The Gran Tour

by Ben Aitken

  3

  Why aren’t you in bed?

  I write a list on my napkin of things I want to do on my birthday. I write down ‘lap of town’ and ‘dinner with Alan’. Then I leave the hotel and head down Castle Road. Some of the houses on this road – tall Victorian or Georgian jobs – would fetch millions elsewhere. Sash windows and columned porches; pediments and porticos: they remind me, at a stretch, of the streets around Victoria in London, or around the seafront in Brighton. Once upon a time, you would’ve needed a fair bit of money to own a house like this in Scarborough. You would’ve needed to be flogging a fair amount of donkey rides. Now most of them look vacant, knackered and unwanted. One’s for sale for 60 grand.

  At the end of Quay Street, I ask a lone fisherman what’s being caught around here these days.

  ‘Nothing anymore. Not since the fish went missing.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘What comes in nowadays comes from over Norway way.’

  ‘What you doing now then?’

  ‘I’m bringing my pots in.’

  ‘Of course you are.’ Of course he is. ‘Why are you doing that?’

  ‘To see if there’s owt in ’em.’

  I leave the man to it and continue along South Bay, still pretty much clueless as to the state of the local fishing scene. The fish went missing, now they’re over Norway way, and yet he’s bringing his pots in to see if there’s owt in ’em. This is why people Google things.7

  I enter an entertainment venue called The Spa and ask the girl on the box-office what she reckons of Scarborough. She says she used to live in Manchester and Leeds but is happier here. She says that, rightly or wrongly, here’s where she’s from. She says that some people can’t put their finger on where they’re from but she can. She says that the people she loves and the people that love her are concentrated in this town, by this sea, among these streets and below those moors, and that’s just the way it is. I ask what she’d do if she had one day in Scarborough, hoping for some inspiration. ‘I’d walk my dog,’ she says.

  Having no dog to walk, I climb through the Italian Gardens and up to Esplanade Crescent. The latter is some street. The stone tenements are five stories high. They put me in mind of Edinburgh and the old (sorry, older) residential streets south of the centre, around the Dalkeith Road, where the likes of Hume and Hobbs and Walter Scott did their thinking and scribbling, their pipe-smoking and pipe-dreaming, and were aided in their efforts by fifth floor servants, whose liberty to think and scribble was reliably compromised by their obligation to serve, but so it goes. I sit on a bench facing the sea, my back to the emphatic Victorian terrace, and think: I could live here, with or without love. Then I get a text from my mum. Parents remember first. ‘Happy birthday darling xx hope your balls drop.’ Presumably an awkward bingo reference.

  I return to the town centre and then head north-west on Dean Road. As I do, my girlfriend calls to tell me she’s going to stop being a teaching assistant and start being an artist. I tell her to think seriously about what that would do to our finances. ‘We’ll be the poorest couple in England, Meg. Think about it. Somebody has to put the sourdough on the table.’ But she’s resolved. She’s going to be a painter first, and something else second, rather than the other way around. At the end of the call, I don’t tell her I love her, because she knows I do. By the same logic, she doesn’t mention my birthday, because she knows I know it’s my birthday. That or she’s forgotten.

  ‘Oh, by the way,’ I say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s half-term next week, right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Do you want to go on holiday to St Ives?’

  ‘Would it just be the two of us?’

  ‘No, it would be a Shearings holiday.’

  ‘In which case, okay then.’

  I find North Bay. It’s twilight now. There’s a golf course up on the cliff. A pair of gentlemen, presumably unmarried and insane, are persisting with illuminous balls. The promenade stretches south for a mile, then turns left toward the castle and my hotel, which for now is a vague smudge in the distance. The tide is out, and on the flat, hard sand, owners exercise what’s theirs – balls are flung and kicked for children and pets. There are a range of colourful beach huts – orange and green and yellow, somehow still glowing in the dusk. Inside one such hut, a couple sit entwined under rugs, a pair of low dogs peeping out from between their feet. I think of Larkin’s couple at Arundel. What survives of us is love.

