‘You’re a funny one,’ he says. ‘We’re married and we’ve got a kid and you’re still worried about whether I should have been in love with your sister who isn’t even alive.’
‘Not worried. Maybe I still need reassurance.’
His hands come together to cup themselves around my face, to embrace my cheeks with his brown fingers and to tilt my head. His eyes find me, direct and pure. ‘Don’t get funny on me,’ he says.
The bottom part of his torso is covered by the bedclothes, but I know what is about to happen. Our skin calls to each other across the short space between us and I move and I feel him rising against me and what I first might have thought was love becomes something else, something that is only about scent and heat and physicality; it’s his skin and him on top of me, and I welcome him in and through the exchange of our inward and outward breath he becomes a stranger to me all over again.
‘Hayley,’ I whisper into his ear, ‘the door’s open.’
‘We won’t be long,’ he whispers back into my mouth, and then he is right.
When he steps out from the shower, I start it again. ‘Was it because I was talking about Devin?’
‘What the hell?’ He’s incredulous.
It’s too far, I know it, but I still push. ‘That you wanted sex. Were you really thinking of her?’
He throws the towel onto a chair and rummages through his cupboard, searching for clothes. He finds a pair of underpants and pulls them up over his slender legs, then blue jeans, faded at the knee. He chooses a pale blue T-shirt from the rail and pulls it over his head.
‘What are you doing today?’ he asks.
‘You’re changing the subject.’
‘I’m tired of this subject. I have work to do, Cat. I’m going to the office.’
‘What about us?’
‘Please, Cat.’ He turns to look at me and there is a distance between us, a great divide, a chasm or a valley, silent and motionless. I am afraid. I lean back on the pillows. I watch him put his shoes on, see the way his dark hair falls forward as he leans down and then I know that the blood that I am a part of, the confusion that mirrors my father’s disintegrating mind, has nothing to do with Auster. He cannot take the brunt of what I scramble to process. He walks away from me, he leaves the room.
Minutes later there’s a faint knock on the wooden door. Hayley enters, fully dressed. She has a mug in her hand. ‘I made you some coffee, Mom,’ she says. I sit up and pull the bedclothes to my chin for fear of what she might make of my nakedness, but it never seems of any consequence to her whether I sleep clothed or not.
Her hair falls in a clean line to the base of her spine. Her skin is unmarked and I wonder what kind of lines will eventually find the purity of my daughter’s face. I take the coffee from her and put it on the small table beside me. She sits on the edge of the bed between my knees and my ankles with her feet straight out and crossed over each other, her eyes looking towards the window.
‘What’s it, chicken?’
She doesn’t answer. She looks at me with big hollow eyes and I want to pull back from her stare, but I don’t, not always trusting the emptiness, the familiarity, that I sometimes see in there.
I take a sip of the coffee, too soon, and it scalds my top lip. There’s too much sugar in it. I hear Auster pick up his keys in the hallway, fiddle with papers. ‘I didn’t send him away, Hayley.’ I nudge her with my foot. ‘Go and put your costume on.’
‘Why?’
‘I want to go to the beach.’
The lock clicks back and the front door opens. I expect to hear it slamming shut but it doesn’t. His footsteps sound in the hallway again, closer now, then his head appears around the bedroom door. ‘You two, behave yourselves today,’ he says. I try to transfer a look of silent apology to him and he blows us each a solid kiss.
Seconds later he’s gone again. The front door closes behind him.
I’ve been on this road many times in my life, but less often since I drove it with Devin beside me. I don’t know why I’ve chosen it now, and with Hayley in the car. There’s a long section where the paint on the buildings fades and tears from the brick in giant flakes and the glass in the windows is smashed and the shops have moved out and buildings stand like shells, derelict and waiting for night when the vagrants will come. This is the back route to the sea, the road I choose when my eyes are fatigued by too much beauty. This is where I learn again that life has an underbelly. It wasn’t always this way, but it is now.
