‘Hello. I’m Christopher,’ she heard, and when she raised her head and opened her eyes there he was, right in front of her – his skinny ankles no more than a couple of inches from her face.
This was how it tended to happen. This was how the scenario played itself out.
She looked up. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘What’s up, Christopher?’
‘Do you want to play?’ He presented the question – rather flat, a little wan – like a dish he had prepared that had turned out bland, and beige, and unappealing, so he wasn’t necessarily expecting a positive response. She looked up, squinting, to the rest of him, and saw his body plastered with the sun cream his mother had applied, and the white cloth sun hat, the kind that babies wear with great floppy rims, and beneath it his pale face, the nose obliterated by factor 50. His eyes, large and blue and long-lashed, were glittering beneath the indignities that had been piled upon him, and his thin red lips were burning furiously.
She hauled her body to its feet.
‘Lead on, Christopher.’
He gave her the loveliest smile, and then led the way towards the rock pools and the cliffs.
But of course this was not how it had happened, not how it had played itself out.
*
Later she would learn about alternatives, but that summer, that first time, Frankie had shuttled up and down the beach with pads, back and forth between the encampment her family had made close to the water, and the interminable queue for the loos. Accompanying her all the while was an ache deep in her pelvis, which made her grateful for the kick of heat coming from the sand beneath her feet.
That queue, over and over – bodies shuffling inch by slow inch, limbs lazy in the sun, arms swatting listlessly at flies, like the tails of cows. The stink of urine. The wet sand gritty and slippery against the concrete underfoot. Then the toilet more like a shower; the white porcelain stained and chipped with an uninviting platform for each foot, and filthy overflow – including her own – from the bin. Squatting there, through the wide gap underneath the stall door, Frank would inspect the flip-flopped feet that were lined up and waiting.
She had felt stranded wherever she went: stranded in the water, knowing each time she swam there was a risk she would humiliate herself on her way out; stranded and oddly solitary as she made the quick change, under cover of her towel, into the relative safety of padded knickers and shorts; stranded as she marched up the beach to the queue, past those who were flat out and happy and careless, when she was not.
Standing in the shallows, the small waves washing over her feet, she had looked back towards the mound of towels and bags and picnic things surrounding her parents, who lay reading, or sleeping, or watching as her brothers dug a moat around their castle in the sand. She had felt hot and stupid in her clothes.
‘Frankie, take off your shirt,’ her mother had teased. But she couldn’t.
She hated the way her brothers shook her off – the look of absence in their eyes when they rested on her. She hated that.
Instead of running around as she would usually do, or diving off rocks, Frank spent time sitting and watching instead. First she would look for her brothers, and then she would let her gaze trail right along the beach, where perfect surf was coasting in, where bodies hurled themselves about, ecstatic.
She watched as down the beach a woman and her son arrived and started setting up camp. The woman – sallow-looking – fussed over the boy. She plastered him with cream; it didn’t look like fun. The boy picked his way towards the water, and stood gazing out, his feet barely wet. He did a little dance there, at the water’s edge, and then turned to look for his mother.
Frank studied her own parents – her mother on her belly, deep in her book, her father, cross-legged, picking at a hangnail on his toe.
There were others she remembered like pieces on a chess board.
She remembered a man – white-haired, slim, and wearing spectacles, wire-rimmed – who held the hand of a girl playing in the sea. Years later she could picture him, carried an image of him in her mind, as if it mattered.
She remembered another younger man on her route up the beach, lying in a pair of yellow Speedos so tight she had to force herself to look away: his skin slick, his thighs prominent, his body, even at rest, in a state of readiness – tense and compact.
She remembered the two teenage girls who were closer to the spot her family had claimed, halfway between the water and the ridge of seaweed marking high tide, far from the fuss at the top of the beach – the back and forth, the queues, the booths for food. They too had chosen the sand that was firm, that was good for digging and striated with shells – the broken fragments smoothed by the sea, the larger clams and cuttlefish prized by Frank’s brothers – though mostly all they did was lie there talking about nights out, past and future.
