6. Watching
The wind came off the Channel in long gray pushes, and he stood in it and let it work at him.
From here the tape line was a thin yellow scratch on all that shingle.
Figures moved along it in ones and twos, slow as beetles.
A woman in a tan coat. A photographer crouching, standing, crouching.
Someone in a hi-vis jacket walking a grid with his head down, as if the beach had misplaced something small.
They had no idea what they were looking at. That was the pleasure of it. They would take their photographs and bag their samples and go home tonight to warm houses and tell their wives they'd seen something terrible, and none of them would have seen anything at all.
Thirty years he had carried this. Thirty years, while the shingle crept and the sea worked at the wall and the world went on believing itself solid.
Now he had set the truth down on the strand line where anyone could see it.
He thought about the hours of it. The shells laid out under the lamp, the fine tool, the ridging that kept wanting to split.
Four characters, twice over. Nobody had ever accused him of being clever, and they had been right, and it hadn't mattered.
Patience did the work that cleverness could not match.
He thought about the boy's hair. How it had wanted to fall the wrong way, and how he had wetted his fingers and drawn it straight, three times, four, until it sat as it should. That part had surprised him. He had not planned it. It had simply seemed right.
Then the tide had come up around them both, and that was all.
A car turned in off the road below and rolled toward the security gate. Something low and American. It stopped. A woman got out, and even at this distance he could see she was dressed wrong for it, bare-legged, mud to the knee, hair scraped back.
He watched her jog up the shingle rise. She didn't slow at the top the way they all slowed at the top, she just kept on running.
Interesting.
Above the reactors the clouds were stacking into darkness. Within an hour or two the storm would be unleashed, and the beach would eat all of their evidence, and maybe all of them too, if he was lucky.
He smiled. There was no such thing as luck. All of this had been planned.
He put his hands in his pockets and walked away without hurrying. He knew they were never going to find him. Nobody ever had.