The Always Beach

The Always Beach.

I recollect only a few things about that day; the shadowed light, waking to the drumbeat of water lapping against my calves, waves pushing and pulling at the sodden cloth of my dress, its purple and yellow daisies popping up from the wet sand nearby. It was so unreal at first, the pinks and greens too like an unexpected garden, sown into the Earth beneath me. 

Slowly I gathered my thoughts, but the remembering spun around in my mind, like a prize wheel at the fair. 

Round and round and round it goes

Where it stops, nobody knows....

I had been swimming, but why in a dress? 

 I was out for a run and slipped, on rocks maybe, but I could feel the sand on my feet. Why was I  running shoeless, in a dress?

Was I at a party, on a boat, and leaned too far across the rail?

Nothing was making sense. I tried rolling onto my side and pushing up, hands and toes gripping tightly into the damp grit, hoping for the strength to push upwards and upright. My legs, barely covered by the sticking weight of my vast skirt, looked strangely unblemished. No open flesh, no bones exposed, and yet like a sickening punch to the brain I knew that I was pulled and bound to the earth, weighted down, immovable. Exhausted by the effort against that force, my eyes closed. The wheel of misfortune turned and turned again..

********************************                             

The restaurant had been a bright oasis on the dimly lit beach. Sand stretched from her left as far as she could see and swung in a giant curve to her right, swallowed again by the shadows of night. Far distant at each end of the bay, barely seeable in the weak white light, were towering cliffs of rock, sentries holding vigil over the bay. 

She could hear the gentle surf throwing its lazy waves onto the sand not far away, where the earth and ocean met. Scant moonlight silvered the wave tops, a white path on the water out into the black horizon of the Pacific Ocean.

“La Plage” she had read as she walked up the boardwalk towards the hungry crowd waiting in line for tables. It seemed a restaurant for optimistic, happy people, with its bright warm lights and welcoming hum of laughter and good spirit. 

 “This feels really good. I’ll have to remember this one,” she reminded herself of previous encounters, each more forgettable than the last, not unpleasant but not wonderful. And wonderful was what she wanted more than anything. She wanted moonlit walks along soft sandy beaches, she craved the familiarity and safety of strong arms, she needed the reassuring permanence of ‘always’ and ‘wonderful’. 

The table was booked for eight pm. A little late, she had thought at first, but “Dinner at eight” sounded so grown up. An assignation, be there at eight. So romantic. 

As she worked her way up the line, looking through the large window ahead of her, she had spotted him sitting in a far corner, a bottle of wine already chilling in a silver bucket, linen napkins folded neatly on each side plate, a single white rose laying awkwardly across the middle of the stark white cloth, not yet given or received. 

“That’s so sweet,” she complimented him in her mind, practising the right response, the perfect intonation between gushy and needy. And as she entered the room, pushing on through the maze of tightly packed tables and chairs, he had looked up and smiled. 

It was that ‘always’ moment she had hoped for. She would always see that smile when she was lonely and tired of life’s dramas, when she needed a friend and when she needed a lover. 

His light brown hair was not immaculately barbered like other men at other dinners. His shirt was not the latest style and had the telltale scrunch of a single man without an iron. His eyes were not blue crystals or a deep green sea. In all she saw a man with a nice face, softened by a boyish nose and good lips, not immediately kissable but with promise. He was words her teachers had told her never to use; good, nice, normal....and yet they fitted this face, this man, to perfection.

“Hi” he had nervously cleared his throat, “so nice to meet you, I’m Joe.” He offered his hand and she felt a comfortable, warm ease growing in her chest. She knew this could be her ‘always,’ and hugged him with the shy closeness of strangers. 

*************************************

The tide was receding as my eyes fluttered open. My mind was working now the spinning had stopped, and clarity as sharp as the white light of the sun pierced through with each thought. I am here at the beach, a small bay, rocky ledge jutting out over me. I am between two large fingers of brown rock, razor sharp and pocked with small glassy pools. The sand is firmer but still I am left half buried in the damp, salty grit. “I know this place” her mind whispered, “the place for secrecy.”

I pictured behind me the cavelike hole, eroded by the wicked tides, its ceiling heavy, the constant darkness suffocating. It was a place for intimacy and secrets. 

A lonely soldier crab scuttled warily past then burrowed instantly into the damp ground and disappeared. Another, summoned by the first, appeared and hurried curiously towards me. In seconds, the entire space in front of the small cave moved in unison, the blue army emboldened by its numbers, marching closer. 

A scream would not come, there was no other sound than the staccato shrill of cicadas and the dull click-clacking of shell against shell. The heat of the day was stoked by the high bright sun, the overhanging cliff did little more than obscure me from view for anyone climbing the tortuous, overgrown path metres above. 

The wheel spun one more time. 

Did I fall into the sea? Onto the rocks?

And with one last strong turn of the wheel a name came into focus: Average Joe.

