Two childhood friends reunite by fate.
Enjoy…
**************
It was August and I was nine years old.
I was down near the water, digging sand and shaping it as I needed it. I was content, in my element, my only concern the critically important engineering job I’d undertaken.
A shadow fell over me.
“Hello!” said a breathy little voice.
I blew my dark curls out of my eyes with a frustrated puff and squinted up at the newcomer.
She smiled shyly down at me, hands clasped behind her, twisting slightly from side to side as she waited for my answer.
“Hello,” I responded. I smiled, despite myself.
“What are you doing?”
I looked down at my construction site.
“I’m building a castle,” I explained. “For the fish.”
“Oh,” she said. She contemplated that morsel for a bit as I dug in the sand with my bright green spade.
“Can I help?” she asked me.
“But I’ve only got one spade.”
“I’ve got a spade and a bucket. I’ll go get them!”
She dashed off, pale blonde ponytail flapping behind her. I watched her for a moment, then went back to my construction. I was digging a hole, but it kept filling with water. So frustrating! But maybe the fish would enjoy it…
“I’m back!” she announced, and she dropped to her knees next to me, clutching her neon pink shovel and matching bucket. “See?”
She grinned at me, and just like that we were friends.
“We need to build a wall,” I told her. “To keep the bad fish out. And this water.”
“I’ll do it!”
She started digging.
“Gonna build a wall, build a wall,” she sang softly.
“Gonna build a wall,” I joined in.
She laughed.
And that was how we spent our first day together, on that sandy beach alongside the warm, friendly blue expanse of water that I would only later learn was the Aegean.
Charlotte – that was her name, though she insisted on Charley – became my partner in crime for the next five days.
We’d find one another first thing at the breakfast buffet and breathlessly discuss our plans to repair and extend our growing fortress.
And for those all-too-brief five days I had the best friend ever, the twin sister I’d never known I was missing until she’d barged into my life.
She was there to say goodbye as my family boarded our bus to the airport; she hugged me and pushed a folded piece of paper into my hand.
“Bye Ari!” she said.
“Bye Charley!” I answered.
“Come on Ari,” my daddy said. “Time to go. Wave goodbye to your friend now.”
So I did.
And once I was on the bus, I unfolded the paper, and looked at the drawing of two girls holding hands in front of curling blue waves with a bright yellow sun overhead.
It was very nice, and I decided to draw one for her when I got home.
.:.
It was August and I was ten, busy with my thoughts and blithely ignoring my parents’ desperate entreaties that I do something – anything – other than build sandcastles all day.
I stood on the beach; slightly taller and a bit more tanned than the year before. I tucked my dark curls back behind my ear as I squinted at the footprints that marred the flat plain that I planned to fortify.
Then I took my spade and dragged it through the sand, laying out the schematic for this year’s opus.
( I was different even back then – fascinated by castles rather than princesses, by cataphracts rather than ponies, and more likely to spend a day buried in Lego than even one minute with a doll. )
I started my bailey. Bailey, I repeated the word, remembering the BBC Bitesize video I’d watched the night before about a type of early fortification that I’d really rather liked.
A bit of my encircling wall fell down.
I glared at it, and sighed in frustration. I carried some wetter sand from nearer the gently-rippling waves and moulded it into the gap, then glared at my repairs with intense suspicion, waiting for them to fail.
A shadow fell over me.
I looked up.
A thin blonde girl smiled down at me from under her pink sun-hat.
“Hello Ari!”
I grinned, elated to see her again.
“Hello Charley!”
“What are we building? A fortress?”
“Yup. I’ve drawn the plans. Look!”
“Oh, it’s enormous! Awesome. I’ll find a spade!”
And for the next five perfect days I had my twin again.
.:.
It was August, and I was eleven.
The small waves of the wide bay curled in and out, endlessly counting out the passing seconds.
The sun was hot overhead; I pushed the straw hat I’d stolen from Mummy’s bag back on my head to better shade my shoulders. I blew out a breath to kick some vexing curls of hair away from my mouth, and scratched at my hip where the fabric of my swimsuit was irritating me.
The moat was proving harder this year. I was stronger, so I could dig deeper, and as a result I kept hitting small pebbles along the way. I was pulling each one out, stacking them up to use as lining for my keep’s walls, grumbling to myself, when a shadow fell over me.
I looked up, shielded my eyes with my hand.
“Hello, Ari,” she said softly.
I smiled.
“Hello, Charley.” I answered. “I’m glad you’re here this year. Are you here to help?”
