The Beach Hut

Legend Press Ltd, The Old Fire Station,

140 Tabernacle Street, London, EC2A 4SD

[email protected] | www.legendpress.co.uk

Contents © Cassandra Parkin 2015

The right of the above author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

Print ISBN 978-1-9102665-0-2

Ebook ISBN 978-1-9102665-1-9

Set in Times. Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays Ltd.

Cover design by Gudrun Jobst www.yotedesign.com

All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well-established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Cassandra Parkin grew up in Hull, and now lives in East Yorkshire. Her debut novel The Summer We All Ran Away was published by Legend Press in 2013 and was shortlisted for the Amazon Rising Star Award. Her short story collection, New World Fairy Tales (Salt Publishing, 2011) was the winner of the 2011 Scott Prize for Short Stories. Cassandra’s work has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies.

Visit Cassandra at
cassandraparkin.wordpress.com
or follow her @cassandrajaneuk

Acknowledgements

If you know the coast of North Cornwall at all, you’ll recognise the place that inspired this book as Perranporth Beach, which has had my heart for as long as I can remember. As writers tend to do, I’ve made small changes to suit the purposes of the story, and filled it with fictional characters.

No-one in the book is real; but the beach really is that beautiful, and the tide really does come in that fast, and (if you were careless enough to get caught out) the caves really would be that dangerous. Never turn your back on the ocean.

Thank you to my wonderful editor Lauren Parsons and the rest of the team at Legend for all the amazing things you do for writers and readers.

Thank you to my brother Ian for being the most awesome little brother on the planet (and for being absolutely nothing like Finn), and to all of my amazing family down in the West Country. May Third Cubicle Jesus watch over us always.

Special thanks to my children Becky and Ben, for proudly taking my books in to Show and Tell (despite having to tell all your friends “You can’t read this because it’s got swearing in it”) and for never once complaining when I huddle on the sofa, wild-haired and in my pyjamas, muttering over my keyboard like a witch.

Most of all, thank you to my amazing husband Tony for believing in me so entirely and supporting me so generously.

For big sisters and little brothers everywhere.

Chapter One: 1978

On this blazing afternoon the beach is home to both death and beauty, hiding its savage nature beneath a hot white welcome almost too bright for the eyes to bear. The retreating ocean has left tigery ripples in the bronze sand, and families with coloured windbreaks perch on the surface. Close to the top of the beach, billowy dunes bear witness to the power of the tide when it pours in, but now the waves are churning froth in the far distance and the dry sand dances in the wind. The children drop their buckets and stare in disbelief.

“What do you think?” their father asks.

“Struck dumb,” says their mother, ruffling her son’s hair. Her daughter, taller and older, frowns and pulls restlessly at the thin brown straps of her swimsuit. “Ava, will you leave those straps? They’re fine.”

“What shall we do first?” Their father looks around for a spot to settle. He selects a patch of sand, hesitates, walks on a few paces, pauses again, takes three steps more. The beach’s scope is so vast – a bite from the black cliffs, taken by a mouth nearly two miles wide – that choosing any particular spot seems arbitrary. “Want to build a sandcastle? Dig a hole? Explore the caves?”

His daughter turns her frown towards him.

“I don’t think we should go in the caves, Dad.”

“Why not?”

“That sign, remember? And the tide?”

“Those signs are just to cover themselves,” her father says. “They wouldn’t leave them open if they were dangerous.”

Ava looks disbelieving, but chooses to stay silent.

“So. What’s it going to be, kids? Who fancies going caving? Come on, Finn, you’ll love it.”

“Can we run?” His son, who has been scrunching his toes into the sand and studying the results with interest, looks up eagerly, bright black eyes beneath thick lashes. His skin is already turning golden.

“Well, I suppose, but wouldn’t you rather… ”

“Come on!” Ava seizes her brother’s hand and they charge off, roaring with delight, bare feet beating against the sand, the girl’s long brown hair flying, the boy’s black curls leaping. Their parents begin to claim their patch. The father hammers the windbreak with a rubber mallet. The mother tries to spread towels, but is foiled by the lick and curl of the wind.

“The lilo’s going to blow away,” she says.