She could remember too, beside the rocks to the left of the girls, close to the cliffs, the woman dressed only in bikini bottoms squatting in the sand, skin scorched to mahogany and wizened with age, breasts flat against her chest.
Frank had watched her father playing chess often. The board in their living room alcove was equipped with handsome resin figurines. They were the Lewis Chessmen: the king stunned; his sullen, cogitative queen with one hand resting on her cheek and looking – Frank’s mother said – as if she’d had one bitch of a week; the knight with a cloak draped in perfect folds over his steed; the steed the most contented of the lot, Frank always thought, with a very satisfying, perfectly straight fringe.
Her father had tried to teach her. She would sit in the armchair across from him, planted sideways and almost inverted with the soles of her feet pressed flat against the wall. He told her more than once that she had things the wrong way round: she insisted each time on retracing her steps to get her bearings, always making a mental journey back to the start. ‘Look ahead!’ he would urge. But back she would go, over and over, to the beginning, where everything was clear, and where the figurines were neatly lined up in a row.
That day, on the beach, she had felt something in motion, the main players having already made moves. She could find no clear beginning, and yet the powerful feeling remained, long afterwards – if only she could.
The older woman had seemed familiar. Frank felt she had seen her before; found herself pondering the face scored with lines, the limbs thin and loose-skinned.
‘Frank,’ her mother had said. ‘You’re staring.’
She couldn’t place her, couldn’t think where it had been. ‘I’m not.’
She fell back on her towel, and then flipped herself over so her face was pressed hard into the damp, salt-smelling cloth. Behind her eyelids she saw explosions – fireworks in orange and blue spinning trails through the dark.
Close by, a girl had been going on to a friend. It was impossible not to hear every word; as she warmed to her theme her voice became loud and hard – relentless. The theme was vomit. Behind her closed lids Frank had visions of the girl painting a car, a hallway, and then a kitchen, with great sticky lumps of the stuff.
‘Ice cream anyone?’ Frank’s father had said.
For Frank, the voice had conjured someone stocky and ugly, so when she opened her eyes and located the girls it seemed impossible that the words belonged to them – both slim and attractive, one a redhead, the other with a dark, glossy mane. They had been older than Frank by only a few years, but seemed so sure of themselves. She could remember their legs flicking up and down as they lay on their towels, and the way they changed position for an even tan, like old hands, and the ritual they made of comparing white marks under bikini straps.
Suddenly there was the small boy, in front of the girls. What could have possessed him? She couldn’t hear what he said, but they shrieked with laughter.
He stood there a moment, looking at them, before moving off. A few feet away he stopped and seemed to be taking stock. He started making his way towards her.
‘No,’ she breathed. ‘No. No. No. No. No.’
She fell forward on her towel, flat out, pretending to sleep.
‘Hello,’ a voice said. ‘I’m Christopher.’
‘Hello Christopher,’ she heard her father say, agreeably. ‘What can we do for you?’
‘I’ve come to play.’
‘Frank!’ her father called out, as if she were some distance away, or in her room at the top of the stairs.
‘No.’
‘Frankie!’
She could sense him standing there, right at the edge of her towel. Slowly, she propped herself up on one elbow, and shielded her eyes from the sun with her hand.
His toes were curled tight, all together, his pale feet smeared with sunscreen, and clotted with sand. He stood there bravely, small shoulders back. It was as if, for that moment, his whole body were on pause, as if he were holding his breath.
Frank tried hard to imagine hauling herself up but everything in her felt heavy; a great weight was bearing down. It was impossible.
‘I’m sorry Christopher,’ she said.
He squinted through his disappointment, blinked in the sun, and walked away.
According to her mother she would, in time, feel nostalgic for those days – the way her body flushed itself out like clockwork, with such force, with those torrents of blood. But that day she groaned with hot rage and thrashed her legs about in the sand.
‘It hurts,’ she said, into her towel, kicking her feet, trying to shake off the heavy ache creeping down into her thighs. ‘I have to go again,’ she said, sitting up and rifling, furious, in her bag.
