Prologue
I
watched as the urine coloured lights began to crawl over the Palace Pier like a
hundred thousand lice. From somewhere behind the traffic Vivian shouted,
“Frank, Frank, where are you going Frank?”
Her
voice was ridiculous- the voice of a flapping pantomime dame.
All of the holidaymakers and the families pushed along
the long neck of the Pier, strolling through the heat, like lazy swaggering
bubbles, with inane smiles on their faces and Jesus Christ I thought! Jesus
Christ, it was as though the sun had melted their faces, like lazy swaggering
bubbles, their malleable, waxy features folding into expressions of bleary joy.
A boiled, shrieking girl, raw from the sun, looked up
at me, chocolate ice cream smeared across her cheeks, forehead and wet mouth.
She angrily waved her empty cone, scratching with her useless little fingers at
where grains of sand had stuck to the stickiest patches of her red face. Keep
fighting little fish, I thought, you’re going nowhere. And in fact it was true,
the child was strapped into her pram just as I was strapped into mine and you
were strapped into yours. The dark shadow of her mother, hidden in the shade of
a sweating doughnut stand, blew out cigarette smoke like a bullock and laughed
at the reddening sky.
But still, the waves turned over and over, crashing
grey water onto toenail shells and bottle tops. I looked away from the child,
holding my hands over my ears to drown her the sound of her mad screams, and
down to the beach at a man wearing green shoes, carrying a plastic shopping bag
made heavy with hard dog shit. He walked
down by the gobbing sea edge followed by a mud brown cocker spaniel.
The breeze lifted the back of my light summer shirt
and I stood there feeling peaceful until a fat boy bumped into me. His luminous
bum bag fell onto the black gangway. He looked at me, I looked at him.
‘Fuck off,’ I shouted.
‘Sheeyt,’ said the boy. He had a German accent and
eyes that understood nothing. Behind the boy a drenched pigeon with bright pink
feet compassed his options with his pinprick head and flew into the end of the
day.
The sun collapsed into the sea and I began to walk.
One
Throughout his life Frank’s main problem was that both
of his parents had been eaten by sharks. During his youth he lived with his
Grandmother, who had survived the attack by staying on board the family yacht,
oiled and oblivious until she noticed that the stern whiteness of the boat was
outlined in a plumby, almost fruity kind of red.
The boy, who later became a man, only met his mother
and father twice. Firstly at his birth, where his vision was impaired by blood
and other gunk and secondly, when they leant over his cot before they went
away, dressed in yellow and laughing excitedly. ‘Hey there baby,’ said his
mother. The radio played ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)’ and his
mother hummed along while stuffing an enormous set of suitcases with perfumes,
which she wrapped in sports socks and floppy panama hats. On this second
occasion Frank was only two days old and because of this Frank remembered very
little of his mother and even less of his father.
He was told small truths by various Aunts while they
were falling asleep beside the fire, or waking up on sun chairs.
‘She loved diamonds, even when she was a little girl,
she only wanted diamonds. No ponies like the other little girls, always diamonds
Frank. Pass me my glass.’
Frank
looked at his leather loafers.
‘What was her favourite colour?’ he asked.
‘That’s enough Frank. Move out of my sun.’
From
these snippets Frank imagined his mother as a little girl to look something
like a pattern of light falling through the leaves of a tree or the sunshine
that caught on the water at the seaside, surrounded by people and sparkling
sublimely. But later he learnt that his parents had very few friends and
actually blackmailed a young couple to play tennis with them at the end of
their last summer.
In the attic Frank found several unfinished portraits;
usually one eyed or crippled, with no hands or feet. His mother had been an
amateur painter but called off her debut exhibition in favour of a cocktail
evening at a bar, which was decorated in rich colours and called, The Pretenders. He also found out
that his father, a part-time expert in fishing, had once caught a giant carp
but hadn’t bother to gut it and left it on the path outside the sun room to
rot. ‘I fancy gammon tonight,’ he said to the cook, his voice, the voice of a
film-star, echoed through Frank‘s head.
His mother and father lived in a soft dishonest light, in photographs
where they played golf and smiled as though they had never been ripped into
pieces by sharks at all.
It was true that both of his parents had
found it difficult to trust. This was undoubtedly because of their enormous wealth and had forced
them to fire a total of twenty-seven dishonest house staff. For their final
holiday they left him in the care of a Spanish woman, who was one of the last
employees available from the agency in town. They exited into the sunshine, double
locking the doors with the only bunch of keys so that no one could leave or
enter. In the open-top Saab his mother had laughed with his father, imagining
the Spanish woman escaping down the creeper ivy with their silver candlesticks.
The sun lit Frank’s mother’s teeth, so that they looked opaque and her floral headscarf
whipped the back of her skull.
Unfortunately, after the attack, when Frank’s
Grandmother had located her spectacles and realised her situation she remained
drunk on the yacht for several weeks, until she drifted ashore, half dead and
delirious.
Frank and the Spanish woman stayed in the house
for the first month of Frank’s life, surviving, in the last week, on soft
bananas and apples.
The Spanish woman smoked two hundred and ninety-six of
Frank’s father’s good cigarettes and, when his Grandmother returned, stepping
over the baby, who had been left at the foot of the stairs, she escaped out of
the backdoor with several thousand pounds worth of jewellery.
