The Sing of the Shore

by Lucy Wood

  ‘Hey look,’ Freya said.

  ‘I’m driving,’ I told her.

  ‘Hey look,’ Freya said.

  I turned around. She’d got a pair of my pants from God knows where and put them on Mercury’s head. Mercury was walking backwards over the mattress and trying to shake them off. I didn’t even know dogs could walk backwards.

  ‘Get them off her you stupid bint,’ I said.

  Freya didn’t move. She just sat there watching Mercury with that dopey expression she gets – as if the dog was her kid performing Shakespeare. The van bounced over a pothole and she had to duck her head to stop it hitting the roof. She’s been six foot since we were about nine and then just got wider, like one of those giant redwoods. Whenever she goes in the supermarket someone always asks if she’ll get something down for them from a high shelf – if she’s in the right mood she does it, if she isn’t she’ll pass them something like absinthe or itch-relief cream and then walk away.

  Jory finally turned around from the front seat and looked at what was going on. He’s always about five minutes behind everyone else. I think it’s because he’s thinking about things but who can tell. He once found a body that had washed in and got caught amongst all these rock pools and it took him about an hour to realise it wasn’t just someone sleeping. If you ask him why he thought someone was sleeping all twisted up in a rock pool he’ll just shrug and say it was quiet down there. He likes quiet places where no one else goes. He took me out in his boat once and we just drifted for a long time.

  I turned at the crossroads and the sea spread out in front of us. The beach down there is long and wide and packed every summer. We never go there in the summer. But now the holidays were over, and it was empty again, and we were doing what we always did after everyone had gone back home: scouring around with our metal detectors for whatever had been left behind. Sometimes we found money, jewellery, watches, and unopened cans of beer. But mostly we found belt buckles, keys, forks, tins smothered in barnacles. One time I found a bra and another time I found a crutch – I can understand forgetting a bra but I sometimes wonder how the person with the crutch got off the beach without noticing they’d left something important behind.

  We borrow the metal detectors off Mr Warner. His son, Buddy, used to hang around with us before he moved away. Buddy had one of those BB guns and he once shot Jory in the leg with it. Jory won’t tell anyone what it was about. Freya heard Buddy had made it out to Alaska and was working on boats – he and Jory had always wanted to work on boats – but I heard he’d married some crazy woman and had five kids in a caravan somewhere. Mr Warner told us he was working in insurance upcountry, which I guess is about in between.

  The thing is, there used to be a whole load of us that came down to the beach and went around with the metal detectors. But, one by one, they all moved away and now we were the only ones left, doing the same old things over and over. We’d be twenty-six soon, then we’d be almost thirty. I didn’t want to do it this year, and I sure as hell didn’t want to be back doing it again next year – digging up tins and rusty coins, the three of us stuck up to our knees in the damp sand.

  Tide: 7.0 metres

  I parked next to the steps and we got out and looked down across the beach. There was no one around. There were brambles and sloe thickets all over the cliffs and Freya picked a blackberry, ate it, then spat it back out. She did the same thing every year – the blackberries up there are always sour, she just forgets every time.

  The tide was high, a lot higher than usual, just like they’d told me at the pub the night before. I’d been in there with Jake and Lyn and Ricky and the talk had got around to how there was going to be this huge tide. It would come right up the beach, and then, when it dropped out, it would be so low that it would be possible to get round to the cove. Usually no one can get round to the cove but this time all the rocks leading over to it would be uncovered. And according to Lyn, who’d heard it from Morrie, who’d heard it from someone who’d seen it from their boat, all the sand and shingle had been scraped away by the spring storms.

  ‘So you know what that means,’ Lyn had said, leaning back on her stool until the legs looked like they were about to snap.

  ‘Exactly,’ Jake said, nodding slowly.

  ‘Exactly,’ Ricky said.

  Then they all looked at me.

