Five-year-old Masie pulled a crumpled foil sandwich from the beach bag. It was squashed on one side by the weight of a water bottle. Her mother, Marie, watched her peel back the the foil and recognised the brown bread from 30 years before. She glimpsed the little folds of sliced ham as if she hadn’t put them there herself. Then she smiled at her daughter like she would smile at a picture of a dead aunt.
Marie's husband, George, leant over his daughter to help her with the sandwich.
‘Like this, like this,’ he peeled the foil back quickly and held it up in a ball. ‘Do we have a bin?’
Marie lifted up a towel.
‘Here, we’ll use this,’ he unfolded a plastic bag.
‘Ok,’ Marie said. ‘It was for the swimming stuff.' She smiled weakly.
Little Masie stood up on two strong legs and walked over to the sandcastle she was building on her own. Her parents watched her pink body move and her hair swirl around her face.
‘Masie, sweetheart, don’t put the sandwich on the rug, it'll get sandy,’ Marie called, when she saw what her daughter had done. George picked it up.
‘The foil,’ Marie said. ‘If you leave it in the foil, it’s…’
‘Foil’s in the bin babe!’ George said sharply, grinning.
‘I know.’ Marie smiled weakly again. ‘We used to leave the foil on as kids, that's all.’
George rested the sandwich on top of the bag.
‘Fucking sand,’ he said, and dropped onto the rug beside his wife.
George had done four tours in Afghanistan disposing IEDs. He had joined the army at 16 and his career had been glittering. He was a Major at 31 - the youngest ever to have come up through the ranks.
Now, at 38, he was based at the Army Headquarters in Andover, Hampshire. Marie wasn’t sure of his role, other than to sign off training procedures and take trips to America. When he explained what he did, it was always in such great detail that it never fell back together smoothly when explained by someone else.
‘Dust,’ he said. ‘It was dust more than sand’.
‘It was sand,’ Marie said.
‘Uh?’
‘I remember the sand in the sandwiches, not dust.'
‘Dust on fucking everything. On Fiona.’
Marie put out her hand and rested it on his arm.
‘Do you like these Irish beaches George Foot?’
George threw is head back and laughed.
‘You love it here my little gorgeous Irish pumpkin and that is why we are here!’ He leaned over and pouted his lips. Marie kissed him. Then he looked at her just above the eyes and jumped up. ‘Mimi!' he called to their daughter. 'Here comes the sandcastle killer!’ Masie squealed with fear and ran. Marie picked up the sandwich and took a bite.
Marie's two sisters were also over from the UK with their kids. Over the past three years, they all tried to be in Ireland at the same time. Marie was the last to arrive in Ireland this year and on their second night she and George invited everyone over for a barbecue. Each sister had rented their own holiday house.
The house Marie and George were renting looked out over Galway Bay. It had big windows and an Aga. The kitchen was sweeping with stone and black appliances. George had found it himself this time, although had a network of hundreds of buddies he knew from the army who seemed, to Marie, to operate in a sort of awkward Masonic body, a fellowship of blue jeans, boat shoes and RAB jackets They had a feet parted, folded arms, hips forward stance on greeting, whether it was in a supermarket or a closing swimming pool. It was a brotherhood and their women. They helped each other out. They had tips and tricks for civilian life, which, as far as Marie could tell, was not considered reality for them. They operated as if they were strategising in a game. It was doubtful their circles ran into the west of Ireland, but then again, they might. The place was nice.
When Marie’s sisters and their families arrived for the barbecue, George started to talk about how he had found he house. No one cared, least of all, Mike, married to Marie's eldest sister. But Mike was from Birmingham, like George, and George gravitated towards him whenever the sisters and their husbands were together. For a few years Mike had done ‘George duty’. But as the kids started to grow, and as Mike’s business thrived, he began to say things like, ‘Mate, sorry, I just don’t care,’ as George, with the precision with which he approached a bomb, launched into the details of a recent purchase.
