Murmuration

by Robert Lock

  “Oh, Mickey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  Mickey Braithwaite looked at the archivist, and the torment laid bare in his eyes not only shocked Colin but also made him fearful for his own safety. He had always regarded the deckchair attendant as a harmless eccentric with mental incapacities which were, in certain areas, compensated by a rare, even unique, insight; what he had just seen was rage, pure, unadulterated rage, and though he sensed it was not directed primarily at him, Colin suspected that he could well be swept up in some all-consuming outburst if these emotions ever breached whatever defences Mickey had put in place to contain them.

  “I don’t want to see anything else!” Mickey cried. “I don’t want to see anything! I saw what the birds were telling me and so I rescued Ma, but they didn’t say anything about Mrs Tyler. Why didn’t they say anything about her? What had Mrs Tyler done wrong that she had to be blown to bits? My ma was all in one piece and all I found of Mrs Tyler was her arm and they were in the Sally Army doing the same thing ten minutes before.” The deckchair attendant wiped his nose with the back of his fingers. “If I’d told everybody to get out that would have been a miracle but I didn’t, did I? I just told my ma because that’s all I saw, so really it was my fault all those ladies died, not Fucking Adolf. Mrs Tyler was right there in front of me all in one piece and I never said anything and then the bomb came down and afterwards all that was left was her arm. I never thought about anything but rescuing my ma… all those other ladies died and they said it was a miracle, but how could it be? How could it be, Mr Draper?”

  “You saved another girl too,” Colin said quietly.

  Mickey sat forward in his deckchair. For a moment his mouth moved, as though speaking silently. Only after this brief phantom sentence did anything audible begin. “Another? There was just my ma—”

  “No,” Colin corrected, “a younger girl heard you talking to your mother… to your ma, and she decided to get out of the Sally Army building as well before the bomb dropped, so you saved her too, Mickey, without even knowing you’d saved her. And a few years later that same girl became a midwife… a sort of nurse who helps ladies have their babies, you know? Well anyway, when I was being born it wasn’t happening right, and this girl saved my life, so really you saved me as well.” A thought came to him, an extrapolation of his last sentence. “And I bet she saved lots more babies as well as me, so you saved all of them too. You see, Mickey? You didn’t just save your ma that night, you saved lots of people, including me.”

  A light aircraft droned overhead, drawing the deckchair attendant’s eyes upwards in a reflex action so ingrained it was as much a character trait as his spectacle-adjusting nose twitch.

  “Cessna 172,” he declared, before popping the last piece of ice cream cone in his mouth and standing up. “Time to start packing up now, Mr Draper. Thank you very much for my ice cream.”

  The archivist managed a weak smile. He hoped a little of what he had said had registered, because what he had seen during Mickey’s moment of disclosure, when Colin’s persistence had broken through a crust of ingenuousness to reveal the magma of self-recrimination and anguish bubbling beneath, was a life forever compromised, pulled this way and that by the dilemmas posed by his unearthly powers. Would a keener intellect have been better able to cope with Mickey’s premonitions, and the decisions that they demanded? Colin thought not. Such deliberations and intellectualising would only end up going round in circles, whereas a gut response was the only appropriate action. Colin could not think of anyone better qualified to have these gifts bestowed on them, but he did not envy the deckchair attendant, not for a moment.

  “You’re welcome,” he replied. “Thank you for talking to me. It’s helped put things in perspective.” The archivist manoeuvred his bulk out of the deckchair and stretched his weary bones. “I suppose it is time to go home.”

  Mickey half-turned, apparently on the point of leaving, then suddenly turned back to face Colin, drew up neatly to attention and gave him an impeccable, crisply executed salute. “They’re all waiting for us, Mr Draper,” he said simply, the tone of his voice implying some deep and abiding consolation. Then he turned again, away from the reassuring mass of the theatre, and headed off down the pier, a mystical figure in the evening light; hair aglow, ticket machine glinting, a figure that paused as a small group of starlings flew past, and tracked their business-like direction, before setting off once more as soon as the birds were safely settled on the roof of a booth.

