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.

An Old Man and a Seafront, Part Six

Bob leaned against the mottled glass wall of the Home’s sole balcony, overlooking the road separating sleeping souls from the dunes. It was a rather optimistic promontory constructed in the seventies when memories and hopes of the gay seaside resort Blackpool had once been and might one day be again still gave out the occasional death rattle, and sometimes, out here, they were almost audible. Bob piled what remained of his tobacco into a rizzla, producing a lumpy, rather unwieldy cigarette. He lit it with the last of his matches, put it to his cracking lips, and dragged in tarry pabulum. As he gazed out towards the murky peat, specks of ash danced away from his face in a desultory frolic, a firefly sarabande retreating rhythmically into night.

The traffic lights to his right seemed permanently set to green, and cars whizzed past, heedless of the lateness of the hour. The odd car that passed him more slowly occasioned a look through windscreens that revealed people close to his own age, in no seeming hurry to reach their destination. Along the pavement on the side of the road closest to him he saw a couple in their twenties, walking hand in hand and barely cognisant of the bear-like golden retriever that pulled against the lead that stretched three feet ahead of them. The woman, colourfully dressed for the summer day just passed, looked upwards in his direction. Though his face was backlit from the reception room behind him and thus to all intents and purposes invisible, he raised his eyebrows in kind. In his younger days those appendages had been thick and expressive in their every moment, often betraying unwilled sentiments so aggressively that he often resented them, but in recent years he had begun to sense recalcitrant gravity attenuating even forced attempts at honest expression. It did not matter at any rate: when she had noticed the ghoul-like figure on the second floor she had abruptly bent down to ruffle and make an audible fuss of her leonine pet’s haunches, as if she had never noticed him in the first place.

Though she herself was nowhere to be seen, Ness’ slippers had been found out on the front this morning. Like George’s. Mable had excitedly spoken of ghosts and eldritch sprites, in a fervour that Bob had been anxious to communicate to Estella, but, alas, he had not had the opportunity. She had not been down to sup for days. Earlier that evening he had knocked on her door with the offer of an Irish Horlicks – her favourite – but she had opened the door incrementally and rejected offer, with a voice whose cadence suggested that much more than a malt beverage was being refused.

Bob looked down to the cigarette he was smoking. There were only a couple of drags left, and the extent to which he had crammed it meant that he now felt queasy, discombobulated. He wondered why this infrequent habit of his had not done him in yet. It had seen to many of his friends. This led him to ponder why he had indulged the habit for such a long time. He couldn’t come up with an answer, so he stopped asking himself the question. 


He thought about Estella. He thought about Rosalind. He thought about himself. With nothing more to think about, he went to bed.

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

Robert Neff’s naked form lay plague pallid that night in the traffic light refracted through his bedroom window, his cracked pores sweating out tobacco atop brittle sheets. Spray churned up from the sea to crash up against the panes, though that was impossible.

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

The next morning was the day when the St. Annes on-Sea staff treated the residents to their “Monthly Jaunt”. It was August, so, if the last four years were anything to go by, they would again be paying a visit to Louis Tussaud’s wax museum on the Prom. Though Louis’ efforts were hardly as Pygmalion-esque as his great-grandmother’s, Bob decided to keep on the tradition because, in his eyes, the waxworks therein displayed far more personality than the people with whom he spent the majority of his day-to-day life.

The bus, pink in colour, was about the size of those VW panel vans that had been so fashionable in the seventies, but crucially was not one. Pastel-coloured cloth frills adorned the windows like shy, ineffective curtains, and it was hard for Bob to ignore the creeping sensation that he and his fellow inmate were being put on show in a kind of mobile pillory for the aged, with abject desiccation masquerading for the masses of St. Annes as Cliff Richard’s ‘Summer Holiday’. Estella never came out on these things, and Bob had never blamed her, but this was the first time he had worried about her refusal. He feared that she was not only rejected being paraded about on that hopeless bus, but also walking outside the front door of the Home. He now worried about her daily, and about the awful possibility that he was soon to be left alone for the final time before he death forced him to ask the questions he had always wanted to put off. He would shake his head when thoughts like this shaded his mind, and try to look on the bright side of what he had left. As the panel van whisked along Lytham Road, he looked out past the buildings and towards the sea, trying to do that now. Bob had heard that this place had recently unveiled an effigy of Cilla Black, to whom, he admitted to himself, he’d always been a bit partial.

