Calabash Read online

  The Sultan clapped his hands.

  Apart from the dozing dromedary in the marketplace, I had yet to spot a camel in the kingdom. The one placed before me now was hairless and steamed. Six men set it down on cedar poles, so that its head was facing the Sultan. Grapefruits filled its eye sockets. A muscular man dressed in a brass-studded loincloth and sweating heavily appeared beside it, and with a bloodcurdling scream brought a scimitar down hard across the creature’s hump. The tender flesh sprang apart to reveal, once the clouds of steam had lifted, a whole goat, horned, pale and drenched in spice-oils. The scimitar flashed once more. Inside the split goat was a peacock dressed in metallic green feathers. Another scream, another shear of the blade. Inside the peacock was a chicken, and inside this a sand-grouse, then a quail, then a guinea pig, then a sparrow, and finally a canary. The man in the loincloth pushed a long-handled spoon into the canary’s opened chest and dug out half an ounce of brown granules, which he brought to a silver plate and laid before me with the greatest delicacy. Everyone looked at me expectantly.

  ‘See!’ said the Sultan, pointing proudly to the side of the plate. ‘Knife and fork!’

  They were all waiting.

  ‘Don’t let it get cold,’ said Rosamunde drily.

  I raised my fork and lifted the savoury brown blob to my lips. It smelled of citrus, but had a subtle nutty taste.

  ‘Speciality of Calabash,’ said the Sultan proudly. ‘Molida.’

  ‘Molida?’ I chewed carefully. ‘It’s very nice.’

  ‘Molida!’ Everyone smiled and began to eat.

  ‘Roasted mashed cockroach in fruit-bat oil, seasoned with lemons,’ explained Rosamunde. I managed to mask my surprise as I swallowed, and tried not to cough. As we ate, I noticed that Rosamunde was still watching my every move. My white skin seemed to fascinate her. Once she reached out and touched my wrist, only to recoil as if electrified. The Sultan eyed her and issued a displeased ‘Harrumph’. Nobody spoke, but concentrated on the serious business of enjoying the extraordinary repast.

  ‘Well, I expect your journey has wearied you,’ the Sultan decided after the last of several courses had been cleared away. He pushed aside a tray of torn-open lemons and released a series of baritone belches that were roundly applauded. ‘When you are fully rested, Mister Kaygoodwin, we expect to hear all about your land, its people and customs, its arts and sciences, yes? Especially its sciences.’ He winked knowingly at the Lord Chancellor. ‘We must be friends. There are so few young people in the palace these days. I wanted you to meet Scammer, but apparently he’s stuck in a chimney.’ He leaned back to his mother and said loudly, ‘Is he still in the chimney?’ She nodded, her chins rippling. ‘Well, next time, perhaps. Now that you are here you must treat my humble palace as your home. You can sleep in the Kiosk of the Circumcisions. Or, if you prefer, the doctor will take you to his village, yes?’

  The palace was a spectacularly beautiful edifice, but only hospitable to those who were its subjects, and given the choice I knew I would be more likely to relax in an atmosphere of less formality beyond the guarded walls. Making my decision known to Trebunculus, the doctor gave a shy smile. ‘A wise choice,’ he whispered. ‘I have just the very place for you.’

  So, amid much complimenting of the sun and moon and stars, and much low bowing and scraping and walking backwards, our visiting party took its leave of the Sultan and his retinue, crossed back through the cooling courtyards and remounted the donkeys at the base of the palace steps, to ride gently with full stomachs towards the setting sun.

  Chapter 13

  The Criteria for Happiness

  I began to feel cold. The shoulders of my windcheater were soaked, and my teeth were chattering. Someone was shouting at me. ‘Oi, in bloody dreamland you are. I’m trying to close up here.’ Mr Church pulled a sodden green tarpaulin across the coconut mats at the bottom of the helter skelter. He was responsible for opening and closing the pier, and took his job too seriously. On wet evenings when there were few visitors he shut the place early, and conducted convoluted arguments with anyone who dared to point out that they were entitled to finish their stroll. I snapped from my reverie as if someone had thrown a bucket of cold water over me, and looked back at the pier end, trying to make sense of what had happened. I checked my watch. Only half an hour had passed since I had fled from the ghost train. I wanted to return to the lower deck, but Church was busily ushering me out. How did I get back up the steps to here?

