The Squid

Jo Castle

The first time the floods came, they hit Mum’s homemade soap workshop, and we were all horribly clean for months. I grew to hate the smell of verbena.

The second time, I was at school. It was a dark Thursday afternoon, and we had double Physics. Something about radiation was on the board, and me and Jim Reed were interlocked in a furious battle royale of tic-tac-toe. I’m certain he cheated. When I voiced my outrage, Mr Redmond stepped forward to admonish me-and then frowned. There was a delicate splish at his foot, and his frown lines communicated in Morse code his regret at forgetting his wellies that day.

Our area was flat and near-ish the sea, so we were naturally vulnerable to floods, or something. However, two in a month was previously unheardof. It was a big inconvenience for everybody really. But life goes on. After the second, we all assumed the tides were done with their generosity, and continued as usual.

The third flood came when I was walking along the beach.

I’m no villain, no miscreant teenager who likes to desecrate public places with graffiti and litter and such. I wasn’t on the beach for a bit of old-fashioned rebellion, just a stretch of the legs. I had a couple of shells in my pocket, and sand in my shoes. Soon I had a small pond in both. I saw the sea once roll and tickle my soles, and I’d assumed I’d meandered over to the shore unwittingly. Then it was at my waist.

Our beach was no gorgeous desktop-wallpaper lagoon; the salty slew of silt rolled over and swamped me before I got the common sense to run. Some seaweed fluttered past my face like an ugly, foul-smelling butterfly. It occurred to me I was choking, and the water had swarmed into every sort of oxygen port I had, as well as my ears. It played a wobbly, thrashing soundtrack, my struggling arms cymbal crashes and the pounding of my feet trying to find floor a feeble bassline.

Even if the flood sirens sounded above, I couldn’t have heard them. I dreamed up help - perhaps passers-by had watched my head vanish under the rolling wave and flung out a rope, desperately crying out- “Sir!” or, perhaps, “Oliver!”, if they were people I knew. I saw no rope. I couldn’t really see anything.

I felt the shells drift out of my pockets, fleeing for home. Good on them.

I waited a couple of seconds for the wave to recede, and had no such luck. It had claimed me, like Grandma did when I came over and her skinny arms became my prison, one with the faint vapour of White Diamonds by Elizabeth Taylor- a Christmas present we all regretted. There was nothing I wanted more right now than that dowdy floral smell, the soft fleece of her jumper; as it happened, I was being swallowed by a giant wave, and wasn’t feeling so good.

I hadn’t wanted to die like this- freezing cold, my last vision a muddy watercolour wash of grey-teal-brown. My last words would be “sorry”, for that guy on the promenade I’d nearly bumped straight into. God, how pathetic. What had he done to deserve my mouth’s final movements? All that hassle when I was young, learning how to say words- for what? “Sorry”, and then “excuse me, mate”.

The darkness built up on me. I took up fatalism. The darkening shade of the seawater was the approach of the tunnel to the next life. I hoped it didn’t matter if I hadn’t been able to complete my GCSEs when I tried to get in.

It was gladdening, during my final moments, that I got to witness something a bit more exciting. A big thing crawled into the corner of my eye- or was it my brain? Well, it didn’t crawl so much as float. It floated along, propelled by the flapping of two great fins like the beating wings of an exotic bird. It wasn’t a bird, though, either. It had a long body, starred with all sorts of great colours and glowing dots, and two eyes the size of basketballs. Not to mention a number of tentacles.

Funny, isn’t it? I swear you can’t get giant squids on the Southwold coast.

He scrolled into the frame of the scene, not emoting- well, maybe, I don’t study squid psychology-and I noticed his arms floundering in my direction. “Hello, Mr. Squid!” I would have called out, if my mouth wasn’t engaged. “Awful lot of water, this, isn’t it? Funny, really, maybe a bit ironic. Neither of us should really be here!”

I didn’t need to. He had already noticed me- I was faced with both of his eyes, folded-over ‘w’s. He looked quite judgemental of me- my face probably wasn’t very photogenic, eyes streaming, mouth elliptical, and my hair swishing as per the demands of the water. I probably didn’t look like a gourmet meal. At least if I was going to die, I would gave a bit of nourishment to an endangered creature. Even if I was the equivalent of an abandoned roadside takeaway.

He swam further and further away- I followed. Getting eaten would be simpler.

Things would have been easier if the squid stayed to eat me. I didn’t want to look desperate, chasing after a predator just so it could kill me before the seawater sloshing down my throat could.

I slammed into a rock before either got the chance. The rock, the rock- it was the size of me. A cold, impenetrable middle finger directed at the currents. It took a couple of seconds to realise. I was in a video game- hold the rock to survive! I reached forward, clinging to its stony mass, and the squid fluttered away from my vision; evidently this was just too boring for him.

“Oliver!” A sharp cry permeated my head like an alarm clock. “Oliver!” I woke up to the sight of Southwold-well, a large portion of it, anyway- crowded around an interesting piece of public sculpture: me, slumped against the stone walls in my sodden coat and school uniform. No shells in my pockets. Just silt.

Mum was at the front, along with some men in high-visibility jackets. They all gazed in at me, as though through a fisheye lens; as though I was the catfish in the aquarium which usually hid under the rocks, and to the uninitiated, didn’t actually seem to be there. Was I in heaven? I noticed Mr Redmond among the gaggle and decided I wasn’t.

“He’s alive,” noted one of the fluorescent men gruffly. “God knows how.”

“The squid!” The words fell out of my mouth.

“Oh, darling,” my mother wailed, her face a steady cascade of tears and mucus. “Oh, Oliver, we thought you’d drowned.” She was in her apron- the insistent punch of verbena found my nostrils, and stirred me out of my hypnopompic state by brute-force. Still making soap even on rough days.

“The squid!” I repeated, in case they hadn’t heard me. “The squid! It must have saved my life.”

Nobody acknowledged this, except for Mrs Wetherspoon’s toddler who started crying. What, like he’d nearly died too? Narcissistic jerk. Wasn’t all about him.

The fluorescent men congregated to write some things down and mutter in serious tones. The flat brass-band tones of ambulance sirens powered through in the distance, and soon some matching neon vehicles drew up. Paramedics. “Listen, guys, I’m fine.” Nothing I could have said would have mattered to

them. They were really insistent on lifting me up. “The squid saved me. I’m great. I don’t have to go to the hospital.”

“Phone Jenny Walker,” a fluorescent man uttered to a less active fluorescent man. “There’s the possibility he might be suffering paranoid delusion. He might need to be referred to the trauma unit.”

Despite my cries, they took me away. My stretcher was long and flat, like a buffet platter, and uncomfortable. The insides of the ambulance were greyteal-brown.