Slapton Sands

by Francis Cottam

  They were talking about American films. The best French and German films apparently addressed Issues. The most influential American film of recent times starred a vindictive rubber fish and had emptied beaches. This was not considered by the group to be a pertinent achievement. That’s why mainstream Hollywood studios made The Candidate and The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor, Alice thought. That’s why they were all solid box-office hits. But she didn’t say anything, because she’d been invited to observe. We don’t address issues. That’s why Pakula was right then having to shoot All the President’s Men on a shoestring, forced to resort as his leads to those two underground actors, Redford and Dustin Hoffman.

  The group moved on to cultural imperialism. Coca-Cola seemed to be the principal culprit in this particular area of discussion.

  She cracked when they began to talk about Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan as representatives of America’s counter-culture.

  ‘I don’t think you can be part of the counter-culture if your work forms window displays in Barnes and Noble,’ she said. The words weren’t out of her mouth before she remembered that Professor Champion had written a paper on the lyrics of Dylan in the context of something called the American Dissident Tradition.

  ‘You don’t think Dylan has anything authentic to say about what is wrong with his country?’ Despite the heat and cloying odours in the room, the professor’s tone was arctic.

  ‘I think he was always a middle-class, urban boy performing in borrowed clothes. I think Woody Guthrie was a phoney, too. All that riding freight was just romantic posturing. They’re troubadours, not itinerant labour. They are to popular music what Jack London was to literature. There’s a new blue-collar hero on the scene. A fellow called Springsteen. His credentials are equally bogus, and I’m sure he’ll be just as successful. Probably even more so.’

  They were all staring at her.

  ‘Oops,’ Alice said.

  She kept quiet after that. But it was a long two hours before she could escape the room and what she thought of as the smug and lazy preconceptions of its collective occupants.

  She lay in bed and remembered the debacle of her single American Century seminar and still she couldn’t sleep. She wished David Lucas had not said what he had about the temperature of the room. It did feel cold. It felt cold and clammy on her face and forearms, the bits of her above her duvet, and there was that faint, insistent, saline insinuation of rottenness. It could have been coming from the shore, must have been coming from there, but there was no wind to bring it, because the night was still. Whitstable was still. The town was sleeping, except for her. And it slumbered silently.

  She thought about David Lucas. He was strong and very good-looking and quite intelligent, and she felt sorry for him in her heart. She could see him as a child on the pillion seat of his father’s motorcycle, with a pair of boxing gloves knotted around his neck, on his way to be dropped at night outside some church hall in a Liverpool suburb to be educated in the bleak pragmatism of the noble art by bigger boys only too eager to inflict the lesson. She could see him in an oversized wetsuit, struggling under the weight of an air tank, his face lost inside a face mask belonging to his father, its rubber straps stretched and bunched in buckled knots at the back of his head. He’d been frightened of the big creatures that lurked under water in his child’s imagination, and his father’s solution had been to take him for a weekend in Scotland and put a lead belt around him and bully him into dives down into the peaty blackness of Loch Ness. She’d had to tease this stuff out of him over dinner. He didn’t offer information, he surrendered it.

  She thought again about her own dad, in his Floresheim shoes, with his brush-cut hair and the kind look on his pained, honest, Pennsylvania cop’s face.

  David Lucas had called Alice Bourne’s face beautiful. And she had known he’d been telling her the truth. Her looks were to her as some alchemic miracle. Her dad had not been a remarkable-looking man. If she looked at the family album now, with sincere objectivity, she saw her dad’s expression as stolid-featured and redolent of the fortitude he’d certainly required in life. Her mother was elusive in the camera’s eye, never more than a suggestion, a filled-out shadow of how she must have looked. Her mother’s pictures suggested a wistful impermanence they’d been sadly accurate to portray. But these two people had produced a daughter, somehow, who was beautiful. It had been often and dispassionately remarked on. It was a truth. You play the hand you’re dealt. You do.

  Someone had said that at forty everyone has the face they deserve. Was it Orwell who’d said it? Auden? It had been an Englishman, she was sure. Well, she had seventeen years to play with before she earned that questionable fate.

