“Do you ever feel homesick for a place you can’t remember?” my father would ask me, late at night, when the tide pressed high against the dunes. I would smile, shake my head, and turn up the heating a little higher. He was half delirious towards the end of his life, slipping back in time as the dementia tightened its grip. “I am the sea,” he would say softly, looking out the kitchen window towards the waves. I am the sea. He sang it under his breath to a tune he half recalled, and he watched the waves roll in and break against the sand.
That winter, he began to wander. I would visit, only to find his front door wide open and the wind whipping through the house. Down the cliff path, where the gorse and wild privet clung low to the earth, I would follow his familiar footprints; two slippered feet and one blackthorn walking stick. The track was steep. It wound down between the sand dunes and crossed a small, but wilful, stream. The gulls would wheel away, disgruntled at my presence, and on the beach below the brown specks of sandpipers scampered, indifferent, along the water’s edge. I knew exactly where I would find my father.
The wanderings would take him down to the waterline, where he would stand, sand-splattered and dreaming. The waves washed over his feet, filling his slippers and soaking his socks. When I took his arm gently, he would look at me with sea-grey eyes, blank as the sky, and meekly permit me to guide him back home. It was after he caught pneumonia, and worsened it by leaving bed to visit the sea, that we decided he should move into a care home. He took the news distantly, as if part of him was already gone, wild as the white horses that reared and plunged amongst the surf.
He would always point out the horses to me. We counted them from the clifftop while they pranced and plunged, foam flecked and carefree as they sank and rose with the swell of the tide. I am the sea, my father would whisper, as he watched the white horses with tears in his eyes. I looked for those horses after phoning the care home. When I visited next, he was dead. It was the day before his move into the home, and his whole house had been meticulously tidied, as if in preparation. I phoned the police. Then I boiled the kettle to make some tea. Folded neatly, inside my favourite mug, was an envelope.
I recognised the spidery handwriting as I turned over the note in my hand. It was a few days later that I was brave enough to read it. It was after surviving the visit from the police, and the trip to the hospital, and the phoning around of relatives, that I sought the sanctuary of the sea myself. My feet took the cliff path out of habit, drawing me down through the dunes, where tufted marram grass tangled the sands into stillness. The seabirds screeched and soared, mocking my landbound body. I wondered if my father had taken flight with them, discarding his aching limbs like last year’s leaves. They chuckled, high above me, at the idea.
The sea was choppy, rushing and retreating across the sand with a rattle of restless pebbles. Further out, larger waves battered the concrete jetty and exploded in angry foam. A storm was coming. I watched the white horses until the tide rose and covered my shoes. Then I opened the envelope. My dearest Kitty, it sounded just like him, his voice ringing in my head as I read it, I must ask you one last thing.
With wet shoes, I laboured back up the cliff path, glancing back occasionally at the shrinking beach. I pocketed the note, and searched for the shed key that always hung on the hook in the hallway. It was there, just as I remembered, and the lock on the wooden door turned as if it had been oiled.
A crowbar lay out ready on the workbench. I smiled at my fathers organisation. Then I took the tool to the patio, and turned up three of the grey flagstones. Beneath them was silver sand, just like on the beach. I used a trowel to shift it aside, and very soon I hit something solid. It was a large metal ammunition box; a leftover relic from the second world war. Easing open the rusty old clasps, I pushed the lid wide in degrees. My childish imagination was half expecting a chest full of gold. But it was nothing of the sort. The box was filled with bones. Hundreds of bones, browned with age, and damp from the seaslick air. I recoiled, pressing my sleeve across my mouth. My lungs were filled with the smell of decay, and tight with the scent of long stale air. I slammed shut the lid and went inside for a shower.
That night, a storm lay siege to Sennen. It howled through the sand dunes and re-sculpted the jagged lines of the cliffs. It frothed the waves into a frenzy, scouring the skeletons of old shipwrecks, driving the water high up the beach and over the path. The sea roared, writhing between the rocks and lashing out at the land.