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

They had to park in a concrete lot about five minute walk from the building. The wrinkled pilgrimage travelled in a  group, and were herded by a disgruntled man in his thirties called Greg, who visibly miffed at his luck in drawing the short straw so that he was unable to take the afternoon off like the rest of the Home’s staff.  When they arrived at the door, Bob looked up at the tatty, hopeless edifice, and read garish banners excitedly proclaiming the uncanny illusory reality of what could ever hope to be anything more than petrified ghouls. Greg told him to get a move on.

The carpets in the foyer were a sticky burgundy, and the doors into the main exhibition were from grander times. A glowering approximation of Anthony Hopkins in Hannibal Lecter garb leered to their left, in an invitation that would have elicited laughter were it not for the fact that said likeness could only be construed through reading the plaque at the base of the plinth upon which he was standing, and looked more like an alcoholic attendant behind a key cutting counter.

Passing through the doors, he was greeted by row upon row of heavy ghosts, encased in glass that seemed to will the figures inside to self-vivify and attempt an escape, as if that would justify its existence. The likenesses were all as shoddy as the effort at Hopkins, and in this low light the names on the cards were illegible. He read the waxy wrinkles on those models’ faces instead, scanned all those uncanny nooks, artificial indications of attenuated transience accruing a dust filled with optimistic mites still lost in an impossible hope for dead skin. In their exhibit cases the facsimiles gave off an impression of boredom more than anything else, a resignation that had followed its logical course towards its logical end as glass eyes looked out a glass cage. This empty weight bore down on the room and its nothing made Bob nauseous. The air hung heavy, as if diffused with the wax; all inhalation embalmed.

Enough of that. Trying to put the must of time out of his mind, Bob looked for his fellow residents, who were standing about in groups and trying to guess who each statue was supposed to be. He allowed a smile to insinuate itself on his face when he noted the difference between these cantankerous familiars and the frozen facsimiles in their goblet mausoleums: he had been unkind before in his indictment of his fellow travellers as lacking in soul. Personality now shone in juxtaposition with the dead wax; there were smiles and titters dispersed amidst cantankerous confusion and irascible harrumphing, and Bob held onto them for dear life, like a man clinging to a buoy at stormy sea. There were wrinkled hands patting wool-covered shoulders, crusty lips stretched to reveal mottled smiles, and eyeballs evincing viscous veins strung under a patina of gloopy gloss and sleep that were all too human against the perfect pearls inset into these hand-pressed homunculi. He felt his shoulders relax, then. Things seemed better. The waves lulled and clouds parted. Bob felt his age, but at least he felt it.

His eyes wandering, he noted that Greg - who had for the past few minutes been staring at what was quite frankly an insulting attempt at Cilla - was clearly very anxious to turn it down and guide everybody back to the van. In response, Bob began to rifle around in his cardigan pockets for a rizzla, so as to roll a cigarette to accompany him on the return. Evening the dried leaves into the tube with thumbs and forefingers, he caught sight of one Home resident, Conrad, a sanguine specimen with whom Bob had never spoken. He had evidently taken to exploring the exhibition on his own, away from the group.  Conrad was also in the process of rolling a cigarette. They looked at each other. Bob nodded. Conrad nodded. They went back to tending their rollies.

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

The next morning, Estella’s slippers washed in on the surf.

An Old Man and a Seafront, Part Five

The next day, at Estella’s behest, they ambled over to St. Annes Library to “assess the situation further.” The local news records were always the best place to start, she had told him as they walked. In reply, he leant over and furtively complimented her left ear;

“You seem to know a lot about this lark, Stella.”

She beamed, flattered.

“I always wanted to be like Nancy Drew, I did. Except, you know - less shite.” 

The library was a humble little husk that had managed to survive recent government cuts, though only in a nominal sense. Upon entering, it took the visitor a rather discernible effort to locate actual books. What predominantly met the eye were rows and rows of videos, DVDs and compact discs; the borrowing of these happened to come at the price of a small daily charge, and so the library carried on its burdened trawl, shoulders hunched against the storms of apathy.

