by Adam Thorpe
‘I’m just standing in,’ she says, her voice hoarse and knowing nevertheless. ‘Seriously, like, I haven’t the foggiest about anything,’ she adds with a cheery cackle.
‘The point is, we live in London so I could put a few up there. Posters. Unless she’s been found?’
She turns round slowly and studies the poster as if she’s unfamiliar with it, pulling her coat over her buttocks. ‘I imagine not,’ she says. ‘The campsite up the road can do you a photocopy, like? They’ve got a colour one.’ She turns back to him, her full upper lip winking with gloss. ‘Are you from Australia or South Africa or summat?’
‘I’m a Kiwi.’
‘Don’t mind me asking, but why the heck have you come here then? It’s just a mudflat the whole way along. Water’s full of sewage. They don’t even bother replacing the light bulbs in them Las Vegas illuminations in Skeggy.’
‘We’re not staying long,’ David admits, startled by the sewage info. ‘Just passing through, really. My wife’s family came from here about a century ago.’
‘Changed a bit since then. To be honest. Do you really want it?’
He nods. She turns back to unpin the poster, struggling with her sharp bright-green nails, then hands it over a touch slyly.
He rolls it up. ‘I’ll bring it back today. What time do you shut?’
‘No urgency,’ she says, leaning her elbows on the sticky counter. ‘But I’ll probably get a right bollocking. Have you tried the seal sanctuary?’
‘Temporarily closed.’
‘That’s what people round here have got tattooed on their brains.’
Which earns a chuckle from him. She smiles back, looking straight into his eyes. Christ, it feels good.
The others are well through their ices outside by the time he joins them, somewhat perky. His own Magnum has started melting – he has a struggle to unwrap it cleanly, asking Lisa to hold the poster.
‘We’ll photocopy it and take a few to London.’
Lisa looks at him as if he’s doing something slightly perverse. The kids are too busy with their lollies to be interested.
‘Let’s shift back to the beach,’ he suggests.
‘Are you OK, David?’
‘Yeah, why?’
‘Dunno. You never stand like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘I dunno. Legs wide. Like my brothers. Like you’re used to straddling horses. Weird. It doesn’t really work. The jackaroo look,’ she adds with a kind of giggle that reminds him of the old days.
They sit on the sand between two big tufts of grey-green marram grass, safely hidden from stares, shivering a little, within sight of the wetter grey that is the sea. It’s attractive here if you don’t look to the right too far, where the concrete reappears a few hundred yards up. Why couldn’t the whole coastline have been preserved? Who is in charge of Lincolnshire? Gulls flock screamingly overhead and then find someone else to harass. He knows what he has to do, apart from being careful about the way he stands, for Chrissake. He’ll carry out a personal word survey, quantify his vocal output, establish indices of nattering density and then establish long-term, year-on-year monitoring of the spew coming out of his mouth. He’ll ring certain home-grown words and record their reappearance, like reckon or heaps or keen. Won’t he just?
‘What’s up now?’ Lisa asks, frowning at him.
He blinks innocently and mentions the monastery. Organic allotments, herb garden, beehives. This could be a good contact.
‘Your parents would be delighted,’ Lisa says in a tone made more caustic by her Aussie twang.
‘I think we should visit. They’re completely organic. Reach out, build the network.’
‘Try selling it to the kids. The monastic peace would be shattered. Forget work for a day, yeah?’
Lisa was a social worker back in Auckland, and is currently struggling with her doctoral thesis on the use of manaakitanga in mental health risk management – manaakitanga being the Maori concept of hospitality. It seemed a great idea at the time. She’s yet to find a suitable supervisor in the UK, but Skype comes in useful. David reckons she misses her job and is resentful of his. She’s already chomped her Magnum all but down to its stick. Despite her veganish ways, she has a sweet tooth.
Sex on a stick. You’d be so lucky.
If he catches her burying it in the sand, with the idea that it’s organic …
He looks out at the sea, narrowing his eyes like a sailor. There’s a silvery line of hope out there, right on the horizon. He hunkers into his silence.
