Calabash

by Christopher Fowler

  I ladled another forkful of beans drenched in brown sauce into my mouth and chewed, watching as she reached for her needlework scissors to clip out the offending article. Somebody somewhere was going to be slapped with a grim little note of complaint. She mailed a dozen such missives each week, usually to the Cole Bay Mercury, expressing her disgust with everything from the condition of public toilets to the unruliness of bus queues, and persisted until she received acknowledgement. Oddly, it didn’t take much to assuage her, just a form letter thanking her for drawing attention to the matter. There was such an air of inevitability about my mum’s disapproval that I would find myself reading out newspaper items just to inspire her to whip out a Biro and some Basildon Bond.

  According to Janine’s latest issue of Reveille, London remained the centre of the universe, and was still filled with a hedonistic generation of groovy swingers even though Paul was leaving the Beatles and the Fab Four had all been turned strange by psychedelic music, Eastern philosophy and drugs. But nobody knew whether the capital’s cool would last far into the new decade. The portents were poor. The Conservatives were back in power, Jimi Hendrix had died of an overdose the month before, and pop music was relapsing into kiddie tunes; you couldn’t turn on a radio without hearing Mungo Jerry singing ‘In the Summertime’. Everything was still very English then. The only American pop culture I recall from that time is Peanuts starting on the back page of the Daily Mail, Mad magazine and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, held over for a fourth week at Cole Bay’s only cinema.

  As far as I was concerned, London was seventy-eight trillion miles away, and all the tales of swinging hip affairs that Pauline and Janine read out to each other in tones of hushed horror might as well have been happening on the far side of the sun. I had no part in the world that my mother grimaced over in her magazines. I had no role in the modern world at all. Everyone at my school seemed obsessed with the new sciences. They were all looking forward to some kind of magical electronic future in outer space, but no-one was bothered about what they would have to surrender to get there. And no-one was interested in finding out why they had ended up here instead.

  Looking around Cole Bay, I could see why. Everything summoned up the past in its worst possible sense: gloomy bed and breakfast lodgings, damp arcades, cheap postwar office blocks, grumbly old folk, desperate-looking foreign students, corrupt town councillors, noticeboards banning anything that people might really want to do, dead-as-a-grave Sundays, esplanade buildings that were losing their crepuscular battle with the corrosive sea air, and one road out that led to London, a city I had only ever visited with my parents to see the Christmas lights in Regent Street, although I had also managed to drag Bob and Pauline around the British Museum. They’d lasted almost twenty minutes before heading for the cafeteria.

  There was never a moment when I felt attached to the rest of the world. I remember watching live footage of the Apollo moon landing on the tiny television set in the school recreation room. The broadcast, which ran throughout the whole day, was very slow and deathly boring. Admittedly, picture reception was poor because the third-formers had a habit of flying kites above the aerial on the roof, and the pieces of silver cigarette-pack paper they attached as weights interfered with the signal. Even so, I kept having to remind myself that this was a milestone in the history of human development, especially when I read that Neil Armstrong had got his words wrong, having been supposed to say that this was ‘one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,’ instead of which he said that it was ‘one small step for man,’ which meant the same thing as ‘mankind’. It felt strangely appropriate that the first sentence spoken by a human being on another planet should turn out to be wrong.

  The spacemen looked as if they were at a loss for something to do on the surface of the moon. They took several more giant leaps for mankind across the planet’s surface, acting as if their parents had left them behind on a bouncy castle. They planted a flag and saluted. They took pictures of each other. The moon’s landscape appeared as inviting as Cole Bay’s beach at low tide. Finally they got tired of bounding wide-legged past each other, returned to a spaceship that looked like a Chinese takeaway on stilts, and came home. I imagined them sleeping on the way back, then rubbing their eyes as the hatchway was opened and asking each other if they were home.

