Read Sliver Moon Bay: The Looking for Free Online Page A

new
home.
    From the outside, the house is
not much. A barn in the woods. Painted green, with a low sloping
gable roof and a stone porch. It has a chimney. So that’s
something. Lilian’s looking like she’d rather not be here but I’m
keeping an open mind. You never know, do you?
    We go inside. Inside’s rigged
up like somebody’s houseboat. It’s dark and there’s scarred,
chipped wood everywhere making up the floor, the walls, the
furniture. The windows are small and have shutters. The ceiling is
low, with exposed beams. The place feels claustrophobic. But. The
living room has a fireplace. Full of soot so it probably works. The
kitchen’s tiny, with a tiny window and a door facing the back yard.
Somewhere behind those trees is the beach, Lilian tells me, trying
to put a positive spin on this. Poor Lil’. Starting over, once
again. And in a place like this. So I get into the spirit of the
thing. It’s gonna be great here, Mum, I tell her. She nods, looking
like she’s going to cry. Ah, well, you can only try your best,
can’t you?
    We go see the three pokey
bedrooms together. I get to pick one and I chose the room opposite
Starling’s. It’s been our little nest, separated from Lilian and
Chris’s by the kitchen and the bathroom on the one side and the
living room on the other. There are twenty elephants between us so
if we’re quiet, they won’t hear a thing. Course, I will be able to
hear them cause they’re always loud, doing stuff in their bedroom,
and arguing and talking, sometimes, like normal people do.
    We went to the kitchen to
regroup. Chris made a pot of tea and we sat around the kitchen
table drinking it out of these brand new mugs that we found in the
cupboard, and Lilian began to thaw when she saw that everything she
could possibly want in a house was already there and the kitchen
had a new fridge and a new oven and even a set of brand new pans
hanging off the range. She told Chris that he’d come good on his
promise and the two of them kissed in front of me like they were
still on their honeymoon. Course, they’d been married for a long
time so you would think this sort of behaviour was past them but
no. These two, when they were in the mood, could be embarrassing.
So anyway, after they were done kissing we all went outside through
the kitchen, to see the back yard, this patch of ground cleared of
bushes and with no good grass, but I loved it straightaway cause
behind the clearing everything looked pretty wild and definitely
untamed, and you could hear the ocean quite clearly from our back
steps. Even Lilian got excited, hearing the waves crashing below
us. Of course, we were all set to go see the beach when Starling
cut her knee crawling about on twigs and had a fit, and Lilian and
Chris got busy with the situation. Ah, just as well.
    I set out on my own, down the
narrow path, along the bushes, under the trees, counting. Two
hundred elephants get me to the cliff hanging over Sliver Moon Bay.
Underneath, the beach is lovely, curved like a sliver moon hemmed
in by steep sand dunes at either end. It’s quiet here. There’s
nobody around, just crabs and birds, and things floating about, in
the grey, which shimmers like silk in the sunshine. Beyond the
dunes, the ocean goes on forever. The beach smells good. It’s a
glorious morning.
    I stood there watching the
ocean, thinking it would always be that colour, but the truth is
the ocean changes colours all the time, like a kaleidoscope. I
know; I stood in that same spot every day for many years, and every
day the ocean was different. But it always smelled the same.
    I went down the dune to the
beach and walked the length of it in the wet sand. The birds didn’t
seem to mind me. They went about their own business, without a care
in the world. I sat down and watched them. Eventually it started to
rain and I knew I had to get back to the house cause Lilian would
worry about me getting a cold. The first climb up the dune was hard
work. There’s