Murmuration

by Robert Lock

  The archivist, for that was what he was, in all things, reached out for the fan’s switch and turned it off. The whirr of the blades subsided, returned after so long as a translucent disc to their component parts, and it was this simplest of endings which finally broke through his composure, offering up a pristine silence in which his sobs could take the place of their hum.

  The Plausible Tide

  The sea had turned from its lowest ebb and was beginning to wrap itself around the pier’s outermost stanchions like the coils of a glittering grey snake. How patient the water was, touching the iron posts that impeded it with a beguiling tenderness, stroking each one briefly before creeping further up the beach. No one could have seen the malice lurking behind each caress; no one except Mickey Braithwaite, who lay sprawled, belly down on the floor of the sun lounge, peering through a wide gap in the planks to the sands below, and the plausible tide.

  Prostrate, a most penitent of disciples, Mickey loved the intimacy with the pier that lying spread-eagled on its planks afforded. It was almost like becoming part of its structure, some malleable strut or span. Every part of his body was in contact with the pier, from head to toe, allowing for a much more satisfying communion than simply walking along it or sitting in one of his stripy deckchairs. It was only by performing this act of obeisance that he could detect the faint tremor running through the structure beneath him as the pier, appalled by the tide’s silky touch, which whispered of destruction and a victory only briefly deferred, anticipated its inevitable defeat. Twice every day it had to endure this gloating embrace, knowing full well that the ocean was correct, that it would one day wash over rusted stumps protruding from the sand like the blackened bones of some half-buried corpse, and then, in a million years, remember the pier as nothing more than an ephemeral hindrance, its grandeur commemorated by a scattering of iron atoms dissolved in the cold belly of the sea.

  Mickey thought of the sea’s everlasting consciousness, and the cruelty that inevitably accompanied it. What a dreadful cage immortality was, a limitless cage, and yet it offered such temptation to the mortal soul; only after succumbing to such temptation, and having stepped willingly through its portal, did immortality reveal the true horror of its towering, impregnable barricades. Then there was nothing to be done except seek some form of unknowing through madness, or else become a god and dispense cruelty to all those happy creatures who could count the days of their existence.

  Further along the pier Colin Draper was slumped in a deckchair, unaware of the tide’s intentions, or indeed of anything except the lengthening shadows which were creeping gradually nearer to the scuffed toes of his shoes, and the gossiping of starlings flying in small groups to and from the theatre roof, carried on the rhythms of their own headlong tides.

  The funeral had been and gone, interminable at the time and yet now little more than a crowded moment. He remembered the uneasy smiles of mourners, the sharp edge of his mother’s coffin cutting into his shoulder, the sunshine on his neck as Edna Draper was committed to the soil next to her husband, and the overpowering sensation of needing to be away from the house within minutes of the last guest leaving. Colin hadn’t even tidied away the cups and plates. He had simply grabbed his coat and caught the first bus that came along, a bus that had deposited him on the promenade only yards from the pier. The resort had known where he needed to be, and had guided him there.

  Since then Colin had wandered up and down the silvery-grey boards, barely noticed by the tourists. The archivist was already one of those people whose unremarkable physical presence rendered them, if not transparent, then extremely easily forgotten. Wrap this persona in a raincoat whose grey was a close match to the weathered boards and what resulted was an almost chameleon-like level of camouflage. And so he wandered, trailing what appeared at first glance to be an untethered shadow, until his feet ached and he sought refuge in the blue-and-white striped haven of a deckchair. He had looked up and down the pier for Mickey, not wanting to deprive the attendant of his fee, but Mickey was nowhere to be seen, so Colin settled himself at an angle that gave him a panoramic view of the returning sea, the beach, and the resort.

