Lanikai Krishnadasan Torrens Extract from Sea Glass
I
wait for Rebecca in the car park on top of the cliffs. The site is open to visitors until the end of the month. After that, the process of moving the stones further inland will begin, to prevent them from falling into the sea as the cliff erodes. There is a note on the information board explaining everything. It will take months of painstaking work, carefully excavating what remains of the foundations and transporting them twenty metres back from the edge of the cliffs. Below the board is a donation box, on which someone has written: Every contribution helps us to preserve this historic site. There is a cuttlebone lying on the tarmac. It makes me think of mangoes – sucking the sweet husks as a child, my dad splitting them open with a spoon to show me the seed. There is nothing else inside a cuttlebone. It fills with liquid or gas depending on whether the fish wants to float or sink. Something has picked it up and dropped it here, a hundred feet above the sea. A small tour group are clustered next to a pile of stones nearby listening to their guide, inaudible over the buffeting wind and the gulls. My phone vibrates in my pocket – Rebecca, saying she is almost here. The flag above the information board wraps and unwraps itself wildly around its pole. I wander to the edge, where a thin fence stands between me and the hundred-foot drop to the sea below, which roils and whips itself up against the rocks like egg white. The wind drags back the skin of my face and holds my eyelids open. I go back for the cuttlebone and kick it until it skitters over the edge to freedom. Then a car door slams behind me and Rebecca has seen me before I turn around. Her hair is loose and crazy in the wind as she walks over.
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lanikai krishnadasan torrens
