Out of the Water, All of You, Now

I grew up on this coast. I have read this bay my whole life the way farmers read sky, and that afternoon it was a postcard: small clean swell, kids everywhere in the shallows, my own two among them.

The feeling hit me like cold water down the spine — out. Everyone out. There was nothing to see; I want that understood. No dark line on the horizon, no change in the wind, no gull behaviour, none of the folk signs my grandfather taught me. The sea was lying, and something under my sternum knew it and began shouting.

I am not an assertive man. Ask anyone. But I was in the water fully clothed hauling my two out by the arms, and then — this still astonishes me — turning to strangers' children and barking at them in a voice I did not recognise: out, now, all of you, out. Parents stared at me. One mother pulled her toddler close and away from me, which was fair. A teenager laughed. But it was a loud, certain voice, and voices like that move people before their opinions catch up: the shallows emptied, grumbling.

Ninety seconds, perhaps two minutes later, the bay changed state. A rip opened along the whole eastern arm — later they said a sandbar had collapsed offshore — and the gentle shallows became a conveyor. Beach chairs left standing in ankle-water were in deep water in under a minute, moving fast, out and sideways. A grown man wading after one was taken off his feet; he was strong enough, barely, to angle out of it.

No children were in it. They were beside me on the sand, complaining about their interrupted game.

The mother who had shielded her toddler from me came over afterwards and could not finish her sentence. Neither could I. Neither can I now, really — except to say the sea lied, and something in me refused to co-sign it.