All at Sea, page 2
There is a nervy moment when Jake wriggles out of my arm. ‘I want to face you!’ he protests, twisting onto his front, and at once we start to sink. Suddenly I am as helpless as Tony had been. ‘No, Jake! You have to lie on your back! This is not a game!’ I don’t know if my scream frightened him, but he flips onto his back obediently, and once again we are swimming.
I am not sure how long we have been in the water when I turn to see the beach, but it feels like quite a while. A surprisingly long time, in fact. Surely by now we should be there? I twist my neck to look – and cannot believe what I see.
This can’t be possible. The beach should be just a few feet away. But we are nowhere near it; we’re not even halfway there. What is going on? I remember the undertow. Of course, that’s what’s going on. How could I have forgotten? We are trapped in its current. But it is nothing like any undertow I have ever known before. This feels more like the force of a gigantic magnet sucking us out to the horizon. And yet, even now, it does not cross my mind to panic. I will just have to swim harder, I tell myself, and it is going to take a little longer than I had thought.
It still has not occurred to me to worry when I spot another head nearby in the water. The head turns and I see that it is Blouser, a fisherman I’ve known for fifteen years. He must be in his forties by now, but is still lean and fearsomely fit; his home is a tin shack on the beach near our cottage, and he more or less lives in the sea. We have bought fish from Blouser most days on this holiday, and Jake and Joe have been dazzled and fascinated by him, for he can sometimes seem more amphibian than human.
I open my mouth to call to him, but his expression silences me. Blouser looks frightened to death. He stares back at me across the water, his features rigid with terror and exhaustion.
What is going on? Why does Blouser look like that? What has happened? ‘Blouser!’ I shout. ‘Are you okay?’ He struggles to nod. ‘Can you take my hand?’ I yell, and he does. We swim together for a few yards, until I see his features relax. ‘Blouser, are you standing? Are you in your depth?’ He nods faintly, head tilted back, straining to keep his mouth above water. I swim on another yard or so past him, searching with outstretched toes until at last they touch wet sand. Hoisting Jake above my shoulders, weak with fatigue, I carry him out of the waves, lower him to his feet, and together we fall to our knees.
‘Are you alright?’ I gasp. Jake blinks back at me and grins. ‘Yeah, fine.’ Brushing sand off his pyjamas, he shrugs away the adventure as if it were nothing.
As I kneel and catch my breath I’m inclined to think he is probably right. There were a couple of dicey moments out there, certainly, and I am very glad it’s over. But nothing significantly dangerous happened. Jake just got out of his depth, and needed help getting in. I don’t know why Blouser looked so panic-stricken, but now that Jake is safely ashore he must be fine. I stand and turn to look for him on the beach, anticipating a hug and rueful smiles.
But I don’t see Blouser. I don’t even look for him. As I stand and turn, what I see makes me forget all about Blouser. Tony should be wading onto the beach by now; at worst he should be back in his depth. But Tony isn’t anywhere near the shore. He isn’t even where I left him. He is further out to sea, much, much further, 50 feet off shore, and isn’t even trying to swim.
He is tipping backwards in the water, his neck lolling in the swell, as if the waves were an armchair. He raises an arm, but the gesture looks half-hearted, almost casual, and a moment later he lets it drop. He is shouting something, but the voice is not his. It sounds slurred and thick, more animal than human. ‘Help,’ I hear. ‘Help.’ But there is no urgency in his cry.
What is he doing all the way out there? Without thinking I race back into the water. A voice from the beach halts me. ‘No!’ Waist-deep in surf, I turn. Blouser is shouting, and his pitch of raw fear seizes me for long enough to turn again and register three men out in the ocean, yards from Tony, swimming hard towards him. One is Shugoo; I can’t make out the other two. But whoever they are, they are going to reach Tony long before I can. I wade back to the beach.
It’s at this moment that time’s rhythm becomes unrecognisable, simultaneously frenetic and slow-motion. Seconds begin to stretch like minutes, minutes feel more like hours. Time is passing, but nothing is happening, nothing is changing. Tony is still floundering in the waves, the swimmers still have not reached him. I am pacing frantically, pointing and shouting in confusion. Why are they dawdling? Can’t they see he’s in trouble?
