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LEATHERBACK By Mi Wae

Leatherback

Copyright 2012

Thank you for downloading this eBook. Your support and respect for the property of this author is appreciated.

This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or

places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or

transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations in critical reviews and other noncommercial uses.

Many thanks to my husband Karl for everything.

I wrote this story back in 2008, when things were better, for a time when my faculties wouldn't be... that time is now. Thanks so much for being here.

I hope you enjoy the story as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Contents LEATHERBACK ........................................................................................................................... 1 Authors note .................................................................................................................................... 6 Prologue........................................................................................................................................... 7 I ...................................................................................................................................................... 10 II ..................................................................................................................................................... 18 III ................................................................................................................................................... 29 IV ................................................................................................................................................... 42 V..................................................................................................................................................... 49 VI ................................................................................................................................................... 61 VII .................................................................................................................................................. 75 VIII ................................................................................................................................................ 88 IX ................................................................................................................................................... 99 X................................................................................................................................................... 115 XI ................................................................................................................................................. 124 Epilogue....................................................................................................................................... 130 About the author ......................................................................................................................... 132

Authors note

Leatherback turtles are a critically endangered species (IUCN List). Males spend their entire lives entirely at sea while females come to land only to nest. There are only 25,000 adult nesting females remaining worldwide – in 1980, there were 115,000. They can live up to 150 years-old and the species has existed for over 65 million years, second only to crocodiles.

It is the largest of the sea turtles and can survive in the cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean and dive deep for jellyfish, thought to be its main source of food. It has the ability to raise its body temperature so it can traverse the cold, deep ocean – the deepest it has been recorded is 1.2km deep in the Arctic Ocean. It can measure up to 1.8 metres long and weigh about 500kg, on average. In fact, the heaviest ever recorded was found drowned in a fishing net off the coast of Wales in 1988 – it weighed 900kg.

The habits of the leatherback young are quite mysterious to the watchful eye of conservationists but they are thought to survive only in warm, tropical waters and be prey to a number of fish and birds, like seagulls. Typical nesting sites are in the Caribbean and West Africa.

Adult leatherback turtles have been recorded migrating as far north as Alaska and as far south as Cape Town in South Africa. However, it is habituating the world’s oceans that leave them susceptible to being caught in long line fisheries.

Unlike other turtles, the Leatherback is different. It does not have a thick shell like the others but has a thick black leathery covering, hence its name – Leatherback.

Adult leatherbacks have few natural predators except for humans: many leatherbacks die each year in fishing nets or on fishing lines and many nesting beaches are lost every year to tourist or residential development. The poaching of eggs and pollution is also a danger to adult and hatchling turtles. Scientists estimate that only 1 in 1000 leatherback hatchlings survive to adulthood.

References: www.leatherback.org, WWF and BBC.

Prologue

On a white moonlit beach littered with stones and seaweed, I walked. I didn’t care about the relaxing sounds of the shore, the tinsel of stars streaked above me, the full moon saluting the Earth with its cool resplendence. I would love to believe I was not relegated here.

The western coast had smells of ember, of fruit and herbs and the air felt wet. It struck me how odd the night felt, very much unlike what I expected from Wales. Crests of white water were breaking far offshore and the rest of the sea seemed still. A flap of wings startled me as I heard seagulls and other winged things distancing themselves from the coast. I looked at my silver-plated watch like I would ordinarily in London and removed it from my wrist to my pocket. I was on holiday now, maybe to get my ‘head together,’ maybe to ‘think about what I’d done.’

‘Relax,’ I told myself. For whatever purpose I was there, the last thing I owed anybody was to admit error. I scanned my holiday destination. Nothing there except the ocean: still, soundless and darkly violet in the night. I would never think I was there for a sound reason though. And if my life had ever taken an unexpected turn, it was when she came. Well, I wasn’t sure if it was female until she did what she did. She fixated my gaze the moment she arrived.

Actually, my gaze was caught by a certain piece of seaweed floating in the shallows of the water. It was nothing that would have interested me normally but I liked how it floated in place as the tiny waves cupped the shore jingling like a lady rattling her gold bracelets.

Soon all the sound of my surroundings shut out. All the rustling in the dunes, the whistling of the wind and the lapping of the waves on the shore were quiet like they were told to hush. I was left standing in hallows of silence.

The piece of seaweed disappeared and was replaced by the pinhole nostrils of a hideous creature that grunted as it lugged itself out of the water, beads of water falling off its body like luxurious jewels.

Resembling a noisy mechanical bull running out of batteries, its sluggish plight up the shore was pitiful but instead of rushing to help the spotted creature, its leathery skin dotted with white flecks, I only stood further back not knowing whether to run away or watch what it was doing.

As I stood back in a muck of panicky indecisiveness, I could see that it was quite a simple beast; the moonlight seemed to be illuminating the journey before it, dancing off its back and made the sand appear serenely spread with a butter knife. It was clockwork, it was elementary. It grunted every time it muscled its bony front flippers forward. At length, it grunted and lugged its body up the sand and it became visible under pale moonlight. Sliding up the shore, its head and shell were in sight.

I could see its brown eyes crushed under its fibrous lids. Its shell that I’m sure would serve as protection and give it the agility to be swift in the vast glittering ocean

behind it, looked vulnerable in front of me, like it was made only of tougher skin raised above its body, offering weather protection at best when out in the open like it was.

But it continued grunting as its broad shoulders and thick forehead turned away from me and back to sea. It stopped – a peaceful repose from its struggle. Then I saw its back flippers, its shell cut into a sharp point and a sad tail sticking out under it. Those back flippers heaved the sand to each side and its body twisted so it sank into the hole it was creating underneath itself– I saw the turtle was making a nest, of sorts.

No wonder the moon and the stars were silently lighting the sky above it and everything else around me dimmed. Life was being dropped into the hole. Little slimy life egg capsules fell into the hole she prepared.

And it was calm! So calm. And probably from the obvious age of the great creature, she seemed nonchalant in her endeavour. She looked as though the process was an awkwardness that didn’t seem to bother her. She began to fill the hole with the sand either side of her. It muddled in the cavern and pushed sand back in.

After her nest became well hidden and the only sign of her visit was the ripples of sand that she carved with her body moving up shore, its oceanic home captured her attention and she pulled and lugged and grunted again, as it was now evident it was her way; the turtle moved on.

It thrilled me for an instant that the turtle was still there by the edge of the sea and had left a puzzling chasm of eggs under the sand near my feet. I asked myself, did that turtle leave a nest here in front of me? It took me how ignored I was even if the mother was aware I was there.

Soon the sounds from the waves returned, the impact of the wind’s bursts could be heard whistling through crevices, the rustling in the dunes resumed and the turtle had disappeared.

I let out the breath I had been holding in. What had I seen?

The glow of the sun began to lighten the sky behind me, across the vast green field, behind the mountains. This was not a holiday anymore; I was not in a vacant abandon from my day-to-day stress. Surely what I had witnessed was important. The beast’s appearance was certainly a surprise. I had not expected a reptilian visitor to these shores.

Now at the end of a long emotional journey myself, I was pleased to be at the beginning of life. I did not have to put any effort into forgetting now. I had something to remember.

I began, at first, without feeling tired and like it wasn’t past my bedtime, to put one foot in front of the other, which sunk like lead pellets into dry custard powder, and pull myself across the beach to the sandy road upon which my holiday let sat. I was staying at a beachfront terrace cottage. I stood on the street that linked the chain of such lets together along the beach. And I suddenly saw myself in my dark window – a weary old dragon dismissed as far away as they could get me.

I walked up the steps to my flat with the cool breeze at the back of my neck bringing smells of wet grass and rabbit poop. The gentle lapping of the shore did not sooth as I

thumped the wooden door with my shoulder until it opened with a loud cry. I pulled the cord under the only light bulb that illuminated the shackled room. The gaps in the floorboards must have been a thoroughfare for the beach sand that carpeted the floor. The dampness I smelt in the room was salty and was probably the reason why the fridge had rusted so solidly at its edges. I collapsed on the naked mattress which made its springs to creek like a seesaw as I bounced.

I

A waddle of women in shorts, bum bags and caps walked down the loose stone road under the Welsh summer sun and stopped before the beach started.

Having spent most of the night like I had spent most of my life – uncomfortable, wired, worried – and then being as far from London as possible, and meeting a turtle that had to be the size of a small whale, I was in a daze. I was at first amazed, then felt privileged, that I had witnessed a wonder of nature, and did not drink a drop of fermented nasty rum at breakfast from the bottles that filled my travel bag but sipped tea in appreciation of the surprising beauty of planet Earth. I imagined talking to the village folk and taking a bus ride to a library to learn about what I saw last night – a maternal nesting of an ancient sea dweller that almost came to my door. But as I stood outside my Welsh hideaway in my trusty black canvas culottes and decades old flowery blue shirt and flip-flops, I realised I was in the middle of nowhere with only two or three terraced homes attached to mine. And apart from that, there was nothing. Nothing but nature.

I saw the waddle of women talking to a much younger, fresh girl in a big straw hat and summery High Street wear. She was effusing with the enthusiasm only seen in youth – she was pointing this way and that, all around the estuary. Why don’t I ask her? I stepped out to join the group.

‘Lloergan Traeth shares its sky with many species of bird such as the once-considered endangered Red Kite, whose population has skyrocketed here of late,’ said the girl. ‘The return in numbers of a bird species is evidence of global warming in Britain. They are returning home because it is warmer. As you can see up there, the Red Kite is often seen here because of the bird reserve fifty miles past the dunes going north. He must be here for some foraging; the farmers nearby leave out some meat for it. This bird of prey is well looked after, not a threat to the animals here at all, are you little buddy?’

I could see the majestic red bird pecking at my neighbour’s roof. Call it a buddy though? I wanted the Snow White to give it a rest. I moved to speak to her. ‘Ah and I see another walker here. I am Teresa. I have introduced myself on the bus, but I will quickly tell you now. I am an Environmental Science student. I’m working here for the summer. And your name?’

‘Margarethe.’

‘Okay great welcome. Now we can start our walk down the coast line here south to the shell path that will take us up through the dunes where we can see a few varieties of orchids in flower such as the marsh helliborine. Here Margarethe,’ Teresa pulled a brochure from her clipboard with a quick snap of the metal clasp. I took it from her and followed the lot down to the beach southward.

The ripples of sand the turtle left had completely disappeared, as did any sign of the nest; the old girl just struggled along the land and left last night. No one would ever know a turtle visited the beach the night before, much like no one would know I was visiting the beach now.

I didn’t know but it could be a week or a month before those eggs hatched; maybe the mother would come back? How else would those babies be able to find their way up out of the airless hole, be in the new oceanic home and learn the ways of living in the sea – the dangers – the best places for food – how to avoid sharks?

‘The shell path,’ Teresa smiled enthusiastically still. I wished I had my sunglasses; perhaps I would be as cheery.

‘Crushed shells make this entire route as long as you can see up the hill. When we walk up this path we are walking through what is known as the cloudy dunes because the rocks bordering the path are for the most part grey. Lichen, you see?’ Teresa knelt to touch the leafy moss. ‘But let’s walk up here until we get to the dune slack. And look out for Common Blue butterflies too. If we’re lucky one will flutter by.’

‘I was lucky last night.’ I slid up next to the student trying to be surprising, and somewhat cheery, although I must have appeared awkward.

‘Sorry?’ The girl asked mustering friendliness, but not the sort reserved for birds and butterflies.

I started with a laugh, trying to be friendlier than I normally am with strangers. ‘I mean, I saw a turtle last night.’

‘A turtle! Lucky you, they don’t normally come out to the shore here.’

‘Really?’ I was amazed but mostly vindicated that I should feel as lucky as I felt when I woke up. ‘I was on the beach last night and this giant thing – a turtle – just crawled up to the top of the sand there.’

‘Well, you are lucky,’ said the student, ‘Turtles only come to land really to nest or to die perhaps.’

‘It did nest!’ I spoke in a higher tone now. ‘It dug a hole and plopped out little eggs the size of ping pong balls.’

‘But turtles don’t nest in Wales. It mustn’t have.’ Teresa sounded sorry. I wanted to protest but she turned away. I was dejected that asking the bubbly animal lover turned to nothing.

‘Okay folks. Can I just direct your attention to the host of pretty orchids here that are flowering only for the summer months? Here,’ Teresa knelt and swayed an exotic, purple flower between her first two fingers: its tiny branches adorned with miniature cups. ‘This is the northern marsh orchid which only flowers in June and July since its introduction in 1918. And the brownish splotchy flower there is the western marsh orchid.’

Oh. I was ignored. I would explain that I wasn’t a liar if the tour guide wasn’t so engrossed with the flowers.

This made me feel like when I was first in the home, ignored despite my standing up for life as I knew it. I remembered the first day at the Shellingborne Home for Children in

Southampton. My baby sister was crying and the staff just so calmly bounced Penny on their shoulder. ‘Colic, colic,’ was all they could say, whereupon I appeared in the front door hall demanding a doctor for my sick sister. As the eldest sister of five siblings I had no choice but to protect the youngest. With all my muster I tried to push the staff member away and take the screaming lump, its face stretched in fury, but upon failing that manoeuvre I took a sheet of paper out of my cloth bag that had a rainbow and a unicorn patch pinned to the side, and started to compose a letter to the Southampton MP, requesting him to be so kind as to find some other family member to look after Penny, Eddie, Ellie, Andyroo and myself so we wouldn’t have to venture any further into the dauntingly tall and cold hall. Its floor was laid with black and white tiles and it had stained oak all around its walls, which smelt like cigarettes and was altogether strange.

This letter I would deliver myself and discuss with the man because I was almost ten and had learned enough to know that an MP would know what to do for us.

I doubted Penny would be in absolute peril but would probably keep crying until I could find a safer home for us to live, so I tucked the letter in my bag that contained just enough clothes for a summer week and my pyjamas and toothbrush, and crossed the sandstone path to the road. With the beach on my right and the green grass of the home to my left, I walked with steely determination towards the main street I saw before when two Salvation Army officers took me and the clan to the home; they were the two uniformed giants who drove us through the main street and down the curly roads to the place.

A minute later I was journeying through a sticky drizzle under smoky clouds. My rainbow bag was only made of cotton; it could not shelter me from weather. Every step I then made and with every passing second, I thought of the children I was leaving in the clutches of the wrinkly women strangers who hadn’t even said hello. Shellingborne Home for Children, the Salvation Army lady said, was a good place, very happy children lived there, and some were lucky enough to be adopted into loving families. But a loving family would take little Penny away. Eddie and Ellie were two-year old twins and it would not be right if they were taken away and even worse if they were not together, and my brother Andyroo was my best friend. He was only a school year younger. He couldn’t go.

I turned around reasoning that I couldn’t leave. From day to night, to months to years, I was going to look after my family. Now that my parents had gone, it was up to me as the eldest to take charge. In the front garden, dampening from the drizzle, stood little Eddie and Ellie clutching their bags and looking with wide eyes at me marching back up the path to the doorway. Andyroo looked just as frightened cuddling his tedi ba ba almost smiling in relief that I was back and looked like I was going to do something.

I stood up to a different woman who had taken Penny to stop crying and I held both arms out to take her and stood straight like a brave soldier. The woman placed the screaming baby in my arms and I said: ‘Sh, sh, we’re okay, we’re okay.’ And little Penny hushed. I knew at that moment that I had to stay with my siblings, as long as we were together, nothing would change.

‘Well, Margarethe. Looks like you should always look after the crying babies,’ the woman said; the crinkles beside her eyes met together momentarily before the lines around her mouth came back. ‘If Penny is ever uncontrollable again, we’ll send for you, okay. Good girl.’ The lady patted my head.

A breeze crossed the path of the walking group; crickets tatted and a butterfly wafted through the breeze and over my shoulder. The sun overhead was resting towards the west enticing a twinkle off the water, bringing an extra brightness to the sand dunes and casting a shadow over the grassland. Several rabbit-dropping mounds sat here and there across the green-carpeted plain and pink patches sat on the tops of the dunes, the pink flowers were what Teresa named restharrow, ‘which binds to the sand fixing like clover on the dunes,’ she said.

Smells of wild aromatic thyme brushed past my nostrils, so fresh and awakening. Hundreds of birds flew in formation overhead. Seagulls? Sparrows? No, skylarks, said Teresa. ‘Those abandoned rabbit burrows by the marram grass and scrub land at the skirting of the field often make the best places for some bird species to nest, as you’ll notice there aren’t many trees to see unless you travelled all the way to the north horizon where the RSPB sanctuary is.’

The skylarks flew to the heavens together before curling to fly northwards then circling and landing in a swift drop en masse. Across the clearing was a brown rabbit whose fur did not seem so soft to cuddle. It paused to nibble at grass and darted into obscurity on spotting the pointing women who huddled together to ensure all saw the rabbit. ‘Hundreds of rabbits take residence here,’ Teresa explained. ‘Thanks to them we are walking on shorn grass today and have many droppings to dodge. But see those grey mounds all over the place? They are designated poo spots for the rabbits. They don’t relieve themselves where they live you see.’

We then made our way across the grassland to a boardwalk-viewing platform for all to take in the wide flowery vista – coloured by summertime foliage prospering under the sun. It was warm. I flapped my blue shirt with my fingertips and entertained the idea of going back to my pad for shade and a cool glass of rum and coke – if the rum was in the fridge and I had coke. The 360-degree view was breathtaking even I couldn’t deny that, but my avoidance of alcohol in the name of nature could not last long.

From the vantage point I could see the entire coastline and far out over the various shades of blue ocean as well as the grass field and sand dunes, which clipped the edges of the coast and linked it to the field.

‘Further up the beach down there, we’ll see a rather notable wave shape in the rock formed after millions of years of erosion. In fact, at that part of the estuary are many natural wonders, we will make our way there,’ Teresa pointed out the next plan of action, down the stairs and journey to the north side of the shore.

As we descended, a man dressed in khakis, pull up socks and a wide brimmed straw hat stood up. He seemed to be taking notes, looking around and foraging in the plant life below: digging around the marram grass and finding a lone orchid, shaking it, inspecting its sides and then smelling it. ‘Smelling the bee orchid, John?’ asked Teresa.

‘Yes,’ he spoke like he was happy for the attention from the little group of clucking ladies. ‘I am taking note of the flora that has popped up over the summer. Hi,’ he wiped a single wave in the air, ‘I am Dr John Robinson from the University of Exeter. I am a professor of marine biology.’

‘John is here to make observations of the estuary both on land and in the sea. Good luck with it all.” Teresa nodded and took her group past John on the stairs and they disappeared below. I stayed. This doctor was one more person to hear about the wonders of last night.

‘I am hoping to catch you so I can tell you of the turtle I saw, last night.’ I started.

‘Oh you saw a turtle,’ said John, ‘Marvellous, they have been known to drop by here. What kind of turtle did you see?’

‘I don’t know. I want to tell you. It was large, probably eight feet, dirty scaly skin…. And it didn’t really have a shell of sorts, just a thicker kind of shield …’

John interrupted. ‘Well that’s probably a leatherback turtle. They have been noticed in the deep water around these parts…’

‘A leatherback…’ I lost myself in the name, the name to the face.

‘Yes,’ John said and returned to his flower, he marked a tick next to several ticks by the word ‘bee orchid’ and marked again next to two ticks by ‘sea spurge.’

‘Yes,’ I repeated him, ‘and then it dug a hole.’ I caught the marine biologist’s attention now. ‘And it laid eggs.’

John held his clipboard closer to himself and shook his head disbelievingly at me. He was going to be firm. ‘First of all, dear, leatherback turtles may swim by here but common guests on our shore line? They are not. And to make a nest? Sorry we are not in West Africa or the Caribbean.’

And with that, the straight backed marine biologist took his study away from me and I stood down to a platform built so the stairs could twist down the dune bank, in spite of the bee orchids, helliborine and the northern marsh orchids I could name and identify now. But the estuary had lost its charm. The estuary was nothing but a grass field, common marram grass, scrub, flowers and rabbit dung. A turtle was one of the highlights of my existence, and the snobbery of Mr Robinson was not going to lessen all I had seen and learned. ‘Well,’ I started. ‘If a turtle chooses this beach to lay eggs, then who am I to tell her it’s not the Caribbean?’

‘Listen,’ came back John. ‘If you saw a turtle then that’s fine. But I’ll tell you this. This is not the season for turtles to nest, they’ll do that in six months time on the equatorial coasts, and turtles always return to the same nesting sites year after year, so if that turtle knew that a Welsh beach was for nesting then it probably has been doing it for decades, and why hasn’t anyone seen it before? And besides, if the eggs hatched, the turtles would only run into a cold ocean and be swept up by the current to Iceland. I beg to differ, madam.’ And Mr Robinson tipped his hat and engrossed himself with the notes on the clipboard.

I loathed John Robinson. I stepped down from the stairway back to the beach and I took slow steps kicking up sand as I stormed. I walked home; I did not want to see the sand dune wave formation or any more delights on the far away part of the beach. I stayed by my doorway however and presumed that the gaggle of nature watchers was having a good time.

When I was little and in my blue velveteen playsuit with the large appliquéd flower on the shoulder and I had returned home from a few hours playing dress ups with the girl over the road, I was barred from entering my home by a woman in a navy and red skirt suit and hat. So I sat on the rectangle of grass outside the front door with my younger siblings while another lady in the same costume held a sleeping Penny and walked up and down the front hall. Where the hall met the front door, the lady could see us sitting in a circle chatting and she would smile a compassionate smile and walk down the hall out of sight again.

A breeze tapped our heads, the sound of distant cars on the motorway rumbled and the sun peered through a hole in the clouds and illuminated the suburban street, on which, we the Rainer family, lived. Homes were identical, rendered in a flocked white clad and the symmetrical bricked doorways were a sign that everyone was equal to everyone who lived in an identical house. If it wasn’t for the distinguishable yellow wallpaper adorned with white hibiscus print in the kitchen, I wouldn’t know what home was or what it felt like. It was a warm place where we were looked after. But the continuous sight of the lady in uniform smiling at the door and disappearing again made me nervous.

Soon one of the suited ladies appeared with a bag for each child. ‘Hold on to them dear. Here are clothes for you.’

I took my bag filled with the clothes I wore in the summertime and looked mystified at the older lady. Compelled to speak, the lady said, ‘We are going to go to a wonderful place. A place that is so lovely, you’ll be thankful your parents thought to send you there.’

I was mystified further. Our parents, I questioned silently, are they sending us somewhere? The twins had no fear of this statement; they rolled on the grass covering their backs with the bits of dried leaves and stems that had once been hidden beneath the scratchy green grass. Their mother would tell them not to do that, I thought and told them to stop, which they did but then everyone grew bored. Andyroo looked as scared as me but wouldn’t hold my hand when I offered it. I felt alone.

It was my own fault. I must have been away for a very long time to miss these strange women coming into my house. But mummy had sent me, I remembered. I was certain I must have been bad – naughty – misbehaved. I should have been better behaved and cheered my mummy up when she was sad in the morning. Without a word my mother led me and Andyroo across the road to a place where we stayed for lunch. Now the uniformed ladies had taken over the house. I could almost hear them talking in muted tones to each other. I moved to the front door to better hear what they were saying.

‘We will take them to Shellingborne now.’

‘We’ll tell them first. Do you know what to say?’

‘I do…’

I could hear the clacky heels coming towards the door and I rushed back to take a place where I sat with my siblings before. The ladies approached us. ‘I have some news,’ said the lady who introduced herself as Marion from the Salvation Army. ‘Remember we are here to look after you,’ she added.

Marion continued as the breeze pushed some of her hair out of its curls and across her eye. ‘I am sorry children, but your mother has been in an accident. She was driving on the motorway and I am afraid she is not coming back.’

Andyroo looked horrified at the lady through tear stained eyes. The twins looked at Andyroo and the face of terror and confusion on me and were quiet. ‘What about daddy?’ I sniffed.

‘I am sorry darling, but your daddy was so sad, his heart just broke,’ said Marion. ‘I am afraid he is with your mummy now, they are with Jesus in Heaven.’

The woman reached out to the shoulders of the children who were just out of reach and staring into their laps at the news. ‘We are going to take you to Shellingborne now. Only very good children go there, so all of you, and Penny, will have someone to take care of them.’

‘But mummy?’ I cried.

‘I know dear,’ Marion stood, ‘Now everyone take your bags. That’s good children. And get into the car. We are going to go to the home now.’

I sat in the back of the large brown car, with four doors and a boot as large as our front garden, I thought. I sat by the window with one twin by my side and another one on my lap as we all were driven dumbfounded out through the curling streets of our home suburb. My friends from school seemed to disappear from my mind with every minute in the car. Rows and rows of houses blurred by and stayed behind with our memories of our childhood home.

As the car stopped at a corner, a rush of cars streamed down the motorway and me and Andyroo gasped, looked at each other and then held hands behind Eddie’s back. When the car rolled into the busy thoroughfare, tears turned into sobs and then became painful for me as I could only think how our mother was lost to a busy road like this one. It was hard to imagine what happened. She was on a motorway and never came back? She could still be driving? But daddy died of a broken heart, so I guessed, mummy was never coming back.

I looked out the windows at the passing homes which became more sporadic as we continued along the motorway until nothing but farms and telegraph wires remained. I shifted in my seat and Andyroo closed his eyes. ‘Not much further,’ said Sonia, the other lady from the Salvation Army. ‘Shellingborne is a lovely, lovely home. You are very lucky to be accepted there. They must think you are very special children.

‘You know, I lived in a home like Shellingborne when I was growing up. I have so many happy memories and all the games to play and food to eat. But I knew it wasn’t as nice a place to live as Shellingborne. You are very special children.’

I was mixed with emotion and confusion by the time the car had turned into Southampton with a written billboard welcoming us there. ‘Nearly there now,’ sang Marion and turned the car into a wide road reminiscent of the roads we had left behind: the houses

still had rendered fronts but had more red brick exposed on the second-storey. Their front yards looked bigger too. The power lines still ran above the pathways but there were less children playing.

Then the car continued on past the homes, through a high street, past a tall building that looked like a place for men in suits to go and do their business work, like daddy used to. I imagined my father and his broken heart: standing one minute and upon hearing that his wife would not be returning, his heart just broke. He must have cried so much, I thought. If you cry too much you can die, I reasoned.

We could see the ocean now. ‘We are just getting there,’ said Sonia and the car turned down parallel to the beachfront and put its two tyres on the curb in front of a grand manor house which had more ladies in smart clothes waiting to greet us. Penny started to cry as the car doors slammed behind the Salvation Army staff. And I became terrified of the women who bent to hug each child on our arrival at the front door. Their big teeth were hedged by dark brown lips as they smiled at us, like they could suck us all through the grimy gaps in between.

II

I was known as Margie once, and my grip on the memories of my past are patchy, as my feelings for them are too.

When I was Margie I was key protector of the Rainer family: key protector of the baby, twins and Andyroo. Behind the tall home were the ‘sleeping cottages’, halls named after poets: Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Tennyson. I was with Ellie in Keats; Andyroo and Eddie were in Wordsworth. The five-windowed dormitories were made up of the one room full of bunk beds and a communal shower room, and they were always under the eye of Matron Clegg.

In the green lawn square that sat in the middle of all the cottages, the gang members were named: I was the Hen. Andyroo was Rooster and Eddie and Ellie were the chicks. But Penny was missing, so our first mission was to find and save her.

It was after breakfast, the home’s time, so I rounded my troops and led them down the back path through the green square to the main house. As soon as we were out of the warm summer air, the coldness of the Great Hall hit us. Barefoot, our exposed ankles attracted small biting insects; I felt a nip and rubbed it away. Nevertheless, the team inched up the stairs listening out for a crying baby or any staff member that could catch us from their lounge chairs on the first floor.

Andyroo Rooster was in charge of listening at all the doors to hear if Penny was in there, while the chicks kept an ear out for danger – any footsteps, whistling, shouting – any staff sounds – as me the Hen went ahead to lead the way if the coast was clear.

Cautiously, I sidestepped through the hall, Andyroo pressed his ears against doors and the twins stood guard at the top of the stairs. Downstairs the great door creaked open. Eddie and Ellie sucked in a breath and ran to me, who with Andyroo, ran along the hall runner to the second flight of stairs and oh so quietly tip toed our way up those. Positions were restored again on the top floor and I slid forwards again, back to the old oak panelled walls, the back of my head occasionally grazing the floral pink and purple wallpaper.

I reached the end of the hall undisturbed, not even by a sound of a baby. I turned to Andyroo, who was partly opening a door and scanning the room. He waved me over to show me a room full of cots: side by side like showing pairs in a game of Go Fish.

The team in the nursery whispered, ‘Penny? Penny?’ to each sleeping baby lying in a cot. Not one had turned up Penny. But I knew her. I picked up a sleeping Penny who was given a start. When the baby started, its face swelled up and it began to wail, and we knew we had a distance to cover to get back to the square. We picked up pace like rats scurrying to a hole in the wall.

Penny wailed as I carried her down the flights of stairs. The staff awoke from their Sunday morning papers and saw the dash of children running out towards the sunshine. The Matron used both arms to swing open the back doors of the hall and saw the scurry of children disappear behind the cottages. She followed the children and saw me with big eyes

shooshing Penny back to sleep in my arms. The Matron took the baby from me and said, ‘Penny will meet her adoptive parents tomorrow, you can say goodbye after breakfast then.’ And with that the Matron, with Penny, left.

The very next day, Penny’s adoptive parents were given a tour of Shellingborne Home for Children. Wasn’t it beautiful? Safe. Kind. Loving, they said. I followed their every step. I was interested in every facet and angle of the plans for Penny’s new home. ‘When she grows up, will she like that?’ I asked often. It annoyed the adults after the fifth time.

‘Margarethe,’ Matron Clegg snapped. ‘Of course she will. Don’t ask silly questions…’ She then laughed at the parents, wasn’t the child darling?

First they went to an empty classroom where five children were pasting cut outs from wrapping paper to blank paper trying to express a story, yet as the old wrapping paper was of the Christmas kind, it limited the stories the children could tell. The prospective parents nodded and smiled politely. Stories were told of Santa Claus climbing down the Christmas tree and Jesus sleeping under the chimney breast and other creations of that kind. Girls were also taught to sew by watching a staff teacher thread a needle to duck it in and out of cloth. Now it was time to see Penny.

We went to the nursery full of sleeping babies in cots – Penny’s pen, us children called it. We had to be very quiet before we went in the room and could not make a sound lest we wake the platoon. A staff lady dressed in a clean suit dress led us through the forest of cots to Penny’s crib. The prospective mother sighed and held her hands to her breast. This time as Penny was lifted she did not wake, but when the guests and the staff lady were downstairs, Penny wailed.

‘The colic seems to be behind her,’ said the boss lady, ‘but she doesn’t like to be woken as you can imagine.’

‘Oh yes,’ the prospective mother was still touched. She smiled and held out her arms, ‘Can I?’

‘Sure,’ and Penny was shifted from breast to breast.

Penny will cry, I was certain; she hates strangers and always will. She still looked like a turnip and she wasn’t old: she was still a pink lump with streaks of hair and eyes that rarely opened, but still, she was a Rainer and she will protest to this whole thing.

But, she didn’t cry. ‘Aw!’ the new mother was happy, she giggled quietly to not to wake the baby.

‘She must know you are for her,’ the staff lady said, ‘would you like to come to the office now and we’ll sort out the final papers?’ And with that the staff lady, father and mother and Penny went downstairs to the matron’s office.

‘Your sister is going to a better place now Margie,’ Matron Clegg placed her warm hand on my shoulder as they watched the new parents put Penny in their car. ‘A family to love her and look after her. Hopefully the same will happen for the rest of you. I am sure it will.’

*

The twins never asked questions; instead they kept a docile open view to everything. They haven’t grown opinions, I thought. Every now and then, however, one of the twins would ask me if mummy would like the picture they have made or if Pen Pen would come to church with everyone on a Sunday. I would only answer ‘no’ and after a time they did not ask about their mother or Penny again.

They were lucky, I thought, they could play all day and have afternoon naps. I would have liked afternoon naps but at almost 10, I had to learn instead. Me and Andyroo went to the local primary school for learning. Mr Trundleson was my teacher and he was nice to me, I was a good pupil – quietly to myself, though, I called him Mr Trumpet. Andyroo did not have a nice time at school. His teacher Miss Brown would always send him to the back of the class or send for the headmaster to wrap his knuckles.

The staff lady, Miss Gurston, told me not to worry. “He is probably a bit slow; he’ll grow up to be very clever.” And that was that.

Some of the games we played before dinner did not require much smarts, just listening skills. Because a lot of the time I was speaking and the rest were listening. The Rainers would sit in a corner and discuss their day; that is, I would talk about my day. Andyroo would not want to talk about his, and Eddie and Ellie would have just woken up and would be a bit irritable. I would cuddle them.

Games were games without toys and it was often the only thing to do; there was only one television and the staff watched that. No television was allowed during teatime either. After teatime all the children had to go to their sleeping cottage. Matron or another staff member would make sure we washed and brushed our teeth before sending everyone to bed. Sometimes a staff member would read a story, like those by Enid Blyton or the Hungry, Hungry Caterpillar on the big red round mat in the centre of the room with all the bunk beds around it.

Story time was lulling and magical and some girls would fall asleep on the circle mat. A staff member would pick the girl up and take her to her bunk after the story.

I never talked to the other girls, instead I would be with my brothers and sister when they didn’t have to sleep, eat or go to school. Together we could be in our own world: pretend to sip cups of my yummy tea – all warm, milky and proper – all guests at the tea party had to sit up straight. I would even prepare invisible scones with jam and cream for everyone - they were delicious.

The best game had to be when it involved running around to catch the little twins; they were so easy to catch. Eddie, dressed in his brown corduroy flare trousers and a little

yellow cardigan over his blue t-shirt, was clearly the faster of the two when Andyroo or I chased him. He would dart behind trees or hide in a sleeping cottage, once he closed his eyes so tight that the elder children played a trick, “I can’t see him,” I said. “Neither can I,” Andyroo chorused, until Eddie opened his eyes, darted looks at both me and Andyroo and burst out, “Here I am!”

“Margie?” Ellie asked one day, “Are we going to be adopled too?”

“I don’t know,” I said back, it was a fine autumnal day; I was relaxing back on the grass. “Why do you say that?”

“Miss Gurston said that one day we’ll get adopled.”

“Well, we’d have runaway by then,” I had a plan – a dream to fulfil very soon. “I am thinking that we can go back home and Andyroo and me will look after you and Eddie.” It was all planned; it just had to happen sooner now is all.

We had been training: I knew we’d be okay. Andyroo would be the dad, me the mum and Eddie and Ellie would be themselves. I had a kitchen by the tree and everything was in the fridge, I’d open it constantly to find things to eat. Andyroo would return from work, “I am home,” he would announce and sit on the grass. “What is for dinner?”

“Oh, I don’t know yet,” I said, wiping the table tops around me, “I have been so busy taking Eddie and Ellie to the toy store, they are happy now, and the car broke down again. You’ll have to pay £100 to get that back again.”

Andyroo growled “Rraarr!” and chased me about the lawn; I would hide behind the giant oak tree – which marked the space designated as my kitchen - but Andyroo always caught me and dug his knuckles into my arm. Andyroo was fast.

It looked like rain again, so we would go inside the Great Hall and wait for dinner. The dining room was a big room; in it would be five or six round tables and each sleeping cottage group would have to sit around the same table.

The dining hall wasn’t as grand as the rest of the hall, and the children were quite cramped in the muddy coloured room with green and yellow swirly carpet. On the walls, pictures of sea birds, the beach, waves and fish hung on an angle, but above the fire place was a picture of the Queen in her white ball gown and medals, I would stare and stare at that picture; it was so close.

The children would take their dishes to the kitchen as long as all our dinner was eaten. I stood on a stool and prepared to wash the dishes when it was my turn, so I let lots of hot water pour out the long tap into the large drum-like sink. Andyroo would talk to me: “I want to watch Doctor Who. I can’t believe I haven’t seen it at all here. I don’t know what is happening now.’

‘You should ask to watch it.’

