The Beach

“Aw hey!”

But the boy kept walking kicking up the grass. I fixed my bike to the wall and shook off my raincoat. All them cats sat up to look at me. They’re pretty cats, aren’t you the pretty cat! Ah they don’t care what you say to them or how you coo them, they still come in and kill whatever you didn’t lock into the coop.

“Hey!” and the cats all turned their one dark head and looked at the boy and he turned around.

“Where you going?”

He stared at me and he looked funny there in the field with the black of all the cats, all standing up, poked through the green of the field and the boy there with his t-shirt, that had a band on it and was fading at the collar and it and the whole thing just made me laugh. “I’m just trying to get across to the beach,” he said.

“What you going to the beach for?”

He stayed shock-still, but the cats they all lay down on their bellies and field was green again. “I won’t bite ye,” I said. “I can take you to the beach on my bike if you want. It’s a good bike.” I rolled the bike over. A good bike? My bike is the fastest bike and everybody in Saintstown knows it when I slip in and out of the stalls at the market and fly over the cobbles on the square and I’m so fast that I scared Ms Anne Marie Jacobs almost to death.

“I wasn’t even anywhere near her, I was on the road and she was on the path.”

“She’s just a nervous person,” my mam said.

“What’s she got to be nervous about?”

“Ah some of the older people, they just have a nervous way about a lot of things,” she said. And I thought about the film I saw on the reel at home that spat out images of five men with thick skin, thick and wet skin, with faces you could break into triangles, circles, squares, all those big, thick shapes. And they were sitting on the top of a hill with their fists full of bread and one of them gasped and hunched down and they all saw a truck battering its way up the hill to them and they all hunched down all together and one pulled a grenade and threw it at the truck. And I thought, “There’s a thing to be nervous about, there’s a thing to jump into a porch for,” like Anne Marie had done. 

The boy looked at my bike and said “okay”, because it’s such a fast bike.

And he came over to my side and walked beside me and we walked through that longer grass because you’ll run over the cats if you cycle through here.

“It’s a nice bike, did you paint it that blue?”

“Yeah, when I found it it was rusted.”

“When I found my bike my mam made me paint it bright red and white so everyone could see me and I didn’t get knocked over.”

Haha! And I doubled up from laughing so hard and tears came out of my eyes and I thought I was going to break in half I was laughing that hard. The boy smiled.

“Will the gates close at night?”

And in front of us two twisting antlers stood out against the smooth thick grass – so thick I thought that when the wind went through it it moved all as the one thing.

“Oh there aren’t any gates anymore,” I said. “Nobody wants to come into the park at night anyway because of all the murders.”

The deer turned its face to us and then laid its head back down and went to sleep. Another strutted out of the door of a house. The roof had all slid off and wasn’t I glad of it because I’d been watching that house for two months wondering when the roof was going to slide off and it finally had and I knew I had to tell Charlie about it because we’d made a bet and he betted on three months and he was going to be really sore about the whole thing when he found out I was right about the two months.

“What murders?”

“Loads of people were murdered ages ago here and now it’s haunted.” But Charlie was such a liar anyway so I’d never win.

“I think you’re making that up.”

“You’re so sure! Why else would no one want to live here!”

“Well no one lives this close to the sea, it’s colder and when the sea is rough everything gets flooded,” he said and he looked towards the windows that were still zipped up in ivy even in that summer heat. “And they all look the same, so one day if you went outside you might never be able to work out which one you lived in again,” he said. But the ghosts aren’t scary and the deer don’t mind them. And we turned past the last trees, on a foggy day they were almost the last trees on earth with their branches holding out their begging bowls to the sea. But what they were begging for I didn’t know and I’d never know because the trees have their secrets. And their branches ripple down to me and brush my face like they know my secrets too but they don’t and they never will because my bike is too fast for them. And here’s where those men might hide, the men with thick faces and crusty bread and I cycled though a little faster and the boy noticed but didn’t mind because suddenly there it was; all the blue and the grey and the green but I didn’t like it; it wasn’t any good. And the boy just hopped off, just like that he skipped straight down to the water. I rolled my bike to the side and looked around and saw shells the size of trumpets all there along the rock.

The boy slipped out of his shoes and his trousers and into the water a little further, a little further, until he stopped and the waves of the water folded over him.

“Hey!” and I ran and I felt sick to my stomach – sick like Charlie felt when I told him about the roof, ah but he’s such a liar – but he stood up. And he walked back, slowly, because the water is a heavy thing to walk against. “Here,” he said and he smiled, “look at this one.” And he held out the bicycle frame with blue and silver paint, a little rough but good. “You have to go a little far out to find the best things,” he said. And we walked in and out like that for a long time, such a long time that the trees fell apart with the darkness and were just a shadow there. I didn’t want to see any ghosts, I said. “But the deer are there,” the boy said, “ghosts wouldn’t come when the deer are still awake and they’re awake still, I can hear them.”

And as he said it he bent down into the water and pulled out metal nails, thick and square, and a steel rafter – it took the two of us to pull it in and set it safe by the rocks – and it had some marking on it, and numbers chewed off by rust, and an end that looked like it had been twisted by heat. And the nails were bashed in and scratched too but “they’re good”, the boy said, and he wrapped them up in his bag until the lump of the metal stuck out through the canvas and he bent forward as he carried it.  

And between all the tides of nails, there were pretty things like a round door with painted windows, and glass cups and tiny forks with metal flowers on the handle. Some of them had fallen off and some of the prongs had bended in but we left them because the boy said there would be others around tomorrow, and sometimes they have wooden carts with them. They were pretty things, and I was glad I’d gone down into the water, but even then when I picked up my bike to go home and looked back it made me feel cold to think about, and I wanted to cycle fast, the fastest I’ve ever cycled and that’s the truth, to make me feel better about it.

But there on the beach the boy knelt down on the sand. “I want to go back,” I said. “But wait,” he said, and he didn’t look up, he looked out there and he looked and he looked until the blue and grey and the green all folded over each other and made me feel sick and cold, and all of the ghosts made me feel sick and cold because the deer would be asleep, and the cats would be asleep and “there!” he shouted and I screamed that loud because I was so sick and scared. But “there”, he said again. And I heard the feet of deer moving in and out of the trees. And I laughed because I was so stupid to be nervous like that, the deer drifted in and out between the trees making so much noise, I could have danced when I heard that noise. And my face was warm again and my hands were warm and the air was warm, and the boy’s t-shirt dried, and his hair dried and fell back over his face. “That’s a cool t-shirt,” I said.