I woke up, out of a heavy sleep, very early one morning at the beginning of March to feel somebody stroking my hair. Don’t ask me how, but I knew instinctively that it was my Mother doing it - and she has been dead for over 30 years. I told her that I knew she was meaning well, but that she was freaking me out all the same. I looked at Misty, just to make sure it wasn’t him doing it, but he was very much asleep. Now I’ve got ghosts stroking me, I thought, and sometimes I really felt as though I was going insane.
The news that Tara had been sectioned made me wonder if she had tried to communicate with me lately. I had blocked her e-mails several months ago, so I looked in my spam box. There was one from her fairly recently, which was a long and barely comprehensible rant about life, the Universe and everything. It was all written in lower-case, with no punctuation at all, which is extremely hard (if not downright impossible really) on the reader. Here’s a snippet: “… THAT’S THE WAY THE WORLD SPIN BUSH CREATES A CONFLICT IN IRAQ WHY WMD NO HELPING THE IRAQI PEOPLE NO DEMOCRACY IN THE MIDDLE EAST NO WHO THE HELL CARES ABOUT THE MIDDLE EAST CONSPIRACY NO ITS PLAIN AND SIMPLE MONEY ISSUE ….”
There was a lot more where that came from. Tara knew I had blocked her e-mails (she had confronted me about it last year), so she must have written all this knowing there was a strong chance I wouldn’t read it, but I guess that didn’t matter. She wanted to rant at somebody. Another victim of this crazy world.
We needed some bits of shopping so I walked up to the mini-mart. The new supermarket had had its TESCO sign put up, and there were men wandering about in paint-splattered overalls. The mini-mart, which had become increasingly shabby and disorganised (and generally couldn’t-give-a-shit) over the past couple of years, was making a belated effort to pull itself together, in the looming face of this massive competition, but it was really a case of too little too late. When I came out of the main doors I found Henry and Kristy gossiping in the front forecourt. They both jumped apart guiltily when they saw me, so I assumed they had been talking about me. I was getting increasingly fed up with this area, something that I never thought would happen. There were too many secrets, too many people not being upfront, far too much going on behind the scenes.
“You walked out of there very purposefully”, Kristy twittered, nervously.
“I always walk like that”, I said “Henry, have you heard anything about Jeannette at all?”
“Nothing”, he said “But Jeannette once said, many years ago, that if she wanted to disappear she’d be able to do so, and nobody would be able to find any trace of her”.
This did sound very like Jeannette. She had made a knack of disappearing all her life. Probably learnt from her family when she was a child, and she had been whisked out of the Foxley limelight so effectively. The hapless trip to Spain had been like a sort of dress-rehearsal for this one, I suppose. She had come back from that one, so for once I could understand why Henry was acting unconcerned. He probably thought she would eventually turn up from this one as well, and regally reclaim him.
I wasn’t in the mood for hearing a detailed account of Kristy’s sex life yet again, so I left them to their gossiping and went home, where Misty was shovelling towels into the washing-machine.
“About time”, I said “They haven’t been done for over a week!”
“They didn’t look dirty!” he protested “I suppose you’ve just seen Henry”.
“How did you know that?” I said, in astonishment.
“’Cos you’re in a bad mood”, he said “You’re always in a bad mood when you’ve just seen Henry”.
“Misty”, I said “How would you feel about moving from here for a while?”
“Going back to London?” he said, and there was a noticeable tremor of fear in his voice.
“No not there”, I said “I don’t think I could stand living in a city again. No, I meant somewhere quiet”.
“Would we be selling ’Barnacles’?” he said.
“We could rent it out”, I said “If we can persuade one of the others to pay rent for it perhaps. I wouldn’t like to let it go completely”.
“Well we can’t seem to do much good here”, he said “How can we fight something if we don’t know what it is? Mr Beresford will miss you though”.
“We have to think about all that very carefully”, I said.
He leaned his head on my arm in a comforting gesture. I put my fingers through his hair, feeling its soft, silkiness. The feel of his body against mine helped me to momentarily forget Henry, Jeannette, Tara, and all the rest of the Shinglesea caboodle. I looked up to find Aleck standing in the doorway with a kettle in his hand, his mouth a perfect ’o’.
“I was just wondering if I could fill this up”, he said “Our plumbing seems to have really had it now”.
“Go ahead”, I said.
Misty offered to cook dinner for me, as a nice surprise. Well it was certainly a surprise. Chopped sausages and tinned peas. With the best will in the world, there was little positive that could be said about it.
“Shall I go to the chippy?” he said, forlornly.
