The Jester's Bell, Part One

Moonlight filtered down through burning rafters. Publican Jim Reed struggled to lift the erstwhile roof-beam from his midsection, but it had fallen over not only his abdomen but also his left arm. Both were crushed. Ivory splinters toured arteries, scratching corridor walls. He heard the celebratory laughter of Father Clemence and his retinue of townspeople petering out as they discarded their torches on the other side of the hillock. Reed grappled at the beam with his remaining arm, but only managed to shift it so that it crashed down on the lower section of his left lung. He felt something bubble, and then give way, and his torso housed a breaking dam. Reed began to wheeze, the blood he spat singeing in the crackling flames.

His eyes moved from the encumbering wood up to the moon, and he whispered something under his breath, something much like the words that, in being much too holy, had provoked Father Clemence’s parochial crusade. He looked to his right side then, along the floorboards, and towards the iron trap door that steamed like a griddle beneath conflagrating kegs. Reed smiled at the sight. Death came and froze the irony his face .

By morning, the flesh under Jim Reed’s nose had charred to the bone, making that smile even wider.

…………………….

The eleven thirty-four Virgin Pendolino to London Paddington moved more quickly on the outside. Inside they sipped lattes, occasionally looking out at fields that they would never roam. Megan McColl and Leo Campbell were due to alight at Chippenham before getting the bus to Castle Combe, where they had decided to share a quiet and romantic weekend in fourteenth century pubs and in castles and in other assorted quaint and pretty things. The mini-break would remind them that there was a history outside of themselves, and one that hadn’t all been composed of blood and guts and forced hierarchies, at that: from the looks of the brochure, it was a place that would reassure them that some of the nation’s past had actually been rather lovely. Both Meg and Leo had forgotten whose idea it was to go there.

Meg was reading ‘Pride and Prejudice’ again. Leo had forgotten to bring a book, and his iPod had run out of battery. Initially she was glad about this, because he had always been too cheap to buy headphones of quality and so a tinny reverberation of whatever Bruce Springsteen song he happened to be listening to – and it would definitely be a Springsteen song, as he never listened to anything else - would always infringe upon her relaxation like an adolescent bluebottle. She discovered, however, that the alternative was much more frustrating.

“Which bit are you at?”

He had been asking her that every five minutes, as if he was acutely familiar, on an incident-by-incident level, with every event and emotion in Elizabeth Bennett’s life, and wished to be reminded of each and every one. This literary equivalent of punching someone in the arm whenever you see a yellow car punctured her personal experience of the narrative so unceasingly – the word “the” seemingly qualified as a yellow car - that after an hour she wanted to throttle his neck and throw his pathetic gropings at connection onto the oncoming rails.

“She’s just met Wickham,” she relented.

“Isn’t he the one who dates her older sister? ‘Courts’, I mean.”

Evidently, he wasn’t as familiar with it as she’d thought, and was just bored. This was not something to be welcomed: she had head the adage that ‘only boring people get bored’, but the person who had come up with that one had never met Leo, who had a tendency, whenever ennui struck, to become – in his own eyes, at least - cloyingly, overwhelmingly interesting . She leant over and brought her bag into her lap, and proceeded to fumble within, scrambling for mp3s, praying to the relationship gods that there would be battery power.

“No,” she said, trying hard not to make it sound like the “fuck you” that permanently-holidaying courage would have provided. “That’s Bingley. And she marries him.”

“Bingley, that’s it.” He beamed suddenly. “I remember. I liked him. He was cool.”

She found herself at very risk of starting to hate her favourite book, which was now soiled by his banal textual commentary. Thankfully, at that moment, her fingers clasped around the cold surface of her iPhone and she was free. She told him she was tired, and was going to sleep the rest of the way. She told him she could read the Austen, if he wanted.

Leo didn’t want to read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ again. He didn't particularly enjoy reading books, let alone rereading them: the only reason he was familiar with that one is that, at a time when he still thought it germane to do his homework, she had said it was her favourite. She had read that book five times since they had started seeing each other two years ago, and he got the distinct impression that each time she read it he receded further in her eyes from the ideal that its landed gentry promoted. She seemed unhappy with him again and he could not understand why. A few months ago, this would have angered him, or caused him to worry about how to rectify the situation, but now he did not want to understand why. Situations like this now only left within him a dull tension that was bearable and would only deteriorate were you to fiddle with it further, like an old television with which one has made a compromise: accept the mild interference on the image, because if you start to play with the aerial any more you’ll lose the picture entirely. He would let her sleep now, and make sure to do something charming later to resolve the situation and save the weekend. He started to think about what this adorable act could be (should the situation call for it, he was, if he didn’t mind thinking so himself, always rather good at being adorable), but, petulant that it was again left to him ameliorate matters, he resolved that he would leave thinking it up on the bus from Chippenham. If she was still visibly irritated when she woke up then he wouldn’t bother, anyway. Right now, all that Leo wanted was to look out of the train’s window and to not think about it. He sighed, wondered if that was possible, and wished his iPod hadn’t run out of battery. He could really do with listening to ‘Born to Run’ right now.

