Member-only story
Sea Glass and Salty Secrets
Emma’s new home is next to a very strange beach
We were told those tales before I was old enough to really know what they meant.
‘There’s creatures under that sand.’
We’d imagine mermaids in caves beneath us, wrapped in seaweed cloaks with crowns made of pearls and sapphires.
‘If you stay too long on the sand, they’ll catch you and drag you down,’ and we imagined their soft fingers, like tentacles, catching our ankles, and the rough drag of the sand over our skin.
My parents bought the little cottage in the bay when I was 4 and Becky was 7.
‘You’ll love it, Emma,’ my mother had said, wrapping plates in pages of The Times and popping them in old tea chest. ‘Just think, every day by the sea.’
I dimly remember saying goodbye to our old bedroom, with its high ceilings which the ghosts moved across when the car headlights whizzed past on the busy street outside, and promising my friend Bella that we’d be back to visit, but most of the rest of those memories are gone.
The new house, № 6, The Lane, has superseded them all. Gone were the huge windows, the airy rooms. In the cottage my father could lift his hands up and touch the ceiling without standing on tip toes. He grumbled when he banged his…