“I’ll come with you”, I said “The walk will do me good”.
I scraped the plates into the kitchen bin, and mentally stuck two fingers up at my father, who would have been ranting at that point about how criminal it was to waste food. As we walked out of our front garden into Beach Lane, we could see Aleck standing at the back of their wagon, preparing some hamburgers. He stared fixedly at Misty as we walked past, which put Misty in a grot.
“I wish you’d just ignore him”, I said “He stares at you precisely because he knows it’ll wind you up!”
“He keeps doing it all the time”, he said, angrily.
“Well perhaps he fancies you”, I joked.
Misty stood and looked a picture of perfect umbrage. All he needed was a fur stole and a handbag and he would have been the perfect old Tunbridge Wells dowager, Dame Edith Evans in the flesh.
“That is NOT funny”, he hissed.
“Maybe not”, I said “But if you don’t stop harping on about it, I’ll say it again!”
He was well brassed off with me by the time we got to the chippy. To try and make amends I said we could have a quick session in the amusement arcade next door first. Misty pounded one of the machines, whilst continuing to blast me with indignant stares at the same time. I decided to step outside and take a look at the strange light. We had been deluged with so much rain lately that the air had turned a strange colour, a sort of pale amber. It gave the whole place an even more surreal feel than usual. As I was standing there I got a shock because I thought I saw my sister Stella coming out of the mini-mart. A middle-aged fair-haired woman, wearing an absolutely ludicrous outfit of polka dot Bermuda shorts and a navy blue blazer with brass buttons, stamped aggressively round to the driver’s side of a car, chucked two packets of cigarettes at someone in the passenger seat, and then got in. It was only when I heard her shout something that I realised she was Dutch. The relief that she wasn’t Stella was overwhelming.
As coincidence would have it though, I got an e-mail from Stella later that evening. I think the main objective of it was to boast about their new car, (their old one had got written off in January by a couple of joy-riders), which had cost 15 grand. As a sort of postscript to this she told me that my nephew Arthur wanted to come and stay at Shinglesea for a while. Over my dead body, was my reaction. Words cannot adequately express what a loathsome little tit Arthur is. He has been petted and indulged since the day he was born, his every wish and whim granted immediately. As a consequence, from a very early age his whole aim in life seems to have been how much money he can screw out of people, by fair means or foul.
For quite some while now I have made it a point of honour to barely acknowledge Arthur’s existence on this planet, on the grounds that quite enough other people are doing that already. I have actually gotten to quite enjoy doing this, it gives me some sad, mild sadistic satisfaction I suppose. There is no point raging at someone like Arthur, even a torrent of negative words will only make him the centre of attention yet again, and re-confirm his importance in his own eyes. No, the best thing to do is to ignore him completely.
Once, many years ago when I first ventured out into the working world, I had had to do the same to a bloke who was trying to bully me in the office. Nothing I could say could make him lay off me, so in the end I took some advice from a New Age writer and mentally drew a sort of psychic bubble around myself whenever he was in the nearby vicinity. It was as if I had put him in a vacuum, and it worked. He could sneer and insult me all he liked, and it was as if he was speaking from a distant part of the Universe. The more I ignored him the more confused and bewildered he got, until in the end he had been reduced to a sort of stumbling, whimpering heap of nothing. I’m not saying this would work with everyone, (some bullies aren’t so easily seen off I know), but it worked spectacularly well that time. Bullies need attention more than anything else, they can’t seem to function without it. Jade Goody’s bombastic strutting round the Big Brother house proved that. By ignoring them you whip the carpet out from under their feet.
I replied in a crisp manner to Stella, saying that there was no room at ‘Barnacles’ for one more person (this was certainly the God’s-honest truth!). I fully expected then to get a long diatribe back about how I didn’t care a stuff about my own nephew blah-blah-blah.
Speak to the hand.
Mr Beresford had had another brain-wave. Following on from the success of the Christmas cards, he felt we should work on another series of postcards, depicting local scenes. Quite frankly, I was running out of ideas when it came to Local Scenes, I felt as though I had painted everything there was to paint! I remembered that I had some old postcards of Granny’s up in the loft, and I went up there, looking for inspiration. Granny had had quite some skill as a landscape artist. She had never made a single penny out of it, instead doing postcards as gifts for friends and neighbours, but even as a kid I had admired her gentle little pen-and-ink or watercolour pictures.
