Broken
written by: Mary Bevan
The boy is gawky-thin: his shoulder blades protrude through the pale skin stretched tight across them.
A wind has come up emptying the beach of visitors, but he takes no notice, squatting down on a thin rib of sand absorbed in the objects before him – a skein of yellow-brown bladder wrack, a mottled grey pebble shaped like a dog’s head with eye sockets, a perfect, creamy whelk shell. He peers at them short-sightedly through owlish glasses, these amazing survivors, running bony fingers over their curves and indentations, wondering how it is they can come through their daily battering by the sea and yet be so perfect and beautiful. He is too preoccupied to notice the bulky figure in red making its way awkwardly down the slippery cliff path to the beach. It is a woman – heavy, ungainly, a cigarette drooping from one corner of her mouth.
Halfway down, she halts, brushes strands of lank hair out of her eyes, shouts, ‘Hey, you!’ The harsh sound fractures the quiet of the place: the boy lifts his head like a dog sniffing the wind.
Grumbling to herself, the woman takes a few more steps down, megaphones her hands and shouts again, ‘Jimmy, d’yer hear me? I’m talking to you. Get yer arse up here.’
The boy uncoils slowly. He does not look at the woman but begins to move towards the path very slowly, dragging his feet.
This infuriates her, ‘Get a sodding move on, will you!’ she screams.
Just above the beach huts, he reaches her where she waits for him, breathing heavily, hands on hips. She sees what he is carrying, ‘And you can chuck that muck away. You’re not bringing that stinking stuff indoors.’
‘But they’re not dirty, they’re…’
‘None of yer lip, chuck it, I said.’
‘Please, it’s only…’
But already she’s on him, furious, tugging and shaking. He sways backward, loses his balance, lets go of his treasures. Now she has him: she kicks the pebble and the seaweed back down the cliff, then, lifting her boot, brings the heel down hard and deliberate on the shell again and again, grinding it into the ground. The boy lets out a thin, high wail – the despairing, desperate cry that has echoed and still echoes down the years to me here, standing again as I have stood time after time re-enacting the scene.
But this time it will be different. This time will be the last. For now, in my imagination, I take him in my arms – that boy I once was – and say, ‘Enough. This must be the end of it. Now we know that it was not your fault. It was not that you were bad or unlovable: the truth is that she was broken herself and in her misery tried to find some relief in breaking you, too. But now we must believe that she broke nothing that mattered on that day or all the other days like it, nothing in us that time and strength of will cannot mend.’
And as we walk back along the beach together – that boy I was and the man I am struggling to become – I dare to glance up at the cliff path where I hope I may see a slim figure in white, waiting for me. And yes, there she is, waving and beckoning, and now I can begin the steep climb up from the empty beach that will lead me to her.
