The Complete Afternet: All 3 Volumes In One Place (The Afternet)

by Peter Empringham

  There was one exception, and he tested Ron’s man-management skills to the limit.

  “It’s lovely, Thomas, but I’m not sure we have a call for something so…fancy.”

  “Ornate, Ron.” said Ethel, who had watched Antiques Roadshow, so long as it didn’t clash with Dad’s Army.

  “Ornate, thank you love. Ornate, Thomas.”

  The subject of his rebuke, a thin man with a terrible cough, but hair a little too bouffant for Ron’s taste, looked from the couple back to the chair he had made over the past week. It had straight legs, but the back fanned out extravagantly, its centre strut a beautiful fan of diamond shapes and fleur de lys, carved by hand deep into the night. Some of the more enthusiastic hewers had furnished an entire chalet with borderline dangerous whittling in the same time.

  “I could bow the legs.” Thomas said, hacking decorously into a lace handkerchief, “if I could get a steam box. Not really my style, but-“he shrugged, “some people like fancy. The French, for example.”

  “It’s really lovely, Thomas.” Said Ethel, smiling at the hunched man, his shoulder bones evident against the rough cotton of his nightshirt. “What did you die of, dear?”

  “Oh! Am I dead?” They stared at him blankly. “Jest. TB. It was bad enough for six months before I passed on. I’ve been expectorating for two hundred and fifty years. My throat feels like it’s been through a cheese grater.”

  “That’s awful.” She said. “I suppose we were lucky, really.”

  “Lucky?” said Chippendale. “You’re dead. What’s lucky?”

  “It was sudden. We’re not ill. We’re together. Were you married?”

  “Ha! Twice. The last time for two years. I was ill for one of those. Elizabeth wasn’t the luckiest wife, I think.”

  “Lucky to have you, Thomas.” Ethel smiled at him. “I think I know what you can do for us.”

  Ron stood on the hill on a beautiful sunlit day, the light filtering through the tops of the trees at the far end of the camp, deep shadow beginning to creep towards him. It was possibly late spring and the descent of the light was slow, the lengthening of the shadows imperceptible, denoted as much by the chill as the failing of the light. He held the much-fondled blueprint in front of him, across his waist, his fingers tightening on the scroll, wrists screwing it back and forward. What he saw was so much more than he could have dreamed of.

  Admittedly, there were no caravans, but then few of the holiday camps Ron recalled featured many actual caravans. Those bug-shaped tin cans were out in the countryside, dragged behind underpowered cars, snarling up traffic. But it absolutely was a holiday camp, embodying every facet of venues he had loved. The buildings in front of him were jerrybuilt and inconsistent in shape and size. They had been lucky with the weather, so no-one knew if they would leak appallingly in heavy rain (although he held a justified hope that this would be so); they were almost certainly not going to be impervious to wind. Inside, the possibility of laceration was only ever an unguarded turn away, the beds were the width of three-quarters of a person, and fire risk was all-pervading.

  Above the entrance to the site a massive arch had been raised, on the top portion of which was the nomenclature ‘EVERLAND’. Inside the camp, and to the left of the arch, were the site office and a shop, as yet to be stocked with anything other than sawdust. If the excited visitor contemplating a week or more of good old English seaside fun turned right on entry, and looked right again, he or she would see on the hillside the genuinely spectacular Entertainments Complex. Ron had a vision of this becoming the premier attraction in the region, whichever region that may have been, a mecca for the best dead acts wandering around with nothing to do.

  It was a rectangular structure with the extended balcony out in front, looking out over the campsite to allow residents to ensure they weren’t being burgled. Tables and chairs of myriad shapes, heights, and sizes were set out on the veranda to enable the enjoyment of any sunny day. Behind this was the building itself, with large plastic sheeted windows looking out over the terrace and inside a further collection of handmade furniture, suitable for anyone from an elf to a yeti and all shapes and sizes in between. There were large posters on the walls proclaiming that the management took no responsibility for any accidents arising from collapse, misplaced nails, unset glue, or general shoddy workmanship.

