A couple of them sounded like they were from other countries, but they always had at least one person with them who spoke English. I didn’t see them all. One lot said they had boats parked up in Pegwell Bay – speedboats, lifejackets, the whole works. Another came with a coach. A shitty coach with broken headlights, and a driver with a twisted body, his torso two-thirds of him, vodka on the dashboard.
The whole scene looked desperate. I suppose it had spread out everywhere we couldn’t. Desperation, I mean. It moves through walls. It’s the kind of thing you can smell across the sea.
‘What people?’ Ma said when I told her about the men who’d come.
‘Not official people. Smugglers. I don’t know. Gangs.’
‘From where?’
‘Dunno, I said. The other side of the wall.’
‘Well, how are they getting here, if we can’t get there?’
‘I’d guess that’s their whole marketing plan.’ I found myself taking a breath. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘serious for a second. If we could, would you want to?’
‘I thought you said Blue was coming back here?’
‘Well, I think the plan might have changed.’
All I needed to know was that it was safe. It had to be better than waiting. What Caleb had said played again and again through my head. What we’re supposed to do now is die. But I couldn’t just die. I refused.
The first person I knew who left was Lace. Lace, no rings on his fingers now, said it was a lot cheaper if you didn’t bring anything with you, and he left without even a backpack. I asked him to find a way to tell me if it was safe.
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘but how?’
‘Just please,’ I asked him, ‘if you can.’
I tried to speak to one guy, stacked, not an inch of fat, and asked if we could pay when we got there. He laughed at me. Then he looked at me.
‘Other ways to pay,’ he said. Underneath his eyes was as yellow as smokers’ fingers. They looked rubbed with Vaseline.
‘For how many people?’ I said.
‘How many people you bring?’ he said. ‘Or how many people I bring?’
I didn’t say anything.
‘Don’t you be worry,’ he said, after that. ‘Water warm if you fall in.’
I walked away and was stopped by Davey.
‘Were you talking to him?’ he said.
‘No, we were just standing in front of each other in silence. What do you think? Why are you following me?’
‘Were you talking to him?’ he said again.
‘You’re not my dad.’
‘Tell me not you,’ he said. ‘Please tell me not you too. I know you said before but I thought you were joking.’
‘I don’t have any money,’ I said. I couldn’t look at him.
He reached for my cheek. Made it so I was facing him. ‘If you see anyone else who’s leaving, you tell them to stop. Please, Cha. You promise me that.’
‘Why, Davey? Why won’t you stop? All this fucking Planet Thanet till I die thing – it isn’t working.’
‘It’s not that,’ he said. ‘It’s not even that this time. It’s just that all this “get you out” shit – it’s a fucking lie. No way it isn’t lies. Have you heard what these people are saying? That they’re going to step off the coach and straight into a job. Spoke to one woman. She had a fucking child with her.’
‘She’s hardly gonna leave her child behind.’
‘She said their lorry had a metal-lined box in the back for them to sit in. To check there’s not too much breathing. Checks at the border or something like that.’
‘Good if they’re being careful.’
‘It’s not careful! It’s not about care. It’s just so they die quicker. They’ll be dead before an hour’s up. Don’t you see, mate? They’re paying to die.’
‘Why you calling me mate?’
‘“Smugglers” got some clout to it. Sounds piratey, decent. But this lot are basic fucking crims. Look at them. Where the hell do they have to take people?’
But I didn’t care what Davey said. If I could balance the risk right, I should take it. I was sure, right then, that this is what the money from our money box was supposed to have been for. I pictured it in my head, remembered counting the money, tried to remember how much there’d been, planned what we’d have done with it.
Sometimes it felt so simple. It hit me clean, like a clear bar of light. Go on and fuck the guy, fuck whoever you need to, just fucking go.
But the day I decided to do it, they found Lace on the beach. His skin was white, looked loose, like a case around his body that was too big for him. There were open cuts across the side of his head, this roundness to them, like they’d come from a blunt instrument.
And it wasn’t just Lace. Other bodies started washing up on the beach too. Bodies we recognised, others we didn’t. There was even one that had papers from Iceland on it, in a waterproof pouch strapped round the waist. He was grey on the sea steps, others were spread heaps on the sand. It didn’t matter if you could see it, you’d know when one was close. The smell of bad fruit, rotten flower water, meat, shit, but so much worse that it filled up your whole mouth.
