Yesterday’s Newspapers by Sally Bramley

The road ran straight, heading towards the cliffs, puddles both sides and water drumming under the floor. I flinched as the car swerved, punched sideways by the wind, gusty now and getting stronger as we approached the coast. The rain hit hard, as if someone was throwing buckets of water from the grass verge.

‘Christ!’ Jack hung onto the steering wheel. ‘What are we doing in this Godforsaken place?’

I peered between them from the back seat, him and my sister Ruth, keen to see what there was to see, like a small child out with its parents, even though they were both barely two or three years older than me. Jack and Ruth that is. But I was the one who had gone away, left home, run off as they say. As they had said, often enough. I still felt like a stroppy teenager when I was with them, as if I had ceased getting any older once I had left. But this was clearly their territory now. Ruth had stayed and married Jack and now they were showing me around, as if I had never been there at all.

‘I remember days like this.’ Ruth peered out of the side window at the flat muddy fields, rainwater standing in the furrows, trees doubling over in the onslaught. ‘When I was young.’

‘Uh-huh,’ I said. ‘Me too.’

I was visiting. A short respite from my real life. And they had both welcomed me, even after everything that had happened, and that was kind of them. We had decided a day out might be a thing that we could all do together. It had been my idea to revisit the place where Ruth and I had spent our school holidays, staying with our cousins.

Ruth had seemed keen. ‘That would be good. We never get there, these days.’

Jack had shrugged, turning away. ‘If we must.’

We passed Auntie Pat’s house, over to the left, at the end of a short track. Red bricks against the grey sky. She had moved out long ago, but the house looked just the same, as far as I could recall. A long low farmhouse with a sway-backed tiled roof. A cluster of outbuildings surrounding it, open fronted wooden sheds, galvanised roofs, lumps of farm machinery dotted around the place, like hump-backed whales breaking through the long grass and brambles. All much the same, except that the farm gate had disappeared.

‘The gate’s gone,’ I said.

‘Has it?’ Ruth peered at the gap. ‘Oh, right. I don’t remember that.’

‘We used to swing on it, waiting for the milk lorry. Just Josie and me. We used to like doing that.’

Ruth nodded but didn’t speak.

We approached the red and white barrier stretched across the road with a large sign on it saying Danger! Keep away from eroding cliffs! It was attached to poles that sat in large galvanised dustbins spilling over with concrete. For ease of moving, I supposed, though they must have weighed a ton. They sat there ready to be shifted further inland as that became necessary. A continuous retreat. Past the barrier the tarmac was cracked and upended in jagged slabs. The double yellows wavered, reminding me of the unravelling stripes of an old sweater I once had. A garden fence dangled, wires straining, the wooden posts flattened on the cliff top. Beyond all this, the sea stretched to the horizon, hazy with rain, while closer, white horses gathered angrily around the rocks.

Ruth said, ‘Jack! Just don’t get too near the edge!’ She said it several times her voice getting louder, as if she knew he would.

He clicked his tongue against his teeth. ‘Don’t fuss, it’ll be fine! Don’t you trust my driving?’ He drove fast, braking at the last minute and pulling up sharply. The car bonnet almost touched the barrier.

Ruth flinched, leaning back, gripping each side of the front seat, speaking through her teeth. ‘It’s not safe this close.’

He sighed. ‘For heaven’s sake, you don’t need to worry.’ He raised his voice above the noise of the engine and the wind to speak to me. ‘Ruth isn’t very good with heights.’

‘I don’t remember that.’ I frowned, thinking back. ‘Not when we were young.’

Jack patted Ruth’s knee as she sat rigid, as if reassuring a small child. Eventually, with another sigh, he reversed the car back around sharply, one hand on the wheel, skidding over the gravel and parking up in the turning space.

‘Thank you.’ Ruth breathed out and sank back into her seat.

I felt on the outside of something, some ongoing argument that I didn’t know about, so I kept quiet. And I didn’t understand about the heights thing either. When we were children we clambered around on the cliffs all the time. Ruth more than any of us. In fact it was Ruth that would say to me and Josie (because we were only nine or ten), ‘You two had better stay away from here.’ But she didn’t stay away. It occurred to me now that maybe she and Simon had wanted to hide on their own down on the ledges, without their kid sisters tagging along. Those private grassy layers sloping back towards the land. The chunks of field that had broken away and slumped some distance down the cliffs and then stopped.

These were the places where you could lie on your stomach in the grass and look out to sea, as if on the prow of a ship. Ignoring the steep drop down to the beach. Ruth hadn’t seemed scared of heights at all, back then.

‘Do you see anything of Simon these days?’ I asked.