‘Yeah but I don’t know. What if they don’t let me?’

‘They could, you just have to ask nice enough.’

A big adult arm reached across me and the hand twisted the tap shut. No more water, no more suds. I looked at Matron Clegg. ‘We still have a water shortage Margie. Do not waste water. That is quite enough.’

When the plump lady left I said to Andyroo, ‘Don’t ask her.’

Andyroo never asked about Dr Who, I remembered.

*

One morning after the words of doubt had left my mind, when I came to terms with the fact that the giant leatherback turtle was a truth only to my mind, I understood that I saw the mother perform the most important act of all – and that was to bring life to these shores.

It was now that I felt I was of a reasonable ability to protect the nest laid by a mother who could be anywhere in the dark endless ocean, anywhere in the depths and anywhere as far as the sea is long. But I would not have baby turtles hatch to a heartless world. I would not have them awaken to a beach displaying the typical disregard humans bring to any location they visit. I was too agitated by the disbelievers who did not think it was possible and thought it was impossible that a turtle would make her nest here. I saw it and a liar I was not.

So under the noonday sun, I had ventured to the location where I remembered the eggs were laid. I surveyed the area. Litter had been blown in from the main street, probably from the General Store at the top of the street by the strong westerly wind. A branch on a little shrub on the dunes caught a page of newspaper. The same could be said for at least four plastic bags on other dune shrubs. I had also passed aluminium cans between my holiday home and the edge of the sand – faded by the sun and wasting away from the erosive elements that everything on Lloergan Traeth endured.

I only had one skill I could draw upon for the incubating eggs – I could rid this ecosystem of rubbish. And if I was going to embark on that endeavour there was a lot of work to do.

My shadow left a long dirty streak across the beach and to the road. I followed its trail and walked by the white holiday lets to the General Store – a chalk board welcomed the passers-by by stating in big cartoonish letters that it’s ‘OPEN.’ I pushed the door that rang a small bell to which the store woman raised her head from behind a counter. ‘Hello,’ she said, her accent obviously of the area: Welsh, friendly and dotted with colour. ‘Can I help you, love?’

‘No,’ I said and looked past the cereal boxes, sweetie tubs and dishwashing liquid. I found three shelves filled with tools, superglue and all sorts of handy things that I thought men would find of interest. It must be a hardware section. And I started a search for my litter removal project there.

‘Are you building something, love?’ asked the shopkeeper. ‘We have nearly everything there.’

‘No,’ I replied and kept looking.

Gloves were the first things I saw and I saw bin liners. I reckoned they were all I needed to help tidy the beach.

‘Oh,’ said the shopkeeper as I approached the counter. ‘You off for a clean up, I suppose.’ The woman still remained friendly despite my tight glare in response to the prying. ‘That is good, that is,’ continued the woman. ‘Things do need to keep tidy, if the road isn’t covered with litter, the homes are untidy.’

Irritated still, I thought it better to prove the biddy - blonde, jeans and sensible yellow polo shirt – wrong. I didn’t know her. ‘I am “cleaning up”, as you say, the entire beach.’

‘Oh that’s good, some people have no respect. Want tidier sunbathing? That is good. I would like a tidy sunbathe.’

‘No,’ I said, taking some pleasure in disproving the lady’s assumptions. ‘I am tidying the beach for a turtle’s nest; I think it must be tidy for the hatchlings.’

‘Oh!’ the shopkeeper exclaimed. ‘That is good. I don’t know anything about turtles. I know they come close to the shores and you could see one if you went scuba diving. But a nest you say? Well I have never heard of that.’

‘Yes, well, no one seems to believe me.’ I grabbed my shopping bag and my change.

‘Oh well, I believe it. I just don’t know anything about turtles is all.’

The lady thought for a moment; her hands tapping her chin with straight fingers. ‘But I’ll tell you what. I have to pick up my eldest girl from school at four and then we are going to the library. I can pick up a book on turtles that come here and I will learn. But cleaning up is a good start I am sure.’ She nodded.

‘Thank you,’ I said. My expression softened to a tight lipped purse.

‘Come by later. I’ll have a book,’ said the shopkeeper.

‘Yes,’ I said and left with my gloves and bags and walked down the sunny loose stone road to the beach.

The shoreline seemed much messier than when I first saw it. There was nearly a full newspaper that had blown onto the dunes and there were many more cans if I looked hard enough. It was a big job. I slid on my loose gardener’s gloves with stitched red and blue stripes down the back of each hand, unrolled a bin liner and waded into the dunes to snatch each page of the newspaper away. This beach was not to be a tip any longer. The bee orchids could breathe and the skylarks could nest here, when I was finished with it.

Cans reflected sunlight into my eyes as I scanned the dunes for each shining piece of metal that could be hiding under any shrub or rock, or even the plastic bottles distorted by the sun’s rays could be hiding there. As I walked down the entire length of the beach I picked up more litter. Once I turned around after a couple of hours, I could see the impact I

had made on the beauty of the beach by picking up the litter. Down towards the wave shape imposed onto the rock face I could see Professor Robinson knee deep in the water filling test tubes and placing them in his shoulder bag.

Walking on a seashore at low tide made suction pop noises, making a surprise visit to John Robinson impossible. I navigated my way through the wet rippled sea bed that was much flatter and longer than I perceived it from the shore. I did not feel like the useless wheel on an ecology project that John Robinson made me feel like the last time I interrupted his work – which the biologist made me feel like again as I was stopped by his flexed palm and the many sticks pointing out of the water by his knees.

‘Do not come any further,’ he kept his balance in the knee deep water whilst keeping a hand out to stop me. ‘We can’t mess with the water gauges. These are temperature gauges. Very expensive temperature gauges.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I only wanted to say that despite any objections. I am cleaning the beach for the baby turtles to have a clean environment when they hatch.’

‘Excellent. Excellent,’ John Robinson did not take his eyes off a temperature gauge by his feet. ‘Although the turtles won’t come, it is always good for people to take an interest in keeping Lloergan tip top.’

I sighed. Of course that man would not change his opinion about what I saw. But gone was the respectful layman who first approached him with the story. In her place stood a woman who had more faith in herself than any anorak or authority figure would have if they did not believe what she had to say. ‘Well, I know what I saw and I am still doing what I can. I am offering you a chance to make sticking poles into the water a bit more interesting.’

John laughed to his chest; shook his head and picked up a thermometer, shook it around and wrote a small note on the notebook tied to his belt loop. ‘Well,’ he laughed, ‘All I can tell you now is that turtle sightings are not conducive to the sea temperatures that I am picking up. Never mind that it isn’t breeding season for leatherbacks.’

Infuriating, I thought. I shrugged my shoulders at the man in khaki overalls and wellies, his hat still more functional than attractive, and I turned to navigate my way through the smoothed waves of wet grainy mud. My feet making gloop noises as I left.

Like a holidaymaker, I sat by the spot where I knew the nest was and stroked the top with a flat palm for a while. And although I saw the marine biologist wasn’t looking at me, I stood up and in a visible huff charged home.

I threw pots and pans out of the cupboard, broke glass and emptied my bag contents all over the dirty bed. I needed a drink and picked up one of the many bottles of rum I had packed. I had not been in this frame of mind since I first arrived at the holiday home. My bottle of mixer was empty so I had nothing with which to enjoy my rum and I wasn’t keen on having the drink neat. I fetched my purse and flew out the front door. The sun was receding late in the day as I landed at the General Store. ‘Hiya,’ said the shopkeeper as the bell tingled and the door closed behind me.

Without saying a word, I walked straight to the shelves of evening beverages and grabbed a bottle of ginger beer. ‘Need some tonic for a bevvie, love? Here’s something cheaper,’ said the shopkeeper who opened another fridge door and took a plastic bottle out for me. ‘We went to the library too,’ she added. ‘I didn’t forget.’ And she took a large, flat book from under the counter and put it in front of me. ‘It isn’t about Lloergan say, but it talks about all the turtles that swim in these waters.’

‘Oh,’ I looked at it. It had an illustration of a turtle swimming to the surface of an ocean with green seaweed swaying on the floor. ‘Does this have information about leatherback turtles?’

‘I think so if they come here,’ said the peering shopkeeper reading the pages before I flicked over.

‘Can I read this?’ I took the book by my chest and paid the lady for the drink.

‘Of course, if you bring it back. You’re at the first flat aren’t you?’

‘I am,’ I took the bag of shopping. ‘I will give it back soon, it isn’t big.’

I left the woman, but not without asking her name, Delores, I repeated the name to myself. Delores, Delores.

At my flat, I twisted the cap from the fizzy drink and poured myself a large glass over a dash of rum. I sipped the drink. Sitting at the table, which served for everything - kitchen, dining, card, drinks - as it was the only table in the room, I opened out the book and read the first opening paragraph.

Turtles have a unique biology among the cold-blooded reptiles.

I skipped a few pages to a story about leatherbacks.

Leatherback turtles are critically endangered, in fact, at last count the global population came in at 34,000 nesting females. Leatherback turtles could be extinct in 20 years. They have almost completely disappeared from the Atlantic Ocean, often nesting in Florida, Mexico or the Caribbean. Therefore, coastal reserves and captive breeding programmes have been established to make sure the species do not disappear completely.

Gulping a drink down, I felt relief that the day was at an end. I was learning about the giant marine creatures now and no matter what that biologist said, I’d have some words to say next time I saw him. Just here, I exclaimed to myself, leatherbacks like the cold water. Leatherbacks have the distinction among the other sea turtles in that they have the circulatory system and internal shell structure to endure the cooler temperatures of the Northern Atlantic and dive deeper than other marine creatures. This is why they are often a regular sight in UK waters.

I mixed myself a straight drink of rum. I had drunk little of the thick chemically brew, like poison to the lips and fire to the throat, and I would mix the tonic with the next one. My red-rimmed eyes scanned the room and I moved my heavy legs one by one to the fridge. My hair was burdened with weeks of unwashed grease but I had no mind for aesthetics. I opened the salted shut window with a heave and looked out at the north and south of the seashore; I could jump out of that window and straight onto the shore in an

emergency. Suddenly the wind blew into the room and lost my page in the book. I shuffled back to my seat and poured some ginger drink for my rum.

I opened the book to where I had left it and read that turtles can live to up to 60 years and the newborns do not rely on the light of a full moon for direction to the ocean. This was a myth. But when sea turtles hatch they have the instinct to move towards the brightest direction, usually on a natural beach, it is the horizon out at sea. Therefore, beachfront lights must be turned off as it could confuse hatchlings when they try to find their direction.

I turned my lights off but opened the curtains. The sun wouldn’t set at this time of year until ten – it was British summertime - no light to be turned on after that. This was very important.

I read how a mother turtle would lay up to 120 eggs in a sitting – I thought I saw hundreds. I read more about what was becoming a sad life for the sea turtle, especially the leatherback, endangered, threatened, nearly extinct. The poor things confused plastic bags with jelly fish – their one abundant food source. A clean up was a good idea.

Interestingly, the eggs incubate for about two months on average. I had no idea when the eggs were laid – a week ago? A month? I had no idea but the grand hatching wasn’t too distant; I could still do my best for those underground: leg forming, body making brood ready for their journey to a tidy Welsh sea.

The big turtle I saw all that time ago would have weighed about 1,300 pounds too, I read, it was a giant. I vowed to look after those babies I said to myself, wiping my stringy hair from my glassy eyes. I took a sip of rum. Everything was going to be taken care of. I repeated to myself: lights out, bags out, beach clean. Lights out, bags out, beach clean. Lights out, bags out, beach clean.

I came to the chapter entitled Hatchlings.

Only about one in 1,000 survive to adulthood. They may not reach the ocean quick enough decreasing their chance of survival either by dehydration and drying out; or they could become prey to birds, crabs or other predators.

However, there was some hope: once the turtles hatched from a particular beach, and once grown, they will then return to that spot to lay their own eggs each year.

I almost wept now I had learned the turtle’s plight. Life had not even begun to disappoint them, in fact, life does not even rate for most of those turtles at all; they could all die. Maths brought out a dyslexia gene in me only seen at times of counting. If only 100 eggs were laid and there’s only one in 1,000 chance of survival then if any turtle makes it to the shore it would be a miracle.

I’ll save them. I stood up, swayed and stumbled out the door to the beach where the nest was. ‘Shh, shh,’ I said to the sand. The nest was about somewhere, ‘Don’t worry little eggs, I will save you, not your mummy, but I will do it. Don’t worry.’

My whispers were not as quiet as I wanted. I plonked my bottom on the sand and looked out to the moonlight dancing on the ripples of black sea covering all sorts of life underneath its glittering facade. With a little help from me, I was certain, I was going to

make sure they had the best chance of getting out to sea no matter if a supposed expert laughed at my attempts.

I sat there on the sand for at least half an hour until I stood and toppled backwards and then slept where I fell. A bass guitar sound streamed through the air and kept a pulse, rocking like a lullaby at an uneven count. Drums started the same beat but added a top cymbal flutter. Almost a minute later an electric guitar kept the same pulse as the bass. It was reggae music. I woke dozily. Had I slept? Voices sang along to what must have been music on a stereo turned up loud. There was a party. I could hear shrieks and laughter and male voices challenging, fighting and generally being boisterous. Young people, I was intrigued, excited and interested. I hadn’t been a teenager for such a long time. If they were anything like my neighbour in London then I had to prepare for a long night of this loud music.

The turtles! I realised they may be threatened by the pulsating bass, it might be heard underground. I walked to the street outside my holiday home and counted that the music was coming from two doors down. I would have to appear cool but firm with those guests, I thought. But I would have to be clear above all. If there were girls there, then they would care about the turtle babies, I was sure.

The music did not subdue. Fortunately there were not any other holidaymakers at the terrace cottages now, but there was me, the shopkeeper’s family AND the turtles. I knocked on the door, the same strong oak but less weather beaten than mine.

I pounded on the door, each rap incrementally louder than before, until I found myself pounding with both fists to be heard. ‘Hello?’ the door swung open abruptly. ‘Can I help you?’

The man looked like he had stepped out of a mini minor in the 70s, all the kids did so nowadays, I thought. ‘The music is a bit loud,’ I said. ‘There are people around here, not to mention there is wildlife. You are disturbing the wildlife.’

‘Wildlife?’ the man said, ‘I thought there are only sheep here.’

I shook her head. ‘No, not just sheep, there are birds and rabbits and turtles.’

‘Turtles?’ he pulled a face that said it was news to him. ‘Didn’t know that.’

He sounded well schooled and much more refined than me. I glared at him. ‘Oh, hold on,’ he said and disappeared behind the door. The sound was turned down. ‘Is that better?’ he sounded impatient, almost patronising.

‘Yes, thank you,’ I said, and disappeared myself down the street. That rude kid. But I was not finished and had to return another time. I had not even mentioned the light that was left on after the sun had gone down.

It was an hour later and the music pulsated loudly again in a Tropicana style. I did truly hope that it would stop. I was lying down in bed with my bottle and tonic pouring glasses and was only half awake. I groaned; the turtles! Rude kids, but I lay defeated. I was tired and paying the cost created by drinking too much the evening previous.

Glasses rattled to the off-beat. A melody cascaded down and then up making a singsong see saw that was only relieved by a voice of Kingston Town. In Keeengston Town… it warbled.

It was apt to say, I couldn’t sleep. Three o’clock in the morning and sadly it was not just because of the reggae tones, but what it came to represent: people disrespecting my newly found authority on the reptiles that were calling Lloergan their home. Not to mention Delores’s young family who lived here.

III

I knew early that Eddie and Ellie were to be taken that day - taken by lovely people, according to Miss Gurston. They couldn’t be lovely, I thought. If they were lovely they would send me, Eddie and Ellie and Andyroo back home. They would get Penny and then they would buy dinner and maybe teach me how to use the washing machine.

I sat with the twins and Andyroo behind Keats with our backs against the wall. The autumn breeze was cool so Eddie wore his smart brown corduroy trousers and orange knitted cardigan. Ellie had her hair braided and her best flowery pink dress on. The staff had told them that morning to look smart, sharp. Eddie was handsome, don’t you think? And Ellie was the prettiest thing around - from Southampton to Portsmouth. I couldn’t smile about this. They were waiting to be found by the Shellingborne staff to be taken away like a bag of apples at the greengrocers.

We could hear the staff calling out for them from the square. Holding our mouths with both hands Andyroo and I giggled with a snort. The twins did the same. Time, though, was now obviously short. ‘Make sure I see you again,’ I said, ‘Don’t forget us. Always remember Andyroo and me.’ My voice was breathy, quiet, with an added hint of desperation.

Ellie put her arm over my shoulder. I wouldn’t cry but I hated the business of being separated. One by one, the youngest children were being picked like plums in a bucket. Andyroo and me were all that was left.

‘Don’t end up like them and change and not be a Rainer anymore.’ I didn’t look at them. It was no use saying this. The twins didn’t understand.

‘Here they are!’ a triumphant voice bellowed with a lilt of relief. ‘Hiding behind here,’ Miss Gurston stood above us and waved the others over. She looked smart too. Her hair was tied up, her skirt suit was pressed and she wore bright plastic jewellery.

The matron and the new parents came around the corner and saw the wide eyes of the twins and the wet eyes of mine. The jig was up. ‘Naughty children,’ growled the round woman. But we’ve never got into serious trouble. Just called naughty. I didn’t know why. I was making no trouble at Shellingborne Home for Children that the staff was privy to.

The staff took Eddie and Ellie by the wrists and walked with the new parents back to the Great Hall. The twins followed but looked back at me. I did not rise and did not follow them. I had given up. ‘Margie!’ cried Ellie not understanding what was happening.

I sighed and struggled up from the grass and followed them to the main hall. I knew the process; they will talk to the twins and then go to the office to sign papers. I waited by the office with my arms crossed.

‘Uncross your arms and cheer up,’ Matron sternly instructed after the twins had left in the car. The staff waved them off. ‘No games anymore. You and Andrew must do your best here and perhaps we’ll be rid of you too.’

She left and I, with straight arms, my head up, had grown a smile. I constructed it just to make the matron leave. Only me and Andyroo were left now. With the little ones gone, we would have to wait until someone would like Big Kids. Who would want big kids? I wasn’t so cute anymore but my mother used to tell me I was beautiful as she brushed my hair before bedtime. No one brushed my hair now. The staff would tell me to do it myself, but I didn’t unless I was going to school and I only brushed my hair for school every so often but not that often. Often enough, but it was my mother’s job. She used to do it really very well.

One day potential parents came to see me but they wanted someone younger. I was of the age now where I would have to do a lot of work around the home for prospective parents to like me. ‘They would need someone to sweep the floors and clean the windows. So you better practice,’ the staff would tell me. A cleanly house was next to Godliness. Miss Gurston would say, 'All girls have house chores.'

Now that the babies had gone away, Andyroo and I were left to talk to the other children. I made a friendship with a younger girl called Renèe who was six. She followed me everywhere. Sat next to me at dinner and joined in the games I organised for me and Andyroo. She even tried to talk about her day after school. It should only be me who talked about my day. But Renèe made me think of what Penny would be like if she grew up to be six. But she wasn’t Penny.

‘I can spell nearly,’ said Renèe.

‘No you can’t,’ I retorted.

‘I can.’

‘What can you spell?’ I knew that six year olds only learned the alphabet.

‘A, B, ssseee, kkkk,’ Renèe made letter sounds.

‘That’s not words.’

‘C A T! Cat!’ Renèe was defiant, proud.

‘Well, you can spell one word, whoop de do.’

I felt a cloud grow over me then. I knew that seeing my brothers and sister was nearly impossible – they would probably grow up not remembering me. My parents dying ruined everything. I felt that everything was ruined.

The day was clear. Renèe’s hair was brushed. Long and straight. Not messy like the Rainers, and it was yellow. ‘I hate yellow hair.’ I was grumbley.

‘Why?’ Renèe asked. Why indeed.

‘I just do.’

I sat cross-legged on the grass; it was dewy, still damp from the drizzle that fell an hour before. My elbows fitted between my shins. My chin sat in my hands. I sat up only to pick at the grass; there was no point in playing. Andyroo was in the house, the rest were nowhere but anywhere. That yellow hair flew in a gust of wind that gave me a chill. I stood and grabbed at that hair.

‘Ow!’ Renèe screamed and pushed me away.

‘Oh boo hoo,’ I taunted and pushed her to the ground.

‘Ow!’ Renèe said louder. She could catch the attention of the staff with those ‘ows.’

I pushed Renèe again when she stood up. ‘Ow!’

‘Get up again. Get up again!’ I instructed. Renèe got up so I pushed her down. ‘Ow! Stop it!’ and Renèe started crying. Annoyed, I crouched down and pushed her again and again until my pushes turned into hits. Pound pound pound, went my fists until Miss Gurston’s attention darted towards the girl laying flat and my hammering fists, ‘Stop that,’ Miss Gurston screamed. ‘Stop that right now!’

The stern looking lady dressed in a shirt and knee-length skirt horse-stepped across the grass in her high-heeled shoes and pinched and pulled me to my feet by the ear. I didn’t utter a sound but mouthed the words I hate you to the shakened girl on the lawn.

‘I will have your guts for garters, Margarethe,’ said the lady pulling me to the Great Hall. ‘You were always a good girl but the Devil is making work for idle thumbs. So I think the appropriate punishment for hurting poor Renèe is to wash all the floors, varnish the balustrades and wash all the windows top to bottom.’

Life at the home was never the same but some things were the same – Andyroo and me were inseparable. Under the giant oak tree we would congregate to talk about each other’s day. Andyroo had something to say this evening. The sun was a couple of hours away from setting; the sky was almost silver from the slowly evaporating light.

‘It is strange how everyone is going,’ he started, ‘but they are happy I spose.’

‘They are not happy.’ I said, neatening the fold of my skivvy neck. ‘I think we should find where they are.’

‘Why?’

‘Because…’

I didn’t add further to the because because there was no reason, no need to explain. It was Obvious. I was tired; I had been so busy doing chores. So busy caring. So busy planning, mulling, scheming, working. Ever since I had started bullying too, the staff had given me a lot of chores to do. Every time they saw a chore to do they would call for me, it seemed. I could see now why my father would spend time at the pub after his work. He was tired too. Going to the pub must have been a way to relax.

‘I bet in the office there are facts. There is where addresses and stuff are.’

‘What addresses?’ Andyroo asked.

‘Where they are.’ I was tired. My words were hardly a call to action.

‘No,’ replied Andyroo, ‘But they are happy now. In a happy home. It is sad here. The staff don’t cuddle. They only give you work to do. I think getting adopted is good. Hope I get adopted.’

I scratched at the grass with a dry leaf. If I looked up my true feelings about Andyroo’s comment would be known. I was hurt by what he said. We were best friends. But I was not surprised. ‘You probably will get adopted,’ I said.

‘You will get adopted too.’

Andyroo would get adopted because he was such a good boy. I was told that good little children get adopted. I wasn’t good.

‘You will be adopted cos everyone wants an Andyroo,’ I said; the sun was disappearing behind the perimeter fence. I sighed. ‘I am too naughty.’

Andyroo didn’t say anything in response to that - the statement of truth floated by like a breeze washing silence across our mouths. No one looked at each other. I noticed the geese flying in a loose diamond to their nests far away. Andyroo was picking the grass around his feet. He stuck his nail through the middle of a blade of it. He brought it to his lips and blew. ‘Urgh,’ he sounded. It didn’t work; it was supposed to whistle. He brought another sliced grass to his lips and tried again. ‘Ffft,’ he made a sound. ‘Urgh,’ he grunted; he tried again. It took five goes before it worked. The whistle was surprising.

‘You’re not really going to get Penny and Ellie and Eddie?’ Andyroo asked, spitting bits of grass from his lips.

‘Probably not.’ I could feel an insurmountable weight of the thought of disrupting the little ones in a happy home. I wouldn’t dare. The staff members were big. They would win.

‘They are probably happy now,’ said Andyroo. He still looked to the ground, picking grass miserably.

‘We probably won’t see them again,’ I said.

‘We might, but they would have their adoptive parents with them. Having new parents is weird.’

‘It is weird. I don’t like it.’

‘I don’t like it either.’

I went to the kitchen to help with food preparation. Whoever was cooking would always appreciate a hand, the staff had told me. I was sent to set the table and with an armful of brown flowered tablecloths and fistfuls of cutlery, I entered the dining room.

Flapping the cloths over the tables first I then placed knives and forks and spoons in lines in front of each chair. Seven places for seven chairs on ten tables. That’s everyone. Tonight we were eating stew. Stringy beef bits with carrots and potatoes and greens in gravy. My little siblings probably ate the same AND had desert every night. That’s what a happy home would have, I thought. Ice cream, apple crumble and custard and cake. No rhubarb. Children at the Shellingborne Home always had rhubarb and custard one night a week – on Sundays.

‘Oh never mind us,’ said Delores when I came to see her the next day. ‘We live at the main town a couple of miles away from here. But I’m sorry to hear some kids playing loud music. I will talk to them.’ She smiled.

‘That’s good,’ I said. I paid a visit to the shopkeeper as soon as I awoke mid afternoon the next day. ‘I was more concerned with the turtles than me. I don’t know if they can hear it?’

The shopkeeper looked bright with her makeup that seemed like a daily regime of blue eye shadow, mascara, foundation and pink lipstick. She wore a lilac polo shirt today with the jeans she always wore. ‘Oh they could,’ Delores agreed. ‘They say babies can hear in the womb.’

‘I didn’t even begin talking about their lights on after dark…’ I started but trailed off.

‘Oh, I can’t tell them to turn their lights off,’ said Delores, ‘They might think that’s a bit much.’

I straightened my neck. I would have to tell the strangers the whole story about the turtles myself and why their house lights must be off to save the younglings’ life. ‘It would be enough to tell them to keep the music down.’ I started a smile and left the General Store with a readymade sandwich, bread for toast and another bottle of ginger beer. ‘I still have the book…’

‘You’ve got another week with that love.’

I walked unsteadily outside to the main street wearing the clothes I wore yesterday; I dragged my feet through the sand at the side of the road. I was wobbly, worried and perturbed by the sounds of a Caribbean songbook giving me a wakeful night last night. Before that, I put a bottle of rum away down my throat. The memories of the event compelled my eyes to shut.

I stood at the beach and realised I had not presented myself well enough to speak like the commander to the merry makers last night; I was a common sea harpy de la mer.

I felt the warm salty breeze on my face and breathed it in. The sun was shining above the sea making the waves dance with light. It was good weather Wales was enjoying this summer. I returned to my holiday home but I stopped in my tracks. A long tailed unshorn shaggy sheep bleated at my plastic bag. The beast had a dark blue triangular shape spray painted on its coat and another shape spray painted on its head. Its ears were deformed into twists. At a second glance it was clear that the ears were damaged and cut

into two. Quickly I disappeared through my front creaking door and closed it quickly. Meeee, I could hear the sheep outside. I rummaged through the cupboards and fridge. I did have some bread. I saw it sitting brightly in my plastic bag. I grabbed a handful of slices and quickly threw it on the road for the sheep. I peered out of the cloudy window by the front door and watched the beast chew on the discards left on the ground. When it finished, it bleeted again. Why was a sheep wandering wild at Lloergan Traeth? The farm was not separated by boundaries where the field finished and the reserve started. I wondered if there were more sheep where that came from. Maybe they wandered the mountain range far in the distance: its blue shadow protected the bay with a hug radiated by its sheer dominating presence.

The sheep was shaggy; its wool had been left to grow until its coat nearly touched the ground. It was hard to imagine that the soiled mane would be shorn and one day spun into a usable yarn. Its locks were almost knotted into dreadlocks; it needed a good comb. Meee, it said. It became as docile and still at my door like it was in a standing trance for almost two hours. Then the reggae music started again and the sheep departed my front door to follow its source.

I stayed indoors all afternoon and listened to the bass sound again. It knocked the glasses and vibrated the floor of the home. I prayed Dolores would be annoyed enough to do something about the reggae music. This wasn’t an island party, I thought, although I relished in the idea of sitting poolside with some rum punch in my hand, the music dotting stars in the sky. The music stopped. Delores, who I could hear faintly down the road said, ‘okay, love, tar rah…’

I was just getting used to the music now but didn’t even miss it a little when it was gone. I meandered out through the wasting doorframe with paint peeling away from it, down the steps and to the sandy road which was disappearing further under a cover of the white stuff with each passing day. The estuary was nothing but a rabbit infested grassland to me today; nothing but green grass and rabbit droppings across to the musty dark mountains far into the distance. The dune banks consisted of a splattering of dry grass and some red fish netting covering a corner of the plant life – that was rubbish, I would discard of that immediately.

I loathed Lloergan’s disposition to attract muck from the sea. I slowly bent over to pick the red net off the marram grass; I almost stood on a bee orchid as I pulled. I stayed on the spot and surveyed the land that played host to all sorts of oddities: from rare and beautiful flowers that find true perfection as they grow to the wild barnyard animals free from the confines of organised agriculture.

The sun left its place in the sky slowly and clouds moved in overhead. I shifted indoors and pushed the netting under the sink. I could not bring myself to finish another bottle of rum but twisted open the cap and poured myself a glass. The music grew louder again. Could reggae music be relaxing, I considered. Its lulling beats and easy going melody enticed my head to sway and I repeatedly said no, no, no.

A strong smell of deep chlorophyll filled my nostrils and intoxicated my drifting mind. It was a highly distinguishable odour of dry plant and fresh natural smoke: like fresh chopped grass mixed with a drop of booze. Someone was smoking marijuana outside. Although it had been sometime since I had smelt anything remotely like it, the experience of what it meant to me was of social togetherness, relaxation, a gathering. I could remember

that odour like I could remember the flats high in London and the purple walls in my neighbour’s home. Those kids must have made their way to my side of the beach. I whisked myself outside.

I could see the impression of a lone man on the seashore looking out to a small fishing boat anchored to the floor about 20 metres out to sea and he was smoking. ‘How are you girl?!’ he exclaimed, he seemed almost in admiration of me.

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I thought you were the kids.’ I turned around.

‘No, no, no,’ he said, smiling. ‘I am no keed but you stay, we’ll check out this lovely ocean.’

The black man had his trousers rolled up to his knees. He was bare foot and wore a white tank top and his long dreaded hair was tied back. His voice rolled off his lips like the smoke he blew to the sand. I wanted to leave and could not remove the look of polite fright from my face.

‘Don’t be scared. Look!’ He pointed out to his boat where fish flip flopped about it. ‘Have you ever seen it? The fish just want to go in the boat. They want to be feeshed man.’ He laughed at his joke and blew smoke through his teeth. ‘I don’t want to go back through da water, you know? The fish might go!’

I stared. A most peculiar smell hung about the fisherman like dead fish poisoned by nettles, and green flies flew around his face and crawled up to his lips which he blew away with his stale vegetable breath. But as he pointed to his boat, he was amazed with the absurdity of the fish, not quite flying but throwing their bodies out from the water to his boat. Although he wasn’t there to catch those ones with his net, they fell back to the water only to try again. ‘It tis amazing,’ he said. He sounded Caribbean.

He lit another joint and held it in his lips. I was quite taken by the tall, endlessly casual man. He jotted his eyebrows up in a double salute and he waded back into the clear water, the fish dispersing as he approached. He waved goodbye and climbed into his small boat under the mellow sunshine. After a moment the fish returned to their sky bound play and the Islander brought out a small hand net and scooped some of them up, tipped them into his boat and started the single motor. He turned the dinghy around and jetted away to the deep of the dark blue ocean. He was gone.

How strange? I told myself and the music grew louder as I walked back. The flies had left with that man and so had the pot. I only had my rum to drink, but I felt the pull for something stronger. The moment I turned to walk back to my shelter I noticed the party had collected many bits of wood, including chair legs into a pile and were attempting to light it. A bonfire. A bonfire! Common sense told me that a fire would be worse than house lights to confuse turtles. There was no time like the present, like the matron used to say, to get the job done. Instead of walking to my holiday home, I made a path for the firebugs who were struggling to light the thing.

A boy crouched at the pile of wood, he snapped at a sparking lighter over and over, until another boy jumped to it with a box of matches. Covering the lit tip with a cupped hand, he managed to light the scrunches of paper underneath the logs and blew and covered

with his hands and blew and covered. ‘It is a matter of controlling its air at this stage, no wind but wind, you know?’ the boy said.

As I walked along the Lloergan shoreline, I felt like their mother, if their mother was a harpy from the sea. The group of four boys and two girls looked up, their heads held high like startled seagulls. I arrived to address the group who immediately returned to their frivolous chattering and upon my arrival. ‘Ahem,’ I coughed. Some looked at me, smiled and continued giggling. A taller man of the group stood up and walked to me. He seemed mature, I thought.

‘Can I help you?’ he said.

‘Ah,’ I started. I was a bit dry, a bit taught, and I felt a bit too righteous. ‘I am here to see your fire. Bit much, don’t you think?’

‘Oh is it a bit much?’ returned the youngling.

‘No, not for me,’ I said, ‘but I want to make sure it isn’t too distracting for the turtles when they hatch, you see?’

‘Oh, it’s not distracting,’ said the boy who took my old arm and motioned for me to join them. ‘You’ll see, come have a drink.’

‘A drink’ were the magic words and I rather weakly sat on the damp sand in the circle with the others. ‘Hi,’ said a girl. ‘I am Emily.’ There was also a Mike, Travis, Dunlop, a Mary and the more charismatic male who brought me to the circle was David. They were all young and it was July, they must be students, I thought, on their summer holidays. All English and their accent sounded educated.

‘I’m Margarethe. I’m here to see your fire.’ The group giggled.

‘Yes,’ said David. He put a drink in my hand. ‘Have that. Relax.’ He jumped down into an empty space in the circle and sat crossed legged.

I took a sip of the sugary brew. Rum was in it, I could guess. Sweet, strong and warming. I could garner a lot of information from a drink. Cheap, I concluded. These were definitely students.

I studied the fire while the kids resumed chatting. Could it damage the turtlings’ journey back to sea? There was not much I could ascertain when the sun was still a couple of hours from setting. I knew the moon was waning and it was still a bright source of light above the ocean, but if this fire was brighter than the horizon, the turtles would soon miss their miss their target – to return to the sea and be with their mother.

‘What do you do?’ asked Mary, her hair in pigtails, the rest of her garb all loose and flowing. Hippy ideals, I could assume.

‘Oh nothing. A PA sometimes,’ I said. ‘I am in between jobs, I suppose, I am here on holiday until I would like to return to London.’

The group gasped sounds of envy and desire. Wouldn’t they like that, they agreed, only if they didn’t have to go back to university. ‘Why’d you like to do that?’ I asked, I sounded rather schoolmarmish.

‘If we could!’ Emily made animated faces. ‘My mum would have a fit!’

Mine too, mine too, echoed the young holiday makers.

I had almost finished my drink. It left a sweet coconut taste on my lips. I shrugged and stared out to the long flat sea, the little waves played gently under the setting sun.

‘My father,’ said Travis, ‘Would cut me off completely if I left. I have had a gap year. Now I must knuckle down,’ he impersonated a strict man, ‘I should be in finance. ‘Make the big money,’ he grumbled his words again.

‘Good for you,’ I said. ‘Your father sounds very wise.’

‘Yeah,’ Travis whined his words, ‘it would be cooler if he just relaxed. I am doing okay at school.’

The party had transformed into a therapy circle, the sort that someone would be paid to attend. I soon grew bored. I took another sip of my brew. I wondered if the General Store was still open. The sun started its descent down the back of the sky and the fire started to rage. It also sounded as though those kids have had this conversation many times before. ‘You’d be lucky to be earning that sort of money those fellows in the City can earn,’ I looked into my cup.

‘Oh yeah,’ said Travis, ‘I would work in the City while I was young and then retire off the money.’

‘Once, you’re in there it might be hard to quit,’ was all I wanted to say to the boy, who just shrugged. These kids did not want to be serious.

New music filled what space uncomfortably sat between me and the group. David said, ‘I love Lee Perry,’ as he returned from the house and jumped into his position again.

‘You people love your reggae,’ I said.

‘Reggae? Yes,’ said the young man, ‘But this is dub.’ He started nodding to the quick syncopated and broken beats.