One day, the morning after a big storm, another body washed up. Even if this body was curled up in a heap at first, this body turned onto all fours and coughed a lot. There was water, sand, blood in the cough – but this person was alive.
A group of men made a circle around him as he came round. He was black, his skin was dark on the wet concrete sand. When the man could talk, he shouted. It wasn’t English. That was when one of the men closest to him punched him in the head. His lip split open and a tooth came loose, more blood in the sand.
I was with Davey on the beach that day. When we saw what was happening, we ran. Davey got there faster than me. He pushed his way into the middle of all of it. The man was bleeding in these long strings from the mouth, and his face was almost too swollen to speak.
‘What d’you fucking want here?’ one of the men circling him was shouting. He had a piece of driftwood in his hand. It was covered in bent nails. ‘He’s Jamaican or something, int’he?’ He was going to hit the man on the sand with the wood when Davey pulled him out of the way.
‘What you going on about, Jamaican?’ I said. ‘They speak fucking English in Jamaica.’
‘African cunt, then.’
‘You’re a fucking idiot,’ Davey put his body between the two men. The man on the beach was on his knees, his hands in a prayer in front of him. He carried on speaking.
‘He’s speaking French maybe,’ I said. ‘Something like that. I don’t know.’
‘If he’s speaking about me…’ the man with the wood said.
‘It’s not about you,’ Davey started. ‘He doesn’t give a shit about you. No one gives a shit about you.’
‘I’ll slice his fucking heart out.’
Davey got to his knees beside the man. ‘Listen, I don’t know what you’re saying,’ he made a cross over his mouth with his hands. ‘We don’t understand. No comprendo? I don’t know.’ He turned to me. ‘You sure it’s French, Cha? Does Caleb do French?’
The man started to look like he was allergic to his own skin, like he might pull it off. A white, dry rash was all across his stomach. He’d been in the water for so long his skin looked like a thumbprint. Parts of it starting to rise up in patchy welts.
‘What’s he asking for? What’s he saying?’ the man with the plank in his hand said.
‘Don’t be dumb, I’m sure he wants to get the water off him. He wants a fucking shower.’ Davey looked at him, looked at the wood. ‘What’s wrong with you? Don’t you know anyone who left?’
‘Yeah – got a cousin who went. Cousin and her kid. Paid for it myself, din’t I?’
‘And what did you want? What were you hoping for when they got somewhere?’ Davey helped the man on the beach stand up; he had the man’s arm across the back of his neck now and was holding him up like that. ‘If you see anyone out there who needs help, we should be charging out into the water to get them.’
We took the man to Caleb’s house, each of his arms over one of our shoulders. He was all bones, not heavy at all, sometimes his feet walked, sometimes they stopped and we carried him.
I remember not knowing what to say, and saying stupid things like, ‘Caleb’s really nice, so don’t worry.’ ‘You’re okay now, buddy, you’re okay,’ Davey said at the same time.
When he got to the door, Caleb looked thin too, even thinner than last time. He’d put string through his belt loops.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked us.
‘He came up on the beach. Some dickheads found him. Do you speak French?’
‘I did.’
‘Well, is this French?’
Davey gestured that the man should talk. When he didn’t say anything, Caleb said: ‘Français? Vous parlez Français?’
‘Français, oui, oui, oui.’ The man took Caleb’s hand. ‘Mais pas de France.’
The man was shivering.
‘You need a bath,’ Caleb said. ‘Bain, pour laver?’
The man nodded. Then he turned to us and started almost crying.
‘What’s he saying?’
‘He’s saying thank you,’ Caleb said. ‘I’ll get him water. I’ll make sure he eats. Leave him here. I have space. I’ll get him fixed up.’ Then he turned to me: ‘Where have you been? I’ve been worried.’
‘I’ve been—’
‘She’s been bad but she’s getting better,’ Davey said. ‘We’ll get her better.’
On the way home, Davey said the bodies on the beach were proof that what had happened to us was happening everywhere. That we were right to have stayed. ‘Gotta run and drop something off, but I’ll come by for dinner,’ he said.
‘What dinner?’
‘Not fussy, you know me. A carrot or two will do.’
‘You heard the storm last night. It’s fucked the garden for weeks.’
The wind was so loud, had branches in it, bins, constant smashes of sand, that Ma had suggested we each slept in a different door frame in our flat. In the morning, some of the wind turbines out at sea had lost propellers. They looked like daisies with their petals ripped off.
