Salinity

Watery sunbeams raked the water, but I could not see the seabed, or the surface, and I could not tell which way was up. The ocean, under its grey wrinkled surface, was as green as a peacock’s neck. I hung which-ever-way-up in the sea’s strange emerald light, and strands of pearls bubbled from my nose and mouth. ‘Is this drowning?’ I wondered, as it began to hurt in my chest. Just before I’d been teaching Salina to swim in the shallows where doll-sized waves rippled. Now the blue sky had been replaced by sea-grapes and swirling ribbons of seaweed.

I gave up trying to reach the surface, and then a few moments later I could not remember why I had wanted to. The sharp saltiness in the back of my nose stopped hurting and the beautiful shimmering green began to disappear from the water. As though the sun went down in a rush everything turned grey and then greyer, until there was only a soft, cosy blackness.

I was seven years old, the day I drowned, and it took my Uncle Brian seven puffs of air to bring me back to life. I sucked in lung-fulls of sea-damp air with a gasp, and vomited salty water down my neck and into my ears. I could feel the prickles and wetness where Uncle Brian’s mouth had been on mine. Gritty sand scratched my back, and the stinging tickle of stinking black seaweed scraped the bare skin of my legs, but I lay a little longer wondering what would happen next. The next sound I heard, as I lay there getting over drowning, was that of my mother crying.

‘My baby, my little baby!’ she was sobbing, and then, ‘Hopeless. You’re just plain hopeless!’ My Dad had been minding me while she sat in out of the cold. Other voices were talking and someone put a towel around me and I lay there until I felt warmer and had left it long enough so I wouldn't have to say sorry for causing all the fuss.

Then I smelt my favourite smell in the whole world drifting on the breeze: hot chips with salt and vinegar. I surprised them all by sitting straight up and opening my eyes. ‘Hello there!’ I said in a watery voice. The world looked bluer than I remembered. My mother didn't say anything, she had to go and sit in the car. But my Dad hugged me with a teary grin and promised to find my doll if it took him all night.

Uncle Brian carried me up the beach. I was embarrassed to be pressed so close to his tanned chest smelling of coconut and sweat, so I closed my eyes again. His tightly coiled chest hairs prickled my skin. He bundled me into the back of the car, and he sat in the front with Mum and held her hand.

From the car I watched Dad wade up and down in the shallows, searching forSalina, his trousers rolled over his knees and his feet white in the half-light. He peered deep into the waves; their folding tops glowing silver and purple in the fading day. Only the backs of Mum and Uncle Brians’ heads kept me company and they talked in low voices only to each other, their heads close together.

My eyes stung, and my head swirled like I was back in the peacock-green ocean. I ate my chips one by one, and hoped Salina would float into Dad’s outstretched fingers. I imagined Dad’s hands with soft webs stretching between his fingers like a Mer-man’s.

Mum and my uncle were talking, and from the tone of their voices I could tell I wasn’t meant to be listening. After a few moments Mum moved away from him and her fingers drummed in sharp rhythms on the shiny, black steering wheel. ‘You are dangerous for me, Brian,’ she said at last. ‘I shouldn’t be left alone with you.’

By the time my chips are gone, Dad will find Salina, I thought. I ate slowly, and when the cup was nearly empty I licked the salt from my fingers. Salty tears oozed from my eyes, and dripped into the cup, plop, plop, plop.

I thought, I am full of the sea. I am salt.

The first stars were appearing when Dad finally came up the foot-track. Empty handed. Uncle Brian leapt out of the car, ‘Any luck?’ he asked in a booming, cheery voice. Dad did not answer him. He knelt at the rear door, and put his hand on mine. ‘I'm sorry, little mite,’ he said. His skin was strangely grey and moist looking, and his trousers dripped into the dust of the car park. ‘Salina has gone. She’s gone to live with the mermaids.’ I looked at his big white hand. It was wrinkled and cold like something dead, something bloated with water, not webbed like a Mer-man’s should be. I looked away, pulling my hand from under his at the same time. An aching in my throat would not let me talk.

Mum started the car, and revved the engine impatiently. ‘Sorry love,’ she said. She looked over her shoulder into the back seat for the first time. ‘You were too old for a dolly, any how,’ she added, lighting another cigarette with a glowing coil of wire. My uncle Brian got in the back with me while Dad started the car. ‘Chip tax,’ he said with a chuckle, stealing the longest chip I’d been saving and that was now soggy on one end from my tears. ‘Well, Frank, that was quite a trip to the beach, hey!’

The very next Sunday, when he came to take my Mum out to lunch, Uncle Brian gave me a new doll. She came in crinkly, purple paper with a wardrobe of little clothes. She had such long, smooth hair that I hated her a bit for being so beautiful. My own hair was not long and it was never smooth, it frizzled up in the rain. I spent hours in my room with the door shut on the silence of Dad left alone in the house, arranging her tiny clothes on pale yellow plastic hangers. I could not think of a name so didn’t call her anything. I told her that in life there were many things that were very dangerous, and especially warned her about the dangers of the sea, and she promised not to go anywhere near it. I cut her hair as short as mine to make it easier to look after.