“It’ll be fine.” He unfolds the lilo and begins to inflate it. His wife lays herself elegantly out on the towel and bastes herself with oil.

The children’s run ends at a large square pillar of rock, as big as the hotel they left that morning.

“What’s it for?” asks Finn.

“It’s a rock,” his sister tells him, enjoying the opportunity to patronise. “It’s not for anything.”

“There’s people climbing on it.” He points to three precarious figures teetering on a narrow path, yelling encouragement.

Ava is studying the ocean. She looks down at her brother, growing all the time, losing the baby roundness she has secretly cherished, but still small and vulnerable to her ten-year-old eyes. His armbands are at the bottom of their mother’s beach-bag. He cannot yet swim without them.

“Shall we go back to Mum and Dad?” she asks heroically. “We can build a sandcastle if you like.”

“Let’s explore the rock first.”

“How can you explore a rock?” she asks, then adds, “We’re not climbing it, it’s all right for me but you’re too small,” but he’s already off, disappearing before her eyes, that steady sturdy tireless jogtrot she finds so hard to keep pace with. A second later and he’s back.

“Come and look!” he’s yelling. “It’s this really ace weird thing!”

She’s reluctant to get too excited, knowing his definition of an ace weird thing is not the same as hers.

“What is it?” she asks, not moving.

“I don’t know, but it’s ace! Come and see!”

Just in case she’s being watched by anyone important, she rolls her eyes and sighs before following him. On the rock’s seaward side, there’s a large rectangular hollow, like a giant rock-pool. It’s big enough to swim ten or fifteen strokes in. It’s swimming-pool-shaped, but the bottom is sandy and greenish weed floats back and forth like drowned hair.

“What is it?” he asks.

“I don’t know!” she snaps, annoyed because she likes knowing the answers and being able to tell him. “Why do you always expect me to know everything?”

He shrugs. “Mostly you do.”

There are people in the pool, although they don’t look as if they’re enjoying it. A child floats precariously in a thin inflatable ring. The frill of her swimming costume flutters as she kicks. The child’s father sits on the side and berates her for being scared.

“Let’s go in,” Finn says.

“You haven’t got your armbands.”

“I’ll just go in a little bit,” he replies, clambering up.

“You can’t swim yet.” She can’t imagine why he wants to go in anyway. To her it seems like the worst of both worlds, the clinging communal oiliness of a public swimming pool combined with the chill and salt of the ocean. Why not just walk the extra ten feet and get into the proper water? “You’re not allowed, Mum and Dad said so.”

“I can swim without my armbands,” he says. “Look, I can do it.”

And to her astonishment, he almost can. His head bobs beneath the water and his foot slips secretly beneath him to push off from the bottom every few strokes, but he’s undeniably making progress, huffing and breathless and jerky, but not sinking, not drowning. He’s become a fledgling water-creature.

“You can!” she says. “You can swim. You’re swimming! When did you learn that?”

The pride in his face as he glances shyly towards her squeezes her heart.

It takes them a long time to find their way back. She keeps up a bright artificial stream of chatter in case he’s worried, this little boy she loves and tyrannises so fiercely. After a few minutes, she feels a warm hand slip trustingly into hers, and she squeezes it, breathless with responsibility.

“We’ll find them soon,” she says for the seventh time.

“You keep saying that, and we keep not finding them.”

“Well, I can’t help it, all right? We will find them – look, there they are.”

She had imagined her parents sitting on the edge of their towels, anxiously searching, but her mother has unfastened the tie of her bikini and turned onto her front, and her father is sprawled across the lilo listening to the radio.

“You back?” Their father glances at them from beneath the hat that makes her embarrassed to be seen with him. “Want to dig that hole now?”

“Um… okay.” Finn reaches for the spade and hands it to their father, who marks out a raggedy circle.

Ava’s been so worried about getting them back safely that she’s only just remembered the exciting news.

“Guess what?”

Her dad is busy with the spade. After a minute her mother stirs and turns her head.

“What?” she murmurs.

“We found this pool, and… ”

“A rock-pool? That’s lovely. Was there a crab in it?”

“No, not a rock-pool, like a sort of outside swimming pool thing, only with seawater in it, and… ”

“Oh yes. They mentioned that at the hotel. It’s covered at high tide. Did it look nice?”

