Little Yellow Boat

Ocean. All is found in you. The soul of the world.

Sarah was in a small boat with her mother - they had been drifting out
for quite some time. Figures on the Bournemouth beach were now just
smears on a plate of soft green sea.

The sun reddened Sarah's thin wrists as she rocked the oars through the
water. Her mother sat still beside her, in a cerise straw hat and
yellow polka-dotted leggings. She imagined they must look quite a
picture.

In seventeen years Sarah had never felt like this - her body so
tranquil. Often she had imagined what calm might be, but Sarah was in a
moment she had never known even to wish for. This was a living calm
that seemed to haze up around them. Even the sun was white today.

Her mother lifted her feet over the edge of the boat to touch the water
with her toes. Sarah's eyes widened for a moment as the boat swayed
fiercely from side to side. Then they became still again.

Sarah looked at the little lines on her mother's ankles and thought of
all the places she must have walked in her fifty years. Born in
Slovenia, a young chiselled-faced Marika had come to England. Her own
father had been a Marine and you could see the ruggedness of his bones
in her ankles.
Each line, the faint and the cavernous, told a story:

A story about the time Marika stepped daintily when she first saw Jim,
her husband-to-be, in the kitchen where they worked as teenagers. A
story about the time Marika was head-girl at a school in Piran - when
they'd played games in the sea, and the boys would hold the girls'
heads under the water and see who could last the longest. The lines
told of her affinity with the water, how she'd spent much of her
childhood playing in the town bay. Swimming and splashing. The lines
told of how she missed Slovenia - the times she'd literally walked out
of the door in England and not returned for hours, driving in her car,
somewhere, anywhere. The lines told of how she missed Jim, Sarah's
father.

Told of how she bent down at night in front of the fireplace, tore at
the carpet with her teeth and prayed, wretched. Told of the night in
hospital when she was seventeen and gave her first-born away with her
eyes closed. Told of when she carried Sarah to school by Underground
with bags and pushchairs and pencils. Told of how Marika curled up like
a baby at night.

Each line on her foot carved a trail into the parts a mother never
tells her daughter - the cerebral convolutions that wanted more than
this, the shreds of the past that lay sleeping but not dead. Still,
there were many stories Marika told - she loved to talk and often
magnetised her audience, her wild laugh and tumbling brown mane made
everyone around fall viciously in love with her: even grown men would
fall to their knees and weep in their sleep.

Lately, Marika had talked a lot about Piran, about how things were
better there - but still she could never go back. Her family were no
longer alive, she didn't want to visit the place where she would find
only the memories - and not the faces - of her mother and father.
Marika allied so much innocence to the rocky sea of her homeland;
sitting in the middle of the ocean made her rush with freedom - made
her feel like the young and gregarious Marika again.

In Piran Marika was complete, in Piran she had lost nothing. The
richest girl in all the apartments, the other kids would run alongside
her at the beach all vying for her sweets; Marika would be laughing,
handing them out to the whole group, and they'd all play in the sea
until the moon came out, or the water got too cold.

Marika was eighteen years old when she came to England to learn
English; she had planned to return home after a short while - but Jim
was a man who assuaged her heart - it was an addictive love that bound
her. Thirty years later she was still in England - now only with
Sarah.

The boat was creeping further and further out; brilliant white rays
coruscated the water. Marika closed her eyes as she extended her calves
into the sea - Sarah's eyes widened as she realised that she could no
longer make out the figures on the beach. Her mother smiled serenely,
dipping her arms into the water as the boat began to rock gently. She
had been silent as they had rowed out, unusual for a woman of many
words.
"Mum, are you all right?" Sarah asked.
"This is wonderful." said Marika, unalarmed by their slow course into
the night of the sea.
"Mum, we're far out."
"It's OK, Sarah, it's OK," she said, almost as if she were
sleeping.

