The wet cement of the new driveway was pristine.
It was simply begging for a heart with initials and an arrow to be drawn upon it.
The workers packed up and we kids were warned NOT to touch it. We knew better than to test our strict, though fair, dad.
He left for work before the rest of us tumbled out of the house into our mom’s old 4x4 to go to the local high school in Bryanston.
My heart sank as we heard the inside garage door reverberate with a SLAM that spoke drama of the highest order. My spoonful of Crispies froze between my favourite childhood baby bunnykins plate and my open mouth.
‘Who did it?’ bawled my dad quite puce in the face. ‘Who refuses to listen to the most simple and basic instruction?’ We gawped like idiots and followed him sheeplike to survey the abomination.
The smooth as a lake on a windless day cement driveway was 99.5 percent still perfect EXCEPT for one deep imprint of a single right foot.
‘I haven’t time for this Marcia,’ he bawled rudely at my mother who though surprised by the footprint was hiding a smile with difficulty. It was so deliberately placed………such care had been taken with even pressure marking a perfect imprint………..just one!
I wanted to shriek with nervous giggles and stuffed the end of my first team hockey player scarf into my mouth.
In the hushed, horrified silence not one of us 3 kids could even speak.
‘’I’m furious,’ he shouted, ‘who the heck did this?’
With that he turned on his well shod heel and with his equally shiny briefcase hurried off to his car to appear in court as a barrister as usual.
‘I wonder,’ said my bemused and unflustered mom. She was the rock upon whom each one of us depended. She sorted ‘everything’ out in her unflappable manner, from a broken teenage heart to an unfinished project to a lost sock.
She knew her husband’s tensions and was the perfect partner for him. We often heard him say when she hugged him fiercely as he came through the door after a long day, ‘you are my safe haven M………I wouldn’t survive that jungle out there without you.’
She would shut the door and bring in the tea tray and we would sit around for a precious half an hour chatting and usually laughing before a phone was allowed to be answered or homework begun.
I digress………back to THAT footprint.
We never found out who had perpetrated that ‘dastardly deed’ but it was imprinted in my memory because we all saw it 100 times a month as we used that driveway repeatedly.
So when I saw THAT footprint embedded on the hard wet sand of St Michael’s beach I stopped in amazement, mesmerised.
I even shook my head!
It was a peculiar shape. The big toe was big and splayed, obviously male we had decided way back then. The second toe was longer, a lobster claw I’d always thought. AND the small 5th toe was absent, completely tucked under the other toes.
When the spell of amazement was broken like a popped bubble, I looked around. Like a tracker dog I had the ‘scent’ in my nostrils and I was desperate to find out who had imprinted that careful foot on our driveway 20 years before.
Eyes down I followed these strange footprints (the left foot, though the same length was subtly different. The little toe on that foot was perfectly visible, but the lobster claw second toe was there to match the right foot.)
Suddenly I was in the foamy waves of a beautiful rock pool and the deep imprints were being gently erased.
I was unreasonably disappointed.
I looked about but the beach had a number of people on it enjoying the early morning sunrise.
Later in the day I was back at the hotel. After reading under an umbrella at the pool, I removed my sunglasses and went to the edge of the water to dive in.
There before my bedazzled eyes was a wet imprint, of the ‘lobster claw footprint’.
I was the bloodhound once again. I followed, with my eyes, the gradually drying footprints ‘til they were invisible on the hot paving. Further on however, at the tropical outside bar, were a pair of hairy, well formed calves still glistening wet. I allowed my eyes to travel up a broad tanned back, slightly freckled, to a head of hair that was sleek as an otter’s and the same black colour.
In spite of the ridiculous situation, my heart flipped in my chest and I smiled to myself at the Mills and Boon scenario.
‘Ah me,’ I thought, ‘ romantic notions never die completely.’ I had firmly given up on men in general after ending a hopeless non romance that had soured, two months before.
With that the barman shouted, ‘how are the waves for later Roberto?’ and my lobster clawed suspect, answered, ‘ all good for 4pm, see you on the beach?’
‘Yeah, sure thing, I’ll be off duty.’
And then he………my lobster clawed suspect turned and a blast from the past hit me full force as I stared at the grown up version of the ‘pest of the neighbourhood’. Robert, called ‘that pesky kid Bobby, was tall and dare I say, almost handsome with a rash of rust freckles across his nose.
Here was the kid who stole the doctor’s ripe plums,
Here was the kid who woke the old lady on the corner throwing her dustbin lid onto the roof of her tin garden shed.
Here was the kid who put a newspaper full of dog pooh in front of The Grump’s front door, lit it, knocked hard and watched from behind a tree as the man frantically stamped on it, with dire consequences.
And here was the perpetrator of ‘THE DASTARDLY DEED’ who was never found out.
In a ridiculous flow of images through my horribly romantic brain, I saw it all coming out in his speech as my bridegroom on our wedding day! ‘Good grief I thought, save me!’
Fortunately, instead of proposing when I stepped forward, I said,
’Gotcha at last!’
His surprise at my spontaneous, outrageous exclamation was accompanied by a wonderful broad grin. He said in a glorious deep voice, (the Mills and Boon unfolding story had soft violin music now)
‘all my pleasure' he paused dramatically….…'Is it?.........can it be THE gorgeous Shirley from Petervale? Must be over 20 years ago!’
The violins peaked in a crescendo of sound, ‘yes, Shirley with the twin brother brats, mmmmm from Petervale,’ I stammered, blathering on in my own confusion.
‘Shut up!’ I commanded myself.
‘What on earth do you mean ‘Gotcha’ in that tone of voice?’ he asked, laughing with the pleasure of the moment.
Laughing too since I had managed to stop my stupid prattling, I answered, ‘YOU were the culprit! My dad nearly had a fit that day!’
As realisation dawned, his jaw dropped and he slapped his thigh (well muscled I noticed) and he rocked with laughter. ‘I had such a crush on you…….that teenage angst…….. I simply had to leave my mark…….. somehow, anyhow!’
But how did you…….follow me here?’ he said hesitantly.
I sighed with relief.
He wasn’t the perfect man after all. I remembered that peculiar lobster claw toe and the non existence of his small toe in that imprint and I allowed the symphony orchestra to escalate into a glorious conclusion of drums, cymbals and trumpets.
The sea shimmered gold in the sunshine and a whisper of wind lifted the hair off my forehead and he stared into my eyes as he approached me with his arms held out to embrace me.
Pixabay
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