by Lee Rourke
box 27
The safety deposit box is on the other side of town. It takes me a while to find it, even with directions on my phone. The man behind the desk looks at me disapprovingly, so I have to explain to him that I have a key. I hand it over. I tell him that I’m here to pick up something. He stares at me for a while, then leans back in his chair after handing me back my key.
‘Ah, number 27 … Yes, we were told about this one … It’s held under Mr Rey Michaels …’
‘Yes, that’s right … My uncle.’
‘Can you give me your name please?’
‘Jon Michaels.’
‘Jon, right, that’s the ticket … You were here earlier, right?’
‘Pardon …?’
‘You came by earlier … Without the key?’
‘Er . . no … I don’t know what …’
‘I have some instructions for you … I’ll need to check with the manager first … Can you just hang on?’
‘Sure, I’m not going anywhere.’
‘Ah, sorry, may I …’
I hand him back my key. He walks off. I feel a little panicked; tiptoeing from one foot to the other, like I need the toilet. What does he mean I ‘came by earlier’? Without the key. I begin to shiver. I look around, out through the window. I see someone sitting on the wall outside, but it’s hard to make out who they are. At first it looks like they’re looking back at me, but they turn away. I turn back to the desk, hoping they’ll let me through. I’m desperate to find out what’s in the box. I can hear the man talking with his manager. I listen to them.
‘You know …’
‘Which box?’
‘Key 27 …’
‘Eh?’
‘You know, that man … He came in …’
‘What man?’
‘Mr Michaels.’
‘Oh, him … a tricky one, that.’
A tall man appears who I presume is the manager. He looks me up and down, as if scrutinising something just washed up on the beach. He makes me feel uncomfortable, but I manage not to show it. I hold on to my stick like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
‘Right … Hello … Box 27 …’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you just fill this out?’
‘Sure.’
‘And do you have ID?’
‘Yes.’
‘I ask this … I would ask it anyway … I ask this because I am under instruction only to open the box for a Mr Jon Michaels.’
‘Yes, that’s me … Here …’
‘Right, great … Yes, come with me … Jon.’
I follow him upstairs to Box 27. It’s a huge room and not some little box as I’d imagined, the type of storage room an entire household would use. I look around. It seems empty at first, but then I spot the envelope in the middle of the room on the smooth concrete floor. A small, brown, flimsy envelope. I must look embarrassed; I feel embarrassed if I’m honest, I was expecting a lot more than a little envelope in here.
‘Is that it? Is that all there is?’
‘Yes. Mr Michaels instructed me that he’d keep paying by direct debit, until you arrived to pick this up. He stressed that no one else should be allowed in here under any circumstances. Even if they said they had a key …’
‘Oh, right …’
I walk over to the envelope and pick it up, the bones cracking in my knees, each pop amplified by the size of the empty room. The envelope feels empty, but it’s sealed and my name is on the front, so there must be something in it. I look at my name, printed in his handwriting – my full name, including my two middle names.
‘Right … Thanks.’
‘Whatever it is, good luck … He went to all this trouble, so it must be something important.’
‘Yes, I hope so.’
I sense he wants me to open the envelope but I walk out of the room, forcing him to lock up behind me and follow me down to the main desk. I sign some further papers and then bid farewell. I hold the envelope close to my chest; I don’t want the wind to steal it from me. I hold it tightly, walking back to Royal Terrace, which overlooks the estuary. I get the feeling I’m being watched all the way back.
I sit at the same bench, the pier below me, the vast blue sky stretching from left to right, and out over to the docks in Kent. Vapour trails cross it, creating a canvas, a unique piece of art-in-progress. There’s a container ship just behind the pier; I can’t hear its engines as I’m too far away, but I know they’re there nonetheless. I mark its journey, millimetre by millimetre, the envelope in my hands, eager to open it but putting it off. It feels strange sitting here again, on the bench, overlooking the daily progress of the estuary, the island to my right, just hidden by the trees on the cliff gardens in the distance. Ordinarily I’d be at my desk in London listening to Jane and Jessica’s prattle, editing the proofs of some journal or other. It feels funny: the strange feeling when life suddenly takes an unexpected turn.
