Phosphorescence Read Online Free Page B

it’s true that if you draw a circle, with our house as the mid-point, more than half the circle would be in the sea. When I was small I played on the quay every day, fishing for crabs, and I didn’t know any other children in the village, so I did everything with Mum, and that’s when I can remember her really laughing and happy. But I remember that even when I was small, I was always waiting for the day when I could go off across the marshes with Dad, and Jack, my grandfather, and Mum never wanted to do that.She really wanted a life in a town with a garden and a road outside leading to friends and shops, not a small seaside house with markers to show the height the floods might reach, and a creek full of mud and salt water outside the back door. Mum feels hemmed in by the sea, and Dad feels free. That’s how different they are. I think I am somewhere in the middle, which makes sense, I suppose.
    Mum says the sea is a fair-weather friend and a cruel enemy, and she is right. Every day the turning tide is a reminder of Dad’s older brother James, drowned when he was fifteen and the boat he was sailing with his best friend, Ian Christie, was swept out and around Seal Point on a rip tide, and further into a storm where it capsized, tossing James far out into the cold, roaring sea. Ian was picked up by the lifeboat, but it was a week before James’s body was found, carried miles down the coast by the powerful currents. Not having any brothers or sisters, I can’t properly imagine what it would be like to lose one, but when I am with Grandma and I find her looking at the photograph of James smiling, holding up a huge sea trout he caught on his fourteenth birthday, sadness runs through my veins like ice.
    I know because Mum told me that the reason why Dad doesn’t talk to Ian Christie is that he has never been able to get over his brother’s death. Dad was only twelve, and tagged along with James and Ian wherever they went. He could so easily have been with them that day, but he was at home with Grandma. I don’t think he can forgive himself for that either, or that’s what Mum says. It’s funny,because Mum talks to me about this, and tells me what she thinks Dad and Grandma feel about it, and what she thinks Jack might feel, but none of them ever say anything about it themselves. It is a secret that everyone knows.
    The next afternoon I walk across the marshes to my grandparents’ house. Ever since I was little I have spent a night there every week, but these holidays I’ve been too busy and my old familiar routine has disappeared. I have been feeling a bit guilty about not seeing them, but Grandma hugs me and smiles and I know I don’t ever have to apologize because she is glad to see me.
    Jack, my grandfather, white-haired, gruff, but kind, and with a big moustache, has always lived on the marshes, and now he is nearly eighty. He has been a fisherman all his life and he is still out setting mussel and lobster traps on every tide. He has caught every kind of fish there is to find in these waters and he is famous in all the villages around here for bringing in a catch on tides when most people wouldn’t dare leave the harbour.
    â€˜He’s an old fool,’ snaps Annie, my grandma. ‘He has no need to be out there in all weathers now. He could come and help me in the garden, but he’s always got a boat to mend or an engine to restore.’
    I love Grandma’s house, where the kitchen is warm with the scent of clean laundry and baking, and there are tins in the cupboard by the window always full of the flapjacks and cakes she makes. In the telly room, which Grandma calls the drawing room, a high shelf around the walls gleams withpearl-pink lustre china, and there is a box of toys kept behind the sofa for visiting children; in other words, mostly for me. The toys in it are battered and faded survivors from Dad’s childhood, growing up here on the