A Day Out In Margate

Mattie picked up the giant shell. At four years old, it took all the strength of both her hands. Carefully, she walked across the aged tiled floor with the honey colored conch to her grandmother's bed. Dotti lay there dozing peacefully, warmed by the early spring sunshine. After laying the shell onto the pillow beside Dotti, Mattie clambered up and lay beside her. Gently, she leant one tiny ear against the open lip of the Conch to listen to the swirl and rush of waves upon the shore. Reaching out an arm and draping it over the dozing Dotti, Mattie slipped into the dream. 

‘There you are, lovely girl! called Dotti, smiling and waving at Mattie across the sand. The bright dancing blue of the sea behind her, was broken by the high rolls of white surf. Towering waves rushed in from the ocean toward the outer banks, their excess flipping over the rocks and into the bay before gently lapping onto the sand at Dottie's feet. The sun beat down hot and hard, the sand gritty and shifting under Mattie until she reached the shoreline where it firmed and cooled her little toes. Scooping Mattie up into her arms Dotti dipped her in and out, out and into the water, round and around they went; a merry-go-round, of the human kind. 

A shimmer of tiny silvered fish caught her eye and Mattie jumped out of Dottie's arms chasing them along, before tripping and splashing full length into the shallows as she lost the race. Eyes wide open under the water, Mattie blew bubbles back at the last of the silver jennies that had turned back from the crowd to swim almost to her nose, turning Mattie almost cross-eyed for a moment as she focused on him. Dottie's strong arms lifted her up out of the water, back up into the sunshine. 

‘My word, Mattie, you are having adventures with the underworld under my very nose,’ she laughed. ‘Come on, it must be time for a treat by now, do you think?’ Dusty white sand clung almost to their knees as they almost danced their way along the beach toward the little track leading back toward home. 

The ice cream stand at the entrance to Sunnyvale, served beautiful peaks of chilled soft strawberry ice-cream on chocolate-dipped cones, their favourite.

 ‘Did I ever tell you about Margate darling?’ asked Dottie. Mattie shook her head with a smile, ‘not today Grandma, tell me the story, tell me the story!’ she laughed, hop skipping along licking her ice cream. 

‘Well. It was a beautiful day. The air was light and bright, I could run and run so fast, so far, without all the sweatiness of late summer in KZN, you know how that is child? Mattie nodded and wiped her hand in pretence of cleaning a sweated brow. 

‘Before college, I would get up in the dark, put on my running shoes and run from Zimbali to Balito for a warm up, before catching the bus into Durban, I was training you know as’

‘As a nurse Grandma’ Mattie beamed.

‘Yes . Yes, as a nurse, but really I just wanted to run faster and further everyday.’

‘Like running away?’ Mattie interrupted with a worried look up to Dottie.

‘No child, no, it was like I just wanted to speed up the world, as if the faster I ran, the more life I could live, and enjoy, I was running to life, not away from it.’

‘And then you won! 

‘Yes, yes I did and what did I win?

‘You won Grandpa!’

‘Well not quite sweetpea, not straight away. When I won the college athletics trophy, then I captained the team that went to the Hibiscus Coast regionals, that's when I went for a day out competing in sand sports in Margate.’

‘And that is when you won Grandpa!’

‘Ummn, I like to think Grandpa won me!’ Dottie laughed and carried on with her story..

‘It was such a wonderful day, the sea beating its heart on the sand, my whole self feeling alive and happy. I ran as fast as a flea after blood, I jumped further than a sharp nosed grass frog, and higher than a monkey from a snake. I just kept winning and it felt so good! Mattie, it was like a buzz of frizzy electricity inside me. Then I turned away from the crowds to stand on the podium and collect my winners cup and along came, our Olympic champion for the prize giving.’ 

‘Grandpa!’

‘Yes, yes, it was Grandpa, John.’ Dotti smiled. ‘And well, really I think then that I knew what I’d been running toward my life long. It was when he looked deeply into my eyes and I let him in, to know me in that swirling way that we began. Then, as I looked down into his as he shook my hand, I felt at home with hope and happiness. All of course in an instant, and in front of crowds of cheering people.’ Dottie shook her head wiping an escaping tear from her eye. ‘ So we carried on celebrating until the partying settled down and took a walk that evening on the beach at Margate. The conch shell was left for us on the sand by the falling waves and we sat down on the soft sands and listened to the lives inside it. He gave me the shell, and said with it,  I could always be with him, just by listening, that he would know, and well, it worked! She laughed. ‘Although, it was a while before he started showing up in Zimbali for morning training. And then, when he did, we ran and ran together through the days and races of our lives. Here we are darling, in we go.’ Dotti swung open the garden gate, ‘Go find Mama now sweetpea.’

 Mattie ran up the kitchen steps turning at the top to see Dottie and Grandpa going down the path way to the wicket fence. Just as they left, they turned to wave to Mattie, who raised her hand in surprise. She hadn't seen Grandpa in a while now, since before last Christmas she thought watching them walking back down the lane they had just travelled, smiling, laughing, becoming distant, like a gradually fading memory.

‘Mama’ she muttered, as her mother gently wakened her and helped her quietly from Grandma's bed to her own.

The conch shell was placed upon Dottie's coffin during the procession not more than a week or so later. Mattie begged her mother to bring the shell home. Each evening as she settled to sleep she listened to its rolling waves and wisps of dreams. 

Its next real outing, several years later, involved another day out in Margate, for the under sevens beach athletics tournament. As captain of the Zimbali junior athletics team, Mattie demanded her parents bring the shell along to every match, especially away days. Like her grandma, Mattie needed to move to be comfortable in her world. Hours of sitting in classrooms and focussing on the drone of rote teaching were only manageable after running zig zags to school and arm swings along the lengths of climbing frames. In any case, she could already read and wondered why they needed to keep being told things when they could just read books about it all anyway. Teachers soon learned that Mattie was the fastest to complete an errand, or a set task, or a test paper. Some teachers found her exhausting and banished her,moving her on.  Others found Mattie exhilarating, and cherished her, helping her direct her intellect and energies, and enjoyed the reflected energy of her successes, yet felt the pain of her failures. ‘Not all races entered, are always won,’ her mother told her, ‘at least not at the finish line Mattie. Sometimes the winning is the learning, the improving.’ 

The evening before they were due to leave for Margate, Mattie lifted the shell to her ears as she lay in her bed, as she normally did. And as her eyelids fluttered, she  heard Dottie's voice as clear as day over the crashing waves, ‘Keep running toward life Sweetpea, feel the Ocean beat and the sands heat, you are the stars, like Grandpa and me, you are our pride’  

‘and joy Grandma, and joy.’ whispered Mattie.

As Mattie stood on the winners podium later that afternoon on the sands of Margate beach, a thousand hibiscus flower petals dropped from the spinning party drone above the winning teams heads. Last year's victorious captain of the under sevens KZN regionals for beach athletics reached up to Mattie to hand her the winners cup. As Mattie looked down into his smiling face, she knew she had come home to where she was meant to be right now. That electric fizz of completion, of winning, welled up inside her making sparks fly, even as her heart and the sea rolled as one and her smile reached the stars.