  Colin thought of the dirty plates and cups waiting for him in the bungalow. Before their discussion the post-funeral detritus had seemed like a callous reminder of his loneliness and loss, but now it was simply a chore to be completed. Mickey had somehow waved his magic wand over them, drawing their sting, and for the life of him the archivist could not explain how he had done it.

  As for George Parr and Hannah Goodwin, Colin had no idea whether the deckchair attendant knew anything about the events of a hundred years ago. There was a part of him, the chronicler, the assiduous gatherer of detail, the archivist, that felt disappointed by his failure to unlock the mystery of George and Hannah’s deaths. Mickey Braithwaite had, however, demonstrated how extraordinarily high the cost of such knowledge could sometimes be, perhaps even at the risk of losing one’s grip on reality, so there was another part of him that recognised and accepted this cautionary footnote bound up in certain secrets. Yes, perhaps the answers were out there somewhere, but could he be sure they offered enlightenment or merely confusion?

  Colin began to walk back towards the promenade, his scuffed shoes finding consolation in the weathered boards as they carried him safely back over the unfathomable sea. It was then that the archivist realised the pier was the perfect metaphor for civilisation and everything it represented, lifting humanity above the chaos which boiled and churned not so far beneath. And the pier was also a bridge, linking solid ground, the prosaic and understandable, to an entirely different realm, one of delicacy and magic. George and Hannah had crossed this bridge, as had his mother. As must we all.

  Today

  The West Wind

  The west wind has returned, and the gulls cry welcome to its enduring songs. It knows the resort, as it once knew the dunes and marshland that existed before the resort, and the warm shallow sea that covered the coast long, long before the dunes and marshland. In time it will know whatever is to come after the resort. But the wind is immortal, so there will be no record of its understanding, for what are stories if not an attempt to outwit death? Yet if the wind is content to play, there are others whose greatest purpose is to document and preserve. They write their own rhythms on the wind’s transparent pages in a shifting, swaying, shimmering form of calligraphy, a beguiling language within whose ebb and flow lies the resort’s history. And who can they be, these peerless narrators? Why, the starlings, of course.

  TV’s Very Own

  “Why did my wife cross the road?”

  A robust, masculine cheer went up in the theatre as the audience recognised one of the comedian’s old, oft-repeated jokes. He paced the stage, question posed, his erratic movements leaving the spotlight behind. Thrown into shadow, one arm illuminated, Sammy Samuels was as though fallen from a dream. He paused, and the beam caught up and glistened once more off his evangelist sweat. He draped one arm over the microphone stand and thrust his head out towards the audience.

  “Hey, never mind why she crossed the road… what was she doing out of the fucking kitchen?”

  Laughter, from men who knew the line and shared the sentiment, but this was a thin, early season audience and their timing was out. They weren’t giving Sammy the space to hone his act, pissing him off even more than their coughs and farts and frequent trips to the toilet. The offbeat crashing of the waves against the stanchions below broke up what remained of the theatre’s rhythm, leaving everyone unsure of their role.

  “Yeah, well, there isn’t a lot of point my wife being in the kitchen anyway, she’s a
shit cook,” Sammy continued. “She says she doesn’t need any of those poncey cookbooks, she just uses her own rule: if it’s brown it’s cooked, if it’s black it’s fucked. She’s started experimenting with those foreign foods now. The other night she said to me, ‘I’m going to make one of those coq au vins,’ but I said the only coq au vin I’m interested in is if I’m shagging some bird in me Transit!”

  Smoke from the cigarette in a tin ashtray curled and looped around the four working light bulbs and two blown ones. A tatty-edged poster advertising last year’s end-of-pier summer show depicted Sammy in his trademark Hawaiian shirt, pointing thumb up index finger out, the way children turn their hand into a gun. The pockmarks on his cheeks had been airbrushed out and a cartoon glint on his teeth added. The show’s other acts were positioned around him, smaller photos, smaller captions, as Sammy had demanded.

