Second Runner Up -- Primary Section
Taroona High School
“Hurry up we haven’t got all day!” Margret sighed. These nurses! Finally, one managed to open the door and several clambered inside the van.
She spotted Christopher approaching her through the sea of nurse scrubs. He grabbed her wheelchair and started steering it toward the exit.
Clunk!
The wheelchair hit the pavement and Chris wheeled it away from the van. “Same as usual Margret?” he asked cheerily.
“I never go anyplace else”. She didn’t like going to the shops or cafes like the other people in the nursing home did on their weekly trip. Just the beach. That was all she wanted. All she needed. He steered her down the street towards the esplanade. A sea gull followed them lazily overhead, slowly winging its way across the sky.
The water came into view and Chris guided her down the ramp and onto the sand. He used to complain when they went down here. “You’ll get your wheelchair all rusty!” “That chair was very expensive you know!” “There’s so much rubbish everywhere, don’t you want to go somewhere else with the others?”. Margret always ignored him.
He stopped for a second checking where the tide line was before moving the wheelchair to rest at the very edge of the damp sand. He bent down and pried her shoes off and sat her feet on the sand. She looked down at her toes as the waves rushed towards them and swallowed her feet. She could no longer feel the water when this happened, but she could still imagine the feeling. The shock of the cold, the pull of the current.
Like all her visits, foggy memories flooded her mind. A young Margret splashing in the shallows, slightly older Margret, getting her first surfboard. The feeling of a wave behind her powering her and her board back towards land. Her first international surf competition. She had grown up on this beach and once a week she returned to the waves letting the memories envelope her.
“Please tell me this is one of your silly young person jokes”, she frowned at Chris a week later.
He shook his head looking genuinely empathetic. “I’m really sorry ma’am…”
She looked at the massive sign nailed up in front of the beach.
Swimming prohibited due to over pollution
Please don’t come in contact with contaminated water
Beach access is not advised but still allowed
“They can’t do this, it’s not that bad…” she started. Whenever she came to the beach it was always to the beach of the past, but now that she was paying attention there was no denying that it was no longer what it used to be. It was as though somebody had dumped a truck load of rubbish over the beach and scattered it around. The once white sands and clear water were both now much greyer.
“They can’t keep me from the water, I don’t care what signs say, they can’t stop me.”
“I’m afraid we can’t let you do that ma’am,” Chris apologised.
“What are you going to do to stop me!” Margret yelled.
“We can ban you from your excursion privileges if we must,” he replied.
Tears started welling in her eyes, but she wiped them away before Chris could see. “Just take me back to the van, I’ll wait there for the rest of the day.”
The idea came to her as she lay in bed staring up at the cracked ceiling of her room. “I’ll clean it up! They can’t keep me from clean water. I just need some help…”
Margret spent the following days trying to convince the other patients and nurses who lived in the home to help her with the clean-up. Although many wanted to help, only a handful were well enough to spend a day bending down and picking up trash.
I’m not sure we have enough… its such a big task. But she kept her hopes up, because she couldn’t bear to think of not returning.
The small group huddled around in a circle in the centre of the beach. This was their fourth week of cleaning up and yet it seemed as though they had barely gotten through anything. Even once they had cleaned most of it up, they would return the next week and the waves would have brought more.
“Michelle and I will go out on the boat and fish out the rubbish in the water. Will you be fine on your own Margret?” asked Chris.
“Yes, yes, I’ll be fine don’t you worry,” she reassured him as the two nurses hopped into the van and drove off towards the jetty.
The others scattered off to different corners of the beach. Margret wheeled her chair over to the seagrass and rocks that lined the perimeter of the beach and started reaching in with her litter picker. She spotted a plastic bottle and reached out to grab it. It remained just out of her reach. She risked leaning forward in her chair. Still, she couldn’t reach it. She tried learning forward a little more… suddenly she was falling forward and just before the darkness came, she spotted the rock her head was about to collide with.
Chris and the others were gathered around Margret’s hospital bed. He had got her there as fast as he could but apparently that wasn’t enough. He took her limp hand in his and held it tight as tears rolled down his face. She was alive but the doctors had informed she wouldn’t awaken, and her family had decided to pull the plug.
“Goodbye, Margret.”
According to her will, $10,000 was supposed to go to the renewal of the beach. Chris gladly dedicated all his free time to her dream until finally, finally, after hours of hard work, the sign was taken down. They gathered at her favourite spot and scattered her ashes as the waves flooded their bare feet.
She could finally, for the last time, return to the waves.
