Graham Swift - Tomorrow

He was the stronger, of course, but I was the better swimmer. He knew this: he’d seen me at Craiginish, he’d seen me in Brighton. He’d seen me, for goodness’ sake, right there in Cornwall. But he dived in almost at the same time as he let out that yell to me. How was he to know that that current that was pulling you out and away from the rocks wouldn’t be as defeating for an adult as for your own nine-year-old frames?

It swept him out to you quickly enough at least. To both of you. I’d already, for the second time in my life, taken overpowering and indelible note of your both-ness. That is, that you were being drawn away from dry land by some force that neither of you could resist and you, Nick, even less than your sister, but you weren’t going to be separated from each other. Your two bobbing heads, like linked, swirling buoys — another image of you that’s with me for ever.

Mike moved rapidly towards you, almost too rapidly. I could only see the back of his own bobbing head. I had the unthinkable thought that in the next few gliding moments you would all be lost, all pulled away from me, all that mattered to me, and I would have to watch. I saw myself standing alone on bare rock, wishing to turn to rock myself.

Everything in my memory of that day is like some evil blend of the benign and the horrific. It was a beautiful day, it was hot, it was more like a day in the Mediterranean than in Cornwall. It was the third summer we’d spent by that little safe, sandy cove and we thought we could trust you now if you scampered off a bit further. You’d learnt to swim two years before. You were good and confident at it, like me. The sea was blue and wallowy and lazy, the tide was coming in. On the other side of the headland, when we got there, there was a touch of breeze and a bit of swell and slap to the waves, but no one would have called that sea dangerous.

There were other happy people on the beach. The two of us had been swimming not so long before and we were lying, drying, becoming sweetly drowsy. It sends a terror through me, even now, that we might have just fallen asleep. But we both had the sudden simultaneous alarm: where are they? It makes me quiver still — I can’t explain our decision — that we might have gone in the other direction first.

Even as I stood there, looking at the three of you, about to leave me, I had the mocking, the split-second dream of a thought: that this would be a nice spot to be in, just to stand here or to sit, on this warm, basking shelf of rock, with these beautiful dark-blue waves now and then sending up pleasing spouts of spray, with the cliffs and the blue sky and the whole hazy, summery coastline curving away. I think I even saw myself flipped safely, inviolately back: a girl again, aged nine myself, on the beach at Craiginish, where none of this could possibly be happening.

But I saw something wonderful enough. I saw your father reach you, and I saw some commotion between you: sounds, words that I couldn’t hear. Perhaps he just barked at you too. But I saw that your father was sizing up the situation, he wasn’t just struggling. I saw — oh God, this was the vital, the crucial factor — that when he turned, the current was only of infant-threatening significance, he could make his way, with effort, against it. On the other hand, he had to make his way with the two of you.

The wonderful thing is that you acted, all of you, like a team. That is, you took decisions, you made pacts among yourselves, all of which might have been risky, but which turned out in every case to be the right ones. It was almost as if you’d practised it. He couldn’t ferry you both in, that might have been disastrous. It had to be Nick first, and that meant that you, Kate (I won’t forget it), had to put yourself at lonely, terrible risk. It stopped me being too angry later. How brave you were, how on your own. I could see there was not much more you could do than hold your own against the current, perhaps make the very tiniest headway. You were thinking of the distance your father would have to cover a second time: you were losing strength and you had to think of how it might be used or wasted.

Meanwhile your strength, Nick, as your dad towed you in, had almost vanished. I still see your white, drained face, lolling against the blue. Somehow you managed to hang on to his shoulder and kick a bit yourself, while he managed to swim, with one arm and your weight, and still outswim the current.

Please don’t let go, Nick. And please don’t drown your dad.

He got you to a low ledge of rock, where I was waiting for you. You were already like some piece of limp delivered cargo. He was thinking of Kate. He spluttered out, in that same uncontradictable voice, “Wrists! Quick! Pull!”—the last word almost lost in a watery glug. With a strength I never knew I had I got you by both wrists and pulled you out before the downward suck of the wave made you twice as heavy. But I think, even if it had, I would have made you unheavy. I would have made you eject. Up you shot anyway, like a cork from a bottle, into my arms, and I screamed at you, with your dad’s fierce force, “Breathe, Nick! Breathe!” I don’t think you needed telling.

On the way up, you scraped your knee against the rock (you complained like crazy later). Blood ran down your shin. It didn’t matter. Blood was good, it was somehow very good. On your way up too, I noticed, with another strange little intensity of mere observation, that under the lip of the ledge, just beneath the glinting waterline, there were clusters of barnacles, little clenched, packed shells, tresses and twirls of swaying seaweed, a whole world of gripping life.

Mike was already swimming out again. When I could look, I saw that you, Kate, had hardly anything left now, but you managed to hold on to your father in a slightly more efficient way than Nick. And Mike said later that on that second journey back, even in the moments (but they seemed like hours) that had passed, the current had actually lessened. It must have been some trick of just that stage of the tide. And that was just as well. It was a longer journey this time: your dad’s strength was going. But there was a point when I knew, even before it had actually quite happened, like a sudden flooding current itself, fighting back a dreadful anti-current of “ifs” and “might have beens” and eternal anguish for ever after, that my wonderful and adorable family, my incomparable family, every precious member of it, was going to be restored to me. It would be there at the end of this summer’s day, just as it had been at the start.

There we were on that warm slab of firm rock, like miniature people on some giant’s dry, magic, outspread palm. Or rather, there were the three of us. Your dad was still clinging to its edge, still in the water, too exhausted yet to heave himself out, breathing furiously, his wet forearms clear, his head bowed, not even looking at us. What was he thinking?

YOU WERE NINE years old. You were too young then to understand that the great wave of anger that heaved up inside me, like nausea, only moments later wasn’t what it seemed. It was its opposite. It was a venting, it wasn’t a punishing. Punish you? For being saved ?

“What on earth were you doing ?! Just what were you doing ?!”

I surprised even myself, I surprised Mike, with my uncontrollable rage. And you were too young not to think that that current itself hadn’t been like some punishment prepared specially for you — never mind your mother’s fury. But you didn’t have to confess, Kate, to the extent that you did. You might just have said it had been a dare, an adventure, to swim back round the headland, and it had all gone wrong. And, yes, you should never have gone off like that out of sight in the first place.