Wrecking (Part Two)

2/3

The house is different from memory, I guess things normally are. It was too much to expect parity with memories that owed more, to some cinematic ideal of what you feel somewhere from your childhood should be, than reality itself. I thought it would be exotic and evocative, that it would bring long suppressed memories leaking back through freshly poked holes. That’s what they say about this kind of place don’t they; long forgotten, remote, an abandoned family home the site of sepia tinged memories of holidays and growing up and the sea. Sometimes, I guess, some things from our own pasts we think to be important, are merely mundane, and for that we have to settle.

It was my Grandfather’s originally, I think, or my Great Grandfather’s. Either way it had been in the family for as long as I could remember, a battered sea stripped thing, perched precariously on a spit of land, guarding the dunes. As with so many things last seen as a child, it seems smaller somehow than from my recollection, not just in size but in grandness. It has sagged. Gone from an exotic distant shelter smelling of ozone and salt, the scene of so many mock battles and children’s games, to what it is. What it always was; just an old house.

It stands, worn and protruding outward, the harsh air has razor bladed the once uniform coat of paint into torn jagged paper, like a tusk in an elephants graveyard in the sand being picked clean by flies.

We bring in our bags and things from the car, he struggles with his.

“I’ll get your bag mate” I say.

He ignores me.

Inside lurk spiders and bare wood, we look around and begin switching on lightbulbs to see which ones still work.

It’s a bit like setting up camp, tenants, as we are, in this old space; both empty yet tainted with personality and smell. Like most things abandoned instead of vacated it has retained something within it, it feels like it still belongs to someone else, an owner who will come lolloping over the dunes at any moment to reclaim it, someone with a beard and torn clothes and amnesia, the survivor from a shipwreck or a plane crash. It drips with history; it lacks a sense of empty, we are barely footnotes to it, so lacking as we are, in permanence and impact.

Laying out our provisions and possessions like this, alongside sleeping bags and rucksacks on bare floors, we are safe and ensconced. We are Antarctic scientists, lost and cut off in a research station. Surrounded by ice, blizzards, and polar bears, but kept by thick concrete walls, the only bright burning points of life in a continent.

We both sit down on the floor and make lists and plans of things we need to do. Provisions we need to buy, things to put right and correct and cross through. Baked beans and politics.

““First thing’s first, survey the beach” I say.

“Skim some stones” he says

“Yes!” I say. He is so right. He is brilliant.

“So” he says “Today: Beach, Stones, Provisions, back here for food”

“Then, get a fire going and drink whisky til dawn”

“I’ll need some more cigarettes” he says

The beach that constantly threatens to encroach the house, that longs to come in through the front door in a wave of animated pebbles, is one of those rock strewn beaches devoid of sand that you hate as a child. Like Brighton or Bognor, it’s a real foot shredder of stones and rocks and bits of glass that wait to stub a toe or plunge into the soft fleshy arches of feet brave, foolish, or unknowing enough to forgo shoes. We stumble toward the waves into crosswinds wearing loose battered converse and hoodies.

“This is a bit of Withnail moment” I say, “The city boys faffing about, undone by weather”

“We’ve gone on holiday by mistake!” he says, quoting.

“We wouldn’t be the hardiest of survivors” I say, “Say, in a plane crash”

“What, like, in those guys lost in the Peruvian rainforest?” he asks

“Sure it was peru?” I say

“One of those south American ones anyway”

“We would be rubbish. Society has trained us for many things, but not dealing with plane crashes”
“It’s not the disease, the starvation, the lack of fresh water or any kind of maps, we would be defeated by lack of designer cofee” he says

“Indeed, no journey can be made without clinging to a medium-grande-cappucino” I say

“We’d end up eating eachother’s legs or something” he says, plunging hands further into pockets “I’d be a crap cannibal I think.”

The gulls rock back and forth against a patchwork grey of clouds and sky. The air picks up spray and dusts us with it. We stumble on, shakily, like old men.

“In retrospect” I say, “maybe April wasn’t the best time to do this”

“I like it.” He says, “It’s dramatic, ‘windswept’, is that the right term? As if we were in a novel… ‘they walked across the windswept rugged coastline together’…”

“Yeah, in a mills and boon novel” I say

“Anyway” He says, “It’s gotta be April. Doc said if I waited until the summer it might be too late” He scratches the beginnings of a beard and looks up at the gulls.

There are fireworks, explosions of connectivity in my thinking. This is the opening. This is a good trip, and a good idea. We will be cleansed.

