Prologue
And now the sea feeds. It has been nibbling at this coastline for so long it was only a matter of time before the house and all its memories fell messily down into that hungry mouth. Wave after wave, the tongues of the sea have licked this cliff side hollow, until the house itself is just one more inevitable tasty treat. The sea remembers, because the sea is old; remembers when this house was shining white and green, newly painted and glistening like a wrapped sweet upon the shore. Maybe it can taste that fresh shininess when the house crumbles in its mouth, even beyond the drab grey and peeling paint, the shutters hanging loose and ready to go as a set of wobbly teeth.
There are cautious gulls watching from the stunted trees beyond. Watching the demise of the house, as though in a last farewell to the sea. These waters are a wasteland now and it will not be long before the birds reach out to the megacity and the tides of human rubbish in which new game might be gone.
Everyone is gone. The sea has no yield and the haven briefly offered by the last islands of Kent was only a fleeting one before the waters rose forever, drawing down a new Atlantis that was crumbling long before it made it to the sea bed. The Young Theatre will lie there, fish swimming between the last fixed seats that have stubbornly stayed bolted to the auditorium floor. The curtains stream in the dark tides like mermaids hair before they too fall apart. If there are still voices echoing in song out from this stage it is a song long quenched by the one the sea sings.
There is no beach at Whitstable now. But if you dared take a boat out over the sunken ghost town, you might see rooftops below, reaching out through the water in terrifying peaks, drowned pyramids all.
The sea bed is made of the chalk now. The chalk that once formed the cliffs all the way from here to Dover- and in the wake of so many fishermen now gone such oysters as remain must be laughing in their shells.
The sea laughs with them, chuckling around those last peaks and chimneys. It has got it all now, nothing missed.
But the sea is wrong. The sea got tricked. It hollowed out the houses searching for the tasty shadows within. But the shadows have up and left. The shadows that shone out from the cracks and skirting boards of Chistleworth House have whistled away with the sunlight that came for them, outsmarting everything.
The sea roars for wanting the ghosts that lived inside these sugar shells of houses; wanting to reach them as though they were the chewy centre of this snack. But the sea cannot have them.
They are gone.
They are gone and their voices, the last voices of the living and the dead echo out over these darkening waters – we are gone, we are done, we are won. Without the taste of them still here the sea has only that final story to remember.
A story about the sunlight and how it took the shadow home.