Calabash Page 2

  Past the pillars of Heracles lay a lush green land cultivated by Atlas’s people. This was the kingdom of Atlantis, built around a great white harbour. In the city were palaces and baths with hot and cold taps, race-tracks, garrisons and magnificent temples. Atlas was the son of Poseidon, whose fivefold brace of male twins swore allegiance atop a pillar in the blood of a sacrificed bull. But riches turned their heads, and Zeus allowed the Athenians to defeat them in battle. The gods sent a mighty deluge that drowned Atlantis in a day and a night—

  A sudden breeze stippled my jacket, covering my arms with goose-pimples. The light dropped once more, returning the tideline to a sepia shadow. Slattery and his gang cycled past, bellowing obscenities, making me lose my place. I tried to concentrate, moving my finger beneath the words.

  Atlantis was long thought to have existed somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, but the only inhabited island ever known to have sunk there is the Dogger Bank, which was inundated in palaeolithic times. It seems much more likely that—

  ‘Oi, Goodwin, you’re going to get your head kicked in!’

  ‘Hey, Book Boy, get out of town!’

  The bicycles made a second pass. The bubble-gum cards wedged in their spokes made their back wheels ratchet with ominous slowness. I shut the book and tucked it into my jacket. They would circle closer and closer like hyenas scenting blood, and would not leave me alone until I left the shelter. This was a familiar pattern. I rose and walked off along the esplanade, keeping my head down, refusing to rise to their bait. It was best not to show defiance by looking at them.

  I waited until their cries had faded, and lifted my eyes to the shore. A smear of sickly yellow light led the way across a grey sea to the dying sun. I wished the tide would rise far beyond its usual level and fill the town, drowning the inhabitants. I imagined Cole Bay becoming a new Atlantis, water spilling across the road and pouring into the high street, swilling a scummy detritus of chip papers and half-eaten ice-cream cones, spilling and sucking through the windows of the penny arcades until it was above the rooftops. After the helpless populace had all been drawn out to sea, after the last weak cry had faded to silence, nothing would be heard except the faint ringing of church bells beneath the waves.

  I kicked a stray stone onto the beach and glumly made my way back along the esplanade. The lightbulbs edging the Las Vegas penny arcade had not yet come on. The illuminated machines in its cavernous interior blinked and shook in the gloom, like treasures awaiting discovery by some third-rate Aladdin. I stood in the doorway watching a huge old machine light up flushes of outsized playing cards. Each one featured the face of a show-business celebrity: Alan Ladd, Alma Cogan, Stanley Baker, Ava Gardner. That summed up our town: out of date and out of step. The year was 1970, but it might as well have been 1958.

  As I crossed the road, the sharp scent of brine was replaced with the stench of stale doughnut fat and candyfloss. Even away from the main strip, the sugary smell of warm, freshly folded rock permeated the pavements. I wondered if rock-making was a purely British coastal occupation. I had never heard of anyone else doing it. Why would they want to? I peered into the window at giant pink false teeth, girls’ gartered legs, fake eggs and bacon, babies’ dummies, all made of rock. The stuff was inedible, a weird prewar souvenir of a place that you wouldn’t admit to visiting, not if you had any sense.

  Cole Bay, population 17,650, former fishing village, had been turned into a seaside resort in the 1830s, its bedraggled Victorian atmosphere only surviving above the plastic signs of the chip shops, once regularly visited by daytrippers to the south coast, now largely forgotten but for the occasional mods and rockers riot on bank holidays. The long straight foreshore was bleak and exposed, its delights exaggerated in railway compartment paintings, its shortcomings hidden by artfully arranged clumps of hydrangeas. The promenade was open to the full force of the wind and the tide, and stayed cool even in summer, an agoraphobia-inducing area where you paused to look out to sea and then moved on, despite the green benches dotted hopefully along its length. A series of rectangular lawns were untrodden, and never appeared to grow. The grass looked as if it had been cut with nail clippers. The floral clock was an immaculate disk of tiny yellow and purple flowers, even though its hands had long ago been vandalised into immobility. There was a battered bandstand with an octagonal roof of oxidised green tiles, but no longer any band to play beneath it. Surrounding the kiddies’ paddling pool, drained and bare for nine months of the year, were rows of blue and white striped council deckchairs that old couples sat in during the few warm days of summer. Like ripening tomato plants they turned to follow the path of the sun, and folded up at five.

