Lee Rourke - Vulgar Things

The stench continues to make me gag. The whole caravan is thick with it and the more I move, the more I seem to interfere with it, as if my contact with it helps each particle to multiply. It moves around me in great thick swirls, slowly. I wade through it to sit down on the sofa. I sink into it and wait for the cold sea air to begin its work. The thought that this is where he was found, hanging from a rope he’d attached to a support in the caravan’s roof. I’m thinking of it as an actuality now. It happened in this room, just by the side of this sofa. His body found in a crumpled heap, after the rope had eventually worked itself free from the support. His body lay here for a whole week before it was found festering among all his stuff, his body fluid in a pool beneath his feet, the pile of newspapers his body had knocked over still strewn across the floor. I look at the pile of newspapers; there they are, all over the floor, next to a box of CDs. I start to shiver as the cold sea air begins to fill the caravan, through the windows and open door. Soon the musty, dead odour is replaced by that familiar smell of the sea around here: iodine, salt and seaweed mixed with something industrial, something from the oil refinery.

I look around the room. Somehow I have to make sense of all this: his belongings, his life. I have to work out what can be thrown away and what should stay, and the more I think about it, the more I don’t want to throw anything away. It doesn’t seem right just now. It all belongs to Uncle Rey, none of it is mine, I don’t have the right to any of it, and besides, I hardly knew the man. It’s his detritus, not mine. It’s the aftermath of an event I had no part in. His event, his aftermath. It doesn’t seem right just to discard it all.

I stretch out on the sofa, resting my tired arms and legs. To my right is a huge record collection, all of it vinyl. I look down to find an old record player on a shelf, speakers on either side of it. I switch it on. There’s a record already on it, an album by Dr Feelgood. I’ve never heard of them before today. Then I realise that it must have been what Uncle Rey was listening to the night he took his own life. It was the last thing he’d listened to. It must have meant something to him. I put the needle onto the record and wait for the first track to fill the room, and I smile as I hear the distinctive vinyl crackle before the opening track, ‘She Does it Right’, begins. At first I think it’s just some ordinary, bluesy pub track. But I sit there and listen to the whole album, enthralled. When it ends I look through Uncle Rey’s collection, where there’s more of the same: about thirty Dr Feelgood albums in total, some of them live recordings from the BBC. Before I put on the next record, I phone Cal. I open a bottle of cider and pick up my phone. He answers immediately.

‘Jon, where’ve you been?’

‘I phoned you earlier …’

‘I must have missed it. Are you there?’

‘Yes, I’m here.’

‘I’ve been travelling to France today, been a fucking right ’mare … What state is the place in?’

‘It’s as I imagined it to be, how it’s always been, I guess. Stuff everywhere, I mean loads of stuff … gadgets, records, books, piles of newspapers and magazines, paper all over the floor. I don’t really know where to start.’

‘Just clear some space and try to locate anything that might look important. We can sell all his shit. Just look for his legal papers and all that crap, letters, bank stuff. I’m sure there’s money tied up somewhere, that’s the main thing …’

‘Right … There’s lots to go through …’

‘And family stuff, don’t throw any of that away …’

‘I don’t want to throw any of it away … It’s quite sad, Uncle Rey living here all alone … It’s such a sad, depressing place, Cal. Like a prison camp. Was it always like this?’

‘Listen, you know I never liked him, the creepy fucker. And Dad hated him. Just strip the place and then get the fuck out as fast as you can …’

‘Okay.’

‘Keep me posted, Jon. I have to shoot now, need some shuteye, meetings all day tomorrow, on a fucking Saturday, what sort of life is this … keep me posted.’

‘Sure, Cal.’

‘Bye.’

‘Bye.’

It was an uneasy night’s sleep. I dreamed that the sea was pouring in through the windows of the caravan and I couldn’t get out. When I awoke in sweat-drenched fits, taking sips from the dregs of my cider, the tankers’ engines and the low, intermittent foghorn blasts kept me awake. I mostly just lay there on the sofa, looking out of the window into the night. I listened to more Dr Feelgood in the early hours, just before sunrise. I became lost, listening to each track while trying to map the whole of Canvey in my mind. I had a vision of Two Tree Island in the moonlight, just away from the creeks; the muddy shallows of Heron Island and Puffin Island; the warm, thick mud along the banks of Benfleet Creek, a barren inlet, crafted in time. Images of Curlew Island and Sandpiper Creek, which I explored in my youth when the tide was out, came back to me, memories I hadn’t realised I owned, reappearing at first in shards.

Here it comes now, the sun, slowly up over the sea wall. I get up off the sofa and open the door to the caravan; the cold air rushes in. I decide that I will explore the island, putting off the job at hand. I have more than enough time. I’m suddenly hungry, but there’s nothing to eat. I find a pot of coffee in the fridge and make some of that, drinking it out of a bowl the way French people do in films. The odour that had first greeted me has shifted, it seems. Although I’m not sure if it’s simply because I’ve become accustomed to it overnight. I give the room a couple of deep sniffs: nothing, not a trace. I potter about for a bit with my coffee, finish it by gulping it down like a meal, and then walk into the bathroom. It’s small, as in an aircraft: everything fitting together, usable in that coolly cramped way designers go for. I take off my clothes and step into the shower. The water is cold, despite paying my ten pounds for the heating. I let the freezing water wash all over me, but it’s not long until I have to get out. It’s too cold. Rummaging through my rucksack, I realise that I’ve forgotten my toiletries. I have no towel. The tube of toothpaste that I find on the shelf above the small sink has a thumb-sized indentation at the bottom of it: Uncle Rey’s no doubt. I gently rub my own thumb over it. At first I want to keep it intact, squeezing the paste from the top of the tube, but this pushes some of the tube’s contents down as well as up, and Uncle Rey’s thumb mark is altered as paste fills the indentation, so I begin to squeeze out the paste from anywhere I please, obliterating any trace of the thumb mark. I figure, during my clearance, that I’ll have to take extra care. I don’t want to obliterate any other marks or traces, no matter how small, Uncle Rey had inadvertently left behind. I brush my teeth with my finger.

I am suddenly startled by the smell of sea-grass and weeds. The odour begins to fill the caravan. The tide is on the rise. I put the same clothes back on and walk out of the caravan and up to the fence and the barbed wire. There’s a gate to my right, which is unlocked. I walk up the grass verge to the sea wall and then manage to clamber up that, so that I’m standing on it. I stand there, like I’ve accomplished something, my back to the sea, gazing out across the caravan site and the entire island, over to the creeks in the distance. I spot little yawls, floating and swinging at anchor. I can hear the familiar sound of curlews in the distance, over to my left beyond Canvey Heights, gathering on the marshes, feeding from the fruits of the sea washed up on the thick mud.