Almost Insentient, Almost Divine Page 8

I wonder what Nigel would have made of my guest. He is even quieter than Nigel, but in many ways that is his great strength. It is a different kind of quiet you see. Nigel was all inside himself. When I discussed the day’s business and items that had interested me from the newspaper, or the wireless, it was as though I were chattering on about a recipe for puff pastry. His grumbling returns of conversation were simply a confirmation of his distance. I would have preferred the blankness I am greeted with from Mr Egare—it speaks of strength, I find. Yes, strength is almost the term for it; blankness, on the other hand is not. No, it is not blankness, but rather a complete openness. Some would see idiocy where I see wisdom. When I look at his face I see a skin darkened by months in the sun and the elements. It is as rough as brown sacking. His features might as well be etched upon it with a rough piece of coal for all the indication they give of the life that beats within him. But, beyond this, there is an immersion in the heart of existence itself; a sort of timeless, and infinite quality about him. The kind of quality one finds normally in an heirloom, or treasured possession from childhood. Yes, the infinite is what I sense in Mr Egare. He has no need of a voice; none of us do. Our voices are already the wind, our conversation the song of birds and our thoughts the opening of a leaf at sunrise to gather sustenance. And so what if he stuffs his battered coat with straw to keep the cold winds at bay, who am I to judge him. Our evenings together are wonderful—serene—now that I have pushed the old dining room table and chairs into the corner and we can sit there in our deckchairs with the doors thrown open wide, gazing up at the slowly burning stars until it is dawn. What are days anymore but the gradual immersion into the permanent drift of the world.

  4th September 1964—Four years today since Daniel’s death.

  I do not think I shall write my journal anymore. It has ceased to be of any importance and I have often found myself feeling beholden to it. It was just such a sense of obligation that Mr Egare has released me from and I have no wish to shackle myself unnecessarily. I received a stern letter from Helen the other day informing me that she had been talking with some in the village and that they are very concerned for me. She doesn’t want to bring the girls here until I have been to the doctor’s for a “check-up”—well, she can stick that euphemism for a start! I have not replied. I could not care one bit for the gossips and their false concern for my welfare. Let the grass cover their dwellings and the moss stuff up their mouths!

  My Egare is here now and I think I shall ask him to stay. Without him, I don’t think I should have ever had the courage to come back to the world—the real world that is!—with all its bountiful, lush grasses and enchanting, hidden places. I would have never felt that flush of vitality again that keeps the land aglow. It is strange, these days I feel as fresh and blooming as the days when I was heavy with Daniel. The world is never truly lost, it only slides and aches into stranger, richer pastures, freshened every year by the folding of the soil.

  A Hive of Pain

  Evening at The Hard, 1951

  The work is over. The air reeks with the sweat of loading and unloading, the packing and craning of the sprat boxes, the stacking upon the low barges that catch the flow into the great city, or the sliding onto squat trucks for the short journey to the railway station. Morning markets for miles around will soon be bustling with the keen barter of this silvery bounty. But the sea does not erase the memories of toil and tragedy. Evening at The Hard is an in-between time, where fantasy mingles with bruised and broken skin.

  The evening tide brings its fresh breeze that erases the stench of trade. The last scavenging gulls desert the masts of the boats that are propped for cleaning and tarring. The jetty creaks, its timbers groaning the lament of generations who have left their mark, if only the slightest of splinters, upon it. But this place is never silent, staring out, as it has for centuries, upon the meeting of the Colne, Blackwater and Thames, and then on into the depths of the North Sea, and away to the darkness of ice and ruin.

  With the evening comes another harbour life. The making of deals and the haggling over flesh. Coins circulate at The Hard, coating their surfaces thicker with every oily transaction. There upon The Hard, outside the old black beams of The Anchor Inn, you will find the workers of the evening, with the little splashes of colour upon their grey garments—so that their Spartan world can shine briefly before the brown dawn mires them back within the world again.

