The sea had embroidery at its edges. It cast a frill of pretty ruffles over the pebbles and sank like fine silk in between them before the giant in the deep ocean turned over in his sleep and drew it back. Sometimes, the sea came in as light and instead of weaving threads in and out amongst the grains of sand and bits of shell, it picked out clefts and promontories, little islands in miniature and brightened them out of the shade. When it did this, Josie looked for the inhabitants of the islands, crouching close and lifting small stones up to her face to get a closer view. Of course, there was no one there by that time. They preferred not to be seen by the likes of her because they were not able to catch things from the sea so they had to make do with leftovers. This made them curiosities for Josie and her friends.
Today Josie was admiring the stitch work; the up and over, round and under that pulled the edge of the sea into bunches of chiffon and trailed silver ribbons behind it as it left. At times like this, you could almost pick it up and shake it like a bedspread, she thought, and she wondered what the giant would think of them sending his waves back again. It would mess things up, surely. Josie shook her head to rid herself of these thoughts and cast her eye over the shoreline where bolts of muslin, denim, and seersucker were tumbling onto the pebbles and rock pools were filling with sequins and reels of cotton. Suddenly she saw what she wanted and clambered out towards a wash of ready-mades that was spilling down onto the sand, then she scrambled back again with a frock of bleached white cotton over her arm.
“Did you catch some nice material today, Josie?” said Marie. She had draped her blue satinette dress over a rock and now she was dotting the lace edges with sparkle from a rock pool.
“Better, I have a whole dress with pockets and a raggedy hem like a dancing girl’s.” Josie held the dress up against herself and swished it about. The neckline was pure princess but the skirt — that was made for barefoot dancing around an open fire while the men drank beer and played their guitars.
Marie gave it a practiced once-over and nodded. “What colour will you dye it?” she asked.
“I think vermillion and orange for the setting sun, and purple in the points of the hem,” said Josie. She watched Marie dipping her finger into the rock pool and bringing it out covered in silver flecks. “When the paint comes, I will make silver thread for the bodice and gold for the hem. The bodice will be the night and full of stars, my waist and hips will be the sun at midday, and the hem will be the sea, deep and mysterious.” Josie rocked her hips and made dark eyes under the real fur eyelashes she had acquired last week.
“The sea? Mysterious? It comes in, it goes out – what’s mysterious about that?” Marie stepped back to admire her dotting, then looked down at her shoes. “These will have to go,” she said. They were lizard leather with turtle-shell buckles, not the sort of thing you wore with a heavenly gown like this. She kicked them off, aiming high in the air and way down the beach, “Back you go!” she said.
“But it’s not shoes today,” Josie said. “Won’t it get things out of wack?”
“One pair of shoes? Don’t be a prune!” Marie looped her arm through Josie’s and pulled her towards the cliff. “Come on, I want to try on this new dress.”
“I’m jealous!” said Josie. “I have to wait for the dye and the paint.” She pulled a face but hurried along with Marie back up to Marie’s house in the cliff-top village.

When the paint and the dye came a few days later, Josie quickly ran down to the rock pools to dip her thread and her dress. This rock pool for the orange, that one for the red, another for indigo that was so deep it almost vibrated. When she was done, she stayed to watch the tide go out. It left a slick on the beach that looked as if someone had caught a dozen rainbows and laid them out across the sand. Of course, if it got onto the pebbles it affected the island people who lived there and so sometimes Josie got her friends together to help clear up a little. She could never tell if the islanders were grateful or not, but she thought they must be, because who would not be grateful for help when they needed it? She crouched down to pick up a pebble. It was yellow and flecked with orange so she scrubbed at it with the hem of her old dress. But after a minute or two of very little progress, she threw it back into the sea. The giant would sort it out, most likely.

