Afterwards I wondered how Devin felt as she was carried out by the movement of the current, greedy and intentional, swift and alert. There was no pause for reflection or chance of escape. Once past the foaming white water that met the rocks with repetitive impatience, she glided smoothly on the water’s surface. It was something way bigger than she was and she surely must have known it, in that moment. The way she was pulled forward in that fluid movement in warm sunshine as the sparkle bounced off the sea. It was perfect to witness and remember, and afterwards she told me that she felt quite calm. She believed that she was going to heaven, but she would never have got there because I believed I was going to dive head first into the waves and save her. But Samuel dived first and swam strongly and caught her in the water just as I reached the edge of the rocks. She later told me how her mouth involuntarily gasped a gulp of air and her lungs filled and the heady rush of oxygen made the world beyond her eyes go white. She fought and she flailed and I stood, motionless now, because my father was there and I knew he would save her. As though it was a game, he swung her round onto his back and shouted at her to hold on, hold on. Devin clung to those smooth brown shoulders as he paddled back towards the shore.
On the beach he lowered her onto the sand and his hand struck her backside in a sharp slap. An awakening from a dream and she started.
‘Are you mental?’ His lips curled into thin lines, white specks of spittle flew from them. ‘I told you to stay with your mother!’ I took a step back. He didn’t look at her. My mother ran up and grabbed her by the arm, her nails dug deep into the skin like a vice or a grip that would slowly crush my sister while she was still alive. She lifted Devin almost off the ground and she too beat my sister’s bottom with her bare hand. Words flew from her mouth in an anger that we didn’t understand. Devin stood calm and still, her eyes focused solely on Samuel as he walked away from her. He didn’t stop or turn back. He went with his head stooped to the umbrella.
He sat on my towel and leaned back, exhausted. My mother returned to her place and pressed her head into her hands, and I couldn’t tell if it was from the heat or from relief. I passed my sister on tiptoes, though my feet in the sand made no sound. The weight of my knees formed dents as I dropped down beside him and felt the warm wet salt of his shoulder against my cheek. He stood again suddenly, as though awakened by my comfort, and he lifted me up onto his shoulders before carrying me with him back to the sea. All the while my sister watched without moving. I imagined her lungs burning, and the beat of her racing heart. But what might have stayed with her most was the memory of his soft skin.
Now that same sea stretches out like a flat plate of painted concrete. The trees on the mountain ridge are purple and expectant, and I keep my eyes up there, away from the blue. Hayley is quiet. Her eyes are on the other side, watching the ocean.
‘You okay, little one?’ I ask her.
‘I’m fine, Ma.’
Auster opens the window and puts his elbow on the edge. The wind forces his hair back and I know he needs that wind on his face, that it must feel something like swimming. Fresh. Open. As though we are actually moving somewhere.
‘Don’t forget to drop me off, Mom.’
‘You sure you still want to go?’
‘What do you think?’ I don’t like the petulant edge that laces her answer. ‘We’re going to the pool.’
‘Will her mother go with you?’
‘It’s only down the road.’
Auster looks at me. I keep my face forward, to the purple mountain that comforts us wherever we go.
‘Just don’t do anything stupid,’ I say. ‘Don’t talk to anyone you don’t know and don’t let anyone follow you home.’
‘God.’ She mutters it under her breath and rolls her eyes. She thinks I don’t see, but I have eyes in the back of my head, because that’s what being a mother does to you; it gives you double, even triple, vision for what you’re not supposed to know.
‘I only have one daughter,’ I say, but her face is gone from me and her eyes are somewhere else, dreaming of things beyond whatever I can offer her.
‘If you come home with us now we can go to the beach later on.’ I want to bargain, to retain a small stake.
