Sliver Moon Bay: The Looking Read online

  When I reach the top, it’s game over. He’s gone. I get the bucket and the spade, and Starling’s towel to wipe the sand from my eyes. Right. That was nasty. We’re taking it up a notch, then. Maybe it’ll get interesting now. Either way, he won’t scare me. I’m onto him.

  3

  It started to rain. I persuaded Starling to go home. She didn’t want to cause she likes rain and she likes to watch raindrops hit the water but I knew Lilian would worry. She’d wake up now the rain’s falling; the sound of it plopping on the roof always roused her, so I told Starling I’d get her ice-cream and she agreed to go home. We went back up the dune and got the trike. I fastened Starling’s sandals on and put her on her towel in the basket, then pushed the trike up the path. It was slow going but at least we weren’t getting wet, here under the trees. We proceeded quietly; Starling was getting sleepy as she tends to do after we’ve had a run along the beach.

  In the quiet I thought about him. He’s come again to watch me. It’s definitely on, then.

  ‘Look, Salah!’ Starling points excitedly. ‘Look! Birdie!’

  It is a birdie. A baby starling lying on the ground. About to take a last breath, by the look of it.

  ‘It sleeping!’ Starling cries, climbing out of her basket. ‘I want birdie!’

  Okay, we’re going to have to take this birdie home. I pick it up. It feels like a blob of chewing gum, like a cotton ball that’s wet. I blow on it and it opens its tiny beak. Take pity on me, it seems to be saying, so I do.

  ‘We take birdie home,’ I say to Starling.

  She climbs back into her seat. I grab a bunchful of leaves and put them in Starling’s lap.

  ‘Here, darling. Hold birdie, okay?’

  She nods, puts her little hands around the leaves. I place the bird in there and Starling hovers over it, preciously. I push the trike up the path. Starling doesn’t take her eyes off of her starling.

  4

  Starling woke up Lilian. She showed her ‘her’ little birdie and Lilian agreed to let her have it then went back to sleep. So now we were alone, free to do as we liked for the rest of the day. So we went into Starling’s room and made the birdie a cotton ball nest in a shoe box. It lay there, looking sleepy.

  ‘Birdie tired,’ says Starling and goes away, to the kitchen to have something to eat. She grabs a chocolate bar from the pantry, climbing up on a box to get it from its secret hiding place on the second shelf where Lilian puts treats, out of Starling’s reach. We share the chocolate bar between us. We talk about the bird and Starling decides to keep a little bit of chocolate for later, to share with her birdie when he wakes up. It’s a cute idea. And who knows? It might just work.

  So goes the afternoon. We draw, we talk, later we watch a movie about fairies. And Lilian sleeps the day through.

  5

  ‘Sarah-honey, I’m going out for a bit. Homework now and bedtime ten o’clock, okay?’

  The door closes behind her and she’s off. She’ll be gone all night, dancing at the Moon Pocket, with her friends. The girls she’s got to know over the years; fishermen’s girlfriends, the ladies from work, the shop where she packs groceries twice a week for a few hours, single mothers all, passing a lonely Sunday night with a country band. Chris knows she goes; doesn’t like it but she still goes. And why shouldn’t she? He’s not here. Ever. It wouldn’t make any difference if he were. He’d be in the caravan thinking, or in the shed, tinkering with the scooter or the dinghy. She’d go to bed, early, despite all the daytime naps. Later, he’d still be there, doing his thing. In the dead of the night, long after me and Starling go to bed. And everything would be quiet. Until later still.

  When she’d be knocking. On the shed door out there in the yard. In the stillness I’ll hear every word.

  ‘Chris? You coming to bed now?’

  ‘Not now, Lilian.’

  ‘I want to talk to you.’

  ‘I’m busy, Lilian. Can’t it wait?’

  ‘You’re always busy. I’m coming in.’

  —

  ‘Open the door, Chris! For fuck’s sake open the fuckin’ door for once!’

  ‘Go to bed, Lilian. I’ve no interest in talking to you when you’re like this.’

  ‘I’m not drunk! Open the fuckin’ door!’

  —

  ‘Open the door now, Chris!’

  ‘Lilian. Lilian, calm down.’