  As an intellectual exercise and distraction the archivist began to mentally strip away every modern encumbrance and alteration within his field of vision, peeling back the layers one by one, reconstructing buildings or features that had been lost, until what lay before him was the resort as George Parr would have seen it: raw, vigorous, confident, a New Jerusalem for that most evangelical of eras. And it was during this process of imaginary restoration that the sadness already within him diverged, so that Colin found himself in mourning not only for his mother, but also the resort’s lost innocence. Having painstakingly renovated the entire sea front in his mind, Colin could now switch from the 1989 version in front of him to his mid-nineteenth century simulacrum and back again, like clicking between two slides in a projector, a process that only emphasised how much had been lost. Where once restraint and optimism had proclaimed the town’s vigour, now there was only garishness and despondency. The resort, like every other in the country, had been left behind, abandoned by all those thousands that once thronged its beach in favour of sun and sangria. It still catered for those who wished to escape their normal lives, certainly — all resorts function, to a greater or lesser degree, as fairground halls of mirrors — but there was an abandonment to its revellers that in Colin’s eyes came perilously close to despair.

  How had it come to this? What had transformed ladies in crinolines and lace gloves into the lewd, mini-skirted young women who, quite frankly, terrified him? Why had the gents, all wearing their splendid hierarchy of hats, seen fit to metamorphose into packs of raucous, predatory young men?

  “Mr Draper?”

  Colin started. A figure, silhouetted by the sun, loomed over him, but even had he not recognised the tangle of hair that glowed like a threadbare halo, the soft, enchanting quality of the voice could belong to only one person. “Mickey… I was looking for you earlier.”

  “Were you?”

  “Yes. I thought I needed to… ” the archivist patted the arms of his deckchair. “I haven’t paid for my chair. Someone else must have left it.”

  Mickey Braithwaite turned to look along the pier. His halo caught the breeze and fluttered slightly as if in response to a less than wholesome thought. “That’s alright,” he decided finally. There was a silence that lasted several seconds. “I was watching the tide. Do you like the tide best when it’s in or out, Mr Draper?”

  Colin looked past the deckchair attendant to the glittering sea, as though the mere sight of it might supply an answer to Mickey’s gnomic question. “Out,” he said, more to satisfy the sudden fervour in Mickey’s eyes than anything else, and then he realised that he really did prefer to be on the pier or promenade with the sea at a safe distance, knew it with a certitude that bordered on the revelatory.

  “It’s coming in now. It wants to swallow everything up.”

  The archivist was one of those people whose desire to educate only ever manifested itself as condescension; not, in his case at least, through any feelings of superiority, but rather because of a lack of communication skills. “I wouldn’t worry about that. The tides are controlled by the moon’s gravity, Mickey, they’ll only come up so far.”

  Mickey squinted upwards. He had still not moved from his position between Colin and the sun. “I like looking at the moon through my binoculars. Have you ever looked at the moon through binoculars, Mr Draper?”

  “I once saw it through a telescope,” Colin answered, and he was not the first person to be surprised at how quickly and easily the deckchair attendant could turn a conversation to his own agenda.

  Mickey nodded. “What did you see?”

  “Oh, the usual. You know, craters, the ‘seas’.”

  “But they aren’t really seas, are they? It’s all dust.”

  “That’s right,” Colin said, surprised by Mickey’s astronomical knowledge. “Darker area
s of dust.”

  The deckchair attendant sighed, as though the lunar topic was cause for some regret. “With dust fishes.”

  Colin smiled. “No, I don’t think so. Mickey—“

  “And dust whales… and dust dolphins. Does it have tides? Does the dust move about because of earth’s gravy?”

  “Gravity. Well, not as far as I’m aware.”

  The deckchair attendant, presumably encouraged by their conversational momentum, settled himself in the deckchair next to Colin, shifting his bus conductor’s ancient lever-operated ticket machine so that it rested on his thigh. “My binoculars used to belong to my grandpa. I used them when I was in the Observer Corps.”

  “I bet you did. You kept this town safe from the bombs, Mickey. You should be very proud of what you did.”

  “Fucking Adolf wanted to put Aunty Irene out of business.”