The engine of the car keeps us moving forward, away from my father and back towards our own lives. This road winds and bends between stretches of thick dark green, taking us further into the city. Three traffic lights later I turn right and suddenly suburban houses surround us, the walls higher than any man and the paths hard and rough and made for city shoes. We find a house that is painted blue, easily visible from the road across a wide lawn, and I press the buzzer at the top of the driveway. There is no answer, but the metal gates swing wide. I put my foot on the accelerator and drive onto the property. The back door of the vehicle opens unexpectedly and I jam on the brakes, just in time to prevent the door from smashing into the concrete gatepost. ‘Hayley!’
‘What?’
‘She didn’t mean it, Cat. Go easy on her,’ Auster says.
‘Don’t come in. Please, Mom. Just drop me here,’ Hayley says.
Further into the property is the house with a wide veranda and a sloping roof that rests on four white pillars. A door opens and a small figure in a green pinafore dress appears and waits there for my daughter, her friend.
‘Are her parents here?’
‘Yes.’ Hayley slams the door and begins to run, but I call out to her through the open window. ‘Hey, come back here!’
She slows and stops and then moves back to the car, dragging her feet. But she doesn’t come to me. She goes to Auster; round to his side. ‘What?’ she asks reluctantly.
‘I want a kiss,’ he says.
‘Come on, Dad.’ She tilts her head to the side, but a smile pulls on her mouth and she gives in to her father. ‘Bye.’ She leans forward and kisses Auster, waves briefly at me. As she walks away from us I notice that her hair is longer, her back straighter, and her legs walk purposefully on, without me.
I drive slowly through the sloping streets and in places the trees on either side rise up so big and tall that they bend across to form an arc of leaves and branches above the road. The feeling in my gut is one of trepidation and I am drawn to it, to that feeling and what it knows, like a swarm of fruit flies will always find the bucket of rotting waste. ‘Marshall’s house is just near here,’ I say.
‘I know,’ Auster replies. ‘Don’t go there, Cat. You don’t have to. Let’s get some coffee somewhere.’
I pause at a stop sign. There’s a school across the way. The classrooms are all dark through the rows of windows, but on a field kept green beside the building some boys are playing tip and run. There’s a compulsion in me, taking me where I don’t want to go. Auster turns towards me and puts his hand on my back.
‘Stop it now. Stop punishing yourself. Leave it alone. Your dad will be happy where he is. Let it all rest now, Cat.’
The roof of the shopping centre has a fresh coat of blue paint, though nothing like the kind of blue I need that is fluid and sunlit and can only be found in the sea. The car park is half-filled with vehicles too big for any city road, cars that cost more money than my father ever had in his life. Samuel wouldn’t have coped now that everything depends on money, on how much you can get and how fast you can get it.
‘He would’ve been worse off,’ I say. ‘He would never have managed in this kind of world.’
The floor of the centre is a white polished tile that gleams with the reflections of the yellow spotlights above. There is nothing natural in here. No leaf, tree, patch of sky, or anything to remind me of the ocean. I hold Auster’s hand and we find a coffee shop that is almost empty. The green chairs are low, the tables topped with glass, false silk flowers in small white vases. There’s a woman in the corner with a cup and saucer on the table. She’s writing furiously in a notebook and she looks up as we enter. Her eyes move back and forth, but what she sees is only a distraction from whatever is going on in her head. Young peop
le in green uniforms make light banter across the tables as they move between them, spilling time as they wait for customers. The girl closest to us fetches two menus and leads us to a table at the far end of the shop. We sit and I order Auster a red cappuccino, and a bowl of ice cream for myself. It comes as a white island swimming in a sea of dark chocolate sauce.
I rest my elbows on the table and rub my eyes with my fingertips. I watch the waiters moving around with their chests out and their pert hairstyles, and I want to tell them that what they’re waiting for will never come. They think they’re all going somewhere. My thoughts spiral down into what I think they don’t yet know; they’re too young to realise there’s nowhere to get to but where they already are.
