by Graham Joyce
“It’s just had its day. The holiday resort is living on borrowed time, too. People don’t want all this anymore.”
By “all this” I knew she meant Abdul-Shazam, Luca Valletti, and dancing girls performing jaded routines in clapped-out variety clubs. She meant the holidaying habits of the industrialized working classes. She meant a way of life that had reached the end of its commercial utility. These were the last days of working culture, ended not through earthquake or tidal wave or volcanic eruption but through the obstinate ticking of the cash register.
We went to a pub and had chicken-and-chips in a basket. I asked Nikki about her future in dancing. I wanted to hear about her next career step, her plans, her dreams. She took off her dark glasses, folded them, and put them on the table next to her chicken in a basket. Then she took a sip of lager.
“I don’t know. This sort of work is dying out, too. I’m going to have to do something else.”
“But there must be better work.”
“And the better you have to be. If you’re really good you could work in the big London shows.”
“But you are really good.”
The skin around her eyes crinkled when she smiled. I wondered how old she was. I figured she was about twenty-five but I didn’t want to ask. “You know nowt about it.”
“I know what I see onstage.”
“So who are the good dancers? Go on! Out of me, Gail, Rebecca, and Debbie. Who is good and who isn’t?”
“Gail is pretty shit.”
“Gail is classically trained.”
“Really?”
“Really. Though in a way you’re right. She’s got no sexiness.”
Not compared to you, is what I thought.
“There is work,” she said, “if you want to take your top off and show your tits to Arab oil sheiks. There are also cruise ships. I don’t really want to do that, either. But I’m never going to be a top dancer and I got used to that idea a while ago.” There was sadness in that. She was a bird with a broken wing.
Some middle-aged men at a table nearby were eavesdropping. They were utterly fascinated by her. Why wouldn’t they be? She was stunning to look at and here she was talking about dancing topless in front of Arab millionaires. I could tell they thought she was wasted on me. I felt their envy and lust. They were like lions in a sawdust pit who had surrendered to the whip. I didn’t give a damn. They could gnaw on their own livers as far as I was concerned. I could afford to feel superior, so when she offered to buy me another drink I held up my glass in salute of the staring men before draining it. They all looked away. I wanted them to hate me.
After lunch we decided to go onto the pier, and as we came out of the pub a man nodded at me briefly and passed us by. I knew him from somewhere but I couldn’t place him.
Once on the pier we strolled past a small arcade of fizzing, pinging, gurgling slot machines. There was a glass case with an upper-body manikin of a lady fortune-teller. Zorena. It was an impressive name for a fortune-teller. Better than Rosa. Sadly Zorena looked like Punch, but with a dark veil over her head. The paint on her hands was peeling, in front of which were spread a few playing cards: aces and queens.
I felt oddly fascinated by it. I was sure I’d seen one of these before. Nikki saw me staring at the thing.
“Give me a coin,” she said, and I fumbled in my pocket.
Some tinkly music struck up and the dummy was underlit with weak yellow light. Zorena rocked and whirred and her flaking mechanical hands made a pass across the cards. There was actually a tape recording of some wise words, but it was so distorted and muffled we couldn’t make out what was said. When it stopped, a card spat out of a slot.
Nikki grabbed it and showed it to me. Know thy elf. The print mechanism had lost its S. We both laughed, but the laughter was won from very different places. Nikki wanted another coin and the machine spat out a second card. Choo e your future wi ely.
“There you are,” Nikki said.
As if by contract we walked the boards all the way to the end of the pier, where in grander times passengers would be loaded on or off pleasure steamers. We leaned easily against the rails looking far out to sea. Nikki turned the conversation to my own future. She asked me what I would do with my life. I wanted to say to her that my immediate ambition was to avoid having my arms and legs broken. Instead I told her some cock about going into journalism or copywriting or teaching, none of which I’d seriously entertained as a career for more than a few moments.
