Birds || Fuenciado

Chapter 16: I'll Be Home For Christmas

When sand dunes have been around for a while, they start growing plants like marram grass. Marram grass is dry and tall and its leaves are rolled to stop it dying.

Then after the marram grass starts growing further across the sand dunes, shorter crops of grass and mosses start growing on them, more so the further back you get from the sea. The mobile sand dunes gain more and more sand from the sweeping of the water and on top of them grows greenery. The greenery causes some other plants to grow - plants like hawkweed or spurge, and then, when rabbits start burrowing into the soft sand, they crop the shrubbery so low it forms a tight turf. More flowers crop up - pyramidal orchids, evening primroses, common centauries start to appear - some toxic plants too, like ragwort. The massive variety of plant life brings voles and mice and small mammals, which attract, in turn, birds. Birds that hunt small mammals such as Kestrels and Skylarks nest nearby.

Of course, when the dunes have been growing for long enough, it reaches the final stage of its succession, where conifer trees emerge and dominate the earthy, now nutrient rich sand. But the sand dunes upon which Jaime and I sit on a couple of picnic blankets to protect from the pointy crop of grass have not reached that stage and will not for a long time - for now, they remain spotted with the pretty pink, pastel centauries that match the colour of Jaime's scarf, and the occasional colonies of hawkweed that polkadot the dunes with yellow, and the orchids that splash purple amongst them and the tough, waxy spurge growing slightly taller than the neat, cropped turf - spurge is too tough for rabbits to eat. We're sitting on the grey dunes; if the yellow dunes were still around then we wouldn't be able to see the beach at all because they are generally taller, but on this beach the embryo dunes, foredunes and yellow dunes have been built over by concrete walkways and then steps that lead down to the sand.

I lean back a little and squeeze one eye shut, looking through my left eye at the way I can frame the ocean and the beach between my feet that way, almost using my battered black and white converse as picture frames. As I place my hands on the dune to balance myself as I stretch out my legs, I can feel the slightly prickly turf underneath my fingers, and beneath it the dry, soft, gently shifting, soil filled sand.

On the beach below, Mike and Tony play on the soft sand, occasionally having to divert their course of movement to avoid slipping on the clay. They move slowly down the beach towards the ocean, tossing a tennis ball between them - Mike attempts more than once to be super cool and catch the ball with his arm behind his back, or throw it with a spin. On each occasion, he just ends up either failing to catch the ball or tossing it in a totally different direction to what he intended. It's amusing to watch, but I can only find it amusing for a short while before I start getting a slightly sick feeling in my stomach.

"How's Mike?" Jaime asks, voice penetrating the gentle, sea-filled quiet. I tilt my head as I watch him and Tony playing down below.

"I don't think I know," I say softly.

Mike came home from school two days ago, on Thursday, the day before finishing for Christmas holidays, and he was not smiling. He stayed silent all evening, appearing downstairs only for dinner, the only words to come out of his mouth being; "when will Mom get home?" And then he vanished again. I tried to talk to him, but I had no response, so, naturally, I'm worried once more. My brother ceasing to be happy is like the whining of a dog when the sky turns grey and threatening, and the birds fall silent - it's the precursor of a storm.

By Friday he was trying - smiling when spoken to, trying to put on that facade of happiness; but in the moments nobody spoke to him, his happiness vanished instantaneously. He pottered round the kitchen, made a few slices of toast and a cup of coffee - he only finished three quarters of the toast and got halfway down his cup. I was dressed in my work uniform and ready to head out; but I didn't. I drove him to school instead, partly to cheer him up, partly in an attempt to discover the root of whatever problem was going down; but before I could ask him a thing he'd slipped a Green Day CD into the CD slot and had turned it up even louder than normal; he said he was just in the mood for loud music. What was really happening was that he wanted to prevent me asking the questions he knew I would.