On the beach

with Max Romeo and the Upsetters

WHEN THE FIRST swimmers arrived at the beach that morning, some time before seven, they saw that they were not the first. Down at the water’s edge, just at the line where lazy shingle allowed itself to get wet, a silhouette in a pork pie hat was dancing.

The swimmers, two of them, undressed and pushed out a good twenty yards south of the dancing man. They were accustomed to regarding the beach as theirs at that hour — and today it was not. One of them, the girl, swam across his bows, where he danced, barely moving now but still shifting, like wreckage at the edge of the tide. She feigned indifference but copped a good look, on the quiet.

There were curly wires attaching his ears to one pocket of his bomber and he wore shades beneath the pork pie hat. His knees, feet and hips were doing the dancing for him, though one arm swung slowly back and round, back and round, on the three. She gave him a little wave as she crossed his bows, one hand, she knew, sticking cutely out of the flat water. He waved a little wave back.

She could not see at her respectful distance that, beneath the sunglasses, the man’s face was wet with tears.

“Wa-a-ar in a Babylon, tri-bal war in a Babylon, it sipple out de-e-eh…”