  The furniture may have been largely as finished as it was going to be, but the bar itself was another matter. Ron’s abiding memory of the many happy evenings he spent during his life in the unique entertainment environment of the British Holiday Camp was the warming effect of firstly a couple of pleasant shandies, and secondly the heating effect of large numbers of living, breathing bodies in an enclosed space. Coastal Britain is not (although some suggest it one day will be) the Mediterranean shore of Spain or the bustling flat-beached sunbathers’ paradise of the Italian Adriatic, let alone the gently washed shores of the Aegean.

  The British holidaymaker is a hardy annual, capable of withstanding transplantation from warm, centrally-heated bungalows in the Midlands to sandier ground, buffeted by wind and in close proximity to heaving brown masses of water. The east coast of Britain, where the first holiday camp was sited, is on the North Sea. This is a body of water of such embedded chill that global warming can do its worst; it would require the sun to plummet from the skies into its waves to reach the level of tepid. Much of the South Coast of Wales, beloved of visitors from the South West, and indeed the North coast of Devon, gazes out onto no sea at all, but the Severn estuary, which bodily forces silt downstream from somewhere in the Welsh mountains. Those prepared to travel further south and take in the north coast of Devon and Cornwall are treated to the delights of the Atlantic, an Ocean that, were it a dog, would be a Rottweiler. West of Newquay, the nearest land is Newfoundland, and you don’t hear anyone in the Americas saying they are packing their Speedos and flip-flops to go there for the summer. The ambitiously entitled ‘Cornish Riviera’, in common with the Regency resorts of the English South Coast doesn’t place its beaches in front of any ocean, but the English Channel, a waterway so busy that they have to have traffic lanes. The chances of getting a suntan on the beach at Torquay or Bournemouth are around the same as those of finding the used condom of a Filipino sailor in the gut of your grilled herring.

  This was why Ron loved holiday camps. He hadn’t fought in the Second World War, but two weeks in Bognor Regis was as close as he could get whilst still having access to decent fish and chips. When they began to travel, to Selsey Bill, to Bexhill, they would buy tea on a tray; an unspeakably heated metal pot and two cups, a jug of full fat milk, and take it to the beach. There, they used to huddle behind their hired windbreak, a canvas construction hammered into the sand to provide three sides of shelter from the inevitable gale force wind. On their last holiday, they had searched in vain to find windbreaks, only realising after trudging long miles that the same items had been renamed ‘Suntraps’. Bloody marketing wonks, he thought, handing over his two pounds.

  Ron had spent enough days huddled in ‘suntraps’ under a tartan blanket, or when the sun actually deigned to emerge, rolling up his sleeves and perhaps even removing his tie, to value the purely medicinal effects of some massive tin shed called ‘The Golden Ballroom’, full of people heading back towards body temperatures of 98.6. He knew also, that this was where the holiday mentality was really fuelled. Many more trippers would be likely to go home and say that they’d had a great night out than that there had been a day on the beach when the fat on their chips didn’t congeal. And, being British, at the core of that was alcohol.

  Goodnight was a marvel. In a tent behind the centre he had set up a micro-brewery, and paid little kids to wander far and wide to find him ingredients. The mere activity surrounding the camp being a draw, other prospective suppliers seemed to emerge from the trees on a daily basis. Ron felt that he had to oversee the ongoing construction, so asked Ethel to act as the arbiter in his place .

  “Don’t be too
soft, Ethel. Just because someone’s made something, it doesn’t mean we want to serve it here.”

  “I know, love. I just feel terrible when they’ve spent all this time. Surely we could just have anything and then it would be caveat emptor?”

  Ron gave her a stern look.

  “You do this! You talk foreign when you want to confuse me.”

  “C’est la vie.” She said, turning away towards the queue of those bidding for a place in the supply list.

  “Stop it.”

  “Que sera, sera.” said Ethel, who in truth had learned most of her idioms from pop songs or the terms and conditions of trading for energy companies.

  Ron had that feeling again. The one he got when she played with languages. He took a deep breath and adjusted his steering wheel. No time for that, he thought. It’s not Easter. At some distance he heard her trilling the words to a song he knew, gazed at her cretonne frock as she beckoned to the first person in the queue.

