Saltwater

Ed was the first and most careless custodian of my heart, but its hairline cracks had long been Polyfilla’d over...

An only child, I loved growing up by the sea, running wild on the gritty dark beach each summer, turning brown as a nut while turning cartwheels on shingle.

With its dank groynes and the refinery on the headland, it was never the most scenic spot, but I always felt at home.

‘That’s because the sea’s in our blood,’ my dad used to say. ‘There were Compsons trawling these waters for generations before the fish stocks ran out. We’ve an affinity, I suppose.’

He was right, because Mum and I still live by the sea. We start each day with a pot of coffee before I head off to the college where I teach, and she heads into her beachfront garden, her routine more important to her than ever since Dad died.

This particular morning – the morning of the fifth – before we go our separate ways, Mum says, ‘I hear Ed’s settled in at The Beachcomber.’

‘Oh?’ I shrug, affecting minimal interest and fooling neither of us.

Ed had emailed me six months ago to say he’d be in the vicinity from the 4th to the 7th; conference on coastal erosion. Maybe we could meet for brunch?

If I wasn’t too busy, of course, and assuming I ‘did’ brunch. Oh – and what did I think of a newly-opened hotel called The Beachcomber? Did it seem reasonable for three nights?

I’d last heard from him the previous year, when he rang to offer his condolences for Dad, thinking (rightly) that an email was too impersonal.

When I emailed back about the hotel and the idea of brunch, I told him I’d meet him for a coffee on my first free period from college, if it didn’t clash with his conference schedule: Elevenses rather than brunch. Morning of the 6th would suit me best.

Ever since, despite affecting shrugs and the rest to Mum, I’d been aware of the calendar creeping round to our ‘date’. But still, I stuck to my guns and my casual shrug as I pecked Mum on the cheek and went off to work, trying hard not to dwell on forthcoming elevenses with Ed.

We’d met at school, bunking off together to mooch on bollards downwind of the oil refinery looming in the estuary, sharing a cigarette with each other and nutty slack with the seagulls, while Ed dreamed of elsewhere and I pretended to understand his frustration.

Although Ed had as much saltwater in his blood as me

(his folks had cast shrimp nets for generations), he’d kick the gritty shingle, say the place was the very definition of ‘bourgeois’, and grunt that he couldn’t wait to leave.

I would listen and cluck my sophisticated agreement, shelving any reservations until I could run his charge sheet past Dad.

And Dad, scratching his chin, would muse, ‘I did hear say that net curtains are the definition of “bourgeois”, and you don’t get many of those to the pound in our lickspittle of a town.’

Or any coastal town, I came to think later. Shore-dwellers like to look out at the sea, however gunmetal grey, unfringed by bleached frills.

Still, everyone had their dreams, of course. Once upon a time, my parents must have had plenty, before Mum got pregnant while they were still planning the wedding, and the refinery sent out its siren call of gainful employment to a generation stymied by no more fish in the sea.

‘How do you feel about seeing Ed again?’ Mum asks on this particular morning – the morning of the 6th – and I have to think about it as I pour our coffee.

Feel? I don’t feel anything much. I’m almost fairly certain of that. Ed was the first and most careless custodian of my heart, but its hairline cracks had long been Polyfilla’d over, and we’d kept in touch down the years like the grown-ups we now were, politely and conscientiously swapping our news and photos.

I re-examine my feelings (or lack of them) on the drive to the cafe later that morning, my car hugging the coast road under a sky of unbroken blue, saltwater stippling the sunlight. How things have changed – although memories, perhaps because they’re carefully wrapped away, remain constant.

Me and Ed were each other’s first in every way, lying entwined on the gritty shingle while planning our escape to the great elsewhere. Well, he’d plan and I’d listen, in awe of the scope of his imagination and the ease with which he saw himself out in the world.

When he left for university and I went to a local college to do resits, he kissed my tear-streaked face and said, ‘This changes nothing. I’ll come back every weekend. You’ll only be a year behind me.’

Because, of course, we’d applied to the same university, making sure it was a long, long way from home.

I was just as clever, after all, only failing my A-levels because I couldn’t concentrate. Dad had just started to get ill, and it wasn’t his coughing that had kept me awake on the eve of exams, it was worrying what it might mean.

