Turtle at Low Tide

A story by Miranda Gold. Originally published in The London Magazine, June/July 2021.

Freddie’s father was fifty when he informed what remained of the family that his number was up, that he was on his way out. It was the closest the man had come to completing a sentence in over a decade. Freddie’s Uncle studied the wine menu, his mother lurched her eyes up in search of her hairline, Freddie’s thumb and index finger considered then resisted a tender protuberance that had been swelling ripe on the back of his neck. The truth did not require anyone’s undivided attention – Freddie’s father simply felt it would be discourteous not to warn them: there would be no death bed scene, no drama, no tears – this was a matter of making one’s exit rather than being shown the door.

It would take until Freddie was just past the age his father had been when he’d signed off, as his Uncle had put it, for Freddie’s father’s death to lend a broken mirror to the death of Freddie’s brother Toby. Thirty years since his father, forty since Toby: his father laying himself to rest in a lukewarm bath with a bitter pick and mix of anonymous pharmaceuticals sweetened by a second bottle of vintage; Toby up to his neck in sand, Freddie and his school friend Neville running off as the tide came in. Freddie hadn’t been anywhere near the sea since. Not till now: standing on the beach at Torre Canne. The wine tinged suds floated like rosy clouds over his father’s body in the marble tub; the black gloss of Toby’s unburied eyes gleamed in the sun.

It was seeing the washed up turtle that did it. If it hadn’t been for the turtle’s cracked back there’d be no mirrored shards; if it hadn’t been for the turtle, Death by Water wouldn’t have been brazen enough to suggest itself as something of a theme. Freddie watched the flies swarm round the parched shell, a barnacled mosaic of crimson bleached where the sun had stolen its colour.

Freddie had been eleven, Toby nine, the whole month of August in Cornwall with Neville’s family every summer till that last. Freddie and Neville had built a secret stash – compass, penknife, tinned spaghetti, flask, torches –

‘We’ll need a map,’ Neville had said, ‘and a code.’

‘And spy names,’ Freddie had been doing research.

The boys were going to be explorers and conquer savage lands –

‘Is that right?’ Neville’s mother had given each of them a pronounced nod, ‘Well, so long as you’re back by lunch.’

Toby had come scrambling after them, ‘I want to be an explorer too!’

Freddie and Toby’s mother said he could explore well enough right where he was – their father lifted his eyes above his revised draft of a paper on Cornish folklore (his sixth of the twelve he would never finish), and said it would be good for Toby, ‘Go on,’ he murmured, ‘let him go.’

Neville had screwed his eyes and nudged Freddie – ‘What if,’ Neville proposed, ‘we let him? He can be our first subject.’

Freddie looked his brother over, considered. ‘Yes, alright.’

Freddie and Toby’s father’s face had disappeared again, their mother was sinking lethargic fingers into a pot of cream and pasting it on to the scaly backs of Toby’s knees, ‘don’t go further than the ferry – and no going anywhere near the cliffs,’ she urged him before she turned to Freddie and Neville, ‘and don’t you two go running ahead – stay together, okay?’

All that seemed to be left of Freddie and Toby’s father was the startled veins on his hands holding up a page, a jagged, indecipherable mutter coming from behind it.

Forty years ago and hardly a thought – yet here he was, Torre Canne, a place he’d never been to before in his life, with the desiccated feet of a washed up turtle incomprehensibly recalling Cornwall, Toby, his father. The turtle’s feet had been buried a little more every morning he’d walked past since they’d arrived five days ago, burying and washing up Toby all over again – and their father with him...the turtle had dry black nuggets for eyes. Torre Canne had been Neville’s idea, one of his epiphanies. That should have been warning enough. Of course Neville never said anything about Torre Canne being on the sea.

