Sangronun (pr. n): 1. A person born in the municipality of Blackpool, Lancashire 2. A culture or entity (sic) with its genetic roots in areas in, or surrounding, Blackpool, Lancashire. Lit “Sand Grown One”
-Oxford English Dictionary, 1936 ed.
Robert Neff was old. He was what qualified as an “old man”, so empirically so that even he wouldn’t argue the case in point. Day in day out, drawing back the curtains of his sepia cubicle of a room on the third floor of St. Annes-on-Sea Care Home, he would prepare himself for the day ahead, and he would sigh. There were at least, he knew, worse places to be. Bloody hell, he’d been to them. At least here he had the sea and the gulls and the barking of the gangly young collie pups, straining their necks at the leads of the families who owned them out on those dunes of sand that separated him from the salt, and at least he could hear their laughter rise above the traffic and surf.
He was always up earlier than everybody else, and he intended to keep it that way. Rising at six o’clock was something he’d started doing early in his twenties, and he wasn’t about to go and stop just because the work had run out. He would put on his mottled brown cardigan, looser every day, and his walking shoes, still dapper enough if you were colour-blind and you squinted, and he would go, with his keys jangling from his left trouser pocket, to buy a newspaper from Mike’s across the road. It was always important to know what was going on beyond those dunes, and the fact that other residents did not feel the same was a constant source of consternation to Bob. He would sit there at the breakfast table with Ness and Mable and George, working his way through the news, and they would chew and stare into space, forcing porridge and splinters of denture porcelain down their apathetic throats.
He did not like to be so bitter; he could feel himself age every moment he gave into that. He would push it back and remember the warmth he knew he must feel for these people. After all, “these people”, by some misfortune or another, had also wound up in this house by the water, where they could fade away together in relative peace. Bob remembered what he had heard once, something a writer or someone of that sort had said: “everybody dies alone.” He understood the thought processes behind those words, but was willing to wager that the person who had coined them had never spent any time in St. Annes-on-Sea. People weren’t alone here - even if they wanted to be. It had been that way since Bob had arrived, four years ago, and it didn’t show any signs of abating. Everyone shared their lives with you, but they were much more invasive when it came to the other thing. They shared that with you whether you wanted them to or not, and eventually you would share yours with them. It was cloying and undignified and he didn’t like it one b-No. Wait. There it was creeping in again, like a greedy child’s fingers at a half-torn sweet wrapper, and Bob didn’t need that; not today. He felt old enough as it was already.
Without moving his head, George shifted his eyes over in Bob’s direction, like a gecko eyeing a bluebottle.
“What are you reading about, Bob?”
Bob had barely set about looking at the front page headline, and he knew it involved the environment, and it would make sense to him when he read it (slowly), but he was never that articulate, our Bob. He felt uncomfortable when people put him on the spot.
“It’s about climate change,” he managed. He felt older again, saying those words; never had to worry about things like the climate down the mines. Barely got to see the bloody thing, let alone worry about it.
“What the bloody hell does that matter to you?”
Bob knew it mattered, and he knew why it did; alas, he hadn’t become any more articulate in the last fifteen seconds, and he wasn’t about to do so. He affected a grimace in riposte and opened his paper pointedly to a page that would be about something other than George and his views.
Instead of the fallout from the gecko’s opinions, he tried to concentrate on the news that somebody in Europe had thrown a paperweight at a prime minister’s face. He looked at the picture, the politician with a bloody nose. Despite previous efforts, the smashed-in face brought him back to thinking about George. He looked a little bit like him, Bob thought. Didn’t mind that one for a reminder, though.
vvvvv
Later on, after he’d read the international stuff and the others at the table had drifted off for their mid-morning naps on the sofas in the cloyingly-heated leisure lounge, Bob set about putting his affairs in order. Daily routine and all that; important for the soul. He tidied his room (about three years ago, he’d begun to sleepwalk and mess it all up every few nights), played whist with Mable, smoked a couple of hand-rolled cigarettes behind the employee’s garage, and looked forward to the evening. He looked forward to every evening, because that was when he’d get to see Estella.
Estella was a new arrival to St. Annes-on-Sea, or at least she had been six months ago, and she filled a lot of the holes that life had punched into Bob’s margins. She spent her days in the Home’s other wing, so Bob didn’t get to see her that much during the day; apparently she slept through most of it at any rate. The night, though: that was when she came into her own, and Bob was lucky enough to be the person that she decided to share that with. Estella, you see, had found an access route to the roof that could be navigated with a little bit of impromptu acrobatics, and she had appointed him her cohort. Bob and Estella, then, would sit on the roof under the midnight moon and look out over the waves towards the lights of Southport, and sometimes Bob would laugh.
