The Rocks Below

by Nigel Bird

  The world was about to become her oyster and inside it she was sure to find an enormous, shiny pearl.

  The Prisoners

  Dougal persuaded Sam and Hashtag to return with him to his home.

  It took a little bit longer than it usually did on account of them all having to limp and to carry the paddle-boards and oars along with them.

  They went in as quietly as they could at Dougal’s insistence, but it didn’t stop his wife from waking up and coming down to check up what was going on.

  She was wearing a cosy-looking bathrobe that was almost as pink as the flare that Dougal had used to save himself from becoming the dinner of a crustacean down at the beach. Her slippers looked like they were put together using the wool from half a sheep and her glasses perched on her nose like she’d spent a lifetime practising the art.

  “Now, now Rose,” Dougal said to his wife as she plumped up the cushions in the living room for their guests and insisted on putting on the kettle to make them all a “nice, hot cup of coffee.”

  She’d already piled up towels and some of Dougal’s old clothes in the middle of the room so that the younger men could change.

  “We don’t want to put you to any trouble Mrs Munro,” Sam said in a voice that was polite enough to win over the old lady in spite of the whisky fumes that poured from him.

  “It’s no trouble at all, Sam,” she replied. “It’s like a trip down memory lane. Reminds me of when Dougal was policing nights. Now let me get you that coffee. You’ll be needing a few sugars in there by the looks of you and I’ll bring through the biscuit tin in a mo’.” Rose shuffled out of the room and left the men together.

  “You were police?” Hashtag asked.

  “Aye. Man and boy.”

  “Cool.”

  “Why, do you fancy yourself on the force?” Sam asked.

  “I might. Anyway, let’s get this stuff off and work out what we’re going to do about all of this.”

  The men peeled off their wetsuits and wrapped themselves in towels.

  Rose knocked at the door. “You decent?”

  Dougal opened the door and Rose came in with a tray full of mugs of coffee, sugar, spoons and a barrel-shaped biscuit tin.

  “Shame,” she said. I was hoping I might catch a bit of action.” She smiled at Hashtag, raising an ‘if-only-I-were-years-younger’ eye-brow, put down the tray and looked down at the bloody marks on his legs. “What the heck have you been doing? Wrestling an octopus?”

  She bent down and rubbed her hands around his calves shaking her head. “Well?”

  “It was nothing Rose,” Dougal told her.

  “If that’s nothing, I’m a monkey’s uncle. You should be getting these men to the doctor.”

  “We’ll be there first thing in the morning, don’t fret. Now leave us to it. There’s a lot for us to sort out before morning.”

  Rose stood, tutted at her husband and left the room again. She closed the door with a bang that was almost half a slam, caused the china cups to tinkle in their saucers and the key in the lock to fall to the beige carpet.

  “Nice,” Hashtag said.

  “She’ll be fine.”

  “We owe her a bunch of flowers,” Sam said and then passed round the coffee that would help their insides warm to somewhere near room temperature.

  “It’s like there’s a huge elephant in the room,” Sam said to break the silence when the drinks were gone and the biscuit barrel had been emptied.

  “You don’t half talk some rubbish,” Dougal told him.

  “Not a real elephant. More of a huge rock.”

  “Makes me sick just thinking of it,” Hashtag said.

  Dougal stood up in the room, something he’d been trained to do in situations where he needed to take a position of authority. “Aye. Well we’ll have no time for messing around. I’ll need you boys to stay here overnight. Soon as we can, we’ll need to report what happened. I’ll be recommending that they get the army in to blow those things to smithereens.”

  Sam was in agreement. “If it means I never have to see them again, I’m all for it.”

  “Now wait a minute…” Hashtag began.

  “I’ll not be waiting thirty seconds. You know what those things can do. All those dogs. Doc Brown. Those twins, God rest their souls. The sooner we get rid of them, the better for everyone.”

  “It’s not their fault they’ve been stranded on our beaches, it’s ours. Messing the world up. What are they supposed to do? Turn vegetarian?”

  Dougal’s face reddened. He pointed a finger at Hashtag and waved it at him like he was about to teach him some kind of lesson. “There’s no choice.” Dougal went over to the living room door, picked up the key and turned it in the door’s lock.

  “What the hell?”

  Dougal put the key on the floor and flicked it under the door as hard as he could. The men heard it slide across the wooden floor of the hallway until it hit something solid way over on the other side. “And if you’re thinking you’ll shout for Mrs Munro, let me tell you that she’ll already have her earplugs in. She couldn’t hear an atom bomb with those in.”

  “Are you crazy? I need to pee.” Sam had suddenly become aware of his full bladder and started jiggling up and down on the spot.

  “Window.” Dougal nodded over to the tiny slit of leaded glass.

  Sure enough, the window was big enough to pee out of but there was no way they were going to be able to climb out of there.

  “Are you taking us hostage?” Hashtag asked.

  “You can leave in the morning once you’ve show your wounds to anyone who needs to see it and soon as you’ve told your story and we’ve got the bomb squad over to those monsters you’ll be free to go wherever you wish.

