“Where the bloody hell have you been? I’ve been worried sick!”
“I went for a walk in the rain”.
“And you’ve got absolutely drenched. What the hell are you playing at?”
This cosy little exchange was between Misty and myself. We had had a barney early in the day, and he had gone out in the torrential rain, coming back looking like Neptune’s idiotic brother.
“I’ve been worried about you”, he said, fiercely “You’re really missing the sea, but you won’t admit it”.
“That doesn’t mean you have to go out and drown yourself!” I said, chucking a towel over his head.
“You don’t like it here”, he said “I think we need to go back to Shinglesea Beach so that you can try and sort out what’s going on”.
“I don’t think it can be sorted out, that’s the trouble”, I said.
“Well let’s go back anyway”, he said “You’ve not done a stroke of work this past month, and it’s getting to you, I can tell. Plus you’re missing Al, and he’s probably missing you. And I don’t think it’s fair on him not to tell him where we are, and that we’re safe”.
He was right. Of course he was bloody right, he usually is. We had set off in our little camper-van, and eventually found ourselves renting out a space in a field on the edge of the Oxfordshire downs. The field was owned by the woman who lived in the house next to it. She lived there with her moronic toy-boy, and I don’t think I could stand much more of their chaotic lifestyle. The boyfriend was so gormless and inept at everything he did that he was making Henry Temple look like Abraham Lincoln by comparison! The pair of them lived a drunken, slapstick life that wouldn’t have been out of place in an old Laurel and Hardy film.
Jasmine (her name) couldn’t even climb up the couple of steps to her front door without falling flat on her face and breaking two fingers in her hand in the process! Her toy-boy lover (he’s 10 years younger than her, which makes him about 30, but you could be forgiven for thinking he was 6) was neurotic, jealous and insecure in the extreme. If she was home late from work he would throw the kind of noisy, foot-stamping tantrum which made you want to smack his legs and send him to bed without his supper, and if she made the grievous mistake of going off to the pub without him, he would threaten to hang himself. Jasmine is supposed to be a top, ruthless businesswoman, a thought which does my head in, quite frankly. To hear her talk about her job she made it sound as though she was Bill Gates’ personal advisor, or occupied some top rank in the KGB. From what little truth of the matter I had been able to glean, she worked for some small town firm of accountants. A job she had occupied for the past 23 years, since she was 17, and where she revelled in being known as The Rottweiler. She was constantly threatening to leave this job, and would talk in hushed tones of being “head-hunted”. Yeah right.
We had been living in the field next door to them for nearly a month, and I knew the situation couldn’t go on for much longer. Money was a problem for one thing. When you live in a camper-van in a field you don’t tend to have a massive financial outlay, but you still have to live, and we were eking out what remained of my father’s legacy. I hadn’t earned anything since leaving Shinglesea, for the simple reason that I hadn’t done any work, and I was feeling guilty about that, plus feeling guilty for having let Mr Beresford down with no warning whatsoever. We had had a good working relationship, and I was wondering if he would be kind enough to take me back. It’s also simply not good for any kind of creative person not to do any … well … creating. It’s bad for the soul. We sort of seem to shrivel up inside. We need that other life. I think it was F Scott Fitzgerald who said only work gives you dignity, and I think it’s very true.
Plus we did both of us miss the sea. Oxfordshire is very, very beautiful in parts, but it’s not the seaside. Plus people are different inland. They’re more rude, less tolerant, less easy-going and fatalistic about life. The sea isn’t there to remind you that there is always something bigger and more powerful than yourself, a force you don’t argue with. I missed the quiet eccentricity of the people I was used to. I missed the rhythms of life in a seaside village, and the way that everybody just keeps going, against all the odds sometimes.
Late one Saturday night, a few hours after Misty had come in out of the rain, we decided to go home in the morning. We were curled up in our bed at the back of the van, watching Glastonbury Festival highlights on the little television, and Misty suggested I should ring Al and tell him what was what. I thought it was too late to ring him, just in case he had turned in, so I texted him instead, simply saying “SAFE & SOUND. WILL B HOME TOMORROW”. He texted back very quickly “GLAD 2 HEAR IT. WILL TEXT ROBBIE. THEY R IN WILTS”.
We went to bed in great excitement, and lay talking about the possibility of doing a detour to Wiltshire (even though it’s in completely the opposite direction to home) on the way back. More rain overnight, more mud. The whole country was getting deluged under the stuff. I could hardly believe that almost exactly a year ago I had been crying out for it! Like the Glastonbury go-ers we seemed to be living in gum-boots at the moment.