“Do you suppose the sea minds coming in and out every day?” said Josie.
“How can it mind? It’s the sea!”
“I know, but sometimes I think it seems, well, disappointed, as if it ought to be doing something more important than just giving us things.”
“Josie, you are one crazy lady.” Marie stood up and arched her elbows from the hips, schoolteacher style, while Josie sat hugging her knees and twiddling her rings. They were on the cliff top waiting for the new tide and Marie was hoping for something soft, like leopard skins or bear, to put on her floor. When the tide came in, it was shiny and full of crystals that showered and tumbled in whorls and rivulets up and down the beach. People were scooping them up and looking out to the horizon to see if there would be anything to hang them on or fix them into, but the sea was almost flat with just a gentle swell that rolled blue and green light over itself and sang like a million wind chimes.
“I do like tides like this,” said Josie, paddling through a pool of zircon and bending to swish some into her pocket. “No rushing or wondering what’s coming next.”
“Or leaping out of the way when there’s a massive wave,” said Marie, hopping and flinging her arms out sideways in demonstration.
“Full of cupboards.”
“Or beds.”
“And especially the white goods!” They both laughed.
You had to stay well away when the fridges and washers and dryers started rolling in. Sometimes the harbour or the entrance to the bay got blocked up with great teetering towers of industrial freezers with a froth of toasters and irons on top. Jack, Josie’s partner, was a blockage wrangler. He went out with the team across the beach in tanks that spat trails of tin tacks and pins behind them. Their job was to push back the tide so that the next day’s waves could come in. When the sea came back, it seemed to hop and judder over the tacks, coughing up clots of them and flinging them back onto the beach. Josie had the impression that the sea was upset about the tacks and pins but why would that be? The sea had made them in the first place, hadn’t it?
Sometimes the sea would clamber up the beach on rolling logs with whipping branches and when it had gone again, you might find little artefacts; a bird house or a walking stick with a carved head, or a triptych without its paintings because paint came separately. When the wood came in banging and crashing the next day, the men were down there on the beach, shining bodies muscled and ready to catch what they needed for their homes. Some were also looking for dark mahogany buttresses to build a church or a town hall, or silvered oak for gable ends and tables. They all wanted soft pine too, to make cradles for the new babies.
“What will you have, Josie?” Marie asked, keeping an eye on William, her own partner, “a boy or a girl?”
“A girl, I hope.” She smiled, then giggled, “The clothes are nicer and you get to collect butterflies and pixies and you can paint their eyes to look like peacocks.”
“You have a point,” said Marie. “I want a boy though — “
“For all sorts of noble reasons, no doubt?” Josie laughed.
“Oh, you’re right of course, I just fancy all the leather and studs, the cars and the motorbikes,” Marie said. She already had a one-piece in shiny black PVC with zips and pockets and a place to put a small wrench. She would certainly look the part.
They were still chattering about being shallow when a cry went up from the beach, “Paul’s been crushed!” Then another, “Stay back, there’s another wave coming over.”
The horizon was suddenly black and brown and very high, almost as high as the cliff top Josie and Marie were standing on, and it was moving towards them. The slab sides of timber huts, shed roofs, a giant redwood you could drive a tank along, sharp fence palings, and brittle beams darkened the sky and rumbled forwards. For a moment, the shower of sandalwood shavings drifting in the air was like being at a wedding, but then the wooden soldiers, building bricks, and arrow shafts began to rain down and everyone took cover.
When it was over and the giant started taking the ocean back, Paul was gone. Not because the sea had picked him up and sucked him in but because his friends had given him over. There was no point, they said, making a thing of it, the sea would do what it did and turn him into something useful. “More useful!” someone joked, and everybody laughed. But Jeannie was not laughing. She stood at the shore with her face making a silent howl and her hands clenched. Then she started running towards the ocean, shouting and kicking at brackets and dominoes and other bits and pieces that were still drifting slowly back to where they had come from. Nobody stopped her when she climbed out onto a bridge then a pier then a galleon and began to disappear with the tide. The giant would sort it all out, in the end.

The next day, Josie was woken by a racket like nothing she had heard before. A creaking, crashing sound that echoed and clapped and seemed to be grinding into the earth itself. She ran out of the house she shared with Jack, the one he was extending and adding to with every tide. The crib was in place now, it would be the toys and lights and little mufflers next. Pink, she hoped.
Outside she stopped, open-mouthed, and counted in her mind the number of feet high the wall of ice must be. Shards had fallen off and pierced the beach, which was leaking oily streaks that ran down the shore. Great blocks of ice were rocking and groaning as the whole thing continued on towards the cliff. High above, sharp points dragged along the sky, tearing holes in it through which nothing could be seen, but it was not the sort of nothing that put you at ease. Quite the opposite; this nothing looked blank and bottomless at the same time as it seemed to be writhing and full to bursting. Josie looked away quickly but looking straight ahead was just as unsettling. Some of the blocks of ice had shattered into small cubes and several had landed at her feet. She picked one up.
“Marie,” she said, “look at this ice cube.”
“Drinks all round, is it?” Marie sounded cheerful; perhaps she didn’t see that there was something in the ice cube.
“There’s something in the ice cube,” Josie said, squinting at the little thing refracting in there. Was it just a bubble?
“Ridiculous. One thing at a time, no combination.” Marie was firm but peered closer anyway. “What is it?”
Josie turned the ice cube over and over to get a better look. Then she held it in both hands to warm it so that it would melt and whatever was in there would be exposed. She rubbed and it dripped and drizzled. Then her hands got cold so she gave it to Marie who breathed on it and almost put it in her mouth.
“Stop!” Josie said. Marie stopped. “It’s a person! I mean it’s an island person.”
“It can’t be,” Marie said. “One element, no combinations. Definitely no people.” But it was a person, a girl, and she was dead.
“Throw it back,” Marie said. She seemed disgusted and inconvenienced more than concerned, but Josie was worried now because this was not about unseemliness or just irregularity, it was about a disturbance in the way things were supposed to be. She was still pondering this when Marie snatched the dead little person away and threw her down to the beach. “There,” she said, “that’s that.” And she dusted off her hands and wiped them on the blue velvet dress the sea had given her a few days before when nothing was amiss. Marie did not like looking at the Island people because they were embarrassing, what with having nothing and always needing hand-outs. If anything was amiss around here, it was them. Disposing of the dead girl meant nothing was amiss again. “The babies will be coming soon,” she said, and stalked off with a straight back that said she had more important things to do than worry about walls of ice, rips in the sky, and ice cubes with inconvenient dead people in them.
Josie squatted on the grass. The ice was beginning to creak back to where it came from, dragging pieces of rock along which scoured the beach and dug deep channels in the shelves of pebbles, the rock pools and the shivering sand as it went. There was debris in the ice and other things too. There was a car and a plane and a building with a flag on top. They were all going back to the deep for the giant there to make sense of and Josie wondered what tomorrow’s tide would bring.

