IN THE PENGUIN COLONY
It had been a long, hot, irritating drive, with his wife misreading the map and the twins fighting in the back of the car. Finally they arrived, found somewhere to park and hauled their belongings out of the trunk. He carried the cool-box, the beach mats and a towel with a garishly bright sunset-and-palm-tree motif. Rolled up it still looked unpleasantly lurid, but he was past caring.
His family straggled in an untidy line behind him as he led the way down the beach, jostling and elbowing his way towards the sea until they came to the only four -metre-square patch of sand left unoccupied. Here, a stone’s throw from the sea’s edge he drove their umbrella into the sand, whacking it with his shoe, then spread out their towels and beach mats and tried to protect their belongings from the gangs of marauding children and dogs and the feet of wet bathers. His wife sank heavily onto the loose sand, anchoring the beach mat. His nine-year-old son and the twins arranged themselves neatly in a line at her side, just under the shade. He squeezed in at their feet, only partially shaded, aware that his neck was already burning from the sun. Undoing the cool-box, his wife handed each packed lunch over as though it were some prize they had won. She thrust his sandwiches out to him with a pink, rounded arm. Corned beef and beetroot, he guessed, looking at the magenta juice leaking into the cling film. It smelled warm and soggy. He decided he could wait.
"I think I’ll go for a swim," he said. "Save it for me?" She sighed and put it back in the cool-box with the apples, kit-kats, tinned drinks and packets of crisps.
"Watch how you eat that," she called to a twin, ignoring him. " If you drop it in the sand that’ll be the end of it." The twin, a boy, almost dropped it, startled; then stuffed it in his mouth. His sister licked sand off her fingers.
The man kicked off his sandals and picked his way carefully through the sunbathers towards the water.
The sea came to greet him with promises of cool, delightfully weightless pleasure. He submitted gratefully and launched himself through the shallows full of skinny brown children splashing and chasing one another with buckets, to where the water was a little deeper and there were youths playing ball and fooling with their dark eyed girlfriends, who wore tiny bikinis and had water slick hair. On he went, ducking the beach balls, disentangling himself from the legs of a sedate older snorkeller, to where there was no one at all; only the blue horizon, and the hazy dark fin of an island popping up very far away. He inhaled deeply the smell of the clean briny sea. He lay on his back in the water and moved his hands a little and floated effortlessly on the undulating surface of the ocean.
This was more like it. No phone calls, no demands from his wife or his children, no one chasing up a query, sharing information or asking him to go to meetings he didn’t want to attend.
He swam out a little further for the exercise, hung there in the water a while, then turned back, drifting his way slowly towards the beach, doing breast stroke, side stroke and backstroke alternately. After a while he realised he was in his depth. The youths playing ball had gone for lunch. He tiptoed along the ridged sandy bottom until he was waist deep. He looked at the beach, trying to get his bearings.
Their umbrella was red. It should be visible. He moved closer in and crouched, covering his shoulders with the water as he crept forwards. He wasn’t looking forward to getting out of the sea and he put it off as long as he could. Then, stumbling up the beach he felt his full weight return to him. Dripping and self-conscious, he decided to go left, and made his way along the shoreline carefully, searching for his family under their red umbrella. He couldn’t see them anywhere. He wanted to walk higher up the beach, but realised his soft feet would be burned by the sand. He had left his shoes by the red umbrella, anxious in case he should lose them on this crowded beach. After two hundred yards his back was burning and there was no sign of his family. He turned round and went back the other way, trying not to kick over the sandcastles guarded by angry little girls. There was still no sign of his family. There were many red umbrellas.
He sat at the edge of the sea as the water lapped against his toes and tickled his calves and wondered what to do. Had they left the beach without him? He decided to see if they were in the car. It was a simple explanation; they had felt ill or too burned or tired to stay on the beach. They had gone back to wait in the car. He trod with careful, scorched feet along the sand to the road, climbed over the wall and crossed over. The smell of hot melted vanilla ice cream mingled pleasantly with the ozone from the sea. Someone had dropped a cornet on the pavement. The car park he had used was along here somewhere. Gritting his teeth with pain from the loose gravel on the road, which dug into his naked feet, he looked around at the orderly rows of Fiats and Mercedes under the trees. There was his car. There was no one in it and it was locked. The sun had moved round now and it was no longer in the shade. People looked strangely at him as he stood there in his swimming shorts trying every lock on the car. It didn’t look as though anyone had come back to it; the back seat was a mess of sweet wrappers and his wife’s jacket was still on the back of the passenger seat.