  I walked home in a daze, my head still filled with sunlight. Had I imagined everything? I gingerly explored the back of my skull with my fingertips. A tender welt from the ghost train’s steel beam, no broken skin. Could it just have been an extremely vivid hallucination?

  A van almost ran me over as I crossed the promenade. I remained lost in dreams until I reached my front door. The house smelled of boiling cabbage. Janine and Sean were over for dinner, and were arguing about buying a motorbike. Janine didn’t want to ride in a sidecar because she used to ride in her father’s and the smell of the acetate windows on a hot day made her sick. She had entered the Daily Mail’s competition to win a Mini Minor with a Union Jack painted on its roof. Pauline complained about a butcher who had been caught using contaminated bonemeal in dog food, reminded us all that since the Fray Bentos scandal she still didn’t trust corned beef, and rose from the table in the middle of her meal in order to clip out an article from the paper about council cleaners refusing to clear up dog’s muck left on the esplanade. Bob stared at the television even though the sound was turned off. I had no stomach for two grey lamb chops coated in elastic gravy, and toyed with the dry meat before excusing myself from the table at the first available opportunity.

  Up in my room, I set aside my precious maps of Mesopotamia and all of my notes on ancient Babylonian burial sites, sealing them in labelled plastic bags and placing them on top of the wardrobe. I cleared a space on the floor, pulled a fresh pad of A2 cartridge paper from under my bed, and began to sketch out a city unlike any other I had attempted. The sights, smells and sounds of Calabash lived on inside me. Everything had been so intense and alive that I could not believe all this had simply sprung from a crack on the head. I wanted to get back to the pier as quickly as possible. I needed to understand what had happened: whether the area below the fishing deck was somehow responsible for fostering this fever-dream, or if something truly mystical had occurred, and I had actually crossed a point in time and space to arrive at a different part of our planet. The harder I thought, the less it made sense. For Calabash to have once occupied the same spot where the pier now stood, surely the world needed to have stopped spinning.

  One thing was certain: I had to return there, if only to talk to Trebunculus. The doctor appeared to have fulfilled some kind of promise to the Sultan, who had congratulated him on his success. Trebunculus held the key to my appearance. To occupy my mind I scoured my atlases in search of any city remotely resembling the one I was sure I had visited in person, but nothing like it existed in the Near, Middle or Far East. I dragged books from cupboards and examined historical timelines going back through thirty centuries; nothing. I checked the names of British Ambassadors to the East, but there was no mention of anybody called Septimus Peason. I recalled what Sean had said about drifting off into one’s own world; I had not expected the sensation to feel so real. Could I have spontaneously imagined something as fully formed, as detailed and colourful as Calabash?

  —

  ‘I have to get out of this bleeding town, it’s getting on my nerves. I tried to buy a kipper tie in the high street and the woman laughed at me. She said, “You want to try the fish shop, love.” Obviously not a dedicated follower of fashion.’

  Danny considered the residents of Cole Bay to be common and out of touch with the rest of the country, but he’d been born here just like me. He wouldn’t eat at any of the Wimpy Bars or cafés on the front, so he treated me to a set lunch in the Buckingham. This was Cole Bay’s smartest hotel. Once it had been
a popular retreat for wealthy landowners, but during the war it was occupied by the military, who billeted troops there because of its commanding position on top of the cliffs, and the building had never quite recovered from the shock. The restaurant was a slim glass box swagged with dusty festoon curtains. It ran along the cliff edge to take advantage of the view, which meant that the wind moaned forlornly around it even on a still summer’s day, and every third winter half of its salt-caked windows blew in. The waitresses were morose teenagers in ill-fitting black dresses and white caps serving grapefruit cocktails and dry pork chops with plates of watery mixed vegetables, but there was a wine list presented in a red mock-leather folder, and an elderly quartet played Bach in an alcove. To Danny it represented a step up from the seafront restaurants where the smell of batter permeated the curtains and all meals came with slices of white processed bread and a cup of milky tea.

