Calabash Page 20

  Endings, that year, nothing but endings. One more that month, God going for a fully representative set of tragedies. Dudley Salterton was found dead in his flat. He’d been there for three days before a neighbour noticed that the milk wasn’t being taken in. You’d have thought Barnacle Bill would have called someone. He’d just been given a new lip. There was gratitude for you. Two weeks after Dudley’s funeral, his posters still adorned the advertising sites on the railings of the promenade. I freed one from its case, took it home and pinned it up in my kitchenette. The little monochrome photograph showed Dudley in his striped summer jacket, mugging for the camera as he adjusted the straw hat on Barnacle Bill’s head, the fading image of a performer in a happier but already forgotten time. At least you’ve gone to join your beloved Dolores, I thought. She’s waiting for you on some celestial stage in her spangly leotard, posturing beside your cabinet of swords. I wondered if Parizade still waited for me, seated in the garden beneath peach blossom and bougainvillea, looking up from her book and listening for the distant sound of an approaching fishing boat.

  Chapter 32

  Staying Behind

  Summer came, and with it the arrival of those few visitors to Cole Bay who had not opted for the new Spanish holiday packages. In the face of unsettled weather they meandered along the esplanade looking for something to do, dissatisfied with the dated amusements on offer and ill at ease with each other, until the first warning prickles of rain drove them into my arcade. The summer of 1974 would go down as the hottest in living memory; it was the summer that changed Cole Bay forever. But that was still two years away, and if the past was another country, then so was the future.

  During the out of season period my job had reached zen-like levels of boredom. Despite the electronic racket ricocheting around me, I found myself drifting into a trance state that only the electrocution of a screaming child on the Bally Ski-Rally could awaken me from. I tried not to think about Sean, now recovered but missing part of an arm and languishing in a Thai custody centre, still awaiting his court appeal. Bob had been out to see him—a disastrous trip by all accounts, due to misinformation from the British embassy and delayed flights that resulted in Bob missing his meeting with the consul in charge of Sean’s case. My brother’s chances of a reduced sentence were either fair or nonexistent, depending on who we listened to, and the degree of variation was less to do with the circumstances surrounding the arrest than our government’s unwillingness to upset Thailand while its building programme relied on British imports. Bob and Pauline were told that they had to view the case as part of a bigger picture, which must have been a comfort to them.

  Sean wrote to me a few times, meandering apologetic notes that embarrassed both of us. He had always been honest with me, but was uncomfortable with any discussion of the events leading to his arrest, so his letters became like my conversations with Bob and Pauline, where nobody ever said what they meant, or what they really wanted to say.

  The Scheherazade Hotel announced that it was going broke, and would be laying off many of its staff in order to downgrade from three stars to two. It cut everyone’s pay and asked Bob to work overtime without remuneration. One evening when he had to work late, I decided to go around and see him. The Scheherazade employed a doorman who wore an outfit that was meant to look exotic and Middle Eastern. It was made of shiny orange nylon, and came with a sequin-trimmed cape, curly-toed shoes and a purple fez with a feather. The trousers didn’t fit properly, and hung below his crotch. The ensemble made him look like a children’s entertainer of below normal intelligence. He wouldn’t have lasted a minute in Calabash.

  ‘Oi, you can’t come in here dressed like that,’ he told me, holding up his hand.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked.

  ‘Plimsolls.’ He pointed at my feet. ‘This is a smart establishment.’

  ‘You must be joking. Take a look at yourself. I wasn’t aware that there were any man-made fabrics in the Ottoman Empire. Anyway, I’m on business.’

  ‘Oh, yeah? How d’you work that out?’

  ‘I’ve come to see my dad,’ I explained. ‘He works here.’ I thought the doorman might be reasonable and let me in. We looked about the same age. ‘He’s the manager of catering services.’