“Journalism? Do you get to go around the world breaking big stories?”
“I guess.” That was the fantasy anyway.
“You could take me with you.”
I laughed. Not because of what she’d said but because of what a great time I was having just being with her. She looked at me strangely. Perhaps she was offended, but I was distracted because in that moment I suddenly realized who the man was outside the pub. I remembered where I’d seen him before. It was at the National Front meeting. He was the second man Colin had introduced me to, the oily-haired man called Talbot, John Talbot.
Nikki sighed.
“What?” I asked.
“You. There’s always something else going on inside your head. You’re never fully there. Or here.”
“Is that true?”
“Oh yes, it is. You’ve got a noisy inner life.”
“Have I?”
“If a woman waved at you with a barn door, what would you do?”
I didn’t know what she meant and I said so. Then she turned away and started to wander back up the pier. I was about to follow her when I was distracted by the sound of a motorboat cutting across the water.
It was a dazzling white power launch, about twenty-five foot, cruising the shallows at low throttle and turning in a wide arc as it approached the pier. Behind it trailed a frothy wake, rolling from its rudder like silvery earth from a plowshare. I couldn’t make out who was at the wheel but a man stood on the deck looking toward me. I was struck by his strange posture. He stood at a right angle to the line of the boat, looking over the gunwale at the pier. His feet were planted together and one hand seemed to grip his lapel. His chin was raised and he stared right at me.
As the boat approached the pier my heart scraped. It was the man in the blue suit I’d hallucinated when I’d almost fallen from the roof of the theater, the man I’d seen on the beach with the little boy. He wasn’t holding his lapel at all: He had a rope coiled over his shoulder. Though the light made a shadow play of his gray features there was no mistaking that familiar jaw. Worse than that was the awful confirmation in the shadow of his face. Even though the sun shone full on him and should have lit him like a stage spotlight, his face was gray, blue-gray, smoky even. As if his face was made of smoke.
He held a rope coiled over his shoulder and he was coming for me. Another shiver of revulsion went through me. I felt cold, lonely, and very small. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I had never before known what it meant to quake. I felt my heart ice over.
The man gazed right at me with what can only be described as a menacing grin. I gripped the rails of the pier, leaning out to get a better look at him, willing the light to reveal that I was mistaken. But just as easily as the boat had cruised in, it followed the clean line of its arc and the man, still gazing at me and holding his rope, was taken away again. I watched the boat complete its turn and go deep out to sea. A man in a dark blue suit, in a boat, in the sun, in the bay of Skegness.
There was a coin-operated binoculars mounted on a stand. I swung it round to follow the boat and though I fumbled in my pockets I didn’t have the right coin. By the time the boat had diminished to a dot far out to sea, Nikki had returned to find me. “Are you okay?” she said.
“I’ve been here before,” I said.
“What? Like déjà vu?”
“Yes. No. I mean literally. I stood here. Exactly in this spot. I held his hand.”
“Who?”
I couldn’t bring myself to say
it. “I was here when I was a little boy. I stood here. Right here. I’d forgotten. But now I remember it.”
The pupils of her dark brown eyes dilated as she searched my features. There was a frown line on her forehead, like an omega. If I was pale or if my hands were still trembling, she didn’t see it.
“I’m okay,” I said. “Someone just walked over my grave.”
Oddly that banal phrase made her feel reassured. Whatever it was that had just happened, those six words made it all right, made everything proportionate. Just to show her I was okay I linked arms with her and nudged her toward the other side of the arcade. The cash machines and winking lights of the games arcade made everything normal again.
An elderly couple asked if we would take their picture, which we did. Then as we made our way back down the length of the pier, Nikki drew up by another one of those absurd glass cases. Inside this one was not a fortune-teller but a manikin of a jolly jack-tar sailor, its face painted with an evil smile, like an early-period ventriloquist’s dummy.
“Do you remember these from when you were a kid?” she said. “These are great! Another coin, please.”