Where could they be? They must be on the beach. Returning, he trod carefully over the hot sands with sore and smarting feet and went into the sea again to cool off. He really needed a drink. His wife had his wallet and the car keys. He had nothing.
He swam out again and floated on his back, weighing things up. He wondered if it were possible to sleep in the sea, if the water was calm enough. His weight made him buoyant and he needed little effort to stay afloat. He had heard that people from the South Sea Islands carried extra body fat to help them swim and keep out the cold.
Blubber. He felt he had something in common with them. Bored by his own company, he turned his attention to his family and the red umbrella. Where were they?
Maybe the current along the shore had carried him further along this stretch of coast than he realised. He began to swim back towards the beach, a crowded horizon of seething, moving, basking bodies.
Reaching it, he clambered up the sand, which sloped here a little more than before, his feet sliding away under him, and threaded his way once more between the recliners and sun beds, the towels, mats and umbrellas, but there was nothing to say his family had ever been here. After a while he became dispirited and walked away from the sea on the hot, yielding sand, clenching his toes, towards the road, looking to see if there was a shower or a drinking water tap. Eventually he found both, though there were hornets around the drain, drinking the spilled tap water. He turned the tap on anyway, cupping his hands to get enough cool liquid into his salty mouth. There was a queue for the shower and he didn’t wait.
He thought he recognised the gap in the wall where they had first come down to the beach, and, heartened, he came through it and retraced their steps over the bitter, unreliable dust to where the bathers were. At every turn he was swerving to avoid treading on someone, or dodging other bathers and knocking over someone’s water bottle. There were more people than ever now, and he had to keep a tight hold on his temper. Okay, he wanted to shout, I give up. Come out and show yourselves!
He looked a little wild at this point, and his shoulders were burning badly. Sunbathers backed away as he drew close, uncertain what he might do. Even the beach peddlers didn’t approach him. There was still no sign of his family, or their belongings.
He walked back and forth along the beach, from end to end. It took him most of the afternoon. He walked to the rocks where the last of the sunbathers had arranged their clothes neatly on a boulder, and back again to where the water was murky with weed on the far end of the beach. Then he swam again. He wished he had eaten the sandwich now.
People were beginning to pack up their belongings and leave the beach.
In the sea again, he reasoned with himself that if he stayed in the water long enough, all the other people on the sands would go home eventually, leaving just his family behind.
He stayed in the sea for a long time, swimming up and down until a slight breeze ruffled the water and strands of dark stringy weed began to catch around his legs. He almost panicked but got a grip on himself just in time. He sat again at the water’s edge and let the waves lap his calves and ankles. His feet had wrinkled, so had his fingertips, and both had the tired puckered look of white orange peel.
People walked over him, or jumped across his legs as he sat there, utterly defeated. Where in heaven’s name were his family? He thought then of calling them, loudly, one by one, but felt a fool and didn’t. He walked up and down from end to end of the beach again, first along the tidemark, then along the sand behind the bathers, checking every family, every umbrella.
Finally he gave up and went into the sea, floating listlessly just out of his depth. How did penguins manage it? They were all identical to look at, yet they found their way back to their colony of thousands and unerringly found the right mate, the appropriate egg; the correct territory. Without fail. How did they do it? And what happened to those that could not perform this feat? He wished he knew. At first he had been anxious about his family, then irritated, then desperate. Now he was anxious about them again, but even more concerned about his own survival.
The beach was half empty now. There was still no sign of them. An eerie thought came into his mind. What if they were a figment of his imagination? What if they had never existed? He shook his head to get rid of the idea. It was crazy. Evening crept on, as he went in and out of the sea, up and down the beach. He went back to the car several times. His belly growled with hunger and his body was sore from the sun. He had a headache that forced him to go back to the standpipe and drink vast quantities of water, like a camel. Then he sprawled on the cooling sand, face down, and slept. Above him the sky turned copper green and then indigo and the stars began their journey. Couples walked along the road, restaurant lights twinkled.
He woke, cold and anxious, and went for a last swim. The water was warmer than the night air. He felt it wrap around his tired body, comforting him. He allowed himself to weep then, for everything he thought he had and everything he had lost. The soft embrace of water felt like home.