  An upward path takes me to the North Cloisters, a lofty run of stone enclosures, a place to come and sit and contemplate the view, half-sheltered from the weather. Writing is on the wall. Support is pledged in dark pen – to the nation, the region, the town, this or that cause. Someone has written: ‘Every piece of meat begins with an animal begging for its life.’ Beneath this, someone else (at least, I presume it was someone else) has written: ‘Bacon – yum!’ The stone surface is a veritable message board, a forum of competing leanings, a chatroom of public pledges – evidence of the various directions in which emotion can travel, the various ways passion can take. To my mind, much of what’s written isn’t meant, not really, not fully. Were you to bring any pair of on-paper adversaries up here and sit them down in front of the sea, perhaps under a rug with a flask of tea, like that pair in the hut, I’d be surprised if they so much as raised their voices. Sure, they might not get on like French and Saunders, but they wouldn’t be unkind to each other. I don’t think so. From a distance it’s hard to see what connects us, but up close it’s easy.

  Call me easily pleased, but to my mind there’s nothing like walking in a new town, with no plan other than to run an eye over the place. For others, there are plenty of things like walking in a new town, plenty of humdrum unremarkable things, like ironing shirts or cutting the grass, because for them there’s nothing in it, no promise, no prospect, no dividend, but for me it can afford a pleasure like – if not like nothing else, then like few other things. Going about a new town, I am both restful and engaged; at once at ease and on edge – on the edge of novelty, drama, distress, beauty, history. I lose my sense of self (which is mostly a boring and bothersome sense, unduly predominant, reliably dull) and gain, in its stead, a sense of place, of place and people, of other and else, of here and hereafter, of besides and instead. I am lightened by the weight of it all, for the more novelty, the less me. And if the town’s by the sea, all the better, for then a salty wind will whip me further, and offer a timeless prospect to mull over and chew on. Towns. Bloody wonderful things really.

  Alan used to get hit by a slipper. I shouldn’t have asked. He was trying to eat a chicken wing to start and I just came out and asked what he remembers about being a boy. ‘I used to get hit by a slipper. That’s what I remember. Other than that, not a great deal. I was the youngest. Not expected to amount to much. Not relied upon. It can weigh you down not being bothered with. You start to drag your heels. And once you’ve dragged your heels for 30 years, believe me, you know about it.’

  He excuses himself. I’d say he’s gone to wash his hands, given the chicken wings, but I can’t be sure. I order the cod and the espresso Martini cheesecake. Alan returns with two pints of lager.

  ‘It’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow,’ he says.

  ‘Yeah, and you’ll be having dinner with me, Alan.’

  ‘Would you remind me? In the morning. In case I forget.’

  ‘Have you got her something?’

  ‘There was a lovely cake in York I saw. In a bakery. It was heart shaped.’

  ‘I’m sure she’ll like that.’

  ‘No I didn’t buy it. I took a photo of it. I’ll send it tomorrow.’

  ‘I expect she’ll be delighted with that.’

  ‘Why, have you got your Megan something?’

  ‘I haven’t actually.’

  ‘So stop telling me how to suck eggs.’

  Not having a clue what Alan means by this, I ask him how he met his second wife. ‘I met her in the pub. W
e were both working there. This was after the iron foundry closed – early 90s. She was a chef, you see, at the pub, a cook. It just sort of happened.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘As I say, it just sort of happened.’

  I don’t reckon it did just sort of happen, I reckon there was more to it than that, but I also reckon I’m not going to get any more out of Alan on the subject. I reckon he’d rather talk about anything under the sun – cookbooks, soap operas, the menstrual cycle – than how he fell in love. Then, to my surprise, he says:

  ‘I used to go in with the orders. At first I’d just say what it was, haddock and chips, pie and mash, and clear off. Then I started taking longer to tell her. That’s how it happened.’