The years after that last summer in Cornwall were punctuated by events but they never quite crystallized into memories he could grasp – there was little beyond borrowed nostalgia, other people’s vaporous souvenirs ferried back from a time that might never have been. Freddie had managed to cobble together an early biography for his wife Nina’s sake – she always wanted to hear about what he was like, what his family was like, it was important to her she said and it only got worse when she was pregnant with Cammy. He stitched up what he could and it didn’t feel for a moment that he was omitting anything. Toby hadn’t occurred to him – and the few photographs over the mantelpiece at his parents’ didn’t contradict him. That way she had of picking the frames up, though – holding each so carefully and sipping them in – it made him clench a little until she set them back down. There were no photos from before that summer – the evidence on the mantelpiece was of a family of three, looking precisely how people look in family photos. After Freddie’s father died Freddie found a picture of the four of them in the drawer of his desk – even then Freddie hadn’t connected his father’s signing off with Toby, but then he hadn’t let himself have more than a glance. They gave the desk away with the rest of his things – only realised now it would still have had the photo in it. He’d taken the letter opener out, yes – but that was all he’d kept. Couldn’t think where he’d put it though – had an ivory handle, the sort of thing Nina would have called immoral, would have ruined the image she’d constructed of his father…or, was it him that constructed it? – and then, after what felt like an interminable gestation, Cammy was born – and Nina’s questions stopped. Questions became a luxury – and there was no such thing as memory, there was no before: there was only Nina, Cammy, and nothing else – except the prayer that he might get some kip, with the caveat that he’d wake up to find everything exactly as it was – Nina, Cammy, still there, all four limbs apiece, that this precious and terrifying world he could hardly believe was real, let alone be a part of, wouldn’t be snatched or crushed without his keeping vigil.

A six year lull and then the questions began again – Cammy this time: everyone else had two grandpas, why did she only have one grandpa? What had happened to Grandpa? which all got a bit awkward since Nina was intent on her progressive thing about being honest with children – well alright when it came to the tooth fairy, less so when it came to suicide. They compromised with ‘Grandpa had been unhappy and so he died.’ A cause and effect explanation which meant every time she got upset or saw anyone else upset she’d beg them please please don’t die – several excursions to the headmistress followed. When Freddie’s mother came for her annual review of her son and his progeny Cammy poked her grandmother on the subject of Grandpa. Grandma gave one of her more ferocious smiles, clawed Cammy’s little forearm with her immaculate nails, and asked in a voice tepid as the water her husband had died in: ‘Cammy darling, do you like truly horrible stories?’ Cammy quite liked them. Then how about stories so truly horrible she’d never sleep a wink so long as she lived? Maybe not that horrible then.

It trickled out eventually – but never a word about Toby. Not to Nina, not to Cammy. Only Freddie and Neville knew what happened. No one but they had seen Toby’s unburied eyes blink and flash out of his tomb of sand. Freddie and Neville, explorers off to conquer, racing away, leaving their first subject as the tide came in. Yes, they might have gone further back than that summer and Toby, but it was that summer and Toby that bound them – and pulled them apart. Freddie couldn’t shake Neville off, however flimsy Neville became, though somehow he didn’t want to. He couldn’t stand to see the only other person who knew – but he couldn’t know alone either, so they’d kept rubbing along together, keeping one another in sight without quite letting their eyes catch. Of course Toby never crossed Freddie’s mind now and Neville was different too, went through his patches like they all did and Neville had had one hell of a patch – it seemed the worse a man’s patches the more ludicrous the reinvention. Freddie and Neville might have gone way back but that was it, all they really had between them was time – and that last summer in Cornwall. 

Freddie and Neville had come to Torre Canne out of season but Neville’s cheeks had already established a good fortnight’s worth of sheer blue skies before they’d even boarded the plane, his face kissed gold as the epiphany struck after their third round that night in The Stag’s Head: what old Fred needed was a change of scene, a break, a holiday, and Neville, all too literally, had just the ticket – at least now that his wife Janice had definitively removed herself from the picture.