  ‘I don’t care if he’s the genie of the lamp, you’re not coming in with those things on.’ I peered over the doorman’s shoulder. In the foyer two very old ladies were slumped in armchairs, fast asleep or possibly dead. There was no-one at the reception desk.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ I said, ‘there’s nobody about.’

  ‘Go on, you, piss off back to your arcade,’ he said nastily, shooing me off the step, and I realised with a shock that he must have noticed me sitting there on my stool. Seeing my job through his eyes suddenly made me feel ashamed. He clearly considered it on a lower social scale than his own. Depressed, I went around to Balaclava Terrace and sat with my mother. The anger, or at least the tetchiness—for there were no large emotions on display in our family—seemed to have departed her, leaving only a weary acceptance that manifested itself in an inability to decide anything: what to cook, what television programme to watch, what to do next. After a few hours of this agonised pottering, I found myself longing for the days when she and Janine sat together in the kitchen moaning about topless models.

  The rain refused to let up. It was as though there was some kind of dial controlling the weather, and it had become jammed. Some days the temperature rose enough to make the pavements steam, but nothing dried out. I shifted my stool to the front of the arcade and stared up at the incontinent sky like some malevolent pixie, aware that I was slowly becoming a Cole Bay character, like the escapologist who used to dive into the sea in a straitjacket from the side of the pier, or the scary old man with the boil on the end of his nose who had dispensed 99s from Giuseppi’s ice-cream counter for about thirty-five years before being put away for tampering with his electricity supply. Meanwhile, a wave of vandalism swept Cole Bay with the force of an exciting new trend. Sixth-formers smashed several of the pinball tables while I was out getting a sandwich, and although I was sure that Malcolm Slattery was the most likely ringleader, I had no proof to offer Mr Cottesloe. Incredibly, Slattery had opted to stay on at school, thus defeating the time-honoured tradition of bullies leaving early to drift into lives of petty crime. It didn’t seem right that he was to be the recipient of higher education while my own communication skills were reduced to shouting, ‘Oi, mate, don’t leave your cola bottle on the mechanical grab.’

  It was difficult to read in the arcade because the lights were dimmed to prevent reflections in the glass cases of the games. Also, several of the machines ‘talked’, and though some could be turned down, none could be silenced. Especially grating was a Texan voice that counted down from ten to ‘three…two…one…BLASTOFF!’ every minute or so.

  To say that I missed visiting Calabash was like saying the Germans were disappointed about Dresden. Not a day passed when I didn’t long to be back in the palace bedchamber with Rosamunde, holding her gently in my arms upon sheets of quilted crimson silk. I even thought of Parizade on her crescent bench of white marble, high above the sea, an open book unread in her lap, her eyes focused on the dimming horizon. It felt as though I had lost the only piece of my life worth living for. Part of my mind was always thinking about going back. The only way I could return to the problems of the real world was by reminding myself that Calabash only existed as a fanciful form of escape, that what I had actually been doing on all those occasions was standing on the lower fishing platform for hours in a state of mental aphasia, risking my life and half freezing to death until the cold and the wind finally snapped me out of it. I told myself that I could have killed Julia, that we could have fallen into the sea and drowned, and if that didn’t work I reminded myself that I had started to behave like my real father, running away from reality to live in some childish world of make-believe. Thank God, I said, that I saw sense in time and stopped being foolish.


  It didn’t stop me from missing Calabash.

  Hell, everyone retreated from trouble, they just had different ways of doing it: my mother with her letter writing, Bob with his solitary drinking, Sean with his dreams of escape, Janine with her illusions of a storybook marriage. Had Calabash been such a harmful alternative? Here I was, trapped like a rat in a maze, working six days a week in the arcade, making barely enough money to live on, unable to save, unable to move, and for what? At the end of June, during the first really dry week of the year, my chest infection returned and put me back in the hospital for a fortnight. Cottesloe grudgingly kept my job open, but only after remarking that it would have been easy for him to find someone younger—and, he implied, cheaper—for the position.

