Thursday 29 May 2014

Am Strand


His eyes drifted over the lip of the Uffer, past the crab shack and to something directly in front. A figure gradually took shape, as if rising into form out of an upset pallet of paint. It was her. He recognised her a few moments before he knew it. He was looking straight at her. He wasn’t aware of how long she had been there, or at what point he had seen her, but there she was. She was standing about ten feet in front of the car looking back at him. She was wearing a black anorak over a bright pink skirt. There was a polka-dot scarf about her neck and a royal blue head scarf wrapped over her head. Her shoes were wholly unsuitable for the weather and he saw that she was standing in a puddle that was being whipped up in the wind about her ankles.

There was a prickling sensation crackling up his arms and over his chest. His heart has risen up to his throat and his mouth was too dry to swallow. Was it really her? Maybe it wasn’t her. Why on earth didn’t she get out of the puddle? What was she doing there? In a fierce onslaught of rain he lost her for a few seconds. When she appeared again it seemed that she was smiling at him, dipping her head a little and cocking it to one side, her face smudged in the blurred rain that sprayed across the windscreen. She waved. His hand juddered forward to turn on the windscreen wipers, but then changed direction in mid-course and went to open the door. He was out of the car and into the rain faster than he had expected, cursing his rudeness in sitting there so long. As he waded through the wind towards her he felt a cold sweat swarm over his head and down the line of his neck. What would he say to her? He stopped a foot from her and stared into her face. A bolt of pain shot through his chest as he recognised eyes he had not looked upon for a lifetime.

Reeling a little, a gust of wind took advantage of him and he almost stumbled over. He shot out a crooked leg driving his foot deep into the puddle she was standing in. She was laughing at him. He opened his mouth but any paltry words that rose up died in his throat. He was lost, and terrified, and thought that the wind would bowl him over at any moment. He took his foot out of the puddle and tried to straighten himself. She said nothing but looked back at him with an amused smile.

To relieve the drama punching in his chest he forced a sentence out but the wind carried his words away as soon as he said them and so he heard only their wooden echo inside his own head. She laughed at this though he heard nothing of that either and she shook her head smiling. A damp and twisted string of her hair danced across her face. Worn and heavy flesh drooped over her black eyes that were pulled back into her skull. But the sparkle in them spun like that string of dark hair, stubbornly joyous against the silvered fringe that peaked out below the headscarf. The wind roared. He cried,

‘What … What are you doing here?’

Her eyes danced over him and her hardened face didn’t drop from that rich smile. He opened his mouth again to entreat for answers but then close it. She nodded. Something stirred in the smoky pit of his bowls and rose like a bubble, stifling his throat. He could feel his mouth stretch and hers mimicked his as her eyes blurred into tears to join the rain streaking down her cheeks. He raised his arms and his hands gripped her shoulders. Bringing them around her back he brought her to him and held her fully against his body and they gently rocked in the wind. As if aware of awkwardness he took his hands back and shoved them into his pockets like a shy groom. He shuffled his feet and brought the left one out of the puddle. ‘I’m shaking like a dog!’ he bellowed at her. ‘What are you doing here?’

He took hold of one of her cold hand to take her back to the cat but she shook her head and gestured towards the Uffer. Without withdrawing her gaze she turned to the sea. He followed a few steps after her and they began to walk across the car park towards the beach. He took her hand again and was surprised to feel embarrassed at his rashness. Her palm fell easily into his. The rain spat in their face. As they walked the racing in his chest began to lessen and in its place rose up a confused sensation of joy that swelled in his breast and lifted his head, like a bouncy-castle slowly filling with air. The beginnings of questions rose up in his mind but were chased off by the next load before he could hear them through. The same happened to the following questions and together the whole lot made a merry dance of puzzlement and wonder in his head that took physical form in the smile that grew across his face, and in his fingers that gripped her hand the harder. As they turned to the sea his legs grew lighter and his knees buckled in their caps. The rain that splattered in his face was as refreshing as gulps of water swallowed when still panting after a run in the sun.

They made their way slowly along the path that cut off from the car park and lay between the woods and the beach. Like an awkward couple courting they stumbled along. They descended the crumbling steps down to the beach slowly, bumping into each other against the wind. At the foot of the steps they both sunk a little into the waterlogged sand. He turned to her. She was looking across the empty beach out to sea with an expression of rapture filling her little old face, blotches of apple-red emerging on her cheeks. Suddenly she let out a little yelp and stumbled into a trot towards the water, ungainly and crooked, she seemed to tip to one side as she went. He stood where he was and watched her go.

What would they do now? What must they do now? These questions rose up above the din in his head. Venture into the water? They could take off their shoes and socks and he could roll up his trousers to his knees and she could lift her dress up about her. Or they could return along the path to the hut for Krebbe in Brott … He walked a few feet into the beach in front of the steps. The trees creaked and strained at their roots behind him, and little branches were torn off and thrown about him on the sand. He paid them no heed but only watched her zigzag her way down the beach. She wasn’t making progress fast and had still not reached the waves which crashed less than forty metres away from the steps. Each trip and turn of hers he watched, each stumble and spin, trying to guess where she would turn next. And when it came, when she bent her legs to steady herself or turned her face up to the sky, a little burst of pleasure sprung up in his chest as he realised that he had known she would do just that, and this little realisation surprised him each time, and pleased him as much as the guessing. The rain had lost its ferocity.

