Island Hideaway 45 - Beach walk

We walked on the beach late at night when we wanted to talk, or didn't want to talk. It was our confessional, our playground, our private space, our connection to the universe. If we had a god then the beach would have been where we spoke to him. ​
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The next night I suggested we go for a walk. We'd been for a drink at the Builders with Andy and Kaz. I was drinking courage by the pint-glass, for this would be the walk where I asked Mo out. Not asking a girl out, not asking someone I fancied out, that was old hat, I'd broken my 'will you go out with me' cherry at the school disco with a girl I can remember precisely nothing about. This was Mo, this was my best friend, this was the person I turned to with all my relationship problems, this was my housemate, this was my mucker, my connection to the universe in those moods when I felt my connection with the universe was broken. I needed a pint of Reverend James with a pint of Reverend James chaser and a pint of Reverend James to carry out a Reverend James count as I couldn't remember how many I'd had. ​
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“Bloody Blair”, she said, refering I assumed to her boyfriend's leaving her for a lowly New Labour stooge, but everything was Blair's fault now, and would remain so for over a decade, every time a car wouldn't start, the alarm didn't go off and you missed a lecture and wage inequality continued to rise. It was all fucking Tony Blair.​
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“You know you're single now”, I said​
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“Yeah, I sort of noticed. The lonely nights, the all-consuming feeling of rejection, the absence of sex.” ​
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“Well I'm single too. I wonder, I just thought, what if, you know, you and I …” I had been working on what I was going to say all day. Spontaneity would probably have worked better.​
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“Oh Terrence, don't”, she said. Not the start I'd hoped for.​
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“It's just that”, I began to say, she cut me short, like a copy editor spotting a cliché approaching or a shark spotting a snack-sized pair of legs on a passing swimmer.​
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"I just don't see you that way," she said. And she thought I was about to come out with the cliché.  ​
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I said nothing for a while. Well, what do you say in such circumstances. ​
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By this time we were in the middle of the beach. The tide had gone right out, wanting to be as far away as possible when I popped the question, the moon too was hiding its embarrassment behind a cloud. We were nowhere, in the middle of it, nobody around, no bird, no scuttling gossip-crab, we were the very definition of alone together, the silence was the very definition of silence, there was nothing around to make a sound, it was dark, with distant starlight the only illumination, distant suns, sat there billions of years ago, oblivious, surely, that in a galaxy far, far away long after the sun itself was spent, they would have the tricky job of lighting the rejection scene between two friends, friends as close as starlight and darkness.​
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We said nothing for a bit longer.  ​
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It was fine all the while the silence lasted.​
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Then I broke the silence. If forget what I said, it wasn't the words that mattered anyway, it was the anger of them, the noise of them. ​
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She ran away crying. ​
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I ran after her, shouting. I caught her up, she's a very slow runner and I once represented my county. I shouted at her some more and she ran away again. I caught her up, shouted at her some more, she ran away again, I caught her up, repeat to fade.​
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It was a very long way home.​