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“A pearl is an everlasting tear,” he whispers. “A swaddled hurt.”
IT WAS a wild empty place, that beach. A place where the ocean met the sky and the seabirds screamed and reeled in wide, wide, borderless blue. The dunes were three stories high or no bigger than an anthill, great ancient breakers or new little hillocks. It was a place of shifting sand, singing sand, sinking sand, hard-packed made-for-running-on sand. Sand with a sheen to it, a certain luster in the right light (moonlight, starlight, dawnlight). A long crescent swoon of a beach, even its name was magical: Pearl Strand.
“Do you know what I’ve learnt from life?” “Is it profound?” “Not at all; it’s very simple. Just be sincere and everything else will follow.”
Memory is like a wayward dog. Sometimes it drops the ball and sometimes it brings it, and sometimes it doesn’t bring a ball at all; it brings a shoe.
I cry for the people who are dying from bowel obstructions and car crashes, heart attacks and lingering diseases, unhappiness and fluke DIY accidents. I cry for old rogues holed up in their clutter and brave souls too scared to go out. I cry for dead wives and bad sisters and disappeared schoolgirls. I cry for those who can’t remember and those who can’t forget and those who are stuck somewhere in the fucking middle.