Whilst I was boiling up hard-boiled eggs on the camping-stove I texted Alan again, asking whereabouts in Wiltshire Robbie and Jason were. “AVEBURY”, came the reply, and then a succinct telegraph-style rundown of what had happened to everybody since we had left. “XANTHE WELL, MAGDA V BUSY, HENRY VANISHED OFF FACE OF EARTH”. Oh let joy be unconfined!!!
Whilst I was marvelling at this wonderful news, Jasmine The Rottweiler came to see us, and gave the unsettling news that she was going on “sabbatical” for 5 weeks next month, and that she and the overgrown toddler could come down and see us. Joy turns to dismay! Shinglesea Beach has had enough problems lately, without Oxfordshire’s answer to Margaret Thatcher and Frank Spencer coming to visit! I couldn’t think of anything I could say to this that would sound remotely civilised, so I simply gave a little pained sort of a smile instead.
When we found a convenient lay-by I stopped to ring Al. It was good to hear his voice again. He told me he had already been on the phone to Robbie, and that he and Jason would like to meet us in ’The Red Lion’, at the top of the High Street in Avebury. Before he rang off Xanthe insisted on coming to the phone, and proceeded to tell me that “something terrible is going to happen in the next few days, I just know it!” Xanthe seems to have been predicting the imminent end of the world for her entire life, so I didn’t take too much notice of this. (Although I would dearly love to ask her sometime if she had been raised by Jehovah’s Witnesses!).
Misty had been a touch miffed that we weren’t heading straight back to the coast, but almost as soon as crossed into Wiltshire, he lightened up. It’s an extraordinary, mysterious county, and with its long open roads and rolling hills, it doesn’t feel like the south of England. Somehow we got through the obstacle course that is Marlborough’s town centre, noting on the way the mass of yellow ribbons and pictures of little Madeleine McCann tied to the church railings. I was starting to think that Madeleine would become another Genette Tate: that no trace of her would ever be found.
We found ‘The Red Lion’ easily enough, and the leather-clad bikers in the car-park reminded me of the ones who often congregate outside the coffee-shop at Fobbington harbour. It was an emotional reunion with the lads. Robbie did make a sort of semi-reproachful comment that it wasn’t fair of us to have simply disappeared on Al just like that.
“He won’t admit it, because he likes to be thought of as the hard-nosed journalist all the time”, he said “But people disappearing like that really gets to him, it reminds him of Clag Heath”.
“Yeah I wanted to go there”, said Jason “But he wouldn’t have it”.
“I’m not surprised”, I said “Compared to Clag Heath Shinglesea seems normal!”
“So what happened to you then?” said Jason “Did it all just get to your or what?”
“It all just got to me”, I said “I felt I needed to get completely away from the area, and try and think straight about what was going on”.
“Did you come to any conclusions?” said Robbie, sounding hopeful.
“’Cos we sure as hell haven’t!” said Jason.
“Nothing, not a damn thing”, I sighed “Even spending a month ruminating in a muddy field hasn’t brought any answers to me”.
After a lengthy lunch we wandered around the rose-garden at the Manor, where we were followed by a friendly tortoise cat. Robbie suggested we all camp for the night at the abandoned ruins of a small industrial site overlooking the village of Newbourne, a few miles down the road.
“We’ll have to keep out of sight”, he said “Or they’ll think we’re Travellers”.
We camped here for several days whilst Robbie and Jason showed us round some of their favourite Wiltshire sights (usually consisting of the latest crop-circles to appear in the fields). I kept expecting the police to appear at any moment and move us on, but no one came up the hill from the village to see us.
I was sick of this gypsy lifestyle though. It’s no damn fun living like this when the rain is pouring down on you endlessly, and the entire country seems to be disappearing under a welter of mud. Also I got a sore throat whilst we were staying at the abandoned industrial place, and it didn’t clear until we left it.
There was yet another half-arsed attempt by moronic terrorists on the last day of June to try and blow up our airports, which was pretty shambolic really, but nevertheless made me feel that I wanted to go home. You can’t cope with life by running away from it, you have to get right back in there and face it square-on.
Trying to prise Jason and Robbie away from the spiritual charms of Wiltshire looked like it was going to be a tough call though, until salvation came in the form of a text from Al, to say that he had been asked by a Sunday newspaper to look into the current hive of supernatural interest in Chantley Stones.