  He peered into the mirror and was gratified to see a profound absence in the pale grey, bloodshot eyes staring back at him. As a boy Samuel Rosenberg had made friends easily due to a knack for remembering jokes, coupled with an innate sense of timing in their telling, but even then he cared little for these schoolmates aside from the gratification of their laughter. Their games were dull, and their own attempts at humour seemed to consist largely of how loudly they could fart. His brother David, eight years older and groomed by their parents from an early age as heir apparent to the family’s law firm, treated his younger sibling with a condescending arrogance that infuriated Samuel. It was like having two fathers in the house, constantly pointing out his shortcomings and offering advice on every aspect of his life. His switch to Sammy Samuels when setting out on the club circuit was ostensibly to provide him with a more poster-friendly name, but the real joy he derived from it was the effect it had on his father and brother, who were both appalled at what they regarded as a betrayal, not only of the family but also of his Jewishness. Contact became increasingly sporadic, particularly after his television breakthrough, which resulted in a hectic diary of appearances and shows designed by his then agent to make him a ‘household name’. When Sammy appeared on the Royal Variety Performance he sent a telegram to David that read If only I’d listened to you and Dad.

  He picked up the cigarette and took a long drag. Still holding it between his fingers, Samuels pulled down the skin below one eye: he saw pale pink, capillaries, some yellow round things.

  “Are you alright?”

  Sammy jumped. “Shit!” He turned from the mirror to see David Clark, the pier manager, leaning round the door. “Ever thought of knocking?”

  “It was open.”

  The comedian studied the cigarette between his fingers. “So that’s an invitation to just barge in, is it? Hoping to catch old Sammy doing something he shouldn’t be, hmm? A quick Jodrell after the show? I get somebody else to do that for me, pal.”

  “I didn’t wish to know that,” David replied. His checked shirt was too tight, making him look fatter than he really was. A hankie protruded from one pocket of his jeans. “Is there something wrong with your eye?”

  Sammy glared at the younger man. “Would it make any difference if I said there was? If I said I couldn’t go on, do the show without me, it’s terminal, I’ve got two weeks to live. You’d still expect me up on that fucking stage, wouldn’t you? How many seasons have I done here? Who do the punters keep coming back to see? Sammy Samuels!” He threw his arms wide, like some flamboyant compere announcing the top of the bill. “TV’s very own, star of stage and screen, like it says on the poster.” He laughed disparagingly. “When I did the Royal Variety Performance I never thought I’d end up in a shit-hole like this.”

  The pier manager looked away from his star act’s compassionless eyes. David remembered the 70s footage of Sammy on stage at Drury Lane, bowing to the Queen, frilly shirt and lapels flamboyant even for that decade. There was regular television work after the appearance, even talk of his own series, but tastes changed, and vodka provided Samuels with a comfortable refuge from rejection. Alcohol helped his fall from grace, but his own behaviour sealed it, leaving Sammy to coarsen his act and scratch a living from incoherent club turns, drunken rants which the audiences enjoyed because they could witness fame unravelling before them, until too many years had passed and the draw of a collapsing talent turned to apathy. The comedian woke to find himself a cliché, the boozy has-been, and this epiphany was enough to turn him teetotal. Sober, he climbed back onto the lower rungs of showbusiness, but there was something moribund about him now. Former colleagues spoke of lost potential, but David saw only self-delusion and malignant fury.

  “Morecambe and Wise played this ‘shit-hole’,” the pier manager pointed out, “as did Tommy Cooper, and Norman Wisdom, and—”

  Samuels held up his hands in surrender. “Alright, alright, enough already. I get the picture. I should be honoured, right? I should be paying you to work here. That better?”

  David decided not to pursue the matter. “All I wanted to say was there’s a meeting to discuss the season with the MD tomorrow in his office at eleven. He said he wanted you to be there.”

  “Did he now? Did he ask whether I’d got anything on? Whether I was free to come to his meeting?”

  “No. Why, have you?”

  “I might have. Just depends whether I get lucky or not.” Sammy sucked hard on his cigarette and blew smoke in the pier manager’s direction. “I want extra for working on a Sunday.”