  The other reason we ate up there was so that no-one would see us and start making trouble. Danny was fond of describing himself as the Queen of Cole Bay, by which he meant that while he was not the only gay man in the area, he was the only one who went out of his way to look it. He wore fitted-waist stripy suits with flared trousers, orange lace roll-neck shirts that fastened with Velcro, and wide white patent-leather belts. His blond hair was cut in a fringe so that he looked like Justin Hayward from the Moody Blues, but the effect was spoiled because he also had a thin, long neck (which my stepfather once referred to as ‘breakable’) and a prominent Adam’s apple.

  He carefully unfolded his napkin across his knees and leaned closer. ‘Look at her over there.’ I looked for a woman, but only saw a man eating alone. ‘That’s a wig. I think it’s a trannie.’

  I thought a ‘trannie’ was short for ‘transistor radio’. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know, Venus with a Penis. Honestly, what’s she like?’ Danny called men ‘she’ sometimes, especially after he’d been listening to Round the Horne on a Sunday lunchtime. Frankly, I felt that Danny had been standing a bit too close when the gay bomb exploded. He adopted the elbows-in-wrists-up mannerism that I associated with effeminate posture, but only when others were looking. I had long suspected that he was only pretending to be camp in order to be noticed. What gave him away most of all, though, was his determination to dress as if he was going to a fashionable party in London, when in reality he was stranded here on the south coast along with the rest of us. He usually tried a few screamy shock effects when we met up, then went back to behaving normally when he realised that I was indifferent to his routine.

  Danny was a display manager—‘not a window dresser,’ he was quick to point out—at Ramsey & Danforth, the old-fashioned department store in the high street, and we had become friends because he was often on the pier visiting an older man who owned the postcard shop, who I now think might have been gay as well, although he was married with a daughter. I suppose I had no problem with Danny being that way because I had always understood it from an historical perspective. I knew about the Romans, the Greeks and the ‘army of lovers’, holding hands as they faced death in battle. I knew about the homosexual kings of England and Leonardo da Vinci and Nero and Michelangelo and Oscar Wilde. I knew that Sir Richard Burton, the translator of The Arabian Nights, had openly supported gay rights, as had Tolstoy and H. G. Wells. In fact, I knew a lot more about the subject than he did. But Danny wasn’t interested in the academic aspects of being homosexual; he just wanted to meet someone nice and fall in love. He had no political motivation at all. When activists in London rallied to fight for equal rights, he went off to Amsterdam with a Spanish waiter from the Cole Bay Trocadero.

  The fact that I was the only heterosexual male he knew who would talk to him as if he was an ordinary human being made him my lifelong friend, although of course he would never admit that this was the reason. He seemed incapable of standing up for himself. Wearing outrageous clothes and being sarcastic was the best protest against conformity that he could muster. ‘What can I do, darling?’ he said helplessly. ‘The butch look just isn’t me.’

  I somehow expected all outsiders to be angry with their status and prepared to do something about it, so it always came as a shock to me to find that people were fully prepared to remain marginalised for the whole of their lives.

  Although Cole Bay had missed out on the Summer of Love, it was experiencing its first public flirtation with drugs. Marijuana was easy to obtain, as were amphetamines, and on a Saturday night the front was full of kids off their faces, but Danny liked to make friends with a bottle of gin. Alcohol was his big weakness. He drank too much and became a little too vocal in his condemnation of the town. I was worried that one day someone was going to bash his head in. He handled his problems in what I considered to be a typically English manner. Instead of acting upon the calling of his heart and moving to London where he would be free to grow, he remained in Cole Bay and moaned about his life. And so we amused ourselves by pretending to be posh at the Buckingham, and by making fun of others we felt better about ourselves. We laughed all the time when we were together, and if Danny drank too much and became maudlin I would try to cheer him up before steering him back in the direction of his flat, and we would promise to meet again some other time. It was a comfortable friendship, undemanding and easy. I could ask him the sort of questions anyone else would have thought soft, and I knew that he wouldn’t laugh at me.

