Shelley
Merlin and I are approaching the end of the sand dunes about halfway up the beach, which normally tells him it’s time to turn to go home, but to my surprise he darts off in a direction he never ventures, sniffing and yelping lightly as he climbs one of the sand dunes. For the first time in my many years of walking this beach, I can feel my heart flutter in fear of what may have got his attention.
Then I hear something, a whimper through the rain in the distance.
What on earth could it be? It’s someone crying and it sounds like a child. Oh God. Am I hearing things in this awful rain?
‘Lily?’ I call out, then cover my mouth with my hand when I realize what I just did. I am losing my mind. I am hearing things. Oh God, help me. But the crying … is real and it’s coming from somewhere beyond Merlin.
Yet still I can only hear Lily. I hear her cry just like I did that day – close enough to hear her but far enough for me to be too late. It’s not Lily, I know it’s not her but I can hear and I can’t bring myself to ignore it. I look back towards my house in the distance, the yellow lights coming from the kitchen window, and the lighthouse across the bay. Someone is in trouble and I can’t just run and hide. I need to try and help.
I pull the strings tight on my hood as the rain comes down in buckets, drenching my hands and running down my face, and I cagily follow Merlin towards the sand dunes, calling his name to come back, hoping that I am imagining things, hearing things as I often do.
‘Merlin! Merlin, come back here! Merlin!’
He darts on, up to the top of the sand dune, still barking, and I slip and slide in the mushy sand, balancing myself as I stumble up. I hear the sobbing more loudly now and it comes from underneath a large green golf umbrella. I freeze. I don’t know who it is or what I should do and then I see a hand reach out for the dog and hear a young voice greet him amidst the sobs.
‘Hello there, you!’ the voice of what appears to be a little girl with an English accent says, so I approach her, coughing to announce my presence and trying to make some noise over the sounds of the rain so that I don’t scare her.
‘Excuse me? Are you okay?’
I walk around to the other side of the umbrella to find her huddled up with a sodden paper bag of chips by her side, which Merlin is now helping himself to but the girl doesn’t seem to mind.
I look at her. My heart stops.
‘Lily?’ I say.
‘What?’
Oh God. What am I saying? I’m seeing things again. Please don’t let this happen again! I can’t keep seeing Lily in every child I see.
‘I’m so … I’m so sorry if I frightened you,’ I say to her over the rain. ‘I thought you were someone else.’
My heart starts to beat faster. She looks up at me with familiar eyes and I stumble backwards, squinting to make sure what or who I am looking at is real.
I can’t keep doing this. Eliza has tried to coach me through this and Matt has calmed me down when I have come home before convinced I saw her somewhere, or when I wake up in the night in cold sweats believing that it’s all just a horrible nightmare and she is at home safe and sound and I go to her room calling her name to find an empty bed. And here I go again letting my mind wander. But this is not Lily. This is a teenage girl who looks nothing like Lily. It is not my dead daughter. My daughter was only three years old, for goodness’ sake.
‘It looks like you’re the one who’s frightened,’ the girl replies in a choked-up voice that isn’t as tough as she wants it to be. ‘What did you call me?’
‘Me?’ I mutter.
‘Yes, you,’ she says. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Oh, just leave me alone.’
She is about fifteen or sixteen, I guess, and her dark hair is tucked behind her ears but it’s the familiar sadness in her young eyes, dripping black with mascara, that takes my breath away. The fear, the worry, the anger, the pain … she looks away which allows me to compose myself.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t normally sneak up on people like this,’ I say to her. I should really just do what she says and leave her alone but what if I do that and then hear later that something awful has happened to her out here.
‘That’s good,’ she says with a snigger. ‘You should try minding your own business. Everyone should.’
‘It’s just,’ I try to explain. ‘Well, my dog, Merlin, well, he never leaves my side for too long so I had to follow him and then I heard you and … please just tell me, are you okay? Can I do anything?’
She looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. Maybe I have.
‘Can I help you at all?’ I try again. ‘You’re going to catch your death up here. It’s pouring down.’
‘Who are you, my mother?’ she says with attitude and her words and tone take me back in time again. ‘I have one of those, thank you very much, and one is quite enough.’
‘No, no, I’m not your mother, no, but I’m sure your own mother is worried about you?’ I realize that I must sound exactly like a mother, her mother.
