How many years will it take for Alex to be comfortable with girls, to become someone like Daniel, who can give a gift without throwing it? He is a caterpillar before he pupates, he doesn’t realise that the awkwardness of his body, his self-consciousness, is precious in and of itself.
‘It’s okay,’ I say, gently. I pick it up, dry it against the leg of my jeans. It is a pamphlet, no more than twenty pages, entitled,Drift Seeds.On the cover is a pair of seeds the exact colour of conkers, although their shape is unusual – flat and heart-shaped. ‘What’s a drift seed?’
‘They’re seeds from the tropics. They travel on the currents thousands of miles until they wash up here.’
I feel a shiver of curiosity, the fresh green of a new shoot. ‘I don’t understand. How do they survive?’
‘It’s all in there,’ he says. Regaining his confidence, he takes the book from me, turning a few pages to a section on buoyancy. He’s already read it. ‘They float. Some of them have air spaces inside or their husks are fibrous or they have water-repellent coats.’
‘You mean, they’ve evolved to travel thousands of miles?’
‘I think so,’ he says, slowly. ‘Chris, my dad’s friend, found one the other day.’
‘In Cornwall?’
‘Porthcothan, in the north. His wife collects them, she thinks they’re lucky, they’re really rare though, she’s only found a handful in decades.’
‘You saw it?’
He nods.
‘What did it look like?’
‘Exactly like those,’ he says, pointing to the cover. I flick to the section on identifying drift seeds.Coeur de la mer, sea hearts. They come from Central America, the Caribbean, South America, Africa. Rapt, I turn back to the beginning, start to read.
‘I was thinking . . .’ he says shyly, and I realise he’s been planning this, perhaps for days. His hands are clasped tightly together. ‘We could look for them. On the beaches. If you want.’
I cover his hands with mine. ‘Yes. A hundred times yes.’
Daniel doesn’t like that I am not in the field. ‘I miss you,’ he says, holding my hand. ‘Forget the assistants. The days are too long without seeing you in the afternoon. Come back.’ But I don’t want to hear Rachael’s voice in my head, that hint of disgust.
When that doesn’t work, he says it isn’t good for me to be in the cottage for so long.
I tell him I am not in the cottage; I am in the sea. I show him my sketchbook, how it is bursting with kelp fronds, leafy furls of rose weed, drift seeds I’ve copied from Alex’s book. He isn’t interested. ‘I don’t like you swimming.’
‘Why? I’m getting good at it.’
‘What if something happens to you in the water?’
‘I don’t go very far.’
‘I’m not there.’
‘What could you do if you were? You can’t swim.’
In bed, he tries other strategies, he whispers that swimming reminds him of those weeks we spent apart, he tells me he’d press his face against my cold swimsuit each evening while it dripped over the bath, trying to find me in the water, the seaweed, the shingle. ‘It hurts me,’ he says, ‘I feel like you’re slipping away.’
If that is meant to convince me, it does not. Because I, too, am haunted by those weeks. Sometimes, as I walk through the corridors of the cottage, I am suffocated by the memory of my own loneliness, the dark heart of my grief, even if I am heading to the bedroom where Daniel is waiting for me. I want him haunted too. Let the sea remind him of my absence. The possibility that I could be gone.
His dislike for swimming and my insistence on it solidifies between us. Now, when I get back from seeing Alex, he doesn’t take me in that wild, desperate way he used to when we came back from the field. If I try to kiss him, he flinches. ‘Wash up,’ he says as if he can smell on my skin the seaweed rotting on the strandline. Once, while I was having a bath, he took my apple bodywash wordlessly from me, cut white circles over my skin, made the lather rise. He wants the sea erased.
But because I am petty and fourteen and I don’t like how he is making me feel, I am fierce about my secrets. I never tell him about Alex or snorkelling or the mutations of the oaks on the foreshore, I don’t tell him about my search for drift seeds, that they are so rare, people have always considered them charms. Irebel. I don’t keep his rules. I buy chocolate and crisps with the change he leaves round the house; I hold the vitamins he gives me on my tongue, feel their edges dissolve, spit them out when his back is turned. Sometimes, I will not wash one of my hands so that later, in the dark, I can put my wrist over my mouth. Taste the salt on my skin.
From: Kit McDermott
11:25
Whenever my friend Peter talks to me, I think of his wife. You remember. One day, she simply decided not to speak to him anymore. They lived with each other for six months until their divorce was finalised, and not a single word passed between them. Peter said he never knew why.