The Love of My Life
Rosie Walsh
PART I
LEO & EMMA
Prologue
We walked north, separated from the main sweep of the beach by kelp beds and rippling tidepools. The sea was a field of white crests and the few clouds in the sky moved fast, throwing spiral shadows across the sand.
It felt good for the two of us to be here, in this liminal place where the land shelved into the sea. This realm wasn’t ours. It belonged to the sea stars and limpets, the anemones and hermit crabs. Nobody noticed our togetherness; nobody cared.
It rained for a while and we sat in a shack hidden in the dunes, eating sandwiches. There were middens of dried sheep droppings in the corners and the rain drummed on the roof like gunfire. It was the perfect sanctuary. A place just for us.
We talked easily, as weather systems tore back and forth across the beach below. In my heart, hope grew.
We spotted the crab skeleton at the far end of the beach, soon after our picnic lunch. Medium-sized, dead, alone on the strandline amid deposits of driftwood and dried spiral wrack. There were razor shell fragments stuck to its abdomen, a bleached twist of trawler net hooked around a lifeless antenna, and peculiar, signal-red spots on its body and claws.
Tired now, I sat down to examine it properly. Four distinct spines crossed its carapace. Its claws were covered in bristles.
I looked into its unseeing eyes, trying to imagine where it might have travelled from. I’d read that crabs rafted long-distance on all sorts of vessels – pieces of plastic, hunks of seaweed, even the barnacled hulls of cargo ships. For all I knew this creature could have travelled from Polynesia, surviving thousands of miles just for the chance to die on a Northumbrian beach.
I should take some photographs. My tutors would know what it was.
But as I reached into my bag for my camera, my vision took a sudden pitch. Light-headedness dropped like marine fog and I had to stay still, hunched over, until it passed.
‘Low blood pressure,’ I said, when I was able to straighten up. ‘Had it since I was a kid.’
We turned back to the crab. I got up onto hands and knees and photographed it from every angle.
The dizziness returned as I put my camera away, although this time it ebbed and flowed, imitating the waves. Pain was beginning to gather in my back, accompanied by a darker, more powerful sensation near my ribs. I knelt down again, tucking my hands in my lap, and the dizziness billowed.
I counted to ten. Murmured words of concern, laced with fear, tumbled around above my head. The wind changed direction.
When I finally opened my eyes, there was blood on my hand.
I looked carefully. It was unmistakably blood. Fresh, wet, across my right palm.
‘It’s fine,’ I heard myself say. ‘Nothing to worry about.’
Panic rolled in with the tide.
Chapter One
LEO
Her eyelashes are often wet when she wakes, as if she’s been swimming a sea of sad dreams. ‘It’s just some sleep-related thing,’ she’s always said. ‘I never have nightmares.’ After a fathomless yawn she’ll wipe her eyes and slip out of bed to check Ruby is alive and breathing. It’s a habit she’s been unable to break, even though Ruby’s three.
‘Leo!’ she’ll say, when she gets back. ‘Wake up! Kiss me!’
Moments will pass, as I slide into day from the slow-moving depths. Dawn will spread from the east in amber shadows and we will burrow in close to each other, Emma talking almost non-stop – although from time to time she will pause, mid-stream, to kiss me. At 6.45 we will check Wikideaths for overnight passings, then at 7.00 she will break wind, blaming the sound on a moped out in the road.
I can’t remember how far into our relationship it was when she started doing this: not far enough, probably. But she would have known that I was on board, by then, that I was no more likely to swim back to the shore than I was to grow wings and fly there.
If our daughter hasn’t climbed into our bed by that time, we climb into hers. Her room is sweet and hot, and our early-morning conversations about Duck are among the happiest moments my heart knows. Duck, whom she clutches tightly to herself all night, is credited with incredible nocturnal adventures.
Normally I’ll dress Ruby while Emma ‘goes down to make breakfast’, although most days she’ll get sidetracked by marine data collected overnight in her lab, and it’s Ruby and me who’ll sort out the food. My wife was forty minutes late for our wedding because she’d stopped to photograph the tidal strandlines at Restronguet Creek in her wedding dress. Nobody, except the registrar, was surprised.
Emma’s an intertidal ecologist, which means she studies the places and creatures that are submerged at high tide and exposed at low. The most miraculous and exciting ecosystem on earth, she says: she’s been rockpooling since she was a young girl; it’s in her blood. Her main research interest is crabs, but I believe most crustaceans are fair game. Right now she’s got a bunch of little guys called Hemigrapsus takanoi in special sea-water tanks at work. I know they’re an invasive species and that she’s looking at some specific morphology she’s been trying to pin down for years, but that’s as much as I’m able to understand. Less than a third of the words biologists use can be understood by the average human; getting trapped in a group of them at a party is a nightmare.