‘Look,’ says the little English voice with the big dark eyes. ‘Just take your lovely dog for a walk and leave me alone before you catch your death. And why is everything about death these days? You don’t know anything about my mother so just leave it, will you?’
‘Well, no I don’t know your mother, but—’
‘She thinks no one knows anything about her,’ says the girl. ‘But I know more than she thinks I do. I’m not stupid. I just don’t know what the hell I’m doing here and I want to go home so she can die back there instead! No point dying here where no one knows her, is there?’
So, her mother is dying. Oh no. Oh, this poor little girl.
She cries openly now and wipes her face on the back of the sleeves of her sodden jacket. I sit down beside her. I don’t think twice about it and I don’t notice the rain anymore. I just sit.
‘Just go away and mind your own business,’ says the girl. ‘You don’t have to feel sorry for me. I seem to be doing a good enough job of that myself, thank you very much.’
I should really go and do what she says, but I don’t. I wait. I stay.
‘I don’t want to go just yet, if you don’t mind,’ I tell her, not knowing where this urge to stay with her is coming from.
I normally walk straight past strangers these days. The old me would have stopped and helped a stranger, but not the me after Lily died. These days I normally don’t take time to care. I don’t take time to care because I usually don’t care – but this time, I do.
‘And you didn’t scare me at all actually,’ I continue. ‘You remind me of someone that I know very well and it startled me, that’s all.’
She looks at me like I’ve just sprouted two horns at the suggestion that she could possibly remind me of someone. Imagine.
‘Well I don’t know anyone around here so you must be seeing things,’ she tells me and looks away, hugging her knees again. ‘I can’t possibly remind you of anyone you know.’
A cold shiver runs down my spine as I realize who she reminds me of, and it’s not my Lily after all.
‘It’s not someone from here I was talking about,’ I explain. ‘It’s someone who came here to live and who never went home, quite a few years ago. A young girl, just like you.’
‘Who?’ she asks. ‘Someone from England? Don’t tell me, it’s the accent that gives me away.’
Her voice is dripping with sarcasm and I can’t help but laugh just a little.
‘My mind is a bit mixed up and I thought you were someone you couldn’t possibly be, but now I realize – I realize you remind me of me actually,’ I tell her and this seems to get her attention.
‘Yeah, right,’ she says. ‘You have no idea who I am or what I’m like, so how can I remind you of yourself. That’s stupid.’
‘Believe me,’ I tell her. ‘When I was a lot younger. I was exactly like you are now in a lot of ways. Exactly.’
And it’s true. She really is just like me twenty years ago and it’s like looking at my own reflection, not physically, but in her I see the same sense of deep despair and anger that she feels inside right now. The hopelessness. The fear that the one person who you need the most is going to leave you soon and that no one else in the whole world can understand what you are going through.
‘My name is Shelley,’ I say to her and her tear-filled eyes meet mine again. ‘I live in the house over there on the hill, the one across from the lighthouse. I wonder … would you like to come over and get dried off and call your mum from there? She must be worried sick.’
She doesn’t look so hard around the edges now. Her lip trembles and I see she is just a little girl, really. She is a lot younger at heart than she looks, beneath the makeup and the attitude and the tears.
‘You’re scared, right?’ I say to her and she nods, biting her lip. ‘Is your mum sick?’
Her bottom lip trembles more and she breathes in stifled muffles, trying so hard not to let it all go.
‘She is … she is very sick,’ she stutters. ‘She’s dying.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I mumble.
‘She’s dying and I’m so afraid that she’s going to die really soon and I don’t know what I’m going to do without her. It’s so unfair!’
I gasp inside. This is like looking in the mirror, like looking back in time.
‘Of course, you’re scared,’ I say to her. ‘Is that why you’ve run away from her? To lash out and cry here on your own.’
She nods again and I wait for a backlash from her but instead she leans forward to pat the dog who has settled at her feet, still feasting on her bag of chips.
‘You’re scared because there is nothing you can do and you’re angry and frightened,’ I continue. ‘And you are so frightened you are going to be left on your own and it feels like no one understands what you are going through.’
She looks at me like I have read her mind, then tries to speak and her voice breaks when she does.
