Murmuration

by Robert Lock

  “To mark the official opening,” Harvey continued, “we have gathered for your entertainment a sparkling cornucopia of stars, a veritable galaxy of song, theatre and laughter, so sit back and enjoy the show!” Hesitant applause rippled through the audience, dying away before the pier manager’s outstretched arms had dropped back to his sides. He hurried on. “Yes… ah, please welcome our first act, performing a medley of Broadway classics, the beautiful, the sensational… Alexandra Bright!”

  A young, dark-haired woman wearing an acid-yellow mini-skirt and matching short-sleeved blouse stepped up to the microphone, to several appreciative whistles from men in the audience. Harvey edged to one side, his outfit suddenly rendering a jarring incongruity when juxtaposed with the girl’s contemporary clothes. After a moment’s indecision he turned to leave the stage and narrowly missed colliding with one of two male backing dancers who were taking up their positions on either side and slightly behind Miss Bright. She unclipped the microphone from its stand, causing the PA system to clonk and boom, before beaming at the assembled throng arrayed below her.

  “Whoo!” she yelped, “Hi everybody! I can’t tell you how excited I am to be here! It’s a great honour to be asked to start the show with my two boys Rory,” a smile to her left, “and James,” a smile to her right. “I’m going to do a couple of numbers, and you’re bound to know the words, so sing along!”

  The smile still incised into her face, Alexandra nodded in the direction of the technicians sitting at a small table by the side of the stage. A rhythmic crackle came over the speakers, followed by the opening bars of ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly’ from My Fair Lady, which brought the dancers to life, spinning them slowly round like some benign galvanic force.

  Miss Bright crossed her legs and, holding the microphone in both hands as though in prayer, switched expressions from rictus smile to what presumably she believed was a sort of wistful longing. She began singing in a strikingly deep voice, her cockney accent prolonging the vowels and making her sound as though she was having to dredge up each word from a thick sediment of half-remembered songs.

  Val again leaned in close to her friend. “What d’you think? Rory or James?”

  Bella tutted in mock disapproval. “Honestly, Val. You’re old enough to be their mother.”

  “So? They need to learn from somebody, it might as well be me.”

  Bella glanced towards the stage, where the dancers were prancing in opposite directions. “I’ve got a feeling they wouldn’t be interested in any lessons you had to offer, sweetheart!” And they laughed, the more so for the disapproving looks aimed in their direction by some of the audience.

  Evening came quickly, as the sun, reconciled at last with a subjugating sea, rushed to its fate below the horizon, leaving behind a stillness that lent the resort a rare eloquence. The pier, its outline now illuminated by strings of bulbs, stood over a reflection of itself so perfect that it became a second, inverted reality. A small group of pigeons circled the amusement arcade roof, but theirs, unlike the starlings, was a utilitarian flight; this was nothing more than a drawn-out landing, with nothing to impart.

  The day’s warmth was beginning to ebb from the sun lounge, taking with it a number of the audience, who had made their way outside for the firework display. Bella and Val had swapped their bar stools for two of Mickey’s vacant deckchairs, and were now only several rows from the stage. Bella felt drowsy, sedated by two further double gins and the reclined position of the deckchair, but she had, against expectation, enjoyed the centenary celebration show and now wanted to see it through to the end. She was not urgently required by either of her men, anyway; Tom had a bowl of water in the booth, and would doubtless find somewhere comfortable to await his mistress’ return, while Vince was a better cook than she was, and would probably welcome the opportunity for an evening in the Farmers Arms. Bella realised, with some regret, that nobody depended on her any more.

  She and Val applauded as the ventriloquist took his bow, and before Harvey came back on stage she turned to the bar manager. “I’m going for a wee. You coming?”

  Val shook her head. “I’m alright. I’ll save your seat.”

  Bella levered herself out of the deckchair, retrieved her handbag from under it and headed in the direction of the Tudor Bar.

