Footprint in the sand

He is slight in comparison to the other boys in his class. His hair is dark and shaggy, his curls have not seen a brush in years and the sea salt remaining from swims in the East Coast Ocean give it a matt finish. His olive skin tone darkens as the year cycles from winter to spring, spring to summer. He wears a variation of the same thing every day; chocolate brown Billabong board shorts and a t-shirt. The shorts had been left on the beach by a crowd of skinny dippers one night. Four sizes too big but he loved them. The rope he has around them is frayed and worn but does the trick in stopping them becoming trousers. His t-shirts, also too big, were borrowed from a visiting cousin one year and but have never been returned. One has the words “truck off” printed underneath a big monster truck. Originally white but now a beige yellow colour with brown stains. The next is black with a picture of Bob Marley smoking a joint on the front. It has a large hole in the seam where the stitching gave way after it had been used to hall him back inside. The last was a present he had received from his Nanny. This was the only one that fit him. It was his favourite. It was light blue and had an iron on picture of Poppa and Nerdy Smurf on it. He wore this one on special occasions.

A knock at the door was not too unusual. His mother’s boyfriends sometimes knocked but a second knock was different, they didn’t knock twice. He gets up from playing in front of the TV, an old PYE that only receives one channel. He opens the door and an older lady stands looking down at him. She is plump but not fat. Her hair is thick and curly like his but with large chunks of grey bursting from beneath. Her face warms with a smile, like the pictures of his mother when she was younger. Her olive skin is aged but remains smooth and soft and is parted with sparse wrinkles with no make-up. Long eyelashes shade her piercing blue eyes that can see straight through the boy. He already knows her.  “You must be...’” she said as she bends down, reaching out and drawing him into her for a tight grasp. She embraces him for some time, close, eyes shut.  She softly asks. “Where is your mother boy?”

His mother has gone down the road for some milk or another bottle of wine. When she returns the two new acquaintances are laughing and talking on the couch like long lost friends.  His mother opens the door and looks across the room. The old lady rises. The two women stare at each other across the small space. “Mum this is Nanny, she brought me a new t-shirt” the boy blurts out. “Hello-.” the old lady begins “Get to your room” his mother cuts her off. No amount of “but” was going to change that command so he gets up and obeys. He sits on his bed and looks at all the detail of his new t-shirt. In the background he could hear the two women talking; sometimes raising their voices. Long stretches of silence stagnate the air, there is crying too. He looks out his window as he listened to what they a saying. Sitting he hears “Your father really does love you” and “It’s not his fault, you should have known better” and “shouldn’t he love me no matter what?” and “I never wanted him”. Looking back at his t-shirt he studies the new character. His Nanny had told him he was a Smurf. He knew they weren’t talking about his t-shirt.

His Nanny does not stay long and only as he peers out his room in a longer silence does he catch a glimpse of her leaving, tears running through her wrinkles as his mother closes the door behind her. He runs to the window in the lounge. As he tiptoes to look over the window sill he sees her walk down the dirt driveway. She gets in her little green car and the dust cloud hides her as she drives off. She doesn’t see him waving and thanking her for his t-shirt through the cob webbed window.

He sits in the front of his classroom, hiding from the attention that the back row attracts. There are 23 in his class and the ages range from 6 to 13 with a mixture of boys and girls. They are all local children that their parents have not sent off to the city. He enjoys school, he can escape in to the pages of the books and day dream. Some days he dreams about the family of orcas that visit the bay in the summer around Christmas time. He puts himself on the back of the mother orca and rides off to the island across from Taputahi and Takau Bays. He has adventures that take him on tramps through the jungle and discovers ferocious animals. He finds treasure hidden in the secret caves and swims in the coves where he collects shellfish and crayfish for his Mum.

His teacher is an older lady. She is nice but yells a lot and often can’t keep control of all the children. She wears bright coloured cloths and big glasses, like the ones he has seen on television on Coronation Street. One day he caught sight of her outside the classroom window crouching and having a cigarette. She seemed to be crying. She came back in and was very quiet for the rest of the day.  Some days she just seems to give up and just let the class go wild. He never does, you can’t go wild when you’re daydreaming.

His mother only smiles after a few wines. She had him at only 19. Her plans to move away to the city and become a beauty therapist changed when she fell pregnant. She had been beautiful. Long dark hair, clear blues eyes that reflect the ocean and a warm smile. He sometimes thinks that she is a mermaid from the ocean sent to look after him until he was big enough to ride off with the pod of orcas. She used to take care of her appearance. Nails were neatly painted, her hair back in a pony tail and clothes that showed off her figure. When her father found out about the pregnancy he kicked her out and she stopped caring what she looked like.

