Debut Flash: 'Memento' by Felicity Goodall

White sand, sun in your eyes, salt on your tongue. A memory that shimmers like a mirage on the outer edges of your mind. You reach towards it, can’t quite touch it. Try harder.

A baking August day before the war. The outgoing tide has abandoned a whale on the beach at L’Ancresse, as big as one of father’s ships it bulges among the rotting seaweed.

A boy’s smooth hand enfolds yours and you look up. Blinded by the sun, you can’t see the face as it leans down towards you but you know it’s David.

‘Smile for the camera.’

You look along the bone-white sand, see a figure in his Saturday clothes, loose jacket and open-necked shirt. You pout, turn away, tug David’s hand. You want to look at the whale, not perform for father’s new Box Brownie. This you will come to regret.

You pull your brother towards the whale and the faces round it shaded by cloche hats and fedoras so you can see only their smiles. You want to touch the skin of this whale. Feel its fishiness.

David pinches his nostrils. You copy him.

A dead brown eye stares at you. You turn into the sun to tell your brother he has the eyes of a whale. Take your hand from your nose to shade your eyes to see his sun-bleached features….

Smell disinfectant, feel the pinch of nursing shoes, the rough knuckles of a man with blue eyes, swathed in bandages. This faceless pilot is not him. David’s plane plunged into the icy waters of the English Channel. His face, the one you can’t remember, eaten by crabs.