IN LATE DECEMBER 2003, sometime during the hungover wasteland between Christmas and New Year, Denny Archer found himself back in The Celeste public house, half concealed behind a sickly looking Spruce pruning that somehow passed for decoration in this town.
Inches from his nose, a single, cracked golden bauble swung gently like a festive wrecking ball. Outside, as angry waves were breaking on a beach far below, Denny Archer sat fighting the rising swell of his own spiritual desolation, anchored on the shore as the last few sands of the year were washed away with the ebbing tide.
He’d made a resolution (days in advance of the usual clamour, but here he was breaking it with equal lack of respect for tradition) never to set foot in The Celeste again. After the events of Christmas Eve, he thought the move, all things considered, diplomatic. Thus it was with a depressing sense of his own weak, predictable acquiescence that he considered his position as part of the evening tableau.
Denny Archer cut a tragic figure, sat alone at a corner table and nursing a cadged third-full pint glass that predated his arrival by at least ten minutes (to judge by temperature alone). He wore an oversize heavy woollen duffle coat with a giant, frayed pancake hood. The duffle coat, so the story went, had belonged to a sailor serving with the HMS Loosestrife, a WW2 corvette that patrolled the North Atlantic and hunted down U-Boats. The toggles had been whittled away to resemble miniature depth charges. Denny, who in nearly thirty years had amassed no glorious history of his own, slipped comfortably into the tattered remnants of someone else’s, was warmed by association.
From time to time he’d extend his head from the garment, periscope-like, to suck on a cigarette, exhale dolefully and bid a hasty retreat. In both left and right pockets he had sixty-two pence, equal coinage, and trusted in this small ballast to keep him on the straight and narrow.
That morning he’d received a perplexing message in the mail. On the back of a rather naughty seaside postcard, unsigned but in a familiar hand, he read:
Had to shoot off for a few days. Meet me in The Cuttle at 8. Can’t say anymore
which was true enough. The large, clumsy letters (almost engraved into the surface with a green biro running low on ink) had quickly run out of real estate. The franking said Southend.
This was all very strange for any number of reasons. The flat in which he was at that moment standing, in dirty underpants and dressing gown, tilting the saucy cartoon as if to locate a more revealing angle, belonged to one Cassidy, a fellow late twenties drifter. Denny had being sleeping on his floor for a couple of weeks now, having sublet his own DSS subsidised attic bedsit out to Cassidy (hungry for a low-profile business premises) in return for food and alcohol. Cassidy was the only person who knew he was here, and the postcard was without doubt the work of his peculiar hand. But Cassidy was surely still lying prostrate in his room, sleeping off the after affects of a typically left-field interpretation of Christmas Dinner?
He was not. The only signs of life came from an impressive array of battery-powered roadwork lights, blinking in pleasing sequence, stolen that summer in a protest against ugly council expenditure.
In fact, Denny had lost track of things somewhat during the last day or so. He had no idea what date it was (though would’ve been startled to learn the 29th), and no burning desire to brave the newsagents for a paper to find out. He returned to his makeshift crib on the floor – a comfortless patchwork of blankets, cushions, towels and teacloths – and slept a few more hours away.
Cassidy’s Christmas Dinner had contained a number of various unorthodox ingredients, all lurking in the stuffing and mixed with more straight-laced, reputable neighbours: breadcrumbs, egg yolk, sage and so forth. The pair took turns with a wooden spoon as the stuffing took shape, proposing regular toasts with a few bottles of repugnant English sherry. Denny was charged with buying a turkey, but had left it late (last day late), and when the time came couldn’t face a long trek to the outskirts supermarket. Five minutes before closing, he found a town centre butchers and came away with two dressed woodcock. Not renowned for their holding capacity, the application of stuffing to bird had to be abandoned in favour of the reverse, and probably unique, bird to stuffing solution. Nobody had remembered to buy any vegetables, so Denny and Cassidy fleshed out the meal with some Chicken & Mushroom Pot Noodles. They watched a repeat of The Two Ronnies and began to unravel . . .
Whatever the chemical composition of the stuffing, its effects had been explosive enough to obliterate Boxing Day from memory. Denny drowsed pale and sweat-soaked for many hours after that, fantasising about a glass of crystal clear, mountain spring water, but unable to find a tap. During one brave trek around the flat, he’d stumbled across the bathroom, but still couldn’t locate one. Hot or cold, he wasn’t fussy, and a distant memory whispered that he was nearing Nirvana. There he’d knelt, hands on the enamel of the bathtub, praying to the Almighty, begging forgiveness. He found the television remote, but could only get The History Channel, no matter which buttons he pressed. Denny watched documentaries on endless rotation; Hitler tore into Stalingrad at regular, six-hourly intervals, and made the same procedural errors time after time after time. Denny empathised. During that period, he had eaten two slices of white bread and a pickled onion, the sole contents of a fridge that alone stood undamaged in the devastation of the kitchen. The path to recovery had been long and uncertain; he’d assumed Cassidy had been negotiating a similar ascent from within the privacy of his room.