“For a bit,” she answered. She knelt down by me, and I grinned at the neon unicorn cap she was wearing. “I’m going sailing in a little bit though.”
“Oh. That sounds… nice…”
“Meh,” she said, sticking out her tongue. “I’d far rather stay here with you, but we didn’t know you were here. So my mum decided to book things for me. I was on my way down when I saw you and came to say hi.”
“Oh well. I’m sure you’ll have fun,” I smiled. “Come on, then, lets get building while you’re free!”
She slotted in next to me and we started working like we’d never stopped.
I saw her intermittently at first over the next few days, but what time she could beg or steal she’d spend with me. And for once I put aside my single-minded pursuit of the perfect sandcastle so that I could swim with her, and play ping-pong with her, and honestly just spend time with her, because I loved the sound of her voice so much that I didn’t want us to be apart for even one unnecessary second.
She smiled shyly at me when I boarded the bus to leave, then her grin burst forth like sunrise.
“Take care, Ari. See you next year!”
And I smiled and waved.
.:.
It was August and I was twelve.
I roamed the beach, the pool, the games arcade and all the various hidden nooks and crannies that she and I had found and catalogued for later chaos.
But I didn’t find her that year.
All the colour leached out of the world, leaving everything a little greyer and sadder and less enticing, and as I sat on the bus to the airport at the end of the endless, horrid, awful, lonely week away, I cried silently but no less bitterly for the silence.
“I’m sorry, Ari, love,” my dad said to me as he gently rubbed my back and tried as best he could to comfort me. “I know it hurts. I guess they went somewhere else this year.”
I turned my face to the window,
and watched the world glide by,
and grieved.
.:.
It was August and I was fifteen.
I’d discovered windsurfing two years before, and now no longer deigned to spend my entire week at the resort up to my elbows in the sand when the wind and sun whispered their siren song to me.
I was on my knees – fighting a dogged but doomed battle with my rented board’s outhaul – when a shadow fell over me.
I paused for a moment, breathed slowly in and out, then carried on working, parking the bitter heartbreak of my childhood twin’s shade for later, for when I had time and privacy to face it and the tears it could still bring…
“Ariadne?” said a soft, hesitant voice.
I froze.
“Ari… is that you?”
I turned slowly, heart hammering, squinting upwards into the glare…
“Charley?” I breathed, far too scared to hope.
“It is you! Hey!” she said, and grinned like sunrise. “Oh my goodness, Ari, you look so different to how I remember you. It’s just… it was your hair that gave me the clue.”
I stood, shook the sand off my hands and stepped closer to her.
I took her hands in mine and looked her up and down.
She smiled artlessly up at me.
“You look the same,” I said as joy’s incandescence roared through me. “Just… well, more grown up, but the same. What are you doing here?”
She gestured vaguely towards a small scarlet and white dinghy that was beached on the sand nearby. “I’m finally back. Here, I mean. And as for today… I was… I was going to tack and go back out, but… but I saw you and I thought that it might just be you, so I beached the Laser and came… well… to see.”
“Where have you been?” I scolded her. “I looked for you every year. I’d just finally made peace with you being gone…”
Her smile faded.
“I know. I guessed you would. Dad changed jobs and it was… well, it was hard for him to take leave. And then… well… stuff happened. But… I begged and begged and eventually we were able to come back here. I always loved it here,” she said. “It’s always been my favourite place.”
“It’s mine too.”
“Are you going out or coming in?” she asked me, as she tucked her glory of sun-bleached blonde hair back out of her warm brown eyes and pulled her cap down to lock everything in place.
“I was about to go out if I can sort this… this bloody sail out. Whoever last used it really didn’t have a clue, they’ve tied such terrible knots. I can’t get them loose. I’m not strong enough.”
“Can I help?”
“Yes, please!”
So she squatted down in the sand beside me, and between the two of us we finally managed to get the knots undone and corrected.
I spent the rest of the day chasing her back and forward through the gentle rolling waves.
And for the next five days I had my partner back as we swam, ate, laughed, joked, talked until late at night, and in many ways behaved like girls several years younger than we actually were.
She hugged me so hard that I squeaked when it was time for me to board the bus, and pushed a piece of paper with some numbers scrawled across it into my hand.
“Our phone number at home. Call me sometime… please? And see you next year… I hope,” she said.
I smiled at her. “I hope so too,” I answered her. “Take care, Charley!”
“You too! Love you!”
But a strange gloom dropped down over me as I rode the bus back to the airport.
And that evening, at home, I realised I’d lost the priceless piece of paper that contained my only way to reach her.
I cried more on than off for weeks.