  ‘That’s amoré.” He breathed, matching her singing to perfection.

  Ron, back in the Entertainment Complex, sighed and momentarily wondered if he had done the right thing letting Ethel loose on the alcohol front, since what he was now looking at was the result of another of her decisions.

  Thomas Chippendale had managed to find a large number of apprentices, and they were scurrying around the interior in a haze of sawdust and a cacophony of sawing, hammering and paring. There was no shortage, alas, of children left to wander this wasteland on their own, their parents either still living or cast somewhere else into the infinite space. At least here they were in the presence of a master craftsman, though the simple safety standards Chippendale imposed wouldn’t have passed muster in the twenty-first century or even long before. They were already dead, though, so they may hurt themselves or slice chunks off, but it wasn’t going to make their situation any worse, after all.

  The effect was positively Dickensian. The air lay thick and dimmed the light; the shafts of sunlight through the openings in the building softened as they filtered through the motes of wood shavings. Filthy urchins ran to and fro, their cries high-pitched in the dense air.

  In the midst of it, barking instructions, gently correcting errors, coughing constantly and most of all working like a Trojan, was Chippendale. His sleeves were rolled up, revealing the sawdust plastering the hairs on his arms, his eyebrows and long dark hair turned almost white. He mopped his brow with a filthy rag as he urged his helpers to work harder, faster. The bar he was constructing would be his masterpiece, running all along one side of the building in a long curve, its arc formed by thin bevelled boards, each finishing flush with the next, and each bearing on its narrow width a delicate carving that connected seamlessly with the panel placed before, so that each time Ron saw it, it was as if he were watching an unfolding picture story.

  He had found no mahogany, so the panels were of pine from the ubiquitous forests, the benefit of which was an endless supply. The wood was stained using some mixture he had worked up from the clays he found locally, and the oil that bubbled slowly from a strange spring in the midst of the forest. The frieze along its face was taking shape, but its intent was still not clear. Though he kept the thought to himself, Ron would have preferred some padded and buttoned leatherette.

  The air was unpleasant, dehydrating, so he waved at Chippendale, who simply nodded, a pencil clamped between his teeth, and walked back out into the fresh air. The sky was pleasingly grey and there was a threat of rain that made him feel very much as if he were on holiday. Guntrick was ambling up the hill towards him, his huge bulk swaying from side to side with the effort. With the completion of most of the construction, he and his clan were beginning to run out of things to hit, so Ron had deputed them to tree felling and production of wood for the carpenter’s efforts, and they had taken to the task with their usual enthusiasm for hacking away at things with metal implements.

  “Ron! Ron! When are you going to do the selection of the acts for the Entertainment Centre? There’s loads of ‘em, now, camped outside. The lads can barely get to the woods for jugglers. What’s the point of that, anyway?”

  “I think it’s just to show manual dexterity, Guntrick.” He said, as if the Visigoth had any idea what that might be. “Mind you, some of them do it with fire. Or swords.”

  “Swords! We could get them to do it with Franzel’s.”

  “It’s stuck up his bottom, Guntrick. That would basically be throwing a bloke with a sword up his bottom into the air. I think juggling means that you have more than one item.”

  “What if we found more people with swords up their bottoms?”

  “Unlikely.” He looked out around the apparently unending landscape, the periphery of the camp, where people drawn by the activity had set up shelters, lit fires, and wandered around, bearing the seemingly infinite varieties of scars and sources of their demise. He lightly touched the steering wheel protruding from his chest. “Even here.”

  12

  Magritte had also co-opted an impressive number of assistants, mainly children and youths, to help him decorate the interior of the Entertainment Centre, sent them out to harvest dyes and colourings, put them to mixing paints and plasters. The buzz of activity, together with the hammering, sawing and planing of Chippendale’s small army contributed to a creative hubbub that rang across the hills and fields.

  “What are you planning, René?” asked Ethel, who loved being around the energetic enthusiasm of the construction.

  “It’s a bit difficult, Ethel. I thought I was surreal until I came here. I have to try to shut out this reality to get inside my own.”