I had unearthed some very old sketches of the Downs, and had put these aside to take back down below, when I found a couple of very weird old scenes of the beach, done on postcards. This certainly wasn’t Granny’s usual thing. They showed some odd-looking people sunbathing naked on the shingle. It wasn’t the nudity that surprised me (Granny had been very broad-minded. When all the fuss about Brighton’s nudist beach had first erupted many years ago she had said “what’s the problem? It’s only the human body!”), but that these people didn’t seem right somehow. They were all completely hairless and vaguely androgynous. You couldn’t tell which were men or women. On the back of one of the cards she had written in biro “AUGUST 1969”. I had only been a toddler in August 1969 so the date meant nothing to me whatsoever. I sat staring at these weird little pictures for some while. Granny had hardly ever sketched people, so why she had suddenly chosen to sketch these peculiar strangers was odd in itself.
Misty was yelling for me from the living-room, shouting something about an invitation that had come in the post. I clambered back down the loft ladder.
“It’s really weird”, he said, waving it about excitedly.
It was an invitation to Henry’s 50th birthday party (I could have sworn that he was over 50 but never mind), to be held at the village hall. A simpering note attached to it said: “I KNOW THIS IS A BIT SHORT NOTICE, BUT THE CHURCH HAVE ARRANGED THIS FOR ME”. The invitation gave a detailed account of the grim festivities that would be awaiting us that evening: plenty of Organised Fun, including Rowland threatening to play the trumpet and the guitar (both at the same time?!), and that one of the Church members would give “a powerpoint” about Henry’s life, which Henry assured us would be “both amusing and poignant”. What was really breath-taking though was the Church’s statement that they wanted to “celebrate” Henry’s life, (by this point I wanted to slump shell-shocked onto the living-room floor!) his umpteen (far too many) days on this Earth. To render me speechless even further, they then said that “IT IS OF COURSE A GREAT SADNESS TO US ALL THAT JEANNETTE WILL NOT BE HERE FOR THIS EVENT, BUT SHE WILL ALWAYS BE IN ALL OUR HEARTS. WITH THIS PARTY WE ARE HOPING TO RE-CREATE THE JOY OF THEIR WEDDING DAY [you what?] ALL THOSE YEARS AGO, AND HENRY WANTS TO TAKE THIS OPPORTUNITY TO THANK EVERYONE FOR THEIR OVERWHELMING KINDNESS AND SUPPORT IN THESE RECENT DIFFICULT TIMES”.
It was disgusting! No trace of Jeannette has been found, and Henry himself had talked about her recently as though he was certain she had disappeared entirely of her own volition, and was alive and well somewhere. And here was this bunch of nauseating do-gooders talking about her as though she was definitely sunk six feet under! (I suddenly had a highly entertaining image of Henry’s eulogistic powerpoint being interrupted by Jeannette storming into the village hall like the wicked fairy at the christening! It would serve him bloody well right too!!!).
Misty got himself in a state, thinking that I was intending to make us go to this travesty. Nothing I said could convince him that I had no intention of doing any such thing. He kept bringing up how I made us go to the party at ’The Hedges’ back at Christmas-time. In the end I said that the only way I would go to this damn party would be if somebody were to club me senseless and strap me on a stretcher to wheel me there! I think that finally got the message through to him.
To add insult to injury that bloody séance at Magda’s house was going ahead. It didn’t matter how many dire warnings I issued, nobody took a blind bit of notice. I went out to Al’s wagon taking a cup of coffee with me (which I had to drink alone, as he had given up coffee for Lent, even though he’s not remotely religious in any shape or form), and found (to my surprise) that he agreed with me.
“I thought your journalistic curiosity might get the better of you”, I said.
“As I’ve said before”, he said “There are enough weird things happening in this area already, without adding to it! Anyway, I got a shock the other night. And it actually made me leap out of bed”.
“What was it?” I said.
“I was alone in here”, he explained “The lads had gone night-fishing. I was half-awake half-asleep so everything is a bit confused, but I swear I saw a dark shape come in here. Just a shape. Like a human shape cut out of black cardboard, life-size. I don’t know what the fuck it was, but I did actually leap out of bed”.
“Did it disappear?” I asked.
“I put the light on and it disappeared”, he said “But Christ, it gave me the heeby-jeebies I can tell you!”
“I can see why you don’t want to go the séance”, I said.
“Jason is hoping to capture it on film”, said Al “Preferably with some poltergeist activity thrown in, and then he’s going to show it on YouTube!”
“And be flamed by trolls everywhere”, I said.
“He’s well used to that”, said Al, looking longingly at my coffee mug.
“Do you want me to go outside and finish this?” I said.
“No no that’s alright”, he said, wistfully “Are you not giving anything up for Lent?”
