He’d hoped to go to the sea caves now, but the tide was too high and he knew better than to risk it. So instead he considered all the ways that the place had altered in the years since he’d been here.
Money had come to the area. He could see that in the summer houses and the getaway cottages that overlooked the cove. Long ago there had been only one of them?far out on the end of the cliff, an impressive granite structure whose proud white paint and gleaming black gutters and trim spoke of more money than any local family had?but now there were at least a dozen, although Cliff House still stood, as proudly as ever. He’d been inside only once, at an adolescent party orchestrated by a family called Parsons who’d taken up residence for five summers in a row. A celebration before our Jamie heads off to university, they’d called the gathering.
None of the locals had liked Jamie Parsons, who’d spent his gap year traveling the globe and who hadn’t possessed the common sense to keep quiet about it. But all of them had been willing to pretend the kid was everything from best mate to the Second Coming for a night of carousing inside his home.
They’d had to look cool, though. Ben remembered that. They had to look like kids who experienced this sort of revelry all the time: end of summer, an invitation that had arrived for God’s sake by post, a rock band come down from Newquay to play, tables of food, a strobe above the dance area, and nighttime bolt holes all over the house where mischief of every imaginable kind could be got up to with no one the wiser. At least two of the Parsons kids were there?had there been four of them in all? perhaps five??but no parents. Beer of every imaginable kind, as well as the contraband: whiskey, vodka, rum mixed with cola, tabs of something no one would identify, and cannabis. Cannabis by the crateful, it seemed. Cocaine as well? Ben couldn’t remember.
What he did remember was the talk, and he remembered that because of surfing that summer and what had come of surfing that summer.
The great divide: It existed any place invaded seasonally by people not born and bred to a spot. There were always the townies…and the interlopers. In Cornwall especially, there were those who toiled and scrabbled to make a modest living, and there was everyone who arrived to spend their holiday time and money enjoying the pleasures of the southwest. The main pleasure was the coast with its brilliant weather, crystalline sea, pristine coves, and soaring cliffs. The lure, however, was the water.
Longtime residents knew the rules. Anyone who surfed regularly knew the rules, for they were easy and basic. Take your turn, do not snake, do not drop in when someone else calls a wave, give way to the more experienced, respect the hierarchy. The shore break belongs to beginners with wide boards, to kids playing in the water, and sometimes to knee boarders and body boarders wanting a quick return for their efforts. Anyone surfing beyond the shore break rode in at the end of a session but otherwise remained outside, dropping off the board or cutting over the shoulder of the wave and down the backside of it to paddle out again long before reaching the area where the beginners were. It was simple. It was also unwritten, but ignorance was never an acceptable excuse.
No one knew whether Jamie Parsons operated in ignorance or indifference. What everyone did know was that Jamie Parsons somehow felt that he had certain rights, which he saw as rights and not as what they actually were: inexcusable blunders.