Lisa Sanders with her children, Ayala, Lior, Talis, Yoel

The building with the dove logo is still on the corner. In the eighties the white-tiled apartment block stood sentinel on the cliff top; these days its tiles are somewhat chipped, and a further row of sand-colored apartment buildings, put up in the nineties in defiance of city building laws and gravity, has eclipsed the sea view. Eleven years ago I immigrated to the town where I spent my summer holidays as a child. The beach path, once a sandy track, is now a paved road. On this last day of the summer holidays I am driving my kids to the beach.

In the back, my eleven-year-old son Yoel stares with fierce concentration at the screen of the electronic game toy he balances on his knees while pushing furiously at the buttons with his thumbs. His legs are long and angular, covered in fine blonde hair and folded like hairpins; already he is too tall to sit comfortably in the back of the car. I glance across at those knees jabbing into the back of the passenger seat, remembering a cute chubby toddler strapped into a booster seat. Next to him, five-year-old Lior in a Sponge Bob hat leans over to watch his brother’s progress in the game. Ayala, eight months old, pink and oblivious, sleeps cocooned inside the plastic shell of her baby seat.

In a sudden surge of empathy, remembering how bereft I was when the summer holidays came to an end, I have scooped them all into the car for one last trip to the beach, one last ice cream. On the kitchen worktop, we have abandoned piles of battered old textbooks beside the roll of shiny plastic wrapping; tonight the newly-covered books will go into schoolbags, along with the notebooks and dangly pencil case accoutrements that are lugged to and from school.

The traffic lights are extra slow today, sluggish in the late-August heat. Lior has placed his blue bucket on the ridge behind the gear lever. It has been several weeks since I insisted we clean out the car, and there is a two-month detritus of crisp packets, ice lolly wrappers and wooden sticks lining the prickly black carpeting of the footwell.

Lior pitches forward in his seat with an ear-splitting yelp.

“Stop iiiit! Mummy, tell her to stop kicking me! Owww!”

In the rear view mirror, I see Talia, my nine-year-old daughter, scowling from the back row.

“Just stretching,” she says, her cool blue-grey eyes daring me to contradict her. Talia has the back row today, on one of the two pull-up seats and acknowledged as the worst place to sit in the strict rotation we have had to employ to prevent all-out war over who sits next to the baby. Talia shifts in her seat, takes the heel of one bare foot in her hand, and stretches her leg out until the toes, en pointe, touch Yoel’s head in front of her.

“Gerroff. Oy. Mummy, tell her to gerroff.” He tries to knock her foot away with the back of his head, without taking his eyes from the screen.

Lior still writhes in fury, clutching his backside. Ayala gives a loud intake of breath, her customary prelude to sustained crying, then goes quiet again.

I breathe.

“Tally. Can you just … put your legs down until we get there? Please?”

I am breathless with the effort of not shouting, not waking the baby. And then, because I am hot and exhausted from getting up in the night for the baby and entertaining four children for the large part of two months of summer holidays I cannot stop myself, “I mean, is it just too much to ask from you lot to sit quietly while I drive you. Hm? Is it?” My sarcasm is heralded by an electronically high-pitched fanfare. “And turn that bloody thing off, will you?”

Damn it, I am swearing at my children. But they are cowed into silence, for now. I push back my hair where it is sticking to my forehead and try to make eye contact with Lior. My almost-youngest who was all set to be the youngest, until the bombshell surprise of Ayala. Sometimes I catch Lior doing nothing, not building Lego or riding his bike, just standing, looking bewildered, as if he cannot fathom this unexpected direction life has taken. He has been difficult this summer. Earlier in the month, the older two traveled to England and spent ten days with their grandparents. Instead of reveling in all the extra attention his dad and I lavished on him in the absence of his big brother and sister, Lior was listless and nervous, constantly whining for their return and openly worried that we would forget him, abandon him. He catches my glance and rubs his nose with the flat of his hand, his father’s gesture.

“Can we get shells?” he asks.

A dim recollection grazes the surface of my maternal brain: some article about it being illegal to remove things from nature these days. No pine cones from the forests, no shells from the beach, etcetera. Forget it.

“Yup, shells, absolutely,” I tell him.

I turn the last corner and join the queue for parking, rummaging with my right hand amid CDs and hair bobbles for the coins to hand over to the attendant.

The car in front, a yellow beetle, has a sticker in its back window that reads, “God in heaven, We love You!” A couple is silhouetted inside; their elbows poke out of the open windows. The driver has one hand lazily on top of the wheel, the other across his girlfriend; she leans towards him. An ache of envy for their youth and their silly, impractical, gorgeous beetle surges through me and evaporates with the puff of black smoke from the exhaust as they chug out of sight.

Hot, wet sea air slaps my skin the instant I open the windows. The man on the barrier reminds me of driftwood. A cigarette dangles from his lower lip, walnut brown muscular legs poke out from tattered denim shorts.

“Fifteen.”