The envelope is in my hands; the container ship is now parallel with me, it feels like it’s taken an age to get here; up above an airliner cuts a diagonal streak of vapour thirty-seven thousand feet up. I look at the envelope and carefully begin to open it. I look at the cheque in my hands. It’s made payable to me, Jonathan Michaels. I look at the amount a couple of times before it registers with me. It’s a cheque for one hundred thousand pounds. From Uncle Rey to me. I sit here on the bench unable to move, for a good hour or so, I think, the cheque in my hands, before I get up and make my way down the cliff footpath, past those thronging around the hotel and towards the esplanade and the entrance to the pier.
a kind of shuffle
From where I’m standing, up above the pier entrance, by the Palace Hotel, the entire pier looks empty. I lean on my stick, looking out along its full length. I take this as a good sign: the empty walkway, the lack of people. It seems right that I should venture it alone, the whole pier, the mile or so of it stretching out into the estuary. As I’m considering I notice a girl walk up to the ticket office at the main entrance to the pier. She pays her fee and walks out onto the planks of wood. I rush forward, down Pier Hill towards the ticket office at the main gate. It takes me some time to cross the road, as the traffic is bad and no one seems capable of slowing down enough to allow me to walk over to the other side, so I wait for the lights to change and then dash over to the main entrance. I look up along the pier. I can see her, she’s about two hundred yards ahead of me now, walking up to the end of the pier.
I hand the man in the ticket office some money after explaining to him that I just want to walk to the end and back again, and not catch the small train. He looks at me without smiling and hands me my change.
‘Through the gate.’
‘Thanks.’
I step onto the pier. I can see her up ahead; I follow discreetly, looking back from time to time at the widening landscape, Southend in all its ragged finery. The sky also widens out here, in all directions, and I begin to feel minute beneath it. She’s walking much slower than I am, so I slow down, I don’t want to catch her up. It’s best I keep a safe distance, so that I can observe her, so that I don’t seem a threat to her. There’s no one else on the pier, so I don’t want to frighten her, or for her to think I’m some kind of predator, out looking for lone women.
I remember Uncle Rey telling me all about Southend Pier. He loved it out here, when the ‘sky was grey’ and the ‘wind was up’ – when everyone else was ‘tucked-up inside’ away from the elements. He always said something like: ‘A man could get lost out here. You walk all this way out here, beneath the sky, and there’s nothing to do at the end of it. Sums this place up.’ He was right, too. At least that’s how it seems to me now.
Apparently, the cottages scattered along the shoreline were mainly occupied by fishermen and farmers. I look back at the same shoreline and it kind of sickens me, not that I’m in any way nostalgic for a past I’ve never known. But I feel like I need to accelerate away from it, Southend, the past, the present, a poss
ible future. I just want to keep walking away from it all, following this girl for as long as I can. I check my pocket for the cheque. It’s still there: I push it deeper into my pocket. I’m still dazed by the amount. I’m effectively rich; I can pretty much do what I want – within reason. I look up at the sky, at the seagulls gathering above the pier, hanging in the air above me. Further out, towards the horizon, the oil tankers and container ships are motionless, it seems, the murky Thames holding them there. I follow the sky down towards them, the power stations of Kent in the distance. They’re moving, I can see that now. There it is, wait – yes, there it is. I can hear them, that familiar rumble, their engines pushing them ahead, forward.
