Blueback

XV

After a few years Abel’s mother could no longer walk along the beach she loved. She was too frail to dive any more and too stiff to pick fruit or dig vegetables. In the end she lay in her bed and listened to the sea. On fine days Abel carried her to the verandah so she could watch the tide and see the life of the ocean. Her hair was white as the sand on the shore and little Dora liked to feel it silky between her fingers. Old Dora Jackson slept a lot but when she woke she told stories.

‘When Abel was born,’ she said, ‘his father thought we should let him meet the sea straight away so he wouldn’t get homesick. After all, he’d been swimming inside me all that time. He was always a swimmer. So we took him down while the water was warm. We knelt in the shallows and lowered him gently into the sea. For a moment he went stiff as coral and then he kicked like a fish about to be set free. He wanted to swim off right there and then. He cried when I took him back to the house. He was always like that. Just like his father. Couldn’t get him out of the water.’

The day before Dora Jackson died, Abel carried her gingerly down from the verandah and took her to the shore. Her nightie flapped and her hair became a tumbleweed in the breeze. He walked out a little way as whiting darted past his feet. He cradled her in his arms, laid her back and let her float against him in the clear, still water.

‘We come from water,’ she whispered. ‘We belong to it, Abel.’

She lay back smiling, her arms and legs bobbing lightly. She weighed nothing at all. A long, blue shadow swerved into the shallows and swam around them once, stirring up the sand like confetti against them.

The next afternoon she died in her sleep and Abel made a new cross for the little graveyard behind the orchard.