I started to feel uncomfortable. Reggae, dub, whatever it is, I scrunched up my nose. My bottom started to feel damp, the sun was setting, my drink was finished and the fire was too bright.

I stood up. ‘First of all,’ I started, ‘That fire is too bright for the turtle hatchlings and your lights should go off after dark – that will only kill the turtles.’

‘Kill?’ said Mary.

‘Yes, kill. Kill, kill, kill! A bonfire on the beach is disruptive at the best of times for all the life around you. So it should go out or you should go home,’ I was commanding

now. ‘Turn your lights off in the house and do not have a bonfire lit after dark. The turtles, you see. The turtles will get lost and die. And my drink has finished and you’re all spoilt.’ I turned quickly and marched back to my let to the mocking sounds of the turtles, the turtles behind me. The group laughed too. I closed my door behind me and I could hear the party atmosphere and the music. Reggae, dub, whatever it was.

*

It was a special day. Matron Clegg had entered Keats and told the girls to put their best dress on – everyone had pretty dresses from their life of old. I had a white dress with pink flowers and a blue clover print all over the bottom half. It made me feel pretty even though the top cut under my arms and the spaghetti straps dug into my shoulders. I hadn’t worn the dress for a year and I had outgrown it.

Out in the square the children assembled. All were in their good suits or best dresses and some of the lucky ones had a hat, even though some looked too small. The group had to look good because the Queen would see them; the staff said they would tell if we weren’t neat and tidy. I didn’t believe them; I had been at the children’s home for a year with Andyroo. I didn’t believe the tales they told to make us behave: don’t make that face because the wind might change; the road to hell is paved with good intentions, cleanliness is close to Godliness; the devil can quote Scripture for his own ends.

But today was a special day. It was the Queen’s Jubilee and we all had special flags to wave at the roadside.

The walk we embarked on to Portsmouth was made longer for me as my stiff, white plastic shiny shoes refused to bend with my steps. Andyroo walked by my side, our heads down, not talking, just walking step by step to the next town, the sun radiating burns onto our heads. We could see the border of Portsmouth coming closer as we approached. The tops of factory chimneys stuck out like lit cigars and small roadside homes sat very close to the footpath. The sparse sproutings of rose trees neglected in gardens were littered with newspapers and plastic bags blown in by the gusts of air whirled up by cars speeding down the nearby M275.

Entering the modest rows of red brick terrace houses the children walked single file in front of the homes on the narrow embankment of dried lawn. I held the hand of the boy behind as well as the girl in front. ‘Nearly there, children,’ alerted Matron Clegg, ‘one more mile and then we can see the Queen.’

When the main road in the middle of town was in our sights, we walked in the cover provided by food stall covers hiked high on caravans. The smells of sausages and ham effused the hot air. I was tempted to beg for an ice cream and a cool drink from under the giant umbrella keeping a fridge on wheels in the shade. ‘Here we are,’ said Matron Clegg, removing a tiny fold out chair from her large carrier bag onto which to place her large bottom. She propped open a parasol to balance on her shoulder and pushed her sunglasses up onto her nose so light didn’t shine in her eyes, although they faced the sun. She noticed a boy sitting on the bitumen. He bounced pebbles and pretended to catch them as they stuck

to the road. ‘No sitting on the road please Kevan!’ hollered Matron Clegg, too established to move herself from her view of the road. ‘We must look smart for the Queen. Dust yourself off - on your bottom!’

A sea of Union Jacks quivered like wind bustling all the leaves in a forest on both sides of the wide road. The crowd was abuzz with news of what the Queen will look like. What will she wear? What will she do? The wait now was for a car; just like the one in which she was a passenger on the London leg of the Silver Jubilee Tour. It was an open top Mercedes Benz with the Duke of Edinburgh by her side. She wore lilac in London and she was beautiful, said a woman stranger to Matron Clegg.

Miss Gurston had disappeared. ‘Where is she?’ Matron Clegg said, flapping a newspaper to fan her face. ‘I am not keeping her spot.’ Next to the matron was a twin fold out seat just wide enough for another adult to sit on.

Then the youngest staff member side stepped through the crowds making her way to the group. She was carrying a large plastic bag with Elizabeth and Phillip in regalia on the front. She showed the children plates and spoons to commemorate the special day. Souvenirs they were. ‘Won’t they look nice on the mantle above the fireplace at home? It will look nice under the portrait of her.’

The sea of people turned to their right. Heads darted up, looking left and right. ‘Is it her?’ ‘I heard it was her.’ ‘Where is she?’ ‘I can’t see over people’s heads.’ The talk turned to a hush. Those behind stood on tippy toes. ‘To the front children!’ directed Matron Clegg. ‘Flowers out now and remember your curtsies and bows, like we know how to do.’

Matron Clegg had shown everyone what to do if the Queen passes by. Curtsy, smile, hand flowers out. Wait for her to take them. Don’t push them in her face. Every sentence should finish with Ma’am. Don’t talk first. Answer questions politely. Nicely. If you are asked to say where we are from, say Shellingborne Home for Children. Don’t say Orphanage. Don’t say a home.

She was near. People gasped at the realisation. The monarch took slow steps along the crowd accompanied by minders and the Duke of Edinburgh. Then silence. I could hear children tell the stories of their Nursery School to the Queen and hand small bouquets to her. ‘She is wearing Mint Green!’ Miss Gurston whispered to the matron. She wasn’t that quiet. People looked at her.

‘And who are you?’ the Queen had asked Renèe!

‘I am Renèe Ma’am,’ Renèe curtsied and held out her flowers.

‘Where are you from, Renèe?’

‘Shellingborne Home for Children,’ she replied.

The Queen walked to the next group of children. Excited boys and girls. Why did she talk to Renèe? The thought hung in my mind like a heavy pebble with spikes. I was happy when Renèe was adopted.

‘Wait here,’ yelled Andyroo and he left me on the road not far from the home. He ran up ahead and bent over what appeared, to me, as nothing at all, but he picked up a ten pence coin. ‘Saw that from where you were,’ he remarked.

‘You’re a magpie,’ I said.

We found the unmarked sandy pathway to the ocean. It led to a hideaway so during our scheduled playtime we could escape to the beach.

On that day when the sun shined bright and the breeze was so gentle it was nothing to speak of, Andyroo was interested in everything and all the adventures we could embark upon. He kept saying ‘Me matey, ar hargh,’ which annoyed me, as there were no pirate roles for girls.

First, we dug a hole in the sand where the ocean could wash in bringing in a sea creature that would need our help. This sea creature, Andyroo explained, would have been waiting for us to arrive and prepare the basin in which it could hide – hide from the evil crabs with giant claws that use other creatures for slaves. The slaves who could get away from the evil masters would ride a wave to the safety of the hole. After we waited for the tenth wave, nothing turned up. After the fourteenth, sixteenth, twenty-seventh wave, Andyroo resolved, ‘They must be okay today.’

Games in the sun were short lived as our pink skin turned tender and our sweat turned bits of our summer clothes wet. Us saviours sat under the nearest weather-beaten tree and made a base that the marine-life could find if they washed to shore. Andyroo would keep an eye out for them. He did find the ten pence coin from fifteen feet away.

We made mountains and castles with our feet and miniature holes with our heels, until the heat of the day took the last of our energy away.

Instead we remembered. Remember Penny, I asked. Oh yeah, replied Andyroo. She must be happy now, we supposed, she would grow up to a whole new world and not know that she came from a family. A family where she had older brothers and sisters. At least she wouldn’t remember the home. We both agreed to be happy for that.

‘Margarethe! Andrew! Yoo hoo!’ cried a woman’s voice.

Oh no it’s the staff! I followed Andyroo’s lead. We swivelled, spun and laid flat on the sand with our faces in our hands. Hidden. I doubted that we were hidden and looked up. Miss Gurston struggled her way across the beach, each step looked harder to make than the last, a newspaper shading her eyes from the sun. ‘Yoo hoo!’ she waved from afar and walked to the hideaway-children who soon sat up. ‘Children,’ gasped Miss Gurston, ‘We have been calling out for you for a while. Do be careful, Matron needs you to be ready.’

Blank faces returned Miss Gurston gasps of information. She panted from her chest, out of breath. ‘You have to be ready for our visitors.’

‘Why?’ said Andyroo.

‘Some prospective parents want to have a look at you,’ Miss Gurston explained to the boy.

‘What!’ I exclaimed. ‘Is Andyroo going away!?’

‘It is not finalised, dear. We don’t know until they meet. They know all about you,’ she sounded kind and caring to Andyroo. ‘They want a nice strong boy to look after.’

‘I am sick of this…’ I pouted, my head to my chest; left alone in the home was a reality too soon for me to endure.

‘Never mind Margie, you will always be close to Andrew still if he went with these parents. You can visit him if you were fostered too and Andrew could visit you. The prospective parents know that you two are brother and sister and should remain in touch.’

The woman gave her clucky laugh and almost squished the children with a reassuring hug but stood up before she lost her stiff composure. She explained that older children would be put into foster homes and that they can stay with a real family that would look after them and make sure they still go to school. Foster parents, Miss Gurston said, were the loveliest people of all because they look after children out of the goodness of their heart. We walked back up the unmarked path to the road, and with our heads down, us sullen children trod up the stone pathway to the home.

I became annoyed with Andyroo and his way of looking on the bright side. Leaving with the Hamilton’s could be great and they could be rich and kind AND have a dog. Andyroo wanted a dog to play with. I didn’t believe this and did not share his enthusiasm. ‘Still,’ I said, ‘our family would be over.’

‘No it won’t,’ said Andyroo neatening and patting down his good clothes that Miss Gurston instructed him to wear when the pair returned to the home. ‘Miss Gurston said we would visit each other.’

Two adults waited at the front door of the Great Hall and greeted Andryroo with a hand shake and said, hello boy. I skulked back into the shadows. I didn’t care for Andyroo anymore anyway.

‘Say goodbye, Margarethe,’ instructed Matron Clegg.

‘Bye,’ I said quickly raising my hand half way to full waving position.

‘Bye Margie,’ said Andyroo happily, ‘We’ll see each other soon.’

Which, of course, we didn’t. I watched Andyroo in his good clothes walking down the pathway to a big silver Volvo; the mother woman’s hand gently rested on the back of Andyroo’s head - the father man was ahead opening the car door on the driver’s side. Andyroo sat in the back seat and waved ardently out of the window.

IV

It was only a few hours later when this old woman decided to go to bed. It was precisely three in the morning when I first cast my eyes out through the salty window to a night time as dark as mourning jewellery before I would shut them to sleep. I beheld the silver sea and a waning moon. In the haze of the dulled horizon, I could see my own white, bony hands scrunch the white sheet that covered me on the uncomfortable bed where I slept.

The reggae music had come to a stop, so abruptly the holiday homes shook as the foundations readjusted. They were outlandish, rebellious and crazy kids, I thought – students without the authority to keep them in line. By choice they had decided to holiday away from their normal society and chose a break that meant they had freedom at the expense of all around them. I didn’t hold much hope for the turtles when they were here.

Something knocked like a pellet at the door. Thump. There it was again. Something hard was tapping at the door but I heard whatever it was fall with a bump on the steps outside. Thump. There it was again. I pulled the bedclothes up to my chest. ‘Students!’ I thought immediately. I could almost hear the whispered sniggering. Thump, it hit my door again. It was likely that some of those uncivilized holidaymakers thought knocking at my door would be an entertaining pursuit before bed. I heard the sniggers followed by a thump.

I could not deny the fact that the culprits were who I thought they were and that I would have to make an example of them, if I could. Despite the commotion at the door, I fell asleep mumbling acts of revenge.

No sooner had I fallen asleep cursing the existence of students in Lloergan, I awoke to a bright new day with only seagulls and a fluttering flight of waves appearing on the shoreline. I made myself a coffee and planned to take it outside but was halted at the door. I saw outside along the steps and down on the sandy road litters and litters of rabbit droppings. At first I couldn’t think why a rabbit – known for its tidy piles of poop along the farm - would be scattered about so, until I remembered the thumping on the door when I retired to bed. I stood there for a moment, looking, and it was obvious by some of the flattened droppings that the students had trodden on them as they escaped back down the beach.

There was no sound coming from the holiday lets where the students usually played their loud music despite the protests from me and Delores. But I had made it quite clear that I was fine with the merriment they had brought to the beach but if anything was going to disturb the turtles – such as lights on at night time or booming bass – they would have to answer to me.

I decided to check on the nest on the beach; the spot where the mother entrusted to be a safe haven for her babies. There was not a sign of any disturbance or any breaking free. The eggs must still be safe down there. Lucky for them, I thought, lucky the knees-up around the bonfire had not interfered with the hatchlings’ journey to the sea… yet.

The midday sun shone light all the way from the mountains to the shore – shining light on the entire estuary: the grass looked long and healthy, the fences seemed strong, the rooftops were well maintained, I could not see any litter on my reserve; despite the rabbit droppings sprayed all across the road where they shouldn’t be, all was well.

Around where the bonfire previously burned, I could see beer cans strewn across the sand, as well as empty glasses, crisp packets, cigarette butts and articles of clothing. On the south side of the beach, the serene coastline had become the aftermath of a nightclub party.

Hungry, I went back to my home and rummaged through the refrigerator for something that could resemble breakfast. I grabbed a half empty carton of eggs out from the back. I smelled an aroma that could only be described as rancid as the sell-by date preceded today’s year. Putting them back into the multi-stained fridge, I made some toast and drank some straight up rum.

Later that day when the kids were up, the reggae music was blaring and their dash to the water, usually with one girl thrown over a boy’s shoulder, was a staggered pursuit of laughter, until the flung girl met with the coppery shallows. The group, as the sun went down, congregated around the fire with paper plates full of spaghetti bolognaise, accompanied with bottles of beer. I at this time decided to sit close to the turtle nest, out of the sight of the party, in the shadows. At least if the turtles did hatch tonight, I could steer them to the beach and away from the group who, if they saw them, might eat them. I did not know what those savages would be capable of.

The night was long and I didn’t move. I had a bottle of rum by my side as well as a feeling of self-righteousness. With the reggae filling the night sky along with chatter and laughter, I would close my eyes when the strong, brewed beverage was fire to the tongue and steam to my sinuses. It was my more expensive rum. I opened my eyes and took in the vast starry night above me. There was a lot to worry about in this world, like the rampant callousness of the country’s future generation – their shrieks and shouts could be heard over the music – it was one thing to worry about.

I could have slept all night if I wasn’t focusing so much on the nightlife environment around me: I heard the chirps of a cricket and the slurp of waves receding back into the sea. But no sounds of nature could drown out the sound of student activity, though. The stars were glistening above me. But the chattering of some kids evaporated any plans to relax. I rolled over and faced them. There were only two of them now, sitting on chairs, throwing the odd bit of their rubbish into the fire. Lovebirds? I thought, but with blankets covering their knees and tucked into their waist, they resembled an old couple. They were probably more than friends, I gathered, my arms slipping from beneath me as I tried to sit myself up.

Then, as the night grew cold and the lovebirds were stretching their arms to the heavens to yawn, one of them hopped away, maybe to go to the toilet, but it wasn’t quite five minutes later and the girl stood up with the blanket and rummaged about the party debris and followed the boy indoors. It was time for me to act and I went home. Two minutes later, I came out again with the carton of the rotten eggs I had seen in the old fridge before.

Running to the beachfront side of the students’ play pit I picked up an egg. The shell was softened probably from its retched innards turning a dark brown. I threw it fast to a

darkened window. It echoed a loud thump. ‘Hey,’ I heard. I must have woken a boy. ‘What’s that?’

I quickly threw another that smacked the centre of the glass sliding door. Lights turned on in the lounge room so I ran. Exhilarated like a naughty child playing knock and run, I ran down around the line of holiday homes and along the street in front, each loose stone stabbing the balls of my feet as I went. I could hear the sliding door open through the house and a loud, ‘Oh no!’ which almost made me giggle. What a good trick! The sliding door slammed shut and I saw the light switch off in the flat and the darkness return. My tirade was not over, though. I threw the remaining few eggs, not only at the house doors, walls and windows but at the two cars parked on the estuary field embankment. Lights did not come on again, and with an empty carton I took it home. I walked proudly satisfied at my act of retribution.

At home in bed, I pulled the covers to my neck and lay there smugly satisfied. I liked it when I could inflict justice. Although what I did, I knew, was worse than whatever was handed to me. But it was about the power I felt, and always felt. No one could expect what I was capable of. But they knew it if I felt crossed. They always knew.

I awoke the next morning to the miserable sounds of ‘Oh no,’ ‘Who would do that?’ ‘My car!’ ‘Egg ruins a car’s paint you know?’ ‘That woman.’ ‘It must have been her.’ But I fell right back to sleep with a smile each time those bratty children whined. Poor babies, I thought in jest, I hope daddy can fix the paint job? I didn’t wake when the cars started, but I woke at lunchtime as I always did and paid a visit Delores. It had become a daily routine to do so almost every day when I woke on my holiday, but this time it was not to complain about the noise but to observe the after effects of my jolly good prank.

Having spent what felt like hours elevating myself from my bed, I opened the old door to the street and the waiting sheep gave me a great shock. I was feeling rather sleepy with the headache that only too much time in bed can bring. I could not withstand the sight of the dreadlocked sheep, which inched closer to me and bleeted. Its eyes were blank except for an instinct for food. ‘I know how that is,’ I said, ‘But I have nothing. I’ll get you something from the store. You should really loiter along the road there?’ I pointed to towards the General Store. ‘There’s nothing for you here.’

I walked down the loose stone road, my feet were still aching from my barefoot tirade the night before. I inspected the damage I made last night. There were still eggshells stuck to the wall along with brown smudges the egg innards made. The heat and the rotten eggs made a pungent stink, which compelled me to hold my nose, but it was still something I couldn’t help laughing at.

Even the shopkeeper was affected by the smell. ‘Can you smell that?’ Delores grimaced. ‘It’s disgusting that is. It wasn’t you was it?’

‘No,’ I replied running my finger along the many bottles of sweet liquor. ‘Why? What happened?’

‘Oh someone threw a bunch of eggs at a house last night, and at the boy’s car. He was very sorry when he came in this morning.’

‘Really?’ I said trying to contain my delight.

‘Yes, well, it is not good news for them. Their car is wrecked and my poor Mel is going to get the hose to the walls soon to wash it away. Actually I will have to ask him about that again.’

‘So,’ I said interrupting. ‘Have those kids gone home then?’

‘No,’ said Delores, ‘they have gone to the mountains. I don’t know when they are coming back again. Or if they will. They think it might be nicer up in the mountains than here. Don’t know where they’ll stay.’

The mountains, I said to myself. Better there than down here. ‘Well, if they think they will be happy there.’ I said to the shopkeeper whose glassy eyes said she had a sleepless night as well. ‘At least there won’t be any loud music.’

‘I suppose not,’ said Delores.

*

When I found myself alone I found I was without use. I sat by the great oak tree after school that day and discovered that I could not even recall what I had done; what I had seen; what I said, or what I intended to do.

With nothing to do I sat and waited for something to come. Andyroo was meant to contact me, but I hadn’t heard from him in weeks. He had really gone, I thought, they have all gone now. I felt as blank as I did when the news of my parents’ death was dropped on me like someone drops an egg. I pushed myself off the grass and leant against the ribbed trunk of the oak tree. Nothing could be done, but I had to do something. I kicked the grass and brought up some damp soil-like dirt from underneath.

The grand house seemed empty without my family: a grand empty house with vacant halls except for carpet runners, unoccupied rooms and maybe some screaming babies, or worse, cross adults if they saw me. But I knew there was a television in one of the rooms, and in that room were some board games. And maybe, I thought, if there were board games there might be other things to do. Maybe there were toys there. Maybe there were riches.

To enter the hidden and banned rooms – those that were not for children – I would use my talents at sneaking and creeping and being invisible. I would first plan my method of tiptoeing through the halls where the slightest creek of a floorboard would give my game away so instead I intended to keep my back to the walls and slide my toes along the edges where the boards were sturdiest. And because I didn’t have my team to keep a look out for the clumping footsteps of the staff, I would have to flick my head left and right to guard against the danger of adults for myself.

When I crossed the back sun room and started at the hall, I noticed empty cups of tea on tables and cob webs in the ceiling cornices that made me think that the staff could be so lazy. The children in Keats would not leave their sections like that. The dust collecting on the floor made me think that the floors also needed a sweep. Yet I inched forwards to the

staircase with a feeling of boldness that made me almost climb the stairs with abandon. I was filled with imaginings of the staff having no control over me; I never asked for my siblings to leave me in an institution that I never asked to be moved into, and I should have a toy from the room if I wanted. A toy I could call Andyroo and tell him about my day.

When I reached the top of the stairs, the floorboards cried an awkward squeak. I urged myself to be quiet and resume my original plan of sneaking and creeping; I was good at that. I consoled myself at bedtime with thoughts of what I was good at, if I received any compliments that day. But I could only remember a teacher saying once, ‘that’s good Margie.’

‘Margarethe!’ stern Matron Clegg appeared on the first floor landing, obviously on her way to the stairs. ‘What are you doing here?’ she tutted, ‘Go back outside now; if I ever see you in here again I will have to get the strap. Have I made myself clear?!’ I weakly nodded and returned from whence I came: alone in the back garden.

I stomped miserably downstairs without a care for the noise I made since I was found out before I could find the television room. As I walked back to my bed where I could bury my head, I saw a small whimpering freckle-faced kid stand up with his toy cars. I pushed him down and yelled, ‘Get away,’ and marched singularly to my bed. The thrill of pushing the boy, however, stayed with me. I had only felt that kind of power and strength when Renèe was a child at the home. I saw another child sitting alone by the door of Keats. ‘Stand up!’ I commanded and the girl, her red frizzy hair controlled in plaits stood and I felt the control again. I could get away with this all the time. ‘Don’t sit there!’ I yelled and grabbed the ear of the girl, who grimaced with pain, ‘If I see you in my way again…’ I held up a fist to the other girl’s chin, ‘I will hurt you.’

As the girl cried and ran out of my trajectory, still marching I went to my bed and laid face down on the pillow, flattened and misshapened from age. A couple of tears fell from my eyes and liquid filled my nose, but as I turned and rested on my elbows, I felt empowered by the weight I had exuded at Shellingborne. Except for the staff, I was the boss. It was like a new talent. The sniffling children new at the home and awaiting adoption did not have the standing and experience of me. I knew where everything was and I knew how to sneak and creep into the Great Hall, if an adult wasn’t already walking in my way. But I had workers now to get things from the Great Home for me. Next time, I would just have to get one of the children to go in there.

On the very next weekend morning, I woke to the sounds of sparrows and starlings in song and wandered, in my nightgown, to the front door of Keats to take in the freshness of morning and watch the floating spores and feathers aloft in the early breeze.

Alive with my new powers and boredom creeping ever closer already, I planned my day. First I would have breakfast and an orange juice and then I would look into something to do: maybe a board game or dress ups, but for those activities I would need someone to find those things for me, rather it be them than me facing the strap from the cold grip of Matron Clegg.

The clang of cups and dishes from the kitchen in the Great Hall was my invitation to ready myself for breakfast and I dressed appropriately. But on that Saturday morning I saw

Miss Gurston set out to wake up all the children in the dormitories, so I ran for first choice of the breakfast fare so I could race to wait by the oak tree for whoever returned to their rooms first after the meal - not to mention racing to avoid having to clean the tables once the meal was had.

After breakfast, I formed a plan by the imposing tree, its branches blocking the sky; its limbs still in leaf. I would have to get a child on its own, not grouped in a collective of possible fighters, when it is on its own, the child had no one to stand up for it.

First in flight out of the Great Hall travelling in a total delight of a day to play was the red haired girl without her locks fashioned into plaits by a staff member. I almost jumped in giddiness of my first catch. If I could intimidate her with my height and weight so I could get her to do my bidding. ‘Oi,’ I called to the skipping girl who stopped still and looked up to the older 12-year-old me. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Um,’ she whimpered, ‘To my room?’

‘No, you’re not,’ I said, ‘you are going to get things for me from the Great Hall.’

The red haired girl looked past me to the door of her sleeping cottage and I interpreted the glance as a plot to escape me. I grabbed the girl’s ear. ‘You are going to go upstairs and bring back a board game or some makeup from a staff member’s room or I am going to get you! Do you understand?’

The little girl mewed from the pain of her ear being stretched to her shoulder and nodded, so I pushed her to the house door. ‘Good, bring it back here.’ And I leant back on the oak tree and waited for a board game or the little girl being yelled at by Matron Clegg.

‘Margie! Yoo hoo!’ Miss Gurston stepped her high-heeled shoes onto the grass and trotted sideways like a horse in dressage to me by the tree. ‘We have some news for you Margie. It came last night.’

Miss Gurston straightened her cotton blouse over her tweed skirt and bent to speak to me. ‘There are some possible foster parents for you, we found some.’

That meant that I could leave Shellingborne and all the misery of loneliness behind me. I was excited; I might even see a brother or sister again.

‘Is Andyroo with them?’

‘No dear, but they do know about him. They are Mr and Mrs Pearce and they have fostered before so you never know, you could have new children to play with?’

I didn’t want new children to play with; I looked at the ground with a mixed feeling of fear and disappointment.

‘It is good for you,’ said Miss Gurston, ‘They live near where you are from originally but in the next suburb in a great big house in a very quaint street with lots of trees. You will be very happy there I’m sure. You are only one town away from your old school; you might be able to play with your old school chums, okay? Now, there’s a good girl, fold all your clothes and put your things all on your bed and get changed into your best dress… there’s a good girl.’

Miss Gurston patted me on my back to propel me to my room and I walked and half ran to escape Miss Gurston and the news that meant change. In my room my mind wandered to the possibility of what it meant to me to be fostered. Would they be actual new parents? Would I be taken to somewhere that would feel like my new home? Would I have to call them mummy and daddy? Why couldn’t I be with my other brothers and sisters? Would I be happy again?

I looked out the window and saw the red haired girl standing with her arms stretched wide to hold a large board game. Matron Clegg rushed behind her to snatch the board game away and wag her finger in the girl’s face. It looked as though the little girl was being told off like I had a few days before.

Miss Gurston came to my bed with a small suitcase and started filling it before brushing my hair and leading me to the front room of the Great Hall.

Nervously I stood with the two staff members who smiled and greeted the foster parents dressed in a fashion new to me. The mother had a high hairstyle of bleached blonde curls and her red blouse was only barely buttoned over her breasts. The father, his hair slicked back, wore his flared trousers pulled very high to cover a very rotund belly. They both smoked and flicked their ash into glass trays given to them in an act of hospitality by the staff members. I was scared and fascinated by the pair. They were very unlike anybody I had experienced before. They were unlike the staff members at Shellingborne, my teachers at school, and indeed, unlike my parents.

I wanted to run away from the pair that were foreign and unfamiliar in a way that scared me for my very life.

‘Don’t worry love, we are here for you,’ said the bottle blonde who asked to be called Bethel. ‘Come with us, we have a car.’

Me and my parents climbed into a car that could have been white sometime in its life; I could see that it was dirty. As the family drove away from Shellingborne, I looked to Matron Clegg and Miss Gurston to wave goodbye but they had already turned into the house. As the foster parents left the beachside street, they lit new cigarettes and Bethel asked, ‘Alright, poppet?’

I could not answer while the familiar landscape of Southampton became strange and unknown to me, as I was a passenger on what I imagined to be the dark descent to the devil’s doorstep.

V

The white car bounced, cracked and whistled as it hurtled down the newly built M27. My new parents hadn’t spoken for an hour so I watched the sloping embankments along the motorway pass, the blank buildings, as well as the birds on the telegraph wires. My new parents, as strange as they were, seemed happy now they were making good speed, according to the father person who had clear passage to accelerate. He would wind down his window only to tap the ash from his cigarette and roll his window back up again. The mother person protested the opened window, wanting ‘to keep her hair nice,’ and smoked with the window shut, choosing to tap her ash in an open ash tray below the dashboard.

The drive felt like an age to me. I couldn’t remember the journey with the Salvation Army taking as long from our home to Shellingborne. Miss Gurston’s tale of my new foster parents living in a big house near my old school could be a lie or a very big mistake. As my two parents looked ahead, chain-smoking furiously, I asked in a voice broken with fear, ‘Where do you live?’

But the question seemed to go unnoticed. Bethel turned on the radio and I sat in silence feeling the fright of not knowing where these people were taking me. I was scared of them and had no experience in talking to strangers who were meant to be so important to my well being.

Ken turned into a wide road with a dense row of houses far away from the curb. ‘We are nearly there love,’ said Bethel. ‘This is London, innit?’

I opened my eyes wide to the sight of the homes aligned in a row, separated about fifteen at a time by a row of shops. It was like where I came from, but as my new family drove for another hour, I realised, there was much, much more of it. ‘Here we are poppet, Lewisham,’ Bethel stretched her arms above her head and scratched the car’s ceiling with her long pink fingernails.

Ken made a sharp turn, followed by another before he took the car over a grassy island in the middle of the road to take a narrower street to a T junction. ‘Shortcut,’ he said. Both his hands were on the steering wheel, he darted his head left and right while keeping a cigarette stuck to his top lip.

Five minutes later, Ken pulled into a large space to park his car. There were tall buildings shaped like windowed shoeboxes either side of the car park and I followed Bethel’s curling fingernail and her snappy ‘come on’ to a doorway. We climbed a concrete staircase and I hopped along a few steps behind Bethel’s clacking red heels, her bottom swinging with each step.

When Bethel took me, the 12 year old, to a flat landing, which overlooked the car park from where we came, Bethel announced, ‘We’re here!’ and pushed a blue wooden door open to a kitchen where she dumped her handbag.

‘I’ll show you your room first, petal,’ she said leading me down a brown shaggy carpeted hall to a room with blue walls, a glossy black wardrobe and a small bed pushed

into a corner underneath a window. ‘That’s it,’ said Bethel and walked back to the kitchen to where I followed again. ‘We really cleaned that room before you showed, my love,’ said the bleached blonde lady who lit another cigarette. She exhaled, ‘We had to show the foster people that we had a room for you. You can paint it any colour you want. They enrolled you in school that I think you have to go to soon. Probably tomorrow. A.S.A.P. innit? I’ll have to call about that.’

Bethel seemed lost in the things she was trying to remember and was tapping at her cheek with her nails, searching the ceiling. She looked at the timid quietness of the little kid and smiled, ‘We’re just happy to have you, darl. It’ll be good having a kid around the house.’ Bethel kicked her shoes off and offered me a squash. Bethel poured two more drinks of clear thicker water that came from a bottle with the big word ‘vodka’ on its label. ‘I’ll be honest with you,’ she continued, ‘Ever since Ken lost his job we have just been able to make ends meet. A foster kid means we will get a little bit extra money, not to mention a better dole.’

Ken appeared in the doorway with my suitcase and bags under his arms - his cigarette still between his lips. ‘Oh don’t help,’ Ken said to Bethel with sarcasm. He dropped the bags to the ground, sat on a stool and grabbed his vodka.

‘How’d you go, love?’ asked Bethel.

‘How’d you think?’

Bethel laughed so gently and focused on me. ‘Well, you know where your room is. The bathroom is down the hall and the lounge is there.’ She pointed to an adjoining room with leather sofas bordering the walls. ‘I can’t think of anything else to tell you.’

‘Here,’ commanded Ken who held up a suitcase which I took and wandered down the hall to the half open door of the room that was for me.

I let my bag drop on the floor and laid flat on my single bed and wondered what had happened. Only a few days ago Matron Clegg was telling me off, but now the matron was gone, and why was Miss Gurston who was so keen for me to go to a place where I’d be so happy? I could hear plates clanging the kitchen benches very audibly. The voices of my foster parents grew loud too. I was a little girl. I rolled on my side so I could watch my door. I didn’t know what to expect, but I knew that I would have to start looking after myself.

‘Margie,’ called Bethel one day, ‘Now I’m sure you picked up good habits at the home, but seeing you tidy away my fags and pour drinks only in the evening is a ridiculous waste of time. Now I might not be as fancy as those women at the home, but I am your mother now. And let’s call a spade a spade. You are the donkey’s roller-skates, aren’t ya? Now stop being useless and pour your mum a drink.’

I did not understand what Bethel meant by a donkey’s roller-skates but I went to the kitchen, all shiny from too much Spray & Wipe on the white units, took the bottle of vodka from the back of the bottom cupboard and poured half a glass. ‘Mix it with orange juice, will ya!’ my carer shouted and I, nearly 13 years old, took a full four-litre bottle of juice

and tipped it suddenly onto the glass that made a big orange puddle on the tabletop. I would clear up later. I took the glass to Bethel. ‘Thanks love,’ she said sipping the drink. ‘Come sit here now. Corries’ on.’

I didn’t know why my foster mother found Coronation Street so riveting, but I sat loyally with Bethel at these times and absorbed the drama like my elder, gasping when she did and being surprised at the same times when it was called for. The exchange of glances when the drama surprised Bethel was an attention I enjoyed and wished for more of it - for Bethel to look at me again.

‘Oh it’s good,’ Bethel would say, changing the channel when the show was finished with the remote. ‘I love Bet Lynch. I can tell what you’re thinking – I look just like her. Ooh, if I ever saw her, I would tell her that I love her. But I tell ya I don’t think she’ll come to Lewisham. There’s enough Bet Lynches to make a hundred Corrie shows!’ Bethel cackled and quietened when Family Fortune began.

The woman shouted answers to the screen until the front door opened and shut with a sudden slam that could only mean Ken was back. ‘Look at the mess in ‘ere,’ he sang prompting me to sit up.

‘No, sit down. Ken’ll clean it up. Any luck at the Job Centre, love?’

‘Nah,’ Ken echoed Bethel, ‘Nah, there’s nuffink. Fuckin’ nuffink.’

‘That’s too bad doll. Come get yourself a drink and si’down. Family Fortune is on.’

‘Oh that fucking show.’ Ken said as he sat next to Bethel with a drink. ‘Mad as a bunch of fucking hatters.’

Bethel warmed TV dinners in the oven for a few hours later as no one, not Ken, not Bethel, not me, had moved from our position on the grey vinyl sofas. They did get up intermittently, of course, to pour another bevvy. So I was with my family again. The idea that we were a new family did not sit comfortably with me at first, but slowly, the discomfort of the new home decreased as the memories of my siblings evaporated.

It was on this sticky vinyl sofa where I sat. It was towards the outer edge of the lounge room and now had an electric fire switched on, ‘as it was winter,’ said Ken. And I sat still with my arms folded around a mismatched cushion and fell asleep to the warmth and comfort of the room. It was from this sleeping position where I heard whispers in the hall. I was surprised to hear them there because I did not notice my foster parents leave the front room to have private words. Immediately the instinct for self-preservation flicked to life in me. I did not think private words were a good sign.

Then Bethel re-entered the room followed by Ken. Bethel looked tired at this time in the evening. Too late, I knew, for her to still be awake. Ken dropped on the sofa and shut his eyes placing a cushion on his face. What could be going on, I thought.

‘Time for you to go to sleep young lady,’ commanded Bethel, to which I rose and dragged my feet to my room.

I didn’t hear any more noises from the lounge; in fact, the television had been switched off as well. When I woke the following morning I was told that the television was to leave the house now and the heater would not be turned on again that winter, ‘You see,’ Bethel said. ‘With Ken and me both out of work, we have to cut back on a few things. No more television. No lights left on. No radio…’

And I would remember that night as the last I could remember of a time when a family could sit warmly in the lounge room and watch television

I remember when a lady picked me up after school and drove me to different council flat in which to live. My clothes and belongings were already packed and in the car boot. This was upsetting. I never had the chance to say goodbye to Ken and Bethel.

*

I took a swig of rum to my lips before jetting outside to sit next to the nest, all defenceless and unaware of the commotion up here on land. But, I thought, those kids have gone. I might have even scared them away.

The weather drifted from a sunny day to overcast and back again. There were wet dots scattered across the road and on the sandy shore. It had been raining a misty drizzle but the day was improving I’d think, before the grey clouds floated across the sunshine again.