  I go out to see what Scarborough gets up to of an evening. My first port of call is The Sun Inn on St Thomas Street. I drink a pint at the bar, where I get talking to two lads. You’d call them geezers where I’m from – in their twenties, athletically dressed, forthcoming. I tell them I’m on holiday. They’re fine with this – tolerant. I tell them I’m on holiday with people much older than me – they’re fine with this also, encouraging even. I tell them I think Scarborough’s nice – they’re not fine with this. ‘Nice and shit, you mean,’ they say in unison.

  Because it’s my birthday, and I’m feeling buoyant and risqué, I buy a packet of cigarettes from the One Stop on Newborough. I light up outside the shop. There’s a group of boys hanging around the entrance, in the way that boys of a certain age and inclination will. They’re not lads or geezers, or oiks or yobs, just boys on bikes that think it’s their civic duty to offer a remark to anyone entering or leaving the shop. As a way of killing time, I can see its appeal. I hate to say it, but the boy nominated to remark on my exit from the shop won’t be getting the Nobel Prize for Originality. ‘Gis a fag,’ he says. Because I’m feeling a bit like Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas morning, when he orders the biggest turkey and gives Bob Cratchit a pay rise, I hold out the pack and tell him to help himself. The boy takes four or five – one for each of his girlfriends, he says – then asks if I’m a policeman. I assure the boy – let’s call him Tim – that I am no such man. He doesn’t believe me. I tell him I write books, which he seems to believe even less than I’m not a policeman.

  ‘Write books?’ he says, ‘What’s man saying?’

  But then his friend says, ‘Nah mate, people do do that.’

  Tiny Tim wants my name, says he’s gonna Google me, and if there ain’t no books to my name he’s gonna … gonna not finish his sentence, presumably. I tell him my name. He Googles me.

  ‘Man writes books,’ he says, and I think I’m off the hook, but then he adds, ‘Don’t mean you can’t be a policeman, though.’

  The good sense one demonstrates and articulates when sober – ‘just a couple’, ‘I know my limit’ – is no longer operational when not. There’s a crucial line, a trip wire, two and a half pints thick. You think the line’s a long way off and then, bang, you’re straddling the damn thing. A drunk person has little respect for – and often little recollection of – their sober self. Alcohol is a retardant, it slows you down, distorts your operating system, trips the circuitry that you depend on to live a civilised and law-abiding life. All this is to say: I know where I am, I know I’ve crossed the line, I know I’m in The Lord Rosebery ordering my fifth pint of the evening.

  My night peaked outside One Stop. I can see that now. I liked those boys – rascals though they were. I should have pinched their cheeks and polished their faces with spittle and a hanky, then turned on my heel and gone back to the hotel, where I might have had a cheeky nightcap with Alan, or Paul and his doughnuts, or some other kindly person, and with that nightcap some cheerful chit-chat until the barman called last orders at 11, which he does because he knows that 11 is enough, that 11 is good for us, that the best way to liberate someone is to subject them to limits. That’s what I should have done. Instead I headed up Westborough to The Lord Rosebery, whose clients must rank as some of the most spirited in Yorkshire, especially one lady, a committed apostle of Malbec, who, when I mention it’s my birthday, buys me an Archers and lemonade, calls me a policeman, then tells me to go to Bacchus. I do what I’m told, but when I get to Bacchus it’s closed, so I follow a man called Archibald (who is just as thirsty for the extending caress of alcohol and the company of anyone) to a place called Marley’s off the Albion Road, where I buy him a large Chardonnay and he reads my palm, and then to a nightclub called L’amour, which is inexcusably awful, and then to a casino on St Thomas Street, where it takes me two hours and several more pints to lose five quid. When I get back to the hotel, I can’t get in. The door’s locked. The night porter’s asleep in the lounge. I knock on the window. We talk through the glass.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘To come in.’

  ‘Do you have a room here?’

  ‘No, I just thought I’d pop over to say hi.’

  ‘What number?’

  ‘312.’

  ‘Why aren’t you in bed?’

  ‘It’s my birthday.’

  ‘For f*ck’s sake.’