My first reaction was that The Silly Season had clearly started early this year. My second was “what hive of supernatural interest?” There is no denying that odd things have happened in the area, which is our very own version of Avebury I suppose, but I wouldn’t class it as anything particularly outstanding, and like all areas associated with paranormal phenomena it attracts odd people anyway, which does no end to muddy the waters somewhat.
Nevertheless it was enough to persuade the boys to go home. We got back to Shinglesea at about 6 o’clock in the evening, and found ‘Barnacles’ deserted, with just a terse note on the coffee table from Al, saying that he and Xanthe were at ‘The Ship’, so we toodled round to there.
The smoking ban had come in since we had left, and the first thing I noticed was a big board up outside urging everyone to try “OUR FRESH NEW ATMOSPHERE INSIDE”. The Toby Jugs had all been herded outside, looking disgruntled at some ignorant git who had decided to leave his car radio blaring at full volume, with all the car doors and windows wide open, so that his unsightly brat could be entertained whilst he himself had a fag and a drink, thus completely shattering the peace of the afternoon. To add insult to injury the doting (moronic) father leapt to his feet (fag stuck firmly in gob) when we appeared and attempted to execute some pathetic dance moves, presumably in the misguided belief that we would all simply love to entertain his kid as well.
We sought the cathedral-like calm of the pub interior. Al and Xanthe were sitting in the window bay. Al tried to look displeased with us for having disappeared in the first place, but he didn’t quite manage it. Xanthe simply grinned like a nun having a beatific vision, which made me want to kiss her.
“So what’s with the Chantley Stones then?” said Jason, presumably to stop us getting side-tracked by our exploits in a muddy Oxfordshire field.
“There aren’t many crop-circles this year apparently”, said Al “As far as I can gather this is for two reasons. One is that the convention of fake crop-circles makers have retired from the scene, after their guiding light committed suicide last year. And secondly, that the Inland Revenue have finally got wise to the farmers charging people to come and look at their fields”.
(This conjured up such a delicious image to me of tax-men snooping round corn-circles surreptitiously that I feared it would tickle me for hours to come, leading to one of my periodic embarrassing times when I would suddenly snort with laughter for no apparent reason at all).
“So, as a result”, Al continued “The farmers are destroying any crop circles as soon as they appear”.
“But if all the crop circles are fake, and the fakers have given up, as some of these others are claiming”, said Misty “Why are the farmers having to destroy them … if they’re not now supposed to be appearing?”
“Exactly!” said Al “That’s what’s got the paranormalists jumping up and down in such excitement. They Are Still Appearing, just not so many of them”.
“But what’s this got to do with Chantley Stones?” said Robbie.
“There was one up there, briefly”, said Al “Whether it was destroyed by the farmer or all the torrential rain, nobody knows, but anyway the local wacky-baccy brigade have been going bonkers over it. I think Julie Sparrow’s been going round targeting the media, trying to get them interested, and one of them got onto me. Perhaps people want something other to read about than terrorists and floods. Plus Julie’s lot want to open a café up there, catering to the paranormal crowd. There’s some concern locally that this will destroy the unique atmosphere of the area”.
An old man, leaning heavily on two sticks, and wheezing like a clapped-out old engine, passed us on his way to the Gents, and burst out “all you bloody non-smokers should be outside, and us lot allowed indoors!”
“Perhaps he’s frightened all the fresh air might kill him”, said Al, after the old man had wheezed his way onwards.
“I’ve been doing some work whilst you’ve been away”, said Xanthe, pulling out a scrap of paper from her handbag “Collecting ghosts stories from the area. Recent ones I mean”.
“There’s only one so far”, said Al, apologetically.
“It’s a start!” she said “They’ve only been gone a month!”
She handed the bit of paper to me. According to her handwriting it read: ‘SHORTY MONKS SIGHTED BOTH VARNISHED’.
“Ghostly monks sighted, both vanished”, she translated, in exasperation.
“Where were the shorty monks then?” I said.
“Up on the road past those flats Magda wanted to buy”, said Xanthe.
“Why would monks be sighted round here?” I said “As far as I know there’s never been an abbey in the area or anything like that”.
“It could just be somebody they sighted in long loose clothes”, said Al “It’s all a bit too vague if you ask me. Julie passed it onto us. But that’s about all the detail there is”.
