by Robert Lock
“They do it all the time!” the comedian protested. “It’s just so they can sell more papers. They don’t give a shit about her, they just want to embarrass me.”
The pier manager leaned away from Sammy, as though suddenly appalled by his proximity to him. “You don’t think you’ve done anything wrong, do you?” he said, the revulsion clear in his voice. “You think this is all some plot to make you look bad. Bloody hell, talk about paranoid. You’re going to have to start taking responsibility for your own actions, Sammy. This sort of thing is a clear breach of contract. If Julian wanted to get rid of you you’ve given him the perfect excuse.”
Samuels looked closely at David. Did the pier manager know more about the comedian’s private discussion with Julian than he was letting on? Could he even be in league with the EuroEnts boss? Were the two of them playing some sort of game with him for their own amusement? “What makes you think Julian would want to get rid of me? Why would you say that?”
“Because I know what Julian is like. I know he doesn’t give a shit about this place, and I suspect he has a similarly cavalier attitude to the people who work in it, which includes you, amazing though that may seem, you being the ‘star of the show’ and all. We’re all just chess pieces on a board to him.”
“Yeah,” the comedian countered, “but there’s normally two people playing chess, isn’t there?”
“What?”
“You heard. Strange how you’ve never said a word about Julian wanting to get rid of me before, and then you both come out with the same thing within a few weeks of each other.”
“Julian’s said that to you?”
“Julian’s said that to you?” Sammy repeated, exaggerating the tone of surprise in the pier manager’s voice. “Don’t treat me like a fucking idiot. I know what the two of you are up to.” He tapped the side of his nose. “Well, Sammy’s got one or two things up his sleeve as well, sunshine. You just wait and see. Julian J Walker’s in for a big surprise. My old man didn’t teach me much, but he showed me how to recognise a cunt, because there wasn’t a bigger cunt on the planet than him. Him and that stupid fortune-teller tried to lay some sort of psychological bullshit on me but I saw straight through them, just like I can with you and Julian. First he dangles the old Spanish carrot in front of me and then you come in with your breach of contract bollocks, and I’m supposed to go down on my knees and beg for forgiveness. Well it won’t fucking wash! You won’t get me like that!”
“What the hell are you on about? You’re not making any sense! Spanish carrot?”
“You know! You fucking know!”
The dancers on stage, distracted by the outburst from the stalls, again lost their rhythm and stumbled to a halt. McNeil sprang out of his seat in the front row and turned to see what the disturbance was.
“Could you two gentlemen please find somewhere else to have your argument?” The director pleaded. “These girls are finding it hard enough without you two ranting at each other.”
“Sorry, Paddy,” David said loudly, then turned back to Sammy and continued speaking more quietly. “We need to have a proper discussion about this, because a) I don’t know what the hell you’re on about and b) we need to think of a reason why Julian shouldn’t just cancel the whole bloody season and stick one of his sodding rollercoasters on the end of the pier.”
Sammy, however, was already levering himself upright. “You,” he snapped, screwing up the newspaper and throwing it on the floor, “can go fuck yourself.”
The comedian edged along the row of seats, holding on to the backs of the row in front to help mitigate the dizzying swirl of lights which had flowed down from above the stage to encircle him and form an amalgamated reality, part pole-dancing club, part prostitute’s bedroom, part pier theatre, where Amanda and the prostitute and the dancers blended into some sort of combined uber-eroticised girl. She pirouetted in front of him, this creature of pure carnality, tantalisingly out of reach, her smile gleaming like a beacon in the darkness beyond the red and green blurs. She guided him into the soft harbour of her ever-willing mouth, while also leading him away from the puzzled eyes, up the central aisle and out of the double doors, through the foyer and out, out onto the pier.
While its unquestionable solidity brought some measure of calm to Sammy Samuels’ turmoil, there was a part of him now that welcomed the tumult, found both solace and impetus within it, a freedom that the linear, the cast iron, could never offer. Perhaps, he concluded, if the world was spinning out of control the only way to cope was to follow a similar trajectory.