Shore-dwellers like to look out at the sea, however gunmetal grey

Then, a few months after Ed went away, the tone of his phone calls had started to change. He wasn’t so keen to come back at weekends or have me visit him: he had too much work, too little spare cash to take me out – and so on.

For a while, I’d become the girl who couldn’t quite accept being left behind, though our easy correspondence of recent years proved we’d consigned all that to the past. Besides, I knew now (I have a therapist) that I might’ve failed those exams because, on a subconscious level, I was afraid to leave home and have only myself to rely on, especially in matters of the heart.

So now, I’d share a coffee with Ed, enquire politely after his two grown-up kids (he was divorced) and wave him off back to his conference.

I brace myself as I walk into the cafe. Then I see him, and the years fall away, eroded by saltwater memory.

‘Hello, Carol,’ he says, half-rising from his chair.

He’s breeze-blown and nut-brown, sunglasses in his top pocket so we can look at each other properly.

‘Hello, Ed.’

We don’t peck cheeks or even shake hands. I’m not certain we know what to do, so we both sit down and hide behind menus.

Despite everything, he’s still the boy who taught me to do handstands on the bottom of the lido pool, which closed when we were both 15, not long after someone from the council measured the refinery funnel output and declared it hazardous to bathe in an open-air lido.

Never did us any harm, I’d once emailed Ed.

No, he’d replied, sending me a picture of himself as a three-headed fish – the first of quite a few tasteless, release-valve jokes.

I spend a long time studying the menu, even though my stomach’s churning too much for anything other than coffee. For the first time, I feel uneasy about not offering to put him up at the house – too dicey, too soon.

‘How’s your mum keeping?’ he asks.

‘Fine. Sends her regards. You must come and see her, if you’ve got time. And your mum and dad?’

We make similar, unsatisfactory small talk, but after coffee, I surprise us both by suggesting a walk along the beach. I don’t want to let him go just yet, but I don’t even know why. My feelings refuse every attempt at self-examination.

We head towards the bluffs, walking self-consciously, not quite touching, until Ed stops. He raises his hands, frames them as if taking a shot and squints through the frame, saying, ‘Since they closed the refinery, the vista here could almost pass for home.’

Almost. Yet, for a moment in the caff, I’d thought he was all at sea here, perhaps unnerved by the size of the surf waves and the big, unsubtle openness of everything Californian, from

My feelings refuse every attempt at self-examination

the waitress’ smile to the sharpfinned cars in the parking lot.

Because I was the one who left home and never went back, using the commission money from my growing art career to flee to the endless light of America’s West Coast, eventually persuading Mum and Dad to come out and live with me – too late then for

Dad, but at least his last days were spent feeding the pelicans and not his regrets.

Meanwhile, Ed, with his degree in something chemical I’ve never understood, had led a team that paved the way for closing the refinery. It had been breaking safety guidelines for years, it emerged. Talk of compensation came too late for Dad and others, and when the place did finally shut, some locals were unhappy about the effect on employment. Sons

and

daughters had worked there for several generations.

Things have got better, though. Last year, our hometown beach won its first ever blue flag award, and tourism has reinvigorated the place, shrimp nets returning to skim rock pools, lobster pots unloading to serve seafood restaurants. Ed’s been happy to re-establish his roots there and be a part of what he helped create. Sometimes, I envy him.

‘It is a lot like home,’ I consider now, looking down the beach. ‘I’ve got almost everything from there to make me feel at home. Almost.’

As lines go, that one’s a bit cheeky – and cheesy – but he looks at me with familiar, serious eyes that spark something to life deep inside me, right in the core that’s been frozen, despite my nut-brown exterior, since Dad died.

We kick off our shoes and start to jog, then run down to the edge of the water, where I show off my cartwheels and he does a one-handed handstand in the lea of a curving wave. And then we collapse into each other, laughing, tasting saltwater on our tongues and – in my case – letting it flow into the Pollyfilla’d cracks and start to dissolve layers of DIY self-protection.

When Ed looks at me again, I can see the same thing happening to him. I never thought about his own cracks; never let him explain or apologise for how he’d backed away from me years earlier, a selfish (but not heartless) boy with big dreams, afraid of being ‘tied’ to home.

Instead of gritty, dark shingle (which would have been our first preference, old romantics that we are), we lie down on a beach that’s a never-ending vista of gold.

Soon, we’re entwined where the tide laps our toes, and we start talking, and then we start listening. This time, we’ve no plans for escape.

THE END