by Jonathan Lee
“Surfer John?”
“No! The maybe-detective.”
“Oh.”
“He thinks about surveillance while he’s doing the deed.”
“Yuck.”
“Don’t judge me, Frey-Hey. It’s him who’s the sicko. He sleeps most days ’til around two in the afternoon. Then he wakes up for another wankathon.”
Freya wiggled her toes between pebbles at this unpleasant thought, then resolved to put her shoes back on. “And he’s up early today because…”
“Because,” Susie said, “he’s become so proficient at surveillance that he can’t shake the sense that he himself is being watched.”
“Good detail,” Freya said. She was impressed.
They agreed the maybe-detective was in Brighton on holiday. They agreed he couldn’t shake off the idea that he was being watched. They agreed he couldn’t get any privacy and it was stressing him out. The world was intruding on him at night—noises, nightmares. John fell off his board and they started laughing.
“In the mornings detective man is all over the place.”
“In the mornings he can barely walk! Look at him. He blatantly forgot to put his belt on.”
Into the pinpoint world of Freya’s imagination came a detailed image of the absent belt: thick brown leather with a complicated buckle. It was lying on the floor of the man’s hotel room, a place further back from the beachfront. Mini white plastic kettle. Iron that stains your shirts. Brown-and-green carpet in a diamond pattern. Type of place she and her dad stayed for a while when he split from her mum and the year in America ended. Then she started picturing Surfer John in the hotel room instead. This proved to be distracting.
“What do you think of John’s trainers?” Susie said. He’d left them, together with a small rucksack, a stone’s throw from their chosen position.
Gulls had arrived. They were studying the sea. Freya shrugged. “They look fine. Pretty average trainers, if you ask me.”
“Huh,” Susie said.
Freya turned to confirm that this “huh” was a “huh” of disapproval, which it was. She looked at Susie’s hands. They were in her lap, unmoving. Ordinarily Susie’s hands were in motion, gesticulating desperately while she explained the extent of some little-known injustice in El Salvador or Israel, or worrying at the wooden beads on her necklace as she panicked about whether a boy liked her or not. Today her beads caught the sun and sent milky spots of light up into the shadowy area under her jaw. She managed always to look misplaced.
“OK,” Freya said. “Forget about his trainers.”
“An African kid,” Susie said, her voice suddenly raw. “That’s who makes that brand. A sweatshop.”
“Is that definitely a fact, Sooz?”
Susie raised a wispy orange eyebrow. The limits of knowledge in its strictest sense rarely marked the confines of their conversations. When they were in people-watching mode it was all about how much detail you could apply to a life before it crumbled; how plausibly you could deform people’s histories. “We can make a guess,” Susie said. “We can guess that, like most branded trainers, they are made by children overseas.”
Here it was again: her habit of rushing her attention to stories of exploitation, as if the words themselves were a form of emergency aid.
“I didn’t buy John’s trainers,” Freya said.
“But you buy other ones.”
“So do you.”
“Plimsolls.”
“Sweatshops.”
“Made in Northamptonshire! In nice places!”
“The manufacturing isn’t down to me, Sooz. It’s not my problem.”
“Whose problem is it, then, Frey-Hey? Your tennis shoes. Those nice heels you wear to work?”
“I don’t know.”
“Exactly,” Susie said, and shook her head as if she’d won.
“So you basically asked me about his trainers as—what?—a kind of trap?”
“That’s ridiculous,” Susie said.
“A trap so that you could say that I represent some kind of Western ignorance?”
“Maybe you do,” Susie said.
“Because I buy shoes?”
“It’s an idea.”
“Because I don’t ask the girl in Coast Sports a hundred questions before I get myself some trainers for running, or a swimsuit for swimming?”
“It’s an idea.”
It was an idea. An annoying one. Freya let it drift out to sea. She focused on the sight of Surfer John catching the crest of a wave. It was a small wave, and his balance didn’t last that long, but for an instant he was serene.
