Page 56 of Hard Tail
“Doesn’t everyone at the start?”
“Well, that’s what the instructor said, at first. By the end of the hour, he was begging me to try sailing instead—like he said, you can do that sitting down.”
I swallowed my last bite of the tangy Roquefort. “Is it an inner-ear thing?” I asked, hoping he wouldn’t think I was being too personal. “Or something like dyspraxia?”
“Diss-what-sia?” Matt shrugged. “Nah. I’m just a klutz, that’s all.” He smiled and picked up his Diet Coke.
“Cheers,” I said, clinking bottles with him. “Here’s to klutzes everywhere.”
As we finished, the breeze coming in off the sea seemed to pick up—or maybe it was just so long sitting still that made me feel a bit of a chill. I stood, wrapping my arms around myself. “Want to skim some stones? Bet you manage to get more bounces than I do.”
“Bet I don’t,” Matt said cheerfully, scrambling to his feet.
He won that bet. Matt was unbelievably, awfully, spectacularly bad at skimming stones. Most of his efforts just plopped into the water and sank like, well, stones. I, on the other hand, seemed to have finally got the knack. “Yes!” I shouted after one particularly good effort, punching the air for good measure. “Did you see that? Nine bounces! We have a winner!”
“Right, that does it. I’m conceding defeat.” Matt clapped me on the back in congratulation, and even that casual contact was enough to derail my mental processes completely. “Fancy a walk? We could go round the coast a bit.”
I collected my scrambled thoughts. “Sounds good.”
As we crunched through the shingle, Matt nodded to the Isle of Wight. “Ever go over there?”
“Just once—Gran and Grandad took me for a day trip.” I frowned. “I think Jay was in hospital then too—broken collarbone; I can’t remember how he did it. Anyway, all I can really remember is being disappointed you couldn’t walk all round it in half an hour. It didn’t seem like a proper island.”
“Yeah, it’s about seventy miles around the outside.” He must have caught my look of surprise that he knew it that exactly. “There’s a round-the-island cycle race every September. Jay and me and some of the lads go down most years. You should try it—might want to get a bit of training in, first, though.”
“Just a bit,” I agreed. “If I tried it right now, I think my legs would fall off.”
“Actually, there’s worse things you’ve got to worry about on the long-distance routes. Phil had a bit of trouble last year—things got a bit, um, twisted.”
I winced as I realised just whatthingsMatt was referring to. “Ouch.”
“Yeah. His wife was well miffed about it and all.” Matt grinned. “Race you to the concrete bits!” He set off along the beach, hurdling the low wooden breakwater, and I scrambled after him, my feet slipping and crunching in the shingle. He was faster than he looked, and it took me almost until the “concrete bits” he’d mentioned before I overtook him with my longer legs.
“Hah! Beat you!” I gasped, bending over to rest my hands on my legs while I got my breath back. “What are these things, anyway?” I asked, looking around at the low concrete blocks that lined the shore. “Did there use to be something here?”
“It’s to do with the D-Day landings,” Matt confirmed, his face flushed from the run. “They built these huge concrete boxes here and towed them out to France… It’s all on a board over there. And you see the big bars of chocolate?” Startled, I followed his pointing finger with my gaze and saw a sort of concrete flooring laid on the beach that did, indeed, resemble giant bars of chocolate. “They were so the tanks wouldn’t sink in the sand when they drove them onto the ships.”
We wandered over to the board, which told us Matt’s “huge concrete boxes” had beencaissons—or basically, huge concrete boxes—which were constructed here on the beach and towed across to Normandy for D-Day. They’d formed part of a floating harbour the size of Dover, needed to handle supplies for the 160,000 Allied invasion forces who’d landed in France. It must have been a staggering undertaking—I could hardly believe the six-thousand-ton behemoths would have even floated.
I stood and stared out to sea, shading my eyes from the sun with one hand. What must it have been like for those men, I wondered, leaving English shores and not knowing if they’d ever return? “If we’d been born sixty years earlier, that could have been us going off to fight,” I mused. “Sort of puts your own troubles into perspective, doesn’t it?” I suddenly remembered who I was talking to. “Shit. Sorry—didn’t mean to—”
“No—No, you’re right.” Matt said. He bit his lip. “I really was daft to stay with him so long, wasn’t I?”
I hesitated, then put a hand on his shoulder to reassure him. I tried to ignore the effect the physical contact was having on me as I spoke. “When you’re right in the middle of a situation, it’s often hard to keep your perspective.” I looked at my watch. “We should probably head back now.”
We walked back along the shingle, me with my hands shoved firmly in my pockets because I wasn’t sure I could trust them not to stray back over to Matt if I didn’t keep an eye on them. Matt did the same, but I didn’t flatter myself it was for the same reason.
“You know, it’s weird,” I said, struggling to formulate my thoughts even as I spoke. “All this time, I’ve been thinking that this—me being down here, I mean—was just a sort of interruption. Normal service will be resumed shortly, that sort of thing. But now I’m not so sure.” I took a deep breath, the smell of the sea filling my lungs. “Now—coming back to this place—I think maybe this is my normal life. Or should have been. It was living in London that was the aberration.” As we reached the car park, Matt fumbled in his pocket for his keys, his gaze not leaving my face for a second. “Maybe…maybe I had to go away to learn to appreciate it—but I stayed too long, and I forgot it instead. But now, it’s all coming back.” I frowned. “Does that make sense?”
Matt nodded. “You know what? You couldn’t pay me to live in London. All those people crammed in together, all breathing the same air.”
“It’s not as bad as you think,” I said, wondering if I really believed it myself. I sighed. “But it’s not like this.”
We got back into the car, and I batted fondly at the furry dice hanging from the rearview mirror. When they settled back into position, both sixes were facing me. It felt like an omen, and I smiled.
***
“You’re not going to karate tonight, are you?” Matt asked as we washed up after dinner that evening. We’d picked up a few ingredients for veggie pasta when we’d been shopping earlier, which Matt had cooked up with my dubiously helpful assistance. It had all seemed so simple, I’d wondered what on earth I’d been making a fuss about all these years.
