Dimity knew many other paths up from the beach; she didn’t need to use the main one where they might wait, if they were bored enough. She realized, as she reached the finer gravel, that she’d left her shoes behind. One on the rock, one in the pool with a cargo of shells. She would have to go back for them later; and she did, once Valentina had snapped at her for losing them and given her a stinging slap that Dimity thought disproportionate. But she’d forgotten how close to the shore she’d been when she’d taken them off, and the rising tide had swept them away. She scanned the surface of the sea for long minutes, in case she would see them floating nearby. They would not be replaced, she guessed, at least not for a while, even though her mother had found the money for a new lipstick and stockings that week. And she was right, and lucky that the weather set fair and dry. But she picked up a gorse thorn in her left heel. It refused to come out and she limped for a week, until Valentina pinned her down, heated the spot with steam from the kettle, and squeezed, ignoring Dimity’s howls, until the thorn rode out on a jet of yellow filth.
School was a kind of slow torture. It was a forty-minute walk to the drafty buildings in the next village, and there she sat at the back and tried to pay attention when all the while she was glanced at and whispered about, and notes were flung at her with crude drawings and insults scrawled on them. Even the poorest children, even the ones whose fathers were always drunk or beat their mothers or had lost their jobs and slept all day under the hedgerows, like Danny Shaw’s did, even they looked down on Dimity Hatcher. When the teacher caught them at it, she told them off, and ostensibly encouraged Dimity during lessons, but Dimity always saw the look on her face, pinched and faintly disgusted, as if teaching Dimity was above and beyond the call of duty and almost more than she could bear.
When it was time to go home Dimity was always torn between wanting to get away quickly and not wanting to walk with the others behind her, back along the lane to Blacknowle. Mocking her all the way, throwing names, throwing things, laughing. Sometimes she hid until they had all set off, then walked alone at the back, careful to keep one curve in the road between them. She wasn’t scared of them, exactly, more tired. Every bit as unwilling to interact with them as they were with her. Don’t touch that! Dimity’s touched it! It’s got her fleas now! Every insult, every name they hurled was like a dart that would strike, and stay stuck in her skin, hard to brush off. She would try not to feel as she walked behind them, careful never to let them see her cry. They were like a pack of hounds in that way, driven wild by any sign of weakness. She heard their chatter, drifting back to her on the breeze, heard their games and their jokes and wondered what it might be like to be a part of it all, just for one day, just for a short while. Just to see how different it would feel.
Sometimes Wilf walked with her. Wilf Coulson, a skinny runt of a lad, born late to the grinning Marty Coulson and his beleaguered wife, Lana, who, at forty-four years of age and the mother of eight, had thought her travails were over when Wilf was conceived. He had a permanently runny nose and a crusted left nostril. Dimity offered him rosemary oil on a handkerchief to clear it, but he always shook his head, said his mother told him not to take things from her.
“Why not? Your dad comes to see us, sometimes. So your ma can’t mind us so much,” she said one time. Wilf shrugged his skinny shoulders.
“She don’t like it, though. Ma says we’re not to talk about you, even.”
“That’s stupid. And it’s perfectly safe. I made it myself, from our bushes in the backyard.”
“Don’t go calling my ma stupid. It’s got something to do with you not having a dad, I think,” said Wilf. It was November, the fields all sludgy and plowed. They slipped and skidded along a track that cut between great loops in the lane, the pale gray mud caking their shoes, making them walk wide-legged, inelegantly. The sky was the same color as the mud, that day.
“I have got a dad, only he’s lost at sea,” said Dimity. This was what Valentina had told her, when she’d asked enough times to be wary of the woman lashing out. She’d been sitting on the front step, gazing out at the horizon. Smoking, squinting. Will you give it a bloody rest? He’s gone, that’s all you need to know! Lost at sea, for all I care.
“Was he a sailor then?” said Wilf.
“I don’t know. I suppose so. Or a fisherman maybe. So he’s only lost; he’ll come back one day and then he’ll pick up Maggie and Mary Crane by their collars and shake them like a pair of rats!” For the rest of the day she sang “Bobby Shaftoe” in her head, humming it softly. Bobby Shaftoe’s gone to sea… It was some years before she realized that lost at sea meant dead, meant not coming back.
One stormy day, while the wind tore the water into high, angry waves, she stood and watched them hammer ashore, picturing all the drowned sailors and fishermen, from the beginning of time, swirling down into the depths like autumn leaves in an eddying breeze. Their bones ground up, turned into sand. The coast where she lived was a treacherous one, and wrecks abounded. The year before, she’d gone on the bus with Wilf and his brothers to see the carcass of the Madeleine Tristan, a three-masted schooner that had blown into Chesil Cove. It sat lopsidedly on the beach, surrounded by tourists and locals alike. Dimity and Wilf, along with all the other children, climbed the loose rigging to peer onto the deck and play at pirates. It was the best playground they’d ever had, and they went back again and again until rats took it over, infesting it with their bustling bodies and whiplike tails. Just along the beach from the Madeleine Tristan sat the massive, flaking iron boilers of another ship, the Preveza. Wrecks upon wrecks; layers of lost ships, lost lives.
Realizing that her father would never knock at the door of The Watch, take her side, or shake the Crane twins like rats made Dimity sad for a long time. And when Ma Coulson found out that her boys had taken Dimity Hatcher along with them to the wreck of the Madeleine Tristan, she stood by with her arms folded while Marty took his belt to each one of their backsides. From her hiding place in the blackcurrant bushes, Dimity heard the crack of leather on skin and heard the lads whimper and yelp. She chewed on her lip until it bled, but didn’t leave until the last beating had been given.
When Dimity was twelve, Valentina said she wasn’t going to go to school anymore; that it was a waste of time and she was needed at home. Dimity was surprised to find that she missed it. She even missed the other children, whom she mostly hated. Missed seeing their new pencils and clothes, missed hearing their stories. Missed walking back with Wilf. She didn’t feel she was missing any learning, though. What use was maths and knowing where Africa was? What use was being shown how to bake a pie by a horse-faced woman whose bosoms rested on the waistband of her skirt when she’d been baking them since she was old enough to stand on a stool and reach the countertop? The things Valentina taught her were more important. All the other children were staying on till they were fourteen at the least. That was the law, but nobody said anything when Dimity left. Dimity thought the headmaster might come knocking at The Watch and demand she go back; but he didn’t. She looked out for him for a few days, but not very many.