IT - Pieces in the Dark

Chapter 2 - Beach

Chapter 2  -  The Beach

 

He woke up with his back pressed flat against the coarse dark sand of the beach dune looking up into the grey sky above. He hadn’t been aware of drifting off to sleep again, and the salty wind on his face was uncompromising to his desire to stay that way.

 Grasping at reality, his eyes darted about the clouds trying to sense where he was, gathering perspective for his mind, which itself was lumbering out of the starting gate of sleep. He could feel his lower body vibrating in the sand.

It was unnerving and he couldn’t work out what was going on. After a few seconds his mind automatically did the science and the maths for him and relayed the obvious; it was just his mobile phone in his back pocket humming away. It was obviously a text from Brina, who was now he assumed, leaving the supermarket in town to pick him up.

He knew he had been ‘looked after’ by her for the last three days but he couldn’t recall any of that time, it all seemed to be voided. He felt clean, shaved, and pressed, but it was either thanks to his own system autopilot, or Brina, that had been doing the driving for him as far as his body and his welfare were both concerned. He wasn’t starving and his shorts had been ironed so he had a fairly good idea which one it was.

He slid his hand behind to pull the phone out, but only succeeded in putting grey gritty sand in there instead. He flipped over on his side, and pulled the pocket liner out to get the phone and the sand out. He slapped the pocket lining to get the grit off like some waving, beached seal on its side, with little regard to what he must look like. He picked the phone out of the sand, rolled over onto his back again, and placed the phone in the sand next to him so he wouldn’t forget it.

As she was the only one to have the number it was either Brina, or something free he couldn’t survive without from some enthusiastic telecom company, so rather than looking at it he just he left it there in the sand without bothering to check it.

Sitting up he noticed that there were now a few more people on the beach walking dogs or collecting drift wood. Fortunately he hadn’t yet been classed as a suspicious washed-up dead body on the shore. This was probably as he was too clean looking and a little too far up the dune to qualify.

There was a clear stretch on any beach where you could sleep peacefully. If you were too close to the sea or too far inland, you always ran the risk of being resuscitated by some well-meaning unattractive passer-by, regardless of whether you were dead or alive. Although the sandflies currently biting his bare ankles were clearly not that fussed either way, capitalising on his sleeping insensitivity.

Smacking them off he was amazed just how something so small could inflict so much pain; little black flies the size of pin heads but clearly with fangs that a rattlesnake would be proud of. Smears of blood and black bits of fly were now all over his ankles, so he rubbed sand over them as he had nothing else to use. He had to remember to put something on them when he got back or they would itch like hell for days.

He had learnt that the hard way in the first week in New Zealand. He got angry with himself for forgetting to put insect repellent on, then he remembered that a few hours ago he could hardly remember his own name, and then he got angry at Brina for not looking after him properly and not remembering for him, which was rapidly followed by guilt at even thinking such a thing.

Over the last long three days, the pain in his head had given way to numbness. It had been working flat out doing something. It felt as if it was busy processing, converting, interpreting, but oddly it also felt as if he wasn’t involved.