To my horror The Doting Father and his loathsome offspring came into the bar, and proceeded to engage in a vigorous mock-wrestling session, which took no regard whatsoever of furniture, glasses, the landlord’s dog, or other people. I felt as though this would be a good time to go home.
It took me a while to get back into the swim of things. I spent several days ploughing my way through a mountain of e-mails and spam. That is something that never changes I suppose, spam I mean. A bit like death and taxes, you can rely on getting your inbox filled with idiots asking you to do some money laundering for them, or trying to fleece your bank and/or credit card details out of you. Just for change I also had some Whingeing Winnie in Dubai, complaining that she could be as happy as me if only she enjoyed my perfect health. (Duh?! What the ….?)
I also had to do with some catching up with people, and where Mr Beresford was concerned, this involved some grovelling as well, something that doesn’t normally come naturally to me. He was far more sympathetic than I deserved, and said he looked forward to seeing all the work I had done whilst I was in Oxfordshire, which was a tad unfortunate as I hadn’t done any! Magda came down to see me, and I was worried to see how down she was. She plainly said that buying the bungalow had been the worst decision of her entire life, and that she and Aleck had known nothing but bad luck since they had acquired it. As this ’bad luck’ seemed to mainly involve small accidents (pranging the van, Aleck falling off his bike, that sort of thing), I didn’t place too much credence on it. This sort of thing happens when you’re stressed, it’s like I get a lot clumsier when I’m tired.
“You need to get away from that place”, I said “Come and live in our front garden again, for the time being. Treat the renovation work as a day job, and when you’ve finished at the end of the day, lock it up and come back down here. A lot of this is because you’re sick of the sight of the place!”
Asking her to move back down to Beach Lane wasn’t the most brilliant idea I had ever had. Because as it turned out she would have been better off up on high ground, even if it was Rattlebone Farm! Our long, dreary wet Summer continued on its relentless way by dumping no less than 5 inches of rain on us in the course of one afternoon. I mustered up just about every bag of sand, every dust-sheet, duvet and towel I had in my possession to wrap round the doors of ‘Barnacles’, but still the water came sweeping in. Hastily, we tried to get things moved up into the loft, and I couldn’t help thinking that it was exactly a year ago that I had been screaming for rain, and opening the loft door to try and let the hot air out!
It’s a scary thing to watch the water flowing remorselessly up your front garden, creeping up the veranda steps and then across the veranda itself. Xanthe said afterwards that she had sat in her caravan and prayed as it rose quickly up to her door level. By the time I had got her into ’Barnacles’ she was adopting a recklessly fatalistic approach though, crying out “oh let the water take everything! Why should we care!” Magda said apologetically that Aleck didn’t believe that global warming existed. I said that Aleck had better not say that in my hearing, because if he did he would probably have to die.
I’ve said some horribly bitchy things about Kristy over the past couple of years, but she proved her colours in this crisis, and I admired her. She went around checking up on things, and at one point I found her stranded on the other side of the lane, holding her skirt up out of the water. I called her across, and she waded through. She said she was on traffic duty, as selfish bloody drivers wouldn’t slow down or take diversions, and they were causing mini tidal-waves to flow into people’s houses. After several cups of tea, I went up onto the main road to help her try and sort them out. I shall never forget her valiantly running towards approaching cars with her hands held up, like King Canute trying to stop the waves, yelling “Stop! Go back!”
It was pleasing to see one woman getting her car short-circuited. Not so pleasing to have her get out of it, and tell us that we were stupid for buying houses in a low-lying area! Her face was the sort that seems to be permanently locked in a sour expression, and I had some comfort that no matter how much muck I will have chucked at me in my life, I will never end up with an expression like that on my face! She disdainfully tried to locate the pavement to stand on. She was wearing a wholly impractical outfit of tight jeans and designer cowboy boots.
“You’d be better off in a short skirt and flip-flops in all this”, said Kristy.
“I do not possess such things”, said the sour-puss, with immense arrogance.
Sadly, the sight I longed to see, of her losing her balance and falling flat on her arse in the raging torrent, did not come to pass.
Back at Beach Lane gangs of children were enjoying themselves riding their bikes at high speed up and done our new ‘river’.
