Salt Bert

I saw the ghost of Salt Bert last night.
As the train whistled by over the embankment near Sandhills station, I spied a lonely figure floating down the broken road between the old dock warehouses. I was compelled to get off, though Craven, who was travelling with me, thought I was mad. Maybe I had gone mad, but all I could think about was following this strange lonely creature through the night.
I soon picked up his trail, as I ran through the rain-soaked night. Crates and bins were turned over on either side of the road, as though a fierce drunk had staggered there; kicking and punching at the littered flotsam as he rolled across each side of the street.
And then I came upon him... he leaned upon the side of a massive brick-built storehouse, once used for processing raw tobacco from the Colonies. He seemed to smoke a stogey from one quivering hand. His grey beard scratched through, whiskers illuminated by the gibbous moon. He wore the hanging face of a doomed man. He didn't see me, he was eyeing a dark patch, spreading across his dirty checked shirt.
Soon his clothing was dripping with blood, but he staggered on into the night, his body seemingly effervescing, fading imperceptibly as the night's seconds ticked by. I followed him again, followed the shining trail of blood until we reached the great dock wall. The grave man passed through the wall as if he were merely pushing through green undergrowth.
I watched him then, through the bars of an old gateway. He stood by the dock and his shirt was ripped from him by an unseen force. Then the wound, spread thinly below his chest, was opened wider and entrails poured forth into the salt water. My eyes stung and my ears cringed at the sound of organs splashing into the swilling water of the Queen's Dock.

to be continued…

The fleeting house

And they came back to the old cottage then, Maggie and he, after so many years away.
He marvelled at how well nature had hidden the place: “Saved, just for us!” But Maggie grew sad, poignant, thinking of how the old place had changed so, how it had not been cherished and loved. “I want to cry, I think,” she told him. “I’m happy too, but I want so much to cry some tears right now, for this place.”
He touched her though, wiped at her cheek before the tears had even started to well, and that was enough to make her smile and dry her eyes and take his hand as they continued to walk along the edge of the dry stone wall.
This was a palace of great wonder to both their lives, and even the ravages of time and nature could not dim its memory and meaning.
When they got to the gate they both tensed and resisted. “You go first,” she whispered, and he nodded, leading her slowly across the threshold once again.

Back to the sea

What is it that drives us back to the sea? We escaped from the tides and the surf and the foam all those millennia ago, so why does the crashing pound of those rhythmical waves claw at us still, mirroring the Sirens' call?
I wonder this as I lounge here on a Cornish beach. It is the height of summer now, and this is the second sunny day we've had. We go home tomorrow. Still, the weather brings us out in our droves; the weather and the whisper of the water.
I'm on holiday with Sylvie and her family. It is as fun as it can be. I'm enjoying peering through dark sunglasses at the perfect and the almost perfect bodies of the women who waltz by, and wondering which of them I could realistically have.
Anne has texted me twice this week. I can't decide if she's making a real effort by texting me, or if this meagre couple of texts shows I'm worth anything much to her at all.
This whole weekend, it's made me question why I bother holding on to this relationship with Anne. Of all the people to choose to have an affair with, why the woman I previously loved and lived with? I may as well have chosen some beautiful young thing. An oozing, raw, sexual presence whom I could just meet for a meal and some red wine in a shaded corner of a bistro, before whisking off to a hotel room for a few hours of sweating, heaving passion.
That way sounds good. I get everything I want - all the sex, the excitement - and I don't have all these unresolved issues cropping up, all the raised eyebrows and impatient huffs as I manage to annoy Anne, yet again. At least now I can leave before the row starts. That's probably why it's just about working. It's funny that I never row with Sylvie. She is an implacable pond before me and I can just skim right over her without a care.
Everything inside tells me I should concentrate all my attentions and affections and time on just one person, Sylvie. But then, I'm thinking, is she worth it?
So, as the waves crash in my ears like tribal drums, I close my eyes on the bikini beach and drift off to sleep while the sun's still high and my body's still warm and Sylvie's still by my side.

Field skeletons

If a man stands in a field for long enough, he might become one of its skeletons.
As his shadow grows long in the afternoon, he may find that his feet have fixed to the tilled earth below him and that fate has made him part of that idyll forever.
That is a dream to have anyway, this dream to become a part of the field. Perhaps when I die someone will find my bones and scatter them there, bury them among the compacted clods and roots, plant them kindly.
A field holds many skeletons and not all of them below its green-brown canvas. From the dead sheathes of yesterday’s harvest to the slender sapling that yearns to grow so thickly and quickly towards the sun, all are skeletal beings. Spectral before you, transitory, without flesh, promising either life or death... but who knows which side will win through?
The very nature of the field is a slowly convolving routine; the ageless schema of death to life to death and life again. Nature is a wonderful thing of permanent resurrection.
But where does man fit into the field? Is man like this long dead machine, left to rust on the sidelines? Set there for eternity to watch its successor, the better machine, doing its role, doing everything better, while the new grass grows fresh and long all around it? What torment, it must feel.
No, I think man has a place closer to the field. It’s almost kin, to me, that aching pasture, that threshed turf, and we sit somewhere between that rusting carcass and the steady green grass. Though it’s hard to say just where.
I hope I’ll find out, some day, when the sun casts its long fingers across the shadow of my life and leaves me standing there, naked before the winter, still and skeletal in the midst of the great field.