  ‘Danny.’ I waited until the waitress had plonked a custard jug between us. ‘Do you think there’s a place where you could be completely happy?’

  ‘Depends on your criteria for happiness,’ he replied.

  ‘Somewhere nice and warm. Where people treat you properly. Sort of like…in an old painting.’

  Danny tipped the jug over his apple pie, but the skin seemed determined to hold the custard in. He prodded it with a fork. ‘Oh, well, it would be nice to think that charm and style and grace still counted for something, somewhere in the world. I don’t know, though. Some of those old paintings have all sorts of trouble going on. Hidden serpents lurking in unlit corners. Besides, a perfect world is your actual contradiction in itself.’

  ‘But imagine being able to do whatever you want.’

  ‘They’ve promised me a promotion in the new year. If I can get some money together I can move to London, apply at one of the big stores.’ He peered into the jug. ‘There’s something wrong with this custard. It’s supposed to fall out. Sod it, let’s have another bottle of wine. By the way, how’s Addis Ababa?’

  ‘Mesopotamia. Stalled, I’m afraid. I’m working on something else for a while.’

  ‘Forgive me, but I don’t entirely see what you’re trying to do, re-creating all these dead kingdoms. What do you hope to achieve? Nowhere’s perfect. People don’t exist in a vacuum.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Forget it, it doesn’t matter.’

  Later we stood on the edge of the cliff, looking down at the sea as it smashed over the shale. A gale was roaring so loudly in our frozen ears that we had to turn sideways to hear each other. I was worried that the windshear might react with Danny’s fashions and whip him over the edge.

  ‘Sometimes you can see the coast of France when it’s clear,’ said Danny. ‘It’s different over there. The cafés are all open-air, the bars never close, everyone’s drinking, laughing. At it like rabbits. People are up to all sorts of things. Not over here. Everything’s shut. Everyone’s hiding indoors.’

  ‘Why don’t we go there, then? Calais, Boulogne, Dieppe. Ferries go back and forth all the time. All you need is a passport and a few quid.’

  Danny drew a great breath and exhaled slowly.

  ‘It’s a long way, though, isn’t it? They don’t speak the same language as us. Probably wouldn’t want us coming over.’

  I decided there and then to tell no-one about my discovery of Calabash. Not Danny or Sean or Julia or Dudley Salterton. I wanted to get back to the platform, to see if I could make it happen again, but today was Saturday
and the weather was fine, and I knew that the pier would be full of people. I resolved to get up early and go there the next morning, when it was supposed to rain once more. My instinct told me that there could be no-one else around to witness my escape.

  I had to go somewhere, do something. Even if it was only in my head.

  Chapter 14

  A Crystal Constellation

  The sky was the colour of greaseproof paper. Rain scythed in grey sheets across the sea until I could no longer see the horizon. Even the ghost train was shut. I stood at the end of the pier facing the DANGER KEEP OUT sign with my left hand steadying myself against the railing, and pressed my right palm over my beating heart. I felt as though I was about to do something highly illegal. Below my feet, waves churned around the pillars of the pier, the downwards suction of the eddies revealing struts covered with dripping black molluscs, thousands of shiny razor-sharp shells. I leaned forward and looked down. Every third wave swamped one end of the lower platform.

  Fearful that I would change my mind if I waited any longer, I ducked beneath the chain and made my way down the spray-drenched steps. The metal floor of the platform creaked and groaned like an old ship, but felt sturdy enough to hold my weight. It was slippery, though, and the only railing consisted of metal chains slung between posts. Directly in front of me a ten-foot section was missing. I tried to remember where I had been standing, and realised with a sinking heart that it had been right at the back, in the darkest corner, where the ocean seemed to be rising to its highest level.