98.4 by Hodder-Williams Christopher

Author:Hodder-Williams, Christopher [Hodder-Williams, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Venture Press
Published: 2015-11-19T16:00:00+00:00

TEN

It was dark and moist with heavy woodland scent when I shoved the Land-Rover in a copse and made my way on foot to the cliff edge. We were due for a moon a few minutes after midnight, but now my luminous watch thrust its digits weirdly at me and indicated that it was seven minutes before my scheduled rendezvous with Simmonds. By now he should be beached in the bay below.

To my right, the nuclear power station glittered like a tin monument to the atom. Two identical buildings showed their guts to the world through huge expanses of sheet glass like an X-ray. A large intestine of plump piping coiled itself down from top to bottom in each, tortuously bulbing around giant blocks of gear, then reappearing, much thickened from an encounter with other tubes. A halo of reflected boundary lights described an inverted arc-umbrella over the top, encasing light within light.

But here on the cliff a brief downpour at sundown had squeezed mud from under the scrubby grass and rainwater dripped from the swollen wooden fence I had climbed. The hoots of patient owls echoed from the unseen masts of big trees and sounded vaguely unnerving. It was difficult to associate the eerie nightcall with those friendly, agreeable birds which, though not particularly wise, are intrinsically tame and affectionate. As I slithered down a steep path towards the bare beach the owl-sounds were editorial comment on isolation.

Tyrant’s Bay smelled of fish. The stored life in countless shells waited for the quiet tide to wash them over salt. Seaweed laced among pebbles gave off a clinical odour as it breathed. And I’d caught the place unawares; here was the alien incubator for organisms that were lost and forgotten in the rat-race of evolutionary bustle; not even the gulls were there to bridge the astronomical gap in time which separated Man from his inscrutable forebears in the washpan of the sea.

Underfoot, flat sand gave place to shingle and soon I could see the dim glow of a cigarette which broke against the shimmering coastal marshlight that was Wales. There was a pencil of rocks protruding towards the moored craft. I felt and picked my way along it, till the boards of the deck were under me. Simmonds crouched near the cabin entrance. It seemed strange that I had so recently been recalling another encounter aboard a tied-up craft. Time had wrapped around itself and produced a logic of its own.

There was, however, little about the structure of Golden Hind that was logical. It had ugly lines and the weight of the engine — mounted high too near the stern — kept the thing in permanent imbalance. There was too much bow out of the water and the deckboards reflected the awkwardness of hull shape by warping uncomfortably as if they’d been put in upside down. Good boats, even when anchored, feel serene; this one felt as though it would pop its nails from a permanent sense of nautical anxiety.

We headed out to sea and for a long time nothing was said.

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