Beaches: real and imaginary
by Jennifer Hill
Riverbank
What do you call a man with no arms or legs who is floating on the water?
Bob.
Yes, of course you know that one.
What do you call Bob if he has no head?
The London River Police called him Adam. Unfortunately this black child’s
torso was dragged from the Thames the day after 9/11, in 2001, so he didn’t
make the News. It didn’t really make much difference to Adam as nobody
had reported him missing beforehand.
Pebble Beach
In December 2004, the UK press reported the plight of Leyla Mafi, a nineteen
year old woman, who had been found guilty in Iran of ‘Acts contrary to
chastity’ and sentenced to execution by stoning. Her alleged crimes included:
controlling a brothel, having intercourse with blood relatives and giving birth
to an illegitimate child. Amnesty International argued that she was forced
into prostitution by her mother at the age of eight but she was sentenced to
death solely on the basis of her explicit confessions, without consideration
of her background or mental health. Social workers, it was reported at the
same time as the unsuccessful end of her appeal process, had assessed Leyla
as having a mental age of eight.
Leyla, alone in her cell, experienced strange feelings while awake and
desperate dreams while asleep. Had she ever swum she would have known the
experience
to be like that of floating, her view: the horizon like one of sea, and she
would have recognized the closest land to her as that of a pebble beach. Of
course she had never seen the sea or a pebble beach so could never know that
on such real beaches the stones are never all round, never uniform in size,
never small enough to cause injury without being large enough to kill. Such
stones as on Leyla’s beach, when hurled with enough hatred, and especially
following 100 lashes, were strong enough to split skin, teeth and bone, but
so very slow to stop a heart beating.
But now the world was watching.
Oceans
Do you know how far you can swim without the hindrance of a torso? Adam’s
arms, legs, and head can lap the globe in the time it takes a tide to change.
Rivers, seas, and even skies don’t stand in the way of lost limbs looking
for recognition. They cross oceans stopping only to dance with dolphins, whisper
into the ears of whales, spar with sharks.
Little boys, with or without their torso, whichever waters they flow in,
still with their head (albeit detached) do have a brain and always know when
it’s
Christmas. They know that if, by the next day, and even when years of next
days have passed they have not been missed, let alone given gifts, then it’s
time to make waves. Often they do.
But such a giant wave, as the one that crossed the Indian Ocean on Boxing
Day, was beyond even the scope of millions of lost limbs, had they all been
angrily pushing the water or even waving for attention at once. No, it was
a deeper cause, a fault in the crust of the earth itself that initiated the
vast wall of water, the Tsunami that drowned hundreds of thousands of children,
parents, grandparents.
The world was watching.
Sandy Beaches
January, 2005. The world reacts to the devastation in the wake of the Tsunami.
Aid arrives, clearing up begins, local bodies are burned, foreign bodies are
boxed and returned home.
Elsewhere
A hole is dug. Deep enough for a young woman to be buried to her waist. Nearby
Leyla treads water relentlessly but her legs are tiring and the tide has pushed
her closer to the pebble beach.
Unfortunately the water that now struggles to support Leyla is imaginary and
the beach the world is watching now is far away. It consists of the softest
sand.
Jennifer Hill
Jennifer Hill lives in Kent, England. Her fiction, and articles
have been published in UK small press, The Lady, The
New Writer, and online and have even won her some money.
