A stiff sporadic wind blew sand against Joe’s bare chest and whipped the crests of the breaking waves into a froth. Some of the sand caught in the thick hairs that covered his chest and shoulders, most of which were black, but a few of which, particularly in the bright August sunshine, had a silver sheen. Joe brushed the sand away, felt it scratch against his skin as it resisted the movement of his hand. It seemed strange to him, when he thought about it, that all sand had once been rocks, as big as boulders, or as big as the cliffs that guarded this eroding stretch of coastline, or as big as anything, and all these rocks had been worn down and worn down until they could not be worn down any more and all that was left was these minute grains; millions and billions of them.

When he was a child, Joe’s father had once told him that there were more stars in the universe than there were grains of sand on all the beaches in the world. Joe had looked out across the yellow-grey expanse and thought that on any beach alone there must be millions of grains of sand. That had been forty or so miles up the coast, near Scarborough, where Joe had spent his childhood summer holidays, and nearly the same number of years ago. He rarely went up there now, having little cause to, but knew the town had changed with the years that had passed. Time changed stars and sand too: stars burned out and all sand would eventually be pushed deeper and deeper underground until it was again pressed back into rock.

Joe’s reverie was broken when he saw a girl, perhaps fourteen, maybe younger, wading into the chocolate-coloured waves. A full bust, that belied her apparent age, protruded awkwardly from her chest, covered by a dark-coloured vest-top. Joe watched her, thought she was pretty, thought she was the type of girl he would once have stared at with a beating heart across the classroom, but not the type of girl he had married.

“I never liked swimming in the sea when I was a child,” Joe said to Maggie.

His wife sat next to him on the angular rocks that had been placed here about twenty years before in an effort to halt the gradual reclamation of this part of the coastline by the North Sea. She had been dipping her toes in the water that pooled up between the rocks with every wave, and staring out towards the horizon. Now she looked at the cold-looking girl who was up to her stomach in water.

“You don’t now, do you?” she said.

Joe thought back to a few years ago, when he had resolved to take a morning swim each day before work. The first few days of January had brought snow and then rain. On the sixth day the sun had reappeared, pale and waxen behind the thin clouds, above the grey sea. Joe had gone down to the beach, towel in hand, surfer-shorts drawn tightly around his waist, and marched his way into the freezing surf. He had barely gotten as deep as his knees before he decided it might be best to wait until spring.

Spring brought a few similarly fruitless attempts, leading Maggie, for his birthday in April, to buy him a full-body insulating wet-suit. This improved matters, to an extent: Joe had been able to submerse himself completely in the waves and make several frantically asymmetrical attempts at breast-stroke before he remembered the other reason he had never like swimming in the sea as a child: the sense of powerlessness; the way waves swept you up and invisible currents dragged you about like a puppet, no matter how hard you kicked and fought. From then on his interactions with the sea had been limited to passively staring at its undulating surface, barefoot summer evening strolls along the shore with Maggie or, as now, dipping his feet from the wave-breaking rocks.

“No, not really,” Joe said.

The girl was in nearly up to her chest. Joe felt sure the girls he went to school with had never looked like that, though maybe they had dressed differently. He took a sideways look at Maggie, whose breasts, he knew, had begun to droop though the bikini top she wore beneath her partly-open blouse disguised the fact. Even twenty years ago Maggie’s bust might not have compared so well to that of the girl in the waves, who was now deep enough that her sand-coloured ponytail, doubled over at the back of her head, was getting wet. Maggie and he had never had children. They probably never would.
The girl splashed around, brought her feet up off the sharp stones and scratching sand, tried to keep her face above the surface as she twisted round and waved to her parents, who had draped themselves across two beach chairs by a wind-sheltering rock. Joe remembered vividly the way the wave-thrown stones cut into your shins, and how the all-consuming cold of the ocean choked you when it came up to your neck, making you gasp for the salty air. He did not miss that feeling, nor the way he had been afraid to follow his older brothers beyond the shallows, and had always been left where the waves break and the white horses would snatch him up and throw him down onto the rocks with grazed knees, burning lungs and stinging eyes.

With a kind of longing, Joe watched the girl, looking around every few seconds as if bashful or guilty. The wind was cold and made him feel naked. His skin tingled with goose-pimples. He realised, staring absently at the girl, that he had never taught anyone to swim, or to ride a bike. And then the girl screamed. Maggie looked round, as did the girl’s parents, who had been dozing in the chairs. Joe’s heart raced. The girl had fallen against a rock hidden in the murky water; the result of a sudden undercurrent in the miniature bay. Disorientated and with a mouthful of water, she tried to stand, but was swept back against another rock, which knocked the air from her lungs. Joe, being closest to her, was the first to react in any useful way. While Maggie gasped, he stepped deftly between the rocks until he was as close as he could safely get to the panic-stricken girl. Taking hold of a rock behind, he leaned out with arm outstretched.

“Here, take my hand,” he said.

The girl, after several wild misses, clasped her fingers around his wrist. They were cold against his skin. He took hold of her arm and pulled her out onto the rock, then began to lead her, holding now her hand, towards her parents. Her shin had been cut by the rock, and the blood had mixed with the sea-water, making the cut look worse than it was, but otherwise she was unharmed. The girl’s father met them halfway across the rocks, a brightly coloured towel in his hands.

“Thank you,” the father said, wrapping the girl in the towel.

Joe nodded.

“You’ve got to be careful with the sea,” he said, “it’s not like a swimming pool.”

Joe’s father had told him something similar once.

“Yeah,” said the girl’s father, looking down at her blood-running shin, “you hear that, Frankie, you need to be more careful.”

The girl nodded, keeping her eyes on the solid rock below, but did not say anything.

“Well, thanks again,” her father said.

Joe watched the father lead the girl away, back to the mother who stood anxiously by her chair, then turned and stepped back across the rocks to Maggie. She rubbed his arm when he sat down but said nothing except, a few minutes later,

“Shall we go now?”

Joe nodded and they stood.

“I think it might rain later,” Maggie said, as they walked away, “or tomorrow.”

Joe was looking once finally at the girl, who sat with her towel draped over her like a cloak, pressing a tissue against her cut. He nodded, half in response to Maggie’s prediction, and half at the father, who, having caught Joe’s eye across the sands, dipped his head in acknowledgement.

~   ~   ~

That night, Joe was unable to sleep. Rain beat against the window and he could still feel the vivid impression of the girl’s fingers around his wrist: cold and wet from the sea, bony and wrinkled, like Maggie’s, but from saturation, not age. Before his mind’s eye hovered an image of the girl’s cleavage, momentarily glimpsed as he reached down to pull her up. Without the hot panic of the moment, the contextualising knowledge of her age, it seemed full and womanly, an incontrovertible object of sexual attraction. It reminded him achingly of how long it had been since he and Maggie had last made love. More than two weeks, he thought, more than three. He rolled over, waking Maggie. An image of the brine-diluted blood running down the girl’s bare pale shin emerged and mingled with the other phantoms of his mind.

“Can’t you sleep?” Maggie asked, moving closer to him and pressing her forehead against his shoulder.

“No,” he said.

“I’m proud of you,” she said.

Her hand on his arm prompted him to roll over and face her. When he did so she kissed him open-mouthed. Her lips, her tongue, her kiss, were familiar, yet had been absent, Joe realised, half-forgotten since the last time they had made love.

Tags: beach, erosion, Old People, sea, seaside, swimming

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