Stella stood watching them walk on, the chill her mother had warned of beginning to seep under her skin. Unable to look away she was still watching the figures tiny in the distance, goosebumps on her arms, when she heard a voice call, ‘Mum! Mum!’
Stella looked across to see Sonny walking at a pace a little quicker than his normal lope down the beach towards her. He was wearing his stripy pyjama bottoms and a grey T-shirt, his phone outstretched in front of him. ‘Mum, take a look at this!’
After the encounter with Mitch and Moira it was a relief to see him, if also a surprise. She walked up the beach to meet him midway. When she got closer she could see that he’d just woken up, his hair standing on end, a line in his face from the pillow.
He handed her his phone.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
Sonny was a little breathless, more with excitement than exertion. ‘It’s an Instagram. He’s Instagrammed.’
‘Who?’
‘Grandpa.’
‘No way!’
Sonny was nodding, grinning as he stood next to her and tapped in his passcode. ‘I took a screenshot as well, in case he deleted it. I don’t think he knows how so it’s just a precaution.’
‘Well done,’ Stella said, casting a quick glance at her son.
‘Thanks.’ He flicked his hair out his eyes with a sweep of his head. Her chest tightened at their camaraderie. Then, almost to undercut his own buoyancy, Sonny added, ‘I think he’s posted it by accident, so it’s well…’
Stella turned to look at the photo posted under the account name Neptune013. What she’d been expecting she wasn’t sure; a smiling sun-lounger selfie maybe or a shot of a serene landscape. In reality the image itself was a bit of a disappointment, partly out of focus and taken at the awkward angle of being snapped by mistake. There was a pole in the centre of the shot from a train or a bus, a grey scuffed floor with different pairs of feet, and then a jean-clad leg – pale denim, a touch too short, white athletics socks and a pair of old white Nike hightops – without a doubt, her father’s leg. On the floor was a red triangle – the corner of something or a box. She zoomed in to see if she could decipher more but the focus was too grainy.
Sonny peered over her arm at the screen. ‘That’s his leg, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, I think so,’ Stella agreed.
‘And do you see there?’ Sonny reached over and zoomed right in close. ‘That’s a staircase.’
‘Really?’ Stella wasn’t sure.
Sonny shrugged. ‘It might not be.’
‘No, no, it could be. A double-decker bus, maybe? And what’s that red thing?’
‘I don’t know.’
She blew out a breath. ‘How annoying.’
‘Well, at least it’s a clue,’ he said, glancing up at her, hopeful.
Stella smiled, still surprised by how much he cared. Softened that he had come to find her when he’d seen it. Her dad unwittingly uniting them with his accidental Instagram post.
She could feel the weight of Sonny leaning against her arm, she watched his fingers zooming in on the photo and wondered when the last time they had shared an interest was, when the last time they had done anything together that wasn’t her sighing up at the ceiling as Sonny wrote gobbledegook numbers down on his maths homework.
‘It means he’s looking at his Instagram,’ Sonny said.
Stella nodded.
‘Maybe we need to post something?’ Sonny went on. ‘Tell him to come home?’
Stella shook her head. ‘I don’t know, Sonny. He knows people will be worried and still he’s choosing not to come back.’
‘Yeah,’ Sonny took his phone back. ‘You’re right.’
They walked on a few steps. Stella inwardly quite stunned by their chat. It felt like the first grown-up conversation they had ever had. This was Jack’s recommended Time Out, sneaking up on her unawares. And now she’d recognised it, she was desperate to keep it afloat. From the fact Sonny had ceded her point, it felt like he knew it too. The conversation now a game of bat and ball that had reached the hundreds, neither wanting the ball to drop.
Sonny stopped walking. ‘Maybe we need to post to show him what he’s missing. Rather than that we’re missing him.’
