LITMIR.BIZ

      I’ve known this shore all my life: from its ancient Seaweed Hut – a weird structure which might as well have been put up by Iron Age inhabitants – to the brutal towers of its nineteen-sixties housing estate. It is as familiar to me as it is to the birds that scrabble for their livelihoods in its shingle and mud. I’d taken it for granted, that it would always be there.

      I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The beach was being torn apart before my eyes. The wall, usually only lapped even at the highest spring tide, was entirely overwhelmed. Waves – to call them waves seems pathetically inadequate – had lost their laterality and gone vertical, rising higher than a house.

      My world had lost its moorings. This was not some rocky Cornish or Scottish coast, buttressed against such a battering; this was a sedate, suburban shore, complacent and unprepared; a soft place on the southern edge of England, open to the rest of the world, successively invaded and settled for millennia. This estuary even had its own Roman deity, Ancasta. Clearly, she had been offended.

      It was as though someone had computer-generated the weather and ramped it up to a ridiculous degree. An invisible alien, formed of roaring air and raging water, had been unleashed. The sea spray reached the tops of the trees on the shore. It was terrifying, and exhilarating. My heart raced to keep up with every rattling rolling rumble; a cacophony created by raked-up shingle and creaking trees, the Foley effects of enraged gods flinging nature around.

      I watched it like some viral video; not rerun, but in real time. Behind this frontline, people were driving cars, taking buses, going to work, school, shops, locked in their own personal climate. We shared the same city; but they felt safe, seeing the storm through their screens. I was on the edge of it, physically confronted by the violence, as shocking as if I’d come across a fist fight on the street.

      The sea wall had been replaced by a wall of sea. The placid site where I propped up my bike every morning, where I’d leave my clothes and slip into the water, joining rather than entering it, had become a deadly, repulsive place.

      It was the only day during those storms that I did not, could not swim; perhaps the only day that year. Even at the height of the past days’ disruption I’d launched myself into the madness, defying the warnings. So what if anything went wrong? I didn’t take my mobile phone in case of emergency because I don’t have one. People say I should be careful; but why be careful, when we are so full of cares? This was the opposite of that. I glorified in my stupidity. Foolhardy, a hardy fool. I had rocked with the waves, holding my head above water like a shipwrecked dog, dodging planks and plastic buckets. A single trainer had floated past, then a motorbike helmet; I wondered if the head might still be in it. I was borne up by the rollercoaster ride, exultant and excited, although I had soon found myself spat back onshore.

      Not that day. That day I had to admit defeat, and defer to a greater power.

      During the night the wind woke me again, prowling around the house like a midnight demon, ready to suck me out of the window. The sound was beyond sound: one white noise comprised of many others, fit to eviscerate my dreams.

      In the morning, not quite believing what had happened during the darkness – was that last night, or the night before; did I even imagine it? – I ventured out on the third day of the storm, expecting to see a newly devastated world.

      But the streets looked the same, just as they do when you come back from holiday. Only a few fallen branches from the trees hinted at the mayhem of the small hours. I rode on down to the beach, not knowing what to expect, but expecting it anyway.

      There I realised that the storm had taken its final revenge. Defeated by what it could do inland, it had reshaped the coast itself.

      The beach had been lifted up and thrown back, creating a shingle tsunami. The path had been replaced by a tangle of branches and rope, a twisted mass of line and grass torn from some other shore, in the way drowned men’s pockets are turned inside out. The flotsam lay still, but contorted with the torque and tension of the wind and water. Tiny balls of coloured plastic, like the roe of some new petrochemical sea creature, were scattered through the wrackline. The calm itself was violent.

      Then I saw the sea wall. The waves had fallen back to reveal their guilty secret. The long straight stalwart of my pre-dawn swims, my chilly changing place, my launching point from the land, had been smashed to pieces, kicked over by a petulant child. The wall had stood for seventy years or more, made of the same stone that had built the abbey and fort behind it. Now, like the abbey, it lay in ruins.

      I took it personally. A structure I knew as well as my own body had been reduced to rubble. And I knew I was responsible. I had allowed this to happen.

      No one would ever rebuild this place, this insignificant corner, bypassed by ships and cars. The aftermath of this assault was the reality of ‘managed retreat’, in the bureaucrats’ parlance; the desertion of an already forgotten site. We had abandoned beauty, abandoned nature. This was the future: the rising sea on a suburban shore. I wanted to cry, but the hardness of the stone stopped me. So I picked my way over the remains, pulled off my clothes, and got in.

      The sea was still filled with debris; household doors and tree trunks floated like lumber thrown from a giant’s outhouse. And even as I swam, the waves began to rise again, responding to an invisible moon. Giving up the struggle, I climbed out, fighting to get dressed as the wind whipped my clothes into air-filled versions of me.

      I rode off into a new landscape. Time had sped up; geological change happened overnight. New streams had been formed and new islands created in the flood. Reluctant to let me go, the waves lashed me as I passed.

      Frail as I am as a human, I had the ability to withstand the storm. But along this coast, thousands of seabirds died in those few days, ten thousand guillemots alone. Birds that mate for life waited for partners who would never return.

      That afternoon I found a dead guillemot on the beach. Its slender-sharp bill and black-brown body lay slumped on the shingle like a soft toy lost over the side of a passing ferry. It was so perfect – and so far from the rocky ledges where it breeds so close to its fellows that they preen one another, even though they are not partners – that I wondered if I should take it home with me. I talked to it, commiserating with its fate. The next tide claimed it – only to bring another victim, rolled about in nylon line.

      I pulled it out. It was an avocet. A delicate, emblematic bird I’d only ever seen from afar, suddenly brought into near focus, graphically black and white, a piece of netsuke. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so exquisite, there in my hands. I turned it over in my fingers, feeling its long, scaly legs – relics of its reptilian past – and their knobbly joints like threaded veins, or worms that had swallowed soil. It was their colour that amazed me: an indefinable, pearly blue-mauve withheld under a soft misty bloom; electric, verging on iridescent. I could only compare it to the oceanic blue-grey of a gannet’s bill, as if this were a marine colour reserved for a seabird’s exclusive use. The legs, which might have been made out of some alien metal or art nouveau glass, culminated in tiny black claws, embedded like chips of polished jet.

      It was an enamelled animal. Vitrified. As much jewellery as a live, or recently dead, thing. It was hard to believe it had stood on such fragile stilts, let alone stalked its prey from them. Then I remembered the living avocets I’d seen, moving with eighteenth-century elegance, as if they might dance a gavotte. Avocets enact their own rituals, gathering in a circle and bowing to one another like dandies.

      I opened

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