Ruth just shook her head. Jack looked sideways at her. ‘I’m sure she’d like to.’

‘Do you remember the café?’ I spoke quickly, looking for safer ground.

‘It was a bit of a dump, wasn’t it,’ Ruth said.

We sat for a while, the wind rocking the car. I stared, trying to picture the wooden beach café that used to stand over to the left: the cafe with the tin roof that sold lemonade and crisps and always had motorbikes outside. It was the kind of cafe where people hung about. The scrubby grass and sand underfoot was always scuffed and flattened, and rubbish blew in the wind. But it was where we went with our cousins when we stayed there. We met up with their friends and knocked around and thought that the school holidays would go on for ever.

The main thing was that we were allowed to go there on our own. At Auntie Pat’s house, things were different to what we were used to. There seemed to be different rules. I hadn’t yet realised that happened, that rules were not the same everywhere. Simon and Josie could do anything they liked, or so it seemed. And that meant that we could too, while we were there. Auntie Pat would sit on the veranda with a mug of tea and her knitting and say, ‘Oh, are you going out? Just keep away from the cliffs, mind.’ The warning was just an afterthought, we could see that. It could safely be ignored. Besides, where else would we go, apart from along the cliffs?

I remembered the feeling of skipping down the road, always in the sunshine, of course, sand and dust covering my bare legs, wondering what it was that I would choose to do, on that particular day.

Now there was no café. Just a blank space in front of us, the sea having done its worst, eating away at the land. I wondered if it had been demolished before it clattered down to the beach. If someone had taken pity on it and done that; I hoped that it hadn’t just been left to break apart, as if it didn’t matter at all. I stared, my eyes convinced that it must still be there somewhere. I blinked, but there was only the steep drop down to the beach and eventually it made me feel dizzy and I looked away.

Now the closest thing to the cliff edge was a wooden chalet, currently the last in a long line by the side of the road, with boards over the windows. Others further back had lace curtains and chimney smoke still, although paint was flaking and fences hanging. I could imagine people turning to each other and saying, ‘Well, I don’t suppose it’s worth fixing it, not now.’

I opened the car window a fraction and the newspaper on the back shelf whipped and spun as the wind caught it. I could smell the sea – a cold mix of salt and fish and drains.

‘I used to help Simon with his paper round, here,’ Ruth said.

‘Oh?’ I didn’t remember that.

‘We delivered to all these chalets. And then if we had some left over we would go on to the caravan site and stand in the middle and shout, and people would come out and buy them. We had to shout really loudly, or they wouldn’t hear us.’

‘You certainly knew how to live,’ Jack said, turning to me, looking for some sort of confirmation that I could see the funny side of this. As if he expected me to laugh with him about my own sister. I looked away out of the car window.

‘What exciting holidays you had,’ he sighed, as I didn’t speak. He said this with a flat sarcastic voice, turning away from the two of us, his fingers drumming on the steering wheel, as if he was keen to go. But I was imagining Ruth and Simon standing in the middle of the caravan site in the dusk, with enormous canvas bags of evening newspapers weighing them down. How exciting that must have been.

‘I don’t remember that. Where was I?’

‘You were probably too young,’ Ruth said. ‘The caravan site was the best bit. People were always so pleased to see us.’

‘What did you shout?’

It was quiet for a minute until Ruth sat forward a little in her seat to get her breath and then shouted, ‘Paperrr!’ She sounded like an old man selling papers on a street corner. It made me jump. Paper was throaty and loud and it rose sharply at the end, the noise filling up the car. And then there was silence and I could hear everyone breathing.

Jack turned to her then, leaning close, his mouth twitching, his eyes amused. He rested his hand on her knee. ‘What did you shout, again, sweetheart?’

Ruth turned her head slightly towards Jack. She sat up straight then, and stared back at him. Defiant. I could see her face blushing and her eyes wet. For a long moment it was as if I wasn’t there. They could have been alone in the car, the way the air between them fizzed. Electric. I thought she would ignore him and not answer his question. But instead, she leaned a little towards him and she did it again.

‘Paaa-perrrr,’ she shouted proudly, louder this time and with barely any consonants at all. The noise exploded in his face and I caught my breath. I was thrilled. ‘That’s what we shouted,’ she said.

Jack sat silent then, his mouth dropping open. And I caught sight of the look on my sister’s face as she stared back at him, her face puzzled now, as if she was suddenly wondering who he was. And then she looked back at me and we both grinned, before turning away and staring out of the car windows at the sea. Both sitting softly with our memories, I was sure. Memories of those times when we were young and shouted out loud whenever we chose.