San’wich

Sitting on the toilet, Eleni called out, “Did you know there’s such a thing as a black hole?”

We laughed. Just six years old, mind like a sponge, and already her timing was immaculate. The best thing about these moments was that Chris and I laughed at the same time, not a common thing these days.

The old house: a holiday place, rented to itinerants like us. Chris, Eleni and I, there for a week of blatant sun and fun. Weatherboard walls, wooden floors, with a high ceiling and an iron roof that made the rain sound up close and personal. Built in the sixties, we reckoned. Fisherman’s cottage or something like, with furniture never bought new.

The backyard was long and like a jungle. Everything grew too well with so much sun and rain. Beyond a rotting gazebo, the wooden fence at the far end looked like busted teeth and gave way to a forest of ferns and tall eucalypts. We warned Eleni to be careful in that understorey—to stay in sight of us—but she was an explorer. When she was three, she managed to open the front gate at home and go for a long walk with the dog.

So we lost her again—of course we did. The last we saw of her, she was crouched inside that gazebo, happy inside her little space of leaning wood and flowering vines. When we realised that we couldn’t hear her talking anymore—she was always having conversations with herself—we both went down to look. The gazebo held only shade, and beyond it the way to the forest.

“Goddammit. Can she not just stay put?” Chris muttered.

I said nothing.

The yard disintegrated as we clambered through into wild bush. Shards of afternoon light made the trees glow in shades of salmon flesh, helping hide our wayward daughter. We called her name and wandered deeper.

We discovered her in a clearing of scattered ferns and soft volcanic soil—grey and fine and fertile stuff. She was staring into space, as she often did.

“Why didn’t you answer us?” Chris demanded.

She turned to her daddy and said, “San’wich?”

“I’ll give you a fucking sandwich,” he said, and clipped her across the head.

---

Next morning it rained for hours, as it often did, and then the sun returned to bake things dry—quickly, harshly, warping wood and warming stagnant pools of water. For us it was a godsend. We’d all been sulking and finally we could break free and go to the beach.

The sun and sand restored us. The beach seemed to go on forever and we had it to ourselves that day. We kept to the shallows and played together, all of us happy and relieved. When Eleni and I sat together for a snack, Chris announced he was going for a run along the beach. He always did this when he had some energy to burn and I was happy for him to go exhaust himself.

He jogged away from us, following the waterline and occasionally splashing through it. He’d always said that jogging barefoot on sand was the best way to run. We watched him until we’d lost interest.

For a while, Eleni and I laid on our towels and saw things in the clouds. Our passing fancies, I called them. The pounding surf was like a lullaby and so we drifted.

Eleni was first to sit up again. She quaffed some cold water from her bottle and then stood. Beautiful girl—I could see the woman in her already. She pointed into the distance.

“San’wich, Mummy!”

I sat up and looked along the beach. There was a breeze, but it was warm. In the distance, the sand shimmered and shifted in the heat of the afternoon. I couldn’t see where she was pointing, so I got to my feet and looked with her.

It was Chris. He was a long way away, but I could recognise his lean and languid body; his baby-shit tan and red swimming trunks. He was talking to someone: a woman, I thought. She was short, a little hunched, draped in something to keep the heat off.

That breeze seemed to whip up sand around them. I thought I saw the woman raise a shawled hand to him. Then they both turned and walked away together.

“Where on earth is he going?”

Eleni repeated: “San’wich, Mummy.”

I called out his name, but the breeze snatched it away and threw it into a churning sea.

The shimmering sands made fragments of them as they walked. They transformed—became a mirage. I wanted to chase after them, but Eleni would never keep up and I couldn’t leave her alone.

“Where are they going, Eleni?”

“Under,” was all she said.

It struck me then—how the old woman’s clothes were like shades of the beach.

That golden place—it felt so old then. Families had lived there for thousands of years, leaving behind middens of shell, bone and ash—proof of ancient life, there among the dunes. What else had they left behind?

Or maybe something more recent; something carried here in the hold of a darkwood ship, some settlers’ remnant, free to wander.

---

Everyone looked, police and villagers, all the way along that beautiful stretch of glimmering coast, but Chris never came back, neither whole nor in fragments.

Eleni doesn’t wander much anymore, and we go to a different beach now, where there are always other people. I don’t think much about him now, but I do have dreams and they’re always the same:

An impossibly long beach laid bare to the sun, exposed like bleached bones. Pristine sands, brilliant surf of many heartbeats. I stand there with Eleni, holding hands and watching two faraway figures disintegrating into a hazy distance, becoming one with the sand. We smile and wave. He can’t see us anymore, but we wave anyway.

And together we say San’wich.