Denny didn’t own a mobile. He kept a list of various numbers he had collected over the years on the back of an old Asda till receipt. It wasn’t a particularly long list, but he treasured many of the contacts, folded away safely in his real leather wallet, snug there with his bus pass, National Insurance number and library card. His mother had given him the wallet as a secure place for his lunch money (you could still make out his name, Dennis Archer, 2C, biro’d on the inside), many years ago. It had a compartment for loose change and a section for notes. As a schoolboy, he’d rarely had need to broach the note section. Nothing much had since changed in that respect. The wallet was about the single possession Denny now owned linking him back to either of his parents. It was a dearly precious tie to his past, and contained most of the glue that bound him to his present. As such, the wallet - and its often itinerant relationship with his back pocket – represented a potentially catastrophic single point of failure that Denny preferred not to dwell on.
It was three in the afternoon, light already fading. He was watching a re-run of Desert Fox on Bravo, and when the end credits rolled, made for the old Bakelite telephone by the window sill. He dug out the list; Cassidy’s faded, pencilled number was just about there. Denny was mildly surprised to hear a dialling tone; he’d assumed the telephone was just another one of Cassidy’s retro decorations that littered the flat with their umbilical cords severed. He dialled the number and gazed down at the street two floors below. Sure enough, Cassidy’s plum re-sprayed Capri was nowhere to be seen. After a few seconds, Denny could hear the muffled, digitised theme music to Airwolf floating across the room, epicentred somewhere down the back of the sofa (a furnishing with so sordid a past that even Denny gave it a very wide berth). He waited for voicemail to kick in and left a message anyway.
“Uh... I’ve found your mobile”.
And hung up. Never being renowned for an expansive telephone manner.
The Cuttle was The Cuttlefish pub, part of a tight little knot of boozers that huddled together on the seafront. But Cassidy couldn’t have really meant The Cuttlefish. He avoided the place for various dark and mysterious reasons, which Denny had never sought to clarify. On Friday nights they sold a poisonous variation of Snakebite & Black, ready mixed in a ten gallon oak casket called the snakepit. For fifteen pounds you could purchase a special pewter goblet, thus entitling you to dip into this dark, nefarious pond (at intervals of your choosing) until closing time. Denny had tried it once and was still wishing he hadn’t come the following Wednesday. His goblet had a glass bottom, which apparently (and not unlike the consumption of industrial quantities of Snakebite) bestowed the drinker with special powers. Repeated covert lechery through the bottom of this goblet gave the pub a blackcurrant colour wash, a tint that lingered long after his drink was returned to table, and was still present when he’d stumbled outside to hurl purple puke onto a purple pavement. The Cuttlefish was a magnet for teenage jailbait, minibussed in from the surrounding villages and hamlets, generally wearing little more than a half can of hairspray. Cassidy, as anybody who had chanced upon his bathroom literature could testify, had quite a predilection for this kind of thing. It followed, therefore, that whatever counterforce kept him away from these particular shores must have been very dark and very mysterious indeed. Denny shuddered to think.
No, Cassidy must’ve meant The Celeste; he was presumably entering another one of his maddening paranoid phases, and fearful of his mail being intercepted. The postcard (in all its naked glory) was an arrogant swipe at these ghostly figments of his imagination. He was relying on Denny to make the necessary tweaks to the content and decipher.
A half hour later and he was beginning to have doubts. He watched Michelle, the barmaid, fiddle with her hair in the mirror, her low cut gold lamé top sparkling with each and every readjustment. Denny sighed appreciatively. A couple of old fisherman muttered something smutty, discussed buoyancy. Denny figured that if she clapped eyes on him, he may as well fill his dufflecoat pockets with pebbles and jump off the pier.
Denny was, of course, crushingly in love with Michelle; it had begun as unalloyed lust, but such carnal thoughts were deemed distasteful to a hopeless romantic dreamer. He quickly and subconsiously made all the necessary adjustments. Many months had been fruitlessly spent in trying to get close to her. The sole outcome (as so often seemed to be the case during such hormonal quests) was that he’d attracted the attentions of her best friend, a perplexing girl by turns demure and predatory, often during the same night and with no obvious connection to the usual hair triggers. Her emotions were governed by some mysterious internal clock of unconventional gearing, a clock Denny had no real desire to wind or (heaven forbid) alarm. Since the summer, when the town was swelled with trippers and the gulls grew fat and bold on fallen ice-cream, she had laboured under the illusion of a ‘relationship’. The changing season had done little to dull this ardent misconception. In retrospect, Denny had probably not helped his cause by sleeping with her on at least seven occasions. He could plead diminished responsibility on some counts, although certainly not on the last and final encounter, when her daddy (which she’d called him for the majority of her twenty years and saw no reason to stop at his behest) nearly caught them at it on the living room sofa.