She has been crying for over an hour in her room when her father gets home from work. Her mother has left her alone to think about what she is going to say to him. Her mother hasn’t said much but she knows that she was disappointed. Her parents have worked hard all their lives and while they didn’t have large amounts of money they were comfortable and the three kids never go without. This news was not in their grand plan.

Her father is a tall distinguished man. He has dark hair, firm eyes and a look of seriousness that seldom smiles brightening his pale face. He takes pride in his appearance and everything that he does, combing his hair to one side with exactness the same for the past 20 years, trimming the edging before the lawn mowing every week and saying grace every night. He has strong opinions and is a little racist, ironic as his wife is part Māori.  He doesn’t go to church but he tells everyone that he is a Christian and lives what he believes is a moral life. He has been strict on his children growing up, especially on his eldest daughter who, while he would not admit it, was also his favourite.

Sitting on her bed she hears her mother tell him that she is waiting for him and that she needs to speak to him in her bedroom. She can feel his measured foot steps down the hall to her bedroom shatter through her like a pick crashing into ice . Her heart is sure to burst through her chest at any time. He arrives at the door with his blank look. “So what’s the problem?” he asks. She looks up at him, her eyes are bright red with tears. Her throat feels like it has a ball of gardening twine, dry and large preventing her from getting the words out. She feels like vomiting her stomach is so full of a swarm of butterflies.  “Well?” he asks again. “I went to the doctor, and he said I am pregnant” she stuttered between sobs. “I’m five months and the doctor said I have to have it” Her sobbing returns and as she hold her head in her hands looking to the floor her father walks off just saying “17”. He returns a short time later with a suitcase in hand. He places it at the door and says “You had better start packing then”. She can hear her mother trying to reason with him but she knows it will be pointless. “No daughter of mine does this, she is no longer my daughter” was the last words she heard her father say as her mother lead her to the car.

They moved to the beach when his mother missed her payments on their state house in Whangarei. An auntie had a discarded batch, and without her father’s knowledge, allowed her to stay. It is a small two bedroom batch. It sits on a hill behind all the flash batches that line the dirt road in front of the beach. It has dark green weatherboard with some flaking giving way to the brown undercoat that blends in to the surrounding bush.  It has five rooms; two bedrooms, lounge/dining room, kitchen and bathroom. One bedroom is very small only fitting a single mattress, this is his room. The other has a double bed and some drawers. Each has two windows. The lounge has an old couch with wooden arms, dirty lime green with holes in the fabric showing through to the springs. A television that is encased by a wooden box sits in the corner. In the opposing corner a Formica table with three chairs. Some of the stainless steel beading around the edge has been pulled off to reveal the layers of pressed wood supporting the speckled top. The bathroom has a toilet, hand basin and a bath with a shower over it. It is small. The shower curtain, once adorned with fish and sea creatures, now is coated in various shades of green mould. The house smells of dried damp.

His mother has had several boyfriends over the years, the range in their kindness. Some are Māori some are Pakeha. Some just ignore him and let him do his own thing and others lecture him on how he needed to be disciplined. This usually is followed by a hiding or being locked in his room, a little hard without a door handle. If he is lucky it is just a few straps around the legs. The back hand across the face is the worst. He is used to expecting them, he sinks into his mind and blocks most of the pain out. He learnt quickly how to cower and always look to be crying. He doesn’t cry anymore.

One boyfriend is nice. He sits him on his knee and talks about things and listens to his stories. They play fight but he never hurts him. He sometimes comes into his bedroom at night when his mother has fallen asleep after a night with her friend Montana, Sauvignon Blanc. The boyfriend comes and lies on the bed next to the boy. It is usually on top of the covers but sometimes he gets under the covers too. The boyfriend holds him. Then he caress him up and down his leg. The boy doesn’t like this. The boys breath stops as he clenches in fear. He pretends he is asleep, frozen. He tries to stop the flinching but the harder he tries the worse it gets. Little shocks of energy make him jerk uncontrollably. He can’t turn; if he does he will end up facing the boyfriend. He doesn’t want to. The boyfriend touches him a few times and that is all this time. He is sure he asked him to stop but maybe he didn’t; maybe it was his fault; he only thought he said it. The boyfriend visits often. He now pulls down his pants and he move rubs himself up and down on the boy. He only stops after the boy feels wet sticky stuff on his leg. His mother’s boyfriend stops coming to sleep with him when she comes in one morning and he hasn’t left the boys room. She screams a lot. He doesn’t stay again.

His journey home from school isn’t a long in distance, only about two kilometres. It takes him over a large grassy field filled with cows. Friesians, he had been told once. They do not seem to mind the small boy that wanders between them. They are busy with their slow churn of the grass they had just pulled from the ground, their blank looks only changing when they let out a moo. From the dirt road there is a tar sealed road that leads down to the beach. It winds down to the left and then straightens out to a road that all the houses sit on. It takes him much longer to get home than it does going to school.