“No, not really, it’s all seaweedy, but listen… ”

“If it’s seaweedy be careful,” says her mother. “You might slip.”

Ava gives up. She will keep the knowledge to herself. They can find out for themselves that their son has (almost) learned to swim. Maybe Finn will tell them, later today perhaps, maybe even tomorrow, and she can say casually, ‘Oh yes, didn’t you know? He showed me yesterday morning.’

“Do you want to help dig this hole?” Her dad, already bored of his engineering project, offers her his spade.

“Can’t I go in the sea?”

She can see from his expression that she’s asked too soon. Her father feels rejected. He wants her to want to dig the hole. In his mind, digging a hole with her father and little brother will teach her teamwork and cooperation and be healthy, whereas going off to the sea by herself smacks of precocious pre-teen rebellion. Today a swim by herself, tomorrow cigarettes behind the bike-shed. Where will it end?

“It’s too windy,” her father says. “I don’t want the lilo blowing away.”

“I won’t take the lilo.”

“What if the waves are big?”

“The waves are fine.”

“And we’ve only got three towels and your mother needs one.”

“I’ll dry off in the sun. Please, Dad.”

“If you lie down in the sun for a bit you’ll get a nice tan,” her mother says. “You can have some of my oil.”

She swallows the words that she wants to say, which are What’s the point of coming if I can’t go in the water?

“I’ll bring back some seaweed,” she suggests, suddenly inspired. Her father likes them to collect things.

“Love?” He nudges his wife with one toe. “What do you think?”

“She’ll be fine,” his wife mumbles from the edges of sleep.

“All right.” He waves her off.

Finn watches wistfully as his big sister vanishes. He was hoping she would stay and dig the hole with him. He can already see that their dad was just pretending to be interested, and is about to leave him to get on with it “just for five minutes while I sit down”. His mother won’t want to get sand in her tanning-oil. Now he’s stuck by himself with a big circle of sand to dig out.

If Ava was helping, she’d already have taken over. They’d be knee-deep beneath the surface, and he would have been assigned a specific menial task, such as building a surrounding wall to make the hole even deeper. While he periodically rebels against her bossiness, just so she doesn’t get the idea she’s in charge of him, he also secretly likes it. It’s comforting to be told what to do.

Besides, however much he complains, Ava is in charge. She knows more than him. She can run faster than him. She can read harder books than him. She can swim in the ocean, breaking past the surf to slip between the wave’s peaks like a mermaid, until he’s afraid she’ll swim on and on into the horizon. She can do anything. She is the person he admires the most in the whole world.

The only thing he doesn’t understand is why she’s so bad at managing their parents.

“This hole’s going to be really great,” Finn tells his dad, now back on the lilo.

“That’s good.”

“It might need decorating. To make it look even cooler.”

“Ava’s getting some seaweed.”

“She might not get enough, though. It’s going to be a really big hole. With a wall.”

“A wall? That’s nice.”

“Yes. A really, really big wall.”

“That sounds good.”

“So, do you think I should get some more seaweed? Just in case she doesn’t get enough?”

“Can you find your way back all right?”

“Easy. I just look for our windbreak.”

His father smiles affectionately. “That’s my boy.”

The drowning begins gently. First, the shallows, seductive sheets of flat sun-warmed water. Then, the smallest breakers, little rolling waves that barely wet his knees, enticing him in further.

The swim in the pool was a test, a final experiment. He will join his big sister in the water, swim up behind her and say, ‘Oh, hello,’ calm and casual as if he’s done this every summer of their lives, and she’ll be even more surprised and impressed than when she saw him in the pool. He won’t be stuck on the shore while she disappears off on her mysterious water-journeys. He’ll be able to keep up with her at last. He’s done this a thousand times in his dreams.

He rehearses how she does it in his mind. She wades out, gasping, until the water’s up to her chest. Then she turns her back and lets a wave wash over her shoulders. Then she turns around again and starts swimming, and there’s a moment when she stops gasping and starts laughing, as the cold holds her so tightly she doesn’t feel it any more, and she disappears and reappears, disappears and reappears, until eventually she’s glowing and filled with savage life.