  There were fewer people in the bar now, but those that remained had grown more voluble as the alcohol took effect, resulting in a level of conversational noise not appreciably lower than when the bar had been at its busiest. The quality of this hubbub had altered, however, taking on a palpably more threatening tone. Bella hurried towards the ladies. Without the reassuring presence of Val by her side she suddenly felt very vulnerable, hauled back to her childhood bedroom by the drink-coarsened voices.

  Sitting in the cubicle she heard the door to the toilets open, accompanied by a brief increase in volume of the conversation and jukebox out in the bar before the door closed again. The clack of high heels approached, then entered the adjacent cubicle, followed by a resounding bang as the door was slammed shut and locked. A zip was unfastened, its sound metallic in the echoing silence, then the rustle of clothing, and finally a loud and exasperated ‘tut’.

  “Och, you’ve got to be kidding me,” a young woman’s voice said, her Scottish accent thick and slurred.

  Bella craned her neck down to look under the gap beneath the partition wall, but all she could see was the pointed tip of a dark red shoe and the frilly edge of lowered knickers. “What’s up, sweetheart?”

  “There’s no any paper in here. Would ya credit it, hey? And here’s me just got maself nice and comfy.”

  “Don’t you worry,” the fortune-teller replied, “I’ve got plenty in here.” She unrolled a handful of sheets and passed them under the partition, letting them go when she felt her neighbour take hold.

  “There you go. Is that enough?”

  A brief, gravelly laugh emanated from the cubicle. “Aye, that’ll be fine. I’m no havin’ a shite.”

  Bella smiled. “Glad to be of service.” She flushed her toilet, opened the cubicle door and walked over to the sinks to wash her hands. Moments later the other toilet flushed, the door was unlocked, and she was joined by a red-haired girl in her early twenties.

  The two washed their hands in an amicable silence. Bella was aware, out of the corner of her eye, that the girl was swaying slightly, so she assumed that their brief exchange in the cubicles had perhaps exhausted the girl’s inclination, or indeed ability, to communicate.

  As she turned off the taps and yanked a towel from the dispenser, however, the girl turned to Bella. “Are yous on holiday?”

  Bella looked into the girl’s green eyes, which if they had not been so bloodshot would have been incredibly beautiful. “No, not me, sweetheart. I live here.”

  “Live here?” The concept appeared to baffle her.

  “That’s right.”

  “Live here,” she repeated. “Aye, well, some folk have all the luck.”

  Bella took a paper towel for herself. “Where are you from?”

  “Paisley.” She crumpled her towel and threw it at the bin, missing by several feet.

  “Oh. Is it nice?”

  Again the bark of a laugh. “No, it is not. It’s a shite-hole. And then we come here every year and when we go home again it seems even more of a shite-hole. I cannae think why we do it to ourselves. We’d be better off no’ coming at all.”

  Bella dropped her paper towel into the bin, retrieving the girl’s from the floor at the same time. She straightened and gave the girl’s arm a reassuring rub. “No you wouldn’t. Everybody feels like that when they go home after a holiday. It just means you’ve had a good time.”

  The girl ran one hand through her hair. “Aye, but you never have to go home, do you?”

  With her inscrutable message delivered, the girl from Paisley nodded farewell and tottered away, back to the Tudor Bar and all its temporary delights, to be paid for later with a more abiding disappointment. Bella
stood by herself in the stark, echoing light of the women’s toilet, and as the cisterns filled and a pipe hammered and gulped behind the wall like some insatiable beast clamouring for release, she realised that she was lucky; lucky to have the sea so near, lucky to be able to breathe in its iodine purity whenever she wanted, lucky to work in a town that most people regarded as an exemplar of all that was fun and exciting in life. She took all this for granted, and it had needed an empty toilet roll to make her realise her presumption.

  She came out of the toilets and was walking past the bar when a familiar voice stopped her in her tracks.

  “Well, well, well. If it isn’t the Wicked Witch of the West.”

  Bella turned to face the young man, who was standing at the bar, one foot resting on the polished brass rail at its base. “What do you want?”

  He waved one hand in the air, dismissing her concern with a loose-wristed gesture. “Ah, don’t panic. I’m not after a refund.”

  “Well what is it then?”

