COPYRIGHT

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014

Copyright © Lee Rourke 2014

Lee Rourke asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007542512

Ebook Edition © July 2014 ISBN: 9780007542529

Version: 2015-06-03

From the reviews of Vulgar Things:

‘Sad, lost men looking for maps in the starry Essex sky, small-town strippers, absent mothers, angry brothers, planets photographed on smart phones, cider and a lot of rare steak – Rourke is on his way to becoming the J. G. Ballard of Southend-on-Sea’

Deborah Levy

‘A consistently disturbing yet compelling vision of loss, violence and identity, Vulgar Things stalks the reader’s memory long after the last page. A novel of innovation and resonance, it is as bleak and as beautiful as a deserted coastline’

Stuart Evers

DEDICATION

For Wilko Johnson

My mind shudders recounting.

Virgil: The Aeneid

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

Maybe Someone is Wondering Just What I’m Doing Here

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Back in the Night I Lay Down by Your Fireside

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

MAYBE SOMEONE IS WONDERING JUST WHAT I’M DOING HERE
an office

Look at them both sitting at their desks, feigning important business. What do they think they’re doing with their lives? What are they hoping to achieve, acting the way they do, alienating everyone else in the office? I’ve asked myself many, many times: What am I doing here? I’m pretty much resigned to the fact that I’ve more or less chosen the wrong path in life. Not that I have any idea what the correct path might be. I look at what my life, until now, has amounted to: a boring job, a failed marriage, a small flat I can barely afford, and each working day the same agonising prospect of these two loathsome cretins, sitting at their desks, constantly talking to one another. It sickens me. To be honest, I don’t think I have the strength for it any more.

lunch hour

Jessica, the younger of the two and my line manager, had taken me to one side in the company kitchen earlier that week. Her words had been rattling around my head ever since, delivered, as they were, in her usual pseudo-flirtatious manner: ‘What’s wrong with you these days? Have you been having trouble at home again?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Have you been having trouble at home, you poor dear? I know things didn’t work out for you last year … your marriage … I’m genuinely worried for you. Is that why you’ve been letting things slip here?’

‘Slip?’

‘Your journals, some haven’t met cover month, when you said they would. Editors have been complaining, plus those suppliers’ invoices haven’t been sent that I asked you to send last week.’

‘Oh, those … I’ll send them today …’

‘Are your journals even on schedule?’

‘Yes, of course they are. I might not have hit cover month on a couple, but everything else I publish is published on schedule, on time and to budget, you know that.’

‘Jon, you know … I only ask you this because I actually care … It’s just that, things are slipping, people’s confidence in you has started to drop … We’re thinking of taking some journals from your list …’

‘What!?’

‘Just a couple … Maybe IBD and VVA … Nothing’s concrete yet, just to ease the pressure you must be feeling, you know … It’ll help ease your schedule … and if, you know, if there are problems outside here, this should ease the stress levels, too …’

‘Jessica, there are no problems outside here … and I’m not stressed …’

‘Well, you sound stressed …’

‘You’ve just told me you’re taking journals away from me, depleting my list … of course I’m going to sound concerned …’

‘Jon, I know you can pull through all this, it’s just a phase … a bad patch. I know you can get through this.’

‘Jessica … there’s no …’

‘Oh, I didn’t say … You’re still on for my engagement drinkies this weekend, yes? Blacks of course …’

‘…’

My time is up. Publishing is nothing to me. To be honest, I don’t even remember how I fell into this profession in the first place. I’m a good editor, I think, but the job bores me to tears. It must have been some kind of accident, some heinous sleight of hand – something that happened when I was looking the other way.

I’ve had a sense something has been wrong for some time. Jane, Jessica’s boss and the head of production, has been in a strange mood for a number of days, singing loudly and quite inappropriately to Jessica across the office, annoying the editorial team to her immediate right, who suffer on a daily basis at the hands of this bizarre office friendship, which I and a few others have always thought unprofessional at the best of times and verging on surreal the rest. Today, each time I look up from my proofs Jane is staring at me, and then I’ll notice her glance over to Jessica when she thinks I’m not looking, who in turn pulls some sort of face back at her, as if to say: ‘I know, I know, I’ll sort him out.’ I try to ignore this behaviour as best I can, but it’s no good. I bury my head in the proofs I’m working on, hoping this phase will pass – but it doesn’t.

As usual I go for my lunch alone. I sit on a bench in St James’s Park across the way from the ICA in some sort of stupor. I don’t think, or look at much in particular. I can sense people all around me, office workers and tourists going about their business. Everything in front of me – people, birds in trees, dogs and squirrels in the park, cars and cyclists on the Mall – I can’t reach, whatever it is that is happening, because I’m stuck in it. I feel helpless. There’s nothing I can do – and the way I’m feeling, even if there were I probably wouldn’t bother to do it. This sense of helplessness stays with me all through my lunch hour, like a bad smell.

I walk back into the office and immediately notice Jessica staring at me. I ignore her and walk over to my desk to check my emails. There are thirty-seven unopened emails in my inbox, all of them from this morning. I sit there looking at them, pretending to be busy. I can feel Jessica’s eyes on the side of my face, my cheeks reddening. I try my best to ignore what is happening. Then, just as I let out an exasperated ‘What!?’ in Jessica’s direction, I notice the email from Jane. It had been sent exactly one minute after I had left for lunch, as I was walking out of the building. I don’t bother reading all of it. I know immediately what it is.

everything looks as it should

I knock on the door to Meeting Room 4 as requested. Jane is sitting at the table. She doesn’t smile. I sit opposite her.

‘Jon, there’ve been some serious complaints made by editors … about your productivity and capability … The editors of IBD, for example, they didn’t see the final set of proofs before issue 5 went to press … and …’

‘It’s okay, I know.’

‘We just don’t think it’s working, Jon.’

‘Really.’

‘Jessica thinks you’re unsuitable for this role, she’s been keeping me posted for the past few weeks … She feels …’

‘Jane, I’m not interested in how Jessica feels … Just give me the letter.’

I walk out of the office without clearing my desk. At the door I look back – everything looks just as it should: people are at their desks, oblivious, heads down correcting proofs, or up staring at their monitors, working. Only one thing looks out of place: Jessica’s empty desk. She hasn’t even bothered waiting until I’ve left the building before scurrying over to her pal in Meeting Room 4. I exhale and walk out of the door.

into a room

I walk into Soho. I need a drink and something to eat. I take a seat in Spuntino’s on Rupert Street and order a bottle of red wine and some truffled egg toast. Two portions for myself. I immediately feel calmer, but it doesn’t last all that long. Two men sit down beside me and ruin my thoughts. They are loud. Media types. They work in the film industry and want everyone to know. I can’t hear myself think, so I just sip my wine and listen to them instead, staring down at my food.

‘When are they shooting?’

‘June.’

‘Where?’

‘Dunno. Somewhere near Kingsland Road. They’ve found some old buildings.’

‘Who’s shooting?’

‘Stevens.’

‘From United Agents?’

‘Yes. He’s shooting that before he heads out to LA for the location meetings on Rob’s project.’

‘Really.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Never really liked his stuff …’

‘Really?’

‘He holds back. Tries to fuck the lens. In fucking love with the lens. Spends too much time finding the right shot and then when he’s found it he spends too much time wanking all over it. He should just fucking shoot … He’s not an artist, say, like Dom is; now Dom’s a true artist, he finds the right shot without thinking, bam, bam, bam …’

‘Bish bash bosh …’

‘Ha, yeah, right … but seriously, he doesn’t fuck about. His art just happens; do you know what I mean?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And then there’s all the fucking gak …’

‘Yeah, that.’

‘He puts too much up his nose, thinks it’s the fucking eighties … He can’t see for gak sometimes … I saw him last week. He was with some office temp from his production company, giving it the large with her; she’s all wide-eyed around him like he’s some fucking god. He’s got his fat married hands all over her skinny arse. Fucking sad to witness … He bought me drinks, though, so what can you say? I don’t care if it was just to impress the slag, I’ll fucking drink them. I spent the afternoon in the French with him, before he fucked off to the Groucho with her. He told me about the shoot, he told everyone about it … Everyone in Soho knows how much his fucking budget is …’

‘Really.’

‘Just go and fucking shoot, that’s what I say, stop fucking talking about it and go and fucking shoot the fucker.’

‘Yeah.’

The two men continue in this manner for the rest of their meal, fiddling with their phones all the while. I listen to every word and finish my food. It’s a cyclical, looped conversation: a spiral of ‘shoots’, ‘budgets’, ‘gak’ and ‘locations’. It’s pointless and completely fascinating. Just as they are leaving, I look up at the taller of the two, intent on gaining eye contact.

‘What’s the name of the film?’

He looks at me quizzically when I ask him this, and then looks at his colleague as if to say: ‘Why don’t these people just leave us the fuck alone?’

‘Pardon?’

‘The film you were just talking about … What’s it called?’

‘It’s an ad, not a film … for Nike.’

I don’t know why I ask him this. I feel compelled to ask. I’m not remotely interested in what it is they do for a living. I just feel they need to know I’ve been listening. I’d tuned into their frequency by accident. I can re-tune, should I wish, to something far more interesting. They walk out of the door, heading up through the alleyway that leads to Old Compton Street, both still embroiled in the same conversation. I watch them until they vanish out of view. I even lean forward on my stool to see if I can catch a final glimpse, but it’s no good, they’ve gone. I finish the rest of my wine, settle the bill, and walk out onto the street.

