In a bottle

She was walking along the shoreline under a pallid sun gathering cockles and butterfly shells when the first pangs of birth began. She took her underbelly and doubled up with pain but could not avoid paying attention to a bright brownish cockle that lied in the sand next to her right feet. When the pain subsided, she crouched down carefully holding her protruding abdomen with one hand so with the other she could get the precious treasure.
The cockle was huge and quiet extraordinary. It looked like a Giant Pacific one, a “Trachycardium quadragenarium, family: Cardiidae, identified by Conrad in 1837”, a smile touched the corner of her mouth thinking how much her father would have enjoyed her discovery.
Immediately, her father’s collection of found bottles appeared in her mind; most of them had been collected by sailing vessels or gathered along the coastline in faraway places or close to home. There were pop bottles, wine bottles, medicine bottles, coloured glass bottles, green and white glass bottles, unmarked bottles and numbered bottles _belonging to some science project_, bottles with cork and with plastic caps, worn bottles and bottles that looked brand new, empty bottles and bottles with messages.
She was particularly fond of one, small and rather disconcerting-looking, with a short and simple message in a plain sheet torn from a notebook: “Dearest Rhonda, I love you. Louis, 1941”. It wasn’t signed but he had added his address in Larkhall, Scotland. Her father told her it could have belonged to a WWII soldier based on a training camp probably in Loch Ewe who sent a last, hopeful message to her lover before embarking in a mission.
She had always tried to imagine the man writing to her beloved at candlelight, desperate for seeing her, afraid of what was coming ahead for him. She could also see in her mind's eye the girl of his dreams, lovely, ethereal Rhonda, waiting for Louis’s mail in her cottage by the sea _much like hers these days_, looking at the road, trying to figure out when the postman would arrive. But she would avoid thinking about Rhonda’s disappointment when there was no mail. Her father had not wanted her to mull over anything, she wanted her bright and lively, ready to run along the coast or have a quick swim in the sea.
Her father had delusions of being an oceanographer, but he had barely completed secondary school when he was sent to work with his uncle at the port. Whenever he had a moment, he studied the currents of the North Sea and later when he had read many books on the subject and asked most of the fishermen in the village innumerable questions, he could tell the difference between the tides and currents and could foretell their whimsical behaviour. The fishermen asked him about the capricious sea that behaved like a woman, so they said, before they set sail into the menacing horizon.
Gathering seashells, inspecting sea anemones in the rocky shore, learning the name of fishes or cockles had been her father’s legacy to her. Her childhood was made of those memories, her nostrils filled with the sea air and her feet remembered the echo of the sand in her toes. She cherished those moments now more than ever as she slowly walked back home and the pain in her belly became deeper and more frequent.
She looked at the grassy cliff and the rocks that ended up in the sea, defying the majestic mass of dark blue water that crashed up their surface. She knew she would not change this place for any other and she remembered how difficult it had been to adapt to the big town and the rhythm of campus when she left town to go to University. The city was overwhelming and though she knew rationally that the place was almost perfect (with regal buildings with trimmed lawns and out-of-this-world gardens), she would dream of the windy shore, the rivulets and harsh rock pools and the sea gulls crying of her coastal homeland.
She majored in English literature as quickly as she could and returned to her hometown, meaning to earn her living teaching poetry to the local school children who would never understand iambic pentameters.
Life was not easy at her arrival: the cottage by the sea, the one that had been a safe haven in her mind when things were difficult and unaccommodating in her lonely dorm at college, had become a dilapidated mess. Little by little her father had followed the house’s steps and had become a decrepit old man regardless of his age; his mind was muddled with a mass of cobwebs instead of ideas.
Her job was just enough to make ends meets and buy his father’s abundant medicine but not to restore the old sea house. She hated seeing the walls deteriorating in front of her eyes and the roof falling in pieces at her feet. There was not much she could do and the little time she had after school she spent it taking care of her father who had become her child.
The child in her belly was now announcing its coming to life with force and she reached the cottage with a last breath. She opened the door with effort and went to the bedroom to take the bag she had prepared for the maternity ward, but the pain stopped her dead in her tracks. She wished she weren’t alone, but she was and on her own will. Her father was in hospice care which she had to resort to when her means were not enough to hire a daily nurse.
She had not seen or talked to the father of her child since the moment he came to know of its existence and told her he was married. He had tried to reach her in many ways but she had refused any contact with him as she had already decided she was going to have the baby on her own.
Pain didn’t subside with breathing as it had done before and she knew the time had come. Seagulls cried and she could hear in their cry the echo of her own. She took the keys of her battered Fiat and plunged into the driver’s seat, cursing the moment she had not asked anyone to take her to hospital. She breathed in deeply and took the road that ran along the coastline. Her eyes lingered in the sea and further on she could see the ships that rested in the harbour. One of her father’s favourite poems came to her mind and she mumbled the lines as she absorbed the upcoming pain.

“All day they loitered by the resting ships,
Telling their beauties over, taking stock;
At night the verdict left my messmate's lips,
"The Wanderer is the finest ship in dock."