  ‘What are you doing in there?’

  ‘I’m working.’

  ‘Let me in. I wanna see.’

  —

  ‘Chris! Open the door!’

  She rattles the door handle. She kicks the door.

  ‘Stop it, Lilian. Go to bed. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.’

  —

  So Lilian goes to bed. I lie awake thinking of her. I know she’s crying. But I can’t help her. She doesn’t want me to. So I don’t go to her anymore. She’s in a black hole. We all are. It’s tearing us apart, little by little but eventually it will swallow us whole. Nothing is going to change that so why worry?

  —

  ‘Sarah-honey, I’m going out for a bit. Homework now and bedtime ten o’clock, okay?’

  ‘Okay, I heard you, Mum.’

  She goes, gets on the scooter and disappears into the darkness. Starling and I stand at the door, waving. Bye, Mummy. Bye. Starling looks out into the night. At the full moon rising. In a little while I manage to put Starling to bed and I do homework. Tomorrow’s school and I might get to go. So it’s a good idea to do my homework.

  At half past eleven I’ve finished my English essay. Now there’s only my maths to do. But I’m tired. I’ll get up early and finish it in the morning. So I turn in for the night. Then Starling starts. She’s having a bad dream. She’s crying; she wants a drink. She goes back to bed, but soon she’s up again, and she’s wet herself. We change her in the bathroom. And she won’t go back in her room. So she comes to me. By now she’s not sleepy at all. She’s got her elephant pyjamas on and she’s counting the rows of them. But she can only count to five. One efelent, two efelent, three efelent, four efelent, five. One, two, three, four, five. We count, over and over, and I’m hoping she’ll fall asleep. But she’s not sleepy at all. She wants to check on her birdie. So we go check on her birdie. It lies there in its cotton nest.

  ‘It sleeping,’ says Starling. She’s looking at it very closely, at its little bald head and scrappy feet.

  ‘Yes, it’s sleeping,’ I say. ‘You should be too. Come sleep with Sarah, okay?’

  She runs to my room and jumps on the bed, burrows under the blanket, into my pillow. I crawl in after her. It’s half past two in the morning.

  6

  But tomorrow is not a school day. Tomorrow is Looking-After-Starling day cause Lilian’s in bed, asleep.

  ‘Mummy tired,’ whispers Starling.

  We’re looking in on her. She’s in bed, curled up under the blanket and spooning Chris’s pillow. She has her wig and make-up on but her dress and her platforms are at the foot of the bed. Starling grabs the shoes and starts dragging them out the door.

  ‘Mummy shoes,’ she says, pulling hard. The heavy shoes make a racket on the wooden floor. I see what she’s doing. She means to line them up behind my boots which she insists we keep in her room. She loves to play with them. But it’s not going to happen. We’re not lining up shoes today.

  I pick her up and she drops them.

  ‘No, Salah! No!’ She struggles with me but I carry her out, close the door behind us. Starling’s squealing like a stuck pig but it makes no difference to Lilian. She’s unconscious, possibly, and will sleep the day through.

  So what shall we do with the rest of the morning? —We go down to the beach.

  The surf is up and it’s still windy but the sky is blue. Starling likes the blue. She runs down the dune, shouting blue blue blue, scattering the birds and making them angry. They fly off, complaining. But it’s only seagulls and they come back after making a loop in the blue. It’s a very blue day in Sliver
Moon Bay. You look out over the ocean and you don’t see the horizon. ‘Blue! Blue! Blue!’ shouts Startling, scooping up sand and throwing a handful at the circling birds.

  She spies her sandcastle. It’s almost intact despite the rising tide which only now and then licks the moat.

  ‘My castle!’ she squeals. She drops to her knees right there.

  I hand her the little bucket and spade.

  ‘Go get some seashells, sweetie. We’ll make a garden, okay?’

  Starling scampers off, looks for shells. She’s singing to herself, totally absorbed, happy, for once, to be alone. So I leave her be. I’m lying down, looking at the blue sky. I spy the Moon, up there, somewhere, holding court in the vast big blue. He’s looking down at me, challenging me to a game of I Spy… I spy with my little eye… Fairy… on a ladder… I spy with my little eye a sparkly ball hanging from a tree… I spy with my little eye a chubby little hand reaching up…

  ‘Sarah!’