Despite the wettish sand, I sat with aching bones alongside where I thought the turtle nest lied. ‘Hello babies,’ I whispered to the nest, hoping that was the actual spot. ‘Margarethe is here. I’m still here.’

I had brought my silver flask with me and took it out from my pocket. I had filled it with rum and licked my lips after I took a swig and looked out to the horizon where a storm was brewing. I saw a vision of grey cloud and shooting rain out there. In fact, as I took in the breadth of the ocean panorama, there was not much to see except the jungle of storm, I thought it did not reflect the newly acquired peace that befell me on the Welsh seaside.

I stood up and walked to where the sea started nudging the shore and stared out to the storm that enraged out there. After wiping my flask clean, I screwed the lid back on tight and tucked it back into my pocket.

And as if the storm worked as a vacuum, sand from the seafloor seemed to drag out far to sea and so did any sign of rocks and seaweed. The dirt evaporated and so did the murky colour. And as the sun returned to Lloergan, I could see the sea had become a silky turquoise lagoon, as still as a puddle. The sun brought warmth to my face and the heat I wore like a cloak. The beach had become a tropical oasis and the storm I saw out to sea was a monsoon of some kind. I thought perhaps that I should go indoors but the luscious shimmer of the new water captivated my gaze like hypnosis.

In my daze, I turned to the turtle nest where there was no activity except that the sand seemed whiter than usual. I returned my eyes to the sea and marvelled at the clear water, and reasoned that the storm was concocting some sort of spell on the beach.

I looked a few feet out to sea where the water deepened and the colour became dark. I saw a flash of white, which came as instantly as it disappeared again, but then it flashed into view again and evaporated. I stood where the water could touch my toes. The white apparition was a jellyfish. A clear, white, giant jellyfish. Its bell top lifted in and out; it looked as if it was breathing.

My heart was beating. The marine creatures were almost invisible just breathing the water in order to swim. And it wasn’t alone. Deeper down and further away, I saw it was part of a swarm: an army of white lungs, perfectly spherical, flattening and curving, were behaving like organs working in unison. The jellyfish were as clean as the water and as harmonious with the sea and its waves and tides.

The sea mushrooms, a name I figured, were like giant Portobellos but were larger and had tentacles. Their legs were wavy and thickened as they joined together on an inhale and dangled behind as the lungs breathed out.

Some jellyfish swam out to sea but as they did more of the creatures as luminous as a full moon on a cloudless night came into view. I took out my flask and drank more rum not moving my eyes from the spectacle, and I blindly returned it to my pocket not moving away or trying to. I was now convinced that the sight of the jellyfish was as rare as the turtles. I was aware now of so many more natural splendours in Lloergan than the locals could say, I thought. I felt empowered, benevolent and chosen to see what I saw. I knew, I knew.

Although the storm sat at the end of the sky like a dead weight sucking all what was understood to be native to the Celtic Sea, I could not feel worried about it; I stood like a proud parent of the marine beauty the ocean had chosen to show at the surface. As the jellyfish breathed in and out they swam further and further away from the shore. Like a setting sun, I could watch them evaporate from view. I remembered that sea turtles ate jellyfish; maybe they were swimming to sacrifice themselves to the big creatures. Maybe the mother of the turtle babies was out there, mouth open and ready for her dinner.

When the last jellyfish left and I could not see any trace of them, I returned to the nest. ‘There’s lots of food for you out there, I have seen it,’ I gently stroked the sand. ‘It’s a beautiful world out there. Under there where you’re going, at least.’

I had spent another insecure and quiet year, after four years, in a home in Walthamstow where I served as a moneymaker for another unemployed couple. I felt I could have been a lone house spider coming through the flat in the autumn time as I spent a year with a mother who was blasé about my existence.

Living in another council flat in London, I was soon provided with food and second-hand schoolbooks, and a place in a new school, in which I enrolled myself. I pretty much had to fend for myself in the big city, as far as school, friends and after-school activities were concerned.

When I hit puberty, my new mother Kate did allow me to use her products but it came with no warning. I thought I was dying that day at school until the nurses and my mother laughed with resignation and said, ‘it is an inconvenience for all of us.’

Then secondary school was a place where I could be as inconspicuous from teachers and authorities as possible. Although I passed my classes, I did so with the slimmest of scrapes. A C-grade gave me the relief to hide in the shadows, along the walls and stare at the linoleum floors. I could sit at my desk and stare out of the wooden framed windows at the busy street outside; I did not completely understand the lessons my teacher would give but I’d hand in my homework on time and sit exams with the same cognitive impact as a twig on the ground. In this way, I could create a life full of met expectations, of adequacy, of sound behaviour. People who enjoyed such a life, I learned, were safe in the attention they didn’t get. Being ‘a student of sound performance’ meant I did not bring disrepute to any teacher and it meant my parents never had to concern themselves with me either, until this morning when the Deputy Head teacher had called me into his shoebox office.

The man had decided since seeing my performance at the school that I would not be able to cope with the demands of sixth form, and was probably better suited for secretary school seeing that I was not showing the promise of someone who intends to go to university. Then the official directed me out of school with two letters, one for the Typists, Administrators and Secretaries school who would train and place me in a job for life, and the other for my parents.

‘Ooh-er, look at you,’ winced Kate who flapped the letter at her husband Bob sitting on the next lounge chair, to which Bob responded, ‘That’s good, at least someone here is doing something. You will have to pay your way around here someday, so might as well now.’ He stretched his arm out to me to return the paper.

I left the room with East Enders being the sole centre of attention compelling the adults into a half sleeps. It wasn’t so bad telling my guardians what my school planned for the future, I thought. Then the angry growls of Bob responding quite loudly to the muffled tuts of Kate followed me through the halls and cut my ears in my bedroom, ‘At least someone would be working around here!’

The sound of glass shattering on the wood chipped walls expressed the feelings of someone, probably Bob, in the lounge, which was followed by a command from Kate who said, ‘Shut up, my soaps are on.’

And the bedroom was silent for me and I took note of the Typists, Administrators and Secretaries school phone number which I was going to call in the morning.

I was 15, which would mean that after I was placed in a role as a secretary, I could be earning the money to rent my own place. Of course, I would not be lawfully free to move from my foster parents until I was 16.

When I was 16 and free to leave the custody of my keepers, I did, after all, have a certificate of excellence from Typists, Administrators and Secretaries, Kate and Bob decided to throw me a small gathering in celebration of the milestone of me leaving.

I returned home after my first week as a secretary to Alan Harvey of Harvey’s Home Insurance to a dark room and found my mother, father and a few of the close neighbours whispering in a dark lounge room. ‘Oh she’s here!’ exclaimed Kate who threw on the light to about four or five people, in addition to my guardians shouting a happy ‘Surprise!’

‘Ah there she is,’ said Kate with the warmth of a sweet desert wine, who gave me a hug and handed me a vodka and coke, a drink I had been accustomed to drinking in front of the soaps when I sat in the good room with Kate. ‘Our little Margie has grown into a full blown secretary now!’

‘Oh she is professional,’ clucked Robin from next door.

‘Yeah,’ continued Kate, ‘I don’t know what we are going to do without her now! Get another foster child I spose, if they let us!’

Kate roared with a laughter which was followed by polite chuckles from the other guests in the living room. I smiled too and gulped more of my drink. ‘There’s wine too in the fridge Margarethe if you want that,’ Kate offered.

But I did not want a different drink and instead forced myself into the circle of neighbours celebrating my good fortune. As warm hearted as they were, I could not help but notice the ease in which they drank. Malcolm from two doors down liberated the bottle of white wine with a pop. I could almost see the computations of a calculator in Bob’s eyes counting the amounts of wine poured into the empty glasses. Then the tall man fetched the cork and snatched the wine out of Malcolm’s hand and returned it to the fridge.

I wondered at that moment if wine was so expensive that I couldn’t afford a bottle when my pay went in my bank. If I could afford wine, really expensive wine, I was not going to hoard it like Bob; I was going to let it flow for everyone and anyone who wanted to drink with me, I thought.

When I was the secretary, I did often wish to be working anywhere other than Harvey’s Home Insurance in Enfield. But this was not to say that I didn’t appreciate the opportunity to earn a crust there, but if Mr Harvey was to be believed, I wasn’t a good secretary. I was awkward, careless and sometimes apathetic to the general business of the insurance firm. Even if I actually earned the trouble laid down by Mr Harvey, I didn’t plan to work for him for long.

In those days I couldn’t sleep. It was the cyclical situation in which I was living: I was too tired to work well but I was under too much pressure by my errors to sleep. This was my reality since I started full time employment.

Mr Harvey was wearing his dark blue suit but no tie one day when he sat himself on the edge of my desk. I was pushing papers across my desk, disarranging them in a further jumble looking for the letter that Mr Harvey was expecting from a gentleman who wanted to upgrade his home insurance package. He was patient, calm and staring at his secretary with the look of hopelessness that he experienced every day with me. But he did stand

when I continued hunting in the scramble of papers I had created and said, ‘Margarethe. I do not know how you expect to be good at this. In fact, I don’t know why you try.’

He left and I started organising my table by lifting each page, checking it and placing it in a pile I named, the ‘was nots’. I don’t know why I am here, Mr Harvey, I said to myself. I was sure that the letter he wanted had not come in today’s early post. But reluctantly I pursued the letter I was sure was not there.

Mr Harvey was an arsehol I knew. I knew that I may not be the prim and efficient secretary he so tried to form with his critical words, but sometimes he was just unfair. And if he ‘didn’t know why I tried’ to be a secretary, when I was alright, I knew I could be a lot worse. Others were worse. As I lifted each paper I checked and placed it in the ‘was nots’ and the pile grew taller signalling the non-existence of that letter, my hands shook with a rage coloured by the additional stress emitted by the florescent strips of light above my head. One had started to flicker but infrequently: too infrequently to warrant a change of bulb but often enough to really tick me off.

Why did I do it? Why was I there? I asked myself over and over again slamming each page into the pile at the point of each question mark. Why was I there? Why did I do it? Why after five years was I not a better worker for Mr Harvey? And why did he keep me on?

Finally the letter was not to be found as my pile of ‘was nots’ did not lead to its appearance, nor was it to be seen anywhere else. I had to confront that man, probably sitting so smugly in his office, blaming me for not having the letter that was apparently so important to him. I wanted to knock the tower of letters onto the musty blue carpet that was laid out across the entire office. I wanted to push my black office chair over and make a loud bang. I wanted to make a racket over how horrible my boss made me feel. But I didn’t. I remained as professional as I could and bottled my rage which resulted with me drowning my head in my hands and letting my tears falls through my fingers.

Why was I there? I repeated. Why was I?

Resolved that I knew the answer to that question, I pushed myself up from my desk, knocked and entered Mr Harvey’s room. He, swivelling in his chair and talking on his cream phone, put one hand on the mouthpiece and waved a piece of paper in the other to me. ‘It’s okay, I got it,’ he whispered, and resumed chatting smarmy-like to who must have been a client. ‘Yes, absolutely. I like to take out my sons when I can to the seashore in summer. When the one indoors lets us out.’ He laughed.

Still at the door I stood staring at the older balding gentleman. He still had his natural hair colour but it was receding like a hairpin bend - something the inspiration pictures, which sat on small wooden cupboards behind him, could not inspire back. ‘I know, I know, I’m there,’ said the man continuing his conversation. He was such a yuppie, I thought. The 80s were nearly over but he still conducted himself as if he was one of the rich ones, one of the winners. His well spoken voice, which I knew wasn’t a result of education, bothered me as a secretary. In fact, Mr Harvey bothered me unequivocally, and when his conversation ended, I would tell him so.

When he did hang up and linked his fingers under his chin, he said ‘yes’ to me. I had been waiting for him for a long awkward time.

‘Just to let you know Mr Harvey, I quit. I am giving you notice and I will be out at the end of the week because you owe me holidays.’

Mr Harvey did look shocked, ‘What? No. No Margarethe you can’t leave. I know you are untidy but that’s what we love about you. You know we love what you do here. We think you are the backbone of this company. You can’t leave.’

We? I queried.

‘Okay, me. You can’t leave. We need you… I mean I need you.’

Mr Harvey had walked to me and placed both his hands on my shoulders. ‘Please stay. Look, I will give you a pay rise. You will stay. Hmmmm?’

I stood silent not knowing what to say. He needed me?

‘Look, don’t answer now,’ the man said. ‘Come out for a drink and dinner and we’ll discuss it. It’ll be a business dinner. We’ll discuss it then.’

I found that I had been walking backwards during the revelation and was now in my office and Mr Harvey closed his door. With mixed with emotions I sat back at my desk and looked at my boss’ door. Was I a backbone, then?

*

‘Ooh, it’s cold,’ said Delores rubbing her arms, ‘I think I will close the windows now.’

And the shopkeeper took long strides to the wooden framed windows and pulled the three of them down with some might. It was not cold, I said to myself as I read the back of a gin bottle; the elixir was first bottled in 1069. I was wearing a vest in this weather that felt as hot as a tropical day. The shopkeeper returned to her post at the cash register, and I alerted her to the quite muggy weather in fact. ‘It isn’t cold,’ I stated, ‘I am sweating.’

‘Oh, don’t start,’ said Delores, ‘I felt like that about five years ago. It would be cold, raining and look like snow and I would be sweating like I was in the boiler room. It is the change that is.’

I took some bottles of tonic out of one of the fridges standing in a row like perfect soldiers in the Coca Cola army. The change, I thought? ‘I don’t think so, I am only 45, a bit young for the change.’ I paid the woman for my drinks and waited for the few pence change.

‘Maybe,’ said Delores, ‘Maybe.’ She gave me some pennies. ‘It might not, but it is cold, the wind is picking up. I hope you have a jumper!’

I left the shop and gleaned from the spots of rain on my face that the storm I saw at sea an hour ago must have moved in overhead, but all I could see was a pure blue sky and

some starling jettisoning overhead. The heat pressed my shoulders down and loosened my walk. I was in no hurry. There was no place to go. All I wanted was to sit on the beach with a glass, mango juice and mix a rum cocktail. In fact, the weather felt so warm I thought of adding some ice.

Rather than sitting by the turtle nest I looked for those moon jelly fish I saw using the water to breathe. I longed to see the stringy tentacles dragging behind the domes that were pretty to look at but I bet the shock of your life if you trod on one. But I could not see them, all I could see was water chopping and slapping each other as the little waves went in all sorts of directions except straight. I looked out to sea as well and there was no sign of the raging storm that looked like it was to be as heavy as a monsoon.

All had changed. The turquoise water was not so clean anymore, and the white, white sand was no longer so unspoiled. Instead the sea had resumed to being the coarse murky grey-green it had always been and the shore was filled with rocks and debris. The sight of the crystal water and luminescent jellyfish was now a memory that might not have happened at all. Was it an apparition? I asked myself that question and repeated it in a never-ending circle of doubt. But when I answered that question as often as I asked it, I told myself. Why not? It could have. It should have, jellyfish live all over the world. I was sure jellyfish were residents of the Welsh sea. Maybe not the white jellies that resembled the moon, but jellyfish lived here for sure. The sea turtles had to eat something when they came to these waters and they must be the kind of jellyfish turtles, and more specifically leatherback turtles, would like to eat.

Suddenly, a rolling drum of thunder heralded the coming of a storm and then lightening struck the sea. It happened so close together, I thought the storm must be close and I looked up. The blue sky I saw before had gone and was replaced by the thick wool of heavy grey clouds. Then I felt a drop of water hit my cheek like a fat pin, followed by another two drops in quick succession on my shoulders. I turned around and briskly trotted with bottles under my arms back to my shelter. Another roll of the shuddering bellows from the heavens preceded the whip crack of light at sea. I closed the door behind me, and with a glass in hand sat at the kitchen table and poured some warm rum and tonic and listened to the rattle of rain on the roof and the whistle of the wind through the gaps in the windows. It was cold.

I turned on the radio. I found it on top of the fridge and dialled for a Welsh accent that could be reporting the storm on the local news. ‘Nah mun,’ said the deep voice, ‘It couldn’t be rainin in t’summertime but it is heavy, whooo!’

That wasn’t a Welsh accent but a heavy Caribbean accent, I was sure. I continued to tune the dial to any station but could only hear noise. The rattle of the windows from the wind and the white noise emitted from the radio gave me a sense of urgency to hear a voice. Any voice. ‘So I says to myself, what do we do now?’ the same man spoke again on the airwaves.

‘I know what we do,’ said a much deeper voice. ‘We sit back and relax and some sweet music will look after choo.’

‘Ooh mun, some schweet tunes,’ said the first voice, ‘We play something schweet from King Tubby for you.’

And the reggae music was back in my house. The off count beats did not cause me to jolt any longer and the voices were lulling me into a dream state with stories of tropical paradise. I leant back in my chair and relaxed and thought nothing of the storm raging outside.

I was definitely in doubt that the men on the radio were based in Wales and were probably not even in the United Kingdom at all. First they were aware of the weather but their accent and local knowledge was so deeply instilled in a different country and culture. Between songs, the men reviewed last night at a dance hall and gave wind directions only fishermen in smooth tropical climates could make sense of, the report did not fit with the pouring of rain on my roof at all.

Then came a howl of wind wrapping around my holiday chalet, and probably the rest in the row, finding, what it seemed, every gap, crevice and hole in the structure and whistled. It felt like an intruder was shaking my home until I felt the fright it demanded. I was afraid, I felt as though I could die.

When the storm raged on and I did not die, I pulled a blanket from my bed around my shoulders, kicked off my flip-flops and pulled my grey socks as far as they could stretch up my shins. I did not know how long the storm would keep me indoors so I poured a rum neat and drank it disregarding its taste.

‘Let me tell you now, mun, I was walkin down da street and I saw a mudda duck.’ I caught more natter from the deejays on my little transistor radio. It was covered in a thick dust that could only be scrubbed clean with a butter knife.

‘Wot was a duck dere den?’

‘I saw a mudda duck and I followed it to de black river.’

‘Yeah.’

‘And she chucked up her guts to the chirpin baby birds nesting at its shore.’

‘Den wot?’

‘Den, she went back to de worms she found down de road.’

‘Yeah.’

‘And a car come quick and she was thrown on her back and her legs were flaying like she wos riding a unicycle in the sky. And den the mudda live no more. Dis is for the mudda duck.’

A reggae chill song trickled out of the dusty radio; it sounded heavy but ethereal - a relaxing reggae tune that didn’t make me feel as though I should be going somewhere, but then a long crack of thunder interrupted the soothing music. I jumped and felt the rum in my belly swirl. I felt sick. The rain started to fall like a hail of bullets rattling the roof. In my alarm, I sought to see the shoreline from my salty window and through the endless grey that faced me. It caused me to worry about the eggs that I couldn’t check on. I panicked as I

was caught with indecision to see if the nest was not washed away by the boundless downpour or save myself from being washed away too.

‘But wot can I do? I couldn’t save the duck. It is nature. Its poor babies… I don’t know wot happened to dem. So I remember the lady ere tonight.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Dis is for you.’

More sad lovelorn music oozed out of the radio. That was a kind of reggae I didn’t mind even though it didn’t bounce along like the other songs. I had tuned into a reggae night at a bandwidth far, far away, I presumed before I cried. I cried in frustration.

‘Don’t worry about a ting doh,’ said the other voice on the radio that was listening to his partner previously. ‘It tis nature. Dose babies will find anuddah way. It is wot God wants. So don’t worry about a ting and everyone out dere, don’t worry bout a ting. It is nature’s way.’

I imagined I must have cried for a long time, but the deejay’s words were hard to not follow. There was nothing I could do. The rain moderated and softened to a continuous stream. I poured myself a rum to melt my worries away.

‘We play a lullaby for you,’ said the radio.

A song about clouds and babies and stars and rainbows filled the air. It did calm me down but I didn’t sleep, instead, I planned my actions for the moment the storm passed. I imagined that the rain could have washed the sand away leaving the little white ping-pong eggs exposed. The rain that was so unrelentingly severe. If the eggs were bared to the mean storm, and if it was ferocious enough, the baby turtles in the eggs would surely be dead. If they were still incubating underground, I would never leave their side again. I would cover them in a blanket before a storm could ravage their nest again.

My thoughts turned to the large truck-sized mother that I knew could have been swimming in the depths of the ocean for any number of decades: eating jellyfish, swimming among the sea grass waving in tranquillity, away from the storm that had battered its way through Lloergan. Where was the mother? Why didn’t the mother choose a place where storms couldn’t hurt her children? The mother turtle had rejected those eggs, I was sure. But mothers of any species have more of a role to play than to spit eggs down a hole, they had a nurturing one to play as well. Like the mother duck on the radio that had died, at least she fed the babies while she was alive. She didn’t fail as a mother like the turtle. The turtle that was free to roam the open seas.

I fell asleep at the table. My head dropped to my bosom and the radio slowly faded to noise. My blanket dropped down off my shoulders and a drop of rum sat undrunk in the glass.

VI

I closed the door of my first home – a fourth floor bedsit that overlooked Finsbury Park Road. It was tall but creaky, small but warm, in fact, I thought of it as a snug in a corner of the sky. My place in the world.

My flat was one of ten on a floor that squeaked all the way from where the boards began at the stairs. My front door made a curious cry as it opened and shut short of closed as the thick blue carpet muffled its swing. I sat on my sloping sofa that also served as my bed and decided to fix the troublesome shower that sat in the segment of the room that also served as my kitchen. For the second time I thought I could try the shower again – my other option was a coin operated hot bath in the communal bathroom downstairs. My flat still smelled a little of damp from the first time I used the shower. Maybe the water it expelled was water that sat in the pipes for a long time and the next shower I run would smell less.

Thus I took three steps to my kitchen/shower for second time to analyse how the taps work. I stood in the square covered in a grey and black linoleum, which wanted to emulate the look of tiles, and I leaned through the curtains to the taps fitted on the wall above a toilet; I turned on the taps: a mix of hot and cold brown water surged onto the shady lino. The water looked and smelled like it had travelled though the Thames before arriving at my bedsit. Quickly the spray of muck ceased with a flick of my wrists. The communal bathroom better be functional… and private, I thought.

I sat back on the sloping sofa; its tan material was paler on the window side and darker towards the wall in its shaded situation. From this position I could hear voices in the hall: a couple’s petty snaps at each other about change from the supermarket with the clumsy bumps and knocks of heavy plastic bags transported through a door. As the door slammed, I assumed the shopping probably went into a flat like mine but with flatter carpet; I could not hear those voices after the door so quickly shut.

But I could hear next door; from where I sat I could hear a woman shouting in a foreign language at an argumentative man. I hadn’t heard them before. I felt smug; Me and Alan didn’t argue, not even at the office anymore. I thought it was probably because he had shouted enough at home at his wife and his misbehaved children. But because he cared about those children was why he shouted and why he wouldn’t leave them… or her, he said.

The sun disappeared over my building and the room became void of natural light. I had been watching television and hadn’t noticed the transition of time but soon flicked on the central light hanging by its cable and it illuminated the entire room. It was an adequate light source; there were no dark corners or shadows in which to miss my night time pleasures: a recipe book given to me by my foster family in Walthamstow, my pyjamas, slippers and my bottle of Lambrusco.

When I made my dinner innovatively like I did most nights, with mash potato and tins of tuna, I sat at my coffee table and ate in front of my nightly soaps, another pleasure, when East Enders, Corrie and Emmerdale was on.

It was a little after dinnertime when I had finished two glasses of the easy-to-drink red wine; I drank it in far less time than it took to finish my meal; my dishes sat in my kitchen sink and washing them was a task I chose to ignore – that was a habit.

This was me as a weary adult. I had felt this way for about for over 20 years now and felt the onset of my ways sticking into an unmovable mud. My habits were the subject of many anecdotes in my internal monologue and to Alan: my employer and lover for the past five years. I could tell that my habits may be a reason why he had not paid me a visit at my new flat yet. We were still patrons of the local two-star hotel accessible by a slender slip of stairs between a pub and a drycleaner in Enfield. I sighed and chose not to be offended; I had only lived on Finsbury Park Road for a couple of weeks.

The hotel itself was in a hidden corner of the High Street that was frequented by many men Alan’s age, which was middle aged. But it was in the pub next door that saw us as a couple who have the most fun, although, in some evenings, it could be a place where I would watch Alan put away pints of ale like it was the only liquid for miles. It was those times that I was happy Alan would return to his wife.

At home, I sat comfortably with a glass of wine in my hand. I fought any feelings that would make me face myself with the distracting visions of the television and the bleary mind induced by wine.

With my eyes closed and my head dropped forwards, I would lift my eyes for a moment to see a bulldozer clearing a back garden until they closed again, only to wake again to a late night symphony orchestra plucking through a quiet phrase of arrangement that made me think of the squirrels at Shellingborne scurrying across the square of lawn under the giant oak tree. I put down my glass on the coffee table and checked for any signs of a spill, and as there was none, I swivelled and curled my legs on the sofa and placed a cushion under my head. And there I slept through the sound of the humming test pattern on the BBC.

In the foul-smelling North London bed sit, I alighted from the sloping sofa and searched for a broom, with which to hit the ceiling at the heavy bass beats that woke me. Failing on finding a broom in the moonlight, I looked for any long handled object that might make a desirable sound of protest at what I could only describe as a party in the room above mine.

My clock on the yellow wallpapered wall told me it was about four in the morning. I flicked on the light to find a broom or duster but only noticed the pile of dishes that were left to rot the night previous and had now started to fester.

I sat defeated by my lack of cleaning tools or initiative on the sofa and listened to the booming bass, the creak of the door upstairs opening and closing and the sound of lone footsteps in the flat walking up to the door and back again. It sounded like one person was dancing to the music despite the many visitors coming to the door - to complain, no doubt, I guessed. But I knew my attempts to protest through the ceiling, I shared with the dancing individual upstairs, would not work.

I listened to the pounding, singular beat and tried to adapt to its energising sounds, but as footsteps stomped the floorboards above at every second count, I felt compelled to go talk to the person.

Dressed in my pyjamas, I wrapped a robe around me and headed for the flat that would be directly upstairs from mine. And I thought, when I pressed my ear to the identical door to my own, it was the flat of thumping music. I rapped loud slow knocks at the door and stood there for a long minute before a man, his hair shaven to hide a receding hairline, swung the door open and thrusted his body forward. His torso was bare, except for a silver charm on a black leather strap around his neck and he had track suit trousers on his bottom half; he whistled ‘wha?’

He looked left and right to a bare hallway quickly. I felt a nervous intensity forcing me back. He was a skinny man, but muscular, I spoke fast. ‘Your sound is too loud.’

‘It’s wha?’ he winced like he couldn’t hear me.

‘Turn your sound down.’

He looked up and down the hall again. Looked at me and said, ‘Come in.’

And I entered a purple-walled room, laden with posters of marijuana plants and one with a smiley face, and heard what I thought was like a disco tune playing with a screaming singer howling messages of hope, heaven and gladness, while a shouting man would encourage everyone to put their hands up. ‘What can I do for you?’ said the man who offered the sofa for me to sit upon.

‘The music is a bit loud,’ I said, ‘It woke me up.’ I looked around at the maze of old furniture that cramped the room. His kitchen was as small as mine.

‘Do you live here then?’ he said lighting a cigarette.

I said I did and we introduced themselves. He was Alistair and he promised to keep the music quiet when he came home early from the club again. It had been a rockin’ night, he said.

His apology had been satisfactory, and I forgave his one time only wakeful activity.

I enjoyed Alistair’s company for many years. He was my shoulder to cry on, he was my good time pal. Sometimes I did entertain the idea that we could be best friends but did not dare communicate it to the shaven head party boy in case it turned out to be a one-sided feeling.

Guests would constantly enter his flat, which I could hear by the sound of footsteps at the door above and the quick firm shuts after them. Alistair would not make any sound up there, as he had offered all those years ago to wear socks at home and not ever stomp about.

I would even look away during those times the guests arrived at his door when I was sitting on his sofa, feeling tiny as his couch was big enough to swallow me in a navy blue

velveteen gulp. I would instead read a magazine intently, change the channels on his television or pretend to see something out of the window. When somebody was at the door, Alistair would greet the guest, be informed why they had come, shuffle to the big mahogany dresser and remove tiny packets from its drawers and exchange it for money. His guests would leave after the deal was done.

My upstairs neighbour had a life similar to mine in that he was a foster child too. His parents had problems with alcohol and one too many run-ins with the law. His father was in prison and his mother was a drunk. He lived with his grandparents until they were too old to be capable carers. Then he had to be fostered. He lived in Dulwich then in Lewisham.

Alistair had a home to where I could escape if Alan would disappoint me. Usually it was due to Alan drinking too much alcohol somewhere far away that would cause the absences. Alistair did not like Alan, the idea of him or anything he stood for. He would be impatient with me for seeing him, a married man, who would never leave his wife. I should realise that. It had been years. It was these conversations that would leave me in a desperate state of disarray. I couldn’t speak to Alistair about Alan - he was a demon I would have to face myself.

Alistair, after a while, forgot about the agreement we had made about the volume of his late night bursts of music.

*

I knew it may be fruitless, but I went out to the clear oceanfront. Well, it was clear except for a wafting feather afloat in the breeze. It was the next morning after the storm. I was awake early to check on the nest and that it hadn’t been ravaged by last night’s turmoil. The day, aglow under the new sun, was sprinkled in bird song and the gentle lapping of the sea on the shore swooned in serenity. I wanted to feel relief after the torture I endured by the storm that trapped me powerless to protect the life encased in eggs. The nest was my duty to protect as it was familiar only to me. I found the site where I remembered it was and saw nothing but unsullied sand – like the storm was never there and blew away any evidence of man and their footprints.

I had grown a great affection for the nest and however many lives were kept in it. I thought nothing of any other soul who dared compromise the baby turtles return to sea and I worked to pave their journey back to the ocean with no obstacles, light or treachery in their path.

I looked around Lloergan, and except for the clear untouched sand about my feet, there were no footprints visible except my own. I saw driftwood, grass, masses of seaweed and a tyre which must have arrived on the beach ferried by the storm. I fetched my gardening gloves, a bin liner and a hat and monitored the beach for any more storm debris.

Since I could count some blessings that the storm didn’t mess with my nest, I did not feel burdened by the litter I started to clear away. With two strong arms, I would lift

pieces of any knotted seaweed, wet and lined with pods, and hurl it into the ocean. Any pieces of driftwood I would stick in my rubbish bag. My gaze rested on the thick black tyre that sat heavily by the shore and couldn’t think how I would get it off the beach. I lifted it onto its curved rubber end and started to roll it away from the ocean. When it slipped from my hands, it splashed my face with the salty shallows. I wiped the briny flecks away. It had landed too close to the shore and I wasn’t happy to have a large foreign obstacle be a part of a natural coastline – besides it could block the turtles’ journey home, depending I supposed on where the moon hung.

I pulled the tyre from the sandy seafloor and with all my might struggled to push it up. However, two giant black hands grabbed the top of the tyre, and the fisherman I had met briefly before, tucked the tyre under his arm and walked away from the shore. ‘Where do you want dis den?’ he said.

‘Ah,’ I started, my mind was fixed on the man and wondered where he had come from. ‘On the road there.’

The man, with long black dreadlocks hanging down his back, his dark legs pushing through the sand like combustion pumps out of his cut off jeans, dropped the tyre on the road, which settled on the ground like a coin. He walked back to me with a casual bounce and smiled. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘No problem, girl. You want the beach clean and tings. No problem.’

I looked back to the gentleman’s boat. Anchored again at the same point, ‘No fish jumping in your boat?’

‘No, dere’s no fish here today.’

‘Maybe jellyfish? I’ve seen jellyfish?’

‘Yup.’

‘And turtles? You haven’t seen a large leatherback turtle out there?’

‘Turtles? I don’t know. Turtles live in the deep sea.’

‘I’ve seen one. A big one. Out here. It nested. No one believes me though.’

The man swung his arms, pulled his dreadlocks off his back and scratched the back of his head. ‘No one believes you?’

‘No, they say that turtles only come to beaches here to die. That they don’t nest and have babies here. But I think they do. I saw it. You’ve seen turtles out this way? Being a fisherman…’

‘Sure, turtles are here. They have been here for thousands of years, mun. Longer than you and me.’

‘And they nest…’

‘Of course they do girl. They are the sovereigns of the oceans. They have been here since the salt was made for the oceans and before the fishies come to eat.’

‘They eat jellyfish.’

‘Jellyfish have been around that long too. It was just the turtles and the jellyfish.’

I took the man’s explanation as vindication. Turtles are here. ‘I am looking after a nest.’ I pointed to the sand. I felt pride rush to my mouth as I spoke. It is what a purpose could do.

The man said goodbye. I had experienced a very busy morning so far, I exhaled audibly, waved goodbye and thanked the man for his help. I walked backwards to the nest and crouched down. I watched the fisherman slip into his small fishing boat, which wobbled under his weight. He pulled in the engine’s cord until a constant stream of pulsing guns propelled him away, and he disappeared. ‘You hear that?’ I gently stroked the sand. 'You are going to grow up to be kings and queens of the ocean.’

Delores was present on the road. I could hear her sliding boxes into her General Store. Poor Delores did this work alone with no sign of her husband, I noticed, and I alighted to help. And, I realised that I had been on holiday without sitting on a sun lounger. I could keep a better guard of the beach and the turtles if I could be there all the time. On a sun lounger with a rum cocktail.

I dodged puddles that had amassed on the road. I saw Delores take the last box from outside her store and take it in. ‘I was going to help you,’ I said as I tinkled the bell when the door shut behind me.

‘No, I’m alright.’

I looked around the store for ingredients for a rum cocktail but didn’t know what was in them. ‘There’s Walter out on the beach today. He will take your order,’ Delores said.

‘Do you have sun loungers too? I would like to sit on one out on the beach.’

‘Walter is putting them out.’

*

Having heard Alan speak my name over the public telephone line, and having finally agreed to visit me after almost a year of avoiding any intimate contact with me at home, I was extremely excited.

I couldn’t sleep as my mind kept waxing and waning towards what I could offer Alan in terms of food and wine. The visit brought a feeling of acceptance and normality that made me feel like it was my birthday. As I tidied and swept the floor of my 10-foot square flat, my feeling of occasion grew. I collected the photo I had of Alan and me at the Smoky Dragon pub in Enfield, rubbed it on my chest to flatten it and placed it on the centre

of my windowsill. And once I returned to my lemon and peach sloping sofa, I remembered my conversation with Alan an hour before. He said, ‘Yeah, sure I will.’ His answer to my invitation asked again for what felt like the thousandth time. I had almost given up. I gasped at his words. I couldn’t help it. Mind you, I would rather be in the position of having to beat him back from my door, not have him relaying his many excuses on me.

I did believe the excuses before, but after a fashion, I did not know what to do with them. The excuses usually involved an illness in the family. But when the excuses about his children became too repetitive, the excuses then involved being roped into arrangements with his wife. Sometimes he was just plain tired of me asking. ‘No,’ he’d say, ‘I’m busy.’

At last his words dripped honey found my soul and caressed it with his answer, ‘Yeah, sure I will.’ However, my lover had still not arrived, but maybe he was still at the office or packing an overnight bag, I thought. I leaned back on my sofa. At first it served to calm my nerves and relax, but instead I heard Alistair wake or come home and turn his energising music on followed by his pounding dance steps.

The beats were simple and loud. I could understand why Alan would describe that music as doosh, doosh, doosh. That was what it sounded like through floorboards.

My brow crumpled over my eyes. I had to quickly rectify the peace Alistair had sucked away from my tidy prepared flat.

I can’t stand that noise. Alan would say. It’s not music. Young people do not understand music. And I don’t care if I sound old because I am old enough to know that TECHNO is just a phase and its difference with what music stays for good. They said Elvis was a phase, but that is solid music. ELVIS is music that stays…

His face would turn pink if he heard dance music belting out of a car parked at traffic lights.

I knew instinctively that Alan would not stay at my home a second – or ever return again – if he heard the good times Alistair was creating upstairs with his latest CD. So, I found myself impatiently knocking at Alistair’s door.

‘What’s up?’ the baggy jean wearing man said. He returned to his sitting room as soon as he saw it was me at his door.