Bob had to admit, though – he didn’t really deserve to feel judgemental of any of this. He could not recollect the last time he had held a book in his hands, let alone read one. In his twenties his escapes into fiction had been both unremitting and voracious. He had spent long nights soaking mental pores with stories after long days spent working on the telephone at the taxi garage. Bob had never subscribed to the books which other young men at the time devoured; he had found the escapes they promised inherently limited by the very realism and modernity that they displayed as testament to their radicalism. He had instead found refuge in moth-eaten horror comics and stories of the macabre, the preserve of boys half his age. These tales of ghostly highwaymen, wayward ghouls, and rotting homunculi spoke to a part of him that reality seemed to dismiss. He treasured them for what he saw to be their un-dead magnanimity; they offered an alternative to the querulous vice that clamped his desperate brain by way of the days’ constant telephone calls from so many apparently different kinds of people who were ultimately all so similar in their desire to merely travel from point A to point B. These ghosts with whom he spent the night pointed ectoplasmic fingers towards a somewhat darker letter, and God, did he love them for it. Every night fiction found him and occupied a horizon stretch that had seemed to invite the luxury of unqualified indulgence at the time and was only revealed as a snare to wasted life through the bitter spectacles of hindsight.

On the last day of his third decade, however, Bob put down his evening books suddenly and indefinitely for something that he had never, and would never, be able to view as a waste.

She was a pretty little thing and, when she smiled, her smile was a true smile. It confronted him with a goodness that was almost discombobulating in its perceived lack of ulteriority. This is not to say, however, that it was the simplistic grin of a doe-eyed child, lips smeared red, who wanted a strawberry lollypop and got a strawberry lollypop is happy it has obtained said strawberry lollypop. Far from it. It was instead the smile of a decidedly adult someone who, when faced with a number of much easier alternatives, chooses to carry on smiling anyway. In this sense, then, the only thing displayed through her stretching cheeks besides happiness was a decisive recalcitrance, a firm yet magnanimous “ sod you” to forces in whose interest it was to challenge her optimism, be they boredom, disillusion, even bereavement. It was this optimistic rebuttal that so appealed to him, that so drew him in and made him want to widen his own mouth and attend her party; a dance against the darkness, a revelry in the light. brown had grown to know Rosalind, had grown to care about her, and then one day – neglecting rather than forgetting to watch his step – he understood that he had utterly and unequivocally fallen headlong into the cushioned trap of love. 

The ears of his memory often noted a nostalgic refrain when Estella spoke of the pulpy fantasy in which she took so much pleasure. He enjoyed indulging in this harkening back for two reasons. Firstly, it reminded him of that pleasure he had taken in spending time on his own, by his terms and for his own enjoyment and damn anybody else should they think otherwise. Secondly, it allowed him to mentally inhabit an imagined time wherein he was yet to meet Rosalind, so that this time by itself wasn’t all that there was. There was more to come, which meant that it was Estella who held within glowing clenched fists the burgeoning seeds of an impossible promise, prophesying a future that had already died.

In these jittering hands she now held five sepia-toned copies of the Lytham St. Annes Gazette, and was motioning him over to the table over which she now spread them out before her. He sat down and scoured their front pages: she had selected two editions from the late sixties, one from 1986, and one from 2008. The latter was not discoloured due to age, he noticed. Somebody had spilled what must have been a gargantuan cup of coffee all over it. He looked at the photo on the cover. The caffeinated smear had bestowed the leader of the opposition with a face even more amorphous that it had been before.

Estella held a finger up by her ear – she had forgotten something, evidently - and dashed off behind some shelves. Bob was afraid to touch the papers lest he jump the gun of Estella’s presentation before she returned, so he sat at the table staring at the politician’s lopsided jowls for a good five minutes, until Estella reappeared – or at least, until her legs did. Her torso and head were completely eclipsed by the stack five books she rested against herself. She was, he judged by her somewhat seasick movement, in very real danger of falling over if she attempted to carry them any further, and, relieved, she slammed the pile down onto the papers with an almighty thunk. Bob and Estella looked around sheepishly, but they discarded their guilt, recognising its anachronism - the very likelihood there was anybody in here trying to read who didn’t have hearing as bad as they did was a rather remote possibility. The books were titled, in alphabetical order, Celestial and Extra-Astrological Phenomena and How to Interpret Them by F.R. Wolfe, Cthaat Aquadingen (Bob couldn't make out the author of that one, but Estella told him the title meant 'Things of the Water'), Far Encounters: Extraterrestrial Implications of Astral Projection and the Multiverse of the Mind by Marie Melville , Moon Cycles and Their Bearings on the Soul: An Investigation into Cosmic Communion by Archimedes T. Horne, and  Precautionary Procedures: Failsafes in Preparation for the Coming End by some personage spartanly monikered ‘Z’. He noticed that she had also picked herself up a copy of The Time Traveller’s Wife - Ness had recommended it to her, she said. She liked a good cry.