This time I found the right coin and she dropped it into the machine. The mechanism rumbled. The manikin’s shoulders began to shake and its arms moved. Then a recording of muffled laughter bubbled up from within the bowels of the machine. We stood and watched the manikin howl and laugh, as if we were both five-year-olds. But the laughter seemed to have a nasty edge that cut against the sea air. I don’t know how long the thing went on for.
“I suppose we’d better get back to that fucking place,” Nikki said, when the sun started to drop in the sky. The sun was a big golden-red balloon, like something you take home from the funfair. She grabbed my wrist. “Can we get some sandwiches and a drink and just go to the dunes for an hour before we go back?” She was like a child begging for an extra hour of play.
I said, “Sure.”
We strolled along the beach and she suggested we find a place in the deep dunes. I started to feel uneasy about the dunes so I suggested we sit on the pebbles, but she insisted we go deeper into the spiky marram grass and the hills of sand. It was still hot. She said she wanted to get some sunbathing in. I gave in.
As soon as we settled down, she wriggled out of her skirt and took her top off. “You don’t mind, do you? I want to get some air to my body.”
I assured her that I didn’t mind. She lay on her back with her hands behind her head. I sat down near enough to her but with a couple of feet of distance between us. I felt too agitated to lie back. I opened a can of cola and it frothed over. The spray went onto her midriff. She wiped her flat belly with a tanned, elegant finger and sucked her finger to clean it.
With the heat diminishing by the second, the day had distilled itself into a wonderful calm, even if inside I was fighting my own inexplicable anxieties. Were I not still troubled by the apparition of the man in the boat, I would have said it was a moment of paradise. We could hear the sea, gone far out now, rhythmically sucking at the sand. I had to force myself not to scan the dune hills. I had this idea that I would see a boy and his father there. Finally I forced myself to lay back with my tormented thoughts, and I thought Nikki had gone to sleep.
I felt a finger trace my neck. I opened my eyes.
“Ladybug,” she said. “Look, they’re everywhere.”
She had one on her arm, too, so I flicked it off. I lay back again but Nikki flopped lazily on her side and reached out a hand toward me. At first she rested her hand on my thigh and then she moved her hand to cup my genitals. I felt a jolt inside my jeans. I gasped.
Yes, she was beautiful. Yes, she was sexy. She was extraordinary. But I had to stop it. I wasn’t ready to stop thinking about Terri. It was ridiculous: It hadn’t gone anywhere with Terri, but I was still obsessed.
I knew what I should do. I should speak to Terri and remind her that she was married and tell her straight up that I didn’t want the complication. It was the right and decent thing to do. I could honestly say to Terri that nothing had happened with anyone else and that I’d made a moral decision about her situation, and after that the way would be clear with Nikki.
That was what I should do.
I lifted Nikki’s hands from my balls.
“What’s wrong with it?” Nikki said.
“Look, Nikki, there’s someone else.”
“Who?”
I shook my head.
“Is it a man?”
“God, no!” I said.
Then Nikki screamed, right in my face. She pulled her T-shirt on, scrambled to her feet, and stormed over the dunes and ran toward the beach. I waited for a while and then decided to go after her.
She stood on the sand in her T-shirt and knickers with her back to me. Her arms were folded and she appeared to be gazing out to sea. With the tide out and the sun dropping behind us, her lonely figure cast a long shadow across the sand. I didn’t say anything, just stood abreast of her, gazing out to sea.
“I could have any man back at that resort,” she said. “Any man. I know it. That’s not being vain. I just know it. I would only have to point at one of them. So why is it I pick the one man I can’t have? Why is it? I always do it. Always. Something in me sees that I can’t have this or that one, and that becomes the one I want. If I can have them I don’t want them; if I can’t have them I want them. Who are you seeing?”
“I can’t tell you … just yet. I want to get it sorted out.”
“Oh? Well, I think I know anyway.”
“Really? Who?”
