In the Approaches

Yes.

Kimberly has passed … Oh, look! There she goes! Hear the whistle? Kimberly! She’s a heavy-goods train thundering through the station of life (no timetabled stop) and then into the glorious bleakness – the billowing clouds of dry ice – beyond. Only the truly adventurous – the demented hobo, the illegal, the felon – would consider running after her and hitching a ride. Those trains are heavily guarded, I’ve heard. No. Better just wait a little longer on the welcoming, well-lit platform and flick through the local paper (great article about piles. Wonderful small ads. Nothing really amounting to ‘news’, as such) then head over to the kiosk for a hot cup of coffee (avoid the tea. The tea’s dreadful, like warm iron filings. It’s been stewing for days inside a giant rusty urn).

Just stand back (always respectful, mind) and let that old, heavy-goods train rumble on through …

Rumble.

Rrrrrrumble?

Gracious me! A sudden outbreak of goose-bumps on my forearm. How odd!

Uh …

No.

No. Let’s not talk of death, eh? Death sticks between the teeth like a pesky piece of sweetcorn husk. Sweetcorn’s way too ambitious a vegetable for a man in my state. I need mashed potato softened with milk. Or mushy peas. Or a lightly seasoned dollop of glowing swede, shining with butter. Or porridge. I need porridge! I need custard! A soft-boiled egg!

I’m too delicate!

Coddle me!

Uh …

No.

It wasn’t a great scheme, in other words. I wasn’t genned up on the Tide Times. I just headed out – flew out.

Perhaps I was more upset than I thought. Everything felt very sharp – the light, the sound of the gulls, the waves – the damn Channel so unapologetic, so vital, so unbearably bloody there; the texture of the pebbles on the beach, the individual grains of sand … Everything sharp. Everything cruel. And then … What happened?

I’m struggling to … uh …

Ten paces after I saw Miss Hahn and her ridiculous dog – that awful, fat dog; a barely perambulating canine offence, a cruel joke – I suddenly stopped short and thought, God. Did I actually just say that? Did I actually just speak those words from here … up here … from this mouth? The exchange – was there an exchange, though? – fell across the beach in front of me like a shadow in bright sun. I moved, it moved. Good heavens! Did I actually just …? No. Surely not! So I promptly strode on. Had to get through it. Simple as that. Fight or flight. Fight and flight. Pure instinct. Couldn’t think. Didn’t want to. Continued walking.

It’s possible the plan hadn’t even been fully hatched at that stage – the epic hike. It was barely in incubation. I was just … still can’t quite remember what I … I think it was just … just getting away from that word. The relentless hammer-blow of that word.

‘Good afternoon, Ms Hahn! The renovations? Uh … not now, dear. I’m … uh … My wife just died. We weren’t really married … well we were, but in title alone. We lived on separate continents. But I still reserve the right to be intensely pissed off – alternately numbed, bewildered, shattered, even – by the news. All right, Miss Hahn? Okay with that, are we? Is that acceptable to you, Miss Hahn? It is? It is? Good! Great! Toodle-oo!’

I just … I just … I wanted to blurt it out! Yes! I wanted to castigate, to blame – worse still, to share. I felt this sudden, overwhelming urge to unload! To unburden, to spill out my guts to that awful Miss Hahn with her … her frayed collar, her fat dog, her man’s trousers and her Soviet-style nose. But why her? Why then? Why there? Eh?!

Happenstance. Pure happenstance! A fluke. She could’ve been anyone! That’s why. And worse still, I’m sure I even found myself thinking: eyes on the prize, Franklin! This could actually prove useful – playing the sympathy card! I did! I swear! But then I suddenly realized (hammer-blow – bang!) that without Kimberly there was no meaning – no book (and no Advance! Bang, bang! Double whammy!). And I also realized that I couldn’t play the card if I didn’t accept the feeling. And I didn’t accept it. No! I just didn’t. So I stopped myself. I tried to find a suitable cover for my confusion. My mind was racing (but there was no race, no track, just miles and miles of empty air) and I found myself blurting out … Uh … What? Did I say that the dog was fat? Yes. Yes. I think I did, actually. But then the dog is fat. Big deal! I merely stated a known fact! No harm done there, then.