“Not on your Aunt Nelly!” I said “Life’s bloody hard enough at the moment, without giving up things I enjoy into the bargain! Anyway, I’m not a Christian [neither are you, I felt like saying] so I don’t have to worry about all that”.
“I’ve been doing quite a bit research on this area”, said Al, presumably to take his mind off my coffee “I found out some things about ’The Hedges’”.
“Well it’s been a holiday let for a long time”, I said “But before the Temples came here, it was hardly ever rented out. You won’t find that as a big surprise I’m sure!”
“The last person to live there properly, I mean actually own it and live in it”, said Al “Was an old man. He died of a heart-attack in the living-room”.
“He must have been before my time”, I said “Because I don’t remember him”.
“He wasn’t found for several days”, said Al “Was just sitting there in his armchair, with the telly still on, like Benny Hill”.
“Sad, but it happens”, I said.
“What struck me about the history of that house though”, Al continued “Was just how many previous owners had died of cancer. Every single one of them!”
“Shit”, I said, for once not bothering to try and dredge up some Smart Aleck sceptical explanation.
“My reaction exactly”, said Al “The worst place for someone like Jeannette to go and live in don’t you think, someone recovering from cancer?”
“Well I admit she could have found somewhere better than ’The Hedges’”, I said “But cancer’s not exactly catching is it! It’s not as if it’s seeped into the woodwork like some radioactive force”.
“Not like that, no”, said Al “But I bet you that’s what’s made that building as sick as it is. A huge, negative atmosphere has built up there. Look how Jeannette deteriorated physically since she came to live there”.
“I know”, I said “I thought the cancer had come back, she looked so ill. But Henry didn’t exactly help matters, that’s one of the reasons I’m so damn angry with him about this party”.
“’The Hedges’ was a sick, vile house”, said Al, sounding unusually dramatic for him “But the point I’m trying to make is this: was it all just coincidence that people got sick and died there, and gradually it all built up into some horrible atmosphere that jinxed people? OR was there something there to start with that caused people to deteriorate and eventually die?”
“Like what?” I couldn’t help but ask.
“I don’t know, that’s just the problem!” said Al “Robbie talks about ley lines, and says he wonders if this area’s on a node, a place where ley lines cross, but I’m not sure I buy that. He said that Foxley’s on a node too, and that’s partly why it’s called Foxley”.
“Sometimes I think my brain’s going to disintegrate under the weight of all this!” I said “Are you sure you won’t have a coffee? One a day won’t do you any harm”.
“Yeah go on then”, he said, almost absent-mindedly.
The kettle had been unplugged, and it’s cord wrapped round it, as though it had been put under restraint. I released it, filled it up, and plugged it in.
“That’s not all”, he said “I did a bit of digging into Rattlebone Farm, and there is some SERIOUSLY weird shit from up there. Did you know there was a trio of unsolved murders there in the 1960s and 70s?”
I tried to cast my mind back to my holiday visits here when I was a child. I remember there was a lot of excitement one year, with police cars whizzing through the village at all hours, because there was said to be a murderer on the run, (the sort of thing kids talk about in hushed, breathless excitement) and the cops thought he was hiding out up on the Downs. But I was only a small kid at the time, and it was all very vague. I have no idea if they even caught him.
“The murders were actually at the farm?” I said, in astonishment.
“No, the farmland and the surrounding countryside”, said Al “People were found in ditches and on the roadside, that sort of thing. It happened over a time of several years, so that’s probably why it hasn’t made that much impact”.
“Who were they?” I said “The victims I mean”.
“One was a homeless woman”, said Al “Had a lifetime of mental illness behind her. Another was a retired vicar from out Darklight Cove way, and another was a bloke who was on holiday here at the time. He used to like going walking over the Downs, a bit like our Henry. No one ever caught for it. People at the farm not suspected, not as far as we know anyway. Each of the victims was strangled”.
“Good grief”, I said.
“It all goes back a lot further than that I can assure you”, said Al “Back in the 1880s there is a tale that one of the daughters at the farm suffered from a sleeping sickness. Like an extreme version of narcolepsy. She fell asleep for several years at a time”.
“I have heard of things like that happening”, I said “Freaks me out quite a bit. Imagine waking up and finding that several years of your life has gone! Was she kept at the farm all that time?”
“Yes”, said Al “Well I guess if she was asleep, she wasn’t much trouble! I suppose all they had to do was to keep her clean, and try and get some nourishment into her somehow. The daily life of the farm just carried on all around her. Occasionally she’d wake up, and for a few weeks she’d be perfectly normal, and then she’d go under again”.