I think it is bloody stupid those people who don’t get that music moves on, Alistair would say. THIS music is the future. Music had to progress man, and it went this way. People should know that. Except I can’t go anywhere in my car and listen to this music before the cops try to fuck us up.

Alistair would curl his nostril and nod his head with this story.

‘I know, I know,’ I said to Alistair as he became agitated. ‘But just give us tonight, alrigh’. He never comes over.’

To this news, Alistair grabbed his shiny blue jacket with XL woven in white on the lapel and left me alone in his room with empty take away containers as ornaments and a strong stale smell of cannabis as incense.

I followed the quiet halls back to my room where there was no Alan waiting for me at the doorstep. I squatted on the sofa and resumed my waiting to the peaceful sound of the fridge humming. Alan would not have a problem with that noise, I thought; in fact, he might offer to fix it if it was annoying.

As the noises of the block augmented in the silence of no television or the sound of Alistair’s rump bumping, I could hear the couple next door speak taut and audibly through the walls and the distant sound of a baby’s wails. The cries down the passageway soon diminished probably in the cuddling arms of a mother, and as the argument next door grew into a shouting battle of volume, I turned my television on loud.

The clock on the flowery wallpaper wall ticked to half past one in the afternoon. Alan was quite late. I turned to the prospect of opening a bottle of wine before my guest arrived, and as it was a red wine, I decided that perhaps it would benefit from a breath of the stagnant air contained in my flat.

I poured myself a small glass from which to sip, and I found that I took gulps as it became more and more obvious to me that there was a chance Alan would not show. I did not have a phone or know where to call him at this time on a Saturday, so I drank. I thought it was understandable why half a bottle would have disappeared due to waiting for someone and not having to share the drink. Explaining why the entire bottle was drunk might have been difficult to understand but at that point in the evening I no longer cared and I opened the second bottle of pinot.

I sat on my sofa to pour the first glass from the second bottle and knew that Alan would see me with a shining red nose and stained teeth if he came now. But he wasn’t going to turn up. And whatever the reason for his absence, it was going to be something absurd. I was absurd, I thought, and laughed. I laughed into my glass of wine and laughed to the ceiling at the empty apartment Alistair had left - for what was now no reason.

I laughed and laughed which could have been crying but I was quite aware of my pathetic situation and never wanted to think about it again in case I remembered how sad and pointless I felt that day.

I did discover later, as I gave my notice to Alan, that he had an emergency with his wife and could not get in touch with me to explain. I didn’t work the month of my official notice and Alan never asked me to.

It was sometime after I left Alan and Harvey’s Home Insurance when I had the chance to fit in a pool of actual typists, assistants and secretaries on Chancery Lane.

By nine o’clock in the morning, I would transform into a typist proper. I would even arrive early to have my breakfast at the rows of desks with all the other typists at their word processors. At half past nine, I would be ready to commence the rat a tat tat of inputting the law reports that needed entry into an arcane filing system.

I looked the part too with a black skirt suit, long tie, shirt, pantyhose and high heeled shoes that would pinch my ankles.

In the ladies bathroom, I would see a lonely desperate woman staring back at me in the mirror – I could see the distraught longing in her eyes. But when I would walk in the room of the busy fingers tapping out reports, I held myself like a secretary: worldly, professional and with her head held high as if she belonged a level higher than as part of a giant human processor of information.

Edwina Lindsay walked along the backs of the ladies peering over shoulders to ensure the standards and styles of the company were adhered to and having the quality someone working in law. She would often review my work when I was a novice but after a year her eyes would cast over the work of a woman called Jenny de Lacy who was adept at producing the lowest quality of work and escaping the wrath of Edwina all the same. ‘Sshh,’ Jenny would whisper to me when Edwina would enter the birdcage. Jenny would quickly pick up a piece of paper from which she would transpose and study intently.

‘Stand,’ Edwina would command to review Jenny’s short passage she had worked on all day.

‘Up,’ Jenny would behave with a tone of understanding the strict woman of 1,000 skirt suits. I only had one.

‘Is this all you’ve done?’ Edwina would question.

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘We don’t pay you to type like a sloth walks’

‘No, ma’am. I was confused by the handwriting on this…’ she waved the piece of paper from her hip like a silk belt caught in the wind. ‘I can’t read it or know what they are talking about.’

‘You don’t need to know what they are talking about. Here,’ the stern woman snatched the paper from Jenny. ‘It says for recommendation to the ingenuity of the… oh, I can’t read that either. Take these papers…’ she grabbed my work for Jenny at those times. ‘I will find something else for Margarethe.’

When Edwina was gone, Jenny would lean across the desks to me. ‘She might forget about giving you new work,’ she would say. ‘You’re welcome.’

I never felt welcome at Jenny’s imagined service. There was a laziness in that girl that I had never been allowed or have the luxury to feel. Jenny sometimes would blame me for her mistakes with the explanation of ‘I took that favour you owed me,’ when I would return from the bathroom or annual leave, much to my irritation. Sure I would have difficult mornings when I was hung-over or still drunk from an evening when I was home alone except for a bottle of spirits, but apart from those mornings I would do my job to the expectations of my superiors, stay invisible like the C-grade student I was at school. Never had I enjoyed the abandon of the carefree work-shy woman who sat next to me in the pool. It was never the case that I could stay with parents if the earning of money went awry.

So unpleasant to me was the character of Jenny that one day I did take a complaint to Edwina. Jenny, to my mind, didn’t deserve any of the work the company gave. She was lazy like a cat and as slippery as trying to catch one too. Edwina one day would study

Jenny’s employment contract thoroughly and speak plainly to me, ‘we can’t fire Jenny, Margarethe, but we are aware of her constant excuses involving you.’

One day, during a vast reorganisation of the company when the legal secretaries became executives and more lawyers had Personal Assistants, I became a PA for a young lawyer named Adam Farley. What happened to Jenny, I never knew, but I did know that Jenny was not a Personal Assistant or lunched in the same circles as the other PAs on Chancery Lane.

*

I sat on the plastic sun lounger that pointed out to sea. I accepted a rum punch from a polite man in a waiter’s uniform, Walter. It was a very good rum punch and I sipped it with savour. When I looked up, I was not looking at the chalets or even at the turtles – they were safe beside me – but out to sea and the vast might of its depths. Behind me I could hear giggling and car doors slam.

No more than an hour later when I had dropped off to sleep under the burning yellow sun, I was woken by a rather tall laddish looking fellow who cast a long shadow over me. ‘I see you’re still here.’ It was David, the young well-spoken student I’d met before.

‘And you’re back,’ I said not looking at him after I inspected him up and down. David didn’t have the clean-cut look I admired in him before, he was unshaven, his legs had smears of motor oil running up and down them and his hair had grown shaggy.

‘Yeah, we were staying up in the mountains. Anyway, I’ve just come over to let you know there’s no hard feelings?’

He had my attention now; I looked straight at the shaggy-haired brave one who looked at me unblinking with a smile that wasn’t unfriendly but commanded cooperation. ‘Hauh?’ I said, and David responded with his hand out. I shook it lightly and said, ‘Well, don’t do anything to disturb the turtles this time, hmm?’

David looked surprised. ‘You’re still keeping the turtles?’

‘Yes and if you tread anywhere near them or disturb their incubation, I’ll kill you.’

The man almost laughed when he said okay, turned and left down the beach towards the chalet he shared with his friends before. ‘She’s really lost it this time,’ I heard him say to a friend who ran up to greet him. I sipped my rum cocktail and pushed the sunglasses I found in the depths of my bag up the ridge of my nose.

I did have some affection for those young people and I didn’t want to repeat the incident with the rotten eggs again; but now those driftwood youths had floated back to Lloergan. Some debris is almost impossible to be rid of completely, I surrendered.

Since I had experienced a very relaxing afternoon so far, I had expected it to continue and took a deep breath to oxygenate parts of my body that needed freshness. Yet my mind recalled why those kids had bedevilled my holiday before they left.

The reggae music blared across the beach and stung me. I could hear the Jamaican rap so casually over the brass instruments blurting out staccato. Birds alighted from the hidden flats of the estuary and flocked together to head north to the sanctuary. Wind picked up the marram grass and pulled it away from the sea. The air turbulence rippled the top of my rum punch and I shivered. The uplift of the world blown around me may have been a signal to wander indoors but I sat proudly at my seat and succumbed to the wind that rushed about my shoulders. Reggae music won’t scare me away and I hoped that it would not affect the turtlings beside me.

As the students chatted wildly outside their chalet, with moments of laughter rambling out to the shore, I let my head fall towards them to spy at their wrong-doings. Their volume of chat, laughter and music was increasing. If I caught their eye, they would see me looking suspiciously at them over my glasses. I knew they were only going to get louder.

Although their noise and activity disturbed me, it was a grain of sand in the whirlwind of emotion contained in my aging frame – I was feeling so much older since arriving at Lloergan Traeth. I watched the flurry of students falling in and out of their flat and then scanned across the bay until fixing my gaze on an intangible phantom dipping his arms in and out of the sea towards the wave rock. I stared and shifted myself until the figure came into focus. It was the biologist, planting stakes into the seabed again.

‘Yoohoo!’ I shouted across the beach. Yoohoo, over here.’ I waved my arm above my head to a man not registering I was talking to him. ‘Yoohoo,’ I waved both hands above my head. ‘Hello! Biologist! Over here!’

John looked both ways until he saw a figure lying on a plastic deck chair near the chalets. He waved back and cautiously drew his hand back to his stakes. Returning to his work, I felt frustrated. ‘Yoohoo, biologist John! It’s Margarethe, come here!’

He shook his head and pulled his stakes out from the seabed and kicked the water with his shins as he walked to the shore, his sticks under his arms. He dropped them to the ground and walked towards me. He looked much the same as the last time I saw him. Khaki shorts, a white shirt. I could make out pens in his top pocket. His face was old and he wore thick brown glasses this time. His fisherman’s hat did little to cover his nose and I noticed it was burning red.

‘Lovely day,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said. He was impatient and commanded quick realistic responses from me with the shortness of his reply.

‘I’m looking after the turtles, as you can see.’

‘Are you?’ he said, I hadn’t got his concern.

‘Yes, I thought what better place to keep as eye on them, so to speak, than waiting right next to their nest.’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes, well, they need closer attention since the storm a couple of days ago.’

‘Yes.’

‘Not to mention those students bringing their ruckus here. The music is too loud. Don’t you think?’

‘It is loud but it is the tribulations of having the young nearby on holiday, I’m afraid.’

‘Yes, but don’t you think their music is too loud?’ The reggae was as clear as if it were playing in front of us by a band of steel drums.

‘It isn’t too loud for this time of day. No one could legally say anything at this time.’

It was true it was the mid afternoon. ‘But wouldn’t the vibrations disturb the baby turtles?’

He sighed. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘They haven’t hatched yet. Should they hatch?’

He sighed, tutted, and began to walk away. ‘I don’t know. I am a marine biologist who is more interested in the algae count in this water. I am not an animal biologist. I have to get back to my monitoring work. Good day.’ He walked away but not before I quickly asked.

‘Well, who should I talk to then?’

‘Talk to the Royal Society for the Protection of Marine Wildlife. They would be interested in that kind of thing.’

Of course, I thought, some sort of animal protection body needs to know this. I looked around. It was a quiet spot on the Welsh coast. No one came to this beach except for the odd environmental boffin, the General Store family, me and those students. I lifted myself from the lounger; I wobbled onto my feet until my head commanded my body to move. I had to get in touch with the Royal Society for turtle protection, or whatever they were called, and tell them what I had seen.

It was not yet four o’clock in the afternoon of a weekday. I knew I only had an hour or so to report my findings to the people who would believe me, and most probably, do something to protect them. The prospect of those turtles not having the best chance in life took the colour out of my face and hollowed my chest. I set off, walking briskly, anxious to make contact with the organisation before it was too late. As I crossed outside the students home on the sandy road, a clique of scraggly youths who collectively looked as though a dip in the sea was the closest bath time event they’ve had since their holiday began, watched me walk past without taking my eyes off them. Yes, it was too early in the day to accost them with a music curfew, but it didn’t mean I was completely powerless. ‘Your music is too loud,’ I curled the unassuming words into something significantly threatening.

‘Ooh,’ they mocked, laughed and turned away.

‘You might not think your loud music, lights and bonfires aren’t a problem. And you may think that all of us around you have to suffer it. But I am calling the Animal Protection Agency and I am sure that your loud music would be a problem to them.’

‘Ooh,’ they said again and laughed. Many turned into their house while the other more brazen stayed and followed me to the General Store. Oo-er, they taunted, don’t call the egg police, they might have pistols. Eggrenades! They laughed and turned away.

The General Store’s door jangled the bell as I walked in. ‘Did you hear that?’ I hung my mouth open as I spoke to Delores.

The woman reading a true-life magazine received me kindly over her large glasses to look at a shocked woman. ‘No, sorry love, I was reading the stories. A woman gave all her lotto millions to orphans in Africa! I can’t believe it. Are you after some booze? We’ve got a shipment of wine in this morning. We will have to sell some of it cheap. There’s too much of it.’

‘No, I meant those kids! They are being very noisy.’

‘Oh yes, those kids. They aren’t being too loud this time? I said to them don’t be so loud this time and we will let them back.’

‘They are being loud,’ I said, ‘I’ve been speaking to the biologist here and he said to call the Royal Protection Society or something, and they would be interested in knowing a turtle nested here and probably do something to protect the nest from harm.’

‘Royal Protection Society is it?’

‘Well, I’m not sure of the name but could I borrow your phone and Yellow Pages.’

I ran my finger down the best page of the heavy weight book after Delores found a current copy of the reference system. I read The Royal Academy, Royal Society of the Protection Of Birds, Royal Society of Chemists, The Royal Society of the Protection of Wildlife. There. I summoned the number on a large circular face that jutted back to its original position after each dial. I listened to the phone ring and responded to the Royal Society for the Protection of Wildlife with ‘I’d like to report a turtle sighting please.’

‘And whereabouts was this?’

‘In Lloergan Traeth on the Welsh Coast.’

‘One moment, please.’

I was on hold and listened to an eighties band. I looked up at Delores who had resumed reading her magazine. She stood and read it behind the counter. She seemed enthralled with what she was reading and gave it her sole focus. She was wearing her blue jeans and a yellow polo shirt. She always wore that, I thought.

‘Hello?’ said a man’s voice on the phone.

‘Oh hello.’

‘How can I help you?’

‘I’d like to report a turtle sighting.’

‘Really? Whereabouts?’

I gave the details of where I was and what time I saw the large mother turtle.

‘And it’s alive?’ questioned the man.

‘Yes, I believe so; it pulled itself back out to sea. That’s what I’m calling for. It laid eggs and then went back out to sea.’

‘It laid eggs?’

‘Yes, hundreds of them. They are underground now.’

‘Underground? So there isn’t a turtle there?’

‘Yes, hundreds of them.’

‘But they’re underground?’

‘Yes, they have just been laid.’

‘Madam. We do not appreciate crank calls.’

‘This isn’t a crank call!’

‘But you do not have a turtle there that we can see?’

‘No, but…’

‘Turtles do come to the Welsh coast madam, but they are of adolescent age and are usually lost. Then we would rehabilitate them and send them home to the Caribbean or Africa. We are not in the business of hearing stories of large mammalian creatures washed to shore thousands of miles away from home and nest in Wales. We will take a note of your call and its contents but don’t ring again unless you have something of note or an actual turtle.’

‘Okay…’

VII

All day long, I had been chasing dry cleaning as outlined in dockets left on my desk with a note: I have shirts left everywhere. It was a long list of items I had to collect for my lawyer employer Mr Farley, Adam Farley, Solicitor.

Yet, when I read on my silver plated watch that I could clock off, I was somewhere along Fleet Street and could not locate the nearest convenient tube station. It was from there I could catch a train to take me straight home. I decided to walk the distance to Covent Garden Underground Station at that time to take the Piccadilly Line straight to Finsbury Park Station eastbound.

The sun had set an hour or so earlier so I walked to Aldwych – the crescent street of flickering lights - and then took Kingsway. My eyes traced along the thick limestone bricks of the buildings looming above me. I stopped at the Great Queen Street junction at Long Acre and read the street signs which spelt out clearly in black and white that I was in the Royal Borough of Camden.

I arrived at the side streets cornering the Covent Garden tube station bustling with tourists and rickshaw rides at every inch. I watched those tourists stare wondrously at their location, at the next group of arrivals on rickshaws, or those stepping out onto the lane, who all had the same expression which melded together into a blur of opened mouths.

I continued into the station and took the industrial elevator to the platform and jumped on a train destined towards my home in the sky. I wondered if I was on the right train for me and that it would stop at Finsbury Park as the doors closed in on my reaching for something to hold onto in the crush of people. The automated words announced the train terminated at Kings Cross. I knew I could change at King’s Cross or even walk, if it wasn’t raining out there.

Invariably, another train eastbound arrived a minute later so I didn't have to wait for another train further down the line and it wasn’t raining, despite the clouds hanging thick and low in the sky. I walked the distance from Finsbury Park station to my home without waiting for a bus that would take me to my home 400 metres away. I made sure to dodge the pavement bits where the slabs were pushed so close to one another they lifted; I soon walked in a stride and in a rapid pattern that saw me slip past other pedestrians walking towards me. I could even enjoy the smell of fresh spice smouldering in pots from the Indian restaurants opening their doors for the first run of evening business.

At last I climbed the stairs to my flat and could fall onto my sofa in exhaustion. The amount of deep puffing from the exercise needed for my journey induced me to breathe in dust, exhaust and all kinds of particles; I sniffed, good London air.

It was a quarter to eight when I was sitting down to my dinner of schnitzels and chips when the telephone rang. A nasal voice on the other end apologised for the late hour and hoped he wasn’t intruding but he had been searching for me for almost a year and wanted just a minute of my time to introduce himself.

‘Who is this?’ I asked, incredulously.

‘Ah, you don’t know me, well, that is to say you might not remember me, but I am Andrew, Andrew Rainer, we both went to Shellingborne Home for Children, and I think we might be related.’

‘Andyroo?’ My voice lifted to a register I hadn’t heard for a long time; my brain travelled to the far depths of my memory I hadn’t accessed in years. ‘You’re my…’ I was almost puzzled by the recollection the voice on the phone triggered … ‘… brother?’

‘Yes, I believe so. There are five of us altogether. I am locating all of you. I have spoken to Penny, Eddie and Ellie. Now that I have spoken to you I have the set!’

I was shocked at Andyroo’s, I mean Andrew’s, lightness of knowledge of a life I barely thought of anymore.

‘But… wha…’

‘Listen, I am in London next weekend, maybe we can meet? Where are you?’

I would not say my address to the voice on the phone and said to meet at the kaf by the train station. I only partially listened when he spoke of my siblings, I was more concerned how this individual found my phone number; apparently the foster agency had a record of my post at Harvey’s Home Insurance. Alan must have been involved in this.

I set the receiver down after we reiterated our meeting next Saturday and turned to my schnitzel, for which I no longer cared. I instead dipped my chips in tomato sauce and mayonnaise and stared at an insignificant spot on my kitchen floor dumbfounded.

I lived at the home, I remembered, when I was ten, for a couple of years. There were siblings there, I remembered, and especially remembered Andyroo in his brown corduroy slacks and lemon t-shit. We were best friends. Under the giant oak tree we would talk for hours until teatime. Andyroo would talk endlessly about Dr Who. I wondered if he still did like him.

Then, like a leaking balloon, I remembered why we were there. My mother. My mother who would dress me in fake pearls and let me wear her scarves and high heels had died. That poor woman; it was a car accident, I remembered. That poor woman. I remembered she loved me.

I was purposefully late for our meeting at Finsbury kaf where my brother was supposed to meet me. I stood at the cold metal doorframe and scanned the wooden panelled room with a dirty terracotta floor for a face that would trigger a childlike memory but instead I watched the girls take money for 50p coffees from an urn. I immediately thought I would like to drink the same.

I walked through the tight path between the wooden chairs and shuffled past the large builders’ bottoms, they were stabbing their large all-day breakfasts with a silver fork. When I held a mug of black instant coffee, I turned back to the almost full kaf and spied the large eyes of a man trying to catch me into a gaze of acknowledgement. Was that Andyroo?

‘Margarethe,’ he called, and I sidestepped to the corner table he kept with a half-smile that said, okay, I am here, but talk fast because I already don’t believe a word you say.

‘Well,’ started the tall skinny man, smiling with a careful optimism. ‘I guess I better introduce myself again then. I am Andrew; I believe we go way back. I believe even that we are…’

‘Whoah there,’ I interrupted, ‘I don’t know if you are taking the mick...’

‘No, no, I’m not,’ Andrew, still smiling, said. He took a file from a briefcase that seemed inappropriate for a man dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, navy blue shell suit trousers and hair coated in what I could only describe as coffee icing for a cake. His hair was dyed; it made his face seem paler than clean china. Like he thought he was tanned to complete his holiday-making look. But he smiled. His optimism made me not despise him entirely.

‘See, look.’ Andrew opened a manila folder to a stack of paperwork, not in uniformed size but in small pieces here, larger folded birth certificates there. ‘See I have your birth certificate. Edna and Arthur Rainer are your parents aaaaand…’ He pulled a similar birth certificate out from the bottom of the pile, ‘And Edna and Arthur are mine… both born at Princess Anne Hospital see?’

I couldn’t decide whether this fallen Ken-doll was having a laugh or not, but that file required some effort, too much to take a jaded jenny for a trot around the racetrack. I stayed in my chair, watching distrustfully even as he pulled the birth certificates of Eddie, Ellie and Penny from the pile. He was careful not to smudge them and held them from the edges. When he looked up to my expressionless face his with wide blue eyes, he looked quite eager to impress his knowledge and work on me. I gave him a break when he produced a letter from Shellingborne.

‘Okay, okay,’ I said. ‘I believe you, but what are you doing? Why are you seeking us out?’

‘Because,’ said Andrew, ‘we are family. I don’t know about you but I remember Shellingborne. I have good memories.’

I could only remember trying to keep my family together, but they had left. ‘I remember that I was promised to see you and the rest again. It didn’t happen though.’

‘Oh gosh, I don’t remember that.’

‘Oh well,’ I soon forgot about him anyway, I huffed, ‘so what happened to you?’

‘Well, I was fostered to a family in Portsmouth and after a while, I went to Medway, then Tonbridge, Folkstone and finally Crawley. I mainly lived in Kent.’

‘You moved around a lot,’ I said. My voice had softened.

I then told the story how I came to London and stayed with families who lived in council estates in Lewisham and Walthamstow and now live in a flat on the street around the corner for the past ten years. ‘Are you married?’ he asked me.

‘No.’

‘Neither am I.’

Andrew, I had learned, was never kept for long whenever he was fostered. I asked him if he ever wanted to stay somewhere for longer anyway, and he said he longed for a normal family, and wanted it more than being the council tax collector he was and more than the home he almost owned in Slough. I then saw Andrew as a man unfulfilled in his life, much like me, but instead of resigning to the situation like me, he was on a crusade to fix it.

‘The Church is very understanding,’ he said, ‘They are the ones who first lit the torch for whom I should seek.’

I then saw I was subject to a God-seeking recruitment drive. ‘The Church…’ I repeated. I could have guessed. I took my sight away from the fidgety man and glanced at the images horizontally aligned above the patron’s heads on the walls, covering the country kitchen wallpaper.

‘No, no, don’t get me wrong. I am not on a mission for Christianity. It’s just that they were there, you know.’

I saw a man pitifully alone. Like how I felt about myself, some days. ‘So, where to from here?’ I asked.

‘Well, I am thinking that we should all get together, you know, for a barbecue. At my place. Penny is in Surrey. Eddie and Ellie aren’t far from here in Essex. I think if everyone took a train from Paddington, they could get to my place. I am not close to the station but I can get you all in my Mazda. It’s small, but big enough.’

I leaned back in my seat and looked upwards at the peeling paint curling away from the ceiling. I realised the separation would end: I could see the grown women and men I remembered only as babies. I was a much older woman sitting hunched over on my chair and stirred the grounds that had congregated in the bottom of my almost empty cup. The smell of stale coffee poked my nostrils and I left it alone. A horrid sound of Andrew slurping his tea and gulping its remnants down made me wonder about how those three babies thought of the awkward man in front of me, and if they trusted him enough to drop their lives in Surrey and Essex to travel to his home, and also, what they would think of me! I tried to look after them when they were babies. They would not remember or recognise me now. ‘Are the others going to your barbecue?’ I asked.

‘They are open to it,’ said Andrew wiping his mouth and blowing his nose in the napkin.

*

The bass was a creepy crawly tune and a deep, deep voice spoke in rhymes over a subtle beat. I liked reggae when it was casual, it made me relax.

‘A drink you like ma’am,’ said Walter to me. I was sleepy on my sun lounger. It was right where I left it when I walked back to the spot to sit by the nest in the morning.

I was expecting a volunteer now from the Wild Thing Conservation Trust. I had spoken to a disarming man on the phone who, upon hearing I had seen a leatherback turtle on the Welsh coast, said they had volunteers all over Wales who were eager to investigate turtle sightings, and he would send a volunteer right away.

So I waited on the sun bed for my visitor, but not before I told those students that a Protection Agency was on the way. ‘Is it?!’ they said.

‘Yes, just so you know. This is a wildlife protection site here.’

So I waited on the beach by the turtle eggs. I ordered a rum cocktail from Walter and gulped it like flavoured water when it arrived. Rum was not the punchy elixir I knew when I first drank it. It was my eminent daily drink now.

‘Are you Margarethe, then?’ said a voice that appeared behind me.

I turned. ‘Yes, you must be the volunteer.’

‘Aye, I am Rhys from the Wild Thing Conservation Trust. So there is a turtle here is there?’

‘Yes, it came from the ocean. Late at night three weeks ago.’

Rhys took a notebook and biro out of his baggy jeans and he also wore a ripped t-shirt and old sand shoes. His ginger beard had a couple of crumbs lost in it that I could see. I wondered if Rhys was unemployed except for his volunteer work for the Trust. When asked, Rhys said he was from a coastal town not twenty miles from Lloergan, and yes, he spent his days working for charity.

‘So, what size was it like then?’

‘It was huge,’ I explained, ‘Like if two beach towels were stapled together.’

‘So it was old?’

‘I guess so. But she’s gone now. She pulled herself up the beach here with her flippers and dug a hole… right here.’

I pointed beside my sun lounger at the hallowed space I was keeping safe from the non-believers that trod these shores. It was where I believed the eggs were. Based on my memory.

‘It dug a hole?’ Rhys slapped his pen flat on the notebook.

‘Yes,’ I said properly. ‘Then it laid eggs.’

‘No,’ said Rhys.

‘It did.’

Rhys looked out to the ocean that was grey and thick with the earth. It churned as if it was sad today. ‘I think it is a bit unusual that a turtle that size comes here and lays eggs. It has never been heard of here in these parts before. I can tell you.’

‘It did. I saw it with my own eyes. It was late at night and I just saw this mound. A lump, dragging itself. I thought it was a full refuse bag caught in the wind at first. But as it came closer, it groaned, and I knew it was alive. And then it turned around; started flicking sand in the air and laid eggs. I saw that, even in the dark because they were bright white.’

Rhys wrote the story down. He brought his brow down between his eyes as he took down the words. I saw his gaze resting out to the grey sea and then concentrating on his notes. He became so immersed in noting the surroundings of Lloergan. Rhys seemed to be taking my claim seriously when other nature workers had been dismissing me as a kook.

‘I’ll just feel the water,’ he said as he strode determinedly to the seashore. He dropped his hand into the water and appeared alert to what he was feeling. I brimmed with a justification I felt bouncing in my chest like a glowing yellow ball in my rib cage.

He walked back directly to me and pointed at the sand. ‘And it laid eggs there, you think?’

‘Yes but I haven’t seen the mama turtle since.’

‘Well, I don’t know if she would come back. The water doesn’t feel especially warm. It’s a pity that you don’t have any photographs. You need pictures… otherwise…’

He paused and looked around. I couldn’t see any crumbs on the young volunteer anymore, in fact, I thought he was handsome. ‘We could find some temperature measures of the water for summer. See if it was warm enough for turtles. We do get turtles in Wales. But the water is too cold for nesting, except maybe for leatherbacks, which are fine in the cold but are usually just swimming about here right out at sea, when they are adults though, eating jellyfish and the like.’

‘That guy over there,’ I said pointing to John in his khakis reading the sticks as he pulled them out of the water. ‘That guy is a marine biologist.’

‘Well, why don’t we speak to him?’

Rhys smiled at me as we purposely strode to a lone John, lost in his project. Why Rhys took an interest in my claims, I couldn’t tell you. Although, I thought that I could join him in a love of the Welsh wildlife. It could be the escapade of the day. I did feel like a sleuth and the temperature of the water might offer a clue.

‘Hi there. I’m Rhys from the Wild Thing Conservation Trust. I am investigating this lady’s sighting of a turtle. Have you seen anything like that here?’

John, not surprisingly to me, rolled his eyes and sighed. ‘No, I have not seen anything like that here, nor am I likely.’

‘Oh no, you might,’ said Rhys taking out his notepad. ‘Leatherbacks are seen out at sea this time of year, but the water would have to have been very warm if she came to land. Are you noticing any warm waters out here in your studies?’

John looked pained. ‘The water is getting warmer now…. But not warm enough for an entire transformation in the ecosystem.’

The elderly marine biologist flipped pages on his wooden clipboard. He held out the board with a page corresponding to a few weeks ago, which Rhys took from him. Without speaking a word, Rhys ran is finger down the page. ‘A few weeks ago was it?’

‘Yes.’

It took a moment for me to realise I was in the company of academic minds. I therefore mirrored the expressions of John and Rhys in concentrating on the world around me. I felt bigger than just a tourist but an eco tourist or someone using their time worthily. I could smell a particular stillness in the water where the marine biology study occurred. I could smell seaweed, algae, fish and sweat, but I had no way of knowing if that was the smell of an integral ecosystem or something more coarse: the smell of scientists hard at work in the ocean.

‘Well, the water was certainly warmer here a few weeks ago,’ said Rhys handing back the file to the researcher.

My hopes made me smile as they lifted. Rhys continued, ‘But I can’t be sure until I read something more conclusive.’

‘Oh. This work is considered conclusive, my good man,’ said John protecting his file with the smoothness of his hand as he pressed the pages back down.

‘I am sure they are. I just have to get it confirmed by national records and then I can tell you Margarethe if the ocean was warm enough to lure a turtle to shore. She may have been lost.’

We returned to the nest site and Rhys looked about the area for clues, he said. ‘It happened a while ago now; I don’t think any clues would survive. Did you see what marks in left in the sand?’

‘Yes, it left ripples in the sand like a trail behind it.’

‘Yeah, those ripples would look like what powerboats leave on a river. In this case it’s like a powerboat on sand.’

Rhys continued scouting the shore for signs of the reptile’s presence. He said, ‘I can’t see anything she would have brought with her. This seaweed here is red mind. She could have brought that from the deep. Seaweed changes colour, you know, brown and green towards the shore where the sun shines, then purples and reds deeper down. But who can say if that didn’t wash to shore?’

We walked to a small yellow two-door Citroen and passed the young people who congregated at their front door again. I had come to feel that their time at Lloergan Traeth was not so much a stay but a trespass. Their music vibrated their cabin walls. My emotions were stirred by the noise that drifted through their walls, out across the estuary, and perhaps to where I feared, underground too.

‘Don’t you think the turtles are disturbed by that,’ I said loud enough for the scruffy children and the conservationist to hear.

‘I think if they did hear it,’ said one of the loose jean wearing boys, ‘they would come out with dreadlocks and Rasta hats.’

‘Yeah,’ said another, ‘they would probably dance out to the sea all relaxed and smoking a spliff.’

Rhys opened his car door, ‘There,’ was all he said and turned to me. I was visibly upset. ‘I will call you with the temperature report,’ he said almost reassuringly, but looked at his path out from the holiday inlet and sat on the driver’s seat. ‘Hey, you never know, those turtles might hatch without any problem. Just make sure to take a picture of it okay.’

‘But the flash…’ she said.

‘Yes,’ Rhys became serious once more. ‘That isn’t good is it? Well, take a picture without the flash and we’ll see. She might even come back sometime.’

‘Who?’

‘Your mother,’ he said, ‘If she does, you could take a photo with a flash then I’m sure.’

I waved to the car as the conservationist drove away. I was sure the mother wouldn’t come back and turned to the beach again. ‘We’re monitoring those turtles now,’ I said as I passed the boys standing on the road. ‘So time to be respectful huh?’

I could hear sniggering behind me and felt more deflated by Rhys leaving me to care for the nest on my own. I reached deep inside my pockets to feel for loose change and brought out a shiny one pound coin. Maybe Delores could let me buy film and borrow a camera with that.

I sat heavily on my sun bed and looked up to Walter standing there with a platter of fruit: paw paw, mango, pineapple, banana and some other fruit I didn’t recognise, and he offered me some to taste. I picked up a slither of the most yellow fruit and let it slip down my throat. ‘That’s beautiful,’ I said tiredly.

‘Paw paw, ma’am, some mango?’

I took the juicy orange slithers and let them rest in my mouth. They were sweet, succulent and unique; I could never mistake the taste of a mango for another fruit. Walter left a small plate of pineapple and banana at my feet on the lounger, which I ate feverishly. I was hungry and grateful for the sugar.

‘A drink, madam?’

The sun had moved from behind a cloud and the sky became a luscious azure. The ocean did not look so sad now, as I looked out to clear blue green waters. Seagulls delighted in flying in circles predatorily over something they later tore between themselves that washed in from the sea. The sand was a smooth white as well and I relaxed into the clear surroundings that didn’t need me to tidy from seaweed and rocks. I looked up to

Walter. He was a kind helpful man. ‘Yes please, Walter. Can I have a rum cocktail? Maybe make it fruity. Can you use fresh juice?’

‘Yes ma’am. A fresh juice rum cocktail.’

I sat under a hot sun. It was so warm it began to scald my skin. I did not move. Instead I gazed across the vista before me. I watched a red legged gull dart across the wet sand and I relaxed. I could not be fearful for any living creature here.

*

I waited at the train station at Reading. It wasn’t too far away from home in London; Andrew was almost a leap away all this time. Yet even as I had approached Reading Station, I felt how far away Andrew actually was from me: he was a stranger, I wouldn’t have known him if he was my neighbour. In fact, the thought of meeting Penny and the twins filled me with an anxiety that felt like sandpaper scratching my ribs, lungs, neck and face when I breathed. The thought was enough to send me back to my flat, where I was alone except for the sounds of my noisy neighbours.

The footpath outside the station was filled with men and women tailored for the office but some were casually dressed in jeans: there were lots of legs walking in smart blue jeans. I guessed Reading was filled with those young computer-types on their lunch break at this time. I saw mouths open for long rolls to be squashed into them, and some people could talk on their mobile and walk and smoke at once. The bustle in Reading looked fast but perfectly ordered. I almost lost myself in the crowd gazing at the station; it was the first time I had left London since I arrived there just over 30 years ago. I wasn’t a Londoner born and bred, I knew that, but I had come from the south, like the family I was to see again soon. Anxiety scratched all over again. I took a deep breath of the air laced with the monoxide of passing traffic snapping by me as I sat on a red wooden bench.

Yet all the time, a man had been walking up and down in front of the beige station: the pathway was by the tall archways on one side and had the road on the other; he bounded onto the street when he saw me sitting tensely holding my large canvas bag filled with items that I thought I may need, such as a hairbrush, coat, a jumper and trainers.

‘There you are,’ he panted, ‘I have been everywhere.’ He drew a loose circle in the air before returning his hands to his knees for him to catch his breath. ‘I never got your mobile number.’

‘I don’t have one.’

‘Oh,’ he pointed to the car park. ‘I am parked in there.’

We walked along the train station wall. Andrew did not stop the quick pace he must have used to find me. I held my bag tight to my chest and almost jogged to meet his speed. As I did so, my mind wandered to thoughts of being with Andrew when we were children: how we rode bicycles on the street and went exploring by the grassland before we were taken to Shellingborne. Andrew did move fast even then.

