‘Have you noticed?’ Kit once said to me. ‘We don’t really fight?’
I cupped his cheek in my hand. ‘I have nothing to fight with you about.’
He has no idea who you are.
I can feel the rain on my skin now. Under my parka, I’m dry but it’s spattered my jeans, seeped into my trainers, it is running down my face. In front of me, there are no pedestrians apart from a man walking on the other side of the road, and I wonder if he is the same as me, if he doesn’t care about the rain, if the wet makes absolutely no difference. Because he is crying too.
From: Kit McDermott
11:36
I’ve found your secret.
30
Boy
Then
There is a boy on my beach when I get out of the water one day. He wears black swim shorts. He has gel in his hair. He is comfortable in his body, something I am envious of, his palms are flat on the sand behind him, his feet are a man’s, flung out and fleshy. A boat is moored up a few metres from the shore.
‘You’ve been in there for ages,’ he says. He looks at me frankly, and that old self-consciousness comes back to me, I am aware of the uncertain colour of my eyes, my flat chest, the blotches on my school swimsuit from a washing accident. I am probably the only mixed girl he’s ever seen. The sand is suddenly itchy, a strap of seaweed is plastered to my leg from the fistful I’ve brought out of the water to sketch. I wrap a towel round myself, drop the seaweed on a rock.
‘Are you at school?’ he asks.
His question confuses me for a second and then it dawns on me that it is an obvious one, it isn’t Easter holiday anymore,I should be at school, although I have lost my sense of what time it is, if it’s a weekday or weekend. I shake my head, try and frame a response that wards off further questions. ‘I’m off for a bit.’
‘Oh.’ He digs his toe into the shingle.
‘What about you?’ I ask.
‘Finished at three. Although, I don’t really see the point in school, I don’t want to go to uni or anything like that. I’m going to fish, like my dad.’
I stare at him. That someone sees school as pointless, does not intend to go to university is beyond me. Mama was always adamant about running my botanical hobbies alongside traditional education, she never went to university, she went straight to the Royal Academy of Music. ‘Don’t be like me,’ she’d said. It’s only now, listening to this boy, that I think what a strange thing that was to say. Why would I not want to be like her? What was wrong with our life? I would do anything to go back.
‘That’s mine over there.’ He points to the boat calledForager. The hull is painted sky blue; an orange buoy hangs over the side. It is moored at least ten metres out; he has swum to the beach; he must have passed me in the water.
‘What do you fish for?’
‘Dover sole, lemon, turbot, mackerel.’
I cannot picture what a mackerel looks like either alive or on a plate. It seems like something old men eat for breakfast in country hotels.
‘Conger eels, sometimes, rays—’
‘Rays? Like sting rays?’
He throws his head back and laughs, which I do not like, I do not like feeling stupid. ‘Thornbacks mostly, cuckoo rays, spotted rays. Dad said there used to be common rays but now they’re not common at all, they’re only in Wales and Scotland.’
I stare back at the water I’ve come from. I’ve seen small shoals of fish when I swim, nothing more. But now I think the sea is like the woodlands, like the thyme on the grassy chalkland, it is worlds inside of worlds, under the surface, it is teeming with life. ‘Tell me about it.’
‘About what?’
‘Fishing.’
He presses his lips together in a taut line. ‘Are you having a laugh?’
‘No.’