I head in the same direction: out through the alleyway, past the clip joints and porn shops, and out onto Old Compton Street. I am buzzing, distinctly aware of each and every person sweeping around me, each sight and sound on the busy Soho streets. I’m not really sure where I’m going, or why. It doesn’t matter. I bathe in the dislocation from my usual routine, allowing the nowness of my predicament to cover me. I trust it completely. So I follow it without thought or question.

petty dramas

Rather predictably I find myself in another bar, the Montagu Pike, a horrible, cavernous wreck of a place stuffed with chrome furniture and blatherskites. I sit upstairs on the balcony, looking down at the swathes of daytime drinkers. It feels good up here, drinking beer after beer, looking down on them. It feels like I belong on some separate level, something higher: a plateau designed only for people like me – whatever I am. Sometimes I catch people looking up at me between sips and conversation, flashes of face and eye, vacant features pointing upwards, like you see in old religious paintings. I feel like the icon, the subject of their gaze. It’s a good feeling, no matter how fleeting and inconsequential. So I stay here all afternoon, until the streets of Soho darken – drinking, watching, being watched.

As I am about to leave I strike up a conversation with a member of the bar staff as she wipes down the tables around me. She is young and looks bored. I feel a bit sorry for her, stuck in such an awful pub at this hour.

‘Not long to go, eh?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Not long until closing …’

‘Oh, yeah, closing …’

‘You must hate it here?’

‘It’s okay …’

‘People like me bothering you all the time; it must bore you to tears?’

‘Not really.’

‘Oh, why?’

‘I like being around people … What about you?’

‘Me?’

‘Why are you here? I’ve been watching you all day sitting up here, looking down on everyone, drinking cheap beer; surely it’s you that’s bored?’

‘I was sacked from my job today …’

‘Really? What do … did you do?’

‘I was a production editor, at a small academic publisher. They sacked me because I wasn’t … productive enough.’

‘Silly billy.’

‘Yeah. I guess I am.’

‘Maybe this is the start of something new? … a new adventure for you.’

‘Another petty drama? … I doubt it.’

She continues to wipe down the tables, long after our conversation has run its rudimentary course. I like her. She seems to bounce from table to table, the same bored look on her face. I want to be just like her, I want to look and feel just like her. But I know this isn’t the case – should a mirror be at hand, I’d see a look of abject terror on my face. A deep fixed terror. I stumble up from my chair and walk somewhat clumsily back down the stairs towards the front door. I feel the cold night air as I step onto Charing Cross Road. I have two options: a) go home to my poky flat, or b) carry on drinking. It doesn’t take much thought to go with the latter.

some sort of theatre

I stumble into the Griffin on Clerkenwell Road. What I can only describe as some kind of miasma, a fug of sorts, has blurred my vision, in fact my perception. I feel behind-time, having no idea at this moment what time it is or what I am really doing. I stand at the end of the bar, near the stage, sipping a whiskey, watching a girl dance around a pole. She is no more than twenty years of age, bored, filled with contempt for the assorted men salivating over her in the room. She is wonderful. I didn’t expect to think like this about her, having never ventured into a strip club before. I expected to hate everything and everyone in here, but something else has happened: some form of rapture.

I am soon interrupted by a small lady, maybe in her thirties, dressed in nothing but a red thong, heels and a latex tube around her chest. It looks crude. I suppose that’s the point. She thrusts a pint pot towards me.

‘Quids in … I’m on next, darling.’

She doesn’t really look at me when she says this. I don’t mind, it all feels right somehow. I rummage through my pockets and drop a pound coin into her pot.

‘Come and see me for a private dance later.’

She walks away, swinging her hips, towards a group of men dressed in expensive-looking suits. Married men out for a drink after work. Probably lawyers and solicitors with too much spare change in their pockets, their wives and children tucked up in bed at home. But who am I to judge? They huddle around her, cracking jokes – crude gags – with a familiarity that suggests to me they’re regulars. I decide that I might as well see her later on for a private dance, even though I don’t really like the look of her.

I wait for her at the other end of the bar, near the curtain into the private room. She takes her time getting from the stage and over to where I’m standing. While watching her dance I’d been listening to a conversation between two of the bouncers standing just inside the door. Big, hefty men, who look like they enjoy the constant threat of violence that comes with their job.

‘Listen, I don’t care how much money I owe him. He’s not coming through that door. And if he does, the cunt’s going straight back out through it …’

‘He’s going to be angry with you …’

‘Fuck him.’

‘He could bring trouble …’

‘Fuck him.’

‘Real trouble … gun trouble.’

‘Let him, I’ll fucking eat him alive …’

‘You’ve got to calm down …’

‘Fuck him.’

‘Just calm down. We’ve got a job to do.’

‘I don’t care. It’s his own fault … the fucking lag. Flashing his fucking cash. If he’s so fucking flash and he gives me his money when I want it, then he brings it on himself …’

‘Just pay the man his money back …’

‘Fuck him.’

As she walks through the bar a thought comes to me: this primordial scene is fuelled by absence: wives, children, work, daily lives. It’s a detachment, an easy step aside from the general order of things. It makes perfect sense to me. I smile to myself and order another whiskey from the short, stocky barmaid.

Before I know it the dancer is standing next to me. She acts like I don’t really exist, looking back up to the stage.

‘Will you dance for me?’

‘Of course, darling.’

‘How much?’

‘Fifteen.’

‘Good.’

‘Come with me.’

I follow her through the curtains into a room that I immediately find disappointing. It isn’t ‘private’ for a start: various dancers are dotted about on low platforms, dancing for other men. She leads me to an empty platform in the corner of the room.

‘You can put your drink on there … sit down. What’s your name?’

‘Jon … What’s yours?’

‘Paris.’

She dances for me, taking off what little she is wearing. Having never experienced such a thing before, I enjoy it, at first. Then something terrible begins to happen: her skin starts to peel away, quickly, revealing her red, blood-sodden muscle and sinew – decaying, bubbling and oozing stuff. It feels like I’m watching speeded-up footage of a rotting corpse, the flesh putrefying, turning to liquid, finally foul gas. I try to rub my eyes to shift the terror from them, hoping it’s just the drink fooling me, but it’s no good, the more I try to shift these rotten images the more intense they become. Her flesh falls from her bones, like slow-cooked shanks, onto my lap, my shoes, smearing down my shins, collecting in a purplish, stinking gloop by my feet. I want to be sick. I want to run away, to run out of the bar, but I can’t move. I want to scream at anyone who’ll listen: ‘She’s dead! She’s dead!’ But I can’t make the words in my mouth. The whole room seems to collapse in on me, I whirl within it, spinning.

‘Hey … hey … what’s wrong? Are you okay?’

I look up at her. She’s standing over me, her performance over, trying to feign a smile, but clearly worried.

‘Are you drunk?’

‘No … no … I’ve made a mistake. I shouldn’t have come here … I’m not supposed to be here … that’s all … I really shouldn’t be here …’

‘Fifteen pounds, then …’

‘No … no … I can’t pay. If I pay then it’s real … I’ll just go … I’ll just get out of here and go home.’

‘You’ve got to pay …’

‘No …’

She signals to someone near the curtain who I hadn’t noticed was there when we walked in. Other dancers have stopped now and people are looking over at me. She puts her thong and stockings back on, nearly tripping up as she steps back away from me, just as the hefty bouncer I was listening to moments before walks over to us.

‘He refuses to pay.’

‘Really.’

It happens quickly. I am on my back, chair legs interrupting my vision. He stands over me and demands my wallet. I give it to him. He passes the fifteen pounds to the girl and then throws the wallet back at me. Something hits me in the ribs and the air disappears from my lungs. I am gasping for breath. Suddenly I’m being dragged across the stinking carpet; I can feel it burn my knuckles. The door swings open. Cold air. I swallow it. I can see blackness and orange, headlamps and paving stones. The whiff of petrol fumes. I come to my senses on the pavement; I scramble to my feet, clutching my wallet. He’s standing by the door, looking down at me.

‘Now, fuck off!’

I walk away. My ribs hurt, but it’s manageable. The traffic beside me is waiting at a red light at the junction of Rosebery Avenue. I can sense passengers on buses looking at me. I continue to walk, in a strange myopia; just the pavement ahead to lead me away from what has just happened.

the phone call

I can’t remember my journey home. I figure I must have used the usual route. I just remember opening the door to my flat and the smell of something stale irritating my nostrils. I think I must have fallen asleep on the sofa, after making myself some food, as I have a vague recollection of being in my kitchen for a short time, standing over a hob, eating something from the pan before it was even cooked properly. Then blackness.

I’m interrupted by a persistent ringing, which becomes louder and louder in the blackness until I realise it’s my phone. Before I know it my eyes are open and I’m fumbling for it. I stare at it as it rings. I answer just in time. It’s my brother.

‘Where’ve you been?’

‘Something bad happened …’

‘I’ve been phoning all day …’

‘I’ve been asleep …’

‘All day?’

‘…’

‘Listen, I need to talk to you …’

‘I’m all ears …’

‘It’s Uncle Rey …’

‘What’s he done now?’

‘He’s dead … Suicide … Hanged himself.’

‘…’

‘It happened the other week, but no one knew. He’s been in that caravan all week … dead … I was …’

‘No one knew?’

‘No, no one … I was supposed to be travelling to the island today to clear things up. They asked me to come down, to clear his stuff, but I have to go to France to meet our new clients. I can’t get out of it …’

‘And …’

‘You need to go to the island … to clear Rey’s caravan, to go through his belongings and pack them all away … sort it all out before it’s removed.’

‘Jesus … Uncle Rey …’

‘It has to be done …’

‘Jesus, Cal … I don’t need this right now …’

‘Jon, please, it needs to be done … since Dad died there’re only us two, we have to take care of shit like this now.’

‘Fuck, Cal … Okay … I’ll go … I’ll go … I’ll do it.’

