Low Tide

The tide tables said they had three hours. Michael checked them twice on his phone, and then a third time, because checking things was what Michael did. His younger brother, Sean, watched him with an expression that Michael remembered from their childhood: patient, faintly amused, and quietly contemptuous.

“It’s a sandbank, Mike, not the Atlantic,” Sean said.

“People drown out there every year.”

“People who don’t own a waterproof watch and three tide apps.”

They hadn’t spoken properly in nine years, not since the argument at their mother’s funeral, which neither of them could now fully reconstruct, though both remembered exactly how it had felt. Since then, there had been Christmas messages, brief and correct, and a single phone call when their father was diagnosed. Now their father was dead too, and his last request, written in pencil on the back of an envelope, was that his ashes should be scattered on Seal Sands, the long sandbank in the bay where he had taken them both fishing every summer when they were boys.

So here they were: two estranged men in their forties, walking out across the wet, rippled sand of the estuary, carrying a plastic container that held what was left of the person who had connected them.

The sands at low tide were extraordinary, a vast, shining plain stretching almost to the horizon, broken by channels of shallow water and the occasional bird. It took them forty minutes to reach the far end of the sandbank, where the old wooden marker post still stood. Neither of them spoke much on the way. The silence was not comfortable, but it was familiar.

At the post, they stood awkwardly, unsure who should do it. In the end, Sean opened the container and they took turns, letting the grey ash fall onto the sand, where the wind caught it and carried it towards the sea. Michael had prepared a few words, but when the moment came, he couldn’t say them. Sean simply said, “Bye, Dad,” in a voice Michael hadn’t heard him use since they were children.

It was only when they turned to walk back that they saw the water.

The channel they had crossed on the way out, which had been ankle-deep, was now a fast-flowing river, wide and brown. The tide was coming in, much earlier than the tables had said — a combination, they later learned, of strong winds and the full moon. Michael checked his phone. They had over an hour, according to the app. The sea disagreed.

“We can’t cross that,” Michael said. His heart was racing.

For once, Sean didn’t argue. He looked around them. The sandbank was slowly shrinking as the water crept in on both sides, but the highest part, around the marker post, was still well above the waterline. “We go back to the post,” he said. “It’s the highest point. And we call the coastguard.”

The coastguard told them, calmly, that a boat would reach them in about an hour, and that they should stay exactly where they were. So they sat with their backs against the old wooden post, stranded, watching the sea surround them.

It is difficult to maintain a nine-year silence when you are sitting shoulder to shoulder on a disappearing piece of sand. At first they talked about practical things: the cold, the coastguard, whether the phone battery would last. Then Sean laughed suddenly.

“Dad would have loved this,” he said. “He always said we’d get caught out here one day.”

And something shifted. They began, cautiously, to talk about their father, and then about their mother, and then, inevitably, about the funeral. Each of them had been carrying a version of that day. Michael had believed that Sean had accused him of abandoning their mother when she was ill, because he had moved to London for work. Sean had believed that Michael thought he was a failure who had stayed in their home town and never achieved anything.

As they talked, it became clear that both of them had been wrong about what the other had meant, and right about what each of them had been afraid of. The resentment was real, but the grievance at its centre turned out to be almost entirely imaginary. They had each spent nine years defending themselves against an accusation the other had never made.

“I was jealous of you,” Sean said eventually, looking at the water. “You got out. I stayed and looked after them, and I was angry that you didn’t have to.”

“I was jealous of you,” Michael said. “You were there. They loved having you there. I was the one they worried about.”

They were quiet for a long time after that. The water was very close now, lapping at the edge of the sand a few metres away. The light was fading.

When the coastguard boat finally arrived, its searchlight sweeping across the waves, the crew found two men sitting together against the post, laughing at something. One of the crew members later said it was the strangest rescue he’d ever attended: “Usually people are terrified. These two seemed almost sorry to leave.”

Michael and Sean did not reconcile completely that evening; nine years do not disappear in an hour, however dramatic the circumstances. But it was a beginning. They inherited their father’s small house in the town, and instead of selling it, as Michael had planned, they kept it. They spend a week there together every summer.

And every year, at low tide, they walk out to Seal Sands, check the tables twice, and leave much, much earlier than they need to.