Two
I followed that pigeon for a quarter of a mile down
the road and then took the bus with almost the last of my pay packet. I wore
vast shades (they are not my vast shades- they belong to Vivian.) I took them
out of her, (Vivian’s) handbag because the sun had been very strong that
morning. Now I wore them so that no one could see that I was watching the
pigeon, watching him watching me. Little cock gobbling prophet. He always stepped
sideways, his attentive ginger eye watching me.
The two small thick coins were new and polished and
when I moved my hand they caught the light and looked beautiful. In contrast
the large coin was almost black with a strip of bronze showing hard around the
Queen’s face. Illuminate my fate. The brass woman looked stern and angry and I
wondered for a second if she looked angry on all the coins of lesser value. ‘Bitch,’
I said quietly into my hand.
The pigeon looked at me like I was a fruity loop.
I had been working every day that week and spending
the early hours shaking in the freezing bathroom. Refreshing. Companies in
Brighton (and other places in the UK) pay 3% less than inflation as part of
their policy. Once I was so hungry that I stole a Pink Lady (apple), ‘tell it
to the Judge,’ they said. So I did. ‘People like you make me sick!’ That’s what
he said. You’ve got to believe me. It’s only in the movies because it’s true.
If you can’t trust Hollywood, Brad. I had taken to biting my fingernails so far
down that they bled. Stigmata for the modern tomartar![1] I
was very tired and my thoughts had started to become spontaneous, as if I
hadn’t thought them myself at all.
It took me twelve minutes to walk to the bus stop. I
decided to time every part of my journey on my stopwatch so that I could
explain the story accurately to my children and their children if I were to
have any children and they were to have children too. I imagined Vivian filled
with seeds, her belly round and her face as rosy as a Pink Lady, babies at her
feet and deliciousness in her eyes as I told her what I had done.
It made me feel safer too, as I watched the eyelashes
tickling the face of my watch that these seconds had always been in the same
minutes who were in the same hours every single day. Everything was normal[2]
and I began to feel as though I was shaking snow from my limbs, warmth
spreading through my body, which was growing lighter, but then heavier at the
same time.
I saw an elderly woman who was handing out Samaritan
leaflets and as my eyes flickered I thought very briefly about how nice it
would be to know her and also about what was under her dress. The bus filled
with tourists who pulled their souvenirs up the stairs so that they could look
at the globes[3] of the Royal Pavilion[4]
and the homeless people who drunk cider in its arches from the top deck. Then
people who had come out of the hospital wanted to get on and the bus driver had
to lower the step for the ones who were in wheelchairs and they were meek and
vulnerable and therefore at the back of the queue and they sat downstairs with
their bags pulled into their chests. Several of the outpatients had soft clumps
of matted hair on the backs of their heads where they had been laid on their
backs to be pumped with things for weeks and months and years. I felt sick and
had to look away.
I let my cheek slap[5]
against the glass and watched, as the bus engine started up, the woman putting
her leaflets in her handbag and struggling with her shopping. A vision
stealthily crept into my mind and in the space it took me to blink, I imagined
her crunching under the tyres of the bus and her flesh grinding into the
concrete, her fingers splayed as though waving. I could only assume that this
was because of my tremendous fatigue and to prove it I picked up my head to
smile broadly at her as the bus moved on. She looked frightened and backed into
the doorway of an off licence. I could see urine soaking into her canvas shoes.
She wore no socks.
It was illogical[6]
but I spent the next half an hour wondering if people on the bus could read my
thoughts.
When a young girl, who sat with a collapsible walking
stick folded into her poppy covered skirt, turned her soft blonde head around
to look at me for the third time I decided to get off the bus and break my
journey up by walking for a while. I walked medium- fast, with my head down and
my blue and green rucksack cutting red and white into my shoulder. The idea of
keeping my head down was to avoid contact with the others but with my eyes on
the ground I saw several dogs. Every time I turned a corner a mongrel seemed to
be looking up at me with disapproving caramel eyes. One had crapped royally on
the floor near the brick supermarket and a man with startling green shoes leant
down to pick up the mess. He was so old and when he bent over with the poop bag
he fell to his knees and his left hand broke the soft seal of the shit, smearing
it up the pavement. The dog licked itself, fluttering its long eyelashes in
disdain, but the old man was perfectly still, apart from the shaking of his
arms and legs, which quivered from the effort it was taking to support his
frame.
I stood for a minute in the shadow of a skip, which
was piled high with slats of wood and orange bags decorated with black skulls.
I thought about helping the man. That man is lying in shit I thought and
through gritted teeth I said to myself, I really did, I said, ‘Why would a man lie in shit? What kind of a
man would do that?’ I looked at the floor and my shoes- the leather around the
tongue had cracked and was constantly bent, curling upwards, even when I took
them off. Ashamed of my hesitation I began to kick at the side of the skip. I
felt the end of my toes burn with pain and bit my forefinger. It tasted of
grease and oil. And then I was skipping, dancing, swapping feet to kick until I
thought that the loon had probably gone and I was sure that my toes were bleeding
and I leapt out from behind the skip and shouted![7]
But the old man really had gone and I carried on walking up the high street
with the key cold and dead in my pocket and my shoulders covered in snow and
misery.
No comments:
Post a Comment