At the end of the night, after a bottle of wine Marie's eldest sister said she would prefer not to have someone like George around her kids, repeating and slurring ‘it’s for an accumulation of reasons’. Marie told her to leave. Her eldest sister was tall and beautiful. She had cheek-bones that led to her mouth. Sometimes Marie would watch her grown sister talk and want to climb into a wind that ran up and down the angles of her face. However, when George was around her sister was unbearable to her.
Marie had wanted love from George at first. At the beginning she had been obsessed with locating his love. In it's absence, she discovered something else. It was stronger and more powerful than the memory of feelings in childhood summers, or sunshine on her back, it was not soft and warm. In the pursuit of love, and in trying not to look back, Marie had learnt to find relief in the shiny terror of its absence.
They had learnt a precise code of willingness to move from ways of being, to violence. It had begun one night early on. Marie had asked a question, quietly in the dark and George told the truth in reply. Marie told him what she thought of him. She told him that he was missing something essential, and then she said respect was just the thing that filled the space where love should be.
Lying together whispering in the dark, they found a deep hot pool of glistening hate, and they fucked there. They came back to it again and again for, what Marie experienced as some sort of relief. Sometimes though, she felt a shudder as sure as a thunderbolt that told her to stop saying what she thought. Like the night she told him women could smell his fear, that he would never be able to get shoulders big enough to hide it - that his discipline couldn't cover up even an edge of his shadow for those who see shadows. When she felt the bolt that stopped her it was as if old summers, the playground at dusk, her father's warm, strong hugs, her abundance heaved inside her and closed her throat. George sometimes stopped suddenly and would leave the room and go for a shower, sometimes he would leave the house. Once he went to Andover and didn’t call for a week.
When everyone had left the barbecue, George stood behind Marie as she wiped the surface by the sink and moved his hips gently so that they tapped against her.
‘George I feel sad,’ Marie said.
‘Um?’
‘I’m sad.’
‘Oh?’ George bent round and kissed her cheek.
Marie let go of the cloth but didn’t move.
‘But I feel sad too,’ he said. ‘Your sisters hate me again.’ He rested his forehead on the back of her head and kept moving his hips.
‘Do they really hate you?’ Marie said.
‘They really, really hate me. They don't want me near the kids.’
‘Did you hear that?’
'I did, pumpkin.'
'She didn't mean it,' Marie said.
George put his hand over her mouth.
‘She did. The only way you know how to go, you clever little sausage, is backwards. Unless you follows me. And you think you hate me. But you can't live without me. Handy.’
George had lots of barbecues at his flat in Lymington the summer Marie met him. It was on a barbecue evening that she first cut him, the night when a journalist from London came with Rob, who had a George Cross. The journalist had a lot of make-up on, she had blonde hair and low rise jeans, and George tended to her all night, switching between her and the ambers of the barbecue.
That night six years ago, when everyone left, under the bright white light of the kitchen, George said he didn’t know how Rob could deal with such a bitch as a girlfriend and Marie laughed. George went outside to get the last of the plates. Marie heard him whistling, swinging happily from note to note. She picked up her keys. As she sensed him approach the doorway she threw them as hard and sharply as she could, aiming for his eyes. They hit his face and cut his cheekbone. The pile of empty plates fell to the floor. He touched the blood. That is when it began. He walked over, and slung her against the fridge like a wet cloth. The noise and the pain – his attention – split Marie open like a flower, she felt relief. From the floor, she looked up at him. He told her to go outside into the garden, where it was night and dark, and without hesitation she did, knowing he would follow her and that something might hurt.
From the very beginning George would lock the door of the bedroom at night, and sometimes they would lie in bed and talk for hours. Marie would kiss his nose as he talked. At first she was always tender, even more tender the crueller his stories became until sometimes they made love after a spillage of hate against something they could both share. One night George told her about Fiona. Her thighs first, she had strong thighs, then his need for a woman when he was on tour. It was wrong, he had been married to his ex at the time. But they had fucked and the next day she died. George's face twisted with disgust as he described seeing Fiona's exploded body. He blamed Fiona for the ugliness of her dead body. And he couldn't tell anyone he had been inside her hours before. He had trained her and she had worked on hundreds of bombs. George couldn’t forgive her faulty performance.
