Not Dead Enough

51

The tide was coming in on the Brighton and Hove waterfront, but there was still a wide expanse of exposed mudflats between the pebble beach and the frothing surf from the breakers. Although it was almost half past eight in the evening and the sun was fast closing on the horizon, there were still plenty of people on the beach.

Sweet barbecue smoke mingled with the smells of salt, weed and tar. Strains of steel-band music from a stoned group playing on the promenade drifted through the warm, still air. Two small naked children dug plastic spades into the mud, helped by a plump, badly sunburnt man in loud shorts and a baseball cap who was adding a further layer to an already fine-looking sandcastle.

Two young lovers, in shorts and T-shirts, walked barefoot across cool, wet mud. They stepped on whorls of lugworm casts, upturned shells, strands of weed, carefully avoiding the occasional rusted can, discarded bottle or empty plastic carton. Their hands were tightly linked and they stopped every few steps to kiss, dangling their flip-flops with their free hands.

Carefree, smiling, they passed a solemn, elderly man in a crumpled white hat pulled tight down over his ears, swinging a metal detector in an arc in front of him, inches above the surface of the mud. Then they passed a youth, in gumboots and khaki trousers, with an open shirt spilled over them, a fishing bag on the ground beside him, digging out worms for bait with a garden spade and shaking them off the blade into a rubber bucket.

A short distance ahead were the blackened girders of the ruin of the West Pier, rising out of the shallows, in the fading light, like an eerie sculpture. The water seemed to be travelling faster, more urgently, every minute, the breakers getting larger, louder.

The girl squealed and tried to pull her boyfriend away, towards the shore, as water suddenly ran in further than before, covering her bare feet. ‘I’m getting wet, Ben!’

‘Tamara, you’re such a wuss!’ he replied, standing firm as another breaker, even closer, sent water shooting over their ankles, and then a third, almost up to their knees. He pointed out towards the horizon, at the crimson orb of the sun. ‘Watch the sunset. You get a green flash of light when it hits the horizon. You ever seen it?’

But she wasn’t looking at the sun. She was looking at a log that was rolling over and over in the surf. A log with long tendrils of seaweed attached to one end, trailing from it. An even bigger breaker roared, and the log was sucked back. And for one brief, fleeting instant, as the log rolled, she saw a face. Arms and legs. And realized that it wasn’t seaweed on the end of it. It was human hair.

She screamed.

Ben broke free of her hand and ran into the water, towards it. A breaker hit his knees, showering spray over his body and face, spattering the lenses of his sunglasses, blurring his vision. The body rolled again, a naked woman with her face partially eaten away, her skin the colour of tallow wax. She was being pulled back, away from Ben, reclaimed by the ocean as if she had merely been presented for a brief inspection.

The young man lunged forward, water up to his thighs now, drenched completely as another breaker exploded around him, and grabbed an arm by the wrist, then pulled hard. The skin felt cold and slimy, reptilian. He shuddered but hung on resolutely. She seemed only slightly built, but with the pull of the ocean against him she felt as heavy as lead. He pulled back, locked in a grim tug-of-war. ‘Tam!’ he shouted. ‘Call someone for help! Dial 999 on yer mob!’

Then suddenly, still gripping the wrist hard, he was falling. He landed flat on his back in the mud, as deafening surf from another breaker roared and sucked and gurgled over his face and around him. And there was another sound in his ears now, a dull, ragged whine, getting louder, more intense, more piercing.

It was Tamara. Standing rigid, her eyes bulging in shock, mouth open, the scream coming from deep within her.

Ben hadn’t yet fully realized that the arm he was holding had torn clean away from the rest of the body.