What the hell is this curious light-headedness about, anyway! Excitement! Depression! Overbreathing?
In general Arthur was not a man particularly prone to random feelings of arbitrary optimism (well if not never, then at least rarely. He was a solitary creature. And glum, habitually). Heck. He was just tired. That was it. Definitely. And he needed his medication.
Or a stiff, stiff brandy
Good Lord. How easily, how smoothly that’d slipped out of him. Five long years, dry as the Sahara. A stiff brandy? With his liver? What a curiously reckless, what a crazily inappropriate, what a stupid, what a stupid, what a stupid… A stiff brandy?
Arthur Young took a tremulous half-step out onto the truncated pier. It groaned under him, but it did not give. It was secure. Not so the handrail which crumbled like ripe Stilton under his fingertips. Woodworm. He placed both his feet together. He pushed back his shoulders. And then, in a single, smooth motion, he reached out his arm and threw the key — the string — the tag — up, up up into the foggy air.
There!
He diligently supervised its multiple adventures — its brief spiralling rise, its determined fall (like a sycamore seed, a helicopter blade, an injured grouse on the wing), its eventual splash-landing, its half-hearted floating, its gradual submerging — with a strong, with a wicked, with a powerful sense of satisfaction.
There
It did not matter a damn. He smiled blearily, his lips numbed by the cold, his cheeks damp and stinging. It did not matter one iota. He took a deep, steady breath and stared firmly ahead of him. No key. No keys. Because this was a door already open.
Nine
‘It has to be the start,’ Wesley declaimed passionately, his two elbows practically indenting the soft pine counter-top, ‘it just has to be the beginning of a whole, new, completely comprehensive language of mammals.’
He was holding forth in Canvey’s rather small but surprisingly high-ceilinged, semi-pre-fabricated library, to a charming and comely woman who wore a pale blue nylon twinset — effortlessly exuding the kind of easy stylishness rarely attributed to artificial fibre — some ludicrously playful kitten heels — not the heels, surely, of a dedicated librarian? — a heavy, calf-length beige skirt — sharply pleated to the front and the rear — a coral necklace — her ten wildly impractical false nails painted the exact-same peachy-coral colour — and a mop of blonde hair set in solid tribute to Angela Dickinson circa 1964. A woman in her late fifties.
This lucky female was standing on the opposite side of the waist-high, well-buffed library counter, over which her hypnotically pointed mamillae asserted their powerful dominion with such thrust and determination that it was as much as Wesley could do not to push his flattened palm onto them (simply to ascertain whether they’d cave or resist… Oh let them resist… But let them cave… Lord, why was sex always so fucking contrary?).
She was almost certainly the chief librarian, although she wore no formal indication to this effect about her person. No tag, no badge, no pin or anything. Just had an aura of inexplicably kindly authority.
‘And you honestly think coughing is central to this new language?’ she asked playfully, her lavender eyes twinkling behind a large pair of expensively cumbersome, baby-blue-framed glasses. She was charmed by Wesley’s conversation. But she was incredulous. Both responses in equal measure. Wesley always found this combination to be a happy mixture. He provoked it knowingly.
His ravaged olive-paste eyes twinkled straight back at her (was she a real pointy woman — like the wonderful, huge-hearted, exquisitely-well-starched kind who starred in all the best films of the 1950s — or was this riveting display purely the result of a lower back problem and an ill-fitting brassiere?).
Wesley tried not to stare. But it was a struggle. The breasts reared up at him like angry cobras, they pointed like cheeky schoolgirls without any manners. Oh.
‘What else?’ Wesley smiled, struggling to keep atuned to the flirty meander of their conversation, ‘I mean I’m no linguist or anything — this is purely an instinctive reaction — but what else unifies all creatures quite so absolutely as a sharp, hard cough, when you really come to think about it?’
He paused, then added, his voice dropping, but still showing a certain flash of sangfroid, ‘Apart, I suppose from those other three great unifiers: the fart, the burp, the sneeze.’
The chief librarian snorted, then covered her neatly-painted lips with her neatly-painted hand to try and mask it, pushed her glasses straight and shrugged, somewhat coquettishly. Her name was Eileen, and at root, at heart, she was incorrigibly Otherwise. (Otherwise? She was a mish-mash, a mosaic, a medley.)
Eileen was Otherwise (plainly and simply): she was the bird in the hand worth two on the bush, she was the silk purse from a sow’s ear, she was the stitch in time who saved nine — she was all of these things and more in her Littlewood’s underwear and skin-tone support stockings (only the merest hint of French eau de Cologne, but with industrial quantities of Harmony, for good measure, enveloping and supporting her bright, blonde hair).
Eileen.
An English rose, but with solid, Irish foundations. A refined and elegant lady — undisputedly — but with an accent steeped to its well-turned shins in the coarse, muddy burr of the Estuary. Blissfully miserable. Softly tough. Strictly gentle. Horribly lovely.
Irish parents: Siobhan and Flannery. Walthamstow born and bred. A north-east Londoner, an east-seventeen-teen, then twenty-something, then faltering, gingerly, on that awful ravine of thirty (thirty!) when in 1975 her whole damn family — aunts and uncles, nephews, nieces — upped and shifted, en masse, to Canvey.
She’d already served a full ten year sentence inside the Love Penitentiary: marriage — maximum security — to a wretch called Patrick, who smoked Silk Cut and worked as a plasterer (a devoutly Catholic union. Messily divorcing. They’d had no children. Eileen, it turned out, was hopelessly barren).
Poor Eileen: a planner, a dreamer, a lover, a traveller, yet still somehow — but how? How the heck had she managed it? — still living bumper-to-bumper with the people who’d raised her. Same house, same job, same prospects as her mother. 1975. Everything just as she’d dreaded it.
Needed a change of direction — but nothing too violent, or challenging — so when the whole street migrated (staggering, as one, to this tried but untested gumboot territory), Eileen packed her bags, hitched up her skirts and clambered (broke a nail, bruised a knee) onto the back of the bandwagon. Joined the exodus. Started a brand new life for herself, next to the Estuary.
I mean there were new houses here, weren’t there? And jobs promised. There were plans and stratagems, designs and sophistry. Multiple incentives for the poor, the keen, the needy. A social experiment, they called it, to shore up the demoralised Canvey community after the chronic floods of ‘53. To re-populate, re-invigorate, rejuvenate. New schools, new shops, new industry, new bridge, new… new library.