Sandcastles – by Ruth Armstrong
ISLAND | ISSUE 166
WINNER - OLGA MASTERS SHORT STORY AWARD 2022
Rumi doesn’t know how long he’s been on the beach. He’s not sunburnt, thanks to his yellow and red lycra stinger suit. He’s not particularly thirsty either. The only sign that time has passed is the collection of identical sandcastles lined up in evenly spaced rows fanning back from the shore – each moulded into the turreted shape of his plastic beach bucket.
He often stays on the beach while his big sister Sasha swims in the bay. Rumi is a reliable boy, who is never tempted to follow her in no matter how hot it gets. He isn’t much of a swimmer anyway, preferring to spend his beach time with a bucket and spade. When the tide goes out it will leave his creations pale and brittle in the sun, and by the following morning they will be gone – no trace of them amongst the stingray holes and fragments of chalky bleached coral.
Rumi doesn’t notice Mumma on the beach until she is standing over him. She bends down and places a hand on each of his shoulders, her face very close to his; sunglasses pushed up onto her head. Her eyes are red and watery and she smells smoky, sweet, like the stubby cigarettes she and Chad were sharing earlier, when Sasha slung Rumi’s bucket into her snorkelling bag.
‘C’mon,’ she’d said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
Rumi had followed her down the short path from their flat to the beach. He doesn’t mind Chad, but he’s noticed the way he never takes his eyes off Sasha when Mumma isn’t in the room – like he wants to say something. Sasha never looks at him.
Mumma’s voice is loud as she questions Rumi over and over. Other adults on the beach come closer when they realise something is wrong. Where did Sasha go? In the water. How long ago? Rumi doesn’t know. Sasha loves to snorkel the bay at low tide, when the rock walls drop into clear, deep water and you can go way out. She has told Rumi about following stingrays and reef sharks, spying on cod in their caves, and coming face to face with green turtles. The tide was about halfway out when she went in, and is almost at its lowest now. Rumi’s front row of sandcastles is well clear of the water’s edge.
People arrive in cars and boats. It gets dark and lights are brought out, their beams crossing the water. Scuba divers wade into the deep, carrying their tanks. A tiny, curved sliver of moon rises dimly behind the clouds and when it begins to rain, a police lady brings Rumi and Mumma a crunchy silver blanket each. Later, somebody gives him a sandwich – dry bread and mashed-up boiled egg. He takes a mouthful and throws the rest onto the sand.
Mumma won’t leave the beach after the divers call it a night. She sits hunched on a rock at the water’s edge, and all Rumi can see of her is the orange tip of a cigarette floating up and down in the darkness. Chad takes his hand and leads him back to the flat.
‘Bed, mate,’ is all he says.
Later, in the double bed he usually shares with Sasha, Rumi hears the front door open and the sound of Mumma’s voice swelling in the next room.
Early in the morning Chad carries Rumi out to his ute and they take the first car ferry over to Townsville, where Nan and Pop are waiting with pale, crumpled faces and more questions.
Each time the phone rings Pop snatches it from its cradle and walks out the back. Rumi hears fragments of conversation as Pop works through the grim possibilities: a crocodile from the mainland? a shark? a box jellyfish?
Rumi stays at Nan and Pop’s place for the rest of the school holidays. When he gets back to the island, nobody is looking for Sasha anymore. Nobody mentions Sasha being missing, but it’s obvious they’re thinking about it. His teacher takes him aside on the first day and tells him to just say if he needs anything. At the supermarket one afternoon, a lady he’s never seen before pulls a handful of notes from her purse and pays Mumma’s bill.
‘I’m so sorry, love.’
Weeks, then months go by. Chad stops coming round to their little flat above the bay. Mumma’s hands shake when she tries to roll her smokes and eventually she gives up. When the school bus drops Rumi at his stop each afternoon he goes home via the beach, where he usually finds her sitting on the sand or ankle deep in the water, shading her eyes against the sun with her forearm. One night, she announces they are going to stay with Nan and Pop for a while so she can go to uni.
Mumma takes most of their stuff to the tip shop but keeps some of Sasha’s clothes to wear – the cutoff shorts and tight tees, the chunky Docs with silver buckles, a straw hat with just the right number of loose strands. She is thinner now, her legs straight up and down, and her hair looks like the dead pine spindles that litter the grassy area above the beach. Pop jokes that she looks about sixteen from behind and that the boys at uni will get a shock when she turns around.
Every Sunday for the years they live in Townsville, Pop takes Rumi on the passenger ferry to the island for Nippers. He learns to enjoy the feeling of putting his head under, of using his arms to pull himself through the water, of working with the currents and tides. On calm days they often stay to snorkel around the rocks. At the fishing shop Rumi buys a plastic-coated guide to the fish species around the island and copies out a list to tick off. When he sees a fish that isn’t on the list, he makes a note describing it, with an accompanying drawing.
Rumi often thinks of Sasha while snorkelling in the bay. His memories of her are fading, but it feels like her disappearance has shaped everything that has happened since. He and Pop have trawled every rock and bommie here. They’ve mapped the ocean floor at every tide and have found no sign of her. If she’s not here, Rumi thinks, she’s not anywhere. Unlike Mumma, he doesn’t look for his big sister on buses or in cinemas or in the background of crowds on TV.
