The Sand Dog. Sarah Lean

this time I was sure Grandfather was coming. The sea knew this story and it was telling me so.

      

      THE SEA TAKES ITS own time to tell its story, Grandfather once told me. It was here long before we were and moved at its own pace and rhythm, not ours. Uncle was too busy in the restaurant over the weekend for me to talk to him again about Grandfather but it didn’t stop me thinking about what had happened. Grandfather had left suddenly to go to London, Uncle had said, to sort out an old family problem. Grandfather hadn’t been born here but neither had he been born in England, so I was sure he couldn’t have family there. Why then had he never come back?

      Uncle gave me lots of jobs to do over the weekend so it wasn’t until Monday that I could go down to the beach again. I was out swimming at the cove when I saw a strange shape and shadow in the water and before long a blue door came floating in on the tide. Was this another sign? It wasn’t the kind of thing you would normally find in the sea, but after the turtle had turned up I wasn’t sure what to expect. I swam out to meet the door and climbed onboard. Although the paint on it was crackled and flaked away, it was the same colour blue as the one on Grandfather’s cottage.

      Grandfather had lost his fishing boat a while before he left, so it was nice to feel what it was like to have something solid to float on again. There was a hole in the door where the letter box used to be and I looked down through it at the shadow it made on the seabed. Then I dived under and looked up through the opening, blowing bubbles through the hole before climbing back up and lying on it, face down, like a wide surfboard. I paddled around for a while and then took it to shore. It was already so hot in June that you had to hop across the sand. I dug away to get to the cooler, damp sand underneath and then propped the door up with some rocks and sheltered in its shade, looking out across the water for the afternoon ferries. When I saw the first big white-and-yellow ferry in the distance I knew it was time to go down to the quay and hand out more flyers, and while I was waiting I noticed something on the rocks out of the corner of my eye.

      I squinted in the light until I could just make out that it was a dog. How long must he have been sitting there? He was looking out to sea, his narrow nose up in the air in a kind of proud way. He sometimes glanced over at me but when I looked at him he would look away. Then when I looked away he would shuffle a bit closer. I guessed he must want some shade because the sand was oven-hot, so I moved over and soon he came and sat next to me under the shadow of the door. He was almost as tall as I was sitting down, long and lean, with wispy fur the colour of sand. He didn’t do anything else but watch with his nose up while his ears drooped down. I wondered for a minute if he could be the third sign, but I decided he couldn’t be because he hadn’t actually come from the sea.

      ‘What are you waiting for?’ I said to him.

      The dog’s eyes twitched towards me for a moment, but looking out over the waves was all he seemed to want to do, and we sat there for a long time, just like that, until the yellow-and-white ferry turned into the quay.

      ‘Gotta go,’ I said to the dog. ‘You can sit here, if you want, and keep watch for me.’ The dog looked up. ‘I’m waiting for another sign.’

      At the quay, crowds of passengers disembarked.

      ‘Come to Uncle’s. Best restaurant on the beach,’ I said. ‘Calamari and chips. Ice-cold beer.’

      I didn’t think Grandfather would really come on a Monday but you never knew, so I was still keeping an eye out for a short white-haired old man with muscular shoulders and arms, because that door was definitely telling me something. Maybe it meant that a letter from Grandfather had come! I headed into the village.

      At the post office hardly anyone was queuing. I looked through the doorway to see who was inside and nearly stopped myself from going in to speak to Mrs Halimeda because she was an impatient kind of person. But when everyone else had gone I took my chance, and stepped up to the counter.

      Mrs Halimeda sighed. ‘What is it this time, Azi?’

      I folded one of the spare flyers, pushing it under the glass partition. ‘I couldn’t remember whether you’d seen Uncle’s new menu,’ I said.

      She took it, unfolded it, and sighed again. ‘It’s exactly the same as the one you gave me last time you came in,’ she said, pushing it back through the window.

      I rolled and unrolled the paper in my fingers before finally saying what I was really there for. ‘I wondered if there was a letter for me today?’

      Mrs Halimeda narrowed her eyes. ‘As I’ve told you every week now for a very long time, if we did it would be delivered to your uncle’s address like everything else is. And before you ask again, yes, we know where you live.’

      I felt uncomfortable that I always seemed to annoy her but I wanted to be sure she hadn’t missed anything.

      ‘I found a door and I think it’s a sign that something’s been sent to me, you see,’ I said.

      Mrs Halimeda shook her head and looked over my shoulder as the queue began to grow behind me.

      ‘What about a postcard?’ I asked.

      ‘No postcards,’ she said, stern and as unmoved as a stone wall. ‘Next!’

      When I moved away I heard her saying ‘Hopeless boy!’ and the lady from the Turkish Baths replying, ‘Well, you only have to look at who raised him.’

      It burned inside and made me angry that they’d say something like that about me and Grandfather. But when people had called me names, or when they had looked at me as if I didn’t belong here, Grandfather would say, ‘They don’t know you at all, not like I do.’

      And they didn’t know Grandfather like I did either.

      When I went outside I found the dog from the cove was sitting beside the door. He put his nose in the air, looking away at first then looking back at me. Maybe his owner was in the post office.

      Having no luck, I went back to the cove to check the turtle nest was safe from anybody disturbing it. As I was sitting there, digging away at my own hole in the sand with a stick to see how much work the mother turtle had to do to make her nest, a cool shadow fell across me, blocking the sun. It was the dog again, up on the rocks making shade for me. He climbed down and sat next to me again, looking out to sea.

      ‘Do you like it here too?’ I said.

      He turned his head to look at me. His eyes were warm earth brown.

      ‘Nobody can bother you here. There’s just the whole wide sea … and us.’

      The dog looked away when I didn’t say any more.

      I wrapped my arms round my shins, rubbing at the scar on my knee, and rested my chin there as I thought about Grandfather. Would he be coming on a ferry? Or would he have bought himself a new boat?

      I remembered once when Grandfather and I had found broken wooden boxes scattered along the tideline of the cove. Then, a few days later, whole crates were washed up, and he said I had to wait and see what else came floating in. After about two weeks and loads of my guesses about what it might be (none of which were right), hundreds of pineapples had been washed up on the beach. The pineapples had come out of the boxes and must have fallen off a ship, but, because the boxes and pineapples were different shapes and weights and sizes, it had taken them different lengths of time to arrive. I’m not saying that Grandfather was a pineapple, and I definitely couldn’t read the sea as well as he could, but it did mean that different things came at different times.

      The dog sighed.

      ‘Be patient, you’ve only been sitting here for one day,’ I said. ‘I’ve been waiting for two years for Grandfather to come home.’

      We stayed like that