Hayley watches through the window with her body turned away from me, her eyes flicking from the man in a doorway with his head down and the empty bottle in his hand, to an old woman dragging a cart of corrugated-iron sheets from a disintegrated roof somewhere, to the blond wig and blue eye shadow and riding skirt of a slender form who is surely way too tall to be any kind of woman.
‘Look at that man,’ Hayley says.
‘You’re right,’ I tell her. ‘It is a man.’
‘Why is he dressed like a lady?’
‘Who knows? Maybe he feels more comfortable like that.’
‘I don’t like this street, Mom. It makes me feel funny.’
‘It makes me feel funny too. I suppose that’s why I do like it.’
‘Why is everyone here so poor?’
I pause at a traffic light with my foot idling and I wait for it to go green, to release me to follow the path to the beach. I see a glint, and catch sight of a man holding a piece of broken mirror. His face is scarred and his clothes soiled at the back of his trousers, but he’s holding onto that mirror like the whole world is reflected there. But inside the car I am safely encapsulated and looking out. No matter what happened to Samuel in his life and what he could have been, he always made sure of that. I was always looking out.
‘We were poor,’ I tell Hayley. ‘When I was young, we had almost nothing, and your grandpa lost everything that we did have. We were pretty poor then.’
She turns her head from the window and gives me this look. I know that she doesn’t believe much of what I say, or if she believes it, then she thinks it’s only one side of the story. Her sense of self is so strong that she thinks she knows better than me. The light turns green, I accelerate and my eyes find the road ahead and soon this part of the town is past. We come to the rows of small railway houses beside the track and then these diminish and make way for the seafront houses that run eventually into the village where I grew up.
‘How did he lose it?’ she asks.
‘He was never too good with money,’ I tell her. ‘I suppose he never really took it very seriously.’
‘Why do we always have to go to this beach?’ she asks as she gets out of the car. Her feet are bare. I watch her walk the short distance of the tarmac gingerly on her toes and I think that I was never like that; my feet could walk on anything, they were so toughened by the raw ground. I find my place beside her and I wrap her pink swimming towel around her neck and she allows me to do it. My daughter allows me, for a moment, to be her mother.
‘We don’t always have to go to this beach. But it’s safe to swim.’
‘You feel safe here just ’cos you know it. I’ve been to lots of other beaches and it’s safe at those ones too.’
The sun is warm and in the distance the mist gives form to the vague mountains across the bay. There are no clouds and the powder blue creates a roof over the world; it is the kind of day where it is only ever possible to feel safe. I feel something in my daughter shift. She stops and bends and picks up a shell from the sand.
We walk the water’s edge and I watch the tide rein itself in and then release, back and forth in small waves. Hayley skips ahead of me, clinging to the towel that snakes around her neck. ‘When can we swim, Mom? When can we swim?’
Before the wall that rises to the pinnacle of the road we stop and turn and leave the towels on the sand. We shed our clothes and enter the water there. I have moved through time to become somebody else entirely, but through all time, this wat
er has remained the same. It still supports me, still holds my slow body. Hayley laughs and throws herself backwards and then she splashes to me and clings about my neck with her tentacle arms. I hold her body aloft, afloat, as I am so seldom allowed to do now, and she yields and laughs and gives in to my protection while I myself am watched over by the warmth of the perpetual sun. And then Hayley stops, mid-water, and stares towards the shore.
‘What?’
‘There’s a dog!’ she says. ‘It’s sniffing in our clothes.’
The fluid pull resists the movement of our legs, but Hayley wants to get to that animal. Her small feet find the bottom of the shallow sea and she wades ahead of me. She runs across the wet sand and water droplets fly from her skin as she goes and just further on from where the sand is dark and shiny, she stops and the dog stares back.
I stand behind her. ‘Don’t get close, Hayley. It could be feral.’