  The Pavilion Pier was falling into disrepair. Once a T-shape, now just an L, its wrought-iron pergolas were blighted with rust, its bulb-holders corroded by the salty sea air. Beside the entrance was a theatre called The Crow’s Nest that ran decrepit Brian Rix farces and guessable Francis Durbridge mysteries starring character actors who had been around for so long that their faces were more familiar to me than some of my relatives. In an effort to attract audiences to the performances that did not fall on pension day, The Crow’s Nest’s summer season featured pop performers whose most famous songs were often bracketed within their names, like Susan ‘Bobby’s Girl’ Maughan and Frank ‘I Remember You’ Ifield. This week Scaffold, the ugliest band in the world, were bill-topping with their chart smash ‘Lily the Pink’. For Cole Bay, this was a major coup.

  But the fun didn’t end there. Just along from the theatre, other seaside treats awaited the unwary visitor. There was a Guinness clock that amused the undemanding with an unreliable robotic parade on the quarter-hour, a telescope that gave you a twenty-second view of the bare horizon for a penny, and a plinth-mounted floating mine that looked like a giant red beach ball with teats. Shops stocked practical jokes like ‘Fake Soot’ and ‘Naughty Puppy Turds’, and comic postcards with punchlines like ‘Is That Mine Floating or Is That a Floating Mine?’ and ‘Come and See My Husband’s Little Wotnot Stand’. Beneath the pier were a pair of smelly, haggard donkeys that walked children brief distances for a tanner, although it seemed a crime to put anything heavy on their backs, and a Punch and Judy man whose swozzle-filtered squeals rendered him incomprehensible and frightening.

  Across the road were two further dubious attractions. The waxworks (motto—‘Meet the Immortal Stars of Today and Yesteryear!’) appeared to feature the dummies Madame Tussaud had rejected. Within its musty basement rooms, long-forgotten celebrities (Jessie Matthews and Robert Donat still featured) leaned from draped pedestals at perilous angles, looking extremely mortal, and even ill. None of them seemed to be wearing their own hair; it looked as though someone had swapped all the wigs around. There was no chamber of horrors; presumably the proprietors realised that it wasn’t needed.

  The Aquarium, on the other hand, appeared to offer nothing at all. This was mainly because most of the fish spent their lives in hiding, and the tanks were hardly ever cleaned out. Many a small boy had been traumatised after spending twenty minutes with his face pressed to the glass trying to spy an octopus in the murk, only to have it suddenly appear in a swirl of suckers an inch from his nose.

  Outside, the year-round regulars were taking the ozone; rows of severely handicapped children left gurning at the sea, hunched biddies creeping past on tripod-sticks, ex-military men in blazers and too-tight ties standing stock still at the railings, a smattering of potato-faced nuns. The promenade shelters belonged to blanket-lapped couples who examined paste sandwiches and decanted tea from thermos flasks as if they were still at home.

  At the edge of the town was the Cole Bay Kursaal, a funfair more commonly known as The Deathtrap, given its spotted safety record. Several people had flown out of the roller coaster, a child had been interfered with in the Tunnel of Love and a woman had been slung-shot from one of the chain-chair roundabouts. ‘They found her handbag on the other side of the Express Dairy,’ warned my mother darkly. Being a sickly child,
I was forbidden from going anywhere near the place, so of course I went whenever I got the chance.

  The history books have little to say about my home town. All the interesting coastal battles occurred elsewhere; none of the weird historical footnotes you read about in libraries—like St Ethelred having his hair set on fire—happened anywhere near Cole Bay; no marauding invaders had attempted to alight on these shores, unless you counted drunken boat-trippers from around the headland. The local museum comprised a single whitewashed room in a fishing hut, filled with musty sailors’ knots in cases, driftwood spars, and washed-out photographs of men in waterproof hats and huge wellingtons standing awkwardly beside netting.