  Crash! The sparkly ball falls from the tree. The tinsel shakes. Now, look what you’ve done, Emily! Fairy frowns at the millions, billions, trillions of little sparkly bits scattered shattered on the floor. Emily’s in trouble.

  ‘Sarah!’

  Oh, Lord, not him. I don’t want to dream about him. He doesn’t belong here.

  ‘Sarah! Wake up!’

  Now he’s got my attention. We belong here, on the beach, together as always. Of course. He’s wide awake. He’s been watching while I fell asleep.

  In two strides the old man was upon me. He has Starling in his arms, scared stiff. Her pants are wet, all the way up to her crotch.

  ‘She was up to her thighs in the surf, Sarah!’

  He deposits Starling on my lap.

  ‘Hi, Mr Drake. How are you?’

  He’s looming over me; his gnarly old hands hanging by his sides like tree roots. I see his inked snake poking out from under his shirt cuff. It looks mean, like him. Like Chris. But Chris’s hands look like hammers.

  ‘You ought to be more careful. She could have drowned.’

  He’s staring at me through his bulging hairy nostrils, it looks like. They’re so big I could crawl up them and see what’s inside his head. You can feel the old dude is angry cause these here massive flared nostrils are pumping air like fans in a tunnel. It’s funny, it really is and I desperately want to laugh but of course, I don’t. It would be too rude. So I don’t laugh and he continues to stare. Soon I’m feeling a little impatient with this charade. Am I supposed to be scared now? What’s he gonna do? Tell Chris? I know he’s not going to do that; he’s caught me napping a few times now and he’s never said a thing to Chris or Lilian about it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘It won’t happen again.’

  He nods, turns around. His big brown boots make an audible squeaky sound as he walks them away from us. Sand flies from underneath his footfall. Soon he’s crawling up the dune like a tall skinny spider and finally he disappears from view.

  7

  On the way home, Starling spies another birdie. Another baby starling lying on twigs in the same spot.

  ‘Birdie sleeping,’ says Starling. ‘Take birdie home.’

  She grabs a handful of leaves. But this birdie is dead. It should be, anyway. It’s so tiny, with massive staring eyes and scrappy little feet. It has no feathers. It can’t have dropped down from the sky. It couldn’t have flown. How weird to find a second bird in the same place.

  ‘Birdie gone to Heaven, darling,’ I say to Starling.

  But Starling is not listening. She’s busy making a nest in the basket.

  I don’t want her touching this thing. I’ll have to distract her from it.

  ‘Look, sweetie. Up there. See?’

  In the fork of the tree branch a little way above my head is a hole. I see some straw and little twigs sticking out so I’m guessing the cavity has a nest in it. I step on the tree trunk where a big knot allows me a good foothold and I jump up and grab the nearest branch to help me pull myself up. I see the hole. It does have a nest. A big fat baby cuckoo fills it, encased in it like a sausage bursting out of its skin. It’s a big bird with dark beady eyes and a downward curling beak. It looks as if it likes to quarrel. Well, it would quarrel if it had siblings. But this is a cuckoo. It doesn’t tolerate brothers and sisters. So it just sits there like a judge on a lunch break waiting to be served.

  ‘Mummy bird!’ cries Starling. I’ve lifted her up to see it better. She’s very excited, eye to eye with this fluffy ball of a murderer. He looks calm, eyeing her off like a choice morsel. Not gonna happen, bird. I’ll keep my baby Starling away from you.

  Starling soon tires of the cuckoo. She wants to go home to tell Mummy.

  At home we find Lilian drinking tea. She’s nursing a headache and can’t do without chamomile. But she looks fresh; she’s had a shower and the sleep-in did her good. She finishes her tea and goes to cuddle Starling on the couch. They watch Starling’s favourite fairy movie while I cook porridge for Starling. Lilian will eat nothing; she has no appetite. The phone rings. It’s school, asking the usual. Lilian lies, as usual. I’ve not been well over the weekend. She’s let me stay home, just as a precaution. She forgot to ring in the morning. Yes, I’ll be fine for school tomorrow.