She flicks her hair and fixes the creature’s eyes with her own. ‘It is wild, Mom.’
Its fur is dark and mottled in places, hanging loose and limp on a body that is just a scrawny collection of bones. The dog lowers its head and stands beside our clothes, assessing us, but taking no stance yet. It’s a pitiful sight and one that takes my daughter’s heart clear and whole. Hayley’s body is rigid and all her attention is fixed on the skinny body and fur that reeks of the street gutter and the wild places where the homeless go.
‘Mom. I’m going to touch it.’
‘No!’
Hayley takes a step. She moves her right foot forward as slowly as a mime artist in a pantomime show. Her body shifts to place her full weight on that foot and in a sudden movement the dog’s forelegs stretch, the front torso lowers and a rumbled sound comes from a cavity deep inside of it. The dog is hollow in that sound, and Hayley freezes.
I keep back but now there is something in my fingers that causes them to tremble. My fists clench to keep still what I cannot control and I feel the ancient beat of a heart that will always know fear. ‘Come here, Hayley; leave it, let’s go back into the sea.’
She keeps her gaze and the edge of the mountain is still all around us. Neither the dog nor the child make another move, but the dog’s ears flatten and the eyes narrow and there is no telling what it might do. Or what Hayley might do. I take a short step backwards and then another and the creature’s eyes brush over me, then back to Hayley. My daughter is the one who holds the magic, who casts the spell. ‘Hayley, let’s leave it alone; it could have rabies.’
‘Ma.’ Her voice comes out in a whisper. ‘She’s hungry. Look, she’s got puppies!’
And then I see that despite the dog’s thinness there is a heaviness to that body, a downward pull, and the swellings of her teats are round and full and purple and they ache to be full enough to feed what she loves most in the world. Hayley takes a step closer to the animal and it lifts one paw, holds it there suspended and bent at the joint as though, if the girl was to make a sudden move, the dog would already be poised to run. Hayley’s lips move softly and slowly in faint mumblings and the dog is caught by the sound of her voice. She places a front paw on the ground and watches the girl. I too am mesmerised by the soothing sounds. As Hayley speaks, the dog relaxes and something else comes over my daughter, transforming her into someone I have never met. She speaks and the dog swallows the sound of her words with its eyes. I have no idea what will happen next.
Behind them, far across the sand, is the car park. Vehicles move into it, one after the other. Doors open and families pour out clutching towels and umbrellas making the day incongruous, like the backdrop of another world. I look at the girl and the dog and the girl speaking to the dog and the dog watching with those eyes, waiting for her. I think about Devin. And then she’s there, in my head, and all I can think about are the last hours I spent here with my sister, when the moon was up and the night had spread itself black and thick like Marmite across the sea.
The breeze plays with the ends of Hayley’s curls at the base of her back. It separates the hair and lifts loose strands, would carry them away if they weren’t fixed to her head. She’s still talking to the dog, but I can’t understand what she’s saying. The dog’s ears have lifted now, and are poised towards her like radar antennae. Hayley’s arms hang loose and unthreatening at her sides. She begins to move her bare feet forward, slowly, as though in practice for some kind of Eastern moving meditation. Inch by inch the distance between her and the dog grows shorter. The dog is poised for flight, but it waits, as I do, for what Hayley will do. The girl’s eyes don’t leave its face and now she is above it and looking down. The creature tilts its head and gazes upwards with its yellow eyes. Hayley reaches out a hand and lowers it to the dog’s head. The dog’s eyes waver, resting momentarily closed as the hand alights. All the time Hayley keeps talking, and now that the breeze is still I can just make out that she is telling the dog warm things of love and light and acceptance and freedom, all of these things, all of this in my daughter who is still small and only ten years old.
