Snake Beach

by Glass, Lisa

  ‘Just shut up,’ I said, ‘and have a Minstrel, for God’s sake.’ Finally out of steam, he took the sweet and crunched it up. I let him eat the whole packet.

  Chapter 12I was only little when I learned that most people didn’t keep to the morals they said they believed in. Firstly there was my dad, who’d talk to me and my mum about decency and honour-among-thieves, and who’d then go and spend our electric money in the pub. And when I’d just started school full time, I was out walking Lizzie when I stumbled on a stash of empty wine bottles, beer cans, and a lot of bare bums. Half of the bare bums belonged to folk I recognised. I was too embarrassed to tell anybody what I seen, but them disgusting adults, some of my neighbours that I’d known since I was born, have been nice to me ever since. If I ever washed their cars or cleaned their chalet windows I could work half as hard and they’d still pay me double. Most people I knew had at least two faces; their polite one and their real one.

  There were accidents here every now and again. Car smash-ups from where people parked outside the church right on a blind bend, though nothing too serious. Someone’s granny once fell down a bit of cliff whilst she was blind drunk on sherry and she broke her hip. She died not long afterwards, but she was eighty-nine, so it wasn’t exactly a tragedy.

  A roof blew off when we was hit by the tail-end of a hurricane that spun across the Atlantic Ocean, but we all chipped in and got it mended. Nothing happened that we couldn’t put right. We had country lanes with campion flowers like pink sweets and our evening walks were perfumed with the pretty smell of honeysuckle and sea air. We had kestrels swooping on our fields and a panoramic view of the ocean. Even people had not done too much to spoil it and it couldn’t have looked much different in modern times than a hundred years ago. Our site pub, The Bucket o’ Blood, could have been a museum set with its low ceilings, uneven flagstones and black wooden beams.

  The church that the plane crash destroyed had been standing since the Black Death and was full of old roses and yew trees. I used to like that it had an ancient graveyard full of people from olden days, and a kissing gate that I sometimes dreamt about at night. Well, that plane crash was the end of that and I could only imagine what else that summer might take away from us.

  Most of my lot lived on a sprawling patch of wooden chalets on the edge of the dunes, but there was other people that lived in stone houses down the hill, in the main part of the town. Some of them thought they was better than us because they had a chemist, a dress shop, and a bakery which claimed to have “the world’s best pasties”, though in fact they were pretty rank and gave you minging pastie belches for at least twelve hours after eating one.

  People have always come on holiday here because they say it’s idyllic, that it can wash all your troubles away. A writer called Virginia Woolf visited here as a little girl and looked at our lighthouse, Godrevy, and when she grew up she even wrote a book about it. It says so in the piles of leaflets that Luke Gilbert once handed out to shops and cafés, back before the wiring in his brain went totally fried.

  When Luke calmed down enough to talk to the police without screeching or attacking anybody, he sounded just like Nathan. He said he reckoned God hated us and had forsaken us. He said that this was why people was getting crueller by the day.

  The policemen just looked at him blankly. He was not a man in his right mind. That was the consensus. I expected that in their line of work they had seen it all and more besides. But Luke wasn’t quite as nuts as they thought. What he had to say wasn’t gibberish. He might have been one rabbit short of a stew, but he still had a point. He told them that he was in the Hayle Towans sand dunes regular as courting rabbits and one morning he stumbled upon a pile of snake corpses. He couldn’t stop the boys by force, but he said he tried to reason with them. They just laughed at him, so he took a sack and began taking the adders to his own back garden, a gross patch of wildlife not mowed in five years. Saving as many as he could, that was the plan. Dozens of adders he collected, sackful after sackful. Didn’t care that he was turning his garden into a seething snake pit. Here and there he went, with that heavy wriggling bag. And when the boys still hunted the snakes, he said he had to do something else. To get people’s attention. To make them listen.

  Luke was led off by the police to help them with their enquiries and Han and me looked at each other.

  ‘He knows,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, he does.’

  ‘I can’t believe he recognised us after all this time.’

  ‘It ain’t good,’ Han said.

  ‘What are we going to do if he tells them coppers?’

  ‘No one’s gonna believe him. Not after what happened with Luke’s old man.’

  ‘You know about that?’

  ‘My gran told me. Scandal, wasn’t it. That girl was probably well messed up afterwards. Nobody is going to believe Luke, what with being the son of a pervert and that.’

  ‘Just cos Luke’s dad was a perv, that don’t make Luke one.’

  ‘You don’t know, do you? Things like that can be genetic. Can run in families. Kids raised by freaks normally turn out freaks themselves.’

  I tried not to think about the broken necklace that Luke had been keeping in his pocket. He had found it on the same day that Edith had gone missing; the day before the snow melted. Serial killers on shows like CSI always had things like that on them. Necklaces or rings or bracelets from their victims. Trophies, they called them. Could Luke really do something like that though?

  ‘I dunno. Luke has money cos of his dead uncle. They might listen to him because of that. Then what’d we do?’

  ‘Face the music, I guess.’

