A) To the sea (part 1)

Not many families still go on holiday together at our age, but
everyone needs holidays, and we have no one else to go with, though Dad
and Terry often go on their own. I don't know what it is about our
family. Even Mum and Dad go separately. But I'm too scared to go
anywhere on my own, and when Terry offered to let me come with him and
Dad on their fishing trip, I was grateful.

As we waited at for the lights to change I watched, through the back
window, the drift of small town life. A couple hand in hand strolled
past, then stopping, turned to each other and as two trickles of honey
melding, kissed. I looked away quickly, embarrassed, wistful, imagining
being that easy with someone must be like swimming in a warm sea. But
the water always feels cold to me, and I am too afraid to swim.

A few miles further, out of the town the road wound through massive
ossified dragon hills, grey scaled with slate, Terry whooped, then,
eager as a child, "There's the sea!" and, peering between the diagonal
bars of canvas-scrolled fishing rods wedged front-floor to boot-roof, I
saw his scrap of silver plate piled with the infinitely bouncing light
that always, wherever on the coast you are, seems familiar with the
thrill of magic just taken place.

It was evening when we reached the holiday house, and the next morning
they went off at six to catch the turning tide while I lay in,
wandering the angles of this new ceiling, untangling the sounds of
birds I'd never heard before through the differently suffused light of
this curtain, relishing the excitement of a bed facing another
way.

They got back about 11 without having caught anything except the tide,
and I got up quickly, ashamed to have missed so much of our first
day.

I made us a picnic and we went for a walk along a footpath above a
beach further along the coast Terry wanted to check for likely fishing
spots. The air was swollen with heat, taut and heavy as a bag about to
split; leaving the tide spewed detritus of plastic bottles, cans,
shreds of polythene, frayed plastic rope our path was steep up a sheep
cropped slope, and sweat was seeping from me as we made the top,
stopping for our picnic by a tiny tumble down cottage of sea lathed
rocks from the beach below. Ivy seemed to have stilled its writhing
through the crumbling eye holes of its windows only at our approach,
the last slates slipping from the collapsing rafters to leave emptiness
like the loss of remembering whoever once lived here.

Terry, wanting to try out his new primus had brought a tin of soup, but
the smell was so sudden it jarred, making me feel sick, so I went along
the path a little, the sea on my left. Their talk of tackle blurred to
a murmer There were more foxgloves here than I'd ever seen before, a
fairy forest towering up through tall seeding grasses, their cool
purple bells seemed to ring out sleepy silence threaded by bumblebees
buzzing between the nectar full cells. I settled down on the foot
beaten earth, space opening out over the bay below.

The walk up with Dad and Terry became less and less real : you know
how, when you are alone, you can feel that time is not like one way
glass, but water: that you can dip through the surface of now? The
cottage nagged me, like when walking under the pylon on the way home
from town I could feel the electricity overhead, or, sitting close to
someone, their mind working, only a bone's width away from
understanding their thoughts.

It really was very hot. I felt like a fly trapped in webs of stillness.
A seagull glided past, and I followed it with my eyes, then caught a
larger movement on the slope below, heard the faint catch of a woman's
voice, singing; it would be embarrassing to be found sitting alone on
the path like this and I knelt up ready to go back to Dad and Terry,
then realised she was making her way down, rather. But how could she be
coming from here? I hadn't seen her. I peered through the grasses,
looking for her path between the haze of foxgloves. She was wearing far
too many clothes for this weather : I was baking in a loose shirt and
trousers, yet she was in a long skirt which seemed odd. Infact she
looked odd. Like someone out of a historical drama on telly. Afraid I
might be on film, I scanned round, but could see only nature, hear
nothing but the bees. Dad and Terry might as well not exist. Becoming
aware I'd not heard them from a while, I went back up the path to tell
them of this film someone was shooting, but couldn't find them. The
path looked different, there was the hard edge of a wall through the
bushes, that was not the tumbledown cottage. I must have got on a
different one somehow. Retracing my way, panic fingering the edge of my
mind I got to where I thought I'd been sitting. Maybe if I'd not seen
the woman passing me, they could have too? Of course, Terry would have
wanted to go down to the beach. I didn't care now whether anyone was
filming or not, I was afraid of getting left behind. I had no money,
didn't know the name of the place we were staying.

I found the path the woman must have taken easily. The sea glittered
through shoals of leaves