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settling in against
the sea wall for shelter.
It was a cold afternoon, the wind fitful from the previous day's storm, the
waves erratic against the cliff. Although the Playland carnival rides were
going full-strength, there were few other beachgoers that day to object to a
Chinese boy. Tom happily stuffed the remnants of his sandwich into his mouth
and ran off to see what the waves had thrown up. He stopped regularly to swipe
his glasses clean on his shirt-tail, and squatted occasionally to examine some
treasure or other.
Another family was making its slow way up the beach in their direction. They
were white people: a tall man with that yellow hair some of them possessed
and, behind a pair of gold spectacles, the peculiar blue eyes that often went
with the hair; a woman with dark eyes and tendrils of normal-coloured hair
blowing out from under her warm hat; between them, half hidden between the
woman's dark red skirt and the father's tall legs, toddled a young child. The
father had taken off his hat and tucked it under his arm against the wind. The
man and the woman, both of them warmly bundled, were talking and watching the
ground. The woman, too, bent from time to time, holding up whatever small
thing she had found to show to the man or the child.
They did not see Tom; Tom did not see them; the two paths were set to
coincide. And although Long did not worry that this man would perform any act
of actual violence against the boy, he did not want his son's day ruined by a
white man's crushing remark. So he got to his feet, as if his limping gait
might actually interrupt the meeting.
To his relief, however, the progress of the trio was broken when the child's
small foot caught on a length of kelp and she was sent sprawling face-first
into the sand. Both parents lifted her, brushed her off, comforted her. The
father held her to his chest and seemed to be engaging her in conversation,
which made Long warm to him: White men so seldom talked with their children.
And then the father turned away from the sea, carrying the child to the
shelter of the sea wall.
Long could not hear her, but he could tell when she laughed, and he was
smiling himself when the father sat down with his great arms wrapped around
her slim, well-padded body.
The woman, meanwhile, had been distracted by the approach of Tom. Long's face
twisted in concern and he strode as quickly as he could out onto the damp
sand, but half a dozen steps and he slowed again. The woman said something to
Tom, but whatever her greeting, it had been friendly, and Tom answered her by
holding out something in his hand. She leant over to examine it, and the two
discussed it for a while. She must have asked where he had come upon the
object, because Long saw his son's arm go out to point up the beach towards
the rocks. The woman straightened to look, and then she nodded at the boy.
They both continued in their original directions, Tom down the beach, the
white woman in the direction of the cliffs; in a minute she was passing
between Long and the water, greeting him with a polite nod before her eyes
returned to the rocks.
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It happened so fast that, if Long had paused even an instant to consider his
actions, he would have been too late. The long-skirted figure strolled around
the spit of boulders, comfortably above (or so she thought) the waves that
broke and sank into the sand eight or ten feet away from her boots. But on
this sea, the waves were unpredictable, and turning one's back on the water
invited that seventh wave, or seventieth the big one. The woman had bent to
study something in the lee of the boulder or she might have noticed the
uncharacteristic retreat of the waters, sucked back to feed a growing swell
like the lungs of a man preparing to shout. The husband saw the danger-Long
heard the man behind him, his call faint and snatched away by the wind. But
the woman remained oblivious, the wave built and swelled, and Long stumbled
into a run, ignoring the pain in his leg.
"Miss!" he screamed. "Miss, come away, oh "
But the great wave was already surging on, its summoned waters rising,
cresting to hurl itself at the shore. Its ridge began to show white, the cap
dwarfing the woman even as she stood upright, stared in alarm at Long with his
lurching run and flailing arms, then whirled to see what threat lay behind
her. The monster wave leapt at her like a falling wall, like the slabs of
pavement at the base of the scaffolding. It pounced and scooped her up and
hurled her over the small spit like a twig a booted foot and a swirl of red
skirt above the white foam the only signs of her as she skidded over the rocks
and onto the sand, then turned, tumbling and gaining speed as the weight of
the water sucked her down to the bowl of the ocean.
Long saw only a flash of red in the turmoil of foam and launched himself at
it. The fingers of his right hand met only liquid grit and the bite of rock;
his left felt the tease of wet fabric darting rapidly past them and he grabbed
hard.
Even with two of them struggling, even with four legs and two sets of arms
digging into the sand and clawing at the rocks, the ocean nearly had them.
Long's heels dug in first, came to rest with a jolt against a half-buried
outcrop of rock, and the sudden jar of the woman's weight shot a bolt of hot
pain up his arm. The half-healed collarbone snapped; he cried out, but he did
not let go, his fingers clenched into the wet fabric as he prayed that the
seams did not give way, that his muscles not fail, that his bones... And then
the predatory water turned its back on its prey, retreating into the sand; out
of its foam appeared a tangle of red skirts and undergarments, a moving tangle
as the woman choked and pushed herself upright against the immense weight of
her sodden clothing. Long staggered upright, curled his right arm around her
waist, and hauled her up into the air and away from the greedy fingers of the
waves.
They collapsed onto sand that was damp but not wet, the woman retching and
crying, blood and hair casting red-and-black fingers across her face as she
fought to free her arms from the ripped and constricting garments. Only when
he saw that she was safe did Long sink to his knees, gagging up quantities of
sea water.
The husband was there then, the little girl in his arms screaming with alarm
at their startling flight across the sand and the state of her mother and this
strange man, both of whom were bleeding and making frightening noises. After a
minute, Tom arrived, stark-faced, bending over his father, dabbing at Long's
bloody hand with his schoolboy handkerchief.
Slowly, the woman's vomiting passed, to be replaced by deep shudders of cold
and shock. The husband, satisfied at last that her bleeding was superficial
and her skull and bones unbroken, dashed tears of relief from his eyes and
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lowered the child down to her mother's lap, where the two clung to each other.
He glanced over his shoulder to measure the distance to the road, then looked
at his wife's rescuer; taking in Long's pinched expression and the care with
which his right hand was cradling the other elbow, the pale eyes shifted from
relief back into alarm.
"You're hurt."
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