  I knew what they were trying to do. Everyone knows about the cache that’s supposed to be buried in the cove and how impossible it is to even get round there, let alone find it. They were trying to rile me up. They love getting me riled up. They’d done it before with the lottery ticket, and when the hospital was opened by that prince, and I wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction this time.

  So I just shrugged and didn’t say a word. After a while I asked Ricky about his mother – she has this thing where she woke up one morning speaking French, even though she’d never spoken it before in her life – and then, when I thought I’d left it long enough, I finished my drink, stretched and got up. ‘I guess I better head off,’ I said.

  ‘Early start in the morning then?’ Lyn said, and they all practically stopped breathing from laughing, the bastards. That’s the thing – people get certain ideas in their heads about you, and they never let you forget them. After a while, you find yourself doing exactly what they expect because mostly it’s just easier.

  I leaned into the van and got out the metal detectors and passed them round. Buddy’s dad has a whole collection of them – most of them are old and a bit knackered; the kind with rusty coils rather than digital screens. He collects clocks too – they all chime on the hour across the house, slightly out of sync, and all these cuckoos and other weird crap jump out. I stayed over there once and I swear I still sometimes hear the ticking of each passing second.

  ‘I’ve got the buggered one,’ Freya said. She turned her detector over and examined it. ‘Remember last year, there was one that kept whining? It just whined the whole time without stopping. I think I’ve got that one.’

  ‘It’s not doing it now,’ Jory said.

  ‘That’s because I haven’t turned it on yet dumb-ass.’

  I locked up the van and put the key on a chain around my neck. I wasn’t about to lose it like I did that other time, which wasn’t even my fault, it was that bloody scarecrow in that bloody field, but that’s another story.

  ‘The tide’s really high today,’ I said.

  ‘Turn it on then,’ Jory said to Freya.

  ‘It’s going to go out really far,’ I said.

  ‘I’m trying to turn it on,’ Freya said.

  ‘We’d be able to get round to the cove.’

  Freya kicked her metal detector and it made a screeching noise. She kicked it again and it stopped. ‘Why would we want to do that?’ she said.

  I told them what everyone had been saying in the pub. ‘Ricky was there,’ I said. ‘And Jake. They said Morrie said he’d heard it from someone on a boat.’

  Freya broke off a bit of stick from the hedge and threw it for Mercury. Mercury didn’t move. She pulled a long bit of ivy out and draped it around Mercury’s neck.

  ‘Cache,’ she said. ‘What the hell is a cache?’

  ‘A hoard,’ I said.

  ‘A hoard?’

  ‘Treasure for fuck’s sake.’

  Jory did up his rucksack and put it on his back. ‘It’s supposed to be drugs,’ he said. ‘From South America.’ He always carries a rucksack. No one knows what he keeps in it.

  ‘Ricky was being a total moron the other night,’ Freya said. ‘Did you see him doing that thing with the snooker cue?’

  ‘Or gold coins,’ Jory said. ‘Bullion.’

  ‘We just need to wait for the tide to drop,’ I said.

  ‘He’s going to get kicked out soon,’ Freya said. ‘And then where will he go every night?’ She opened a bottle and started walking down the steps to the beach.

  ‘They let him back in before,’ Jory said. He followed Freya down the steps. Mercury wat
ched them, then suddenly ran, skidding down the loose stones.

  I waited at the top for a minute, watching the tide. A few rocks had already started to appear. The water looked thick and creased, like oil. There was a container ship on the horizon. The sand was wide and empty. Sometimes, when I see the sand and rocks all bare like that, it looks like a building site: all brown and heaped up like it’s going to become something else, but it never does, does it.

  Tide: 5.8 metres

  Freya and Jory started going over the beach from right to left, their detectors making those low, steady beeps that remind me of monitors in a hospital.

  After a while Freya’s detector started to beep faster and she stopped and moved it around until it became a single, high-pitched note. Jory opened his bag, got out a plastic kids’ spade and started digging.

  ‘It sounds like something big,’ Freya said.

