The Sing of the Shore
An uncanny, startlingly beautiful story collection steeped in the Cornish landscape, from the award-winning author of Diving Belles and Other Stories and Weathering.At the very edge of England, where the Atlantic Ocean meets the land and visitors flock in with the summer like seagulls, there is a Cornwall that is not shown on postcards.It is a place where communication cables buzz deep beneath the sand; where satellite dishes turn like flowers on clifftops, and where people drift like flotsam, caught in eddying tides. Restless children haunt empty holiday homes, a surfer struggles with the undertow of family life, a girl watches her childhood spin away from her in the whirl of a night-time fairground and, in a web of sea caves, a brother and sister search the dark for something lost.These astonishing, beguiling stories of ghosts and shifting sands, of static caravans and shipwrecked cargo, explore notions of landscape and belonging, permanence and impermanence, and the way places can take hold and never quite let go.
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate 2018
Copyright © Lucy Wood 2018
Cover images © Shutterstock
Kind permission to reproduce an excerpt from A Glossary of Cornish Sea-Words by Robert Morton Nance (1963) granted by the Federation of Old Cornwall Societies.
Lucy Wood asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008193393
Ebook Edition © April 2018 ISBN: 9780008193423
Version: 2018-02-14
For Ellie and Georgina
The sing of the shore:
the sound made by waves breaking, varying with the nature of the shore – sand, pebbles, boulders, scarped cliff, or reefs and ledges of rock – and thus giving the experienced fisherman an indication of his position when fog or darkness make land invisible
– From A Glossary of Cornish Sea-Words by Robert Morton Nance
The sea was what his father called a cowshitty sea – a brownish, algae green, that meant it would be good fishing, even though it sounded like it would be bad fishing. But when he said something was bullshit, like the landlord raising the rent, or not fixing the oven, or mentioning that he might put the flat up for sale, then that was definitely something bad. Except when he was in the pub, in a group, and then it could be said and the laughter would be low and raucous as seagulls. To Ivor, it was all in the same murky category as words like restive – Ivor is a very restive boy, his teacher would say into the phone, is everything alright? Apparently that didn’t mean that he was calm and easy.
The beach had been scraped and dragged by the winter storms. It was almost March now and where there had been sand there were stones, and where there had been stones there were channels that kept their water long after the tide had gone back out.
Crystal and Gull Gilbert were throwing stones at a limpet on a rock. The rock was covered in a rind of barnacles and there were anemones deep in the cracks; dark red and glistening like sweets.
Crystal picked up a handful of stones and threw them. One of them hit the limpet but it didn’t move. She went up and pressed her hand against it. The limpet grated a few millimetres across the rock. ‘That one up there looks empty,’ she said. She was pushing the limpet, but staring at a house on the cliff.
‘Let’s do something else,’ Ivor said. The week billowed and sagged around them, like a tent that might stay up, or might at any moment collapse. It was a school holiday. They’d already wrecked Crystal’s TV and been forced out of Gull Gilbert’s house by his brother, who had a girl hidden in his sour, dim bedroom. Ivor had seen her feet sticking out from under the bed.
He put his hand in one of the pools. Sea gooseberries rolled in the wind, scattering like a smashed chandelier. The ripples in the pool were dark and bright. Crystal’s hair was the same dark, dry colour as charcoal – you could rub your hand over it and get an electric shock. Sometimes it got tangled and clumps had to be cut off with scissors. She was the biggest person in their class, bigger even than Gull Gilbert, and could put a safety pin through the skin on her elbow. Last year she’d pushed over a teacher.
‘We’ve been in there already,’ Gull Gilbert said. He picked up a stone with two hands and swung it through the air. There were blotchy freckles on his wrists and neck. He never wore a coat. He picked up another stone. He was frowning like he always did when he was concentrating. He would throw for hours until he hit his target in exactly the way he wanted. When he was concentrating, you knew exactly what he was doing. When he wasn’t, anything could happen.
‘We haven’t,’ Crystal said.
‘Let’s go back into town,’ Ivor said. There was an indent in the rock, shallow and easy to miss at first, where the limpet had been before it moved. It was exactly the same size as the limpet’s shell and it had the same rough curves, the same fluted edge.
‘I want to go in that one.’ Crystal pushed her foot in the sand and turned a fast, lumbering pirouette.
