Chapter 69
They strode briskly through the streets, deserted but for the occasional figure running for cover. Shop keepers stood in their windows eyeing the weather disdainfully, trying to decide whether it was worth staying open or whether people would be exhumed from their guesthouses by desperation and hyperactive children and feel the need to buy plates with Greetings From Lyme Regis painted dully across them.
As Lettie and Doug reached the promenade and left the shelter of the buildings, the wind immediately buffeted them and sea spray soon joined rain in soaking them. They held hands and scuttled through the gale, each holding their hoods tightly under their chins to stop them blowing back and exposing more of their faces than necessary. An A-Board pointlessly advertising ice creams lay on its side amongst a scattering of mushy Impatiens petals from the hanging basket that swayed above it, now just a ball of sodden moss.
Bins lay overturned, their contents spilling out onto the stone flags and being quickly blown around the promenade. A metal gate crashed repeatedly against the wall and then its frame as the vacant second home would have no one to run out and fasten it for at least the next month. It was only the seagulls that seemed to be enjoying the weather, soaring in the gusts, making no headway despite their best efforts.
Doug and Lettie eventually reached the back beach and stood by the railings, where Rizzo had eaten his panini two hours earlier. The view was awesome. Waves crashed angrily against the inadequate sea wall, which was failing to keep the wilderness behind it from piling over into the sea. Pebbles stacked up against old wooden groynes and were sucked back with each wave and then thrown out, with a deafening rumble, with the power of the next.
Rain, no longer being absorbed by the now-saturated cliffs, poured in muddy rivulets over the sea wall to join the saltwater beneath it. Lettie tugged at Doug’s sleeve and pointed to a spot two hundred yards along the beach. He squinted through the weather to see a large pile of mud that had slumped onto the beach and which was now being slowly eaten away by the waves that crashed around it.
“That’s new,” she shouted, trying to make herself heard over the howling wind. Doug nodded as he followed her finger up the cliff, “See where that scar is fresh? It’s a biggie, no doubt about that.”
As they looked at the landslip, each trying to imagine what it must have been like when it happened, a small flash of red appeared on the far side. Lettie clutched Doug’s arm. Oh my God, she said to herself, as there was no way Doug would hear her over the wind – it couldn’t be? They turned to each other and then back to the red that had now disappeared from sight. Lettie scooped a tendril of sodden hair that had been plastered across her face and pushed it back into her hood and Doug lent further forward over the railings as if the extra six inches would change the reality of what he saw.
The red returned and seemed to be scrambling up the mud. Repeatedly it would slide back down and disappear momentarily from view, only to reappear on a slightly different route. Above it, mud that had turned to the consistency of slurry from the rain, slopped intermittently onto the pile.
“What’s he doing?” shrieked Lettie, “that stuff is lethal! It’s like quicksand; he’ll be drowned in it.” Doug heard the panic in her voice and saw the tremble in her hands.
“What do we do? Can we get to him?”
“No, the tide is too high – we’d be swept away. Oh, shit, shit, shit,” she said, wretched in her exasperation. She thought for a few seconds, her eyes staring at the red blob hoping that it would turn out to be a red buoy that had been washed up or an old fertiliser bag fluttering in the wind. But the blob had arms that moved in a clawing fashion and were surely tiring from the effort.
“The lifeboat,” she said. “It’s got to be the lifeboat,” and she turned and sprinted off to the phone booths that were thankfully only a few hundred yards away, cursing that she hadn’t thought to bring her mobile phone. Doug stayed at the railings, watching helplessly as the red clad figure repeated its slow ascent, an ascent that took him closer and closer to the wet mud that slopped down onto the top of his mountain, making it more treacherous with each new addition.