The following day was spent cutting up all the sodden carpets in ’Barnacles’ and dumping them out onto the veranda. Whilst doing this back-breaking, depressing job I fantasised about various tortures I would love to inflict on a certain van driver, who had bombed through Shinglesea at high speed, sending up vast sprays of water on either side, and swamping everything and everybody in his path. Pleasing images of him being publicly debagged and doused in buckets of filthy water occupied my thoughts, and was most absorbing. Al had a more practical idea. He had taken a picture of the van on his mobile phone, and suggested putting it up on the website, as a sort of Name And Shame. He then went outside to sarcastically pose for various vile rubbernecks who had turned up to take photographs of our house.
In the midst of all this I had a phone-call (on the landline, as the mobiles were out) from my brother-in-law, gloating, and saying that now all us poncey Southerners know what it’s like. I didn’t say anything at the time. I waited until very late that night, then rang him up, and simply blew a loud raspberry down the phone line at him. And that was intended to be my very last communication with him. Seventeen miserable years of having his boorish acquaintance was quite long enough.
About a week after the flooding we got a visit from the Gestapo (aka the insurance assessors), who told us that the house was riddled with germs and that we would have to move out, and so couldn’t we go and stay with family or friends? (I am always amazed at this lofty assumption that everybody has hordes of obliging kinfolk, all with vast mansions (or the odd spare cottage or granny-flat) at their disposal, and quite happy to loan you the spare wing for any length of time you may require!). They then went on to make one of the most brazen remarks I’ve ever heard from anyone. We were to put all our furniture out the front. When I pointed out that it would get nicked out there, as several other flood victims have found to their cost, I was informed that I should take a Stanley knife to my sofa and chairs, because if they got stolen the thieves might catch the germs!!!! With a superhuman effort to keep my temper under control, I informed them that if that should happen, then the Greeks have a word for it: hubris.
“When did the entire world go completely insane?” I asked Al.
Answer came there none.
We were better off than some of course, in that we had our campervan parked outside, and the water hadn’t managed to get inside that, mainly because the parking space is slightly elevated. We could sleep in there to get away from the ever-present smell of mould and disinfectant. Some areas too were getting the added stress of bogus water-board officials, bogus firefighters, and bogus council workers, let alone the cowboy builders all sniffing out a desperate customer. We only had our local MP, who I found wandering around our living-room one day when I had foolishly left the front door open whilst Misty and me went to have a look at the sea. I suppose it was good of him to call (I suppose), although afterwards I felt as though I had had an encounter with a vat of treacle! His charm offensive had certainly worked on Xanthe, who enthused about him for days afterwards.
After his visit he sent a leaflet round to every house in the neighbourhood, in which he said how “shocked and horrified” he had been by what he had seen, and we must e-mail him and tell him if there was anything we wanted him to do. Restraining myself from the obvious one (take a running jump), I sent him a detailed bullet point list headed with the most important one of all “WHERE WERE OUR BLOODY SAND-BAGS THAT WERE NEVER DELIVERED????”
There was a distinct whiff of revolution in the air, one that I hadn’t seen since the heady days of the Poll Tax rebellion. People were muttering outside shops and in the road. The same words cropping up: no sand-bags, blocked ditches etc. I’m a fairly peace-loving person really, I like a quiet life (even if I rarely get it), and so the thought of any violent disruption to the norm fills me with horror. I haven’t been a Marxist revolutionary since my school-days. But after my encounter with the henchmen from the insurance company I was feeling as rabid as Lenin returning from exile!
Meanwhile, there were some strange goings-on at Henry’s old house. One afternoon, when the Summer seemed to have at last finally arrived (it was only the very last day of July after all!) and it was warm and sunny for a change, a van-load of miserable looking geezers in yellow jackets turned up, and began to unload some frightening-looking equipment, which they then stuck into various holes in the ground and made very loud noises with.
“I think they’re cleaning out the drains”, said Xanthe.
“But it’s not just the drains they’re looking in”, I said, as they seemed to be creating even more holes in the garden as well.
They cleared off, leaving all their equipment behind, and then briefly turned up early the following morning to put a barrier around various heaps of rubble. They departed again, leaving it all like that, and I had a strong suspicion that it would be a very long time before we saw them again. I decided that it was more important to enjoy this rare blast of sunshine, than to worry about all that, so Misty, Xanthe and me went up onto the beach, where I lay for so long with my legs propped in the air that they were red and sore by the time we packed up to come home. I felt a bit of a clot really.