“Poor girl”, I said.
“She became a bit of a celebrity at the time”, said Al “Visitors to the area used to drop in and see her, not that she’d have known anything about it of course. There is some tale that one day she actually got out of bed and sleepwalked around the room, but she was completely unconscious”.
“When did she die?” I asked.
“She came out of her final sleep when she was in her 30s”, he said “And lived for another 20 years, got married and had a couple of kids. Ordinary, country woman in every way, except she’d get quite narked if anyone wanted to talk to her about the Sleeps. I suppose you can’t blame her really. She wouldn’t want constantly reminding how much time she’d missed!”
“So how old was she when it first happened?” I said.
“12”, he said “She came home from school one afternoon, complaining that she felt tired. No one took much notice, because the kids walked miles to and from school in those days. She lay down and fell asleep. No one could wake her up. She stayed like that for about 6 years that time”.
“12 could be the onset of puberty I suppose”, I said “If she was an early starter”.
“Not that old chestnut about the onset of puberty and poltergeist phenomena?” said Al.
“Well there does seem to be a link”, I said “I don’t know what the hell it is, but it crops up a lot”.
Anyway, all in all, yet another thing to muddy the waters.
I have never before in my entire life, from the very bottom of my heart, wished for somebody to be dead. This isn’t (largely) from any insufferable saintly tolerance on my part, but usually because I believe the ancient Pagan superstition that if you hex somebody, there is a chance that the hex could rebound on you threefold. But this time I decided to change the habit of a lifetime. I wanted Henry Temple to die. His continued existence on this Earth was wearing me down in a way that was rapidly becoming intolerable. Just when I think that there is nothing more he can possibly say or do to shock or upset me, along comes this bloody travesty of a birthday party.
It had taken me some while to realise that I had been suffering from depression for a long time now. But suddenly it all made sense. For instance, the days when I had so little energy that doing the simplest things felt impossible, and I actually felt as though the life-force was being sucked from my body. The days when I would stop in the middle of whatever I was doing, and give a sharp cry of emotional pain as though somebody had come along and punched me in the stomach. And there were the days when I would go to write an e-mail and couldn’t remember how to spell the simplest of words (that was VERY frightening). There wasn’t any one factor to blame for this, it was a mix of many different things. But, rightly or wrongly (I have no idea which), I gave Henry the lion’s share of the blame. For months on end he had worn me down until I had no idea what to think about anything anymore, and sometimes it felt as though he was causing my brain to go into meltdown.
People were surprisingly kind to me when I finally confessed what the trouble was. (This was after I had filled in a questionnaire on the Internet to evaluate if I had manic depression. If I answered ’yes’ to more than 5 questions then I had. I answered ‘yes’ to about a dozen). Misty of course, goes without saying, was the soul of kindness, even though I knew he was baffled by my condition. He seemed to think somebody had said or done something in particular to floor me, but I tried to explain that it was a whole mass (mess?) of things. He said that I should drink more tea when I found myself feeling particularly low, and actually it did help! (That and listening to Vivaldi, somewhat bizarrely, as he’d never been a particularly favourite composer of mine before, but there was something about that over-the-top Italian exuberance that helped me a lot).
I got unexpected help from Xanthe. I was dreading her finding out, as I envisaged some kind of full-blown melodramatic scene about the graphic horrors of mental illness. Instead, she just nodded when I described my symptoms, and said “I know, I’ve had that too”. She took to sticking little scribbled notes through the letterbox asking me if I was well. At times I was irritated. (The hardest question I found to answer these days was “how are you?” I couldn’t say “OK” or “fine”, because I wasn’t). Most of the time I valued her kindness though.
My psychic advisor even tried to help (in her own way). After cutting through a lot of waffle about Mars and Chiron The Sacred Healer, she said that I had to come to terms with things, and to turn negative thoughts of anger into compassion. Easier said than done, but I was game. All I knew was that I wanted this damn thing to go, to leave me. I had told her about my feelings about Henry’s party, and she had said something along the lines of “he’s a Piscean, and sometimes Pisces people can be whales, they swallow people up”. I couldn’t help thinking of Kristy when she said that. Kristy’s birthday is around the same time as Henry’s, and she’s certainly swallowed up poor old Owen Maddock, and is right now (as I write) probably having a good chew on him before spitting him out!
