Eight Foot Blue - 6

To my right a seagull landed, caw-cawed, and started pecking at a dropped piece of cod, or some other fish maybe, haddock, or skate, or rock. Anyway it was some fish wrapped in brown batter, that once would have been crispy but was now soggy and falling apart. It must have rained during the night, or it could have been the dew. The gull pushed its beak through the batter and bit hold of a huge chunk of grey flesh, spread its wings a full metre across, flapped and then flew off. I watched it go. High into the sky, then the sun.

“Don’t cry, Rah, he’ll be alright,” I said. Rah looked at me, still walking, but with her head cocked again.

“Sometimes you’re very simple for a thirteen year old,” she said, and then I wasn’t trying to hold her hand anymore. I’d heard all this before. Not just from Rah, but from teachers, and Dad, and Mum. I’d heard all this stuff like, George is a lovely boy but sometimes he goes off, lost in his own little world. It’s not that he’s stupid, he’s not, it just he’s somewhat of a dreamer. A little naive, they would say.

Rah had no right to say what she said. She was my little sister, not my older sister, not my Mum. And we walked the rest of the way to the shop in silence, with just the sound of her sniffs as she tried to stop crying, and the caws of more gulls, getting loud, getting quiet, as they flew around our heads. And also I wanted Lily to be with me now, because although I didn’t really know her, I thought she might understand.

In the shop we were served by a bad toothed old woman, who sat behind the counter, beneath a row of rubber rings. Some were just round and some in odd shapes, like ducks, or dolphins, or whales, and the woman smelt of rubber herself. She was all dressed in black, and it wasn’t the first time we’d seen her, because on the first day of the holiday she’d refused to sell us cigarettes for Dad, although we had a note from Mum. Mum was quite angry to start with, then very angry, because it meant that half way through the morning she had to come up from the beach to buy them herself. It was made worse because Dad insisted she only buy one pack at a time, because Dad always insisted he was about to give up.

In the shop we bought the Express and the Daily Mail, which were the papers Dad always read. I had to speak to Rah then, because I had to ask her for the money. She unhooked her purse from around her neck, unzipped it, and handed me two coins. She let me pay for the papers, because I was buying wine gums for myself, and she wasn’t buying anything. She always said she didn’t see the point of sweets, especially when you weren’t hungry and your teeth weren’t fully formed. She said she was going to keep her money because she was saving, though she never said exactly what for.

It didn’t matter what Rah was going to do, because I still bought wine gums. I chewed on them as we walked back along the street out of town, going the way that we’d come. I ate the black ones first, then the greens, then the oranges, then the reds, though really they all tasted the same. My mouth was numb with the acid, my jaw ached from chewing, and I remembered that I wasn’t supposed to be eating anything, and then I realised that I was eating wine gums on an empty stomach. I wondered if they’d make me as drunk as Dad got sometimes. I wondered if it was the sweets that were making me light headed now, or if it were Lily and love, and the fact that we were walking fast back up the hill. All this time, I carried on eating the gums, and this was because I still couldn’t bring myself to talk to Rah.

Rah must have begun to feel bad because half way up the hill, she reached for my hand and I flinched, then for some reason let her hold it, though she didn’t say anything like she should have, like sorry I didn’t mean what I said.

But we walked together anyway, and Rah didn’t let go which wasn’t like her. She held on even when Mum saw us together, because she was standing in the doorway of the Pengelly’s, waiting for us, and ready to go. Dad was standing with her too, resting on his walking frame.

And also, what I hated most about life, and the holiday, was walking anywhere with Dad. Mum insisted we were a family and families should walk together, and it didn’t matter because the sea would still be the sea, and the sand would still be the sand, but I knew it would take us an hour to get to the beach like this, limping through crowded streets, through the shopkeepers, the fishermen, and the tourists. I hoped Lily wouldn’t see us.

It wasn’t as though I even particularly wanted to go to the beach, but we had to walk at Dad’s speed. We had to feel his pain with him, struggle with his every step, and these weren’t made easier as Dad had made Mum tie a big string bag to his walking frame. In it were the things that Mum thought we’d need for the day. Our towels. Rah’s bucket and spade. Rah’s book, another of Rah’s books and Mum’s knitting. The spade stuck out from the top of the bag and banged against the walking frame with every step Dad took. It was like the metronomes we’d been shown in music once, swinging back and forth, not going anywhere, beating time. I mean it was like this. We were two days through our holiday. It was mid-morning already. I was thirteen years old and I was walking down streets that I’d already walked up and down, it seemed about ten times every day.