Crustaceans (17 page)

A minute isn't a long time, more than enough for one photo. Another minute slipped by, and then a few more – nine or ten, maybe fifteen – but I didn't forget you, I held you somewhere in mind as I lay on my back in the sand at Ruth's side. You were always hiding, Euan, and sometimes we would ignore you. Eventually you'd come out to join us. But I wasn't ignoring you then; I always intended to follow. In a minute, I'd said. The sand was warm and I began to feel drowsy. Ruth sat across me, one hand splayed out on my chest, and she drank the last of our water. I narrowed my eyes to the glare of sunlight. I smoothed my hands on her arms and she lowered herself to her elbows, her chin touching mine, and she kissed me. She rolled on to her back. I had an erection. We held hands, and I listened to the sounds of our holiday, the gulls and the hush of the sea, the cracking of the breeze in a windbreak, a bellying deckchair. There was a motorboat, murmuring voices, a dog barking, and the noises of children. But I couldn't hear you, your voice amongst theirs. It was the dog that disturbed me. I'd better go and see what he's up to, I said.

It didn't take long, another few minutes. I set out for the cliffs, scuffing through the soft sand, and if I noticed the girl, it was only in passing, for I was looking for you, Euan; your red trunks and dark hair. Our beach was busy that afternoon – as crowded as it ever became that far down from the pier – and there were so many children. I scanned the deckchairs and windbreaks, and I saw a few faces I recognised – other people we knew from the caravans – but they didn't look up and I didn't approach them. I shielded my eyes and looked out to the sea, the lethargic roll of the waves and the shimmering air, the scatter of figures on the shoreline. And of course you weren't to be seen. I hadn't expected you would be, but for a brief moment then I felt fearful – something disturbed me – and I glanced towards Ruth. She had turned onto her belly and she seemed to be sleeping. Her dress was bunched at her buttocks and her legs were splayed out on our blanket. Everything remained as it was; and when I turned again to the cliffs I saw the girl clearly, thirty yards in the distance. I registered then what she doing, and vaguely it seemed I'd known all along. You would have called her a big girl, Euan. She was fourteen – a one and a four – and her name, I learned later, was Chloe. She was a teenager, and she was digging in the sand at the base of the cliffs – frantically digging – and her dog was flapping its tail, edging closer then back, crouching and barking. She was wearing a yellow jersey, V-necked and sleeveless, and a pair of mauve shorts, some white plastic sandals. Her dog was an old one. His snout was grizzled, his belly distended, but he was large and excited, and I'm sure you wouldn't have liked him. His name, I remember, was Toby.

There was an immediate clench of adrenaline, my heart suddenly lurching, and yet still, for a few paces more, I resisted the impulse to run. I looked all around me, making sure that no one was watching, confirming your absence from all that I'd seen. And then I was sprinting, as fast as I could through the drag of the sand. I yelled out Ruth's name. I stumbled, got up, and it was then that I found you. You were hiding. You had tunnelled into one of the hollows at the base of the cliffs. There were tucks and folds there just deep enough for you to crouch down in. But you hadn't wanted to crouch; you had used your spade and gone further. The sand was damp – it had been raining all night and for most of the morning – and a section of cliff had crumbled, collapsed on to you, leaving a tall shallow groove, a pile of debris. I saw your legs, and I knew their size, their shape, and your ankles. They were skinny like mine. You were buried face down, and your toes had turned blue. I fell to my knees – Chloe kneeling beside me – and no, I said nothing to her. I began digging, and dug with both hands, but Chloe's dog was excited. He jumped at my back. I felt his claws through my shirt, and I shouted; I swung out an arm. Chloe dragged him away then. She held him by the collar and watched me. She was crying, I remember, and some other people were coming towards us, Ruth somewhere amongst them. The dog was yelping, slavering wildly, and I shouted at Chloe. I told her to ring for an ambulance – there was a phone at the top of the cliffs, up the rickety steps – and as she ran off, the dog leaping beside her, I heard Ruth yelling your name, her panic and fury, and the echo of her voice skirling back from the cliff-face. Then she too was tearing with her hands at the sand, the rocks and fossil-strewn scree. There wasn't much room. Other hands were trying to help us, our arms and elbows colliding. Some more sand collapsed from above. And when at last we got past your trunks I took hold of your legs in my arms and I dragged you. I panicked too; I didn't know what I was doing. Your body juddered over the ground. Your head bumped as it came, and it was then that Ruth wailed, a sound I'd last heard in the hospital, five and a half years before.