Other nights he would say it all over again. He had fucked Fiona, he had needed it. Then he had to pick her up, piece by piece a day later. He spoke about a bag. Her bits in a bag. Sometimes Marie imagined George ripping her own thigh off in a clinically white room, no dust, no bombs, no variables, and George would fuck her, rip her thigh off and eat it like a chicken drumstick because of Fiona. Whenever she was close to an orgasm, if she slipped within his desire to kill her, if she conjured an attack, if she filled herself with terror, and then pulled herself back into the moment, to his head between her legs, or his body in steady devotion to her, in all that hate, she would cum.
She had met him in an ordinary way. George was a regular at the restaurant where she worked as a waitress. He began coming in with a group of army weekenders and one afternoon, after she had served their table with particular chirpiness, he came up to the bar looking for information about a local regatta. She felt her body loosening as soon as he formulated the first few rigid sentences. She feigned interest in his words and laughed when she thought he made a joke.
They went for dinner. He said he was divorced. He stared at her and dropped his head to the side and curled his lips into a smile. Marie declined dessert and asked him back to her flat. He pretended he was surprised. She pretended to be embarrassed for being so rash. They went to bed.
The fling would have ended there, except for the fact that the condom got lodged inside her, and after mediocre sex, with a desire in her that had been completely unmet, she asked him to get it out. She lay on her back, bent her knees, spread her thighs and raised her eyebrows. George turned the lamp and positioned himself between her thighs on his knees without saying anything. Then he pushed his hand in until Marie flinched with pain. And as she flinched, he stopped, cocked his head to the side and pushed his hand.
At the start George asked Marie why she didn’t walk beside him and hold his hand. She said that it was because she didn’t want to. But in time she began to slip her hand into his anyway. Very soon George started writing his name and then her name on things in her flat. If Marie left a notebook or a scrap of paper on the table, he would write Marie Moran and underneath George Foot. And then, he began to write Marie Foot, and sometimes ‘I love you Marie Foot’.
Marie married George soon after she became pregnant. She had told no one but her two friends from the restaurant. She couldn't bring herself to tell her family what she had done. George had said it was important for him.
Once she had Masie, Marie stopped working. She took a handful of different online courses; in botanical painting, creative writing, healing mediation and body awareness and Jungian Theory. In her twenties she had told everyone she wanted to work in business, designing logos. She hadn’t wanted to do that, she just couldn’t think of anything else to say. She had occasionally entered her artwork into competitions but she had never won, or even been acknowledged. Nothing, actually had felt meaningful until she met George.
On the inside, he was terrified and insecure and on edge and she recognised him; she had come to believe that she had been snapped in the act of growing into a woman, like he had been snapped in the dust. She just didn’t have anything to talk about. No bodies, no bombs. But she was talking to herself when she unleashed herself on him. Rattle, rattle, rattle, she would whisper when he was inside her, rattle rattle rattle, for the nothingness of him and her. It felt so precious to share. They pretended they weren’t scared, but when they stopped pretending they wanted to take things from people in ways they could not name, and they had agreed in some way, that they could do that to each other.
Every so often, since meeting George, Marie would cry and want name everything that was lost. List it. Write things down. Record the names of old friends and the smell of their porches. Remember the promises she kept without even trying. These things had been lost before George gave form to their absence. She knew the reverberations of violence, stupidity, loss, from the tiniest patterns forming and becoming concrete. It happened as she tied a knot in her sarong so that it would open all the way up and then learnt that she must pretend she didn't know she had done it. It happened as she began to love her body and give it away. It happened as she asked for what she wanted and refused what she didn't. The violence had a source she couldn’t name. She would ring her sisters and try and explain, say that she felt as if she was dying. But the next day, she would call again and say sorry and that she was fine and she that had been drinking, that was the reason for her crying and then she would talk about anti-depressants and meditation.
Her sister, whichever one it was, would assure her that she loved her and it was ok, and in the middle of that love Marie would sometimes put down the phone and later text to say sorry again.
