Test Signal

by Nathan Connolly (Dead Ink)

  The game goes into extra time, then penalties. We wriggle through the crowd. We see Auntie Nic with her new boyfriend, and I wonder who’s watching Steph’s cousins. Maybe they don’t need babysitters anymore. Everyone’s focus is on the screen, jackets and bags abandoned on nearby chairs. We let the crowd jostle us, let things get knocked to the floor, return them with apologetic smiles. No one even notices.

  By the time we get through the crush of people and into the disabled toilet on the other side of the room, I’ve got three wallets up my sleeve. Steph’s got two and two purses. We empty our spoils into the sink.

  ‘Don’t show me whose they are,’ I tell Stephanie, as she starts rifling through them for cash. ‘I don’t want to feel guilty.’

  ‘You’re too nice,’ she grins, but tilts the one she’s rummaging through away from me, so I don’t see the driver’s licence.

  ‘We must have a death wish to do this here.’

  ‘That’s what makes it fun.’ As if to prove her point, she holds up a small clear plastic packet she’s just unearthed from someone’s wallet. Pills. In the next purse, an origami paper square. We smooth out the folds carefully to find a snowdrift of pale powder.

  We dump the wallets in the sanitary bin as England score the winning goal. The pub shakes with victory chants. We divide the money and drugs, hide them in our bras before slipping out of the pub towards home. There are slurred choruses of ‘Three Lions’ in the street all night. Steph falls asleep, curled up at the end of my single bed. I try to draw her but after the rum and the beer, the lines are too slippery and soft. Still, the finished sketch has something to it. A rebellious sort of sweetness.

  The following Saturday, we’ve taken two each of the mystery pills: a pink, shimmery candyfloss feeling in the ends of our fingers making us laugh on the bus towards town. On a whim, we convince the lad in the piercing place that we’re over eighteen, then take it in turns to squeeze each other’s hands as he threads the metal in.

  There’s a storm on the way back. We stand under our tree, Steph prodding at the silver hoop in her belly button through the blood-speckled dressing, my chin webbed with drool from the bar in my tongue.

  She cackles when thunder rumbles overhead. ‘Stick your tongue out, dare you.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘So the lightning will go to you and not me.’

  I remember a TV show about it and tell her so. ‘That’s a myth, stupid.’

  ‘Prove it.’

  I stare her down, grinning, then stick my tongue out. I feel like a witch about to be burnt at the stake.

  Another vicious clap of thunder over our heads makes us jump, then dissolve laughing again. We slide down the tree, streaking black grime down our backs. Lightning forks the sky, so bright that once its sudden camera flash is over, everything in its wake seems gloomy and strange.

  We look at each other and crack up again. My tongue aches when the bar trips against my teeth.

  ‘We’ve got lightning in us,’ I lisp to Steph, excited and urgent. The drugs have made me hyper, mapping in all the invisible connections between everything. ‘Babe, we’re made of electricity. It’s in our veins. We’ve got powers.’

  ‘Superpowers,’ Steph shrieks, gleeful, trying to haul me upright and overbalancing so we end up collapsed in a pile again. We stumble home arm in arm, Stephanie pretending to shoot lightning bolts from her fingertips at everyone we pass.

  We are bleary and subdued when we meet to walk to school on Monday. We somehow miss the headlines on the board outside the newsagents. They’ve been boring lately: the election and the football and the latest wave of blackouts. But this day, it’s different. By the time we get to class, everyone’s talking about it.

  ‘It’s them. Amber and Imogen.’ Steph finds my hand and grips tight.

  ‘They found the bodies.’ I can’t make sense of what they’re saying, but the conversation keeps going. Everyone wants to put in what they know.

  ‘They arrested someone, late last night.’

  ‘They’ve put up one of those white crime scene tents.’

  ‘They think there might be more bodies there.’

  ‘I saw them bringing the digger in, early this morning.’

  ‘My dog was howling all night.’

  ‘My grandma said something was going to happen. She’s psychic, you know. Hasn’t stopped crying all week.’

  ‘I was in the pub last night, when the news came in. You should’ve seen all the dads. Full sobbing. Like, enough to give you chills. I’ll never forget the noise.’

