Free Slapton Sands by Francis Cottam Page A

sweat that heat and tension had slicked across the pads of her fingers and palm. The Pils had made her mouth dry without it providing the Dutch courage she had hoped for. The sea and the town were quiet. The tide was out. A few lights burned on Sheppey, and a beacon warned of sandbanks, from a buoy flashing in the channel. But the buoy did not bob, and the beacon was static on still water. To their left the small houses were dark. You could see down into their back yards from the sea wall, and some of the houses had small boats leaned prow upwards on their rear walls and nets set out to dry on hooks and over fences. There were blocks and tackles in these yards, bits of rigging,oars and rolled sails and pots for catching lobster and crayfish and crab. There was the mingled smell of tar and creosote, cooling in the night after the burning day.
    When first she’d arrived here, there had seemed a bogus, theme-park quality to Whitstable. Excepting the small and shabby co-op supermarket branch, every store on its narrow high street was a business independent of a chain. There were scrolled proprietorial names on scrupulous antique frontages. There were hand-painted pub signs batted back and forth by the wind in their proud gibbets. It had all seemed too self-consciously picturesque, too Dickensian, the way Dickens might be done by Disneyland. Then someone had told her that Dickens had lived in Chatham and known intimately this part of the Kent coast as a child. And over weeks she had seen the shabbiness under what had appeared to her indiscriminate tourist’s eye merely to be picturesque. And she had realized that Whitstable had endured rather than been re-created. The town had depended on the oyster trade and was actually dying. Established by the Romans, it had dwindled through centuries until the Victorian appetite for oysters had funded its final, short-lived pomp. But culinary fashions had changed, and it was a town dying now, subsidizing its demise by student rents and odd foreign visitors on the way to somewhere else.
    When Alice had arrived, they’d been showing
The Towering Inferno
at the Oxford, Whitstable’s decrepit cinema. A month later, by the time
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
opened at the Oxford, she’d grown to love the town.
    That had been until the intrusion at her flat. Now she didn’t think Whitstable charming at all, but sinister. It was astonishing the difference in a person’s emotions that forty-eight hours could bring about. Now she couldn’t wait to escape the still, picturesque days and night stillness of Whitstable. If David Lucas made the pass at her she assumed he inevitably would, she’d send him away with as much tact as she could summon. But she knew the night to come would be an ordeal after his departure.
    â€˜What are you thinking about?’
    â€˜About English girls. About how promiscuous they are.’
    He appeared to take this in. He nodded, as she pretended not to be looking at him.
    â€˜Bit of a generalization.’
    He didn’t sound so drunk as she felt. He was capable of a polysyllabic word, pronounced without slurring. They were on the sea wall, seated, feet dangling seawards. It was late. She didn’t want to go back to the flat.
    â€˜What happened to the Apache, after Champion’s lawn party?’
    â€˜Went home to bed, eventually. Managed to undress himself. There was a minor drama concerning one of his Doc Martens, which he couldn’t remove. After his frenzied struggle with the laces, which functioned as a sort of tourniquet, I managed to get it off him.’
    â€˜He was carrying enough amphetamine to kill a horse.’
    â€˜Lost it. He has a way of losing his drugs. It must be a survival mechanism.’
    â€˜You saved his life.’
    David didn’t react to this claim.
    â€˜His foot, leastways. You saved his foot.’
    â€˜Do you give everyone a nickname?’
    â€˜Survival mechanism,’