‘Mustn’t every cloud have its whatsit lining,’ Neville had asked, waving at the barman for a chaser. Neville, eager to breeze on, explained that divorce lawyers aside, it wasn’t anything for a man like him to get down about – not now that it meant he could cheer up old Fred. Neville had developed what Freddie could only describe as an unsettling capacity for perkiness. He’d always been the colour of a November London afternoon, but lately he’d become pink, plump, with a good sheen. He hadn’t lost a hair of his comb-over either. Freddie gulped his pint, patted his sparse crown and bit his tongue a little harder than he intended – perhaps Freddie should consider a comb-over too. This was the New Neville, Post Neville...this was barely Neville at all. All through secondary he’d had panda rings and this dusty old man look about him, his caved chest and disappearing chin and that sniffle which might have explained why Freddie wasn’t picked last every time. He’d muddled along alright for a bit, Freddie supposed, but wasn’t it only a couple of years back, just before Freddie and Nina had introduced Neville and Janice, that Neville drooped? Yes, everything about him back then was dragged downward, as though gravity hungered for him. Terrible state he was and Nina, being Nina, was set on having Neville to stay with them for a while.

‘You could be a little…’ Nina whispered.

‘A little what?’ Freddie asked.

‘I don’t know…a little empathetic – or something.’

‘For the love of – why is everything about damn empathy these days? The word get thrown about like – like –’

‘Alright, Freddie, alright. Just, I don’t know, try and look up a bit when he’s talking, nod, that sort of thing.’

‘I am trying,’ Freddie said, eyes on the tumbler of scotch in his hand, jaw so tight the words barely came out.

The timing didn’t help – Freddie being under the company director’s scrutiny the day Neville moved in. The director, well stocked on euphemisms, had spent the afternoon circling Freddie –

Not quite as sharp as you used to be, eh?

– and all Freddie had hoped for when he got back that evening was a large scotch and sympathy. Instead he found himself forced to listen to Neville blather on at Nina, in tones assisted by Freddie’s scotch, about the sea. He didn’t say anything about Cornwall then, thank God. Of course not Cornwall: Freddie and Neville might have been only eleven when they’d made their pact never to mention Cornwall again but it had held good these last forty years. Freddie had kept his eye and ear close to Neville’s dancing voice and brow, but he needn’t have – Neville might have been a lot of things but he wasn’t a snitch, still had his cubs’ honour. Freddie couldn’t help wishing the man would just conk out though. It wasn’t just Neville’s refusal to abandon his chosen subject matter (about which one word was too much) but the way Nina’s sweetness, which had never been the sickly kind, nauseated Freddie. Never had before – but her attentive eyes softly resting on Neville, with just enough of a hmm, yes, to acknowledge and encourage without interrupting. And the way she leant forward – ever so slightly, hardly noticeable.

Neville had been congealed to the sofa during those first few days at Freddie and Nina’s – eyes transfixed by the television, an arm extending as far as the drinks cabinet – until Nina said Neville could have Cammy’s room. Cammy had gone off to Exeter the October before, she wouldn’t mind, Nina promised. Like mother like daughter. Drooping hell-ward Neville was then – but less than a week in and his mouth had adopted a permanently sloppy grin, his puffy lips and thick gums licked over with a dislodged tongue that went on – and on – about the damn sea. There wasn’t any other way round it: Freddie would have to find Neville somewhere of his own – and decent enough it was too, a studio in Kentish Town – ‘Oh come on! there isn’t that much mold round the bath’, he’d told Nina. Got Neville in at the company – Freddie could bet the New Perky Post Neville wasn’t having to suppress growls in the director’s office. Forcing a performance of enthusiasm, he and Nina drove a car full of housewarming casseroles and cushions to the studio. Nina’s hand touched Freddie’s as he rapped on the door, her voice as light as her hand saying she couldn’t believe she’d married a man who couldn’t stand the sea and Freddie having to chew on his defence until he could just let his forehead fall on to Nina’s and his mouth find its way down to hers – he was a lucky bastard and he knew it. It did snick though, Nina’s little joke about the sea. No, he could never have told Nina about Toby – she always heard what he meant, not what he said. What had she meant then? Her joke about the sea? Nothing: he envied her that, that she could always mean what she said and what she meant was that she couldn’t believe...would she make the same joke now, if she was here, the turtle’s buried feet in front of them? No use wondering – she was in London and he was in Torre Canne; she was at home and he was... God he hated the damn sea! Freddie supposed Nina’d be buttering her toast around about now, glazing it with marmalade the way she did, still marveled at the neatness of it even after twenty years – yes, he was a lucky bastard – and instead of marmalade toast with Nina he’d had, for five days on the trot, Neville’s ‘Buongiorno!’ Yes, Freddie had tried that morning, Bonjour, and decided he couldn’t eat his toast without marmalade. Neville lathered his toast in a plummy sludge – ‘Conserve, Freddie!’ –and read out the weather report on his phone, jubilant as he updated Freddie – just as Neville had predicted: not a cloud in the sky.