Auster takes a packet of brown sugar from the bowl in the centre of the table and tears it at the top, tips it into the hot drink and it pours out like sea sand from an hourglass. He stirs slowly with a long teaspoon and tells me that it is the things of life that are the most enduring, the longest lasting, that occur in a moment and then are gone. He tells me that there’s nothing right or wrong, and you can punish yourself forever over things that have happened or have never been. He tells me that things happen, that is all.
When he puts the teaspoon down, I close my eyes and reach for his hand. I feel his skin on mine, the fine tapering fingers. ‘Devin would have done the same,’ he says. ‘You can’t look after everybody. You can’t carry him to his death.’
‘I have to, I’m his daughter.’
The sweetness of the chocolate sauce burns at my throat. He drinks his milky red tea slowly through the froth, sipping it carefully to monitor the heat as I tell him about my most recent walk on the mountain. I go there sometimes, to sort things out in my head.
‘The mountain is a dangerous place to be alone,’ he says. ‘Don’t you watch the news? People will take your life for a cellphone.’
I’ve known it cheaper than that.
I go in the evenings when the day has cooled, when the afternoon shadow shifts and falls on the city, then overflows to settle on the wide sea. I know the paths in the places too secluded for a woman alone; I map out the dangers and I speak a prayer for my own safety, but my fear doesn’t stop me from moving forward, away from what I want to forget. The irony is that it’s in the wind or the glint of the sea that she’s most with me, and on the mountain that proves that time is motionless.
‘Keep yourself safe. For Hayley’s sake.’ Auster raises an eyebrow at me. ‘And mine.’
I move the salt and pepper shakers around on the table with one hand. ‘It’s like she’s everywhere, but I can’t catch her.’
‘I know it’s hard.’
‘It’s not hard,’ I say. ‘It’s too easy. To lose myself. What’s hard is getting on with life, getting a grip on the present.’
‘Your dad will be okay. Just go and see him often. You’ll get used to him being there. So will he.’
But there’s something more. Something uncomfortable in the way that life moves, as though we’re always standing in the same place. I’m almost afraid to say it. ‘Hayley reminds me too much of Devin,’ I tell him. ‘It’s her hair. The colour of her skin. Hayley looks a lot like her.’
Auster leans forward, grips my hand. He wants to be clear on this one.
‘Hayley is not Devin, Cat. Nothing will happen to her. She’s safe. She’s another person entirely. She’s with us. She’s completely safe.’
It’s a drama, my own, and I’m drawing him in.
He shakes his head. ‘You were young. You can’t blame a child for stuff like that.’ I look away and think of time and how it ravages, like the reckless sea.
Auster gazes at me with the eyes of a priest, as though I believe that he can absolve me of some sin.
‘I take the blame in both of my hands, and I give it to him,’ I say. ‘I give it to Samuel.’
Auster pays the bill when his drink is finished. We get up and walk together, window-shopping through the arcade, my arm interlinked with his, but I look at my watch too often, counting the hours until Hayley will come home, irrationally fearing the worst for her.
‘Samuel was a man, once,’ I say. ‘His shoulders were broad enough to carry us both on his back. Now he’s just a shadow of himself, a ghost. It’s like part of him has seeped out, evaporated, and left his body sagging, with wrinkled skin. Just a sack of bones where a man once lived. Now he can hardly remember to wash himself. He’s not old enough for that yet.’
‘Life does that, takes those we love the most and transforms them into something else, into living shadows of themselves, and we don’t notice the process as it happens. And then one day we look at them and it takes us by surprise. We ask ourselves how they got there, and how we got to be who we are.’
I look at him, this man who, from the start, has felt like the rational side of me. It’s the weight of his consistency that keeps my scales balanced. ‘Something ties them together always, in my head,’ I say. ‘Devin and Samuel. In their lives, they both became somebody different.’
‘Different from what?’
‘From the people I thought they were.’
Auster takes my hand from his arm, pries my fingers loose. He wraps his fingers around mine, contains them with a gentle pressure.