When tomorrow’s tide came, it came with even more noise and also a smell. The noise was shrieking and wailing and howling and the smell was rot and filth.
Running out of their new houses, everyone gathered on the cliff top. They were clapping and cheering because the babies had arrived and they got ready to run down to the beach to find the one with their names on it. But the happy sounds faded out when they smelled the smells and saw what else had arrived. Plastic and nets and cans and bones, and bits of dead people, living people damaged and wailing, a whole wave’s-worth of straggly islanders clinging to bits of string and plastic bottle stoppers, and wasted scraps of animals carved for dinner and hissing though open wounds. For a moment they all stood, mouths gaping, looking at the littered beach, the sea withdrawing and leaving a trail of flesh as it went. Then they rushed down to the shore to get their babies. They pushed aside rotting arms and fingers, elbowed wounded people and animals out of the way, scooped up the tiny bundles in their pink and blue cocoons, and ran as fast as possible back up to the top of the cliff.
Josie’s baby was a girl. It had Josie and Jack’s names on the label and another just underneath – Carlie. Marie had found her little boy, Edward, and she was unclipping the blue cocoon when William came up from the beach with another bundle. This one was pink.
Marie glanced at it, “That’s not ours,” she said, and went back to working at Edward’s cocoon fasteners.
“No, it isn’t. Well, yes it is. She is.” William showed her the label where Paul and Jeannie’s names had been crossed out. Now it said Marie and William and underneath it said Frances. “This is Frances,” William said, holding out the child, “She’s going to be our daughter.” But Marie was not listening. She had opened Edward’s cocoon and she was staring at the baby within. It was perfect – it gurgled, its little arms and legs convulsed with delight as it looked at her, it blew tiny bubbles as it laughed. But it was tinged green and its eyes were the colour of fish scales and its ears were like flowers, two fleshy calices of gold with fluttering stamens in the centre. Josie’s baby had metal legs with springs on the ends and its eyes were black and deep and seemed to have another world inside them. Somebody else had a magenta-tinged child with polyester hair, and another wore a carapace of plastic around its chest.
“The sea has got it all mixed up,” Marie said. People were standing around, some holding their babies at arm’s length and some handing them back to their partners.
“You got the wrong one.”
“It’s not right.”
“It’s a mistake.”
One woman dropped her baby to the ground and shoved it with her foot towards the edge of the cliff. It toppled over and fell onto the beach, bouncing on its rubberised limbs until the wheels clicked out from its shoulder blades and hips. Then it powered away, chasing the tide back to the deep. Someone else ran to the shore with her baby and held it up to show the sea, “He’s got no eyes,” she screamed at it. “He’s got glass lenses, how could you give my baby glass lenses for eyes?”
Soon, almost everyone was down there yelling at the sea about how wrong it all was and how could it have happened and what were they supposed to do now and that the giant had better damn well take back all these defective items or else.
Marie was still holding her little boy. She had looked at him, he had smiled. “I hate you,” she told him. “You’re all wrong. I don’t need this.”
Josie held Carlie up in front of her so her metal legs dangled and Carlie wiggled them, making them glint in the sunlight. The springy ends looked as though they might bounce her right up to the sky. Carlie made a squeeeee noise and kicked her legs like a frog and Josie waggled her in the air. “When has the sea ever failed to give us what we need?” she said.

(c) Conboy-Hill 2014

I don’t know who to credit for the image but the idea of lifting up the sea was what inspired this story. I don’t think what was under there had registered with me, at least not consciously, so the idea of a sea that provides necessities for a rather lazy and entitled population seems quite fitting.