MORNING SERIAL
ISSIE’S skin was scalding cold, covered in a dark flush like a rash. She dragged the weight of herself up the sand. Probably about to be sick.
Owen had used to stand at the edge of the sea with the blue bathing robe and a towel thick as a blanket, holding it out when she trotted from the surf, wrapping it round, saying, Come on now, there’s my beauty. She scrubbed the towel to and fro over her back and flanks, teeth chattering. Owen not really Tada. Owen, just some friendly chap who happened to be around.
Enemy aliens. Amongst Jews on the Isle of Man. She had asked Renate Are we Jews, Mummy? on the Mumbles train, chuffing through Oystermouth from Black Pill: how the great beak snapped then, how the claws came out.
She wormed her way into her slacks, having to wriggle the chilled, not-quite-dry legs into them, legs like hams of pork, the wrong colour, as if they’d been skinned. Her fingers were puckered, clumsy. Sopping hair sluiced water down the neck of her sweater.
Sins of fathers visited or not visited on sons? Pastor at chapel going on and on, hands waving so that you feared for the flowers perched either side of the communion table. Yes or no, visited on sons or not? On daughters?
One possible father, bloody and brutal. Black uniform, marching by torchlight, his seventeen-year-old bride baying with the mob. Another possible father a Polish American; a tall slick guy, giggling like a girl, lounging around on a barstool. And Tada, self-apologetic, with no claim at all, answering, Well, there you are then! indiscriminately to any question in lieu of yes or no.
And now she could remember spying on Owen and Renate in the gap between door and jamb, and hearing her mother saying, Silver fox. I got it dirt cheap from Mrs Levi. She didn’t need it where she was going. Oh God, oh God.
And there sat Tada, masticating on nothing, swallowing draughts of his own saliva.
> The Element of Water by Stevie Davies is published by Parthian in the Library of Wales series www.parthianbooks.com
CONTINUES TOMORROW