Creative Writing: The Beach

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The steps are some way away to the left of where we’re standing. The wall is high, not as high as I’d imagined, but overhung by a steep grass slope. ‘How did you get here, then? Washed up by the tide, were you?’ ‘I’m sorry I slept in your boat. I was frightened and it looked safe.’ ‘You’re not the first to sleep down here. It happens every year. People use this beach like a doss house sometimes. I’m thinking of putting a pillow and a blanket in the boat and charging rent.’
And now it comes back to me in a rush: staggering down the steps to the beach, throwing off my shoes and backpack, running into the sea. I can’t swim. I never even paddle. I’d laid down under whirling stars in a sky as mad and alive as a Van Gogh painting, and dared …show more content…

As if I didn’t know. As if the memory of my self-destructive gesture doesn’t make me sick with the thought of what might have happened.
‘Why were you on the beach, anyway? It’s a dangerous place to be at night.’ ‘I was drunk. I wanted to get away from the man I came with. He’d laughed every time someone got splattered in the films.’
‘Well, that stuff’s tongue in cheek. Most people laugh at it.’
‘Not when it’s a child….’ and I have to stop. I see her again, see her luminous eyes and yellow hair.
‘She was in my dream, the girl in the film. We were in the sea together. She clung onto me and then she let go, as if she was too tired to hold on any longer. I didn’t save her. I could have held onto her, caught her, but I let her go.’
He’s looking away to sea, and twisting at a band on his wrist, turning it obsessively.
‘In your dream. You didn’t save her in your dream,’ he says, and his voice is flat. ‘It was just a dream.’
He looks at me briefly, snaps his eyes at me, and I realise it’s the first time he’s looked at me directly.
‘You must have been in a right state, walking into the sea like that, especially in the dark, and on your own. The sea is dangerous. People get into difficulties all the time.’
‘I was upset …’ He doesn’t let me …show more content…

I tell him about my own lost girl. We turn our chairs around to face each other, and our knees touch, and then our hands.
I text Mike, telling him I’ll make my own way home and take the train back to London the next morning. I’m sorry to leave. I’ve fallen in love with Whitby, with its heroic past and its brave determination to survive in a changing world. I stare out at the landscape sliding past me: at the wooded hills, the rushing brown water over jagged rocks, the small perfect villages. We meet up in London, a week later, Nick and I, and for a year, we travelled between his town and mine. He was uncomfortable in London, and I was uncomfortable for him. We loved each other for a while, but I loved my life in London more, and he belonged in Whitby. He shared its prosaic public face and its dark soul. Maybe we were wrong to give each other up, to let each other go so easily. I think of him often and when I do, I hear the sound of waves, and catch the fading scent of oil, hemp and

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