He weaved and tottered as quickly as he could towards the resort, hoping to be free of the pier’s influence quickly enough so that he could reach his flat, masturbate while the dizziness lasted, and watch enchanted as his ejaculation added a stream of glowing semen to the churning maternal lights.
The Friable Fabric of History
A balding, shambolic figure stepped warily onto the pier, scuffed shoes barely clearing the boards with each step. It appeared their owner distrusted the silver-grey planking, believing it might vanish from beneath him if contact was lost between sole and wood and leave him, like some cartoon character, suspended in mid-air for several seconds — complete with a comedic double-take — before the inevitable plunge to the beach below. Where had this phobia come from? Why did stepping onto the pier now feel like stepping onto a tightrope, when for years its boards had offered nothing but comfort and clemency? Colin suspected the extraordinary vision of Mickey Braithwaite was to blame, which had, as the decades passed, gnawed away at the cosy fabric of his observable world like some sort of slow-release acid, dissolving his-tory’s friable fabric to reveal the chasm beneath. Colin often wondered what the deckchair attendant had done to him on that glassy afternoon more than a quarter of a century ago when, after his mother’s funeral, they had eaten ice cream together on the pier and talked about the sea, and the moon, and the girl whose life Mickey had saved without even knowing it. He honestly believed Mickey had somehow set a psychological corrosive in motion, perhaps by means of a subliminal message, perhaps simply through a coded flash of his spectacles, which had slowly, inexorably, dismantled the pillars upon which the historian had constructed his faith in the observable universe’s ability to supply an answer. Bedevilled by these new uncertainties, Colin took early retirement soon after his sixtieth birthday because, although the archivist in him remained, his indexing and cataloguing had taken on a sandbagging aspect, a somewhat frantic building of barricades against the ever-rising tide released by Mickey Braithwaite. Now he spent his days pottering around the bungalow on Rosemere Crescent, helping out in the local Oxfam shop, and writing what even he admitted was a rather po-faced and overly technical novel set in a Victorian workhouse. And, though what had once been his mother’s bedroom was now a book-lined study, steeped in the musty tranquility which Colin seemed the very manifestation of, there remained several of the touchstones which had punctuated his and Edna’s life together; the clatter of keys in the brass bowl on his return home; the early morning cup of tea during which he would often converse with his absent mother; a tendency to cook enough tea for two; these things endured, like the smallest of echoes, a sort of living archive into which Colin had filed himself.
As for George Parr and Hannah Goodwin, Colin had collated all his notes, together with the Public Records Office documents, the newspaper articles, and a selection of photographs of the resort contemporaneous to the tragic events of 1880, to create a pamphlet which had successfully laid their ghosts to rest. Until yesterday, when he had picked up the evening paper from the hall carpet and seen the headline, with the prostitute’s battered and bruised face looking up at him. In that moment Colin felt not only a surging return of the crusading zeal which had characterised his investigations into the baffling events beneath the pier, but also dismay that history appeared to be repeating itself. The archivist already carried with him a kind of assumed guilt for failing to either exonerate George or provide Hannah wi
th an explanation that would give her at least a modicum of peace. It was intolerable to contemplate failing again, in circumstances so strangely consonant that Colin felt himself being drawn physically back into the nineteenth century, which was why he now found himself stepping once more onto the pier, determined to make amends for previous shortcomings and prevent Sammy Samuels from following Georgie Parr down the same, catastrophic path.
He found it easier to navigate his way along the pier by keeping his eyes fixed firmly on the theatre at its end. This way the planking remained in his peripheral vision and Colin could more or less convince himself that he was on a solid pavement, and not a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old collection of wood and cast iron which tiptoed out into the sea with all the grace and infirmity of a dowager taking her first dip.
Evening sunshine raked long shadows across the pier, which to the former archivist looked like cracks or crevasses to be negotiated, as though the entire structure were coming apart, but he found a modicum of comfort in the unhurried demeanour of the other visitors. If the pier was indeed undergoing some form of silent disintegration then surely they would not be soaking up the last of the sun with quite such equanimity.