‘Have the others arrived?’ I asked. Andrew started the engine of his silver car that looked Japanese with an interior that lit up as the engine started. The headlights seemed to be hidden under the squares on his bonnet. It looked like this car could have been very slick ten years ago, I thought, now it looked dated.

‘They are driving. They said they’d be at my place at three.’

It was an hour later when Andrew pulled into a paved front yard. I noted the rows of homes with rounded front windows and rendered walls that meant we were in a suburbia I only knew when I was young. Here was a home that evoked our past. Inside I saw pictures of vases with bright flowers in plastic frames and pink lacy cushions on a well-used faded-brown sofa. ‘Very pretty?’ I said.

‘Oh you know. The place needs a woman’s touch. A drink?’

I said yes to a glass of white while taking in the bright curling wallpaper and the boxed television set on a corner unit filled with videos. ‘So how long have you been here?’ I asked.

Ah,’ he shouted from the kitchen, ‘four, five years.’

In a moment there was a ringing that sounded like it was twisted at his wall. ‘That’s the doorbell,’ said Andrew.

‘Well, hello,’ he smiled grandly to the opened door. ‘Welcome to my home. Mi casa, su casa’

Stepping into the hallway was a boy and a girl who must have been in their early twenties. They were blonde like Andrew and looked sceptically at their surroundings. Eddie and Ellie, I whispered to myself. I did not stand to greet the pair but waited on the sofa to see if they would join me there because they seemed frightened. I was stunned into stillness. The girl was quite tall wearing pale blue trousers with a purple dress shamefully covering her arms and neck and all. She was tall probably two inches taller than me but Ellie was not taller than Eddie who towered over his twin sister. Both of them brought two-litre bottles of Coke and a bowl of salad.

Ellie turned her head into the living room, ‘Hi,’ she said, briefly lifting her palm to make a quick wave. ‘I’m Ellie.’

‘I’m Margarethe,’ I mirrored the girl and politely smiled.

‘Oh, are you Andrew’s girlfriend?’ she asked.

I looked at the girl unblinking. ‘No, I am Margarethe, Andrew’s sister.’

‘Ah,’ said Ellie breaking into an embarrassed laugh. ‘Andrew said that Margie would be here. Oh! Is Margie short for Margarethe? Oh!’ Ellie sat down by me. I felt like the much older woman. ‘So you’re like one of us who was adopted? Isn’t this weird meeting here like this? Eddie didn’t want to, but I thought it would be a laugh. And we had to meet everyone. Our parents…. I mean our adoptive parents would not like this if they knew we were here.’

I smiled a polite smile again. It was hard to think that this audacious girl who spoke so fast was remotely related to me. Ordinarily, blonde haired Essex girls and me would not ever meet.

‘Well,’ said Ellie. She looked at Eddie who was more interested in the videos in the cabinet and back at me. ‘Were you adopted?’

‘No, I was fostered; I am quite older than you. I knew you when you were both babies.’

I waited for the actual lunch to begin. I knew my connection with those two would not mean much; they were so small when I knew them. They wouldn’t remember the 10 year old girl’s attempts to protect them in the home or my efforts to keep the family together.

‘Well, looks like Penny is late or not coming, so let’s go outside and I’ll put the barbecue on,’ Andrew smiled at them from the kitchen.

‘I am not looking forward to eating,’ said Ellie, ‘I feel like I have been eating for days.’

This from a toothpick, I thought, as Ellie ambled behind us to the outdoor area set up with plastic plates and napkins ready for five guests.

I sat with the boundary fence behind me and glanced at the entire back garden. It was only big enough for the table, and a small stretch of grass made the entirety of it. ‘Here you are,’ said Andrew placing a bowl of crisps in front of us, ‘Eddie and I will start the barbecue now.’

And I was left alone with the girl. ‘So, do you remember anything about Shellingborne or Andrew and me?’

‘No!’ replied Ellie, ‘I never knew Eddie and me were adopted til two years ago. I would love to visit that place though. Maybe we should go there, Eddie?’

‘You won’t see it,’ said Andrew with a mouthful of crisps and a spatula in his hand. ‘Shellingborne is flats now.’

‘Oh,’ said Ellie to me, ‘I guess we won’t.’

It was not long before my brothers had returned to the table with an array of charcoaled meats that could only be recognised by their shape. I took the long cylinder shapes and others that looked like countries, steaks and sausages, and ate them with the twins’ salad and another glass of wine. ‘So, what do you kids do then?’ I asked.

‘Okay,’ said Ellie hurriedly chewing, ‘I am in a shop in Colchester, and Eddie is starting a trainee program at some engineering firm.’

‘I am impressed,’ I said to the quiet Eddie, who shrugged and continued with his food.

Andrew must have seen my boredom and spoke for Eddie. ‘Eddie is an engineer in mechanics…’

‘Aeronautics,’ corrected Eddie. He was still chewing on a mouthful as he spoke.

‘Yes, aeronautics and can build entire airplanes, can’t you Eddie?’

‘I can design them,’ chewed Eddie.

Silence fell upon the group so I scanned the table for any kind of similarity shared among the siblings and could see how the other three were linked by a mass of thick blonde hair lifted from their scalps by course waves. Me on the other hand appeared to be an outsider with my brown hair as flat as rain. I supposed we were all linked by thick eyebrows that stopped short of a completed arch, except for Ellie who drew the stumped eyebrow to finish its intended span.

For an hour, we had finished our lunch and emptied a bottle of wine. Andrew stacked the makeshift plates together and stood to the sound of the twisted ring doorbell, the timing of which caught the attention of everyone feeling naked without conversation and laughed. After a moment, Andrew returned with a stunning girl with my darker hair, but tall, pale and sylphlike. She sauntered head high with a majestic smile for her family. A burly man followed behind not smiling but helping Andrew with chairs and plates.

‘Hi,’ waved the girl who sat on the chair pulled out by the burly man, ‘I’m Penny.’

Ellie perked up into her chatty self and introduced the guests at the table. I thought I heard Ellie’s tone of voice drop when introducing me, but started with the usual questions. ‘So you are one of us? How great, when did you find out we existed?’

‘About a month ago,’ Penny replied eating some of the lunch no one had eaten. ‘Andrew called and came to Surrey and talked to my parents. I knew I was adopted since I could remember, so it wasn’t a big deal.’

‘Same!’ agreed Ellie, ‘I knew we were adopted but Andrew was new. Did you think he was strange?’

‘Yes!’ agreed Penny, ‘But I have never had a brother before. I thought brothers should be nerdy.’

Ellie laughed. ‘Mine is. I mean Eddie is too!’

The two girls spoke like this for what felt like an hour but shortly Andrew returned with Ben and another chair from the kitchen, and sat down with them. ‘Ben is Penny’s boyfriend,’ said Andrew.

‘No he isn’t,’ said Penny. Ben seemed sad about that.

‘So, Penny,’ I enquired, ‘What do you do?’

Penny laughed at the question, to which I felt out of touch with the younger members of the party. ‘Everyone always asked that! What do you do? What do you want to do? I mean, I have only just finished sixth form. We’ll see how well I did at the exams.’

‘Oh, I did terribly at GCSEs, that’s why I left,’ Ellie gushed and the two girls partook in uninterruptible chat about life - a life so very light in respect to what I knew it to be.

So that is how the Rainer family reunited, who were in no way lessened by the absence of each member growing up and not necessarily strengthened by their renewed acquaintance either. My sisters and brother were homed with loving parents before they had known what had happened to their real parents; how suddenly and young they were when they were taken? How the younger ones laughed together without missing a mother or father? And Andrew, although alone, was the owner of a home and was employed. As for me, I had made some errors in my life: such as not doing well at school or wasting too much time with a married man, not having friends, and I felt now, in comparison with the family, how not having the guidance of a mother may have cost me. I felt its absence.

‘So what happened to our real parents?’ said Ellie, ‘I mean I know they died.’

‘No,’ said Andrew patting his mouth with a napkin, ‘only dad is dead, mum is alive. She ran away to Jamaica.’

VIII

In the morning confusion I experienced due to being awakened by a modern dance version of the reggae music pouring out of my young neighbours’ home, I wandered to the General Store, and kicked a stone at the door of the flat from where the music was playing. And before I knew it, I was picking the ingredients of a rum fruit cocktail, taking a muesli bar and was talking to Delores. ‘Breakfast time, love?’ Delores asked.

‘Oh,’ I said looking at my items. ‘I don’t know what I have here. I don’t need rum. I have a lot of it at the chalet there. It’s too early for me.’

‘It is 12 o’clock.’

‘It’s not?’

I returned the items, except the muesli bar, which I tucked into my trouser pocket, tapped it as I paid for it and walked outside. A beaten orange bus rolled onto the sandy road in front of the General Store, it was decorated rather excessively with gaudy pictures of flowers and birds and ribbons around the words ‘Estuary Walking Tours.’ There were rows of half open windows bordered with tied muslin curtains and the faces of various women dressing themselves in caps and visors, and rubbing sunscreen onto their arms; and as a result, a happy cavalcade of women poured out of the automobile which hissed as it lowered and opened its door to the road.

About a dozen or so women were looking at the sky and at the green expanse to their right and didn’t notice when I stood to the back of their huddle. The collective were filled with wonder and chattered about what they could see. Teresa, the woman I had met before on this tour, stood before us with a clipboard, and what I thought was a pasted-on smile.

‘Okay, ladies,’ Teresa looked up from her board, ‘Here we are at Lloergan Traeth, or Moonlight Beach, as it is translated, so called because the people of an early day, maybe as far back as the Middle Ages, admired the area under a brilliant moon. Full, I imagine. But let’s walk to the seashore now and start our tour, okay?’

No more than 30 seconds later, the group were ushered along the sandy road to my holiday stay and looked out to the ocean where we were met by a friendly sea. It playfully turned small waves and ran short resonating streams of water up and down the shore, which immediately pulled back into the white bubbly foam again.

‘How may I help you Mssss…?’ Teresa was facing me and primly tapping her pen on her clipboard and raising her eyebrows. The woman was wearing an efficient uniform today with ‘Estuary Walking Tours’ printed on a logo on the left hand side of her navy polo shirt and on her white cap. Her hair was tied in a pony tail and pulled through the gap at the back.

‘Oh, I’ve seen this tour here before. I’d like to join it again.’

After a brief negotiation period where I was told the walk was not free but avoided payment because I was not a passenger on the bus, I was permitted to tag along if I wasn’t a nuisance.

Lloergan was a sea of distinctive odours: salty water and still seaweed that had been pushed up onto the beach and was baking under the sun. I was going to move that later. I could also see my sun lounger becoming hot. I would sit on that when the sun started to set. ‘Just come this way,’ Teresa said as she led the women, who were feeling the heat, to the pathway that marked the beginning of the tour. ‘This is a shell-path and as we walk through this way, keep your eyes open for little lone flowers, they could be purple or cream or pink close to the ground. These could be the marsh orchids native to the estuary. And if you look up…’

The ladies, shading their eyes looked up to see the birds that silhouetted in the sky. ‘These are skylarks, darting about in the sky there. There is a bird sanctuary a couple a miles north, so we see many species of birds here: skylarks, linnet, stonechat, meadow pipit. Birds of the dunes. If we’re lucky we’ll see them all. But up there are the skylarks.’

Towards the top of the shell path, the group saw a mass of flies covering the carcass of what must have once been a rabbit. ‘Oh, I don’t know why a rabbit has died here. The natural predator of rabbits is the Red Kite, but its skull is crushed. Keep walking.’ Teresa pointed to the mountains beyond the stretch of green grass and the women quickly diverted their attention away from the gruesome sight. Me, however, stared intently at the crushed rabbit skull. Flies may have been festering on its body but most of it was still intact so must have never been the prey of a Red Kite. I thought something large would be responsible for this death. Something large with a stick, or a baseball bat. Could those students be so cruel during their time here? I would ask them later.

Focusing back on the tour, I ran to catch the group as they had found a purple marsh orchid and were marvelling at its covering of brushing petals. A Common Blue butterfly had also fluttered by Teresa’s eyes, which caused the ladies to grab their cameras only to snap too late at nothing after the event.

‘The dunes and estuary of Lloergan make up the Dafid Nature Reserve and is currently under consideration by UNESCO to become a full Biosphere Reserve, which means it is a place of so many natural wonders, it has become a place of international importance,’ Teresa stated, almost as if she was reciting it from a book.

The group walked by crickets twitching perhaps in the marram grass and as the sun was just beginning to lose its intensity, the group felt collectively at ease. I took advantage of seeing Teresa walking behind the group and approached her. ‘The Wild Thing Conservation Trust is investigating the area now as a turtle nesting site,’ I spoke with the authority I had assumed after my discussions with Rhys. ‘I am expecting a call from their representative soon. They are checking the seawater temperatures to see if such as event was likely. Wouldn’t it be great if the area became even more special and linked to the shores on the other side of the world?’

‘It would be special,’ said the woman tightening her ponytail by pulling at it in two halves. Teresa moved her legs quickly to be heard by the tour group who had waded through the grassland and were staring out to sea. The sea was still now and I smirked at the rippled expanses of the dark blue mystery that kept so many secrets, of which I was privy to

some. It was a magnificent vista today – its water was flat and heavy like it had an understanding with gravity that it was master of the Earth while the rest of the universe had all the space above.

‘You’ll notice that the plants growing down the steep of the dunes are also reaching up towards the sun. These plants, the ones with the fleshy leaves, are sea rocket and prickly saltwort. The marram grass there also provides a home for the linnet bird to nest in. Otherwise it protects the dunes and the over trampling of it, which can help make it vulnerable to erosion blow outs.’

As the group stepped down the estuary staircase along the face of the dune, I stood back with Teresa. She shielded her eyes from the sun as she talked. ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about your turtle sighting. I was reading an article about the nesting sites in Africa and along the equator to the Caribbean. And many conservationists have their work cut out for them with new developments popping up along the coastline and the increase in tourism there. In fact, so many people are staying along the coast where turtles have historically nested, the turtles are staying out at sea, confused. Now, I don’t know if they are giving up on these sites entirely or if they could be possibly be looking somewhere else - somewhere safer to make a nest.’

I gasped. Really? As a two, we walked down the rows of pine wood planks that connected the estuary to the shore. Dots of pink and purple orchids grew just out of the staircase’s shadow and clasped onto the strength of the dune foliage.

‘Do you think that turtles could be coming to Wales and turning away from their conventional sites along the equator?’ I asked like a school child. This theory made me feel giddy.

‘Well, maybe it’s possible. The estuary here is not one that is crammed with tourists. Maybe as leatherbacks come out this way from time to time anyway, they thought that this beach looked safe. But more than likely, if this theory is right, then it would have come out this way because it was confused.’

Confused, that’s right, I thought. It is not entirely unthinkable that the turtle was confused.

Both of us walked towards the group who were leisurely looking up towards the dunes as we continued north along the shore. The rich greenery found on the dunes before was dissipating and sightings of any foliage was scarce, and when we did see anything it was just the tips of leaves, it was usually that of a plant covered in the smooth white sand freshly blown in by the wind. ‘And here we can see the effects of erosion,’ said Teresa when we had caught up with the bunch. ‘Now this is caused here by the wind, obviously.’ Teresa raised her hand to feel the opposition given by the wind that felt stronger at this part of Lloergan. ‘Obviously, there is a lack of flora growing natively here. Now perhaps those plants have been solely covered by sand blown in by the wind, but recent thought has it that hundreds of years ago, this dune may have been the causeway for fishermen to the mountains. Archaeological findings of tools and cutlery suggest as much.’

I almost grabbed Teresa’s shoulder as the assembly continued to amble, but instead I tapped her on the shoulder. ‘I am waiting for a phone call from the Wild Thing Protection Trust soon. Is that theory something they should know?’

‘Sure,’ said Teresa as she turned around, walked backwards, and then stopped. ‘But also, interestingly, the conservationalists in the Caribbean had a time trying to make those nesting sites ready for the eggs to hatch. They had to shoo people from the beach at night, clear all the day’s rubbish left behind, not to mention scaring away seagulls…’

‘Seagulls?’

‘Yes. Seagulls are the natural born predator of the newly hatched turtle.’

I hadn’t thought about the seagulls. I never thought they were important. But Teresa knew more about these kinds of things than me.

There were flocks of seagulls that landed on Lloergan everyday but I had never thought anything of it. Maybe if I could scare them away myself, they wouldn’t return to the beach. I had no time to lose. Thinking I had to make up for lost time for allowing the seagulls to have such free reign on the shoreline, I excused myself from Teresa and ran back to my section of beach.

The space by my holiday home had about ten gulls facing each other while a grey-legged one puffed up and bullied the others to stand back. As I ran, I headed straight for the flock, which dispersed the moment I entered their circle, only to see them regroup at another space closer to the surf. With both arms stretched as far as I could reach I ran to them again growling like a pirate. The birds did fly a few metres into the air but hovered and landed back to the same spot when I turned my back. Those darn seagulls, I thought. I felt panic grip my throat and I ran again at the birds. They are just waiting for those eggs to hatch, I tutted in worry, shook my head and ran at them again.

*

It was a pleasant day, fine and humid, although perhaps a little too warm for running in short bursts up and down the stretch of beach shooing away seagulls - too warm to shoo away the birds with a small shot of rum in my belly, and certainly too warm to continue this activity all day every day.

In any case, I knew that something had to be done to protect the baby turtles from one of the fiercest predators known to them – seagulls - but it wasn’t something to be done manually. I’d try a few things, I resolved, but I would first have to see what supplies I had to work with from the General Store.

From the beach the General Store was only a few yards away, but I was not keen to pass the place of stay for the handful of students, who had, I felt, no regard for my efforts at Lloergan and the new sleeping inhabitants tucked away in their eggs.

Music thumped the sandy road on which I walked; I could feel the vibration as I neared their place. It was unavoidable to hear since they stayed next door to the store. But when I looked at their home, the door was closed and it was quiet there except for the loud music. It was like this, I realised, because every one of those young people were assembling on the estuary. One, I saw, held a shiny silver stick into the air only to swing it at a white

projectile that flew in the air. I could hear faint yelling ‘four!’ laughs, shrieks and saw running around the field with some trying to see where the ball landed. Seems like fun, I thought disapprovingly, and I continued to the clear glass door of the General Store.

‘Hello, Margarethe, love. What can I do for you?’ Delores had more energy than me. I felt quite fatigued after running so much under the sun but I managed to mosey about the shelves in the store looking at the hardware goods.

‘Oh, I just want to fashion something frightening to keep the birds off the beach.’

Delores sounded doubtful. ‘Why do that then?’

‘To keep the seagulls away from the baby turtles, I was told that they are a predator of them.’

The shopkeeper looked away and suddenly jumped, startled. ‘Oh, that reminds me, love. That young man from the Conservation Agency called looking for you. He wants you to call him right away. He says it is interesting.’

Delores held out a piece of paper with the ink scratching of the name Rhys and a telephone number. ‘Thanks,’ I said and I wandered out to the stark public phone box outside the store that allowed me to view the goings on of the student party while listening to a phone conversation.

When Rhys got to the phone he sounded happy but intrigued, compassionate but wary. ‘It is interesting,’ he said. ‘You remember that I was going to see what water temperatures were recorded on the Welsh coast for the summer?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, it is interesting, you see, because there are higher than average water temperatures for the summer. Why this is occurring, I don’t know. But it could be the El Nino in the Pacific Ocean.’

‘The El Nino?’

‘Yes, there are large scale variations in the atmospheric pressure between the Indian and Pacific Oceans and the water has been recorded to be very warm in the Caribbean Sea which is unusual and all the countries around the Pacific Oceans are in absolute climatic chaos, I don’t know if you see the news, but scientists say it is because the atmospheric system is in complete disarray.’

The boys out at the estuary swung what must be their golf club again, but this time they chased the ball through the grassland, as it was in mid-flight.

‘Now, why this has anything to do with the unusually warm water in Wales may have something to do with the Gulf Stream.’

I didn’t say anything to the Welshman, but instead heard what he said and stared at the party who hit the dirt with their club with enough force to upset the turf.

‘The Gulf Stream is one of the strongest ocean currents flowing about here. It is driven by changes in density when it starts as salty cold sea water in Greenland and is replaced by warm water when it travels to the Gulf of Mexico. It can change again when it continues through to the Atlantic. It isn’t entirely impossible that more warm water is flowing with the Gulf Stream current to our shores.’

‘I was told by an estuary tour guide here that turtles’ current habitats are being over developed and too many tourists are scaring them away!’ I said.

‘Yes, and I was going to say that the leatherback turtle that you described is fine with the cold water and likes to feed on the jellyfish out here at this time of year anyway.’

‘So it is possible that the mother turtle was too scared to approach the beaches in the touristy Caribbean and came here?’

‘It’s not impossible. She may have followed the warm current all this way to lay eggs.’

‘That’s right!’

‘It’s not impossible, and with global warming, the planet is in a mess anyhow. Poor the turtles being confused with what we have done to the planet.’

‘It could be global warming!’ I repeated. ‘There are so many reasons why a turtle would choose to nest here.’

‘It’s not impossible.’

When I put down the phone, I saw that the students were returning to their home. I watched them pass haughtily by me while I stayed in the clear glass phone box decorated in the phone company’s logos. I stepped out and walked back to the beach only to see seagulls circling above the nesting site. There was nothing I could do when they were up high like that there short of shooting a gun. But there were more reasons now to keep the birds away! Rhys had said that it wasn’t ‘impossible’ that a turtle nested here. I had agreed to take a photograph when the turtles hatched and show it to him. This discovery could be one to change what scientists knew about the ocean and indeed the world. Turn the Earth literally on its head with this discovery, he said. But I’d have to take a photograph.

The fisherman gave me a start when I returned to the beach. As I crossed the white sand to the cool turquoise sea, I thought I liked him here; he always gave me a feeling of relief because he was my friend.

He sat by the lapping of the water with his legs crossed and knees up. The water ran up to his feet and he didn’t seem to mind. He said hello to me and threw a roll up butt a fair distance out to sea and pulled another fat roll up out of his shirt pocket. He lit it with a flame that grew long out of his lighter. He was continuously staring at me and patted the sand by his side for me to join him. He breathed out a pungent smoke that stank like grass and carrots. He forever stank like that to me. He told me to relax and feel the rhythm of the ocean. The reggae music coloured the air in tangerine brass, yellow guitars and blue bass

and I felt like I was on an island while I breathed in the perfume of fresh grass. My mind span.

He told me how he had seen a giant beast eating jellyfish a mile out to sea. I told him that the water was unusually warm and if that turtle is confused, it may have nested here on shore. He said I should come away with him to the deep sea on his boat and see the turtle.

I didn’t notice the high count of seagulls that had landed on the beach behind me or Delores, who dropped cardboard boxes, markers and the kinds of sticks real estate agents use to put up their signs on the ground. ‘A hoy hoy!?’ she yelled and waved to the back of me. ‘I have things for a scarecrow here. Get them before they blow away! Come see me if you need anything else.’

I turned to see the pile of things I could use and a number of red and grey-legged gulls patting the ground with their webbed feet as they trotted about the sand. They left distinguishable footprints. I felt observant like a hunter when I noticed these details.

‘So what are you doin’ den dere girl?’ the fisherman turned to see me pick up the materials, which compelled the seagulls to scatter, their little legs picked up speed but they never took flight.

I felt I had gotten up too fast. My head felt like it wanted to lift out of my skull, and when it settled down, I said, ‘I am making a scarecrow.’

‘Why?’

‘To keep the seagulls away from this beach.’

‘And you tink a scarecrow would do dat?’ the fisherman laughed and blew smoke out of his nose. ‘You can’t scare de gulls, mon.’ He laughed. ‘Seagulls are everywhere. Dey are de sight of land. Dey tell you and all de people out at sea dat dere is land near. Dey are the flying flags of the land. How is a scarecrow gonna scare dem away? Where are they going to go?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said looking at a box in one hand and a wooden stake in the other, ‘Just not here.’

‘And why do you not want a seagull here?’

I stabbed a stake through a box and felt that was a good head for a constructed man made of rubbish. I pushed the other end of the stick into another box and connected that box with two other stakes to make the feet. ‘Because seagulls are predators of baby turtles.’

‘Seagulls are baby turtle killers! I see dat. But you can’t scare seagulls. Dat robot box is not going to scare de birds.’

The fisherman shook his head, inhaled his joint and exhaled out to the sky. I was examining the multicoloured markers that I assumed Delores had lifted from one of her children’s school bags. I chose a red one. ‘Well, I have to get rid of them. When the turtles hatch I don’t want them to be gobbled up by a scavenger gull.’ I drew the beginnings of a mad scary face on the box before picking up a green pen to make its hair. ‘If this scarecrow

doesn’t work, I will chase them myself. I will stay up all night and protect this beach from seagulls. I will chase them down and follow them to the next beach if I have to.’ I was out of breath.

‘Your box isn’t scary. What is that on the top? Is dat a face? Dat aint scary. Dat won’t scare a baby.’

‘It isn’t meant to scare a baby, it is meant to scare the seagulls.’ I lifted my human-like composition onto its box shoes and stabbed stakes through them to attach it to the ground. I pushed the stakes as far as I could through the sand. I stood back. ‘There.’

‘I tell you woman, that is not gonna scare de birds.’

It was difficult for me to converse with the man, who I felt, was not as supportive as he had been as the last time I saw him. It was even harder to argue with him when the next series of events proved he was right. When I sat back next to him and looked at my creation sitting crookedly out of the sand, the seagulls didn’t move, in fact one flew by the awkward dummy and landed not even a yard away. ‘See,’ he said, ‘look at dat bird.’

The bird did fly away when a strong gust of wind blew by the beach, lifting up the top surface of sand. I felt it hit my skin like tiny stings. I closed my eyes to protect them. But I squinted at my scarecrow as it fell onto its side. I walked towards it to put it back on its feet, only the wind caught it. I ran after it as the wind pushed it along the length of the shore.

*

It was windy and fresh in the summery conditions and whenever I raised my head from the lumpy pillow that I called an awkward bed mate, my head would swirl like a patient in a hospital ward and I felt the need to call a nurse. Sometimes I couldn’t bear another moment of my holiday where my sense of self-preservation had left to fester in bad health and a drinking problem.

For my part though, I had only taken a short spell out of my normal day-to-day life, and if I wanted to drink, I would. Besides, I was entrusted by Mother Nature, or the universe or some cosmic force that put me in the path of the groaning giant that entrusted me as guardian of the hallowed nest.

I was now bursting to get through the unsteady forces that kept me to my bed; I had heard the noises of laughing young adults splashing in the sea close by me. I knew that I was the crazy witch of the sea to them, and it was apparent to me, as it was apparent to other experts I had talked to, that I could be out of my senses. I was someone who believed what I saw as fact and was following through with the upkeep the situation demanded.

I was also feeling rather drained and weary, but this did not stop me from meandering out my door. As a matter of fact, I summoned the strength against my will to venture outwards to sit by the turtles and make sure the giggling children didn’t muck about

and disturb the sacrosanct of nature. But why couldn’t they show that respect by themselves?

I imagined them thumping above the spot with their play, upsetting an otherwise still and peaceful womb. I saw how they ran up and down the shore kicking up water with their feet as they leaped to catch a Frisbee. I would have wanted to move the play at least 50 metres down shore, but I was sitting at my sun lounger now and would be as deterring to them as a scarecrow.

Walter arrived with a plate of succulent fruit and a rum cocktail and placed it on my lap. I also watched as the gentlemanly waiter motioned his arms like a rotating motor to encourage the student activity to be conducted somewhere else. I watched Walter herd them towards their part of Lloergan. I saw David, the taller and more sociable of the pack, turn to me and wave. He waved with a smile and seemed good-natured about them having to leave. Not that it took long. One boy threw the disc far along the shore for another to run and catch it. I sat back and covered my eyes with my sunglasses, triumphant that the morning ruckus had left so easily. I didn’t have to say a word.

The sun lounger – or maybe me - had morphed in a shape that fitted me well, although the seat was made out of a hard plastic and was immutable to any solid force. I noticed how my thighs gravitated to a particular space on it. I was sure grooves had formed around me. Throughout all the chaos caused by the students’ ruckus the beach kept its natural tranquillity: the dotting of lonely seagulls flapping their wings to land nearby and the placid breeze skimmed across the sand and ocean. It flattened the water to gentle ripples. I held my post, like the Queen’s guard and was as immoveable as my plastic chair.

That is until I heard the arrival of a car full of new visitors. Although I could not see them, I thought these tourists were shiny and new to the conservation project I was leading. I had to pay them a visit to act as a messenger of ecology.

As I rose, I saw the arrival of the fisherman’s boat and the tall deadlocked man drop anchor. He was a hundred yards out and I thought I could visit the new arrivals before he waded to shore, so I waved when he saw me and dashed around to the terrace house between mine and the students’ to make myself known.

It was only an hour since I woke and I was walking barefoot on the sandy pavement; my knees were reacting from the pain my feet felt as I trod on sharp pebbles. But I saw that the entire party of people I heard arrive must have vanished. I did peer in the window of the spare house and saw wooden floorboards, green painted walls and a small amber lamp glowing through its glass petals on what appeared to be a bar. My eyes adjusted to the dark room and I saw movement in there: a man behind the bar, a man sitting at a stool and another sitting at a table in the corner.

When the man behind the bar motioned for me to come in, I stepped back from the window. My heart beat so strongly in my chest, I could feel it in my throat.

I entered the house without anyone glancing towards me and the barman put a small cup down as I sat at a stool and he poured rum into it. I sat without anyone saying a word and I feared I had entered an underground hideout that seemed dangerous and was, without a doubt, out-of-bounds.

What are you doin’ ere den, girly?’ said the black barman in tan trousers and white t-shirt, busily wiping glasses and stacking them on shelves.

I had to think for a moment. Why was I there? But I remembered, ‘Ah, I just wanted to visit, introduce myself, I’m Margarethe and…’

‘You look like you are a long way from home,’ said the barman.

‘No,’ I replied, ‘I am not. I am heading a conservation initiative…’

I scanned the room to ensure I was receiving the attention the issue deserved. But I saw I was in some kind of gentlemen’s club, everyone was looking at me as I spoke, but the men there looked disinterested, and returned to drinking their little glasses of rum.

‘I am looking after a nest of baby turtles.’

‘Oh, you are the turtle lady,’ said the man sitting next to her. ‘I ‘av ‘eard of you.’

‘Yes, well, there are some things to consider because they are due to hatch soon.’

I dutifully began relaying the information I had accumulated on baby turtles and what tourists like themselves should do in order to support their voyage from sand to the wondrous sea. The man sitting next to me, elderly and grey and listening, despite me losing the attention of the rest of the house’s patrons, said, ‘And I ‘eard you’d say dat.’

He snorted into his drink, but I didn’t mind. I was savouring the taste of the brew in front of me. It tasted of wheat and spice, much unlike how I was drinking rum now – with a mix of fruit juice. I did like this drink.

The barman rose from bending under the bar, which was soon followed by a familiar Jamaican vocal singing of Zion, forgiveness and freedom. ‘Bob Marley,’ I said.

The barman nodded. The man next to me slid a white roll up as fat as what the fisherman smoked. ‘Oh, I know who should be here,’ I said as I left my stool. ‘I’ll be one minute.’

Before anyone said anything to me, even a goodbye, I was tiptoeing across the sandy road, grimacing at the pain the sharp pebbles induced, towards the soft, sandy beach. I strode onto the cool sand, completely devoid of gulls but the wind had succeeded in either revealing small rocks on the sand or bringing them to shore with the waves. The ocean was grey, murky and dull, and covered by a layer of waves cresting at small peaks atop of giant swells. There was little chance that the fisherman I sought would be fishing in these conditions and I assumed it was for that reason that I could not see his small blue boat where I first saw it a moment ago. Three of the young students were seated outside the sliding door at the front of their residence, but none sat up or even noticed me standing there. But as I looked across the row of houses, my attention did not linger at the students but at the florescent glow in the window behind them. They still didn’t care.

I was not happy with what I saw on Lloergan that afternoon. Bad weather, new stones, lights on at the holiday lets, a tumultuous sea, and the absence of my friend the fisherman. I wished I wasn’t seeing what I was, but it was too late. I was reminded of the work protecting the nest entailed.

No more than 30 seconds later, I returned to the gentleman’s club playing the familiar reggae. It was a pity I couldn’t knock on their door with the fisherman in tow; the relaxed atmosphere at the new house seemed like something he would have enjoyed, especially now that they lit one of his special smokes.

I sat back on the stool and was offered another cup of rum. It was very tasty rum and I sipped it attentively. When I looked up, it was not at the other gentlemen but at a mirror on the wall behind the barman. I saw my eyes were red and raw; maybe I was a little upset.

‘Wos he not dere den?’ said the man beside me.

‘No.’

‘Well, don’t worry yourself about dat. He’s not worth de tears.’

Shocked, I rubbed my eyes and spoke defiantly, ‘I’m not upset at him! I don’t know why I’m teary.’

Another guest turned and accepted a refill from the barman. Although I had lost his interest, I spoke, ‘I don’t know why am teary. It is certainly not because of that man. I guess it is because I saw those kids that are next door from here. That and the bad weather. I try so hard to make sure those baby turtles will have the best start in life. And if they hatched now, the weather is bad, and the sand is full of rocks and those kids have the lights on!...’

‘Sh sh sh,’ said the man. ‘Now, why are you troubling yourself, girl?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said dabbing my eyes with my shirt.

‘Dere’s no ting you can do. The baby turtles, dey belong to nature. Let nature take its course.’

I appreciated the wisdom and smiled. But I didn’t know why I cared so much and would make such a fuss. But I had to see those turtles back safe in the ocean. ‘Just relax,’ added the man.

I smiled at that too. I had been hearing much of that advice of late. I should relax.

I stood and left the rum bar. I, however, stood at the doorway for a moment with my brow furrowed over my eyes. It was not clear how I could relax, but I soon departed my neighbour’s home and wandered out onto the road again under a distinctly cloudy sky. A sprinkling of rain on my nose did count me out of finding a way to abandon my worries on the sun bed, and as the drizzle became pellets of rain on my hair, I indeed found a reason to run and take cover and relax at home.

IX

I soon found reason to doubt everything Andrew had said about knowing that my (our) mother was alive. First, there was the Salvation Army who had said my parents had died and, second, how had she never visited me at the home or when I was fostered out to strangers or at my flat now; and third, she just wouldn’t, a mother couldn’t. It would be too shocking to think she had faked her death to cover an escape from me and the rest of the children.

But a shock I got. Andrew had spent months researching the Rainer family and somehow found, by way of a lack of death certificate, that Edna Rainer was indeed alive. Salvation Army records showed that the mother was missing. My father was dead and Edna had remarried… in Jamaica.

‘According to what was in the Salvation Army report, Dad had committed suicide. Put his head in the oven. Mum was missing. Never to have been found. ‘Maybe that was what pushed him over the edge?’ Andrew said.

Then tears poured from my eyes, heavy uncontrollable drops of it, and I cried from my throat for the happiness I never experienced. Perhaps from not having a mother. I could remember the woman: she was a giant in my eyes as a 10-year-old. She had blonde hair and wore skirts. A red one I remembered particularly. But most of all, I remembered the costume jewellery Edna had kept on a dressing table in her room. And makeup too. I would spend what felt like an entire afternoon putting on my mother’s makeup and wearing the long strands of plastic beads. My mother had told me that I looked beautiful when I dressed up like a movie star.

‘I don’t know why she left, but it is okay, I forgive her,’ Andrew said, ‘I never really knew her. And I turned out okay.’

I was not sure that I could forgive my mother. I felt rejected, sure, but I saw no reason to love or hate her. At this stage of my turning over the news in my head, I must have slept, not eaten, and be very lucky to have made it home from Reading at all, since the news sent my mind spinning and I felt lost, without anchor, ever since.

I looked up towards the ceiling as I heard the roll of a voice commanding for all hands in the air. Alistair must have a microphone plugged into his impressive sound system. It was before 11 at night, too early to complain.