  Sam pushed his way past Hashtag. “Get out the road, I’m busting.” He opened the window and let out a satisfied gasp as he watered the roses in the flowerbed below.

  Hashtag sat in the corner. He pulled out his Blackberry from its waterproof cover and began to write the first of many messages that he’d send that evening as he began calling in as many favours as he could muster.

  Fight Them On The Beaches

  At half past 8 the next morning, Dougal, Hashtag and Sam were all awake.

  Dougal got up from his armchair, walked over to the door and pulled it open. “Anyone fancy a brew?”

  Sam’s jaw dropped open and he looked over to Hashtag for an explanation.

  “You mean we weren’t locked in at all.”

  “Course not. I wouldn’t do that to my mates. That key hasn’t worked since before we moved in and that’s over nearly thirty years.”

  “Ha Ha.” Sam threw a pair of rolled up socks at Dougal as he left the room. “Coffee. 2 sugars. And I’ll need a go on your phone. I’d better call Dianne or I’ll be grounded for weeks.”

  Rose made them the works for breakfast: croissants, juice, eggs, beans and hash browns, a pot of coffee and an endless supply of toast.

  True to his word, Dougal asked the others to accompany him to the police station so that they could report the incident of the night before and could show the marks on their legs as evidence.

  Hashtag seemed to take it all surprisingly well, seeing as he was passionately against the idea. He went along with the whole thing and offered to hang around until the soldiers appeared once it had been decided that blowing up the rocks would be the best solution on offer.

  Sergeant Timms, a portly man with the ruddy completion of a drinker and a grey moustache that looked like it had been badly stuck on, phoned Edinburgh to arrange some press coverage for the afternoon.

  A squad of army engineers would start the mission in Dunbar at 2pm and work their way west until all was done.

  Photo finish

  Jenny Wilson sped recklessly from Edinburgh to Dunbar, collecting 2 speed camera photographs on the way – at least she’d had her hair done.

  As she whizzed off the A1 round the roundabout with the strawberry farm, her laptop and briefcase s
lide from the passenger seat and into the door.

  When she pulled in to a parking bay at the swimming pool, she checked herself in the vanity mirror and decided she looked perfect – not enough make up to look like she was going out on the town, just enough to give her the look of a sexy professor.

  It was a quarter to 2 and she had a whole 15 minutes to amble over to the beach and to meet up with the reporters from the BBC and ITV and whoever else bothered to turn out so she could give them the background to the story.

  Point Break

  Hashtag and Dougal stood in the ruined, red wall of the castle and looked down at the beach.

  Dougal looked his normal self, but Hashtag looked like a new man, sporting the tweed jacket, shirt and a pair of neatly ironed trousers that Rose had chosen for him from Dougal’s wardrobe.

  Beneath them was pandemonium.

  “What the heck is going on?” Dougal asked.

  Hashtag just laughed. It was even more comical than he’d pictured.

  At the bottom of the steps to the beach, an old woman carrying a laptop bag and a briefcase was shouting at a young soldier who was blocking her way and refusing to let her past.

  A couple of TV cameramen were taking pictures of the scene, standing by the yellow and black tape tied to metal posts that blocked off the area around the boulder.

  At the boulder, there was a chain of people Hashtag knew to be the surfers and protestors that he’d managed to contact during the night. They’d circled the rock, separated from the danger of the tentacles by a makeshift barrier of surfboards and garden fencing and assorted clothes.

  The protestors had managed to roll the boulder on to a huge square of fishing net and had handcuffed themselves around it so that there wasn’t going to be any action until someone had managed to either open the cuffs or cut through them.

  There were groups of soldiers milling around, too, all dressed in khaki-green camouflage gear, black boots and berets. They were having conversations around their tool-boxes and cases. Clearly, whatever they were carrying, bolt cutters weren’t among their typical items of equipment.

  A couple of policemen had turned up for good measure – Hashtag had done his job and told his bosses there’d be a major protest at Dunbar’s beach, just like they employed him to do. The only thing he’d bent the truth on was the timing and they’d arrived an hour too late to do anything about anything.

  “I take it you’re behind this mess,” Dougal asked Hashtag.

  “I told you, it’s the human race is to blame.”

  “But this mess here.”

  “I might have had something to do with it.”

  “So what exactly are we watching?”

  Hashtag looked out to sea and up into the air and pointed at a black spot that was clearly heading their way. “That’s the icing on the cake. The Greenpeace helicopter. It’s been at it all morning, taking the boulders out and dropping them into the water where they belong. The ones here I had them save till last, just to make sure that we got to see some action. The cameras are nothing to do with me, but it’s great that they’re here. They can frame the event for posterity. If we’re really lucky, they’ll get some great shots of the ‘Frack Off’ artwork we put there, too. Help spread the good word.”

  Dougal didn’t bother to say anything. Some things it was better to leave be and this very much looked like it was one of them.

  The helicopter approached with amazing speed, filling the air with a deafening drone. Dougal wished he had his wife’s earplugs to hand.