 ............................

The village was quiet in a manner that justified the tour guides’ decision to label it serene. They ambled through the old square as a quaint sun shone past spires overhead. They had to amble; there wasn’t enough square to facilitate walking. There was a lot of thatch, though, and a few of pubs and tea shops. That was something they could see themselves doing: a blog had told them that they were supposed to like tea shops. Still, the overwhelming quietude of the village exposed other, less welcome silences, and they grew uneasy with one another. Leo lamented the lack of a Nando’s, in an attempt at compensatory charm for earlier. That only made things worse: unbeknownst to him, his river of charm had run dry a long time ago, and unveiled to Meg a bedrock of overwhelming conceit. Seeing as it was still eleven in the morning - the taverns were out of the question - they decided to sit down at the tables outside a tea room facing the Market Cross. They hoped the blog was right.

Each ordered an earl grey, both (mistakenly) thinking that it was the others favourite. When it arrived, they chinked their cups, and smiled at one another, dappled attractively by the beams refracted off mottled stonemasonry. There was a moment or two where nothing much was said. It was a rather prolonged moment. Meg was loathe to say ‘this is nice’ - that would be as much of a death-knell as bringing out the iPhone - so she delved forthwith into her bag, rifled about, and pulled out the stapled-together printouts she had pertaining to ‘The Prettiest Village in England.’

“I was thinking we could look at the church after this.  Apparently it has some rather lovely stained-glass windows.” She was hoping he’d fail to observe that she had never cared about stained glass windows before in her life.

He looked away from the indeterminate point in space that had been occupying his attention: “Where’s that?”

She regarded the printout, looked right past him, and pointed. “It’s right there.”

It really was right there. Where else would it have been?, they both asked themselves. There wasn’t a lot of town in which it could be.

“Sure, I guess,” he said, before resuming his previous ocular engagement.

She scoured to find something that would interest him further, resenting the fact that she once again had to do so. After a couple of minutes she felt she had reason to interrupt his activity once again.

“Apparently this place we’re staying tonight is haunted!”

“Yeah?” His eyes lit up.

They both loved ghosts. Things that had died and found within or without themselves the supracosmic wherewithal to actually come back fascinated them. They had discovered this shared enthusiasm a few months ago, and it had facilitated the most passionate, lengthy, and cod-philosophical conversation they had shared since the early days when they were still wrapped in each other’s illusions and their eyes were filled with smiles. During this talk, a rekindling felt immanent. Eventually, however, and before that connection could be consummated, something in the conversation had caused them to  stop, and they had been left agitated, awkward and unable to sleep. The accusatory silence had confused them both at the time, but its hidden meaning was beginning to dawn on them: that night they had exposed their shared desire for their relationship to come back, and in doing so they had betrayed the reality of its current state.

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.

'The Call of Cthulhu' via Dr. Seuss

Just came across this on twitter. Isn't it wonderful?

The artist, DrFaustusAU, has done more pages, 

also marvellous and viewable here: http://bit.ly/qi11Q1

"Knives and Teeth": Stanley Cavell on Horror

I'm reading Stanley Cavell's The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (New York: The Viking Press, 1971) at the moment, and I just came across a paragraph on horror films, which follows an appreciation of Hitchcock that takes in To Catch a Thief, Marnie, The Birds, and Notorious. This elegant paragraph, on page 67 and dealing with the power of the projected nightmare, is worthy of quotation:

"In horror movies, sexuality is not suggested but directly coded onto, or synchronised with, the knives and teeth as they penetrate. Here is an obvious reason not to be quick about equating films with dreams. Most dreams are boring narratives (like most tales of neurotic or physical symptoms), their skimpy surface all out of proportion with their riddle interest and their effect on the dreamer. To speak of film adventures or glamours or comedies as dreams is a dream of dreams: it doesn't capture the wish behind the dream, but merely the wish to have interesting dreams. But horror films specifically do infuse boring narratives with the skin-shrinking haunts of dreams."

It's quite something, isn't it? 

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.