The boyfriend who isn’t is keeping a copy for when you’ve left again — straight backs, you’re good at that, and sepia, an aspidistra on a table — and you will throw your copy away, because in Cloppa Castle it will not make sense.
After the photo you were discontented and anxious for candy floss because that has a reliable, unoffending smell. You ate toddler-blue spun sugar until your teeth hurt so that it could be a part of you, a place you’ll dip into later, but it did not cure you. And you went back to the Tower Ballroom and watched the old, old couples creeping and sliding about to the jaunty organ medley — ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’ — and this did not help you. Pairs and pairs of people.
Pressure may be usefully applied or threatened against relatives and partners.
Same angles bent in their spines — and here they are dancing, wrapping each other around and high heads and big smiles and if you get to their age you still won’t know the steps. You don’t believe in dancing. It makes the body visible and is an invitation. It is reckless.
Ended up in a club last night. No dancing. Not the music for it. Red lights darting about in rods and slices, a bit of smoke, and a skinny, big-lipped guy on the karaoke singing ‘Nellie the Elephant’ — sweating and screaming it.
You nearly laughed at that. Nasty crowd in the place. Nothing in the look of them, in their bearing, that you could like. But you nearly laughed anyway, because ‘Nellie the Elephant’ all the way through, that gives you your chest compressions and then the two breaths and then again.
FFD and pressure — Dressing soaked — Hemcon — Hemcon — Bleeding not controlled — FFD and direct pressure.
Training for injury.
For when their hearts stop.
And somebody doesn’t want them to.
An observer.
Just Another Fucking Observer.
Boyfriend would like to see your eyes — everyone always wants that, point of contact, proof of humanity — but you’ve got on your new Inks — no sun, but the glasses anyway because you express yourself better in their dark.
Sometimes very dark.
He has seen you, thinks he understands you naked.
Standard Operating Procedure — the utility of nakedness — necessary — you did ask — necessary — make them sing ‘Nellie the Elephant’.
When you observe strangers they seem cautious, bundled, prudish. They should be skin and singing — Standard Operating Procedure.
You take off your glasses, show willing, show something, the colour of your thought, a shade that he won’t recognise, won’t understand. Standard Operating Procedure.
And you’re nearer to the standing men by this time — except it appears they’re actually cormorants: three birds and not three men. Completely unforgivable you’d get this wrong. They don’t like you being so close and fit themselves into the air, long heads and lizard necks pointing into the whitewashy sky.
Nice to hop up like that — leave.
You smile for them and he misunderstands and smiles back and you stroll him in under the pier — repetitions of metal, verticals, diagonals, bad repairs — slush of surf to your right and mercury pools seething in the hollows and at the pillars’ feet. The rust is so established it has bloomed into purples, oranges, greens — wide flaking bruises that look infectious, predatory.
This is a not pleasant or secure location and you should leave it.
You lead him up to the pier entrance, wear your glasses again, smile again as you go through the gate and onto the boards.
Some of the wood is soft-rotted, unreliable underfoot, which is amusing although you couldn’t explain why.
In Cloppa Castle it is slidey underfoot.
You have special notebooks you can write on when it’s wet. Could write on them underwater. You don’t have to be underwater. That’s not a problem that will afflict you, ask things of you, demand.
The notes you take can sometimes seem absurd and surprise you when you look at your hand writing, your handwriting and the words you continue to find in testing situations.
On the pier, there’s a dart game, an old-fashioned scam. You have to chuck darts into playing cards to win a shit prize of this or that sort, or else to win nothing. The cards are pinholed and warry, they seem to have taken hits, which encourages, is intended to draw you, and the stallman, boothman, whoever, gives you a patter which makes it clear that he knows you are military, has noticed it on you although you are not wearing anything approaching uniform because this gets you stared at in the street. Come home and be hated by strangers in the street, avoided by the women in the village who are gathering shampoo and shaving things and affection for returning heroes only. You are not exactly that.
The boothman does not hate you. He lies to you in ways that mean he can steal very small amounts of money for a rigged game and a bit of a chat and a consolation prize of playing cards — made in China — you’ll take them with you. If you had darts, you could set up a game of your own. This is perhaps what occurs always — that the scam is passed along from one to another and either harms a little or a lot and that’s how we know time is passing, by the progress of each lie — set them free and let them run.
Take the cards back to the Castle.
Where we play many, many games. Shoeing and beasting and whatelsewouldyoulikefromus games making use of the objects to hand.
A childish place, the Castle — even its name — they took it from this 70s’ show on the box — Cloppa Castle — puppets and a theme song that warned you’d be staying a while.
You didn’t believe it.
First day.
Hoods on the men, but they’re naked and singing the theme song.
Fucking mad house.
So you go fucking mad.
What a lily-white lawyer wouldn’t understand.
It was hard to explain how annoying you eventually found it when you ordered up the singing from them — they could all speak English, everyone can speak English — and the prisoners sounded scared when you wanted them sounding angry, or sounded angry when you wanted them sounding scared, or when they were faking tiredness, illness. Or when one of them slipped his cuffs and tried to take off the hood.
Which is a very, very clear threat — a man looking at you.
Necessary evil.
Everyone’s a victim.
No doubt about that.
You get an education in that.