The evening of the séance at The Shell House, by some curious chance (sure!) coincided with Henry’s party. Misty and I had absolutely no intention of going to either of them, and the prospect of having ’Barnacles’ to ourselves for one whole night was too tempting to miss. All our lodgers were going up to the fun and games at The Shell House, and I was glad to see the back of Jason, who was driving me mad with his enthusiasm to find a weird kink in everything. He had even tried to make out that the night of the recent lunar eclipse had seen more weird things happening than usual. I honestly couldn’t remember anything weird happening that night … it made a refreshing change really.
Late that evening, after an enjoyable few hours of frolics, Misty was practicing golf putting in the living-room, whilst I was trying to find something to watch on the television. I had come across some Wagner opera, in which a mountainous woman in a dreary grey dressing-gown was bawling her head off about something. Another, slightly less mountainous, woman appeared, and the big one roared “park your horse in the forest, my dear” (or I think that’s what the subtitles said). Big Girl then proceeded to bore the tits off everybody at great length by going on about how Wotan didn’t come to see her anymore. Her visitor, who (quite understandably), had been sitting with her hands clamped over her ears, suddenly stood up and roared shrilly that Wotan had been under a lot of pressure lately. He had had his spear damaged in a fight, and had then come home in a petulant fit of pique and smashed up all the furniture in the Sacred Hall (MEN! Sheesh!). God Almighty, it was starting to feel like an episode of The Trisha Goddard Show!
“Why are you watching this?” said Misty.
“’Cos there’s nothing else on”, I said.
“There must be!” said Misty, grabbing a listings magazine “This goes on until 2 o’clock in the morning!”
“Good lord”, I said “Does it really?”
When he said that cricket highlights were on the other side, I think we both came to the conclusion that the only thing to do was to go to bed. I proceeded to go round putting chain up on the door, switching off television, lights and heating. At one point I saw a dark shape walking behind me (out of the corner of my eye) in the living-room. I thought it was Misty, and said “I’ll be with you in a minute”, and then it occurred to me that it wasn’t him. I went into the bedroom, where he was already curled up in bed.
Although the thought that someone (or something) completely unknown to me might be walking around my house was hardly a comforting one, yet at the same time I wasn’t very afraid. I came to the conclusion that whoever it was, they could hardly subject us to the same psychological warfare that the Temples had done since they had moved to Shinglesea Beach!
Only a fool could feel completely safe and at peace with all the murders, vanishings, and disembowelling of animals that had gone on around here lately, but at the same time, in some very perverse way, that was easier to deal with than the relentless wearing down that Henry and Jeannette had done. We were coming up to the Spring Equinox, and I couldn’t help but reflect how much older and sadder I felt since this time last year. Some of this must be blamed on the state of the world, (which was in a perfectly miserable shape), but a lot for me was the effect the Temples had had on our lives.
It was a curious thing though that I was starting to feel better since I had Come Out about my depression. It was as if I no longer had to pretend that I was Mr Invincible, the strong rock around which everybody else swam. I didn’t have to jolly everybody else along like some fucking Butlin’s Red Coat, whilst they all indulged in their latest umpteenth nervous breakdown! As Mark puts it in the masterly series ’Peep Show’, it’s so easy being a nutcase I’m not surprised there’s so many around! I could go out nude into the garden if I wanted to (a bit on the parky side at the moment, but incredibly invigorating), I could answer the phone in Italian if I wanted to (don’t ask, it’s just a little quirk of mine). I could suddenly relax and do an awful lot of things, and the people that knew me would think “well he’s been a bit under the weather lately”. I guess it’s simply a case of if you can’t beat ’em join ’em.
Mrs Jackson had left me a bunch of tulips on the veranda, and I went out into the lane to thank her for them. She was talking to Kristy when I got there, who I barely recognised, muffled up to the eyes as she was in a bulky wax jacket (unlike the teenage girl I had seen coming out of the mini-mart, who, for reasons I really can’t imagine, was swanning around in these bone-scrapingly cold temperatures in a little strappy top, looking absolutely purple with cold). When Kristy saw me she stared intently at me as if I was an escaped lunatic.
“I hope they’re alright”, said Mrs J, referring to the tulips “They seemed a bit droopy when I bought them”.
“They perked up when I put them in water”, I said.
All through this short conversation, Kristy kept digging me in the ribs and chortling at the words “droopy” and “perked up”. To be honest with you, (misogyny alert), I was getting more than a little tired of Kristy’s schoolgirl attitude to sex. The constant rib-jabbing, giggling, and the need to tell me in great detail about every single dismal coupling was ridiculous. She’s 53 for crying out loud!!! It would be curious to know what accounts for this arrested development on her part. I know she got married fairly young, and so she didn’t sow her wild oats when she should have done, but even so …
As usual, she had just managed to drag the conversation back to herself. (You simply can’t get Kristy to show any genuine interest in anything but her own life for longer than a few seconds). She was telling some long and convoluted tale, the simple gist of which seemed to be that some bloke at ’The Ship’ recently had told her she had nice tits.
