15.10.04
My father tried his best to convince me that the car on the beach had been abandoned, pushed over the cliff, probably, he said, stolen. On that day, he could not distract me with rock pools or construction in the sand. I spent the afternoon with the car, and when my father bribed me away with ice cream and a new bucket and spade from the seasonal concrete hut in the car park, I kept glancing back when he was not looking. I had not really left it.
I believed it to be red, but this was difficult to prove as it had rusted from weeks in the sea air and salt water, and blistered from the fire as the impact of a two-hundred foot drop ignited the fuel. It was upside down. It had been compacted, like a person with no neck. The roof had been crushed until there was not enough room for the seats. All the space for a human head had been taken away.
I thought about the woodlice in our back garden. Small, stupid, armoured aliens that were too boxy to right themselves when they fell over. I thought about the wheel-legs of the car, useless in the open air, overturned like a great, dead insect.
The car did not scare me. It was pinned and trapped on wide slabs of rock. It would stay there until the undertow finally dislodged it and carried it across the expansive sand plain, carried it past the boulders, sticking up from the ground like lost teeth, trapping water and fish behind them in deep, swimming sand pools. Until it was carried out to open sea. And then, I supposed, it would be smashed to pieces and carried back one bolt at a time, like driftwood.
I knew the tidal range was vast. The second largest in the world, I had been told. It was, perhaps, my first real understanding of geological time. There were fossils on the dining room windowsill, ammonites I brought home in my bucket. I knew, I had been told, they were imprints of creatures that had lived tens of millions of years ago. I understood them as snapshots, photographs, and supposed they had been made as quickly. Erosion, weathering, continental drift, I understood these things in terms of effect. I was not to go too near the cliffs, because they might collapse on me. Some rocks were smooth. I had seen a clock in the city museum that showed how fast we were moving towards America. I suppose I thought we would gently bump together, like docked ships.
But the car, I could not tell if all the pieces would be washed up or worn to nothing in my lifetime. The ocean was wide and older than I was.
We stayed at the beach all day, from a little below half tide to high tide. The waves swept up the flat beach, pushing long tongues of clear water up the sand, pulling them back to provide momentum for the next wave. The sea leapt forward, feet at a time. Had it not been late in the day, late in the season, almost time for the concrete hut to downgrade to a window-kiosk, and then shut down entirely, the beach would have been full of families, kite-flyers, dog-walkers, beachcombers, sun-bathers, picking up their towels, packing up their beach bags, shrieking in delight as the waves appeared, suddenly, magically at the corners of their pitches, soaking all their dry clothes.
As it was, the car was the only thing keeping my father and myself company as the waves began to break on the rocks that covered the higher part of the beach. The water hit, and sprayed, fanning out in a peacock's tail, joining with the mist-fine rain that had begun to fall. The rocks were as wide and flat as giant's paving slabs. But we were sitting even further up the beach. We were almost in the parking lot, in the dip between the two ancient cliffs, at the beach's only access point. Here there is only a small, steep run of blue-grey stones, the size of dinosaur eggs, comfortable in the hollow of a bare foot. The only part of the beach that is never submerged.
Slowly, almost parallel with us, the waves sank the car until I could only see the wheels during the dips between the waves, framed by the white, breaking foam, like the flare of a camera-flash, there and then gone again. Eventually I could not see the wheels at all, and I wondered if the car was being moved by the currents, if the din of the ocean was hiding the sound of metal and stone and the slow movement of a two-ton car-shell.
The water reached the edge of the stone slope, and then raised itself again, and again. It settled, just shy of the high tide waterline of dehydrated seaweed, dead leaves, dead driftwood, and dead, rusting soda cans.
My father and I listened to the perpetual thunder underneath the waves as rocks, sometimes the size of footballs, were lifted, thrown forward, pulled backwards, and smashed together mid-leap. I wondered what else was colliding under the water, and what else would survive down there, in that place that made sounds like the breaking sky.