He squints bleached blue eyes in my direction and holds his hand open, a brown cracked bowl of fingers which close around the money, then pulls on a frayed rope and the barrier, a rusted metal pole with an oil drum counterweight, swings upwards. As we drive onto the smooth sweep of tarmac that takes us down to the beach, my brain does its flashback trick. I am eleven years old and the strap of my beach bag cuts into my shoulder as my flip-flops try to gain purchase on the sandy track. The blistered metal frame of an orange-and-brown striped folding deckchair is awkward and itchy to carry. My sister, five years younger and unburdened with heavy gear, skips ahead, her pigtails swinging below a kibbutz hat. My dad strides determinedly before me, little puffs of sand rise up with with every slap of his size twelve sandals. The backs of his knees are already pink from their unaccustomed exposure to the sun, and his left hand, as yet unaffected by tennis elbow and arthritis, lugs a huge orange plastic picnic box. My mother slogs along behind us in silver mules and a kind of caftan, struggling to control a folded beach umbrella, which is probably orange too.

I have to concentrate at the bottom. Where the path used to peter out onto the beach itself there is now a regimented set of white-lined parking bays. I park, shut off the engine and go to open the boot. Talia jumps down and Lior scrambles over the back of the seat before dive-slithering to the ground clutching his bucket.

 “Here, Talia, come and take these.” I hold out the big Ikea carrier filled with buckets and spades, crusted with dried sand and shell fragments. But she can’t hear me, or ignores me. She swings on the railing, holding one leg high over her head. With the engine switched off, the air inside the car already feels sour and burning hot. I lean over the baby and release the seatbelt. Sweat runs down my face as I grasp the handle of the seat and lift seat and baby out of the car.

“Talia! Yoel! Can you come and take some of this?” We have towels, buckets and spades, spare lotion, bats and ball, drinking water and a box of cut watermelon. I have brought a sling, a long piece of lycra cloth that the online instruction video and my friend Caroline have taught me to wrap around myself and tie to fasten the baby onto me, but that will require waking Ayala up and yanking her out of her car seat, not to mention unraveling the thing here, in the middle of the dirty car park. 

“Wait a second, I just got to level eight.” Despite the heat in the car, Yoel has not budged. He holds the game so close to his face that his eyelashes brush the screen. I stand beside him, my right arm numb from the weight of Ayala and her seat. 

I move without thinking, tear the precious toy from his grasp, feel the sleek shiny red plastic rectangle in the palm of my free hand as I effect a staggering run, hampered by the car seat, over to the metal railing where Talia and Lior wait. Ayala hiccups awake in surprise and I hurl the loathsome toy out towards sea. As it turns eye-catchingly in the sunlight I am vaguely aware of Talia’s shocked intake of breath, Yoel and Lior’s shouting, Ayala’s crying and the small hands clutching at my shirt, my trousers, but I am unstoppable, caught up in the adrenalin rush of the moment.

“Is everything okay?”

The girl and boy from the yellow beetle – I see it parked next to us – are observing my parenting skills with concern (her) and, yikes, disgust (him).

“Fine. Yes, we’re fine. Totally.” I nod, spot Yoel and Talia scrambling down the steps to the beach where they retrieve the toy from the sand where it fell amidst chunks of building rubble, old flipflops and drinking bottles some fifty yards short of the sea. Then a bloom of black and purple crowds my vision and I clutch the railing, momentarily dizzied. A moment later I am drinking thirstily from a water bottle the girl has thrust at me. “Sorry. Phew, that’s better. Really I’m fine.”

“What a cutie,” the girl pushes oversize sunglasses up on top of her ponytailed head as she bends down to smile at Ayala, who rewards the stranger with a beatific grin, showing the stub of a new tooth in her lower gum. “How old?”

“Eight – nearly nine months.” I crouch slowly, so as not to get dizzy again, and unclick Ayala’s harness. I breathe in the soft, damp babyness of my daughter.

Lior rattles his bucket against my leg. “Can we go? I want to go, can we go? I need shells.”

“Let me get the rest of the stuff from the car then,” I tell him. I glance around to see the boyfriend peering enthusiastically at my son’s game toy, which Yoel is demonstrating, using the little red pen instrument on the touch screen.

 “I’ll watch her for you, no problem,” the girl says, reaching out to take Ayala. “Avi, help them get their stuff.” Yoel and the boyfriend go over to the car, Yoel closing up the game and laying it carefully under the seat. Avi sets the big blue bag down beside Talia. When we are finally ready to lock the car, Yoel and Avi high five.

“Thanks a lot. Have a nice evening,” I tell the couple, taking Ayala into my arms.

“No worries. You have gorgeous kids by the way,” the girl says.

I do, I do, I remind myself silently. Lior and Yoel kick off their shoes halfway down the beach and dash headlong towards the water. Talia goes ahead of me, the strap of the beach bag weighing down one skinny shoulder as she walks sure-footed across the sand to the shadow of the lifeguard station where we will spread out our towel. Later on we will head to the café where the old men sip Turkish coffees and play backgammon, to buy our last ice creams of the summer.

Last Ice Cream was one of the stories submitted to ESRA’s 3^rd Literary Competition, “My Israel”.

Byline

Lisa Sanders made aliyah from the UK in 1996. She works as a writer and TV documentary producer.