldfish bowl used to store lumps of solidified plasticine, a dented metal helicopter. I looked at all of these and thought: these are just useless ugly things. I want them out of my house. I never want to see them again. ‘I’m taking them to the dump,’ I told you brusquely. ‘Might as well.’ So you dropped the puppet that you had been caressing, raised your small face bruised with nights of silent weeping, then whipped your fist across my mouth. I folded my mind between my hands and backed into a corner. When my breath came, it was like a wind released from old caves when the entrance is cleared. Then I dropped my hands and saw my blood, the fresh red blood of a sinner, staining my fingers and my shirt. One summer … I remember the boy who loved God lying blue on the sand, his breath drowned by a burst of flat cold water. I remember you, later on, desperately shaking our towels down as the siren of the ambulance leaving shattered the day. ‘What are you doing?’ ‘There’s still sand in these. I’m getting rid of the sand.’ I remember seagulls arcing slyly over us, the whisper of breezes carrying scents of seaweed, a crab screwing itself energetically into the wet grit of smashed shells. I remember the uncertain faces of family and friends, and the lengths of silences in our house. I remember it all as vividly as I remember that first night, lying in bed, together but separate beneath a shroud of clammy summer heat. ‘What’ll we do?’ you asked eventually but I didn’t know, and I still don’t. Every moment in every place forms a random unity that determines the direction of our lives. One summer I lost my child. I lost my future, my innocence, any prospect of unsullied happiness. I lost you – I think forever – and I lost faith in myself. Every day since I have been confronted by the child that I once pulled madly from the sea, the blue-lipped boy who now swims lithely and beautifully inside of me. Once again I can only watch helplessly, as he deftly strokes his way through my rich, warm, rotting guilt towards the God that always wanted him.
 * One Summer Appendix 2 **