‘Oh Frank.’ This was her mother. ‘Are you sure? You’ve only just been.’
‘You’re exhausting to watch,’ her father said. ‘Just leave it be.’
‘How can she leave it be?’
‘If you were in Nepal they would kick you out of the house.’
Frank glared at her father.
‘You’re a pollutant.’
‘Thom. For God’s sake,’ her mother said.
He shrugged. He was enjoying himself. ‘They wouldn’t let you prepare food, either.’
‘Fine.’ Frank threw the wad of pads she had ready in her hand on to her towel, not bothering to hide them away. ‘Fetch your own ice cream.’
It was good to get away from the sweltering sand and on to the rocks where there was a breeze. In the shadow of the cliffs it was cool underfoot.
She found a place to stand on a large, smooth rock with a perfect indentation for her feet. She slotted herself in and looked back towards the beach, which was warped now by the hazy heat. Mirages, slippery like mercury, appeared and disappeared, rolling their silver along folds in the sand that could not possibly be there. It all looked like a picture on paper that someone had taken and crumpled in their fist and then released, producing odd ridges and troughs, a relief changing shape as the paper relaxed, a slow metamorphosis startled here and there by odd spasms – the sudden surge of a kite, the spume of a cresting wave, the panicked flap of a pyjama-striped windbreak.
Standing there, looking back towards her parents, she tried to assess how long it would take her to make it to them, and to supplies, and then on to the toilets up at the top of the beach. The memory of an attempted swim was fresh with humiliating detail: those rivulets of watery blood coursing down her legs. She hadn’t even noticed. She had been standing on her beach towel shivering with pleasure from the salty cold, when her mother had said, ‘Frank.’
From her rock she could see her father, on his feet, arms crossed, looking out towards the water – a pose she recognised from the lecture theatre, where as a child she had once been allowed to sit and watch. She could see the girls in their bikinis, ankle-deep in the water, long hair snatched up by the wind. She could see the older man reading to the little girl up above the line of seaweed, and Christopher in his floppy sun hat dragging a spade in solitary circles in the sand. ‘Only boring people—’ she mouthed. And then, ‘Only boring people, Christopher, get bored,’ she said, parroting Ms Wilson her head teacher.
Hot and dizzy, she sat on the smooth stone, her legs stretched in front, palms flat. She closed her eyes and felt the breeze that was coming off the water licking at her face. Behind her lids something plummeted, fast and dark and heavy – as if all the movement on the beach had found its way inside to merge with the exhaustion she felt pulling her down. She lay back, the noise of people – the hordes, their screams – fading to something distant.
Years later, she would try to describe the feeling to a boyfriend who wanted to know what it was like; who found it all fascinating; who used the word ‘menses’; who would ask her to set it out over brunch in King’s Cross, even knowing that people could hear. She would find herself embarrassed on his behalf for being so po-faced, for being such a fucking try-hard.
‘You’ll never know,’ she would say, mashing her eggs Benedict with her fork and slowly shaking her head, all the while willing some laughter, longing for more of a sense of humour from him.
But he would insist.
‘This is what it feels like,’ she would say, as they sat hemmed in at their table, couples in their faces on either side. ‘It feels like a hand is reaching inside you and twisting until you double over, thighs aching, burning. Between the legs: rawness, heat, and blood, and lust, and fear, and disgust, and shame, and humiliation.’
‘Eat up,’ she would say, as he picked at his food.
He would be disappointed, even hurt; would shake his head slowly; would say, as they settled their bill, that she wasn’t the person he’d hoped for; would say she had a hard edge that he couldn’t fathom.
It was the sound of rock on rock that woke her. She raised her head and opened her eyes, brushing vaguely with her forearm at moisture collected around her mouth.
She saw him, like a vision at the water’s edge, moving slowly towards her. He didn’t have his floppy hat on, but wore goggles, and yellow flippers, oversized. He was luminously pale, and wide-eyed, with every movement halting.
He was a thing of awkward beauty, a strange bird newly hatched.
