Murmuration

by Robert Lock

  Bella let go of his hand, not only to break the physical connection, but also so that he would not feel her own trembling. Outside the resort was stirring, drawn out like a snail from its shell by the clearing skies. After a thorough cleansing and reinvigoration by the wind and rain it was now being burnished by the sun, which reflected off the wet surfaces and dazzled the eye in every direction. She heard the rattle of shutters as Eddie opened up his rock and candyfloss stall in the identical booth on the other side of the pier. Soon there would be a steady stream of people passing by, eager to breathe in the purified air, and some would feel the urge to seek out a glimpse of their future, inspired by the reconstituted resort to discover what lay beyond the storms of their own lives. And yet here she was, trapped inside her own booth with a lunatic who was searching for answers she did not possess.

  “Why did you come to see me?” Bella asked, and even she could hear the note of pleading in her voice. “What are you looking for?”

  “You don’t know anything, do you?” he replied contemptuously. “You’re pathetic. D’you get a kick out of messing with people’s minds? Telling them what they should be doing?”

  “I’m not trying to tell you anything.”

  He shook his head. “You probably don’t even realise you’re doing it. You’re like every other woman, you just want to drain all the life out of us and turn us into zombies so we’ll do as we’re told. You’re like a bleedin’ vampire!”

  Bella imagined the young man’s father saying something similar, a sentiment perhaps updated by his son through a love of the Hammer horror films that her own husband was so enthusiastic about. “I really don’t think I can help you,” she said, inching back in her chair to maximise the distance between them.

  He stood up, ran both hands through his still-damp hair, then held them, fingers interlocked, at the back of his head. “This was a stupid idea,” he said, as though addressing someone else. “I knew I was wasting my time.”

  “And mine,” the fortune-teller added under her breath.

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing. And if you don’t mind I’d like to get ready for my next customer.”

  His hands dropped to his sides, where they continued to flex and twitch. “So. You’ve done your worst.”

  Bella held his gaze with a great effort of will. “Well, what do you expect for two bob?”

  “Aw, piss off then,” he said, turning away from her. He had opened the door of the booth, letting in a strong breeze that dispersed the tension with a diplomat’s touch.

  Bella felt released, almost to the point of hysteria, by her booth’s inhalation. Never before had the sounds and smells of the resort seemed as sweet and precious, as though she had been buried underground for days and finally found a route back to the surface. “Leave the door open,” she requested. “There seems to be a nasty smell in here.”

  The young man turned in the doorway to face her. “Yeah, it must be all the bullshit you’re coming out with.”

  Bella could not help but laugh. “Very good! You should be on the stage.”

  He shook his head, either in sadness or disbelief, and then he was gone, reclaimed by the purifying light.

  The curtain that separated the main part of the booth from the tiny area where Bella had her kettle and store cupboard moved slightly and Tom peeped out. Noting that his owner’s most recent customer had departed, the cat stepped forward and rubbed himself around Bella’s legs, purring loudly.

  “Yes, I’m glad he’s gone too,” she said, reaching down to stroke the cat.

  Nightmares

  Her nightmare began in the frail hour before dawn.

  A crabbed, hunched figure is rushing towards her in a kind of lumpen scramble, boots on darkened pier pounding with metronomic rhythm, terrifying in its unvarying cadence. On and on the man comes, a silhouette, a hole, an animated brutality. His advance is relentless; it shakes the pier to its foundations. Bella can feel it tremble through the soles of her feet. He means her terrible harm, she knows this as unaccountable things are known in dreams, and yet she cannot move, cannot flee. She is rooted to the spot. Boom… boom… boom… boom his footsteps approach. She would not be surprised to see the pier shatter under his boots like a glass ornament. Who is he? What is he? It is too dark to make out any detail. A compounding of the terror settles on her as she senses that there may not be detail to be had, that the figure would be black in even the brightest of sunlight, a shadow untethered from its casting form. Closer and closer. The pier vibrates, a low resonance struck from its iron frame multiplying with every footfall into a deep, organ-like chord. He is almost upon her, blotting out all else and still she cannot move, though every fibre screams for release. And beneath the darkness a warped musculature slides, propelling the figure towards her with an inhuman functioning, reaching out, touching…

  Bella jerked upright in bed, her heart pounding. The dark bedroom seemed, for a moment, like a continuation of her dream, a place where reason cannot prevail. She fumbled for the switch on her bedside lamp and clicked it on, knocking over one of the cups on the teasmade.