The pier was initially built by three men, Uncle Rey used to say, which is hard for me to imagine standing on it today, looking at the immensity of it all. A carpenter, an engineer, and a labourer, each of them working where and when they could, going on pure instinct, with no real ‘plans’ to speak of, just a desire to build, outwards, away from the land. Work began later on the ‘new’ iron pier, the one I’m standing on, designed by James Brunlees. It was built, Rey said, alongside its wooden predecessor, as if out of respect. It’s a magnificent structure, supported by a series of cast-iron screw piles, each extending 12 feet into the foreshore, each column spaced 30 feet longitudinally and 9 feet laterally. The thought makes me smile. The sky widens around me with each of my steps, as though infinite space is revealing itself to me; it feels like I can see and feel everything hurtling through space and time, the feeling broken only when my eyes return to the girl in front of me, the elongated sway of her arse leading me on. I feel like she’s hypnotising me with each step. I keep a good distance still, enough to go on observing her, a good 10 to 15 metres now, just close enough to see what she’s wearing, the colour of her hair, what she’s doing. She’s looking down into her phone, ignoring the view, completely oblivious to her surroundings. It looks like she’s texting someone, though she could be on Twitter, or Facebook. In any case, she doesn’t look up to see where she is going. It’s as if she is on some form of monorail, part of the structure of the pier, just moving along effortlessly, part of the mechanism. She relaxes me, so I carry on walking behind her as if it’s the most natural thing to do, like she’s the furthest thing from my mind, like all of this isn’t really happening. Every so often a seagull will swoop down and hover alongside me, just out of reach, one of its beady eyes on me, in the hope that I might throw it some food, like the tourists do. But I don’t have anything to give, I just feel like holding out my stick for it, like a perch, to see if it will land, but I don’t do it. I don’t want to draw attention to myself. I don’t want to startle her, so I allow the seagulls to go about their business, ignoring them as much as I can. I concentrate on the girl. I like the way she walks. It’s the first thing that strikes me about her: a kind of shuffle, her feet barely lifting up off the planks, head down, hands up, holding on to her phone. The sway of her hips and arse, gentle and soothing, side to side.
Soon we both reach the end of the pier, on the landing, past the ‘station’ where the Sir John Betjeman train waits for those who want to take the train back along the pier to the shore. I look back once more at the shoreline, the whole of Southend, Thorpe Bay and Shoeburyness to my right and Westcliff, Leigh-on-Sea and Canvey Island to my left, all of it spread out, flattened into two dimensions. The island looks especially flat, only really noticeable because of the towers and chimneys of the oil refinery sticking out of it; the rest of it sunk below the water, out of view. The whole landmass is morphed into a creamy brown and green gloop before me. I turn back to the sky ahead of me, stretching out over to Kent and beyond, above the tankers and container ships. Then I see her again, she’s heading up the steps, onto the viewing platform above the RNLI station, where the pigeons hang out and rarely anyone else goes because of the years of pigeon shit on the boards. I follow her up the steps and onto the viewing platform. Below my feet I can hear the pigeons, and to my right I can see men fishing on the platform below us; they must have been here all morning, lots of them, patiently waiting in silence. She walks over to the large bell at the end of the platform, standing there, looking out towards Shoeburyness in the distance. I walk up behind her casually so as not to alarm her. I stand at the rail beside her, looking out across the estuary in the same direction. Suddenly she turns to me, the sadness in her eyes momentarily reaching out to me. I freeze, and my lungs seize up. Then she looks down at her feet and through the gap in the boards, at the pigeons beneath us.
‘Can you hear them?’
‘Who?’
‘The pigeons, just under our feet, a whole colony, maybe about one hundred or so I think … I have no idea …’
‘Yes, I can … What a racket …’
‘I don’t blame them …’
‘For making a racket?’
‘For being out here … I don’t blame them, living out here, away from everyone back there … You know, people, that lot …’
Her voice is Eastern European, harsh but fluent in English. She nods back over at Southend.
‘Yes, that lot … I know what you mean.’
‘I like them living here … they fly over to the land, taking scraps of food from it, and then return here with them … away from all the hassle, all the people, the nasty ones … I sometimes wish I could do that.’
‘Really …’
‘I’d be happy living out here all alone, away from them, just the birds and the sea and the sky to keep me company …’
‘I like the sound of that …’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m living over on Canvey …’
‘Canvey?’
‘The island, just behind us … Over there …’
‘Island?’
‘Look … see it?’
‘Oh, yes, there … That over there … Yes, I see it.’
‘The island is like being out here, at the end of this pier, the furthest point away from civilisation, as far as possible, without even having to travel that far, it seems. Does that make sense? I mean … there are places to hide all around us …’
‘I suppose it does … If only something like that was possible …’
‘Yes.’
‘…’
‘…’
‘Look, I shouldn’t be talking to you … To you … Anyone …’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s … well … I could be seen. I shouldn’t really be here, if they see me talking … to you … They could be watching me, they’re always watching me …’
‘Watching? … Who?’