I began to cry but stopped short of crying for myself because I found that I had nothing to cry about… really. Edna had become separate from me.

‘What was wrong with her?’ Ellie had asked upon hearing the news.

‘I don’t know,’ said Andrew. ‘And we might never know. But I am planning to write to her to find out. Maybe she will write back?’

‘Well, whatever was wrong with her, Eddie and I don’t want to know, do you Eddie? We have our parents. The ones that took care of us since we were babies.’

‘Yeah, I know what you mean. My mother never ran out on us. I still live with her and my dad,’ Penny added.

I wasn’t surprised to hear the reactions of my youngest siblings, but Andrew had seemed to be complacent about it. Too complacent. I felt frustrated. Didn’t he feel annoyed? Wasn’t he fuming mad with her? He must have been when he first heard? I bombarded my brother with questions when he drove me back to Reading Station. His gaze was attached to the road, but he would quickly glance at me and shrug. ‘We don’t know what she was going through. A woman doesn’t just leave her family without good reason.’

I understood what Andrew was saying but saw glimpses of sadness in him as he looked back to the road. Andrew was eight when Edna left, she must have hurt him somehow. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘to forgive will bring you peace.’

It was easy enough to say, I thought. I distanced myself from his words that would have come from some Church reading material. Where was God when I was all alone and found only by a string of strangers who drank and sinned and were only interested in the pay fostering could bring? Where was God when I broke up with Alan? And why has God left me so sadly alone?

I closed my eyes and drifted back to sleep on my sofa, only to be woken to Alistair bounding up and down on the floorboards shouting wicked, wicked, wicked, into his microphone.

By now I was willing to forget that I knew Edna was alive. My father had killed himself, and that I was alone. After the weekend, I resumed dashing about London for my employer. I typed his letters and arranged his meetings. I had even begun to lunch with the ladies who PA and not have my thoughts wander to the dark place where my real parents existed in my mind.

Until, while I was eating salmon fish cakes, the phone rang. It was Andrew.

‘She answered my letter!’ his voice flipped with a sound that made me nervous. He could have been crying about this. ‘She is in Jamaica, near a place called St Anne’s Bay. She said she was sorry.’

‘She would,’ I said. I didn’t realise that in forgetting about Edna, I had become cynical.

‘Ah, yes,’ Andrew stuttered, ‘she was sorry. She said she was so miserable before she left, she thought we would be better off with our father. She didn’t know he had done what he done.’

I didn’t say anything to this news. I didn’t know what to think. Andrew was really turning on the lights to the reality that had surrounded me but I still didn’t want to know. I hadn’t forgiven Edna or my father or anyone for what they had done.

‘Yes well, she sends her love to you.’

I didn’t know if I wanted it.

‘I am writing to her again. I’m going to ask for her phone number.’

I didn’t hear from my brother for a couple of months after that phone call. My mother was an alive human. She was easier to dismiss when she only existed as a memory, now she was a theory.

By the springtime and at dinnertime, Andrew rang me, his sister. ‘She gave me her number.’ His voice jumped like he had been jogging. Breathlessly he added, ‘She wrote back and gave me her number.’

‘Okay.’

‘I am going to call her… what’s the time difference is Jamaica?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I am going to find that out…’

I held the phone away from my ear. He had hung up. I hardly knew Andrew and his exhilaration and his tendency to think out loud was new to me. It was dusk and I was finishing my dinner. My amusement at Andrew made me nearly forget that my brother was soon to speak with the woman who had left me. It still seemed separate.

I was absorbed with liquor when Andrew called again. I had returned home after a few ‘shooters’ with the PAs – who were coping with their workload of late with some hard drinking. I had the taste for some straight up vodka after the soiree on the town and had almost drunk myself into oblivion when the phone rang.

‘Margarethe.’

‘Yeeeessss,’ I purred into the receiver, stumbling across the chair as I leant to pick up the phone.

‘Margarethe. What would you say to a trip to Jamaica?’

I missed chair when I went to sit on it and when I spoke on the phone I was heaving myself upright. ‘Have I won?’

‘You could say that, but you would have to pay for yourself.’ Andrew was laughing.

‘Is this Andrew?’ I was disbelieving. ‘Are you talking about our mum?’

‘Yes. I was just speaking to her. Well, for the fourteenth time. And we were thinking that I should come over there. And I said that I would ask to see if anyone else would like to come. She said she would love it if you’d be there…’

‘Where to?’

‘Jamaica!’

‘Well, no one would say no to Jamaica. Is mum paying then?’

‘No, you’d pay. I can help you with the hotel or flight or something.’

I only remembered parts of this conversation. I may have said yes to a holiday in Jamaica with my brother. My thoughts at work, which saw me dreamily flick my blue pen left and right, were of that conversation. I remembered Andrew offering to ‘help’ with the travel expenses.

‘I have rung the others as well,’ Andrew had said, I remembered. The others meant Penny, Eddie and Ellie, ‘And they aren’t coming. It would just be the older children seeing our mother. And her new husband too. Jimmy. Jimmy Brown. He sounds Jamaican doesn’t he?’

I strolled down the high road to my block of flats in which I had resided for the past ten years and checked my mail from the ratty metal pigeon holes. One, which was addressed in a scribbled hand, had my address and a simple stamp of the Queen’s head on it. I opened that letter first when I was inside my flat. It was an itinerary of a flight from Heathrow to Norman Manley Airport, Jamaica - then a seven night stay at some hotel in Negril called The Castle. In the same pen scratching a sentence read, ‘We’ll have a great time at this seaside resort. Remember the beach at Shellingborne?’

I did remember the beach near Shellingborne Home for Children. Andyroo could save any creature that had washed up on shore, although, more often than not, it was a creature that would be thrown in my direction, to my squeals of terror at anything slimy. It was fun, though.

I held the photocopied itinerary. There was only one way to meet my mother and Andrew had jimmied that door open with a determined crucifix. I still, however, did not know how I felt about meeting my mother, despite my reasons against it being so logical; I felt more comfortable with the idea of lying on a clean white shore line and becoming toasty brown. Rather than an indoorsy London white.

Andrew had, in what was a nervous greeting, outstretched his albatross wingspan for a hug as I arrived at Terminal 5 pulling my small suitcase on wheels behind me, and my oversized carry bag under my arm.

‘Ready for ten hours on the plane?’

I made a donkey sound for yes, which sounded as awkward as I felt.

‘I wasn’t sure if you were going to come in the end. I thought, oh no, there’s an empty seat to pay for. But here you are.’

Here I was indeed. Off to Jamaica. Off to a place that had not meant anything to me except for Bob Marley and the accent my upstairs neighbour sometimes feigned on his microphone. But now I had family there.

My brother grabbed my bag as we reached a British Airways worker behind her desk who rushed our tickets through a system, checked our passports and strapped barcode

labels to our bags. Leaving us with our boarding passes and passports, me and my brother passed the security points and sat on the padded plastic chairs within a sea of people, tourist faces, suitcases, papers and direction signs.

‘I’m going for a drink,’ I rushed with my carry bag to a sports bar. Andrew followed.

I was feeling a panic in my situation and drank straight up vodkas to lighten my mood. I must have been in a positive frame of mind to agree to this journey. A mood I was bent on recreating with as many cups of the stiff clear drink as I could manage. My plan was to devour as many as possible within the hour before the plane was scheduled for boarding.

*

I did truly wish I had better materials to work with: just three nails, two lengths of wood that gave me splinters and one long, thin heavy hammer. This was not to say I didn’t appreciate the help and insight of Delores, and the generous contribution of materials, I just couldn’t see how I was going to make a menacing scarecrow with what I had.

Now, I held up the structure to the wind that blew grains of sand here and there, into my eyes or onto the corner of my mouth. I pushed the ‘crow into the sand in front of my feet and slumped onto my knees. I had made a cardboard crucifix, I knew it. It was something that could maybe frighten the beach goers into making better moral decisions, or to make them flee the destination entirely, but it wouldn’t scare away the seagulls and would become an opportune perching roost instead. In fact, the few I spied earlier were still trotting about the sea edge and hadn’t shifted since the scarecrow’s assembly.

Delores, in her ever-reliable way, had opened her shop early and said she was there all day – that meant until school had finished. I was frustrated and a little disappointed with the tall wooden cross made out of stakes in front of me, and thought, I could at least visit Delores in the General Store and discuss possible faces.

This morning had seen me have a fruit breakfast on the sun lounger courtesy of Walter, followed by a tall Jamaican Ice Tea, and then I grew ever more relaxed and felt ready to start my day in construction. Delores gave me the nails and hammer to fix the stakes together so it would not, this time, blow away. Which it didn’t, but I had to admit, it was in itself, still completely useless for its purpose.

‘Here,’ Delores said after rummaging behind her counter in the small dark room behind it. She returned with a clownish green plastic bucket. ‘I don’t mind you using this, we have others. Stick it on top to be a head.’

I looked at it. The surprise I felt and the tiredness that betrayed me made Delores react with an impatient sigh, ‘You can nail it on top, see, and…’ she ran her palms under the counter and brought out a black marker, ‘and you can draw a face on it, see?’

I did have a nail left and said thanks. ‘That will do.’

I took the bucket by its thin metal handle and swung it beside me as I walked. The sun was shining hot today but a chilling breeze made the temperature tolerable. I wasn’t hot or cold. I saw the students drinking beer outside their house. It was at that point when I passed their front door on the sandy road when they spotted me stepping quickly and drawing the bucket to my chest like I was protecting a sensitive secret from them. They called out. ‘Ah Mrs… ah Margarethe?’

I stopped and looked at the motley crew of three boys dressed in sports clothes that, by the look of their misshapen appearance, served as pyjamas as well. Their hair looked greasy and knotted like dreadlocks.

‘Come have a drink with us!’ David said, ‘Go on! We haven’t had a drink for a while now; it’d be good to get together. You always have a drink in your hand.’

I was taken aback by the frank observation.

‘Go on,’ he continued with his tone changing to that like enticing a cat towards him. ‘Go on, you know you want to…’

I was flattered by the attention, no matter how basic it was. I warmed to the acceptance to my neighbour’s inner circle, despite the crudeness of our past disagreements. I walked through their front door, still with a rucksack of suspicion tied to my back.

‘Excellent, I knew you were a groover,’ said David who smacked is hands together as he followed behind.

A groover, I heard, I had never been called that. The front room in which I walked was bordered by ruby felt sofas, lying like tormented soldiers laid to rest. Two girls stretched themselves into a full recline on a couch each, their eyes were glued to the blue flicker of a television that gained a poor reception. The walls were bare except for the cream rotting wallpaper curling at the edges. In some places it had been dramatically ripped away. The four of us continued through to an ill-kept kitchen. Flies were attracted to the darkened bench tops and unwashed dishes. But above the sink was a nice view of the water’s edge. They slid the doors beside the kitchen open and walked straight onto a vanishing metre block of sandy grass that sat right at their door.

Everyone grabbed a piece of plastic garden furniture to sit on. I was given a lawn chair, not dissimilar to the material of my plastic sun lounger, and sat at the matching table. David appeared a little later with a glass of rum and coke for me and bottles of beer for the others. ‘How long are you here for anyway?’ I asked, scanning the prime position their holiday home sat upon.

‘Aw, are you trying to get rid of us?’ said a boy, whose name I remembered to be Travis.

‘No, no,’ I said calmly.

Travis laughed, ‘Not much longer anyway. A couple more days isn’t it?’

The group sat down. There were mumbles of yes, and that’s right. I didn’t know how long I was staying for. Until the turtles hatched, I supposed.

‘Still believe in those turtles, hey?’ said David shaking his head.

‘They haven’t hatched yet?’ said another boy. I didn’t know his name but recognised his hissing giggles from the other times I had passed them.

‘Well it is not a matter of believing in them. It is a matter of protecting them now. You see, Wales is not their usual home. They need help to survive…’

‘Yes, yes, yes. Let’s not talk about the turtles tonight, hmm?’ said David, patting the air as a motion to call an end to any potential argument. ‘We are having a lovely time relaxing, having a few drinks.’

Thus I became quiet. I knew these students were too young to care about responsibilities. They were here to have a good time, that’s all. However, I was relieved in knowing they were only here for two days more.

Among the students, they chatted about the weather, returning to university and mundane activities such as paying the bill for their stay. I had become invisible; well, they certainly didn’t put on any airs or effort in their conversation because I was there.

So I sat on my plastic chair and felt myself blending into the wall behind me, while two of the boys, David and Travis, whispered together by the sliding door. They looked at me, the sliding door and each other. I felt most alien to the goings on amongst the young people, especially when the two boys left and I remained with a silent man, to whom I managed a slight closed-lipped smile.

‘What is your name?’ I asked, feeling my words ride the silence like they would expose the lack of my inner confidence.

‘Dunlop.’

Then the silence became something tangible, if I could see it, it would be smoke. I was more uncomfortable and felt the need to leave when the other boys returned followed by the two females, looking dishevelled on the one side of their face. They had been lying on the sofa for a while.

The first of the two women was Emily, who was thin and long in the face, plain except for the scattering of freckles across all of her exposed skin. The other was a plumper more ordinary girl who hovered by the doorway until it was settled where Emily would sit, and sat on the chair close to me. She looked younger but maybe that was because she seemed shyer and did not come across as audacious as the others. I heard Travis call her Mary, when he took drink orders, and he disappeared for a moment into the kitchen.

There was a time towards the beginning of the setting sun that we all sat around the small plastic table, not talking but drinking assorted elixirs, when another boy, Mike, had appeared looking scruffier than the others, perhaps he had emerged after a long day of sleeping. And between the boys they told ‘in-jokes’ that the inner-circle would laugh at, while David took delight in making the girls scream in fright at the seaweed or the wet sand he would bring from the turning ocean to the table.

I was happy to sit and drink laughing at the attempts to entertain the group, but when Travis and Mike marched from the General Store with arms full of short fire logs, I spoke finally, ‘And what are those for?’

Travis mocked the coming of what he knew I going to bring to the table, the rules. He stopped, laughed, rolled his eyes and continued to the spot on the beach where I had often seen them sitting by the shore. ‘It’s getting cold,’ said Travis, ‘time for a fire.’

Chairs dug and tipped into the sand as they were pushed back and the remaining partygoers at the table reconvened where the boys were dropping the wood. They poked balls of scrunched up paper under the logs and lit it. Despite me holding the hope that the fire wouldn’t take to the logs, I thought the wind would have made a bonfire impossible, smoke billowed high into the air, and the flames caught onto one side of the wooden stack and the smoke blew into my face. I spat the smog out of my mouth and rubbed my eyes.

‘That means you are a witch,’ said Emily. ‘The smoke blows towards the witch. They say.’

I moved from the smoke and instead stood in the glow of the flames. I felt my cheeks flicker in warmth. ‘You know you can’t have bonfires on the beach,’ I said.

‘O-oh, we knew that was coming,’ said Trevor, reliving the mocking joke.

‘So you know you shouldn’t.’

‘No,’ said Trevor, ‘you don’t know that we can’t.’

‘No you can’t.’

‘Yes we can. There are no rules here that say you can’t have a fire on the beach. We asked Delores and her husband.’

Delores, I whispered to herself, she … she… was really two-faced. But I thought I’d worry about Delores’s duplicity later. ‘No, Delores knows. You must have asked her before the conservation group arrived…’

‘Oh no, we know where this is going,’ Trevor’s mockery saddened and infuriated me.

‘Yes you know where this is going. A turtle has made a nest here for her young. She has obviously chosen this beach because it looks safe and far away from tourism. But if you are going to make a mockery out of…’

‘Listen lady,’ Dunlop stood. His tone was schoolmarmish, ‘Turtles don’t lay eggs in Wales. It’s too fucking cold.’

I stood, my bucket in one hand, realising that all this time I was concentrating on the never-ending flurry of seagulls when the obvious threat was the tourists. ‘Now, you listen to me. Baby turtles are going to hatch any day now, and…’

The firewatchers groaned. ‘And,’ I continued. These people acted like they were in school, so I thought, I would teach them a lesson. ‘And, if that fire is the first thing they see… I’ll.’

‘Oh you’ll what,’ said Trevor.

I pursed my lips tight together. I was angry. I turned and brought my bucket to my chest. And saying to myself, those bloody kids, those bloody kids, I took my bucket to the sea’s edge, filled it with water, stomped back and splashed it over the fire, which hissed as it instantly dampened and extinguished.

The group yelled at the deadened flames and turned their angry gazes at me. I had turned then and was making my way to my house. ‘What did you do that for!?’ I heard.

‘Oh the fucking turtles.’

‘You don’t have to do that!’

‘There are no turtles here, you hear!’

‘There are no baby turtles in Wales, you harpy.’

‘You witch.’

‘There are no fucking baby turtles in Wales, you mad cow!’

‘There are no turtles here. You are mad. There are no turtles here, my love, and I will prove it, do you hear, I will prove it!’

*

It was the jasmine that first aroused my senses as me and my brother walked out of Norman Manley Airport, Jamaica. It was the smell of jasmine, palm trees and maybe coconut, infusing the fresh air. It may not have been these things but I knew it was something exotic and strange. There were no smells of yesterday’s alcohol and piss that I ignored in London where we left. But the smells were sweet and fresh and gave me a feeling of spiritual freedom.

We stood at the airport’s pick up point and admired the tall palm trees waving to the left in the strong wind vibrating its leaves like a soft rattle. ‘We’re looking for the hotel van. Castle Hotel,’ said Andrew who changed into a Hawaiian shirt and shorts on the plane. Although he dressed aptly for a holiday, I felt more protected against the strong wind in my long sleeved shirt.

Leaning against a small, white bus was a man dressed like Andrew but with a t-shirt under his hibiscus print shirt, canvas shoes and long dreaded hair tied back with a black band. He was smoking and reading the Jamaica Gleaner newspaper. He was leaning on a small bus, full of seats, lined with tall tinted windows and the words Castle Hotel and a

palm tree emblazoned in blue paint on its side. When the Jamaican man saw the two tourists looking left and right by our luggage, he threw down his cigarette and paper and grabbed our bags. ‘Castle Hotel, all right?’ he asked.

In the bus, we sat on upholstered seating and the driver started the engine. ‘No one, else,’ he called, and the van drove off the crescent pick up road, drove through the car park and sped comfortably down a main road.

The road was devoid of cars or pedestrians and instead the roads were lined with thick green wilderness under a solid blue sky, unwavering in its brilliance. I saw wooden houses, painted in green, yellow or blue not far from the road where they looked like shacks. I saw rusted cars outside their doors, drums and maybe people lazing on verandas. In this residential area, tall telegraph poles linked across the road, as more homes appeared closer together and closer to the road. Yet, even as we approached what appeared to be a city, neither me nor Andrew said a word and the bus avoided a chaotic maze of cars driving in what looked like a myriad of directions. ‘We’re in Kingston,’ said the driver across the cabin.

I peered up to the high residential blocks of people out of balconies or drying clothes in the outside air. We saw children climbing the rails without fear and men standing at their cars in groups, smoking and perhaps conducting business.

The bus inched through the mass of cars and in a moment they were free to pull into a petrol station called Toucan. ‘I am just filling up and then we go to the hotel,’ said the driver to us siblings who were not saying a word, we were still stunned by our surroundings.

I could hear the nozzle scratch into the tank and I looked out at the cars on the main road looking busier than Finsbury in peak hour. ‘Hey, hey,’ a man tapped at the window as he passed me and strolled to the shop window. I enjoyed the yellow colour of the station, its walls complimenting the blue sky that peeped through the tall buildings. I thought it must have been hot outside for the gang of men who stood in the shade of the station. They wore tank tops and long shorts, wiping sweat from their brow periodically between taking drags of a cigarette. I admired their manly flip-flops and how some wore necklaces tight to their collarbone. I looked at their faces and thought they were handsome but quickly looked away. I thought they saw me looking from the bus. ‘Hey, hey, who we got in dere?’ said one as the group followed behind them. ‘Come on out there. I see you.’ He tapped on the window to the hooting laughs of his friends.

Our driver returned with a receipt and a bottle of fluorescent yellow pop and started the engine. ‘Aw, don’t go,’ said some of the men, and the car drove back to the jam of cars outside the station. I looked back at the gang of men who returned to their place in the shade. I didn’t think I was in their interest anymore.

It was dusk when our bus reached a main strip of road by the triple coloured sea: green and two shades of blue water stretching out to the horizon. Grass and weeds creeped over the edge of the wild lawn to the road. I thought Jamaica was creeping on me too. There was nothing but beauty and invitations to relax by it, but I knew that the bus was taking me closer to a confrontation. I felt the impending confrontation and would prefer now to stay onboard the long vehicle.

When the car took a little road down to a tall white wall with an authoritative black gate in front, which opened to a click of the driver’s remote, I knew that the car journey was to stop now – and I knew what the next step was.

Us siblings stayed in rooms 31 and 32 on the third floor and could talk to each other again as our balcony walls touched. I looked out at the still blue water glistening under the sunset and sighed. The clean white shore and the fun of the people, who sounded American, made a perfect picture of what I thought an overseas holiday would look like: a place to relax, smile and, most of all, abandon all my worries. I would float in the water, laze on the sun beds, maybe drink rum cocktails and wear sunglasses.

‘I don’t have sunglasses,’ I said to my brother and escaped from his presence, the presence that led me here and was taking me further into this land, away from the fun, sun and abandon. Andrew represented a mission to see my mother.

I landed on the beachfront and met with the wind that knocked my hair into my face and forced me to walk past the empty sun beds to the flickering light of a late night diner facing out towards the drooping sun. I flitted like a seagull caught in the wind and was brought up onto the patio with the other late night diners.

The wind chimes were knocking the veranda posts and the flat sea slid up the shore only a few metres away. It was idyllic, I thought. I was happy to be free of Andrew and his plans for a moment. I noticed the other diners ordering meals straight from a window through to a kitchen and did the same for myself. I approached the window – a slit between the two-toned blue and white walls sitting on the reddish concrete of the floor. ‘What I do ya for, hun’?’ said the lady cook from the kitchen.

‘Ah,’ I paused, looking at the rough display of chalk outlining the menu. ‘Ah, chicken?’

‘Okay, a jerk chicken!’ shouted the chef. I stared at the large lady in floral with her chef’s hat wilting in the heat of the kitchen.

‘Whatchoo looking at?’ said the cook, with her hand pressed on her bouncy hips. ‘You never see a fat chef before, den? Well you know you never trust a skinny cook, now off wid you, we bring out your jerky soon.’

I sat at one of the picnic tables and meditated on the ocean; it was silvery now the sun had gone. A man with his dreads scattered freely about his shoulders, wearing a shirt and jeans, sat by me with a thump making the table creak in unsteadiness. ‘Hello there, shy lady, you mind if I sit widchoo. I don’t want to sit alone, and a lady should not sit alone.’

I smiled and enjoyed the rush of receiving my chicken, ordering a rum and coke and having a guest for dinner. ‘Where are you from?’ he said.

‘London.’

‘London? Well, I have many family dere.’

‘Are you from here, then?’ I asked pulling at the tough texture of the chicken with my teeth.

‘Don’t forget to eat the bones,’ laughed the cook.

‘I am born and bred in Jamaica,’ said the man. ‘I am born and bred. My family has been here for generations. Since the slaves.’

‘That was a long time ago,’ I said.

‘Yes, my family goes back to the maroons who escaped the slave owners and disappeared to the mountains. We were the first free slaves cos we said so.’

I nodded, smiled and enjoyed my chicken. ‘But I no go on about dat, but you understand that we feel it.' He tapped his chest with his fist. 'How long are you in Jamaica? I show you around.’

I felt uncomfortable at this request and explained I was here with my brother to visit my mother, but continued talking to the man called Smooth until I had finished my meal, rum and was ready for sleep. Smooth walked me back to the hotel and disappeared.

When I woke the next day in my hotel room, unremarkable with cane furniture and a red quilted bedspread, I was careful not to make a sound and rouse Andrew and totted to the downstairs buffet. I chose from the selection of fruits: paw paw, mango, passion fruit, pineapple and banana, and relaxed on a sun lounger before anyone was awake to join me. One by one an American or European tourist secured a lounger. The peace of birds twittering and the wind rustling the palm trees diminished to the sounds of parents’ controlling the screams of children and the general hum of conversation. It grew louder and louder. A waiter asked me if he could get me anything, to whom I asked for a rum cocktail and pink and white umbrella with a cherry as an accompaniment. I ordered another and another as the sweet drink tasted more like pop than a beverage and had the bill sent up to Andrew’s room.

‘There you are!’ said a stern voice towering over me and blocking the sun. ‘I have been looking for you.’

Damn, I thought. ‘I said to mother last night that we would be in St Anne’s by lunch. She has sent Jimmy down to drive us there.’

‘Jimmy?’

‘Jimmy. Mum’s new husband.’

When I remembered why we were in Jamaica, and I found, to my great surprise, that I was able to lift myself off the sun lounger and follow Andrew to the front of the hotel, I saw a black man sitting on a rusted blue and brown Ford waiting for us. He was bald except for a sprout of hair cupping the back of his head.

‘Hi Jimmy? I am Andrew, this is Margarethe. Are you here to take us to St Anne’s?’

The man nodded and started the engine that sluggishly ignited. I studied the man my mother married. He wore a thick gold band on his wedding finger. He was black but did not

look as relaxed and Rastafarian as the other locals I had seen. He seemed gentrified in his tan trousers and cream short sleeve shirt. But he could be putting on airs, I thought. He seemed tense and was very untalkative. He finished Andrew’s questions with one-word answers until they spoke no more and turned into the countryside.

I saw fields of burning sugar cane and thick untouched woodland alongside the road as we drove. Clouds were streaks of white across the stark Jamaican sky and the roadside idylls were stores with tatty signs painted on used flat metal or wood advertising chicken or fruit or motorcycle hire.

After an hour or two, we turned down an unfinished road and drove slowly to dodge goats and children playing on the road. ‘Malcolm, get back home, your mother’s making lunch,’ Jimmy commanded a child stunned into a straight posture with wide eyes. He had pale black skin and Margarethe wondered if Jimmy meant Edna. But that child must have belonged to another mother of the many houses that lined this lane. My mother didn’t like children.

*

I diligently stood at the front door of the General Store, as I did like clockwork upon waking up. However, this morning the store wasn’t open; I had never been quite ‘open’ myself at this time of the morning. But I couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t because the noise from last night’s party was especially wakeful, it was because there was no sound at all and that stirred my thoughts all night. I asked myself, had I bitten the tail of a lion? It could turn and overpower me? Perhaps dumping a full bucket of water over their tiny bonfire antagonised them into full red-blooded foes.

I admired the General Store’s shop front window: posters of specials, cut price deals and new in store bargains curtained the view of the shop’s entails, perhaps shielding it from budding thieves, but the honesty of the alerts’ cost effective spending ideas charmed me because this General Store could be as expensive as it wanted; there was not another store for miles.

I was enjoying the summer sunshine that poured onto my back at that time in the morning. I was thinking to buy some of the advertised deals when Delores appeared at the door. ‘Ooh you’re early, love? Come on in,’ she said.

I felt compelled to follow the woman into the store out of friendship. I pushed the glass door open and listened for the tinkle of the bell that sat atop of the frame and walked, my sand shoes squeaking on the flat floor, to the counter and ran my fingers over the boxes of chocolate bars, each as brightly coloured as the next. I sighed. I helped Delores by adding more boxes to the counter. ‘I doused the children’s fire last night.’

‘Sorry,’ Delores looked up, ‘You doused?’

‘Yep, they were mouthing off about the turtles and their fire was too bright. I told them…’

‘So you doused it, with water?’

‘Yep, I used that bucket you gave me, filled it up with water and doused it.’

‘Oh dear,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘I am sure they didn’t like that? Unless it was in good fun?’

‘Nope, it wasn’t fun. They called me a witch.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘Well,’ I looked to the shop ceiling, a glaze of water coated my eyes; I was tired, I told myself, the tears were not to be misconstrued as emotion, ‘I try so hard for those turtles. I keep the beach clean every day. I guard their nest in my spare time. I have tried to shoo away those seagulls, which doesn’t work.’

Delores moved boxes behind the counter but left two on the table. She shook her head at me. ‘My dear poor girl, you sound like you are doing too much. Those turtles are not even your children.’ Delores tore a box open to replenish the shelves with chocolate bars. ‘You know what I do when Jack and Nancy become too much? I go for a walk. You haven’t done anything like that since you’ve been here.’

‘I have, I have been on the estuary tour.’

‘But even then you had those eggs in mind, didn’t you?’

I took a deep intake of air and agreed.

‘You need to go for a walk and get your mind off those turtles. Just a day’s walk. Go up that hill there. You will get a great view of Lloergan Traeth from up there. It is quite breathtaking. Go on. There’s a gate that leads to a path. Don’t go far, come back at sunset and then you have the night to be with those turtles. Right?’

I doubted the wrath of the students anymore and knew a day away from them would give them time to calm down. If they were still mad, I wondered.

Despite my worries at the beach, I left the sandy road that curved around the holiday homes and began my trek across the straggling green grass that struggled to cover the paddock. The fresh air awoke my mind to the pleasures of bees buzzing past my trajectory; a simple brown butterfly caught in the breeze also passed my view. I pulled my cardigan across my chest, and marvelled at the tiny daisies that grew towards the edge of the field. I saw another dead rabbit by the fence that stood at the edge of the mountains and avoided it by walking in a huge arch until I saw the gap in the fence, I didn’t see the gate that Delores described but saw a series of wooden stiles and climbed over it and looked up.

I was confronted by something that was craggy, unwalkable, spiky and leering, I felt tiny in the might of the hill – a hill that looked nothing more than a shadow from the distance, it could have been a cloud, but now I saw that this hill rolled in every landscape imaginable: there were parts that were arid, there were sections of green forest, luscious grass, a trickling stream, rocks that stretched high through the mountain, and if I could see the very peak, it could be snow covered, for all I could tell, a hazy mist sat above it.

I was impressed. Who wouldn’t be? But there was no way I could attempt such an ascent. I looked up and down the fence looking for the path Delores mentioned but was quite affronted by sheep, ten maybe even twenty sheep, all spray painted with blue marks, their long tails waving side to side, looking at me. ‘Baa,’ said one inching closer.

I didn’t have food; I could not be of interest to this untamed sheep! I dashed away from the stronghold by the stile, and ran, my feet picking up behind, my folded arms swinging by my chest. I was out of breath when I stopped. The sheep were not moving from their place. I fell to my knees to get breath. I thought, those horrible sheep. I had lost where I was along the mountain.

It was prehistoric, I knew, the hill seemed older than me, older than everything. To the northern side of the hill I saw how the rocks were mounds so they looked like seats. I climbed across another fence and pulled my legs one at a time to the seats. The stiffened earth beneath my feet helped me push through the effort it took to walk uphill, and then I sat: I saw the sheep turn to something that had caught their interest, was it grass? And I saw the clear sky; there was the sun out. It was a lovely day to find another direction to walk, I had traipsed the coastline long enough. I could only view the tops of the holiday homes from where I was; I’d have to go up. My brief sprint filled me with exhilaration. How alive I felt.

Under a dust of sand, the beginning of a path became apparent at the surface. I could see there was flattened rock, cratered and rough, maybe it was a natural slate? Maybe, as uncultivated as it was, that was a path. Treading on it felt sharp through my sand shoes, I moaned at the daggers of each step, but I pulled through. Each step was difficult and the sand would often cause a leg to slip down and flatten me to the Earth, but pushing up with my hands I summoned the strength, I knew I had all my life, for it to come to my aid again, and I ascended some more.

The rocky terrain soon became a wilderness that I had only read about in storybooks. It was as if I was in the moors. Plant life appeared cold and pale. It was a scrub that cusped the rocks and hardly called for water. Looking up I saw large birds of prey circling overhead. I gulped, I wasn’t dead yet, although my mind filled with thoughts of never being found, staying up the hill forever, learning to live like the wilderness, not needing water but tough enough to endure the strong downpours of rain I knew happened here. There were banks of flat rock pointing to the sky. Years of erosion, I assumed, until I noticed, for the past hour, I was walking upon a flat rock, much like the others I saw.

I was not taking the pedestrian path I planned, the one Delores spoke about this morning, I was rock climbing. I shuddered, never in my life did I ever plan for this one day, or any day, it was not an ambition. I turned back down the hill; the steep view made me sit, gulp and worry like I stood in front of a barrage of muggers. It was obvious to me that to get down to the paddock, to the safe, green paddocks, I would have to slide down on my bottom. If I stood I’d fall down, I imagined myself falling headfirst, somersaulting over the spikes of rocks, tangling my hair in the sparse flora and slipping along my back to the gang of sheep.

It was a long way down and the ocean just peeped above the lets in the distance. It looked flat, peaceful and as strong as the earth beneath me from the distance. I thought, it would be lovely to see Lloergan Traeth from high in the air. Agreeing that I had come so far, I memorised the rocks back up the hill; I stood on one and chose another and another to

climb higher towards the sun. Trees grew so rarely but majestically, I saw as I worked upwards; small, windblown and perfect miniatures of great oak trees, the singing-kind, the ones that shake and whistle in the wind.

With each great step and intake of air I felt power growing in my spirit, my mind became sharper and strength worked in my muscles. I ignored the instinct that made me want to curl into a ball and sleep. Thoughts of my bed rampaged in my mind as cracks in the rock beds caused my toes to drag in their crevices, but I continued.

After a few fits of initiative I stopped. I was in a plantation of pine trees, I could see right up into the maze of branches that extended into the other’s reach. A brown seabird fluttered away from me. The ground was soft where I was, the rock was now behind me. I was cool in the forest. The sunlight was only visible as a fan of beams that spilled through the leaves. I walked to stand under one; it was the sort of hallowed light that made me think of angels, of a presence that looked over me. Leaves cracked under my feet and a wind rustled the leaves. I followed the light that disappeared as I approached. It was disappointing but then I saw through the trees, a babbling brook.

It was a little waterfall in an open clearing. Sun was beaming down on the tiny streams of water that played over rocks and smoothed the surfaces as it travelled down the hill. It was a pretty sight and delicate white flowers grew by its side. It was lovely, and I sat by the whimsical stream dazing up to the sun that shone greatly overhead and made the stream sparkle like magic danced there. All around me were pine trees, rich and green, but a view of the beach was still in my mind. Delores said a lovely view exists up the top, and that, I told myself, was why I was there.

The forest ended abruptly as I followed the stream to its source. Obviously this forest was manmade. But the thought that it would be lopped one day would be a miserable one. I persevered through. The stream narrowed until it disappeared and I stood before rocks that were taller than I had seen before; the forest was behind me and I turned very carefully on the flat rock beneath me. There was Lloergan Traeth. The ocean was as blue as the darkest sky and the sky was as blue as the lightest ocean. Streaks of cloud were like a jet stream of darts in front of the sun. I breathed in the air expecting the taste and smells of salt and sea but took the aromas of pine and dew instead. I kept standing because if I sat the view would disappear behind the trees. I marvelled about how much this beach had become a part of me; it had now meant so much. I would do anything now to preserve it. I sighed. I felt so lonely.

X

If I had not drunk so much rum at breakfast, my stomach would not have felt so doubly knotted as I stepped out of the car and onto the dirt track driveway next to a wooden white house. It was like most of the homes I saw along the way but it had a few English touches: net curtains in the windows, a gap for post in the front door, and roses. They were struggling to stay fresh in pots on window sills and in the hanging baskets on the veranda.

But my stomach was twisted. I felt ill. So I was easily led to the front door and into the home of my long lost mother without a word of protest or request to catch my breath.

Two teenage boys, who must not have been older than 14, stormed through the house, thumped on the wooden floor boards and disappeared through a large gap in the wall that led to the kitchen. I let my eyes follow along the framed pictures on the walls and to those resting on the small side tables next to the sofas. There were pictures of the two boys I saw on the road and of an older lady with a different, young boy; there were also more of the lady with the boys who bounded through the house before and also with Jimmy. That is my mother, I whispered.