‘Oh, Christopher,’ she said, half under her breath.
A rush of warmth from her belly and she was laughing. She was delighted. He seemed to her lit up. She was surprised at the feeling that caught in her throat.
She watched as he proceeded, head craning forwards and downwards, goggled eyes trained on each foot as he tried to take a step that proved each time almost impossible.
‘Your flippers are too big,’ she murmured.
She watched him as he stopped and pulled the goggles up on to his forehead, and looked about in an assessing kind of way. She watched as he poked his head forward, goggle-free, and tried again. He would reach a point of no return, perform a pirouette on the end of each flipper as he tried to lever it out of the wet sand.
‘Your flippers are too big.’
She let out a sigh of relief when he changed tack and shuffled backwards – now something closer to a crab – and actually, finally, got his feet properly wet. Knee high in the water he re-secured his goggles, and folded himself so he was doubled over and peering down beneath the surface of the sea.
Again, Frank heard rock striking against rock. She tried to follow the sound but it came in bursts, sporadic, and the way noise was carried about on the breeze it was hard to tell.
She saw then, scrambling on rocks close by, where seaweed was pasted in dark seams underfoot, the woman: topless, shrunken, her hair hanging matted to her neck. She must have
been sixty at least, but along her hairline, running sideways and framing her face, there was a plait – the kind of thing schoolgirls had.
Frank understood now what it was she had heard, saw the woman squat to attack a citadel of limpets, saw her hacking at them, over and over, with a rock. When she set the rock down, and the sound stopped, she brought the broken shells to her mouth, one by one, and sucked the tender creatures out.
Awful.
The woman was spider-like, scrawny. A string of weathered shells, like little skulls, were slung around her neck. More of them garlanded her hair. Hollow-eyed and freakish. One of Frank’s father’s favourites. They had seen her at the British Museum. She appeared half-starved, and voracious: the great goddess in the form of an old hag. From collarbones down to empty breasts her ribs were scored across her chest.
Standing to go, Frank knew she was in trouble; a clot of dark blood had somehow worked its way into the open from between her legs. A change of position? The movement to stand? It didn’t matter now. It had fingered its mark on her upper thigh – a stamp, black and fibrous.
Movement. What looked to her like seaweed bothered by the wind. Again she saw that scraggy, salt-tangled hair. She felt herself to be swaying up on her rock, and dizzy. She was frightened. She tried to plot a route back to her parents, whatever the humiliation involved. She turned at a sound close by, and found those pitted eyes fixed on her from only a few feet away, a smile on the woman’s lips. Everything went silent. She felt her insides twist.
And then the pieces on the chessboard moved all at once, no rules to their game.
Frank would remember this moment later, when, aged thirty-five, she lost control of her car on a bend, watched her hands sit impassively on the wheel as the car ran off the road and lost its hold on the earth, as it found the tipping point beyond which there is no return, falling, rolling then in a movement of some grace until it flipped and settled in the shallow waters of a saltmarsh. The paralysis she would feel, the separation from the scene as she hung there suspended by her seatbelt, the world upside down and brackish water sidling in through the open window of the car.
She had simply watched it unfolding: a story over which she had no control.
She saw the man in yellow Speedos striding out into the water, all sure-footed muscularity. He passed the girls, who were leaping over the smallest of the waves. He broke into a run, his legs ploughing the water, and then – arms arrowed forward – he pierced the surface and disappeared. She thought in that moment to look for Christopher, but was distracted by the sight of the older man – the man earlier with the small girl – who was alone now, and walking fast, running even, seemed to be running towards Frank. Frank looked for the little girl and could not find her. She caught movement on the rocks closest to the sand. She saw that the man was running not to her but to the end of the beach, where the scrawny woman was now standing up to her knees in the water – all leather, all skin and bones, the string of shells hanging down from her neck.
But it was not even to her that he was running, Frankie realised, at last. He was not running to her.
It was to Christopher, who was bobbing adrift in the shallows, the tender skin of his back white in the sun.