  Colin was shocked by the abrupt expletive, but he reasoned that Mickey, like many others who lived through the war, had every reason to feel so strongly about Hitler. “He wanted to put a lot of people out of business, Mickey, but it was thanks to people like you that he didn’t. I’ve seen photos of the pier during the war. It looked a bit like a battleship with its gun, and there you were up on the bridge like the captain.”

  Mickey turned towards the theatre. He wrinkled his nose to push his spectacles back up his nose. “We were on the roof, Mr Draper, not a bridge.”

  “No, no, the bridge of a ship. It’s where the captain and the officers are.”

  “My brother was on a ship.”

  “During the war?”

  Mickey nodded. “He didn’t die in the war like Pa, but he died afterwards.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Colin said. “It was my mother’s funeral today. I thought… I thought I’d cry from start to finish, but I didn’t feel anything. It was like we were burying an empty box. Is that wrong?”

  The deckchair attendant sniffed. His hands, which were almost freakishly large, flexed and shifted as though following some compulsion quite detached from his motionless body. “Your mum went away in the storm. A bomb came and took Mrs Tyler away. There’s always something that takes you away, Mr Draper. Bella thought the burnt man was coming to take her away but he wasn’t, he was just angry with her, but it won’t be her fault. Even when things we do take people away it’s not our fault, not really. It would’ve happened anyway.”

  Why, thought Colin, am I attempting to have a meaningful conversation with Mickey Braithwaite? All I’m ever going to get in return is a meaningless stream of consciousness. Even if there is some sort of meaning to it it’s nothing anybody but Mickey would be able to understand. But then he remembered hearing the thunder whilst in the middle of his argument with the librarian, and the waterlogged streets on his way home that evening, the evening he found her. “What do you mean, my mother went away in the storm?”

  The deckchair attendant’s hands performed a brief, explanatory dance in the air on either side of his head.

  “Onetwothreefourfive… boom!” He chanted. “Onetwo-three… boom! Two… boom! That’s how the storm takes you away, Mr Draper. You shouldn’t count the numbers. Don’t count the numbers.”

  “What do you mean, Mickey? What numbers?” The archivist was becoming increasingly disorientated by the surreal turn to the conversation, a sensation not helped by the strobe-like reflections and distorting layers of Mickey Braithwaite’s thick lenses, which at certain angles appeared to reveal a depth of glass that went far beyond the frame’s boundaries.

  But Mickey had seen a middle-aged couple settling themselves in two of his deckchairs, and without a word set off purposefully in their direction. By the time he returned Colin knew it would have been hopeless to repeat the question, so he tried another tack.

  “Would you like an ice cream? I fancy an ice cream. We can have a nice ice cream and a chat. How does that sound? If you’re not too busy working, that is,” he added, sensing that he was talking as if to a five-year-old.

  “A ninety-nine, please,” Mickey replied decisively. “With monkey’s blood and hundreds and thousands.”

  Colin grimaced. “What?”

  The deckchair attendant elbowed him playfully in the ribs.

  “Raspberry sauce! It isn’t really monkey’s blood. I wouldn’t want monkey’s blood on my ice cream.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. Two ninety-nines it is, then.”

  To the casual observer the two men might have been father and son, enjoying an ice cream in the sun. There was even a passing resemblance between them, not only because of their windswept straggly hair, but also from a certain similarity of demeanour. Colin would probably not have been conscious of it, as he lacked the ego required for prolonged self-analysis, but as a socially inept obsessive-compulsive he had much in common with Mickey Braithwaite. However, as he watched the deckchair attendant carefully lick any dribble of melting ice cream before it could reach the wafer cone, rotating it round and round continuously on a constant lookout for new drips, Colin perceived only a huge gulf between them. Mickey appeared to inhabit a different world, a place of wonder and infinite possibility, hidden from most people’s view behind the theatre scenery of the tangible. What rules there were seemed concerned solely with repetition, as though these behavioural mantras served to anchor the deckchair attendant and prevent him from being carried off on some prodigious tide.

