this, I’m not a philosophical person. I feel I may have read it, or heard someone else say it. I’m not quite sure of its origins. It’s important for me to see things this way – especially in the light of Uncle Rey’s suicide. Time will make sense of these events, change them into a shape I can cling on to. That’s how I see things. It makes it easier for me to exist here.
This is how it all feels to me: Uncle Rey’s suicide is just another strand, part of the braid, something that has frayed over time. It’s up to me to rebind things, tightly, I guess. At least that’s how it feels walking along the road, the sea and sky above me, everything else behind me. It makes immediate sense, my being here, to help decipher things, to tie up all the loose ends of Uncle Rey’s life. I phone Cal. It takes me a long while to reach him because I don’t get much of a signal out here. Cal doesn’t answer anyway and my call goes straight through to his voicemail. I leave him a message, telling him everything is okay, that it will be good for me to take this break and that I’m happy to sort through Uncle Rey’s belongings. Before I say goodbye I suddenly become aware of my own voice. It sounds incongruous, an impostor’s. It booms all around me, startling pigeons and other birds. I quickly say goodbye to Cal in a whisper and put the phone back into my pocket. I am not alone either: I turn around to see a man walking behind me, about twenty metres away, walking quickly, it seems, with purpose. My skin begins to prickle. I wonder whether I should quicken my pace also, so that he can’t catch up, but I figure this might look too obvious, so I decide to walk even slower than I am, to stop and look at things at the side of the road, so that he can pass me by and I’ll look natural, like I should be here. Locals can probably sniff out a stranger on this island and I don’t want him to think that I might be up to no good.
After about five minutes of this I look back, and he’s about ten metres away: a big, stocky man, tattooed arms, thick with muscle. He looks odd, out of place too, but I know he’s not, I know he’s local. He’s wearing a pair of tracksuit bottoms and a Dr Feelgood T-shirt, but he’s not a jogger. I figure he’s just left one of the houses I passed earlier and, like me, he’s on his way to the Lobster Smack. He catches up with me, just as we reach the first of the giant oil storage containers to my left, on the peripheries of the refinery. Huge round things, all full of oil, gallons upon gallons of the stuff.
‘You heading up to Hole Haven Point?’
‘Pardon?’
‘The point … are you heading that way?’
‘Well, yes, I am …’
‘Me, too … Long walk, eh?’
‘Yes.’
‘You in from London?’
‘Er … Yes … How do you know?’
‘I saw you get off the train at Benfleet, plus … you look like a London type, asking for directions, looking at the map on your phone … I could just tell.’
‘Oh.’
We walk together, side by side, for two to three minutes. He doesn’t look at me, not in the eye, at least, fixing his on the road ahead. Then he begins to pick up pace.
‘No doubt I’ll see you in the Smack?’
‘Yes, that’s where I’m headed …’
‘Enjoy the walk.’
‘Yes, thanks.’
He walks away from me at great speed, heading up Haven Road towards the Lobster Smack. Either there, or the sea wall, as there isn’t much else at the end of this road. Along the way I count twenty-seven oil storage containers, big round domes, each of them easily as big as a small office block. I feel minute beside them; the island has a way about it, it’s all coming back to me: it seems as if it’s stuck out on a ledge, too far into the great expanse of things. It feels like it’s clinging on, and at any given moment each of the twenty-seven containers will slip off with me into the abyss. I look around, goose pimples covering my arms; there are only trees around me to cling on to should this happen, but it feels like we are so far out, even the trees would be uprooted. Walking along, the strange man up ahead, heading towards Hole Haven Point, the jetty, the sea wall, the Lobster Smack, I am certain of this catastrophe.
I look up. The sky is beginning to blacken, bad weather from the hills of Kent across the estuary. I quicken my step, pulling the straps down on my rucksack to tighten things up. The rain comes quicker than I expect, and it falls heavily. It’s cold and sharp, driving into the earth beside the road.
because there’s nothing else to do
It hasn’t changed since I was last here. Why should it? There’s nothing to dictate that sort of thing out here. I’m sure the two men sitting at the bar are the same two men who were sitting at the bar when I was last in here. I look at them again: one of them is, but now he’s with a new companion, he’s sipping his stout slower now. He’s still repeating the same conversations throughout the day. His new drinking buddy nods away like his predecessor once did, though. I’ve often thought that the clientele of such establishments are like the wondrous mechanism of the great white’s mouth: as soon as one tooth is lost another one flips into its place. Pubs like the Lobster Smack are always the same: you can see the younger generation of drinkers growing in the shade of the towering men at the bar, readying themselves for the next old-timer to fall, eager to pick up their stool and take their place.
I stand at the bar and order a pint of cider with ice. I’m aware people are staring at me. I take a sip of my drink, take my change and walk over to a table by the window. The bar itself is quiet, except for the man in the Dr Feelgood T-shirt who I’d met in the road. He lifts up his drink to greet me when I look over to him, before resuming his loud conversation with a woman. The rain is hitting the window beside me; it rattles the Essex weatherboard that forms each exterior wall of the pub. I stare into my pint of cider, feeling snug and warm. I figure that I’ll have a couple more, and something to eat, before I speak with the landlord, Mr Buchanan. The cider is cold. I watch as the ice cracks. I can’t imagine Uncle Rey sitting in this pub, it doesn’t seem quite right somehow. I never thought of him as the sort of man who would see out the rest of his days sitting at the bar of his local pub, although he must have frequented it at some point. I mooch about the place, looking for what might have been his favourite table or something, but they all look the same. Then I glance out of the window, through the rain, towards the roofs of some caravans in the distance. Uncle Rey’s caravan isn’t that far from the pub, just a short walk along the sea wall if I remember correctly, towards Thorney Bay, or ‘Dead Man’s Cove’ as he called it. I remember him telling me about the numerous things that would be washed up on the beach there in the bay: unwanted hospital waste, like needles and prosthetic limbs; the odd dead animal; dead swimmers of all ages; plastic from far-off lands. Whatever got lost out at sea would eventually be washed up there.
I’m sitting with my back to the sea wall, which stretches out behind me to my right, just outside the window. It isn’t far to walk from here. I watch people in the bar; they hardly notice my presence now. They’ve forgotten about me, I’ve already settled into the background. It’s the perfect place to sit, somewhere cosy to settle in for the evening. Apart from the rain lashing down, rattling the weatherboard behind me, all I can hear are the clientele’s murmurs and the odd cackle from the man in the Dr Feelgood T-shirt. If I concentrate, between the rain hitting the window and their voices disappearing, I can just about decipher what he’s saying to the woman: he’s explaining something to her, something about Southend. Then the sound goes again as the rain hits the window and I concentrate on the movement of his mouth instead, his scabby lips filling in the blanks for me.
‘It’s changing over there. It used to be different, Southend … Remember when … No one really went out … The pubs used to be full of National Front, some of them still fucking are … I hated it, you couldn’t move for fear of bumping into some fucking knuckle-scraper, the sights I’ve seen by the Kursaal at kicking-out time, the detritus of human existence, fucking real scum, drunk and angry, sexually frustrated … fucking soulless … Those