Beach Baby Part 1

Beach Baby Part 1

Beach Baby - Part 1

I refuse, absolutely refuse to enjoy myself. Sure I get into the car but I do it in a pissed off sixteen-year-old boy kind of way. I slam myself down on the back seat and pull my headphones out of my pocket. My two little sisters want to play dolls next to each other but I’m in the middle. I pretend not to hear their high pitched little whines at me. Then they whine at Dad and he’s all like, “Dylan, move over so that your sisters can sit together!” and you don’t ignore Dad so I huff and make an act of all that effort it takes to shift a seat. Then he gets in the driver’s seat and I think, what have you been smoking to think that this is a good idea? Then SHE gets in beside him.

We’re going to spend a fortnight at Fordsea, the coastal town where Mum and Dad met and fell in love at first sight, like in a Disney film. They bought a holiday home down there and everything and we used to go all the time before my eight-year-old sister Dixie (the horse obsessed, braided brown hair, freckly one) was born. Finally Dad’s plucked up the courage to go again but we’re not going with Mum – she died five years ago – we’re going with my oh-so-perfect stepmother Kate and her little brat Molly (the pink obsessed, curly blonde hair, whiny one).

“We’re going to all have a good time, aren’t we?” Kate demands rather than asks as her reflection in the driver’s mirror fixes its sludgy green eyes on me. I pull my hoodie over my head and face so that you can’t see my choppy brown hair, stormy grey eyes or freckle splattered nose, just the bottom of the ugly glare my mouth completes. It takes an hour to get to Fordsea and Kate’s reflection dares me to hold that expression all the way there. You’re on, my mind quips back.

Dad starts the engine and pops a CD into the player. It’s a CD version of the holiday mix tape he used to play when we went to Fordsea with Mum. First song is ‘Beach Baby’ by The First Class. Kate laughs at his taste and then sings along anyway, “Beach baby, beach baby, / Give me your hand –” then Dad joins in, “ – Give me somethin’ that I can remember –” I turn my mp3 player up, ‘Mercury’ by Bloc Party should drown them out.

Call me ‘Emo’ if you want, that’s what Kate calls me, because she doesn’t get me. If only I’d have been a little girl like Dixie and susceptible to Little Pony bribes. She’ll never get me though because I’m wasted, unable to be reshaped, too imprinted with the memory of perfection. Call it an ‘Oedipal Complex’ if you want, that’s what someone like Frasier Crane would call it, but I won’t ever let her be my mother. Ariel was graceful, refined, sympathetic, accepting, a good cook, a beautiful singer, everything that Kate can’t ever comprehend to be.

The car pulls out of the bottom of our road. The low battery sign flashes on my mp3 player. Cliff Richard is on a ‘Summer Holiday’. Molly wants to go to the toilet. It’s going to be one long journey.