  She was lying on her back. She coiled her body to the right, succumbing to the instinctive shelter of the foetal position. You play the hand you’re dealt, was Alice Bourne’s last thought before sleep claimed her.

  Once again the dream left that thick taste of caramel sweetness in her mouth on waking. She flung off the duvet and tiptoed naked to the lavatory. She lifted the lavatory seat and spat. She remembered then how the bottom of the boat had been swimming in sea water and vomit in the dream and she almost retched over the lavatory bowl. She could feel goose bumps, bumpy as Braille, when to warm them she ran her fingers up and down the flesh of her bare arms. She was shivering. She flushed the toilet and fetched her dressing gown from its hook on the back of her bedroom door.

  She would make herself a cup of coffee. There was a small refrigerator in the kitchenette off her room and an electric coil on an enamel platform with a plug for heating pans. She’d located no proper coffee in Whitstable. Her method was to heap two spoons of decent instant into a cup and pour near-boiling milk over the grains. It wasn’t coffee. But it wasn’t a bad improvised beverage in the sense that it provided something hot to hold and sip between linked fingers. It was a focus separate from her fear. She’d put sugar in it. She’d read that sugar was a good antidote to shock. She’d bought sugar in theoretical consideration of the guests she’d never entertained at the tea parties she’d anticipated, looked forward to, but never hosted in her time in England. She had milk for her coffee, reasonably fresh, in a bottle in the fridge.

  It was five-thirty in the morning. It was ridiculous. But sipping her makeshift brew, barefoot on the tacky linoleum of the kitchenette, Alice did not want to return to her own bedroom. Was it the dream? She’d dreamed the dream before. She’d endured its wrenching dislocation and bewilderment, the sick churning of the sea and the vertiginous feeling dreamers always suffer in nightmares of witnessing their own fate fleeing their control. She’d been dismayed at the gargoyle grip of the cormorant’s talons on the hull of the boat over many nights. It was prehistoric, this bird, its scaly malevolence its own dream within a dream. She’d lurched and slapped on the sea, toyed with. What was new? Nothing, she decided, steeling herself, rubbing the rash of goose bumps on her arms like energetic friction would make the Braille go away. It didn’t. Heat from the electric plate did not radiate either in the kitchenette. It was the smell that was different. The smell of her coffee substitute could not dispel that rancorous, rotten odour. Where was that smell coming from? She shivered. Damn David Lucas and his sensitivity to temperature. She wished he was still here. But he wasn’t here. She strode in her bathrobe back into her bedroom. And she saw it immediately and wondered how she could have missed the thing on awakening.

  The Olivetti portable on her desk looked diminished, naked. This was because the single sheet of white A4 Alice habitually wound into its roller had been removed. She looked for it first balled up, the consequence of some sleepwalking episode, in her waste-paper bin. But she did this with a sinking heart, as someone might performing a pointless duty. For Christ’s sake. She’d never sleepwalked. When she looked properly around the room, she saw the shift in its arrangement almost immediately. A single sheet of white paper had been newly affixed to the wall. It had been stuck up above her bed
head, diagonally opposite her cluster of historical photographs. Words were printed at the centre of this otherwise blank sheet. It tried to crawl in on itself up the wall from its time in the roller. The words had been printed in the upper-case font familiar from her typewriter. It was a good machine, but the letters were slightly misaligned, as though the legend had been hammered out by someone inexperienced at typing, either in haste, or perhaps anger. The words, the message, were, however, clear.

  ‘GO HOME,’ it said.

  So he’d been back.

  The note had been glued above her bed head with something other than student Blu-Tack. A stain at the top centre the size of an English ten pence piece was sweating through the paper. Blu-Tack didn’t sweat. She carefully peeled off the sheet. A disc of pink gum adhered to the wall. In the dim light and saline stink of the room, it resembled, for a moment, a bullet wound. Alice looked at the gum. Its edges were whitening, drying palely. It was moist and sticky still at its centre. She lifted her arm and watched her fingers prise the wad away from the wall. It wasn’t warm, thank God. Thank God at least for that. She held it close to her nose and smelled it. The smell was cloying, American, almost nostalgic.

