A Benchmark For Ghosts
Lucy and her companion stayed here for a few weeks -- in the guest space -- whilst I slept in my attic bedrooom. I had lived in Holland-on-Sea, Essex, it seemed, since its development as a resort in the Thirties. But query: was I old enough? I was, after all, only 37.
Lucy -- let me confess straightaway -- was one of those types of girl for whom I had unquenchable hankerings. She used to be a typical hysterical student who suffered a terrible series of crushes on her peers as well as lecturers ... until she settled for Dr Storme: a swarthy cove who treated her like muck.
None of this excuses such changes of style nor does it shed any light on the deceptive depth of my past -- decades of unlived time on this flat expanse of sunny, yet often cold, coast, whilst recalling within my own living memory the very chalet bungalow (in which I live) being built in 1936! And, today, the millennium approaches, when everything starts at zero again.
It was a previous starting-from-scratch when I went to University in Lancashire, close to another coast, a bigger bay, warmer, muddier, wider expanses of sand and salt-marshes ... unlike the stunted beaches and civilised promenade of Holland-on-Sea, Essex. I met Lucy in that very Lancashire period and hobnobbed with her various lovers. I became, for a precious moment, actually one of her so-called lovers (a fitful antagonistic affair that eventually returned us to a rather sterile friendship, one which still prevails).
You see, Lucy and someone she called Bob visited me in Holland-on-Sea, Essex and were wondrously impressed by my chalet bungalow -- the one I thought I'd seen built.
"It's really lovely," Lucy said, planting a kiss on my upraised cheek. The two dormer windows, however, I knew looked like staring eyes. Far from lovely.
Bob smiled facetiously, as if he knew something I didn't. Indeed, I took an immediate dislike to him, wondering whence the hell she dredged him. All a question of style.
I still felt a soft spot for Lucy. Jealous, too -- not only on my own account but also on Dr Storme's ... although she had ditched that darksome don years before.
Dr Storme? How can I paint a picture of him, dark against dark? Either my memory snakes like that very inky substance with which I write, nib scratching and gouging forever into the deepening past, or Dr Storme himself is his own scene-set. Lucy fell for him -- when they first met -- in my digs. A typical student party, it was, in a house that served, in the high season, as seaside flats for holidaymakers. A hang-dog affair was that so-called party, where funny cigarettes were shared round, drinks being guzzled more for quenching thought than thirst.
The odd brave lecturer or two attended, believing that to mix with the students at this 'basic' level was no more than carrying out a duty, even if it meant appearing clumsily trendy. Yet Dr Storme was more than all this. Or, perhaps, less. Certainly different from the other supercilious lecturers who actually stooped this low, by entering our filthy fox-earths.
But the dim-worn years have unrolled as far as the present, while the constant April sunshine floods Holland-on-Sea, Essex, with the heavenly light that seems fitting for a place which some have nicknamed God's Little Acre. (Or Heaven’s Waiting-Room.)
"Why did you come to live here?" asked Bob, as we ate one evening. We had been trudging along the beach. The distant Big Wheel on Clacton Pier was circling invisible insect folk on a vertical plane, as if teasing angel-fishers. Now, with Lucy having produced a strange mixture of fried egg and meat pâté sandwiches (I always say pâté, not paste, but today it seemed a trifle too exotic a word for Lucy's thin scrapings on to-be-used-up slices of ready-cut bread) ... well, Bob's question took me by surprise with its undercurrent of scorn.
"I was born at Walton-on-Naze," I replied flatly.
"Just along the coast from here, you see," explained Lucy for Bob's benefit.
I nodded -- then continued, oddly feeling the need to confess everything to this despicable individual Lucy had brought with her.
"Yes, I lived in Walton till my parents moved away. I was seven. I always knew I'd come back to the Tendring Peninsular ... though, of course, I never knew this stretch of coast was called that then."
"Didn't Dr Storme come from round here?" asked Lucy.
The nature of her interruption took me by surprise. Dr Storme? How long was it since that name had sounded in my ears, let alone dwelt upon as a person? I could not believe she was being serious. Dr Storme could never have derived from this backwater of Essex, surely. He was too ... too divine, too something-or-other ... too dark. Few mortals of his persuasion lived on the Tendring Peninsular. Of that, I was most certainly certain, if only due to the evidence of my eyes.
