Lee Rourke - Vulgar Things

‘What?’

‘Who are you scared of?’

‘You have quite a few of those twenty-pound notes, yes.’

‘Here … Now tell me …’

‘Thanks … Them … I was scared of them.’

‘Them?’

‘Downstairs, them downstairs … I was supposed to be working, I shouldn’t have been out, I should have been here.’

‘Listen, I can get you out.’

‘How?’

‘We can move away … They’ll never find you. I have enough money to disappear, to start a new life with … please, you’ve got to trust me.’

‘I can’t just leave.’

‘Why?’

‘Er … They’ll come after me.’

‘No they won’t … they’ll just find someone else to take your place …’

‘I can’t just leave …’

‘Please … I think you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen … I’ve thought that from the first moment I set eyes on you, on the pier …’

‘Well, mister, if you think that, why don’t you want to fuck me now … here?’

‘Because it’s not about that …’

‘What’s it about then?’

‘I don’t know … I can’t explain it. Something is happening to me in my life and it’s like I have no control over it, like I’m being controlled, like each of my footsteps is being continually written out for me … I just know I have to do this … That I have to save you … Does that make any sense?’

‘I get this from men a lot, especially older ones …’

‘Get what?’

‘That I need to be fucking saved. I mean, what’s all that about? I don’t need to be saved. I can take care of myself … All you lonely men … What’s wrong with you?’

‘I’m not lonely … I’m not like other men.’

‘You’re all the same … A fucking viper’s nest inside your heads …’

‘No … No … No … I’m honest … I’ve never felt anything like this, for anyone … Not even my wife …’

‘See … You’re married … Typical … You’re a fucking cliché.’

‘I’m not, she left me for another man, she was having an affair with another man she met at work … She was seeing him for over a year before she left me … with nothing … I had nothing.’

‘It’s not my problem.’

‘I am different …’

‘I don’t …’

‘Please … let me take you … We can go to Canvey tonight …’

‘I don’t want to go to Canvey …’

‘Please … Anywhere, then?’

‘Stop it … I don’t like this … I only have to shout and you’ll be thrown out of here.’

‘Please, Laura, please …’

‘Stop calling me that … My name isn’t fucking Laura … I hate that name …’

‘But the pier …’

‘You freak …’

‘But …’

‘What fucking pier? … I’ve never been on that fucking pier … I hate Southend Pier.’

‘Please … I can help you …’

‘Fuck off, you’re scaring me …’

‘Please, there’s nothing to be scared of …’

Before I can finish what I’m saying the door bursts open and the two men from downstairs pull me off the bed and drag me out of the room. I bang my head on the door as they scramble me out. I think I black out in the process, for a few seconds or a minute or two because the next thing I know I’m sitting on the doorstep with one of the men shouting something at me, as the other pokes my stick hard into my gut before pulling me down the porch and onto the pavement, throwing my stick out onto Toledo Road. I stumble to my feet and pick it up, using it to steady myself. I run over to the grass verge and then onto Queensway without looking back at the house, stopping the traffic on the road. I run up York Road towards the High Street, through the gang of youths who were standing on the corner of Toledo Road near the phone box earlier — one of them tries to trip me up, but I somehow manage to dodge his foot. I can hear them laughing at me. I keep running, faster and faster, up the hill towards the bus station.

I sit down on a bench as the pain suddenly begins. My head feels like it’s developing a huge lump at the back where it connected. My stomach is burning with pain. I’m in agony. I need to go back to the island, the Sunset Bar can wait.

path of saturn

I arrive back at Uncle Rey’s caravan late. I head straight for the key to his shed. The sky is clear now and the deepest black, each star shining brighter than I have ever seen. There’s something quite remarkable about them, littering the blackness, like they’ve just been thrown there. I set up the telescope and retract the roof with the pulley-lever. I know exactly what I want to look at. I swivel the telescope roughly to where I had pointed it the other night, hoping that it’s still hanging there, somewhere among the stars. I put my eye to the lens. Nothing. I move the telescope a fraction to the left. Nothing. Then to the right. Nothing. Up. Down. Nothing. Then I look up through the opening in the roof myself; I’m sure I’ve got the telescope pointing in the right direction. It has to be there. I look back through the lens, focusing and refocusing, moving the viewfinder across the night. Nothing. I can’t find it. I begin to feel dizzy, that same sense of vertigo, like when I first set eyes on it: Saturn, that beautiful planet. But this time, now that it’s not there, it feels stronger, like I have no control of what is happening to me.

I continue to try to find Saturn, but it’s not there. It can’t disappear. It can’t hide away like this. Things can’t have shifted like that, as if nothing had ever happened. Not as much as this, not in a couple of days. I begin to feel sick, like I’m spinning out of control, the lump on the back of my head throbbing, like I’m whirling through the same deep blackness above me, like I’m vanishing too. I need to see it, to make it all stop. I want it all to stop. But it’s not there. I want it to reveal itself, so that I can be sure it’s still hanging there in the black of night. I look around the shed: there’re some charts pinned to the wall, but I don’t understand them. I pick up a couple of books, looking for ‘Saturn’ in their indexes. Nothing. The last book I look at has a chapter called: ‘Looking for Saturn in the Night Sky, 2006–2013’. I sit beneath the gaping void of night and read as much of it as I possibly can before the feeling of vertigo takes hold of me again, throwing my eyes off the pages, my head spinning. At the end of the chapter is a chart that makes no sense to me whatsoever. I stare at it. It’s quite mesmerising: a series of arcs and giant ellipses, of widening degrees, sweeping diagonally downwards, through the constellations, which I presume to be the path of Saturn in the night sky. But it makes no sense to me. All I know is that somewhere within it is not only Saturn’s, but my own place in time. I stare at it, trying to make sense of it, but it’s simply impossible for me to connect the chart with the giant expanse of black through the retracted roof of this shed. Again, I look at the path of Saturn depicted on the chart: spiralling downwards in a series of ellipses, turning, spinning through the years, each month, disappearing and becoming visible again. I can’t help but think that I’m somehow aligned with it, mirroring its fall through time and space.

I can feel Saturn near. I know it is up there somewhere in the blackness. I just need to see it. That’s all I need to do. I look through the lens again. Still nothing. I frantically focus and refocus the lens, even changing it for others: a x12 mm, a x20 mm and then a x25 mm. Nothing, just a blurry void. Saturn’s disappeared. It’s too much for me to take. I feel like screaming, smashing the whole place up, but I can’t. I just can’t. I simply crawl into the corner of the shed, where it’s darker, where the void can’t reach me, and curl up into a ball, hoping that I will disappear, too.