  The clatter and light woke her husband Vincent. He grunted and turned over to face his wife. “What time is it?”

  “Go back to sleep,” Bella said testily. “It’s early.”

  He coughed and rubbed the top of his head, generating a dry, rustling sound that Bella found irritating in the extreme. “How early?”

  “For goodness sake… ” She glanced at the alarm clock. “Ten past four.”

  “Bloody hell, Bella.”

  “I didn’t wake you up on purpose, I assure you.”

  Vincent placed one hand over the lower half of his face, slowly massaged his stubbly cheeks and chin, then with thumb and forefinger kneaded at his closed eyes, pushing at them with such force that Bella feared for his sight, before finally dragging down the loose skin below them to reveal a pink meniscus cupping the bloodshot white. “That doesn’t make me any less awake, though, does it? Bloody hell, Bella, I’ve got a busy day tomorrow… today.”

  “Well, I’m very sorry I spoiled your beauty sleep,” she replied, the tone in her voice making quite clear that this was anything but an apology, “but I’ve just had a horrible dream, probably the worst dream I’ve ever had. If you were any kind of a husband you’d give me a cuddle and make me feel safe, but that would be too much to ask, wouldn’t it? Put your arms around me? Heaven forbid! I can’t remember the last time you came near me, and as for sex, well—”

  “Here we go,” Vincent muttered.

  Bella, however, was in full flow. “As for sex,” she repeated heavily, “I might as well just give up on that idea. You obviously find me so repulsive you can’t bear the thought of any sort of intimate contact. I shouldn’t be surprised, really, you were never all that bothered about it even when we were young. I’m amazed we ended up with children at all. Not that we would have done if I hadn’t—”

  “Let’s do it now, then,” Vincent interrupted, knowing, from long and bitter experience, that cutting across his wife’s monologue was the only way to wedge his own opinion into the torrent of words.

  “What?”

  “Let’s do it now. Come on, you obviously want to behave like those youngsters they keep catching under the pier.” He plucked at the sleeve of her nightgown. “Come on, get ‘em off.”

  Bella slapped her husband’s hand away. “Sod off, Vincent. I said cuddle, but like most men you interpret ‘cuddle’ as ‘sex’. After the dream I’ve just had the last thing I want is a big lummox on top of me trying to stick his tongue down my throat.”

  “Thanks a bunch.” He had laced these three words with an inflection of deep hurt, but both he and Bella recognised, like most couples who have been together for many years, that this expression of martyrdom had been fashioned entirely for dramatic effect as part of a finely honed verbal jousting, bounded by unspoken rules governing the limits of what could and could not be said without causing real pain. Of
course they both possessed the weaponry with which a terrible blow could be dealt to the other; a life properly shared opens up this vulnerability on some flank or other, but love stays the hand unless in extremis.

  “Well, you pick your moments.”

  Vincent turned onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. “What were you dreaming about, anyway?”

  Bella snuggled in closer to him and rested one arm on his chest. “It was horrible. I was on the pier, and this… thing was coming towards me, all bent and black, like a sort of cross between a crab and a human being, and its boots were going crash crash crash, louder and louder, until it touched me and I woke up.” She shuddered.

  “It was probably one of those daft buggers who you tell they’re going to meet a tall dark stranger. Or maybe that was the tall dark stranger. You did say he was black.”

