The Amnesia Clinic by James Scudamore

Author:James Scudamore
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781409079699
Publisher: Random House
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

If you tried to translate the word ‘Pedrascada’ into English, you’d come up with something like ‘Rock Storm’. The name fitted the place. Colossal piles of igneous rock and sandstone book-ended the beach, taking turns to cast shadows over it at different times of day, like the elusive hands of twin sundials. And in view of all the local volcanic activity, the name wasn’t so ridiculous an explanation for their existence. How else were the Galápagos formed? One day they weren’t there, and the next, whole landmasses welled up out of the ocean: molten islands, boiling and slopping about on the surface until they set. In an environment where that was possible, imagining a storm of rocks wasn’t too difficult. If you’d had the strength to overturn one of the huge boulders that studded the shoreline at each end, you might justifiably have expected to find a startled pre-Colombian skeleton underneath, primitive fishing rod stuck in hand since the moment a few civilisations ago when the meteor shower caught him unawares.

But for their matching natural towers, the opposing ends of the beach bore few similarities. At the south end, on your left as you faced the ocean, the sand curved away from the shore behind the rocks, hardening into a dirt track that became a rooster-pecked high street, along which Pedrascada the town slowly accumulated. Single-storey, unfinished houses and bars became larger homes and shops along this road, culminating in the rough formality of the Plaza de la Independencia, where the town had evolved as far as it ever would: neat flowerbeds set among yellow dust and palm trees, street-lamps, a pharmacy and a post office that housed Pedrascada’s only telephone.

Our bus had dropped us at the north end: the untamed, anarchic end. Apart from a scattering of beach bars topped with palm thatch, civilisation here consisted of a crude complex of wooden cabins, set back from the shore amid scrubland and leafless trees, behind a primitive wooden sign that read ‘Juan’s’. Up here, the beach ended abruptly where it met the northern rock pile, and the only way to get out and into the next bay was to pick your way around the base of the cliff face at low tide. No formal pathway existed, but the accumulated graffiti of countless pairs of lovers indicated that the route was well-used.

Beneath the surface of the water lay the coral shelf that gave the bay its celebrated long right break. It meant that the waves were big at Pedrascada, but could be treacherous if you surfed too near the north end. A small, red-painted shrine, like a cartoon dog kennel with a cross on top, sat in the cliff face, facing the bay – a memorial to a surfer who had misjudged things a few years previously and keelhauled himself on the reef. More than once, at night during our stay, I looked up and noticed that a candle had been lit there, although I didn’t see how anyone could possibly have climbed the cliff.

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