She loved the moment when waves broke, the moment when the walls of turquoise grew toppings of white foam that spread along their length and hung, bubbling in the air, as the wave curled itself into a forward roll. She loved seeing water crashing against the West Pier, its delicate legs. She thought John must love these moments too. It seemed wasteful, somehow, that they hadn’t spoken about it.
“Do you ever think about your mum?” Susie said.
“What?”
“Your mum.”
She hesitated. Motivations. “No.”
“Whatever. Just asking.”
Freya shut her eyes. “If I’m ever a parent, Sooz, I’m going to remember that the only rule, basically, is that you shouldn’t take sides. You shouldn’t say stuff about the other parent. Our cleaner says—”
“You have a cleaner?”
“Yeah.”
“How much do you pay her?”
“I don’t know. That’s not…It’s Sandra from the hotel, she only comes once a fortnight.”
“Interesting.”
“Sooz, cleaning’s what she does.”
“Through choice?”
Freya sighed a deliberately heavy sigh. “I’m not a receptionist through choice. We’re not forcing her. And what I was going to say about my mum is that—”
“You are not forcing her.”
She tried to unpack this, find the trick in it. “That what I said.”
“Huh.”
Freya picked up a large stone. A big seagull waddled towards the maybe-detective and flew off with his doughnut wrapper. Suddenly the only thing all the other seagulls wanted was that exact doughnut wrapper. She turned the stone over in her hand.
“Look,” Susie said, “I’ve got something to ask you.”
“What?”
“You know I said about that protest?”
“What protest?”
“Outside the hotel, when Thatcher arrives.”
“You didn’t tell me about any protest.”
“I did. I fully did. But anyway, they won’t let us in the hotel, obviously. We’re protesters. It’s them against us. So there’s a limit to what we can do. But I was thinking you’d be perfectly placed to, like, get involved…”
“What are you after, Sooz?”
A pause. “Stink bomb.”
“What?”
“Something like that, anyway. Shake things up a bit. Show her how we all feel about her. That her policies, that her attitude—”
“Stinks.”
“Yes!” Susie said. She looked astonished that her message had got through.
“But I’m not even sure I think that,” Freya said.
Susie shook her head and lay back on the stones. The joy seemed to fly right out of her. “Pathetic,” she said to the sky. “I knew you wouldn’t do it.”
One of the reasons why Susie wasn’t in Freya’s Top Five Friends anymore—why a couple of people Freya never really saw at all had managed to edge Susie out—was that she never fucking listened. Her inattentiveness turned your worries into insignificant trifles, things which floated free of reality. Susie prided herself on being honest and open about everything, confronting issues other people would prefer to keep below the surface, on doing lots of stuff for charitable and political causes, on nothing she did being for herself, but when she grew silent it was a tactical silence, it served her needs. Every little ges
ture was intended to have an effect on other people. Silent like she’d been over the trainer comment. Silent like she’d been when Freya had gone to Sally Lander’s party even though they were supposed to hate Sally Lander. Silent like she’d been when Freya had asked Sarah to be the one friend who joined her and Moose on a camping holiday in the Lake District two summers ago.
Suspicious of beaches, Susie was. Unimpressed by oceans. It was an attitude which seemed at odds with her membership of Greenpeace, but, there you go, that was Susie. She thought anything picturesque was frivolous. She was always asking Freya why she wore lipstick on nights out. Like many people who felt that their talents were under-acknowledged, Susie spent a lot of time looking at her watch.
“You’re annoyed with me,” Susie said.
“No.”
“You’re always annoyed with me these days. I’ve left, like, six messages at the hotel these last few weeks. I even saw you, last Monday, disappearing into the kitchen, and I asked Karen whatserface, the one with the dead sister—”
“Brother.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It probably does to her.”
“To see if you had two minutes for a talk or anything, and she came back from going to find you and said—one hundred per cent lying—that you weren’t working today. And why would she even say that?”