  He shrugged. “Who knows? Do you? Get your crystal ball out and let’s see. Tell you what, I’ll buy you a drink while you’re having a look. Can’t say fairer than that, can I? Come on, what’s your poison?”

  Bella found it hard to look him in the eye, particularly as she recognised the over-precise and combative manner of someone both drunk and angry. “I’m really sorry, but my friend’s waiting—“

  “No no no no no,” he said, closing his eyes and shaking his head with a smile, like a teacher hearing the wrong answer from a particularly troublesome pupil. “You’re not listening. Just one little drink. I’d take it very personally if you said no.” He licked his lips.

  “Don’t let me down, now.”

  “I can’t.”

  The fortune-teller made to walk away, primed and ready to shout, or even scream, if he tried to stop her, but it was as he reached out, misjudging the distance between them so that only his fingertips brushed against the back of her hand, that it happened.

  In an instant, Bella felt engulfed in a heat so fierce, so all-consuming, that the young man, the bar, the pier, everything vanished, and all that was left was an overwhelming need to escape, to flee from this terrifying inferno. Indeed, even as she stumbled into a table, heading blindly towards the exit, Bella could not look down for fear of seeing herself on fire. Her clothes must already have been stripped away, seared off in moments. The appalling heat was now peeling away her skin, layer after layer crisping and curling, her hair gone in a brief, incandescent flare, the very meat of her bubbling, tightening, separating from her bones.

  Vaguely, as though seen through a trembling sheet of flame, Bella could make out the bulb-lit perspective of the pier. The heat behind her was just as intense, but ahead, in the direction of the resort, she sensed a cooler world. Gasping, crying, she ran towards land.

  The heat. It was following her. Like the blackened figure from her nightmares, Bella knew she was being pursued. The fire desired nothing more than to consume her, as it had consumed everyone in the Tudor Bar, the sun lounge, the theatre, gobbled them up with its insatiable appetite, and now the fire had seen her trying to escape, and it was beyond rage.

  The pier groaned beneath her. The fortune-teller’s legs were weakening and the heat grew closer, wrapping itself around her like some hellish blanket. She heard her voice being called by a gentle, sing-song voice, and moments later Mickey Braithwaite loomed out of the dark, but this was not the Mickey Braithwaite she knew, this was a terrifying, incandescent version of the deckchair attendant, ablaze and yet seemingly impervious to the pain, revelling in his immolation.

  “Bella! No!”

  She hesitated, slowed by the cooling tone of his voice, which seemed to pacify the fire behind her somewhat, but then she looked into the great void of his eyes and Bella saw the flames there, dancing victoriously. She pushed him aside and never heard his last words to her as they turned to ash in the night air.

  “Wait! You don’t need to go.” And then, quieter, almost to himself, “It isn’t happening yet.”

  Was it instinct that brought her to a halt outside her booth, or the faint yowling of a cat that recognises the footfall of its mistress? Whatever it was, the fortune-teller could not leave Tom to suffer a captive, agonising death. With trembling hands she unlocked the booth door, opened it slightly and slipped through the gap, stopping the cat from escaping with the shin of one leg.

  Inside the booth, shadows cast by the flames outside flickered and skipped over the familiar items, the tools and props of her trade animated by their impending destruction. Bella could not look directly at her crystal ball on the table; it burned a dazzling scarlet, like a miniature sun. Grabbing the cat’s basket, she opened its barred door, crammed Tom unceremoniously inside, fastened the buckles and opened the booth door, not really knowing what she would find outside.

  The heat hammered Bella to her knees, but somehow she found the strength to stand, and to attempt to close and lock the booth’s door. The key was red hot, however, and burnt her hand, so she dropped it, abandoning the booth to its fate. A crackling noise above her made Bella look up, and she saw winged embers wheeling in a black sky; they were starlings, burning, red-hot starlings, weaving a net of glittering trails across the night.