‘If he hits you, fucking leave Marie. Does he hit you?’
They had been beside her for the therapy, the sober years, the other strange boyfriends, the running, mountain climbing, the travelling, the stint at the orphanage in Mumbai.
Marie knew that George had a blank space in daylight were she still felt what was missing. She knew that he had no echo of summers and beaches, or at least if it had ever sounded, it was a long time ago and he had drowned it out with other things. That is why she needed him. He didn’t care for all the strands of longing that wound her up. He showed her how to move forward.
They ran together sometimes. George shouted ‘good morning’ at everyone they passed; a clipped, breathy good morning far enough ahead of them to see the passing person smile and return the greeting. It was so civilised; it was so functioning. Marie learnt to snatch the words from him, to repeat them and so, become him.
When it came down to it, he was better than her at covering up his fear, and he was darker underneath than she could have ever imagined. He had every move, every gentle smile that she wanted, he ironed and polished, threw his head back as if he were really laughing, and he did it so well, all these signs of love. These were things he showed her how to do. For Marie, it was an art. He could imitate love and then create something new on top of that. He had built himself for the world.
Only Marie got to experience him fully at night. His fear, his cruelty, his distrust, the price paid for the exquisite execution of a life without space for longing. That is what she wanted to be released from - longing for something she was not sure she ever knew - which was completeness, it was buried in a ham sandwich on the windy beach - but that was not it either. Now, at night she was complete - in the truth of all the things she had lost. In the day, she built something around her that looked like a life.
Over the years, Marie got good at critiquing George in the dark. She asked him why he bought her grandmother whiskey when he didn’t care, she told him his friends were a sham, that no one likes a Squaddie that gets too big for his boots, that he was scared like a little boy in the woods, that his laughs clattered like the tip of a forgotten umbrella against the window of a bus. That his Birmingham accent would repulse the Sandhurst officers. That he was hole in the earth waiting for fragments of the dead.
One night, as she spoke and they fucked, he took her arm and twisted it fast behind her back and it snapped. She screamed. And then she laughed as pleasure spilled into her like a life force, warm and absolute.
The next morning at the hospital she told the doctor what happened: how she had been running, about the root on the ground, how she had fallen and tried to hold onto a tree, how her arm had got caught. She spoke and she cried with pain, and George held her hand and leant over to get her tissues. The doctor prescribed codine and paracetamol and told them where to go for the x-ray. As they left George asked the doctor a question about morphine and the two men spoke for a while about buddy-buddy intermuscular injections.
After the hospital, she and George never spoke in daylight about how she really broke her arm. Once they had outlined the story in casualty, that was real, and they knocked it between them like a ball before a tennis match. It was the same with the story of George’s scar from the keys, and when she slipped a disc.
The winter Masie was four, George held Marie’s neck tight one night for a long time. She covered the bruises when she went out, but in the house, for those weeks, she wore the changing colours on her skin like new scarves. Each evening when George got home she cocked her neck to the side and asked him if he thought she was pretty. That was the closest they got to allowing the night in.
Marie knew she was not living in a world that her sister’s would ever recognise. She bit again into the sandwich as she watched her husband dunk Masie into the water and throw her into the air. Marie heard her daughter’s little screams distantly, like the tinkle of a neighbour’s pans.
She knew she was moving away from them, she had agreed to go that way, to surrender to the way the light had been ripped from her at the beginning and at the moment of forming, as she stepped into womanhood, as she opened in search of light…
Sussshhhh…. no, she had heard, why are you so arrogant? She twisted in search of light. Proud, feisty little thing. No, she had tried again, turned once more. Sexy proud, smart, thing; but this was not light. I don’t want you. Unstable, greedy thing, but unstable greedy people hurt, don't they Marie? Why are you hurting me? And so she began, it had begun, the eclipse. I bought you a yellow dress are you happy? Stable. Are you happy? Marie? Yes! He wants to marry you. He is lovely! Yes! He is smart. He is, he is. You’re so lucky. Will you work Marie? There, in that office, like this? Yes. No? No, sussshh… No, sex is not like that, sex is like this. Oh yes. Not with him, because you promised. Do you remember the promise Marie? You are equal. What rights are you missing? What are you talking about? Get up. Sush. What do you want? Lots of women Marie, lots of women don’t orgasm. I fantasise about young girls and old men too. It is a thing. What do you mean Marie? No one has made you do anything. Who made you think like him? You're not lost, you need to grow up. You did it all. Just believe in yourself. That woman there, god, she’s so inspiring. She was 18 stone two years ago. Look at her now. Believe in yourself. You’re running? You're an inspiration. Shusssssh. What happened then? What happened? Think positively. It's your serotonin levels, try Sertraline.