“What do we do with all of this, then?”

“We do the fun part. Each of these papers contains within it a report of strange lights spotted over the bay, and each paper also contains within it an obituary for somebody who went missing the night before. They concur, like. So I say we should note the concurrences.”

She said “concurrences” strangely, retaining the long ‘u’ of the original verb her Lancashire brogue had italicised in enthusiasm. He grinned at this, an indulgence that revealed decrepit tombstones of teeth at odds with the boyishness of their frame. “You’re suggesting they were kidnapped by Marvin the Martian?”

“No, Bob. I don’t think they were abducted” – she both corrected and judged him here – “by Marvin the Martian. But don’t you think the coincidence is a wee bit on the peculiar side?”

“But what about all of this codswallop?” He motioned towards the clunkily-labelled tomes.

She appeared to consider and reluctantly confirm the validity of his question before answering that “a little bit of extrapolatory affirmatorical corroboration never hurt anyone.”

He shook his head at this in a mock disapproval, understanding on a conscious level what she now signalled for him: a liaison with life.

“You aren’t half a silly sod, you know that?”

She beamed right back at this. “It’ll be something to do, though, won’t it?”

Her logic was, once again, irrefutable. Though his limbs and mind were already fatigued by the trip to the library, he reached for the paper.

They sat in that library for hours that day, poring over and comparing page after page. Bob hid the occasional yawn with a turn of the head, intent on maintaining the momentum of her quixotic crusade. Annotating, cross-referencing, investigation and exegetical reasoning wiled away the hours until twilight’s shadows crept in through the building’s bay windows and further adumbrated the texts over which the scoured.

There was a cough by his left ear. He looked up to see a bored-looking teenager glowering over him, motioning to his watch. While on any other occasion Bob would have been insulted by the ageism, it had taken a rather concentrated effort in his tiredness throughout the last hour to keep the letters on the pages in front of him from floating off the page, so he welcomed the intrusion. He nudged Estella’s shoulder, and whispered – though they were the only people still in the place – that it was probably best that they leave.

“Tell him they can wait another few minutes.”

He implored her once again, only to be met with a similar response. The spotty youth continued to glower. Finally, exhausted and more than a little bored, Bob placed his hand down firmly over the page Estella’s gaze was in the middle of imbibing.  

“Enough is enough,” he said.

She stopped reading, then, and looked up at him, the gloss of her pupils slipping from recrimination to lament.

Though Estella was already sat hunched over, Bob could swear that he saw her shoulders sag.

Estella pushed her chair back, then, and stood. She walked out of the library without another word, leaving them alone at the dusk-clothed table. Bob knew that there was nothing left to say.

An Old Man and a Seafront, Part Four

He experienced a jactating sleep that night, a restive palimpsest where the spectres of then and now and never passed through one another one moment and lost each other the next. Memories danced with hopes and forgotten dreams hazily, as if lost and intoxicated at an indistinct masked ball. One imagined recollection where he and Estella, firm and gay in their twenties before they’d ever met, attempted impressions of Hollywood stars along Blackpool pier, was interlaced by another where he and his wife Rosalind had travelled to London in a rickety bus and pulled funny faces in front of the British museum’s suggestively-shaped exhibits. In this hinterland of loss, transience refused to depart. Sometimes, because of this very obstinate recalcitrance, Rosalind and Estella would meet in impossibility. They would laugh together, whispering the private jokes they shared about him into each other’s ears. It heartened Bob to see this; those two would have got on like a house on fire, were they ever to have met.  

He was on a beach with Estella, now, walking side by side along an ivory strip eternally beaten by the inchoate churning that we have decided to call the sea. They were in their late thirties here. It was spring; a limpid balm suffused the night, galvanising the skin on their faces into one last youthful hurrah.  They were barefoot, with the sand was smoother than they had ever felt it; the waters had done their job well. Sometimes her features slipped and slid into those of Rosalind’s, but on this fresh night the majority of his companion was Estella, and on this night he was glad for it.