  Managing to keep one step ahead of the flames Bella lurched towards safety, expecting at any moment to be swallowed up by the fire and praying that, if and when she succumbed, it would be quick. She thought of Vince, and Paul and Sarah, her children. She thought of Val and was overwhelmed with guilt at her selfishness. Bella had abandoned them all without thinking: Val, Harvey, Mickey, the young woman from Paisley, she had condemned them all by her despicable actions. No one else had escaped the flames, and if, by some miracle, Bella did survive, she would have to somehow reconcile herself with the consequences of her cowardice.

  There seemed to be the slightest diminishing of the heat’s intensity as she rushed away from her booth, but the fortune-teller did not stop. She would not stop until her feet touched the promenade, leaving the pier behind her for good, and so Bella never saw the solitary starling hop down from the roof of her booth and watch her figure diminish into the night, until all that could be seen of her was the glint of gold on fingers wrapped tightly around the cat basket’s handle. And then that last spark was extinguished, leaving the pier cold and empty, its planks a pale smear across the darkness. At the end of the pier came a small, explosive bang, followed moments later by a burst of colour as the first fireworks spread across the sky. The starling ruffled the feathers on its back; from a distance, the gesture could almost have been interpreted as a shrug.

  1989

  Hats

  Early morning light seeped through grubby net curtains and highlighted the group of Capo di Monte figures neatly displayed in their glass-fronted cabinet. A large oval mirror above the fireplace reflected the china pieces, but its dusty glass made them look more like a collection of disfigured bones, exhibits in a museum of degenerative diseases. Nubs and knuckles of cold, unthreatening bones. Below the mirror an ancient gas fire hissed and popped, its centre burner glowing bright orange from being on for most of the night. A plastic vine straggled across the fire’s brick surround; its leaves had been singed and distorted from being in close proximity to the heat, paradoxically making the fake plant appear more realistic. Next to the display cabinet was a large dining table, and at this table sat archivist and local historian Colin Draper.

  Colin was forty-six, but most people thought he was at least ten years older, partly because of his unkempt greying hair and crumpled, nondescript clothes, but also because he behaved like an old man, and had done since the age of twelve, when his father died and Colin became, in his mother’s words, the ‘man of the house’. He occasionally pondered how fate had lifted him clean out of puberty’s clutches and dropped him down into a world of responsibility and obligations, but Colin was not a man to dwell on life’s ‘what ifs’. Studying the past had shown him how lucky he w
as to be alive in the twentieth century, when similar circumstances only a hundred years ago would have put the Draper family in the workhouse. It was also fair to say that, had Colin been given the opportunity to rebel, sleep around, marry and become a father, he would undoubtedly have run a mile in the opposite direction.

  “Look at all those hats!” he exclaimed out loud, then pulled a face when he remembered how early it was. His mother’s bedroom was across the hall, a room that had become, as her multiple sclerosis gradually, inexorably, tightened its bindings around her limbs, the limits of her world. Following her diagnosis almost fifteen years ago Colin had found himself, practically by default, as the person charged with her care. Other family members made their apologies, professing a variety of commitments or reasons why they would be unable to help, but in all honesty, both Colin and his mother would not have wanted it any other way. For the best part of a decade her mobility remained relatively unimpaired, giving Colin the time to build himself a reputation in the resort as its definitive chronicler. As the council’s archivist, Colin Draper spent his working life in basements and dimly lit offices, absorbing the slightly bitter odour of old documents until the two coalesced. With his clothing’s palette of beiges and browns he became a form of document himself, a covenant telling the story of how a meek history graduate found his voice through a fascination with the resort which grew to become an all-consuming passion. In many people’s eyes the archivist was as much a part of the town as its theatre, winter gardens, promenade and pier, not only because of his encyclopedic knowledge of its history, but also because Colin exhibited an utter lack of ego. It was as though the resort spoke through him, channelling its thoughts and memories with a clarity made possible only by his own happy absence. Having read the words and studied the photographs of those long dead the archivist regarded his own existence within this same historical perspective. His fleeting consciousness was both a privilege and a wonderful gift, but any claim to its importance lay solely in what could be bequeathed to the future. Colin’s rigorously intellectual way of life appeared dry and joyless to some, but this was not a vision he would have recognised. Researching, indexing, recording. He was not being selfless by dedicating himself to these activities. These were the things that brought him joy.