Published 'Gathering Darkness' 1993 

 

Jamesiah Fenn settled back into the chimney corner of the Innsmouth Arms, upon a well-worn seat which he had made his own from decades of supping and chin-wagging.

 

          When other less hardened regulars wandered into his conversational catchment area, they were often amazed by his ability to feed off stale gossip which they brought with them, often thus creating new gossip of his own for them to translate into action.  It was like visiting the Oracle of Rumours, an ever-tipsy greybeard with telltales and memories to weave, which his audience could subsequently live out as best they could on the stage of life.  Thus, memories became real...

 

One evening, he was talking aloud even before the others gathered round with pint-pots to drink in his every word...

 

          "There was a curious shop in the backstreets, not far from the seafront, called Brix & Malta, where I once worked as a nipper. It was next door to a wetfish shop, selling long cod in the main, I remember..."

 

          I dreaded a tangent.  Fenn's tea-stained face nodded in tune, not with his speech, but with some contradictory inner rhythm caused by an encroaching disease which old age could no longer disown.  His eyes weltered with tears, but I wondered if it really were sadness that had brought such glistening to those sunken oases either side of the beached nose.  He decided to continue with his story of Brix & Malta.

 

          "It purveyed bric-a-brac from the Mediterranean, things made with care and unmodern hands.  The figurines glinted in the bay window ... and there was one item in particular..."

 

As he hesitated lengthily, I nodded. I was the only one present.  The rest were strangers of one kind and another, I realised, irregulars fresh from beating tracks along the esplanade, those on solitary holiday from the cities further north.  The locals, who usually populated the Innsmouth Arms were noticeable by their absence: a peculiar evening of coincidence, by all accounts, since they all must have dicky stomachs or been kept at home in the fishing cottages by overwhelming wives.  Pity, that, for tonight, Fenn was in evident form, eager to let drop perhaps a prize tidbit of scandal-mongering.  Being on my own, it was not too difficult to interrupt him, for he could see I was a thinking being, unlike those irregulars with the mindless routine of the cities still hanging about them like a set of glassy-eyed masks in the window of Brix & Malta.

 

"Hey, Mr. Fenn, I bet you anything the item you mention in Brix & Malta was a painting in a splendid frame."

 

          He turned to me (and I was grateful that he had at least recognised me for what I was) and nodded his head:  "Yes, you are right about the painting, if not the frame.  It showed our resort when it was little more than houses and redoubts made of upturned boats.  The artist had captured the sea and its close inhabitants with a few deft strokes and just a little bit of imagination on the part of any that viewed it."

 

          All this time, the Innsmouth Arms was filling up with more seeming strangers (some more complete than others and a few with saucy postcards in their hatbands).  Old Fenn scowled and continued, whilst finger-combing his beard.

 

"I was so desperate for that painting myself, I can tell you. I tried to prevent anybody else from buying it.  I told the customers that it had been in the shop for twenty year or so, gathering dust, because nobody wanted it.  So nobody did want it, even (or especially) at a knock-down price."

 

          "Why didn't you buy it?" I asked, knowing the answer all the time, but hoping to lead him away from another tangent.

 

          "I had no money, of course.  I was paid in kind.  Crusts of bread dipped in pulse soup.  My mother used to send me to Brix & Malta, because there was nothing else for me to do and nothing at home to eat.  She used to have nightmares about men who scratched underneath our home, themselves wanting something to eat.  Did you know my home?  Even the fish swam no near it."

 

He turned more positively towards me, as I asked:  "I understand your family lived in one of the boathouses on the backwater?"

 

          "Yes, the sea weeds did crackle outside the porthole of my bedroom."  He leaned closer to me as if I'd become the confidant he'd awaited for decades.  "You see, it was our boathouse at the centre of that painting..."

 

          I sighed with relief.

 

          But the strangers were now growing even stranger around me.  They were tanked to the gills.  I hoped the pub would soon shut up for the night.

 

          He had stopped speaking because of an incident at the entrance door, but it soon passed over.  For a moment, you had thought some regulars were being forcibly kept outside, their bellies having now abruptly rumbled out their long pent up bouts of wind.

 

          Not to be swerved unduly from the fateful course of his speech, Jamesiah Fenn continued:  "Yes, I think our boathouse at the centre of the painting had a face at one of its portholes.  And it may have been mine ... with terror in the eyes..."

 

          I could only interrupt:  "Surely you must have bought that painting in the end.  You surely wanted it so very much ... a souvenir of childhood..." 

 

Silence intervened.  He looked simply inscrutable and then laughed his butt off.

 

          But memory can only play tricks.  I was hustled, I think, from the Innsmouth Arms by many hands with unseen faces.  Some had children's sand spades grasped in them and others fanned out yellowy close-up photographs of human genitals like raw meat.  And if I had not seen fit to write all this down, even the certainty of Fenn's existence would be merely another item of gossip.

 

          I can tell you one thing for certain, however.  The shop that was once called Brix & Malta is now a pork butchers.