  ‘Bet you anything there’s gonna be a special assembly today. We should ask for the day off. We can’t do any work today. We should tell the teachers that we’re traumatised.’

  Steph storms to the toilets and I follow. I hold her hair back while she pukes. We sit on the cold floor for ages, not talking. I want to smash a million mirrors, but it’s just metal on the wall, so I can’t. No one comes to find us. There is no lightning and no thunder. The world goes on like before.

  GOD HATES WITHERNSEA

  ADAM FARRER

  Hello from the clifftop in Scarborough.’

  Richard Whitely had just begun a live news broadcast from outside the Holbeck Hall hotel when the scene behind him dramatically changed. There was a brief, low rumble as a huge section of the building broke away and fell from sight over the cliff edge, a cloud of brick dust billowing in its wake. He turned to point at the scene, momentarily flustered.

  ‘Holbeck Hall, a building here that has stood for a hundred and ten years, as you can see losing its battle – its grim battle – to cling on to the crumbling cliff.’

  The report cut to an aerial shot of the hotel, the remains of it hugging the cliff edge above a great scoop of missing land. Following a night of torrential rain, a 200 metre-wide landslip had taken place, causing 27,000 square metres of soil to take on the consistency of damp sponge cake and slither down towards the beach. This was in June of 1993. Our family had been living in the small town of Withernsea on the same stretch of coast for less than a year, and for us, Holbeck Hall was big news. I watched this report with no small amount of concern.

  ‘Fucking hell!’ I said, then blushed. I was seventeen and in the trial stages of swearing in front of my mother. While I’d successfully road-tested ‘bloody’ and ‘shit’, ‘fuck’ was new ground. But she smirked and let it slide, realising that the report had troubled me. ‘That won’t happen to us,’ she said, having been reassured at the time of purchase that it would be at least another hundred years before the sea became a problem for our home. ‘We’re nowhere near the cliffs.’

  What happened to Holbeck Hall was alarming, but at the same time it was viewed as an outlier. A rare combination of factors, it was said. So, not knowing what the future held for us, my mother was more intrigued by the sight of Whitely presenting the news. Having spent the majority of our lives in Suffolk, we only knew him as the presenter of the daytime quiz show Countdown. It was a novelty to watch Yorkshire TV and see him in this role, as if he’d won the chance to present the news in a charity auction. And because my mother was not worried, I tried not to be either. Instead, I would go on to use this situation as a handy way of geographically pinpointing Withernsea for people who had never heard of it.

  ‘It’s near Bridlington,’ I’d say. ‘Waxholme? Hornsea?’ Mentally tracking the coastline for somewhere they might be familiar with. Summoning names of resort towns that are more likely to be mistaken for Dickens characters than places where you might stop and build a sandcastle. Eventually, getting nowhere, I’d plump for disaster: ‘Do you remember that hotel that fell off the cliff?’

  ‘Oh, right!’ they’d reply, lighting up with recognition. ‘You’re from Scarborough?’

  The demise of Holbeck Hall was a reference that no one loaded with sympathy or fear, because generally no one thinks about the problems of the north-east coast. This is because no one thinks about the north-east coast at all. Chances are, if the person I was
talking to had previously looked at this part of the country on a map, it would have been to see where Hull was, then decide not to go there. Withernsea is another eighteen miles further out from that decision, away from the city and along winding rural roads clotted with unremarkable houses and industrial fruit farms. It’s not on the way to anywhere. It is not a region that anyone just passes through; it’s a destination. If someone accidentally ends up in Withernsea, it’s likely to be because they’ve washed up on the beach, having first tossed themselves off the Humber Bridge. So, a lack of interest in the area is completely understandable. Had my family not moved there, I wouldn’t have thought about it either. But once we did, its fate was pretty much all I could think about. The fall of Holbeck Hall only amplified these thoughts.

