Going Down to the Sea Again
by Annie Edge
Moira takes the right hand turn, but even as she swings the Landrover round (no power steering) she knows the angle is too sharp and she nearly hits the hedge but manages to turn. It’s not the one. It’s not as she remembers. The track to the sea was wider at the start, with a field sloping away to the left and here the trees are too close to the road.
She knew she shouldn’t have listened to Cally’s directions. Her sister’s voice, hard and tired, from her heritage housing home on the edge of the estate with her toolbox under the sink and her city-and-guilds and how she can now cut all three kids’ hair herself for free. Her kids with three different dads. What was Moira going to do? Take him for afternoon tea at her writer’s cottage? How was she going to get him out of the car by herself? What about wheelchair access? There wasn’t even any tarmac for chrissake.
No, this was Moira’s day; Moira and dad’s day and she was sick of Cally claiming she wasn’t pulling her weight. She was going to collect Dad from the care home and take him down to the sea where they used to go when they were kids. She would fold the wheelchair and stow it in the boot (he wouldn’t need it) and they would sit on the cliff side by side. She would hold his hand and they would look out at the wide blue and she would talk about her writing. She would talk and he would nod and listen and smile.
She trundles on down the track, sending up dust. She looks for a field entrance to make a u-turn, waits for the dust to clear with her foot a few seconds too long on the clutch to slow and stop and there’s a thud and a lurch as the car tilts at forty-five degrees down to the left.
The engine stalls and she waits for the dust to settle, her hand still on the key in the ignition. Moira looks down and sees how her heart beat is making her chest move. She rubs her sternum where the seatbelt is cutting in and then twists round in her seat and looks through the headrest.
Dad?
Behind her, an old man sits, his head lolling forward, pinpricks of blood oozing from a graze on his temple where a blue vein pulses.
Dad?
Moira hears the tearing in her voice. She’s the younger of the two daughters and her father, octogenarian, ex-Paxman’s Diesel, factory-foreman, widowed now for fifteen years and suffering late-onset Alzheimer’s, is slumped behind her without a seatbelt. She knows he’s dead.
The dust clears and through the rear window she sees the nodding heads of wheat, a red poppy, a hover fly appear and disappear, and she looks at her father, with his Sunday-best tie and collar cutting into his neck and she can’t get her head clear. She’s waiting for the kick under the table, the “Move it, then!” from an older girl’s voice, the twist and pinch. Without looking, she knows that the front end of the land rover, with its square wings and blunt headlights, is hanging over nothing. She feels that there is a moving space between her and the solid ground and for a few moments she is at the fulcrum.
Where she goes from here, whether she leaves the cottage before the lease is up, packs her lap-top, calls up Tom, his eyes still half-moons. And whether those eyes smile, and say yes and whether they start a life, at first two separate people teetering, faltering, and then holding on to each other. Whether she looks for a teaching job, learns to cook, yearns for a child, and whether it's easy and they make it and have it and it’s a little girl and to her, Moira, she’s Dorothea, and to Tom (he will let her have that name, she knows it, but will never use it) she’s “My Dotty” in their towel- dry conversations at bath time. Where they will sit side-by-side, Tom on the loo seat and Dotty on a little stool that she uses for cleaning her teeth, and he will dry between her toes. He will lean in and tickle her with his five o’clock beard and she will be warm and dry and the only one.
Moira looks at her dad, at his grey face and stretches out a hand. She can’t reach him. She twists further round in her seat and feels herself tipping, a shifting beneath her. Her hand reaches out (fingernails bitten down to skin) but she knows this is as far as she can go and she strokes the air with her fingertips.
Daddy! My daddy?
His eyes open. He makes a moaning noise and puts his hand to his head.
What the bloody hell’s this? Where are we?
Moira twists to look out of the front windscreen and there’s no wide blue sea, no cliff-edge, just a pot-holed track ahead of her. She wrestles the gear stick into reverse and the back wheels spin for a few seconds. Then they catch and the car rears and bucks, as she veers it and swerves it back onto the main road.
Who are you? Where are you taking me? Cally? Where’s Cally?
Moira knows she will take him back to the home and leave him there. She will drive down the lonely track to her rented cottage. And she thinks how it’s funny that one minute something is a sure fact, and the next it’s fiction. She hurries home to write it down.
Annie Edge lives and writes on the east coast of England. She’s been writing in her head for the past twenty years and has finally decided to put pen to paper. She has been previously published in Mslexia Magazine in the UK. Contact Annie.
