She’d had no choice but to turn back for Arnside, which was closer than Grange-over-Sands. But in less than five minutes she’d stopped moving forward because she no longer knew if it was forward that she was moving.
There were sounds that should have helped her negotiate the route back to her home, but she couldn’t tell where they were coming from. The first she heard was the train crossing the railway viaduct, which spanned the Kent Channel from Arnside and ultimately carried passengers onward to Grange-over-Sands. But she couldn’t make out whether the train was going to or coming from Grange-over-Sands, and further, she couldn’t even tell in what direction the railway track lay. According to her reckoning, it should have been to her left if she was on the route back to Arnside, but it sounded as if it was coming from behind her, which would mean she was heading out to sea.
She turned to correct her course, then, and began to walk again. She hit a puddle, sank up to her calf, and quickly pulled back. Someone shouted in the distance somewhere. She couldn’t tell where the shout was coming from, but it sounded close, and this was good. She turned towards it and resumed her progress.
A tractor roared. At least it sounded like a tractor. But it was directly behind her— or so it seemed— so that would be the best route to shore. She turned towards it. She called out— “Hello? Hello? I’m here. Over here,” but she heard nothing in reply, only the tractor’s engine, and it seemed to groan and strain, as if the machine was pulling an inconceivably heavy load.
And then a horn honked. Yes, she thought, that way was the road. Only, the road seemed to be where the sea was supposed to be and if she went in that direction, she’d be lost, surely. She would wander among the little hillocks of sand, through the puddles, and ultimately she’d stumble into a scour, where the waters of the bay did exactly that: scoured out the sand to form a trough upon which sand resettled in a new form that was too much liquid to bear the weight of anything other than the smallest bird. And then she would sink.
She stopped again. She turned. She listened. She called out. In reply came the cry of a gull. A moment later the air seemed to part for an instant with the sound of a gunshot or the backfire from a car. Then silence, utter and complete.
That was the moment Alatea knew there was no escape. That there never had been any real escape. From this instant out in the far east part of Morecambe Bay there might be some form of either flight or rescue. But from her life and the lies she’d constructed so that she might dwell safely within it, there was not. It was time she faced up to that, she decided. For every occasion of her life had led her to a moment of revelation she’d foolishly thought she could avoid forever. But there simply was no avoiding it any longer. That was the only truth that remained.
All right. So be it. She would take what was coming to her because she surely deserved it. She opened her bag. It was only when she found her purse, her chequebook, her makeup case, and not her mobile phone inside that she saw in her mind’s eye where she had left the device, sitting on the kitchen worktop plugged into a socket, recharging itself. She stared mutely into her bag then and understood that speaking the truth to Nicholas was not the final challenge remaining for her.
Hers would be to take the leap into accepting the icy embrace of what was inevitable. How could she have thought it would ever have been otherwise? she wondered. For hadn’t each step she’d taken since she’d run away from her family brought her to this single spot on earth in this one perilous moment of time?
There had never really been an escape— only a postponement— and she finally understood this. While science and surgery had provided her a way to shed the terrible carapace that had been her prison, rendering her the strangest of strangers in a very strange land, there was no taking flight from what had gone into her making and this was the stuff of her memories, which could not be shed no matter how she tried.
The worst part, she thought, had been the boxing lessons that followed the declaration that her brothers couldn’t be expected to fight the battles of Santiago Vasquez y del Torres forever. It was time Santiago learned to defend himself against bullies, his father insisted. But the fear was bright like a silver coin in his eyes as he spoke, and he frowned with more than concern and displeasure when Santiago didn’t want horseplay with his brothers, when Santiago wasn’t interested in building fortresses or playing soldiers, in wrestling, in trying to direct his pee as far as Carlos could. And the fear was bright in his mother’s eyes when she came upon her Santiago playing dressing-up, cradling a doll, or planning a tea party with cousin Elena Maria.
The faces of Santiago’s parents said the same thing without speaking: What have we borne into this world? His father’s worry was an obvious one for a man of his culture, his age, his religion, and his upbringing. He worried he had foisted upon the world another depraved homosexual. His mother’s worry was more subtle and more in keeping with her nurturing disposition in general. How would her Santiago cope in a world ill equipped to understand him?
Escape at the time meant Elena Maria. To her Santiago had told it all. She’d heard his explanation of being a soul inside a body that he did not even recognise as his own. He looked out of this body, he told her, and looked down upon it and saw it was male and knew it as male, but it did not function as the body of a male and he did not wish it to function so. He couldn’t even stand to touch it, he said. It was like touching someone else.
I don’t know what it is, he told her, I don’t know what it means, I just don’t want it, I can’t live with it, I have to be rid of it, and if I can’t be rid of it then I will die I swear I will die.
With Elena Maria, then, there was relief. For those few hours, for a day trip to one of the larger towns, for a weekend once in which they were adolescent girls on their own at a beach… This allowed the young Santiago to see what he truly wanted, what he had to be. But this could not happen in a world in which his father believed that toughening him up was the only answer. In order to live as he had been born to live, Santiago had run, and he’d continued running until he’d run into the arms of Raul Montenegro.
So was the worst really those boxing lessons? Alatea asked herself now. Or was the worst the promise that Raul Montenegro had held out to her and the reality of how she’d been intended to keep up her end of the bargain they’d struck with each other? She wasn’t sure. But what she did know was that Raul Montenegro was a driven man. Just as he’d been unwavering in his promise to fulfill the feminine dreams of his young lover Santiago Vasquez y del Torres, so was he equally unwavering in his decision to find Alatea Vasquez y del Torres so that she could repay him in coin he’d long ago determined.
And now here she was, as lost as ever, with no choice left but to move or to die. So she moved in the direction she hoped against hope was Arnside, although she no longer knew. Within ten yards she hit the quicksand, a scour she had feared she’d stumble upon. In an instant she was up to her thighs. And cold, cold. So horribly cold.
No panic was necessary, she told herself. She knew what to do. Nicholas had told her. A long-ago walk across the expanse of the empty bay and she remembered his words. It’s completely counterintuitive, darling, but you’ve got to do it, he had said.
She knew that. She prepared herself.
That was when the siren began to blare.