He watched as a gust of wind snatched her headscarf from her. She went to catch it but it fluttered through her fingers and was taken out to sea. She began to fall to the ground and fear struck him. As she fell further from him he felt a surge of heat rising up and spilling into his temple. The confusion was cleared and he saw that he would lose her in the rain, and if he lost her in the rain, he would not this time find her again. He loped down the beach after her in great wonky strides, falling unstably on small rocks and sinking into the soggy sand. He reached her in a few leaps as she was struggling up from the sand. He took her in his arms, his hands clinging to her slippery anorak. She tumbled back to him and lifting her face up to his they kissed. The colour of her hair seemed now to reflect not the cloud above but the sand they stood on her, and as he pulled away from the kiss, he saw that her lips were rosy once more. The wind appeared to quieten for a moment within the great air that hugged him as he clung to her. Upon this plateau of wind and rain that he felt from his pink nose to his wet toes to her warm mouth, into this he fell.

Slipping apart they led each other across the beach, winding in and out of the shallows, the water to one side of them, the woods on the other. They grabbed and stroked each other both still unpractised in this forgotten gaiety, dodging the little Löcher des Strand with improving dexterity. The echo of jokes unrecollected rose again between them and twinkled in their eyes and babbling unheard giggles, a peace reclaimed, even though the planks and ropes of its original construction were forgotten. He noticed there was a ship out to sea. Walkers passed by along the path up, taking advantage of the slight repost the wind had taken.

Ahead of them they could see the barrier where the public beach became the private one. He turned to go back the way they had come but she led him on staring straight ahead. He smiled as the rain continued to splatter across his face, watching her closely, expecting her to turn back after the next step. They had never before dared to break this rule and slip under the wire to the other end of the beach. But she kept going forward with a broad smile on her face that broke through her attempts to suppress it. He didn’t dare look around to see if those on the path by the woods were watching them. Without slacking or increasing their pace they walked straight through the barrier. They kept walking in this calm fashion, until it was clear that no one was to going to call them back. Then, like a young child, or a dog that gradually begins to realise that you mean not to scold or ignore but to play, the thrill took over them growing, wagging, jumping and they scuttled farther along the path. The further they went the stronger he felt. He had left the shell of his frail and timid self the other side of the wire, and breathed deep gulps of wind on this new beach. He drew his hand through his hair and let out a whoop. She looked up at him and laughed.

This side of the beach was the same as that before but a little wilder. There were no benches here or indeed any landmarks to break the heather and rock that led up from the beach inland. The path stretched on in front of them, until it appeared to turn to one side in the distance, the like the curve of the horizon.

Stopping to embrace again he pulled her into his body and holding her face as he kissed he raised his hands and ran them down her smooth cheeks to her neck. He stifled her laugher here and withdrawing, saw that her eyes had grown serious. He loosed his grip on her but she held him where he stood, her arms slipping under his coat and around his waist. Now she came to him. He felt one finger wriggle its way between his shirt and belt. That finger pressed cold against his flesh and after it followed the rest of the hand. The other then came to join the first. Their bodies seemed to make sense again.

The wind carried to them the sound of a dog barking. They pulled apart and saw through the rain someone shouting after it. Looking back towards the car park they saw a dark figure, bundled up and hooded in the drizzle. In front a black dog was leaping, snuffling in the undergrowth and springing up into the air when the wind blew between its legs. They turned back to each other and giggled, her corn-coloured fringe dancing in the wind. Up the path from the way they had come a couple were approaching, an elderly man and a woman. He was wearing a stiff winter, khaki trousers and thick brown boots that threw his feet out of proportion with the rest of the body. He had a black scarf wrapped neatly about his neck but no hat, so his hair blew erratically in the wind. She was almost half the size of him, stout and wrapped up in a black coat and wore a bright yellow dress that blew in the wind like a veil. She smiled up at them as they passed as an indulgent grandmother might while the man nodded to them congenially and Anya tried to push away his hands that clung to her. When the couple had passed them they fell into each other again, she squealed and he chuckled guilty. The old couple turned back at them and all four smiled at each other and broke into laughter.

As a particularly ferocious gust of wind tumbled down upon them he jumped up like a starfish and howled into it. She fell to a crouch laughing at him and had to steady herself on all fours, her hands sinking into the mud. Seeing her glee he howled louder until she toppled onto the ground, and he fell down next to her. The person was shouting after their dog again. It paid no heed as it rushed towards the sea. Catching their scent it ran towards them, snuffling in their faces and trampling over their bodies with filthy paws.

Keeping the dog at bay with one hand he rose to his feet and she scampered up after him. And then, whether it was the wind that rushed behind them urging their legs forward, or whether it was in an attempt to mimic the enthusiasm of dog that ran about them, or whether it was to catch up with the couple ahead who were already disappearing into the horizon, but at the same moment, free of the aches and strains that had previously debilitated them, they began to run. The wind whistled louder in their ears, pulling their hair back from their faces that flinched and grinned into the rain. They ran with full lungs bursting to live, their hearts beating with a bouncing cadence. They threw their knees into the air and kicked out their feet behind them, all four limbs bending out akimbo like a gaggle of geese in a flurry. Their arms swung around them and their elbows knocked together until their hands found each other and clasped tight. Like this they ran faster and faster, pebbles shaped like little bird eggs flying off in all directions under their feet. Hand in hand they flew along the beach, flying down the path that stretched to where land became sea and sea became sky.


Bertie Digby Alexander
Berlin 2014





 






           



















 



Zum Strand

He studied his knuckles. They sat in rows curling around the steering wheel. Bent white hairs sprouted out of them amidst the blotches that plagued his hands and up his arms to his shoulders, and then over and down his hairy chest. He tried to move his hands, to bring some life into them but they stayed still like an ancient mountain range. His trousers had dried sticking to his skin. He could smell his damp socks and the mud that had crept into his shoes was slowly crusting over. His overcoat was frozen about him and the coarse collar scratched at his neck. He attempted to twitch his thumbs and when they remained motionless as well he decided that he would keep his hands where they were for fear he no longer had the power to move them at all. They must be frozen. 