It was an unnatural life, but it was now hers. She began to cry. She put down the sandwich. No other man. She would have no other man than George. She could surrender with him, she needed the pleasure of it too, she wanted to choose how the lights went out. If this was it. The man, the child, the size of life, and if she did live like this she would let herself bruise and break and bleed like she should. Like she needed to, to do it. And she would orgasm in the grace of his honest hate. She had come to need George's violence, it was where things felt true. When she orgasmed, she streamed with gratefulness.
Marie breathed in and pressed her tears away. The water in front of her became beautifully unfocussed. She took another bite of the sandwich.
‘Baby!’ George called, he was walking towards her with Masie over his shoulder. She looked like a little bag of flesh. ‘Did you bring the arm bands?’
‘No.’
‘Ohh babe! You are having a nightmare today!’ George laughed, swept Masie into a princess hold and ran down to the water.
‘Baby!!’ George was calling from the shore. ‘Baby!!! Come into the water! Come and play with Masie!’
The little girl called for her mother.
Marie got up and walked to the shore. She watched her pink thighs moving below her. She touched them. They didn't feel like hers. The wind blasted her ears. She felt the cold water on her feet.
‘You two are crazy!’ she yelled as perfectly as she could. George threw is head back and laughed.
‘Baby, come here and Masie wants to try and swim between us.’
‘Oh! Wow! Masie, you are such a brave girl!’
She waded in, they were out quite far, she went in until the water reached her chest. Her daughter clung to George. Masie was cold. Her little lips were blue, like Marie remembered.
‘Mimi, you’re cold,’ she said in her aunt's voice. ‘We can go and get some crisps and hot chocolate after this.’
‘Go a little further away babe,’ George said. ‘The armbands would have had her moving a bit more. Mimi are you ready?’
‘Yes,’ the little girl tried to smile.
‘Mimi,’ Marie said, now her like her mother, holding her arms out. ‘Me and daddy are here, we’ll do this once and then go to the rug and get warm.’
‘I can do it!’ The little girl tried to smile again to show her parents how grateful she was. Marie called to her and threw her arms out again, and Masie, struck by her mother’s voice, hurled herself from George’s shoulder.
She began to thrash in the water. She dipped and spluttered up. Marie sensed she was too far away.
‘Go, Mimi!’ George called, as his daughter dipped again and struggled for air.
‘Here! Here!’ Marie shouted, in her own voice, as she watched Masie struggle. 'Come on Mimi, you’re doing so well.’ The little girl dragged her hands through the water trying to hold onto something that wasn’t there. She squealed, but she could not swim.
She disappeared. ‘Mimi!’ Marie called. She willed her daughter back up but she didn't move towards her. She looked up at her husband who was also looking at the space where their daughter had disappeared. He looked at his wife and they rested there in each other’s eyes for the beats they knew so well. It was unnatural. The sea was silent. A surge passed underneath them. A rip tide. Marie was knocked off her feet.
‘You fuck,’ George spat.
He dived under and came straight back up alone. They looked out at the huge expanse of sea. Marie's heart felt like it stopped beating.
She screamed her daughter's name.
They couldn't see her. George began to swim out, ducking under and back up scanning the water. Marie began to swim too. Water roared in her ears.
Marie swam in and called 999. The wind blew and it got cold and as the sun dipped below the horizon their daughter's body slipped onto the shore at the end of the beach.
