Phosphorescence Read Online Free PDF Page A

marshes with his two older brothers, John and poor lost James. It makes me sad to see them gathering dust, unplayed with in the box, so I always get them out when I am at Grandma’s.
    I have developed a ritual with the toys. I separate them into the groups I think suit the three brothers or what I know of them. In Dad’s lot, for example, I put all the animals: the lead donkey with the carrot in its mouth, the cattle and the sea lion with its bucket of fish. Of course, there aren’t many wild sea birds in a children’s farmyard collection, but there are a few trees and the odd tiny painting, on scraps of crumpled paper, of a garden or a field. I add all these things, and I like to think you could get a sense of Dad and his connection with nature, when you look at the toys I give him. In James’s pile I sort all the little boats and their fishing nets, the miniature lighthouse and the tiny toy ice-cream van. Anything with a connection to the sea, because all I know about him is that he loved being on the water, and even that is more something I know in my head, because no one ever talks about him to me. I feel sad when I think of James, so any random black toys tend to go in his pile, like the plastic alien that appeared in the box one day, and the model Batman figure. Dad got the Bart Simpson model that came out of a cereal packet, and I gave John the McDonald’s plastic car. When James died, John, the oldest of the three, wasnineteen, and the tragedy made him closed and silent. He would not go on the sea again, no matter how Jack shouted and blustered and tried to persuade him to help with the boats. John moved away when he left school, to landlocked Germany, and began working in electronics. So his toys must be the cars and tractors, the engines and wheels and dynamos in the wooden box. I line them all up, and then, because I don’t know what else to do, and I am not interested in them at all, I make myself play with them and I vroom them around the room until Grandma finds me for tea and says, ‘Aren’t you a bit old for those toys now?’ But I like them because they give me a secret entrance into the past.
    My Uncle John rarely comes back to Staitheley. Sometimes he sends me gadgets, and I struggle to see what they are for. But if I ask Dad, he gazes at them, baffled, and smiles wryly before saying, ‘I think we’ll take this to Jack. He knows how things work.’
    Every time I go over to Salt Head with Jack he shows me something I haven’t seen before or tells me something new. You would think he would run out of things, but an island is always changing, and he has such a knack for finding curious things washed up by the tide that I used to sometimes think he’d come along for a rehearsal before bringing me.
    Once we found a wooden chessboard under a twist of rope at the very end of the northernmost beach; another time after terrible electric storms and high seas for weeks, we found a wedding dress, or the ragged remains of one. I shiver slightly with this memory. It is so vivid it could have been yesterday,but it was four years ago. It was a summer afternoon, and Jack and I had taken Cactus for a walk at the northern tip of the island. The tide was coming in, and we had taken my little red boat with its outboard motor.
    â€˜Let’s go up and see what the storms have done round the end of the island. We’ll wave to your father. I know he went over there this afternoon.’
    We chugged up the inside channel past the marshes, with Jack showing me nests abandoned by the oystercatchers because of the unusually high water. Leaning out with the binoculars, I was exclaiming over a nest, ‘Oh, it’s got eggs in. She must be going back. Look, Jack.’
    I turned round when he didn’t answer, and his face was blank white and he was staring at something in the water.
    â€˜What is it? Tell me? Let me see.’
    Jack tried to stand between me and the