The Salt Marsh by Clare Carson Read Free Book Online Page A

she was no longer so certain; she couldn’t sit there much longer, on this barren beach with only the cries of the oyster-catchers for company.
    She skidded down the shingle. Out in the Channel, ghostly terns flitted around the boil – the warm-water discharge from the power station. She crouched, selected a flat pebble, rusty brown, leaking warmth in her palm, high iron content perhaps. Radioactive? Not possible. She dropped it anyway, selected another, held it horizontally between her thumb and index finger. She had always been useless at skimming stones; they invariably sank on first contact, an inconsequential inability that had riled Jim. She curved her hand inwards. Jim sneered.
Not like that. Flick. Not throw. You cack-handed lummox.
    She flung the stone. It scudded, fizzed, then sank. Her father scoffed. She ignored him. She didn’t want Jim occupying her mind, dragging her into the shadows, reminding her of his paranoid undercover world, making her worry about Luke when there was undoubtedly a simple explanation for his non-appearance. She twisted around and yelled into the night.
    â€˜Leave me alone.’
    Her words were consumed by the slope behind. She stooped, groped for a rock, lifted it, hurled it at the waves, smiled as it landed with a satisfying splash and thud.
    â€˜Fuck you, Jim Coyle.’
    An emerald moth flitted past her face. She blinked and as she brushed away the fragile wings, the scrunch of footfall caught her attention. Luke. He must have heard her shouting. She had been waiting at the wrong spot. He was searching for her.
    â€˜Over here.’
    She ran in the direction of the advancing figure, stumbled on the pebbles rolling beneath her feet.
    â€˜It’s me. It’s Sam.’
    Her eyes could see it wasn’t Luke before her brain was prepared to acknowledge that the scrawny figure sloping along the beach was not her boyfriend. Not Luke, but as he neared, she realized she knew him. She smiled, tried to cover her dismay at finding he was not the person she was hoping to see. He spoke first.
    â€˜We’ve met. Nukiller trains.’
    She was flattered by his recognition; she was more likely to remember other people’s faces than they were to remember hers these days. She had become invisible since Jim’s death, saying nothing and disappearing.
    â€˜Nukiller trains,’ she said. ‘That’s right. The meetings.’
    The meetings had been Luke’s idea. Luke had talked it through with Dave, because Dave had contacts in Greenpeace and he knew about the power station. Dave had said, in his usual dismissive way, that he didn’t think a protest would achieve much, but he could put Luke in touch with a couple of people if he thought it would help. Luke had sweet-talked the landlord of the local pub, persuaded him to let them use the back room. They had stuck up posters and dished out a few flyers in the insular towns scattered around the marsh. Lydd. New Romney. Rye. The meeting had attracted only a handful of people and over half of those had been from the archaeology group Sam had joined the previous June when she first came down to Dungeness with Dave. Not much local interest in protesting against a power station that provided jobs.
    The man with the beaky nose and black ponytail had slipped into the back of the room late, unnoticed except by her, because she was sitting at the front, her mind wandering while Luke held the floor. His oily fisherman’s jumper sagged off his bony frame and gave him the appearance of a scarecrow. At the end of the meeting, as everybody was shuffling around to leave, he had stood and announced he was there because he wanted to protect the ancient powers of the land from the destructive evils of capitalism and the nuclear industry. Luke rolled his eyes. After the meeting, Luke said he distrusted ageing hippies, the sixties generation who talked about revolution and the dawning of a new age while amassing