“Fuck Den, he’ll fuckin’ kill me...!” she’d squealed hotly into his ear, before ejecting him from between her thighs with such force he nearly cracked his head against the cluttered mantlepiece.
Lunging for his underwear, but unfortunately in the candlelight coming away with Jessica’s knickers, Denny darted for the back door, half into his shirt which billowed behind him like a sail, merely adding to his sozzled inertia. He softly cursed the full moon and waddled across the dew silvered back garden, knickers by now somewhere around his knees. It was better than nothing, he figured, and went to shelter in the little greenhouse.
This was the first Friday after Halloween, and Denny had a small army of shrivelling pumpkin lanterns for company. His was not to reason why. They grinned demonically as he tucked what was left of his erection back into his knickers.
“The compost heap for you my boys,” he muttered between gritted and shivering teeth of his own. Drizzle started to drum menacingly on the glass roof.
An hour later and a growing sense of paranoia, boredom and bladder unease forced him to assert what was left of his authority. He lifted the lid of the most obnoxious looking pumpkin and used him as a pisspot. A burnt out tealight helped him aim. Denny sat back on a growbag and lit a cigarette. He found an old porno beneath a seed catalogue, and delighted at the chance euphemism. None of girls looked too happy being opened up and displayed to the galaxies at such a desolate hour. They needn’t have worried. Slugs had eaten away at the damp pages and cunningly censored all the interesting bits.
By the time her daddy had returned to safe snoring, Denny was deathly sober and borderline hypothermic. He could offer none of the standard excuses for what followed.
Christmas morning, though, he’d left her weeping and wasted at 2am, huddled in an alley that funnelled a cruel winter wind. He didn’t want to hear whatever it was she was trying to tell him. It was vital, imperative. He’d somehow managed to avoid the nebulous ‘issue’ all evening, employing his whole, fearsome arsenal of diversionary tactics, and wasn’t about to fall at the last, weary and crushed. Denny wasn’t certain exactly what the news was, but could hazard a pretty accurate guess.
A strand of loose tinsel blew horizontal from around her neck like a distress flag. Big tears rolled down her icy cheeks, picking up the glitter that she’d carefully applied there many hours earlier. He thought of bugs in amber, and wandered off without a backward glance. He thought of those glitter specks trapped in an albumen of her tears, splashing onto a cold lonely street, fathered by his own blundering insensitivity. He made it round the nearest corner, paused for breath and cast his eyes to the clear, starry sky. There was the Plough; rump-end of Ursa Major; celestial saucepan. And he instantly thought of another place, another time entirely.
Late in the afternoon on Christmas Eve 1999, Denny had wandered back into London, canvas haversack slung across his shoulder and carrying his few essentials: a sleeping-bag, three jumpers, Tolstoy’s War And Peace – a paperback softened and dog-eared to the extent that it now happily doubled as a pillow – some cutlery, a frying pan and a tiny primus stove that had been with him since the very start. The haversack was by no means full, and Denny made a strange clanking sound as he walked. It was his very own leper-bell, he figured, his own creation; a tailored calling-card, or the music of the destitute. Denny had trudged for so many hundreds of miles that he barely noticed the noise anymore, though not through any conscious attempt to filter it or escape; the clanking was there like the ticking of a clock or a leaking tap, invisible to the ever present ear, deadened by routine. The good people of London, however, were not generally so inured to Denny’s death rattle. This, in combination with the faint scent of petrol that wafted from the haversack, ensured that he was given a very wide berth indeed. He placed the bag down now, and stood rubbing his cold hands by the steps down to Chancery Lane underground. It didn’t seem much to show for a life, really, but there was a purity there too. Denny had long since resolved to shed himself of possessions - or at least reduce his material encumbrances to a bare minimum - but not through hatred or any moral distaste (as might be supposed), rather a desire to value and cherish what he had, to protect and control. It had occurred to him once that he may have had a fetish as far as objects were concerned, some kind of disorder, for he covetted them too much, quaked in often groundless anticipation of their departure, wear or breakage. Such a level of emotional involvement made it difficult to be surrounded by too many possessions, too overwhelming. Of course, there was another side to this particular coin: namely that only by paring his attachments down to a threadbare level was he able to lavish appropriate affection, the pre-medidated escape from material ties merely feeding the addiction. Denny had considered this too, feeling ever more trapped and buffeted by the fates.