  We looked over to the models who was a pitiful sight shivering in their thin overalls. They weren’t the only ones who were in for a rough ride. Everything was looking bad for me and Han too. I had to admit that it was, but I also couldn’t ignore the fact that Han was talking to me again. Absent-mindedly he took my hand and squeezed it. I looked over at Vega and she was looking right at us.

  ‘We have to talk about this properly,’ I said.

  ‘Not here.’

  ‘Well, can I come over to yours then?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s my gran. She don’t want me to see you.’

  ‘What’ve I ever done to her?’

  ‘Nothing. . . She just gets ideas in her head. She’ll come around eventually.’

  Was that why he’d gone so quiet on me, blowing hot and cold all the time? His gran?

  ‘But you’re supposed to be teaching me to surf.’

  ‘It’ll have to be tonight then. Gran’s out with the Women’s Institute, doing a fundraiser for the church. She’s all depressed, as much by the ruined church as by the dead family, I reckon. So she’s trying to help ‘em raise enough money to rebuild the tower. They got no chance. Gonna need at least a hundred K just to get started and who’s got that?’

  ‘No one,’ I said.

  ‘Good waves today and it’ll be even better at high tide tonight,’ he went on, getting all excited by his own idea.

  ‘What about that algae? Thought it was already in the bay?’

  ‘Turns out it ain’t toxic after all. Local rag got the wrong end of the stick. Most of it’s broken up already, so nothing to worry about.’

  ‘I dunno. My mum is watching me like a flipping vulture at the moment.’

  ‘Make an excuse and meet me on the beach at eight o’clock. We’ll get a couple hours in before it gets dark.’

  ‘I don’t have a board.’

  ‘Borrow your dad’s. You got a wetsuit?’

  ‘Course.’

  ‘See you then.’

  ‘You know the lifeguards leave at six?’

  ‘Chill. It’s not like you’ll be out in the sea on your own. I’ll look after you.’

  He ki
ssed me on the mouth and we caught the bus back up to the site.

  I decided then that I would have to go and see his gran myself, and somehow get her to like me.

  Chapter 13I made my excuses about a Science revision session at Nathan’s place, but in the end it didn’t matter because my parents had an invite to go wet a baby’s head at a neighbour’s place.

  ‘It’s important to be thankful for the good things in life at a time like this,’ my mum said, putting on a thick smear of brown lipstick. ‘Nothing more precious than a child.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll be okay with Nathan. Not too much Biology though, eh. Don’t want to become a granny at my age.’

  ‘Hilarious,’ I said. ‘Old ones are the best.’

  My dad said, ‘The Wilsons have got their parrot saying swear words in Spanish. Sure you won’t come, Jenny, love?’

  ‘Yeah, I’d better not.’

  They were out the door before me so I didn’t even bother to take a change of clothes. Just wore my swim shorts and rash vest with my wetsuit over the top.

  I took the long way to the beach, the scenic view, past Han’s granny’s house. Faintly I could hear classical music in the air. I wondered if it was Han listening to it and then wondered why Han never let me see him playing the violin. I was thinking about what Luke Gilbert had said about Han playing the fiddle for a girl fitting Vega’s description, when something bright white flitted across the long shadows in his garden.

  Wearing a leotard and a tutu, Han’s granny was dancing.

  I wanted to laugh but I was so shocked that I just stood there and stared. She was actually pretty good. Better than pretty good. She was kind of amazing. Leaping about even though she was like twice my mum’s age, and my mum could barely touch her own toes.

  I heard clapping and then two of the models stepped out of the summer house and approached her. One of them had a distinctive Cleopatra hairstyle. I walked back into the trees and swore.

  *

  I ran the last bit to the beach, sweating hard with my dad’s board under my arm. I saw Han pacing at the water’s edge, looking around for me. I was camouflaged by the cliff and so I took a minute to watch him there. The green dye had almost washed out of his blond hair, what with all the surfing, and though he was taller and his shoulders much broader, I could still see a glimpse of how he used to be.

  He turned and spotted me just as I jumped down onto the sand from the path.

  ‘Everything okay?’ he said.

  ‘Sorry I’m late. I got distracted.’

  He placed his fancy black board on the sand and showed me how to jump up on it. I tried to do the same a few times and eventually managed to do it, very badly.

  ‘That’ll do. We better go in now before the light goes. The best way to learn is to practise out there. It’s all about time in the water,’ he said. ‘Some okay waves tonight.’

  ‘Which foot do I put the leash thing on?’

  ‘Depends on which foot you lead with.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Just jump up for me again, pretend like you’re catching a wave?’

  I felt stupid but I did it.

  ‘Okay, you lead with your left foot, same as me, so put the leash on your right foot. It always has to go on the back foot.’

  I wrapped the Velcro strap around my right ankle and followed him into the sea. Han turned around, saying something about being careful not to trip, just in time to see me stagger as my left foot got tangled in the leash.

  ‘Yeah, that’s why we don’t put it on until the last minute. Trip hazard. You don’t want to know how many times I’ve gone arse over tit cos of that.’

  My heart was really racing. Han was so good at surfing and I was a total beginner. I didn’t want to make an idiot of myself. Or drown.

  ‘I don’t want to go out too far,’ I said.

