Sand by Ben Tufnell

The first time I visited, I was only seven years old. It was beautiful, of course, and not just because, in memory, it is preserved in the amber glow of the hottest, dryest summer of all time. It was beautiful because it was unlike anywhere else I had ever been. 

I remember we unpacked the car and then made our way through the woods alongside many other families. Before long the earth turned to soft, pale sand beneath our feet. I took off my shoes and could feel it between my toes.

Soon the firs and pines gave way to the dunes, their crests bound by long grasses and low bushes. The path became a boardwalk across the sand. Then, we crested the last dune and the beach lay before us. There was a kind of lagoon, set into a much wider curve of coast. The dunes and woods stretched away to both sides, sweeping around to form an opening out onto a much wider expense of sand. Families were camped along the edge of the dunes and children were playing, building sandcastles, flying kites, flashes of bright colour against the ochre of the sand. In the distance, far out past the mouth of the lagoon, a rippling brightness indicated the edge of the sea. It was breathtaking. Looking back, in my mind’s eye, the whole spectacle shimmers. It was not like any of the English beaches I had been to before, which tended to be made of stones or pebbles or expanses of dirty grey sand; it was like something from another part of the world, a dream of a tropical desert island.

We settled ourselves and then walked out to the sea. Unlike the dunes, the sand of the lagoon was not soft but packed hard. We walked out past the wide opening onto the beach itself. It was dotted with the shells of cockles and razor clams, the remains of crabs and long strands of oily seaweed. Eventually we reached the sea. Disappointingly, the waves were tiny. The beach was so shallow that one could walk on and on and the water would only come up to your shins. But, said my mum, you have to be careful. The tide comes in fast. If you’re not careful, and you’re too far out when the tide turns, you could be washed away. This was a terrifying notion, and in later years, visiting that place with friends who had not been before, I would solemnly intone the warning, undercutting the ravishing beauty of the scene with that awful idea of jeopardy. Even in this wonderful place, I thought, amongst all this beauty, death is waiting.

*

And indeed a few years later, on another glorious summer day, I walked away from the lagoon, out across a beach that seemed boundless, infinite. The sea was a very long way out. I walked alone and felt, as always in that place, that I had passed into another dimension. Something ahead caught my attention, a dark mass, movement. I thought it was a man, struggling, but when I came close, I saw it was a seal. It was dead and two seagulls were upon it, flapping their wings, fighting and screaming, tearing at its eyes and nose.

*

A decade later, as school closed for the summer, someone had the idea to have a party there. As the sun went down, twenty or thirty of us gathered. It was funny, arriving at the carpark as it was emptying out. The families leaving the beach looked at us curiously, disapprovingly, as we trooped out through the dunes carrying boxes of beer and cider, sleeping bags, cassette players, guitars and drums.

In the dusky light, we gathered stones to make a hearth and collected bone-dry branches and driftwood to build a fire, something absolutely forbidden in that place. Someone started to play music loudly and we opened cans and bottles and toasted the future. I drank too much, too quickly, as I always did, to hide the awful emptiness that sometimes seemed to fill me.

Later, much later, I found myself sitting by the fire with S and some of the other girls. S was a friend. We were in English classes together. I had even been to her house. She was a big girl, a funny one, not conventionally pretty but good looking and strong, too. As the last light vanished from the horizon, she tugged at my arm. Come on, she said, let’s go to the water. Her eyes were feral in the flickering firelight, her lips were dark with blood. She looked magnificent, and it would have been hopeless to object. I stood up, unsteadily, and she took my hand and pulled me away from the group.

We were barefoot. I was wearing a t-shirt and had rolled up my jeans. S wore a long, loose-fitting dress and a short denim jacket. Beyond the dunes, a warm breeze greeted us. We walked, hand in hand, for what seemed like a very long time, before the sand beneath our feet became hard and cold, a sign that we were nearing the water’s edge. Looking back inland, all was dark beneath the speckled sky, the faint light of the fire only just visible, the music inaudible. We retreated to where it was still dry and sat down, leaning into each other. I had a plastic bottle of cider and drank deeply, the liquid spilling down my chin and the front of my t-shirt. I offered the bottle to S, but she waved it away.

We sat in silence for a few minutes, and then S kissed me. I was too drunk to be surprised. She pulled my face towards hers and kissed me hard, forcing her tongue into my mouth. I pushed back with my tongue, and I remember that she tasted of beer and cigarettes. Her hand was inside my t-shirt, and she pushed me back onto the sand and then was on top of me. I laughed. The whole thing felt mad. I could feel the weight of her breasts, her hips pushing into me. I tried to respond, to push back into her, and with one hand I seized a handful of her hair, curly and stiff with hairspray, and pulled her closer. With the other hand I gracelessly tugged her dress up, freeing her legs, and stroked her powerful thighs. Yes, she said, and plunged her tongue into my mouth.