‘I’ll bring something then,’ he said.
‘Nothing fancy,’ I said. ‘Just a starter, main and dessert.’
‘Dude paid with this,’ Davey said that evening when he arrived at our flat.
‘Who did? Paid for what?’
Davey slapped something hard and wet, wrapped in cling film, onto the table. It was a red colour, fleshy. ‘Whale!’ he said, like he’d made it himself.
‘So dumb,’ I said. ‘Literally the stupidest man I ever met.’
‘Shit you not. Huge one washed up in Westgate. Maybe not a whale-whale, but big enough. People were carving shapes in its side. Kind of like graffiti. Smelled bad.’
‘Delicious.’
‘It’ll be like tuna! Whack it in a pan. Chicken of the sea.’
It shrank and tasted like tyres when we cooked it, but we ate it straight from the pan, nothing else on the side.
‘Here,’ Davey said, after we’d nearly finished, when Ma went to the loo. ‘If you want your meal to be balanced.’ And he unwrapped his second parcel – a huge mountain of kem.
Sometimes you look at someone – you look into their face – and, like a Rubik’s cube, it all falls into place. ‘What did you mean before?’ I said. ‘‘‘Dude paid with this”?’
He shrugged. But I knew.
It was our old flat – our first one, four floors down – where Davey had been spending his time. The flat where JD and Kole had started their business. That was the reason why he’d been sleeping on our sofa so much. All that kem he had, he’d been making it himself. In the old bathtub, with their pots and their pipes.
‘It’s not like you don’t have some,’ he said, ‘if it’s there.’
‘Yeah, but to make it. To make more. To sell it to people.’
‘Oh, whatever. Stop though.’
‘How, even?’ I said.
‘’Cos it’s a ghost, mate, the stuff you need to make it. It’s like Casper. Moves through any old wall.’
‘Don’t smile like that. It’s what happened to JD, to my mum.’
‘Stop,’ he said again. ‘You’re being too much now.’
‘It’s not too much.’
‘It is, though. The way you’re looking at me.’
That night, in the pitch-black semi-cool, Davey moved all Kole’s equipment back to his old glazing workshop.
I told him not to. I tried to block him in the door. ‘Stay the night. Please Davey, come see Caleb with me in the morning.’
‘It’s not just you,’ he said. His cheeks were red. ‘I been thinking, too. I’ve cared what you think too long, and where does it get me? I’m trying to do good, and you’re making me feel bad.’
‘But Davey—’
‘You do it too much,’ he said.
‘Has he left too?’ Ma asked in the morning.
‘He did,’ I said, ‘but he’ll be back. Just being a boy. Hey, I’ve got a second before the tide,’ I said.
I got into her bed next to her. I felt sad. Sad about Davey. Sad about everything. I wanted to hear the sound of her breathing, feel a warmth that was human not sun. ‘I’m off out,’ I said. ‘Can I pick you up anything from the shops?’ She laughed, pulled my hand to her cheek to make it a quick pillow and told me to be safe. ‘Thank you,’ I said.
By then, one in every three tides came up around and beyond the building. Up into Dreamland, which always filled first, then up and over into the park. At highest tide, it could get up to the first floor. In a storm, like the storm we’d just had, it smacked up to the second.
I made my way to Caleb’s. ‘You came back,’ he said, when he opened the door.
‘Don’t sound surprised.’
‘Well, you kept me waiting several decades last time, didn’t you?’
‘I was working stuff out.’
‘Did you, then?’ he said. ‘Did you know his daughter?’ But just then there was a creak of the floorboards at the top of the stairs.
It was the man from the beach. He had a white towel around his waist, and one of Caleb’s T-shirts on, and he came down the stairs, gentle on his feet, and Caleb pulled out a seat for him. ‘Hiya,’ I said.
‘This is Drissa,’ Caleb said. Drissa took my hand and he shook it, and I remember how cool his hands were on a day that was so hot.
‘Yesterday evening, he wouldn’t speak,’ Caleb said. ‘And last night I woke up to him screaming. Saying words, but I couldn’t put any of it together really. Pas bon, mon français,’ he said to Drissa. ‘Très rusty.’
‘Non, ça va,’ Drissa said.
‘But today it was good. We worked out some stuff.’