The digging had taken five minutes, ten, I have no idea, but it was a very long time, Euan, long enough for you to leave us, for your heart to stop beating. I turned you over. Your lips and fingers were blue, your hair claggy with sand, your eyelashes. There was a plug of blood-clotted sand in your nose and I plucked it away. And then I did what I knew, the ABC I'd learned in my lessons – the airway, breathing, circulation. I tilted your head back and opened your mouth. I pushed a forefinger to the back of your throat, and as I scooped for the sand there, finding nothing, I remembered – a fleeting image, a reflex of memory – a moment when you were eighteen months old and taking a bath in your tub. There was a moulded tray in the rim of the bath where the water would gather. You liked to drink from it. And that evening, as I glanced to the television, I thought I saw you suck up the sliver of soap that lay there. You seemed to be choking, and immediately I swept you out of the water. I forced my finger into your mouth. There was a blockage; I was sure I could feel it. I jabbed and clawed with my fingernail, and then turned you on to your front and patted hard on your back. But your cries were too clear – the soap, I realised, was still in the water. By then you were screeching, and my hands were shaking. I wrapped you in a towel, and cradled and rocked you; I bit hard on the towel to stop myself crying. I had panicked, as I always would. And I was panicking still. I thought I might cry. But you made no sound at all. You weren't breathing, and you hadn't a pulse.

I pinched your nostrils together and put my mouth over your mouth – sand gritting my tongue, my lips – and I gave to you all the breath that I had. Your chest rose. I breathed into you again, and felt your neck for a pulse, but still there was nothing. I found the end of your breastbone, and measured two finger widths up, my nails broken, flaps of torn skin on my knuckles. I locked my hands together, one on top of the other, and pressed down with the heel of my hand. But that was too much; your chest was too small. I pressed with only one hand, and released, and slumped back on my heels; I counted one-and-two, and did it again. Sweat stung my eyes. I counted fifteen compressions, another two breaths, and then I returned to your chest. I did what I knew, what I thought I remembered, forcing your heart to circulate blood, transferring my oxygen, counting fifteen then two, fifteen then two. And all the time Ruth was saying your name, pathetic and pleading, holding your face in her hands to stop the loll of your head as I thrust down on your chest, until at last I told her to take over, to copy what I had done: pinch your nose, seal her mouth over yours, blow hard and evenly. But she was too hasty, she wanted to start even whilst I was pumping, and then she didn't do it quite right, and I snapped at her, I shouted. I shouted at Mummy as I had shouted at Chloe.

The ambulance was a long time in coming – it felt like a long time – and I remember Chloe came back to us, though not now with her dog. She was panting, and seemed frightened, but she said she had phoned. And I kept going, my shirt clammy with sweat, the backs of my knees. My new sandals bit into my feet. My arms and shoulders were aching, and I felt a hand on my elbow. The man was bearded, older than me, and he offered to take over; he said he knew what to do. But I shook my head, Euan. I wouldn't allow him, for I was your father; it was my job to help you. The other people were standing now at a distance. Some couldn't watch, but how could they leave? The parents had ushered their children away. Then I heard the man asking Chloe where she had rung from, and what directions she'd given. She pointed to the top of the cliffs, our caravan site, and admitted that she'd left no one to meet them. Come on then, he said, and led her away by the arm. They started to trot. I heard their feet on the steps. I took all of this in, and I continued to count – fifteen compressions, two breaths – and I heard the sounds of our beach, the speedboat passing and turning, the sea. I noticed the bruise on your chest where I was pressing, and the limp jerk of your arms and your legs, the dusky cast to your face. I saw Ruth wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, the snot from her nose. But I wasn't crying, Euan. I thought that I might, but I couldn't. It wasn't something I did. And though I knew it was hopeless, that you'd already gone, still I wouldn't give up. I kept hoping. I couldn't imagine a future without you, as I couldn't then keep from my mind the images – the random memories – of how you had been. Your life passed before me, Euan, the life you were leaving, all the stuff I'd recorded, and which you would never have time for.