Freya didn’t respond to this. There were things in her life, small fractions of the whole, that she chose never to look at. It was easy. She did it all the time. She heard herself saying, “I’ve got to go.”
“But we were going to hang out.” A stitch of grief had sewn itself between Susie’s eyes.
“Yeah, well. I’ve got this date tonight, and another shift before then.”
“Someone’s taking you for a big dinner?”
“Yep,” Freya said, though the date was just another invention. “While the African kids starve.”
“You’re mocking me,” Susie said. “I never said you shouldn’t eat.”
“But it’s what you don’t say, isn’t it?”
“That’s the same with anyone! You could accuse anyone of that!”
“Sooz, did it ever occur to you that it’s not a very nice thing to do to my dad, to try and disrupt them all when they’re staying at the hotel? I mean, why not focus on the Conference Centre?”
“If you’re a real friend you’ll do it. You’ll think of the bigger picture.”
“But this whole thing, it’s important to him. It’s his chance to get promoted, feel good about himself.”
“And what isn’t? What isn’t important, Freya? The government? The Prime Minister? The way this country is going? The unemployment and the money wasted on sham wars and the massive divide between rich and poor and all the fancy people in London and then people without any food up north and striking miners and the total lack of interest in trying to soothe the racial tensions in our community, or solve unemployment?” She was getting shouty. Her hands were flapping and her freckles were blurring. “If those are cool enough reasons.”
“OK, whatever. If you want my dad to lose his job, go ahead.”
“The protests are going to be massive,” Susie said. The words came with the engineered airiness that told you they were a threat. But then, in a more natural voice: “So you should probably let him know, or something. You know, security. It’ll be peaceful. They’re only talking about some chanting and a prank to get publicity.”
With each word Susie’s confidence seemed to wane. Freya said nothing. Surfer John was coming out of the water. He was carrying his surfboard under one arm. He didn’t seem to feel the weight of it at all. His hair was dripping. His wetsuit was shining. He flicked the hair out of his eyes.
“Hey,” he said, smiling. “How’s it going?”
“Not bad,” Susie said.
“Yeah,” Freya said.
The sunlight made John’s cheekbones look nicer than usual. His hair seemed blonder, his eyelashes darker. He was breathing slowly. “Cool,” he said. “See you guys later, then.” He retrieved his bag and shoes.
“Look,” Susie said, “we’ll mainly be outside the Conference Centre, anyway. You know, on the day Thatcher speaks. The singer from the Angelic Upstarts might be coming. And they’re letting us use songs from the Two Million Voices album? And the guitarist from that Belfast band, Stiff Little Fingers, he might be there too.”
“Nice,” Freya said.
“Our group. The Collective of the Discontented. It’s basically an alliance between a lot of smaller liberal and socialist groups who are depressed by what they’re seeing. I mean, it affects all of us. Bad things will happen, my dad says, if we don’t shift this country away from the right.”
Freya shifted slightly to the left. The palm of her right hand hurt from the stones.
“And you need to take the public with you,” Susie continued. “It has to be a change from within. Which is why we’re collaborating with these musicians, and this new Paul Weller thing called Red Wedge. The idea is that rock people, bands, who want to get Labour into power, are collaborating with grass-roots organisations to do that. A cultural—they call it a cultural revolution. Though the problem with Weller, my dad says, is that he seems too much like a working-class boy made good, like pursuing individual success and achievement, which is, you know, what’s portrayed as a Thatcherite success story…”
“Yeah,” Freya said.
“You could join us?”
“Hmm.”
“You could come along now, to this planning meeting for the protest.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Thatcher wants to privatise everything, Frey-Hey. She wants to privatise people. Brigid says she’s so obsessed with this, like, this dependency culture—”
“Who’s Brigid?”
“—that she can’t see what she’s doing. Nobody’s saying she’s evil. OK, some people. But the results of what she’s doing are most definitely bad. She thinks everyone is responsible only for themselves, and that’s that, the only kind of rule there is. No community. No society! Everyone separate! That’s a sucky way to live. Don’t you see?”
