by Sulivan, Tricia; Nevill, Adam; Tchaikovsky, Adrian; McDougall, Sophia; Tidhar, Lavie
On both sides of the channel what remained of us drew together in greying cities, clutching at charity thrown from the back of lorries; or we stood in long lines, day after day, hunched toward the distant promise of something of colour. This country was also being closed down village by town, as if the villages and towns were little lights on some great grid that winked out on the Grande Retraite towards Paris and left the rest in darkness. On the epic grid, the coastline was almost entirely black now, as if the sea was coming over the rim; thick and salty and toxic.
But in the abandoned places, other regions were either opening or had always been open but obscured by irrelevance. Without clutter and noise and traffic and so much electricity, strange flowers were opening to the moon, and curious doors and windows were being left carelessly agape and uncovered. There was no life to be had in such spaces now revealed; just a silent staring at what has invested itself, until an unrecorded end. But that had done nothing to dim Toby’s fascination with such things in such places. Until now, because now he was saying goodbye to it all; bidding farewell to the places where those left alive were outnumbered by the dead.
Back to the sea. Toward the seaward side of Arromanches I found an open restaurant. And I studied its yellowing menu intently through the brown glass while my stomach gaped and burned. The broad windows were tinted to protect diners from the heat; many years ago someone had thought it a good idea. In the seventies perhaps. This town seemed to have known nothing of the brief peaks of prosperity that had come and gone since the decline. Like everywhere else, the people left when the tourists left, or the factories closed, or the fields became overgrown, and the jobs vanished.
I checked the prices rather than the items on the restaurant menu. Vanity possessed me to casually withdraw the coins from my pocket and to count them; I knew exactly how much money I was carrying. Along with the crisp brown sheet of a treasured ten euro note, that I could not bear to part with, was the last of my benefits in coinage: three euros and thirty-four cents. It had been thirty-two cents, but I had found two greening one cent coins close to the cemetery and had polished them into a serviceable lustre while Toby stared at the sky from the amongst the weeds and tombstones. My half of the guest house bill, five euros, was buried at the bottom of my rucksack. That five was gone, dead to me; and was to become the property of the yellowy woman soon enough.
There was to be no rib-eye steak or bourguignon for me that night. It would have to be soup of the day and a cup of coffee. When I returned to Wolverhampton, whatever remained of my money would have to last for two weeks until my next benefit payment. The length of time was staggering; recalling it made me lightheaded, and I needed to lean on the glass of the restaurant for a moment to regain my balance. Inside the restaurant I saw a woolly head, hunched over a table, feeding.
The restaurant was warm. The walls were brown and tatty and peeling. The furniture municipal. The carpet hard under my feet. I could see no staff behind the counter with the curved glass sneeze screens and little golden lamps shielding empty hot plates. Despite the scores of tables, there was only one diner: what appeared to be an old man in a bad wig and a maternity dress, gobbling at soup. I kept my eyes away from him. Beside his table was a wheelchair and a plastic supermarket bag full of children’s books.
I walked alongside the broad counter, peeking over and muttering ‘Hellos’ towards the dim suggestion of a kitchen beyond a fire door. No one came out.
I sat at a table by a window; there was nothing to be seen through it beside some smudges of building exteriors and the odd globe of a street lamp. I could still hear the sea. For all I knew it was black as oil and welling up the glass outside the restaurant.
A meagre old woman with a man’s haircut eventually shuffled out of the dim kitchen and approached without looking at me once. She dropped a menu encased in a heavy binding on the table before me and then retreated back behind the counter where she busied herself with things out of my sight. I felt awkward and underdressed; had not washed in three, no four… no, at least five days, and I was pungent and rubbery beneath my waterproof and knitwear. Stupidly, I envied the disabled man his ghastly floral maternity dress; at least he was clean. What had possessed me to think I could come in here and eat?