I saw all of that, and I saw the paramedics hurrying towards us, their blue and yellow jumpsuits, and the weight of their bags bumping into their legs. And no, the ambulance didn't come down to the beach, but we would see it later, a real one. It had a blue light and a siren, and it was parked up near our caravan. That would be after the ambulancemen had got your heart beating, independent of me. They took over, and I had no purpose then but to stand and look on. I reached out for Ruth, and she came to me slowly, desolate, lost to herself and to me, unable to watch. I smelled the sweat in her hair, and the sourness of her breath, but she wasn't crying then; she was shaking. The men did what they knew, what they'd been trained for, and I remember the pads they clapped on to your chest, and the shout of
Stand clear!
The shock made you jolt, Euan; jerk up from the ground. The sound was hollow, a thwack like a slap, and Ruth glanced at you then, looked briefly. The men were watching a monitor. They slid a tube down your throat, and connected that to a cylinder. One of them squeezed a bag, then did some compressions. They stepped up the voltage; they got your heart beating. But you had already gone, Euan. You died because you'd stopped breathing. You died of compression asphyxia. The pressure of your burial had squashed up your chest so hard it couldn't expand. Your lungs had failed. The respiratory centres in your brainstem had starved; they hadn't had enough oxygen and so you had died. You could not be revived. But the heart is a machine, Euan; shocked into working, it carried on regardless. For three days more, it kept pumping. The coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death, and the newspaper called it a Tunnelling Tragedy.
Couple's Agony At Tunnelling Tragedy.
Your picture appeared on the television. Many people came to the funeral. We had you cremated. And no, you cannot come back now; it isn't okay to come back now.

TWENTY-NINE

There ought to have been rain, darkness, cold; it should have been winter. Instead there was sunshine, the scents and noises of summer. Our windows stayed open to the sounds of our neighbours, their kitchens and gardens, the traffic beyond. The light softly faded, returned. One hot day succeeded another. The mail kept arriving. The clock at Ruth's bedside kept pace with the seconds, the minutes and hours, but time had no use for you now, and meant nothing to me. When to wash, dress or eat; the simplest act would defeat me. I wandered into rooms only to forget why I'd gone there. I stumbled drunk into bed in the early hours of the morning, and woke in a sweat soon after, woke repeatedly all night, and then again as Ruth dressed. I would listen to her tread on the boards and the slide and clunk of the drawers, her coat-hangers jangling, and stare into the pillows and bedclothes, the sunlight on her jewellery, and feel only the blanketing weight of my loss, another day to come in your absence. Heavy-limbed and hung-over, I closed my eyes, curled into myself, and sank again into numbness, forgetting.

But of course I could not forget. My thoughts, my memory, were independent of me. I saw your sandals, your ankles, the fall of the cliff on your legs. I saw your blue toes and fingers. I remembered the sunburn on your shoulders, and the cold hard press of your bedframe, the tube in your mouth and the gaps in your teeth, the sensors and wires and banks of machines, but often also my mother, propped up on her pillows, smiling feebly across the distance between us, extending her arm. There was my father's grip on my shoulder, and the single sharp crease of her frown, the dry white skin on her lips. Repeatedly I saw a cream-coloured ambulance – the driver removing his cap, raking a hand though his hair – and then a nurse striding before me, splay-footed, her shoes as clumpy and black as a man's. I saw these things, and I found myself shaking. My neck and legs began prickling with sweat; sudden pains clenched my stomach, my chest. The light was too bright, and sometimes I thought I would vomit. Often I cried. Eventually the numbness returned.

There ought to have been silence, the hush of snow falling, everything frozen, but still the cars continued to pass in our street, the footsteps and voices. I heard the lawnmowers and telephones, scudding footballs and children – always the children – and felt not just your absence from our house, the life we had made, but also from those noises outside, your part in all that. Most afternoons, too, I spent long hours in bed. Half naked, exhausted, I lay beneath my tangle of sheets and listened to Ruth's movements downstairs – the constant shufflings and knocks, doors opening and closing, her feet in the hallway – and felt as if eavesdropping on some other life, remote and unconnected with mine. Descending the stairs, I would find her scrubbing the stains from the carpets, the sofas and chairs. In every room except yours she took down the curtains, washed them by hand, and repositioned the furniture. She dragged out the cooker and scoured the dirt from the skirting behind it. But however much I wished she would stop, leave these things as they were, still I said nothing. I never complained, just as Ruth never once mentioned my smoking, or the amount I was drinking, the hours I spent idle. I heard her crying, as she must have heard me, and knew I could not go near her. In the evenings we prepared our meals separately, not talking, our eyes rarely meeting. Often we ate in different rooms.