The Clamshell

Do you remember, when you and Jane used to run about, uncertain of your nature and most of all, unsure of destination or arrival?
I do know that one summer, a summer which had followed up on the warmest spring I’d ever seen, you and your sister spent the afternoons using the beach as your playground – that beach which used to border your house, the one that had taken up all the space in the backyard and had opened up to the ocean, as though it were a clamshell opening up to the world – though no pearl was inside, and no pearl would ever appear upon it, I found it to be quite a pearly sight of itself, by itself I must say.
Jane used to tease you, she used to pull your hair and you used to spit in her face in revenge – she didn’t mind, neither did you – you were brother and sister after all – there never was a reason why you shouldn’t have been living together, so acclimated to each other. I hope you remember the days we spent gazing at the stars or the sluicing rain which curved the windows in odd shapes, I dearly hope you remember it – because I have forgotten most of it. Ever since that day, the one we all know, and the one we will both never forget, I have found myself longing for that forgotten time, the lost time, you could say. She was so much younger than you – she was so, so young. We all know, I guess we had always known, she hadn’t deserved to die.
I know how many years it has been now, since then, I mean. I know how nothing might have changed and how everything will remain unchanged no matter what we have already done. Yet still, those images, they seek me, haunt me in my sleep. The solaced images of joy, our childhood, the running on the beach, barely dressed, half-nude. Jane was the first to run, we slouched behind and she would mock us – would turn her back to us and speed up faster than we could see. She would laugh and mock – we would never feel offended, rather humiliated. We were outrun by this meagre girl – the blonde-haired girl with the sun kissed face, the one girl who had gotten her beauty from the sea and the sky. Even some might say these days or weeks were underlined by the serenity of the beach which I had come to know as the clamshell. This shell was bowed around the coast and curved all the way to the next city, where it would be replaced by port and harbour. This gradient seemed almost aleatory, which I’d come to despise during the summers I spent in the clamshell. I had always hated, no, despised the random, or the arbitrary – that which spreads out in the most unpredictable directions only to come back to where everything else met. Those lines along the shore, the steep cut-off where the harbour began and the nature ended, the smoke rising from some factory or plant of which I could only see the highest vent – everything I despised came together in this one, so utterly solacing though carelessly blinding beach, this one clamshell which so many had told me about. If I say that many had told me about this beach, I mean that there were warnings. Friends, or I might say acquaintances whom I had told of my excursions to your house and your beach-adjacent backyard, had warned me of this place – they told me that it was best to avoid such places – such places of arbitrary luck and guessed survival. I had never seen anything wrong with this place other than that vent and harbour, though I had become wary – I had become a certain, careful clamshell for myself. I had put myself between these two layers, me, being the pearl I was, I lay stuck between the sandwiched shells and basked in my solace.
Sometimes, the streams would reach quite far into the beach – they would curve around the mud flats, would bring themselves closer to me than I could bear and would tell me of the greatness and multitudinousness of the ocean. I never listened to the water during these days – I mostly sat outside in the one red-white-striped beach chair you had assigned to me and sipped on green juices. Jane ran around and you followed her – after a while I had gotten tired of running and you had taken my shift. The great happiness I had seen in her face then was so unbearably light and alive! You know, I had never seen anything like it.
On rainy days, those which had become more and more common as the summer had begun coming to a full stop, Jane would not run – instead, she would sit on the floor in a sort of buddha-pose and she would either knit or look at picture books. Jane loved picture books and I would always buy her new ones – some of whales, some of sea turtles, one time I had even bought her one all about shells, especially clamshells. She had asked me out of all people why the beach was known as the clamshell and I could not instantly give her an answer – of course she was disappointed and I had to make up an excuse that I simply wasn’t an expert on the nature and functions of clamshells! You applauded me for evading Jane’s disappointment – you know, I often did it, avoiding her becoming saddened or dimmed. Even on those utterly grey and calamitous days which often followed the most beautiful and hopeful ones, I always found an excuse to give her – I found some way for her to be satisfied with her current picture book or knitting assignment. Of course, there was always something which did not quite fit – something which wasn’t right, or didn’t feel right to me at least. Perhaps I felt guilty for lying to her, maybe I was ashamed that I had told her that the vent which she had noticed one day, belonged to the house of a very old man who needed to heat his house to survive. She would always believe me – she believed no one else and I often felt as though I used this to my advantage, either to gain more time for myself or to fend her off and let her continue her aimless running. Of course I would have never told her that once, in that factory which produced the stark smoke, a pipe or something had burst and killed fifty workers. She would not have understood it, and perhaps neither would I have. The days often became unbearably warm and sometimes, rain would mix with the utter insanity of the burning sun to create the most ironic of rainbows. These days, I spent inside, drinking green juice and reading the newspapers. Jane would of course run around and you would follow her – after all, why shouldn’t you have? Perhaps it was my fault how she ended up. Perhaps I should have ran after you both.
One of those days, I found the sea to be particularly stunning – it shone in fluorescent colours beneath the blue sky and there seemed to be an almost odd shimmer lain across it. The vent had stopped releasing smoke for a while and the thick cloud above the factory stopped while the noises from the harbour hadn’t increased much. You had tripped on one of Jane’s toys and had sprained your ankle – I held your leg so your mother could wrap a bandage around it – your father would look at it when he came home. We left Jane to run around for herself – we had figured that she was a good swimmer and responsible enough not to go too far out into the mud flats and she seemed happy. You sat on your chair for the rest of the day, watching over her making sure that she didn’t wade too far out – I stood next to you with one of my usual green juices and figured I could just as well join the girl in her fun.
When I approached her and could still see you, nearly asleep in your green-white beach chair, I saw the grin which the sun had so kindly given to her – and I saw that her hair was oddly shimmery. I let the water run through my hands and just as I noticed a certain difference in colour, I noticed a seagull, drenched in a black liquid. There was a washed-up nail stuck in its head and its feathers were blackened. I’d never seen anything like it before. I told Jane to go back to the house and shower so I could dispose of the bird properly. It had a vile stench of rotten algae and oil and I had to put it in a special container before throwing it away. The sea was darker now – the sun had taken its path for the day and the shimmer no longer stood out to me.
Jane began coughing up blood a few days later.
You always told me how you believed it to have been your fault, how if you hadn’t sprained your ankle, you could have seen the sickening fluid on top of the water – you told me how you were the one responsible for her death and how perhaps you should have been the one to die. I know that you still hold on firmly to this belief, I know that I will never change your mind about it – yet, I know clearly that her death was at least to a part my own fault. She had lived all her life in the bliss, in euphoria, no one had ever explained to her how the world had been changing – no one would have dared to tell her what we had done to the planet – I still don’t know if she would have understood any of it, if she would have understood the underlying danger of her favourite places, I don’t know if she would have ever understood, how much the world had changed. And why should she have understood? She had lived her entire blissful existence in the confines of the clamshell – where we all thought she was safe.