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.

A letter to the North Pole

Mrs. Jennifer Thornton

15 Riley Avenue

Lytham St. Annes

Blackpool

FY8 1HD
25/12/1991

Pet Dispatch Unit
Santa's Delivery Service
c/o The North Pole
The Arctic

Dear Fr. Christmas,

     Next time, please do remember to put in the air-holes. Little Timmy was most distraught.

Regards,

Mrs. Jennifer Thornton

An Old Man and a Seafront, Part One

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.

15cert.

The other children were allowed to watch horror films, and Timmy envied them for it. They didn’t understand how lucky they were; how lucky, how blessed, to experience such dangers and risks and come out the other end completely safe. They got to stare hideous, gory death in the face and laugh at it. Their victories were frequent; nightly they conquered fears they were then able to put aside. These were the brave young ones. These were the ones who were able to lead healthy lives, filled with promise and society. These were the ones who vanquished the monsters in the dark and kicked the thing that hid under the bed. Their pillow was warm and comforting, and their only worry was that they hadn’t yet been able to copy their homework for tomorrow’s first lesson. Timmy, alas, was not one of these people.

He’d wonder what these imaginings, these dark and perverse directors’ dreams, could possibly be like. A boy of eleven, he could not begin to comprehend the violence he would not even be capable of watching until his fifteenth birthday, a violence that would forever discombobulate his undeveloped brain circuits and irrevocably alter his nascent outlook on the world were he to gaze upon it prior to that sacred day. He feared that bright red encircling of the numerals “15” on the DVD cases at Blockbuster. It promised revulsion, dementia and morbidity. It was his Medusa, and so he feared it with the reverence it deserved. Timmy did not want to turn to stone. He was a good boy, so he wanted to remain soft for as long as possible.

He had watched the first twenty minutes of one once, though. The gorgon had tempted him with its deceitful siren song, and he, powerless to resist the temptations of forbidden fruit and an aura of premature maturity, had asked his older brother to rent a copy of it for him. His brother had not minded; the film he wanted happened to be funny and exciting, and he had a large crush on the leading actress, so he’d get it as long as Timmy would pay for it and he could watch it afterwards. A film called 'Gremlins', it told of a cuddly little animal, not dissimilar to a puppy, which, if fed after midnight, would turn into something hideous and wrong. Timmy, however, did not last past the twenty-minute-mark. The dread of the viscous arteries, the burst eyeballs, and disembodied colons he would no doubt see in the ensuing eighty minutes was too much for him. He put it back in its case and walked up to his brother’s room, holding his victor in his left hand, shaking and self-loathing. He had forfeited the dare. Later, in bed, when he heard his brother laughing from the next room, he envied his adamantine constitution; a braver man than he, kicking the unholy spectres of the shadows’ fringes into humiliated submission.

Later that night, everybody else had fallen asleep and he had stopped crying over his cowardice; that was when the night-things came. Staring at the shadows thrown across his bedroom ceiling, he did not notice them at first. To begin with, there was only a heightened awareness of the subtler night-sounds; there was the drip of taps and the creak of wood beams, but, aside from the common paranoia of the neurotic, nothing with an uncanny face. He rationally chalked it down to nerves; a dripping tap cannot harm an eleven-year-old boy. But it is from these sounds, from these drips and creaks and buzzes, that the night-things come. Their gelatinous multi-torsos writhe and squirm out from inter-dimensional spaces; spaces that our minds manifest between the innocuous happenings of the witching hour and the dark thoughts that we attribute to them. By the time Timmy had gathered that something was amiss, they were upon him. Timmy tried to cover himself with his blanket. They ripped it off of him. With their talons and their tentacled snouts they smothered and sliced, filling up his aesophogus with their lumpy bile, to clog his screams. His eyes, wide and bloodshot and afraid, the only things left to scream for him, were soon forced shut by slippery hands, and he never saw his bedroom ceiling again.

Daniel Happenstance and the Ocean Tomb of Dread Ph'tang-lo

Wrong place. Wrong time.

An Introduction

Hello. I am going to try and put a few things down on here at some point. I don't really know what they'll be, nor that I'll ever get around to doing it at all. The idea definitely appeals, though.