Lee Rourke - Vulgar Things

‘Sure. Feel free …’

‘Thanks, love.’

With this she sits down opposite me, putting her iced bun and milky tea down. I’m a little perturbed as I just thought she needed the chair; there are other tables she could sit at. I’m in no mood for talking if I’m honest. I just want to sit here, looking out of the window at the sea and trying to think of some sort of plan.

‘You’ve got an injured leg, then?’

‘Pardon?’

‘An injured leg …’

‘What?’

‘The walking stick …’

‘Oh … that … No … I just like it. There’s nothing wrong with me.’

‘Don’t see many young’uns with sticks …’

‘I’m not that young.’

‘You look it.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You here on holiday?’

‘No.’

‘Live here?’

‘No.’

‘I do.’

‘…’

‘Up in Westcliff, above here, with a view of the sky and the sea …’

‘Look, I’m … I really have to be …’

‘Which do you prefer?’

‘I’m sorry, what?’

‘The sky or the sea … Which do you prefer?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Dunno, he says, dunno … You must prefer one over the other?’

‘The sky then.’

‘Me too, day or night?’

‘Listen, I’m sorry, but …’

‘Do you prefer the sky during the day, or the sky during the night?’

‘Up until this week, the day … But now it’s the night.’

‘Me too … It’s much more detailed and beautiful at night, isn’t it? The day sky gets peeled back …’

‘Where I’m staying I have a telescope to look at the stars.’

‘What type?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘A reflector?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, do you look through the end, straight through it, at the bottom? Or is there a lens sticking out of the side, near the top?’

‘There’s a lens, with different lenses that fit in it …’

‘A reflector … They’re the best …’

‘Oh.’

‘The best for constellations and deeper ventures into the solar system …’

‘Really … Well, I’d better be …’

‘What have you seen through it?’

‘I just look through it … I don’t really know what I’m looking at, I don’t know much about the stars. I just like looking at them, the way they fill the blackness, the way they hang there. It amazes me that they’re there, just hanging in the blackness, it scares me and fascinates me and I don’t understand any of it. It doesn’t make sense. Them just being there, all the time, always there …’

‘There’s nothing better to put things into perspective.’

‘I saw Saturn last night.’

‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s low in our sky at this time of the year. The lowest it’s been in a long time. That’s probably how you found it so easily.’

‘Like I said … I just point the thing at things I like the look of, things that look like they might be something, and hope for the best …’

‘Funny …’

‘What is?’

‘How random that is. It matches how random everything else is.’

‘…’

‘…’

We both drift off into silence. I drink my coffee and finish my sandwich, looking out of the window at nothing in particular. I think about Saturn, the way it looked like it was just hanging there all alone, motionless in space. I think about the strange sense of vertigo I felt, the way it rushed through me. I wonder where something like that might come from; that feeling, why it might happen. Falling: the sense that everything is about to drop. I think about the earth hanging in space, too: motionless to look at, but spinning on its axis, hurtling through space. I begin to feel dizzy again, the same vertigo pouring into me. I manage to gulp down the last of my coffee, but I can’t finish my sandwich. I grab my stick and rucksack, and say goodbye to the strange lady. She’s lost in some reverie and doesn’t look up, just kind of nods her head a little. I stumble out of the café. Once outside, taking in as much of the air as possible, I cross the road, over the cycle lane and the esplanade and down onto the beach to the water’s edge. The tide is in, a series of small waves, no more than little ripples. I gulp down more of the sea air and stay there until I begin to feel better. I’m not that bothered how long this might take. I just want this feeling of sheer terror to pass. I want it to go away.

afternoon drinking

The sun is high in the sky. Southend High Street below is busy. I keep to the shade, away from the brightness and the heat. The first stage in my plan of action is to search the arcades on the esplanade, the ones just below the Palace Hotel. My idea is that she looked bored when we spoke on the pier and that she might be filling her day with time at the arcades, gambling on the machines, mundane activities in order to pass the time. For some reason I envisage that whatever it is she does for money she does at night, enveloped in blackness. Not that I think she’s a prostitute, or anything like that, even though she could have been. It’s because she seemed detached, like she’d switched herself off when I spoke to her on the pier. That’s how it seemed to me. And then: that strange image of her, of the ghostly woman, last night in the creek. The more I think about her the more beautiful she becomes — like how people become beautiful when captured on film when in real life they are humdrum and nondescript. I could see each curve of her body, the sea water dripping from her back into the creek, the angular sharpness of her cheekbones. Then her eyes are on me, like I’m there with her in the creek again. Or like I’m watching her through a lens, in real time, a more lucid real time — recorded that way. The way she brushed her hand across her face — I see it more clearly now — removing her blonde hair from it, over and over again as the breeze took hold. These repeating images, forcing the original image to change from a murky, faint one of her swimming in the creek to something clearer, bits taken from bits, repixellated and reassembled, images I knew I’d never forget — simple everyday images that are driving me to distraction.

I need to find her. The arcades are bustling with activity, with boys and girls, rushing this way and that, huddling around machines. The schools must be out, it’s pandemonium. They can’t be all playing truant. Then I remember what day it is. This is what the children of Southend do on a Sunday: they escape reality in the arcades. It all makes sense: boredom. But it’s a mess, like the world has short-circuited and there’s not much time left, so everything is accelerated: everything is happening too quickly for me to assimilate what is actually taking place. It’s all out of control. Older lads sporting tattoos and bulldogs try desperately to impress younger girls, who giggle and text each other, updating Facebook statuses and Twitter accounts, taking photos of boys they like, as the boys blow the shit out of enemy lines, or charge along, racing each other in exotic locations without a care in the world. Other boys eye them up menacingly, thinking they own this room; that it’s theirs to do what they like with. But it’s not the case and they don’t see it. The threat of violence is palpable, like it’s part of the decor. My feet stick to the carpets; cigarettes and weed are smoked casually here, with aplomb. It’s a practised art, of course: kids huddle in doorways just outside, along the esplanade, blue smoke rising from their cheap cigarettes, onlookers are milling around in gaggles, doing nothing, or waiting to do nothing with other people. Each large, maddening room is a cacophony of sounds: each machine competing with the next. Everything programmed that way: to seduce the money from our pockets with electronic music and voices, snippets of familiar hits, explosions, cheers, whoops, crashes and bangs. The flash of bare skin, of eyes across the room, threatening looks, winks, kisses blown, gropes. It’s no good, I can’t see through it all, I can’t make out one person from the next. Everything is one spectacular mess. I have to get out. I walk back up to the High Street, up Pier Hill and away from it all.