Blue

Blue. Blue. Blue, blue, blue. She says the word over and over again as she walks, one foot stumbling in front of the other over the scree that stretches all the way to the headland.

Blue. Sea-swept and light-drenched.

Blue begins to bulge with the waves and the sky. The ‘ooo’ at the end, the ‘loooo’ drawn out and soaked in salt spray, the sounds filling her mouth like a full August day. Blue becomes deeper in August. Blue burnishes on the edge between summer and autumn, darkens to lapis.

She walks through blue, and through sun that’s abrasive on the skin. Below, far below where the cliffs cup the bay, ancient tides pull below the surface, ripping water from land and land from water, her from her mother, her mother from her. These tides slow down in August. Blue ebbs and flows in a softer wave, rhythmic like the splash of a clock. Endless. A kind of blue so profound it hurts to look. Her mother would have said to always begin a story at the beginning, but how to separate one shade of blue from another? Blue currents swell and the blue wave breaks, and in that wave is another one already formed. There is no beginning. There’s no end either.

Blue blurs with her sister, walking ahead of her in a vest top the colour of seafoam, ocean swells and foamy ribbons. They are each mapping the path with their bodies, piecing it together, memorising it with their feet. She can feel it inside her, rolling and curving and swelling azure. They are charting their lives until that moment, making sense of them through gull-cries and sea-cries and the gentle blue gust of air currents that mirror those below, only her sister is charting a different map. Her sister’s feet are tracing tracks that she doesn’t recognise, memories that aren’t hers. She doesn’t know when they diverged. Perhaps too long ago to remember; perhaps as far back as the car park at the bottom of the cliff.

She calls to her sister to wait. Sweat drips down her back, a painting running in the heat, pooling in the crevices of her rucksack and t-shirt. Her mother is heavy in the urn on her back, slowing her down. Her mother has always been heavy, and that, she thinks, is why her sister’s steps have always been lighter, more free. Her sister’s steps have traced faint blue lines like veins all over the cliff-top. When her sister waits and she catches up, there is a moment when their feet merge and she absorbs some of her sister’s heartbeat. A pulse, lingering, dropping below the sea’s surface to be carried out on the tides.

A deep blue, a midnight blue, a blue that is so dark it’s almost black. An entire world that’s invisible and unknowable, miles and miles where sunlight doesn’t reach. She wonders if her mother’s ashes will stay on the surface, or sink into a nameless blue that she will never be able to fathom. Her sister offers to carry the rucksack for a while, but she says no. This view must also have been her mother’s, and visions overlap. So far out to sea, there is no telling anymore where she ends and her mother begins, and she thinks it’s strange to think of it that way round when her mother is the one who’s dead.

Did she ever talk to you about Dad? she asks her sister. She thinks of the man conjured in her mind from scraps of sentences, from the descriptions and longings and regrets that sometimes spilled from her mother’s mouth. No, her sister replies, she just said she didn’t like him anymore. Or her childhood? She remembers gentle stories spun out over afternoons and evenings in a blue bedroom, swimming in soft shades of rain on water, the grandfather and grandmother she’d never known forming gradually like shapes in the mist, her mother seeping out from them into something solid. No, her sister replies, she told me she didn’t want to, that it was too unhappy. Maybe she made it all up. Or maybe you really were the favourite.

The spot her mother wanted is dipped, sheltered, prickled with the blue-grey of sea holly. She doesn’t know how her mother knew of it or when her mother came here, and neither does her sister. You looked after her, her sister says, you knew her best. Further out to sea, she catches sight of something that then disappears. A seal, a wave, a sinking boat, a mirage. An invisible force that pulls and caresses, her mother’s voice holding her close, telling her she can swim on her own when she can’t.

The same wave never comes twice; the shade of blue is never exactly the same. Blue, blue, blue. Swollen on her tongue, a depth she can dive into. When she does dive, chasing her mother’s ashes for answers that she’ll never hear, light strikes droplets and cleaves them apart. A momentary arc of colour; a split-second rainbow suspended between sea and sky; all the colours, not just blue. All the answers, impossible to catch. Blue is the only one she can hold. She grasps blue as the mother she thought she knew dissolves a little, hovering like the soft tendrils of spray that catch over the waves before falling in a graceful pirouette to the water.