There was a map on the table.
‘It fits with what we thought,’ Caleb said to me. ‘It’s just it’s bigger than we thought. What’s happening here, it really is happening everywhere.’
Caleb told me Drissa was from Mali, but had come through Niger to Libya, then across the water into Greece. Albania after that, then Italy. Drissa’s finger traced the map.
‘I think he’s blocked out a lot of it,’ Caleb said. He looked at Drissa. ‘Anyone would. And again, maybe I didn’t understand everything, but from what I think he’s saying, in all these places—’ I looked at Drissa’s hand on the map, Caleb’s right next to it ‘—they’d built – or were starting to build – big walls round major cities.’
‘Carry on,’ I said. ‘I’m listening.’
‘Beyond that, everywhere else was fucked,’ Caleb went on. ‘Drissa was trying to get to Paris. Paris,’ he said to Drissa in a French accent. ‘He had family there. But there were walls there, too. The suburbs were burned out. Burned black.’
A stone sunk to the bottom of my stomach. I thought of you and Blue in London. Fires burning around you.
‘But inside?’ I turned to Drissa. ‘What’s it like inside?’ My hands were moving, but I was shit at miming. ‘Inside they are safe, the people?’
‘Qui?’ Drissa said.
‘The rich people,’ I said. ‘The ones inside the cities.’
‘Je sais pas. Y’a des attaques suicidaires,’ Drissa said. ‘Comment ça se dit?’ he said. He looked at Caleb. Drissa started to mime back, explosions with his arms.
‘Suicide bombs,’ Caleb said. ‘People trying to protest, get back in, I don’t know. Listen, whoever’s powerful in the world, they’ll have just roped off what they can. As soon as one person goes, “Fuck it, we’re saving ourselves,” everyone does. It’s human nature.’ He finished his drink. ‘Fucking humans. There’s something better about a wave, don’t you think?’
Then, as if he’d swallowed the wrong way, he coughed and couldn’t stop coughing. When he looked in the tissue, he flinched at what was in there.
‘You should get that looked at,’ I said.
‘Yeah, I’ll nip to the doc’s.’
‘No, I’m serious.’
‘I just need rest,’ he said.
‘Well, then, I should go,’ I said.
‘You’re always welcome, Chance,’ he said. ‘Always.’
He walked me to the door. ‘Thank you, Caleb.’
‘It’s nice,’ he said, tilting his head back to where Drissa was, ‘to have company.’
‘I’m sorry that I didn’t come back for a while.’
‘In more important news, guess what?’ Caleb said, like he’d been waiting to say it. ‘Drissa had a husband before. Or a boyfriend anyway.’ His face broke into a smile, before it crumpled into a cough again. ‘He’s like me.’
‘I mean try and play it cool at least,’ I said.
‘I am, I am,’ he said. ‘Of course. He’s not in a good way. Like I said, he screamed all through the night.’
‘Jesus – what did you do to him?’
And we laughed, and it was stupid and not even funny, but it was real and it was nice to see Caleb happy, and so I felt happy too for a moment as I walked home.
I expected Davey to be back on my sofa when I got there. But he wasn’t, and he didn’t come back that night, or the next night, or any of the nights after that.
‘Where is he?’ Ma asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘What is it about us that the men always leave?’
Davey started to send boys up to the building instead, with bits of extra food, small bags of kem. At first I said no. ‘Where is he, though?’ I said. ‘Tell him to come himself.’
‘Busy.’ The boy shuffled from foot to foot. Scuffed arms, thin legs.
‘How old are you?’
‘Just take it,’ he said, and dropped the packet on the ground by my feet.
Time passed. Fell forwards like one of those toys that climb down stairs. People came to our door to sell things. All of it was stolen. Except the things that came were sadder, and we were less sad to see them.
I tried to find new houses, but there were hardly any left. They’d all been done so badly. Doors kicked in, windows smashed the wrong way, glass everywhere. I’d still find the occasional box of pasta, or bottle of rum with a dusty neck, the labels falling off. Cellars were good places to look, even if they’d been flooded. I found a wedding dress once, folded up and hidden in a deep freeze, the silk stone cold. I picked off a couple of pearls, let them roll around in my palm, then felt bad and put them back on top of the dress.
The water that ran from our taps looked like it had dandruff, and got worse and worse. Huge white flakes floating in it now. We drank from mugs so we could see it less.
