Hastings Pier, 15.22

I am just as scared as you.

She screams into the wind. Stamps her feet. Under us, the full throttle of the sea, ahead only France. The sea here is different to the sea bordering the east coast, bluer, less lonely somehow but also more full in a way. Maybe it’s the tilt of the beach, the sharp slope after the shoreline that speaks of the volume of the tide, retreating now but still, under our feet the waves hit the shore, reverberating upwards, creating this new roar she is afraid of. At its fringes the pier was not a fearsome thing, enough like pavement to feel safe, but as we venture up it, she becomes aware of land becoming a new horizon and certainly she has never been positioned this way in relation to what is known and solid. She had been on a boat twice, as the year pivoted from the longest days to the shorter ones, on the west coast of Scotland. Thrice, if you count the time I claimed to be able to row in Victoria Park and certainly I could but once being able to do a thing is not testimony to still being able to as both my rowing skills and German will attest. Therefore this, half land, half sea, promenade is the source of much distress to her and she shouts at me that no, she cannot do this, that no, she is too afraid and the Islington morning suddenly is far away, when I tipped into the clear November morning, the first hint of a chill on the air, my breath white, and now, here I am, coaxing her onto the middle of the pier and she will not go, she says, she is too scared, and the wind whips my hair, and I have been scared of everything for most of my life, I know how this fear feels, and I know where this fear will lead her and so I bend down to her, and I tell her that the most fun thing about being scared is how good it feels after you do the thing you’re scared of. No, she says, you’re lying. Maybe I am. Maybe I’m just trying to trick her into this. Maybe I should let her listen to her fear. But I have listened to mine. And I do not like the places it took me. And so I urge her on. Is this what being a mother is? I would like to turn back. See her easily satisfied. I remember where that got me. Or didn’t. I can see how scared she is. I wonder if I am being cruel. But I am taking no pleasure from this in the way cruel people often do. A vision of Freud’s girl with kittens slides into view. I am not that girl, surely. The waves now are deafening. If I stop to think about this construction and how flimsy it is and the forces it withstands daily, I am scared too. She is six and I am not. But she doesn’t know about physics. To the west, the clouds are pinking. We cut a deal, we will go as far as the steps, at most a minute away. How long a minute is for a six year old. How far it stretches. We sit on the steps, then we walk back towards land, or the beach at least, where despite the shifting stones, she happily searches for shells. She finds half a mussel with something else attached. A limpet perhaps. She is in awe as she brings me treasure after treasure. I sit on the steps of the promenade, my fingers growing cold, unable to grasp where I am. It’s still too new. I tell her it’s time for dinner, when she protests and I tell her we can come back tomorrow although I don’t really believe it either. Surely I have stumbled into the wrong life. What I don’t know then is that when we return the following day, she will beg to go to the pier and she will run onto it, all fear abandoned and for the rarest moment I will think sometimes I am vaguely good at this endless, impossible trick of being someone’s mother, but for now, she will tuck her small cold hand into my larger but just as cold hand and we will turn to walk home, cheeks pinking as the sky darkens.