‘Oh, you’re here! There’s Andyroo,’ a woman with her skin leathered by the sun and hefty big hips, from what I thought could only be from having so many children, waded into the living room with her arms outstretched to Andrew. His head pressed into her neck and Edna held him tight, gently swinging their embrace side to side. She and Andrew squeezed each other for a time that made me feel awkward. But I did feel the longing for the love that Andrew received. They broke the hold and Edna turned to me. Edna partially moved towards me before I betrayed my feelings of wanting what Andrew had and waved a single palm across my chest and said, ‘Hi.’

A sound of pots and pans rumbling in the kitchen caught Edna’s attention. ‘Roy and Todd, that’s enough of dat noise. We have guests.’ She smiled at me.

I was taken by the odd mix of a South English accent when Edna began speaking and as she continued fell into the bouncing tones of the Jamaican accent.

‘I hope you had a good trip so far,’ Edna began. ‘Kingston can be frightening.’

‘No, it was okay,’ said Andrew. ‘Different but okay.’

‘Well, you are in your hotel now. Nice?’

I nodded. The paintings on the walls were of the English countryside. I nodded to them. ‘When did you leave England?’

‘Ah, I was 30, I had met Jimmy in London and we married and moved here a couple of years later.’

‘Were you hiding out in London?’

‘Margarethe!’ gasped Andrew.

‘No, no,’ Edna placated with her hands and pressed at the knee of Andrew who was sitting so close to her. ‘I was not hiding. Your father, God rest his soul, knew where I was… I’m so sorry for what had happened. When I didn’t hear anything from him, I assumed you were okay and he didn’t want to speak to me. I wasn’t surprised.’

I didn’t respond to the conversation any longer and chose to look around the plastered walls: they were wood chipped and shared the space with a wall of wallpaper, speckled in dainty flowers.

When a short pause of the conversation had passed, Andrew moved his chair closer to Edna and took her hand. ‘You didn’t know dad had killed himself.’

‘No, I didn’t know. It is horrible, I know. I didn’t think he would do dat. He was such an angry, controlling man. His dinner had to be warm and ready when he came home. And the house! Clean of course. I always thought he would be too proud to do anything like that. I look back at him so differently now…’

Edna’s gaze drifted to a space in the air and must have been accessing a place where her first husband existed in her mind. Her earrings grazed her neck as they dangled. She still wore costume jewellery, long strands of plastic beads, I noticed and some memories streamed back to me.

‘So, why leave then?’ I said. I couldn’t say more words than that and held my face away. I was feeling teary all of a sudden.

‘Oh,’ said Edna, ‘you have to understand. I wasn’t good at being a mother. Especially not to you elder children. I couldn’t feed you and Arthur and keep the house tidy. I couldn’t keep an eye on you all when I prepared the house and dinner so your father wouldn’t get angry. It was just too hard. I wanted you to have the best life but I was too young. I was only 17 when you were born. Arthur was 42 and stuck in his ways.’

I could see the emotion punctuating every word Edna said. I looked away from her.

‘And then when the twins were born and then Penny…’

Andrew calmed Edna at that moment. It was obvious that this was a story that upset her. I rolled my eyes and rose to my feet. I watched Andrew comforting the old woman saying ‘it’s okay, it’s okay, you’re like the prodigal mother,’ to which Edna laughed through her tears. ‘I’m going outside,’ I said grimly.

I walked outside onto the landing and sat on the swinging net hammock that was tied to the veranda balustrade and the house. I saw out to the end of the street: a street comprised only of a dusty ill-maintained road, hydrangeas and wild bush land. Although there were two homes further down the road, I couldn’t count the locale in which my mother was living as a residential area of any description, it was not even a village. There was a tropical jungle-like wilderness growing around them and I saw a parrot fly into a tree. Its orange and blue-feathered head was very neat on its glistening green body. My mother might not be living in an area I could describe as civilised but it was a paradise.

I sat for a moment and allowed myself to let in the words my mother had said. A few words seemed to be a chorus always repeating itself in a song: she didn’t know, she was young, if she knew it would be different. A syncopated boom bounced a car along the rough road and rested at one of the neighbours’ homes. The boom seemed jewelled in a jangle of horns and guitars. Reggae, I thought. I appreciated the atmosphere it evoked in the environment. The whole country, I thought, moved to the laggish beat I heard from the beaten silver sedan. I missed it immediately when the engine was turned off. Flies buzzed about my face and attempted to rest on my lips, so I blew the flies away with a spit. ‘Margarethe, love, come in for lunch,’ Edna had opened the door and disappeared back indoors.

As I stepped into the house, a boy younger than the others pushed a BMX bike through a hallway to which Edna shouted, ‘Don’t come down here with dat thing, boy, go outside.’

‘How many children do you have here?’ I said as I walked to the kitchen table.

‘I have five boys,’ she said, ‘No g…’ Edna stopped and looked for my reaction.

I sat at a dark wood oval table covered with a white lace tablecloth and a couple of roses in a small vase sat in the middle. The kitchen was painted blue with shambolic kitchen units that looked like Jimmy could have picked them all, including the rusted oven and hob, from a roadside, seeing they were separate from each other and all different shades of beige and grey. ‘So, you’ve had ten children altogether, then, pretty fertile?’

‘Mmm,’ Edna agreed, ‘I was always pregnant. I’m too old now.’

Edna rose and retrieved a large serving plate of cold aioli, chicken jerky, a plate of white root vegetables and what looked like goat curry for everyone to eat. ‘This the national Jamaican dish. You have to suck the bones…’

I had heard that before, sucking bones. I heard the reggae music again in the distance; the car must be pulling out of that driveway. I liked reggae. ‘Did you ever want to contact us?’ I felt my voice finishing that sentence stronger than I had spoken to Edna before. I didn’t want to challenge her.

‘I did, so many times. Especially before I came to Jamaica. But I would stop myself. What could I say to you or the people that had you then? I might’ve been arrested.’

‘Yes,’ I said into my curried goat. ‘Do you have anything to drink?’

‘Beer?’ said Edna.

‘Yes. Can we listen to reggae?’

‘Of course. Jimmy has some Ska tunes. From the 60s. Jimmy! Put on some music, man,’ she yelled and he pounded the floorboards and then the stereo was playing some tinny and raw vocals of men singing into an old microphone.

‘Do you wish for girls?’ I said, ‘This is very nice.’ I pointed to the meal.

‘I did wish for girls,’ said Edna.

Andrew let in a deep breath and exhaled with a new subject. ‘So where do you recommend for us to visit in Jamaica? We have a few days.’

‘Well,’ said Edna after swallowing a mouthful. ‘The Blue Mountains are gorgeous. You can visit the bird sanctuary there and see the view of the Caribbean Sea. We can take you. Jimmy can drive us to your hotel and den take you to the Blue Mountains.’ She looked up to smile at me. I had just finished a bottle of beer. ‘Another one?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘There are also some very good bargains to be had in the flea markets in Kingston. We could take you there too.’

‘So, why did you say you left again?’ I asked rather matter-of-factly. I heard myself. I only wanted to meet the woman. Not confront her.

‘Margarethe!’ Andrew said firmly. ‘You must all go to the beach a lot here. All this sun.’

‘Yeah,’ said Edna gingerly. I had turned away from them. My beer was almost drunk. I was quiet. ‘We do go to the beach in the dry season. There are beautiful beaches on the north side of the island. Not many tourists are there. You might even get a beach to yourself. We can take you both dere too.’

I felt like a big spider in the room. Everyone was going about a normal conversation but glancing at me every so often. Edna’s face, aged in a wisdom that seemed to earth her, looked flushed. Her hazel eyes darkened as she finished her meal. She picked up the plates when dinner was eaten and although Andrew helped her and offered to help, Edna declined it and hid herself in the mounting dishes that needed clearing. When she joined her older children in the lounge, she said, ‘Jamaica has its problems, though. We have had cyclones here nearly every year for the past 15 years I have lived here. And the gangs! Whoo…’ She trailed off. ‘The gangs. I count my blessings every day that my boys don’t get injured or killed. They don’t seem to be in dem. But dey could not be telling me!’

I thought I could ask them for drugs and then know. ‘Can I have a beer, please?’

‘Help yourself, lovely. You don’t have to ask.’

I wanted some fresh air. I motioned for Andrew to join me or leave. But he was in deep conversation with Edna. ‘What about the history of Jamaica,’ he asked.

I walked outside and onto the dirt road and followed it to the T-junction. Turned left and walked. A wall of leafy bushes shaded the road and made my journey, however long it was going to be, feel cool. With each step I took, I felt freer but still burdened with sadness. I was ready to be brave and meet my mother, but on meeting her, I felt hard done by. I almost regretted being here.

I walked beside the rich green bushes that soon tapered off and only straggled grassland remained. I walked; the sun became hotter and hotter and my temper started to crush my mind. A few dips and a climb of the road lay before me. I was at the very end of what seemed too far away from my original plan - just for some air. I would not wander too much further.

A shiny tin roof freckled with the afternoon light appeared and as I approached the shack, I did not question why I would go in there. Blindly I approached what looked like a pub or a gentleman’s club. I stepped onto the concrete floor of the house and peered through a dirty window. I saw a swathe of men sitting by a bar drinking brown shots of liquid in little glass cups. Here at this establishment I could find relief from the pressures in my head. I pushed a cracked yellow door open to a snap of eyes placed on my presence. An elderly man stood up and offered me his seat before he sat in a corner over his drink. ‘Thank you,’ I had said and ordered a beer.

‘You sure you don’t want rum dere girl. This bar in on a little rum distillery,’ said a man in jeans and a white t-shirt. His hair was short and otherwise hidden under a thatched fedora hat.

‘Ah well, when in Rome,’ I said.

‘That’s it exactly girl,’ a man in trousers and a patterned shirt leaned towards me. I didn’t seem to mind my surroundings. ‘What is a girl like you doing here den? You look like you are a long way from home.’

‘No,’ I said defiantly, ‘my mum lives around here.’ I pointed blindly behind myself. I was more interested in the bottom of my empty glass. I liked that drink. It was strong but gentle, fuming with alcohol and I sensed the subtle spices, was it cloves? ‘Can I have another, please?’

‘So who’s your mum den?’ the man asked like he would know, ‘Is it Rosalind? Sarah? I know, that fat lady, she is with Jimmy.. what is her name…?’

The elderly man yelled from his corner, ‘Edna…’

‘Edna, that’s it. You are Edna and Jimmy’s girl?’

I didn’t argue with him. Why not be both their kid? Better to be known among strangers. I ordered another drink of rum

‘Yeah, I haven’t seen her for 30 years or something like that.’

‘30 years!’ whistled the man. ‘So you come to see her after all this time?’

‘Yeah, I haven’t seen her since I was 10.’

‘So you got questions for her and you no like what you hear. Is dat it?’

Soon enough I felt the attention from the men in the bar wane. I guessed they didn’t want to get involved, much like how I was feeling now about it. There were pictures of Bob Marley over the bar with the Jamaican red, yellow and green flag imposed over his face. ‘Bob Marley,’ I pointed to the picture and slurred my words. ‘I see him everywhere like he is Chairman Mao.’

‘He is not Chairman,’ said the man who introduced himself as Jon, ‘He is the King of the Rastas.’

‘Oh,’ I said, disinterested and ordered another rum.

‘You should look after yourself now, child. Jimmy is a good man. You will not get in trouble here. I will make sure you don’t go wandering in any Kingston garrison talking about Bob Marley like you tink you know, but you go back to your mamma drunk it’s your own problem. My mamma still gives me hiding.’ Jon said to the hoots of the other men who laughed at him.

‘Yeah, I’m sorry,’ I said as the barkeeper played a recording of Bob Marley on his personal sound system.

‘Redemption Song,’ he said.

‘Yeah, I’m just drinking. I can’t stop. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I should have stayed in London. Sometimes it’s better not to know, you know? I wish I didn’t know now.’

Roy lit a cigarette. ‘Ganga,’ he called it and offered some to me. I inhaled a small drag. ‘Well you here now girl,’ he said.

‘I am here now,’ I repeated and thought about what it meant. I was here, sitting on the red leather stools, listening to Bob Marley with my mother around the corner. Although my first instinct was to go back to London, maybe turn back time and never come in the first place, I had to think what I could tell my mother now I had the chance.

‘That horrible bitch,’ I hissed. ‘She ran out on us when I was ten. We had to live in a home.’

‘That is a terrible ting, mothers don’t leave dere babies.’

‘Yeah, and I wasn’t a baby. I remember her. I remember living with her. I remember holidays with her. I remember her putting me to bed. And then poof! No more…’ I was turning into a sad drunk. I hated being sad and drunk at the same time, so I opened my eyes wide to stop the tears, stretched my mouth, roared a dry growl and drank the rest of my drink. ‘Thanks,’ I said and pushed my glass towards the barkeeper. ‘I feel better and Bob Marley is excellent. Seeya Jon!’ I trounced out of the little room and stood at the road, its hills leering at me from both sides.

Now I had to remember how I got there. I shuffled towards the little rum distillery from either side to see which felt more familiar; I remembered I turned left into it because I had never crossed a road to get where I was, so that meant turning right and right again to get to where I started, at my mother’s house.

I took a right through the road cutting through the scattered grassland and returned to the road bordered by wild tropical hedges. The sun had almost set now and although I was hungry, tired and quite drunk from the shots of rum I drank in quick succession, all I thought of was what I couldn’t remember! For all the things I did remember about her, I could not remember ever being in trouble. When I thought back to when I was ten and before, I remembered being good. I remembered being helpful too. So if I was good, helpful, kind and no problem to my mother, then why would I then deserve to be left behind?

‘Well, there you are. Don’t go wandering off in the middle of Jamaica. I was worried sick,’ Edna greeted me stumbling through the front door to find Edna, Jimmy and Andrew in the Anglofied sitting room sipping tea from dainty cups.

‘Nice of you to worry, but I would only have cared for that when I was ten. Forget it now,’ I fell onto the sofa, I felt like a teenager and rubbished the feeling immediately.

‘I would worry about any girl alone ‘ere.’

‘Yes, any girl,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I have ever meant more to you than that.’

‘Margarethe…’ Andrew stood up.

‘You have never been any girl. You have always been more than that to me,’ Edna stood too and approached me. I stood too but only to move backwards.

‘More than that!’ My tone began to shrill; I felt the sad drunk return. ‘More than that! You left me. I was ten. I remember you!’

Edna flapped her muumuu and brushed her brown hair out of her eyes. She sighed a breathless groan and shuffled towards me. I was wiping away tears, and upon seeing her, stepped back to the front door. ‘I was leaving you in better hands,’ Edna said pleading.

‘Better hands!’ I collapsed my mind in what I thought was a nonsense. ‘Better hands! Strangers! Why would a mother leave her eldest girl with strangers? You don’t think that a girl of ten needs her mother?’

Edna was silent and I thought she looked defeated. ‘A mother would have taken her. A good mother would have taken her daughter who followed her. Who looked up to her. Who was under the care and protection of her. But you may as well have left her to wolves.’

‘I didn’t leave you to wolves…’

The chuckling surrendering tone of Edna irritated me. I felt my temper rise out of my mind and opened my eyes. Wide. ‘You might as well left me to wolves. You had no idea what happened to me, where I went. What became of me!’ I felt my shouts laced in cries. ‘You are a terrible mother. A failure! Why would you leave a girl who remembers you? I remember you! And you left me! Why didn’t you take me with you?! I never remembered being trouble. I would have liked to have this…’

I didn’t notice but I was moving towards, leering and crowding Edna with my words who muffled to Jimmy. ‘I think she should go. I think you better go.’

‘Why did you leave me? I remember you! Why couldn’t I have come?’ I cried. ‘Oh, rejected again,’ I said as Jimmy took me by the arm and ushered me to the front door. ‘What’s happened? Rejected again. I am rejected my by mother again. And I remember you again!’ I saw the empty expression of Andrew who clearly didn’t know what to say. ‘I remember you now as a cowardly mother. Someone who means nothing to me!’

I didn’t know if Edna heard my final words to her because the next time I felt conscious I was in the front seat of the brown sedan with Jimmy driving along a dark unlit bay. I closed my eyes again.

I slept on my arms along seats in the Jamaican airport. I had arrived at the airport with all my clothes and bought a heap of duty free rum to stuff into my one oversized canvas bag. My arrival there was hazy but as the sun came up, the shine of my alcohol-intake was replaced by a headache. I summoned what had happened the night before. What had happened? I knew but didn’t want to remember, my headache pierced my eyes. And how horrible I felt in my chest too? I hated my mother. I remembered that. And I hated who I was. And I hated who I myself had become because my mother had left me. And now, I thought, it had happened again.

‘There you are!’ said an exasperated Andrew who rushed to me, panting and shaking his head. He looked to the ground to recover his breath. ‘When I couldn’t find you at the hotel… I thought maybe you were on the beach or went to a bar… but I asked the hotel porter…’

‘Oh you care too.’

‘Yes, I do care. We all care.’

‘All of you care?’ I almost laughed. ‘Edna…’

‘… No, well, she’s upset. Well she was when I left her.’

I didn’t laugh. I sat up and turned away from Andrew.

‘Listen, I feel terrible,’ said Andrew. ‘Let me make it up to you.’ He pulled out his wallet from his holiday shorts. ‘Do you want to go back to London? I will pay for that…’

‘I am on holiday. I don’t want to go home.’

‘Okay, do you want to stay here?’ I laughed then. ‘No, obviously you wouldn’t want to stay here. You wouldn’t want to see her!’ he joked. ‘That was quite the exhibition. Hey?’

I looked at Andrew and thought, an exhibition? It wasn’t an exhibition.

‘No jokes, okay. Well, why don’t you stay at my little place on the Welsh coast? It’s easy to get to, just take a bus from Cardiff Airport. You can stay as long as you like…’ he pulled a bunch of jangly keys from his pocket and slid a singular key off the ring. ‘This is it, and if you have any trouble see the people at the General Store. They know me. Just take a bus to Snowdonia and jump off at Lloergan Traeth. Moonlight Beach. You can relax there. Forget all about this.’

I took the key and a napkin, upon which Andrew had written directions. ‘Please go there,’ Andrew said, ‘you have had a hard time of it here. I understand that you don’t like it here. But let me make it up to you.’

I didn’t know if Andrew was being nice or if I was cooperating in a ruse to get me off the island. My mother didn’t want me there. And when I thought about how I felt and my time on the island, it only reminded me of my mother, and I didn’t want to be there either. Maybe a brief trip to this moonlight beach would help me escape this mess, and more significantly, myself.

XI

I could see the beach, the ocean and the row of homes. I could see the lolloping waves chopping out from the shore. And after quite a lot of staring, using my hand as a visor, I could see a fishing boat moored off the coast. My heart jumped. The fisherman.

Clouds were setting in from the west and their approach to the hills was visible. Their speed was not altogether fast but I could see the feathery grey haze covering the ocean like a bird’s wing coming in to rest.

Lloergan Traeth was a pretty picture, a gorgeous little cove from a distance. Delores was right: the view was worth catching, a perfect dalliance from my conservation effort. I took in a large portion of air into my lungs. The freshness of it was felt in my head, sinuses, chest and mouth. I felt sick. Fresh air, exercise and healthy living were making my head spin. I thought about returning.

There was activity on the beach. Little people were busying themselves with some commotion, but I could not be certain. They seemed to be at work. I could see people moving forwards and back; even though I couldn’t see exactly what they were doing, it did cause me concern. If there was something going on down there, surely I should know. I found some solace; however, knowing the fisherman would not let anything too horrible happen to the turtles’ safe haven.

Rain lightly patted my head. I left the peak on which I stood and embarked on the journey downhill without an umbrella, or a raincoat, to protect my face or hair. And my impractical footwear did not protect me from the solid ground fast turning into mud beneath my feet, but on the threat of unknown activity on the beach, I moved as quick as I could back down through the forest. It had caught some rain in the mess of leaves and delivered huge droplets onto my head: they felt like tiny ponds on my crown which streamed down my face. The brook was streaming now too as it caught water.

It was raining heavily. My legs slipped underneath me and I slid on my side down ten feet of mud. I hated this now, but on trying to pick myself up again, I collapsed and asked myself, ‘Why am I here? Why did I think this would be okay?’

I sat still and stayed there. I saw water cascading down the rock slabs that served as my pathway up and now as it was supposed to offer safe passage down the hill. I had to take the rest on the journey on my bottom. The prospect disgusted me but also offered the safest option.

It was not the sensible choice I knew. I realised, with the horror of repugnance, the prospect of my bottom being in danger of collecting the entire mountain face as I descended what was becoming a trap to me.

I let my feet pull my bottom close to them whilst using my hands to push for the maximum gain on ground; it wasn’t the most direct way to descend the hill, but I followed the path I remembered I’d taken to get to the top of the hill and did not question whether it was the quickest route to the bottom or not.

I was, as those students would tell me if they saw, a stupid, wicked old lady who was making a fool of herself. But I knew, despite what criticisms would come my way if anyone saw, I was an ill-prepared cowardly woman who did not plan for rain on this trip or wore the most sensible footwear for hiking; but I continued on my bottom across the bedrock in haste. The busyness I spied on the beach might mean that the eggs were in danger. I had to make sure of their safety.

I shuffled my bum across the bedrock and stood near the end of the mountain. I felt the bottom of my good canvas trousers pulled almost to my knees. What I must have collected there to make my trousers sag as much as they did? Rain fell more briskly in a continuous stream over my clothing; I lifted each foot burdened with the weight of the water and pulled my sopping hair behind my ears. Carefully I took the few steps to the grassy field at the bottom of the hill. I looked back up the hill; I had climbed down that mountain fast.

I spluttered and looked around for the sheep that were so aggressive at the gate before. They were nowhere to be seen. I would envy them or anyone else indoors at the moment.

That business on the beach must be over now it is raining, I thought, but I made haste across the slippery paddock to the beach anyway, minding the piles of rabbit droppings, glistening under the wet weather; I passed the rabbit carcass too, I saw its innards removed and just a soggy and shaggy outer skin remaining. Its fur disappearing into the grass and turning to soil as the rain pushed it down.

‘My God! What happened to you!?’ Delores shouted at the door of her General Store. ‘You look like you were dragged down that hill!’

I stood at the end of the paddock, relieved to be almost home: that is, to check that the turtles were safe first, and then to sit in a hot bath. It would be the first of my holiday. ‘I got caught in the rain,’ I returned, shouting as much as I needed to carry my voice through the downpour.

‘Well, go home, get out of the rain!’ Delores shouted. I wasn’t sure she heard me.

‘What was happening on the beach before, when I was gone?’

‘Nothing, I didn’t see!’

‘Are those students there?’

‘I don’t know,’ Delores was still shouting. The weather did not let up. ‘They left a few hours ago! Get out of the rain!’

I wondered if what Delores said about the children leaving was true. I could hear the faint baseline of someone playing reggae indoors. The light was on at the rum bar, I saw. The gentlemen’s club must be in full swing, I thought.

I walked down the small road; the sand I was so used to seeing on it had washed away. I wrapped my arms around my shoulders, shivering. I could see there was no activity on the beach from the road but saw the fisherman and Walter standing in the rain. They weren’t happy. I thought they were as crazy as me to be out in this weather.

Outside my place a great wind picked up around me blowing the rain sharp into my eyes. I squinted. The beachfront looked hazy as I approached it. There was Walter in his waiter’s uniform standing there in the downpour: his tray upright on his palm.

‘Is that you?’ I yelled.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ answered Walter.

I pushed myself against the barrage of wind, while I tried to make out the other fellow standing at the water’s edge. The phantom in the hazy spray, as if sensing his identity was sought, waved his arm briefly and called out ‘his girl.’ I was at ease to know the fisherman had come, despite the torrid storm, maybe to protect my turtles. Nevertheless, he could not stop the rain, but he was there anyway.

With an outward sigh that capsized my chest into a puddle of relief, I took long steps on the damp sand. I was walking but then I was falling and I found my body flat on the ground and one leg deep inside a hole. I could not bear to be so ashamed to have fallen and I rose with an embarrassed grin. I could not laugh for the rain caught in my throat. I brushed the sand off my body but it stuck like a painted texture impossible to remove.

I walked again towards the fisherman who didn’t seem to see my accident, or didn’t care, and I walked again with the rain in my eyes. The one leg that was raised up in the air could have been picked up by the wind and flown me back to my home, I guessed. I put the leg straight down but it travelled further than I expected the earth to stop me and my other leg followed into another deep hole. Deeper than the other and somewhat smoothed by the rainfall.

I pushed myself up again. What was going on? I stood towards the ocean and saw the trail of holes leading to the sea. Slowly I turned back to where I came, careful not to descend back into the trench. There were holes at every step behind me. It was a marvel that I only fell in two. I gazed up the dune side of the beach. My sun lounger was discarded into the vegetation, and everywhere I looked, up and down, where I sat and further along the wet messy sand, there were holes. So many holes. There were so many holes that some were close enough together to join into larger holes. And there were no piles of sand, they were somewhat flattened by the rain. But the beach had definitely been dug up.

My turtles, I gasped, shocked, tears formed in my eyes and I wept. I could not see any eggs shells. Maybe they were okay, I thought; it was a brief glimmer of pretending that what I saw was not that bad. But I knew. The turtles must have gone. There was no way they could survive whatever happened here. Wherever I could see, the beach was punctured, stabbed. It was completely ruined. The haven for turtles was no more. I could see that.

‘My God!’ I wailed. ‘What has happened?’

Sobbing, I wished a hole had engulfed me. I hopped quickly to each one to check if any eggs were left. Not even one. Those poor turtles! It was hard to believe but I visited each hole visible on the sand, as wet as it was, and felt the bottoms of each hole. I didn’t know why I did that, but I felt them all to feel how real the emptiness of each hole was.

There were no turtles, not a trace. Whoever did this did not leave any alive, I thought. Then the sad stare of Walter and the fisherman pressed on the back of my head as I lay down with my arms hanging over a pit. I had sand on my face, along my arms and I sniffed. It was cold and I was very upset and did not want to believe it. What about the others, I thought? Walter and the fisherman were there, did they see anything or come too late like me?

I flicked my wet hair from my neck when I faced them. First, the loud reggae music died and the men looked down. Walter bowed so diminutively. He looked up; he was sad and stepped backwards. He disappeared like an apparition. The fisherman shook his head and disappeared like Walter shortly after.

I fell to my knees and cried to the heavens to stop raining. I knew my friends might not have been real. I knew that my mind could have invented them as I left Jamaica so quickly and I didn’t want to leave there. Not really.

But the turtles? The big mamma turtle that visited me on my first day at Lloergan, I thought she was real. I was so sure. I saw the massive female pull herself with so much effort, with a majestic haul only a mysterious queen of the ocean could have managed. I was so sure. So sure.

But everything seemed unreal now. Whoever dug up the beach had taken away my purpose. Even if it was the only purpose for the one time in my life, I felt needed, or even exemplar. But taken away like a young life: I thought it was tragic and the most violent reality check I had ever experienced.

I walked out of the rain back to my holiday shack. I was dejected for the loss. I knew those students probably sought revenge on me. It was troubling that they would kill an entire habitat like they had. But they never believed me anyway. Maybe, I thought as I opened the door to my place of residence, maybe I should stop believing it myself as well.

I had always shown great loyalty to the natural way of things at Lloergan Traeth. It was reflected in my daily routine during my stay: I shooed away seagulls, cleared litter, alerted the neighbourhood and always stood guard at the nest. I thought of nothing but the protection of the new ecological visitors to these shores. Even if I couldn’t prove their existence with the various experts and authorities that came my way, I did have them admit there could be chance.

The subject of my obsession did not know the extent my efforts I would reach to conserve their path back to the ocean, but their lack of existence now was exposed, and without a doubt, proved false. I knew. But I could not come to terms with the efforts those students must have gone to, to contradict my truth.

Since I was experiencing a very unhappy day, now with my purpose dismantled, I sat myself down with my carry bag, dirty, worn and leathered like my spirits, and tried to put thoughts of the sea creatures behind me. They were like a fairy tale, which enchanted my mind away from my lonely life in Finsbury Park, the awkward meeting of my siblings, the trip to Jamaica, and meeting my dead mother.

The next day I had a visitor. Delores was also shocked to see the beach in a state of hollows and trenches. Delores knocked on the door of my holiday home and poked her head in. ‘I saw the beach, Margarethe. I am not surprised you are packing to leave, pet.’

‘The eggs are gone. They might not have been there at all.’

‘I know pet, you must be disappointed, and after all the work you’ve done. To see the beach dug up like that…’

‘I did so much. It seems like it was for nothing now.’

Delores pushed open the door and greeted my sullen self. Delores had a sadness in her eyes as she looked pitifully at the woman sitting on a dusty ground, scrounging for her clothes and drink bottles to put into her bag. ‘It was not necessarily for nothing?’ Delores put a lift in her voice to encourage some cheer. ‘I know we appreciated it, even if those young guests didn’t. If only all guests took an interest in the upkeep of the beach. I must say it has never looked as lovely before you came.’

I zipped my bag and walked with Delores to the door. I looked across from the plant life on the dunes to the sandy shore. I sighed. It was nice of Delores to say that she had never seen the beach look so nice before I came along, but look at it now: it looked like a choppy sea with mounds of sand flattened by yesterday’s rain. The dips looked cavernous like a reef. The narrow ridges between the holes looked as if they would collapse if trodden on. But I decided, in the name of all the work I had put into the upkeep of this beach, I could not leave it this way. ‘I suppose there is a shovel about?’ I asked the shopkeeper.

‘We do have a shovel somewhere. I am not sure where it is now.’

‘I know where it is.’

I dropped my heavy bag to the ground. The clink of bottles knocking against each other did not bother me, and I strolled around the front of the holiday homes to the collection of plastic outdoor furniture, bare and shaking gently in the wind. I pressed and cupped my hands so I could peer into the students’ rental through the sliding window door. For a second I thought the place could be occupied for all the bottles, beer cans, crisp packets and piles of pots and pans stacked across the kitchen tables, benches and floors. But there was an eerie emptiness to the darkened rooms that I could see. I had looked around my feet and inside the home and saw the shovel, the tool of my discredit, lying face down on the lounge room floor. I slid the door open. I was not surprised the students would leave their home in such disarray and unlocked. I walked in and quickly grabbed the shovel. It seems, I thought, those kids would abandon their home like they discarded the beach.

Now with the shovel still turned down, I scraped the mounds of sand back into the holes. It was clear how unhappy and impatient I was with the chore in front of me. I sighed. How I had cared for those eggs, but the gloom of my mood was overtaken with a darker fog when I thought of how much I had failed the eggs. I should have been nicer about the bonfire, I knew it happened because I put that fire out, quite dramatically, I recalled.

But, I thought, if I had ever doubted the existence of the turtle eggs, after their mother’s triumphant carriage up the shore to nest here, I would not have cared as violently as I did.

The students were aware that turtles do not detour far away from their summer Caribbean route, and are only in this part of the world to eat jellyfish, not to lay eggs. I believed so strongly in what I saw. But perhaps, I cried as I carried some sand with the shovel from a flatter part of the beach to drop in a hole, if I had listened to them, the ecologists and the marine biologist, that it was an impossibility, I would not be feeling like the fool I felt now. Turtles nesting in Wales? I spat at myself in my thoughts, what was I thinking?

I smoothed the surface of the sand with the tip of the shovel so the beach was again uncompromised by vandalism. I took bits of seaweed that had appeared since the storm, put the litter I saw safely by my bag and threw the rocks into the ocean. The final touch in my last act as caretaker of the beach, I thought, was to remove the white plastic sun lounger from its overturned state on the dunes and return it to where it was, by the side of the turtles’ nest. The imaginary turtles’ nest, I chastised. And laid upon it one last time, I covered my eyes with my hands. Once I had closed my eyes I soon reopened them again, and before too much time was spent waiting for Walter and the Fisherman to reappear, my head began to nod and lull at my chest as I fell to sleep with dreams of the turtles’ demise to drag me down.

Epilogue

I opened my eyes to a starry night, and I saw, reflecting back at me, my soul revealed as a sopping wet disappointment. I saw my foolishness exposed by those creatures that never existed.

The beachfront I was ready to leave behind was a depressing stretch of sand, so far removed from my quiet existence in London. I was not an outdoor-type and never was.

I stirred from the hard plastic lounge chair. When I finally sat up and freed my face from the corrugated indents, as the chair constituted a pillow for a few hours, I was rewarded with the sound of silence: not a bird whistle, or guests in the villas; I could only hear the gentle slide of the waves on the flat of the sand. I sat with my head in my hands and listened to the calm of the sea.

The day’s effort in tidying the beach did not dismiss the whirlwind of my discredit. While I was sleeping, the sun must have burned bright because yesterday’s storm was now just a memory Lloergan Traeth didn’t seem to remember: the beach looked the same, just as it did when I arrived, but I didn’t see litter strewn on the ground. I felt that I was at least leaving the beach a better place than how I found it.

Now I let my hands down and decided it was time to go, seeing clearly that my time spent at Lloergan was not in vain. Thus, very wearily I stood and managed to leave my chair and start up the beach. But I stopped and stared at the activity emerging from a circular mound right back past where the holes were, near the dune vegetation. Like boiling water, bubbles of sand swelled, dropped then were flicked away. It very soon bubbled furiously as if the sand undug itself and the contents from underneath made itself known.

I drew in a sharp breath of air and held my palms to my mouth. Under the starlight and full moon, reflecting a white luminescent stairway on top of the ocean, I saw little black arms as thick and short as a bite of liquorice flap sand away revealing a hole full of little black lumps rising from their cave. I stood back and pulled my plastic lounge chair away, as one by one, they struggled over the edge of their nest and beelined straight to the moonlit stairway.

My palm covering my mouth helped stop my tears turning into audible sobs. I was not going to disrupt the turtles. They were here! They were here all along. When Lloergan was destroyed the villains missed their nest, I saw. They missed their nest! My sobs were almost bursts of restrained laughter.

Their sandy bodies were partly covered by white dots speckled down their spine and two more parallel rows of the spots were an inch each way down their shell. And they pulled their bodies, hundreds of them, now pulling and flapping in unison across the clean sandy shore towards the light. All this time, they incubated, I marvelled, and there they were entering the wild underwater world. It was not an ordinary place to start, but there they went pulling their little bodies to the water, just like their mother did when she dropped them off. And they were doing this march to the sea without a mother to care for

them. I imagined that maybe the mother would wait for them far out to sea, if they can make it there, but I knew that was not to be.

I could not see their faces or their eyes as the miniature creatures waded into the water and struggled to find their swimming legs. It was amazing to me. I stood back by the hole that was nestled by the marram grass and watched them submerge under water. They had no mother now, but they were lucky. Each and every one of them, I thought. They were survivors.

I sighed as the turtles disappeared away from sight as they travelled deeper into the water. There was nothing to do now. They left streams of curvy marks down the sand. Their trail looked like many tiny ripples on a flat river. It was funny how they stuck together knowing where to go. It was a miracle.

The trail started, as it should, from the hole. I thought I should take a photograph of it, but I didn’t have a camera. I never had anything to document my own life before. I looked into the hole and saw those little creatures’ first home. And then my gaze fell upon a glistening white stone and I saw at a tiny black rupture streaked down its side. I bent down to inspect it; I saw it was an egg, an egg sitting alone in the wet sandy hollow amongst other broken shells. I dusted the other shells away. It was the only egg unbroken in there. But it had a crack in it. I was sad for it. That unborn turtle did not even have the chance to swim out into the uncompromising ocean and battle against the elements, the predators or anything that would threaten its survival. This one never had a chance to hatch with its siblings.

I knew then that I had more reason to stay at Lloergan. I held onto the egg making a benign cavern in my hands. This little egg was to have purpose after all. It was going to protect its brothers and sisters and begin Lloergan Traeth’s first steps to turtle conservation.

About the author

Mi Wae was a music reviewing, web editing, news writing, poet in a former life, now looking after herself since the multiple sclerosis came to stay. Care and calm are the order of today... lest the MS monster grows...

Leatherback was written in 2008 when the creative juices flowed and I managed to get it down in a year, published in 2012, I am just happy it's out there waddling in the world.

http://alifesedentary.wordpress.com