Desire Line Read Free

nobody— which was fine, how I wanted it. I’ve edited down. The mutant growth of contacts made at university in Bristol – even at the time they felt like another person’s – has been starved of updates. Particularly one ex-lover and fellow student, Kailash, now reduced to messaging from wherever her travels took her. It would make Libby mad with envy to see what she’s sending. Here’s orchard road from floor 19 singapore savoy you SHIT! crappy where u r? hope you    you  ICON DELETED ! I get a glimpse, a nanosecond, of gleaming towers before the scene combusts. Still mad then, Kailash? I guess so. But it was for the best. You were a temptation, I admit, to a character like mine till Keep It Simple, I decided. Keep to the black outlines with space to fill in, life as a cleared site. A rented flat, a job, a movie library, some music. Tess, not up to Kailash’s standard in many ways, understands this. And you’re alive and well enough to insult me Kailash so stop whining like the second Mr Jenkinson. But I can’t argue with ICON DELETED .
    I don’t reply.
    Hindsight tells me someone I knew who’d left Rhyl, a man called Josh Meredith, deserved a tap. But riveted to here and now, I let the soup go straight to stomach untasted as the screen filled with action from Foryd Harbour, seaward of the bridge and the town’s oldest feature. Now in jeopardy. The crumbling of Beacon Point’s dunes and too much water in too tight a channel meant small moored boats were either disappearing upstream or already engulfed. The camera homed in on one, The Cariad. A slim pleasure craft that could take a sail, all elegant lines and minimal appendages on deck, I remembered seeing her at berth. Being primped by a surly owner whenever I took a walk that way. She was about to be turned to matchwood against the bridge piers though you almost expected a giant hand to reach down and fish her out. It didn’t and her timbers splintered, shot up into the wind and fell across the tarmac to the sound of ‘Wowee!’ from the camera operator.
    Those who had made it over the bridge wouldn’t be coming back. At least it wasn’t Tess’s road in. Suddenly— Yori?
    Tess! Where was she?
    Where d’you think?
    Spiky if she thought she was talking to her boss but jokey to a sexual partner. I said OK, instantly breathless, picturing her shiny-faced and definitely not in a fleece suit. Nude. Or in material her sparrow’s frame would show through, it being her main attraction, that and the way she says I’m all toast-ty! as she does now. (She’s more Welsh than you hear in town). Day off, eh? I wish we were— but her wish gets drowned out by Libby shouting, ‘Fuckinghell!’ above my head. Above her head the good grey slates must be grinding together like teeth. A dragon was touching down by the sound of it and about to swipe us with its tail—
    So we got The Wave. But The Wave’s not the thing. What it caused is the thing. And to be honest every meteorological blip on the earth’s so well covered if you’re watching them they’ll blend. Towyn, that I described at the start, could easily be somewhere in France a decade on. It doesn’t take many years to become a quiz question. ‘Atlantic City or Rhyl? Ten seconds, team!’ So not to make a drama of it, I survived. Obviously. But I want to say this. Don’t credit any reports of panic. Buses loaded with families continued on inland. Exits blocked as entire fascia claddings and street furniture made landfall in the traffic and had to be dragged out. And Rhyl people stayed calm. Over fifteen hundred of them boarded vehicles of every sort and pulled back from the edge with their babies, gadgets and pet-carriers. See them. Not a work day anymore, a crowd had gathered on the promenade near the weak spot opposite Church Street, dead centre of our Victorian seafront. Through a gap