I walk with one idea of myself in my head, but what I see in the reflection accidentally caught between mannequins in the shop windows is something else. I look more like my mother, like the timeless picture I have of her in my head. The way she was when I had my whole life ahead of me, and when she thought she had at least half of hers. The image catches me by surprise – the widening hips, the spreading thighs, the thickening upper arms and lowering bustline. This is my mother’s body, not mine, and each time I am caught like this, I have a fleeting thought that I must exercise more, cut my calorie intake for a month or two. But the thought is fleeting, because I know that life is a process of becoming more of what we already have inside of us. We will be who we are no matter what we do. I have my mother’s body, her hair and skin tone. More startling to me are the things unseen; that I’ve inherited the heart and mind that always belonged to him.
Auster ruffles my hair. Kisses the top of my head. ‘You were his favourite daughter, though.’
‘Maybe that’s part of the guilt.’
I remember the look on her face, that pink shirt with the clear buttons running down the front, the tiny strip of lace that edged the collar. The time when everything turned.
Four
Sometimes I think Samuel thought of me as a boy, that I could remain the son he never had, if my hair stayed short and my body young. Devin was all girl with her voluminous curls and golden skin. She was already half-woman by the time she was ten, and Samuel could only ever see her from a distance. He marvelled at the languid, natural art of her, but he was too scared to go near her. As though she was a mannequin or a doll that could easily be broken, as though his hand was too clumsy for hers and she belonged in a world apart from our own. And yet she came from him. She was his by her design and physicality, the opposite of what I was and how I looked. Her hair was the same texture as his, her skin tone yellow, even and smooth and moist as children’s play dough, just like his. I was dry and rough as a stick, like some kind of blue insect. Too pale, too plain ever to compete with my sister. But when he turned me upside down, threw me into the air and bounced me on his knee, I was aware of her watching us, assessing her own place in the world through our rough-and-tumble togetherness. She never tried to join in, and I don’t recall that she was ever invited.
I came into the world with the look of a sea monkey, and from the start that was my father’s name for me.
Devin was older and first affiliated with the things of the world; it must have been she who brought the first comic books into our house. We pored over the pages in the sun outside, examining the pictures and dreaming ourselves part of them before I could read the words. We sat in the garden and the wind blew and yellow flowers fell about our heads li
ke some kind of natural benediction, like we were being blessed simply by being born, and it was raining flowers from the sky.
Once when she was reading, Devin gripped my arm, her eyes wide. ‘Look, here’s a sea monkey. Cat, you’re in the book!’ We studied the page as we sat on her bed, peering at the strange cartoon drawings of the creatures with their big eyes and wide foreheads and crowns that were just extensions of their heads. Devin read to me from the printed text, a long brown finger following ahead of the words before she could wrap her tongue around them and spit them from her mouth. ‘You put the eggs in water and then they can be born and come alive into real and living creatures.’ The idea of it made my sister’s eyes wild. ‘Let’s get some!’ she said. ‘You pay money and they send them to you in a packet across the sea.’
‘Those are stupid things,’ my mother said.
My father only laughed. ‘You can send off for them,’ he told us, ‘but you’ll be disappointed. There’re just smelly old shrimps. I can take you out into the bay and throw a cast net and what you’d catch would be no different. I’d rather get you a real pet, like a dog or a hamster.’
It stung me then that I could be nicknamed after something that was a con, something other than it was said to be. I never forgot those cartoon creatures that looked back at me from the cheap pages of those comic books with their big eyes and crowns on their heads. We never did get a dog. My father still calls me Sea Monkey, and sometimes I still wonder if I am real.
Were they happy, my parents, in those early years? People pose for photographs with smiles that hide secrets in the spaces between the camera’s clicks. But in the memory of my child’s eye, that first phase of my life was a period of happiness, a nine-year stretch unbroken by anything significant. No jarring memory cuts through the halcyon days of my early consciousness. There was the house and the beach and the mountain behind it and sand in my hair and salt on my skin and long family expeditions through the city’s parks.