*********************************************

Dinner with Joe had been both relaxed and exhilarating in one. Great food, delicious wine and a good man. The possibility of an ‘always’ man had seeded in her head as they talked so easily for hours at the table. They lingered in conversation until the waiter pressed the check down onto the crisp whiteness between them, polite but quiet, silently inviting them to finish their evening and leave. 

At the boardwalk outside she had not wanted the night to end. 

“Shall we go for a walk, down by the water?” Joe asked, without urging, his voice steady and measured. Normal Joe, Joe with the nice face, Average Joe.

 She was eager to walk with him, a chance to keep things going. It had been a better than good evening and the possibilities with ‘always’ Joe danced in her mind. 

********************************

For several hours I had laid between the red-brown ridges, the sand dried white and chalky by the heat of the afternoon sun. 

“I am driftwood,” I feared, “waiting for someone to claim me. Washed up and left behind.” Tears did not come but instead a resolution, to be the precious object finally found and saved. 

Daylight was retreating as darkness made a slow return. Trying one more time to raise myself to standing it felt as though I had used every grain of energy, taking stock of what might hurt, my mind preempting pain. Surprisingly there was nothing. The expectation of pain was unfulfilled, the only hurt a searing loneliness, laying out there half buried, face down in the sand, darkness creeping in overhead like a monster in the night.

***********************************

Joe had taken her hand, a gesture so sweet she could not refuse. His warm and gentle hand sat neatly around hers as they walked, a gesture nothing more than friendship and familiarity. 

Halfway towards the northern end of the bay they stopped and sat a while, down by the slow flop-flopping waves, talking and watching that beautiful white moonlight outlining the little and large waves dissolving into the dark horizon. 

She took off her shoes and ran to the water’s edge, feeling it splash through her toes with a reassuring warmth, as Joe watched still and silent on the sand. 

The beach had seemed to stretch forever, him walking with her shoes in one hand and lightly holding on to the other hand, her clasping the white rose as if it was the only flower ever grown or given. She would break away occasionally, run on a little way ahead then twirl in girlish delight, her full skirt a garden now billowed by the night’s warm breeze. And all that Joe could hear was the soft, careless laughter, bouncing round in his head. 

They came to the secret place, the small cove, across the sharp ridge of wave-cut rock and onto the smooth wet sand. Joe’s hand gripped hers more forcefully now, fingers locked, as she struggled to match his stride, pulled along, two silent figures pressing forward through the inky black towards the cave. She heard the waves beating their incursion onto the ledges and hollows with a persistent, dangerous roar and swoosh, rising and dropping nearer and nearer until she felt the cold salty slap of ocean on her face and back.

“Joe,” she had cried out in horror, as he released her shoes to the pounding ocean. Average Joe, her ‘always’ man now replaced wonder with fear. ‘Always’ suddenly became a different kind of creature, a thing that takes and destroys, a forever kind of destruction. 

As she had struggled hard, pushing deep into the sand, the sea rolled and retreated ceaselessly over her face, her mouth and nose filling with the salty liquid. He had stared into her eyes, her mouth forming useless sounds, mingled with the bubbling of the water. And as he dragged her down between the jagged fingers they had just crossed as friends, she knew that he was tearing at her life, horrified that this might be her ‘always’, her history and her end.

When he was done, Joe stood upright, surveying the thick darkness for any sign that he had been seen. The dress she wore no longer billowed in the warm breeze but sucked and flapped against the push and pull of the tide. He had liked the way her body looked face down, half buried in the sand, her pale calves as white as the milk, bedraggled hair shielding the terrified eyes. She was a sculpture, flesh and sand, of his creation.

And feeling as mighty as the giant cliffs above him, he turned and stepped his way quite casually again through the now covered rock pools, onto the vast expanse of beach, beyond “La Plage” and into the dark. 

***************************

The heavy night air was broken by the constant wailing sounds of approaching sirens. With one effortless push, I freed my head and shoulders from the sand and rolled onto my back. Carefully brushing the strands of hair from my eyes I was struck by the billion stars that were piercing through the inky black sky. A flood of relief overwhelmed me as the blue-red haze of police and paramedic vehicles stopped, and I could see the approaching crowd of first responders picking their way carefully over the rocks to reach me.

“She’s here” a voice called with urgency, as they knelt beside the limp form of a woman laying in the sand. I could see the bright flowers of the woman’s dress, coloured in the darkness by the flashes of emergency lights. A paramedic moved her gently, feeling for the non existent pulse within her neck. A single white rose, crushed beneath the woman’s weight, revealed itself as petals drifted one by one on the receding tide into oblivion. 

The man stood, quietly and reverently retreating to the sane familiarity of his truck, and I could hear the solemn silence falling like a velvet blanket over the now far distant scene below. 

Upright at last and with a sense of lightness, I saw my ‘always,’ my history and my future, and drifted slowly, effortlessly through the night and into the star laden sky beyond.