Once lunch was over my parents took us to swim in the sea. We wandered west along the shore as the waves rushed the sand to swirl at our calves; following the curve of the bay till we reached the rock outcrop marking the end of the beach. It was here that the lagoon drained into the ocean, running alongside the rocky ledges in a shallow gully about a foot deep. My father climbed onto the rocks to look out at the horizon while my mother settled herself on the sand. Lee and I played in the wash, rolling with the brackish water down toward the surge of the waves.
And it was here, a place we’d played so often before, a place favoured by many parents as the safest on the beach, that Lee drowned.
It had all seemed so simple. Even as it started it seemed nothing more than an inconvenience.
Lee following me in the soft push of water from the lagoon, skimming over the sandy bed of the wash and into the salty foam of the waves. I, standing, turning, reaching behind me to empty a pocket of sand from the seat of my costume. And Lee, his face showing a look of surprise and confusion, still halfway up toward the lagoon, the water pressing him against the rock.
Les, he called, my leg is stuck.
Lee had jammed his leg into a space created by the current below one of the shelves of rock. Had the sand around him been a little more built up there would have been no space at all. A little less sand and his leg would have passed under the rock unhindered. But the sand ’s level rose and fell with each tide, with each wave. A question of inches really, a question of luck.
By the time I had waded back to him Lee was stuck up to his thigh, a few moments later, when my mother arrived, he was wedged in up to his waist.
I don’t understand, said my mother, trying to drag him out. Does it hurt?
No, not really, replied Lee, calmly.
Les, go fetch your father, said my mother. And then, as I walked away, I don’t understand, for the second time.
She would repeat that phrase throughout the day and for much of the next few months.
When I found my father and brought him back to the wash Lee was still in place. My mother had not let him slip any further under the rock nor had she managed to draw him out at all. With each minute the river must have pressed another handful of sand against him, until the grains around him were packed as solid as the rock above.
My father replaced my mother in the water behind Lee, his forearms hooked into Lee’s armpits.
This doesn’t look that difficult, he said. Lee, does it hurt you when I pull you like this.
No.
I mean, is it scratching you when I move you? Does the rock scratch your legs?
I’m not moving.
We must have sat that way for a full minute before my father sent my mother for help.
You’ll be okay Lee. The lifeguards will get you out in no time. They’ll know what to do, said my father once my mother ran off across the beach.
The following forty-five minutes passed calmly enough. A crowd had begun to gather at the end of the beach, a loose knot of the curious and concerned, held in the orbit of Lee and my father. People came forward occasionally to make suggestions and the lifeguards organised a group of men who tried to dig my brother free. But, after fifteen minutes of noisy splashing they had made no discernable headway, the water replacing the muddy sand that they scooped away almost immediately. Lee, rather than lying parallel to the flow of the gully, was angled away from us, his legs far further under the ledge of rock than the men could reach, digging as they were under a foot of rushing water. It was eventually decided that sandbags were needed in order to stem the flow from the lagoon and allow Lee to be excavated like some fragile archaeological relic. A lifeguard told us that the fire brigade had been called and all we could do was wait. After this the men stopped digging and retreated to the dry sand on the beach, returning to their own families, their own children.
In all this our family remained impassive. Lee with the solemn eyes of a stoic, my father holding my brother ’s head to his chest and my mother and I, on the rocks above, looking down in patient silence.
The arrival of the fire brigade coincided with the final ebbing of the tide and, as the firemen organised a human-chain to pass sandbags the length of the beach, so began the steady advance of the sea. Once all of the sandbags had been passed man to man and the firemen began to arrange them across the mouth of the lagoon the waves had reached the level they had been when Lee first became stuck, rushing up to swirl at his belly and occasionally foaming at his chin. When, eventually, the flow from the lagoon had been entirely contained the waves were rushing into his face every few minutes and people around us began to agree that the rising tide posed a threat which had been entirely overlooked.
Its the spring tide, you see, I overheard a lifeguard telling my mother. If it had been neaps it would be different.
Once it had been decided that the sandbags were worthless we were informed that the fire brigade had decided that an enclosure needed to be erected around Lee and my father, some type of fence to hold the water at bay. My father was passed a snorkel, which he fitted into my brothers mouth, twisting the mouthpiece so that the end of the tube was higher than the level of the larger waves. Each time the water rushed toward him my father would pinch Lee ’s nose closed and, bowing his head forward, remind him to keep his lips tight around the tube. When the wave retreated he ’d wipe the water from Lee ’s face as he re-emerged, blinking, into the air.