Stella paused, she smiled. ‘That’s a nice idea.’ She wondered if she would ever have been able to come up with Sonny’s plan – because to Sonny her dad was a person. To her he was an object entitled her ‘father’. One she wanted back purely so she could move on, sort her own shit out. Get back to normal – a phrase now ruined by Mitch the hippy. Perhaps their mistake so far had been trying to locate her dad’s whereabouts via the practical. All of them too aware of his character to consider any other way. Sonny, on the other hand, had enough youthful hope inside him to aim for the heart, banking on the fact her dad could feel.
The sun was higher now, the sky more blue and less pink. Stella’s clothes were starting to dry as they walked. ‘So you two got on, did you?’ she asked.
Sonny kicked the sand ahead of him. ‘Kind of.’
Stella pulled her wet hair back and gave it a squeeze. ‘What did you talk about?’ she asked, trying not to sound as keen as she was to know.
‘I dunno. Stuff,’ he said. Then he picked up a bit of driftwood and chucked it ahead of them. ‘Sometimes we talked about you,’ he said. ‘When you were younger.’
‘Did you?’ Stella was shocked. ‘What did you say?’
‘He said you could have won an Olympic medal.’ Sonny picked up another stick. ‘I didn’t realise you didn’t dive in at the trials. I thought you just, I don’t know, weren’t good enough.’
Stella scoffed. ‘I wasn’t good enough.’
Sonny looked up. ‘He said you were.’
Stella crouched to pick up a big blue mussel shell, taking a moment out, annoyed with her dad for still pedalling the myth. ‘Thing is,’ she said, standing up, running her thumb over the barnacle-dotted surface of the shell, ‘to get a medal, you have to want to win. It all has to come together, it’s all up here.’ She pointed to her head, ‘It’s not enough just to be good. And I didn’t want it as much as he did.’ She let the shell fall from her fingers.
They walked some more, Sonny scuffed up the sand with his bare feet. ‘I can’t believe you didn’t dive in! That’s mental. Grandpa must have been mad.’
Stella looked across at him, his eyes wide and bright with disbelief, but there was something else there, something she’d never seen before, respect maybe. Or perhaps just interest. It made it all seem much less of a drama. Much less the moment her father stopped acknowledging her existence or the moment she actually feared Pete was about to smack her in the face, and more just a cool anecdote for her son.
‘Do you want me to take a picture of you, to put it on Instagram?’ Sonny asked.
Stella shook her head. ‘No, not of me. I’ll take one of you.’
Sonny shook his head. ‘Nah, my hair looks shit.’
Not wanting to upset their fragile détente, Stella quashed her usual comment of, ‘Sonny, language!’ It was quite refreshing. She wondered then why she cared if he swore or not – he’d be swearing non-stop in a couple of years. If her mother had been with them then Stella would definitely have told Sonny off, simply because she would have known her mother would have been offended. She wondered how often she pulled her kids up because of what she actually believed or because of what was deemed acceptable. It made her think of Jack, his silence about his job had stemmed from whether she would deem him less. It was all insidious, these tightening threads of presumption.
Stella realised Sonny was holding the phone up, waiting for her to say something about what to take. ‘Maybe take one of the horizon, there’s still some pink left.’ She pointed out to the rosy aftermath of the sunrise and the sharp flat line of the sea.
‘Nah, it’s OK. I’ve done one,’ Sonny said, clearly not waiting for her photographic suggestions. He handed her the phone to have a look.
‘Oh God, Sonny!’ Stella gasped, looking at the picture, half her back in the shot, her vest, her hair in sodden waves, the caption: Mum’s been swimming. Three easy words loaded with a lifetime. When she saw the flicker of disappointment on his face, the retreat of his shoulders she forced herself to add, ‘He’ll like that.’
And Sonny took the phone back, nodding in agreement. Then as they started to walk back towards the steps that led up to the house, he mumbled, voice tentative, ‘Can we stay, Mum? You know, stay and find him?’
Stella really wanted to say no. But something about the fact they had had this conversation, this moment together, that they had unwittingly found neutral ground in the unlikeliest of sources; her father, made her say, ‘Maybe. We’ll see.’ And Sonny do a barely perceptible, ‘Yes!’