Bread and Honey by Ivan Southall

Author:Ivan Southall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ligature Pty Limited
Published: 2021-11-09T09:30:57+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

There were rocks in the sea at the foot of the cliffs. They looked like hundreds of people asleep, some on the sand and some in the water. Some looked like fat men with huge bellies, floating.

Margaret couldn’t have known about them, that they were dangerous and slippery and that the pools were deep. It was terribly dangerous going out there, specially with shoes on. Little kids weren’t allowed there unless they could swim like fish or had been taught by their big brothers and sisters exactly where to put their feet.

He raised an arm as he ran, sure that it should have called her back. Surely his fear for her was strong enough to reach her as clearly as words, but it wasn’t. She didn’t seem to care, just walked on to the rocks out into the sea.

‘Margaret! Come back!’

Surely, to her, his thoughts should have rushed like sound waves across sand and sea and rocks, but they didn’t. She was separate from him, farther from him than any stranger would have been. That was hard to understand.

He started yelling: ‘Margaret! Don’t go out there. It’s slippery there. No, Margaret, it’s deep.’

But she wouldn’t listen and was still so far ahead. What had happened to distances? What had happened to time? Everything had stretched like a dream. He ran like mad and hardly dared think the thought that turned into the shout that drove ahead. ‘There are sting-rays out there. Can’t you hear? A little girl was slashed last summer. Ambulance men and hospitals and seventy miles an hour.’

She looked tiny against the great greasy sea and the broad grey sky and the looming brown cliffs.

‘They had to stitch her up. She was sick for months. Margaret, don’t go out there.’

She looked tiny enough to drown in an instant and he was her guardian angel. Of course he was. If anything happened to her it would happen to him too.

‘You silly little creep,’ he yelled. ‘Come back.’

But she was stubborn. He floundered to the reef’s edge thirty or forty yards from her and yelled again, ‘Come back. Don’t be silly.’

But still she picked her way seawards from outcrop to outcrop with arms extended for balance like a walker on a wire. She couldn’t have been that stupid. ‘You’re showing off,’ he cried. ‘It’ll bally well serve you right. You’ll drown. Bigger people than you have drowned out there. It’s way over your head.’

It was like one of Grandma’s stories of a goddess walking into the sea to vanish beneath the waves. The rocks were like huge saucers out there, half-awash, almost as if they were floating and at any moment might sink or tip or spill her off. That blooming little kid, that crackpot. She’d got him so churned up he couldn’t think straight, could think only of bodies floating in the water with long stringy hair waving back and forth like seaweed, could think only of people crying and an awful emptiness in the world. ‘Oh, gawd,’

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