‘You need to go there first thing … You need to go to the Lobster Smack pub near the sea wall at the jetty and ask for the landlord, Mr Buchanan, he’s the owner of the caravan site, too … he has the keys …’

‘Right, right … Fuck, Cal, you owe me …’

‘I know … Like I say, I can’t get out of the France trip.’

‘Bye.’

‘Bye.’

I roll off the sofa and fall into a dirty heap on the floor. My ribcage is seized in a paroxysm of pain. The previous night comes flooding back. I groan and think about what I should eat for breakfast.

FRIDAY
recollections

The train journey from Fenchurch Street Station to Benfleet passes without incident, apart from a couple of trips to the toilet in the next carriage to vomit – something that repels the other passengers unfortunate enough to be able to hear my retching. As I walk back to my carriage the second time I hear two women talking about me, and I purposely slow my steps so I can hear each word.

‘Probably on drugs …’

‘It’s disgusting …’

‘Really … on a train?’

‘It’s disgusting …’

‘Other people around, too …’

‘Horrid.’

‘Some people have no manners.’

‘It’s disgusting …’

‘I hope he cleaned it up …’

‘Stop it!’

‘What?’

‘I can’t think about it …’

I walk down the aisle, back to my seat in the next carriage. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter to me. I’ve packed a bag with enough clothes to last a week. I figure that’s how long it should take me to clear up Uncle Rey’s caravan. I’m not sure what to expect. I try to remember when it was I last saw him, but I can’t pin down any single encounter. He comes to me in a blur of phrases, the most prominent being: ‘I like it here, below the sea …’

He would always talk about the sea: how the island lay below it, everything in his life existing below sea level. It seemed to suit him, out there, all alone. Other phrases, other words appear in fits, as do events, songs and smells. I have vivid recollections of his stinking caravan from when I visited the couple of times to smoke weed with him, when I was a teenager. I liked him back then, even though my father distrusted him. Whenever I returned, my father would be there waiting for me. He would always say the same thing: ‘We lost him to wacky baccy and strange ways. He’s better out there on the island. It suits him out there below the sea.’

This was before my dad died. I can’t remember Dad ever visiting Uncle Rey. I just thought they didn’t get on. I never gave it much thought really. I always liked Uncle Rey, the few times I met him. His gnarled face cheered me up, his rasping cigarette/marijuana-burned voice, the songs he’d sing, his dreadful ukulele playing. Everything about him intrigued me: the fact that he’d never worked, had opted out. He seemed real in ways my father never could. Uncle Rey was lost; he made perfect sense to me.

I look out of the window. Green trees merging with the dark mud of the estuary, turning to a constant brown, a slutch that seems to stretch all the way to the horizon. It’s an unforgiving, blank landscape that exposes any irregularities: a church, a tractor, horses, a boat in a yard – before they too become dirt blots, blurs, interrupting the flatness of things.

the island

I stand on the platform at Benfleet with my rucksack. At first I’m unable to move, so I just stand there and watch the train crawl away towards the wilds of Essex: Southend and Shoeburyness. I watch it until it slips out of sight, around a curve in the track. No one else has alighted from the train with me. I stand on the platform alone. Once the train can’t be heard I am immediately struck by the silence, the slight whiff of iodine and a sense of déjà vu. I head towards the exit. I’d decided on the train that I’d walk onto the island. Then startling me, some seagulls swirl above, a sonorous spectacle, their vibrant and beautiful sound all around me.

It strikes me that I’m not really sure of the way. I know the general direction, I can see the oil refinery in the distance, but I’m not sure where the bridge is that takes visitors over the creek and onto the island itself. I know it’s next to some yacht club by the muddy creek, but I’m not sure which road to take from the station. Just as I step out onto the road, outside the station, I notice a man on a mobility scooter. I decide to ask for directions.

‘Which way is it to Canvey?’

‘Follow this road. It’ll take you across the creek. Good luck.’

‘Thanks.’

Good luck? I’m only walking to Canvey, to clear my dead uncle’s caravan. I shrug my shoulders and continue to walk in the direction he’d advised. After about one hundred yards I come to the creek. The yacht club is on the other bank to my left, on Canvey, close enough that I can lean over and touch it, it seems. That’s the extent of the island’s distance from the ‘mainland’ yards away. I realise at this moment just why I used to laugh when Uncle Rey referred to Canvey as ‘the island’, as most people on Canvey do – it hardly looks like one. But it is, and as soon as I cross the bridge things feel different: the whole landmass of the UK is behind me, stretching towards some other horizon. My understanding of its separateness must have been born within me the very first time I stepped onto the island. I’m sure of that. I’ve always understood, deep down, beneath the laughter, why the locals refer to it as the island, deep down it’s always made perfect sense to me: to feel dislocated, to feel lost and forgotten.

The streets are empty. I remember a man I used to see walking the streets when I once visited Uncle Rey in the summer holidays. He was an old man, the locals used to call him Captain Birdseye, or Barnacle Bill. He would walk the streets all day long in his fisherman’s yellow boots and sou’wester. All day long. I would see him everywhere I went, from the jetty to the High Street. Years ago I asked Uncle Rey whatever happened to him.

‘He moved away … to a mobile home site like this one, over near Stock in Chelmsford. Once, I hadn’t seen him for years, I was over in Stock for some reason, some woman I think, and I saw him. He looked frail, like death was close. He was waiting at a bus stop, still wearing the same yellow boots and sou’wester … It was all very sad. He’ll be dead now, I guess.’

I half expect to be greeted by an array of old characters but, after the seagulls and the old man on the mobility scooter, I am met with silence again, maybe the sound of the odd car or two passing me on the road. The houses to my immediate left, tucked away just behind the yacht club, look not just empty, but a strange kind of empty, like their inhabitants have all suddenly upped and left the island, leaving all their personal belongings behind, just as they were. I can even see that some of the houses have left their plasma TV screens on, yet there’s still no sign of life inside, or children playing on their bikes outside, or the odd family pet. I ignore this; I don’t want to feel any more spooked than I am at this moment. I know I have saddening work to do and I want it done quickly and without interruption.

I’ve forgotten just how flat and eerie the island is: the idea that the land beneath my feet actually lies below sea level – the estuary looming, high up behind the sea walls – becomes more worrying with every step. The sky above me, massive and grey, stretched to its limits, bears down on the island. I look over to the large oil refinery that dominates the immediate horizon to my right. There are people in hard hats over there, bobbing about, doing stuff with pipes and machinery. Maybe that’s where everybody is? Working hard at the refinery.

I can hear something, off in the distance. It comes to me suddenly. There it is, the rumble of an oil tanker’s engines ahead of me out on the Thames, a constant baritone, its vibrations felt from the tip of my toes to the hair on my head, all around me, quivering on my tongue and through the fine hairs in my nostrils. There it is again, a slow, aching, constant rumbling, from somewhere within the water above, making slow progress towards Tilbury. I stop dead and listen to it pass, until it fades from my range and the tingling subsides within me.

It shakes me: an image of the sea wall cracking appears in my head. The dark sea reclaiming the land that was taken from it, rushing through the streets, into homes, factories and ancient lanes. The sea wall crumbling away at the eastern edge of the island, giving way to the tide, a black wall of water. The last time this island flooded was 1953. Fifty-eight people died. Uncle Rey was a young lad then. I don’t know if he was aware it had happened until he moved here. If it was ever mentioned, he’d go quiet.

being here makes perfect sense

I walk along Haven Road, leaving the houses behind. I know the Lobster Smack pub is somewhere at the end of it. I’m starting to recognise the place. It’s up at the far end, just below the sea wall at Hole Haven Point. I try to think back to when I last saw Uncle Rey, but I can’t remember. It was a long time ago, probably longer than I think. It strikes me that I’ve been in my flat, the same dreary Islington flat, for over a decade now, and that I’ve been working – without promotion – as a production editor, for the same lousy publisher, for all but three of those years. It certainly doesn’t feel like a decade has passed.

Time is a funny thing like that. It seems to me that we’re made by time, at least it feels like I am. Over the years it is time that has forced me to look at myself the way I do. I’ve often sat alone in the dark, able to feel time physically rushing through me, pounding me into submission. Late at night in the darkness it is time who speaks to me, not the ghosts, it is time who tells me I am alive. I don’t know how I came to think like this, I’m not a philosophical person. I feel I may have read it, or heard someone else say it. I’m not quite sure of its origins. It’s important for me to see things this way – especially in the light of Uncle Rey’s suicide. Time will make sense of these events, change them into a shape I can cling on to. That’s how I see things. It makes it easier for me to exist here.

This is how it all feels to me: Uncle Rey’s suicide is just another strand, part of the braid, something that has frayed over time. It’s up to me to rebind things, tightly, I guess. At least that’s how it feels walking along the road, the sea and sky above me, everything else behind me. It makes immediate sense, my being here, to help decipher things, to tie up all the loose ends of Uncle Rey’s life. I phone Cal. It takes me a long while to reach him because I don’t get much of a signal out here. Cal doesn’t answer anyway and my call goes straight through to his voicemail. I leave him a message, telling him everything is okay, that it will be good for me to take this break and that I’m happy to sort through Uncle Rey’s belongings. Before I say goodbye I suddenly become aware of my own voice. It sounds incongruous, an impostor’s. It booms all around me, startling pigeons and other birds. I quickly say goodbye to Cal in a whisper and put the phone back into my pocket. I am not alone either: I turn around to see a man walking behind me, about twenty metres away, walking quickly, it seems, with purpose. My skin begins to prickle. I wonder whether I should quicken my pace also, so that he can’t catch up, but I figure this might look too obvious, so I decide to walk even slower than I am, to stop and look at things at the side of the road, so that he can pass me by and I’ll look natural, like I should be here. Locals can probably sniff out a stranger on this island and I don’t want him to think that I might be up to no good.

