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A beautiful summer day on the beach: blue sky, fluffy white clouds, sun bearing down on them, sharp wind carrying the salty smell of the sea and frothing up the waves.
Anne would rather be a thousand miles from here.
“Auntie, look! Look what I found!”
She smiled at her little nephew. “That’s a very pretty shell.”
Saunton again. She had dreamt of drowning all night.
“Where is your father? Come, lets show it to him too.”
There was something fatal on being put out of her own home, like so much trash to be taken away. “You know the house is too big for three people,” Elizabeth had sighed, put-upon. “We can rent it out and get a flat in Brighton for half the money!” And when Anne complained they hadn’t asked her, only told her a month before the new tenant was to move in: “Just stay with Mary for a while, she’ll love to have you. Think of it as a vacation!”
Vacation. Ha.
“Walter! There you are.” Charles smiled at her, grateful and a little harried. “You can’t go running away like that. If you don’t want to stay with me, go sit with Mum.”
“But Mum says we should go play,” Walter whined.
Anne glanced at Mary under her beach umbrella. She felt under the weather, she said. Probably ate something last night, she said. “It’s alright, I’ll keep an eye on him. Right, Walter?”
He beamed at her and dashed away.
“Thank you.”
She smiled at Charles. What would it have been like, had she accepted when he asked her out all those years ago? Would it be only the two of them now, with the boys?
She couldn’t imagine. He’d almost talked her ear off about the World Cup yesterday at dinner. Something about cameras.
“Do you want me to take your shirt? You must be hot.”
“No, I’m alright, I don’t want to burn.” She didn’t want to show off her scars. She should have tried something else - drowning would have fit the theme.
“Dad, Walt, look at that drone!”
“Ooh! Auntie, come, look!”
A group of people, ankle-deep in the surf. A dark-skinned woman in bikini holding a drone, a man with a DSLR in plastic housing, another man, and—
Oh.
The events of the year six crashed into her, like a wave. Rattling around Cornwall and Devon in a rusty Astra, Saunton Sennen Croyde Porthleven and Sennen again because it was easy for a beginner, the smell of seaweed and board wax and drying neoprene.
Freddie.
She looked… no, not changed at all. There, laughing with her friends. A wetsuit - of course - her hair tied up high on her head, her tattoo proud and prominent on her chin.
Anne had kissed that tattoo.
It had been fresh and angry red when they met. As angry as Freddie had been, stuck in Monkton living on her brother’s couch because a promised instructor job fell through. Anne, nineteen and about to leave home for uni in a few months, fell fast and hard and hadn’t stopped somersaulting until she was over her head, in more ways than one.
Freddie would save her, though. Freddie would hold her fast and keep her head above the water even when the waves crashed over them as if they wanted them gone.
Anne wrote twenty poems and three essays that summer, pencil in a notebook hopelessly stained with saltwater. She should have realized why the spots looked like tear stains.
Wet strands of long dark hair woven between her fingers, damp sand between her toes, salt on their lips and waves, waves, waves.
When July rolled into August, Freddie announced she was going back home and asked Anne to come with her. “Dad will put us up until we can find our own place, I’ll work as an instructor, you can… I don’t know, write for the newspaper. I’ll take you up to Wainui and show you what real waves look like.”
She said yes.
Before she booked her plane tickets though, she went and asked Aunt Julia.
Her Mum’s best friend looked at her over the rim of her tea mug, the perfect academic in her cardigan and a study lined with bookshelves. “Darling,” she said, so kind, so serious, “you’ve just gotten into a good university. You’re just so talented, it would be a tragedy to waste that. I know you think you’re in love, but you’re young. Where will you be in a year, in two? You don’t want to make a mistake you will regret your whole life.”
“Auntie, look!”
Anne blinked, from a rain-sodden August afternoon to a sunny July morning. Freddie turned. Her eyes widened and her smile slipped off her face, like a wave running back to the sea.
Anne remembered. “I’m sorry, I can’t.” The betrayal in Freddie’s eyes. Then a slam of doors, and car doors, and angry rev of an engine disappearing in the distance.
You don’t want to make a mistake you will regret your whole life. Well, she had anyway. What did that mean?