The good friend stopped in her tracks suddenly, and looked downwards. She had stepped on something. Bob’s gaze followed hers, and their eyes rested on a dark obdurate mass. It was circular, solid, and half-buried in the sand. It then began to move. It shifted from side to side compulsively, an antsy miniature mountain jostling at their feet. Estella began to laugh then, a glittering song backed by the surf; it was a turtle. Bob could now make out its head as it swayed from side to side and its fins dug deep into the sand for purchase before it realised its grip and began the shuffle all over again from a slightly readjusted position. Bob laughed too; in its repetitive gyration, the intent testudine cut a comic figure.

Bob laughed, and opined to Estella how humorous it appeared, noting that it appeared to be dancing to a broken record. Estella looked to him, then, a calm smile in her eyes. She thought it was wondrous, she said; so wondrous that nature danced.

Upon this, the ground began to tremble with a low roar. The grains of sand which had clung to the creature’s cartilaginous husk were displaced so that it emerged from the sand entirely. Still it kept moving forward and back, forward and back, its shielded belly scratching against the grains with a dull, ominous drawl. Bob noticed, then, that the thrum - which had up until now been confined to the Sisyphean bauble beneath their feet - now surrounded them. He looked about to observe the beach covered with emerging shells, all of them dancing to the same repetitive beat. Estella laughed, louder than the all-pervading hum, and began to dance herself, attempting a clumsy approximation of their staccato rhythms. Bob, with humour in his heart, looked up to her staggering form.

Estella was not laughing anymore. Her eyes were filled with fear, and the veins along her neck and in her forehead had snapped rigid, as if lined with solder. She could not stop the dancing. She could not stop the dancing. The turtles’ shells rose up above her like leaping walls, ascending until they towered over them and revealed a lurid underside of viscid limbs and bony tentacles. What had been curious examples of nature’s wonder was revealed to be something large, alien, and perverse. Malignant water wraiths with shells of barbed stone waltzed across the moonlit sand in what seemed to be a grotesque caricature of Estella’s recent attempt at mimicking one of their submerged brethren. Their dread ballet was timed to the tides of solitude and oblivion, with swaying suckers smothering the hope that had filled the night air so recently with a pitched despair. Estella’s dancing became an necessity dictated by a force within herself that she could not control, her body taking on a curious mix of manic frenzy and rigor mortis. She tried to scream, but the sound which emerged from her agonised throat was closer in tone and pitch to hideous whalesong than the appeals of a lost human soul, and her eyes widened further in terror at herself. Bob watched on helplessly, statued himself by similarly cosmic influence. He could feel the malign force within attempting to compel his limbs into like movement, and it took all the remaining exertion his creaking form  possessed to refuse. The cephalopodinous colossi began to move their syncopated ball towards the churning surf, which bowed before them in tragic obeisance. Estella found herself moving along with the horrendous forms, and Bob was powerless to prevent her flailing form from passing into that black, yawning grave. Compulsively gyrating with tears filling dulling eyes, Estella quietly withdrew beneath the waves, locked in an endless dance of hopelessness and of time.

He woke then, the dream still knotted within. There was a knocking at the door. He lifted his legs onto the floor and ambled on over. He was, wonderfully, confronted with Estella, smiling a smile that no turtle ghoul could dispel.

“Why are you grinning like a loon?” he asked, wanting to understand the happiness of her morning, so removed from his own, and to bathe in it.

“I know what happened to George.” She was antsy with excitement and pride, as if she had discovered that George had not passed away, but had actually located the Seven Cities of Gold, and sent her the forwarding address.

Bob motioned her in and she shuffled over to the bed. She sat down and up-ended her knitted satchel, littering the duvet with a deluge of cheap paperback books, notepads and crumpled tissues of indeterminate lineage. Estella rifled through the rubble and pulled out two clippings stapled together by the top-right corner. She scanned her eyes over them hurriedly, implying that she had many such coupled apocrypha and she needed to ensure that this was the right one for the moment, and held it towards him. He walked over, sat down beside her, and read the first clipping. It was from a periodical entitled Anomalist Times.

UNEXPLAINED LIGHTS OVER SOUTHPORT TO BLAME FOR INCREASING NUMBER OF MISSING PERSONS?

A number of unexplained lights have been spotted over the Southport coast over the last few months. Witnesses report erratic movement and fait headaches upon seeing the –

Bob didn’t need to read any of this. The joy that Estella took in it – and not the thing itself - was what pleased him. He’d rather see it through her eyes and understand it through her words than through this dubiously scribbled-upon toilet paper.

“You think George was abducted by aliens?”

“Aye, I do.”

