Forget-Me-Not

 It’s early evening.  I’m nine or ten.  I’m playing with Forget-Me-Not on a sandy beach somewhere on the English coast.  Sand is stuck to our sun-lotioned skin. We have matching white hats.  She is five or six and dancing, spinning, splashing, throwing her hat in the air and catching it and not catching it.  Her hair is strawberry blonde, but the soft evening light is picking out more of the strawberry than the blonde.  I don’t know if this beach is real or not, or a mixture of truth and fiction, of beaches we’ve been to and not been to or maybe just real ones set aside for the future. This is one of many holidays our families spend together.  Sometimes our parents are out of eyeshot but within earshot, other times within eyeshot and out of earshot.  Never neither.  Always either/or.  But where are they now?  It’s a question we don’t ask.  We are mesmerised by the tide.  Splashing ankle-deep, shin-deep, knee-deep.  We chase it and get chased by it.  We are lost in play.  The air is cooling by the minute.  Unburdened by time, we are lost in the magnificent music of the sea.

Then a noticeable fading of light.  Forget-Me-Not stops with a yelp, looks around and calls Tom! with a flash of fear in her eyes.  Did Mummy and Daddy go back?  The tide is advancing, taking over the beach.  I can’t see the steps we walked down from.  Just sea wall, stretching up, stretching out.  Do we go this way or that way? She points up the beach and then down the beach, or down the beach then up it.  I don’t know.  I don't tell her that.  I shield her from my not-knowing. I don’t know anything.  Fun has tricked us.  I grab her by the hand, pick a direction and run.  Make sure you look after your cousin, Mum had said. She’s your responsibility.  And now that's all I can hear.  She’s your responsibility, She’s your responsibility, She’s your responsibility and there’s a horrible, terrible emphasis on the your.  Keep up, Forget-Me-Not, please try to keep up.  We run towards the moon, low and faint in the hazy sky and I remember something from school about the moon and the tide and I ask it directly help us, help us, help us.