He had spent the previous four or five years roaming around, though not with any grand overarching plan or sense of direction. There was no worldly aspect to his movements, no magical search for lost Amazonian tribes or endangered coral, and any plotter of Denny’s wanderings would have had little need to re-ink his feathery quill. On the contrary, he had rarely even left the United Kingdom. Here, however, Denny had frequented the extremities, more or less – Thurso, Porthleven, Lowestoft, a misguided attempt at Ben Nevis one fog-bound Thursday, tulip-picking on The Fens – as if only by stretching himself, geographically, and in planes both horizontal and vertical, could he hope to locate his own centre, his own elusive sense of self. Denny had worked his way about the landscape, sometimes suffocating in the very heart of the capital itself, then gladly trading the bustle for more rural climes if he felt the need for space. He’d worked in offices and dandelion meadows, battled with surly photocopiers and moody, dung spattered Friesians; had poured overly-frothy pints and badly mixed cement, sorted post, washed dishes and polished bannisters, cooked fried breakfasts and the books of a dodgy second-hand car salesman in Ilford alike. Sometimes his ceiling (observed in the slim seconds between heavenly repose and shut-eye) was the mould-bloomed artex of a bedsit or a budget B&B, sometimes the underside of a cardboard box lid. For odd glorious, balmy days in July, it was even the galaxies themselves, pouring down upon a clearing in a woodland, or a sweet-scented Wiltshire cornfield.
“You sure can’t buy a ceiling like that in Homebase,” sighed an old drifter Denny fell in with along the road, the pair of them blowing smoke rings at the night sky, each delicate halo fencing a thousand stars. Which was true enough, he supposed; summer tending to bring out a dreamy romanticism in the destitute that lasted until the first torrential rain storm.
RHIANNON: That’s pretty cute, I’ve never met a ‘Zen’ before. Like wisdom and stuff...
DENNY: Oh, I don’t think that’s what they had in mind. I’m not sure I radiated much at one-and-a-half weeks.
RHIANNON: But maybe in hope. Parents do that kind of thing, don’t they, cast aspirational pebbles (here actually toying with one, stolen from the beach at low-tide, as was her way) straight through the maternity ward window.
DENNY: Smash goes the glass...
RHIANNON: (coquettishly) Of course, a very forlorn hope in your case, ha ha. Sorry Denzy. Hey, Denny Zen... denizen, as in citizen. Ah Bless. Come on, Citizen Archer, let’s go take down the middle classes. We’ll drive Harold (the VW) down some Surrey cul-de-sac and screw with the topiary, get naughty on the front lawns by moonlight.
DENNY: I quite like that, you know –
RHIANNON: The Perrin-esque naughtiness?
DENNY: No, the citizen bit. Well, the other stuff too, of course (smiling).
RHIANNON: We’d have to tape poor Harold’s highlights shut, though, he’s very protective of me.
DENNY: Lucky he doesn’t see through the steering column then. Or the rear wheel arches...
RHIANNON: (mock-outrage, turning towards the dash) “Harry darling, cover your ears honey, don’t listen to the nasty man!” DENNY: I’m not even gonna ask where they are... I pray it’s not anywhere near the shock-absorbers.
RHIANNON: And wouldn’t you just like to keep him awake way past his bedtime, huh...? I dunno, Denny Zen Archer, what am I going to do with you? (pauses, as if inviting suggestions). Come to think of it, wasn’t ‘Zen Archer’ the name of a song... Todd something, seventies dude, can never think of his other name. Mother used to like him, would hum one of his tunes before her pissy soirées. The famous one, you know (here she grabs for a guitar and grinds out a few chords, singing the single line that’s obviously managed to settle)... “ – and the answer was plain to see, coz I saw the light, in your ey-e-e-sss...”
DENNY: How on earth do you know this kinda stuff? you really don’t look the sort. Not old enough, I mean -
RHIANNON: Oh, I dunno. Pretend hippy parents I suppose, before money turned them for good: lawyers by day, joss-sticks and herbal remedies after sundown... I’m the proud product of a messy late-seventies fuck, cheesecloth panties and Albatross on the turntable. You’re looking at Rhiannon Sara Stevie-Mac, ha ha. Don’t even think about asking my surname. Far too embarassing. That’s just between me and Harold -
DENNY: And his bedposts. Fair enough, Stevie-Mac. (Denny brushes a finger carelessly, he hopes, across a wet-suited thigh, tests the water...)
