the longest wall

We went to the sea, the whole family, on a day so hot the road was thinking about melting, and the second my feet hit the sand I decided we were going to set a record.

The sea where we go pulls a long way back at low tide. It leaves wet flat sand that goes on and on, smooth and dark and perfect, the kind of sand that is asking to have something built on it. Most people build a sandcastle. A castle is small. A castle is a thing you build when you have given up on greatness.

I was going to build a wall. The longest sand wall anyone had ever built in the whole history of the kampung. From here to as far as I could go before the sea came back.

First, the measuring. A record is not a record if nobody measures it. I found a long stick of driftwood. I paced out the start line, heel to toe, very serious, and I drew the line in the sand. Everything past this line was about to be history.

Then I went to get builders, because one girl cannot build the longest wall in history on her own. That is just a girl patting some sand.

I got the gang. Then I got other kids, kids I had never met, kids from families all up the beach, because a record this size needs a workforce and the beach was full of them, lying about doing nothing useful with their day. I lined everybody along my line and gave everybody a stretch to build, and I walked up and down behind them like a foreman. Build, build, build. Higher. Longer. This was for history.

The trouble was that nobody understood the plan. A pile of sand and a pair of hands want to build up, into a tower, because a tower is the thing a hand does with sand without being asked. I had to go down the line explaining that we were not building up, we were building along, that a wall has only one important direction and that direction is away. One boy I had never met built a beautiful tower anyway, right on my line, in the middle of history. I let him keep it. I called it a watchtower, because a good foreman knows when to lose.

By mid-morning I had fifteen builders, half of them strangers, all of them building a wall for a girl with a stick who had told them it was for history. Then a boy from another family started a rival wall, ten steps down the beach, shorter than mine but with a flag on it, which I had not thought of. So I sent Kavi to plant a flag on ours. Kavi planted four. For a while the two walls stopped being about length at all and became entirely about flags, until the sea arrived and turned out not to care about either.

Divya came to build next to me with her arms folded, which is hard to build with. Divya is my best friend and she is right about things. "The sea is going to take all of this," she said.

"Not before I measure it," I said.

Aiman appeared. Aiman appears wherever there is a workforce. He could not sell the sand, even Aiman cannot sell sand, but he found a thing to sell. He started renting out the one bit of shade under the one tree, at a price that climbed every time a cloud went over the sun and the shade got worse, which is the opposite of how a price should work, but Aiman prices on how badly you want it, not on what it is.

Kavi was helping. Kavi only knows fast. He had decided the wall needed water, to pack it hard the way the big people pack sand, so he ran buckets up from the sea and threw them at the wall. Throwing a bucket of sea at a sand wall does not make it strong. It makes it a puddle, and then a slump, and then a gap. Kavi ran so fast and helped so hard that he washed away the very part of the wall he was sprinting up to save. Again and again. Soaked. Beaming. A one-boy tide of his own.

And the baby came for the wall too.

The baby found a dip in the sand and decided it was a moat, and filled it in, even though it was not a moat and was now a bump. Then it looked up at me, deeply pleased, for filling in a moat. The baby took a handful off the top of the wall, patted it into a little round shape with great care, and ate it. A sand bun. The baby ate a sand bun off the top of the longest wall in history, and then it sat down. In the middle. A whole metre of record became a flat patch with a baby on it, looking out to sea.

Every so often I went back to the start and measured what we had, heel to toe along the wall with my driftwood stick, counting out loud so the beach could hear history happening. And every time the number was bigger, I announced it. And every time I announced it, the sea had quietly taken a bit off the far end I had already counted. So the wall was at once the longest it had ever been and getting shorter, which is a very hard thing for a record to be.

So now the wall was being eaten from three sides at once. Kavi from the wet end. The baby from the middle. And the sea coming in from the front, the wet line creeping up the flat sand toward my line, slow, and not stopping for anybody.

I ran between them for a while. I tried to hold the sea off the far end and the baby off the middle and steer Kavi's buckets somewhere useful, all at the same time, and I was losing at every end at once.

Then I stopped running.

I picked the baby up off the wall and I did not carry it away to safety. I carried it to the very best bit, the tallest stretch, and I put it down right in the middle and said, here. Help. And the baby helped, which is to say the baby knocked it flat with both hands, delighted, and I let it. We knocked bits down together. We patted them flat. The baby ate another sand bun. I built a lump, and the baby sat on the lump, and I measured the lump very seriously with my stick and announced it, loudly, as a record. The baby clapped for itself. The whole gang stopped trying to save the wall from the sea and started helping the sea instead, and it was the best part of the whole hot day.

The sea came all the way in. It found the end of the wall and took it, soft, one bump at a time, with no fuss and no asking. We stood in the warm water and watched it go. The longest wall in the history of the kampung, melting into the next wave, then the next, gone, like it had never been measured at all.

Nobody minded. The gang were soaked and laughing. The kids I had never met went back to their own families. Aiman was trying to give back the shade deposits the clouds had ruined, which he is very bad at, because giving money back is the one move Aiman has never practised.

My family was up on the dry sand, Mak and Ayah and Nenek under the umbrella, and they had watched the whole thing, the building and the wrecking and the sea taking the lot.

The baby reached up to be carried, sandy from its hair to its feet. I carried it up the beach to the others. It put its head down on my shoulder, gritty and warm and heavy, and watched the last bump of the wall disappear over my shoulder, and gave one more small clap. For the sea. For taking it. Like that had been the best part all along.