by Robert Lock
He dashed along the corridor, too exhausted to shout, or even speak. Simply forcing his legs into motion took all his willpower, and when, with less than ten feet to go, Sammy watched the ladder begin to slide back up into the black rectangle of the trapdoor, its final rungs lingering just beyond his outstretched hand as though mocking his desperate lunge, and the trapdoor slammed shut above him, the comedian collapsed. A searing pain in his chest danced down his left arm, while the name of the boy whose pumps he had committed to the boiling tar echoed through his failing mind.
Ten feet above the prone comedian Mickey Braithwaite pushed the solid oak desk at which Taffy had once sat — fingers poised over the radio dials like a concert pianist about to begin — so that it rested on the trapdoor. Then, because Mickey was a thorough and diligent man, he piled the entire contents of the room on top of the desk, ensuring that the resulting heap was stable and would not fall away if anyone were to attempt to open the trapdoor from below.
Satisfied with this final execution of his duties, Mickey clambered out onto the flat section of roof where once he had watched the starlings plait together a vision of the future. He looked up, but the sky was obscured by plumes of smoke carrying glowing flecks of the pier away into the night. Mickey hesitated, disorientated by the smoke and the crackling fire. Was this the pier, or was it the smouldering remains of the Salvation Army building? Were the birds chittering and dancing beyond the grey clouds? Where had the protective wall of sandbags gone? Where were Mitch and Norman? Where was his steel helmet with OC painted on it?
“I’m coming,” the deckchair attendant whispered.
He clambered onto the ledge at the end of which had once been attached a meteorological box. Mickey remembered the ledge, every inch of it, because Mitch had always sent him to check the thermometer and the air pressure, so the sheer drop to one side, all the way down to the black waves, did not worry him in the slightest. He scampered along the ledge, reached a sloping section of the theatre roof, slid down it, then walked across another flat section and climbed down the metal ladder fixed to the wall of the theatre. He reached the pier’s decking just as one of the dressing room windows shattered, allowing a tongue of flame to curl out and up, as though the fire were tasting the outer skin of the theatre.
Without looking back Mickey Braithwaite headed off down the pier towards the resort. He knew he would be the last person to do so, and this made him very sad, but at the same time immensely proud. Was there anyone who had known the pier longer or more intimately than him, after all? They had both been well aware for a long time that this night was coming, long enough to find reconciliation, perhaps even joy, in its outcome, but this did not stop Mickey from weeping every step of his route back to the promenade, or prevent the gentlest of tremors from oscillating back and forth along the length of the pier, like the shiver of a resurgent memory. He heard the first sirens wailing along the promenade, but Mickey knew there was nothing the firemen could do now but contain the fire and prevent it spreading to the town, not when they found that someone had sabotaged the water pipes which led to the end of the pier. They would have to sacrifice the pier for the greater good, like the amputation of a limb in order to save the life of the patient. Mickey understood the necessity of this act; throughout his life, and particularly in wartime, he had witnessed how atrocities could not only be committed but also excused when prompted by a moral imperative. He was also aware that there was a cleansing quality to the fire, a rebalancing, a symmetry that resonated deep within him, and yet he could find no comfort in any of this knowledge. All the deckchair attendant could hope for was the reconciliation he sensed lay within an ending, no matter how brutal its cause.
***
More fire engines had arrived, a cordon had been established around the pier’s entrance, and six hoses, illuminated by portable lighting rigs, played over the section of pier closest to the promenade, cooling and shielding it from the inferno which raged out on the water. Mickey stood at the railing with a growing crowd of bystanders, many of whom were either taking photographs or videoing the pier’s destruction. His gaze never shifted from the flames, which were reflected in the thick lenses of his spectacles, consuming his vision. The PIER THEATRE sign tilted, then crashed down, swallowed in a pile of burning debris. Across the baroque sea he heard a series of off-key wails as the sun lounge’s organ was consumed; it would serve, Mickey concluded, as a lament for the man he had lured into the theatre and condemned to death for his sure and certain absolution, the man whose body would now be little more than the blackened, twisted thing that had briefly stalked Bella’s dreams. Sammy Samuels had needed to die in order to prevent history repeating itself, and by breaking this pattern also grant a long-awaited release to others still bound to the pier. Mickey knew that somehow, by hammer blow or other implement of creation, the pier had been imbued with a soul, and that it too was now liberated from the ocean’s grasp, freed to ride the west wind for as long as it should wish to carry it.
His steady gaze was distracted by a small group of people standing on the beach. A man, a woman and a child, their details silhouetted and hidden by the fire, but Mickey could see the girl’s wayward fair hair swaying gently in the breeze; it was also possible to discern that they were all holding hands. Mickey waved, and the girl waved back.