Late in August 1999, then, he’d travelled to the Rhône Valley and worked the vine-yards between Cornas and St-Péray. The money wasn’t great, but there was food and free board - a crumbling hostel with a roof that looked destined to leak if it was ever given the chance. Rain, however, was a distant, fast evaporating memory. Denny thought the sun might affect some overnight transformation on his person, turn him from pale sylph to glittering, bronzed Adonis. The pickers worked the slopes from dawn till dusk, the girls in denim shorts and juice-stained tops. His loins ached; his back protested. Pretty soon his lusting found focus, the only wonder being that it had taken so long. Her name was Agnès, a curvy, quarrelsome mess of cornflower blonde hair and bristling temperament, yet with just the right flashes of sweetness and vulnerablity that Denny found himself unable to counter (on display for roughly three hours per day, during drunken, red-wine evenings, or 12.5% of the time, which was beautifully appropriate). She was here from Paris, whiling away down-time after graduation, and was planning a move to London come Autumn. Denny figured she was probably the sort who bruised easily, and that her heart had been badly snapped once, perhaps even as close as that summer, or the final, wrenching days of university. In his bunk at the hostel, trying to blot out the 3am snores, he conjured images of dark-eyed Italian boys with Armani knitwear and Vespas... then dreamt about her for the first time, treading plump Syrah grapes in a boundless vat, juice bursting forth in fountains between her toes, wasps circling her bare breasts, seeds collecting about her pert, tannin-glazed nipples. It wasn’t terribly original. After things finally happened between them - clumsily, drunkenly, Denny pushing all the buttons he could think of, simultaneously, and thus never subsequently able to divine her true pleasure-points – he lay guilt-stricken, alone. Her taste lingered on his tongue, the bitter dregs of that evening’s wine. Wine had drawn them together across the borders and many, many miles; it seemed only fitting that a couple of cheap bottles would serve to collapse the final divide, a distance measured in feet, inches, microns... fitting, though not exactly right.
Yet she continued to fall into his bunk for the remainder of the picking season, which wasn’t long. Denny gave up worrying. “She likes English boys, yes?” said Fabian with a mouthful of toothpaste, a scrawny Pole with a glint that Denny didn’t much care for. He thought about lacing his coffee with rat poison.
One evening towards the end, he walked hand in hand with Agnès from the hostel to the last plundered vine-yard, shimmering in the moonlight. It was getting chilly, so he drew her tightly to his chest. He could feel her heart beating through the flimsy material of his half-buttoned shirt.
“Denny, let’s arrange to meet when I come to London, let’s do it right now.”
“Like a date? Christmas Eve by the Thames, then,” which was a combination even he might manage to remember.
And they arranged a time and a place, Denny nervously pegging himself at a specific map reference in a definite future, an uncommon concept to him. He would take her for a drink; they would laugh uncomfortably at a reunion after so long (though what was it really, seventy, eighty days?), bump into each other’s sentences until eventually settling into nostalgia, sweet-tasting recollection and everything else.
“I’ll track down a bottle from this very vineyard. If it’s not expensive,” which he thought was quite cute.
“Ha ha, way too soon, but very sweet of you. Maybe in three years. Or four. You can buy me a glass anyway. In a London bar.”
“You’ll only forget.”
And she pinched him hard around his middle, though whether in protest or agreement he was unable to tell.
When the last grape had been plucked, the last bin emptied, Denny and Agnès traveled on for a few weeks together, eeking out the last of their pay. They made for Trièste and ate pizza before a violent sunset, even the lone warship in the harbour splashed in romantic orange. They got drunk on wine, but there was sadness in the air. Denny felt the knot that had sealed away all the ache and emptiness in his heart – allowing him briefly to breath the sweet air of companionship – begin to unravel. Pretty soon, poison would be filling his secret compartments again. Agnès took one of the empty bottles back to their cheap hotel room, began filling it with cigarette ash, turning the dregs to a pungent purple paste. She bounced half naked on the narrow single bed; Denny looked towards the floorboards, not out of modesty, but rather concern for the room’s structural integrity. They made love for the last time, Denny horribly sensitized to such moments of finality, even though there was nothing explicit in the act that labelled it such. He just knew. Something in the nature of that withdrawal had screamed permanence.
They said their teary farewells the following evening at the Venezia Santa Lucia railway station, an ugly construction that could survey it’s own reflection in the waters of the Grand Canal, if it dared. Surrounded by such aesthetic beauty, the terminus looked grotesquely, monumentally out of place. Denny looked at Agnès, her massive blue eyes moist beneath long lashes, then considered himself, a virtual gargoyle by comparison. He got the connection. Perhaps this was the reason she had brought him here. There was a lingering kiss, and then she was gone. Lost to the dusk crowds: the office workers, the backpackers, other parting lovers whose goodbyes were better rehearsed, better acted, cinematic by comparison. Denny turned away and thought about the long trek home, started to try and forget.