  Ethel wasn’t entirely sure of what he meant, being from the school of ‘I don’t understand art but I know what I like’. In particular she had a soft spot for Tretchikoff and ersatz Capodimonte.

  “I thought the walls would look nice in a kind of magnolia.” she said. René looked at the walls, which were being plastered by his army of helpers, as if they would reveal to him of their own accord the colour they desired.

  “Plain, you mean? Plain magnolia?”

  “Yes. Or maybe a bit of artex.”

  “I don’t know what artex is, Ethel, but unless it’s naturally occurring I’m not sure we can do it. I find your idea of plain, single-coloured walls very adventurous, though, I must say.”

  Ethel flushed. She had never before been called adventurous. They were interrupted though, when Ron put his head round the door.

  “Eth? Oh, there you are.” He walked busily towards them. “Ethel, there’s a bloke here who says he wants to run the shop.”

  “That’s nice dear.”

  “Well, I thought you might talk to him. Don’t really know much about shopping.” She could have said, or making chalets, or running an Entertainment Complex, but that wasn’t in her nature. Instead she smiled.

  “Of course, love. Thank you René. I’m sure it will be lovely.”

  Magritte waved as she left, scratched his chin and stared at the walls. ‘Lovely’ hadn’t really been his target. Still, magnolia! Bold!

  The prospective retailer was seated on one of the mismatched chairs on the terrace, looking out at the chalets ranked off into the distance, and peripherally at a group of Visigoths playing ‘catch’ with what looked like the head of a young boy. When he heard Ron and Ethel tapping across the wooden deck he stood and turned nervously towards them. He held a hat between his fingers and turned the rim as he looked at them. He wore a black two-piece suit and a grubby white collarless shirt. The trousers of the suit ended somewhat short of where they should have been, revealing scrawny sockless ankles and heavily scuffed boots. He was very pale, his hair deep red apart from the sprays of blackened blood on the left hand side, almost certainly a result of the knife embedded in his neck. Ron briefly conjured with, and guiltily dismissed, the thought that he could play a part in Adrael’s Impaled Persons juggling act.

  He fiddled nervously with the brim of his hat as Ethel and Ron walked towar
ds him, almost bowing towards them, shuffling from foot to foot. When they came close enough to greet him, he stuffed the hat back on his head, and his mouth twitched into a smile.

  “Hello.” Ethel said. “Shall we sit down?” The man plunged his shoulders forward again and then held out a chair for her before re-taking his seat.

  “I’m Ethel.” she said, “I understand you’re interested in running the shop?”

  He held his fist to his mouth as he coughed. She noticed that the knife moved up and down as he swallowed, wondered briefly where the tip might be.

  “Yes ma’am.” He shifted in his seat. “I bin lookin’ for a bit of a break, y’know?” He was American, she could tell that, but had limited exposure to the range of accents that the continent offers. He certainly didn’t sound like Abraham Lincoln, with whom she had been lucky enough to spend some time earlier in her death. Abe had a clipped, studied way of speaking, like someone from abroad trying to sound English. This was more, well, Dukes of Hazzard. She tried to place where that might be from. South, she thought, vaguely picturing an area the size of Brighton, that was where the Dukes were from. That fat sheriff kept saying that thangs ain’t done that way in The South.

  “Well,” she said, “I’m not sure it’s a lucky break you know. I think it might be rather hard work. What with the lack of anything to sell. Or a currency. Or customers.”

  “I gotta tell you ma’am, it don’t take much to work as lucky for me. I ain’t been close to luck most of my time. If it weren’t for bad luck, not sure I’d have had any luck at all.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it’s not that bad. What’s your name young man?”

  “Crick,” he said, “Obadiah Crick.”

  “Well, Obadiah, what is it that makes you think you’re so unlucky?” He swallowed nervously, the knife in his throat dipping and rising.

  “Just a run o’ things, I guess. When I wuz a young boy, my folks wuz in the wagon trains headin’ west, and me an’ ma sister Keziah was travelling with ‘em. Keziah she weren’t no more than 8 or 9.”