  “It’s hardly going to be work. I think Julian’s got a few ideas for acts that he wants to discuss, then he said he’d take us out for lunch.”

  “Fuck me, that’s worrying. What’s he after?”

  David flapped at the cigarette smoke in an effort to dispel it. “I have no idea.”

  “No change there, then.”

  “Ha ha. I did hear a rumour that a couple of the acts from Margate might be moving here, but I haven’t seen any paperwork yet. Whoever it is, I’d appreciate it if you could keep on speaking terms with them for at least a couple of weeks.”

  “Depends whether they’re like the dickheads we had last year, sunshine. I can work with anybody if they know what they’re doing and don’t give me any hassle.” The comic pointed the glowing end of his cigarette at the pier manager. On the other side of the window the iridescence of starlings flashed past like the portal to a more vivid world. “Didn’t you use to run amateur night at the Tavern? Perhaps that’s why we keep ending up with such a bunch of no-hopers.”

  David felt the anger begin to well up, making him flush, stinging his skin. He was annoyed at himself for reacting, knowing that Samuels used his bullying as a force for destabilisation. “I think we ought to be concentrating on making next season a good one, Sammy. Julian’s already told me there’s more money in fairground rides than a theatre.”

  “Smart kid. He’ll go far.”

  “That I don’t doubt, but if everybody spends the entire summer bitching and stabbing each other in the back it’ll be all the excuse he needs to knock this place down and put some bloody rollercoaster up instead. And I happen to think this theatre is something worth saving.”

  “Oh, just listen to yourself, will you?” The comedian ground out his cigarette. “This is nothing but a poxy little theatre on the end of a poxy little pier in the middle of a poxy little has-been… ” He cast around for another suitable adjective. “… shit-hole of a seaside town. You might think we’re on Broadway, but don’t bother trying to convince me, okay?”

  There was a moment’s silence between them. Beneath their feet the sea surged round the Victorian ironwork, sending a tremor through the floorboards. “Just meet me at the EuroEnts office tomorrow at eleven o’clock,” David finally managed, then with the hand which had never left the door frame he pulled himself backwards out of the dressing room like someone saving themselves from an abyss. Sammy noted this act of salvation, derived satisfaction from it and from the trepidation it denoted. He picked up the paper, lit another cigarette, and re-read the small ad he had circ
led, whilst forty feet below him the tide turned, happy to deposit its plastic bottles, condoms, jellyfish, seaweed, and one dead seagull on the drying shingle. Amongst the detritus, however, lay the beautiful curling labyrinth of a broken shell, its destiny to be either crushed under the wheels of a beach patrol Land Rover or picked up by a five-year-old girl, her eye drawn to its laid-bare helix. She would keep it in her jewellery box for the rest of her life and never realise that she loved it so much because the shell, in showing the world its equilibrium and elegance without vanity, was like her.

  Glitterball

  There were no windows in the lap dancing club, only mirrors to give the illusion of size, but the men who came here would not look out even if they could. A platform took pride of place in the centre of the room, illuminated by red spotlights and a rotating glitterball. In the centre of the platform was a gleaming metal pole that acted as the room’s hub, remaining stationary whilst the bar, padded alcoves and reflecting walls all turned in faithless orbit. Cigarette smoke stacked up in spotlit layers, gliding over the expressions of appraisal and assessment.

  Dry ice spurted out from the bottom of a spiral metal staircase, eliciting a cheer from those men who knew its role as overture. Lights dimmed, Madonna began to sing, bottles of beer hung halfway between table and mouth, held in a forgotten trajectory. She descended. High heels, a dancer’s legs, satin mini-skirt, bright white vest which glowed in the ultraviolet striplights, nipples perked up with a quick tweak in the changing room, long straight brown hair that swayed round her pretty face and genuine smile. There was nothing calculating in those brown eyes, which made the least drunk feel a momentary unease, so they concentrated instead on her tits and thighs and arse and found them comforting. She strode round the platform, her arm reaching out, fingers caressing the pole, just in passing; fixing herself, a bearing on which to navigate this dark, thudding, disorientating world.