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.

A Note on Horror Movies/'Scream'

We sit in the dark, and they happen to us. We have to let them, of course; passivity is requisite.  That’s the deal. It only works if we’re strapped to the guillotine: completely helpless in the face of oblivion. That’s how horror films work, isn’t it? They prey on our weakness and cackle maniacally at our pretence that we once weaned ourselves into independence. Perhaps that’s how all of these silly little things we call movies work, yes, but with the shockers the mockery seems so much more damn insidious.

I just sat down and watched Scream with my little sister. There was a reason for this. She’s nearly fifteen, and was lamenting that nothing she had seen really scared her - so jaded for one so young.  Isn’t that a shame? Many of her friends had seen The Human Centipede, and had described its narrative to her in vivid detail (a detail more imaginative, I imagine, than that belonging to the director). Its crass grotesqueness had appealed to her search for sensationalism, and she was eager to see it. I suggested we watched the Craven movie instead. 


I was eager to see what it’d do. I remember it had had a strong effect on me when I was fifteen; I remember the uneasy laughter I shared with those characters so close to my own age who were so soon to become mincemeat. And that opening scene - don’t get me started on that opening scene. It was an assault, systematic and vindictive, on the sense of security that I relied upon in so many things: the divide between fiction and reality, my parents’ home, and - I readily admit here that I wasn’t at the age where Janet Leigh bowing out halfway through Psycho was as shocking as it should have been - the belief that a film’s biggest star would categorically make it through to the final reel.

Watching it again, I enjoyed the mechanics of it, the way it plays with you. It revels in its postmodern game in a manner which is still infectious, even today. At certain points it reaches the heights of pantomime - he’s behind you! The character of Randy works brilliantly in this respect, an audience surrogate who’s as vulnerable as anybody else (what a shame – though what a masterstroke – that they killed him off in the sequel) to the slaughter.  How wonderful, I thought, to be a lamb.

My sister’s reaction was somewhat less effusive.  She reassured me she’d enjoyed it, but also bemoaned that it hadn’t frightened her as much as she would have liked. I panicked, instantaneously taking her on a kneejerk youtube odyssey, showing her trailers for great horror films which have scared me so much in the past – The Evil Dead, The Exorcist, The Thing, The Descent, and so on. All the great Thes. She admitted they looked sort of creepy, yes, but she told me that nothing she had seen her really disturbed her.  

This saddens me. I hope it’s not just simply I’m prematurely ageing into a nostalgic curmudgeon, and I can’t authoritatively promise this isn’t the case. But I hope it isn’t. I really do. I think a film can still work wonders and make us search frantically for the nightlight, if it’s made intelligently enough, with enough wit and verve and mania. It doesn’t need to have a scene where three cardboard cutouts masquerading as characters are sewn together anus-to-mouth, surely?  We need a danse macabre - not an arse palaver.

Crass, yes - but valid, I think. I’m perpetually excited by the possibilities of horror, and I honestly believe in it as a force for good. Everyone has nightmares, and horror is one of the only ways we have at our disposal to confront and - if not to conquer - then at least to accept them. It’s an important life experience, and it’s something that art is uniquely suited to do. I enjoyed watching Scream tonight, because it dares to have a go at playing peek-a-boo with people who are otherwise too old to play such games, and it does so marvellously.

Despite this entry’s sense of eulogy, I am reassured that not all hope is lost. You should have seen her face during the opening scene.

Cue manic cackling...

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.

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.