Driving home, I felt as though the cliff were going to suck the car over. We would fall, tumble, rotate, land. Our roof would concertina, dust would rise, the tide would come and take us, and we would be a part of the undersea thunder. My bones, white and smooth like driftwood, would wash up on a shore five hundred years into the future.
I believed it to be red, but this was difficult to prove as it had rusted from weeks in the sea air and salt water, and blistered from the fire as the impact of a two-hundred foot drop ignited the fuel. It was upside down. It had been compacted, like a person with no neck. The roof had been crushed until there was not enough room for the seats. All the space for a human head had been taken away.
I thought about the woodlice in our back garden. Small, stupid, armoured aliens that were too boxy to right themselves when they fell over. I thought about the wheel-legs of the car, useless in the open air, overturned like a great, dead insect.
The car did not scare me. It was pinned and trapped on wide slabs of rock. It would stay there until the undertow finally dislodged it and carried it across the expansive sand plain, carried it past the boulders, sticking up from the ground like lost teeth, trapping water and fish behind them in deep, swimming sand pools. Until it was carried out to open sea. And then, I supposed, it would be smashed to pieces and carried back one bolt at a time, like driftwood.
I knew the tidal range was vast. The second largest in the world, I had been told. It was, perhaps, my first real understanding of geological time. There were fossils on the dining room windowsill, ammonites I brought home in my bucket. I knew, I had been told, they were imprints of creatures that had lived tens of millions of years ago. I understood them as snapshots, photographs, and supposed they had been made as quickly. Erosion, weathering, continental drift, I understood these things in terms of effect. I was not to go too near the cliffs, because they might collapse on me. Some rocks were smooth. I had seen a clock in the city museum that showed how fast we were moving towards America. I suppose I thought we would gently bump together, like docked ships.
But the car, I could not tell if all the pieces would be washed up or worn to nothing in my lifetime. The ocean was wide and older than I was.
We stayed at the beach all day, from a little below half tide to high tide. The waves swept up the flat beach, pushing long tongues of clear water up the sand, pulling them back to provide momentum for the next wave. The sea leapt forward, feet at a time. Had it not been late in the day, late in the season, almost time for the concrete hut to downgrade to a window-kiosk, and then shut down entirely, the beach would have been full of families, kite-flyers, dog-walkers, beachcombers, sun-bathers, picking up their towels, packing up their beach bags, shrieking in delight as the waves appeared, suddenly, magically at the corners of their pitches, soaking all their dry clothes.
As it was, the car was the only thing keeping my father and myself company as the waves began to break on the rocks that covered the higher part of the beach. The water hit, and sprayed, fanning out in a peacock's tail, joining with the mist-fine rain that had begun to fall. The rocks were as wide and flat as giant's paving slabs. But we were sitting even further up the beach. We were almost in the parking lot, in the dip between the two ancient cliffs, at the beach's only access point. Here there is only a small, steep run of blue-grey stones, the size of dinosaur eggs, comfortable in the hollow of a bare foot. The only part of the beach that is never submerged.
Slowly, almost parallel with us, the waves sank the car until I could only see the wheels during the dips between the waves, framed by the white, breaking foam, like the flare of a camera-flash, there and then gone again. Eventually I could not see the wheels at all, and I wondered if the car was being moved by the currents, if the din of the ocean was hiding the sound of metal and stone and the slow movement of a two-ton car-shell.
The water reached the edge of the stone slope, and then raised itself again, and again. It settled, just shy of the high tide waterline of dehydrated seaweed, dead leaves, dead driftwood, and dead, rusting soda cans.
My father and I listened to the perpetual thunder underneath the waves as rocks, sometimes the size of footballs, were lifted, thrown forward, pulled backwards, and smashed together mid-leap. I wondered what else was colliding under the water, and what else would survive down there, in that place that made sounds like the breaking sky.
Driving home, I felt as though the cliff were going to suck the car over. We would fall, tumble, rotate, land. Our roof would concertina, dust would rise, the tide would come and take us, and we would be a part of the undersea thunder. My bones, white and smooth like driftwood, would wash up on a shore five hundred years into the future.