  Thinking of her dad, Alice tore the piece of gum in half and sniffed it slowly again. Gum and tobacco tar. She spat. Bubble gum and Luckies. The taste would be familiar to her. A woman who had never smoked, she’d spat that taste out of her mouth each morning, she now knew, after the cormorant dream. She took another look around the room. The books she’d bought from Foyles and borrowed from the university library occupied a narrow, two-shelf bookcase. On its top sat the anchoring weight of shells and stones she’d brought back from walks on Whitstable beach. On her bedside table was a framed family photograph taken just before Bobby’s first tour of duty in South-East Asia. Alice had been fifteen when it was taken. Bobby had never posed for another family portrait.

  ‘I’m not leaving, you fucker,’ she said aloud. ‘I’m staying until I’m done. And I’ll fucking nail you, I swear to God.’

  She felt better after saying this, but still scared. Her father, she knew, would have insisted she check the new deadbolts on the door and window. But Alice Bourne did not now think there was any point.

  There was only a duty sergeant present at the police station. He listened to what Alice said to him warily, making no notes with the pen poised over the incident log in front of him. The log rested on a mounted width of ancient timber, scarred and pitted with carved graffiti, which formed a division in the room behind which the policeman stood. He could have sat; there was a stool for him back there. But he stood, leaning over what Alice assumed was his incident book, and explained that as the sole officer on duty he couldn’t leave the station and would have to telephone for an officer to come from Canterbury.

  ‘Will an officer come?’

  ‘Oh yes, miss,’ he said. ‘An officer will come all right.’

  She sat on the wooden bench in the station vestibule and waited. The floor was tiled and the plaster walls painted to a head-high border in a shade of institutional green and then in ivory beyond that. There was no traffic sound from the high street outside. The space was lit by a single bulb, screwed to the high ceiling under wire mesh. There were cobwebs in the corners and a smell of hops and vomit stirred under disinfectant. It was a dispiriting place, deliberately so, Alice thought, wishing she had brought something to read as the smells gathered strength in the heat of the morning. Occasionally the desk sergeant looked up at her from his pantomime of logging Whitstable’s crime epidemic in the large book in front of him. He tried not to let her see him doing this. Her story was a curious one. Unless he was just taking in the view. There was that possibility. She thought he’d probably be outside, sneaking a smoke, at least from time to time, if she hadn’t been there.

  For something to do, she rummaged through her bag. She opened and read the note Champion had left in her pigeonhole the previous day. She’d forgotten about the note altogether, and only remembered it seeing the hand-addressed buff envelope. Three cordial lines enquired about her general wellbeing and invited her to supper that evening. She didn’t know what supper was. She’d heard of the Last Supper, but didn’t think Champion was planning an event on a similar scale. This one took place at his flat near the Cathedral Gate at seven-fifteen.

  It was still quiet enough an hour later for her to hear the small engine of the police car pull up outside. She couldn’t believe how puny were the cars driven by the English police. Stumpy and underpowered in their blue and white livery, they made her father’s state cruiser look as sedate and powerful as a battleship.

  One of the two police officers who entered the station was a woman. Alice was surprised to note that she was obviously in charge. Alice stood.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Sally Emerson,’ the policewoman said. ‘I take it you’re Miss Bourne?’

  ‘Alice Bourne.’

  DS Emerson nodded. ‘This is Constable Rennie.’ She looked to be aged in her late twenties and was slim in a pinstripe trouser suit. Her eyes were a startling green and her hair, cut short, was strawberry blonde and trying to form ringlets even at the length she wore it. Alice could imagine the dull, dyke, canteen jokes. She was flattered they’d sent a detective. She nodded an acknowledgement at the constable.

  Emerson said: ‘We’ll visit the crime scene first, if that’s tolerable to you?’ If there was sarcasm there, it was sarcasm too subtle for Alice to detect.

