For the first time in my life I put my ankles against the wall and lie reading on the perpendicular, with my legs above my head. I wonder whether I did this as a child, artfully creating shapes out of my long limbs and disconnected tissues while reading books about five children and parrots and adventure islands and treasure. The world then was full of strangers and sub-plots, rain than would become a downpour, cause landslides, cause floods.
My spoon clatters against my teeth and I watch the crystalline supplement shards shudder against the base of the glass, the morning sun shimmering through its dusky bottom as I raise it to my parched lips.
The aubergines are chargrilled and ooze a sticky sweet substance out of their centres, like maple syrup, or sap out of a tree. I can smell strawberries on the wind but all I can see are cabbages. I pull up my bike to point this out to my mother. I heard a donkey from our doorstep this morning, my mother says later. She was turned facing the windscreen, so that I could see the little downy hairs on the back of her neck. I find it funny that humans wear this protective layer of fuzz, the same way peaches and quince do. Like this small layer of fluff will protect us from the external dangers of the world, from the speeding road outside the window and the upcoming headlights of a swerving car. They are humanities’s protective film, running soft as bunny’s tails from the follicles of your hair to the base of your toenail.
The cool is a relief, blessed and religious.
I pull over my bike again, pushing it up onto the dried grass of a French verge. I write about my sister, and think these words will be among the top ten of things I should never publish. Then I think siblinghood is almost universal (I look it up - 75-80% of the world has a sibling), and think my experiences of being a young sister - so fundamental to the core of who I am, like the pips in an apple or the exposed spine of a library book - should not be hidden, but shared. I send her an apology text, and type. The world did something to my sister, I think around half-way through senior school, and she has been angry with it - with me - ever since. She frowns at my existence, hates the very fact that I live how I do, like it is something truly distasteful and to-be-avoided-at-all-costs, like foreign food or a bad smell. (I lurk on street corners, outside fast-food joints which flash neon kebab signs onto the pavement to attract the 2am drunks, under the counter-top of a fishmongers, or around a vegetable seller in Morocco where the flies flit purposefully over my porous fruit). She would not be pleased if I didn’t exist. She loves me, but her lack of understanding for who I am and how I choose to live my life (not so vastly opposed to her own, but more accommodating in mindset) comes out in dark stares and glowers usually reserved only for teenagers suffering from the worst kind of parental-induced strop or period-induced fury. I make her angry and I make her sad, but she cannot express a word of it to me. I am the liberal little sister, perennially un-tethered, skinnily slithering into the gap between the table and the half-pushed out chair, not eating enough, not drinking enough, dancing in singledom and cities and spending too much money on the occasional specialty coffee, while she perfects home-made ice cream in her marital kitchen and buys Gianvito Rossi shoes for 30 quid from her local charity shop. We are worlds apart, blood-bound together. One year, 11 months, 10 days.
The days are long — short — short — long in the way they only can be when on holiday, the holidays of childhood, the endless bewitching days of summer which merge and soften and bleed like watercolours painting through a sunset (it is red: shepherd’s delight). They could never be so protean in the office. There they are either short, or long, definitive and sharp in their attitudes, like Headers and Footers and I am the cursor dotting in between.
Coming here is like our yard stick against the wall, the metric by which we judge our annual progress.
I picture summer: the steady and certain drop of condensation from a cool bottle onto my hot skin, the bead tunneling over the crater of the bottle’s dented base, into the crease between the glass and my cheek, my neck, my collarbone. It drips beneath the line of my bikini, and pools in a well by my bellybutton: stuck.
We walk up into the vines and there is thunder at our backs. The storm has made a patchwork out of the sky - the kind of collage a nursery school child might cut and stick onto a piece of card and have lovingly (and slightly begrudgingly) stuck to the fridge alongside the shopping list and ugly magnet from Sweden. (They will remove the collage aged 17, when they walk into the kitchen and see it suddenly - as though for the first time - just seconds before their first girlfriend comes to stay).
The church bell tolls the hour (eight) as I walk past the lake and between the gate posts in the morning. When I walk back between the posts three minutes later, the church bell chimes again.
She turns 21 the day Dolly Parton dies. I believe that is a legacy of some sort; a mile stone; something to be noted; so I write it down like it will prophesize her future.