‘Go to Tony!’ I scream, waving my arms. ‘Help him! For God’s sake, can’t you see he’s drowning?’ Is he? I am shocked by what has just come out of my mouth. He can’t literally be drowning, can he? I am being hysterical. But the hysteria in my voice has unnerved me even more than my words. Is that really what is actually happening? Tony is drowning? That’s absurd; it’s not possible. But Christ, can’t they just hurry up and get to him?
People are streaming out of houses all along the beach. I see Michael, a friend who works in the guesthouse to our right, sprint into the water and fling a float attached to a rope – but the onshore breeze blows it back to his feet. Damian, another friend who works in the villa to our left, comes flying down the bank from the pool and hurls a life ring out to sea, but again the wind blows it back. As each rescue attempt flops, the scene begins to look like some sort of surreal slapstick pantomime; we are cartoonish in our frantic helplessness. For a fleeting moment I actually cringe, mortified to be the cause of such a public spectacle.
Because obviously Tony is going to be alright. For all the drama, he hasn’t actually gone under. The swimmers will reach him any second now, and in half an hour he will be drinking a Red Stripe and complaining about sand in his ears.
I am right. The swimmers do get to him. Somehow they have Michael’s float in their hand, and Michael is holding his end of the rope. The three men cluster around the float with Tony in their arms, and Michael stands in the surf and pulls. I take the rope in front of him, like a two-person tug-of-war team, and together we haul them ashore.
It is over. The panic has exhausted its jeopardy. Michael and I drag Tony onto the sand, and for the first time since I carried Jake out of the ocean I remember him. Now that Tony is safe, I turn my attention to our son. ‘Sweetheart, are you okay?’
He has not moved from the spot where I left him, and is sitting with legs outstretched, squirming. His hands rake the sand. ‘No.’ He is staring past my legs at his father, wide-eyed and white, his voice thin with anxiety. ‘No, I’m worried about Tony.’ I turn, expecting to see Tony sitting up. But he isn’t. His eyes aren’t even open. He is just lying there.
What? For a fraction of a second I’m confused. Then I think I understand. Oh Tony, I think, I know this was a proper scare – but there’s no need to ham it up and spin it out for the sake of the anecdote. Come on, Tone. Just sit up and open your eyes now so we can go back to being on holiday.
‘Dec,’ Jake says behind me. I turn back to look at him. ‘What’s that white stuff coming out of Tony’s nose?’
And then I see it. From each nostril, snaking down to his chin, trickles a stream of white foam. It looks like whipped egg white. I stare at it in shock. I have no idea what that foam is, or what it signifies. I am not a doctor. But even I can see it looks sinister, and dread begins to wrap itself around me.
Don’t be ridiculous, I tell myself. He probably just needs to vomit up a bucketload of seawater. But still Tony doesn’t move. I want to scream at him, ‘Wake up! A joke’s a joke, now wake the fuck up!’ But Jake is at my side, and Tony is surrounded by a semicircle of men, one of whom is kneeling over him and appears to be administering CPR. Tony really is unconscious. But he’s going to come round any moment. It’s just that the process will be messier than I had imagined. It is probably best, I think, if Jake does not watch.
‘Let’s go back up to the cottage and find Joe,’ I suggest lightly, taking his hand. ‘Joe’s probably wondering where we’ve got to.’ I lead Jake up the path back to the cottage, and find Joe on the deck, leaning over the railings, straining to see the commotion on the beach.
‘Is Tony going to be okay?’ Jake asks. ‘I think so,’ I say brightly, but even I can hear how brittle my breeziness sounds. ‘I think the doctors will come and make him better.’ Struggling to appear calm, I make my way into our bedroom to search for my phone. I think I have found it until I try to make a call and realise I am stabbing wildly at an iPod. By the time I locate my phone and call Jake’s, my fingers are shaking and I misdial twice before getting through.