‘She thinks I don’t know the truth but I do know,’ she sniffles. ‘I heard her talking to Aunty Helen before we left and she said this would be our last holiday ever. Like, how am I meant to enjoy myself when I know it’s our last holiday ever? I am so mad! She must think I’m stupid but I just don’t know what to do. She could at least tell me instead of trying to pretend everything is okay when everything is just awful. I’m not a baby, I should know the truth!’
I put my arm around her and hold her close as her shoulders heave.
‘Cry all you want,’ I say to her. ‘Cry and get it all out if that’s what you came here to do.’
The rain mixes with my own tears as she sobs and gasps for breath in between sniffles and lets all her pain out. She grasps my coat as she cries and I squeeze her tight, wondering where on earth I have mustered up the courage to sit and empathize so much with someone I have never met, when I can barely hold a conversation with my own husband these days. I haven’t spoken to my closest friends like this in such a long time but I want to help her. I need to help her.
‘Do you want to come with me and Merlin and we’ll call your mum before you really do get sick out here?’ I ask her when she begins to settle. ‘I don’t have my phone with me but we can contact her or I can take you to her?’
She shakes her head.
‘I have my own phone here in my pocket,’ she says. ‘But thanks anyway. I can call her and make my way back. She’ll be so worried. I need to go back.’
‘Yes, that’s a good idea,’ I tell her.
‘Why do you care?’ she asks me. ‘How do you know what I am going through?’
‘Unfortunately, I know all too well,’ I explain. ‘I know you are feeling so many things right now but your mum is only doing her best for you.’
‘I didn’t want to come here.’
‘I’m sure she knows why she brought you,’ I say. ‘She will tell you everything in her own time, believe me. Imagine how hard this must be for her too. You need each other. You need to make this time special even though you are confused and angry right now. Your mum is still here and you need each other.’
She pauses, hesitant.
‘I should get back to her,’ she says, standing up, sobbing now. ‘I shouldn’t have stayed out so long. We were meant to go for dinner and she was wearing her new dress that she bought today and now I’ve ruined the whole evening.’
Her face crumples and I want to just take away all her pain and make everything alright for her, but I know I can’t. It’s not as simple as that, unfortunately.
‘Your mum will understand,’ I say to her. ‘Mums always do, believe me. Now, go and give her a big hug and tell her you are sorry for worrying her. You may not think it, but I know exactly how mad and frightened you are right now.’
‘You can’t possibly know,’ she asks. ‘No one does.’
‘I do,’ I explain, standing up to meet her, ‘I know because I was once a young girl like you and the same thing happened to me and I ran away from it all too, but I had to go back and face up to what was happening, no matter how horrible it was. My mum got very sick too, just like yours is now.’
‘She did?’ she says, and she lifts the umbrella and we stand beneath it together. ‘And did she get better or did she die in the end?’
I wish I could tell her different. I look out to the sea, then back at her and I take a deep breath.
‘I was sixteen when she died,’ I explain to this beautiful, inquisitive child. ‘Her name was Rosie and she died after a short illness and I only wish that I got to have one last holiday with her, just like you are doing now.’
The little girl’s eyes widen.
‘Rosie? That’s my name,’ she says and for the first time, she smiles slightly. ‘I’m Rosie too. How weird is that?’
For some reason I am not surprised that she shares a name with my dear mother. I have a feeling that we were meant to meet this evening, young Rose, me and Merlin.
‘How did you – how did you cope without her?’ she asks me and I take a deep breath because I honestly don’t know.
‘It’s hard,’ I tell her, not wanting to frighten her more but not wanting to shield her from the inevitable, heart-wrenching truth. ‘We can talk about it more if you are around for a while, that’s if your mum allows you and if you want to?’
‘Really?’ she squints back at me through the rain. I can feel her relax a little.
‘Really,’ I say to her. ‘I know exactly what it feels like to have so much anger inside and that blinding fear of not knowing where to turn. You can talk to me anytime.’
‘I don’t mean to be angry with her,’ says Rosie. ‘But she’s treating me like a baby and not telling me what everyone else already knows.’
‘You’re angry at the situation, not at your mum,’ I try to explain to her. ‘It’s horrible and it hurts and it’s not fair. You are right to be angry, but be angry at the illness, not at her.’
She sniffles and nods a bit.
