Winter writing competition

Auntie Kate had buried him in sand on their day out... it had looked all hot and golden but it was lovely and cold and muddy underneath... she had buried him in it up to his burning robust little red neck, which his mum had told him was her 'little choice cut' when she dried him after his Wednesday bath.

Auntie Kate had buried him in the sand with a blue spade, and it worried him a bit that he could still see his toes wriggling if he wanted them to when, for the first time in his life his head and the haircut his Auntie Jan had marched in and given him because she claimed he was 'lousy', were in two separate places entirely .

Declan was worried that his toes did not belong to him, that the curly pink widgets at the other end of the mound were pretenders.

'Nice' was a word his teacher Miss James said was overused and meaningless...

Declan felt disloyal in thinking that it did indeed feel nice here, but it would have been nicer if they hadn't all laughed and run away to do something that he couldn't see and come running back laughing again...

He'd thought it would be a lot more fun than it was now...

Like when Auntie Kate had married Uncle Chris last year and the grown-ups had fussed around him so much, tucking his big shirt in and making him feel like six, not five...

The grown-ups only wanted to see the sunset on the beach and have a laugh they say crossly, in the car going home...

Declan knows they're angry with him because he's crying, but Auntie Kate is crying too and holding him close under her coat...

But he doesn't know why.

Looking back on that crippled conversation with Verdun in New York, it occurs to me that almost everybody must have been in on the joke.

Everyone except me.

So understandably my sense of outrage encouraged a more aggressive approach.

I glanced across at Heinfield. He's laughing. His eyes are bright and he's writing something in his notebook.

You bastard, I thought.

Alas, poor Heinfield. I knew him well.

I knew him so well that he'd be dead soon enough. I have contacts.

The limo oozed out of West 47th onto Broadway.

Sitting tense in the cream leather, I was starting to feel a rising edge of panic.

Shit!

I shook my head. Open the tequila. Better now.

None of Verdun's goons had turned up to shoot. This was good.

I reached into my pocket and brought out the Mob money.

I almost didn't want to look at it.

I poured another tequila and, in my head, Nobody Smiled.

They owed me. I'd done their dirty work for six years and now it was time to...

To what? Get far away from the city. I was weary. But I had plans.

"You enjoy your sunset on the beach," Verdun drawled.

"You vindictive bastard," were my last words to him.

Years later and ten thousand miles away, I walk in the warm night rain, I see shapes and shrouds, and I always know what that sick lunatic meant.

I am a dead man.

Hungry, lonely, and scared, afraid not just of the dogs down below that had nipped and yapped at my shins, nor the red ants scurrying up and over my trembling thighs, I sat in silence watching what seemed a whole half world stretched out before me.

There was noise from the dogs, and flutters from the chickens, and slight murmurs from the unseen who lived just out of sight behind the palm canopy, steadily going about their business as though absolute terror and sheer beauty weren’t just a hair’s breadth away, as both were very much for me.

It was, I would later learn, a time like that which brings everything into a clear, ice cold sharp focus: The sudden gelling of a thousand mistakes, a hundred regrets, some half-hearted feelings of being wronged; of brain mathematics finally adding everything into a sickly, yet palatable, understandable, and unavoidable conclusion.

Any distraction will do – and a distraction that manifests itself in the shape of a horizon that sears into your eyes from left to right, earthy hues of bright orange turning a flat sea into fire, with a six-mile stretch of completely deserted sand gently coaxing it in, certainly does just that.

But a distraction is indeed only that: No matter where you run or hide, be it another’s arms, the bottom of a bottle, the other side of the world, you take everything else along with you like skin.

It took a friend who was then very much a stranger to put that focus into place. Afterwards, we climbed down from that majestic rock sitting sullenly on the edge of the world, and set about putting things right.

The one thing satisfying about mournfully watching a sunset on a beach, is you can guarantee someone else the most beautiful daybreak.