  The Anchor has not served a drop for thirty years, its owner long since gone away, some say for leisure (as arcane a concept here as calculus) or to safeguard his health. But, for those who remain, these are commodities rarely to be enjoyed or recovered—they are simply the offerings made to placate the screeching lunacy of the sea and her bewildering, fickle, munificence; laughter and bones are traded, ounce for ounce, for scales and shells, all weighed by the mystery of tides.

  But in the evening they play at being human. Sally with her pink shawl, and coquettish little strut. Jack and Terry with their blue neckerchiefs, attempting makeshift tunes on oil-drums, or crates, or spoons. Bill and Bert, with sprigs of purple heather poking from their pockets (a gypsy gift), lighting Dutch tobacco in their craterous pipes. As the evening progresses others gather, as though the shadows had spawned them and night incubated them. And when Sally has done her rounds and all are satiated they understand another camaraderie. Sometimes there are bawdy songs, but always there is laughter and storytelling. At times it is a little dicey, when the knives come out and the improvised tables are turned over, the voices raised—but that is the passion of the evening. Soon it returns to the craft of drinking, from stout barrels and unlabelled bottles that have been brought in from foreign places, potent and earthy.

  In the evening, at The Hard, they drink to forget the dying day. They drink to forget the impending night. They drink to forget the French fields, where their friends fell. They drink to forget the German woods, where their enemies fell. They drink to forget the wastelands, where foreign hordes are gathering and the bunkers overflowing with apocalypse. They drink to forget the drone of bombers and the wail of infants, the scream of shrapnel and the sigh of bullets.

  In the evening, at The Hard, we drink to celebrate survival. Another day will come when we will not be so lucky; when the falling and the gathering, the wailing, screaming and sighing begins again.

  Stow-boats Far Up Shore

  Worn and grey as the pebbles that cradle their husks, as bleached and decayed as the bones of the men that worked them, their once dark timbers have been leeched into the sea by rain, snow and the coastal air, and then dried in the violent gaze of an occasional sun. They are the carcasses of friendly beasts, discarded after faithful labour; their wooden bones plundered for firewood, their metal parts stripped and re-used, or melted into new forms, more suited to the work of a new world. Their once fine masts and sails are ashes and rags.

  Is it a disgrace that their last resting place is far up shore, these sad carapaces of watery insects that never made it home? They are the standing stones of an accomplished empire whose people left long ago. They stand, inscrutable emblems pondered over by the banker and the clerk, with their tuppence of cockles and their grey lives governed by other sigils and ebbs of time; they will never decipher the etchings of eternity.

  Old Moley

  His thoughts are tuned to the ripples of eddies above the mud banks, the billowing clouds of approaching storms, the presentiments of bird-flocks and the odour of changing seasons hinted on the Northerly winds. His domain is a place between sea and river, between two communities, between safety and danger, between death and life.

  Old Moley is the ferryman, even the elderly recall his barge upon the Reach when they were children, transporting sheep and cattle and then the growing numbers of holidaymakers with their flesh as white as crabmeat. His gabardined figure is eternal, floating through the morning mists and fading into the sunsets. Odd Charon, does he return to an earthy burrow for the night, his ceiling the twined roots of an oak tree, his
soil walls hung with simple watercolours of forests and hills?

  An Oyster

  The oysterman relishes the warmer weekend days that bring the crowds, eager for relief from the smoky city drudgery. He sets out his wares upon an old barrel, six for a shilling, with vinegar and salt. He performs his Saturday role as a true showman, gliding his stubby knife into the thin crease between the shells. It makes a noise like a key in a rusted lock, or the opening of a sarcophagus.