  Around this time, Bob lost faith in British justice when it became clear that my brother was going to lose his appeal. The death penalty was ruled out, as it was proven that Sean had been deceived by his employer. The Thai justice system sounded a lot more organised than the British consulate. Although there were all kinds of clauses and riders attached to the ruling, the basic sentence amounted to six years in jail, and the consul ominously warned my parents that as life there was tougher than in British jails, we should expect a big change in his appearance when we next saw him.

  Soon after my lungs had sufficiently recovered, I returned to the end of the pier and stood watching Katherine, who was still rolling clouds of candyfloss around her drum and selling tickets to the ghost train. Now she had heavy black stripes of kohl around her eyes and dyed red hair. She had taken to wearing a studded leather jacket, tight torn jeans and motorcycle boots. It was an image I’d seen on a lot of recent rock albums. I decided that the time had come to meet her. I did this over a number of days by buying a lot of candyfloss and throwing it away once I had walked around the corner.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ she said during my sixth consecutive visit.

  ‘What?’ I tried to look surprised as I accepted another great pink sugar-swirl on a stick.

  ‘Why do you buy this muck?’

  ‘I like the taste.’

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You chuck it away.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You get round the corner and chuck it away.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘It floats. She sees you chuck it over the side.’ She pointed at her friend on the darts stall. ‘It floats right past her. Even the seagulls won’t touch it.’

  ‘I like the look of it, I just don’t like the taste.’

  ‘That’s what Larry told me the other night,’ called her friend, and she laughed coarsely. This wasn’t going at all how I’d imagined.

  ‘Then why don’t you just watch me make it instead of buying it?’ I knew she was teasing me, but there seemed to be no way out of this conversational trap.

  ‘I don’t mind buying it.’

  ‘You’re not doing me a favour, you know, I’m not on a percentage.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, exhausted. ‘Next time I’ll just watch.’

  ‘It’d be quicker if he just asked you out,’ said the friend, who talked to Katherine as if I wasn’t there. I decided to call her bluff.

  ‘All right, do you want to go out?’

  ‘Depends. Where?’

  I hadn’t prepared answers for anything this far down the line. ‘Er, do you like the pictures?’

  ‘No, it’s boring. What about a drink?’

  ‘Yeah, all right.’

  ‘You know the King Edward?’

  ‘The pub?’

  ‘Well, I’m not talking about the potato.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You could meet me in there after I finish, about eight-thirty.’

  ‘Yeah, all right.’

  ‘When, then?’

  ‘Um, tonight if you like.’

  ‘Yeah, all right.’

  I was glad I hadn’t opted for a display of Shavian wit. Katherine was clearly more straightforward than I had imagined. As I walked away, I heard the two girls laughing together.

  The King Edward was frequented by bikers from London. I had to walk past it from the pier to the arcade. It didn’t seem like a good place to get to know someone, but maybe that was the idea.

  I don’t suppose I need to point out that the evening was a hopeless disaster, but to give you some idea of just how horrible it was you have to picture me squeezed onto a red plastic couch next to Katherine’s friend and her Neanderthal biker boyfriend, opposite Katherine and her boyfriend, who turned out to be the psychopath of Cole Bay Grammar, my former nemesis, Malcolm Slattery. Thundering heavy metal music shook the glasses on the lager-swamped table as the tittering weaselly Laurence did tricks with a beermat, and Slattery ominously reminisced about the fun we hadn’t had together at school. The knowledge that Katherine had invited me to the pub was presumably his only reason for not duffing me up.

  ‘Remember the old bitch who took us for English?’ he asked. ‘She died of cancer.’

  ‘I know. I visited her in hospital.’ Slattery gave me an odd look, and seemed on the verge of an insult, then snapped his mouth shut and grabbed his beer to take another noisy draught. Every two minutes he abruptly stopped chewing his gum, turned and clamped his mouth over Katherine’s, as if franking the postage onto a parcel. Her pleasure at my squirming discomfort seemed only slightly higher than the enjoyment she clearly gained from receiving Slattery’s fat tongue in her throat. Each time he attacked her face, she raised her legs from the floor with pleasure and seemed about to jack-knife into the couch.

