The edge of the beach is prime real estate, the sand there damp and pliable, easy to coax into walls and turrets. Children stretch between breakers, spades whirling as they flip their buckets. Parents hover, keeping a competitive eye on neighbouring castles. Many are clutching a flyer: Sandcastle contest! Judged by Miss Porthcurno Bay 1983! Win prizes!
One child is building a palace, but not to win a prize. She knows nothing about competition. She knows only delicate spindling towers, watchmen of whelks and periwinkle, the tiny sea snails lining a courtyard, standing sentinel, a narrow flag of kelp fluttering full-mast as the afternoon wind gets up. These are what concern her, not the blaring of a toddler’s tantrum over a spade, the sullen calypso of arguments nearby.
A mother (distracted from her ginger child crisping under the sun) notices something that sends her family scuttling the scant distance across the sand to the water’s edge to assess the danger. The tide is coming in. This news shivers up the avenue of castles and a fever of pre-emptive reclamation sets in. Adults stand in anxious groups, this emergency, the threat of change, promoting sudden co-operation. They plan routes to stop the sea water like Black and Decker Canutes. Gulleys appear, mazy gutters wind around their hopeful barricades.
The girl does not stop burrowing into the sand with a stick until she feels the water at her heels. Everyone else stands, some with hands on hips, despairing, grimacing out to sea. Children, bottom lips tremulous with failure and disappointment, sink to their knees in the damp sand. Two castles have subsided already and along with them all hopes of prizes and, perhaps, a kind word from Miss Porthcurno Bay, 1983.
The girl slips into the sea, unnoticed and unsuspected. Determination drives her under the waves, somehow believing herself capable of grasping the slipperiest immortality. The crashing water is cold at first, its gravity weighs her down, dragging her out, away from the shore.
Just under the surface the sun makes neon ghosts of the plastic carrier bags, bloated like jellyfish, among the bobbing cans. She sinks through seaweed twisted with earbuds and tampons, clumped with hair, caught in the pull of the tide, the back and forth.
INDENTDeeper now, she shocks fish with her sudden appearance amongst their shoals. They scatter, breaking apart as though struck, vanishing between the rocks. An eel grazes her hand, a lazy grey whip parting the darkening water. Then a shark, looming from the shadows, hunting but not for her, not this time.
INDENTShe sinks down and down, until she arrives at the inky bottom, blind in the crushing darkness. Everything stops here, the weight too heavy. Until a light appears. A blue stutters, then a yellow follows, flashes. Eyes, a mouth gaping, lined with white teeth that glow, lighting the water, revealing the tiny creatures that cloud the way. That such a thing exists down here seems unlikely. It is stellar, planetary. As though the world is upside down and the depths are heights. The ocean and the cosmos switched. The girl twists away, catches a current that races across the sand she feels like grit against her skin.
Although she does not know where she is going she trusts this tide. Rising now, up and up through different waters. Calmer, emptier. Rising up towards the sunlight and the air. As she breaks the surface she catches a wave hurtling towards the shore.
INDENTThe sea rushes her onwards to a palace, onwards until the waves floods the moat and crashes over the drawbridge pushing her through an arch and across a courtyard past the smart salutes of the sea snails and proud periwinkles until she comes to rest on the cool tiles in a great hall beneath banners with their bright coat of arms.
As the water recedes, content having delivered its freight, she climbs into the driftwood throne. Her castle is quiet and still, there’s just the gentle chatter of clams and the growl of a tiger scallop. And the girl can taste the clean salt tang of the sea air and hear it singing, as it always does, of a new beginning.