Sarah Lean - The Sand Dog

‘Come on, just this once, Azi,’ Chris said. ‘We need enough players for two teams.’

I shrugged. ‘I’m going to the beach. I want to swim.’

‘You’re always going to the beach,’ Dimi moaned. ‘You can go anytime.’

We’d been stuck like this for a while now – them asking me to play basketball, me asking them to come swimming – none of us wanting to do what the other wanted. The last couple of years as we’d been growing up, we had grown apart.

‘You’re a weird creature from the sea, Azi!’ Chris shouted. ‘And you don’t even belong here!’ He slammed down the ball as I ran, trying not to listen to what he had said and to what people always told me, my flip-flops slapping on the tarmac that had gone sticky in the heat.

I swam, looking for the turtle, but she had gone, so I went to Uncle’s restaurant to talk to him about it. The restaurant was busy, the tables on the deck almost full of customers, white tablecloths swaying under the shade of the vines overhead.

In the kitchen, Uncle’s face was red and sweaty from the ovens and the scorching day.

‘The turtle came back,’ I said. ‘Do you remember the one that came the day before Grandfather left?’

Uncle frowned but didn’t answer. He was trying to take an order ticket from Maria the waitress, but she held on to it, her other hand on her hip, nodding her head towards me, waiting for Uncle to answer me first.

‘It must be a sign that he’s coming home. Have you heard from him?’ I said.

‘Two calamari!’ Uncle yelled to the other staff bustling and sweating around him as he tried to read the ticket between Maria’s fingers.

‘Azi is trying to speak to you,’ Maria said.

‘Two Greek salads!’ Uncle yelled, snapping the ticket from Maria. She clicked her tongue on her teeth because he was yelling, even though he didn’t need to, but she wasn’t ever bothered by his loud presence and the fact that he was the boss. ‘I don’t know anything about turtles,’ Uncle said more quietly and turned away from me to toss fish in a frying pan.

‘What’s the turtle got to do with Grandfather, Azi?’ Maria said, filling in for Uncle.

‘Grandfather taught me to read the signs from the sea,’ I explained. ‘Things that wash up on the sand can tell you a kind of story.’

Maria raised her eyebrows. ‘Is the turtle the same kind of sign as those big seashells you found on the beach? Or those waves breaking out like seahorses, and all the other signs you keep telling me about?’

I’d said the same kind of thing before, but this time it was different. This time I was sure it meant Grandfather was coming back. ‘Grandfather told me turtles are messengers,’ I said, hoping she’d understand.

At that moment, Uncle yelled across the kitchen. ‘How many times have I told you all of Grandfather’s talk was nonsense? And unless you’re bringing me a turtle to make soup, Azi, out of my kitchen and go get me some more customers!’

Although I was used to Uncle yelling a lot of the time over pots and pans (and I knew he didn’t really mean that he’d cook the turtle), you could hear the uncomfortable silence among the rest of the staff behind all the clanking and sizzling and chopping. Maria shook her head at Uncle, pursing her lips.

It wasn’t the right time to talk to Uncle. The restaurant was quite full, but not as full as Uncle would have liked it, and that made him crabby. He relied on having lots of customers in the summer to keep the bills paid throughout the quiet winter. I collected the flyers that I usually handed out to people who came off the ferries at the quay and was about to leave when Maria called after me, her foot holding the swinging door open.

‘Uncle yells at everyone, you know that, don’t you?’ she said. ‘It’s just a lot of hot air.’

‘Grandfather used to say that if all of Uncle’s yelling didn’t come out, it would boil and boil up inside him and then one day he’d go kaboom !’ I said.

‘Wouldn’t be good for business if Uncle went kaboom , hey, Azi?’ Maria laughed. ‘Grandfather made sense to you, didn’t he?’

I nodded. ‘We’re two of a kind, me and him. Two creatures from the sea.’

‘And what’s the message the turtle has brought you?’ she said.

‘People send messages to say they’re coming, don’t they?’

Maria smiled. ‘Yes, they usually do.’ She reached out and tugged at the end of my hair lying on my shoulders. ‘When are you going to let me cut your hair?’

‘When Grandfather comes back,’ I said, running off.

At the quay, I called out to the tourists as they stepped off the ferries that brought them from the other islands.

‘Come to Uncle’s restaurant on the beach! Fresh fish. Hot chips and ketchup. Cold beer,’ I told them, and handed out flyers, sticking some in the side pockets of suitcases as they were wheeled past. But most of the time I was checking to see if an old man in a blue cap would appear. When the ferries were finally emptied Grandfather hadn’t come, so I headed off, not really sure when to expect him.

I went back to the cove and staked a fence made of driftwood sticks and chicken wire round the area where the turtle eggs were hidden. I stripped down to my shorts and swam, and from out in the water looked back to the land to see what the turtle must have seen when she’d found her way to the same nesting place. Except for that one time two years ago, we’d not had any other turtles nesting on our island before. Surely it couldn’t just be a coincidence that the turtle had come back now.

Uncle’s restaurant was only thirty running steps from the edge of the sea, but neither he nor Maria knew the sea like Grandfather and I did. I might have got it wrong before, but this time I was sure Grandfather was coming. The sea knew this story and it was telling me so.

THE SEA TAKES ITS own time to tell its story, Grandfather once told me. It was here long before we were and moved at its own pace and rhythm, not ours. Uncle was too busy in the restaurant over the weekend for me to talk to him again about Grandfather but it didn’t stop me thinking about what had happened. Grandfather had left suddenly to go to London, Uncle had said, to sort out an old family problem. Grandfather hadn’t been born here but neither had he been born in England, so I was sure he couldn’t have family there. Why then had he never come back?

Uncle gave me lots of jobs to do over the weekend so it wasn’t until Monday that I could go down to the beach again. I was out swimming at the cove when I saw a strange shape and shadow in the water and before long a blue door came floating in on the tide. Was this another sign? It wasn’t the kind of thing you would normally find in the sea, but after the turtle had turned up I wasn’t sure what to expect. I swam out to meet the door and climbed onboard. Although the paint on it was crackled and flaked away, it was the same colour blue as the one on Grandfather’s cottage.

Grandfather had lost his fishing boat a while before he left, so it was nice to feel what it was like to have something solid to float on again. There was a hole in the door where the letter box used to be and I looked down through it at the shadow it made on the seabed. Then I dived under and looked up through the opening, blowing bubbles through the hole before climbing back up and lying on it, face down, like a wide surfboard. I paddled around for a while and then took it to shore. It was already so hot in June that you had to hop across the sand. I dug away to get to the cooler, damp sand underneath and then propped the door up with some rocks and sheltered in its shade, looking out across the water for the afternoon ferries. When I saw the first big white-and-yellow ferry in the distance I knew it was time to go down to the quay and hand out more flyers, and while I was waiting I noticed something on the rocks out of the corner of my eye.