  *

  I’d moved to Withernsea the previous summer, and wasn’t due to start college until the autumn, so I had no friends and a lot of time on my hands. To fill my days, I’d swim in the sea, then walk the cliffs and beaches, trying to calibrate myself for this next stage in my life. And while I did, it was tough to ignore the regular changes in my surroundings. I might sit on a clifftop tuffet and ponder the bleakness of my existence, then, revisiting the same spot a week later, discover that it had shuffled several

  feet down the face. It seemed clear to me that the cliff edge was heading, apparently determinedly, towards our home. I mentioned this to my family and to my mothers’ new colleagues at the pottery works in town, but no one seemed to be talking about it.

  ‘Don’t be soft,’ my mother told me, knowing that I could be dramatic and keen to nip this panic in the bud. ‘You think too much, that’s your problem.’

  This reaction just made me feel like a character in a disaster movie, someone who was able to see an incoming threat that no one else could see and was dismissed as unsound. The problem, it turned out, was that I just hadn’t been speaking to the right people.

  Spend any time standing on the seafront at Withernsea, particularly during bad weather, and you’ll see dozens of people staring out to sea. Generally, they’re elderly, many of them bearing an expression of grim resignation, as if they’d all committed themselves to waiting for a bus they knew would never arrive. Others lean against the railings, watching the waves crash and spit geysers into the air, occasionally whooping like excited children at a fireworks display. And some are very still and considered, staring hard at the horizon line, as if willing it to snap and unravel the whole world. But common in each, when I’d position myself alongside any of them, has always been a sense of welcome. Hard features would soften, there would be a loud exhalation, and this, I recognised, was a precursor to a chat.

  One of the first I spoke to was an old man who sidled up to me on the promenade, his hair sparse and precarious-looking, as if all it would take was one strong gust for the whole lot to be blown off his head like the seeds on a dandelion clock. I guessed he’d been staring into storms his whole life, his face so cragged and deeply pleated you could have used it as a change purse. But when he spoke, I learned that one way you got that kind of a face was by concentrating on impending doom.

  ‘There used to be towns and villages all along here,’ he told me, scything his arm across the sea view. ‘Dozens of ’em. All gone. It’ll be us next.’

  I’d heard this sort of thing before. Tales of the places that were swallowed up by the sea. You could pick up a map of them in tourist information leaflet racks, labelled The Lost Villages of Holderness. Dimlington, Turmarr, Old Kilnsea, Sunthorpe. Records go back to Roman times of the coast’s inability to withstand the waves, which chomped through acres of land and anything unlucky enough to be standing on it. Yet it was local habit to talk of these places as if they’d not been destroyed, but merely submerged as a whole, hidden by the rising sea levels. I imagined a future Withernsea in the same way, sitting intact under brown waters. An East Yorkshire Atlantis with a bustling bingo hall, bubbles rising from the barnacled caller’s mouth as he yells out, ‘Two fat ladies.’

  ‘They say you can see the tip of Owthorne church tower at low tide,’ he said. ‘And sometimes, during storms, you can hear the bells ringing.’ He fell silent, staring out into the spray. I followed his eyeline and squinted, both of us imagining a plaintive, ghostly clang. He pulled his coat tighter around him. ‘Course, it’s a load of bollocks,’ he said, laughing, patting me on the shoulder. ‘But you keep looking, lad.’

  I knew it was nonsense, but I liked the idea all the same. Stories like this are a charming testament to the human capacity not only for producing bullshit, but for swallowing great steaming handfuls of it and asking for more. To me, though, it was the details of grim reality that really captured my imagination. I’d been told that when the graveyards fell, skeletons appeared on the cliff face, poking out like chunks of hazelnut in a chocolate bar. The morbid part of me longed to see something like that when I looked down the coastline, but all I ever saw was exposed pipework. Collapsed outbuildings. Crumpled, static caravans slumped on the cliff edge, like aspirational suicide victims, too depressed and exhausted to even throw themselves over. These are the kinds of sights you can still see all along the Holderness coast.