“No one ever used to say that to me when I was younger”, she was twittering “And yet they say it now, isn’t that amazing?”
Tongue-biting time. The reason they say it now, you daft mare, is very simple: men will say absolutely ANYTHING, (no compliment is considered too excessive, extravagant or far-fetched), when there’s the distinct possibility of free casual sex in the offing. It wouldn’t have surprised me one bit if he had told her she should take up modelling!
We’ve all been there, darling.
I went home. The phone was ringing as I went through the front door. Misty was nowhere in sight (it turned out that he was in Al’s wagon, hearing about the séance). A surreal conversation ensued, in which a forbiddingly serious young man in India demanded to know what I thought about our local W H Smiths. My increasingly hysterical assertions that I hardly ever used the place, that I bought my books and DVDs over the Internet, was only met with the grim statement that I MUST ANSWER THE QUESTIONS (obviously the Internet option hadn‘t been put on his check-list). He asked if such-and-such was my telephone number, and I said “you know it is, you’ve just rung me on it!” Nil response. He asked me what I did for a living. I said Artist. Long pause. Did I mean PROFESSIONAL artist? I said, shirtily, that this is what I do and that’s that. He asked me what the total income of my household was, and I told him I had absolutely no intention of revealing that information (not that it would take long!). “That’s alright, that’s your right”, he said, briskly. Back to W H Smiths. Did I think children enjoyed shopping there? “I have no idea”, I said “Why don’t you ask THEM?” He asked me if I would like loads of people to ring me up and talk to me about mortgages/credit cards/life insurance/installing a new kitchen/replacing doors and windows/making a will/special offers … I seriously can’t imagine anyone in their right mind answering Yes to this!!! It was a great relief when he said “thank you for your precious time” (stop taking the piss), and rang off. In spite of his repeated exertions throughout the call that “this won’t take very long”, I was horrified when I hung up to find that nearly half-an-hour had passed! I was thoroughly fed up by the whole thing, and with a strong determination never to darken the doors of W H Smiths ever again for as long as I lived!
There was no way I was going to go and hear a lot of gibberish about the séance after this, so I went onto the computer to do some e-mails. My psychic advisor said that I would find people very obstructive today. I don’t think she had ever said a truer word! Whilst I was engrossed that vile little toad Henry had stuck a note through the door. It was a whinge-y piece bleating about how hurt he was that none of us had made any effort to come to his party. And for our information it had all gone off very well, apart from Rowland nearly electrocuting himself on the iron just beforehand. He signed off with an extremely irritating “LUV FROM A NOT-VERY-HAPPY HENRY X”, which made me want to go round there and ram the piece of paper right down his scraggy throat! I was stopped from doing this by the realisation that to do so I would have to face him in person, and that thought was frankly intolerable.
Deep breaths. In with anger, out with love. Peace, love, harmony, relax the stomach muscles …
“He’s got no business dumping all this on you”, said Magda, when I showed her the letter a few minutes later.
“That’s Henry for you”, I said, irritably “I am absolutely sick to death of talking about him. I’m appalled at how much I’ve had to think about him this past year!”
“Well I just popped in to say that Aleck and I will be moving on soon”, said Magda “We’re going up to The Shell House, live there whilst we’re doing it up”.
“The séance was a success then?” I said, in astonishment.
“An absolute non-event”, said Magda “Nothing happened. The only bit that freaked us out was when we kept hearing voices outside the house, but when we went out to investigate there was never anybody there”.
“Sound could carry quite far up there”, I said “It might have been somebody you heard at the farm”.
“I hate the place as much as ever”, she said, bluntly.
“So why are you moving up there then?” I asked.
“It’s the only way I feel to try and get some normality into it”, she said “The lighter evenings are coming, and I think that will help. I couldn’t have faced it in the middle of Winter”.
“Well I think it should help”, I said “It would be a dreadful waste of your hard-earned cash if you simply had to abandon it”.
“That’s how I feel”, said Magda “And perhaps, with the current state of the world, the Unknown simply doesn’t feel as scary anymore”.
Normally the clocks changing doesn’t bother me one jot. I’m not one of these people that gets inordinately worked up about it one way or the other. But Xanthe had put the idea in my head recently that I may have been suffering from S.A.D, that Seasonally Affected Disorder (I think that‘s what it‘s called) thingy, and I must admit it made sense. I did feel a relief I had never felt before when we moved into British Summer Time.
