She never understood the cognitive dissonance humans held for warmth, comfort, oozing cosiness which came from a storm hounding brick and mortar, pounding outside, the brutality of nature a pane away. Lia felt the storm viscerally. A tightness, nagging pain spread across her chest.
Her home overlooked the bay. The blue house on the hill.
Lia worried for her rock. Her arch lifting itself above the sea, ever-present. A constant reminder for Lia of the beauty of nature, born from thousands upon thousands of years of constant erosion. Water was savage in its creation. Never ceasing, it tirelessly eroded the headland, never stopping to contemplate its design.
Narrower and narrower, the headland split. Her natural arch formed from granite intrusions.
The rock was resistant to change, Lia knew. By minuscule increments, the waves carved the landscape. But the rock stood steadfast for centuries and centuries more until it didn’t. Lia sat in the booth by the bay window. She could see the house next door’s HOLIDAY LET sign tousling with the wind. The storm hid from her view the hills opposite, shrouded by menace.
The arch is reticent. Yet, powerfully defiant in the face of the sea’s destruction.
Lia knew much about her home’s coastline. How the rugged cliffs were granite strong, how their beauty came from their strength. How her natural arch had formed by wave action causing it to protrude out from the headland on which she lived. Intricate. Beautifully formed.
Perfect. Always in sight. Where she lived. Where she had always lived.
It persevered.
Lia was going to stay.
Steadfast rock. The violence coursed through the sea, its’ destructive nature untameable. She needed a break from this view. Smoked haddock for dinner, she thought. A brisk tea cupped in her hands. Letters strewn on the dining table. Bills. Solicitor updates. Bills. Estate agents brusque in their demands for her home. Bills. The house dim to save on the electric. Creaking oak floors, she’s careful not to slip on in her woolly socks. Lia would eat sat at the window, bent over the coffee table. Another meal for one.
The cliffs around her home seemed not to have moved in her lifetime. Not easily eroded, but it was happening imperceptibly.
A phone full of messages unwanted sat next to her as she ate.
“A bungalow.” “In town.” “Near us!”
“No, you can’t see the coast. But it’s nice.”
“You’ll get to see us more often! You won’t be lonely anymore in that big house.”
Lia’s daughter and her grandchildren were tourists in the village they had all been born in. They couldn’t afford to move back. Lia’s neighbours began to drift out of the village. Slowly. Then with a tidal force strong enough that Lia in her blue house was adrift in a sea of second homes and holiday lets. The arch remained. Lia stayed put. When her friends sold up and moved to bigger towns. When her daughter left for her career, and took the grandchildren with her. When her husband was laid off and couldn’t go on. Lia and her arch were immovable.
They wanted her to find solid rock, yet here she was, water all around her, but Lia, she was safe.
The pain in her chest had resurfaced as she faced out towards the sea from her window. Billowing waves. Swooping toward the air as if they could escape what they were. Then sinking low, lower, embarrassed by their endeavour. Such waves could almost catch the clouds full of rain and make them one with their vastness.
The arch stood grey and gnarled, bristling at the sea. It would not move.
The waves broke all around the arch. Stark grey framed by sparks of harsh white. Again. Then again. Again. Like a heartbeat, pulsing. It made Lia grimace. Palpitations gripped her. The storm had been unrelenting, and the sun was about to set. She had seen a storm like this a few years before and was scared for her arch then, as she sat watching from her bedroom in the blue house.
Had the rock stood steadfast that day in the face of such brutality?
It will today.
Lia would not leave her window until the sun set when all she could hear were the crashing of the waves, almost monotonous, if they didn’t have the capacity for awful destructiveness. She needed a whiskey to settle her nerves, to help her to sleep. The cabinet hadn’t been opened since Terry left, and Lia felt like a teenager breaking into their parents’ alcohol stash.
She dreamt boldly, in saturated colour. Of swimming in March and September ocean water which seized your calves and chattered your teeth. Terry’s refusal to go in and Lia, leading him by the hand, telling him not to be such a wimp. His resigned look and then yells and exclamations as he ran straight into the water. Collecting crabs and sea specimens with tiny biologists, all grabbing hands and shrieking in delight. Geology talks with Terry as they walked along the coast, battered by wind but determined as ever. All of them, together.
And it was suddenly morning. Lia opened the bedroom curtains. What she saw made her dash outside in pyjamas, slippers, and robe. She stopped near the edge of the headland. She didn’t want to remember the last morning like this. She looked down at the sea.
Now her arch was a single pillar of rock protruding from the waves just off the shore. A short stack of granite, the bones of the arch tumbled by its side.
The sea had taken her arch.
A shuddering intake of breath caught her out. The loss felt painful, gutting, brutally visceral. Not again. Not another fall. Lia felt ill, winded. She couldn’t catch her breath, as if the storm had taken it, as it evaporated into the aether. The tide was high, and the waves below moved quickly, like a metronome that was slightly off.
Her arch. Her home. Her arch. Her life. Her arch. Her family. Her arch. Her Terry.
Terry had broken on this headland. It was a slow erosion, but suddenly, all at once, he fractured and broke. His storm was short and violent, and Lia was too afraid to see what was coming.
They both fell. Terry and her arch.
She sat on the dew damp grass and waited. Waited for the dark feeling to pass. Waited for the gut punch to ease. Waited until she could think again without weeping.
Lia took her phone from the pocket of her robe and dialled. A cheerful voice answered, Kirsten, her daughter.
“Mum! It’s so good to hear from you! Were you OK in that storm?”
“I’m fine, Kirsten. About that bungalow, do you think we could arrange a visit?”
Lia looked down again, now at the pillar, perilously slanted. But the rock stood steadfast, day after day, year after year until it couldn’t.