Slapton Sands Read Free

accomplishment she would take away with her.
    She thought about the northern boy with the curls on the bus ride back. He’d said he wasn’t a bad boxer. According to his own reasoning, that should mean he was terrible. She didn’t think he would be, though. She thought it an odd pastime for someone with any claim to intelligence. But boxing hadn’t yet inflicted any damage to his face.
    Jocks and nerds were separate species in American collegiate life. But the dichotomy she was so familiar withfrom home didn’t seem anything like so clear cut or prevalent in England. She’d encountered really stupid sportsmen here, of course, brawny and privileged, doing courses with titles like land economy and agrarian science. She’d come across the rugby crowd, half-naked and bellowing lewd songs as they thumped out their drinking games in college bars. But almost everyone at Kent seemed to participate in some sort of sport. They played scratch soccer matches on the yellow grass of the campus. They flew kites. They played tag. They threw frisbies. There were incomprehensible games of cricket. Racing bikes were ridden along the undulating roads. A number of people drove to Broadstairs or Pegwell Bay to swim. Alice wondered why it was she found all this so strange. She swam most days herself off Whitstable beach, despite being pretty sure that amid the queasy panic of the cormorant dream she was quite unable to swim. It was strange because she’d thought the English sedate, stifled by a sort of class- and history-driven decorum. But the English played all the time. They frolicked under the sun.
    Alice Bourne occupied a room in a large house at the Seasalter end of the shoreline. She lived on the ground floor. She could always hear the water breaking in waves on the steep slope of shingle beyond the sea wall outside her window. The house had wooden floors, and sometimes she could hear the scrape of a crutch from above. The physics postgrad living up there had broken a leg in a motorbike crash, and the rubber ferrules on the tips of his crutchessqueaked on the floorboards with his agitated movement. The crash had been a bad one, the break severe. He couldn’t get down the stairs very easily and was almost always up there, pissed off, fidgety. She could usually hear King Crimson or Genesis playing loudly on his reel-to-reel. Long John Silver’s crutch music.
    But Alice liked Whitstable. She liked the ice-cream parlour in Tankerton with its knickerbocker glory glasses and chipped marbling on old tabletops. She liked the taut slap in the wind of rope against the mast that held the harbour flag. Rigging thrummed in the harbour, beating a homely tattoo. She liked the painted-wood Victorian houses on Wavecrest. The reclusive actor Peter Cushing was rumoured to live in one of them, when he wasn’t elsewhere making horror films. There was a market near the railway station where the cheese was always processed and they sold confectionery that had a suspicion of fire damage about it. But the market was friendly, and the local fruit was good and cheap. Once she’d got used to their frankly weird opening and closing rituals, she’d come to feel comfortable in the Whitstable pubs. She’d eat half a pint of prawns in the Pearson’s Arms or sit on the breakwater outside the Neptune and watch the water, oily at sunset, stretching towards Sheppey as the sun descended, seeing out the day, sipping a glass of tepid Kentish beer.
    She did this now, noticing milky jellyfish on the placid surface of the sea, hundreds of them, brought here, she supposed, by the unfamiliar heat, the slow, relentless raisingof the water’s temperature through this unprecedented summer to something almost tropical. The sea was new to her, an elemental novelty still, as it must have been to many of the men whose fate thirty-odd years ago she intended to explore despite the reluctance of her professor fully to sanction the