  7 Back in the day, tuna was the prize catch locally. Or tunny, as they called it. In 1930 Lorenzo Mitchell-Henry landed a tunny weighing 250 kilograms. The fish was a tourist attraction. It was exhibited and people paid to take a peep. The tunnies gradually realised that they were better off snacking elsewhere, and not a single one was caught in British or Irish waters for 50 years. Then Alan Glanville, 76 and Irish and retired, bought a rod on a whim and slung his hook, hoping for a nibble at worst or a perch at best. With his first cast, he hauled in a whopping bluefin tuna, which he swapped for about £30,000. It’s considered one of the great angling stories of all time. After making his catch, Alan had this to say: ‘I think it’s all downhill from here.’ In my book, Alan is a positive role model for elders around the world. Any septuagenarians not catching fish bigger than cupboards might want to take a look at themselves.

  4

  I’m the right side of 80, she says – 81

  I wake up at 12.15pm. I was meant to be in reception by 9.15am for the excursion to Whitby, which is said to be one of the finest small harbour towns in the solar system, and also where Dracula came from. He used to fish herring. With his teeth. His false teeth. He’d stick them on the end of his line. Instead of bait. That’s what I dreamt.

  Of course I feel bad. Doubly. Bad as in ‘Oh my goodness, it hurts when I blink’. And bad as in ‘For heaven’s sake, what am I like?’ The first type of badness is the easiest to address. The second type doesn’t respond to paracetamol, and in the long run is arguably more damaging. The first is a feeling, an ouch. The second is a solidifying truth – that I’m a liability, a loose cannon, a sad clown.

  I walk down Castle Road then take a left on Queen Street, taking deep meaningful breaths to reboot my hippocampus. I buy painkillers on St Nicholas Street then return to Westborough – the main pedestrianised drag – in order to visit the local Waterstones, where I hope to find something soothing and palliative to take away. The first thing that grabs my attention is a book called How it Works: The Grandparent. After flicking through the book’s 50-odd pages, I can say with some confidence that it wasn’t written by a grandparent. The various characters featured in the book don’t understand basic medical science, only eat pills and tablets, can’t operate a television set, have nothing better to do than redecorate the house each year, have spent their children’s inheritance redecorating the house each year, moan a lot, drink a lot and are only good for one thing – babysitting. I turn my nose up.8

  In the middle of the shop two dozen bestsellers have been squashed together to form an overachieving book ghetto. Stephen Fry is here, with his guide to the Greek myths. I expect the story of Tithonus is in there somewhere. Tithonus was the bloke who was granted immortality but who forgot to specify that he wanted to be sexually resplendent forever, not older and older and older forever. That Tithonus pays for his
life extension with personal decay might serve as a warning. You don’t need me to tell you that people are generally living longer these days, and you also don’t need me to tell you that if the pensionable chunk of a society continues to increase relative to the working-age chunk of a society, with the result that there’s less money to pay bigger bills, then you’ve got something that might loosely be described as an issue on your hands. The solution isn’t obvious. Ask ten people how they would resolve the dilemma and you’ll probably get ten different responses. Anthony Trollope, in The Fixed Period, a short story of 1860-something, satirically suggested that the answer was to kill off all men at 67 with chloroform, while Kurt Vonnegut fictionally suggested that the answer was one in, two out. For my part, I think all retirement should be part-time. Monday to Thursday, retirees can do whatever the hell they like, while Friday through Sunday they should be out fishing for tuna. Either way, I walk out of the shop not with Stephen’s myths or that enlightened yarn about the pill-popping serial decorators, but, instead, The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober by Catherine Gray.

  I go into a bakery a few doors down – Cooplands – and ask the girl what’s peculiar to the area. She points to her colleague and says, ‘She is.’ I take away a curd tart, which I enjoy walking Friargate, Market Way, Eastborough – all excellent streets. Then I walk The Bolts, Leading Post Street, Dog and Duck Lane, and decide I’d have those three in Portsmouth as well. I climb the latter now, dogless and duckless, up towards the church and the castle, turning often to watch the sun call it a day. Scarborough, I’ve come to see, or come to feel, is a pain in the neck – every few steps it gives a fresh scene to turn for, stoop for, put one’s neck out for.