Belinda Bauer - The Facts of Life and Death

Some time just after midnight, a sound like a gunshot fired through the forest and the bench was tilted, then tossed aside by a great upheaval of soil and roots that rose vertically in the sky for ten, twenty feet. They hung there like witches’ fingers, as the tree they’d nourished for so long clung to the only home it had ever known.

With a horrible shriek, the mighty oak tipped slowly forward and peered over the edge at the raging waters below and then – with a final rending sound – it tumbled off the cliff and into the ocean.

The storm was so loud and the sea so wild that when the giant tree hit the waves, it barely made a splash.

Ruby woke at the sound of a gun.

She lay there for a moment, the sweat that was cooling fast on her body the only evidence of a bad, bad dream.

But even though she was awake, something was still very wrong.

The wind and the rain outside were momentous and the branches squealed and banged at her window, but something else was wrong. Something closer.

She frowned in the dark and realized what it was.

She had wet herself.

Ruby sat up in slow disgust and switched on the lamp. Then she pushed her bedsheets down. She hadn’t wet herself in bed for years. Not since she was tiny. She couldn’t believe it had happened now.

It hadn’t.

In the middle of the bed was a small patch of blood.

Ruby slithered out of bed as if she’d found a spider there, then stood and stared at the red spot on the white sheet for a very long time.

She knew what it meant.

Tears rushed up her nose and into her eyes.

She was becoming a woman, and there was nothing she could do about it. It was one of those things you just couldn’t stop.

She finished crying and stood and shivered for a moment in her Mickey Mouse nightshirt. Then she went to the bathroom and took one of the little pads Mummy had shown her and peeled off the strip and stuck it in a fresh pair of knickers. She didn’t know what to do with her old ones so she decided to throw them away. Not here in the little bathroom bin where anyone might see them, but downstairs in the bigger kitchen bin. Maybe even outside in the proper dustbin – although the storm howled so loud around the house that she thought maybe the kitchen bin would be enough, if she pushed them down among the rubbish so nobody knew.

Ruby crept down the stairs and opened the little white door at the bottom. Tried to open it. But something was pressing against it from the other side.

She stopped and frowned. She could hear something on the other side of the door. Something alive.

Something breathing.

‘Daddy?’ she whispered warily. ‘Daddy?’

There was no answer but the trees trying to break in through the roof, and that strange in-out sound of deep, slumbering inhales and exhales.

It made her shiver again – and not because she was cold.

If she hadn’t had the knickers balled up in her hand, Ruby would have gone back upstairs to bed and waited till morning.

Instead she pushed on the door again – hard. This time there was far less resistance. The door to the front room opened suddenly, and Ruby stepped down into the sea.

THE STORM AND the highest tide of the year had joined forces with the rain-sodden forest to finally wipe Limeburn off the map.

The rats had come first. Washed out of their nests in the kilns, and dashed against the cottages and cars by the storm. The waves that crossed the cobbles were fringed with the black, seething beasts, some squealing and terrified, some sodden and limp and already dead.

Then the sea came up the slipway too. Further than it had ever been before.

It met the broken stream coming the other way and together they filled the square with three feet of water – preparing the way for the real onslaught.

That final assault came in the shape of the great oak. In this magnificent tree, the sea had found a true weapon of war. It heaved the oak against the bigger of the limekilns like a battering ram. Again and again and again, until – at last – the thick stone walls fell and the kiln burst apart like a bomb, spilling its dark secrets into the ocean.

Ten thousand years from now, the grey stones that once made up the limekiln walls would be smoothed and rolled for miles up the coast to fortify the pebble ridge, in protection of another place entirely.

But their work here was done; there was no barrier remaining between Limeburn and the sea.

And the sea knew it.

It had crossed the square in a single sweep of breaker, leaving only the top windows of the cottages peeping out of the waves. It had set Maggie’s mother’s twenty-year-old Nissan adrift, and – because John Trick’s old piece of junk still wasn’t between them – crashed it into Mr Braund’s new Range Rover.

Then the sea had surged up the shallow hill to The Retreat, funnelled white water through the garden gate and smashed the front door clean off its hinges.

The sea!

The sea was in their house!

It was nearly up to Ruby’s knees and she staggered sideways with shock and almost fell, and got wet all the way up one thigh too.

It didn’t seem real. Everything else was the same: the lamps were on double – in the room and in the water. The front door was part open – hanging drunkenly on its top hinge alone. The spider rug floated gently off the floor and followed the water back outside as it retreated.

Then the sea exhaled and came again. When it came back this time, it came like a gunfighter into a saloon. The door flapped on its hinge and a wave crashed through the house and broke in a roil of foam, then spread itself around the room and slapped gently against the TV, which banged in a shower of sparks, along with the lamps, and everything went black.

‘Mummy!’ screamed Ruby. ‘Mummy!’

The bitter water gripped Ruby’s hips and she staggered sideways and grabbed the handle of the little white door to stay upright as the wave withdrew once more.

As her eyes adjusted to the new darkness, Ruby could see through the doorway and out into Limeburn.

The water was cold, but the chill that ran down Ruby Trick’s spine was even colder.

She’d been wrong.

The sea was not in their house.

Their house was in the sea.

Through the broken front door, Ruby could see the silhouette of an enormous tree rolling backwards and forwards in the square, bashing and banging between the cars and the cottages.

Everything between here and there was water.

‘Mummy!’ she screamed. ‘Mummy!’

All these years she’d been so scared of the woods, of the trees, of the creeping undergrowth and of the mud.

But the real danger all along had been the dark-grey ocean on their doorstep.

Ruby saw the next wave coming. She turned to run back upstairs, but it knocked her clean off her feet and washed her into the coffee table. She banged her head and her shin, and swallowed salt water, before getting to her hands and knees, choking and spluttering and unable to shout for help.

The sea sucked the wave back out of the house and Ruby knelt there and panted for a moment, too shocked to think straight, only aware of the salt in her mouth and the spongy carpet under her fingers.

‘Ruby!’

‘Mummy!’

She scrambled to her feet just as the next surge hit her, but it wasn’t as great this time, and she stayed upright by grabbing the edge of the table, then splashed her way over to the stairs.

‘Mummy!’

‘Ruby! Where are you?’