  ‘I thought you was a strong swimmer? Didn’t you once swim to Carbis Bay?’

  ‘Nah, that was just a story I used to tell. Don’t like to be out of my depth when I’m body-boarding.’

  ‘You’ll soon get used to it. I know this beach like the back of my hand and I can spot a rip current a mile off. Even if we do get caught in one, just sit on your board and paddle parallel to the beach. Most rips are pretty narrow. They’re just like this treadmill of water pushing you out to sea, so if you can paddle across that treadmill, and off of it, it’s fine. Anyway, even if the current’s too fast and wide and you can’t get across, it’s like the deeper the sea, the more the rip current weakens. You can just ride ‘em out and then box around back to the beach. They’re easy to get out of, so long as you don’t freak out. Anyway, I’ll look after you.’

  By the time we paddled out to where he wanted us, my arms were on fire with the strain of it. It was way harder than body boarding and I’d swallowed a ton of water from massive waves breaking on my head since I hadn’t got the hang of duck-diving, which you had to do by locking your arms, sinking your board and then sinking your body down over it. I was shattered and bedraggled. I looked over at Han, who seemed to be finding the whole thing totally easy.

  ‘Right, when you see a good wave, you paddle like mad – keeping your fingers together and digging down deep – then kick your legs as fast as you can and just go for it, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, dubiously.

  ‘Look, you’ll be fine. You’re a body-boarder, so you already know how to catch a wave, timing-wise. That’s half the battle. Body-boarding also gives you upper-body strength, so you’ll have no problem pushing up on your board to stand.’

  The sun was cutting a glittering path across the water to us and I sent up a little prayer that I’d come out of it alive. Then a big wave started to arc up and I did as Han said. Not only did I miss the wave, falling off the back of it, but I managed to head-butt my surfboard in the process and bloody my nose.

  I tried a few more waves and then paddled back out to where Han was sitting on his board.

  ‘And you enjoy this?’ I said.

  ‘You’re doing fine. Just remember: don’t try to pop-up until you feel that you’ve properly caught the wave, so give it three or four seconds, and then if you do manage to stand, don’t look at your feet. Always look where you want to go, and then your board will go there.’

  ‘Easy as that, eh?’

  ‘Everything’s hard at the start. Like learning to drive. If it’s worth learning, it’s always difficult to begin with.’

  ‘Like playing the violin?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, like playing the violin.’

  ‘And being a ballerina. You know, like your gran.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘She don’t like me, does she?’

  ‘She barely likes me.’

  ‘But she won’t let you see me.’

  ‘Not now, but maybe in a few months when things calm down.’

  ‘That’s forever away.’

  ‘Nah it’s not.’

  ‘Maybe I should go and talk to her.’

  ‘She don’t like visitors.’

  ‘Well she had some this evening.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Two of the models. That one with the stupid hair, and another girl.’

  Han’s face went rigid.

  ‘What were you doing there?’

  ‘Just passing. Why didn’t you tell me that you knew that Vega girl?’

  ‘It’s complicated.’

  ‘Is she your girlfriend?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why is she at your gran’s house?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  ‘I’m gonna go home,’ I said. ‘This was a bad idea.’

  ‘Wait,’ he said. I followed his eyes to something in the water. A black fin cutting through the twilight sea.

  ‘
Sweet Jesus,’ I said. ‘What is that, a dolphin?’

  ‘That ain’t a dolphin,’ he said. ‘Dolphin fins are curved. That’s a shark.’

  Then another fin appeared, and another and another, until there seemed to be a new fin for every new wave. We were surrounded as far as the eye could see. The whole bay seemed full of dark fins.

  ‘It’s alright. They’re just basking sharks,’ he said, ‘they must have come in after plankton. Don’t panic. They’re harmless.’

  But I was panicking. I was panicking my head off.

  ‘I’m paddling back.’

  ‘They’re in the shallow water now. Just wait. You don’t wanna startle them; they’re so big that they could still hurt us, without meaning to.’

  So we just waited there as these sea behemoths like in the books of old surrounded us, with their mouths gaping and their huge dorsel fins surging through the seething water.

  ‘I’ve heard of them gathering like this,’ Han said. ‘They’ve been doing it up and down the coast for the past few weeks. They’re pretty amazing.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘They are though. They can travel two thousand miles in a season before they come back here. That’s if they do get to come back here at all. It said on the News that one fin can sell for twenty grand. Shark fin soup. People abroad love it.’

  ‘Where’s a Japanese fishing boat when you need one, huh.’

  It was eerie to see them move out past the waves into the mill pond sea, twisting and turning, their splashes loud in the quiet. In twenty minutes, as quickly as they appeared, they vanished once more into the depths. By then I was shivering.

  Han paddled over.

  ‘We can go now.’

  Han was glowing. Not from the cold or exercise. He was literally glowing. He looked at me with the same surprise.

  ‘They must have stirred up some bio-luminescence from that algae,’ he said. ‘Man, this is a weird night.’

  I rubbed at my wrist but the faint blue glow wouldn’t rub off.

  I didn’t say another word until we were walking up the beach, my shivering by then so bad that my teeth chattered.