Freddie felt for his phone in his pocket – he hadn’t left Neville more than half an hour ago and there was already a message asking him where he was, another saying he was sitting on the patio, another that he was going up to his room, and a last saying that he’d loaded up the car and – nothing from Nina though, but then she wouldn’t want to bother him, she just wanted him to have a really good time. ‘I don’t want you worrying about a thing,’ she’d said. Meant it too of course. She’d waved to Neville who was waiting in the taxi and was careful not to look at all worried, not to overdo the hug or say anything about looking after himself. She’d never let herself look worried, even when she’d found Freddie in the bath he’d been in so long it had gone cold, helping him out without changing her face once, not asking why, just carrying on, not waiting for him to explain or being too gentle – and so of course when, not for the first time, he’d got half way up the stairs and just stopped, she waited behind him, not nudging him along, only her hand on his back that placed him neatly back inside his own skin. Freddie didn’t know why this stalling happened, it just came along, suspended him while the view fogged over. It always cleared sooner or later, just came and went, let him go on. He’d forgotten there had been one or two flickers of it just after his father died but then all it took was someone kind enough to clear their throat to get him on his way. It was an oddness, a dullness, something just... stopped, nothing more. 

The turtle’s eyes had moved – no, it was only the swarm round it, the relentless chaos of flies. Toby…he really hadn’t thought about him. Couldn’t quite picture him. He was the kind of child people called excitable, Freddie remembered that, how the adults responded to him rather than Toby himself. Now calm down, Toby, his mother was always saying. Bit of a handful that one – who had said that? Neville’s mother, perhaps. The implication was that he was too much. Nina would haven’t have thought so… Toby. Bouncing up and down about going to the seaside right from the beginning of the summer term, those huge black glossy eyes – yes, he could see those eyes alright…could sometimes still hear him trying to call after them the way he had when Freddie and Neville ran off too…then sand in his mouth, he was spitting it up, his mewling disappearing under the tide. 

As Freddie turned to go back to the hotel he saw a little boy burying himself in the sand, packing it solid round his legs. He looked up at Freddie, the boy’s eyes glossed black, blinked, not looking at the handfuls he scooped up and patted over his interred thighs.

‘Aha!’ Neville had been revising the guidebook in Freddie’s absence, designing an itinerary. He slapped the guidebook down on the wicker chair next to him and checked the sky against the weather update on his phone: Not. A. Cloud. Not one!

‘Just in time,’ Neville pronounced as he got up, ‘we’ve got quite a day ahead – to the cove!’

Neville sped the car on while Freddie grappled with the seatbelt. He gave up and kept his eyes on the coastline but the blur of trees and yellow flecked fields wouldn’t hold his gaze.

‘What a view!’ Neville was delighted to see Freddie absorbed by the sea. Freddie rolled the window down, trying to concentrate on the stone walled paths bisecting the green – but still his eyes were drawn back across through Neville’s window to the coastline.