            He had been cold since he had left England. Driving down to Dover and then across France and Belgium and the Netherlands he had been cold. His hands especially so as he had forgotten his gloves. His wife would never had forgotten and nor would his daughter have. But neither of them were there when he packed. One dead. One deceived. He had therefore packed slowly and contentedly and what went into his case was really only a matter of process, the checking-off of necessities that a lifetime had imprinted on his mind. It was the slow sorting of essentials. He took no luxuries; there was nothing he wanted to have close to him. He took only what he needed to get him through the trip, and everything he put in his case he resented as another thing he was to be burdened with. He had left his watch behind too.

            Once in the car he felt a surprising sensation of excitement that in seventy years of driving he had never experienced. Not even at the beginning with those first painful lessons as a young man that had commenced when his family had returned to England, practising with his father who sat rigid and sweating, screaming directions and expletives next to him. It had never got any better.  Driving the family to Norfolk for summer holidays had been the worst journeys of the year. On those trips he had been the one sweating and shouting expletives while his wife fumbled with the map and gave no directions at all. In a gnawing more tedious fashion, driving around the little town they lived in had been as dreadful; drives to the supermarket, to the post office, to the chemists. Driving along these streets now, he was only five minutes in the car when he lost his delayed enthusiasm for the car.

Apart from suffering a little boredom interspersed with a little fear, the journey to Dover had been no problem at all. Nevertheless when getting out of his car and setting foot on the ferry he hurried away from the vehicle and up the narrow white steps onto the first floor. He soon had to return to the car though as he had forgotten his wallet. On the ferry he bought a coffee which he drank quickly and then sat alone in a corner of a quiet canteen area. Once he got up and went on deck but the wind was bitter and he could not find the joy in the wind and the spray that the group of school children running about him did.

He had stayed in a hotel in Ghent that night, where years before he and his wife had been invited to, to celebrate a friend’s 50th. It had been a crisp autumn weekend then but this time he work up the next day to a soggy January morning. He left after a quick dry breakfast and drove under thickening clouds all day, not stopping until he reached his hotel in Wilhelmshaven late that evening. His German came out broken and awkward, like a schoolboy’s, as it had been when he left. The girl behind reception answered him in sharp and clear English with a heavy American twang. Taken aback and a little ashamed he continued in a mumbling English, which he sensed she listened to with disdain. He went to bed early that evening, rising early the next day to have a hurried breakfast. He felt uncomfortable of exposing his trip to curious eyes of the hotel stuff, polite strangers though they were, and was quick to leave into the weather raging outside soon after he had eaten, without shaving.

With him in the car he had taken only his coat and his wallet. He had the faint idea that he would buy Krebbe in Brot. But the shack was shut up, like everything else, and he thought that he probably wouldn’t have bought anything even if it had been otherwise. At least, he wouldn’t have enjoyed it if he had and that would have been worse than not eating. The shack suffered against the wind and the rain as the car did, and the other five or six cars did too, those that sat stationed about the bare car park that had become a muddy plain of quivering grey puddles. He couldn’t see anyone though he had passed a few wrapped up in coats and wearing big boots as he had driven down the track towards the sea. Children and little people looking the same, wrapped up and thinking of nothing but walking through the onslaught; looking neither sideways or back, no attention paid to each other, babies cradles in arms, and all heads bowed against the wind.

He wondered if there were others waiting in those cars now, fearing to emerge to the world that raged about them, clinging to their steering wheels like him, their seatbelts strapped on. Or perhaps those cars sat empty, their former occupants lost in the wind and rain, struggling somewhere on the beach unable to find their way back. There were boulders strewn about the car park, once used, he presumed, to designate parking spots. Parking bays the girl at the hotel had called them. Water rose about these rocks like they were fallen pre-historic beasts devoid of the will to rise. The trees that ringed this end of the car park swayed and creaked in the wind, little branches snapping off and splattering into the puddles like brittle little limbs. Over on the other side he could see the bushes that were littered along the coast this side of the Uffer. Down to the left there were the thicker trees leading into the wood that lined the path all the way along to where the stone steps led down to the beach. Directly in front of him, somewhere behind the crab shack, he knew there was the fence cutting off the private part of the beach to his right with the public part to his left.

            He cleared his throat of the mucus that had been forming there and the sound brought him back to himself and the car. He felt a great sense of both solitude and completeness. There were no other people, no lots of things, or Crebbe in Brott, to take from the full existence that he occupied alone in that car. It was quiet, and it was a joyless thinness, for as there was nothing to irritate or tug at him, there was also nothing to comfort or distract him. It was all metallic, and soulless, and hollow. His light breath was all that stirred in the car and even that seemed to be failing under the weight of the muted space. The smell of car neither grew nor dimmed, but hung suspended in the air around him. Without the interference of people or food or time, and with the click of his throat when it was cleared, he was aware of his complete existence, in the end, in a world that was entirely his own. In this little capsule he had peace, suffocating and fearful; it was as if, when one takes a leap off a rock or a jetty into the water, when in the moment that one is suspended in the air between water and sky, a metallic shell had closed in upon that person, holding them securely and with a careless strength to consider, for once, and for eternity. Something was coming, and much had been, but behind the ordered chaos and the hubbub, this is how it always was. His breath, his hands, his heart – all else had only been supplements to this quiet existence that he had occupied unaware since he first came into the world. About him were the last possessions that one held scattered about the table at the end of a long train journey. That which was left after the trolley lady had been round, and after she had return to pick up the debris, and then left the carriage until the end of the track. 

            He unclenched his hands from the steering wall, undid his seat belt and thrust them into the pockets of his jacket.