It was a poem written by John Masefield and when she had to decide on what to write for her final thesis at University, this had been her choice. She had spent months researching on the writer, his work and this poem in particular. Masefield had long stopped being anyone’s favourite , for her classmates admitting to liking Masefield’s poetry was like confessing sympathy with some far right-wing militia or saying you listen to the Carpenters. She didn’t care he was considered a minor poet, she had chosen him especially for her father with the memory of the sea and the coast continually in her mind. And like all memories of places dear to our souls, her homeland grew to enormous proportions in her mind’s eyes while she was away.
Her father was never able to read her work and neither could she make any comments about it with him for his mind had already been clouded. The memory of his father reciting the poem to her younger self in the most unthought-of places (she remembered a mid-morning in autumn when they were queuing in the bank to pay some bills and he started quoting it without a visible or heard cue amid giggles and low laughs of the others in the line) brought her tears and smiles and the taste of time well-spent, of treasured moments that would live forever with her. In a way those were the moments that had defined her.
Pain and fear were about to paralyse her while the road carried on endlessly. The wind blasted outside and inside her child blasted for going out. The birth was imminent and she still had some miles to go to reach the clinic. Out of an impulse, she swerved right straight to the port; the fishing boats were already docked on the coast and seagulls hovered nearby. She could catch a glimpse of the fishermen unloading nets full of fish, preparing them for the big sale of the day at the port market.
When she opened the door of her car, her belly hardened and she could barely stand up. Carcasses of fish gutted and filleted for customers filled bins and she dragged among them looking for someone to help her. On the brink of fainting, one of the dockworkers saw her and held her seconds before she fell over the fish.
The news of a woman delivering a baby among bins full of fish speeded through the port and soon stunned fishermen and dockworkers crowded outside the small office of the Port Authority officer who was shooed away by the women dockworkers acting as improvised midwives.
A long time passed by but the crowd didn’t move. Bins were half-filled and nets were not taken care of, perhaps for the first time, and the whole port seemed to have come to a standstill. Now and then snippets of stories were whispered among them, but none of them remembered another birth in the town port. Fishermen had harvested the sea as a means of survival since the 16th century in this town and all of them knew the stories around the port, the sea and the ships. Some of them, firmly devotees of Stella Maris or the Virgin of the Sea, entrusted the birth, the mother and the unborn to the Holy Mother.
By midday, a sound moved the crowd: it was a cry, not the cry of the hovering seagulls, a human cry: the sound of a baby arriving into this world. The crowd cheered as if their favourite football team had scored a goal, and more than one of the sturdy fishermen wiped away a tear or two. Mrs Marshall, the supervisor, went out to announce the birth of a baby girl as the siren of the only ambulance in town was heard at the distance.
“What is she like? How’s the mother? What’s her name?”
The fiercely blowing wind took the fishermen’s questions away. The woman and the baby wrapped in blankets lying on a stretcher left the harbour and the men and women at the docks returned slowly to their work. Life had begun once more in the sea…


“How will you name her?” Sister Armand asked her when the doctors finished testing the baby who was in perfect health.
She took a deep breath and rolled up her eyes looking for an answer. The name that had haunted her during the whole pregnancy came to her once more, this time she thought it beautiful and fitting.
“Rhonda,” she answered with a smile.
“So Baby Rhonda, now you go with your mum,” the nurse left her with the baby in her arms and ready to be fed.


***
Rhonda was about 3 and she had her mother’s piercing blue eyes. Her plumpish legs stumbled as she moved from rock to rock looking for seashells and cockles. The sound of the sea clashing against the rocks accompanied the mother and daughter’s explorations.
“Here, this one, mamma,” the little girl said and gave her mother the biggest and most colourful shell.
“It’s beautiful, baby girl.”
The girl’s eyes shone in satisfaction and the dimples in the corner of her mouth came out wide and illuminated her face.
“And who will this one be for?” her mother asked kindly.
“For grandpa.”
The woman’s heart shrunk a bit and some tears threatened to choke her as she made an effort not to let them run down, she knew if she started crying she would not end and she didn’t want to upset Rhonda.
“He’ll be very happy, baby.”
“I know, he says so every night.” Rhonda let her mother’s hand go loose and skipped some rocks. “In my sleep,” she added before squatting again to take a new piece from the sea.
“Take care,” she told the girl with a trail of voice as she watched her move. She couldn’t help imagining how proud her father would have been if he could see Rhonda now. She bit her lips not to let a pain sigh go.
Her father had passed away only a few weeks after she arrived home with Rhonda and by the time he died he didn’t have any idea where he was or who she or the baby were.
She held her breath when the girl tripped on a small rock but Rhonda didn’t fall, so used as she was to climbing like a goat in a mountain. She was born there, on the coast, with the smell of salt in her nostrils and the fresh aroma of fish just taken out of the water in her skin. She belonged there, they belonged there. As her father and his father before him.
A sudden stronger gust of wind made her shiver.
“Time to go, Rhonda.”
“Just a little bit more, mamma.” The girl found another shell and would not leave now.
She looked at her daughter and smiled pleasantly; the girl had been a gift, a reminder that she was alive and that life always gives a second chance. She nodded silently and she remembered the moment, some weeks after her father passed away, when she discovered a box, hidden under a loose floorboard in her father’s bedroom and a whole different story unfolded before her eyes.
The ornate wooden box was full of pictures of a very young man with a smiling blonde woman, beautiful and smart, both wearing clothes that showed pre-war era. Behind them, there was always the same handwritten note: Rhonda & Louis, Filey, 1939 or sometimes 1940. She also found some small notes (from one lover to the other) that confirmed the love shown in the pictures. The photographs stopped in 1941 and there were no more notes after that year.
She had not known her grandmother as she died some years before she had been born, but her mother told her how her parents had been the most loving couple she could know of. Her grandmother was called Angela and she was given her name. She never knew until the moment she found the box that her father Charles had a second name, Louis, and that Rhonda had been the love of his life.
The bottle in his father’s collection, the one she had liked so much during her childhood and cherished as a special treasure had never made into the sea.