Now Denny had left a dingy squat in Wolverhampton a couple of days previously and had fallen towards London more by virtue of gravity that anything else (if you consider the British Isles to be a fine, upstanding little dwelling with ceiling and floorboards, where one naturally tumbles in a Southerly direction if your resistance fails, as Denny’s most certainly had). Back within the M25’s great blue noose, he half expected to keep rolling through the capital, unable to catch a foothold, eventually coming to rest on some empty beach in Brighton, Hove, or even Hastings if his compass was being playful...
But then he suddenly remembered Agnès and their promised reunion, quivered nervously at the thought of fate placing him here, almost to the very hour. Denny tried to talk himself out of the meeting, began to feel sick with anticipation as his carriage rumbled out of White City, but surrender was in his blood-stream by now. Why the hell not, hey? he thought, live a little for once, which is what friends say to friends when attempting to be persuasive and goad the uncertain party into a course of action they would think twice over, sometime purely for their own amusement. Denny, however, had to play both parts himself, which lessened the general effectiveness. For sure, he wasn’t exactly looking his best – as the gaze of other passengers testified, eyes quickly dipped to examine their last-minute Christmas shopping when he caught them at it – but then what did that matter, really? Anyhow, he was sure she wouldn’t turn up, this was pretty much a certainty, the one consideration that finally guaranteed Denny’s attendance.
And of course she didn’t. He waited by the steps on the Southwark side of Blackfriars Bridge, drizzle blowing in sheets off the Thames, the odd tug boat bobbing by. He waited one hour, maybe more, until his feet and hands had turned numb, the rest of him in danger of following suit. He wondered how long he should give it, being a novice at this kind of thing, and not particularly good at drawing a line under stuff, at tossing the dregs onto the campfire and letting the embers die. He didn’t blame her, it was a filthy evening. She was probably out at some party or other, if even in London at all, still breathless after a morning at the reception desk, poured into a dress bought especially for the occasion, a quick-change in the cloakroom so as to avoid the slog back to Earl’s Court, Tufnell Park, or wherever she called home. There would be arms around her shoulder right now, Denny imagined, cheeky you should drop by accounts some day arms whose hands would head progressively lower as the glasses drained and the hour hand began the steady climb that served to morph evening into night. Denny didn’t know how should be feeling exactly, so aimed for nothing, the emptiness which came so naturally and was his very own God-given gift.
He had a telephone number for her in his pocket, perhaps her family home in Paris, she’d written it on the back of a wine label, what else? Denny held it to the sky and let his lighter lick the paper into flames. The fragments blew off into the night. Through a break in the clouds he could just make out Ursa Major, the one constellation he remembered from school. Shaped like a giant saucepan, he’d always thought. So he raised his lighter to the stars once again – a pretend hob flame this time – and warmed some imaginery beans.
Polaris – a Northern light for the weary traveller was also there or thereabouts – and Denny followed it to the opposite bank of The Thames, before this star too was swallowed by clouds.
When Denny next surfaced from the muggy interior of his duffle coat, there was Cassidy, resplendent in a formal shirt and black trousers, clutching what appeared to be a glass of lager and lime. He looked pretty good, all things considered, the major consideration being the recent navigation of a sickly, one-headlight Ford Capri back from Southend-on-Sea in a snowstorm that had tailed him all the way.
“I said The Cuttle, what the fuck’s wrong with you?” He glanced back to the bar and saw Michelle, struggling with a bottle of Smirnoff. “Christ, have you gotta death wish or something? Come on, let’s get outa here.” It then struck Cassidy that Denny was morbidly wearing the look of someone with exactly that, a death wish. He had the bearing of a man who would gladly breathe his last breath and pull the funereal shroud over his tired eyes; would at the very least wander the town looking for accessible gable ends from which to jump, gutters in which to freeze, railway lines to straddle. He thought to soften his approach. “You been alright...? Has anyone called for me...?”
“Called?”
“Yeah, you know, knocketty-knock-knock”. He drummed out a percussive accompaniment on the nearest thing he could find, which just happened to be the cracked golden bauble. It promptly shattered. “Oh fuck... well, there goes Christmas.”
“Till next year.”
“Yeah, there’s always next year. Well?” He ground the golden shards into the carpet, hoping nobody had noticed.
“Don’t think so, no,” thinking back to possible creakings on the stairs, doorbell chimes that may, or may not, have been part of drug-induced dreams, explosions that were surely the work of The History Channel. “Were you expecting anybody?”
“No.” Which was a lie of epic proportions. On Christmas Eve, he had discovered that a certain Walter McCloud was due out of hospital on Boxing Day morning, having recovered from his heart attack in unexpectedly quick time. This was the worst of all Christmas presents for Cassidy, who’d spent the preceding week praying for his complete and utter, irreversible, death. “Come on, let’s head next door and appreciate. There are sights to behold. Fulsome and plentiful.”
