Sarah Lean - The Sand Dog

‘Has Grandfather written to you to say which day he’s coming back?’ I asked.

Uncle had the same irritated look as Mrs Halimeda did when I kept asking the same question.

‘No, he hasn’t,’ he said.

‘Only I thought that if he’s coming home soon, maybe I should go over to his cottage and put some food in the fridge, ready for when he comes back.’

Uncle put a plate down harder on the counter than he needed to and his voice grew like popcorn. I blinked as he told me, ‘How many times have I said that you’re not to go over there? You live here with me now, and that’s that!’

I’d got used to Uncle’s yelling and Mrs Halimeda’s impatience and Chris and Dimi’s mickey-taking but it was getting harder and harder to accept that this was how things had to be. Even though they all repeated the same things to me again and again, it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I belonged with Grandfather at his cottage, and while he wasn’t here I felt like a bucketful of water that had been taken from the sea and left behind on the beach when the sun went down and everyone else had gone home. When you can’t be with the person you need to be with all that you are left with is the longing to go back.

‘I’ve taken care of you, and taught you good things, haven’t I?’ Uncle steadied himself and lowered his voice. ‘You have everything you need here.’

‘Yes, Uncle,’ I said, which was what he wanted to hear.

He wrapped a chicken leg in a piece of foil and added it to my bucket. ‘Eat it all – you’re too skinny.’

I wasn’t hungry after everything that Uncle had said, so when I went back to the cove I fed the dog with the food. ‘You’re the one that’s too skinny,’ I told him as he ate everything I gave him. He burped and then lay down on his side, exhausted from wolfing it all down in such a hurry, and he reminded me of Grandfather all over again.

Grandfather had a thousand tales to tell from his days on his fishing boat. Sometimes the stories would overlap or merge, one tale leading to another, while other times the stories would be familiar because he’d told a part of them before. Sometimes it was just because it included me and I’d already stored it in my memory. But the stories were never the same, never fully told, only narrow doorways into one whole story of our lives. The dog wasn’t going to be able to tell me stories that made me feel like I belonged. He wouldn’t know how to ride the storms that made waves as tall and hard as massive walls of stone, or have heard of giant squid that could wrap their tentacles round sailing boats and drag them to the depths, or about huge sea creatures with heads like hammers. I could sit and listen to Grandfather’s stories for hours, my mouth wide open, daring it all to be true.

Without Grandfather, it was as if my history and the story I belonged in was missing the last chapter, the part when you finally get to hear how the monster is slayed.

Missing someone hurts all over. It’s much worse than a jellyfish sting.

I looked at the dog. Maybe he’d like to hear about Grandfather instead.

‘Once Grandfather saw the seabed split open and spit out fire from the centre of the Earth,’ I told the dog.

He raised his head, his ears twitching when I threw my arms up and wide as if they were the Earth breaking open, shooting out fire with my hands, exploding, bubbling, up and up. The dog blinked.

‘You ever seen such a thing?’

The dog’s eyebrows twitched, and I nodded. ‘The water boiled and the fish in Grandfather’s nets were cooked before he hauled them in or even had a chance to get them to Uncle’s kitchen, and he ate them, steaming, straight from the sea.’

The dog burped again and it made me laugh.

‘It’s true, dog. The boiling water cooked some seaweed too.’

I told him how the sea was full of things he couldn’t imagine, that the sea was a story all by itself, the greatest story I had ever heard. ‘Come on, dog, I’m going to show you something.’

I got up and went to the edge of the water with the bucket. It wasn’t really the edge because the sea didn’t have an edge as such because the sand was sometimes under the water and sometimes not. But, once upon a time, somebody had drawn a line on a map and said ‘This is the edge of our country’.

A dark red piece of seaweed rolled to my feet, strands like an octopus’s legs, waving with the rise and fall of the waves. I filled the tin bucket with seawater, poured in handfuls of sand, placed some small shells and waited for it all to settle. The dog looked in the bucket, sniffing at the wet, shiny weed I was holding, and then looked up at me, as if he was waiting for me to tell him something that might make sense of what we were looking at.

‘This is what I wanted to show you,’ I said. ‘Grandfather says we have roots, like plants do, kind of like an invisible bit of us that is attached to where we belong, and part of us will always be joined there even when we leave.’

But there were plants in the sea that didn’t have roots and drifted on the tides with nothing to hang on to. Grandfather had said that plants in the sea could only take root in the seabed where the water was shallow enough that the sunlight could still reach them.

The water in the bucket cleared and I pushed the end of the weed into the sand, finding a rock to hold it down on the bottom.

‘The seaweed has to live here for a bit,’ I said.

The strands unfurled, reaching towards the surface, and the dog and I stared into the mini aquarium I’d made. I used to find things to show Grandfather in the tin bucket. Back then, while I was diving in the water and he watched, he was the only one who really understood what it meant.

For the first time I touched the dog, stroking his head and neck, resting my hand on his shoulders. He seemed to like it, his eyes blinking slowly, as if he was feeling sleepy, or maybe remembering someone else’s hand that made him feel nice.

‘Even if we aren’t in the place we think of as our home, we still all know where we belong,’ I told him.

IN THE EARLY DAYS of being on the fishing boat with Grandfather he’d taught me to read the sea – if there was a flock of seabirds, a warm current and a kind of bubbling in the water, it meant a huge shoal of fish was feeding near the surface. Then Grandfather could throw out his nets and haul in a good catch. The lie of the rock, the deep shadows underneath and the way the fish emptied the space before gradually coming back (they have short memories and would forget quickly why they weren’t feeding there), meant something else – it meant that in the dark, a moray eel with poisonous teeth would be waiting. From a distance you could poke under the rock with a long stick until the eel showed itself. Then you would know exactly what area to avoid to protect yourself.

I watched the sea to find the story I needed to hear. I wanted there to be a third sign that would tell me more about Grandfather coming home. But deep inside me I also had a feeling there was something else lurking – something lying, waiting in the dark, just like the moray eel under a rock. I needed to know what it was.

It was hot and sticky that night, the sky moody and heavy. I went to the restaurant kitchen while Uncle was very busy to ask him again if he knew anything about Grandfather’s return.

‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’ Uncle yelled, but this time I stood my ground and didn’t leave.

Maria stepped in again. ‘Hold that,’ she said, handing me the ladle from the mussel soup she’d been dishing into bowls. She pulled at Uncle’s arm to get him to turn round. ‘Azi needs an answer.’

The fired oven roared; plates ricocheted on tiled surfaces; glasses jangled on trays. Uncle told Maria that the people at table number five were waiting for their order, although we all knew he couldn’t see from there. Hot plates whizzed past my ears, waiters and waitresses twirled around me and each other to get the orders out quickly, and to bring back dirty plates, as Uncle yelled at them to get a move on. I waited for an answer.