Free Slapton Sands by Francis Cottam

he said. ‘Slapton Sands will seem very different to you from this.’
    They ate dinner in the basement bar of the Pearson’s Arms, seated near the fishtank on the wall, with its lurking population of taped lobsters and crabs. Alice watched David Lucas eat, which he did methodically, without commentabout the quality of the meal. He had good enough table manners but ate like someone taking on fuel rather than enjoying the experience of food. He was probably very hungry. The skin of his knuckles was still reddened from the blows he’d landed on his sparring partner. He looked once at the fishtank beside them and shuddered. Alice asked him what it was he was thinking and he shook his head. So she persisted with the question.
    â€˜Cannibalism,’ he said, wiping his mouth with his paper napkin, pushing his plate away. ‘If their claws weren’t taped, they’d try to eat each other.’
    She nodded. ‘How are you spending your long vacation, David?’
    â€˜Working,’ he said, brightening. ‘They’re renovating one of the old sea forts in the Solent. Do you know about them?’
    â€˜Built to repel French invasion.’
    â€˜Very good.’
    â€˜You surprise me,’ she said. ‘I’d have thought you’d be travelling.’
    He smiled. He looked younger with his hair cut short. ‘Subsidized by what?’
    What was he? A year younger than she was? Two? ‘That’s a Rolex on your wrist,’ she said. ‘I thought Mummy and Daddy might pay.’
    He fingered the watch, a big diver’s model on a steel bracelet, turning the bezel so that it clicked with the calibrations, ‘This is my dad’s. He’s a diver. He works for aFrench company prospecting for oil in the North Sea, and they supply them all with these. He’s separated from Mum. She asked him for a contribution towards my college costs, and this turned up in the post with a note saying I could swap it for three hundred quid or the equivalent in any city in the civilized world.’
    â€˜You don’t see him?’
    â€˜Not since I was fifteen.’
    â€˜That’s tough.’
    He didn’t say anything. His eyes were focused on a triangle of buttered brown bread on a side plate amid the debris of the food on their table.
    â€˜None of my business,’ she said.
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Do you dive?’
    â€˜Not since he left. I didn’t enjoy it. Too claustrophobic.’
    â€˜Boxing. Diving. Your dad sounds like something out of Hemingway.’
    â€˜Except that my dad never wrote a book. I don’t think he’s even read one, to be honest. Unless you count those little Commando comics.’
    Alice Bourne didn’t say anything. She didn’t know what a Commando comic was
    â€˜I suppose he must have read diving manuals,’ David said. ‘Credit where credit’s due.’
    â€˜Will your summer job involve diving?’
    â€˜It’s all diving,’ he said. ‘But it’s paid work. It’s not groping through kelp and plankton on the sixty-year-old wreck ofa scuttled German warship in a freezing current at Scapa Flow.’
    â€˜You’ve done that?’
    He smiled. ‘I’ll get us another drink.’
    â€˜I’ll get them,’ she said. She stood but, gathering her not-quite-empty glass, looked crestfallen.
    â€˜You should try Pils,’ David said.
    â€˜What? And end up like your friend the Apache?’
    â€˜Holsten Pils. It’s a new beer that comes in bottles. They might have some on the cold shelf. It isn’t American, which is greatly to its advantage. But it might be closer to what you remember from home.’
    They talked and drank until the pub closed. Then they walked back along the sea wall to her flat. Alice took David’s arm and with her free hand played with the key to her new lock, turning it over and over in her fingers until it grew slippery with the