After about five minutes of this I look back, and he’s about ten metres away: a big, stocky man, tattooed arms, thick with muscle. He looks odd, out of place too, but I know he’s not, I know he’s local. He’s wearing a pair of tracksuit bottoms and a Dr Feelgood T-shirt, but he’s not a jogger. I figure he’s just left one of the houses I passed earlier and, like me, he’s on his way to the Lobster Smack. He catches up with me, just as we reach the first of the giant oil storage containers to my left, on the peripheries of the refinery. Huge round things, all full of oil, gallons upon gallons of the stuff.

‘You heading up to Hole Haven Point?’

‘Pardon?’

‘The point … are you heading that way?’

‘Well, yes, I am …’

‘Me, too … Long walk, eh?’

‘Yes.’

‘You in from London?’

‘Er … Yes … How do you know?’

‘I saw you get off the train at Benfleet, plus … you look like a London type, asking for directions, looking at the map on your phone … I could just tell.’

‘Oh.’

We walk together, side by side, for two to three minutes. He doesn’t look at me, not in the eye, at least, fixing his on the road ahead. Then he begins to pick up pace.

‘No doubt I’ll see you in the Smack?’

‘Yes, that’s where I’m headed …’

‘Enjoy the walk.’

‘Yes, thanks.’

He walks away from me at great speed, heading up Haven Road towards the Lobster Smack. Either there, or the sea wall, as there isn’t much else at the end of this road. Along the way I count twenty-seven oil storage containers, big round domes, each of them easily as big as a small office block. I feel minute beside them; the island has a way about it, it’s all coming back to me: it seems as if it’s stuck out on a ledge, too far into the great expanse of things. It feels like it’s clinging on, and at any given moment each of the twenty-seven containers will slip off with me into the abyss. I look around, goose pimples covering my arms; there are only trees around me to cling on to should this happen, but it feels like we are so far out, even the trees would be uprooted. Walking along, the strange man up ahead, heading towards Hole Haven Point, the jetty, the sea wall, the Lobster Smack, I am certain of this catastrophe.

I look up. The sky is beginning to blacken, bad weather from the hills of Kent across the estuary. I quicken my step, pulling the straps down on my rucksack to tighten things up. The rain comes quicker than I expect, and it falls heavily. It’s cold and sharp, driving into the earth beside the road.

because there’s nothing else to do

It hasn’t changed since I was last here. Why should it? There’s nothing to dictate that sort of thing out here. I’m sure the two men sitting at the bar are the same two men who were sitting at the bar when I was last in here. I look at them again: one of them is, but now he’s with a new companion, he’s sipping his stout slower now. He’s still repeating the same conversations throughout the day. His new drinking buddy nods away like his predecessor once did, though. I’ve often thought that the clientele of such establishments are like the wondrous mechanism of the great white’s mouth: as soon as one tooth is lost another one flips into its place. Pubs like the Lobster Smack are always the same: you can see the younger generation of drinkers growing in the shade of the towering men at the bar, readying themselves for the next old-timer to fall, eager to pick up their stool and take their place.

I stand at the bar and order a pint of cider with ice. I’m aware people are staring at me. I take a sip of my drink, take my change and walk over to a table by the window. The bar itself is quiet, except for the man in the Dr Feelgood T-shirt who I’d met in the road. He lifts up his drink to greet me when I look over to him, before resuming his loud conversation with a woman. The rain is hitting the window beside me; it rattles the Essex weatherboard that forms each exterior wall of the pub. I stare into my pint of cider, feeling snug and warm. I figure that I’ll have a couple more, and something to eat, before I speak with the landlord, Mr Buchanan. The cider is cold. I watch as the ice cracks. I can’t imagine Uncle Rey sitting in this pub, it doesn’t seem quite right somehow. I never thought of him as the sort of man who would see out the rest of his days sitting at the bar of his local pub, although he must have frequented it at some point. I mooch about the place, looking for what might have been his favourite table or something, but they all look the same. Then I glance out of the window, through the rain, towards the roofs of some caravans in the distance. Uncle Rey’s caravan isn’t that far from the pub, just a short walk along the sea wall if I remember correctly, towards Thorney Bay, or ‘Dead Man’s Cove’ as he called it. I remember him telling me about the numerous things that would be washed up on the beach there in the bay: unwanted hospital waste, like needles and prosthetic limbs; the odd dead animal; dead swimmers of all ages; plastic from far-off lands. Whatever got lost out at sea would eventually be washed up there.

I’m sitting with my back to the sea wall, which stretches out behind me to my right, just outside the window. It isn’t far to walk from here. I watch people in the bar; they hardly notice my presence now. They’ve forgotten about me, I’ve already settled into the background. It’s the perfect place to sit, somewhere cosy to settle in for the evening. Apart from the rain lashing down, rattling the weatherboard behind me, all I can hear are the clientele’s murmurs and the odd cackle from the man in the Dr Feelgood T-shirt. If I concentrate, between the rain hitting the window and their voices disappearing, I can just about decipher what he’s saying to the woman: he’s explaining something to her, something about Southend. Then the sound goes again as the rain hits the window and I concentrate on the movement of his mouth instead, his scabby lips filling in the blanks for me.

‘It’s changing over there. It used to be different, Southend … Remember when … No one really went out … The pubs used to be full of National Front, some of them still fucking are … I hated it, you couldn’t move for fear of bumping into some fucking knuckle-scraper, the sights I’ve seen by the Kursaal at kicking-out time, the detritus of human existence, fucking real scum, drunk and angry, sexually frustrated … fucking soulless … Those flats … Houses … All gone now, they took them down in the seventies, I think. But let me tell you, go down Southend now and it’s all cappuccinos and students, even the old Irish pub by the station has changed, it’s a really nice place now, does good food … All gone, they must drink elsewhere, not as bad as the East End though, fucking Dalston’s full of boarding-school dropouts spending Daddy’s cash thinking they’re all new, they’re all individuals when they’re really a bunch of deluded, privileged scumbags dressed up in sequined rags … there’s that bit though, in Southend, there’s always that bit, down by the seafront, you know the bit, where the arcades are, those filthy pubs, at night they’re such seedy little places, the ones with the saggy dancers, fucking filthy pubs they are, all run by London and Eastern European gangsters, they’re always there, hanging around on the doors, looking for trouble, watching the tills … Always that bit, you know the bit? That little bit that spoils everything for everyone else, gives the rest of the town a bad name, some of the characters who drink in, what’s that place? … The Cornucopia, what a fucking shithole, some of the characters in there, the small place, what a wretched excuse of a pub, a wretched, wretched place … Their girls are all on smack … needle marks in their arms as they’re stripping off their Primark best … Who’d go and watch that? Filthy little place, the Cornucopia, and the Forrester’s, when are they going to knock that place down? It needs knocking down that place. But, you know, you don’t have to drink down there, there’s always the nice Irish place by the station, they do well, take care of their beers … and their customers. I was only in there the other day, lovely staff … but fuck … this fucking estuary …’

More people enter the pub, workers from the refinery and a couple of regulars. I order another cider and ask for the menu. I’m hungry now. The Lobster Smack has become a gastropub since I was last here, it seems. I order the steak, rare, and a bottle of red wine to go with it. I sit back down by the window, trancelike, sipping my drink, watching the group of workers and then looking out of the window from time to time. I finish my drink just as the barmaid arrives with my steak and bottle of house red. I pour myself a glass and tuck into my steak like I haven’t eaten for a week. The steak is cooked just how I like it, tender, oozing natural juices. Halfway through my meal a group of old ladies sit down at the next table. They’re locals, probably in their seventies, maybe older. I wonder why they are here, considering the weather has taken a turn for the worse. I didn’t see or hear a car drop them off, yet they couldn’t have all walked here. It doesn’t take them long to settle and order their drinks and food. They all order steak and gin and tonics. One of the ladies, grey hair all sprayed up, dripping in gold, asks for her steak to be cooked ‘well-done’. She repeats this several times to the barmaid taking the order. As the barmaid walks away from the group, the old lady calls after her: ‘I won’t eat this thing if it’s still alive!’ Her companions laugh in a way that suggests they are all accustomed to her behaviour in public, accepting it as banter. I look at her: she’s showy-Essex, bold as brass, tough-skinned and lippy. I reckon she’s never had a steak cooked any other way.

I drink my house red, which is surprisingly pleasant, and listen to the ladies. They’re mostly discussing things they’ve read in the tabloids and stuff they’ve seen on TV the previous night. The chatter is led by the lady who insisted that her steak be well-done. It ends abruptly as soon as their food arrives. I watch as the salt is passed around, liberally shaken over their meals. They slowly begin to eat, struggling to cut the meat and to chew, some of them struggling with their knives, holding them incorrectly, others moving the food around on their plates with their forks, before they even start. Suddenly, the lady who wanted her steak well-done shouts out to the barmaid.

‘Excuse me! Excuse me!’

The barmaid dashes over immediately, smiling, although it’s obvious she’s been expecting something like this to happen, as if it’s happened on numerous occasions.

‘Yes, my love.’

‘This steak is well-done, I can’t cut through it, it’s too tough, and I can’t chew it.’

‘You asked for it well-done …’

‘But I wanted it tender as well …’

‘Have it rare next time, then it’ll be as tender as you like …’

‘I don’t want my steak like the bloomin’ French have it.’

‘A well-done steak, a really well-done one, like you asked, won’t be tender. You say this to me every time you come in here …’

‘Yes, because you always cook my steak too tough …’

‘And you always ask for it well-done … Every time, and you always come back at me with the same complaint … I’ve told you about this so many times …’

‘It’s too tough …’

‘Okay, do you want your money back?’

‘No, I want some food I can chew …’

‘You say this every time … Every time you come in here.’