Bob had never liked George, whom he felt was apathetic to the point of mental suicide, but this conversation, and the joy Estella was taking in it, left a bad taste in his mouth. He felt a duty to the hopeless deceased, and in doing so reprimanded the person whose enthusiasm stood so much for the exact opposite of that which he loathed.

“People die here every day, Estella. Part and parcel.”

Her face sank against its hinges. It looked older. He rushed to salve his morning by reorienting hers.

“Why do you think it’s was aliens?”

Her cheeks climbed a little at this, though Bob worried he had caused the upper rung of the ladder irreparable damage. This did not stop her from releasing her hypothetical torrent with reckless abandon:

“There are a few telltale signs when it comes to close encounters of the third kind, and I think George’s case fits the criteria. One, he went missing. He didn’t die shite-ing himself like the overwhelming majority, he actually left the building.”

“George never left the building.”

“If he did I never saw him do it. Two, his sleeping patterns had become more erratic over the past two weeks. Kept on telling people he couldn’t get a good night’s sleep, no matter what he did. In recorded cases of extraterrestrial phenomena, abductees often complain of unconventional sleeping patterns. He even complained of losing an hour Tuesday last week at four p.m. Witnesses often report missing periods of time which they cannot account for by any rational means other than a time warp or something inter-cosmologically altered – a wormhole, like.”

“I saw him last Tuesday. He’d fallen asleep in front of Heartbeat.”

She frowned. “No, that can’t be it.”

“I couldn’t believe he’d conked out either. Claude had fallen down a well. It were riveting.”

She punched his arm at this, more in frustration than in jest, before carrying on.

“There are too many strange coincidences. Plus of course, there were his shoes.”

Bob’s interest piqued at this apparently mundane detail. “What about them?”

“They found them. The coppers. Couldn’t explain it. Found ‘em down on the shore.”

“On the shore?”

“Aye. Past the dunes.”

Bob thought about this; about this and about his dream.

“That’s strange,” he said.

She smiled at that.

An Old Man and a Seafront, Part Three

It was eleven o’clock the next morning, and, despite rising to a headache he would much rather have ducked under (a reminder of death at dawn was a small price to pay for life at night, he had measured), it had turned out to be an eventful morning for Bob. More eventful than usual, at the very least. Bob had gone to Mike’s, bought some rizzla and forgotten to buy the paper, he had walked home with nary a glimpse towards the dunes, and, on his way back, he had stopped to talk to some young people who appeared to be contributing to this truancy “epidemic” that the politicians were blathering on about. When Bob had approached them, regarding the availability of something he now viewed as green and secret and escapist and lovely, they had protested their innocence, their pimpled mouths informing him quite politely that it-was-bank-holiday-don’t-you-know-sir, even though a tacit awareness floated amongst them that it was, in fact, very-much-a-Thursday-young-man. Still, they were friendly enough and they had what he wanted (it was understandable at least, he had later reflected, that their commerce had no real call to know the opening hours of the local HSBC), so he let them off.


Upon walking through the door to St. Annes-on-Sea, Bob was greeted with spectacle unusual for this time of day. There were people in the foyer. There were real living people in the foyer who were standing up and moving around and actually seemed to be, whisper it, concerned about something. None of the inmates were up yet (“inmates” - he had actually thought that; he shook the thought from his mind); it was far too early for that. Something serious must have happened, and somethings that were serious were rarely good somethings. Like an accident on the motorway that is still spitting flames, this piqued Bob’s interest, so he wandered over to a portly young man who was wearing a cheap three-piece suit, the blazer of which was already beginning to evidence the sausage roll-fuelled perspiration that had made fast work of his equally cheap white shirt, and had just finished talking into a shockingly small phone with an inordinately long aerial. Bob didn’t even know people used aerials anymore.
“What’s going on here, then?”
Sausage Roll Sweat turned to him and gave him the once-over. Bob saw those thoughts flash through his eyes, thoughts the sight of which he had become far too familiar with, so much so now that Bob was afraid he had begun to imagine that he saw it in innocent eyes; dithering useless old codger poking his nose in where it will never belong anymore.
“I’m afraid that there’s been an accident, sir.”
“What sort of accident?” Bob barked back.
At this, Sausage Roll Sweat gave him the look again, definitively so this time, vindicating Bob’s youthism, before affecting a Compassionate Look™ and asking, in a Sensitive Voice®, “Were you acquainted with a Mr. George G. Russell, sir?”
Bob’s interested waned instantly; another dull day along with another dark death. All these people bustling around the foyer signified was that George, whether he deserved it or not, was much more important to a great deal many more people than anybody else in this prison (there the thought was again; he let it linger this time) would ever be.
“Aye.”
Sausage Roll Sweat affected a newer model of the Compassionate Look™ - updates and modcons included for a small additional price - and began again, “Perhaps you’d like to sit down, sir?”
Bob looked down at the floor and shook his head. “No. I’m going to go and watch television instead”, he sighed, turned on his heels, and left the ageist official standing alone and confused on the foyer carpet, eyes and mouth wide, sweating onto the inside of his suit jacket.