  Jory kept digging. His hair blew around in the wind. There are streaks in there that look almost red – you know when the light catches that sandstone in the cliff? Not the crappy, claggy bits, the other stuff. But I don’t know why I’m telling you that anyway.

  ‘It’s going to be big,’ Freya said.

  Jory dug some more, then reached in and pulled something out of the sand. It was a screwed-up bit of foil.

  ‘Treasure,’ Freya said. ‘We’ve struck frigging foil.’ She slapped me on the back and shook my hand. I slapped her back, harder. She took the foil from Jory and threw it for Mercury to chase, but Mercury was staring down at the sand and didn’t even notice. Jory picked it up and put it in his pocket. He hates litter.

  ‘We never find anything good,’ I said.

  ‘We found that bracelet last year,’ Freya said. ‘We sold it to Lyn.’

  ‘It made her wrist go green.’

  ‘Yeah but that’s not our problem,’ Freya said. She took another drink and passed the bottle round.

  I turned and watched the tide. I could almost see it falling back, millimetre by millimetre. One minute there was a wrinkle in the water, the next it was the top of a rock. The first line of rocks had already appeared, wet and dripping, in front of us.

  ‘If we find it we could do something,’ I said.

  ‘We are doing something,’ Freya said.

  ‘Something else.’

  I scuffed my foot in the sand. Something else. Don’t ask me what, exactly – all I know is that for years now Freya has been scrabbling around for shifts at the restaurant, only getting a few a week because her boss can pay all the younger people less. Once it’s winter, her shifts will halve again and she’ll be back to living off rice – all she eats is rice through the winter even though I told her I read somewhere that it’s laced with arsenic. And then there’s Jory, doing whatever the hell he always does – going for day-long walks on his own, doing up his boat, sleeping on Jake’s floor which is the floor of a shed at the bottom of his dad’s garden. They’ve dragged an old gas stove in there, which is probably going to blow up. I can smell gas as soon as I walk in but apparently, like with the arsenic, I’m just being paranoid. And then there’s me, working in the same old hotel which is about to go under at any minute, serving the same old breakfasts of one stingy piece of bacon and mushrooms swimming in their own grey liquor, seeing things go on that would make your eyes water. Did I ever tell you about the thing with the machete? Remind me later.

  Jory’s detector started making a noise. It got louder, then softer, then it stopped.

  ‘I heard Letty finally made it into acting,’ Freya said.

  ‘She was wooden,’ I said. ‘Remember that play we did at school?’

  ‘She’s got in some advert.’

  ‘Toothpaste,’ Jory said.

  ‘Furniture,’ I said, but it wasn’t even funny.

  ‘She’s living with Mylo.’

  ‘Mylo,’ Jory said. ‘What’s she doing that for?’

  ‘I heard he’s manager of some hotel chain.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘We need to start going round in a minute,’ I told them.

  ‘The one with those beds in them.’

  ‘They’ve all got beds in them,’ I practically shouted. ‘We’ve got to start in a minute, OK?’ We had to time it exactly right, so that we’d have long enough to get round and back again before the tide came in and cut us off.

  ‘There’s loads of stuff here,’ Freya said. She swept her detector over my shoes and it started beeping. What was supposed to happen was that I would take off my shoes and throw them at her, then she’d get the spade and dig at my feet, then I would trip her up and throw sand, and then she’d chase me even though she knows she’ll never be able to catch me. When she starts doing it I just kind of have to go along with it. It’s like when we order Chinese food and we share crispy beef – I don’t even like crispy beef any more, but I don’t exactly know how to tell her.

  I took a step back, and then another. ‘We’ve got to start going round,’ I said.

  Jory’s detector beeped again. Freya stood there for a moment, watching me walk towards the rocks. I thought she was going to chase me and try to take my shoes, but she just watched me, a small frown on her face, then she bent down and started to dig.

