Only a few weeks ago had he watched them all coming out of the Curzon at midnight from some horror film that the paper said involved jack hammers and acid. They were laughing. The girls with their hands in the back pockets of the men.
It had been the same night a homeless lady had been kicked to death under Waterloo Bridge. And while the two things weren’t connected in any literal sense, he felt certain that they occupied the same pool that had formed when the wall between sick imagination and the real world came down.
It was against this potent mixture that they protected themselves at Saint Jude’s and could, ironically, practise the very freedoms the Other people claimed to enjoy, the freedoms that were bandied around as being somehow the looked-for end result of millennia of social cultivation. At Saint Jude’s they were free to think; they were free to examine the meanings of love or happiness, unlike the Other people, for whom happiness was the accumulation of objects and experiences that satisfied the simplest of desires.
The Other world had equality now, they said, but what they meant was that everyone had the means to exhibit their own particular unpleasantness. There had been people shot dead in Londonderry and women blown to shreds in Aldershot in the name of equality. And they were always marching. He had seen men marching for the right to sleep with other men. He had seen women marching for the right to rid themselves of their unborn children without reproach. He had seen them marching to Trafalgar Square with their heavy boots and their Union Jacks. Oh, the black shirts might have been hidden under suits and donkey jackets but they were same men who had infected the place where he had grown up.
Equality. It was laughable. It wasn’t equality at all. Not what he understood by the word. Only in the eyes of God were people equal. In the eyes of God each person had the same opportunity to be rewarded with everlasting peace, even the most hardened sinners. They could all walk the same path together if the people of the Other world would only repent. But they never would.
He detested leaving Saint Jude’s or the presbytery and dreaded any meeting that would necessitate the use of the Tube, which at rush hour really did seem to be a place from Hell.
The only way to cope was to think of himself as Dante, documenting evidence of this Other world’s iniquities to share with his flock on his return. That way, as he was swept along in its currents, he might lift himself out of the tide of filth that pressed up against the doors of the train, the way the gulls were pressing against one another now to get at whatever it was that had become such a prized catch.
***
At first it was an old fishing net rolled up by the sea into a cocoon; no, a beached seal, he decided, when a gull lifted off and he caught a glimpse of pale skin.
But then he saw the boots tumbling in the edge of the water.
He went down the dune, slipping and almost falling, grasping the marram and feeling it hold firm for a moment before it came loose in his hand. At the bottom he took his shoes from around his neck and started across the sand, running for the first time in years, shouting and waving his hands, scattering the gulls.
It was as he had feared. The man was drowned. The thought that he might yet be saved had crossed his mind as he ran towards him, but it was far too late for that. The gulls had pecked deep holes in his neck and slit the tattoos there, but had drawn no blood.
The man’s hair was half covering his face, but when he knelt down and bent his head close to the sand he could see that it was the old tramp they had been talking about at the dinner table. The wretch he had seen asleep in bus shelters and leaning against the gates of cattle fields, his body limp with drink, his eyes slow to follow what was passing. Well, now his eyes were as blank as mushrooms.
A fresh wave broke and surged up the beach and washed under the body, leaving little bubbles in the tramp’s hair and in his beard as it ebbed away.
So this was death. A brief, salty sousing and it was done.
The next wave came soon after and as it retreated again the sand gave way and broke into little runnels, the grains pouring down into the gouges.
He looked around, but there was no use in calling for help. Not here. There was no one. He thought about going back up the dune and waving his arms to try and attract their attention back at Moorings, but it was unlikely they would see him. He would seem a tiny figure to them, obscured to shadow by the sun. And if they did see him what would they think? Would they come? If they came what use would they be? There was nothing they could do now. And was it fair to compel them to see what he had found? The women especially. It would cast a shadow over the whole trip.
Faster and faster the sand was liquefying around the tramp’s body, running away from under him and making him turn slowly on to his side. A larger crack appeared, running out of the top of his head to where Father Wilfred was kneeling. The water filled it on the next wave and widened it so that a great cake of sand broke and the body suddenly rolled and fell and floated. He hadn’t realised it until now, but the tramp had been lying at the very edge of a deep trench.
What made him reach out and grab the shirt, he wasn’t sure. It was instinctive, he supposed. He caught a sleeve and taking it firmly in his grip he dragged the body towards him, feeling for the first time — and with a shock that made him take hold with his other hand as well — the strength of the sea as it was pulling away from the land.
As the water in the trench lowered, the walls became apparent. They were made of a grey substance that was neither sand nor mud. He slipped down, dug in his feet, and slipped further. The outgoing water was moving apace, its speed increasing as it neared the narrowing bottom of the gulley, where he now found himself up to his knees. A section under his foot gave way and disappeared and he fell and ran the side of his face down the wall, tasting the gritty sulphur of the sludge. He let go, floundered, felt the water sucking him, tried to regain his grip, but the body was hurried away. He pushed himself upright and waded after the body a few paces before it was clear that it was pointless and although it was washed back towards him a few times as the tide engaged in its last ebb and flow, it was with the same mockery as a child who holds out a ball for its playmate only to snatch it away. Eventually the body sank out of sight.
He got out of the water and went up the beach and crossed the line of weed. He leant against the pillbox and wiped the mess off his face and stared at the sea, wondering if anything might reappear. But already it seemed that what had happened was unreal. That only minutes before he had been clinging to the sleeve of a corpse. There was no evidence of the old tramp at all now. Even his boots had gone.
It was shock, he supposed, the cold that was making him shiver, but he was terrified. He had almost been dragged into the sea, yes, but it wasn’t the sea that he was afraid of.
He felt alone.
More alone than he had ever felt in his life. It was a kind of nakedness, an instant disrobing. His skin prickled. A cold eel slithered in his stomach. Feelings that he thought he had left behind in childhood on those nights he had cried himself to sleep over another dead brother or sister surfaced and spread and overwhelmed him.
Was it pity? No, he felt nothing for the tramp. He was from the Other world and had got what he deserved. Wasn’t that so?
Why, then, did he feel so altered? So abandoned?
It was the place itself.
What was it about this place?