‘Hayley,’ I whisper. She lifts her hand and I am silenced. Her magic takes away my voice and I purse my lips and keep them still. Now she bends in a fluid movement. She melts down and the animal looks at her sideways through almond eyes. Her hand slides slowly around its neck, her other arm comes up and circles the head from underneath. I am mesmerised. The dog’s ears flatten. Hayley tightens her hold and then, for the first time since meeting the dog, she looks at me. ‘Mom, she’s hungry. She needs to eat so she can feed her puppies. Please can we get her something?’
‘There’s money in my pocket,’ I say.
Hayley loosens her hold on the dog. It stands with ears flat and looks at the girl sideways and then reverses away from her. At her movements, the dog freezes, but Hayley shows no sign of alarm. She gathers up our clothes and towels, then she looks at me and says, ‘Come on,’ as she walks across the sand and I follow. Before the low concrete wall we stop and I take my things from her and we both put our clothes on.
I look back. The dog lopes with its head bent behind us. The building is at the far end of the beach and the awning is an angled sheet of metal. Beneath it an enormous woman leans across the counter, her breasts touching the surface. A small radio beside her elbow belts out a tinny tune as the woman waits for something to happen. She raises her eyebrows as we approach and her piggy eyes drop to my daughter’s hand where the money is. We turn and look at the dog. Its head still droops, but its eyes are raised to my face and I see an emptiness, a vacancy. She is hungry and she is too proud to beg.
‘A burger,’ I say to Hayley. ‘Get her two hamburgers. And water, if you can.’
Hayley speaks to the woman with the note clutched like a caught moth in her fist. I step back and reach a hand out to the dog, but she flinches and ducks. She takes three sidesteps away from me and cowers.
‘Mom! Don’t frighten her!’
The woman busies herself frying burgers at the back, through a thick smell of onions and reheated grease.
‘We need to find the puppies,’ Hayley says. ‘Please, Mom. Please find them.’
I’m quiet and my daughter waits. The sea is flat and there are three gulls perched in a comical row on the roof of the roadhouse building. They could be models of each other except that they’re looking in different directions. Animated and perfect. As life was meant to be.
I scan the beach and the car park scattered with vehicles, and if there are pups tucked away behind a dune or under a wheel or between the cracks of the pavements or in the gutters, I don’t see them. The dog weaves a net around me with its movements, painting a moon on the ground with her feet. She’s impatient to eat and impatient to run, to get back to her babies and her wild place. ‘We don’t have time, Hayley,’ I tell her. ‘Anyway, she might attack us to defend them if we found them.’
Hayley takes the burgers from the woman’s hands and tears the yellow wrapping off each of them. She turns her small body around, her hands poised midair with the burg
ers balanced on them and she eyes the dog and the dog eyes her in return. I move away to give the animal space. The woman at the counter leans forward on her elbows, her eyes moving between the dog and the girl.
The dog steps delicately forward, placing one gentle paw in front of the other. She is led by her nose. Her head reaches up at an angle into the air as she catches the fragrance of the meat in Hayley’s hands. They approach each other, two creatures from a mythological world, and all I am given is the space to stand and watch. The dog’s ears prick forward, catching the slow movements. Hayley drops to her knees and offers the food upwards on her flat palms. The dog sniffs the air, hesitates, looks long into the girl’s eyes. Her neck stretches forward, strains towards Hayley’s hands. Her nose finds first one burger and then the other, her mouth opens and then her tongue is visible, shiny and thick in the wide mouth and there are hardly any chews. The dog lowers its head as though some concentration is required for the act of swallowing, and then the food is gone.
Hayley wipes her hands off on her knees and the dog flinches and backs away, looks distrusting, briefly, at me.
Hayley stands. The food seller backs into the darkness of the cabin. When she returns to the counter, she is carrying a clear plastic bowl of water. The child takes it from her carefully, slowly, watching the edges so as not to spill it, not to waste what is precious. I know now that I have no idea who my daughter is. But she knows. That is all. I can see that now. I can see what I never could before. That she is apart from me, a star in the sky, illuminated. Purposeful and exact and from another place.