Rain came and pecked at the plastic covering what was left of the vegetables. Then, worse, our gas ran out, and when I tried to get more, there was nothing I could swap for even the smallest amount.
A man in Market Square hacked wooden tables to bits that he could sell for firewood. It was the only way to cook. From behind closed doors, there was this thick, sweet, poison smell of varnish in the air as they burned. A little boy came all the way up to our flat just trying to sell us something. ‘Keys,’ he said.
‘I don’t need your keys,’ Ma said. ‘What you going on about? Keys to where?’
But it was a bundle of piano keys he had behind his back.
Outside, on the days I went outside, the streets were deserted, felt like triggers about to be pulled. The last of the smugglers left. Even I could see that the last options were not good ones. The vans had slack wheels, I saw one guy smack the window with a cricket bat when a woman leaned out to say goodbye. Instead of leaving the building, I tried to go into flats that were empty on other floors instead. One day, I found an old lady in a bath. I didn’t recognise her. Hard to say, though, her cheeks scooped away like that. Maybe she’d drowned, but everything was dry now. Her clothes were folded up and placed on the sink. She’d been there so long it didn’t even smell. Maybe if it had, I’d have felt something. But I felt nothing, and when I got back home, it was days later that I thought to mention it to Ma.
I went to see Caleb and it could be nice there, but once or twice he was coughing too much to really speak properly, and said I should come back when he felt better. Drissa stayed with him. I couldn’t always understand the words they were saying, but they laughed a lot when they were together. Their house smelled of food. I always wanted to stay longer than it felt right to.
Weeks passed. When loneliness finally got too much, I went to find Davey.
‘Thought you were too good for me,’ he said.
‘I never said that.’ I looked at him. ‘Not once.’
He was sitting on his big red chair when I got there and he had a computer game controller in his hand, even though it wasn’t connected to anything. He pressed the buttons and said it was to stop him from scratching. His arms were bright red. I’d never seen them that bad.
This time, I was the one who made him go outside. I wanted to see him see it, the place we’d grown up, hear him still try to say it was okay to stay.
There was no one on the street, apart from dogs. When the big ones lay down, they looked melted in the heat, flat to the ground like spilled water. Some had sunburn, I think. We walked to a park. We kicked away some rubbish and lay in uncut grass near a burned-out black spot where a fire had been. Crushed cans nearby, crisp packets, a bright curve of orange peel. I picked what looked like a feather out of the ash. A feather or a dandelion. I blew it. A fragment of bone was left in my fingers.
‘What do you reckon?’ I asked. Looked like a dog bone to me. ‘Some terrier? One of the little yappy ones?’
‘Don’t talk like that,’ he said. ‘You know I hate that. And what you’re doing right now. You’re doing it still. I’ve never done that to you.’
‘What, Davey?’ It was true though. I’d never seen him smoke that much in one go. He didn’t even seem high.
‘Judging,’ he said. ‘I know you’re doing that.’
‘I’m not.’
‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘It’s you. You make me want to go.’
‘Where?’ I said. ‘Look at me. There’s nowhere to go.’ But he was already walking away.
The next time I went to see Caleb, it was the first time he told me I couldn’t come in. He told me to come back in a few days, said we’d have lunch, pretend to be civilised, but it didn’t happen like that.
Thinking back, Caleb was probably ill from the first day Davey and I went to find him after the LandSave people left. That beginning of a cough, the way his T-shirt seemed stretched for a stomach that no longer existed. But it got worse. Soon, it wasn’t just his belly that was gone, it was his hair. It was so thin it looked like new hair rather than old hair.
Davey said maybe he’d got ill the gay way, but he didn’t say it meanly. And when I went to visit Caleb, Davey had sent over food and something for the pain.
I was at home one afternoon when a boy came for me to say that Caleb was finding it hard to breathe. I told the boy to go send word to Davey, too. When I got there, I brought up a chair next to Drissa’s, by Caleb’s bed, and I put my hands on the edge of the mattress, and when Davey got there, we talked to him and talked to him, until long after he could hear us.
When he was gone, I remember staring at Caleb’s wrist. His watch was too big for it now. I couldn’t stop looking. The space between the leather and the bone. All the empty space.
After we carried Caleb out of his house, Davey went straight back inside, and straight to Caleb’s bedside drawer. It was where Caleb kept his gun. I didn’t know what to say.