‘Go and find your mum, Rosie,’ I tell her. ‘Try and be brave though I know it’s the hardest thing in the whole wide world right now. Be brave and you are going to have a lovely holiday with your mum, I just know you are.’
She smiles and pulls her damp sleeves down over her hands.
‘Thank you,’ she whispers. ‘Thank you, Shelley. And you too, Merlin. He’s a really sweet dog, aren’t you Merlin?’
‘You know where I am if you need me,’ I tell her.
She pats Merlin’s head goodbye then walks away from me, her head bowed down against the rain, and I put Merlin back on his lead and walk in the opposite direction, back home to my empty existence but feeling something like I haven’t felt in such a long, long time.
I feel warmth inside, deep inside my broken heart that has been frozen for so long. I think I may have helped that little girl in some way.
At least I hope I have.
Juliette
‘Rosie! Rosie, oh God, Rosie where were you? Look at you! You’re soaked right through!’
I am out of my mind when I finally find my daughter wandering down the street in the lashing rain. She’s so pale and cold that I want to pack my case and get on a plane back to Birmingham right now and pretend this whole stupid trip never happened in the first place.
‘I’m so sorry, Mum,’ she tells me as she falls into my arms and I kiss her forehead what seems like a thousand times in relief.
‘I checked every shop, every bar and I have never been so frightened in all my life, do you hear me?’
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she repeats in a chant. She is soaked through.
‘Are you okay? Just tell me you’re okay?’
‘I am,’ she says. ‘Just cold and wet but I’m fine and I’m really sorry. I’m so sorry to have worried you.’
We walk arm in arm through puddles across the street and down past the harbour to our cottage, where I realize I have left the front door wide open, but to be honest I couldn’t care less. Right now, I really want to go home.
‘Just tell me nothing bad happened to you, Rosie,’ I say through the rain. ‘I want you to get dried off and warmed up and tell me exactly where you have been. I can’t believe I was silly enough to let you go wandering alone when I don’t actually know this place or the people in it at all. Do you know how precious you are to me? What the hell was I thinking?’
‘Mum, it’s not your fault,’ she says to me. ‘None of this is your fault. None of it.’
‘It is my fault! I was here only once!’ I tell her. ‘Just once a lifetime ago and I seem to think it’s some picture postcard different planet where nothing goes wrong ever! How the hell do I know that there aren’t murderers and rapists lurking around each corner? How?’
‘Mum, stop, please, nothing happened,’ Rosie tells me when I finally stop ranting and try to listen to her as I catch my breath. I usher her inside the cottage and throw my soaking wet Marilyn stupid Monroe wig on the sofa and kick off my sodding pumps which I hate now with a vengeance and start to strip off the blue dress which now feels ridiculous since it’s been soaked right through too. I am a crap mother. I never should have let her go walking round a strange village on her own. It looks like Dr Michael was right after all because right now I feel sicker than any cancer could ever make me. I’m sick of myself and the stupid risks that I have taken all my life.
‘Get changed, quickly,’ I tell my daughter who is standing in silence, staring at me with my pathetic fluffy mousey hair and my puffy steroid-filled body which is scarred inside and out.
‘Can we still go for dinner?’ asks Rosie. ‘I’m sorry your new dress got ruined. I got chips but a dog ate them. Are you hungry, Mum?’
I think I’d be physically sick if I ate but I can see my baby girl is shaken and cold and I don’t want to get angry with her. I don’t have time to fight with her.
‘Get into the shower quickly and warm up then we can order some takeaway,’ I tell her with a forced smile. I am so bloody relieved that she is here and she is alright. ‘There’s a nice Chinese a few miles down the road and I’ll see if they deliver.’
Then we both look at my sodden blue dress on the floor and start to laugh.
‘Well you’ve nothing to wear to dinner now, have you?’ says Rosie and I lift the dress up and swing it around so that the rain water splashes her face.
‘Quick, shower and we’ll have a pyjama party!’ I tell her, and then I chase her down the hallway in my underwear, shaking the water from the dress at her as she laughs heartily and closes the door on the bathroom and locks it, still laughing … and then I lean up against the door and slide down onto the floor, crying and laughing with relief that she is safe and well. I am so blessed to have this time with her.
I don’t want to miss a second. I won’t ever let her out of my sight again.