He passed the first of the booths with their onion-shaped roofs, both of which were empty and boarded up. Their redundancy saddened him; Colin remembered visiting the pier as a young man and thinking himself so superior to all the tourists who handed over good money to the fortune-teller dispensing her bogus prognostications from this very booth. Madame… What had she been called? He could picture the booth with its red curtains, and the fortune-teller’s disgruntled-looking cat, which seemed to spend most of its time draped along the windowsill, but all he could remember of her were her tiny eyes and huge bosom. Madame? Madame? No. Perhaps it would come, unbidden, at a later date. How he had scoffed at her claim to be able to see into the future! And yet he had never dared take that test himself.
A rather forlorn single row of deckchairs bore the exacting geometrical hand of Mickey Braithwaite, but Colin dismissed the idea that he could possibly still be working on the pier. Mickey would have to have been approaching ninety by now, and even if he was still alive surely the unsentimental accountants at EuroEnts would have pensioned him off long ago. Even so, Colin stopped, braced himself against a lamp post and glanced up and down the pier, on the lookout for that wild mop of white hair and the dazzling reflections from improbably thick spectacles.
Strangely, the moment his shoes touched the slightly darker boards which were set perpendicularly to the ones running the length of the pier, and which delineated the wider section carrying both the theatre, bar and sun lounge, Colin’s vertigo disappeared. Was it the theatre’s reassuring solidity that calmed him, or did the increase in width of the pier take it beyond some dimensional limit of his phobia? Whatever it was, he felt hugely relieved to have reached the darker boards. The first part of his mission had been successfully negotiated.
Colin glanced at his watch. Ivan, the pier theatre’s stage door manager for over thirty years, had suggested when Colin rang him that the best time to catch Sammy Samuels was half an hour before the start of the show, as the comedian was notoriously uncommunicative and preferred to turn up as late as possible in order to avoid having to talk to either fellow performers or theatre staff. Ivan had also warned Colin that Samuels was unlikely to prove particularly welcoming, but the archivist had emphasised the importance of his visit, alluding to recent events without being too specific.
On entering the theatre foyer a young girl behind the ticket desk looked up from her bags of change and addressed Colin. “We’re not open yet.”
“I know,” he replied, “I’m here to see Sammy Samuels. Ivan has sorted it all out.”
“Oh. Right. Do you know where to go?”
Colin smiled. “I used to be the council archivist. I know this pier like the back of my hand.”
Her face registered a moment’s interest. “Oh? Well, best of luck then.”
“Luck?”
“With that arsehole.” The girl suddenly blanched. “I didn’t… You’re not a friend of his, are you? You won’t—”
Colin shook his head and held up both hands in a gesture of reassurance. “No, no, don’t worry. Your secret’s safe with me.”
She smiled again, the sincerity evident this time. “Thanks. My big gob! I’ve only been here a couple of months, I don’t want to get sacked for dissing the stars of the show.” She gestured to her right. “It’s through that door marked private… but you knew that already, didn’t you? Sorry.”
He glanced in the direction of the door, feeling, for one moment, like Theseus about to enter the Labyrinth, with the kiosk girl his Ariadne. “Perhaps I should have brought a ball of thread with me,” he remarked.
She smiled a third time, and now there was uncertainty tightening the curve of her lips, but her relief at escaping censure for her indelicate comment made some sort of response an obligation. “Oh? Well, yes, maybe you should’ve.”
The door opened onto a corridor lined with framed billboards announcing both the stars and support acts from over a hundred years of entertainment on the pier, printed in a cluttered hierarchy of font size and colour. Colin had to suppress an urge to read every one, and perhaps even find Georgie Parr’s name, but he knew full well that he would almost certainly lose his nerve at the first sign of procrastination. What he had to say was controversial, if not defamatory, but it needed to be voiced, no matter what reaction it provoked.
He did not stop.
