Hall of Sliding Chalk
The parish hall smells, as ever, of damp hymnbooks and institutional floor wax. Plastic chairs — half turquoise, half sun-bleached to grey — stand in regimented rows beneath a pull-down projector screen that chops the brow from a sepia portrait of Alderman Horace Webb, first chairman of the Borough Council, 1893. I sit in the anonymous back corner, notebook ready, telling myself it’s background for a possible blog piece, though really I just want to see who twitches first when the cliff numbers appear.
Maya Hutchinson plays usher, greeting everyone with a grant-committee smile and steering them toward a trestle table with a tea urn and a tower of recyclable cups. Her printed badge — LOCAL COASTAL PARTNERSHIP — has begun to curl at the edges.
Malcolm, the night-shift ferry-hand and erstwhile eighties socialist, perches near the microphone clutching a stapled manifesto. Beside him Tommo Trewin folds himself into a child-sized chair, straw still clinging to his fleece — field to meeting in one manoeuvre. He tips an invisible cap my way but looks preoccupied, as if weighing wheat yields against wave heights.
At precisely 19:03 the council clerk — crisp shirt, nerves jangling — manages to coax the projector out of its Windows-update sulk. The first slide appears: COASTAL EROSION RISK ZONES, 2025–2035. A bold red line snakes along the map, then angles inland — right through the fish processing plant and intersecting mine and Ronnie’s workshops.
“Current average retreat: point-eight metres per annum,” the clerk recites, laser pointer trembling. “The 2030 projection intersects the promenade at … here.”
Someone whistles, low. An elderly woman with a crocheted tote asks for the measurement to be translated to “real money”. Malcolm rises.
“Science is clear,” he says, voice sandpapery yet measured. “The cliff is crumbling because investment never came. Re-nationalise the harbour and we could pay for underpinning tomorrow.”
He gets polite applause from the first two rows, intermixed with a few patient sighs. Maya follows with a three-minute pitch for “living shoreline” reed beds, her slides all painterly estuary greens. The clerk smiles weakly, and writes feasible? in the margin of his print-out.
Tommo stands next, rocking on wellies with thumbs hooked in jean pockets. “Survey’s got the danger line slicing my track in four years,” he says. “If the combine can’t reach Lower Meadow, barley’s done.” No hand-waving, just the fact laid down like a plough furrow.
Halfway through his sentence the projector blanks; hall lights blink twice, just long enough for the room to inhale. In that shadowed beat a dull boom rolls in — from offshore, maybe, or deep under the flooring. Chalk dust drifts from the crossbeam and lands on the laptop lid like powdered sugar. The lights return; no one screams, but a dozen necks crane toward the ceiling before attention snaps back to the slide.
The clerk claims “dodgy surge protector”, and reboots. The motion on the floor — Escalate risk to county council; seek emergency funding pot — passes without dissent. Paper cups clatter into the recycling sack; chairs scrape. Maya corners Tommo about reed-bed pilot plots while Malcolm distributes two copies of his manifesto, pointedly saving the rest for “sympathetic contacts”.
I linger by the hall door long enough to ask the clerk for a spare print-out of the map. The red hazard wash isn’t a tidy polygon; it feathers inland like spilled ink. I trace the contour with a thumb — workshop, Ronnie’s unit, then up through the fish-plant yard and out along the promenade. Our street sits just beyond the blush of colour, but only just.
I tuck the print under my arm and start downhill. Night air smells of damp chalk and hedge-clippings; three lamps in a row have failed, leaving gaps of darkness that feel deliberate. With every step I picture the red stain drifting after me, bleeding across terrace roofs, seeking level ground.
At the seafront I stop beside the shuttered arcade and hold the page against the sodium glow. Sea breeze rattles it like a nervous flag. The hazard tint now seems to lap at the curb, one more spring tide away from the houses.
I push on. Past the Red Lion. Past the Anchor, lights low. At my front gate I glance down: the little square of lawn, the bay window, the recycling bin — everything still present and correct. Yet the map in my hand insists the boundary has shifted, that home is balanced on the bright edge of someone’s contour line.
Inside, I slide the print into the drawer with the bottle photographs and Emma’s sketchbook pages, shut it gently, and tell myself drawers are good at keeping things in their place — for a while, at least.