Lisa is now teaching the kids a tongue-twister: She sells seashells on the seashore. She’s really relishing her latest minor victory, kicking him when he’s down, not letting him limp away to nurse his wounds. No, she’s a tough woman, brought up on a farm in the Outback with five huge and deeply unattractive brothers; she knows how to weld, for Chrissake. Steph’s inherited all that. Lisa once told him, in the early days, that she appreciated his feminine side. Her brothers reckoned ‘your Bluey’ was as camp as a row of tents, she said, simply because he was slight and couldn’t lift a tractor with one hand. They both laughed. He told her about the time he’d met a black tiger snake when out birdwatching on Bruny Island and stayed to watch it swallowing a lizard head first. ‘The fourth deadliest snake in the world,’ he added as if she didn’t know! ‘Yeah,’ she smiled, ‘but it had its mouth pretty full already.’ True too. Most of what she says is a reality check. Rows and rows of little boxes to tick. A blob of Magnum gunk hits his T-shirt like a seagull dropping. The chemicals will no doubt eat into the organic dye.
He gets up and goes over to the trash can behind the grass clumps and drops in the unfinished bulk of his ice cream. The two older children run up to ask him why he has done this. He explains to the kids that commercial ice creams are full of synthetic chemicals and that actually they have never seen a drop of cream or even fresh milk and that their reputation is the result of careful globalised marketing or, in other words, lying, and that many of them use palm oil, which is responsible for terrible deforestation. A great flock of words, he realises. Too many to count, screeching overhead, on and on.
‘Does this one use palm oil?’
‘No, Steph, as it happens, but most of them do.’ The kids are frowning, absorbed in sending all those colourings and flavourings and emulsifiers down into their innocent and miraculously constructed stomachs at massive profit to Unilever. The corporate cynicism lingers on his tongue, oily and synthetic. Serves him right. If they’d bought a chilly bin they could have stocked up on healthier snacks, but he didn’t want to look too equipped and disconnected from the natural world, humping it all about.
He eventually collects the sticks – Lisa’s is bitten raw – and they clatter in the trash can. He holds his youngest child’s hand and walks a little way on the long slatted path towards the beach proper, with Steph and Noah already there. Luke is bandy-legged but steady, a small precious weight pulling on his own enormous hand. Bits of shredded plastic and gunge-food wrappers blow past them in the sudden gusts as their toes hit the harder, cooler sand. A dog and its walker break away from what looks suspiciously like a canine crap in the middle of the beach. Wow, folk are selfish. He’s seen dog poop all over the place in Lincolnshire, actually. Wild animals do it discreetly, terrified of being tracked. Perhaps Lisa was right about him being an earbasher. And so what? It isn’t exactly the greatest of reprimands. He feels good, rationalising his rage into self-judgement and self-awareness like this. His father would’ve given Mum a black eye in the name of the Lord.
He looses the two older kids onto the beach like live balls, swinging them away to where they can hurtle about, trying not to think about sand-speckled sausages of dog poop. Soya sausages of poop. And a small mongrel dog. Owning a large dog is equivalent in sustainability terms to owning an SUV: he’s seen the figures. Luke toddles behind them now on his chubby little legs, freed of his nappy, naked except for his top. The sky has patches of blue and the sun shines
way out in a definitely broadening strip of silver that David stares at again, appreciating the delicate beauty of the light and colours, its diminished northernness. The offshore wind farm is now far more visible, its elements rimming the horizon like tiny skeletal trees. It is the beginning of the future. Clean and sensible. He finds it both ugly and beautiful. A hopeless gesture, really, against the infinite kilowattage of nature herself, soon to come pounding in on gigantic breakers, sorting out all this trash. Not even revenge. Just physics. There are other people scattered on the beach; those sitting down are looking at their mobiles, not the sea. That’s what we’ll all be doing the moment the climate apocalypse happens. We won’t even lift our heads from those tiny screens.
Lincolnshire spreads out behind him, as flat and featureless as the Outback. He’d go insane if he had to live here. Bungalow roofs, patches of foliage and the usual in-your-face glint of antennae and pylons. That’s about it. The kids hate walking so the Wolds were hopeless. Nothing he has ever seen in the world outside New Zealand is anything like as spectacular as New Zealand, but this is ridiculous. The waitress asked a valid question. Why have they come? Why did he leave New Zealand in the first place? To be more connected, less out in the planetary wop-wops? Connected with what? The great liberal-capitalist highway lined with fuckin Macca’s and KFCs?