When we got back to ‘Barnacles’ and switched on the computer I was appalled to find I had had an e-mail from Jasmine The Rottweiler. They had been completely flooded out she said, as water had rolled down on them from the Downs, and now they had cleared the house out they had both decided they couldn’t bear looking at it anymore, and were coming down to see us instead! I replied that we had been flooded too, so they wouldn’t get much respite from it here either … but I don’t know why I thought that was going to stop her!
This news was depressing. Magda had been on at us to move up to the bungalow with them, to get away from it all, but I had resisted because I felt that ‘Barnacles’ was vulnerable at the moment, but now even the cursed bungalow of Rattlebone Farm seemed infinitely desirable to putting up with The Rottweiler and Frank Spencer!
I took Misty out of the house, because I had to have a hair-cut and then a visit to the osteopath (a painful side-effect of wading through cold water for hours on end). At the hairdressers there was only one topic of conversation: The Flood. They even had a stack of photographs for me to look at, and I found myself in the surreal situation of looking at pictures of my own house, including one with Misty, Kristy and Xanthe all standing outside nearly knee-high in water.
“Oh we’ve been showing pictures of your house to everybody”, they screamed with laughter.
At the end of this muggy August afternoon we drove back to Shinglesea Beach, and found what appeared to be two surly-looking crop-headed lads standing outside the gate of ’Barnacles’, both having a fag and swigging from a can of beer.
“If these are friends of Paul’s”, I said to Misty “He can take them straight up to ’The Ship’, I don’t want to have to look at THEM!”
Misty gave me a look of puzzled amusement.
“Don’t you recognise them?” he said.
I looked again. It was Jasmine and Frank. In civvies, out of her sharp business suits, Jasmine looked just like a bloke!
The sight of them standing there could have made me burst into tears, to be quite frank with you. And my tears would have been completely justified, as it turned out. If possible, Jasmine was even more annoying outside her home environment than she had been in it! Her constant pompous wittering on about her “sabbatical” turned out to be only too true. She had no intention of doing ANYTHING whilst she was staying with us, and fully expected to be waited on at the same time. She seemed to be completely oblivious to the fact that we had been flooded out as well, and so weren’t exactly up to providing a 5-star service (even if we had felt so inclined!).
On her first day at ‘Barnacles’ she took herself out into the back garden because she said she wanted to keep her recently acquired sun-tan topped up. She sat out there sunbathing topless all afternoon, and then said she was simply amazed that nobody had taken any notice of her. To which of course the obvious catty answer to that is that everybody probably thought she was a bloke anyway! I did query why she didn’t go to the beach, which would be more salubrious than our sorry excuse for a back yard, but she confided in me that Frank Spencer would get very jealous, and be convinced that she would be besieged by hordes of men all panting for her attention if she did (!).
I suppose I should be grateful that she at least kept herself out of the way, as the same couldn’t be said for her hapless sidekick. Frank went around ‘Barnacles’, pointing out all the things that we could diddle from the insurance company, including a new laptop computer. I said the computer had been safely out of the way on its desk, and the insurance people were going to be going through everything with a fine tooth comb, looking out for precisely this kind of fiddle. I just thought what a seedy, shabby little git he was, and if Jasmine was really such a high-powered businesswoman, what the blazes was she doing wasting her time on him!
“They’re awful people”, said Magda, when we were having a whispered conversation about them one afternoon “Why do you put up with them?”
“Because I seem to have turned into a spineless wimp”, I replied “I’m quite disgusted with myself. And I shall probably spend the rest of my life having a screaming fit any time I hear the word ‘sabbatical’!”
“I wish you and Misty would come up to us”, said Magda “I’d like to have a good long talk with you about that night intruder you had the night before you both disappeared”.
“God knows what all that was about”, I said “I haven’t the faintest idea”.
“Have you had anything like that since you’ve been back?” she asked.
“Somebody, would you believe, went through our stinking heap of sodden carpets the night we ripped them out and chucked them outside!” I said “But I’m pretty certain that was just some greedy vulture hoping we had accidentally thrown out something valuable as well by mistake”.
We were interrupted by the doorbell ringing. Too little lads were standing on the veranda asking me if Christopher lived here. They looked dejected, bewildered and quite forlorn when I said that no he didn’t. They drifted away again, as though this news was simply too much to bear. Barely a couple of minutes after we had resumed our conversation, a leaflet was stuffed noisily through the door. It was from the local police, going under the name of OPERATION EAGLE (?) and had the forbidding headline “DRUG DEALING IS GOING ON IN THIS AREA”, and would we ring them if we knew anything about it.