A receptionist answers the phone with what feels like the longest greeting in the history of the hospitality industry: ‘Hello, this is Colleen speaking, welcome to Jake’s hotel in Treasure Beach. How may I direct your call?’ Before she can get it all out I hear myself screaming, ‘Send help now! Tony has been pulled from the water. He is unconscious. Send help now! Send someone, now!’ I hang up in a blur of shock, worried that I will have frightened Jake and Joe, embarrassed about sounding deranged, afraid that I will have caused an unnecessary fuss, and scared that help will not arrive in time.
‘We want to see Tony,’ Joe says. ‘Can we go and see him?’ I don’t know what to do, but think he must have come round by now, and the sooner the boys can see that he is fine the better. I take them by the hand and together we walk back down the path to the beach.
Where did all these people come from? Half an hour ago the beach had been deserted; now it looks like a carnival. People are streaming in from every direction; they are pouring through our garden, down the lane, along the beach. As we reach the gate I spot my friend Annabelle racing across the sand and falling to her knees beside Tony. Oh thank God, I think. Annabelle has medical training. Now that Annabelle is here, everything is going to be alright.
With Jake in one hand and Joe in the other, I lead them past the crowds and down to the water’s edge. From here we can see Annabelle’s back as she kneels over Tony. She knows what she is doing. Any second now he is going to throw up and come round; it can only be a matter of time. Someone in the crowd shouts at me, ‘Get your car keys, take him to the doctor!’ But the nearest hospital is half an hour away; how is that going to help?
As we stand and watch, warm waves lapping at our ankles, my mind allows just one horrifying thought. What if Tony has been unconscious for so long that when he comes round he will be brain-damaged? Please God no. This idea is so unthinkably shocking that when I see Annabelle press two fingers to his neck, it takes me a moment to register the significance. I stare, bewildered. Why is she checking for a pulse?
Annabelle’s fingers remain pressed to his neck. Then she looks up at the ring of faces gazing down at Tony and slowly shakes her head. I watch in disbelief. Is this some sort of joke? I keep staring, stunned. No. No no no no.
‘Let’s go back up to the cottage,’ I hear myself say, and lead the boys past the crowd towards the garden gate. Suddenly we feel quite peripheral to the drama; we slip quietly away, as if this scene on the beach, this unfolding catastrophe, has nothing to do with us at all. And in my mind, it almost hasn’t. What they all think is happening here right now cannot be true; it is not happening. We climb the path together in silence. I am too dazed to form words. As we enter the cottage a figure races past the open kitchen window and I hear him say ‘Him dead’, but still I do not believe it. They are wrong. In a minute Annabelle is going to come and tell us Tony is conscious and fine.
‘Will Tony be okay?’ asks one of the boys. ‘I hope so,’ I reply. ‘I think a doctor is on his way.’ I look at them, and see that Jake is still in his pyjamas. They are caked in sand.
‘Let’s go and wash all this sand off,’ I suggest, and as if in a dream I lead them into the bathroom. We are going to do something normal; it is going to make everything normal. I perch on the edge of the bath, and turn on the shower. Water explodes everywhere, drenching me. As I wrestle with the shower head I register the silence of boys who would ordinarily fall about at such comedic misfortune. I look up from the edge of the bath to the door and see Annabelle standing in the door frame. She gazes straight at me, unsmiling, and very slowly shakes her head.
I stumble into her arms. ‘No!’ I am shouting at her. She holds me tightly; I cannot stand. I lurch back, staring at her face, willing her to say I have misunderstood. ‘Dec,’ Jake says softly. He stares up at me, frightened. ‘Why is your face like that? What’s happening?’ I open my mouth, but no sound comes out. Joe wraps his arm around my leg and peers up anxiously. ‘Has Tony died-ed?’ he asks.
I look down at my children. ‘Yes. Yes, he has. Tony has died.’
2
My memories of the days before Tony drowned must be unreliable, because in my mind they resemble the opening scenes of a cheap horror film. Every moment now seems so laced with menacing pathos that our oblivion to what was coming feels scarcely plausible. But when we sat side by side on the very spot where Tony would lie dead twenty-four hours later, how could we have known it was our last day together? We thought we had all the time in the world.