*


            He and Anya had often lain on this beach when it was fine weather, playing games and swimming in the sea. They would walk Dana down the shoreline and run through the wood as she chased and snapped at their heels. They would climb up the trees and look down at her laughing as she barked and pawed the trunks. Here on this beach Anya had taught him which shells were the rarest and he showed her the best way to build a channel down to the sea. Once her father had taken them out fishing on his boat. It had rained hard and after an hour the children were soaked through and shivering while Anya’s father shouted out instructions to them in Plattdeutsch. In the summer they had been down at the beach most days; he grabbed at her ankle under water, she had screamed at him when he flicked sand in her eye, and he had cried when the metal end of a spade fell down on his toes. Here he had felt her lips against his when she had kissed him, and he had felt the flesh under her dress amongst the trees.

            Dana always accompanied them to the beach. Anya would bring her to his house first, her barks from down the lane heralding their approach. By the time they got to his house he was outside in his cap and coat waiting for them. When Dana was a puppy she was just a tangled mass of fluff, constantly thick with sand and seaweed from the beach. She would look up with them with reproachful eyes as they tried to wash the remnants of the beach. Despite their best efforts she always smelt a little like a fishing boat, a scent that was constant in Anya’s house.

‘I wish I was like Dana,’ he had said to Anya. ‘So much energy. So few worries.’

            ‘She has her fair share of worries.’

He didn’t believe it.

He could remember them lying on that beach in the sun, him with his shirt off and her lying in the crook of his arm enveloped in her hair. He thought perhaps that it had not been one moment but many times, fragments of memories making up what seemed to him now, almost seventy years later, one of the happiest moments of his life. The clouds had blurred in and out of the thin blue sky above him, and as he slipped deep into daydream his imaginations had coupled with the voices of strangers about him to create weird fantasies. His skin had grown first warm where their flesh touched and then cooled as their bodies grew accustomed together. When they finally separated there was a light pull of their skin where the sweat had dried.

The back of his head had sunk into the sand and he could feel one thin pebble lying against his temple. One arm had been above his head but he brought it down to lie next to him when it began to ache, his fingers gently nosing the sand. Her fingers gently played with the dark hair that sprouted across his chest. Carefully they had tiptoed across his skin, occasionally a hair catching in her worn-down nails and tugging. She hummed tunelessly, and it fell in and out of the sound of her breathing. When his eyes were open, he could see in the corner of his vision the eyes flicking up and down, at the sky and down to the peaceful Dana whose wet nose he could feel at his feet. At one point she ran her whole palm across his chest as if sliding across a stage. As he had had a hairy chest and knuckles so she had little animal hands, wrinkled like a monkey’s.

He was self-conscious of the hair that had emerged all over his body when he had only just entered puberty. He remembered feeling the first spouts before seeing their black heads spring up, peppering the white skin under his arms and at his crotch. He had surveyed himself with horror in the mirror and stolen his mother’s nail clippers to snip away at the most audacious of them.  His legs were suddenly not the legs of a child, and he remembered his grandmother coming to stay and remarking on just that, tickling his calves. ‘I won’t be giving you baths anymore,’ she had said. He didn’t look down at his legs but saw them nevertheless; coarse and ungainly like a cockerel. And the hair kept coming with renewed vigour as the weeks passed, and he would look around shamefully at the smooth arms and legs of the other boys in his class.

Anya would mercilessly tease him for it. It was worse coming from her and he would thunder inside and flush. His father had hair all over his body too, with a great neatly-trimmed beard and full dark locks.
            
‘That is how you will turn out,’ she would say to him with a smile.

            But in this perfect memory – that which was all the more perfect for the myriad other memories that sparked off from it - she was quiet, and they were still save for her fingers that ballet-danced across his chest. Dana was still too, which was rare. As rare as it was for Anya to be so quiet and it was like for a moment, both of them had given up wit and games and were content to simply be with him, lying there on the beach.

            Most Saturdays at the beach he had returned home and been surprised at the time. He would always miss ‘Cocktail Hour’ – a sparse 45 minutes of one drink with a soggy square of cucumber floating in it – which he was compelled to be at despite not permitted to take part. Cocktail Hour had been a custom in his grandfather’s house when his father was a boy, his many siblings and neighbours making up a vibrant party. It was a custom his father had taken with him into the army and practiced from Wiltshire to London to Germany. Now though, as his mother didn’t drink, Cocktail Hour consisted of one weak gin and tonic and his father’s fraught attempts to recreate a throng of gentlemen and ladies, laughter and casual politics. His father would usually commence with some dry tale from work which had made him recall so-and-so from some place. ‘You remember, dear?’ His mother would feign recollection as she could rarely actually remember and his father would know it, cutting her off in her protestations and continue his story. The punch line came fast and flat and his mother always laughed too late and too high and he would glare at wife and son with a thundering brow.

Dutifully and with perseverance his mother had always done her best to make up for the company they lacked in Wilhelmshaven. His father would grunt and make rebuttals to the points she offered, scoffing at her as if they were in the Commons until finally he would suddenly rise from his chair, curse the ‘tumbleweed house’ he was living in, damn his moronic son and return to his study, his drink left half full.

Only when his father’s sister was staying with them would cocktail hour have any spark to it. His father’s sister could bring the whole glittering London society to their house in her long dresses, bubbling charm and amusing anecdotes that would make his father chortle. His mother would be happy too, relieved of a duty that she could never perform adequately and in bliss at seeing her husband so content. On such visits his aunt had graced them each equally with her time and attention. She would feign to assist his mother in the kitchen and about the house, looking at the cutlery and plates and pillows and pictures with an indulgent curiosity. She would banter gaily in a playful German with the shopkeepers and other customers, those that made his mother so anxious. And she would inquire after his mother’s family as if they were also old friends of hers and not people she had met no more times than she could count on one elegantly gloved hand. With him she would come into his room and sit on the foot of his bed, her chin rested on hand as she gazed into his flushed face and asked what he did in his free time. She would ask how he found the town, and the people there, and took a bubbling interest in Anya. She would smoke long cigarettes, and offer him one, and tell him what devils she and her brothers had been when they were his age.