From my fathers cottage, I watched the water. It was two hours past midnight, but still I couldn’t sleep. The light was on in the lifeboat station, and in the garden the wind chimes were shrieking like banshees. The floral teacups trembled in the cupboard as the house braced itself against the biting wind. They had never been used, those teacups. But my mother’s taste lived on through them, so they stayed in the cupboard as a shrine.
On the walls, pictures rattled, and I watched as the images of my father fishing, or rowing or walking the cliffs, seemed to take on a life of their own. There was one of him and I building a sandcastle. I was perhaps seven. The sea sparkled behind us, and as the walls shook with the storm, it almost looked like the waves were dancing. Rubbing my eyes, I turned away and forced myself back to bed.
I slept until late the next morning. The storm had blown itself out and the sun was shining. In the wide, blue sky, gulls wheeled and dived. Throwing open the door, I gulped in mouthfuls of that fresh, sweet air. The beach was swept clean beneath me. But the garden was covered in bones. Something had opened the box and spread the contents across the lawn. They were carelessly tossed; white froth on a grassy sea, looking out of place, like some deep sea creature thrown up onto the sand. I put on thick gloves and returned the bones to their box. Then I made coffee and read the note from my father again.
In the shed, there were a couple of large hessian sacks, which had once been used for wood. I dragged them out and began to fill them with bones. The skull was heavy, with eye sockets the size of my palm, and the ribs were as long as my arm. When the old ammunition box was finally empty, both of the sacks were bulging.
It was a slow walk down to the beach, half carrying and half dragging one sack at a time. The cliff path was wiped clean of footprints, and here and there the marram grass had lost its hold on the shifting sand. The little stream ran fast and full, well fed from last night’s rainfall. With a laborious slowness, I dragged all the bones to the waterline. At the edge of the surf I stopped for breath, delicate tendrils of foam just touching my toes. The air was cool and clean, caressing my hot skin with a reassuring tenderness. Around me, the sand stretched, sculpted into flowing lines and scattered with treasure turned up from the seabed. Between the broken lobster traps and tangled nets I began to lay out the bones.
I counted two hundred and five. They congealed into a creature as I placed them, my hands moving in time with the tide. As I lay down the last one, the water was already touching the first. I stepped back to admire my work; a full horse skeleton, galloping along the beach. The water licked tentatively at the bones, flowed back and sang softly to itself. Then it surged in again, wrapping around the pastern and cannon, tasting their longing to run, and loosening the sand that held them still. Slowly, the bones were sucked out to sea. When the water reached the skull, it began to flow black. Delighting in the movement, the small bones danced and swirled, staining the sea with strange ink. The dark water reached my feet. It filled my shoes and I stood immobile, eyes wide with wonder.
Where the water touched bone, it began to swell. The foam gathered, oily and slow, slick and sleek as sodden hair. And at that moment I understood. Just as the white horses prance above the waves, so the black horses dance below. Always in balance, leaping and diving, the bright spray and dark current, counting out the century slow heartbeat of the sea.
It had always been a fairy story; told late at night while the wind wailed around the clifftop cottage. My father rarely read books. Instead, he closed his eyes, and we were drawn close, into the small space of the armchair, which felt like a boat on the sea. My mother would smile and touch his hand with hers. She loved the story of the kelpie best, where he would lay aside his hooves to speak with a mortal woman.
All of the magic I had discounted as madness.
Salt stung in my eyes. I pulled the note from my pocket, smoothing out the creases on my hand. The paper caught in the wind and was snatched away, blowing across the water like an errant seabird, arcing and diving until it was lost in the skyline. I followed it until my vision grew too blurry. Then I turned around and dragged my soaked feet back up the beach. At the path I paused, wiped the tears from my eyes with my sleeve, and stole a final glance back at the water. The darkness had dispersed and the waves lapped steady and calm. A wild smile bloomed across my face.
“I am the sea,” I whispered to the wind, which carried my voice across the sand dunes and on to the secret caves in the depths of the cliff. “I am the sea,” I told the startled gulls and the creeping marram grass and the low, ragged gorse. “I am the sea,” I cried to the wide water, which answered with silence, and seaspray and the patient rhythm of the tide.