  Cole Bay had just two claims to fame. The first was a plaque to honour a six-week stay by the young H. G. Wells, who had presumably been obeying doctor’s orders and convalescing from an illness that had deprived him of his senses. The second was less salubrious. This year, the resort had snatched the title of ‘Seaside Town with the Highest Suicide Rate’ from Hastings, and Hastings was glad to get rid of it. Their first famous visiting suicide had been Lizzie Rossetti, the unhappy wife of the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who topped herself with an overdose of laudanum in 1862. Sadly, we could not match this.

  Further along the coastline was Eastbourne, a previous holder of the suicide title, where young men killed themselves at more than twice the average national rate thanks to the handy proximity of Beachy Head, a spectacular headland ideally suited for dashing your brains out when you reached your tether’s end. Cole Bay’s only advantage in the self-extinction stakes was a forehead-clutching air of melancholia, largely induced by the overpowering odour of fish that scoured its way across town from the gutting sheds.

  The weekend trippers stopped coming before the start of the Second World War. Although the town was just seventy-eight miles from London, there were only two ways of getting here, via an unreliable Southern Region railway network that required two changes and operated virtually no service on Sundays, or by car on the nightmarish A21, and then on to a variety of convoluted traffic-choked B roads. In every sense, Cole Bay was the end of the line.

  I turned into my street, a lopsided run of terraced houses with pebble-dashed bay windows (pebbles being an extremely available commodity), and stopped before the only property with scallop shells still jauntily set in its front garden wall. As I approached the glass front door indented with frosted yachts, I heard my family before I saw them. As usual, there was an argument in progress. I quietly pushed open the door and waited in the hall. My mother was telling Sean not to use the house as a hotel. I could see my brother standing before her in his courier leathers and motorcycle helmet, waiting for her to finish. Bob was slumped deep in his armchair trying to watch the television through my mother’s body. He possessed the ability to screen out family complaints and only hear electronically transmitted signals, no matter how faint. Bob preferred the television to his wife. It had an off switch.

  I closed the front door as gently as I could and headed for my room, but was spotted at once and forced to divert to the lounge.

  ‘You, don’t you try and slip away. Do you still own a watch? Do you realise what the bloody time is?’ Pauline, my mother, switched the focus of her wrath. Sean used the momentary distraction to slip out into the kitchen.

  ‘You were supposed to be here a bloody hour ago, Kay. Your dinner is dried out. And where’s your scarf? You were wearing it when you went out.’ I felt inside my jacket collar. My mother never missed a trick. I realised I might have dropped it while leaning over the end of the pier trying to see if any more of the stanchions were rusted through.

  ‘You’ve lost it, haven’t you? I give up. Sometimes I don’t think you’re on this bloody planet. Well, you’ll have to eat your dinner as it is. Then Bob wants a serious talk with you.’ Bob’s eyes flitted in our direction at the mention of his name, like a dog hearing the rattle of a lead.

  I knew what the talk would be about. This was the moment I had been dreading: Bob had received the letter from the school. To my horror, he reached forward and turned off the sound of Up Pompeii! just as Frankie Howerd was about to remark on a slave girl’s cleavage. Apart from Doomwatch it was the only programme he never missed. This was serious. He studied me for a moment, long enough to allow my mother to leave the room. I was suddenly alone with my stepfather. I braced myself for the onslaught. Instead, Bob pinched the bridge of his nose and said wearily, ‘Get your dinner, lad. Then I think we should take Gyp for a little walk, don’t you?’

  It was too late to pray for an oceanic inundation now.

  Chapter 4

  Letting the Side Down

  Gyp was a short-haired brindle cross-breed that Bob had found abandoned in a cardboard box outside the Scheherazade Hotel. What exactly Gyp had been crossed with was a mystery, but it presumably hadn’t been another dog. He had tall ears, a long, lean body, short legs, a docked tail and a tongue that was too big to fit properly in his mouth. He looked like the unhappy result of intercourse between a draught-excluder and a fruit bat.

  Sean was still in the kitchen, foraging, and caught my eye. He drew a thick finger across his throat and grinned. I cheerfully mouthed ‘fuck off’ back. As sibling rivalry went it was like Castor and Polydeuces, only with more jokes and swearing.