“They needn’t look at me!” I said “I smoked cannabis twice back in the Eighties, and that’s my sole experience of drugs. I was completely under whelmed by it on both occasions! In fact, I could scarcely believe what all the fuss was about!”
“Cannabis is much stronger these days”, said Magda “Isn’t it a dreadful sign of the times. As soon as you showed me that I immediately equated it with the school holidays!”
“This is always an odd time of year”, I said “Too many people around that you wouldn’t normally see”.
“It couldn’t be anything to do with …” and she pointed in the direction of the back yard, where my unwelcome guests were sitting.
“Well for a start he’s too stupid to be a drug-dealer”, I said “And she’d have to stop thinking about herself for a moment, so I don’t think so!”
I was just relieved Henry was no longer around, or I’d have to put up with him gong on about how this was a sign that this was the decadent end of times, and all that jazz. With foot-and-mouth outbreaks on top of everything else, as well as a toddler being knifed in a London flat, and a Hell’s Angel being shot in the head on the M40, he would have been in his element! Some good things can still happen though. Jasmine’s bloody sabbatical (the longest in history, or as it certainly felt like anyway) came to an end at last, and she had to return to Oxfordshire, to see how her longsuffering firm had been coping without her all this time. (Quite well probably). She went off with threats to return again, as there was no doubt (she said) that a holiday was always just what she needed. She also said that when she and Frank finally got married (God forbid) we would be invited to the wedding, as it was sure to be (and I quote) “the biggest event in the world“.
Shinglesea felt very peaceful after she had gone. Which considering it was August and our busiest time of the year was quite something really. Or perhaps it was simply that I could enjoy the peace of our back yard again, without having to listen to her endless prattling on about herself. My flowery idyll was occasionally interrupted by Misty dragging me up to Chantley Stones to have a look at a crop-circle which had formed in the field nearby. Although to be quite honest I was more fascinated by watching the dowsers striding purposefully about with their welding rods in their hands. Talking of Chantley Stones, I asked Al, when we got home one wet afternoon, how his article had been received.
“Not one of my best”, he said “It’s usually the Press’ attitude to be sceptical about anything paranormal, and to write sort of joke-y pieces, but my heart wasn’t in it. There IS weird stuff going on round here, and I find it hard to be all hard-nosed and objective. But then again, if I go all out and say I believe in it too, that’s it, that’s me banished to the nutty fringe forever more! I don’t want to be sidelined like that. You seem a bit lethargic about looking into these mysteries now”.
“Perhaps”, I said “I suppose I just don’t want to take anything too seriously anymore, not after everything that’s happened this past couple of years”.
Misty, who was sitting on the opposite bunk, almost seemed to visibly relax at this news.
“My idea of clearing up a mystery these days”, I said “Is finally finding out, after all these years, how Rod Hull operated Emu!”
“And how did he?” asked Al.
“The arm you saw round the bird was a false arm“, I said “The real one was inside it. Found that out on the telly the other night”.
“Thank God for that“, said Al “That used to bug me when I was a kid!”
The rain began to hammer much heavier on the caravan roof.
“I used to like the sound of the rain”, I said “I used to find it comforting. Not anymore. What a moody Summer this has been”.
“And there’s been a warning put out about the spring tides too!” said Al. One mellow August afternoon a bunch of us joined a drainage expert and went for a walk all around the village, to try and see why our drainage system had failed quite so spectacularly. I spent part of it walking at the back with Kristy, who seemed less excitable than usual. She told me that she had changed lately. She had got tougher, she said. A combination of the floods and her mother (who had been ailing for quite some time) dying had left her feeling that she really wasn’t going to take any shit anymore. I commiserated. I said I had lost track this year of how many times I had said I was at the end of my rope. It was an interesting conversation. I came away from it feeling that we were both looking for a more calmer flow to our lives.
The afternoon in general was pleasant, marred only by two ugly girls lying in the long grass on the scrubland, who brayed with laughter like demented hyenas at us the entire time we were there. At the back of the hair salon one of the hairdressers came flying out to accost us, and show us the photographs of my house once more. Then we toodled off to look at Kristy’s front yard, which had been severely damaged in the flood, and was spewing so much sand from amongst its bricks that the local dogs were mistaking it for a canine public convenience!