He wanted foreignness too, and this is a foreign coastline. Because this is a foreign country. Where when he says stuff like, ‘I’m just gonna have a kip,’ his UK colleagues say something like, ‘Make me a cup too, there’s a good chep.’ Because of crazy London property prices, they are condemned to living in a small semi-detached in Borehamwood.
A bloke with a camera behind the railing on the raised concrete strip, telephoto lens, half-naked Luke in his field of view. Against the law, probably. Repeat shutter clicks. To be reproduced on the web without permission. Should he go over? Or maybe it’s just zoom shots of the sea. The man is elderly, in a raincoat, with a check scarf and matching cheese-cutter cap on his big round head. Could be harmless, could be evil. Turning away and walking on now; got what he came for. The kids’ souls in his bag maybe.
How come so much of life is tainted?
Lisa stands nearby, packing a sad yet again – staring out to sea like she’s waiting for her lost man to return from his epic voyage. Her figure is running to stout, says a little voice. It is a political move. She once dressed to kill and now she dresses to evade any kind of sexual overtones. Her hair in a practical but unattractive bob.
She is unattractive to him now.
When he first met her she looked very young, like someone’s little sister, mid-teens. She was so thin her clavicles showed through her cotton tops. Her skin was amber; she was lithe and laughing, with freckles over her nose, and he fancied her like crazy. She had an Aussie frankness about her. She’d spent her childhood sunbaking (as she put it) on the farm that her father and her brothers ran with their leather whips and their massive horses. She was a wild girl, or that’s what he believed. She wasn’t, not really. She was in her first year of sociology, had wanted out of Australia. No one is truly wild. But that’s what he projected onto her, the suburban boy from Auckland. Now his terrible secret is that he no longer feels physically drawn to her. He doesn’t know what to do. The feeling is mutual, he reckons. She has only grown tired of his voice because she no longer desires him.
He goes over to her and puts an arm around her shoulders. Her back slopes. Her mouth has a pout to it that he knows well. He’s seen photos of her as a kid, with exactly the same pout. Then, she looked sultry and pretty as a flower, a skinny nut-brown scamp on the farm. Now, somewhere inside her beyond the tired eyes is that same amazing kid. He feels a great nostalgic love for her, welling up in him like springwater in a dry place.
Stephie and Noah are running around with Luke in a large circle, kicking up the sand and chanting, ‘We’re the clever dolphins! We’re the clever dolphins!’ He likes to see them happy and free. It makes him feel he is doing his job, that he and Lisa have brought their ankle-biters up to relish the natural world. It costs nothing to run about on a beach kicking up sand. Not even eight pounds. And it costs the planet nothing either. He feels good about this, that he resisted the ride-on. A tiny victory for Mother Earth.
Luke stoops over, screaming like a swift. David feels his life mate flinch and stiffen under his arm.
‘He’s got sand in his eyes,’ she says flatly, as if she has known this would happen all along.
She runs over to Luke, but David walks. There isn’t any point in panicking.
‘Don’t rub,’ he calls out. ‘Luke, don’t rub your eyes or they’ll scratch.’
Lisa looks as if she is clawing at Luke’s face, trying to brush away the sand, which is covering the little boy’s features like breadcrumbs on a fish. She must know all about grit in the eyes. Maybe this is a tried and tested technique. His little snout of a willy is also coated. David hopes that girl was inventing the stuff about sewage.
‘Was that you, Stephie?’ he shouts.
Steph explodes into angry wails, perhaps out of fear that Luke is really in trouble.
‘There’s no point in telling her off,’ says Lisa. ‘That doesn’t help.’
David swallows a newly furnaced slag of rage and says, ‘Let’s go find some water. You want to splash him. You don’t want the lenses scratched.’
‘He’s not a camera!’ yells Stephie, then, after a pause that feels like surprise at her own brilliance, resumes wailing, but half-heartedly.