One night at the end of summer Mum set the table in the dining room with Grandma’s tablecloth, the one embroidered with red strawberries normally used for Christmas or really fancy dinners. She spread it carefully over the polished wood and laid it with the best plates, arranging them on the table like a magazine ad. I put out the cutlery while Mum spent a long time making a roast dinner, sort of humming every now and then as she peeled and poked. Dad and I grinned at each other as everything came out to the table all piled onto our biggest platter. It looked and tasted like Christmas and I wondered if there would be pudding and ice-cream for dessert.

Dad and I were the happiest we’d been for a long time and I thought that Mum must be too. But after she finished picking at a chicken leg and baked potato she placed her knife and fork side by side in the exact centre of her plate, pushing some peas to one side. In the same voice she had used to ask Dad for the gravy, she said,

‘I'm leaving you Frank. Brian loves the girl like she was his own and he’ll give us both a good home.’ The fork on its way to Dad’s mouth stopped in its tracks. A spot of gravy landed on the table-cloth, making one of the strawberries look like it had a rotten patch in it. Then Mum just picked up her plate and left the table. In the darkened kitchen I heard her fumbling in her cigarette packet, and then theclick, click, click of her lighter.

At first nothing happened, then Dad slid his plate right across the table, ploughing the strawberries into thick rumples and folds. He kept pushing it right to the very edge and I watched it wobble, then fall. Globs of gravy, a slick brown carrot, and half a potato pattered onto the carpet. The lid came off the salt shaker and a drift of salt spewed out.

‘Is that how you tell me?’ he asked in a thin voice, but Mum just puffed away in the kitchen.

Maybe there was pudding, maybe not. I didn’t get any and that, plus the fact that Mum had ruined the lovely dinner, meant I hated her for a while then.

Mum and Dad stopped talking to each other apart from Dad’s thin sentences that started with ‘why…?’ and Mum’s angry, smoky nothings. When he was putting me to bed Dad told me he was trying to find the words to stop us leaving him. But Mum went from one room to another so she didn’t have to listen to him. The only happy person seemed to be Uncle Brian, who appeared in the house when Dad was not there and pretended I was playing a game where I was holding out on him and he had to guess the name of my new doll.

I had to pack my clothes and my toys into green garbage bags all by myself as Mum was too busy to help me. Dad cried when he saw them in my room. I couldn’t imagine Uncle Brian crying about that sort of thing. I told Dad not to worry, because I’d come back to see him all the time. That cheered him up a lot, he said.

Two days later it was me who found her. She was lying face down in a shallow sea of pinkly tinged bathwater, an empty container of strawberry bath-salts bobbing in the crook of her neck. Dad came and the lid of the toilet creaked as he sat on it, next to the bath. My Mum lay so still in the water, like she was sleeping. Then Dad began to cry, but differently, like something was jammed up inside. His noises reminded me of some sort of small animal. I pressed to his side and patted him as lovingly as I could. He pointed out my new doll lying with wet hair and a squashed arm in the bottom of the bath. ‘A bloody doll!’ he cried. ‘She slipped on a bloody doll!’

Water dripped from the tap into the pink water, …plunk, …plunk, …plunk. The water around her head was redder than raspberries but pinker than tomato sauce. Darker outlines of crimson outlined sea-weedy shapes where her hair fanned in tendrils around her head. ‘Should we give her the Kiss of Life?’ I asked eventually, not liking to suggest out-right that we ask Uncle Brian to come and puff seven hot breaths into her wet mouth. ‘Too late Pumpkin,’ said Dad sadly. ‘It’s all too late for that.’

’Oh.’

Rather than look at Mum any longer I sat on Dad’s knee and looked over his shoulder at all the things lying around the sink. Mum’s toothbrush was pale blue, with stiff shiny bristles. Dad’s had soft, curved lashes for bristles. Mine was smaller with yellow flowers. We stayed like that a long time, too sad to move, until the first thin stars appeared out the window.

Much later, when everyone had left, Dad tucked me in and kissed my hair. He left the door open just the right amount and I snuggled in to Angel, my new dolly, and smelled her plasticky smell. I smiled to myself when I realised that Brian had been wrong to try and take us away, but a bit right about Angel – I had known her name all along. Angel, come to save me. She did not like to snuggle, this one, but I was beginning to like her plastic smell. I held her and licked the warm skin of my arm where Dad had cried onto it and it tasted like the sea. ‘Is your poor arm alright?’ I asked Angel. ‘Did clumsy Mummy tread on you and hurt your little arm?’ It was still a little flattened and had a line like a scar on its plastic surface. I kissed it tenderly. ‘I'm glad we won’t have to leave Dad now,’ I whispered to Angel. ‘From now on it will be just him, you and me… thank you for saving me Angel.’