  What was the point of going to another world if you didn’t do something interesting there? And why spoil the event by not allowing the spacecraft to look like a proper rocket with fins? Nobody asked themselves that. My teachers were only concerned with the technical statistics of the event. They could tell you how many gallons of fuel were required to achieve lift-off, but not what the point of it was. The people of Cole Bay were not interested in the universe, or wars in other nations, or even problems affecting other parts of the country. One hundred and ten years earlier they had anxiously read of the battles that were raging in the Crimea. Fifty years after that they followed the drama of the Boer War in their daily papers. In 1970 they discussed which footballer was dating which pop singer, and none of that was even true, just nonsense thought up by promoters to sell things. If I could figure this out at the age of sixteen, why couldn’t my parents, who were old enough to know better?

  I retreated to my bedroom after wolfing down my beans, and returned to Mesopotamia. It was a world I could control. History books provided the bare bones, but the rest was up to me; if I decided that the palace guards wore rings through their noses, then it was true.

  I was hard at work colouring in defence sections of the city when the doorknob started to turn. I started shoving the maps, diagrams, battle plans, timelines, weather charts, population tables, war documents, trade agreements, flora, fauna, armour and weaponry sketches back into their folders. They weren’t secret, I just didn’t want anyone in the family to think I was obsessive. Very little of my documentation was based on fact, anyway. Whenever I lacked details I extemporised.

  ‘Can I come in?’ Sean opened the door and leaned cautiously inside.

  ‘What are they watching?’

  ‘Some kind of game show.’

  ‘I thought there was a lot of screaming.’

  ‘A woman just won a kitchen.’

  ‘Perhaps she’s never seen one before.’

  ‘You’d think so. She’s wetting herself.’ Sean cleared aside some of my fantasy-Mesopotamian temple layouts and sat on the end of my bed. ‘How’s your chest?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Breathe for me.’

  I drew deeply a few times. ‘All right?’

  ‘Still a bit wheezy.’

  ‘That’s my jumper creaking.’

  ‘Make sure you use your inhaler.’

  ‘You don’t have to keep checking up on me.’

  ‘After three bouts of pneumonia—’

  ‘I know, my lungs are like a pair of old dishcloths.’ I had seen the inside of my first oxygen tent at the age of two. There had been a serious recurrence at nine, and another more prolonged life-threatening experience the previous year that had landed me in hospital for nearly two months. Pauline was fond of telling people that it was a miracle I had survived.

  ‘You were wet when you came in tonight. You’re not supposed to do that any more.’

  ‘The rules are unreasonable, like don’t run upstairs and don’t lose your temper. I mean, how can you not? I thought you were going to take Janine home, anyway.’

  ‘She wants to walk back.’

  ‘Only there was a rough lot hanging around the esplanade earlier.’

  ‘Janine can take care of herself. She’s got her boots on.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I grinned, ‘she’s not exactly the Elizabeth Barrett Browning of the confectionery world, is she?’

  Sean spread a big tanned hand across one of the maps, ironing out the creases. ‘So, smartarse, how are you going to catch up on your homework?’

  ‘I’ve been reading a lot.’

  ‘You’ve been reading a lot since you were s
ix.’ He gave a rueful smile, looked at the drawings on the walls. ‘It’s not really the right field of study, is it? Not exactly on the curriculum.’

  ‘More interesting than school.’ I spread out one of my half-finished maps and started to draw a neat pencil line along the edges of a desert.

  ‘You’re supposed to get yourself interested in something useful. You’ve got to be able to use your knowledge, Kay. Can’t do that unless you get good exam results. Have you thought any more about what you want to do?’

  ‘I thought I might join the Imperial Indian police, like George Orwell. His lungs were buggered, just like mine. Has Mum been having a go at you?’ Sean usually left the vocational guidance counselling to others. He wasn’t much of a role model for the ambitious Cole Bay school leaver, but he seemed happy enough. He didn’t talk to me about his own life. Analysis was less important to him than just getting on with things.

  ‘No,’ he replied, ‘not really,’ which meant yes. ‘You’re worrying them. They think you lack confidence.’

  ‘And you don’t.’

  ‘I think you’ve got a bit too much. You’re an annoying little sod, and you reckon you’re too smart for this town. But I suppose you may be right there.’

