Good afternoon, Ms Hahn! The renovations? Uh not now, dear. Im uh My wife just died. We werent 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 mans trousers and her Soviet-style nose. But why her? Why then? Why there? Eh?!
Happenstance. Pure happenstance! A fluke. She couldve been anyone! Thats why. And worse still, Im 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 couldnt play the card if I didnt accept the feeling. And I didnt accept it. No! I just didnt. 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! (Im 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. Whats that ? (Stops spinning, staggers slightly.) Whats 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 Id 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. Id 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 Id confessed a pile of hysterical mumbo-jumbo, in Spanish, to the priest, then knelt and prayed with him (wed conversed freely he was born and raised in Alicante), then jumped up and ran off. Id 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 Id 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? (Ive 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. Its 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 (Im 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
I am trapped (a pathetically bleating shrew dangling from a savage hawks 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? Im 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: Theres an old extension out back. A sun room that Tilda the owner, Tilda Gower closed in with a little pine-wood sauna. Its The bungalow is basically just a series of tiny extensions, one next to the uh to the uh other. Biddy: So youve told Matilda about the landfall?).
At this (lets 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 Id got away with it this time! Id 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 didnt I just answer his calls and have done with it? Why didnt 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 Grimms 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 youve told Matilda about the landfall? Biddy repeats, ignoring the placid and unassuming Clifford completely.
Uh I am thrown into confusion, Yes. No. Thats thats actually why Im 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 couldnt ring her?
Biddy continues to ignore Clifford.
No. Shes still travelling.
The Great Wall?
I nod. She has an itinerary. Her next official pit-stop is somewhere called Huanghua. But shes been delayed by an infected mosquito bite on her heel. Every few months I receive a letter
Clifford is currently inspecting the rack of cellophane and Sellotape. He picks up a packet of Blu-Tack. He seems deeply engrossed in the writing on the back.
Is that her name in Chinese, then? Biddy wonders, indicating the top line of the address.
No. I think it says something like uh to the crazy, European lady traveller who is walking the Great Wall. I humbly ask that you the wall guard at Huanghua please keep this letter for her until she arrives, when she will reward you generously for your kindness. A thousand blessings All very flowery and Chinese. I dont know, exactly something like that, anyway. She sends me her next contact address enclosed in each letter so I can just cut it out and glue it on to an envelope.
Oh. Biddy nods.
Its all fairly hit and miss, I continue (suddenly compelled through guilt and embarrassment to blather on, inanely). The walls over five thousand miles long. Although Tilda seems to think its even longer than that. In her last postcard she said shed recently met someone a Chinese historian or a geographer who told her that the wall originally spanned over fifteen thousand miles
I simply dont understand why Matilda bothered buying that bungalow in the first place if she never had any plans to live in it, Biddy sighs, taking the letter from me and dropping it on to the scales.
No.
Clifford has now moved on to the rack of birthday cards.
Although I suppose it gives you a roof over your poor head, she kindly concedes, so you can rent out your little cottage in Pett and dont need to be getting under the feet of your dear old dad.
Yes. I nod (concerned that she might be confusing my reassuringly tough head or my utterly incorrigible father with someone elses head someone elses dad far more deserving than mine).
Have you ever actually lived in the cottage since you inherited it? she wonders.
Uh. No, no. Ive always been committed to
Someones birthday? Biddy raises her voice to finally acknowledge Clifford.
Clifford is inspecting a card very closely. He is so engrossed that he doesnt seem to hear her.
SOMEONES BIRTHDAY, RUSTY? Biddy bellows.
Cliffords entire body jolts with surprise. He drops the card then bends down to pick it up, inadvertently bumping into a wicker basket containing bags of kindling.
Mine, he says, then, Sorry, (to the basket).
Yours? Biddy scowls.
Clifford clumsily retrieves the card.
The day before yesterday. Clifford nods.
(Oh God! The day of the landslip! I have forgotten Cliffords birthday again, dammit!) Its visible from space, he adds, as a somewhat lacklustre afterthought, the Great Wall.
Happy birthday for for I start to murmur, agonized.
Are you planning on getting yourself a card, Rusty? Biddy wonders, with a supercilious smirk.
Uh no.
Clifford puts the card back down on to the rack.
Thank you, he mutters.
Because youre two days late! Biddy delivers her ringing punch-line with considerable pizzazz.
I was actually just after some uh matches. Clifford grabs a pile of kindling and then moves over towards the shop section of the store. There he grabs a packet of Tuc biscuits and proceeds to the counter which is currently vacant because Biddy is in the P.O.
Biddy snorts, amused, then checks the weight of my letter on her scales and inspects her list of foreign postal prices.
Id be scared stiff to go to bed at night, she murmurs, neatly tearing a small selection of stamps from their sheets, I mean you can never be sure. A bit of heavy rain and the clay just it just slips. And there goes your home! Off a cliff! A high cliff! Into the sea! Everything you own everything youve worked for all gone! Kaput!
And an airmail sticker, please, I remind her.
Poor Dr and Mrs Bassett lost the best part of their front kitchen. She said they found the cat in a cupboard almost half-dead with fear.