They left The Celeste by a side door, using conveniently placed revellers as cover, making it out safe and unseen. Cassidy marvelled at how Denny now managed to look even paler under the yellow glow of the streetlights. It was bitterly cold. Wind rattled the lids of overflowing wheelie-bins, spun the splintered plastic pint glasses that danced along the pavement. A couple of girls tottered past. Somewhere far below – through the dark alleyways between the guest houses and pubs, down the two-hundred-and-six steps to the promenade and the first grains of sand – waves were roaring unseen, spitting at the doors of pastel coloured beach huts padlocked since the end of September, peeling-paint doors that would be matchwood before the long winter was done, the huts themselves inverted, their treasured contents left to the elements. Storms and high-tides would soon plunder these little interiors, rip away the flooring that still bore the stains of summer’s carelessly applied sun-tan lotion, dropped ketchup or grease splatter from the single-hob gas stove, the blooms of spilled coke, coffee and herbal tea. Away would float the deckchairs, shell-paintings, chipped Coronation mugs, scented drawer linings, a forgotten tin of mandarin oranges from the depths of a low cupboard, the lost doll that caused so many tears on the long, headache-plagued journey home...
“Cass, I’m never drinking sherry again, not so much as a thimble-full, the tiniest of... tiniest of...” the words falling away as Denny gradually lost forward momentum and croached down against the nearest wall. He was terribly cold, even inside his duffle coat. He thought it was highly probable that no-one encased inside such a garment had ever been colder. They were near a boarded up amusement arcade, the slot machines still for months now, and yet he could still hear the tumbling, cascading music of temptation, which he knew couldn’t be right. Perhaps he was going mad.
“Yeah, that’s the spirit. Come on fella,” and here Cassidy patted him gently on the shoulder, “you’ll be alright, a second wind will blow in before you know it. And don’t be going too hard on the sherry, there were accomplices you know.” Cassidy wondered at the strength of this friendship-bond – a magnitude he had under-estimated, and was aware of having done so from the very first hours of his flight – that had dragged him from the warm bed of an ex-girlfriend eager to play catch-up, back to this suffering town, this, this human wreckage.
“I think I’m going to be sick.”
“Well try and get it inside that coat of yours, not down my trousers.”
“Where have you been?”
“Southend-on-Sea. Nice this time of year. Bracing.” Not that Cassidy’s assembled photograph album from the jaunt extended to scenes much beyond the underside of peach-coloured duvet.
Cassidy now cast a worried look up the street, a street whose shadows and crannies suddenly became more sinister. At the junction with the coast road a few hundred yards away, where the seafront lights – bulb clusters arranged in the form of blue crabs, red starfish, pink sandcastles – took animation and life from the wind, Cassidy saw some car headlights turning in, slowly, as if the driver was lost. This was as off-season as it was possible to get, however, and all the trippers had surely found their way home by now. The locals who remained drove their vehicles with a grudging, pin-point purpose and precision. The blue crab decoration suddenly went out. Cassidy didn’t particularly like this gesture of the Gods, and could sense the paranoia creeping back over him, as it always did whenever the minutes spent with Denny began piling up, blowing at his back like a snowdrift, eventually bringing him to his knees.
“Come on, Frodo my friend, let’s get off the thoroughfare and have a few drinks.”
And with this, they turned into a side lane and headed for the bright lights and noise of The Cuttlefish.
To the untrained eye, The Cuttlefish that evening might appear to have been hosting some vaguely-themed, semi-erotic fancy dress party. In fact, these sights were on offer most every Friday at this hour, the last of the elderly and easily offended regulars having long departed for safer, more sedate climes. Here were white PVC-clad nurses with twinkling stethoscopes bouncing in ample cleavages as they danced; a teacher in suspenders and a cheekily-tilted mortar-board; a lollipop girl bathing in her own, staggering fluoerescence, wielding a homemade lollipop that yelled (for it was extremely noisy) Stop / Go to any passing suitors; several WPCs taking down various particulars in a hands-on style peculiar to The Cuttlefish; even a couple of Raquel Welchs, one with her furry backside dangerously close to an open fire that licked dark coals to rubied beauty in a single, Friday evening concession to the traditional. All flanked, of course, by the rather more mundane, less flashy sights: bottle-tanned thighs, plump mid-riffs, torturous heels, push-up bras with varying degrees of stage-fright, even on occasions making a bid for total freedom, micro-minis that would – but for the addition of a buckle – have qualified as a belt, and a mean, string-width one at that... In a far corner lurked ‘The Snakepit’, beside which two young sweet-hearts embraced, gazing at their refelections in the purple liquid. A couple of beermats floated across the surface like water lillies. Denny’s stomach fluttered in a blurry reminiscence.