In the evening, her attention fell upon his father. He would recall glorious stories of his own years past in London and narrate them with a colour he could never conjure at other times; evenings out with other officers after a week on Salisbury plain, stag nights and sneaking into the Savoy where one of his brothers worked. He would look from his father to his aunt as they laughed together, and his father refilled their drinks, and smoked her cigarettes and he wished for one night to be in their company in their London of twenty years ago. His father would fall back into the joviality of his youth, a mischievousness and love of life that was utterly absent otherwise, his belly rolling not in toil but in mirth. His cheeks grew ruddy again and his big black eyes shone in generous laughter which welcomed them all in. This mood would sink away though the morning of his sister’s departure, and cynicism and torpor, ever ready, took up their place once more.

            Cocktail Hour without his aunt mercilessly exhibited how dreadful they were when she was there. After one late afternoon at the beach too many, he entered the house to a gruff cry from his father. ‘Ah!’ He emerged from the drawing room with an empty glass and his cucumber knife in his hand. ‘So you have finally decided to come and join us? Are you aware of how long we have been waiting?’

He joined them in the sitting room  and his father proclaimed that he would ‘buy the boy a watch!’ so there need be no further excuses of losing track of the time at ‘that infernal beach!’

            The next week he was called into his father’s study one evening and there sitting on the desk was a crimson velvet box. With his eyes fixed on his son he indicated for him to open the box. He opened the box to find inside a shining silver wristwatch upon which his initials and the date were engraved. His father had picked up is cup of tea and gazed into a picture above the door. He didn’t think they spoke much at that meeting. He didn’t think his father had then said to him, ‘That is a nice watch’. But on numerous other occasions, he could remember him coming into a room his father was in, and if the watch was visible it would inevitably draw a misty gaze from his father and which reverently said, ‘That is a nice watch.’ But at this time when he gave his son the watch, he had no misty gaze but stared hard into the picture on the wall. He looked into his father’s face in silence until it finally jerked back down to him with an expression of mixed reproach and embarrassment. 

Another time his father had called him into his office and presented him with first razor and shaving kit. This would have been a few years before the evening of the watch, but both instances appeared so similar in their sequence he wasn’t sure if once again his memories had fallen upon each other and merged. All that really distinguished the different times were the contents of the boxes laid on the desk in between them, and that on the second occasion his father had taken him upstairs and instructed him in the art of shaving. On both evenings he had been wholly unimpressed by the gifts bestowed upon him. Both, however, he was to use for the rest of his life.

            There was a third occasion he recalled being summoned to the study which stood clearly apart from the previous two due to the relatively great amount his father had spoken. His father had asked him the question commonly asked by parents of their young – and the question he would in turn ask his children – as to what he planned to do when he left school. After some mumbling and hesitation he had answered his father that he wanted to go abroad.

            ‘Abroad? Where to? England?’

            ‘England first, perhaps. But then other places after. Europe of course, but also Africa, and America.’

            He expected rebuttals and patronisation from his father on these words, and sneering at the mention of America, but instead his father had turned to his tea which he sipped for a few moments and then, looking above his son’s face to the picture above the wall he had replied,

            ‘In choosing to live abroad, a man sacrifices being near to his family and loved ones. That is what you have to give up when you live abroad. Some can do it, others cannot.’

            He could definitely do it, he thought to himself. He had always dreamed of travelling the world and would map out his marvellous future to Anya as they threw rocks into the sea.

            However when it became clear that it was impossible for his family to stay in Germany he felt no excitement at all but just a heavy weight in leaving a world that he would never return to, and could never be recreated again. This feeling was intensified by the spirits of his parents. The possibility that they would have to leave Germany and return home and been growing for months. His parents both appeared frightened by the prospect of returning to England again, and this unexpected fear sent his father into more frequent outbursts and his mother down to a severer depth of anxiety than that which she commonly lived in. However as their affairs began to settle on both sides of the channel, his parents returned to their former states and then to his surprise, accelerated past these to a light giddy existence that he had never witnessed before. They made plans about who they would go and visit first and who they would have to stay.

            ‘And you will see London, my boy!’ his father had said to him.

            ‘I have already seen London.’

            ‘But not properly! Not in the way that a countryman sees it!’

            Once packed up and on the ship the two of them had flittered about their cabin as if they were on their honeymoon again. His father had suggested that they all go up on deck so they could see when England approached. They were in such an excitable flurry as they made their way down the corridor that his father tripped and fell with a thud into a cabin door. His mother squealed and started away around the corner. His father, chuckling guilty, made a tip-toed run behind her and their son was left to face the indignant face that presently appeared at the door.

            Up on deck the drizzle and cold billowing air checked them a little.

His father said, ‘A fair wind behind us. The engine can run smoothly. No rocking. No disturbance. It will be an easy passage.’

A couple of weeks or so after arriving in England he had received a letter from Anya. Writing little of herself or her family or the acceleration of her country towards war, she had instead written principally of Dana.

‘I worry about her as much as I do the rest. She is really quite deaf now. I say ‘Dana’ to her and she won’t respond. ‘Walkies’ ‘Ball’ and she won’t turn. Only when I get up and touch her on the behind does she turn with a surprised, and I fear, scared expression. The other day on the walk with Mattheus she stopped suddenly and leant against his legs, unable to go on. She is so restless too. Even when under the stairs I can see her anxious face looking out of the darkness at me. She knows what is to come for it has already come to her. I don’t know what I will do when she is gone.’