  Bella thumped her husband’s chest. “Not black as in Louis Armstrong, you idiot, I meant black as in colour. Just black. Black as the ace of spades. Like something that had been horribly burned. I think I’d remember if one of my customers looked like that. I tell you, Vince, he was out to get me, I just knew it, somehow, like I’d done something wrong.”

  “Guilty conscience, that is.”

  “I don’t hear you complaining about the money I bring home. It’s those ‘daft buggers’ who paid for that Cortina in the garage, so don’t come all high and mighty with me.”

  Vincent looked down at his wife. He knew her remarks regarding their sex life were just Bella being her usual provocative self. Indeed, inciting one of her typically feisty responses had, in their youth, been a favourite method of generating an erotic charge. Their exchanges had often been concluded with a bout of love-making made all the more dynamic for a lingering animosity, the movement, kissing and biting given an added exuberance as a means of exacting some form of retribution for an earlier barbed comment. When he thought back to those times now it seemed as though he was watching a film or documentary about someone else entirely; a frivolous, rather-too-sure-of-himself apprentice butcher who could never quite eliminate the smell of meat on his hands, and a quiet, naive typist with a remarkable hourglass figure. Vincent remembered the first time they met, when he followed Bella up the curving stairs of a Deansgate tram in 1934, admiring the way her calf muscles tensed and relaxed as she ascended the steps ahead of him. There were lots of empty seats on the top deck, but he plonked himself down next to her, bold as you like. When she turned to look at him, Vincent saw suspicion, even fear, flicker in her eyes, so he smiled and introduced himself with a touch of the brim of his snappy felt hat, hoping and praying that she would not dismiss him as some sort of spiv or wide-boy. Luckily his smile had done the trick, with Bella agreeing to meet him later at the Lyons cafe on Piccadilly. The following evening they went dancing, and the moment he had that girl in his arms Vincent knew she was the one for him.

  It was sometimes difficult to reconcile that self-effacing young woman, with a waist he could almost span with his hands, with the chubby, combative grandmother now lying beside him, but then again he was sure Bella regarded him in much the same light. His arms and shoulders were still muscular and strong, legacy of a lifetime’s butchering, but his stomach had expanded, his legs were wound about with varicose veins — like ivy up a tree trunk — from decades of standing behind a counter, and, worst of all, he found it difficult to maintain an erection for more than a few minutes. On the rare occasions they attempted to make love Vincent found the only way to maintain his ardour was to gently bounce one of Bella’s large breasts in the cup of his hand, feeling its soft weight quiver against his fingers. He was under no illusion that Bella derived any great degree of sensual pleasure from this manoeuvre; she had once said it felt like he was weighing out a pound of tripe, but if it kept Vincent in a state of tumescence long enough for her to achieve her own quiet and shivering climax then she was happy to let him do it. They had come a long way, he reflected, since their courtship days in Manchester.

  “I’m not complaining,” Vincent said, “I’m just saying one of these days you might say something that comes back to bite you.”

  “I never tell them anything too specific,” Bella replied. “Everyone wants to hear the same sort of thing, anyway. You know, a nice husband or wife, a decent job, a bit of money. People don’t ask for much, really.”

  “Why do they bother coming to you, then? Why don’t they just enjoy the here and now instead of worrying about what’s round the corner?”

  Bella toyed with her husband’s gold chain. “Because unlike you, sweetheart, most folk have got a bit of imagination, and they want to know more than what they’re having for tea that day. It’s called being human.”

  “It’s called worrying about something you can’t do a damn thing about, more like,” he said, still addressing the ceiling. “You think too much you’ll just end up a nervous wreck.”

  “Well that’s certainly not something you need to worry about.”

  Vincent laughed and looked down at the crown of his wife’s head. “Few more grey hairs there, Bell,” he noted. “You must have been thinking again.”

  “Bugger off.”

