Clare In The Dunes

Clare sat in the cleft between the rocks, stretching out her feet, thinking of the treats snug and secure in her bag. A cheese and onion batch, a large slice of chocolate cake, a huge family sized bag of crisps. This secret place was her favourite for eating. No one would see a crumb. She liked to sit in this little dim nook and imagine tasting everything before her fingers ever touched it.
She saw a flash of red between the dune grass at the front of her hidey-hole and frowned, shifting forwards for a closer look. It was him. He walked arm in arm with a young girl across the deserted beach. Oh no, she thought, ice in her stomach. He’s doing it again. She clamped a hand to her mouth. The couple stopped, they laughed, they threw their arms about each other in a move that looked half protective, half not. Clare cringed and gathered up her bag, almost crushing its precious cargo.

Leave them alone, a voice inside her yelled. He wouldn’t dare be with her if he were guilty. Someone might see him, even here out in the dunes where only the dog walkers ventured. What the gossips were saying were lies. Either that or they were out of their tiny minds. Just like Doug. Just like half the bay. Don’t go near the man. Don’t get his attention. She watched him take a grip on the girl’s frail arm, locking her in place as he studied her for a long drawn out second. What was he thinking? What was he imagining?

Clare wriggled free of her hiding place, snagging her T shirt as she hurried to watch. They were heading away from town. Out where the dunes crowded. She stooped low and ran after them, wishing she were thinner, faster, less of a lump of lard. She dated behind the grasses as she followed them. Straining to hear their words the breeze carried to her. Was he quoting poetry? If he was the girl was doomed.

Then she saw another figure on the beach striding towards them with more purpose than she had ever seen. Doug. Marching like a solider. Carrying something dark and shiny in his hand.

Clare held her breath.


Big Fat Lion (a real life lion.)

Cider

“They say it’s all in my head. But it isn’t,” the wind bullies her words. “I know the truth.” She slides another pill into her mouth and drowns it in cheap cider. She shudders and wipes tears away. “He’ll get away with it all.” She’s not alone. Doug sits by her side on the bench. He’s seen it all, the shadow lands. The in-between. “Where’s the truth,” she asks. He shrugs. “I’m going to get him. I’m going to make him suffer. ”

He takes her hand, holds on, stares at the wrinkles on her fingers. Age, longing, wanting, it turns you inside out. She knows. He does. “I hate him. I hate him for being happy.” Her voice crumbles into sobs. “It’s not fair.”


Chris Leonard

Darius Bredwyn Is Loved

Following disturbing allegations about Douglas Bruton's working habits I no longer feel comfortable including his work in Greyling Bay, and so have deleted the four pieces which were attributed to him here.

For more information read this post on Vanessa Gebbie's blog, and this post on my main blog, How Publishing Really Works.

Apologies for any difficulties this might cause.



About The Contributors

Chips

“Inside me lives a skinny girl crying to get out, but I can always shut the bitch up with chips,” Clare muttered, examining a lean crisp chip. She sat on a bench outside the fish and chip shop, her cod and chips hot in her lap on their polystyrene tray. Her thoughts brimmed with vinegar and cooking fat, her lips rimed with salt, her insides warmer now but never content. After this she had a doughnut planned in the cafe, after that perhaps a big Mac, fries and a nice thick milkshake at the new McDonalds. Oh yes, she had Saturday all planned out, all right. People said she had a pretty face, as if her face was all she was worth now she’d surrounded it with soft white padding. She hated them for that. Hate made her eat; she wrapped her hand about her hate right now and crammed more of it into her mouth. Hate tasted good, but it had a high fat content, it might one day clog her arteries and kill her. But right now, at fifteen, she didn't really care. She wasn't supposed to be here in this boring town but at fifteen your parents just bundled you up like luggage and carted you about. This town, that town. Never keeping still. Why were her parents still together at all? They ought to be divorced by now. They should be arguing and throwing things but no, they were like a couple of teenagers slobbering over each other every night. That was their version of normal.

A man waved at her as he weaved down the path, as he tilted up his head and yelled at a seagull. He came and sat next to her. Shouldn't tramps smell like pee and sweat? Shouldn't he be drunk? Shouldn't they be the last person you’d ever want to talk to? Clare chewed, swallowed. “Hello Doug.”

“Hello.” His voice was always diamond sharp. “A man painted me the other day.”

“Really? What colour?” She smiled. He didn't.

“Sandy. He painted me sandy. Like the beach, so no one can see me.”

“I can see you.”

“That’s because I'm not on the beach.”

He really was insane. She always wondered what he'd look like without his beard. Ugly? Handsome? Young? Old? “Who are you Doug?” she always asked him that. He always shrugged.