“We can go now,” Mickey said.
Murmuration
The blue-and-white police tape shivered in a strengthening wind. How meagre a demarcation it was, and yet no one crossed its boundary, no one questioned its authority, because they all knew what lay beyond the tape: the remains of two men, caged within the twisted skeleton of the pier. One a comedian, who had been blessed with the ability to create laughter and yet found precious little joy in life, the other a deckchair attendant whose astonishing vision had caused him so much inner turmoil and yet somehow still managed to find delight in almost everything. And as he leaned on the promenade railing, his hands grasping its cast iron with a vehemence that spoke of both love and a suspicion that relinquishing that grip would cause the railing, the promenade, perhaps the entire resort, to vanish, Colin Draper was forced to acknowledge his own part in this tragedy.
Why, for example, had he manipulated Mickey so recklessly, in effect carrying out a potentially disastrous psychological experiment in his obsessive search for the truth behind George and Hannah’s deaths? And why had he been so stupid as to think that by pointing out the parallels between Sammy and George’s actions he could have prevented anything? Samuels, like most people, regarded history as a completely separate world, whose influence on the present was negligible and whose inhabitants were nothing more than dust and echoes. It was only by careful study, the building of a detailed picture, an archive, from many sources, that these people could live again in all their vibrant, bumbling, hopeful, flawed richness. Then they could speak across the decades, or even centuries. Only then. Unless, like Mickey Braithwaite, you were not really of one age or another, but more a conduit linking several together, able to see further than most but denied understanding because its weight would prove unsupportable. And was that such a gift?
“It looks worse than it did on the telly.”
Colin glanced to his left and saw a young couple standing at the railing. He had not heard them approach, and it was only when the girl spoke that their presence registered.
“How can it look worse?” The young man said incredulously. “It’s a pile of scrap on a beach… it looks exactly the same.”
“No, no, I don’t mean like that.” She paused, attempting to formulate the phrase which would best explain how she felt. “On the news it’s just a story, isn’t it? You know, like it could be a film or something, but when you see it right in front of you then you know it’s for real.”
“So you thought it was just a special effect before?”
She thumped his arm. “No, you wanker, it’s just… different.”
“A pile of scrap’s a pile of scrap, Donna. The gippos’ll
have that away in no time.”
“You really don’t give a monkey’s, do you? That comedian you like died in that fire, you know.”
“Who?”
“Sammy Samuels.”
“Shit! Did he?”
She sighed. “Weren’t you watching?”
“Not really. Shit. Sammy Samuels? We went to see him on my stag weekend. He was fucking hilarious.”
“And Mickey Braithwaite,” Colin heard himself add. He did not want these two young people to leave the resort thinking that the fire had claimed only one victim.
The man turned to look at Colin. “Who was he, mate?”
“He looked after the deckchairs on the pier. He was very old. He’d worked on the pier since the war.”
“They found his body then?”
Colin looked back to the knotted girders and spars which were all that remained of the theatre. “No, but he’s missing. Everyone else who worked on the pier has been accounted for, but Mickey’s gone. He must be somewhere in amongst all that.”
The young woman grimaced. “That’s horrible. Come on, Lee, I don’t want to stop here if there’s a body.”
“Spoilsport. I want to watch the cops pull it out.”
“He was a friend of mine,” Colin said quietly, still looking out towards the theatre.
“Oh, sorry, mate, no offence.” He gestured in the direction of the town with a tilt of his head to one side, raising his eyebrows to indicate to the girl that they should go. “Come on, it’s three shots for a fiver before seven o’clock. See you later, mate. Sorry about your friend.”
“Thank you. Have a nice evening.”
The man and woman had only been gone for perhaps ten minutes when Colin heard a great chattering in the air above him. Looking up into the evening sky he saw a vast cloud of starlings pass overhead, low enough to be able to hear their numberless wings rustling like the pages of a book caught by the wind. The birds swooped over the still-smouldering remains of the theatre, arced up into the sky, their flimsy bodies shifting, now solid, now translucent, in a final elegiac pattern, and then they were gone.
Acknowledgments
My thanks go to Mrs Evans, my English teacher at secondary school who went way beyond the call of duty marking and editing my first attempts at writing, to my parents for their patience and understanding during the years when I was busy collecting rejection letters, and to Lauren, Imogen, Tom and the team at Legend Press for all their encouragement and support.
COME VISIT US AT
WWW.LEGENDPRESS.CO.UK
FOLLOW US
@LEGEND_PRESS