  Lilian hangs up. ‘Don’t tell Dad,’ she smiles, shrugs her shoulders and scrunches up her nose. Fleetingly, she looks like Starling. They are one and the same. So what does that make me? My mother’s keeper? I’d rather not. I have my hands full with Starling.

  Starling falls asleep watching the fairies. She’s slumped over Lilian and Lilian won’t stir. She sits there, watching the logs crackling in the fireplace, with Starling in her lap, with her arms around her. I love her so much when she’s like that. And of course, I won’t tell Chris. It’s just another school day.

  Lilian wants me to feed the cat. That reminds me; I have to check on Starling’s birdie. It will be dead by now. So I go into Starling’s room. White Sox sits on the table, with his head in the cotton balls. I’m too late. Birdie gone and buried inside the cat.

  8

  Chris comes home the next day. After school, he’s the one picking me up in the truck. Starling’s with him. She’s licking a huge rainbow-colored lollipop wheel, looking at it at the same time cross-eyed. Chris hands me another one, same as Starling’s, and then we drive home. Along the way we have a mundane conversation about school and how I’m doing in general; I give him what he wants to hear—it’s all good. In the silence that follows I know he’s thinking about the best way of tripping me up when he asks about Lilian. But he won’t get me. He never does cause I’m onto him. Presently, he starts.

  ‘So what did you guys do while I was gone?’

  ‘Not much. Same as usual.’

  ‘Aha. Did you play at the beach?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘We find birdie, Daddy!’ That’s Starling chirping in.

  ‘You did? What kind of birdie?’

  Starling thinks about it, licks her lollipop. ‘Birdie,’ she replies and looks out the window.

  ‘Did she go out?’ That’s Chris, trying to trip me.

  The man’s a fool. Does he seriously expect me to rat her out? We coped just fine without you, is what I want to say but of course, I don’t. I tell him what he wants to hear, politely.

  ‘Shopping,’ I reply, lick my lollipop, look out the window.

  We get home and I get to spend time alone in my room, for once. Chris and Starling play in the back yard and Lilian cooks. It’s a good afternoon all around.

  In the evening we sit down to dinner, family style. Lilian has cooked Chris’s favourite, Spaghetti Bolognese. Starling won’t eat the sauce but she loves the pasta and the grated cheese. She’s being very creative with it. Chris can’t take his eyes off of her. It gives Lilian time to breathe.

  Into all this good feeling comes a knock on the door. You’d think it was a gun shot, the way Chris snapped to attention.

  ‘You expecting anybody?’ he asks Lilian
, in an undertone dripping with displeasure. He does not like surprises.

  Lilian looks frightened, scared and she shakes her head like a guilty child, like she’s been caught out doing something terrible. She looks so foolish I want to slap her.

  A succession of rapid knocks batters the door. Abrupt, angry knocks. Chris puts down his cutlery. He wipes his mouth with his thumb and forefinger, pulling the corners down. The veins in his hand are pulsating. He’s angry. His tattoo is too. The snake moves.

  Chris gets up and his chair makes a horrible scraping noise. Even Starling looks up from her pile of noodles strewn over the tray of her baby chair.

  ‘Daddy, don’t!’ she shouts, pushing out her bottom lip. She’s going to cry. ‘Daddy?’

  But Chris is long gone, slithered across the room. He opens the front door. We crane our heads, the three of us collectively, to see who’s standing there.

  ‘What do you want?’

  It’s old Drake. He’s not wasting any time sizing this situation. It’s gonna go the way it always has. Badly.

  ‘Can I come in?’

  Chris steps aside. Old Drake comes in, Chris closes the door. The two of them stand facing each other. The Tree Root versus The Hammerhead, breathing, fuming, about to—

  Lilian rushes forward.

  ‘Drake, how are you?’

  Drake nods at her.

  ‘I need to speak with you.’

  He looks at Chris, at Lilian.

  ‘Both of you.’

  ‘Then speak,’ Chris replies. A question hovers behind his reply and I’m getting an extra bad feeling about this. Old Drake has not looked at me at all. I think he wants to talk about me.