Lee Rourke - Vulgar Things

The place is heaving. I walk through, dripping wet, dodging gaggles of teenagers, women with prams, junkies and old ladies. I find a seat at the Birdwood, a café, and order a large latte from a miserable-looking lady behind the counter. The coffee is good. From where I’m sitting I’ve a clear view of the two escalators that take the shoppers up to and down from the upper level of the shopping mall. I watch people as they’re fed up and down from the upper level, parallel to each other, never acknowledging each other as they pass. A silent geometry surrounds me, the entire mall a complex system of lines, angles, triangles, bisectors, trapezoids, arcs, concurrent figures, grids and oblique lines. I realise that this system of geometry is mapping itself out everywhere I look, in every building, on every street, house, high street, town and city, the most rudimentary of things. Even when I look through the telescope in Uncle Rey’s shed I’m looking up into the vastness of space through some kind of silent geometry, something poetic and unfathomable. Even the vertigo I feel when I think of Saturn hanging there in the blackness of space is pure geometry to me — so is its absence, those moments when I feel like clinging on to the ground beneath my feet, so that I don’t fall off the earth into the same blackness. Gravity isn’t enough in situations such as mine; at least the escalators seem to be defeating all this, delivering us upwards.

I gaze up the escalator as it carries a woman and a small child to the top. I follow them all the way up. It’s at that moment, just as they reach the top, that I see her: Laura. On the upper floor. I’m sure it’s her. Her hair looks longer, and I’ve only just seen her and she was wearing different clothes back then — she could have changed, I guess. She’s walking along the upper level, towards the escalator; it carries her down, just her, looking dead ahead. Time seems to warp, to slow down all around me as I watch her, looking dead ahead, her delicate hands resting on each rail, gliding down towards me from above. As she hits the bottom she carries on walking seamlessly, gliding past the café to the right of my table, never blinking, staring dead ahead, floating almost.

I get up, leaving my half-finished latte where it is, carrying my stick so that it doesn’t hit the floor, tightening the rucksack on my back as I walk, following her through the mall, around gaggles of college kids, mothers and their children, office workers, through the front doors and outside onto the square. It’s her, it’s the same way she walks, that day on the pier, the exact same walk, I’m sure. What’s she doing here? Shouldn’t she be in the flat on Toledo Road? Maybe she had to pop out for something? But isn’t she waiting to go to work at the Sunset Bar? Isn’t that what she’s supposed to be doing? She doesn’t look like everybody else, like she has something ordinary to do. She’s walking with purpose, an apparition in the streets, a lone petal floating along the pavements in the breeze. Everything else around her blackens: the buildings, the cars, the cyclists, the people, everything darkens except her, floating, gliding along. It has to be her. I want to walk right up to her, to smell her perfume again, to hear her voice, her strange, lilting accent. It has to be her, my beautiful vision at the pier.

they kiss

I follow her back down the High Street, towards the sea, hanging back when she stops to look in Ann Summers and then New Look. I sit on a public bench, trying to look normal, like everyone else, as she steps into Greggs to buy a cheap sandwich. I do my best to look like part of the background. She heads to Pier Hill below the Palace Hotel. I follow her, closer this time, straining my neck in the hope that I can catch her perfume, something I want more than anything right now.

Just as she reaches the bottom of Pier Hill she’s greeted by a man. They kiss. My heart sinks. They embrace. The man is in his early twenties, I guess, with slicked-back hair, black. He’s wearing skin-tight, stone-washed jeans, trainers and a black leather jacket, zipped up closely to his chin. I pretend I’m looking out to the estuary, even though I can’t really see it from where I’m standing. I even take out my phone and pretend to take pictures of the scene I can’t see, all the while watching them from the corner of my eye.

After the embrace they both step back a little and become serious with each other, like they have business to do and the kiss and embrace was all an act — which it seems to be as she opens her jacket and hands the man a large, folded Jiffy bag, obviously stuffed with money. After the transaction they both turn and walk off in opposite directions. He walks away, back down towards the arcades on the esplanade, while she heads back up Pier Hill towards me. I panic and stare at my phone awkwardly, trying to act as inconspicuous as I can, even trying to hide my stick on my blind side, but it’s no use, we somehow gain eye contact. I try to smile, but it comes out all wrong, nervy and suspicious, even though she simply looks straight through me as if I’m not really there.

‘Hello …’

‘…’

‘Hello, it’s me …’

‘Pardon?’

‘Fancy seeing you here …’

‘What …’

‘You and me … bumping into each other again …’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I just saw you … I mean … we just spoke at the house …’

‘I’ve never seen you before in my life …’

‘Wait! … Wait! … Toledo Road … Toledo Road … Last night, do you remember?’

‘Stop following me …’

‘But we’re meeting tonight … remember?’

‘Go away!’

‘At the Sunset Bar … You said you wanted to talk with me, that you couldn’t talk outside the house …’

‘Stop following me … now!’

‘But I’m trying to help you …’

‘Stop fucking following me, you fucking pervert!’

‘Please …’

‘I’ll call the fucking police …’

‘Okay … Okay …’

I stop following her. I watch her all the way to the top of Pier Hill, before she walks away, on to the High Street and out of sight. I stand there, looking up the hill. It must have been an act, she mustn’t be able to talk to me, to be seen to be talking to anyone. I look behind me, down the hill towards the esplanade, checking to see if anyone is there, but Pier Hill is empty, the man has gone. She must have been worried he was still there, that’s why she acted the way she did. I need to speak to her, to tell her everything will be okay. I look out over the estuary: yet more black rain clouds are racing over from Sheerness and the hills of Kent. I look up, following the clouds back over me. I can see a terrace behind me, above my head at the Palace Hotel. I steady myself with my stick. The terrace overlooks the entire estuary.

waxy with sweat

I leave my coat, rucksack and stick in the cloakroom, and take a seat by the looming windows. The view is spectacular, even in the fading light. I can trace the entirety of the black storm as it sweeps into Southend. Sheets of slanting rain; they hit the pier and then the amusement arcades below, and finally the looming windows separating me from their tumult, smearing each pane with grease and grime. It’s spectacular: everything blurred above and below me, the outlines of familiar things distorted by the rain, everything morphing into a black-greyness that I want to reach out into and touch, such are the varieties of its textures and hues. It’s hard to believe that anything else can exist outside it.

The early evening passes slowly. After the storm abates reality seeps back in through the looming panes of glass. A man and a woman enter the bar; they fall onto a sofa behind my table, near enough for me to listen to their conversation without making it obvious. I quickly turn around to look at them: the man is tall and lanky, he looks like a retired headmaster of a public school — he sounds like one, too. She’s local, her voice slurring and grating, dressed in jeans too tight for her figure and a vest-top that can hardly contain her chest. She looks out of place. I’m positive the management will ask her to leave, but they don’t.