*

            Calmly telling his daughter over toast and tea that he was to return to Germany she brought up the thousand-and-one reasons why it was simply a ridiculous idea. He sipped the Earl Grey calmly as she outlined each of her points, stopping only to bite another chunk out of her toast, lathering another with Lurpak and Marmite and then resumed again with renewed vigour. He was practised in letting her shrill voice fall over him and listened instead to the sound of her sons upturning furniture in the next room. He looked at her but not at her face. Another of her hands dived into the jaffa cake box and he watched the bare flabby shoulder where her malformed tattoo wiggled morosely like a fat child being pulled up. He tried to see her as beautiful as she had been at nineteen years old, when she barely spoke to them at all, and sitting around that same table he and his wife had interrogated her on the tattoo. Why had she consciously assaulted her body like that?

            ‘What about in twenty years’ time when you still have to look at that thing each day in the mirror?’

Her answer was confusing to him and he saw that it was utterly incomprehensible to his wife.

‘Then each day I will never forget how I felt that night.’

She had left him that day with the stipulation that he would ring her before he made any rash decisions to book flights.

‘Actually I plan to drive.’

She let out an exasperated cry and ushered her boys out of the front door. ‘Just ring me, Dad, OK? Or speak to John.’

He hadn’t spoken to John but instead thought about going down to the local pub. He hadn't been in years. He and his wife had used to go there for half a pint on New Year’s Eve or on the Jubilee, but never otherwise. Only once had he gone there after marriage without his wife, and that was to meet his friend Mike, who lived in the same town, unmarried, no children, and was as regular at the pub as he was absent. That night was soon after the doctor had recommended that his wife should no longer drive. It was a diagnosis that his wife was willing to hear, and tied the two of them closer in the daily nuisance of chores and little excursions.

He had left his wife telling her that Mike was in a bad state and he needed to see him. He found Mike as he expected, red-nosed and spry as always. Mike had a tan that hadn’t left him since his hedonistic days living in Hong Kong where he had worked in the wine trade and went by the name of Michael, or Loki, to his closer friends. The return to England after ‘the Handover’ was only satiable to Mike, he said, as he would be able to see more of ‘that nice Tony.’ He was friends with everyone in the pub and received hails from people in the street.

‘Tell me what marriage is worth?’ Mike has asked him. ‘A lifetime or a tribute to a few moments of utter bliss? An eternal promise or a mark of respect to the joy felt at the wedding ceremony? The joy felt in the early days’

‘Don’t ask me that.’

‘C’mon?’ Mike moved to reach his hands but he withdrew them from the table.

‘Don’t ask me that.’

Then his friends started dying and soon England was shrouded in death. Life which had seemed to move so slowly for so long was suddenly speeding up towards the end. He came to look upon his wife not as someone he loved but as someone he needed. The two of them would sit at the breakfast table and the news of another friend dead would reach them. She would let out a small sad ‘O’ and he would lose his appetite. He would feel his ribcage tighten about his lungs and the feeling that a necktie had grown up inside his throat. He would look to her and be irritated that she was able to go on at her cereal and warm Ribena with gusto, after dropping her sad made-up eyes for only a moment.

They were grey moments, physically uncomfortable moments which took longer to subside with each new blow. The weight of the news would fall to join the mass of veil upon veil of the memories of ghosts. A grey fog that rose up in a slow bluster each time another dropped, then settled, thick at the bed, at the bottom of his stomach, as the latest lay down amongst the powdered lake. When he lay down at night they stirred again, flooding his memory with times lost, friendships sundered, love now unrequited. The shadows would rage and swoop about his head till he finally fell asleep. The dreams were over in the morning. The morning was just cold, and still, and very much absent of all that had been special. Quiet moments with his wife occasionally were a warm breeze in all this turmoil. In the evenings they would sit together on the sofa watching the television and he would take her hand and forget the ashen mass in his bowels. And then when she died there was nothing to stop the reek of death suffocating him. Not even the smell of Ribena.

 That first Christmas he hadn’t wanted to go to either of his children but to stay at home. He had ended up meeting Mike in the pub on Christmas Eve. It was when walking there that evening that he had decided he would return to Germany. 

‘And you will never come back,’ Mike said.

*

Had they believed it would last forever? He didn’t think they had ever really thought of ‘forever.’ Making his own family had been his forever. He had only started thinking of time when he knew that there wasn’t much of it left. And now, at the end of all things, he had returned to a place that had never paid heed to time, but simply lay sprawled across the landscape as it always had displaying few of the wounds that marked the assault of time. His eyes flowed over trees and bushes and rocks that young hands had with an unconscious bliss brushed up against and held on to for almost two decades. It was he who had turned his back on happiness. The beach welcomed him indifferently, saying only, OK, have me again, but know that I have not missed love as you have while you have been away.

What had he expected? Just to be there? To be closer? To reassure himself that he had once been young, that he had once not worried, and in knowing that, he could live the rest of his life peacefully in the knowledge that it would be so again for others? Had they believed it would last forever? He supposed not.

The rain continued to splatter against the car. The wind whipped the windows clean as fast as it attacked them. The rage of the weather had grown to take the role of silence, like a muffler over life.  It blew around the car in its own vortex, as concentrated as the eye of a storm. The car sat deeper in the mud, resigned to its fate. It had reached the end of the road, and its engine was not to start up again.

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2014

Friday 16 May 2014

Secret Fragments #6


The song was beautiful.

