An Old Man and a Seafront, Part Seven

There wasn’t really much else left to do after that happened. There wasn’t the time. Never again would Bob share shibboleths with as game a partner. Instead, he would continue to go out to Mike’s to get the paper every morning, and he would continue to sit in his usual moth-eaten chair by the window watching Loose Women. He’d simply carry on existing alongside those people he’d known for years whose names he had forgotten, and welcoming with a nod new arrivals whose names he would never both to learn. Not in the way that he learnt Estella’s name, at least: Bob had really learnt that name. He’d breathed it in and memorised it and engraved it into mossy stone. All its possible permutations had filled him with warmth at some point during one day or another: Estella; Stella; Stel; all of them were Estella. Sometimes he would go so far as to recite under his breath the five floating sashays followed by three sprightly skips that she insisted upon writing in the top right-hand corner of all her books’ first pages - Estella Ada Finn-Higgins  – and he’d be smiling, full-beam and gap-toothed, by the fourth syllable.

Did those sounds continue to mean anything, though, without a referent for them to sign? Were they names still, or merely elegies? Bob clung to the possibility that they might be something in-between. And perhaps they were, if the cosmos was kind.

To him, though, those phonemes simply didn’t hold the same truth that they had one; there was a time when they had once stood so much for life and the possibilities it still held. They still carried a sense of possibilities - he couldn’t deny that - but these were solely past potentialities, different vantage points the memory mass of his mind could recall to hold up against different lights of day. There were to be different interpretations and readings ahead of him of what had gone before, and yes, he’d look forward to them, but Bob began to feel the distinct impression that the bookshelf was already rather full.

*****

That evening, The X Factor was on television (it was too late for Loose Women). Bob was sitting in his usual chair, and had reached the page of the paper he usually reached at this hour. Unusually however, Bob’s eyes felt tired, and he felt no desire to read to the end of the world news section. He decided that this time, just this time, he would watch the television with his fellow residents instead.

There was a very old man stood on a stage, wearing trousers and a cowboy hat, but nothing else. He was rake thin, excepting a swollen medicine ball of a stomach, and the skin by his eyes that had wrinkled into crows’ feet so entrenched that they had resultantly swollen the leathery hide out around them, windows shuttered in the winter of the soul. The judges of the contest smiled at the man as he introduced himself as “Rob,” from Bristol. Bob was grateful for the diminutive selected.

Rob proceeded to sing Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ at the top of jaundiced lungs, his voice cracking whenever a higher note even hinted to suggest itself, so that half of the performance was inaudible - one would be forgiven for thinking that somebody was toggling with the volume control were it not for the studio audience’s shouts of derision or patronising encouragement. At the end of this sporadically sonic performance, the crowd erupted into a cacophony of hoots and hollers, with close-ups showing audience members standing up, some of them even crying. The show cut back to Rob, exhausted on the empty stage. Between restorative heavy gasps, a smile shone through on that prune of a face, and Bob noticed that the performer’s eyes were blue. One of the judges asked Rob if he had enjoyed the performance, and the man’s head moved back-and-forward in a nodding so vigorous that it caused a chain reaction whereby the lined folds on his forehead whacked against the lipoma on the bridge of his nose. The judge with the Frankenstein’s monster profile asked him if he had anything to say to anybody watching.

“I’d like to say a big hello and thank you to my lovely wife, Jinnie, who’s here tonight.”

The crowd cheered more loudly than ever before - they loved that one. The programme cut to a close-up shot of Jinnie, who happened to have joined the crying crowd. She started when she realised when the camera was focused on her - self-consciousness revealing a humility that must have in some way been critical of her husband’s escapades – but she quelled it with alacrity, and her face was bounteous with affection and indulgence. The judges asked if she as proud of her husband, and she said that she was, yes - very much so. On any other day the directness of this sentimentality would have caused Bob to baulk, but it had been a long day, and he watched as Rob piped up with another crowd-pleaser:

“Eh Jinnie, my loverrr; we did it our way, didn’t we - eh?”

That one sent the crowd into paroxysm. Rob repeated the line once more, for good measure. Bob raised himself from his chair and walked away from a chorus of “aww”s and “bless”es performed by the other residents, who clearly appreciated the wordplay.

Bob made sure not to get in the way of the television as he got up.  

