The Sand Dog

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The dog was sitting outside the post office and watched with interest as I tucked the passport form inside my shorts and under my T-shirt.

‘I’ve got to be with Grandfather, nobody else knows me like he does,’ I said to him.

I didn’t go to the lost-property office, though. I thought I might hang on to the passport in case it helped me to answer any questions on the form.

As I was going along the road I heard someone shout, ‘Oi! Aqua boy!’

I turned to see Chris coming up the street with Dimi.

They came and stood by me. Chris was carrying his basketball. I was expecting them to ask me to play again, but they didn’t this time.

‘What are you doing?’ Chris asked, bouncing his ball.

Dimi rolled his eyes, obviously knowing what my answer would be.

Grandfather and I had both liked it when nobody was there at the cove with us, and there was nothing but the sand and the sea. It had been a long time since anybody had been there with me.

‘Do you want to see a turtle nest?’ I said.

Chris said no first of all, but Dimi nudged him and said, ‘Yeah, we might.’

‘Show us,’ Chris said.

We roamed along the shoreline where tourists speckled the sand with sunhats and towels, sunbeds and umbrellas, some paddling in the sea, their voices babbling in the distance. I told Chris and Dimi they wouldn’t be able to see any turtles yet but I could show them the nest and we could keep watch over the summer. But all they wanted to do was push and shove, kicking at the sand, slamming the ball at each other’s back. I saw the dog nearby, walking along stiffly, his head down.

‘The nest is in the cove over the other side of the rocks,’ I said, pointing in the direction of where the turtle had been. ‘I’ve put a fence round it so nobody touches it. By the end of August the eggs will hatch.’

Chris and Dimi looked over to where I pointed but they were not interested any more and just ran off in the opposite direction when they saw some of the other boys over by the jet-ski school, laughing and shouting back at me, ‘Forget it, turtle boy.’

I sighed. Who needed them anyway? The dog came over and sat down beside me at the cove. I didn’t know why he kept following me around.

‘You still lost your owner?’ I said. ‘Or maybe you want to come swimming with me instead.’

Grandfather was never fearful about me in the water so I had never felt like I should be afraid, not even of the deep-sea monsters that he’d told tall tales about. All the stories of the battles between sea monsters and men were won in the end.

‘What’s out there?’ I’d said, looking out to where the sea seemed endless.

‘Nothing you need to be afraid of,’ he’d say. ‘There are no monsters that we can’t overcome.’

As I thought about his words I waded out until the soft, cool water became my skin. It felt as if I disappeared when I dived under the surface; everything became a silent world of blue, including me. When I came up again the dog had waded into the sea after me. I showed the dog how not to be afraid of the water, staying near him, watching him, putting a hand under his belly when his feet left the ground. He was a natural. He made long doggy-paddle strokes, his nose up high, his body level in the water, graceful and calm, his stiffness all eased out. He seemed to like it too. As the dog circled me, I floated on my back with my arms out, held up by the water like driftwood, going wherever the sea took me. Before long, it pushed me back to the same shore.

The girl’s passport wasn’t much help in filling out the form. I wrote my name, address at Uncle’s (I started to write Grandfather’s but Mrs Halimeda would have something to say about that), and date of birth. I wrote in pencil first, trying to make my letters a bit slanted but neat, like an adult, before going over it slowly with a pen. Some of the questions were long and needed boxes ticking. At the end, there was a list of things I needed to send with it once it was signed, including a birth certificate and two photos.

People had told me for as long as I could remember that I didn’t belong on the island but when I had asked Grandfather why he had just teased me that it was because I had come from the sea. You were born in the breaking waves, Azi, like a mermaid child. He’d put his hand round the back of my head, pull me towards him and push the hair away to look behind my ears for gills. He’d beckon me to put my leg up on his knee, slipping off my flip-flop and rubbing the dust away.

‘What are you looking for, Grandfather?’ I’d say.

‘Roots!’ he would chuckle, and then laugh and laugh, feeling between my toes, then holding all my toes in his hand and peering at the bottom of my foot.

‘Have I got roots, Grandfather?’

‘Yes, Azi, yes!’ he’d say, and I would crook up my knee and look at the dirt on the bottom, saying I couldn’t see any.

‘Roots are not on the sole, they’re in your soul,’ he’d tell me. He took the harsh words said by other people and made them vanish like salt dissolved in the sea because of what he thought of me.

That night, I was up in the flat while the restaurant was full, bubbling over with tourists, and Uncle seared and sizzled in the kitchen. I practised Uncle’s signature over and over in pencil, rubbing it out if it didn’t look right, trying again and again. All the rubbing made a rough place on the passport form, but eventually I thought it looked good enough.

I went through all the drawers and cupboards, and found the folder with all of our important documents, but there wasn’t a birth certificate for me. Did Grandfather have it?

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EARLY IN THE MORNING, before the sun had come up and while all the cool shadows were still merged into one, I left the restaurant with my pocket money and the girl’s passport. The photo booth was outside the post office. I adjusted the stool, spinning round and round until it was the right height, straightened my T-shirt and pushed the hair away from my eyes, ready to take a picture. I went to put a coin in but it dropped out of the slot and rolled out of the booth. When I bent down and reached under the curtain for it I felt the dog’s wet nose on my hand.

