Eight Foot Blue

Eight Foot Blue

I’d known her for an hour before Lily asked me to catch her a shark. It was night and it was dark and we were standing on the beach. The wind was raking through her blue hair, and I was caught up in the way she was silhouetted by the moon, with the crashed-wave-sea-spray sparkling in the starlight all around.

It was magical somehow, distant and unreal like a film. She was talking to me, and it was though I could be her hero, and she was asking me to save the world. And also I’d never been a hero before, but I really believed I could do it. Perhaps it was because something in the tone of her voice, flat and calm, made me believe that she’d just asked for the simplest thing. Say a cup of tea perhaps, or to borrow a book.

I mean Lily wasn’t crazy enough to ask for a particular kind of shark, though I knew there were lots of different types to pick. She could have chosen Blue, or White, or Thresher, or Mako, or Bull, or Tiger, or Hammerhead, or Nurse, or Sand, or Basking even. But she didn’t, and she didn’t even state a size, though I imagined it was meant to be big. After all, an hour was all it took to know that Lily was the sort of girl who was bound to want a huge big shark, with arrow fins, and evil grin and razor teeth which could tear me apart.
“You’ll just have to catch the shark,” said Lily again.
And I made up my mind then that I was going to. “Ok,” I said.

***

Chapter One – Lily Wants A Shark.

It was the first week of summer and I was on holiday with Mum and Dad and my sister, Rah. I hadn’t exactly wanted to come, but I hadn’t been given a choice. I mean I argued and said why can’t I stay at home, but no-one would listen to me.

Instead, on the Saturday morning after the last Friday of term, Dad told me to get ready and to unplug the black and white T.V. which sat on a small table in my bedroom, by my wardrobe. So I did as I was told, and also for good measure, to kill some time, I filed my records alphabetically, and pushed my books even further beneath my bed.

I mean I did this because I knew that something was going to happen to me and also if something did happen, then I wanted to keep them hidden. My Agatha Christies, Dennis Wheatleys, Wildbur Smiths, my secrets, tucked out of sight like they were the porno mags some of the boys took into biology and showed around at the back of the class. I never looked at the magazines. It’s not that I wasn’t interested, but maybe I just wasn’t the sort to risk getting caught.

Anyway, Mum started shouting hurry up before I had finished arranging my things, then Rah started shouting too, and finally Dad and I knew I had run out of time. So I pulled the curtains closed, and said goodbye to the walls, and left everything in my small bedroom, in our small house.

I mean I still wasn’t happy. I couldn’t understand why we would want to spend eight hours driving from one small town to another, just to see the sea. We were only going to Cornwall, and I couldn’t understand why we would want to spend two whole weeks in a place that was full of other people like us. Not people we knew exactly, but sort of the same as the people we did. We weren’t going abroad, to Spain, or France, or Italy, like most of the other kids at school. We wouldn’t be eating paella, or snails, or pasta.

And the journey was the worst thing. All the time we were stuck in the car, I knew exactly how far we’d come, not because of Mrs Monks who taught Geography, but because I’d counted each mile on the map. So, we were meant to be on holiday, but the first Saturday morning after school finished, I was forced to sit for eight hours, bored in the back of the car, kicking and pinching my sister, as Mum was driving us down.

When we’d got halfway we stopped at the services, to go to the toilet and get a cup of tea. I uncurled my legs, and stretched, felt the concrete beneath my feet, and complained as we were walking through the car-park, to the restaurant. “It’s not fair,” I said, because Mum wouldn’t give me the money for the machines in the corner, next to the toilets.

Instead she took me aside, gripped a wrist in each hand and said: “George, listen, I want you to behave. I want you to think about everyone else for a change. The point of this holiday is that we’re together. A family. And we’re supposed to have fun, we’re supposed to be having fun.”

A family, that’s what Mum said, a family, just me and her and Dad and Rah.

Have fun together, she’d said too, and then we went and got ourselves stuck in a bin of a place that just made me want to be anywhere else.

A hot May and a hotter June made shark weather, but by the end of July it turned misty again, and we took the weather with us. Strange shaped clouds filled the sky and threatened to rain all the time. I couldn’t help thinking how school was gone for six weeks and the greyness shouldn’t have mattered much, should have been an aside, or an above. Something I barely noticed. And I should have been happy enough watching the sea gulls, listening to the sea, but I’d left my life behind.

I mean I spent the first two days of our holidays with my eyes closed, wishing I could sleep through it all. I would rather have been stuck in my bad dream places, like falling from an aeroplane. Underwater, drowning. Naked in a busy street. Or back at school, sitting numb bummed on a hard seat, listening to Mr Miller and his assembly drone. Amen. Amen. Amen. Or playing rugby perhaps. I would rather have spent the first two days of my holiday getting kicked in the teeth for no good reason. Mr Johnson watching, shouting, try harder George, stand up, stand up for yourself boy.