Lisa takes no notice and is now flapping a tissue over the screaming child’s face, blowing at the eyes.
‘Go get some water, then, David,’ says Lisa. ‘Stephie, stop wailing. I can’t concentrate with you hollering as well.’
David lopes off to a tap outside a concrete structure that houses a pair of loos. The smell of effluent stubbornly holds out against the sea wind. He has nothing to put the water in. A discarded Coca-Cola can has been placed carefully on the sill of the dunny window. He fills the can up, wondering if it would still have about it a tang of Coke. Appallingly overt graffiti sends toxic darts into his unpolluted consciousness.
‘What’s that?’ yells Lisa as he runs back.
Luke instantly stops screaming and sticks his hand out, hiccupping mournfully.
‘Me,’ he says. ‘Hic.’
‘No, it’s water for your eyes, Luke,’ says David.
‘Me! Me! Coke! Me Coke me!’
The sea crashes on the sand, neither good nor bad but ruthlessly neutral.
‘’Sup, Luke? You said you wanted water, it’s water.’
bronwen is a fat cunt. peados go bak to poland.
Stephie and Noah are watching the proceedings with their arms folded. They hope to catch a Coke out of this. He can tell that’s what they are up to.
What they ought to be up to is scouring the beach for interesting animal specimens. For signs of natural life, bivalves and crabs and worms and waders. For all the living wonders of this remarkable world.
‘Me Coke!’ screams Luke, his face impossibly distorted.
‘Us too!’
Coca-Cola is an evil ogre of a corporation, and the drink little better than paint stripper disguised by sugar, but the agreement, the deal, is that one or two Cokes per vacation are permitted so as to avoid the kids feeling like weirdos, since David always felt such a weirdo as a kid – not being allowed television, not being allowed comics, not being allowed toys, not being allowed Christmas.
‘Just let me photocopy the poster,’ David says. ‘I have to give it back to the café. Two birds, one stone. Won’t take two minutes,’ he adds, already turning up the path.
The campsite’s main hut is thirty yards away. But that trip is enough to make him a free man for a moment. He feels different, on his own, as if breaking into a clearer space. Not watching his back, not permanently checking the kids out in his peripheral vision. He makes ten copies: the face of the girl called Fay looks washed-out in the cop
ies, the machine suffering (according to the overweight teenage campsite operative in his tracksuit, DARREN on his name badge) from some unidentified ink-flow problem. Darren looks at him warily.
‘You know her, then? Family?’
‘Not at all,’ David assures him, securing the rolled-up posters with a free lacky band. ‘But it says spread the word, and we live in London.’
‘Gotta car? Put it in your back windscreen then.’
The café seems crowded now: the German bikies are responsible. The waitress is too busy to acknowledge him at first, leaving a vapour trail behind her of sweat and cheap scent. He rests his elbows on the counter. The seated bikies glance at him but don’t seem to care any more – too busy slurping, too intent on laughing like hyenas. Eventually, the waitress called Colette comes over only to tell him she is out of Cokes because of the bikers but they are sold on the bigger campsite nearby. He feels vaguely upset that she is treating him as if she has never seen him in her life before. The English blow hot and cold, he reflects. He returns the poster, and she takes it without comment. He leaves without saying Au revoir, Colette.
They drove through the bigger campsite yesterday. There were one or two tents like army staff headquarters; otherwise it was the usual oxymoronic spread of immobilised mobile homes populated by ageing bogans. There was a man shovelling white gravel from the boot of his Mitsubishi Shogun SUV (David had done the pollution report on this very model) onto the area in front of his massive white touring caravan in order to make a terrace. There were clipped bushes in tubs, and televisions, and huge tasselled parasols. It was a vision from consumerist hell, David remarked, not helped by the dismal weather and the flood defence ramparts hiding the sea.
Lisa laughed. ‘You’ll be saying it’s all Satan’s fault soon.’
There’s a village a few miles away called Hogsthorpe – everything is either Thorpe-something or Marsh-something round here – but they aren’t going to burn fuel into the atmosphere just to go get some fizzy drinks. If they are that keen to drink Coke, they’ll have to tramp it.