The clouds form a bunny — a Viking ship — My Little Pony — a barking dog. (The dog’s head falls off, and goes rolling down the hill like a wheel of cheese). I sit in the car with my parents, the same way I have for the last 23 years, in the space behind my father who is at the wheel. I watch as they do what they always do; talk, flick on the radio (flick it off — bad opera), argue, fall silent, eat quiche, twist to speak to me. I think about small pleasures, and find the expanse of a car journey irrationally and sensuously pleasing, the same way my first precious sip of coffee is from my jug-like-mug (it has a dog on it: French bulldog). I realise I have stolen this from somewhere, and picture Sally Rooney glowering at me at a Book Launch; (my mind is a bizarre place). People’s minds feel spacious to me, floating, expansive. They are cockpits in an aeroplane, Austin Powers-like bubbles of dystopia with purple sheets and circular beds. Rooms full of emptiness with a hoarder’s tendency to store things and hide it guiltily, boxing it away and shoving it behind cupboard doors which bulge and belch and barf at the whisker of a touch. (The sick is multi-coloured; all the layers of a person’s inner being, the attic of their mind, regurgitated messily onto hardwood floor).
It is one of those mammoth journeys which leaves your body behind, so that even plunging into a warm pool feels strangely foreign and disassociating, like I am watching an actor do it from the carriage of a train, or on the small TV screen pressed against the back of the head rest in my father’s car. France seems a million miles away. The post has piled up like letters to Santa, spilling out in every direction as bulges of lard over his thick black belt. I have bought new shoes, and I stamp them excitedly like a toddler during a tantrum or a frustrated boy at an all-girls ballet class. (It is as though I am testing whether they are real; whether they exist; whether my feet - one toe separated from the four others in cruel neglection, the last to be picked on the netball team - are a part of me, wrapped in designer Italian leather and smelling faintly of water-resistance spray? They are real, and they are mine. I stamp them fondly, hard, in delight).
My hair smells faintly of the tuna pitta tin foil crown a five year old placed on my head at lunchtime, made with the remnants of their lunch box. Any act of love I take as a personal recommendation, as though the blind trust of children is a reflection of my own value in the world.
She tells me things aged five I wouldn’t even tell my therapist. I consider that sentence, rolling it through my mind in the hours of long night in which I can’t sleep, but can feel the dull plane-engine throb of migraine behind my retinas, just in front of my skull. I cannot even remember what she said. All I know is that she tells me things aged five I wouldn’t even tell my therapist. I say it again, again, and sleep.
I can feel the sand disintegrating beneath my curled toes, and the dog barks a manic welcome as I leap down from the rock. It is the final day of my summer — all blue toes, ten of them, digging, digging, deeper, pushing through the saturated surface to a swollen pool of salt water below. September comes on the tide, cloying and fierce like sea anemones, tight in its grip and clawed at by black purple seaweed which pins it in like the metal tabs on the back of a poster-frame. I am staring at it as I look out to sea. I am touching it, softly, as I run my fingertips through the cool water. I am tasting it on the very tip of my pink tongue as I open my lips to the ocean’s constant spray. It rains on me. It dwells in the swirl of the orange snail’s shell, in the grains of dried sand sticking to the black nose of my wet spaniel, in the pleats of crusted salt water plaiting the fur of his ears together into knots. The salt stays in my white fisherman’s jumper, and will stay for another year. Sand marches like ants up my bristly legs, coarse and unshaven from communal showers and beach-side living, bruised yellow and green from rock climbing and late-night dancing. I run a single toe through the sand and pirouette in a circle. I stand on another rock and watch the sea come in, wrapping me up like a present or a hug. I watch my friend chase after a tennis ball, and the dog shiver frustratedly from the sidelines. My mother walks around in blue capri pants and flower-embroidered tops, telling us to “Smile everybody”, “Look at me”, “Over here!”. She waves her phone camera and dangles her ring-finger in front of the lens. We pretend to be annoyed, but we all want the photos (smile anyway; fixed, frozen on the wind, squinting into the patchy Welsh sunshine). We wear shades and shorts like it’s peak summer, and strip down to our bikinis as soon as our feet land on the sand. A year is a long time: 365 days flows in grief, in illness, in pain. I hid for most of it. Crabs can’t hide forever (cancer; Cancer). The rock moves with the force of the tide. We emerge, sideways, into starlight and sunshine. Crawl with me, I think. I like it here.
I wish I could stay here forever. In the small pool of still water held closely to the crevice of pitted rock, clutched to the breast of the ocean and the stern of a ship, here I wish I could stay. The pool shakes slightly at every sigh of the tide, shuddering heaving breaths over single sand-stones, swallowing footprints in mouths-full of gathering foaming bubbles. Cackling laughter takes me from the Sea to the Earth; the sky feels limitless and clouded, but bright. My friend is chasing another tennis ball, the cricket bat up in the air. The dog buries a log, and I turn my back to the beach. Summer ends in heartbeats and friendships, bobbing heads still as ducks upon the sea, socks full of sand and ankles prickling with nettle stings. I watch butterflies idling over the gorse and am back at the office, smiling.