I raised the leatherette menu, which was the size of a stamp album and tasselled. I affected a poise and nonchalance that filled me with a hot self-loathing; as if I, a scruffy man with soiled canvass shoes on his feet, ate in French restaurants as a matter of course. I was ridiculous.
I added the price of soup to the price of coffee and then counted my own money again inside my head, to make sure I had enough.
The waitress came back; she knew I was English. Who else would visit here now the Americans stayed within their own borders with their own dead? “No steak. No stew. Just lemon sole, potato gratin.” She barked more than she spoke.
“Soup?”
She nodded.
“Soup. And to drink, I’ll have… a cup of coffee. White. Sugar.”
She snatched the menu off me.
“Bread with the soup?” I asked, and tried to keep desperation out of my voice.
“Extra.”
“How… How much?”
“Furty cents.”
“Great. Thank you”
She was already walking away from the table as I thanked her. I fretted that she had not taken my order for bread. I felt that I would die without it. I had only eaten two sandwiches at eleven, and had been rationing the crisps and chocolate, that Toby had eaten, for later.
But I think the soup was the best thing I had ever eaten, and there was plenty of it. I soaked it into the two slices of white bread and then crammed them into my mouth. When I had finished, I sat back and sipped at my coffee. Feeling magnanimous, expansive, a man of the world, I pondered the tip.
And left without giving one; the meal consumed most of my change, and I deducted points due to the abrupt service. Thoughts of money had also spoiled the second half of the coffee, which I had swallowed without any memory of doing so. I had left my room in Wolverhampton the previous morning with forty euros to my name, but the ferry, petrol, guest house, the soup and the lunch I paid for, left me with only ten euros to live on for a fortnight. A miserable prospect, but I had done so before, many times over the years, having eschewed a material lifestyle as had Toby – ‘because what is the point now?’ – or so he claimed.
Hunched over, I plodded back toward our lodging. I kept my head down to avoid the stone figures and my instinctive gaping at the sea; the horrified astonishment that I felt it wanted of me. But I was quickly consumed again by my petulant thoughts about paying for our lunch. It was not an unusual train of thought; spending what little I had on Toby inevitably began an interior discourse on the unfair division of our limited resources. But considering what Toby had so recently told me about his father’s directorship of a major surviving industry, and his parents’ purchase of a large flat for their son, in South Kensington in London, where he would now reside while working for his father’s cremation empire, would it have been unreasonable for me to raise the matter of half of the fee I had spent on our lunch provided for the ferry and car journey?
This line of enquiry soon had me gasping for breath and slapping at the stone walls I passed on my way back to the guest house. I even paused to scream “Jesus Christ!” at the black and utterly featureless sky. Cascading through my mind came specific memories, phrases of his, and a terrific welling sensation of betrayal.
Toby had always pleaded poverty for the twenty-three years I had known him. I recalled his habitual rent-free living in my dismal flats and rooms. He always claimed to have no home address; to have successfully crafted a possession-free existence that involved living on the sofas and floor space of ‘friends’, and sometimes in a tent on beaches and in verdant parks that no one used anymore. And I had admired him for this; had even recounted his exploits to anyone who would listen in the long aid queues. What had attracted me to Toby in
the first place was his calm, his confidence, his refusal to worry, his aversion to any anxiety about money. And now I knew how such an attitude was sustained.
Back in the days when I could find work, how many jobs had I lost due to his insistence on my dropping everything and embarking on a journey? A journey that I inevitably funded. And during that time when there was, at least, some work available to the educated but semi-skilled, how often had I called in sick for just the same reason, when some new adventure was announced upon Toby’s return into my life? And what of his curious and inexplicable golden suntans that were not endowed by any British sun? They were a result of what he claimed were holidays provided by affluent friends, or merely ‘friends of friends’. And he may well have been sunning himself on the decks of ‘friends’’ yachts while I collected tickets at the dispensary, and handed boxes of powdered milk over the counter to single mothers who shouted ‘Dat’s mine, innit,’ while pointing long finger nails at the hundreds of parcels behind me, on the shelves holding the boxes that awaited collection.