The boat began to rock furiously as Sarah's mother rose onto unsteady
feet. Strips of balmy sea jumped onto the boat's deck.
"Mum, sit down! Please, what are you doing?"
And then the water came - all over Sarah's face and arms - she
spluttered out the salt as her mother thudded into the sea.
"Mum! Mum!" Sarah screamed.
In the silence the waves stopped. The cerise hat bobbed alone on the
water, pinned flower intact. Sarah felt as if she had swallowed the
whole ocean: she imagined the little creatures that no-one had ever
known about - ugly as sin - coughing, squirming and dying on the dry
ocean bed. Had her mother really jumped?

The waves started to swing again. The water seemed to change from a
light green to a deeper bottle green. Sarah looked hard into the sea as
she steadied herself - it was still. So still that her mother could
only be somewhere at the bottom. Leaning over the edge of the boat, she
thrust in her arms, grasping frantically at the water. As the sun grew
hotter and hotter, Sarah felt its smile singe the back of her neck. She
ducked her head and upper body under the water's surface, using her hip
as a catch on the boat's ridge.

Warm ribbons of wet brushed her cheeks, followed by cold - the briny
water ate at her eyes. She scanned the underside of the ocean until her
face filled up with blue - Sarah thought she might die. Then with a
huge roar, like her mother's jump, her life instinct fired her up out
of the sea and back into the boat.

'MUM! MUM!' she screamed into the sky.
The sun ate at her cheeks again: the sea upstairs just as calm as
before. Fingering the salt from her eyes, Sarah realised she could no
longer see the shore. Her mother was gone, and she would die too. Her
mother was her best friend, and they would die together.

The sea was silent. Sarah felt a rumbling in her stomach, a cough in
her insides. Small bubbles pummeled at the underside of the boat. A
rippling came from deep, deep below: then her mother's face. She rose
out of the water - with her eyes closed, her skin taut - and in no rush
to take her first breath.

Sarah sat awestruck by her mother's face. It was younger. Two minutes
under water had given her mother back her youth. There were no lines
under her eyes. Her sunken cheeks now looked chiselled; she looked
beautiful, as if she had forgotten how her heart fell out every night
when she reached for Jim and her lost son, and they were gone.

Sarah cried. Why is it that we only realise how much someone has been
hurting when their pain is taken away?

The full refulgence of the ocean shone in her mother's eyes. If Sarah
could have encapsulated that feeling earlier as they rowed the little
yellow boat into the ocean, and made it human, it would have been her
mother now. Marika (widow, mother, waitress, housewife, lover, friend
and daughter) had seen God. He had taken her life's tears and bathed
them in his ocean, and blown peace into her pale body with his
lungs.

Marika spluttered. She flung her heavy arms onto the boat's edge.
"Sarah?" she said unassumingly in her deep Slovenian drawl, "can you
lift me up? Oh God, I'm such a whale!"
Sarah reached for her mother's hand, half-expecting it to be a
hologram. She dragged her up from the sea that had almost stolen
her.
"Mum, I thought you were dead."
Marika shot her daughter a look as if to say she were mad.
Sarah continued: "Did you jump?"
Marika took a small breath and spluttered a little, "Yes. I wanted to
feel the water."
Sarah screwed up her face in disbelief: "You wanted to feel the water?
Mum, we can't even see the beach!"
Marika sighed and straightened her leggings. She noticed her hat
floating a couple of metres away.
"Sarah! Quick, quick, get the hat!" Marika exclaimed.
"Mum, you've got arms haven't you!" she said wryly, and began to steer
with the oars.

They drifted back in the direction that they thought the beach might
be. Sarah could see another yellow boat coming towards them. She leant
her head on her mother's shoulder and closed her eyes.
"Hell-o? Excuse me! Can you come this way?" the tanned young lifeguard
bellowed at them.
"Do you know how far out you are?"
Sarah looked out and reached for the oars again; she noticed her
mother's lines had disappeared.

The sun oozed white light: calm dripped through mother and daughter.
Sarah stole another glance at Marika - her skin was dewy and bronzed.
Or was it the bright sunlight? The reflection of the little yellow
boat?

Marika died of an overdose two months later.