Desire Line Read Free Page B

the water’s path yet with partner Alice Norman safe in Spain, he thought he’d cruise the prom. ‘Look, look Yori. You gotta see this. It’s Venus off the top of LoveSync— she’s going past now. Loo-ok-k! There’s her tits still moving in the water.’
    â€˜Get back. Glenn! They’re saying—’
    â€˜Yeah, yeah. Bet you’re nice’n’dry, lucky bugger. Hey, Yori! I am a camera!’ He was on a rioter’s high, no doubt about it. Before we broke I heard, ‘Aw-w, this is disaster porn!’
    Having just missed the seawall breach Glenn made it to Gaiman Avenue. For no reason. He wasn’t invited. Nobody ever is. I can’t afford to encourage interest. Rain was falling like gravel, souvenirs of our birthplace whizzed down the road at head height, but something must watch over the Glenn Hugheses of this world. Big compared to a half-Japanese, and wild-eyed and haired now, he looked like the Storm God himself on the doorstep.
    Glenn’s got at least fifteen years on me but now you’ll picture older than he looks. Alice among other things keeps him in shape so you need to think of a big muscular body topped with one of those square, comic-book faces dictated by the subframe— brow ridges, nose, cheekbones and jaw, an Adam’s apple like a corbel for the chin, all solid foundations for a rugby player, say, or a boxer not that I know if he was either. But straight from outside, his skin has post-match hyperflush. His electric-blue waterproofs dripped on my polished floor and a sudden twist round and he gives me a shower. The single other occasion he’d ‘dropped in’ had he taken off footwear without prompting? Too late. Collapsed onto a seat with fuckme , only then he leans forward and undoes his boots. He muttered, ‘They say the surge’ll knock out the whole of Kinmel.’
    This was the opposite bank of the River Clwyd, a blight of cheap housing and ex-holiday camps. Rhyl’s barrio it’s been called. ‘You sound pleased. Anyway I don’t think so.’
    â€˜â€™S’right!’
    And then fury broke over me in its own wave. I’ve got a temper nobody knows about and kicking him would feel so good, Glenn sitting there in his pathetic too-young for him clothes (tight jeans, the sweatshirt covered in Indian script he couldn’t understand) and putting on this nadatodowithme attitude, a spectator. I really hated him. ‘Not bothering you though? You’re—’ I remembered too late the location of his own house.
    He was paying more attention to his repulsive spongy boots. ‘Tight-arse,’ he said. ‘Go on, shoot the messenger!’
    (Honestly? He turned out totally correct— two thousand static caravans, their occupants fled not a moment too soon, were about to swarm inland. Models called Gallant and Rhino burst apart spilling mock-leather banquettes, dogbeds, broken toys, roller blinds and high-chairs across the fields. This ersatz material hasn’t any patina of age to look forward to and makes unrottable garbage. As with nuclear waste all that could be done was burial).
    The hot drink I couldn’t not offer gave Glenn his second wind. I had a live stream on of teenagers in a water-fight along Vorderman Road but it wasn’t enough for him. Dramas needed to be played out. A natural mimic, he did some woman’s refusal to leave her bedsit only one street back from the front with falsetto cursing of rescuers from the piano nobile window. But the illogic of the damage was Glenn’s main fix. In Abbey Street a trio of empty properties remained upright— with the just-completed clinic next door pulverised. He found that particularly hysterical. It was as if surrendering his home (‘in the front door and out the back by I left, couldn’t stop it— Alice’ll have us well covered—’) had freed him. Neighbours were sending him images of