I pause and try to remember to keep walking. “Ah well then, April… April, it was obviously meant to be”

This is the first time he has mentioned it out loud, and it’s so bare and bald, delivered like a joke. Should I laugh? What is the suitable reaction and response to somebody casually mentioning their impending death and fragile state of mortality as if it were a eye exam or some other mildly inconvenient date in their diary. I have to decide what to say.

I suddenly think, how long am I taking to go through this thought process? Am I standing open mouthed and gawping, like some Tex Avery cartoon character who’s jaw has literally just hit the floor. Think. Respond.

“I didn’t realize they had told you dates.”

What the hell was that? Lame. So appallingly lame.

“Yeah” he says, unperturbed. “Aha, here’s a beauty”

He stands up brandishing a smooth rock.

”Look at that” He says “lovely”

It’s a proper skimmer, one side rubbed flat like burnt glass and obsidian, the right size to slot in between thumb and forefinger, enough heft to feel the weight in the palm. He takes two steps onto the shoreline and whips it out to sea, where it bounces once, twice, before vanishing like an actor falling through a trapdoor.

He throws in that orthodox Frisbee technique, where the throwing arm comes across the body and then, backhand style, launches the stone with a violent flick of the wrist. I throw backwards, like a forehand, my right arm coming from way outside my body, standing almost side on to the waves, looping my arm back round before the release.

We talk between throws.

“Your technique’s all wrong” he says,

Two bounces

“It’s how I’ve always done it” I say,

Two bounces

“You’ll never become a professional with an action like that” ,

Three bounces.

“So how did you feel?” I ask, tentatively.

One bounce

“What’s the most you’ve ever got?” he says

No bounce. He swears.

“I dunno” I say, “Five or six bounces?”

Three bounces

“I felt strange” he says “I kind of felt ok. I felt like…

He thinks, leans back and throws.

Four bounces

“Yes!” he says “Get in”

“Shot.” I say.

“I felt like relieved, I think.” He says “I felt relieved that finally I had something solid, something I could work with. Now at least, I can make lists”

There’s a long pause. I look for stones. Wooden struts of a long gone jetty intermittently appear amongst the waves. Long dead fingers grasping and retreating.

“I saw some guy on Youtube once,” I say

No bounces

“The skimming stone record holder” I say

Splash.

“How many did he get?” he says

Something hits water.

“I can’t remember. Lots. He had some special technique.”

Nobody throws. When I turn around, he’s sitting on the stones looking out.

“You think you’d have regrets” he says, “But…”

“I’m not sure I’d want to know” I say. “The date”

Why I’m trying to imagine a situation I can’t begin to imagine, I’m not sure, but I try anyway. I think in order to take control, to somehow make the situation accessible and thus turn it to something I can affect. Because the realisation and truth that reaches up, grasping like a nagging child, is that I have none. I have planned this weekend, it was my idea, and I have taken every step thus far to ensure my stamp is burned into it’s side. From the music to the in-jokes to even the location, all is mine, or in some way connected to me. We are coming to a place from my past full of my ghosts, to confront the fears and worries that apparently he has already come to terms with, with yet remain inside me. What did I honestly expect him to get out of this? Some kind of goodbye? Is that really what he needs right now?

I kick shingle into the sea and say “I think we should get back now”

Coward.

Reality, I think, is what I’m after. Some kind of trial run. If I can get to grips with the concept now, then, when it happens, or more precisely, before it happens – for the moment I dread is not the act itself, not ‘dying’ as in the moment, the end of someone. I’m terrified of the handholding and the awful hours, days and weeks before, like a film that doesn’t know when to end. I don’t want to see that, don’t want to see him become a facsimile of something once great, now faded and half remembered at the end. I know how much that’ll take, how much he’ll need, am I’m not sure I have that much to give. I’m not sure I’m capable.

—

Later on, after trips to shops and long searches for firewood we are finally prepared for the night that has dropped, like mist, outside. Inside, the house smells of meths and whisky and draw. The camping stove hisses and spits blue around a burnt metal pot. Into it we throw strips of bacon and toast bread in the fire he has finally got going – despite my protestations – with a liberal dose of meths.

“What do you think about this one?” he says, flicking through cds.

I scratch my chin, move bacon around pointlessly in the pan, and try not to make eye contact. We are talking about music for funerals, which I suppose is progress from being unable to even mention his condition in the car. He passes me the half smoked joint and sips at his plastic cup of whiskey.

He shifts position. Outside one of the shutters is loose, it bangs on the walls like a drunk locked out of his own empty house. The rain outside is like a curtain, wrapping us, enveloping us, causing us to seek warmth in whichever ways we can. I take a long drag myself and think about tumours and blackened flesh and photographs from medical journals.