  Colin extracted his chocolate flake and bit off the end clumped with ice cream. A sharp jab of pain in his jaw reminded him of the cavity in one molar that he had been meaning to have filled, but which he always forgot about as soon as the pain receded. He pressed the palm of his hand to his cheek and groaned. “This flipping tooth.”

  “Taffy’s tooth… went all brown,” Mickey noted, his anecdote punctuated by pauses as he continued his hunt for stray trickles of ice cream. “Mitch and Norman wanted to pull it out… with a pair of pliers, but Taffy… told them to f – off.” He laughed, a short, bark-like sound. “Taffy was always telling them to… f– off.”

  Colin sensed an aperture, a gateway into Mickey’s world that might remain open for only a few seconds, so he decided to hazard an educated guess. “Were they your Observer Corps colleagues… friends?”

  “They gave me a helmet with OC painted on it. Well, it did have police painted on it, but Uncle Walter scratched off the other letters so that just the O and C were left. That meant they were quite far apart. They looked a bit like two eyes when it was dark.”

  Colin gestured with his ice cream cone at the building next to them. “And there you were, up on the roof of the theatre. Lords of all you surveyed.”

  Mickey turned and looked up. He was silent for perhaps ten seconds, then returned his attention to his own ice cream. “Do you know what hundreds and thousands are made out of, Mr Draper?”

  What, the archivist wondered, was the best method of dealing with Mickey Braithwaite’s tangential changes of conversational direction? Go along with them and hope to steer him back to the subject, or treat them as diversionary tactics — maybe even a form of test — and continue the theme? He chose the latter. “Yes, I know all about the Observer Corps post up there. You had a radio room above the dressing rooms, and a platform on the roof. I remember seeing photos of it all. You were a very important part of this area’s defences during the war, Mickey. You and your colleagues must have saved a lot of people’s lives.”

  The deckchair attendant dabbed one fingertip onto his ice cream, collecting several of the hundreds and thousands, which he then examined closely, his eyes crossing with the effort.

  “Then there was that terrible night when the Salvation Army was bombed,” Colin persisted.

  “They look like tiny little tablets.”

  “Do you remember? When the bomb fell on the Salvation Army?”

  Mickey stuck his finger in his mouth and sucked. “They’re all different colours, but they all taste the same.”

  “That night when you rescued your mum.”
>
  “You’d think different colours would taste different.”

  “The bomb fell on the Salvation Army, but you rescued your mum just in time. Mickey, do you remember?”

  The deckchair attendant withdrew the now clean fingertip and turned to look at Colin, who smiled encouragingly, even though the eerie light in Mickey’s eyes sent a shiver down his spine.

  “Everybody says it was a miracle,” Mickey said, “but I don’t know about that. I don’t even know what a miracle is. Do you believe in miracles, Mr Draper?”

  Colin, thrilled and terrified in equal measure by his success in bringing Mickey’s mind into some form of focus, sensed also that honest responses were essential if the deckchair attendant was not to revert back to his normal arbitrariness. “No. No, I don’t.”

  “No,” Mickey repeated, his tone of voice suggesting that the reply was a regrettable but inescapable truth. “It’s just people being frightened of something that’s supposed to happen. That’s what I think.”

  “Have you thought about what happened a lot?”

  Mickey licked his ice cream and nodded vigorously. “Every day. It’s like it got stuck in my head. I can still see everything. It’s like watching a film.”

  The archivist leaned forward. “What else can you see? Can you see Georgie Parr? Or Hannah Goodwin?”

  Mickey frowned. He twitched his nose, but a slight film of perspiration meant that his heavy glasses slipped back to their previous position almost immediately.

  “They lived a long, long time ago,” Colin expounded. “Georgie Parr was a comedian who worked in the theatre before this one, and Hannah, she died, right here.” He pointed downwards. “Under the pier. Can you see them, Mickey?”

  The old attendant took a deep breath, sank back in his deckchair and then, to Colin’s horror, began to weep quietly, his body shaking in time with his sobs.