  For several minutes they lay together in a benign silence, broken only by the whine of a milk float passing down the road and the early clamour of seagulls. This quiet communion reminded Bella of simpler times, before the children, when the two of them had lived in a rented one-bedroom flat which was so cold they spent all their time in bed, wound together and still surprised, once in a while, by some detail of the other’s naked body. There were no such surprises now, but she didn’t mind; there was a profound happiness to be found in feeling her husband’s stomach gurgle and shift against her elbow, even when she knew it presaged one of his protein-lover’s robust farts.

  “Vince,” she said quietly.

  “Mmm.”

  “I want to die before you.”

  He looked down quizzically at her. “Why?”

  “Because,” Bella explained, “I think you’ll cope. I’m not being morbid, and I’m not trying to say you love me less than I love you, I just think you’d be able to manage better.”

  “You would if you had to.”

  “No, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t at all.”

  Vincent wrapped his arm round Bella’s shoulder. “Well let’s die together then. Now shut up and go back to sleep.”

  As Old As My Tongue…

  The resort could, in some ways, absent itself during the summer months, when its beaches were crowded and its amusement arcades formed a ribald assault on the senses, with their tumult of mechanical clatter and blinking lights; when the pubs reverberated to the sound of jukeboxes, and its promenade was choked with tourists; when the bandstand in Jubilee Gardens was ringed by deckchairs filled with pensioners knitting or dozing or tapping their feet to the phlegmy rhythm of the band; when children tried to lick the dribbled ice cream from their elbow, and were thrilled or terrified by the musky, turbulent progress of their donkey; then the resort stood back, satisfied that its component parts were working as they should, creating a distinctive, heightened reality — brighter, louder, sweeter, scarier — for however long its visitors could tolerate it. And even when the coaches and trains carried them back to their more prosaic worlds the resort lived on in memories and blurry photographs, a special place attached by only the most delicate of threads to the dimmer land of work and tribulation. The resort placed an implicit trust in its visitors’ ability to locate it beyond the quotidian, never doubting their competency, for they had to believe that somewhere there was a brighter sun, a clearer sky, a warmer wind.

  July began quite promisingly with warm, overcast days followed by a series of spectacular sunsets, but as the school holidays approached a cold wind began to blow, a malicious wind that picked up sand and threw it into the eyes of those on the promenade, a deceiving wind that was welcomed for pulling back the blanket of clouds covering the sun that then, once established, changed direction, bringing an autumnal ch
ill to the days.

  It was this duplicitous wind that pushed Mickey Braith-waite’s empty deckchairs into bulging convexities, as though mocking the assistant by making it too cold for most customers to rent one of his chairs. Only three hardy souls were currently ensconced, their backs to the wind: two women wrapped in headscarves and identical grey macs, sipping coffee in plastic cups poured from a tartan-patterned thermos, and a middle-aged man whose heavily Brylcreemed hair appeared immune to even the strongest of gusts.

  When Mickey saw Bella emerge from her booth to take in her A-board he hurried over to tell her his exciting news. “Bella! Bella! Guess what?”

  “What, Mickey?” she said, continuing with her task in the vain hope that the deckchair attendant would take the hint that she had no desire to stand and chat.

  “They’ve asked me to take part! I got a letter.”

  “That’s lovely, sweetheart.”

  The deckchair attendant, in a display of cunning that Bella did not think him capable of, hurried round her and placed himself in front of the door to her booth, effectively cutting off any hope of escape. “From the council!” he added.

  Defeated, Bella leaned her A-board against the booth and straightened. “Come on, then, you’ve got my undivided attention. What have the council asked you to take part in?”

  “The cent… canteen… ”

  “Centenary?”

  Mickey nodded vigorously. “Centenary! That’s it. The centenary of the pier.”

  Bella knew all about the upcoming celebrations to mark the pier’s one hundredth year. Indeed, she had recently been involved in an argument with the pier manager Harvey Birdsall concerning his request that she shut her booth for the duration of the weekend, citing ‘historical accuracy’ as his reason for the temporary closure. She took great pleasure in relating the subsequent exchange to all and sundry, not only as an example of her debating prowess but also to humiliate Harvey, whom she thought a fool. It went: