Slapton Sands by Francis Cottam

not to smile.
    He sighed. ‘I like listening to Taj Mahal and Mahalia Jackson. I’ve just finished reading
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
What a page-turner. Unputdownable. Ingmar Bergman is my favourite film director. I’ve probably seen
The Seventh Seal
more often than my gran’s seen
The Sound of Music
.’
    Alice sipped her beer. English beer was still an effortful ritual for her. ‘Is any of that true?’
    â€˜I’d stand a better chance of sleeping with you if it was. Better than none, anyway. But the truth is I like listening to the Faces.’
    â€˜And watching
Poldark.
And Roberto Duran.’
    â€˜How do you know about Duran?’
    â€˜I read the papers,’ Alice said. ‘He’s a world champion.’
    David nodded. ‘There’s more to you than meets the eye. Even more, I should say.’
    â€˜Why do you box?’
    â€˜My father and grandfather boxed. I’ve been doing itsince I was eight years old. It’s college that’s the novelty, not the boxing.’
    She took another, willed sip of her beer. The City Arms was a Whitbread pub. She was drinking a draught beer called Trophy A. It was what they insisted was an acquired taste. She thought Trophy C-minus would have been a better name for the brew. ‘So what is your favourite film?
The Woman in White? The Scarlet Pimpernel
?’
    He smiled at that. But he said: ‘You really ought to go to the police. And you should stay well clear of that flat until you do.’
    â€˜My dad was a cop,’ she said. ‘I’m not innocent about crime.’
    Even to her own ears the claim sounded stupid.
    â€˜So,’ she said. ‘I take it your favourite movie is not
The Seventh Seal
?’
    â€˜I don’t go in for lists. If I did,
The Godfather
and
The French Connection
would be pretty near the top.’
    â€˜No foreign movies?’
    â€˜They’re both foreign movies. This is England.’
    â€˜And Lucky Strike are foreign cigarettes.’
    â€˜Chain-smoked by jumpy GIs flushing out Japs with flame-throwers on Iwo Jima,’ David said. ‘Proffered to blondes in cocktail bars by private eyes in trench coats and trilbies.’
    Smoked by state troopers, she thought, risking a week’s pay over a single hand of cards in her father’s den. But not commonly found in Whitstable.
    The Apache returned then from what Alice could only imagine had been a festival of farting in the gents. The guy was turning out to be a clear and present danger anywhere near a naked flame.
    â€˜You know what I mean,’ she said to David Lucas. ‘You know what I mean by foreign movies.’
    â€˜He likes
Enter the Dragon
,’ the Apache said, catching on to their subject with surprising speed, for him. ‘And that was filmed entirely in Hong Kong.’
    Alice Bourne didn’t go home that night. She stayed at the house, on a road to the rear of the campus, shared by David and Oliver and three of their undergraduate friends. One of the sharers was on a geography field trip and she slept on his bed, in a sleeping bag borrowed from David, after fish and chips eaten from the paper it came wrapped in at closing time in Canterbury, grossed out by Oliver’s saveloy and the pickled egg he swallowed whole in an evident bid to turn flatulence from an affliction into a quest. She slept under the
Easy Rider
poster Blu-Tacked above the bed head in the field tripper’s room, alert to the smell of dope that permeated the bedclothes and the carpet and an easy chair spilling its grey and foamy innards.
    Maybe it was the room. Maybe it was the gloomy nihilism of Lou Reed’s Berlin, Oliver’s choice of late-night listening before they all turned in – or, in his inevitable terminology, crashed out. But she awoke sweating at a quarter past six in David’s sleeping bag having dreamed thecormorant dream. And this time the lurching craft had been