Girl on a bicycle

Abigail is the epitome of my lust. Perhaps that doesn't say too much about my sexual appetites, but there's something so sleek and handsome about her, so wholesome and healthy, my desire tarnishes her just that little bit and it stings me.
When I first saw her I wrote down these words in my journal:
"The girl on the bike wheels into view. I'm lost for a moment, panicked on a familiar street. Her hair falls like a celluloid dream, in perfect torrents of colour. She is an element of cool. Her very nature electrifies the air, magnetising the eyes and souls of wanton man and bitter woman. And she feeds off it. She grows straighter, more erect, atop her bicycle. She rides on without catching a single eye."
Perhaps, though, I didn't understand her at first. She is more than a simple object of desire, that is why I am so disgusted by my lust. It is difficult to know how to regard her. Surely not as some goddess, whose divine beauty inspires unholy desires which must be atoned for? No, she is not perfection, no matter how near that level appears in her.
Also, she is not unattainable, not at all. An ordinary man, as ordinary as myself, meets her regularly for dinner. They meet at Cafe Mouchel most often, although I have seen them at Taymon's, when it's not too busy. His name is Jeremy and he is a banker.
Her beautiful posterior is neither divine nor permanently attached to her bicycle, for I have seen her ride the bus and even a tram. Once I followed her onto a busy bus and had to stand, crushed, my face in close proximity to her hair, my body on fire. She smelled of damsons.
Sometimes she will ride her bike all the way to her mother's, on the east side of town, which isn't even served by an underground station. I watch from my scooter as she slides from the saddle and bounces up the grey concrete stair as if she'd just awoken from hibernation on a warm spring day.
I tried to speak to her once, at traffic lights. The red light meant I had to pull up beside her, and wait a few trembling moments in her presence. Remembering this was just a girl - a 27-year-old girl named Abigail who lived alone in the business district and loved to eat ravioli - I decided I could speak to her, we could notice each other today.
My voice was muffled under my helmet, she turned her face towards mine, in case I'd said something, and as her eyes met mine I was dumbstruck. She cycled on as the lights changed to green, but I was lost there, sinking still in the deep blue of her eyes, oblivious to the honking of the traffic behind me.

Summer, on the way to Sylvie's beach

Sylvie’s beach has sand dunes, did I tell you that?
There’s Sylvie, struggling up the dune, trying to balance as the plush sand subsides beneath her comfortable shoes.
Greta is lagging behind and Sylvie’s mum, Patricia, is saying something to her. Patricia is probably telling Greta that she’s done something wrong.
I’m lagging behind too.
I pretended I was just interested in the flora. How does something so green grow straight through sand? I suppose I am a little interested, but I’ve never so much as Googled it, so what the hey!
It’s true that I don’t want to talk to Patricia. She has a penchant for ‘tuts’ and ‘tsks’. At first I thought she couldn’t abide me, but she treats me as fairly as she does her own, so I suppose I can’t complain.
Apart from Sylvie, the other of ‘her own’ is Louis. He’s visiting too and struts about with such purpose and vigour, you’d think he was younger than Sylvie. But he’s not; he’s fully forty years old and still living with mother. A total berk, anyway. You can just make him out, disappearing over the hill.
Father, by the way, is not dead – heaven forbid! No, he’s too ill or lazy to come to the beach. Too much sand, too much sun, that’s not what England is about for him. Patricia would have had to go home soon after and fix him a roast dinner – it’s Sunday, after all!
What do you reckon? You’re not really interested in these photos, are you Anne? Anne? Anne!

James, Wilberforce and the adult world

James watched the flock, pecking and honking in the grass. He rested his young arms on the old fence and made tentative steps towards whistling. He hoped to train his puppy, a recent gift whom he'd named Wilberforce, to be a sheepdog and thought he'd train him using the lazy white geese that lived in the meadow.
In honesty, James had a strong dislike for the geese. They always hissed at him when he ran by on the way to help with the milking, and one (he nicknamed him Goliath) had bitten him on the hand when he was very young and trying to feed them. He paid little attention to the attempts of Wilberforce to herd the birds. He just settled back to practice his whistling and watch the small dog terrorising the flapping, feather-shedding, creatures.
Like the repeat of a rifle shot, the snarl of the dog and the rampant honks of the geese suddenly reached a shocking pitch. James was on high alert now and sprinted into the melee of scattering birds and yelping puppy.
Wilberforce whined and cowered before his master as the voice of James' mother called out in concern from the farmhouse. There at the boy's feet lay the slain Goliath, it's neck bloody and broken.
A sense of satisfaction fought with a sense of impending doom. His father would be striding now, black boots menacing, across the field towards the house. James regarded the sniffling dog below him and couldn't be angry. He felt an extraordinary kinship with him then and knelt down next to the body of the goose, awaiting the fearful arrival of the adult world.