  It was almost dark now, and the streets belonged to elderly ladies in tea-cosy hats who cast their eyes to the sky while their dogs trembled on their haunches and attempted to protrude hard white stools into gutters on command. Bob and I stayed away from the promenade, which by this time belonged to the Chavs, grim little knots of chain-smoking kids who spent their evenings standing around in bus shelters looking hard. We headed towards the park instead. Gyp was trying to strangle himself on his lead, and made gasping, retching noises as he clawed away at the pavement.

  Here, the local council had filled the branches of the plane trees with diseased-looking illuminated gnomes in an attempt to create an enchanted grotto effect. Disfigured plastic faces leered through the leaves beside us, buzzing with errant electricity. Snow White and her four and a half dwarves hung out in a fag-end-filled clearing with Little One-Legged Riding Hood. A deformed Miss Muffet had collapsed in agony over a plaster tuffet, while Little Blind Peep, squinting forlornly towards the bingo hut, appeared to have lost her mind as well as her sheep. A bridge troll bore an eerie resemblance to the man who sold racing forms on the front, and there was something poking out of an elderberry bush that was presumably the only remaining billy goat gruff. As a small child, these fairy tale gargoyles had terrified me. The councillors voted to reinstall them every season, like Christmas tree lights brought down from the attic and draped around a coffin. It seemed appropriate that they should surround me now, in my darkest hour.

  ‘Your mother’s very upset,’ said Bob finally. ‘Very upset indeed. She doesn’t know what to do with you, Kay. She doesn’t understand you. And frankly, neither do I. You’re a clever boy. You’re always bloody reading, some of it must have gone in. But you’re not making the grade, lad. You’re letting the side down. I know you’ve been sick a lot, but at this rate you won’t be able to stay on at school. They’ve written and said as much. The headmaster is very disappointed by your grades. Miss Hill reckons you’re her best pupil, but she’s the only one with anything decent to say. The others are ready to write you off.’

  ‘Don’t want to stay on anyway,’ I mumbled, feeling the heat growing behind my National Health spectacles. Bob halted before a crackling tableau and released a thin, high fart that he thought wouldn’t be noticed. One of Sleeping Beauty’s eyes had dropped out. She had a dent in her head, and the kids had drawn crimson felt-tip nipples on her breasts.

  ‘Don’t talk stupid. What would you do with yourself if you had to leave school, hang around here like the ones on the front? Christ, it’s bad enough that your brother’s let your mother down, bloody motorcycle courier. Do you know what he wanted to be when he was a kid?’

  ‘D
octor.’

  ‘A doctor. He had big plans. Look at him now. “Take a padded envelope to a firm in Margate”. Not exactly the big time, is it?’

  ‘He likes bikes.’

  ‘He could still like bikes if he had a proper career. And now you’re going to follow him. You were doing so well, catching up on all the time you lost in hospital, taking your O Levels a term early. Now it turns out it was a waste of sodding time. You won’t get another chance to make something of yourself. What are you going to do? I’ve no spare cash, and neither’s your mother. How are you going to live?’

  ‘Get a job.’

  ‘Around here? Do you know what the unemployment rate is in this town?’

  ‘Thirty-six per cent.’

  ‘Don’t be smart. What would you do? Be like the bloke who mends the slot machines? The man who gets put in a sack and escapes from handcuffs at the end of the pier? They used to set fire to him until the council put a stop to it. He nearly dies at every performance, and still has to go around with a cap.’

  We stopped beside an arrangement of cankerous shoemaker’s elves. Gyp scrambled over the low wall and attempted to wee on an elf until he was yanked back.

  ‘You’ve got to pull your socks up, and fast. You’re behind in everything except English, and that’s no bleeding use to anyone. From now on you’re indoors, not down at the library.’ Bob puffed out his cheeks, thinking. ‘Regular meals at the table. Homework. A set bedtime. And you can try watching some telly for a change, like normal people. I’m putting my foot down. This is your last chance to make something of yourself.’ He examined the sky for a moment, trying to remember whether there was anything he’d missed. ‘Well, I’ve said my piece. Now it’s up to you.’ He pulled a bottle of stout from his jacket pocket and snapped off the cap with the little opener on his key fob. Obviously it was a bottle Pauline had somehow missed. Usually she conducted a furtive search before he was allowed out of the house.