So just before I met Lily, say half an hour before I followed her to the beach, I was still feeling sorry for myself. I was sitting in a boring restaurant staring at a stained, empty plate that had been full of chips smothered in vinegar and sauce. Brown sauce on one side, red on the other, with salad cream across the top. I mean they’d looked quite good at first, but I hadn’t really enjoyed them, because they were too soggy and fat to be nice chips. I liked pizza. Or at least the thin sort of chips you got in the Wimpy at home, with a Kingsize, or an International Grill. American chips with American food.

I suppose I could have had something else in the restaurant, like fish or scampi, or a steak and kidney pie. I suppose I could have had anything from the menu, except the lobster, which Dad said was too expensive, and Mum said was probably frozen, and Rah said was certainly cruel. But I didn’t, maybe because I was feeling bad inside, and I wanted everyone to know how unhappy I was. How we were in a boring chips only town.

All the time we were eating the last tea before Lily, I had the get-away-walk-about feeling, but I sat in silence as my family spluttered on. Rah saying this, Mum laughing, Rah saying that, Dad laughing. Chatter. Chatter. Chatter. And all the time I was eating my tea, I could feel the pressure building, like I was in a cartoon or a laboratory experiment, with steam coming out of my ears. Chatter, hiss, chatter, hiss, chatter, hiss. I thought I was going to explode or implode maybe, the way stars are meant to do. Mrs Wilson had told us about them in Physics the term before. I mean I had this thump in my head and felt my skull creaking as though it were about to collapse. It took Rah a minute to say every word. It took Mum an hour to take a sip of her wine, and it took Dad a lifetime to chew each pea.

Still, I sat patiently waiting until everyone had finished their main course, their whatever it was with chips. Then I couldn’t take it anymore. I begged ten pence from Dad and scowled at Mum. “I want to go for a walk,” I said.
“Can’t you just wait for us to finish,” she said.
“Not really, no,” I said. Mum looked at me as if I’d just sworn, fuck, and she opened her mouth slightly as if she were going to say something else, but then she must have thought better of it. I was scowling some more.
“Well alright, but be careful. Don’t go too far, and be back at the Pengelly’s by nine. You know the way, don’t you dear?” she said.
“Yeah, see you,” I said and then as quickly as I could, I got up and left the restaurant. I knew they would be ordering big ice-creams and more wine, more beer, and another coke for Rah, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t want any of this. I had my ten pence. I was alone at last, and happy enough being alone, wandering through the holiday streets that were becoming familiar now.

I turned left directly outside the restaurant and headed downhill into the centre of town. I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew where I’d end up. Although we’d only been on holiday for two days, it was already obvious to me that there was only one place to go. All roads led to the Banjo Pier, which wasn’t even a pier exactly, not like other piers I’d seen. Instead it was a concrete platform that stretched into the sea like a fat finger prodding the waves. But still it was the best thing about this place, and the best thing about the holiday.

Just before I got to the pier itself, at the corner of the quayside where the river met the sea, was ‘Banjos’, the flash light amusement arcade. As I got closer, I could already feel the change, the new buzz in the air. I started to walk faster. I wanted to listen to the jangle of coins, the electronic bleeps, smell sugary donuts. And I wanted to watch people smoke.

There were about a million people inside the amusement arcade, almost everyone with a cigarette between their lips, no matter how old they were. About two million eyes were stuck to the screens in front of them, or to the other games the hands of their owners played. All around I could hear the curses of people losing. Fucking machine. Bloody machine, it’s a fix. Still, I had the ten pence piece tight between my fingers, and I knew it would only pay for one go.

I thought I’d chosen my game for the night, but before I could get to even have a go on the Space Invaders in the corner, which was the game that everyone wanted to play, I saw Lily, though I didn’t know she was Lily then. She was hunched over Quest. It was a tall machine on the far wall, behind the pool tables, and on the sides and the border surrounding the screen, were pictures of a wizard with a long grey beard, with beams of light shooting out from his fingers, and a staff that was taller than him.

And I don’t know what I noticed first. Maybe it was Lily’s elbows pumping up and down, her hands working furiously on the joystick and the buttons. Or maybe it was her blue hair dancing when her head moved, bouncing on her shoulders and flowing along the length of her neck, reaching down her spine. It was the sort of blue hair which meant I had to get up close to see. I lost control of myself, as though there were something, say a line just pulling me in.