 This is your 30th year / Now you are dum-dum-dum …’ Even the words he hadn’t heard and those he couldn’t now remember were perfect and thrilling to him. How wonderful it had been! And how wonderful they had been! The singers, and musicians that was. But looking at it again, sinking back into the evening, the guilty heaviness he had felt soon bloomed in his stomach. Bloomed in the place where his guts had turned as he listened, and the beginning of a cough scratched at his throat. Bloated from the beer and sickly from all the food he tried to listen as hard as he could to the song; and sing along though he did, and smile, and keep his eyes fixed on them all, he felt he was missing part of it. He smelt the smoke that clung to his jumper and couldn’t get past feeling how fat he was. And beyond that, he thought to himself, why wasn’t he in that circle singing to Marseille? Not actually that circle, but another one, somewhere, another time. Their ruddy faces and clear voices rang clear and had made him shudder at his evening of shoving more and more in to himself. He needed to get involved somehow. He knew he had smoked too much to take any pleasure in that, and besides, thick smoke sat around him anyway, clouds trailing from the cigarette Pest held in her fingers.

The trip home from the party turned Pest grouchy and he melancholic, and the gloomy thoughts of the song accompanied him the entire journey. He longed just to be there and warm so he could forget about it all. His spirits instantly rose as they ascended the stairs to her flat and he remembered Buda’s stash of weed.

He was rolling a second joint when Pest fell asleep. Now he was utterly content. What he loved about getting high, he thought to himself, was that it made everything else feel so good. Any chair would bring him warmly into its fold; a swig of beer stung the edges of his tongue and cooled his throat. A cigarette would comfort, and then he would put one of the chocolates from Ghent whole into his mouth and smother it under his tongue and crush it with the roof of mouth. It would spread out in thick rolls to line the warm wet little grotto, and he would feel the sharp edges of the nuts cut into his check and squash into the grooves of his teeth, the sides of his check pulled inwards by the gloop.

You are enjoying my birthday chocolates are you?’ Pest had snapped at him. ‘Ye you enjoy them!’ He had felt himself shrinking inside and he despaired for a moment that she had ruined everything by exposing his gluttony. But the feeling thankfully fell away and now she was asleep so he continued to enjoy the chocolates. He would assess and reassess how many more he could have before she would realise in the morning that he had kept on eating after her chastisement.  

This is what he was missing at his grandfather’s he thought, but then reflected, with his grandfather’s port and cigarettes it wasn’t so different. These were the real joys of life he thought. As he was prone to do now, his mind floated towards Lady Baxter-White and the Baron, and wondered if they had enjoyed themselves like this. Had Bobo? And if she had, had it been before or after her eighteenth birthday? He settled back into the past and brought the visage of his glamorous ancestor in front of him. Loosing none of her beauty back in London she had darkened, his grandfather had told them. No longer the face of a dandelion but instead a lilac snowdrop standing in shadow. His grandfather had gone to his study to collect an envelope of old photos and he showed them how his mother’s expression had hardened into a steel pout. The lines already forming over her face were evident in the dusty pictures. Against a silent hysterical current that flowed faster as her birthday approached, Bobo challenged their caution with silence, and her coldness sent all into disarray. Because she hadn’t been enjoying herself.

‘One time, two days before her birthday, when my father took her hand in his, as had been demonstrated by the handsome wives, she withdrew, stood up and bright red in the face screamed at him that he was presumptuous and had no right and left the room. For a moment the juggernaut screeched to holt, and my father found himself flung down from the crest of the wave to a floor he hadn’t previously been aware existed. But the places were already set, and the machine steadily in motion. My father had no more power to alight, or halt the engine, than Bobo did. The train ran itself. And that, I believe, is where it began. I don’t know the exactitudes. Bobo found a quiet resolution that she was to keep as long as I knew her. And my father, well … All I know is that he got through Bobo’s eighteenth with Bordeaux, the eighteen months of their engagement with a few crates, and was half drunk as she walked up the aisle.’

Marriage at eighteen … and him drunk. But older than her. Thirty or so. Imagine marrying a thirty-year-old …  Imagine being married at thirty. They would all be thirty soon, and then what … It wasn’t too bad because times are made just to enjoy ourselves. And we don’t know when the next time we truly, ignorantly enjoy ourselves will come. And this feels good and that can’t be bad. And there were other times and even if he let this time slip past, let the circle of song fall into the mist of things missed, this had sharpened his search to touch the map and really feel next time. It had been beautiful. Squandered, nonetheless.

He wondered what Buda and Vienna really were getting up in that dingy old flat in Pecham. Buda would have enjoyed the song, as she listened to all the songs that he later loved. It had been that way at school, with Pest and the others as well, and they had stumbled upon a band they had loved, but no-one else knew them.

His limbs felt solid and regel, and he was aware of the cold blue streams running through them.  His toes were little pebbles at the end of his bonny little feet that spread out on the sequenced carpet below him. The beer that slopped around the bottom of his glass was now warm and flat but it was trusty and refreshing nonetheless.  All he really cared for now, all he needed for, all he really willed to have was a playful breeze to dance past his feet and over his arms and chest and up to his neck and face. And to listen to that song.

The effort to find it was awful and he almost toppled over an empty beer bottle.     

Where was the laptop?

He fell asleep before the end.


Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2014

Secret Fragments #5


            A few days before he had gone to Pest’s apartment in Tower Hamlets. Weeks before Pest and Buda had invited him to come along to the birthday party of a girl called Marseille who they had met in Cornwall on Buda’s eighteenth and he had subsequently met a few times in London. Buda was no longer going and Pest had said she wasn’t sure if she was but would let him know. She hadn’t let him know but he turned up at her flat on the day of the party anyway. In the doorway her lips tightened as she sucked her teeth but she let him in without a word.