“Never mind.”
“Go on.”
“No.”
“Please tell me,” I said.
“You don’t want to say. I don’t want to say. Let’s nobody say.”
I looked hard at her. I couldn’t tell whether she was just playing games or if she had seen something that had suggested it was Terri.
She sighed. “Oh, come on. Let’s walk back to the resort.”
She linked her arm in mine and we walked along the sand back to our workplace.
“Anyway,” she said when we got back to the gate, “I had a great day.”
“Me, too,” I said.
We kissed briefly. Somehow in that moment I popped my tongue inside her mouth. She drew back and shook her head minutely, as if she didn’t understand me.
She wasn’t the only one.
10
THINGS THAT COULD GET ONE EVICTED FROM THE MAGIC CIRCLE
Before turning in to the theater the next morning I made my way over to the canteen for breakfast. It was hard going. The ladybugs that had been bothering us for a couple of days had begun swarming in the hot air. They pinged at my face as I walked across the yard. One flew in my mouth and I had to spit it out. I could see holidaymakers batting them away with the flat of their hands. What had been a nuisance was becoming a plague. It was a relief to get to the canteen and shut the door on them.
The ladybugs were the talk of the breakfast tables. No one had seen a swarm like this before. Someone said there was a plague of hoverflies one year. Another declared that it was happening because the greenflies were plentiful that season and the ladybugs fed on greenflies. A third reported that it was caused by the drought and the ladybugs were coming to the coast looking for water. I had no wisdom about ladybugs to contribute to this vigorous debate.
After finishing my breakfast I cleared away my plates, stashed my tray, and headed over to the theater. The ladybug blizzard had gotten even worse. If anyone was out and about, they were running. On my way to the theater I passed by reception and one of the office secretaries opened a window and said that I had a call.
My first thought was that it was from home. I had an idea that my stepdad would call at some point and tell me that Mum was sick or would find some other way to pressure me into coming home. I picked up the receiver and pressed the earpiece to my ear.
“All right, son?”
“Oh! Hello, Colin.” Of course
, Colin would know my exact moves. He would know exactly what time I would pass by the offices on the way to the morning briefing. This was all surveillance.
“Anything I should know, son?”
“No, I don’t think so.” One of the secretaries was eavesdropping, so I moved away as far as I could and turned my back.
“What does that mean? You don’t think so.”
“It means nothing to report.”
“Right. You all right for everything?”
With Colin it was like speaking in code. “What do you mean?”
“Are you short for a few quid? I’ll get it to you if you’re short.”
“No, no, I’m fine.”
“Good lad.”
“Where are you right now?”
“I’m around. I ain’t allowed on the resort.”
“Colin.”
“What?”
“If I see her out, am I to buy her a coffee or whatever?”
There was a long pause. “You can buy her a coffee. But not a drink.”
“Okay. I’ve got to go to work now, Colin.”
“Right.”
I put the receiver back on its cradle. The secretary looked at me and compressed her lips.
When I got to the theater Pinky and Tony were hastily revising the program.
“What’s it like out there?” Pinky asked.
“You couldn’t cut it with a knife,” I told them.
We were scheduled to organize a Swimming Gala around the pool. “Can’t do it in this,” Tony said with finality. “Right, let’s get ’em all in the ballroom. We’ll have another fuckin’ magic show.”
“Right,” Pinky said. “Another fuckin’ magic show.”
“We need,” Tony said, “someone to jog up to the pool to see if there’s anyone hanging about. Bring ’em all down to the ballroom.”
“I’m not going out there!” Nobby shouted. “Have you seen out there? It’s like a biblical fuckin’ epidemic out there is what it is. A fuckin’ biblical fuckin’ plague I mean. Cecil B. DeMille, without the toads. Four horsemen of the fuckin’ ladybugs. That’s right. Apopolypse. No, what is it? Apocalypse. I open my mouth to speak and ten ladybugs fly in.”