"Dr Storme? No, he came from abroad. He was a cosmopolitan."
I smiled. After all, Lucy and I had both loved Dr Storme, all those years ago in Lancashire.
Bob naturally failed to spot the knowledge passing back and forth between Lucy and myself. He was sunk into his bread, seeking something tasty to lick off it. His tongue lapping like a dog's. What did Lucy see in this so-called man.
"Yes," chirped up Lucy, "Dr Storme did come from these parts. St Osyth wasn't it? His mother taught in the teacher's college there when he was small."
St Osyth? Yes, there was a place called that not far from Clacton-on-Sea ... it’d got a Priory with super grounds. Style was everything, if not round each corner.
Clacton-on-Sea was the correct postal address for Holland-on-Sea, though I never admitted it, wanting, as I did, where I lived to be a real entity, not merely an outcrop of somewhere else. St Osyth was vaguely on the coast, not far from Brightlingsea -- a town I only knew from the midi-bus on transit to Colchester where my elderly parents still lived.
That's enough about St Osyth. I've not even taken the opportunity to visit St Osyth. It has no place in my memories.
Memories were now the concrete strips which criss-crossed the sea-edged flatlands of Holland-on-Sea. A would-be Fenland, if it were not for these long roads, those bungalow-bordered avenues ... whence the sea could be seen above the roofs like an inch of grey land-locked cloud.
The roads traced, it seemed, crazy ley-lines, crazy because they were so straight, so linear, so damned geometric. So damned geriatric.
Downstairs, my own chalet bungalow -- perhaps I've told you already -- was or, rather, is decidedly middle-class, so damned civilised, with bay-window, through-lounge, patio doors, a sun-drenched garden with a palm tree at its furthest extremity. An old-fashioned kitchen. Modern ground-floor bedroom, too. Bathroom for those too old to climb the stairs. On the upper floor, however, there are two roomy attic bedrooms -- more in keeping with our student days, those days when Lucy and I had both fallen in love with each other (albeit fleetingly) and, in our different ways, in love with Dr Storme during those occasions when he visited our swampy earths for student parties. My attic bedroom walls, now, are painted a strong turquoise and contain eaves cupboards that interconnect the two bedrooms with unlit raftered space. This is where I keep most of my books. Ghost-story books. Science Fiction. Horror. Novels of an intellectual bent.
"Dr Storme came from St Osyth? You know, I had no idea, Lucy," I said.
She preened herself -- more for Bob's benefit than mine. Bob had a common touch about him. Most of his conversation was beyond the pale. Too slight for attention. Indeed, Bob's small talk was so small it made his eyes retreat into pinpricks -- making my own eyes water in sympathy. Lucy's eyes, by contrast, were always great blue bowlfuls of sight, whatever the standard of repartee. She must be going out with Bob, more for his loot than his loving, otherwise how could she endure such ... yes, such shallowless. Such an eroded coast of a cove.
And his style was one of whining grunts -- noises that carried meaning, of sorts, but also teetering on the brink of noise.
"Who's Dr Storme?" Bob suddenly intervened.
"He lectured at University," replied Lucy, without turning to look at this Bob whom I had taken to be her lover. Why else would they arrive at my Bungalow in close proximity to each other? Life surely has to be a series of inferences, if nothing else.
I now lie asleep in my turquoise attic -- although, again, only hindsight has indicated I was asleep. Yet, despite listening to the body-popping that everybody's sleep entails, I hear the silence beyond the eaves, a silence which even the undercurrents of the salt waves can hardly hide. A benchmark for ghosts.
I have more of this to tell: scene-sets, darknesses, feelings, nuances, style-breaking, mood-moving, crass conversations, those kisses I couldn't bear to watch and, yes, more pâté sandwiches. But, even so, I wonder whether, perhaps, all the time, she thought Bob was my friend in the same way I had assumed he was hers. A stranger to both.
#
I dreamt that Lucy and a dark man left Holland-on-Sea together, holding each other's fan-nerved hand -- abandoning Bob to his bungalow, to his sleep, to his nightmare of a dark-skinned sea, a sea, perhaps, of ink.
Yet not even the encroaching tide of death can finish Bob’s recurrent wakings, wakings watermarked with the deep-furrowing ley-lines of youth's extremity.
(Published ‘Eclipse’ 2003)