It was the last sunny afternoon we had for a while. From then on the weather turned extremely Autumnal. The walks I took with Misty round the village would have been very pleasant … if it had been October! Everybody went down with bad colds soon after this, and Magda pestered us again about moving up to her bungalow at Rattlebone Farm. She had a valid point. ‘Barnacles’, in its current sorry condition, was no place to be ill in, and the industrial strength de-humidifier we now had in-situ didn‘t exactly add to the homely feel. It also wasn’t conducive to creativity. I was finding it harder than I had ever known to knuckle down to some work. I am not one of these poncey, pretentious bastards who has to have everything around him absolutely perfect before the Muse can strike. In fact, I’ve always been able to get inspiration anywhere, and prided myself on being able to work even when I was far from up to it, but for the first time I was being defeated on this level, and it was leaving in me a feeling somewhat akin to sexual frustration. I hoped that a change of scene, by moving up to Magda’s bungalow, might help.
Just before we left, Al told me that he had heard some news from one of his “contacts” (which always makes him sound like a copper to me) that might concern Henry. Some guy had been involved in a fatal car accident on a road in the New Forest. The description of the victim, he said, sounded like Henry. The mystery was deepened by the fact that nobody knew how the accident had happened, it seemed that the car had just suddenly veered off the road for no reason. It was an enigma to me too how Henry had got there. The last that had been heard of him was him being carted off by his armpits from outside ’The Crab’ in Fobbington by some unknown thug! It was all very strange.
In the meantime I had plenty of things to do. I had to go and be nice to the longsuffering Mr Beresford, who, as it turned out, was more interested in telling me his latest ideas, than in listening to any of my half-baked apologies. With Autumn coming on, he said (if you ask me, fucking Autumn has been here since fucking April!), wouldn’t it be a good idea to revive some of our old spooky pictures. They are always immensely popular with the public, and if I wanted, he could point me towards a few locations I might find particularly inspiring. I said that when it came to being inspired by spooky places, the whole area was saturated with them, which delighted him no end.
When I got back to the bungalow at Rattlebone Farm (our temporary home, or rather our campervan outside it), Xanthe started tugging on my sleeve, and saying that she had got it completely wrong about the sightings of the ghostly monks (the varnished ones). They weren’t monks at all, she said, but figures that were DRESSED like monks. As I had recently seen a kissagram wandering around Shinglesea dressed up as a nun, (complete with high heels and wildly over-sized crucifix) this naturally made me even more sceptical!
Things weren’t very relaxing up at Rattlebone Farm. The view over the sea was invigorating, and I stood for ages simply taking it in, but there seemed to be even less privacy up there than there had been down at ’Barnacles’! Early one morning, for instance, I had gone over to Misty’s bunk and got under the duvet with him. We were happily engrossed when the door suddenly open and Al came in. He took one look at us, spluttered a load of embarrassed apologies, and then fled. When I caught up with him a short while later, he apologised again, and said that the trouble was that he kept forgetting I was gay, that most of the time, you see, I didn’t act like a gay. To which I snottily replied that we weren’t all like that ridiculous superficial creature who had recently been on ’Big Brother’, boasting that he had laid a man from every country in Europe, and lying about his age, because to admit to being over 30 on the gay scene was certain death when it came to attracting lovers!
I was more rattled than I wanted to be by all this. I got the distinct impression that it was me who should be apologising for daring to do intimate things in my own private space! I couldn’t help feeling that if it had been a woman I had been fooling around with, he would have made a joke about the whole thing and moved on. Matters weren’t helped that day by the overpowering stench coming from some muck they were spreading on the fields nearby, which was revolting even when we were inside the van with all the windows and the doors shut. So I was eager when Misty suggested we drive out to look at a church on the marshes which had got flooded out,, and which, by all accounts, had dehumidifiers inside it that were even bigger and noisier than ours.
In spite of that, there was a calming atmosphere out there on the marshes which I couldn’t help but feel had been noticeably lacking in our immediate vicinities of late. I also got some comfort from the fact that the church had been standing so long that it could cope with the floods, and there was strength in that. When we left the churchyard there was a girl having hysterics at her mother because she was supposed to be getting married there the following Saturday.
“It’s alright, dear”, the mother was trying to soothe her “They’ll switch the machines off during the service. Now why don’t we go and have lunch at ’The Golden Bamboo’ in Fobbington, the staff are VERY attentive there”.
Clearly the thought of being molly-coddled by some overworked underpaid minions for a couple of hours cheered her up no end, because the girl blew her nose noisily and got into the car.
This country.