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


There were five different women displayed on the television screen that the residents of the Home - Gloria, Bev, Mavis, Nessy, and Carmilla - clustered around. The women onscreen were animatedly discussing the possibility of the existence of ghosts.
“I’ve bin in a haunted house before, I ‘av.” Gloria decided to venture at the introduction of this topical debate, bringing the discussion slap-bang into the TV room. Sadly, this was lost to the other viewers, who were trying to block out any distractions to their daily afternoon viewing. Gloria surveyed the situation, realized this was so, and, reclining in her armchair, undertook a small nap. Mavis and Nessy, as if to channel out a snoring they knew to be imminent, craned their heads forward from the beige sofas, their noses awhiff with the expectations of dark mysteries’ shocking illumination. Bob’s fingers digged into the arm rest, but he carried on watching regardless, masochistic silk caressing recalcitrant venom.
“Yeah, I ‘ave too,” Bev revealed. Nessy smiled; Bev was her favourite. “I were living in one during my first marriage, and I’ve got to tell you, it were horrible. Such a bad energy.”
“It had a bad aura, I’ll venture,” Camilla ventured.
Bob looked to each of the rapt viewers in their worn slip-ons, their eyes so concentrative on something so removed from anything resembling life, and he felt a wave of sadness come over him. He pushed himself up from the sofa with his wiry arms, and walked past the television, interrupting his inmates’ view, out into the hallway.
Upon leaving the television room, he heard Nessy’s delayed complaint “You’re in the way,” which was too late and too quiet.


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


It was now dinner-time, and Bob refused to eat. They tried everything they could to make him eat short of pretending his spoon was a choo-choo train, but he wasn’t going to fall for it. Flush out of tricks, the young attendant had resorted to near-screaming, into his ear, that she would do anything if he would just eat something.
Bob pulled his napkin out of his collar and swiveled his head around to face her, standing over his chair, locking his eyes onto hers. She needn’t have shouted so loudly; he already had his hearing aid cranked up to the nines.
“I’m not eating this tripe.”
“It’s not tripe, Mr. Neff. It’s good for you; nutritious, like.”
“I don’t care if it’s nutritious, like. I’ve been served it four times this week already. It’s started to turn. I can tell.”
They didn’t like it when he talked back, he knew that, which is what made it all the more enjoyable.
“Well, then,” the attendant began, considering a new strategy, “what would you like?”
Something different, that’s what he’d like. Something new and exciting that wasn’t the nondescript gloop they forced upon him day-after-day in this stagnant reverse-Petri dish as nurses and attendants watched specimens die under a microscope of pathetic condescension. He wanted something exotic that reminded him of somewhere far, far away from this waiting room for the dead. It was true what they said, see; variety was the spice of life, and Robert Neff was fed up of dried thyme. 
“Chicken Tikka Massala. I want a chicken tikka massala.”
The attendant stared down at him, wondering whether how serious she had to take this demand. Observing his obstinate expression she realized that it would be easier to at least explain why this was in fact impossible, rather than to wait until he simply forgot about it and fell asleep. This one was awkward, though; you couldn’t just fob him off. Bob stared at her as she went through these thought processes, and they shone clear as day to him through her dull eyes. They would not allow him to have a chicken tikka massala; not today, not tomorrow, not ever. He could listen to her patronizing explanation as to why not, but he knew it was simply be a smokescreen for their laziness and belief that the people here weren’t even worth a fatty, processed five-quid-takeaway. As the attendant opened her mouth to veil apathetic reasoning with goo goo baby talk, Bob stood up, and left the dining room.


He was walking away a lot more recently, he realised, as he climbed the stairs to his nook. Only way to deal with them, really.

An Old Man and a Seafront, Part Two

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.