And so I calmly walked on. And a while later it started to rain. And I can remember the pebbles and the rocks all shiny in the wet. And my shoes – dress shoes – splattered with mud. And I remember how high the cliffs were. So high. So improbably high … Woo! Woo-hoo! (I’m spinning around, gazing upwards, woo-hooing, like a jackass) … Oh look – there … See that black bird, just circling above? Is it a raven? A chough? Do they even have choughs in this part of the British Isles? Or ravens for that matter? Uh … No. Possibly not. What’s that …? (Stops spinning, staggers slightly.) What’s that extraordinary … uh …?

And then … And then – Wham! Bam! Alakazam! – forty-eight hours had passed me by, in what felt like the merest of breaths, and I was waking up in the cells with the mother of all hangovers, a tin bucket by the bed, splayed across a creepy, squeaky, rubber-coated mattress, no bed-linen, no blanket, not so much as a pillow – a humble pillow – to rest my pounding head upon.

Oh. And there was a baby rabbit tucked away snugly inside my vest. My suit was still wet. The pockets were full of leaves. White ash? Eucalyptus? After approximately five minutes a young constable brought me some sweet tea and said that they were releasing me without charge but I needed to provide them with some details of my identity. I had no idea at this stage that I was missing an entire day. A day had been stolen! But by whom?! My wallet (a matter of secondary importance; it was empty, remember?) was also gone. Apparently I’d been apprehended by a passing member of the local foot patrol – in riotous mood (me, not the copper) – drinking on the beach the previous morning with a couple of reprobate old fisher-folk. I’d tried to break into a church: St Thomas of Canterbury and the English Martyrs (in St Leonards) which contains exquisite painted murals (stencils, but still lovely) by Nathaniel Westlake, no less. Amazing. Yes – yes! I had broken in (I have no memory of this) and I’d confessed a pile of hysterical mumbo-jumbo, in Spanish, to the priest, then knelt and prayed with him (we’d conversed freely – he was born and raised in Alicante), then jumped up and ran off. I’d tried to make a sled out of a bakery pallet and had careered down the Old London Road on it (I was relatively successful, in other words), ending up in a large bush of pampas grass (slightly cut lip – evidence of white fluff in hair). I had stolen and eaten half a loaf. I was wearing lipstick (yes!). Orange lipstick. In giant circles around my eyes. Three cigarettes had been stubbed out on the top of my hand. My right hand. And the rabbit? A dwarf breed. Quite rare. Of indeterminate age, it transpires. Nobody knew where it had come from, only that I’d been finding great solace in it. The officer had kindly fed it a carrot.

It was a white rabbit with pink eyes. I walked all the way home with it held in a makeshift sling fashioned out of my jacket. Even now I find it incredible to think that I would have walked all that way with it. I am no fan of small mammals. I have given it a temporary berth in the bath. In the bath the enamel turns its white fur a yellower hue. Strange how the act of comparison can suddenly transform one clearly defined object into something else altogether. Life has a nasty habit of doing that.

I noticed that there was a tiny hole in the bathroom window. Later on I found an even tinier stone in the toilet bowl.

But that was not all I found. Oh no. The bin, the missing bulb, the hole in the window (all serious, in their own way, admittedly) were as nothing by comparison (that rabbit in the bath phenomenon, remember?) with the thing I found in my bedroom. I say ‘thing’, but it was more than a mere ‘thing’, it was a performance, a staging, an extravaganza. It was a complete one-act drama. I hate to oversell it, but … come with me. Enter the room. Push open the door and then grimacingly recoil. There is a smell … Not even a smell, a stink, a vile, ungodly odour. Something so foul, so rank, that mere words – simple, uncomplicated language – cannot do justice to its offensiveness. A slap in the face. A physical reaction. A gut reaction. A violent recoil. An existential shudder. A withering of the soul. A shrinking. A boring at the nostril. A tearing at the throat.

