My Son Kept Saying The Water Came Up Too Fast

My son has a rough, raised mark on the left side of his chest, right over his heart. It is about the size of a coin. The doctor said it was a benign thing, that it might fade or might not. It has not faded. If anything it has settled in deeper, like it means to stay.

Before he could string a full sentence together he was talking about a boat. Not a toy boat, not the little plastic ones in the bath. A working boat with nets that smelled of salt and rope that took the skin off your hands. He would sit at breakfast and tell me the water came up too fast, over and over, the way you would report something urgent that no one was listening to.

I want to be honest. We live inland. We are not boat people. My son had never seen the sea when he started talking about it. The closest thing to a harbour in his life was a duck pond. And yet he spoke about a place he called the grey harbour, where the houses came right down to the edge and the boats knocked against the wall all night.

He told me about a man named Tomas. He said Tomas was strong and had a red hat and let him steer sometimes. He said the storm came from the wrong side. He said the water came in over the front and it was so cold it stopped your chest, and he pressed his small hand flat over the raised mark and said, it hit me here.

I asked him where Tomas went. He said Tomas held on to the boat. He said he himself did not hold on, that a wave took him, and then he was cold for a long time and then he was warm and then he was ours. He was not upset when he told me. That was the strangest part. He told it the way you tell an old story that has stopped hurting.