Let’s say dad didn’t beat you because you back-chatted and wore your skirt too short, and you didn’t sneak out to meet Peter, then peck like a bird at our bedroom window at midnight smelling of cask wine and boy.
Imagine — you hadn’t woken up lamenting you’d ever been born, asking me to brush and plait your hair, telling me you didn’t feel like breakfast. That you’d meet me at the bus stop in a bit, and in the meantime, you’d walk to the black sand beach for some fresh air, you know, for some space. Imagine if I’d waited for the old red school bus, wondering where you were, and when the bus came that morning, I didn’t get on the bus and go to school — instead, I ran to the beach looking for you.
Let’s say you didn’t wade out to the island at low tide to sit among the nodding tussock grass watching Little Blue Penguins fresh from their hidey-holes diving for sardines and pilchards and krill. Let’s say you didn’t get the tide wrong and wade back through the rising, turgid ocean and get swept off your feet, dragged to the deep with the flounder and the gurnard and the bottle-nose dolphins, and that your long hair didn’t struggle itself free from the plait I braided; octopus arms waving as you sank and sank, your eyes wide.
Let’s imagine I went searching for you, and what looked like fossilised driftwood wasn’t you washed up on the black sand beach at dusk. That I didn’t lie beside you on the beach with my hand resting on the mound of your belly, and that my heart didn’t petrify and my green eyes didn’t turn gray. That in my grief, I didn’t tear a lock of your sodden black hair with my teeth, stitching it with red silk thread that night to my coat breast-pocket — that I didn’t stitch my lips together.
Instead, let’s imagine we sat at the kitchen table sipping tea, eating porridge with cream and brown sugar — making plans to stick together no matter what — before hefting our school bags full of cheese sandwiches and algebra and poetry up the hill to the bus stop overlooking the black sand beach — imagine we watched the waves roll in.