  His first customers are a couple, with their daughter. They are keen to make the most of their day—a rare treat—and have arrived on the first train and now stand at The Hard, looking out upon the misty morning harbour, its muddy, naked banks emanating pungent wafts of rotten, briny decomposition. The father is a drayman, or a leatherworker, still in his dusty work suit (the bright cloth revealing the ghostly outline of his apron). He has the air of an older world. His young, excitable wife wears a bright yellow dress (with seaming by her own unsteady, inexperienced hands) and heavy sheepskin coat. She is now a typist, or a secretary, keen to maintain her freedom, glimpsed as a land girl, or in the munitions factory. They are two continents colliding, bringing together perplexed civilisations who cannot fathom the others’ customs or traditions. One will win and one will fade. Only the desperate cries of their bodies are means through which they can communicate, in a language as ancient as animals; where words becomes feral scents and syntax the shudder of ecstasy. The girl, four or five years old, is the product of their bizarre diplomacy. She is a stiff, uncertain thing, buttoned in a duffel coat, teetering in oversized wellingtons, and a yellow sunhat of the same material as her mother’s dress, bearing similar marks of imperfect manufacture. She stands at the jetty looking out upon the sea; a thing, some thrashing violent being, she has never seen before.

  Father buys a half dozen and seasons them liberally, to make the most of his shilling. He toys a moment with the first, dabbing it about in its smooth, milky shell. It is as grey as the ghost of his youth, as formless as his memory; a rich and delicate food that has reared his ancestors for generations.

  Unperceivable, its strange body shivers with the sharp sting of the vinegar.

  With two churns of his equine jaw the thing is chewed and swallowed. The little girl giggles and dances as he wipes his mouth with his cuff and laughs. Three more follow quickly, barely touching his tongue.

  The girl, recovering from her squeamishness, is desperate to try one. He obliges, bending down so that she can sniff the shell. She recoils in disgust and runs to her mother, who laughs. The oysterman laughs. Father laughs, almost choking as he swallows it whole.

  There is only one left. Her courage returns. He feigns refusal. She squeals. They laugh again. Hungry gulls cry overhead.

  She sups the vinegary juice from the shell and her face crumples with the taste of sharp acidic brine, her nose recoiling from the stink of the weird creature that looks to her like a stain of playground vomit. In one brave move, almost retching, she slurps the thing down, dribbles, and laughs, nervously. She does not want to fail before father. She does not want to be ungrateful. He wipes the trail of vinegar from her chin with his thumb, ingrained with a decade of filth.

  They depart, for a walk along the promenade, or up to the tower. Today is a day for discoveries.

  I take six oysters, unopened. I have my own knife. I will find a quiet place up on Stone Point. Perhaps I will find a rough pearl.

  Fishermen’s Gloves

  Hanging limply on a wooden crate, discarded at the moment when the call of hearth is louder than the whine of money. The remnants of a relentless ritual; as fragile as udders and as eternal. The skin of another life; a stinking, savage world of battle and butchery, of ropes and rigging, wood and water. The armour of a weary warrior whose days are numbered. In the embers of evening they are as pink and raw as Sally’s areola; for she is a fair girl, wanton and needy.

  View from Bateman’s Tower

  Sad and lonely, out at the end of the promenade, stands a tower built for rest; a tower built in filial love. Its sad and lonely windows would once have framed a sad and lonely face. Its bricks might once have heard her sad and lonely voice, answering with an echo. The low roof that offered shelter from the elements would have resounded with the racks of her consumptive cough and the stairs would have applauded with her soft footfalls as she paced her tender prison. Her eyes, oozing like cracked limpets, would have scanned the wasteland, as I do now. Out, across Westmarsh she would have seen the dull brown boggy flats, dotted with low fern-like plants that cling to some primordial life amidst the saltwater and the sewage. On then, her failing vision would catch the dull grey water, as dead as a December day. In summer the light waves would torment her as they flicked the sun’s murmuring rays up at her, sparkling like fool’s gold. On still, into the distance, when the fog had dissipated, she might identify a shadow of land over at Mersea, or Sandy Point. Then she would remember the wide world and its endless harbours and jetties, its muddy daubings of land into sea, and its crude cliffs and monstrous mountains. A yacht might have flashed by, sails full of the air that was meant to save her. Its tacking crew, pausing in their absurd dance across the deck, may have waved and shouted to the silhouette they saw at the windows. She will have breathed deeply of that pungent air, in the hope that one day she might join them, enjoying the bounty of her father’s labours; his bright and beautiful daughter. But it was not to be, and as she traced her hands across the sills of her deadly retreat she turned to the low, dead land behind her, that in centuries, or millennia, would lie engulfed in icy death, or beneath tropical seas. There among the soils and skies, in a mirroring of the browns and greys of the water, she saw the trees up at Furze Hill, rising like a green promise of fertility and permanence. Her sad and lonely thoughts turned once more to coughs, coffins and cemeteries; the meeting of bodies, wood and earth.

