Managed Retreat

The letter used the words "managed retreat", which is a phrase I've come to hate with the specific, useless hatred you reserve for things that are correct. It means they're not going to defend the cliff. It means the sea gets the house. Not this winter, probably not next, but the engineers have drawn a line on a map and the line moves inland at about a metre a year, some years three, and the house is fourteen metres from the edge, and I can do that arithmetic. I drove up in October. I hadn't been for two years. Mum's in a home in Norwich now, she doesn't remember the house most days, and my brother lives in Sydney and says he'll come back to see it and won't. So it was just me, in a hire car, on the coast road with the wind trying to have the door off. The last time I'd stood in the back garden, there was a garden. A lawn, a shed, Dad's rhubarb, and then a fence, and then a strip of rough grass, and then the edge. Now the fence is gone. Not knocked down, gone, over the edge with the strip of grass it stood on. The rhubarb is two metres from a drop of thirty. I stood where the shed had been. You could see where it had been: a rectangle of paler grass, still, after all this time. I'd kissed a boy called Andrew behind that shed in 1989. He's a dentist in Leicester now. I looked him up once, don't judge me. The house itself looked fine, which was the worst part. Windows intact. Roof on. A house that has no idea. Somebody had put a laminated notice on the gate about unsafe ground and I stepped over it the way you'd step over a puddle. Inside it smelled of damp and of us. Both. There's a mark on the kitchen doorframe, pencil lines with dates, me and my brother, and I put my hand flat against the one from 1987 and I was that height again for a second, and then I wasn't.

I'd brought a screwdriver. I don't know when I decided that. I took the doorframe off. It took twenty minutes and I bent two of the screws and I didn't care. It's in my hallway now, in Cambridge, leaning against the wall where I can see it from the kitchen, and it makes no sense there and I'm not moving it. On the way out I met a man walking a dog along the cliff path, an older man, local by the sound of him. He nodded at the house. "Yours?" "Was." "Mine's next one along." He pointed. A bungalow, further from the edge, but not by much. "They gave me the same letter." "What are you going to do?" He thought about it. The dog sat down, bored. "Stay till they tell me I can't," he said. "Then I don't know. Sit in the car park and watch, probably. Somebody should watch." I didn't have anything to say to that. We stood there for a bit with the wind. Then he went one way and I went the other, and I got in the hire car and sat with the engine off for a long time, looking at the house that looked fine, and the sea behind it that was doing nothing in particular, that was just there, the way it's always just there, the way it always will be.