The two friends nudged carefully through the throng - at one point passing a fragmented line of sexy schoolgirls, hockey-sticks angled like Mulberry phalli sprouting from their tiny plaid skirts, each more sexually provocative (they reckoned, on reflection) than the last, each singing the same Britney tune but in a progressively higher key, the effect being a twenty-or-so yard long ‘harmonisation’ – and eventually neared Valhalla, the bar.
Denny spied a petite nymphet in a brash pink velvet jumpsuit, the material unzipped so dangerously low that he could see her navel glistening under the disco lights, wet from spilled Snakebite he suspected. As she turned, Denny made out the curve of her breasts pressing into the garment’s fur lining. It looked comfy in there. An oddly practical outfit too, considering the season. He felt a sudden stirring in a region he had no desire to arouse, most especially in view of his own broken zipper (held aloft by an ancient, feeble safety pin) and a bladder in need of imminent attention. Nevertheless, something was springing forth, blossoming, and Denny was as powerless as a man tring to haul back the changing seasons.
“Oh fuck, it should be illegal!”, shouted Cassidy above the music, inhaling deeply the sweet perfume of teenage abandon.
Denny pondered that in the majority of cases on display, this was probably exactly what it would be, not that any protuberance of his would ever get within the requisite proximity to invoke upkeepers of the law, no matter how hard he tried. Cassidy, on the other hand, had an endearing faith in his own magnetism; he was the embodiment of a self-fulfilling prophecy, a man who could merely chance upon eye-contact – the girl usually glancing some place else entirely – and become overwhelmed with the beautiful conviction that a night of boundless passion lay ahead, all manner of dreamscape entanglements and blissful touches, caresses and abandonment, finally drained to a tired-eyed breakfast-in-bed, toast crumbs between the pillows, a dry but lingering morning kiss goodbye, a wind-down that usually hovered somewhere between the dismissive and the romantic, yet often failed to find the correct pitch in either camp.
Denny wandered off to find the toilets, located somewhere at the end of a long, dingy, winding corridor (never, seemingly, in exactly the same location as it was on any previous visit, but that was just one of The Cuttlefish’s many mysteries). The grotty orange and black carpet, possibly woven from the coats of a million bumble-bees, would play mean tricks with a sober-man’s eyesight, and seemed to exist soley as an invitation to vomit. Denny resisted and made for a thankfully empty cubicle. He somehow managed to angle his piss relatively near the bowl - not perfect, but marks for effort – and felt the full satisfaction of a spent bladder. Sighing in a fashion that he hoped was profound, just in case anyone was eavesdropping, he took a few moments to read the scribbles on the formica dividing wall. There was an ongoing drama, a restroom serialisation, involving a girl called Stacy which just seemed to grow and grow as the months went by. Nobody ever attempted to purge the walls of this filth, and Denny always made a point of trying to catch up whenever he was in the area. It was like a Bayeux Tapestry in blue biro, the battlefield a fertile land between Stacy’s thighs where various interlopers fought for attention with a variety of swollen, pube-studded cocks instead of arrows. Stacy was apparently renowned for a dizzying array of eye-popping things, but keeping the same mobile number didn’t appear to be one of them. Various combinations of digits were scattered about with a bewildering promiscuity that rivalled Stacy’s own. Helpfully, many of the contributors supplied dates alongside such artistry, as if touchingly aware of its possible future significance, or at least cementing their own little sordid place in history. Denny imagined this very panel being discovered by bearded, aqua-archaeologists of the distant future - long after this rotten little town had been swallowed whole by the North Sea - the silt carefully washed away by miniature hoses and the loving narratives thus uncovered used as the basis for theses or stuffy evening seminars that would nevertheless argue themselves late into the night: Early Twenty-First Century Orifices – A Study In Frequency and Preference, or something like that. All of which made Denny laugh a little until he caught himself in the mirror above wash-basin, looking like a man who’d just risen from a week-long snooze, but should probably consider a fortnight more. There was more colour and expression in his duffle coat.
When he returned, however, Cassidy had gone. Denny searched for a few moments, but never with much enthusiasm. He squeezed past a knot of girls in dainty dental nurse outfits so gorgeous it made him quake, then left The Cuttlefish. An odd snowflake had started to fall; the first brave crystals leaving the safety of their cloud to flirt nervously with the various cold surfaces on offer: pavement, roof-tiles, a skittish sheet from yesterday’s worthless Racing Post. He trudged off into the night.
Taken from the opening chapter of 'The Mud Clock' | © 2007
