Lee Rourke - Vulgar Things

‘Is that it? Is that all there is?’

‘Yes. Mr Michaels instructed me that he’d keep paying by direct debit, until you arrived to pick this up. He stressed that no one else should be allowed in here under any circumstances. Even if they said they had a key …’

‘Oh, right …’

I walk over to the envelope and pick it up, the bones cracking in my knees, each pop amplified by the size of the empty room. The envelope feels empty, but it’s sealed and my name is on the front, so there must be something in it. I look at my name, printed in his handwriting — my full name, including my two middle names.

‘Right … Thanks.’

‘Whatever it is, good luck … He went to all this trouble, so it must be something important.’

‘Yes, I hope so.’

I sense he wants me to open the envelope but I walk out of the room, forcing him to lock up behind me and follow me down to the main desk. I sign some further papers and then bid farewell. I hold the envelope close to my chest; I don’t want the wind to steal it from me. I hold it tightly, walking back to Royal Terrace, which overlooks the estuary. I get the feeling I’m being watched all the way back.

I sit at the same bench, the pier below me, the vast blue sky stretching from left to right, and out over to the docks in Kent. Vapour trails cross it, creating a canvas, a unique piece of art-in-progress. There’s a container ship just behind the pier; I can’t hear its engines as I’m too far away, but I know they’re there nonetheless. I mark its journey, millimetre by millimetre, the envelope in my hands, eager to open it but putting it off. It feels strange sitting here again, on the bench, overlooking the daily progress of the estuary, the island to my right, just hidden by the trees on the cliff gardens in the distance. Ordinarily I’d be at my desk in London listening to Jane and Jessica’s prattle, editing the proofs of some journal or other. It feels funny: the strange feeling when life suddenly takes an unexpected turn.

The envelope is in my hands; the container ship is now parallel with me, it feels like it’s taken an age to get here; up above an airliner cuts a diagonal streak of vapour thirty-seven thousand feet up. I look at the envelope and carefully begin to open it. I look at the cheque in my hands. It’s made payable to me, Jonathan Michaels. I look at the amount a couple of times before it registers with me. It’s a cheque for one hundred thousand pounds. From Uncle Rey to me. I sit here on the bench unable to move, for a good hour or so, I think, the cheque in my hands, before I get up and make my way down the cliff footpath, past those thronging around the hotel and towards the esplanade and the entrance to the pier.

a kind of shuffle

From where I’m standing, up above the pier entrance, by the Palace Hotel, the entire pier looks empty. I lean on my stick, looking out along its full length. I take this as a good sign: the empty walkway, the lack of people. It seems right that I should venture it alone, the whole pier, the mile or so of it stretching out into the estuary. As I’m considering I notice a girl walk up to the ticket office at the main entrance to the pier. She pays her fee and walks out onto the planks of wood. I rush forward, down Pier Hill towards the ticket office at the main gate. It takes me some time to cross the road, as the traffic is bad and no one seems capable of slowing down enough to allow me to walk over to the other side, so I wait for the lights to change and then dash over to the main entrance. I look up along the pier. I can see her, she’s about two hundred yards ahead of me now, walking up to the end of the pier.

I hand the man in the ticket office some money after explaining to him that I just want to walk to the end and back again, and not catch the small train. He looks at me without smiling and hands me my change.

‘Through the gate.’

‘Thanks.’

I step onto the pier. I can see her up ahead; I follow discreetly, looking back from time to time at the widening landscape, Southend in all its ragged finery. The sky also widens out here, in all directions, and I begin to feel minute beneath it. She’s walking much slower than I am, so I slow down, I don’t want to catch her up. It’s best I keep a safe distance, so that I can observe her, so that I don’t seem a threat to her. There’s no one else on the pier, so I don’t want to frighten her, or for her to think I’m some kind of predator, out looking for lone women.

I remember Uncle Rey telling me all about Southend Pier. He loved it out here, when the ‘sky was grey’ and the ‘wind was up’ — when everyone else was ‘tucked-up inside’ away from the elements. He always said something like: ‘A man could get lost out here. You walk all this way out here, beneath the sky, and there’s nothing to do at the end of it. Sums this place up.’ He was right, too. At least that’s how it seems to me now.

Apparently, the cottages scattered along the shoreline were mainly occupied by fishermen and farmers. I look back at the same shoreline and it kind of sickens me, not that I’m in any way nostalgic for a past I’ve never known. But I feel like I need to accelerate away from it, Southend, the past, the present, a possible future. I just want to keep walking away from it all, following this girl for as long as I can. I check my pocket for the cheque. It’s still there: I push it deeper into my pocket. I’m still dazed by the amount. I’m effectively rich; I can pretty much do what I want — within reason. I look up at the sky, at the seagulls gathering above the pier, hanging in the air above me. Further out, towards the horizon, the oil tankers and container ships are motionless, it seems, the murky Thames holding them there. I follow the sky down towards them, the power stations of Kent in the distance. They’re moving, I can see that now. There it is, wait — yes, there it is. I can hear them, that familiar rumble, their engines pushing them ahead, forward.

The pier was initially built by three men, Uncle Rey used to say, which is hard for me to imagine standing on it today, looking at the immensity of it all. A carpenter, an engineer, and a labourer, each of them working where and when they could, going on pure instinct, with no real ‘plans’ to speak of, just a desire to build, outwards, away from the land. Work began later on the ‘new’ iron pier, the one I’m standing on, designed by James Brunlees. It was built, Rey said, alongside its wooden predecessor, as if out of respect. It’s a magnificent structure, supported by a series of cast-iron screw piles, each extending 12 feet into the foreshore, each column spaced 30 feet longitudinally and 9 feet laterally. The thought makes me smile. The sky widens around me with each of my steps, as though infinite space is revealing itself to me; it feels like I can see and feel everything hurtling through space and time, the feeling broken only when my eyes return to the girl in front of me, the elongated sway of her arse leading me on. I feel like she’s hypnotising me with each step. I keep a good distance still, enough to go on observing her, a good 10 to 15 metres now, just close enough to see what she’s wearing, the colour of her hair, what she’s doing. She’s looking down into her phone, ignoring the view, completely oblivious to her surroundings. It looks like she’s texting someone, though she could be on Twitter, or Facebook. In any case, she doesn’t look up to see where she is going. It’s as if she is on some form of monorail, part of the structure of the pier, just moving along effortlessly, part of the mechanism. She relaxes me, so I carry on walking behind her as if it’s the most natural thing to do, like she’s the furthest thing from my mind, like all of this isn’t really happening. Every so often a seagull will swoop down and hover alongside me, just out of reach, one of its beady eyes on me, in the hope that I might throw it some food, like the tourists do. But I don’t have anything to give, I just feel like holding out my stick for it, like a perch, to see if it will land, but I don’t do it. I don’t want to draw attention to myself. I don’t want to startle her, so I allow the seagulls to go about their business, ignoring them as much as I can. I concentrate on the girl. I like the way she walks. It’s the first thing that strikes me about her: a kind of shuffle, her feet barely lifting up off the planks, head down, hands up, holding on to her phone. The sway of her hips and arse, gentle and soothing, side to side.