  They insisted on putting her in the back of their Ford Escort and driving her the five hundred yards or so to where the alleged offence had been committed. Rennie drove, which could have been chauvinism but was probably protocol, Alice thought. She had a sick feeling of impending dread thumping at the wall of her stomach. It was not to do with the warning gummed above her bed by a stranger as she slept. It was to do with Professor Champion. She had no idea of the protocol at the college when it came to matters involving the university with the police. Was there a college policy? Was there a student policy? When she’d arrived at the campus, an acrimonious and damaging occupation of the senate building had been under way. Files had been destroyed, graffiti painted and items of furniture tossed, alight, from upper-floor windows. But she hadn’t seen any police. Perhaps there was an unwritten rule that the college policed itself. Perhaps it was written, but she hadn’t been aware of it. Here she was, a stranger from an unpopular country, studying a begrudged subject for motives thought dubious. And now she’d tried to ally herself with an agency people like David’s friend Oliver thought of as the Filth. But David himself had chastised her for failing to alert the police after the first intrusion. Instinct told her what she had chosen to do would not sit well with her professor. Instinct told her, too, that she’d done the only thing she could have.

  *

  The ice-cream parlour in Tankerton was open by the time they arrived. Rennie looked relieved, driving the little police car back to Canterbury and sanity. He’d have a choice tale for his canteen pals, Alice thought. It didn’t require any great speculative gift to postulate on unwanted one-night stands, pranks provoked by drinking games and the ingesting of a species of mushroom growing in wild abundance locally that never made it on to toast. Ho fucking ho. And that was just him warming up. That wasn’t even premenstrual hysteria, or the suggestibility of a neurotic American woman living four doors away from an actor who starred in horror films.

  Sally Emerson put two cups of coffee down on the fake marble table between herself and Alice Bourne. She sat and lit a B&H gratefully from a pack of twenty without offering one. She hadn’t forgotten. She was sharp and precise. And sexy, Alice thought. She was a woman thriving in a world made of machismo and prejudice.

  ‘You didn’t like Constable Rennie?’

  ‘I don’t have a problem with men on principle.’

  ‘Maybe you’re just a good judge. He won’t go further than constable. He’s in because his dad was in. His dad was a fascist, too. Nearly shot a war hero in a pub h
ere in 1940, apparently. Thought the war hero was a Fenian.’

  ‘Was he?’

  The detective shrugged and smoked. The smoking was furious with nicotine debt. ‘Fellow called Finlay. You never know. Doesn’t strike me as a Fenian name.’

  ‘Sounds Scottish,’ Alice said.

  ‘I don’t think Whitstable was much fun during the war,’ Emerson said. ‘I’ll fill you in on the Finlay incident one day, if you’re interested.’ She smiled over her coffee cup. ‘We should go for a drink some time.’

  History, because history was what Alice did. Alice wondered how far someone as good as this would get if she were a man instead of a woman. A long way. A bloody long way, as they liked to say here.

  ‘What will happen to the evidence?’

  ‘The sheet of typing paper and the wad of gum will be dusted for prints and filed as possible prosecution evidence in tamper-proof evidence bags. This will be a pointless exercise, since what evidence there was has been hopelessly contaminated by you.’

  Emerson had placed her cigarette packet facing her, hinged by the lid and leaning upwards. She picked her next cigarette, Alice thought, the way a marksman might select his next bullet.

  ‘You don’t have many friends here.’

  ‘There’s been no time to make them.’

  The policewoman smoked and looked at her. ‘Nor inclination?’

  ‘Americans are not very popular here just now.’

  ‘We don’t have a great deal of contact with the university,’ Emerson said. ‘Marxist orthodoxy makes America a post-colonial bully. Marxist beliefs are fashionable among students just now. Americans are very popular with the Canterbury Chamber of Commerce. They represent polite behaviour and substantial tourist revenue. But up there on the campus, among the politically active, America mostly means napalm and Agent Orange and the My Lai Massacre.’