How long have we walked the shallows’ kelp-beribboned ululation under a gull’s lonesome call by these seas so old? Tidal tug, increasingly higher now, in thrall to the moon also favoured by wolves and generations of lovers whose dreams, their lives, eddy thoughts to my arrival, done with madcap adventuring, here, when fish were in abundance. This pre-dated progress, that sinful synonym for developers’ vested interests, wealth the supposed surrogate for happiness. Beach hedonism decorates these days now. Early fog burned off, affluent wet-suited kite-surfers ski waves, deftly dodging tinnies, rocks, and bathers, in what was once my largely unknown, therefore treasured, bolthole where I often choose to be alone.
At fourteen, barely shaving, I was already on my own, no heating or aircon, no phone, zero savings. I shared a kitchen where I curated inexpensive snacks, my plat du jour baked beans on toast, before retreating to my single room again. There was no late night raving. In this shadow of my childhood’s premature end I read movie magazines, smoking, sometimes wearing only jeans, my skin, rarely seen on a beach then, pale, a future man, able to choose but ignorant, lying lonely on a narrow bed in my first city imagining starring as the handsome hothead, Cool Hand Me.
Many scrapes and late-night ravings later. Picture a Metro station’s harsh lighting. I feel my heart rush, our taut happiness vanishing like hope into a gusty tunnel’s throat. She turns away wordless, without a fight, not looking back to where I stand statue still. I don’t casually flick a cigarette onto the rails, nor wear a trenchcoat like a sardonic hero in a movie from before my time. It is just me acting mean, my outburst unworthy, this ending of our hot affair not quite a public scene. Now its echo.
The boy I was, an outlaw of the old west who scooped the jackpot after producing an ace and pressed his face between a lovely barmaid’s breasts seen from his redoubt, the dark stalls of his weekly cinema night out, hoped for better than the ramifying silence of my misfit single days ahead. After that woman in the Metro’s measured dignity, a time when kindness was a foreign concept, when I knew betrayal’s stab, I formed a habit for the calmness of books, their characters’ joy and despair, mistakes and atonement. This helps to banish the shadows of melancholic moments when, jolted by rowdy flashbacks, I itch to redirect foolish strife.
A canopy of cloud eclipses the sun, ominously shadowing me like a looming prehistoric bird as another rumour washes in from around Old Man’s Head. A cruise ship owned by a crass woman wallowing in minerals money she inherited shall anchor off Trousers Point where tourists will be ferried in zodiacs from a tall alien, an outrageous hallucination like invasion 250 years earlier, dominating our horizon. So that’s why all the roadkill has disappeared. Ushered to the pub, the gift shop, their cards shall be accepted eagerly here before they are bused to the 40th Parallel, a line across our skinny road where only the winds are famous.
Poking a driftwood fire next to this heaving sea at nightfall I need a helpline to talk me up the long slide of years to the silly songs, those rumbling stations of my past. There, chastened, I might correct bitter wrongs, see faces I never saw again, and didn’t deserve to, but then, I would be young and impetuous again. Keelhauled by nagging loss I try matter-of-fact, identifying my yearning for a rerun as foolish sentiment, our lives but a fold in time. Listening to my outdated memory music proving time’s relentless melting I ride a ghost train zigzagging past the murmur of all those fugitive years’ secrets that suddenly surprise me briefly lit up.
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