‘I’ve said too much …’
‘Wait …’
‘I’ve got to go …’
‘Wait …’
It’s too late, she runs down the steps and onto the landing, towards the train. She runs along until she reaches the front carriage. The train starts to take her back to the shore. I’m sure she’s the only passenger; it’s like the driver was waiting for her. I stand by the bell. I put my hands on the rail, just where hers had been, trying to detect some trace of her. I smell my hands. Nothing. I turn away and walk down the same steps and back along the pier, the train slowly rumbling ahead. I walk behind it, and as soon as it reaches the main gate I begin to run after her, my stick in my hand, along the pier. I know I can’t reach her, that I wouldn’t know what to say, but I continue to run. I brush past some tourists who are heading towards me. I think about asking her for a coffee, or something like that – any excuse to spend some time with her. She looked so lonely back there by the bell, she looked like she needed a friendly face, someone to listen to her.
When I reach the train she is nowhere to be seen. I look for her all along Royal Terrace, the esplanade up to the Kursaal and back again, in the arcades and the funfair at the foot of the pier, but it’s like she’s vanished. I walk up and down the High Street to try to find her, but it’s no good. She’s gone. I just want to see her again, that’s all. I sit on a
bench outside H&M, watching the college kids and a gang of lads on mountain bikes smoking weed on the corner next to Caffè Nero. Then I remember the cheque in my pocket. I get up, my knees cracking, and walk to the nearest bank to pay Uncle Rey’s money into the automated machine.
floating in space
I’m strangely not in the mood to eat, so I phone the Lobster Smack and cancel dinner. I spend the evening back at Uncle Rey’s caravan attempting to edit Vulgar Things but my mind is elsewhere. I’m haunted by her, and as much as I try to banish her from my thoughts I can’t. I stare at each page, blankly, page after page after page, making the odd correction here and there, but nothing like the line edit I should be doing. Soon enough, I find myself staring at the same page, then the same paragraph, then line, then word:
shudder
I know it’s surrounded by all the others, but I can’t stop staring at this one word: shudder. I say it aloud, shudd-er, spitting each syllable out of my mouth. Something has happened to me, is happening to me. It’s growing from within me and it makes me tremble, shake and stutter trying to look at it. Shudd-er. Shudd-er. I keep spitting it out, an S then an H, then a U, the Ds stuttering onto my lap, followed by an E and finally the R. All of it falling into a mess. All over me. I’m mesmerised by it.
When I eventually look away I notice it has gone 11 p.m. and it’s pitch black outside the caravan. I put the manuscript aside and decide to walk to the shed. The night sky is full of stars, constellations upon constellations. I suddenly feel frightened by the immensity of it all and dash over to the shed, where I fumble with the lock. I close the door behind me, as if the stars were chasing me. I stand in the darkness to compose myself, take a few deep breaths and then pull back the roof with the pulley-lever. The sky falls into the shed. I feel safer, tucked away next to the telescope. I look for the familiar constellations with my naked eye: Orion’s belt, Scorpio, et cetera, but most of them look like nothing else I have ever set eyes on before. It’s astonishing. I swivel the telescope and point it at a cluster of stars that look interesting to me. I put my eye to the lens and the shock of what I’m greeted with forces me into the chair in the corner of the shed. I begin to breathe heavily, my legs are shaking and my heart feels like it is about to escape from my chest. I regain some of my composure and look through the lens again. I’m right, it is what I think it is: dead centre, in the middle of the viewfinder, is Saturn. It’s Saturn. There are its rings. I’m looking directly at Saturn, by complete chance. It’s Saturn. I look at it there, floating in space, everything around it disappearing into inky blackness. I marvel until a strange kind of vertigo envelops me. I feel like the earth beneath my feet is about to freefall at any second, down through the abyss. I can’t stand it any longer. I sit down in the chair for a while before regaining some more of my composure. I wind the roof back with the pulley-lever and lock up the shed behind me. I walk into the caravan and take out a torch from a drawer in the kitchenette and pick up my stick from the front room. I decide to go for a walk along the creek to clear my head. My mind is swirling, I feel dizzy. I need to bathe myself, by moonlight.