A Drop in the Ocean. Jenni Ogden
spilled out of me once I got going. I went to bed and slept fitfully, waking every hour, hot and vaguely disturbed by something I had been dreaming about but which was now gone. I got up and opened my laptop and reread what I’d written:
I remember my first friend at school when I was five. She was pretty and called Julia. We stayed friends until I was taken away from that school when I was eight. I must have had other friends back then, but can’t remember anyone in particular. Other than Julia, my best friend was my father. He was always fun, and on the weekends, when he was home, he’d take me somewhere new in London. We’d go on buses and the underground and he’d treat me just like a real person. Looking back, I’m not sure if he behaved like a kid or if I behaved like an adult—perhaps it was somewhere in between—but the important part was that we loved doing things together and being together. Sometimes Mum came with us, and that was okay, although she never quite got it—our silliness. But she tried to enjoy herself. Even when I was little I think I could sense her embarrassment when Dad tried to kiss her in public. “Stop acting the goat,” she would tell him, pulling away.
Dad was a freelance journalist, and that’s why he spent a lot of time away from home. We lived in a smallish townhouse with an even smaller garden in Chelsea, but it was a nice house and a nice area. When Dad was home he walked me to school every morning and Mum picked me up and walked me home every afternoon. I wanted a little sister like Julia had, but when I asked Mum why she didn’t have another baby she went quiet and turned away. Dad jumped in and swung me up in the air and told me that I was all they wanted; our life was perfect without more kids. I didn’t ask again but I often wished I wasn’t the only one. Even a brother would have been better than nothing.
When I was eight everything changed. Back then I didn’t realize that the happiest days of my life were already over. Dad moved out. He and Mum told me one Saturday night after Dad and I had spent the afternoon at the Science Museum. It was cold and wet, so that was about all there was to do. Mum was trying not to cry and Dad was sad. I screamed at them and stamped my foot and ran out of the kitchen and locked myself in my bedroom. Next morning, when I finally came out, Dad had gone. Mum and I had to move to a tiny flat over a greengrocer’s shop in a horrible street in a horrible, scary part of London. The street smelled and was always filthy. I had to go to a different school where nobody liked me. They all had their little groups of friends and they weren’t letting me in. Not that I wanted to be friends with any of them. They were rude and scruffy and laughed at my voice and my clothes. They called me toffy-face. I told Dad when he came to take me out for the day, and he said it was because they didn’t know any better. They thought I was posh, and that made them uncomfortable. He told me to just keep being friendly and in a while they would see I wasn’t really any different from them. But he was wrong and they never liked me.
I went out on the deck and looked up at the starry sky. Through the trees I could see the lagoon, as still as a swimming pool. The moon was rising late tonight, and I watched as it peeked above the horizon, then soared into the heavens, perfectly round. Back in the cabin, I made a cup of tea and sat down at my computer again. Better that than lying in my hot bunk feeling sorry for myself.
Once a week in the summer term our whole class would get the bus to the public swimming baths and have swimming lessons. Dad had already taught me to swim because that was one of his favorite things. He loved scuba diving and he always said he’d take me away when I was older to a tropical beach where I could learn to snorkel and see the amazing world beneath the ocean. So I was quite excited about going to the swimming baths and thought that the other kids might like me better when they saw I could swim.
How wrong I was. First we all had to swim across the pool one at a time so the swimming instructor could see what level we were at. Most of the kids couldn’t swim at all and just walked or floated holding on to a board. I did freestyle and then the instructor asked me if I could do other strokes so I went across the pool again doing breast-stroke, then again doing backstroke. After that, the instructor said we could all play together in the shallow end for ten minutes before we had a lesson, and he went off to the other end of the baths for a smoke with our teacher. As soon as he had gone, two of the biggest boys jumped on me and pushed me under and held me there. I was sure I was going to drown. When they let me up I was coughing and spluttering and crying and I could hear all the kids laughing, and they pushed me under again. But I came straight up because the teacher had heard them and was shouting at them from the side. The instructor hauled me out and I scraped my knee on the side. Then the teacher told me to go and get dressed, and when I came out I had to sit and watch while the other kids had their lesson. That night I couldn’t go to sleep and I was crying and Mum came in and asked me what was wrong. When I told her she gave me a quick hug but then said I just had to toughen up now that I was nearly nine. She said that if I acted like I was scared they would just bully me more. So I decided there and then never to cry in front of anyone ever again. And I never have. But I never made a single friend at that school.
When I was eleven, I passed the eleven-plus exam and went to grammar school. That was better because the girls there were more like me, and I got on all right with a couple of them. I didn’t very often do much with them outside school hours, though, partly because I had to get the bus home and it was an hour’s drive. Mum said I could invite someone home for tea and to stay overnight, but I never did. I think I was a bit ashamed of our flat and the smelly street. Once I went to a party at one of the girls’ homes and stayed the night—it was a pajama party—and her house was about three times the size of the house we used to live in.
Mum didn’t seem to have any friends either. She worked in a bookshop a couple of streets over from our flat and all she did apart from that was read. So Dad was still my best friend. I saw him about once a month, when he was in London, and he would take me out for the day on a Saturday or Sunday. But best of all was in my summer school holidays when Dad and I would go away together for a whole month. When I was nine he took me to Greece, where we sailed around the islands on a boat with friends of his. He had a girlfriend who was nice to me but she didn’t last. When I was ten we went to Egypt, just the two of us, and stayed in an apartment on the Red Sea. That’s where I first went snorkeling. It was beyond words and made up for all the bad things I had ever experienced. When I was eleven we went to the Bahamas and stayed in different places where Dad and his new girlfriend could scuba dive and I could snorkel. That’s where I had my first scuba diving lesson. The next year it was Belize. Dad had the same girlfriend this time. We went to a little island and as soon as we got there Dad said he’d go and check out the diving first and we could all go together the next day after we’d had a good sleep. But we didn’t and I’ve never been in the ocean since.
When I finished banging away it was a bit after four in the morning. I closed My Life, pulled on my shorts and a T-shirt, and went down to the beach. The moon was now high in the sky and the sea well over the reef. It was unbearably beautiful. I sat on the sand and a few tears squeezed out of my eyes. I wiped them away and licked one off the side of my hand. The salty taste made me smile, and more tears welled up and slid down my cheeks. I hadn’t cried, even when alone, since I was in my twenties, and it felt wonderful in a strange sort of way. Then I saw a dark shape pop out of the sea, only a short stone’s throw from where I was sitting. I could see her bright eye in the moonlight and then her head disappeared and I stayed still and quiet. Up her head popped again, and this time her great shell followed. I hardly dared breathe as she hauled herself on to the sand and then lolloped on her great flippers up the gentle incline of the beach. Every four or five lollops she would stop, her eyelids closing over her big eyes, and then she would start again. I felt exhausted just watching her. Exhausted but exhilarated at the same time.
As she passed me I could have reached out and touched her, she was so close. A little farther on after another long rest she made it to where the trees began. After a few experimental flips of her long front flippers in the dry sand, she began digging, using her flippers to shoot the sand away from her, gradually making a saucer in the sand, and then a pit. When it was so deep she’d almost disappeared, she began to use her right back flipper as an elongated scoop, delicately inserting it into the deepest part of the pit and extracting the damp sand that lay below the drier sand on the surface. I had crept up to her