33
The day had been calm, no wind, no terrible heat. Frank could smell the first washes of winter on the salt air. The sugar cane didn’t seem to tower as much as it had before.
He padded down to the beach with a plastic bag wrapped carefully round the figurines. It mattered that they didn’t break up any more for some reason. He thought for a while about lobbing them as hard and far as he could, but that would not be very far and he would know that they were there, underwater, dissolving, heavy and sunk.
Instead, he lined them up on the incoming tidemark and sat back on his haunches to look at them: a strange army.
His grandparents were funny-faced, illogically weighted and old-fashioned. His grandmother’s nose was too flat, or maybe she had looked that way. The bear she held in one hand had something of her husband about it, who stood arms flat to his body, hair done in old black that had sunk into the sugar and turned grey. One of his eyes looked slightly the wrong way. His shoulders were as broad as his bride’s hips.
Next to them were the couple who had been his parents. His mother over-bosomed, pink-skinned, beautiful. His father oddly small. Not really like his father at all. More like the man he’d watched climb the stairs to his house in Roedale, someone who had stumbled into being happy, his smile red and overdone. His father’s self-portrait. A comic weakling.
The seawater soaked into the brides’ dresses. It took the black out of the grooms’ shoes. Began to melt them.
‘What are they?’ It didn’t startle him in the least that Sal was at his side. She appeared softly, like a ghost, and he’d got used to it. ‘Just some dolls.’
‘Are they yours?’
‘I suppose.’
She was quiet for a while. ‘Why are you drowning them?’
‘I’m just letting them dissolve.’
‘How come?’
‘Makes things easier having less stuff. See, if I keep them I’ve got to find a place to put them in – probably in a box or something so they don’t get broken. Then I’d have to find something to put them on – I’d probably have to have a whole shelf just for them – or their own special table that I’d have to build. And there’s not too much room in my shack, and I’d probably bust my hip on it every time I walked by. And when you start to get older that sort of thing gets to be more of a problem.’
He talked nonsense freely and she didn’t pick him up on it. He enjoyed the feeling of lightness that climbed over him.
‘Oh,’ said Sal, and after a moment’s consideration knelt down next to them and planted a withered-looking carrot with a smiling face penned on to the fat end. She stood back. ‘I don’t suppose that will dissolve.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Frank, ‘when the tide comes up the fish’ll take care of it. It’ll be like dissolving.’
She nodded and they both watched as his grandfather was the first to go, knocked over by the seventh wave.
‘We should make something else instead.’
‘Like what?’
‘Something that you don’t have to carry around and look at all the time.’
‘How about a sandcastle?’
‘A sand person?’
‘Man or a woman?’ asked Sal suspiciously.
He shrugged. ‘We could make a carrot.’
She shook her head. ‘I’m so over carrots.’
The two of them started pawing the tide’s edge, blunting their fingernails on pipi shells, pushing up great cakes of sand with the heels of their hands. The work was engrossing and they forgot all about sculpting a man or a woman or a carrot and just concentrated on digging a long shallow trench up along the beach at the tideline. They had been at it for a good twenty minutes, talking each other through the process.
‘There it is, now you go ahead of me and bring it down to reach me, and I’ll go ahead of you and start on the next bit.’
‘’Sa bit of a china plate.’
‘Careful.’
They looked back to where they had come from. The trench behind them had been washed into nothing more than a thin line by the sea and the five upright figures that marked their starting point had gone – Sal’s carrot had fallen over and rolled in the surf. They left a slight dark stain on the sand.
‘They’ve weed into the sea,’ said Sal.
Frank looked at her, put his hand on her head. ‘You are a strange person.’
She let her head rest against his stomach. ‘So are you.’ She pointed up the beach. ‘Who’s that?’
Frank watched the family train of the Haydons while he washed the grubs out of three small lettuces. Vicky sat on the middle step, cutting Sal’s fringe, who was sitting on the bottom step. Bob, at the top, stroked the back of Vicky’s neck with one finger, while the other hand took care of his beer. There was a new goat, just a kid still, and it balanced on the stump table, one hoof in a bowl of chips, bleating. From round the back of the shack came the thick splash of shampoo being washed out of long hair. The Haydons chattered with each other, no one’s voice commanding the conversation, just a gentle murmur of the three of them.