She knocked on his door, and Bob opened it. Estella stood there in her massive long coat, large boa scarf, and extraneous wide-brimmed hat. Framed in the low-level light the Home poured through its corridors at night in case anybody was brave enough to chance a trip to the lavatory, she looked like a quivering church bell.
“Fuck, it’s parky.”
“Hello, Estella.”
She smiled at him, so briefly anybody else would miss it, and looked over to his coat-peg pointedly.
“Get a move on already won’t you; I’ve gone and got us a treat for tonight.”
Bob mock-begrudgingly traipsed over to the wall and put on his heavy brown duffel-coat, before turning back to see that she had already departed for the roof. After shoving on his dapper-ish walking shoes, he hurried out after her, down the corridor and towards the fire escape; she insisted she could climb the thing all by herself thank-you-very-much-chuck, but Bob liked to be there all the same, to catch her in case she fell.
Sometimes, against his better nature, Bob would momentarily wish she would fall for that very reason, so he could catch her, but then he would check himself and remember that he wasn’t the strapping young man of twenty-one he used to be. He couldn’t catch her. He couldn’t catch anything these days. No.
*****
Estella had strained her neck on the fire escape, Bob had twisted his ankle. She had done this when her scarf had become caught on a dislodged rung, he had done so in failing to observe said defect. As they sat there, nursing their sympathetic wounds and sitting on cushions Estella had paid some youths on the prom to chuck up there when the administrators weren’t looking, the night sky bore down on them with its kindly stars, and the spheres sang sweet silence.
“What’s this surprise, then?”
“Eh?” She turned to him, fixing ginger eyes on grey and reminding him of someone from a long time ago.
“The treat, the one you mentioned before,” he said, feigning indignation, “Rushed me up here for it.”
She put up a spindly finger of epiphany and then commenced to rustle around, head down, in her handbag, so that Estella disappeared and all that was left was a very large, very determined, wide-brimmed hat.
“Silly Estella; forget her head if it weren’t screwed on.”
He never used to like it when people would refer to themselves in the third person; it showed a sense of importance not many merited. Bob didn’t mind it when she did it, though. The hat scoured around a little bit more with the odd utterance of “I could have sworn that...” and “maybe it’s...” until it switched back into an immensely proud Estella, displaying before Bob a seemingly-inconspicuous plastic bag filled with seemingly-indeterminate green leaves.
“I’ve got us some wacky-baccy,” she beamed.
“Man alive, Stella! Where in flaming hell did you get that stuff?”
“Shut your mouth, Bob; get the kit out already.”
Bob rifled through his heavy duffle pockets, located the papers, and commenced to roll what he considered two moderate samples. He placed one down on the floor of the roof, beside his good knee, and lit up the other. He drew a deep breath and held the smoke in, before passing the cigarette to his friend. Never tried one of these larks before; he’d only smelt them on walks down by the dunes, on the breaths of those young people who weren’t yet able to get out of Blackpool and up and away to London and Manchester, to the lights and the sounds of freedom and opportunity that faraway cities and lands give out as hospitable gifts. Upon breathing out, Bob’s shoulders relaxed and he understood those youths he had once disparaged a little better.
Stella really pulled it in. She took a big long drag of it, and held it right in her flippant heart before breathing out in a manner that would have been sensual were it not for the guttural rattling of decade-old catarrh hopscotched by curling smoke. She was clearly enjoying it, and that’s where its charm lay; he could see her shoulders slump down beneath her coat as she laid back against the redbrick chimney stand, and when her eyes looked up at the spheres, they seemed so content they made no special attempt to stay open.
“You ever looked to the sea, Bob?”
“What do you mean? For advice, like?”
“No, you daft apoth. That sea.” She pointed ahead of them, out towards the lights on the opposite coast.” Right there. ‘Fore Southport.”
“What about it?”
“Well, it’s so deep, isn’t it? So unknowable.”
“Stella. You’re beginning to sound like one of them kids, talking like that! Next thing you’ll be putting 2001 on the telly and asking what happens after we pop our clogs!”
“Well, good!” She beamed, his teasing apparently serving as some kind of validation. “It’s good I sound like that, and it’s good I can still think about things like how vast and titanic that big dark vat we call a sea is, and the things it makes me think about. So many of these poor souls forget - they forget to wonder.”
