Footprints in the Sand. Eleanor Jones

to myself that my dad was right beside me as I walked back. However hard I tried, though, there was no one there, and my feet were becoming so numb that I couldn’t feel my toes at all. Eventually, when I just couldn’t walk anymore, I sat down on the huge stretch of lonely sand and started to cry.

      I heard the siren blast out across the bay; an ear-splitting sound that brought me sharply to my senses. My dad had warned me about the tide so many times—“get off the sand when you hear that sound,” he used to say, and it felt to me as though he was right there speaking to me now, so I stood up again and began trudging toward the grassy shore.

      I saw the white wave rushing at me around the other side of the bay. It didn’t look so dangerous, and anyway I could always swim. I was a good swimmer. I stared at it, mesmerized, wondering if I could outrun it. Fear prickled, my legs refused to work and then firm hands plucked me from the sand, swinging me high. My tears turned into a delighted shout—my dad had come to get me. I knew he’d never let me down.

      “Now whatever are you doing out here all alone, lass?” came Ted’s voice. “And where are your shoes?”

      A great loneliness welled up inside me, a pain that almost split my heart wide-open, and I went numb because suddenly I knew that my dad was gone forever.

      I wanted Mrs. Mac, wanted to feel her plump arms enfold me, wanted her to hold me close against her big soft chest and wanted to hear her gentle voice telling me that everything was going to be all right.

      “I want to go home,” I wailed as Ted swung me up to sit on his shoulders.

      “And so you shall, little miss,” he promised, but his voice was flat and cold.

      I clung tight to his forehead as he hurried across the sand, racing the water. It reached us just as he climbed the ledge onto the coarse grass of the shore, and then we were heading for the row of cottages that called me home.

      * * *

      MRS. MAC WAS SITTING IN A CHAIR now, but she still looked funny, not like Mrs. Mac at all. Ted said she had had “a bit of a turn,” but not to worry.

      “It takes some people like that,” he told me in a quiet voice.

      I could see he didn’t want her to hear so I whispered, too.

      “Will she be better soon?”

      Mr. Mac heard me. He looked up from his chair and his eyes were all misty and sad.

      “We’ll never be better, lass,” he said, “for your father has lost our Daffyd.”

      “Steady on now, Billy,” urged Ted. “She’s lost her father, too.”

      Guilt hit hard, making everything inside me shrivel into a tight ball and I ran to the only comfort I knew. Mrs. Mac patted my head absentmindedly when I sank onto the floor, cradling her knees, but she didn’t pick me up.

      “Go and get warmed up, lass.” Ted nodded at the dying embers of the fire. “Perhaps Mary will go find you some more shoes while I fill the coal bucket. The fire will be gone altogether if we don’t stoke it up a bit.”

      Mrs. Mac just continued staring into space. “Elsa knows where they are,” she murmured. “She can get them herself.”

      Her face was closed and gray, as if it belonged to someone else, and as I looked at her a big knot of sadness swelled and swelled inside me. Oh, why did my dad have to go away? If he hadn’t lost Daffyd, then Mrs. Mac would still be Mrs. Mac and I could sit on her knee and be cuddled. My knot of sadness hardened. I felt it grow tight inside me as I went next door to get my shoes, and by the time I came back it had turned into a solid lump. I felt cross with my dad and cross with the storm; in fact, I suppose I felt cross with the whole wide world. That night I put myself to bed, since no one else was going to. It felt lonely and cold in my bedroom at the top of our house and hunger pains gnawed at my stomach. I stared out into the darkness, trying not to cry as I watched the twinkling stars. Perhaps that was where my dad was, on a star. Or would he be an angel now?

      Reality hit, melting the crossness that had helped to dull the pain, and I started to cry. I think I cried all night, until the dawn light filtered through my window, but there was no one to listen. I fell asleep eventually, and when I woke there was still no one there.

      * * *

      IT WAS TWO DAYS LATER before I dared to walk along the sand again. I had decided I would never go back there unless my dad came home, but the seagulls called out to me with such a haunting melody that I just had to go.

      Mrs. Mac had managed to make some toast that morning. I put on my own butter and it dripped down onto my chin so that it felt all greasy. I rubbed it with my sleeve but that spread the grease all over my face. Mrs. Mac didn’t seem to notice. I went right up to her but she just stared at me as if I wasn’t there, and that was when I heard the seagulls calling and decided to go outside.

      The tide was in today, covering the sand and almost lapping right up to our row of cottages. In some places, triangular chunks of the grass-covered shore had dropped into the water in huge lumps, so I shied away from the edge. My dad once told me that the sea was trying to eat up the land and if I wasn’t careful it would gobble me up, too. I stopped in my tracks. Now it seemed to me that he was the one who had been gobbled up. The sadness inside me swelled and I couldn’t find the lump of crossness that held it at bay. It was harder to find it when I was on my own, so I started walking again, very quickly, with the wind in my face. I thought that perhaps the wind would blow my sadness away.

      It was where the grass gave way to a small sandy beach that I saw it, lying motionless on a bed of seashells, half in and half out of the sea. I stopped for a moment, shading my eyes with my hand to cut the glare of the sun on the water. It must be a seal, I thought, washed up by the tide. We’d had one of those in Jenny Brown’s Bay before. My heart began to race as I drew closer. It was too big to be a seal. A person, it had to be a person. Could it be...? Could it really be my dad, lying there on the shore? My heart beat very hard and the breath refused to leave my body, for my dad was lying there on the sand and I had to help him.

      It wasn’t my dad, though, it was Daffyd; he had come home at last but it was too late. His face was so swollen and gray that he didn’t look like Daffyd at all. He looked like the seal we saw last year, cold and solid and empty. I hoped my dad wasn’t with him. I didn’t want my dad to look like that—ugly and dead.

      Tears welled in my eyes but I found my crossness as I stared at poor Daffyd’s swollen face, turning my tears into anger again. And then I just ran and ran toward home, looking neither left nor right in case I saw my dad there, too. I didn’t want him to be like Daffyd. If my dad had to be dead, then I wanted him to be an angel because angels can look after you.

      My dad never did come back to look after me.

      CHAPTER FOUR

      I DIDN’T GO TO DAFFYD’S funeral....

      After I told everyone I’d found him, Mr. and Mrs. Mac, Ted and Sam the postman—he was the first person to know because I saw him as I ran toward our row of cottages—things went mad. I don’t think anyone really remembered about me after that.

      They brought the coffin to the Macs’ cottage and it sat right there on the table. Shiny gleaming wood with curvy golden handles; it seemed a shame to me to put it in the ground. I saw it arrive from my hiding place behind Mrs. Mac’s blue sofa but I didn’t stay there for long. All I could think about was Daffyd, lying inside it, a solid gray swollen lump with a face that was Daffyd’s and yet nothing like Daffy at all. We used to laugh a lot, me and Daffyd. He called me his little sister. Now he would never laugh again.

      I couldn’t find my crossness that day so I went to our cottage and curled up in a ball in my bedroom until I got too hungry to stay there. The bread in our kitchen was hard and moldy so I sneaked next door again. That was when I heard them.

      The kitchen door was slightly ajar, so I peered through the crack to see Ted and Mrs. Mac. He had one hand on her shoulder and she was shaking all over.