  ‘I’m not allowed in the water, I’m stuck here breathing the rotten sea air, and I can’t go to London, how crap is that?’ My last bout of pneumonia had damaged my respiratory system enough to make the doctor ban me from the sea and the city.

  ‘I think you’re looking at this the wrong way. It wouldn’t be so bad if you made some friends.’

  ‘I’ve got friends.’

  ‘I’m talking about people of your own age.’

  ‘People of my age are only interested in pop music and finding someone to snog.’

  ‘And of course you’re above all that.’

  ‘I’m being realistic, that’s all. I can’t stand Simon and bloody Garfunkel. I wear the same duffel coat John Noakes wears when he climbs up things on Blue Peter. And the only two girls I know are Julia, who’s given up on men, and Janine, who’s going out with you.’

  ‘You don’t exactly put yourself out. You’re not a bad-looking kid, you could make an effort. Grow your hair a bit and cover those ears, buy some jeans and a leather jacket instead of wearing your school raincoat everywhere. I reckon girls would go for you, if you could find something to talk about other than dead civilisations.’

  ‘That should be a subject of interest to everyone living here.’

  ‘Put down the pencil for a minute.’ I looked up and saw that Sean was wearing his stern older-brother face. ‘I know what this is about, Kay. You can be honest with me.’

  ‘I am honest with you.’

  ‘I heard what you said to Dr Forrest.’

  ‘I didn’t do anything.’

  ‘You asked him about your long-term prospects.’

  ‘He wouldn’t give me an answer. I know what that means. Doctors don’t lie, they just miss things out. What’s a check-up for if he can’t tell me everything?’

  ‘Listen, you’ve got to have a more positive attitude. All this stuff about dying, it’s bollocks.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  Sean’s angry glare could have taken the distemper off the ceiling. ‘None of us knows anything! They might find out tomorrow that beans on toast gives you cancer. The point is, you’re not going anywhere, so you just have to get on with life and start measuring up.’

  ‘I can’t calibrate myself against anything out there.’

  ‘You need to find a way of making things work.’

  ‘Otherwise what?’

  ‘Otherwise—I dunno. You go barmy. Wander off into your own world.’

  ‘It’s got to be more fun than this one. Isn’t that why you and your mates smoke dope all the time?’ I knew that Sean deserved better than this, but could not help myself.

  ‘They’re making allowances for you because you’ve been ill, but you can’t ride on it forever.’

  ‘So what are you saying?’

  ‘I’m saying don’t piss away your chances, that’s all.’

  ‘It could be worse,’ I told Sean’s retreating back. ‘I could be hanging around on street corners selling drugs.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Kay.’ Sean turned in the doorway. ‘There’s still time.’

  ‘Yeah, I thought I’d keep that particular career opportunity up my sleeve for next year, if I make it that far.’

  Sean slammed the door shut behind him, and I returned to shading the map, scribbling at the paper until I tore through it. My heart wasn’t in Mesopotamia any more that night. I knew I had overstepped the line with Sean, and was disgusted with myself.

  Chapter 7

  Persistence of Memory

  ‘You teenagers are always getting het up over little things. You’re hyperactive. It’s to do with glands. Or is it hormones?’ Dudley Salterton selected another chip from his paper cone and ate it carefully. He had a dental plate. ‘How’s Mesopotamia?’

  ‘Unsatisfactory.’ I looked over at his cone. ‘Have you got an onion?’

  ‘Give over. I’m on in an hour. Breath. My pensioners don’t like it.’

  I looked out at the horizon. The grey-green edge of the sea was darkly softening with rain. ‘It’s going to piss down.’