  It stretches for sixty-one kilometres, from the storybook chalk cliffs of Flamborough Head down to the Spurn Point nature reserve, where you can find an abundance of brown-tail moth caterpillars and, sometimes, a bloated dolphin corpse. Spurn Point is a three-mile-long arc of land, reaching out into the mouth of the Humber estuary, partially built from the eroded cliffs that have washed down from the rest of this coastline. Walk along its beaches and you are more than likely treading on the ground-down and transported remains of a once happy and laughter-filled family home that succumbed to the sea generations earlier. The composer Vaughan Williams wrote ‘Andante sostenuto in E flat’ after visiting there – a swooning and pastoral piece, which suggests he did not encounter a dead dolphin or stand contemplating the bleak provenance of the sands while a determined storm attempted to blow his head from his shoulders. But for me, admiring the beauty of Spurn Point while knowing how it came to be began to seem perverse, like severing your carotid artery then using your final minutes of life to applaud the elegant way that your blood pools around your body.

  ‘Don’t be weird,’ my mother would say when I voiced my concerns in this way. ‘It’s fine, someone will do something.’

  ‘But it is like that!’ I’d tell her. ‘It’s like that woman with the steamroller!’

  My mother claims to have known a woman who was run over and killed by a steamroller while riding her moped. She’d been travelling through temporary traffic lights just ahead of it, when the lights malfunctioned and showed green in both directions. She was forced to brake by another vehicle heading towards her, and while she panicked and contemplated her next move, the steamroller gradually caught up with her.

  ‘There she was,’ my mother would say. ‘Flat as a pancake, squashed into the tarmac with her bike.’

  The improbability of this story is great, and I dare say it was told to me as a moral lesson. My mother has lots of stories like this. The boy whose eyes fell out while headbanging to heavy metal music. The musician who was impaled on his drum stool in a prank gone wrong. Whatever point the steamroller story was intended to make, it was lost on me when I chose to take it literally. It’s the visual that most often comes to me when I consider the predicament facing the people of Withernsea. The threat of erosion is devastating, but there is time to avoid it. It’s not so fast that nothing can be done about it, but instead, people have just decided to wait and hope it doesn’t kill them.

  In 1997, I decided not to wait. Exhausted by the anxiety that I was one day going to wake up and find myself in the sea, I moved inland to Manchester. In my absence the sea did to the land what it has always done: consumed it. When I moved away, the edge of the cliff was still a few minutes’ walk from my parents’ house. On each trip home I’d be shocked by the change, in the way you are when you visit a child or an elderl
y relative after a prolonged absence.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ I said on my first visit back, looking towards the cliffs. ‘Didn’t there used to be a road over there?’

  ‘Never mind that,’ my mother said. ‘Watch your language.’

  With every subsequent visit the edge was noticeably closer, and the assurances about being a hundred years away from threat were starting to feel much less bankable. At the time of writing I reckon that, with a fair wind and the right dose of indignant anger, I could kick a football from our front lawn into the sea. In a few years it’s likely that the ball would be able to float away of its own volition, because our garden will be on the beach. It’s hard to watch the rate at which this coastline is being dashed into the sea and not imagine a near future where the United Kingdom has been reduced to an aspirin-sized speck on the world map, labelled Birmingham.

  ‘You should sell up,’ I’d tell my mother on my regular phone calls back home, urging her and my father to move inland.

  ‘You’re like a broken record,’ she’d say. ‘It’ll be fine, they won’t just let these houses fall into the sea.’

  ‘They let Holbeck Hall fall into the sea!’

  ‘They didn’t let it, it just happened. Sometimes bad things just happen.’

  But I wouldn’t be told. Back in Manchester, I began researching the rates of erosion, sifting through government reports, geographical studies and dusty old selfpublished books on East Yorkshire history. I learned that several miles of coast had been lost over the centuries, and that I was not unique in my concern. Look through the historical records, pick an era, and you’ll always find someone like me, freaking out. They could be a concerned Roman administrator or a medieval fisherman mourning a lost tavern. Or the Georgian vicar who stood on the remnants of his clifftop graveyard, watching a pair of robins building their nest in a newly exposed human skull, and calmly noted in his parish journal that the situation, in words more appropriate to his time and station, was extremely fucked up. Sitting at my kitchen table with my stack of printed-out reports and a laptop bearing a boringly sanitary browser history, I realised I was one of those people and deeply committed to becoming my generation’s Withernsea crank.