We played with an old skipping rope until Lily got bored, chanting the rhymes their friends had taught them, and they had taught me. I didn’t know what half of them meant, but I learned the words through repetition and a desire to join in, just like all children do. I remember my favourite rhyme we used to chant and skip to:
Lizzie Borden took an axe,
She gave her mother forty whacks.
After she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.
Lizzie Borden got away.
For her crime she did not pay.
Rose loved that rhyme. Those skipping games on the beach were one of the few childhood activities at Seaglass that required all three of us: two to swing the rope, one to jump.
‘Let’s play the mermaid game instead. Do you want to go first?’ Lily said, with her hole-filled smile.
They buried me in the black sand until my face was all they could see. Then they made a sand-shaped mermaid’s tail and decorated it with seashells. They left me there for over an hour while they built sandcastles nearby. Our family seems like a sandcastle to me now, quick and relatively effortless to build, and even faster to wash away, as though it never existed. I can remember nothing solid about the relationships we had with one another, nothing substantial that couldn’t be obliterated in a mere moment by a cross word or the crash of a wave none of us saw coming. I remember hating both of my sisters for the first time that day. Really hating them. I couldn’t move – the sand was too heavy where they had buried me beneath it. My face was burning in the hot sun and I was crying, until Conor came along. He had two yo-yos that year, and could do all kinds of clever tricks with them, both at once. I heard him talking to Rose before I saw him.
‘Did you know that Seaglass was one of the properties used in the Second World War to look after evacuated children?’ he said.
‘No, how do you know that?’ ten-year-old Rose asked, sounding genuinely interested.
‘I read about it at the library, and now I’m writing about it for my school newspaper. I’m going to be a journalist one day. Children would walk here to this stretch of coast, all the way from Plymouth. A long line of them carrying their little suitcases over the hills and sand dunes, to escape the bombings in the city, leaving their parents behind.’
‘Conor, help me!’ I yelled.
He looked amused at first when he spotted me stuck in the sand with my mermaid’s tail of shells. But when he saw that I’d been crying, he dug me out at once and pulled me up.
‘It was just a joke,’ said Rose, looking at Conor, not wanting him to think badly of her.
‘Yeah, don’t be such a crybaby all the time,’ said Lily.
‘I hate you both!’ I said, then stormed off to get my armbands. ‘I’m going to swim to America and I never want to see either of you ever again.’ When Lily laughed it only made me more determined. The tide was coming in, and I think deep down I knew I’d probably only make it to the little rock island half a mile out, but I thought I was a good swimmer. And with my orange armbands, I felt invincible. I looked at Rose, who was the eldest after all, but she just stared down at the sand.
That was when Lily picked up the camcorder again.
I watch now in horror, along with the rest of the family in the present, as five-year-old me starts to swim out to sea. It reminds me of when we watched Titanic together, knowing that the film couldn’t possibly end well. I see myself getting smaller and smaller, doing my own variation of backstroke, which involved rolling over for a bit of doggy paddle now and then to see where I was going. Only Lily and Rose had been sent for swimming lessons.
When I was halfway to the rock island, I got scared and turned around. Rose was at the water’s edge, yelling something I could not hear. Conor was waving his arms, and even Lily appeared to be a little worried, beckoning me to come back. They all looked very small and far away, and I decided maybe it wasn’t a good idea to swim to America that day after all. I tried to head back towards Blacksand Bay, but the sea had other plans.
I was dragged sideways first. Then backwards. Then one of my armbands came off when a wave crashed over me. We’d been warned about the dangerous undercurrents in the bay when the tide was this distance from the shoreline, but I was too little to understand the consequences of ignoring them. Fear is something we have to feel to learn, and learn to feel.
The harder I tried to swim towards my sisters, the further away they seemed to get. The ocean was suddenly very loud inside my little ears. It dragged me under. I remember the panic and the pain. I felt as though the cold water had stolen the air from my lungs and I couldn’t breathe, then the sea and sky folded in on each other and on me. I was drowning in blue. Then life turned black.