‘Do you think,’ Tony had mused idly, ‘our boys will bring their own kids here one day?’ I lay back on the sand, his hand in mine, and smiled up at the sky. ‘I’ve never thought of that, Tone. But now you say it, yeah. I hope they do. What an amazing idea.’
The truth was, I had never imagined we would bring our own kids to Treasure Beach. I hadn’t seriously expected us to make it as a couple, or have children of our own to take anywhere. If someone had told me ten years earlier that one day we would lie on Calabash beach and watch our sons build sandcastles while we speculated about grandchildren, I would have told them they were out of their mind.
When Tony and I first met, I was married to a man I loved very much. Everyone loved Paul. Everyone loved our marriage. We were one of those couples who make people sentimental; the sort that serves as a repository for their faith in the dreamy ideal of happily ever after. I loved being that couple.
Before then the only kind of couple I had ever been involved with was of the strictly comedy variety. Most of my friends had been falling madly in and out of love for years, and appeared to have no difficulty finding partners with whom they could contemplate a future, but the boyfriends I chose would have been impossible to mistake for credible candidates. There was the flatteringly pretty drummer who lived with his parents and wrote terrible poetry, and a morose Irish chef from Derry, whose appeal would have been indiscernible had I not been immature enough to find any whiff of the IRA romantic. He taught me how to say Tiocfaidh ár lá – our day will come – and I was thrilled. There was a postman, a DJ, a sales rep, a bouncer – and I was fond of them all. Falling in love with any of these men, however, would have been demonstrably absurd.
I was reasonably content with the comedy boyfriends, because it felt unrealistic to expect to meet a serious one. I don’t think this assumption was subjected to close analysis at the time, but the problem would have been easy enough to identify. Losing one’s heart to someone requires a degree of recognition – a shared sensibility – and this was hard to find in anyone else when my childhood had left me marooned between all recognisable categories of social class. In the dating game I was a stateless refugee.
My parents had met at Dartington Hall in the 1950s, when it was still a progressive boarding school favoured by middle-class radicals. Black and white photographs show them as teenagers marching to Aldermaston, wearing CND badges, smoking roll-ups. My father’s father had been a conscientious objector; my mother’s father was an Oxford don. They married before she turned twenty-one, and moved to Bristol; he became a teacher, and at twenty-three she gave birth to her first son. After their second arrived they moved to rural Wiltshire, to a broken-down cottage in a tiny hamlet of woodland and old watermills. A third son was born in their bedroom, and my father gave up teaching to become a carpenter. They were still in their twenties when I arrived in 1971.
Because I am reasonably well-spoken, these days people often assume I come from money. When I was a child, however, we would get mistaken for hippies. To Tory Wiltshire in the Seventies, CND car stickers and a subscription to the Guardian were enough to consign a family’s reputation to the outlandish extremes of bohemia, but this was no more accurate than the false impression of wealth. My parents had little patience with the lazy hypocrisies of hippies – nor did they have any money.
We didn’t have a television, either, but this was unrelated to having no money. It was a signifier of the particular social category to which my parents belonged – one that was very much of its time, relying as it did on the possibility of living in a big house in the country without earning very much. In essence, it meant being highly educated, intellectually radical but indifferent to materialism. My father used to half-joke that we were the ‘genteel poor’, meaning we didn’t care about money. We didn’t care about fashion, or cars, or appearances. What we cared about were words. Conversation wasn’t just a worthy substitute for material possessions, such as a television, but a superior currency of limitless value – the supreme, unrivalled expression of love.
As a consequence, we were an extremely noisy family. When I think about family mealtimes now, in my head I hear something like a cross between The Moral Maze and Question Time. Even The Moral Maze’s smug undertones are faintly audible, for while we were all shouting away about God or Denis Healey, I think we shared an unspoken understanding that this was a dialogue from which other children expected to be excluded. Other children didn’t know about the Labour party, had no idea religion was man-made, and were not typically solicited for their opinions on the monarchy. How we knew this I could not say, but I am sure we did.