‘Okay, I’ll eat it. It’s too tough, but I’ll eat it.’

such a long time

After the old ladies have gone and I’ve finished my wine I grab my rucksack and walk up to the bar.

‘Same again?’

‘No, thanks … May I speak to Mr Buchanan, please?’

‘He’s over there …’

‘Where?’

‘There, talking to that man …’

‘Oh yes, I see him. Thanks.’

Mr Buchanan is speaking to the man in the Dr Feelgood T-shirt. The woman is with them too, but she’s drifted off and is staring out of the window as they talk. Mr Buchanan’s a large man, with a thick beard and small-rimmed, round glasses. I walk over to them. The man in the Dr Feelgood T-shirt stops their conversation as if some dignitary had just arrived.

‘Ah, come and join us. Although I must warn you, we’re as boring as two old fuck-ups can be …’

‘I’m sorry, I’m looking for Mr Buchanan …’

‘I know who you are …’

‘Really?’

‘You’re Rey Michaels’ lad …’

‘I’m his nephew, yes …’

‘Well, of course …’

‘Yes, well …’

‘Excuse me …’

He takes me to the other side of the bar and through a door into the back office. We sit down at his desk. He offers me a whisky, good Scottish stuff, cool as you like. I want to tell him that his actions are just like actions in films I’ve seen – the way he slouches in his chair and pulls the bottle of whisky from a drawer underneath his desk – but I don’t, instead I nod and watch him pour my drink. He hands it to me and I slouch back in my own chair just like him. The whisky burns the back of my throat, it starts a beautiful fire inside me.

‘It was sad … What Rey did … I liked him. He was a private man, kept himself to himself … You know, not that many people came to visit. I knew nothing about him, really, only the things he wanted me to know … I liked that about him, I even admired him for it. There’s so much space in this world, yet most of us feel restricted, like there’s no scope for another perspective, trapped in the moment, one to the next … With Rey, it didn’t seem like that, not to me, it seemed like he had all the space he wanted … then, you know, all this … He was a good man, I think, underneath it all …’

‘I never really … We didn’t see much of him, I guess …’

‘Whatever his problems, you know … Whatever was going on inside his head, in his life for him to do that, you know …’

‘I know … It’s hard to imagine …’

‘He would come here … He’d sit in the corner, reading a book, something about the stars and the planets, he was into all that … Sometimes he’d talk into his phone, but not like a conversation with someone, just into his phone, like he was recording his own voice … He had all the new gadgets … I don’t know what he was saying, he’d just speak into it, you know, discreetly. Some people thought it was odd behaviour, but I didn’t. I liked it, it kept people in here on their toes, they thought he was talking about them, keeping an eye on them or something, but he wasn’t … but what were they to know, eh? If he wasn’t doing that, he would sit there reading his books, he was always doing that, obsessed with the stars, he was. He has a huge telescope at his caravan they say, did you ever see it?’

‘I can’t remember ever having … maybe this is a new thing … I haven’t seen him in such a long time.’

‘…’

‘…’

‘Here … These are the keys … I own the site he lived on, so I have spares.’

‘Oh, thanks …’

‘Do you know where it is?’

‘I’ll find it.’

‘Number 27 … The address is on the key ring. It’s not far … Give me a call if you have any problems.’

‘Okay, thanks.’

‘Right, I’ll get back to that lot outside.’

‘Yes.’

I walk back into the bar after Mr Buchanan, leaving him to serve the man in the Dr Feelgood T-shirt another drink. Before I leave I buy four bottles of strong cider. I figure I’ll need more to drink once I’m inside Uncle Rey’s caravan. The barmaid looks at me pitifully as I hand her the money. I shake my head when she offers me the change. I thank her and walk to the door; just as I step out into the cold air, the smell of iodine and salt in my face, I hear Mr Buchanan wish me luck from behind the bar. I turn round to thank him, but it’s too late, the door has already shut behind me.

caravan 27

At least it’s stopped raining now. I walk up the grass verge and along the sea wall, with the jetty on my right, in the direction of Thorney Bay. The wind seems warmer walking this way, blowing in from the estuary along the water, up past me, following the oil tankers and container ships as they plod towards Tilbury in the opposite direction. I stop just before I reach the caravan site to watch a large container ship pass by. It takes about ten minutes. The whole of the estuary and its immediate surroundings must be reverberating with me. I wonder what all the fish must make of it? It must affect them, such a tremendous force echoing through the water and the earth below it, all the way down, shaking everything in its wake: my feet, the sea wall, the Lobster Smack, Mr Buchanan, the caravans, the entire island.

The caravan site is surrounded by a perimeter fence topped with huge, ugly rolls of barbed wire, running its entire length. It looks like a prison yard. The early evening light doesn’t help, and the lack of sufficient street lamps only heightens the all-round miserable mood of the place. I walk down from the sea wall and all the way around it to the main entrance. At first I want to turn back, but then I think of Uncle Rey: what he did, what I have come here to do. So I continue towards the main gate where I can see a small wooden hut with a light on. There’s a shoddy-looking sign on its door: ‘SITE OFFICE’. A man is sitting inside reading a crinkled copy of the Sun. He’s young, younger than me by a mile, but his face seems old: his eyes look like two oyster shells, and his skin is tough-looking, battered and bruised, weathered in all seasons like a fisherman’s. He looks up at me. His face is expressionless; all manner of emotions could be pouring through him for all I know.

‘Mr Buchanan’s just phoned. Number 27 is just over there, back towards the sea wall. It faces the wall. The generator is on, you’ll be pleased to know, but you’ll have to pay the ten-pound fee, of course. We’re running it, you see, so that you can use the caravan in comfort.’

‘Thanks, here.’

I pay him the money and leave him to his newspaper, walking out of his office without saying anything else. I can hear him shout something to me, something about ‘contacting’ him ‘should there be any problems’. I shake my head. Why do people always say these things? I make a decision not to use the main gate, if I don’t have to, again. I wave my hand, hoping that he might see this and read it as some kind of acknowledgement. I leave it at that.

It takes me longer to find Uncle Rey’s caravan than I expected it to. They all look the same, for a start. This, coupled with the fact that many of them aren’t actually numbered, making it difficult to determine the layout of the site. In fact, I stumble on Uncle Rey’s caravan by accident, just as I’m about to break my word and walk back to the small hut at the main entrance. It’s a sorry-looking thing and I half wonder how Uncle Rey managed to live in it for so long, pretty much the majority of his adult life. But he had, seemingly choosing this God-awful place deliberately, as if to ridicule himself, or persecute himself, even: a constant reminder to him that his life was meaningless.

Looking at caravan 27, it makes perfect sense to me: just the way it looks, the way it feels, how it sits there, all dishevelled and broken-looking. Though I didn’t expect it to have been painted dark green, thick with brushstrokes like an oil-painting. Nor did I expect it to have its own fenced-off, scruffy garden area, complete with garden shed. A big shed, too, like a workshop: the sort of shed media types have built in their gardens. It looks incongruous next to the brutal barbed wire on the perimeter fence and sea wall: a proper den of solitude and tranquillity, a man’s castle, where he can retire, sheltered away from the world in peace. I can see Uncle Rey right here, before I even open the door. I can see him pottering about, sitting in his shed, watching the sun set behind the sea wall, looking out through the barbed wire. It feels really odd.

The door has seen better days. I could force it open without the key if I want to, but I don’t. The first thing that hits me is the stench: a musty, earthy smell that seems alive, like something is growing inside. Which is odd, as it’s a place of death: Uncle Rey’s suicide. I run inside holding my nose and open all the windows, leaving the door open, too, hoping the cold sea air will start to clear through it all, eventually expelling whatever it is that’s causing the smell. I stand in the middle of the room, holding my breath, taking it all in: the complete and utter mess. Ordered chaos reigns supreme: tapes, records, books, newspapers, videos, DVDs, radio equipment, magazines, stacked in every available space, huge towers of information, which look like they might topple over if I move. My first thought is: I’m going to fucking kill Cal. Followed by: It’s much bigger than I thought. And it is; it’s a huge caravan. I exhale slowly. The living area is huge; offset from it is a kitchenette; and beyond that there is the bathroom and master bedroom. I’m surprised, I thought it was going to be dingy, way too small for me, but it’s actually big, bigger than my poky flat in Islington even. At least it seems like it is. The living space and the bedroom certainly are.

The stench continues to make me gag. The whole caravan is thick with it and the more I move, the more I seem to interfere with it, as if my contact with it helps each particle to multiply. It moves around me in great thick swirls, slowly. I wade through it to sit down on the sofa. I sink into it and wait for the cold sea air to begin its work. The thought that this is where he was found, hanging from a rope he’d attached to a support in the caravan’s roof. I’m thinking of it as an actuality now. It happened in this room, just by the side of this sofa. His body found in a crumpled heap, after the rope had eventually worked itself free from the support. His body lay here for a whole week before it was found festering among all his stuff, his body fluid in a pool beneath his feet, the pile of newspapers his body had knocked over still strewn across the floor. I look at the pile of newspapers; there they are, all over the floor, next to a box of CDs. I start to shiver as the cold sea air begins to fill the caravan, through the windows and open door. Soon the musty, dead odour is replaced by that familiar smell of the sea around here: iodine, salt and seaweed mixed with something industrial, something from the oil refinery.

I look around the room. Somehow I have to make sense of all this: his belongings, his life. I have to work out what can be thrown away and what should stay, and the more I think about it, the more I don’t want to throw anything away. It doesn’t seem right just now. It all belongs to Uncle Rey, none of it is mine, I don’t have the right to any of it, and besides, I hardly knew the man. It’s his detritus, not mine. It’s the aftermath of an event I had no part in. His event, his aftermath. It doesn’t seem right just to discard it all.

