The water’s edge was a hard charcoal line scored against the thin grey ink of the waves. The woman pulled her scarf more tightly around her head and shoulders but doing so failed to hold back the cold or muffle the screeches of gulls haunting the deserted promenade. She sympathised with their complaints; the tourists had taken more than half-eaten bags of chips and discarded ice cream cones with them when they left at the end of the season.
The winter skies left the sea shore as bleached and barren as driftwood but it was silence that left it hollow and brittle.
Her eyes followed the breakers on their way up the sand, she still counted them in sevens but her days of running from the last of the set were years behind her. Instead she held doggedly to the path of hard sand and let them pay court to her heels at the top of the tide’s reach.
She wasn't old, at least not by the standards of people who worry that they might be. But she was tired. The last season had seemed longer and leaner than most. Perhaps she should move to Margate or Folkestone and ply her trade among their new bohemians. But she knew her patch and the beach had grown comfortable around her, moulding itself to her shape with each passing tide.
She'd bought the stall more than forty years ago for what had seemed like a song. She had said she would stay for a season and then go travelling or maybe go to college. Either way, it was just for the summer, maybe two.
Then one summer had followed another. Seasons had moved on and taken the visitors with them but she had stayed. Friends became lovers and eventually a family but they too had moved on. Now there was only her, her and the stall.
Looking back she couldn’t remember much about the woman who had sold it to her. She'd thrown in a recipe for seaweed soup with the stall, along with a few designs for witch's faces and gingerbread houses made out of conches and razor shells and a decent sales patter. "Watch what you find and who you sell to." she'd said before vanishing off to the Costa del Somewhere.
Perhaps the stall’s previous owner had said no such thing and the she was just borrowing the voice for her own thoughts. She found herself doing that more and more; arguing with the dead or those who might as well be for all the good their memory would do her.
She picked up a stone, scraped and dragged to perfection and flicked it out across the sea. It scudded from tip to crest before falling through the water to begin its rattling, halting shuffle back towards the shore. She wondered if she had ever skimmed the same stone twice. Was there some twice-cursed pebble that had escaped the pull of the tide only to have her again send it back to a watery grave?
She thought about each one; brown and grey and black, polished to smoothness or split to a cutting edge. She pictured them rattling against each other and being cascaded by the pull of the tide - each one making the tiniest of eddies to nudge the next and the next and the next. Each in turn settling the fate of its neighbour like the penny pushes a hundred yards up the beach.
"Watch who you sell to,” she’d said. Like any truly good piece of advice, it only made sense in retrospect.
She had been young and stupid and had taken the other woman's exhortations as a warning against sin - that shells should only be sold to the virtuous and the righteous. She wondered whether the emphasis she now heard had been there at the time or whether time had added its weight to her words.
"Watch what you find and who you sell to." It had taken her years to learn how to watch.
There had still been good years though. Too good in many ways, perhaps that was why she’d stayed. Or perhaps there had just been nowhere else she’d really wanted to go. The fun would really start when the rides stopped and, at the end of a season, there was always next season to look forward to. The seaside takes some people like that, pulling them out and under until they stop struggling and fall asleep. Perhaps there was one more season to look forward to. One last squeal of ice cream and foolishness and whatever secrets the beach chose to share with her. Perhaps they crowds would come one last time.
A wet, silky brown jumped out at her, hinting at itself just above the sand. She bent down to uncover a netted dog whelk shell, unchipped and with its rigged opening snarling up at her. They were one of her favourites, she should keep it, it was a good specimen and she'd need to restock the shelves soon enough. She wrapped it in a tissue and walked on.
The beach had been kind enough to her in those early years. Friends had become lovers and eventually a family and then they too had moved on.
Were these still good years? They were good enough. What had she expected? That the boys would stay, that there fathers wouldn’t turn out to be exactly the men she had hoped they would be at the time? That she would grow rich and fat off sea shells?
Now at least she had the time to work the beach properly. She had finally learned to watch. There were other treasures than shells among the stones. In forty years, it hadn’t once occurred to the Inland Revenue, the Fraud Squad or her own sons that the last place anyone would actually buy sea shells was at the seashore where you could pick up more than you could ever possibly need for nothing.
She still walked the beach every day, and every day returned with a bag of shells and, sometimes, some seaweed over her widow’s stoop. She was certainly old enough to know that she should offer her visitors thin seaweed soup from time to time for the sake of appearances.
It had taken three years for the first penny to drop. She had stopped handing in the wallets and purses and rings she found and started selling them on through Trevor in Southgate. Trevor had been a lifeline in the early years but he ended up on the long list of unreliable men in her life. In an analogue age, however, there had been a limit to what you could do with a credit card.
Ten years later, she’d found her first mobile phone. Black and heavy and glistening in the sun like the mother of all mussels. As mobile devices began to take over the beach, she’d transformed her operation.
Hawking lost phones and tablets was just paddling in the shallows of the information age. Chips at the seaside now came with pins and access to a world of online credit but the sandy shores of silicon valley had one more gift to give. Hi-res images, telephoto lenses and decent editing software had allowed her to take things to a whole new level. Trinkets and tablets turned up like clam shells at high tide but indiscretions were what most people left at the beach, expecting them to be washed away with the rest of their rubbish. Holiday romances; so sweet, so fleeting, so out-of-mind. So she’d begun collecting those too. Usually the guilty husband offered the most, occasionally the lover, but surprisingly often, it was the wife.
It was a living.
List of illustrations
Scallop Shells was created by Hiroyoshi Urushima and is available on Unsplash.
Devon Marina was created by Monica Volpin and is available from Pixabay.
Railway and Pier was created by brendajw and is available from Pixabay.
Paddling Birds was created by ARWBR and is available from Pixabay.
Slipway at Low Tide was created by Jonny Gios and is available on Unsplash.
Brighton Pier Arcade was created by Hert Niks and is available from Pixabay.
Funland Amusement was created by Alistair MacRobert and is available on Unsplash.