Neville pulled up by an empty restaurant and dragged out the deckchairs, leaving Freddie to follow with the parasol and limoncello, setting them up only inches back from a sheer drop into the waves. Neville settled into his deckchair and threw splayed, stubby fingers toward the happily predicted cloudless sky.

‘What did I tell you?’ Neville closed his eyes and let the sun beat his face smooth.

Freddie dropped the parasol on to a mossy patch sprouting red flowers and stood behind his deckchair, rocking it a touch to test its steadiness – they should really set themselves back a little. The wind was rushing the water against the rocks, rolling the waves up until they burst into chandeliers, dropping into mist, all that sudden force just as sudden in its collapse, leaving nothing more than a gauzy impression while the next waves crashed and burst. Neville flung his arm out, a flapping hand reminding Freddie of the limoncello. Freddie trundled over, watching as Neville (whose eyes didn’t need to open as he twisted the cap off) took a sip with a delicacy that concentrated Freddie’s attention, then a gulp that lost him back to the burst and crash against the rocks. Freddie walked almost to the edge. What was this pull towards it? His body seemed to be moving without him.

‘Careful you don’t fall in!’ Neville had more than a gulp of limoncello in his voice. ‘Next stop...’ Neville was capping the bottle now, cursing the absence of the guidebook he’d left on the patio. ‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘tomorrow’s another day.’ He reached the bottle towards Freddie. Freddie shook his head, a queasy sensation blooming up from him stomach. Neville slid the bottle under his deckchair and explained no civilised being has more than a drop before lunch.

In that instant – less – between Freddie’s pull and repulsion of the sea – he saw Nina’s face – saw it notice what it had taken five post-breakfast sightings of a washed up turtle and the passage of thirty years for Freddie to see: his father, Toby –

Death by Water –

Freddie stepped back – Nina would hear the whole story in that step – no, how could she? Neville was the only one who knew it start to finish – and yet to hear Neville now –

‘The sea, the sea!’

Freddie passed a hand over his half-shaven cheek – that dullness had lowered over him this morning. He’d been standing at the sink, razor in hand, until the sound of Neville knocking at his door shook him into consciousness. He must have been there with that razor in his hand for two hours and yet he couldn’t remember a minute of it. He’d got up – yes, he could remember that – his bad shoulder exacerbated by whatever contortions that dream had twisted him into. Had that dream the night before – and the night before that too. Used to wait for that dream, knew to expect it, dreaded sleep. Didn’t start for a couple of years until after Toby and that last summer in Cornwall and then...when did it stop? After he’d met Nina? Not quite. She never asked him about it though. Let him be. Just brought the mornings in and tucked the night away until the mornings came in and nights tucked themselves up of their own accord. It had comeback once or twice, a little before Cammy was born – and then stopped again – at least until the second night in Torre Canne. You couldn’t have called it a nightmare – there wasn’t anything frightening about it, it was just the sea – that was all, a still sea, glassy, mirror-smooth – but that was it – the lie of it, the waves hiding, waves that would chase them up the beach, leaving Toby buried up to his neck in sand – not just the dream though, but the waiting for it, especially when they first started: the clock ticking, lying there, wishing and not wishing for sleep, wondering if this would be one of the nights he’d hear his mother come up the stairs and stand outside his door. She never opened it, she just stood there and – and then his father’s steps up and that blank before his mother’s terse whisper ‘What? I was just checking Freddie was still...’ and then another blank and both their steps down. Had panda rings just like Neville’s right till the end of secondary – but they’d crossed their hearts and hoped to die so they never said a thing about it. He’d held up his end as good as Neville – unless the dream had given him away. Wonder if his mother ever heard him in the night – or his father – wonder if he dreamt it too, in the marble tub, swirl of water and wine, his pick and mix of pills dissolving in the rising tide.

Freddie took up the waiting deck chair. Neville’s face was smooth as the sea of Freddie’s dream. At least the water crashed here, hid nothing. Rushed and crashed. Rushed and crashed.