But it wasn’t working. She tugged at the waistband of my jeans, awkwardly undoing the top button, pushing her hand inside. But it wasn’t working. I was too drunk. She sucked at my neck and ears, and rubbed my crotch vigorously, but it wasn’t working. 

I’m sorry, I said, and I meant it.

She rolled off me onto her back, and we lay next to each other looking up into the sky. A shooting star appeared, arcing momentarily across the heavens, and then was gone. 

Did you see that? I asked. 

See what? 

The shooting star. 

No.

It’s good luck, to see a shooting star.

Is that so?

I could hear the disappointment in her voice. Not disappointment that she had not seen the shooting star, but disappointment that it hadn’t worked. Now I knew, with drunken clarity, that she had wanted it to happen for a long time. Had been waiting. God knows why. I was hardly a catch. She was probably already thinking that she – I, we – had ruined it, our friendship. As for me, in that moment, I was too drunk to care. I would later though. Our relationship would never recover.

She got to her feet, a darkness against the sky, blocking out the solar system. 

I’m sorry, I said. I’ve had too much. 

It’s OK, she said, I think we should go back now. Her voice was kind, even as it was sad. 

You go, I said, I’m going to stay for a bit. It’s nice watching the stars.

I watched her go, then I drank some more of the cider and lay back against the sand.

Many hours later, the first lapping of the cold sea against my bare feet woke me. My clothes were wet, and I began to shiver. The sky was just starting to pale. I felt ragged, broken, like something ancient washed up by the sea. I got up and walked unsteadily back across the sands and into the dunes.

The fire had burned down; just a few embers glowed in the half-light. A boy I did not recognise was sat crossed legged there, poking them with a stick. He was the only one still awake, it seemed. S was nowhere to be seen which was, to be honest, a relief. I wondered where – how – everyone had gone. Some, I supposed, would have been collected from the carpark at midnight by patient parents. Some who had cars might have risked the drive home in the early hours. Some had stayed; I saw that there were huddles of bodies in sleeping bags. Piles of beer cans and plastic bottles, crisp packets, cigarette butts. We had made a terrible mess of that beautiful place.

I found my rucksack, walked a short way off and, beneath a leaning pine tree, I spread out my sleeping bag, climbed in and was immediately asleep.

*

Years later, following a strange impulse, I cycled to the beach on my own and swallowed a tab of acid that Smith had sold me for a tenner. I was going through a solipsistic phase. I sat alone amongst the dunes, looking out into the emptiness, and the air slowly filled with vague flickerings, things of gossamer, and I wondered if I was seeing angels. My sight disintegrated, and I was inside an Impressionist painting. Light and colour, lost in time. Blue shadows. Blue, blue shadows.

Hours later, coming down, remembering S, I walked out to the edge of the sea, thinking to splash cold water on my face. Out there I came across an awful thing, an object that at first I took to be a severed hand which, when I crouched to examine it closely, was revealed only to be a desiccated starfish.

Pushing my fingers into the wet sand, I thought of something I had read somewhere, that there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on our planet. It seemed impossible.

*

All that has gone now. Like people, landscapes are not still. They shift and change, even as we hold them fixed in our mind’s eye.

Many years later, I was called back to that part of the world after a very long absence. I left my family behind and went alone, as I wanted to test my response to the world where my life began. One day, I revisited that distant shore for the first time in decades.

It was sunny. The carpark was still the same and walking on the boardwalk through the dunes produced an uncanny feeling. I was my younger self again, and my older self too, but both at the same time, layered one onto the other, strangely entwined.

Coming over the last dune, the view before me was so different to what I expected, I wondered for a moment if I was in the wrong place, if I had inadvertently come to another beach, another shore.

The golden sand of the lagoon was gone. Wind and tides had changed the contours of the beach and effectively blocked the passage through the dunes, cutting the lagoon off from the beach and the sea. The sand was now a dirty brown – more mud than the gold I remembered – and was covered in dark moss and scraps of tough grass. No one played amongst the dunes.

I do not know where they have all gone. I do not know what happened to S. But the first beach is still there, and the second, and the others, too.

Ben Tufnell is a writer based in London. He has worked as a curator in both museums and galleries and has published widely on modern and contemporary art, focussing particularly on artists and art forms that engage with ideas of landscape and place. His debut novel, THE NORTH SHORE, was published by Fleet (Little, Brown) in 2023. Influx Press will publish PARADISE, a Kafkaesque eco-thriller, in early 2026.

30 May 2025