But where? From whence doth this rancid odour hail, pray tell? (I’ve fallen into Olde English in a pathetic attempt to try and encompass how primordial this smell is, how primitive, how base, how … how medieval – and how fearful I am, how confused, how repulsed; but still pretending, nevertheless, to be bold, pretending to be jocular; call to mind, if you must, a cheery fifteenth-century soldier – a Man of Fortune – or, better still, a palsied whore or cocky jester.) I search the room, a shirt over my face. My forehead is instantly dripping with sweat. My hand is a claw. I am a zombie. My body is panicking. It’s instinctive. The smell is so … so engulfing.

Eventually I settle on my suitcase, my empty suitcase (old leather, a gift from my maternal grandfather when I went up to Cambridge). It lies under the bed. I drag it out by its handle. I am so full of dread. Hands shaking. Palms wet. I steady myself. My heart is pounding. One, two, three – Come on, Franklin! Grow some balls, man! – I throw open the lid.

NNNAAAAARRRRGGHHHH!

So much worse – so, so much worse – than I could possibly have anticipated! Several hundred huge, buzzing bluebottles swarm out of the case and into my face. It is as though the devil himself (I’m an atheist, but bear with me) has been compressed in that small space. And now he is free. And he is angry. The sound! The intensity of that roar! The violence of those wings! The sense of un … un … unexpurgated filth! And remaining? In the case? The putrefying corpse of a dead shark. A dead sand shark, no less.

Urgh!

Urgh!

I vomited – instantly, spontaneously – on to my own, damp lap.

The sheer indignity!

Words cannot do justice. No. No. Sometimes, even justice – even justice – cannot do justice.

8

Miss Carla Hahn (#ubbb81443-c2ca-5d78-906f-c07893a79e0a)

I am trapped (a pathetically bleating shrew dangling from a savage hawk’s bloodied talon) in the midst of a polite exchange with the indomitable Bridget ‘Biddy’ West, who is manning the Post Office counter in the Fairlight General Store (Biddy: ‘So how many metres of garden did you say you have left, now, Carla?’ Me: ‘Uh … Eight? Nine? I’m not very metric. Eleven or twelve good strides from the back door.’ Biddy: ‘The shed was quite some distance away from the property, then?’ Me: ‘There’s an old extension out back. A sun room that Tilda – the owner, Tilda Gower – closed in with a little pine-wood sauna. It’s … The bungalow is basically just a series of tiny extensions, one next to the … uh … to the … uh … other.’ Biddy: ‘So you’ve told Matilda about the landfall?’).

At this (let’s call it the second ‘uh …’ moment) I am horrified to espy the giant bulk of Clifford Bickerton (previously observed, minutes earlier, driving his van – at considerable speed – towards Hastings on the Fairlight Road) blocking all the light from the windows in the door.

Bugger, bugger, bugger! I was certain I’d got away with it this time! I’d been so careful, so stealthy (had even jumped behind a buddleia to be 100 per cent sure)! Has he been – is he – following me again? Why oh why didn’t I just answer his calls and have done with it? Why didn’t I just speak to him directly when he came to the bungalow the other afternoon, in person, to offer help? Oh bugger, bugger, bugger.

The bell cheerfully tinkles as the door is pushed open and Clifford squeezes himself inside like some huge, red otter gently violating a disused vole hole. Whenever Clifford Bickerton enters any environment constructed for standard human habitation an atmosphere far more appropriate to a Grimm’s fairy tale is promptly established. He is big, powerful, tall, auburn-haired and bushy-bearded with hands like pitchforks and feet like hams. He has been uniquely fashioned for the barn and for the field.

‘So you’ve told Matilda about the landfall?’ Biddy repeats, ignoring the placid and unassuming Clifford completely.

‘Uh …’ I am thrown into confusion, ‘Yes. No. That’s … that’s actually why I’m sending this letter.’

I point towards the letter which I am currently buying stamps for as Clifford smacks his head into the light fitment and quietly curses.

‘You couldn’t ring her?’

Biddy continues to ignore Clifford.

‘No. She’s still travelling.’

‘The Great Wall?’

I nod. ‘She has an itinerary. Her next official pit-stop is somewhere called Huanghua. But she’s been delayed by an infected mosquito bite on her heel. Every few months I receive a letter …’