I stretch out on the sofa, resting my tired arms and legs. To my right is a huge record collection, all of it vinyl. I look down to find an old record player on a shelf, speakers on either side of it. I switch it on. There’s a record already on it, an album by Dr Feelgood. I’ve never heard of them before today. Then I realise that it must have been what Uncle Rey was listening to the night he took his own life. It was the last thing he’d listened to. It must have meant something to him. I put the needle onto the record and wait for the first track to fill the room, and I smile as I hear the distinctive vinyl crackle before the opening track, ‘She Does it Right’, begins. At first I think it’s just some ordinary, bluesy pub track. But I sit there and listen to the whole album, enthralled. When it ends I look through Uncle Rey’s collection, where there’s more of the same: about thirty Dr Feelgood albums in total, some of them live recordings from the BBC. Before I put on the next record, I phone Cal. I open a bottle of cider and pick up my phone. He answers immediately.

‘Jon, where’ve you been?’

‘I phoned you earlier …’

‘I must have missed it. Are you there?’

‘Yes, I’m here.’

‘I’ve been travelling to France today, been a fucking right ’mare … What state is the place in?’

‘It’s as I imagined it to be, how it’s always been, I guess. Stuff everywhere, I mean loads of stuff … gadgets, records, books, piles of newspapers and magazines, paper all over the floor. I don’t really know where to start.’

‘Just clear some space and try to locate anything that might look important. We can sell all his shit. Just look for his legal papers and all that crap, letters, bank stuff. I’m sure there’s money tied up somewhere, that’s the main thing …’

‘Right … There’s lots to go through …’

‘And family stuff, don’t throw any of that away …’

‘I don’t want to throw any of it away … It’s quite sad, Uncle Rey living here all alone … It’s such a sad, depressing place, Cal. Like a prison camp. Was it always like this?’

‘Listen, you know I never liked him, the creepy fucker. And Dad hated him. Just strip the place and then get the fuck out as fast as you can …’

‘Okay.’

‘Keep me posted, Jon. I have to shoot now, need some shuteye, meetings all day tomorrow, on a fucking Saturday, what sort of life is this … keep me posted.’

‘Sure, Cal.’

‘Bye.’

‘Bye.’

SATURDAY
along the sea wall

It was an uneasy night’s sleep. I dreamed that the sea was pouring in through the windows of the caravan and I couldn’t get out. When I awoke in sweat-drenched fits, taking sips from the dregs of my cider, the tankers’ engines and the low, intermittent foghorn blasts kept me awake. I mostly just lay there on the sofa, looking out of the window into the night. I listened to more Dr Feelgood in the early hours, just before sunrise. I became lost, listening to each track while trying to map the whole of Canvey in my mind. I had a vision of Two Tree Island in the moonlight, just away from the creeks; the muddy shallows of Heron Island and Puffin Island; the warm, thick mud along the banks of Benfleet Creek, a barren inlet, crafted in time. Images of Curlew Island and Sandpiper Creek, which I explored in my youth when the tide was out, came back to me, memories I hadn’t realised I owned, reappearing at first in shards.

Here it comes now, the sun, slowly up over the sea wall. I get up off the sofa and open the door to the caravan; the cold air rushes in. I decide that I will explore the island, putting off the job at hand. I have more than enough time. I’m suddenly hungry, but there’s nothing to eat. I find a pot of coffee in the fridge and make some of that, drinking it out of a bowl the way French people do in films. The odour that had first greeted me has shifted, it seems. Although I’m not sure if it’s simply because I’ve become accustomed to it overnight. I give the room a couple of deep sniffs: nothing, not a trace. I potter about for a bit with my coffee, finish it by gulping it down like a meal, and then walk into the bathroom. It’s small, as in an aircraft: everything fitting together, usable in that coolly cramped way designers go for. I take off my clothes and step into the shower. The water is cold, despite paying my ten pounds for the heating. I let the freezing water wash all over me, but it’s not long until I have to get out. It’s too cold. Rummaging through my rucksack, I realise that I’ve forgotten my toiletries. I have no towel. The tube of toothpaste that I find on the shelf above the small sink has a thumb-sized indentation at the bottom of it: Uncle Rey’s no doubt. I gently rub my own thumb over it. At first I want to keep it intact, squeezing the paste from the top of the tube, but this pushes some of the tube’s contents down as well as up, and Uncle Rey’s thumb mark is altered as paste fills the indentation, so I begin to squeeze out the paste from anywhere I please, obliterating any trace of the thumb mark. I figure, during my clearance, that I’ll have to take extra care. I don’t want to obliterate any other marks or traces, no matter how small, Uncle Rey had inadvertently left behind. I brush my teeth with my finger.

I am suddenly startled by the smell of sea-grass and weeds. The odour begins to fill the caravan. The tide is on the rise. I put the same clothes back on and walk out of the caravan and up to the fence and the barbed wire. There’s a gate to my right, which is unlocked. I walk up the grass verge to the sea wall and then manage to clamber up that, so that I’m standing on it. I stand there, like I’ve accomplished something, my back to the sea, gazing out across the caravan site and the entire island, over to the creeks in the distance. I spot little yawls, floating and swinging at anchor. I can hear the familiar sound of curlews in the distance, over to my left beyond Canvey Heights, gathering on the marshes, feeding from the fruits of the sea washed up on the thick mud.

I’m still hungry, too. I decide to walk along the sea wall, around Thorney Bay, to the Labworth, a café on the south shore, built in the thirties and a place I know will serve me a decent breakfast. I run back to Uncle Rey’s caravan to grab my wallet and lock up. Just as I walk back through the unlocked gate I notice the shed. I hesitate for a moment, the urge to look inside rising in me, but my hunger prevails and I decide to look in the shed on my return.

eating in silence

The walk takes longer than I expected. When I eventually reach the Labworth I notice Mr Buchanan sitting at a table by the window. He greets me with a broad smile and gesticulates for me to come and join him.

‘Mr Buchanan, it’s a lovely morning …’

‘Yes, I like it at this hour, the freshness of the air, the smell of sea lavender … And Jon, it’s Robbie, you can call me Robbie, everyone else does …’

‘Yes … Okay, thanks … Robbie.’

‘How was it?’

‘What?’

‘The caravan?’

‘Oh … It’s weird being there, knowing … but I knew the first night would be like that …’

‘It must be difficult … Listen, there’s something else …’

‘Oh …’

‘Rey left me another key … with an address … I think it’s for a safety deposit box in Southend. I forgot to give it to you yesterday. It didn’t click. I was expecting Cal, your brother, that’s who I’d been speaking to … That’s who I spoke to when Rey was … found. I didn’t expect you to be here. But, a few weeks ago now, before … you know … Rey came into the Smack and gave me this key. He said that it “shouldn’t be given to Cal, and only given to Jon”. That’s what he said to me. It didn’t click yesterday, I was too busy thinking about that key, and who not to give it to, that I totally forgot to pass it on to you, I do hope you forgive me … Come to the Smack later and I’ll give it to you …’

‘A key … Right. Okay.’

‘Sorry about this.’

‘I wonder what it’s for?’

‘Like I say, it seems to be for a safety deposit box in Southend.’

I eat my full English breakfast sitting opposite Mr Buchanan while he picks out horses in the paper, taking notes in his notepad, muttering to himself about this jockey and that trainer. We don’t really speak much after our initial exchange. I don’t mind eating in silence. After I clear my plate, mopping up the egg yolk with thick-cut buttered toast, I stare out of the window, thinking about the safety deposit box. The sea is flat, mirroring the fattening vapour trails criss-crossing the sky above.

into the depths

I spend the morning wandering around the island in some kind of hushed daze. I venture up to Canvey Heights, which used to be the local dumping ground, its height the result of the island’s accumulated detritus. The views over to Leigh-on-Sea are extraordinary; to my right my eyes trace the built-up sprawl of Westcliff and then finally, in the real distance, the high-rises of Southend, and the pier, jutting out into the estuary. The sky above me is grey now; the vapour trails have all been covered up for the day. I look directly upwards, craning my neck, my head falling back. It’s immense and it frightens me a little, pressing down on me. I feel like I’m an ant or some other insect scurrying about in the dirt. It’s best to keep moving, to keep walking along so that I don’t notice it as much. I remember that I had decided to look in Uncle Rey’s shed after my breakfast so I head back to his caravan. I know the sky is above me all the way back, and it’s a struggle not to look upwards again, but I somehow manage it.

It takes me an age to find the key to the shed. I find it on Uncle Rey’s bedside table, which I think is an odd place to keep a key; he must have been in the shed each night, walking straight to bed with the key. The shed is much bigger than the other sheds scattered around the site. It’s set away from the caravan, a little further back from the perimeter fence. I open the door: the walls have been painted black so there’s not much light. I notice astronomical charts pinned to each wall. In the centre, before me, is the biggest telescope I’ve ever seen, easily bigger than me, set up on a tripod fixed to a round base that swivels. Next to the telescope, on the wall to the left, is a pulley-lever, a crude thing that Uncle Rey had obviously made himself. I naturally begin to pull it. A slanting shard of light bursts into the shed from the roof, which when I look up I notice is peeling back the more I pull. It’s made from thick, rubbery tarpaulin, and the more I pull the further it folds back, and the brighter the shed becomes. The light reveals a table behind the telescope that is stacked with more charts, books, notepads and coffee cups. I tie the pulley to a hook, leaving the roof open, and pick up one of Uncle Rey’s notepads. He’s listed everything he’d observed in the night sky: times, positions, durations and distances. I flick through pages and pages of the stuff. Underneath the table I spot two or three boxes, each filled with more notepads he’d used to record his stargazing over the years.