  Sally’s Cerement

  Her sandy grave was discovered by a gummy boot, kicking stones across the shore. Down on the slow curve of the promenade, before the abandoned beach-huts, one can find many things brought in by the tantrums of the night waves. This little parcel had been stashed some weeks before by one eager to leave an impression, to demonstrate their artistry, and be sure their efforts would be admired. Another angry little Ripper, sad because of mummy, daddy, or other losses; mad for vengeance, or mad for the Book, the law, morality, or mad with the madness of it all. Whatever his reasons he left his brutal etchings upon our Sally and packaged her up properly so that we might read the messages of his mind.

  But any art he thought he had wrought was nothing to the work of molluscs, urchins, bacteria and worms that had already found their way inside the folds of the waxy sail she had been wrapped in. As a few of us unfurled her we found the feast in full, gluttonous abandon. Her fair skin was even fairer now, plumped with water. She could have looked better than she had in years if it had not been for the burrowing tapestry these shore creatures had left upon her; trails of blue, green and crimson through her fine cheeks, and from her chest erupted battalions of scuttling claws and racing forms, writhing sandworms seemed to leer and probe towards the light, searching for freedom; her whole surface transformed into a teeming warren of feeding and frolicking. Her mouth was crammed with glasswort, as were her nostrils and ears, the meaning of this gesture lost upon us. As the stench became unbearable we wrapped her back in the sail as the sirens approached.

  In another life she would have been content to have caught the bus, at first light, to the canning factory, with Doris and the other girls. She would have settled down with a Thomas, Richard, Henry, or other hearty lad, and borne him five children, rather than having them “brung on” by Mrs Stern in the attic of a boarding house in Colchester. She would have discovered, in the labour of the black stove and the fireplace, the splendour of ashes and the miracle of nourishment as her years collapsed into the hard bones of her sons. She would have seen time for what it was, a tumbling compost, manured regularly.

  In
stead, her eyes are black gems, once bright with dreadful yearnings for that secret code this world will never disclose.

  A Simnel Cake

  Bread and fish are our staple. Beyond this we still have the cursed coupons regulating the pleasures of meat and sugar. As Europe rises from ruin we must subsist and stare through our grey dawns in the hope of another future for the children.

  It is a rare hot morning and the strange sun is agony. I stagger to the bakery to secure my small loaf. I see the town characters doing their rounds, walking their paths as they have like clockwork for twenty, thirty, forty years. We have each ground our little marks upon this place, pounding the earth as the baker does his dough, in the hope that something new will arise. But our plod is unfathomable.

  I see a bloom of children, their dirty noses pushed against the bakery window; their breath as desperate as the panting of rabid dogs. The object of their passion sits on a dais of plaster columns: a Simnel cake. Its dusty yellow surface ripples, and the rich luxury beneath appears to throb with life. The children coo and ahh.

  I watch the energy of movement upon it, for it is resplendent with wasps; each one marching his shiny armoured frame about its surface, nibbling and biting, gnawing and spitting, gorging upon the tiny blocks of marzipan whose forgotten symbols crumble under their hungry attack. The children’s voices are filled with a cruel glee as they watch what they could never have disintegrate and fall; what lust for decay, what delight in decimation.

  But the whole window is feverish with the insects. Their fragile legs flail through swamps of icing-covered buns, their antennae test the crenellations of pastries and their mechanical mandibles continue the assault upon the masterwork. The baker, oblivious, fills the shopping bags of grey-haired ladies in camphor-scented summery dresses. They are buoyed by his window of sweet offerings and are giving up the last of their coupons for a frenzy of greed. They are as drunk with the smell of yeast and sugar as the insects parading their angry exhilaration before us.