My feet were incandescent, and with each forward pace I abandoned another husk of myself — the burnt-out shell of a man I had once been, which upon falling to the pathway fluttered into ash. A pair of boys — perhaps eleven-years-old and starveling thin — rose from a bench and flapped after me. The castellated gateway of the long vanished pier ushered in the tired waves. ‘Oi, mister!’ one of the boys cried. ‘Your laces’re undone.’ I ignored the scallywag, then: ‘Oi, mister, there’s sum wooden cocks fallen ahtuv yer rucksack — could be Iron Age, more likely late Bronze Age.’
I stopped, and together with the obliging lads gathered up the curls of petrified wood, which had a smoky patina. I’d no idea where they had come from, or why they had been lodged in the webbing pocket of my rucksack — looking down into the palm of my hand, where one lay, old and enigmatic, it occurred to me that this was a prompt for a tragic history, that inscribed by the cracks in the pine were the strophe and antistrophe of my own past. I explained this to the boys, then together we chanted: ‘On my holiday I took with me a dying seal pup, a rusted flight of metal stairs leading to a beach, a rubber figurine — such as child might play with — wearing a blue siren suit and with a pig’s head —’, but that was all I could remember and when I looked up from the parenthetic penis the boys had gone.
I crept into the town, passing 7’s Smiles — an amusement parlour, Trixter’s Joke Shop & Fancy Dress and a bowling alley. Shop fronts were hiding under the skirts of the older Victorian buildings — it all looked permanent enough, yet I knew Withernsea had waltzed backwards from the waves, that the esplanade had once been the high street, that the current high street had once been a back alley. An enormous plaice was bracketed by seaweed on the gable end of a building, beside the chip shop there was a Chinese, and beside the Chinese the Bengal Lancer was picketed. A square-headed Bengali put me in the window and I looked around appreciatively at the red cloths strewn with white and yellow rice. He brought me a menu and I began to ask him, ‘Why relocate from one flood zone—’ Then was interrupted by the table of teenagers on the far side of the restaurant: ‘If you wanna real laff watch Jackass.’
‘Ooh, no, Ah don’t think that’s foony.’
I found a paperback in my rucksack and began to read: What rotten luck there was in the world! A swirl of mist on a fine evening, a false step — and life came to an end. Two middle-aged men were seated beside me in the window and they pawed at their menus with callused hands. The pallor of approaching death couldn’t disguise the deep tan of the skin. Outside in the gloaming three large combine harvesters charged past scattering clods and chaff.
‘Ahl av that wun lahk the boxer,’ said the younger of the men.
‘Boxer?’ his companion replied — he was seated so close to me I could have put an arm around the nylon shoulders of his windcheater, and in a way it seemed rude not to.
Bobby shuddered and brought his eyes up again to the face. An attractive face, humorous, determined, resourceful—
‘Jalfrezi.’
‘Boxer?’
‘Aye, y’know — Joe Frazier.’
The eyes, he thought, were probably blue –
And just as he reached that point in his thoughts, the eyes suddenly opened.
‘Chicken jalfrezi.’
They were watchful and at the same time seemed to be asking a question.
Bobby got up quickly and came towards the man.
They were riggers working on a civil engineering contract of some kind. From what they said I gathered the work was dangerous, requiring them to ascend hundreds of feet in cradles. I couldn’t understand why, but the site they were working on was fundamentally unstable. I pictured an alien planet, its colloidal surface shifting and buckling in a nearinfinite series of peaks and troughs that seemed always on the verge of an apprehensible pattern — yet never quite there.
‘… an Audi TT’ — they were discussing their gaffer, a German — ‘that don’t even leave the garage.’
‘’E’s got three fookin’ cars.’
Before he got there the other spoke. His voice was not weak — it came out clear and resonant.
‘Least we’re not at the beck and bluddy call uv wassisface.’
‘Oo?’
‘That scoolptur chap oo’s got the turbine in at Bridlington — they say’ e’s a complete fookin’ nooter.’
‘Why didn’t they ask Evans?’ he said.
And then a queer little shudder passed over him, the eyelids dropped, the jaw fell…
The man was dead.
A woman was charging across the road towards the Bengal Lancer. She had a fake tan the colour of the Holderness mud and her enormous breasts and belly — veiled by the diaphanous sea fret of a three-tiered white blouse — rotationally slumped. Her scary makeup recalled eyes painted on the prows of Athenian ships. I drew the waiter into me conspiratorially by his small arm. ‘For Chrissakes,’ I said as she tinkle-banged through the door. ‘Whatever you do, don’t feed her.’
Punctured, the waiter hissed embarrassment.
Then I was walking out of Withernsea, tending inland, the concrete stanchions of chain-link fences the only things I had ever known in the warm sodium-orange silence of suburban nightfall, the chocolate bar bought from the convenience store where I stopped to ask directions the only solid thing I had ever hungered for, the agony of my blistered feet and the nettle stings pricking my calves the only sensations I had ever felt, as the headlights of oncoming cars planted magenta blooms on the retinas of my dilated eyes.
Beyond the final caravan park the village of Hollym appeared as a black smudge of woodland on the night. Then I was on a long lane footing past a flint church. I sat down on the bench outside the Plough Inn and rolled a cigarette, and was joined by a second smoke-sucker who didn’t speak but paced up and down, thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, while behind us the bar billiards rumbled and clacked.
‘Steve was a geography teacher in Stanford-le-Hope for thirty years, but once the kids were off to uni we began looking around. To begin with we ignored the ad — because of the new house, we didn’t fancy that.’
Another rumble of bar billiards — this time from below. The two of us stood looking at the two narrow single beds, the three white towels, the Country Crunch biscuits, the individual UHT milk cartons, the tea bags and sugar in sachets. She wasn’t exactly friendly, yet competent in the domestic science of pimping.
‘Well,’ she said in answer to a question I couldn’t recall asking, ‘I think the farmers are philosophical about the loss of their land.’
What does she know, I thought. Here in Hollym she’s a good mile from the sea; even given the faster rate of erosion down drift from the Withernsea defences it’ll still be 400 years before the German Ocean marches into the Plough Inn, bellowing, ‘I don’t need a drink — I am the fucking drink!’
Her brown perm floated away along the corridor… mouse droppings, rotting lino, an old knitting pattern used to plug a broken pane in the shed where Uncle Charlie did it. She had left me with careful instructions on how to unlock the two doors when I left in the morning, then relock them and post the keys back in. She had left me with an individual box of cornflakes and a small jug of milk.