If only night would come now, for me to gaze into its depths, to see what Uncle Rey had seen, to reach into those ever-expanding depths. I want to study constellations, to try to work out their movements, just like he had done. I sit down and read through more of his notebooks. I spend about an hour or so doing this, before closing the roof and locking the shed back up. I put the key back where I found it. I feel excited, I’ve never really gazed at the night sky through a powerful telescope before and I can’t wait for night to fall. I sit on the bed thinking about this for some time before I notice the huge row of bookshelves on the opposite wall. I notice that it’s not filled with books, but with video tapes – old ones, some of them Betamax – DVDs, CD-ROMs and cassette tapes. At the foot of the bed are two video recorders, a DVD player, an armchair identical to the one in the other room, and a large TV. Next to the TV are four cine-cameras of varying ages, from an old VHS thing to some compact digital gadget. The TV is on a table, under which I spot a couple of old boxes filled with more CDs and DVDs, all of them, just like those up on the bookshelves, labelled by hand. I crouch down and run my fingers across them, stopping to read random titles. A number of them catch my eye.

Rewriting Aeneid #34 1988

Rewriting Aeneid #48 1991

Rewriting Aeneid #101 1999

Rewriting Aeneid #120 2002

I count well over two hundred of these recordings – or whatever it is they are – all of them with the same title: ‘Rewriting Aeneid …’. I know the book but I’ve not read it. At least I don’t think I have – I remember Uncle Rey being into stuff like that. I pick up one of the tapes from the shelf and switch on the TV and VHS recorder. I feed the tape into the machine and press play, sitting on the end of the bed to face the TV. Uncle Rey’s face suddenly appears on the screen. It makes me jump. The tape is from 1982 and he looks how I remember him: kind of old before his time, greying and wrinkled, his large oyster-shell eyes staring right back at me. He’s smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, sitting in his armchair, the one that’s still in the other room. He’s oblivious to the ash falling from his cigarette onto his T-shirt as he fidgets and positions himself before the camera. He starts to talk, at me, he’s talking at me, his voice hits me, it’s his voice, it’s unmistakably his voice. He stares into the lens, into me.

Rewriting Aeneid #8 1982

… I always wanted to achieve … a new understanding of Virgil regarding Western morality … These writings …

[He takes a long drag from his cigarette.]

… have impressed themselves, not merely upon my memory, but … on the very marrow of my being … They have rooted themselves deeply in the innermost recesses of my mind, my addled brain, the grey matter of my being … so much so that I have forgotten who wrote them in the first place, it seems … which rings true, I didn’t write that, you see, I wish I did, he did … all of this, everything I am trying to do, is a mere appropriation of it, nothing is original. It can’t be … He wrote the words for me, old Petrarch, who himself rewrote Virgil and Homer. Old Petrarch, king of the poets, lover … not lover, ha! … of Laura … Heavenly Laura … He wrote that, not me …

[He shuffles from his seat. He leans forward to adjust the focus on the camera, the screen blurs for a second before correcting itself. He glances at the TV to his right, smiles, stubs out his cigarette, wipes himself down and resumes his conversation.]

It’s like I have taken possession of them … Petrarch and Virgil … like them, my work is left open-ended. This book I cannot write, this book I try to finish, to construct each day, this fucking book which is killing me because I can’t reach the truth … I can’t write it without their words … it haunts me each day … I am ill-equipped to deal with this sorry situation without them by my side … And even then, it’s too much for me …

I hit the pause button. His large face is frozen, flickering a little, contorted on the screen mid-sentence, his mouth ajar like he is about to scream. His voice, his voice is so real, like sitting beside me, talking to me. Only he isn’t, he’s dead and these words are from 1982, another time, another existence. It’s a strange feeling, one that sends prickles of electricity through my skin. I take a deep breath, trying to calm myself, I look around the caravan, at his things, his voice has brought life to them. I’m surrounded by his stuff, by him. His words have brought everything to life.

How long have I been planning this book, this work of beautiful fiction that will reach closer to the truth than any work of autobiography? Good question … to appropriate Virgil’s words, to bring them back into the light of day, to revalue them in my own formation, just to give them a crumbling sense of my own being, from the depth, from deep within, shedding light onto the blackness … bringing the mystery back into the light of day, each ink mark on the white page my struggle …

[He lights another cigarette.]

This book will be the death of me, that’s for sure. That’s all I know, the rest is for you to fathom. All I know is that it won’t be a beautiful book, it’ll be ugly, it’ll cut the heart wide open … that will be its beauty … How many words have I written? How many hours have I slaved away over each page? The rest I’ve burned, the stuff I hate, all of it … I start all over, again and again and again … I will start again at a later date, after I’ve lived, when I have absorbed more anguish, when the time is right.

[He gets up out of his armchair and roots about for things in the room off-camera. His voice fades, but is still just about audible.]

Where is it? Where is it? I put it here. I put it here fucking yesterday. Where the fuck is it? Fuck. Where the fuck … Ah … Fuck, here it is. Fuck … Fuck it …

[He reappears in front of the camera, sitting back down in his armchair.]

So … this is all I retrieved, what a fucking mess, saved from the flames. What did I burn it for, a good two hundred pages of this shit? This is all I have left …

[He waves a manuscript at the camera.]

I don’t need it. I’m going to tear it all up now for you and start all over again … Every word will be different from this, this attempt is useless, nothing will be the same …

[He tears up as many of the pages as he can in front of the camera, throwing it over his head like confetti.]

See! See! … See! … The nuclear fallout … a nuclear fallout of my own creation … destroyer of worlds … I am become death, destroyer of words hahah! Ha! … My wishes fluctuate, and my desires conflict, they tear me apart … The outer man struggles with the inner … There he is again, old Petrarch talking for me, I can’t help myself … maybe he’s my inner man? It’s definitely not Virgil, as much as I love him, I just cannot get to grips with him … he wrote for an audience … I don’t know who mine is … Who are you? Who the fuck are you? Ah, the watchful eye of the moralist watching his own, his every move … move … move … fucking flies, fucking things … get to fuck …

[He tries to swat a fly.]

One side of Petrarch, it seems to me, which found classical culture more engaging than that of … the age, yes the age … in which he was born, was as we have seen, articulated in his first eclogue where … what’s his fucking name? … Fuck, yes, Silvis, he declares the poetry of Homer and Virgil superior to that of the psalms … that’d be a serious thing to say back in his day … a new morality drawn up in these men. Who wrote these words? … I didn’t … I sure as fuck didn’t. I’m just a riff man, like Wilko Johnson … I’m the conduit … I move shapes in time, I create the vibrations, I alter them, to make sounds … I repeat, repeat, repeat … Ha! …

[He cracks up into laughter.]

I stop the tape right there. It’s too much to take, he’d obviously been drinking and it’s difficult to watch. All I know is that, before I do anything with his belongings, I will have to watch more of these recordings.

vulgar things

I walk across to the Lobster Smack to see Mr Buchanan about the key he mentioned over breakfast at the Labworth. I feel quite apprehensive, like he’d made some kind of mistake and the keys were meant for someone else and not me. Maybe Cal? I put this down to having just viewed the tape. I’m rattled by it, that’s for sure, Uncle Rey’s words, and his face, younger but still ravaged. His piercing eyes, grey, like the sky, and that strong, forceful voice of his. It rattles through me in bursts and fragments: ‘I can’t write it without their words’. It strikes me as odd that he was trying to write a book, he’d never mentioned it, and I don’t think of him as a literary man. It must have been his secret, one of his many secrets, something he battled with all his life, something personal to him and no one else. ‘My desires conflict, they tear me apart …’. What on earth does he mean? Desires? The night sky? The island? Sitting alone in the Lobster Smack? Living in that wretched caravan for the majority of his life? It doesn’t make sense to me, he didn’t seem like the type of man who might have battled with his own desires. He just seemed like a man who endured life alone, and all that it threw his way. Then I remember how he ended it, his life. Some form of desire must have caused him to do that. I can’t explain it to myself any other way. There’s no other way around it.

Mr Buchanan is standing behind the bar when I enter the pub. He greets me, like it’s the first time he’s set eyes on me today, with a broad smile. I walk over to him.

‘The key, young Jon …’

‘Yes, Mr Buchanan, the key … Is that all right?’

‘Only if you call me by my name like everyone else does …’

‘Oh, yes … Robbie … Sorry Robbie …’

‘Come with me …’

I follow him into his office again. He opens the drawer in his desk and hands me an envelope.

‘I remember the day he gave me this, he said: “It goes to Jon. No one else. Not Cal, or any of the others. I don’t care how long you have to wait until Jon turns up, just make sure he receives this.” You know, I’d never heard him speak in such a tone before, all sombre, stern, even authoritative, like his life depended on it … Of course, I had no idea that … you know … That he was ill, or … you know, what he did …’

‘Thanks.’

‘That’s okay. Just take the envelope.’

‘Thanks, Robbie.’

‘Seems good that I played some part in his final wishes …’

‘Yes … wishes, yes.’

I walk out of his office after shaking Mr Buchanan’s hand and booking a table for dinner that evening in the restaurant section of the pub.

‘It’s on me, young Jon … The meal’s on me.’

I put the envelope in my pocket and walk back to Uncle Rey’s caravan. I sit myself down in his armchair, the same one I’d just watched him in, and open the envelope. There’s a key inside, just like Mr Buchanan said there was, and a small note:

Jon, maybe you’ve found out already and all this makes sense to you? I don’t know. Well, my finger points down from the sky at you nevertheless: Big Yellow Storage, Airborne Close, SS9 4EN. Rey.