But the materials needed for Lee ’s rescue were not easily located and soon, as the afternoon faded and the sea began to darken and silver, his face was more often under the water than above it. Occasionally the waves would rise above the level of the snorkel and my father would block it with his hand, Lee, too tired by now, would swallow water and then cough it up so that it bubbled out of the tube and hazed the air before my father ’s face with a mist of breath and spit.
He’s getting water in his mouth, said my father.
Blow in the tube, said a lifeguard.
No, don ’t blow. Suck, said someone else.
My brother’s fingers, gripping my father’s forearm, clenched tighter, the skin around the nails puckered and white.
Theres a breathing-tank in the truck. said a fireman, Do you think he’ll be able to use it? I mean, I’m sure this won’t take much longer but just in case?
Yes, said my father, I think we’d better.
I can pinpoint now the exact moment of Lee’s death. I think that both my mother and myself, watching from above, knew the change for what it was. My father, and the people busy around him, noticed my mother’s cries first and what they implied only after.
The fireman with the tank was running back across the beach, his stride uneven, the cylinder banging, with each step, against his right knee. In my memory I see my father’s face below us, looking up questioningly at my mother, Where is he? Wheres the tank? he says.
He’s coming, she says. He’s almost here.
My father looks down at the end of the snorkel, drops of water rattling at its mouth as Lee fights to breath out.
Another wave rushes his chest, spilling into the dark hollow of the tube and then receding and there, darting and fluttering in the water, is Lee’s hand, trailing in the current, no longer fastened to my father’s arm. That hand, suddenly adrift, it’s whiteness flickering below the surface, turning and shining like a fish, is abruptly the focus of my attention. I hear my mother’s voice, high and rising further in pitch, without words, a steady climb of breaking notes. My father looks up at us and then down, his eyes following ours to watch the hand break the surface, roll once and subside again, tumbling in the flow with the freedom of the inanimate.
Jesus, he says, Oh Jesus, and arches forward into the water, pressing his body to Lee’s beneath a filigree of foam.
I wasn’t there when they finally brought my brother’s body out. I had been sent home, back to my sisters who had been phoned to prepare them for my arrival and for the news I would bring. Not long after Lee’s hand had lost its hold on my father’s wrist and Lee himself had floated free of our lives my mother rose from the water to take charge of the practicalities of her loss. She spoke to a lifeguard and asked him if he would mind driving me home, she even remembered to ask how long he had had his license.
Tell your sisters we won’t be long, she said, crouching before me.
I nodded and watched over her shoulder as the firemen erected a semi-circular structure of corrugated plastic around my father and brother. When they started to pump the water out my mother gently steered me away before climbing down the rocks to kneel in the water alongside my father.
I would later be told how the fireman lit the area of their work once I had left, how, after pumping the water away they dug a trench, first alongside my brother, and then extended it under him until they could ease him free.
I picture the scene the moment he begins to slip from under the rock the artificial brightness of the emergency lights; the orient shimmer of the water, dark and high, beyond the wet plastic; the harshly lit blonde of Lee’s head against the densely slicked curling of my father’s chest; the dusting of freckles and peeling skin at his sunburnt shoulders. And my brother’s hand, that dreadful tumbling hand, held still and solid between my mother’s palms.
My mother would later say that it was then that she realised that Lee was truly gone. She would describe the heaviness of his limbs, the limp weight of him as my father shuffled forward on his knees trying, even then, to keep Lee’s face above what little water was left around them.
But for me Lee’s real leaving came not at the beach but as I lay in bed later that night. It was the last time in my life that I would experience what it was to be a twin, to know how it felt in another’s skin. My body seemed to rock and settle in the sheets, the memory of the ocean-swell a ghost of movement deep in my joints, and, as my eyes began to falter, I knew what it was like for Lee I was, for one last time, my brother feeling the soft rush and pull of the sea as, through a shimmer of water, my world closed to dark.
A version of this story first appeared in Matter Magazine which celebrates the launch of its issue 3 in London at the Voice Box, Royal Festival Hall on 11 December 2003 (details: e_m_brett@mac.com).
