I remember these things. These were the things I promised myself I would remember.
The third time my head did not reach the water. Behind me, my sister had risen up from the sand kicking and screaming my name and their names and her name. She had fought them all and won and they were now legging it back to town with their football left behind. She pulled me up and told me to run all the way home. She told me to run home and stay there and to tell Granny Morley that she would not be long but that it might be a good idea to get Daddy. She wanted Daddy. She left me there and ran off behind the boys. She chased them down and I knew she would catch them all. Her legs were longer and stronger than theirs in those days. I turned and ran home and did what she said.
The boys were fine. After she was finished with them they were bruised and tender but they were not seriously hurt. She did not know how to cause too much damage to a human body and their wounds healed quickly. In school for the weeks that followed they kept themselves away from Cathy and for some time they kept away from everybody. When the new term came they were more or less as they had been before, in the way they walked and the way they spoke to people. If there was any more humility than before or any more regard for other people, it was hidden.
In the immediate aftermath of the fight one of the boys told his mother about what had happened. Or part of what had happened. He told his mother that he and Adam and Gregory had been set upon by that feral girl with the strange, absent father. His mother had gone into the school to tell the headmistress.
The following day, Daddy was summoned to go in and speak with the headmistress. He had come back within two hours of Granny Morley’s call and sat me on his knee as we waited for Cathy. Granny Morley asked him if he was going to go out looking for her but he said that he had already seen her out on the beach. He said she was sitting on her own and would come home when she was ready.
Cathy was ready at around six o’clock in the evening. She had been out on the beach all night and all day. Her hands and forearms were covered in a thin layer of sand and there was a small amount of blood on her knuckles. The sand together with the blood looked like the thin lines of grimy oil that wash up on North Sea beaches and mark the high tide.
Daddy got up and took hold of one of her hands. He led Cathy to the seat next to his. He asked her what happened.
She looked at him and I saw that there were tears in her eyes. They were hardly there at all, having not yet pooled into salty droplets, but I could tell the difference. Like the difference between lit and unlit black or between a dead thing and an alive thing.
At first she did not respond. She sat in silence. We all did. Daddy did not ask her again and neither did Granny Morley nor I say anything.
After almost a minute her chest began to convulse. I thought that she was hiccoughing but the heaving became more rapid and then the tone changed and she let the tears come all at once. A deluge.
She sobbed. Her breathing was like waves building up then dropping suddenly over a sea wall. She exhaled as if through an harmonica.
As she cried she spoke: ‘I felt so helpless, Daddy. I felt as if there wandt owt I could do that would change them. Or hurt them. Not really hurt them like they were hurting me. I could hit them all I liked but it woundt change a thing. They were so nasty to me, Daddy. Not the pain, Daddy, I dindt mind that, but the way they made me feel inside. No matter what I do, I can never win.’
‘You did though. You fought them and beat them. You protected your little brother. What more could you do?’
Daddy ran his hands through his hair and then his beard as if searching for an answer there.
‘I mean it doendt matter, does it? I mean that things will always be as they are now. I mean that there will always be more fights and it will just get harder and harder. I feel like I’ll never just be left alone.’
Daddy continued to stroke his hair. He looked more concerned than I had ever seen him. ‘Did you think to tell the teacher?’ he asked. ‘Did you think to tell teacher what these boys were doing?’
‘I did,’ Cathy replied, ‘but she told me they were nice boys.’
It was because of this, I think, that Daddy took us all into the headmistress’s office together. He led Cathy and I by our hands through the narrow corridors of our school. The ceilings were low and lit by halogen strip bulbs that flickered and shone the same colour as the magnolia paint on the walls, making it appear as if the light were emanating from the plaster. The only windows were long and thin and tucked just beneath the ceiling, well above the heads of the children who walked up and down these corridors so that when they looked up and out into the world beyond all they could see was the sky. On that day the sky was a mesh of criss-crossed grey and white cords being ripped and tugged and frayed by colliding winds.
To get to Mrs Randell’s office we walked to the end of the corridor and up a flight of stairs. They were the only stairs in the single-storey school and opened onto a landing holding doors to her office, the staffroom and the administrative office where we collected our lunch tokens each week and handed in consent forms for us to go on school trips.
Daddy knocked. It was a heavy fire door painted dark blue with a small, square window made from thick glass with a network of thin, black wires running through it to hold the shards together in case of breakage. His fat knuckles made a dull thump against the wood, a sound that was echoed by Mrs Randell’s dampened voice from inside the room, instructing us to enter.
Her voice or the instructions she issued sharpened as Daddy opened the door and she told us to sit down. She sat in a high-backed chair behind a large pine veneer desk and there were three chairs set opposite her, made from moulded plastic with a thin, course cushion glued to each seat. I sat on the right, Cathy sat on the left and Daddy was in the middle.
Mrs Randell looked comfortable. She looked as if she led a comfortable life. She wore a peach linen suit and her hair was both blonde and brown. Or blonde overlaid onto brown. It descended just below her ears and flicked out to the sides.
She seemed good enough (as good as could be expected) but she had only known comfort. And she looked troubled by us. Perhaps she would have preferred it if Cathy had never beaten those boys or if Callum’s mother had not told her about it so she would not have to be sitting there on a Friday afternoon having a conversation about violence.