Why had he chosen me? Found out what? In my perplexity I drop the key. It falls to the left of the armchair. I reach down blindly to see if I can feel it, but I can’t. I lean over, spotting it immediately. It has landed on what looks like a manuscript. I pick up the key and then the manuscript. I thumb through its typed-up pages, maybe about 300–350 of them, double spaced, about 90,000 words or so. I put the key back in the envelope and into my pocket. I hold the manuscript up. There’s a title on the front page:

VULGAR THINGS

By

Rey Michaels

I read through bits at random. I’m shaking a little. I’m not sure what it is I’m reading. I’m not sure if it’s a novel, a memoir, or some form of literary criticism about Virgil’s Aeneid. I settle on a rewriting of it, just like he says in his tapes, or some form of appropriation; great swathes of Aeneid have been retyped, it seems, retyped verbatim, interspersed with commentary and fictionalised fragments, photographs, charts and drawings. It’s littered with solecisms and cliché, and seems slapdash. I fall back into his armchair. I decide that I will attempt to edit it, to see if it can be deciphered. I set it down on the coffee table, clearing the bottles of cider I’d drunk last night. I sit back in the armchair and stare at it: it makes no sense to me. I’m even doubtful it made sense to Uncle Rey.

feel like walking

I drag myself up and walk back into the bedroom. There’s only one way to try to make sense of it. I select another of his tapes and slot it into the machine after taking the other out and putting it back in its proper place.

Rewriting Aeneid #64 1994

Through savage woods I walk without demur … why would I have that in my head all day stopping me, halting me in my tracks, unable to write a word without thinking of these other words, words already spoken. Petrarch owned them before me, as much as I own them now … Like him, I’m charged with oblivion and my ship careers through stormy … what’s the rest? … yes … through stormy combers in the depth of night … Who steers me? My enemies … Who? … Why do I even bother? What is there for me to gain here, out here? Nothing … Nothing … Nothing but oblivion …

[He gets up out of his armchair and can be heard off-camera.]

Where’s my fucking baccy? Bastards … I fucking own it … There, come here, you bastard … Baccy …

[He reappears suddenly.]

Fucking things …

Again I stop the tape. His gnarled face frozen on the screen, fuller, fatter around the cheeks, his piercing eyes staring at me. I’m not in the mood for this. Too much is happening, too quickly. All I can think about is the key in my pocket. I decide to get off the island for the day, to venture into Southend and see what’s in the safety deposit box. I check my pocket for the envelope; it’s still there. I switch off the TV, leaving the tape where it is. I get up off the bed and grab my coat and some money. I make sure to bring enough. I’ll spend some time there and arrive back here for dinner later tonight. I feel like walking, and decide to walk the whole way into Southend. I’ll start at Benfleet and follow the seafront in, past Leigh-on-Sea and down into Southend. It should be a leisurely walk, if I pace myself correctly. It should only take a couple of hours to get there; if it gets late, I’ll take a cab back here for dinner. Maybe I’ll be able to watch more of the recordings then, after dinner, when things are more settled.

the stick

I get waylaid right from the outset. I walk along the High Street, past the old Canvey Club and am immediately drawn into a ramshackle old shop called 2nd Hand Rose, a strange little place that seems to sell pretty much all the tat in the world. Rubbish, mostly. Inside the shop is an old man. He introduces himself to me as ‘Tony’.

‘Do you want to see some models?’

‘Pardon?’

‘My collection of model boats and cars made out of everyday rubbish?’

‘All right.’

I follow Tony into the back of the shop. Out on display is his collection: cars, boats, Ferris wheels, all with moving parts, all made from scraps of metal he’d found: tin cans, bits of machinery, household products.

‘I make them every day.’

‘They’re … great.’

‘They take me a long time to make.’

‘They’re really great, honest.’

‘I scour the island, especially the old dump, Canvey Heights, for rubbish, every day.’

‘You’re really talented …’

‘What’s everyone else going to do with the unwanted scrap of their lives, eh?’

‘Yes … Yes … Well, I’d better be going.’

‘I bring life back to the dead …’

As I’m about to leave I notice a big walking stick, carved out of a branch from some tree. It’s gnarled and twisted, perfect for my walk along the sea wall at Benfleet.

‘How much for the stick?’

‘It’s 50p.’

‘Here’s two quid …’

‘Thanks, son.’

‘No worries …’

I take the stick and walk on to Long Road. It’s a perfect fit: neither too long nor too short for my arms and legs. It feels normal, right; like it’s an extension of some part of me. I actually forget its presence within half a mile or so. Halfway along Long Road I spot a ‘Heritage Centre’ in an old church. It’s open. I don’t feel like I’ve much else to do so I walk inside, dropping a couple of pound coins into the visitors’ box. A man rises from a chair in the corner of the room to greet me – it’s obvious that he’s been sleeping and I’m the first visitor of the day. The church – including the old altar and confessional – is filled with all manner of strange and wonderful stuff; all of which, it seems, has had some historical connection to the island. I’m drawn to an old wooden axle and half a wheel, up on the altar. It’s part of an old horse-drawn carriage, I think.

‘Ah, you’ve found the wheel, then …’

‘Yes … it looks old, what’s it from?’

‘A sad story that one …’

‘Really.’

‘Yes.’

‘What happened?’

‘The horse was pulling a carriage with a boy travelling to the island from London. It got stuck out in one of the creeks … before we had bridges. The whole thing stuck in the mud, the bog, the horse, the boy, his mother, the driver, the whole thing got sucked down into the creek in the night. They died there. People from the island couldn’t find them for years, they’d been sucked down so far … until it was eventually found, they recovered the bodies, the boy, the driver, but not the mother … I don’t think they ever found her. She was taken by the sea … the boy had been preserved in the mud. Do you want to see something?’

‘Sure … What is it?’

‘Over here … follow me …’

‘What is it?’

‘We’ve got the head …’

‘The head?’

‘Yes, the horse … We’ve got its head …’

‘Really.’

‘Yes, come with me.’

He ushers me into the next room, to the left of the altar – in what must have been a confessional, an extra prayer room, or the chapel to Our Lady. Then he shows it to me: it’s behind a glass cabinet: a horse’s skull.

‘There she is … a real beauty …’

‘Yes, she’s certainly something …’

‘She’s a specimen all right, our pride and joy …’

It looks like an alien being; I’ve never seen a horse’s skull before.

‘We’ve had it for years … they gave it to us, some farmer had kept it in his hay shed for years, God knows what happened to the rest of her … At least we have something, something here of importance, historical importance, the actual horse’s head, here in the centre … to remember them by … They say the mother … the mother of the boy … they say she haunts the creeks … The “lady of the lake” they call her … There’s an old book, a novel, I forget its name, in which she makes an appearance …’

‘I think I’d better get going now … I’m walking into Southend today.’

‘I did wonder about your stick …’

‘This thing … I just bought it from 2nd Hand Rose …’

‘Good old Tony … I’m hoping to have him in here one day … Ha ha! I’m only joking.’

‘Okay. Bye.’

‘Bye.’

Long Road is so named for obvious reasons and it takes me quite a while to reach the end of it. Once I cross the creek, back onto the mainland, I find it easy along the sea wall from Benfleet and before I know it I’ve reached Leigh-on-Sea. I take a rest at the Crooked Billet pub, feeling quite at ease with my stick. I order a pint of beer and sit outside at one of the many tables overlooking the estuary and fishing boats. I order a seafood platter from Osborne’s Cockle Shed to accompany my beer. The sky’s beginning to open out into a vast blue, which seems to fade to milky white the closer it gets to the horizon. I drink and eat and think of nothing.

towards the sea

Here I am now, and Southend is busy. I’m not ready for it. The streets are teeming with all sorts of people: mostly gaggles of teenagers on skateboards in low-cut jeans with their arses hanging out. The place feels alive, buzzing. People are going this way and that, groups of scruffy men with bulldogs shouting at each other, smoking weed and drinking Tennent’s Super. Old ladies jostle for position through the general brouhaha of mothers and their assorted children hanging around the High Street on their way to M&S. I notice a crowd of people gathering around Waterstones; at first I think there’s a celebrity in town, but on closer inspection I realise what’s attracting the crowd: it’s the local ‘owl man’. The same one I remember seeing in my youth, when I came here on holiday. I hated him back then, too. He’s standing there with his pet owls, showing them off in broad daylight, allowing all manner of people to have their photo taken with these two magnificent creatures. The owls – both tethered at the leg by a rope – are passed from child to teenager, to mother to random man, eager parents snapping away with their phones. It’s a terrible sight. Those poor things. Those beautiful creatures. I walk over to the ‘owl man’.

‘Are you aware these are nocturnal creatures?’

‘I have authenticated approval from the council … I’m doing them no harm. They’re well looked after …’

‘It’s wrong.’

‘I don’t care what you think, mister … I have the papers to prove it.’

‘I don’t care about your fucking papers, you’re holding these beautiful creatures captive … it’s wrong. It will always be wrong. You cruel little man.’

I walk away in disgust, children looking at me, shielding themselves behind their mothers’ legs.

‘DO-GOODER!’

I turn to look at the woman who shouts this at me. Her sour face is contorted in a tight fist of hate, her fingers pointing at me. I smile after a moment or two when I realise that her face is stuck like that and is not a result of my actions. She moves forward from her pram to give me the Vs. I smile again, knowing this will aggravate her more than her own tired old gesture aggravates me. I turn and carry on walking down the High Street towards the seafront. At Royal Terrace I find a bench to sit on, overlooking the pier and the estuary. Uncle Rey loved Southend Pier. He loved its history. He used to bring me here to see it when I was young, I don’t remember when, or how many times to be exact, maybe only the once, I don’t know. We’d walk all the way together to the very end – the longest pleasure pier in the world – to see the bell. We’d never get the train to the end, we’d always walk there and back. I loved it out there on the pier, above the sea and the mud. I decide that after I’ve been to the safety deposit box I’ll walk along the pier to see the bell, in memory of Uncle Rey if nothing else.

box 27

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