he picked up the box – it was heavy – deserted his post, walked into the men’s toilets, dumped it down next to the latrines, walked a few steps, rested both his palms on the sink, stared at himself in the mirror and retched. He retched again but nothing came out. Just air. Just gas.
A retch, he thought, is like a dry fuck.
Oh Christ. Oh Christ. Where did that come from?
3
‘The water’s flat and brown. The sand’s made of shells. It’s been raped by those whelk farmers. The sea, I mean. Raped by those fucking seafood fishermen.’
Lily pointed towards the sea. The man she spoke to was fat and smelled of fish, but he had a good tan and a big prick. He was on his way to the beach.
Lily sat astride her mountain bike. She was seventeen. She was conducting her own little war, but she didn’t know what she was fighting about, not yet, at least. She had widely spaced eyes. At school they’d called her Miss Piggy, because of her strange eyes and because her parents ran a farm. They kept wild boar. Although, as Lily often observed, wild boar actually had eyes that were quite extraordinarily close together.
Lily had wide eyes and a flat nose and a gap between her front teeth. It was as though her face had hardly bothered fitting together. But the skin had been persistent. It had stretched and stretched until it finally joined up, until it met in the middle. It had touched bases. It was one of those faces.
Lily pointed. ‘That’s the Swale. It’s a nature reserve.’
‘I know.’
The man looked uncomfortable. He made as if to surreptitiously cover over his genitals with his hands. Lily noticed. ‘You’ve nothing there that I haven’t seen countless times before.’
He grimaced.
She rubbed her arms. ‘Fuck, it’s cold. You must be freezing.’
‘I’m just going in for a quick dip.’
‘Like I was saying,’ Lily continued, ignoring his response, ‘that’s the Swale, and that there’s the Blockhouse. Right over there, beyond where you can see is the Ferry Inn and the church. Harty church.’
‘I know.’
Lily scowled. ‘Would you stop saying “I know” all the time?’
‘But I do know. I’m renting one of the prefabs. I’m living in Sheppey now.’
‘Yeah, well, what you don’t know, apparently,’ Lily said, smiling, ‘is that I can report you to the police for walking down this road naked.’
The man, under considerable duress, tried his best to hold his own. ‘That’s my prefab,’ he said bullishly, ‘I mean I’m renting it. So this here is the front of my house. And that …’ he pointed, ‘is the nudist beach.’
‘But this,’ Lily indicated with a flourish, ‘this is the sign that says you must put on clothes to go beyond that point. See?’
‘But there’s no one about.’
‘I’m about. And someone else lives in that prefab. Your neighbour. He’s short and bald and he’s always well covered. He would probably also be disgusted if he saw you this way.’
‘I’m not disgusting, I’m just naked. And this is a nudist beach.’
‘That is a nudist beach. This is the public highway.’
The man said nothing. Lily appraised him, coolly. ‘I’ve lived around here a long while. See those over there?’
She pointed at a cluster of houses; small, purpose-built chalets. He nodded. ‘That’s where you people go.’
‘Pardon?’
‘The Hamlet. It’s fenced off, see? That’s where all the temporary people go. Nobody permanent has anything to do with them. We think they’re weird.’
He glanced over at the chalets as though he hadn’t truly noticed them before. ‘Perhaps they think you’re weird.’
‘What?’
Lily crossed her arms.
‘I’m going to the beach now. It’s too cold to stand around talking.’
‘Fine.’
The man – he was called Luke Hamsun, he was forty-seven and a professional photographer – walked past Lily and on to the beach. Lily turned and watched his retreating torso, then she threw down her bike and went to peer inside his prefab.
Luke had found the idea of a shell beach appealing, initially. It brought to mind the image of Venus rising from her oyster. This whole place is practically deserted, he thought bitterly, and yet fate brings me bang into contact with Prissy Miss Moon Features.
He wondered what Lily’s name was. He wondered whether she’d prove photogenic.
No people. He recited this like a mantra. No people. That’s why I’m here. No drink. No fags. No people. No sex. No stress. No people. Just emptiness. That’s all.
The sea was brown. It wasn’t even the sea, really. It was the channel. This place is truly the back of beyond, Luke thought smugly. It was grey and bleak and very flat. It was like the moon, in fact. But did they have seas on the moon? He remembered hearing something similar in a way-distant geography lesson but he couldn’t decide if the seas in question were wet seas or dry seas.
How could you have a dry sea? And if the sea on the moon was wet, wouldn’t the water float off because there was no gravity on the moon to hold things down?
He walked along the beach. The shells were actually quite hard on his feet. His feet were tender, underneath, and so was he. He held in his paunch. Nothing moved. He supposed that the muscles on his gut had stopped working. He breathed out. No, they had been working after all. He coughed. His belly hurt.
The brown water lapped at his feet. It was icy.
Oooohhhhh! Much colder than he’d imagined. He was naïve like that. This instance was entirely typical. He moved back a step. The sky was massive. Flat land, flat sea, and a great big, dirty, mud-puddle of a sky.
It looked like it was going to rain. He shivered. He peered over his shoulder to see if the girl had gone. It seemed like she had.
As Luke strolled back to his prefab he confidently sidelined any thoughts of his own physical timidity (shouldn’t the sea feel warmer in cold weather? He’d certainly always thought so. He’d been misled, clearly) and instead he bolstered himself by imagining the cosmos; black, enormous, dotted intermittently with diamond-chip stars, and then a sea, floating. A giant sea with waves and foam and everything. Just, kind of, floating.
He imagined himself, Luke Hamsun, on the moon, moon-walking. He’d been sent to the moon to recapture the sea, to tighten it up, to winch it down.
Over his shoulder Luke pictured heavy ropes which were weightless because nothing weighed on the moon, and in his hands a dozen giant tent pegs. He was supernaturally powerful. He was Flash Gordon. He had no back problem. No gut-ache. His sciatica was a phantasm. He would never keel over and die. He was no longer forty-seven.
And in some respects this was actually true. At least it could have been true in a different world. It just so happened that Luke Hamsun was an earthling, and as such, he was obliged to endure the drag of gravity. He was grounded.
But he endured phlegmatically, cheerfully almost. He didn’t complain. He saved his breath. In fact he hoarded it. He held it.
Lily, meanwhile, had made herself comfortable on Luke’s sofa and was inspecting one of his portfolios.
‘Oh good,’ she said calmly, when he strolled back inside, turning a photo around so that he could see it properly, ‘now you’ve returned you can set me straight on this. Is that a pickaxe up her arse or …’
‘How