The Beach, 15.40

So Much Water So Close to Home

Five minutes earlier, I saw my mother. Her bobbed hair. Her height. A coat she would wear. Her then. In front of me, she walked away from me as I told myself it was not her. She has no reason to visit this out of season coastal town perched on the southernmost edge of the country. No, she is safe over the border and it is not her and in any case, this version is 11 years out of date. It has been a over a decade since I last saw her like this, this is some poorer version of her, sent to trick me for a moment into believing that there she is, in front of me, and maybe it’s no accident that this accidental way of meeting is how I often think I see her, since meeting on purpose is firmly and forever out the equation. I have heard the same happens to the recently bereaved. Only this is not recent. And I am not bereaved. Not really, just deprived of her. Robbed of her. Best not linger. Not her. Just a woman in a crowd, walking away from me.

Do. Not. Linger.

Watch instead the children attacking the incoming waves with stones. These children of mine are possessed with an almost manic energy. They are not gentle children. They are not often quiet. They require long walks, much running around, lengthy conversations to answer all their questions, in short, they are much like all children, moving towards the world and away from me. This pleases me, in the main, and yet earlier, when the boys were close to the waves on this rapidly sloping beach, I felt a fear I have not known since they were little. Only 17 months between them, I used to dream repeatedly of one running one way and the other the other, both towards the road, and I had a split second to choose between them and how do you choose a thing like that?

I shout to the younger one, instructing him to face the waves so at least he can see them coming. He doesn’t hear above their roar. I run down to where the three of them stand laughing, instructing the weaves to stop at their feet which miraculously they seem to, so regularly the children become convinced they are possessed of messianic powers and the sea here is not the sea at home. It is fuller here. The tide strange, curling along the beach. I am used to bays. To grey seas. To sand, not shingle. I am also used to walking along the beach on wet days and sunny days and fierce days and all the days in between as I realise my children will now be too. So long, since they last saw the sea when we lived in London. The sea, the only thing my family has in common on both sides. Everything else, half; half Scottish, half South African, half Christian, half Jewish. How are you meant to feel whole with a legacy like that? The sea, the uniting factor. My father, on South Africa’s east coast, and my mother, living on a Scottish island measuring ten miles by two.

I am writing about this island now, although I hated it for years, having seen it at the worst time of years, surrounded by mist and filled only with damp. Leave a place and it’s suddenly all you’re able to write about. These places, they teach us things. This isolation showed me how big the world was. The sea exposing horizons; over it, somewhere else. This island, John McPhee also wrote about. His writing is so good, it has made me scared to write about it. Next year I will return to visit it and maybe I will still hate it, but maybe I will not. I remember its sandy beaches, white as any you’ll find elsewhere, the blue of the sea warmed by the gulf stream and the elation of learning to swim. I remember the causeway between the two islands, Colonsay and Oransay and the car almost being stuck there, and the way this disrupted scale, Colonsay suddenly acquiring the status of mainland. An island dwelling friend pointed out earlier this year that when you live on an island, everywhere else is The Mainland. England, US, Finland, South Africa; all is elsewhere; The Island, the centre of the known world, The Mainland, the outsider. I like playing with this idea.

What it must be like to be a baby surrounded only by sea, I do not know. What it must be like for this to be the bounds of your known world until you are three, I do not know. This is why I am now imagining it, in part another way of returning to my mother. I am a tyrant in this way, even when I am not writing directly about her, she is there. She left the island when she was three and a half as she used to say and maybe still does, recalling the fact of her third birthday in the sand dunes which I would say surely she can’t remember but I remember three and who am I to say she cannot, must not remember this celebration. I am not sure she ever recovered from leaving. She has been making an island of herself ever since.

(I missed yesterday, because an insistent child borrowed my laptop and typing on my phone was beyond my tired little mind. Scabbled to make it today, but just did. This is really much harder than it looks, but also really good discipline.)