“Who do you want me to be?” He always said that too and she always came up with a silly answer. The Prime Minister. My Aunt Lilly. Roland Rat.

She just wasn't feeling so silly today. “Somebody normal.”

His blue, blue eyes stared at her, through her. “Might manage normal for a chip.”

She offered him the tray and he plucked one from it. He held it aloft, fingers reaching into the sky. She squinted and watched Whitey swoop. “He'll get fat,” she muttered.

“He'll be all right, Clare,” Doug returned, his voice suddenly as silky smooth as warm butter. “God gave him a pretty face.”

Clare huffed in disgust. “I hate normal.”

“Me too,” Doug said in his usual brittle tones. “That’s why I gave it up.”


Rona J Frith

Ruth And Judy

As the day tips towards twilight the lights flicker on along the seafront, garlanding the bay; tracing the stretch of the pier across the dark heaving water.

The daytime crowds disperse. In an hour or two the night-time crowds will emerge, all fancy clothes and swagger but now, this pause between day and night, is Ruth’s time. As the light leaches from the sky the tides seem to hesitate; even the gulls are subdued. Just the quiet pad of a runner passing by and a solitary walker letting his dog chase the waves as they retreat. The sky flushing gold and soft, bruised mauve above the reach of the sea. And Doug, out on the beach still, stumbling across the cobbles. His worst time of day.

Ruth clips on Judy’s lead and grabs the bag and soon she is out beneath the softening sky and Doug when he sees her stops his frantic lurching, his yelling at the promise of stars and he is quiet again, so quiet that just for a moment Ruth thinks that today might be one of his good days. She lets Judy off her lead and watches as the little dog runs stiffly up to Doug, her stump of a tail wagging frantically, even after all these years.

Ruth has had Judy for longer now than Doug ever did: has fed her and walked her and watched her transform through the years from a swift little terrier to this lumpen, arthritic thing yet everyone still calls Judy Doug’s dog.

Doug walks towards Ruth, smiling; takes the bag from her hand without a word then hurries to the rock pools, Judy beside him. He sits with the little white dog and eats the sandwiches, the apple. The piece of cake that Ruth wrapped so carefully he flings to the few remaining gulls and soon the air around him is full of white flashing wings and as his voice rises with them through the cooling darkened air Ruth remembers when he laughed with her on this same beach, and held her hand and smiled. The way his gaze had focused beyond her, telling her before he spoke that it was over. His dog left behind with her like some sort of consolation prize.

When the food is finished and the gulls have dispersed Judy noses her way back across the stones and stands by Ruth’s side, ready to go home.

“Same time tomorrow, then, Doug?” Ruth says but he is too busy pointing out to sea to reply; too busy watching the waves washing his footsteps off the beach, reaching for him still. Searching for Whitey in the dimming, empty sky.


Jane Smith

Whispers

Ger plods through the dry sand until he reaches the part the sea has licked clean. He huddles into his coat, fingers feeling the envelope crinkling in his pocket.

He tells himself that the water in his eyes is from the wind.

He lies.

The sand is slick from the retreating tide, shells with tiny pools around them, gulls following the tide.

The nutter is absent, thank god, or he’d have had to be patient and nice, and that would not suit. Not today. He needs to keep today to himself. Hard work, Doug is now. When he was a tiny lad Doug had helped him tie hooks on his fishing line and shown him how to fish for crabs. Then one day Doug told him that he’d joined the army, told him with a big grin that he was leaving forever.

Ger picks up a few flat stones, and a shell with an inside as pink as a sunset. The stones are spun into the water, just like Doug taught him years ago. Before. The shell he keeps.

He pulls the envelope from his pocket, the wind snatching at the paper. He reads the letter through, just in case it has changed since he read it last. The tears threaten, so he stuffs the letter in his pocket and zips it up. He runs to the water’s edge, where the waves keep time with his breathing.

He whoops and runs along the edge of the waves as they foam round his ankles. He yells, he screams, and waves his arms as he goes. He is six years old again.

Doug rises out of the rocks, horror on his face.

Ger stops. “Doug. It’s only me, man. I’ve got a job. I’ve. Got. A. Good. Job.” He grins wide enough to crack his face.

Doug relaxes, smiles vacantly. “A job.”

“Yes, man, a real job, not a part-time-helping-out-Mum job.”

Doug picks over each word like the pebbles he plays with. “You’ll go away, then?” he says. Today must be a good day.

“Yes—not for a while, though. Not for a couple of weeks.” Doug’s blue eyes lose focus. Maybe not such a good day. Or perhaps he’s upset, hurt. “I want lead my own life. I have to get away from here, see. I need to get away.”

