Sliver Moon Bay: The Looking Read Free Page B

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