            Sitting in her sitting room, tidy and précised as it has never been when Buda has been there, they drank coffee and he confronted it to break the silence.

            ‘I hear Buda has a new friend.’

            Pest looked at him sharply trying to gage from which angle he was approaching. She raised her eyebrows, turned away from him to look out the window and said, ‘Yes, they are certainly good friends.’ He watched her façade of indifference crumble as she turned to look out the window.

            Clouds lined the sky in white and grey clumps but through a parting bright sunlight streamed into the apartment and flooded Pest’s face. The blotches and faded make-up lines were lit up in sordidness. She looked exhausted. Neither her nor Buda had been looking well for weeks. Three years of living together in London with no parents and no boyfriends and no school they had hit the streets hard. While Buda had hollowed-out Pest had grown plumper, having left her father’s home cooking and farmer’s market vegetables for fatty Italian food and beer. But whereas in the past he had believed that the degeneration of her teenage good looks (blonde, short and rosy cheeked with blue eyes and a babbling laugh that flattered) had a kind of daredevil caution-to-the-wind glamour about it, all the wildness had now settled, crusting over and turning her tired in face and heavy in step. When not hanging loose, about the coffee machine or in the cupboard searching for sugar, her hands skittered over the mugs and plugs like blind rodents with determined spirits of their own.

            ‘You could invite yourself around,’ she said, fingers fumbling with the lighter. ‘You could just go round there, like you came here. They have all sorts of people there. Vang Vieng is always there with all her friends.’

            Vang Vieng was Buda’s sister, five years older than them and therefore when at school had appeared to them, with her dark eyeliner and tattoos, as a sparkling beacon of a life that could be after school. Between rows, with Pest in tow, Buda had tiptoed closer to Vang Vieng and made out a place for the two of them in this new thrilling world. Weekends when Buda’s parents were away she would frantically call Pest and gabble the news down the telephone line. At the party besides the cider and rosé that the two of them sipped in the corner of the kitchen and upstairs on Buda’s bed, flasks were handed round of unknown contents. A spliff was lit up in the shed and a stubble-chinned boy called Sam stole a hockey stick. On one occasion Pest had been taken into an empty room of the long haired brother of Vang Vieng’s boyfriend. Buda had sat on the sofa with the boyfriend and clenched at his wrist hanging loosely over her flat left breast and squeezed it and asked in giggles what he thought the two of them were doing in there, and when they would come out.

The others at school weren’t sure what happened in this new world, at this country brothel, but gazed with envy at their faces Monday morning.  Their faces soaked in glee, revealing that the morbid beacon could be found outside of school, not just after school.

            ‘Yes Vang Vieng’s lot are already there,’ Pest said as she sucked on a cigarette. ‘Sam and Carl too, always there. You know them, you could easily go round. We need to go.’ For a second he thought she meant to Buda’s, but then he realised it was already 7, and Marseille’s had already begun. After a last deep drag Pest stubbed the cigarette out viciously, grimacing into the ashtray.

            She lit another at the bus stop and then dropped it in angry sparks when the bus arrived.

            ‘Have you got a present?’ she barked at him as the bus roared away behind them.

            ‘Er no, I thought it would be OK? That I just came? Should I get one now?’

            She made to answer but the breath caught in her throat and she let out a spluttering cough, hitting her chest with her face shaking her hand at him. ‘No. I thought Buda had said to you to bring some chocolates or something. Never mind.’

            There were plenty of chocolates at the party. In exchange for the collage Pest had made for Marseille she received a small box of chocolates from Ghent, for her birthday that had been two months before. Pest shoved them deep into her bag and the two of them went to sit at the corner of the long wooden table, picking at the crisps in bowls and now and then made a little conversation with the jovial people either side of them. His enthusiasm for the party had dissolved at Marseille’s welcome which although warm was brief, and equally given he noticed to every other guest that arrived. He spirits rose each time his hand dived into the bowl of crisps, but evaporated again as he swallowed. He felt a little ill.

Pest drank the beer on offer at a faster rate them him. He started getting anxious that were being unsociable and that he was drawing askance glances for the mopey dollop he was sitting next to. Someone Swedish asked Marseille if he could smoke. When the singsong affirmative came Pest dived for his pockets. Her stubby fingers writhed about in his pocket, rubbing and pocking into the little flesh of his groin. He thought how he would have loved her finger to be down there when they were at school. In fact they probably had at one time. He felt nothing now but the memory of heroic times past but this was enough to lift him a bit. He grabbed himself another beer and opened himself to the table.

Seeing no other opportunity, he broke into the boys’ conversation next to him. It was a bit about politics and a bit about London and it was easy for him to find things to say. After a while he found he was enjoying himself. He took a cigarette from them and they laughed easily. Later, turning to Pest he saw that she was deep in conversation as well, with a short haired apple-cheeked couple. He tried to catch her eye but they skated over him.

            He turned back to his own happiness which became exuberant when biscuits began being passed around. They were covered in chocolate and inside between two slaps of biscuit was a caramel mesh, and when you bit into the biscuit this mesh held it fractured pieces together in stringy gloops. They all had plenty of these, smiling at each other and at their greed, and when they were gone the apple-cheery twins talking with Pest said there was some crumble in the kitchen which they could have. They found a bottle of cider here too. The couple were held up in the hallway and his friends had moved on. He was gloriously happy and in a moment of bubbling contentment he put his arm around her shoulder and kissed her check hard. She pushed him away instantly but he saw she was smiling.

            There was then a tinkle of glasses from the other room and some shouting. There was lots of swivelling of chair reaching for glasses and phones. Marseille had situated herself in the centre of a circle of people holding guitars and sheets of paper that had formed at the other end of the room.

            They started to sing. 

 

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2014