Not once had he ever invited me to his parental home, which had sounded excessive during his confession in the car – the home in Suffolk, I am referring to, not the one in Spain. In fact, he had always dismissed his parents as tyrants, as bullies, and claimed to have had no contact with them; for all of the years I had known him he had practically passed himself off as an orphan to engage my sympathy. And it was a lie; it was all lies. He was a lie. Utterly inauthentic while claiming his life was a penniless search for the sudden emergence of the authentically weird. He was a Trustafarian and had been slumming at my considerable expense for twenty-three years.
Lies. Liar. Lies. Liar.
I ran down to the water and fell to the freezing wet sand and clutched at it with my hands. I shuddered with a rage so powerful I became blacker than the terrible sea.
And he was getting married. Married: how was that even possible? There were no women in our lives.
I walked into our room a little calmer, but still intent on confrontation after a gradual build. I would have something of his fortune. I had decided this while sobbing into the stones on the beach, the rocks reduced to dust by so many waves for tedious millennia. It would not be inappropriate for him to now provide for me; to return the favour, so to speak. I also felt triumphant about eating independently while he slept, but Toby merely said “I’m not hungry” when I asked him ‘what are you going to do about food’. So my little victory was dashed.
I found him slouched upon his bed smoking a joint that I had been able to smell from the ground floor of the guest house. He’d been inside my rucksack to find the little baggy, containing enough skunk for two joints, that was to have been a treat during our visit to Normandy. The baggy was empty; he’d put all of the weed into one joint for himself. His eyes were red and heavily lidded.
“I want to see the gun emplacements at Longues-Sur-Mer,” he said.
“What? Now?”
He nodded. “They’re the only remaining guns of the Nazis’ Atlantic wall.”
I didn’t want some drug-impaired activity at night to distract us from what we needed to discuss. “But it’s pitch-black out there.”
“So?” he said with such ironic force, it made me blink and swallow.
He looked at the end of the joint, now just a butt. “There’s a fortified observation point up there too. In blast-proof concrete. They could hit targets twenty kilometres away with those guns.”
Why had this not been mentioned before? It was so typical of his selfishness; to have designs on visiting something that he would only share with me moments before he actually wanted to see it. “It’ll all be broken or locked up.” Which was a futile thing for me to say, as those very facts would make him want to see it more.
He looked at me and frowned. “Was that not the entire point of the journey?”
My anger closed my throat down and made my blood hiss through my ears.
“And the fact that is will be pitch-black” he said, “makes it all the more worthwhile. And I’m really fucked now, so I want to be up there before I straighten out.”
His teeth were brown and gleaming with liquid too, so he had taken yet another hit from the bottle. So was I to experience it all straight? As he’d taken all of the drugs, it appeared that was to be the case.
He stood up. “Coming?” He said this with such a weary disinterest, he really didn’t care if I went with him.
“My, my, how things have changed.”
“What? What did you say?”
I swallowed; it was hard to keep my thoughts straight because I was so angry and upset and feeling rejected. If I spoke my voice would have been full of tears.
He shrugged and made his way to the door, stepping over my open and discarded rucksack. It was on the floor at the foot of my bed, where he’d left it after rummaging for the drugs.
We drove to the cliffs in silence. He asked me to park near the old cliff walk. He wanted to climb up to the guns from the sea, in the dark, like the American Rangers had done at Pointe du Hoc in 1944.
“No way,” I said.
But from the car I followed him down a cliff path to the shore, where he then began moving around to the area below the gun emplacements. I trailed him along the crunching shingle, and up and over a stone groin, and then up the side of some wet rocks to the foot of a steep grassy cliff face that would have to be scaled as a scrabble, on our hands and knees in the dark. The sign on the fence at the foot of the grassy cliff forbade access and warned of avalanches. In parts, the sea-facing side of the hill formed a sheer rock cliff face, dropping into angry waves smashing into the black rocks. But I was to follow him and his feeble torchlight upwards? It was too dangerous. “No way, Toby.”