The corridor stretched out before him, elongating and narrowing to a bright point of light in the distance. His footsteps were silenced by the grimy red carpet, making Colin feel as though he were watching a film with the sound turned down. And even though he tried to focus on the far end of the corridor, certain names shouted from the billboards, ebullient, potent, refusing to be denied — George Robey, Gracie Fields, Arthur Askey, George Formby, Tommy Cooper — they were all there, lining the corridor, applauding as he passed, encouraging Colin to do the right thing.
He eventually reached the fire doors at the far end, pushed one open and stepped down into a gloomy hallway. The bare plastered walls were painted bright yellow, but a grubby fluorescent tube leached all joy from the colour, leaving it merely jaundiced. Through a small window in the wall opposite Colin could see Ivan eating a sandwich in his tiny office, surrounded by signed photographs from performers and acts.
“Hello, Ivan,” Colin said.
The stage door manager looked up. “Mr Draper! Long time no see!”
Colin stepped across to the window. “Indeed it is. Must be ten years.”
“Where does the time go, eh?” Ivan shook his head. He stood up, placed the sandwich back in its plastic box, brushed both hands down the front of his jumper and thrust his right hand through the window to shake hands. “How are you, Mr Draper? You look well.”
“Really?”
“Yeah! You haven’t changed a bit. Few more grey hairs, maybe, but then haven’t we all!”
For a moment Colin, as Ivan was actually speaking, felt both disarmed and flattered by the stage door manager’s opinion, but the cheery assessment had hardly concluded before Colin remembered what a relentlessly optimistic outlook on life Ivan possessed, a trait he had always envied. What he envied even more, however, was Ivan’s treasury of anecdotes concerning practically every star, celebrity, has-been and never-would-be that he had signed in since the 1970s. He had met everyone from Frank Sinatra to Bonnie Langford and could recall some little-known fact or tale about them all, but the stories he told were never malicious or derogatory. As far as Ivan was concerned his role was not only to filter out anyone without the proper credentials from accessing the theatre’s inner workings, but also to do exactly the same thing with any information he received concerning a performer, be they a top of the bill star or a dancer. Colin coveted this vast wealth of confidences but he had tried and failed on many occasions to persuade Ivan to let h
im document his tales, even when he offered to sign a legally binding agreement that none of them would ever be published. ‘It would be a crime to let all those wonderful stories die with you,’ he once said, only for Ivan to reply, ‘Well, I’m not planning on dying just yet, Mr Draper.’
“You’re too kind,” Colin responded, before adding, “I’m alright, I suppose. What about you? Not tempted to call it a day yet?”
“Naw.” He looked round the tiny room, his personal fiefdom. “I wouldn’t know what to do with meself stuck at home.”
Colin nodded. “I know what you mean. When Mum died I wandered round the house like a lost soul for months.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
Colin shrugged. “She’d been ill for a long time. It was probably a relief for her, but she left a big hole.” He looked away from the solicitude in the stage door manager’s rheumy eyes and focused instead on a photograph that had caught his eye. It showed a ventriloquist and his dummy which, with its bright green mohican and studded PVC jacket, was clearly supposed to be a punk. The ventriloquist was looking at the dummy, mouth agape in an exaggerated gesture of shock at its two-fingered salute towards the camera. To Ivan, all the best, Kenny Lomax read the dedication, whilst beneath this was an untidy Piss Off! from Karl, presumably added by the dummy.
“I know what you mean,” Ivan said. “I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of Dad’s stuff for two years after he died. As long as it was there he wasn’t totally gone, d’you know what I mean? In the end I just had to bag it all up and give it to the binmen when they came round. If I’d left it on the doorstep I’d have brought it all back in again. I sort of had to give meself no choice, if that doesn’t sound weird.”
“No,” Colin confirmed, “not at all.”
There was a moment’s awkward silence, as the two men contemplated how the lingering presence of their dead parent had affected them, and how, like an unseen cobweb brushing against your face, that death still had the power to be both gentle and startling.