a strand of hair from his fringe. 'Please,' he says, and begins to stagger backward while his eyes scour the dunes for the silhouette that has slowed the blood inside him.
A quick and sudden motion, further down the beach, of something moving fast across the sand on all fours, catches his eye and he yanks his head around to look. But it's gone so quickly, as if it were nothing more than a shimmer at the edge of his sight. The movement occurred up in the dunes, parallel to a point on the beach he would have reached had he kept on running. It was cutting him off. Sweat turns to shivers.
How had it moved so quickly – from behind him to so far down the beach? But there's always an explanation for every strange sight. Could it be nothing more than the shadow of Venus, or the movement of matter in the eyeball's aqueous humour? 'Christ, this is not happening to me.'
'Walter. Walter. Walter.' Three voices form a chorus behind the dunes, their cries led by the younger woman who screams his name into the sky. And before the cold starry heavens, something thin rises again from the dunes to stand upright and look down at him.
Walter turns and runs for the sea.
Instinctively, he thinks it won't follow and that the long blanket of bitter water will offer a haven if only he can reach it. Now his heart is up between his ears, and there is a pain in one lung, and his knees knock together as if the cross-country race on a winter's morning has just begun. From behind he hears sharp feet flit down the side of the dunes to take up a quick and purposeful stride across the flat sand. And the flapping of whatever cloth is twisted about its length grows louder as the distance between them is closed.
Walter runs for all he is worth, losing a boot but never able to look behind again. And soon his feet skitter through the thin watery ice the sea has left after the waves retreat back into the liquid universe of splashes and sparkles and white foamy tips, and where the air is cold enough to make his ears ache inside. And he plunges through the shallows and slides to the deeps, lurching forward, until the cut of the freeze rises above his knees and into his thighs.
As he is poised to scream, the temperature of the water steals his breath and froths with quicksand tugs about his heavy hips. His arms sweep about and clutch for balance. His spine twists. Deafened by the noise of his explosive path, he wrenches his legs high but not clear of the surface, and then plunges them down, deeper, onward, out there, further into the sea.
Something ploughs through his wake. Is it the sea-spray or does it hiss? He feels its presence, its proximity, in the tips of his ears and at the ends of his hair. And before he can decide to face it and to steady his feet for the grapple, it looms up, then down, and he is covered in a heartbeat. He seems to dance with it for a second – two shadows in a drunken piggyback ride – before he plunges through the icy surface of the sea with it all about him.
CHAPTER TWO
'You're going to miss this place, mate,' Tom shouts over the judders and roar of the speeding Land Rover.
'Yeah, like toothache,' Dante replies, his concentration split between driving, thinking, and now Tom's jabber. He wants to dwell, uninterrupted, on the city where he's spent most of his adult life, the city he feels he is leaving with few regrets, besides taking his best friend along.
Birmingham dwindles behind him in the rear-view mirror and he feels it was never a city indifferent or unkind to him. They were comfortable in their squalid life. But the city of their birth and childhood and teens and early twenties wants them to remain with the other musicians, bums and losers of the rock scene, floundering in the shallows of a tide long gone out. Too late for a second start, his instincts suggest. The groaning activity in his stomach, caused by his doubts about driving four hundred miles to depend on an old man he's never met, reinforces this suspicion.
And the statistics are not good. Every other band and musician they know who attempted to leave the Midlands returned home in anything between a month