Without a single word of advice or encouragement, he set off on his hands and knees. I dithered at the bottom, then followed his sounds ahead of me. I stopped after a few minutes and shouted at him to slow down and to direct the torch down at me. He turned the torch off and laughed. But I had gone up too far to start back down the cliff again in the dark, and he knew this. He was forcing me to follow and I was already nearly in tears with fear.
I had nothing else to guide me; his red waterproof and his pale curly head were consumed by the lightless night. Where they clawed at the slippery grass on an almost vertical hill, I could barely see my own hands. At one point, I made again to go back down; but so steep was the gradient, I was sure I would just plummet into the darkness below if I slipped. Descending the same route was impossible. In a breathless voice, I pleaded with him again to stop, but he didn’t reply. His sounds just accelerated ahead of me, as he went higher, alone. Swallowing a panic that wished to become hysteria, I too continued upwards, slowly.
A terrible universe of thin cold air reached out into the darkness behind my back and above my head; it seemed to suck at me. A cold breeze then slapped against me as I clung to the grassy rock face like an insect. Beneath, so far down, was the thunder of the sea, rushing in to smash itself against the land. It was as if I were climbing into the sky; as if I had gone through the very atmosphere and was entering the deep frozen gases of space. There were no lights at the top. A slither of moon. No stars.
It took me over an hour to haul my trembling body up that incline. By the time I reached the top my mind was witless with vertigo and agoraphobia; fatigue had turned my muscles to warm water.
I stumbled through the shrubbery at the summit, and then climbed a wire fence to a mercifully level surface beneath long grass. In which I came across the derelict observation post. It was like a featureless mausoleum with a thin slot in the front for the dead to peer through. I called out to Toby and received no answer.
It took me another twenty minutes to find him up there in the darkness.
“Would you be fucking quiet,” he said at one point, from somewhere to my left. Squinting into the inky absorbing nothingness of the cliff top, I followed the sound of his voice. By this time my breath was sobbing out of me
, and my fear of how we would get back down was close to paralysing. And something terrible was up there with us. Not an individual or a shape this time. But something above us that had no form or end. I felt I could have just fallen upwards, into the sky, at where the stars should have been. This was a night that would have once wrecked ships. There was no bottom to it, no horizon, no sides or ceiling. It was a vast absence that did not end. It was not paranoia that had made my climb unbearable but a justified caution at climbing over the edge of the world.
Where the fence was broken, Toby was standing on the cliff edge, staring up and outwards to sea. “Can you feel it?” he said.
“Too much,” I cried out, and fell to my face and grasped handfuls of long grass. It was too dark to even see the gun emplacements. A terrible sensation that my feet were then rising from the earth and moving upwards into the cold black infinity overcame me and I screamed.
“What is fucking wrong with you?” he snapped at me. “You are ruining it.”
Whatever blackness was attempting to wipe my presence, my very existence, off the face of the earth upon that cliff top, whatever it was we had climbed upwards and right into, withdrew momentarily from around my unravelling mind as if a tight hat had been snatched off my aching head. And within the lightless air I became red and I burned wild and hot with fury.
I stood up. I walked right at him. “Ruining,” was all I could release from behind my clamped-together teeth. And then he came into focus suddenly as he turned around on the very edge of the cliff. He was actually angry with me.
I punched both hands into his chest. Hard. My elbows locked tight.
And Toby fell backward, and was then yanked straight up into the air.
There was a whisk of nylon sleeves as his arms wind-milled. In raking torchlight, his mouth opened and his eyes went wide behind his silly little spectacles, and then the details of his shock and fear were gone from me as his body surged even higher and further out too, like a kite caught on some sudden upward draught of fast moving air. His coat flapped.