“Maybe we are separate,” Freya said. She wasn’t arguing. She was trying to think it through. “Maybe it’s fine sometimes to back down on a point, or not care, or be separate from others?” She hated this feeling, the sensation of trying and failing to get her arms around something big. The way political opinions seemed always to be expressed with a total sureness of tone. The way that sureness was at odds with every true thought she’d ever had.
“You’re so wrong,” Susie said. “You’re just wrong.”
“About what?” Freya said, but no answer came. She watched her friend standing up, her long legs unfolding awkwardly, the motion bringing to mind the setting up of an ironing board, Sandra the Cleaner, Sundays, steam rising from her father’s shirts. She listened to the sound of Susie’s plimsolls crunching loud and then soft across the rocks.
She looked out at the water and thought of Surfer John. Imagined him still there, paddling. She thought about whether Susie might sometimes have a point.
For a while, it had seemed something would happen with John. He liked to tease her about the fact her surname was Finch and also about the fact that, on account of her having worked in the hotel during various summers, she was senior to him and other part-time student staff.
“Freya Finch, you’re at the top of the pecking order,” he’d say.
And then: “To be in your position must be quite a birden?”
And also: “You are aviary talented receptionist.”
And often: “Honestly, I’m not trying to ruffle your feathers.”
He knew his lines were lame and that knowledge, together with his toned arms and the idea he might be kind, was what had first drawn her towards him.
Their timing was off, though. The rhythm, the sequencing, that elusive whatever. Nights where they’d bump into each other in the pub and stand drinking and laughing, him touching h
er shoulder during an anecdote and never anything more, letting the crucial moment slide away into a semi-awkward goodbye, which was among the better ways a thing could end.
—
She and Karen were in the lobby talking about a low-on-laughs sitcom called Bottle Boys when two people came down the staircase, carrying bags. It took a moment for Freya to see that this was Roy Walsh and another, shorter man. Freya said hi to both of them. Roy said hi back. Karen smiled. The shorter man, older, touched his moustache and glanced away.
“How’s your stay been?” Freya said.
“Oh,” Roy said. “Been great.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. It’s a beautiful place you have there. Really beautiful.”
You could see in his eyes that he wasn’t lying. An appreciation of the picturesque. Those eyes were more complex than the eyes of boys her age. A greater amount of noticing. She looked again at the other man—maybe he was a mute?—and thought about what Roy had said when he checked in: “Work with a bit of pleasure, I hope.”
Brighton…Pleasure…A single guy checking in alone and appearing now on the staircase with another man, blushing…The way she’d thought there was a spark of attraction that first time at the front desk, but had seen it die away so quickly.
God, it was obvious. Roy Walsh was blatantly gay.
“So you’re checking out?” Freya said.
“No no,” said Roy. “We’re just running a couple of errands.”
She looked at the bag he was carrying and at the bag the older man was carrying.
“Maybe we’ll catch you later on,” Roy said, and something in his eyes introduced a crackle of doubt again. Bisexuality was a thing she’d heard about. Maybe he was bisexual. It must be nice, good, maybe even much better, to pick a person rather than a gender.
When the men had gone she tried to continue the conversation with Karen, but it had lost most of its energy.
6
His daughter found him in the drying room, trying to establish the veracity of a reported rodent sighting. He was also trying, more half-heartedly, to locate among the laundry Mrs. Anton’s lost pearl earring. Being down here made you long for open air, but in the open air it had been drizzling all morning. The coastline had fizzed up like a badly tuned TV. He hated how quickly guests blamed the cleaners for missing items. Did they think there was a nightclub in town where all the cleaner-robbers gathered, wearing just one earring each? Wearing just one stolen sock, and waving around that important piece of mislaid paper that the guest just happened to have left crumpled up right next to the waste-paper basket?