Flying Fish by Corinne Harrison

Flying Fish | Corinne Harrison

I bend to pick up another bottle and a sharp pain in my back makes me freeze, bowed to the sand. My hand flies to my back, but the pain mellows into something dull and pulsing. 

I straighten and look towards my daughter. Ida is scanning the line of froth, sea stones, and litter while dusting caked sand from a mud-green bottle. She usually works early morning shifts, but today she’s free to accompany me. 

Behind her, the bay is a mass of slow undulating bars. At its fringe, foaming sheets of water fall on top of each other, clapping for the two women who have foregone sleep to scan the beach for the previous night’s leftovers.

My knuckles punch my lower back but there’s a deeper pain it can’t reach, one that thrums through my chest and orbits my heart. I sigh, chase off thoughts of my cleaning shift later in the day, and look at the bottle I’ve picked up. The blue label tells me it’s a Flying Fish.

We’ve been the only people here for the entirety of early morning. So I’m surprised to see a figure break from the palm tree-lined strip far down the beach and struggle over the sand towards us. They’re indistinct, a rocking white column in the distance. Another Cape Town early riser.

Ida returns and drops an armful of beer bottles in our pile with a small crash. She has my deep-night skin tone, and it makes the sea spray along her cheeks sheen like the Milky Way. She inherited her beautiful round eyes from her father. They flick between the bottles and I’m sure that, like me, the numbers are tumbling and merging through her mind. Some rice and potatoes for dinner. Maybe a meatless meal. 

She bends to pick a piece of litter from the mouth of a bottle and as she does, I see her premature greying crown, an iris of embers. Her arm hosts a thin landscape of boils, the same kind that erupted when her father died and again when we were thrown out of our apartment, left on the street with our belongings around our ankles. Even after I’d crushed and liquified a root of devil’s horsewhip and thickly applied the ointment along her forearms, the skin would settle only for a while until something else made it pucker and rise. 

My heart burns.

“Hi there,” a voice says behind us.

I turn and see that the stumbling white column has arrived. A boy. He’s young, maybe as young as Ida. Like her, but not like her. He’s young. And soft as a marshmallow. He has pancake cheeks with a hint of stubble, a radish-like sunburn on the side of his neck, sand-white shirt and chinos, hair bright as a yolk. Blue eyes flicker to the pile of bottles between us.

“Sorry to – disturb you. Don’t suppose you’ve come across a watch? It’s black, got a silver rim. Left it here last night.”

I stare. 

Now that he’s arrived, I see his shirt is crumpled, as though he’s slept in it. His eyes are bloodshot. An unwashed sour odour hangs around him, detectable under the sea breeze. I think of the ring of burnt-out wood at the other end of the beach where we found most of the bottles.

He meets my unwavering stare and his sloppy-adolescent grin falters. His gaze drops to my shoulder. He’s frazzled, like a brood of chickens spooked by a fox. His feathers are all awry.

“No, nothing.” Ida says. She gives him the down-and-up again look, raises her eyebrows my way, just an inch, and grabs a binbag for the bottles. 

“Oh – ok then,” the boy mumbles. He fiddles with the hem of his shirt, and his eyes go to the boils on her arms and stay there. 

I look at his rolled-up sleeves, his forearms. They’re smooth and covered in downy strands. They speak of starched sheets and cool white tiles, and I think of the neighbourhoods on the other side of Cape Town, broad pastel-coloured homes dispersed by private pools, streets embedded with topiary shrubs and palm trees. 

“Well, I’ll just –” the boy says. He still doesn’t know where to look, what to do with his hands. I haven’t taken my gaze from him. 

He throws one last, disconcerted look at the boils on Ida’s arm and crunches back over the sand. Probably back to his bed. Or to a meal, prepped, steaming and waiting.

Ida watches the boy and shakes her head sardonically. My hand is at my back again. She touches my shoulder and says affectionately, “I’ll give you a back rub after your shift Mama.” 

The mention of my cleaning job brings a wash of weary dread, but I pinch her chin and smile up at her. 

“I knew I raised you right.”

She laughs and walks back across the sand towards more bottles. 

I throw the Flying Fish in the pile with a clink.

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