“It’s like planning a really kick-ass party you’re not invited to” he says. “the more I think about it, the more I think ‘I wanna go!’”

The drunk, tired, loses vigor in dying wind, and the shutter finally comes to rest against the frame.

“I can’t believe you’re thinking about this now. That you can think about this now”

What I mean, what I really mean is, ‘How are you dealing with this better than me?’ I’m jealous and small. But I need to know, give me answers and give me solace.

“What’s the alternative?” he says

“Fuck. I dunno. Anger? Why aren’t you so cross, why aren’t you out there naked on the beach screaming protestations at the world into the rain and the wind and at god at everyone and everything who isn’t… who doesn’t have to go through what you’re…” my words, my speech, dies.

He looks back down at the CD’s. Lip bitten, his shoulders are a bowed line once straight. I realize I’ve been shouting.

“Fuck man” I say “Sorry”

“No” he says “I like the sentiment.”

I hand him a bacon sandwich.

“Let’s do it together” I say, not believing my own words.

The shutter bangs on the window as if the whole house is in agreement.

With warmth and fuzzy throats we stumble outside into the dark, momentarily hit by the wind which rushes sideways and devilish. We run as best we can over the stones, lit by moon and maglite, towards the sea, which to us looks black, the breaking waves are white swirls in a wall of moving rock.

There are so many stars overhead, to my untrained, unused, city boy eyes, that it makes me dizzy if I try to look up and see all at once. I feel something stab through my thin shoes and break the skin of my feet as I run. I stumble, feel burning course like liquid through the joints as I go over on my ankle. I go down, sprawled over the stones.

“Are you ok dude?” he says.

“Just my ankle” I say.

I will not let this weak body pause this moment. This breakthrough. I think of the pain he has had to suffer already. I look at him, deerstalker atop regrowing hair, and pull myself to my feet.

“It’s nothing” I say, and add liar to my list of sins.

We continue toward the sea, the two of us unconvincing and haphazard like bad movie monsters. We are whooping and shrieking with childlike realisation that we are doing something abnormal and against the rules and against what is expected. Fire burns, inside my ankle is a thousand broken sharp edges rubbing against eachother.

We reach the shore line, breath short and hearts beating,

“What now?” he shouts.

I can feel warm blood inside my shoe. I grit teeth.

“I have no idea” I say “we should shout something”

“What?” he says, and he turns to me, spotlighting my face with his torch.

“I have no idea” I say again.

We stand against the sea, thinking. The wind whispers out of earshot. The rain drives on.

“It was your plan” he says

“I can’t think of anything” I say. I am paralysed, “I want to say a thousand things but I can’t turn it into words”

“Fuck you” he says.

“Fuck you” he says again, a little louder.

Like winding up to skim a stone he takes a deep breath and bellows it out, extending the syllables like elastic.

“Fuuuuu-ccckk, You!” he screams it, bellows it, gives it so much that he runs out of breath and the end tails off into nothing. He ends it bent double and panting.

He walks forward so the water is up to his knees and screams it again and again and again, ecstatically and ludicrously swearing into the night, his torch waving like a searchlight. Watching him I feel tears hot on my face being obliterated by rain, I feel throbbing coming from my foot. He looks at me expectantly. I can’t move, I can’t speak. I imagine those wooden struts emerging from the water somewhere in front of me, constantly coming up for air and then being dragged under.

“Come on” he says.

I want to shout. I want to scream so hard I bring up a lung and spit blood across the stones. I want to.

“Don’t chicken out on me” he says.

“I can’t” I say. I am suddenly aware of the cold, the rain and the wind pinching my skin. I feel like a drunk suddenly made sober in a party. I am exposed.

“Come on!” he shouts, insistent. He reaches out his hand, reaching to pull me into the water. I think about drowning.

I feel myself involuntarily stepping back. I don’t want to take his hand. I don’t want to be pulled in. What I think will happen to me; should I walk into that black water, should I bellow out curses, is unclear, but something instinctive and deep prevents me. I am blocked.

I shake my head. “Sorry mate”

I can’t.

I can’t endure what you do. I cannot go where you go. I can’t pretend that for you.

I wipe water from my face and hair, taste salt from tears and ocean stinging my eyes and pricking my tongue. My ankle throbs. I turn to go away, pulling my hood over my head to shut out his calls, I head away, away from the sea, away from the beach, away from him. I half run, half crawl up the incline of shingle towards the dunes, away from the breathing rolling rhythm of the waves and the sleeping, snoring, restless thing lying down underneath.