‘You! What are you doing here?’ I said, but I felt pleased to see him again. His tail wagged and swished the curtain.

I picked up the coin and pushed it into the slot. The first of the four photographs flashed and the time on the screen counted down until it was ready for the next. The dog had come into the booth, as if he was wondering what was going on. He stood up on his hind legs as it flashed a second time. I think it scared him a bit because he jumped up on to my lap. I tried to push him out of the way but the camera flashed again and again.

‘No, dog, no!’ I said as he licked my face. ‘You don’t need a passport!’

The pictures developed and dropped out of the slot. The first one was okay, but the second had the top of the dog’s head at the bottom corner. They would have to do, though. The other two photos were a jumble of my hair and the dog’s hair, and me making funny faces because of the dog’s wet tongue. They were nice; I liked them and they made me smile. I’d keep those two for myself.

‘Lost-property office next,’ I said. ‘You coming, dog?’

The office was closed when we got there so the dog and I watched the fishing boats coming in instead, inspecting the smells and sights of the baskets and trays that the fishermen unloaded. Spider crabs and lobsters reached out to pinch at the dog’s nose and long fur; scales of fish flashed with light in the sun. I asked the dog which fish he might like for his dinner because that was what Grandfather used to ask me.

Eventually the lost-property office opened and I went in.

‘I found a passport,’ I said, sliding it across the counter. ‘It’s from a girl called Beth Saunders, aged twelve.’

‘That belongs to me!’ a voice called out from behind me.

Beth Saunders was about my height, with short brown hair, and she threw herself at the desk, clasping the passport in both hands. ‘I didn’t want to tell my parents I’d lost it. I’ve been coming in every five minutes hoping somebody would hand it in.’

I knew how the girl felt. It was just how I was when I went to the post office again and again. The lost-property man rolled his eyes at her, muttering that now, at last, she might stop bothering him.

Beth asked my name and thanked me for finding her passport but as I went to leave she said, ‘There’s a dog outside, does it belong to you, Azi?’

‘No,’ I said. I wasn’t really interested in talking to tourists who took snapshots of their holiday and collected short-lived souvenirs.

But as I walked away the dog came to my side, following me as usual. Beth ran and caught up with me.

‘Are you sure he’s not yours, because he looks as if he belongs to you.’

I smiled at that and bent down to ruffle the dog’s hair. ‘He’s been following me around for a few days,’ I said. ‘But he isn’t actually mine.’

‘Then he’s lost and needs to go home,’ Beth said.

I looked at the dog. There were lots of strays on the island and I hadn’t really thought about the dog like that. Beth’s words reminded me of Grandfather and how much I missed him and our home. It hurt me inside and I wasn’t expecting it. I needed to feel close to the place I belonged.

‘I have to go,’ I said, running off towards Grandfather’s cottage.

Since yesterday I’d been wondering about a lot of new things. For the last two years the only question I’d had was when was Grandfather coming back. Now Uncle had said he wasn’t, I wanted to see what was going on at the cottage.

Grandfather’s cottage was at the end of a narrow road over the other side of the village from Uncle’s restaurant. It was where I had grown up. I knew that I hadn’t been born in the cottage but that Grandfather had raised me there because my parents had died.

The bench was still outside the cottage by the window where Grandfather used to sit in his cap with his walking stick, indigo tattoo on his bare hairy arm: an anchor coiled with the tentacles of a sea monster. When I was little I used to brush at the hairs of his arm, smoothing them down to see the picture clearly; he’d say, ‘It’s the two sides of being a man of the sea, Azi. The anchor for feeling steady while the battle with the monster rages.’

Two cottages had been pulled down next to Grandfather’s, not long ago, and two were deserted, decaying on the other side. His cottage had walls thick with white paint, which I had always helped him redo every other year. His blue front door was the same bright colour as the scales of paint left on the one I’d found on the sea. After I’d found the passport, I’d started to think about that door. The second sign must be to do with the cottage. Maybe this was where I’d find my birth certificate. That was the last thing that I needed to get a passport, find Grandfather and make him come home.

A small patch of concrete with crazy-shaped cemented stones, painted white round the edges, lay under the sandy dust at the front of the cottage. A pot with dried weeds was by the door and a key still underneath. I hadn’t been in there since Grandfather had left because Uncle had said I wasn’t allowed to, but now I let myself in and the dog came too.

I remembered the days when I’d find Grandfather asleep in his chair in the gloom at the back of the room, head rolled forward over his chest, several days’ growth of silver stubble speckling his slack mouth, his shawl slipped to the floor and an empty glass held loosely in his hands. I looked around at the thinness of the life we’d left behind in the cottage. The walls grim with a crust of paint, the swirls of dust on the tiled floor, the gas bottle and rubber tube to the cooker, the space underneath the wooden staircase where I used to sleep. A bright corner of light poured down the stairs from the window in the bedroom and had been my morning alarm clock.