Doug is looking skywards, lost again. Looking for Whitey. Ger shrugs. “Bye now,” he says. And as he walks away he hears a twenty year old whisper following him. “I’m going away, Ger. I’ve got away. And I’m never coming back.”


Linda Gruchy

Invisible Ice

Louise hunched against the radiator. The café was steamy but no heat reached across the counter to the customers even though the skinny woman brewing up tea had sweat running down her forehead. Maybe the cold is inside me, Louise wondered: maybe I should be drinking antifreeze? Hysteria threatened, sourness rising in her throat. She picked up her mug of tea using both hands to steady it.

Well, here I am, though God knows where “here” is.

She had slammed the door behind her, tossed the keys on to the estate agent’s desk and gunned the car towards the motorway. Go West, young woman. It would be difficult to go much further west without swimming, so here she was. Car parked outside the B & B, suitcase unpacked, registered for a week while she looked for somewhere to live, details already with a local agency.

A “stranger in a strange land”. “New beginning;” “fresh fields”. All that kind of crap. The lifeline she was clutching at was that nobody knew where she was. Dead to the world. Old life over. Gone. Andrew would search for her, of course, and he’d be efficient. Efficiency was his middle name after all; well no, actually his middle name was Daniel, but still.... Discreet questions, that’s how he’d start, then phone calls, online enquiries, perhaps even a detective; he’d try the lot but he would fail. Dogged Daniel, dogging her footsteps. The view from the steamy window was bleak and the beach deserted apart from an old man shouting at the seagulls and another figure (male? female? hard to tell) standing in front of an easel, wrapped up against the chill and painting the old man’s picture. If I walked into the sea, would they stop me, she shivered: would they even see me? I think I’m invisible; I’m nothing. A nothing-creature made of invisible ice.

“I got a bikkit,” confided a small voice at her elbow, startling her out of the dark thoughts. It was a small, round child, not obviously male or female, just a generic toddler creature. It held something up to view. “It’s a rectangliar bikkit.”

“Don’t bother the lady, darling.” The mother sounded half-hearted, deep in conversation and, the gesture made, she turned back to her friend.

“Look,” the small voice was polite but persistent. “There’s bumps on my bikkit. There’s ninety-seventy-nine.”

Louise stared at the child and mumbled something that seemed to satisfy its proud boast, then she exhaled a long, sighing breath.

Not invisible then, after all.

It was a start.


Nicola Slade

Whitey

I watch a tramp sitting on a rock on the seashore. He chews on pebbles and starts swearing at the seagulls. 'Where's Whitey?' he yells. One of them is his friend, the locals say; only he's not sure which one it is. His name is Doug, I think, but I’m just a tourist, I came to observe, nothing more. My easel sways with the wind. It’s an isolated spot here between the rocks but he’s staring at me now in that vacant way of his. They say he was in a war but nobody’s said which one. He’s too young for it to be long ago. I try to capture the folds of his coats as he holds his hand above his head. The morning sun is low in the sky but it still blinds him. My brush sweeps across the canvas. I’m stealing life, I always think. Holding it prisoner. Playing God with a man who talks to birds. A man at my hotel told me he’s been yelling at the gulls for years. That he used to live in a home until it closed down. He pushes himself from his perch.

“What you doing, mister?” His words are brittle, unpleasant. He isn’t drunk. I always expect him to be but I’ve never seen a bottle of anything in his soiled fingers. His face is unshaven. His eyes two bright blue beacons shining out from a face darkened by madness.

“Painting.” I always keep my voice low and even. I imagine him carrying a gun, slung low. A soldier stalking me.

“Painting what?” he demands.

“Painting you.”

He moves around my easel and looks at the hunched figure on the rock. He laughs then leans around me to trace the faint lines of the seagulls above the figure’s head. “Is that Whitey?”

“Who’s Whitey?”

“Whitey’s flying. Whitey’s free.”

“Did Whitely die in the war?”

“No, Whitey didn’t die.” He shakes his head. “He flew. Up he went into a sky full of smoke and he never came back down. He turned into a bird, you see. That’s what Whitey did. He turned into a bird.”

“And you’re looking for him?”

“No, he’s there.” He points to the gulls dancing and whirling over the foam of the outgoing tide. He raises his hand and waves to them. “There’s Whitey.”

I stare at the gulls, waiting. Waiting. One splits from the flock, crying out, swooping earthward towards us. It follows Doug as he turns away. A white and black shadow, it follows him down the beach. “Whitey,” he calls to it. “Whitey.”

As I watch it stays with him. It rises and falls but it never turns away. “It’s just a gull,” I tell myself. “It’s just another gull. Anything else is madness.


Rona J Frith