  As the huge, metal flier hovered over the boulder it lowered a winch and the protesters rallied into action, battling against the turbulence of the helicopter blades as they did so.

  First they unlocked their bracelets and then got to work attaching the net to the hook that dangled from the sky.

  The soldiers were under orders to stand their ground - there was no point getting involved and making a spectacle of themselves in front of the world’s TV audiences.

  The police stood on as observers, too, unsure of what they could actually achieve.

  The cameramen took pictures of the whole thing.

  Jenny Wilson had taken to hitting the soldier who was stopping her from getting on the beach with her briefcase. The soldier protected his head with his arms and let her beat away.

  One of the TV crew pointed his camera in her direction. They’d show the pictures later on the news and on the video funnies for many years to come.

  The helicopter pilot gave the people below a wave and pulled off with her enormous cargo. It headed over the harbour, past the golf course and on beyond the lighthouse to the middle of the ocean until it became a tiny speck and then disappeared altogether from view.

  Stone The Crows

  Martin watched the events on the news that evening as he sat in the gypsy caravan with a glass of wine and his ipad.

  He couldn’t remember Dunbar being newsworthy before and the only time he’d seen it on the television was when the Community Bakery made it through to the final of Britain’s Best Bakers.

  The story seemed very dramatic, those surfers in handcuffs and the boulders taken off to their home. It was the ranting of the mad scientist, however, that made it so very entertaining.

  “It’s…it can’t be happening,” Jenny Wilson shouted at nobody in particular. The wind had messed her hair so that it looked like a bunch of tumbleweed and there was a bizarre orange stripe across her lips that Martin guessed might have started life as lipstick. “It’s alive. The rock’s alive,” she shouted for all she was worth.

  The woman had clearly lost it. She reached into her case and pulled out papers which she proceeded to wave around as like Chamberlain returning from Berlin in ’39.

  “The rocks are alive. We can learn so much. Cancer cures. Alzheimer’s. You name it we might get there. All because of me. I should be given the Nobel Prize for this and you’re ruining it. It’s ruined. The whole thing. Ruined.”

  The woman proceeded to rip up her papers into tiny squares and then throw the pieces into the air like they were large pieces of confetti.

  There were tears in her eyes when she closed her bag and stormed off up the steps and bigger tears when she tripped at the third sleeper and fell hard onto her knee.

  “You’ve been framed,” Martin said to his I-pad and it would turn out eventually that she certainly had.

  The Endless Summer

  The sun beamed down onto the waves, making them look like the sea was made of crystal.

  Ellie and Ben Murphy walked across the Bridge To Nowhere and on to Belhaven beach.

  They didn’t speak to each other as they walked, just held hands like young lovers out for a stroll.

  Every so often, Ben bent down to pick up a stick and throw it for the Irish Wolfhound that bounded clumsily ahead of them. The dog would go and collect the stick and bring it back for Ben so that they could do it all over again.

  “Go get it Thumper,” he’d say, or “Fetch boy,” and Thumper would duly oblige.

  In the sea, two black shapes lay on surfboards and paddled madly with their arms to take them closer to the horizon.

  Ben knew the pair well. Hashtag and Sam Surf out for their constitutionals.

  He loved watching them do their thing. They were like a pair of dancers taking to the stage when they caught a wave, a couple of tightrope walkers balancing across the uneven threads of the foam.

  As the water began to swell before them, Sam and Hashtag stood as if they were working in synchronicity. They headed up onto the wave and rode it home all the way to the shore.

  Author’s Note

  I hope you’ve enjoyed this novella.

  If you have, it’s in no small part due to Sam and Martin who have offered great support and advice in relation to surfing, crosswords and the locality. I’d like to thank them here for that help in the knowledge that the story is much more real because of them.

  If you haven’t enjoyed it, I’m blaming Sam and Martin.<
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  Other than being entertained by the story, I hope that you’ve come away from it thinking about a range of environmental issues, not least the ways in which the exploitation of energy resources is potentially damaging to the world. I’m not an expert, but it all seems rather dangerous to me and gambling with such things doesn’t seem to make any sense at all.

  Maybe you’d like to look into Fracking and decide for yourself – it’s not a simple subject, but one that might be important to you or to your children some day.

  Should you decide that you’re not so happy that it goes ahead, why not check out the social media sites and find out what you can do about it? I’m not advocating revolution here, just the possibility of like-minded individuals might come together and becoming all the stronger for it.

  My marching days seem to be over. That said I still have a pair of boots to walk in and might just dust them off one of these days. The last time I took to the streets was for the Stop The War protest in London when around a million protestors turned out. It may not have changed what happened, but there was a feeling that it almost did; regardless, I’m glad I went.

  Now my protest, or my statement, seems better made through writing.

  Here’s hoping it made a difference.

  All material contained herein © Nigel Bird 2013. All rights reserved.

  The story contained here is a work of fiction. All names of characters, places or incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to people, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  The cover is taken from an image of a painting by Philip Wilson Steer which is out of copyright. It's from a fabulous piece called 'On The Beach At Etaples' (1877).