 He stops on the beach and look at all the inetersting things. The washed up sea weed, the upside down crabs that have lost their fight with the sun, the broken sea shells all unique and the footsteps in the sand with their own stories.

The boy likes to make stories for all the different footsteps. Tales of visitors from across at the island, mermaids maybe related to his mother.  Footsteps are fewer in the winter people don’t come to the beach as much. In the winter he follows the same footprints for days or for as long as the rain doesn’t wash them away. The summer always brings new ones and more of them. People visit the beach much more often so that means more footprints, more stories.

The footprints also bring other children, not just the ones from his school but from the city too. They come with their snorkels, flippers and boats their parents anchor in the bay. They build sand castles with swimming pools. The boy tries to play with some of the kids but their parents don’t let them. Some of the children are nice, some are mean. He doesn’t play with them much.

It is April when his mother tells him that she is going to Nanny’s tangi. “I will be back in the next day or two, don’t use the stove and don’t let anyone in you don’t know” she tells him as she shuts the door behind her. He doesn’t know what a tangi is but he guesses he will ask Nanny next time she comes to visit, maybe with another t-shirt, maybe his mum will bring him one back. She had left him by himself before but only over night. He doesn’t mind, he thinks he will get his Mum a present for when she gets back.

The sea is calm in Taputahi Bay. He decides to swim out to the outcrop and get himself some kina. Breast stroke, freestyle and dolphin dive, spurting water out of his mouth as he goes. He floats on his front then his back. Looking up at the sky clouds float above not moving but changing shape. A duck, a dragon and whale appear from the soft cotton balls as the salty water holds him.

The kina recently have been further down the outcrop getting deeper as the summer came and went. He lovs kina, how it moves, how he sucks the life out of something living. The way the kina still wriggle after you take it out of the water; each needle trying to find the water that it had been taken from. He has got used to the sharp prickles and uses seaweed sometimes to protect his hands when he gathers them from the rocks. He has a knife that he hides amongst the rocks that he uses to plunge into the centre eye of the kina splitting its thick shell it in two or three pieces. Crack, splurt, crack. Exposing the creamy yellow roe and the surrounding flesh he drinks the contents and then scoops what’s left with his fingers, licking them to ensure he gets all the goodness. Prickle after prickle the kina dies.

The tide is lapping at the pinnacle of the outcrop. He is late and the tide is returning. On his third dive down he sees movement. He thinks it may have been a crayfish poking its skeletal head out for a look, searching for its dinner. He grabs some floating kelp and bandages his right hand for protection from the spiky animal. He knows how much his mother likes crayfish; it will be a good present for her. It is only three meters deep on a high tide to swim to the bottom and  he can do it with ease and still have enough time to explore the sea floor. He takes a deep breath and duck dives to the rocks below.  He searches amongst the brown and green seaweed but the crayfish does well at playing hide and seek.

As his chest tightens and he needs to breath he readies himself to push off to the surface. Something tumbles. His foot is stuck. He shakes his leg but the movement tightens the grip of whatever is holding him back. He has been out enough to know not to panic. He leans forward reaching to pry his foot free. Sharp stabs of pain as rock and oyster shell hold his foot tighter. A small trickle of blood draws out like a sea snake, vanishing into dark blue beyond the outcrop His chest grows tighter, burning. Panic, he knows better than to let this happen. He thrashes about grabbing at the water above. Wriggling from side to side grabbing, reaching, pulling at nothing. He doesn’t yell he knows no one will hear him.

The kelp around him tries comfort him, a soft touch of his legs, stroking his ankle, trying to tell him it is going to be ok. It dances in the current around him desperately attempting let him know it will be fine. His chest is on fire, he has to breathe. Finally as he gasps, a gush of salty water fills his mouth. His body draws the water down; a substitute for the air he is grabbing for. Deep down. His lungs fill. His bulging eyes grow even larger. Just before they burst, still open, they begin to relax, drain in silence. Embraced by the sea. Flinching as he did in the bed.. Terror drains from his eyes. Calm. His body hangs held on by the rock. The kelp dances around him reassuring that he will be ok.

As the boy relaxes, he sees fireflies in his eyes. He sees the formica table, he is sitting at it with his mother, laughing and smiling, they are joking, eating crayfish. Fire flies jump around his eyes. He is on a big adventure on the Island across the bay searching for a ferocious animal. Fireflies jump about. He sees his Nanny, she gives him lots of t-shirts, and lots of hugs. They sit and talk and she tells him stories. The fireflies are getting tired. He is on the back of the orcas that have come into the bay. All the other children come and look at him in their boats with their parents while the orcas just swim below the surface. There are not many fireflies left. The boy walks on the beach while the orcas wait for him out in the bay. He wonders if anyone will see his footprint in the sand. The fireflies go out.

Jason Wade