But then Davey wrapped it in one of Caleb’s silk scarves and handed it to Drissa. It was the way he held it out with both hands. Davey nodded a lot. ‘Whatever you need,’ he told Drissa. ‘Just ask for Davey, okay? Whatever you need. Davey, okay?’
‘Poor fucker,’ he said, when we left long after dark. ‘Be alone at a time like this. Be not from here at a time like this. Needs all the help he can get.’
Davey slapped a mosquito that had landed on the back of his neck. There were mosquitoes everywhere. I had bites all over me, they changed the shape of my body. I noticed them most when I wanted to sleep. I realised I didn’t want to sleep alone. ‘You coming up then?’ I said, when we were outside the building. ‘You coming back?’
‘I mean I’d like to, but…’ he said. ‘Probably not a good idea.’ He looked at me; I watched him catch himself. ‘How’s it going, anyway? Your plans.’
‘What plans?’
‘The Great Escape. You still building your tunnel?’ I saw them fight in him then: curiosity, anger, tenderness.
I didn’t say anything.
‘I saw that film once,’ he said. He tried to say it lightly. ‘They shot the blind man.’
I was scared of them that night, the mosquitoes. The whining clouds, loop-the-loops, getting closer. Maybe something bad in a bite was what had happened to Caleb. That was what Mac the Kid said had made him ill, anyway, but there were needles around too, and lots of them. All these thin faces. Mac said his teeth felt loose in his gums. Like when he coughed he could feel them moving. And it wasn’t just the mosquitoes or the needles, all that really needed to go wrong was the water. It did. It was everywhere. It didn’t have to be waves. The toilets stopped flushing.
Viv stopped having people over. When I went down to ask her if her taps were running brown too, she had to undo three locks to let me in. The whole building was emptier. The weight of it had changed, like the loose teeth. The noises it made got worse. Beating sun, beating water. And so many flats were missing windows now, that there was also this sort of whistle. It wasn’t a whistle. It could sound like screaming sometimes.
Davey made his kem cheaper and cheaper. Maybe he could make too much for the number of people left. Maybe he just wanted people to do it with. More cheeks hollowed out. Tendons in necks so close to the skin it was easy to see the ridges. Blue forks of lightning on the insides of people’s arms, on their calves. When I was a kid, I used to think bits of Ma’s red nail varnish had chipped off onto her cheek, but I realised that they were just veins that had burst. Small and oblong. They shone. She had more and more of them.
When my period came, I used old T-shirts, and then it stopped coming at all. No one knocked on our door any more. No one had the energy to get up to the eleventh floor, and no one had anything to sell, anyway. Davey’s boys still came, but less regularly. He sent food from time to time, but not a lot. Silence spread out like a blanket.
When the sea was all the way in, the roads it filled were silver. The sky changed. The heat made a haze that hardly ever lifted. The air waved back and forth in silky, shifting stripes. Our windows were hot, sticky, the outside scuffed by sand. It had become impossible to see a way out.
If I needed to get anything I had to go out before the sun came up. Four, five, six in the morning. It was too hot after that. We ate hardly anything. We made a bag of rice last more than a week. We slept when it got dark, before it got dark. We slept a lot.
Somewhere along the way, I forgot the details of what you look like. Worse, I lost Blue’s face, too. I found my arms moving into the position of how I’d hold him, even though he’d be too big now. He’d be three, he’d be four, I didn’t even know. I tried to imagine how much he must have grown, the ways his face might have changed, but that made me lose him even more.
I’ve changed too. I look at the back of my hand, and see all these different triangles. When I touch my body it feels hard in places it wasn’t hard before. When I walk past mirrors or windows I try not to look in them.
You said you would come back. How long had I waited now?
Mornings still came when the sky was a perfect blue, and the sea was like a show, diamonds coming up to the surface. On a good day, on a good day. But it was almost harder to look at it when it was like that. It hits you one way when you’re happy, smacks you another when you’re sad. Because even if the sea shone, and the sky could look like a postcard, the good days had no good in them any more.
I’d waited so long, it felt like too late. Too late, too late. It shot ripples through my head.
At night, I dreamed about a wave. I dreamed that it would pick me up. I dreamed that I was somersaulting under water. That it would feel like being held. I dreamed that it would be slow. I dreamed it would be rushing. I dreamed that it would crush me. I dreamed that it would come.