Page 49 of After the Accident
Chapter Twenty-Nine
THE HIPPO TOSS
Emma:The girls were sitting in the long grass, tossing an inflatable ring with a hippo head towards their own shoes. I wasn’t sure on the exact rules, but they had assigned each shoe a different amount of points – and were competing to see who could throw the ring over the shoes.
…
In fairness, I’ve seen worse game shows on prime-time ITV.
Chloe:It was called hippo toss. You get three points for a left foot; one point for a right. Double points if you get two shoes. Triple points if you get both rights, or both lefts.
Emma:I also think they’d stolen the ring from the hotel pool.
Amy:Weborrowedthe ring.
Emma:They were on the cliffs, near where Dad fell – although not too close to the edge. I’m never going to offer parenting advice, but, if it was me, and I was Julius, I’d have taken them to the cliffs before that afternoon. I’d have wanted to see it if I was their age. Kids are naturally curious.
I was about to tell them that they had to go back to the hotel – and that people were worried. I probably should have done, given that I was the adult… but they seemed so happy in the moment. It didn’t feel as if I could take that joy away from them.
Amy:Auntie Emma asked if she could play our game. We told her everyone had to pay ten euros to play and that it was winner-takes-all.
Emma:I swear, they must get that smartness from their mother.
Either way, I sat with them in the grass for a while. I watched at first and tried to remember what it was like to live so fearlessly. If there hadn’t been a search, I’d bet they could have spent hours in that grass making their own entertainment. You forget all that when you grow up. I can’t tell you how much I craved to be able to go back to that. I almost ached for it.
I’d probably been there for a couple of minutes when Amy asked if that was where Granddad fell. I told them it was, but I think they already knew. There was this moment where they both looked across towards the edge in unison. The crickets or grasshoppers were chirping nearby and there was the rush of the water. I could feel the sun prickling my skin and we felt frozen in the moment.
Then Amy turned around and asked if I still thought of Robbie.
Amy:I didn’t ask. Daddy told me not to.
Emma:He is… my son…wasmy son…
…
I don’t want to say his name any more. Is that OK?
…
It was a question that came so out of nothing that it felt as if she’d run into me. I was winded and the hot, sticky air was clogging my lungs. I have no idea what I told them, but it was probably that my son is always in my thoughts. There is never a time where I don’t think about what he might be doing, or how he might be growing.
Every time I looked at Amy and Chloe, I thought of how they were a few years older than him and that he would have been able to follow them around.
When I looked at that kiddie pool in the hotel, all I could think of was how he would have been a little over four years old and that he might have been learning to swim with his dad.
I thought that he’d love the slides, that I’d be mothering him with umbrellas and hats to keep him out of the heat. That he’d have loved the beach balls that people bounced around the main pool. That I could have got him some knock-off T-shirts from the market, and that he’d have liked the man on the corner who stood and blew bubbles all day long.
Every time I saw anything, I thought of how it would have looked through my son’s eyes…
…
I probably didn’t tell them any of that. I probably just said that I still thought of him.
Amy:Auntie Emma said it was time to go.
Emma:One of the girls asked why people divorced.
Amy:I didn’t ask that. Daddy wouldn’t have liked it.