  I kept going. When I glanced back they’d got whatever it was out of the sand. It looked like someone’s bent and rusty retainer. I knew that any minute now they would do that thing where they pretend the detector is a microphone, and Freya would hold up the retainer, lean right in, and pretend to be the first person she thought of with big teeth.

  I got down to the rocks and started climbing.

  Freya belted out a bar of June Carter.

  Tide: 4.0 metres

  The rocks were dark and slick with seaweed. My thighs scraped against mussels, which shone like wet lumps of coal. A gull banged at a limpet with its beak while I slipped and scraped, and slipped all over again, trying to keep hold of the bloody metal detector with one hand, and using the other to grip with. The beach already looked very far away.

  I tried humming that crazy tune that always gets stuck in my head – you know how things always get stuck in my head, don’t you – but all I kept doing was going over and over all the times I’ve tried to get out of here. I’ve tried a lot of things, if you want to know. I had this idea once, for example, that I would do up an old bus and go around selling food at campsites and festivals – everyone knows that people want to eat about a tonne of food when they’ve had too much to drink. Freya is like a hog at a trough when she’s had a few, I can tell you, and probably I am too.

  No one thought I would even get the bus, let alone the right paperwork for Chrissake, but I did, even though trying to memorise different types of bacteria for the hygiene certificate was one of the low points of my life. Have you heard of listeria? That one’s a complete bastard because it can grow even if the food’s in the fridge.

  I got Freya and Jory to come and help me at the first place; I paid them actually, and we got everything set up the night before, ready for breakfast the next morning. Then Freya got us these drinks and I swear I don’t know what was in them, but I don’t remember anything after that except being on Freya’s shoulders with this ukulele band playing next to us, and a lot of lights flashing, and Jory, Jory was definitely there, very close. We didn’t make any food the whole weekend.

  Then I thought I would train as a lifeguard, because those lifeguards go everywhere, don’t they. I figured I’d better practise first though because it’d been a while since I’d been in the sea and I don’t really like it that much to be honest – all that stuff brushing past your legs, and stones bruising your feet, and have you ever been in when you know the kid next to you is peeing? I hate that; their innocent face, the slightly strained look around their eyes. I don’t know about you but I probably wouldn’t save a kid if I knew it had just pissed through its wetsuit.

  So I got Freya to paddle out and pretend to drown so that I could rescue her, only it turns out that the stupid bint can’t actually
swim. Somehow she forgot to tell me that piece of information. She started flailing around, and I thought she was just pretending really well until she panicked and clung onto my neck and dragged me under. We came up gasping then went under again. I don’t actually remember how we got out, but somehow, finally, we were lying on the sand and Freya was coughing and I was coughing and we were pummelling each other’s backs for a lot longer than we probably needed to.

  After that I sort of lost interest in the whole idea.

  There are about a million other things I’ve tried as well, but I don’t feel like going into them now. I even started drawing this book for kids, about a man who forgets where he lives and just wanders around from door to door, knocking. Sometimes people let him in but mostly they don’t. It took ages and then I showed it to Jory and he looked at it for a long time, just sitting there, turning the pages slowly without saying anything. He never said anything at all.

  Tide: 2.5 metres

  There was this clattering noise and Mercury ran straight past me over the rocks, almost ramming into my legs. The gull lifted upwards, screaming. Freya’s voice came over on the wind, I couldn’t hear what she said, but I turned round and they were both climbing over the rocks behind me.

  I stopped and waited. The tide was very low now. All I could see in either direction were wide, flat rocks, like shelves, and rock pools in between them. There were rock pools everywhere – some were shallow, some were smaller than my hand, others were so narrow and deep that I couldn’t see the bottom. They smelled leafy, sort of vegetable, and they were full of this bright red and green weed. I kept glimpsing things darting around, but whatever they were they always disappeared before I could properly look, leaving the water rippling. There’s a programme I saw on TV once about rock pools; how, every moment, something is trying to kill something else: limpets crushing barnacles, anemones rasping bits off other anemones, starfish cracking open mussels like walnuts. But on the surface they look so still.