‘There’s bin a memory clinic out on Spurn for a while now,’ the attendant said. ‘There was always a lot of older folk in Holderness anyway — retirees an’ that — but when the noombers wi’ Altzheimer’s began to get… well, out of ‘and, like, the clinic were the logical place to put ’em, so the facility were expanded.’
Despite the Struldbrug’s wayward progress, we had gained the dunes and picked our way through the muffled defiles, our ankles scratched by the lyme grass and sea holly. There was homely flybuzz and butterflies swirling in the warming air, then, from top of an acclivity, we could see the whole hummocky panhandle.
‘It’s glacial, yer see,’ the second attendant was moved to explain. ‘The point, that is — it’s a glacial moraine, so it’s stable. It’s only the beach that moves around. Any road’ — he threw his arm wide to bracket the mismatched buildings, some prefabs, some concrete, some stone, that were huddled at the foot of the lighthouse — ‘there were all these here lying empty, so it were a logical idea to put the clinic here. Besides, it’s less institutional.’
‘Less instëtewshunal — that were it.’ His colleague snorted. ‘Patients can get aht, tek the air. It’s dead restful here — calm, like — and if they aren’t too distressed they can have the run of the place. Sort of folk who cwm aht to Spurn, well, they’re nature lovers, twitchers — oonderstandin’ when it cums dahn t’it.’
‘They’ve gotta be!’ the other fellow laughed bitterly. ‘Chances are there’s wunnov their own here, or they’re headed this way themselves. How many is it now with t’dementia, over two million — and rising all the time.’
‘Rising all the time,’ said the first, kicking out at a lump of oily driftwood with his boot. The Struldbrug groaned upon impact, and I wondered if over the centuries he had come to identify somatically with things older than humans, wind and wave weathered trees — perhaps Spurn Head itself.
‘What,’ I asked, ‘happens if the patients do get too distressed?’
The first looked at me curiously and a little contemptuously; at times the fletch of a man’s cartilaginous ear is too much to take, along with the toothbrush bristles in the corner of his jaw, and the slow-roasting shoulders bundled in blue cloth. ‘Do-too, do-too, do-too-too,’ he prated, incorporating my syllables into a parody of just such distress; then, seeing I wasn’t going to rise to it, or laugh, he went on: ‘Bull Sands Fort, out there in the Umber. Filthy big place bang on a sandbank, it were built in the First War — eyronickle, really, weren’t ready ‘til nineteen-nineteen when the show was over.
‘Any road, if any of oor lot get too tricky, like, it’s off to Bull Sands wi’ ’em. I’ve not been out meself, but they say’ — he shuddered — ‘it ain’t pretty — ain’t pretty at all.’
‘And the Struldbrug?’ I felt no compunction talking of the aged one as if he weren’t right by us, because in a way he wasn’t, riding his tempest of time with his ragged wings of linen and leather; what could he grasp of mayflies such as us and our dandelion clock concerns?
‘’Im?’ The lipless mouth widened revealing peg teeth. ‘’E’s no trubble — YER NO TRUBBLE, ARE YER?’ he bellowed at the hapless Struldbrug, who hung so slack now I was reminded of a cadaver strung upon wires. ‘No,’ the piggy warder said, resuming at a more reasonable level, ‘over my dead body duzz ’e go aht t’Bull Sands—’ Then he stopped short, shivering at the absurdity of what he’d just said. ‘Whatever. Anyway, he’s a mascot ’e is — bin ’ere before the clinic, before the new lighthouse — before the old wun inall. ‘E was probably ’ere when the light were joost an iron basket fulla burning faggots lifted by a lever.’
‘How old d’you think he is?’ I ventured. ‘His clothes look medieval.’
‘Medieval!’ the warder guffawed. ‘Don’t be soft, lad — ’ow could they last? No, these togs are theatrical clobber; soom joker put them on ’im back in the day — the fifties weren’t it?’
‘Aye,’ his companion concurred, ‘the fifties.’
The bigger piggier warder gathered the cloth above either hip of his siren suit in his trotters and adopted an oratorical stance, turning so as show his DEMENTIA ADVISORY to me. It was clear, on this most obscurely ephemeral of days, that I was about to be privileged with an insight into deep and pellucid time.
‘Soom folk,’ the warder said, ‘claim ’e’s the old hermit that lived here in the fifteenth century, the wun mentioned in the chronicle of Mo. Personally, I don’t believe it. My granddad, well, before ’e lost ’is own bluddy marbles, ’e told me what the Struldbrug were like when ’e were a nipper. Back then this chap ’ere still ’ad a tooth in ’is head. Now, that wouldn’t put ’im much over the two-hundred mark.’
The sea fret had finally and entirely dispersed. The Struldbrug’s horny toes scrabbled in the sand, the yellow flowering birefringence hung on the neurofibrillary tangle of the gorse, the berries of the sea buckthorn were as shiny-yellow as benzodiazepine capsules. The wallpaper of the sky wrapped around our little colloquy, and for a moment it fooled me with its cloudy furbelows into thinking the three-bladed buckthorns were painted along the skirting board of the nursery, then I regained my sense of scale and grasped that these were massive wind turbines, a long parenthetic curve of them, tending towards the point of Spurn Head. How could I have not noticed these things during my tramp along the coast? Or even heard about them before I left… before I left… wherever it was that I had left.
‘You’re coming on down to the memory clinic with uz and the Struldbrug now — that’s what yer doing,’ the dementia advisor said in answer to a question I couldn’t recall having posed.
‘Aye,’ his number two pitched in, ‘’course you canav a cuppa and sum cayk.’
‘Cayk! Cayk!’ the Struldbrug crowed.
‘What other facilities are there at the… memory clinic?’ My voice swooped up into the interrogative, borne on thermals of hot, moist distress.
‘There’re digital enhancement programmes and neuralactivated webcam systems—’
I whimpered, and the senior advisor silenced his subordinate with a glare, then reassured me, ‘Aye, and there’s uz, uz dementia advisors to help you learn it all, after all, it can be a lot to take on board.’
We were within a few hundred paces of the clinic now, and it seemed to me that I must be a merman, for there were daggers thrust into the soles of my newborn feet, the attendants held me under either arm and I’d all but surrendered the power of speech when, seeing that the Struldbrug had lurched on ahead, I broke away and ran after him.
The ancient clattered along a walkway between thick gorse, and although I soon lost him I also lost my pursuers. I could hear them wandering around in the crannies between the bushes — one of them must have picked up a stick, because there was swishing, smiting and cracking as he cried, ‘Cummon ahtuv it you daft booger!’ and ‘No cake fer you if you don’t cum soon!’ But they soon tired of looking for us, and one of the dementia advisors called to the other, ‘I’m fed oop. He’ll cum back when ’e’s ’ungree.’
I was left alone in the desiccated undergrowth and crawled out from the sandy cave beneath a root system, then limped through this fine dust of ages towards a crest from where I could see the whole semicircular sweep of the beach. The Struldbrug was down there already, paddling in the shallows, his shaggy head dangling low. I wondered what he could be looking for so intently, and felt frustrated by the pointlessness of asking him.