Echoes

This is part of a larger work..........

When I was a little girl, a tiny little girl, I developed my first real phobia.

It wasn’t the usual kind of fear – like spiders or confined spaces or anything like that. My fear was something totally different - something most people wouldn’t even blink at.

We had been searching for shells deep inside a cave at Aberdour beach when I first discovered it. She was with me that day, my mum, holding on to my hand as I dragged her over the slippery rocks beneath our feet. She hadn’t wanted to visit the caves but I insisted – I was too small to go in alone and because I was so determined, she eventually gave in.

The cave was dark and damp and its jagged edges glinted like giant teeth but I wasn’t scared, not at first. I was just mesmerised by the promise of discovery I felt certain lay inside and scrambled on ahead with mum trailing behind me.

We were about half way in to the cave when I felt her gently coaxing me back towards the beach but I wasn’t ready – not yet and besides I had her then, all to myself, right there beside me where I wanted her to be. We spent most of our days cooped up together in a tiny little flat; mum asleep on the settee while I watched television. I wasn’t going to give up on this day of adventure to easily.

I bent low, examining pools with my fingers and feet and picking up bits of stone and sand to look for treasures. The shallow puddles of water were just the right temperature and I loved the idea that each one of them contained tiny underwater villages full of all sorts of incredible little creatures.

I was just about to reach for a perfect white shell which was sparkling in a water pool in front of me when my foot nudged against a large upturned crab, its creamy belly wrinkled and exposed, razor sharp pincers at the ready.

I jerked my foot away causing mum to overbalance and she grabbed a hold of my shoulder to steady herself.“Come on!” she said, “Let’s go.” And then it happened. I stared in horror as the words she had spoken bounded against the walls of the cave, crashing into each other like waves.

She must have seen the panic in my eyes and mistaken it for a fear of the crab because she carried on speaking all around me. ‘It’s dead, it’s dead, it’s dead, it’s dead,’ she said. “Look, look, look, look, look.”

But I didn’t look. I couldn’t. I opened my mouth and screamed into the darkness, long, deep screams of perplexed terror. The screams rushed back at me juggling in the air, before fading away slowly into nothingness.

The effect it had was monstrous and I whispered to her for help, reaching up to try to grab her hand.

But she had already turned back and I cried even louder, screams battering backwards and forwards against my ears.“Wait for me,” I rasped, panic making me hoarse. “Mummy please, please wait for me.” I scrambled towards her but I scraped my feet on the rocks, falling, crawling, desperate to get free of the noises.

I glanced over my shoulder to see who was shouting back at me and it made stumble even more and graze my knees. “Stop it, stop it, stop it, stop, it,” she shouted, angry with me now, the noise affecting her as much as me. “Stop that stupid crying, or I’m going to take you home right away, away, away.”

She grabbed me by the arm and hauled me out into the open. I was tear-stained and shocked, knees bloodied and red from where I had grazed them.

I shook for ages afterwards wrapped up in a towel on the sand as I tried to keep the tears from spilling out again.

I glanced back at the cave where our voices had multiplied and I couldn’t help but wonder whether or not they were still bounding around in there even though we had gone. Mum had no time for such nonsense, she just sighed, her face locked up tight for the rest of the trip. I can still see her now, rocking backwards and forwards with her arms wrapped around her knees as if it was her instead of me who had suffered the trauma. She didn’t like me that day, I felt it so strongly and it made me weep even harder into my towel.

It was just an echo, of course, in the cave. I know that now. The sound of my mother’s voice reflecting back to us. But back then, in the days when knotted trees had faces and monsters lay under the bed, I thought an echo was an evil little creature, which gobbled up your words, and spat them back at you.

It was years before I understood that they were harmless.