Odd things were still very much happening (we had started to have brief power-cuts first thing in the morning, which there didn’t seem to be any logical reason for), but I found it easier to deal with, knowing that we weren’t going to be plunged into darkness come late afternoon -
- all this waffle is merely stalling that fact that I have a difficult thing to say, and I don’t want to say it. Sometimes, over the course of many years now, I have been having revolting dreams about my father, incestuous dreams. The disgust these dreams fill me with has sometimes been near impossible to deal with. I feel as disgusted and revolted as if somebody had pushed my head down a toilet-bowl, or as if I had taken part in the shit-eating scenes in ‘Salo: 120 Days of Sodom’. Soon after he died last year, I kept having recurring nightmares that he hadn’t really died, that he was about to turn up at any moment. But I think I’ve finally realised that he won’t. The old bastard is dead and buried.
(I’ll leave forgiveness to the Christians … for the time being at any rate).
The dreams were about the last straw at this stage though. This one left me so emotionally winded that I felt as though I needed to be picked up off the floor.
I took advantage of a brief lull in the Spring rains to nip outside and expose my flesh to the warm sunshine. I could do this by opening the shed door and using it as a screen, so that the neighbours wouldn’t be unduly traumatised by the sight of my naked body. This was heaven. When I had had my fill I put my dressing-gown back on, and shut the shed door. Kristy had appeared in her back garden, and was lethargically pulling out weeds from between the slabs on her patio. When I spoke to her she turned to look at me with a face that could have stopped traffic (and I don’t mean in any Helen Of Troy-ish way).
“I’ve got a bad back”, she snapped.
I had to bite back some remark to the effect that that could only be expected at her age, and wondered instead why, if she had a bad back, she was bending over pulling up weeds? She then proceeded to tell me some long, inordinately dull tale about Staff Shortages At Work. The only way I could have stopped my mind wandering through this would have been to stick pins in my legs, and as I didn’t have any to hand, I found myself (i) looking up at the cloudscape, (ii) thinking it was about time we got the fence panels replaced, and (iii) trying to overhear Misty and Paul, who were by the kitchen door, having a much more interesting conversation about sexual relationships.
Kristy finally could see that I wasn’t giving her my undivided attention, and with an abrupt “bye then” went in doors. I couldn’t be arsed about this. Ever since I’ve known Kristy she has only ever talked about herself, she almost NEVER shows any interest in anything else, and somehow I didn’t think it would do her any harm to realise (for once) that not everybody finds the minutiae of her daily existence as fascinating as she clearly does. Released from bondage, I went over to the back door.
“I mean”, Paul was saying “Eventually you come to thinking that there’s gotta be more to a relationship than sex. I mean, it’s alright to start with like, but after a while you wanna little bit more than that, don’t you?”
“Oh I don’t mind if I’m just used for sex”, said Misty, who was leaning casually against the door-frame.
“Ignore him, Paul”, I said, putting the kettle on.
“Well I quite like the idea of being a sex slave!” said Misty.
“That’s the problem with girls my age”, Paul was still going on “They’re only interested in sex”.
“Really?” I said “Don’t tell Robbie that, and certainly don’t tell Al, he’s at a dangerous age!”
“I wanna do what Aleck’s done”, said Paul “And find an older woman. I could be a what’s-it-called … a gigolo”.
“Do gigolo’s wear hoods as a rule?” I said.
“There are tonnes of older women round here living by themselves”, Paul continued “When I go out on my gardening jobs this Summer, perhaps I should offer a little something extra”.
“Will that be included in the bill?!” I asked (I can’t wait to see his firm’s invoices!) . Paul was completely undeterred by this potential career expansion.
“Here, imagine it”, he said, and he adopted a nonchalant stance, leaning against the cooker “After I’ve done their lawns, or whatever, I could stand like this, and say ’is there anything else you’d like doing?’”
“You could start off with Kristy”, I suggested.
“Not her!” said Paul “She reminds me of my Mum! They should both go and live in Spain, like that bunch of old slags on the telly”.
“What bunch of old slags on the telly?” I said.
“That Marbella Babes thing, or whatever it is”, said Paul “A bunch of leather-faced old tarts from Essex, lounging around in Spain. They have nothing to do all day but get their nails done. One couldn’t even remember what the name of her little kid was!”
“Magda says they give British women a bad name”, said Misty.
“There’s always been ex-pats like that”, I said “Years ago they used to call them The Lotus-Eaters”.
“Why?” said Paul.
“I don’t know”, said I.