*************

He led what remained of his body down on his crumpled sheets and, leaving the lamp by his bedside table on, looked up at the ceiling for a time. Whereas the walls of the room were decorated with cream wallpaper wrought with stucco mottle, they all reached up towards the communal destination of a ceiling that was unadorned and painted white. He closed his eyes for a while, and then opened them again to look up at the ceiling once more. It was still plain. Outside, the surf sounded strange – almost as if it was moving in throbs rather than waves - and Bob, ill at ease, dragged himself out of bed to go over and close the window. Despite his actions, the thrum persisted, and seemed to permeate the room even more virulently than when the windows had been open; vibrations the aqueous mass emitted seemed to signal that there was something shifting within, and in response to this the abyss proffered an impersonal and indignant harrumphing at having to accommodate a presence that it had never hitherto assumed to be such a recalcitrant upstart. Maybe it would be better if he shut the curtain, too: they were awfully thick, oppressively woolly things which shut out sound as powerfully as a kiss shuts out dismay. Bob rose himself for what felt like the millionth time and ambled on over to the window. Before he closed the heavy cloth over the night, he observed that the sea appeared both closer and blacker, almost as if it had something to say to him personally, and as if that something was only expressible through bleak churn. Bob, quite sensibly, closed the curtains.

He might have been asleep for hours, or he might have only blinked. Time began to have discombobulated. Waking, he was then spurred on by an unknown sense that overcame sleep, which moved Bob over to the curtains and whispered to him to open them wide. Bob obeyed. A drawn George stared in at him, standing on the slippery sill. Bob looked into the revenant’s eyes, and something in them looked back at him. 

Once again, Bob closed the curtains in a manner that, considering the circumstances, could be described as sensible . He threw on his dressing gown, and, paying no heed to the brittle splinters snapping throughout his shins, made for the door. He threw it open, audibly pulling muscles in his arm that he had forgotten he possessed. The world reeked of rotting squid. He ran down the long green corridor towards the stairs, at whose top stood the recently deceased Ness, her eyes bloodshot from salt and her mouth frothing with sand. There was seaweed in her hair and she smelt of kelp. She smiled, but there were barnacles on her eyelids.

He fell down the last five stairs, and felt something in his back go never to come back. Looking up to whence he had fallen to see Ness slowly descending towards him, he noticed that her feet were webbed as if with rubber. Where those suction cups he had seen underneath that raised heel?

Bob pulled himself to his feet, and ran pell-mell across the foyer floor towards the Home’s main door. He felt parts of himself falling off. He pulled the door open, only to find himself standing in the middle of the empty peat-streaked Blackpool beach under static stars.

Bob looked about himself, only to see nothing but the boggy desert for kilometres in every direction. The Home was a dot on the horizon: he had seemingly skipped straight through the dunes. He found it hard to place himself, and he knew then that it would be impossible for anybody else to place him at all, being as he was now just a black speck on a dark horizon. All about him there was only dark, sand, and mud. He heard the sea, which must have been near, though the moonless night meant that he could not see it. This far out, he should have been submerged by it. Where was the tide that sang so?

The moon whispered itself into being, then, dappling Bob with pellucid ether. The sea was shown to him now: it had stopped singing, and for the timeless moment rested still and shimmering and sad. Bob squinted towards it, then, for he thought he saw shadows emerging from its surface, like ashen char espied prancing atop the lip of a dormant volcano. A clammy hand rested on his shoulder, and he turned to see what had up until very recently been George smiling at him, encouraging him with a nod to walk towards the shadows. Bob followed the advice, and began to approach the bounding main.

He kenned the shadows. Those silhouettes at the end of his sight made sense to Bob, and made sense to Bob alone, for they were that forever-dreamt-of palimpsest of inaccessible days yoked together and made flesh through absurd desire. Composed of remembered eyes and hearts and hopes, stood before him were the thens which he had all his life used to cloak himself against the now.


As he had always known that they would be, Rosalind and Estella were standing there, waiting for him, their ankles in brine. They both looked younger than they ever had, the moon’s light bouncing off eldritch skins beautifully scaled with a corpse porcelain suppurating a liminality the living can never witness. There they were, his loves, his love, his life, and they were laughing. Now they were sharing a private joke at his expense – he just knew that they were - and sending surreptitious smirks in his direction implying an understanding, and a home. Their laughter sent Bob's soul soaring against the starless night, ringing like a rushing brook against the locker's tomb silence. 


On this empty stretch under squid-inked night, the past faced up to the future, and the latter yawned. Bob walked on up to his histories, with nary a glance back to the dunes, and Estella and Rosalind’s arms opened up to him in watery welcome. They enveloped him, and they smelt of fish. The three of them began to dance together now, becoming one and all in a coagulating waltz moving towards a nameless city that was so long ago covered by that which our ancestors once happened to call the sea. This was the way in which, as salt-water rushed in to fill up his lungs, the cosmos decided to show Bob its kindness.