He is in high school by the time he and Mumma move back to the island. The now-derelict block of flats over the bay is protected by a cyclone fence, its cement steps collapsing into the creek, but they find a townhouse nearby. Mumma is a teacher at the primary school and Rumi takes the ferry over to Townsville on weekdays to go to school with the Catholics. When Pop comes over on the weekends, they walk to whichever bay is calmest. Rumi still has his lists and drawings, and he adds an underwater camera, downloading images of interesting marine creatures onto a laptop for his final-year major work.
Marine biology is an obvious pathway, and he finds himself drawn to the task of geo-mapping the slow drift of marine stingers to the south as the warming waters extend their habitat. He finds a highly venomous subspecies and commences a PhD, moving back to Townsville to be closer to campus. He meets Maree, a fellow researcher who has moved up from Hobart and is exactly halfway between Mumma’s age and his. He spends his free time in her lab, climbing in and out of a pool at various temperatures and testing the ability of different types of fabric to withstand the stingers’ tentacles.
Maree reminds him of a dolphin. Her body is rounded and smooth, resilient and rubbery to the touch. She surges into rooms, filling them with her bluster and stories, and Rumi loves to flow in behind her, adding details and being the first to laugh. Alone together in his bed, she tells him other things: her father wanted a son but got three daughters; a man whose baby she almost had was married to someone else; she once let a jellyfish tentacle touch her bare skin just to see how it felt. When Maree’s rented apartment on The Strand is turned into an Airbnb a few weeks before her PhD thesis is due, she moves in with Rumi and a year later, Tilly is born.
Rumi pauses his studies and takes a job as a safety officer for a dive company, while Maree, with her newly minted doctorate, finds part-time work tutoring disinterested under- graduates. She seems happy enough for the first two semesters, but over the long and humid summer break she cries almost as much as Tilly. In their bed at night she tells Rumi how she longs for doona weather, her family and decent conversation. When he wakes in the early mornings he hears her quiet sobbing, but she won’t let him hold her.
The three of them spend a lot of time over on the island with Mumma. Tilly loves the beach, but she is very different from Rumi as a toddler (thank God, he hears Mumma say to Maree one day). She likes nothing more than to plunge her tiny hands into the sandcastles Rumi turns out for her, grabbing fistfuls until they collapse. She won’t wear a hat and cries when wet sand chafes her legs inside her lycra suit. Leaving her unattended on the beach is unthinkable. It takes Maree’s and Mumma’s full attention to keep her safe.
Rumi doesn’t know how he comes to be so far out in the bay the morning after he puts Maree and Tilly on the plane to Hobart. It’s a loose arrangement and Rumi is careful not to say anything he’ll regret. Maybe they’ll come back, but Maree has a job lined up, and her mum can’t wait to take on the childcare. Maybe they’ll invite him to join them when his studies are finished.
The tide is on the ebb when he arrives on the beach, and a small lagoon has formed on the northern end of the bay. Rumi heads to the southern side and makes his way out along the rock wall. He’s seen many changes over the years – the bleaching of the bommies, algal growth and cyclone damage – but there are still vibrant green patches of branch coral clinging to the rocks like bonsai trees, harbouring ecosystems of tiny fish. He passes schools of parrot fish, garfish and butterflyfish feeding on the rocks. Out of habit he looks for the tiny bells of Irukandji jellyfish, even though the season has finished.
As he rounds the end of the rock wall he sees a large flatback turtle pass beneath him like a shadow and for a time he follows, aware of nothing but the hollow sound of his own breathing and the graceful creature suspended in the water ahead of him. Eventually the turtle surfaces for air, then picks up speed and is gone.
Rumi strokes out into the middle of the bay where the water is too deep to see the bottom, pushes up his mask and rolls onto his back. The tide is almost at its lowest but he feels it gently pulling him further out into the ocean. He wonders how close he is to the shipping lane that traverses the space between the island and the mainland. The bay is a fine golden crescent in the distance, and he can barely make out the shapes of people from here.
He thinks about Sasha. At what point had she last looked back and seen her little brother bent over his sandcastles on the beach? Would it have made any difference if he had once looked up, if he had scanned the horizon for the tip of a snorkel or the flash of a mask, if he had waded into the shallows and waved at her to come back? Had Sasha fought to return to him, or had she surrendered to the ocean? Did she know that day, when she had reached the point of no return?
These are not new questions. They have been circling in Rumi’s mind like a shoal of sharks for as long as he can remember and he has learned to leave them be. He rights his mask, tests his snorkel, flips onto his front and begins gently stroking against the tide. His body feels strong and relaxed and full of potential. When the ripples in the bay’s sandy floor ease into view, he glances up and thinks he can just make out a figure on the beach – Mumma ankle deep in the water, shading her eyes with her forearm. ▼
Image: 白士 李
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This story won the Olga Masters Short Story Award in 2022. The Olga Masters Short Story Award is administered by SouthEastArts in partnership with the South Coast Writers Centre and is supported by the Masters family.olgamastersshortstoryaward.com