At this, his smile spread from his eyes and down into his chest. That was what it was, that was why he came up here; it was the wonder she experienced at things to which he had long ago gone numb.
“What’s wrong with forgetting?” He liked these starlit opportunities to build up his familiarity with her inner workings bit by bit, shining torchlight down corridors of a house he very much wanted to think of as home.
To this question, Estella pursed her lips, and went serious. “Forgetting's giving up.” She did not sound melancholy here - only determined. “If you don’t keep looking to the sea then that’s when it swallows you.”
Bob nodded; he saw the logic.
Estella then leaned forward, smiled a mercurial smile, and whispered a conspiratorial wink of a hint into his ear. “You know what?”
“What?” he whispered back, though there was no reason for the hushed tones other than the intimacy they conjured.
“There’s things in it.”
“Things?”
“Things.”
“Y’what?”
“Things with things on them. You know. From up there.” A spindly finger shot up against the black. “Things they don’t want us to know about.” Upon the mention of these invisible enforcers she used said finger to simultaneously point emphatically forward as well as wave generally at someone-or-other - as if stuffy, bureaucratic atoms lined the crisp atmosphere of the night, intent on sending them to bed early, and deserved only contempt.
“Not this again, Stella!” He laughed, his hand coming down onto his knee.
“Don’t, Bob. I’ve been reading about it for years. I’m well researched in it and I’ve ascertained it. Churchill told them to investigate it, you know, back when I first saw them up there. They gave it a go, ‘course, but when those extraterrestrial buggers were too clever for them they denied it, refused to admit it and swept it under the bloody rug. Like elves, you know.”
“Underwater space elves?”
The finger shot forward again, this time in a confirmatory capacity. “’Xactly.” She paused for a moment, finger locked midair, before correcting herself slightly: “More like space turtles, at a push.”
Bob enjoyed it when she went on like this. He enjoyed visiting her in her unkempt living space, and casting a warm eye over the crumpled, hurriedly read magazines that lined her moth-eaten carpet. Dotted amongst the soap guides and Sunday supplements from yesteryear, one’s gaze would hap upon creased copies ‘Supernatural Magazine’, the Cryptogram (imported from the united States on the internet, didn’t he know), and some other sensationalist tabloids he’d never heard of, with silly slogan-names, like ‘Truth’ and ‘UFOlogy Today’. He would shake his head at these, but his affection for her would only grow with this acknowledgement of battiness. Pride of place was reserved for her father’s collected copies of ‘Amazing Stories’, which she kept stacked atop an old vanity box which she hadn’t opened in years. These were in pristine condition, and their tales of bizarre entities from amongst the stars still caused her lips to part, coffee-stained teeth beaming out in a jarring paradox of childish rapture. Bob reasoned that the ‘fact’ she received from her dubitable news sources had coalesced with this weird fiction in recent years, and with it her mental boundaries had become muddied and indistinct, like the shore beyond the dunes. Aliens danced with monsters and centaurs in the doolally palace of her mind, but he hadn’t hazarded to call attention to the carnival’s construction. That would spoil the fun.
“It gets harder, though.”
Her voice quavered a little here, and with that their little clubhouse on the roof was tainted by outside fear. This is when Bob would worry; sometimes her daydreams became black as night, and cast a pall over her that no amount of fact could dispel.
He locked his eyes on her profile. “What does?”
“Keeping a lookout.”
She turned her head suddenly then, meeting his gaze with eyes wider than they should have been. She then took another drag, beamed out a manic smile that her face was too old and too uneasy to hold onto for too long, and laughed staccato.
“Blimey. They did say this stuff was good.”
“It’s alright, I’ll give it that,” Bob laughed along, but he didn’t mean all of it.
Estella stood up, put on her hat, and wobbled over to the fire escape. She looked back towards him, expectantly.
“Come on. You can’t get down there on your own.”
Bob stood, his knees cracking; “No, that I can’t.” He walked towards her, prepared for the fiasco that would invariably follow. Then they began the process, a complex jerky shuffle replete with laughter, creaking and more than a little blue language. And, with that, it was forgotten. Bob and Estella went back to their separate beds, and they both dreamed of black.
With things in it.