  ‘That’ll drive them in. Eight people there were last matinée, not a cloud in the sky. More backstage than in the audience.’ Dudley performed in the theatre next to the pier. He did a Mr Memory act, and a bit of ventriloquism with a lascivious sailor-suited dummy called Barnacle Bill. He also led singalongs and managed a few basic magic tricks, tearing ladders from newspapers, producing bouquets of coloured-feather flowers from unusual places, that sort of thing. He was ageless in a way that wasn’t good, somewhere between postmenopause and postmortem. He dyed his hair and eyebrows a really weird shade of gingery-brown, and thought nobody noticed. His false teeth looked too big for his mouth. He never shaved properly, leaving a patina of stubble around his chin, and always wore a grey pin-striped suit with a greasy collar. When he had his stage makeup on, he looked like he’d been badly embalmed. We sometimes sat on the pier and had chips together before his Wednesday matinée.

  ‘Can you not find anything in the library?’

  ‘About Mesopotamia? You’re joking. Their historical shelf doesn’t go back further than the First World War. It’s all romances and thrillers. One of my teachers is trying the London bookshops for me.’

  ‘Dolores always used to say that the past is another country.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Very different. Hard to understand.’

  ‘Oh.’ I thought for a bit. ‘I like that.’

  ‘I don’t think she made it up. Someone else said it first. Still.’

  I never had a conversation with Dudley where he didn’t mention Dolores, his deceased wife. She used to help him with the act when they were resident in Blackpool. She’d been dead for years, but he still missed her.

  ‘When the person you love dies, you never get over losing them,’ he told me once, ‘you just get used to living with the memory.’ It seemed grimly appropriate that he was often billed as Mr Memory. Dudley was quite depressing to be with, but I liked him. He never bothered trying to impress me. Then again, it would have been pretty hard to do; I’d seen his act.

  ‘Dolores used to do this turn where she put a sparkly tube around her neck, and I’d thread a balloon through it.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘What do you mean, what for? It was an optical illusion. It never really worked. We tried it with a sword but I kept nicking her, so we went back to the doves, until someone called the health inspector in.’

  ‘Why, what did they want?’

  ‘Well, there’s this trick where you show your top hat to the audience and tap the bottom, and the dove’s in a triangular black box that clips to the brim at the back of the hat. As you turn the hat over on the table to bang the top with your wand, you drop in a little
explosive pellet, nice bang and a flash, see, then you release the catch on the box and the dove drops into the hat. But the box we had wasn’t big enough. I found out later it was meant for canaries. We got through a fair few doves before I twigged.’ He looked at my watch. ‘And those that made it didn’t last too many performances because the explosives made them very loose down below. I’d best be off. Do you want a comp?’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Barnacle Bill’s Saucy Sea Shanties, “If You Were the Only Girl in the World”, magic mirrors and either “Love Makes the World Go Round” or “You Need Hands”, depending on which music Eileen’s brought with her.’

  ‘Ah—no, not today.’ I balled my cone and potted it into the nearest bin. ‘I’ve got a lot of homework. Maybe Saturday. Who’s top?’ The programme changed on Fridays.

  ‘Brian Poole and the Tremeloes. They had something in the charts once, I thought you’d know. Scruffy looking shower. Makes you wonder where he finds them.’ ‘He’ was Mr Cottesloe, the crimson-faced booking agent who spent most of his life topping up a huge scotch in the snug bar of the Jolly Anglers at the end of the pier.

  ‘Dudley, can I ask you something personal?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Is that your real name?’

  He looked at me. ‘For a smart lad you can be right soft sometimes.’

  ‘Why do you stay here?’

  ‘Well.’ He stuck out his stubbly chin, thinking. ‘It’s regular work. You can get a good crowd in. And the sea air settles me stomach.’

  But as soon as I asked him, I knew the real reason. He didn’t really notice being here, because ‘here’ was inside his head, with Dolores. She made it home for him, wherever he was. Funny that. I’d always thought of him as a poor old sod. His act was really terrible, feeble tricks and ditties no-one remembered, sung in a thin, cracked voice. That Wednesday afternoon I watched him plodding back down the pier just as the first drops of rain spattered the boards, and I wondered how he could keep going without much of his dignity left, without his beloved wife. Back then, I didn’t understand what kept him alive. I do now, but a lot has happened to me since those stormy grey afternoons on the pier.