  After half an hour of this torture, during which time I was expected to keep them all supplied with beer, I went outside to get some fresh air and didn’t go back. I avoided the pier after that. Knowing that she and her friend were still there helped me to avoid the temptation of being drawn back to Calabash. Katherine had come down from her pedestal with a vengeance.

  The dead days were only enlivened once more that summer, by an unannounced visit from Danny, who had changed his appearance yet again. This time he had grown his hair into a glittery mullet and was wearing eye shadow. (This was about the time Mary Quant started selling black and silver ‘Glam Rock’ makeup kits for men.) He told me he had taken a few acting classes and was understudying a part in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which was then playing in a derelict cinema in the King’s Road, Chelsea. He wasn’t sure how long the job would last, but he was enjoying it. I asked him about Dennis and his work with the GLF.

  ‘Who?’ he asked, puzzled, then remembered. ‘Oh, him. That was absolutely yonks ago. We didn’t see eye to eye. He wanted me to go on protest marches all the time, but the people were so awful, shouting about politics and badgering people in the street. The flat was always full of students having stupid arguments about Marxism. They’d sit on the floor burning holes in the carpet with their joints, hang around until they’d emptied the fridge and drunk all our booze, then go home and wait for me to restock. I couldn’t see what wanting to shag men had to do with striking miners, so I moved out. I see you’re still here, then.’ He scratched his nose with a varnished fingernail. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘How does it look?’

  ‘Like you died and went to hell.’

  ‘How astute of you to notice.’

  ‘I guess there’s still no work down here.’

  ‘Not unless you want to be a deckchair attendant. Of course there are plenty of other skills to be had. Why, only yesterday the man on the soft ice-cream counter was telling me how you can cheat customers by keeping the edge of the cone close to the nozzle as you fill it, thus creating a central hole in the ice cream that doesn’t collapse until after you’ve sold it. And I can thrill you with tales of wafer technology, but I’m sure you haven’t the time.’

  ‘At least you don’t have to make your own amusement.’ He waved a hand around the beeping, blinking room. ‘Sorry, I suppose that’s not very funny.’

  ‘Not very
, no.’

  ‘Look, I really do have to go. My mother’s back in the hospital, and it doesn’t look like she’s going to come out this time. I can’t visit her at the same time as my dad because they won’t let him smoke and he won’t sit in the waiting room with me. You should come up and catch the show before it ends its run. You look like you could do with a laugh. I’ll send you my new address.’

  But Danny had never sent me his old one. He was caught up in an exciting new world, and had little in common with someone who was staying behind in the town that time—and he—was determined to forget.

  Chapter 33

  Life’s Little Surprises

  In a small town there are a lot of familiar faces. But even though I watched the girl passing by from my gnome stool in the arcade, I didn’t realise that it was Julia until she turned back and walked towards me.

  ‘Kay?’ she asked in disbelief.

  I hardly recognised her at all. For a start, she had a figure. She had lost her puppy fat and seemed taller, but there was something else about her, a rawness, a new energy that dispelled her former air of lethargic disinterest. She had grown her hair. Her face was thinner, so that her blue eyes now seemed large and searching.

  ‘Kay?’ She slowed in mid-stride, shocked by my appearance. ‘My God, is that you?’

  I knew that I had also changed, and not for the better. The stress I had been through, worrying over my brother, and the fears about my health and sanity, had taken their toll. My face was gaunt and liverish; I was as skinny as a hat-rack.

  She, on the other hand, was as radiant as a summer morning. She should have taken one look at me and run a mile, but instead she took another faltering step forwards, then reached out for my hand without thinking. ‘You poor sausage, I’ve been meaning to come and see you but things have been so crazy…’