Hollow shores, p.16
Hollow Shores, page 16
They reach sand and the coast. They pause at an embossed memorial, dedicated to a young child swept out to sea back in 1994. They walk that bit slower now, heavy prints in the yellow earth. Flatness in all directions and the wind whipping them hard. Look, says Lucy pointing and tugging at John’s sleeve. He sees what she sees, far out and sunken in the mudflats, the wreckage of a ship, wooden and colonised by silt. The landscape is treacherous.
This is perfect, says Lucy, her eyes tearing from the wind and her words lost. She photographs driftwood that she imagines will burn blue, the fractal patterns made by razor-clam shells. John peers through binoculars, hoping to spot scoter or eider perhaps. A man and his young child fly a kite.
Eventually the unnamed channel comes into view. We’re here, shouts John over the wind.
And suddenly, there are the seals. In this sheltered channel they bob and dive, and one hauls itself from the water, blubbery and ridiculous. Lucy realises why they must take human form. They are water things, not of the world she lives in, and she feels a kind of envy. This is something she will remember.
For a long time, John and Lucy sit on a dune, buffeted by the wind, and watch the seals. A middle-aged man walks past with his dog. Magical things, aren’t they? And the couple nod and smile.
Heading back, a mist is coming in off the cold North Sea. It’s cold and drops of condensation bead their clothes, John’s beard, Lucy’s tied-back hair. The world is hushed in the mist and they are glad they are returning to the cottage.
John looks out to sea. He supposes he should be frightened at what he sees. In the swirling mists, he sees the silhouette of an impossibly huge figure, moving gently and slowly, not hostile or friendly but merely indifferent.
He watches the sea giant go, disappearing in the direction of the wreck.
I’m looking forward to getting the fire going, says Lucy finally. And at those simple words, John feels a burst of feeling for her, so strong it’s almost pain. He thinks it might all be okay.
That night they sip more spirits and look out over the marsh as the sun dies for the day. The wind is up and the rushes hiss and whisper. Smoke from John’s cigarette hangs blue in the air.
Lucy squeezes John’s hand and whispers, perhaps to herself, we are nothing but reeds.
What’s that? says John.
Nothing. Doesn’t matter.
And she kisses him on the cheek.
XXI.
The Wrecking Days
It was the magwitching hour; sun like soft gold on the tips of reeds.
– from ‘Skydancer’, Stories from the Marsh: The folklore of the Hollow Shore
The name came later, as we retrofitted chunks of our lives and tied them up with clever titles. We were underachievers with verbal flair, lyrical flourishes and a sharp wit, packaging our time into neat parcels. The wrecking days are, for most of us at least, safely compartmentalised, sitting in a past as unrecoverable as the eroding waterline of a home I haven’t visited in years.
Events that fell during the wrecking days, out on the flat marshes of the Hollow Shore, can be safely explained away. I enjoyed the sleep deprivation, my bleary bloodshot eyes watching shore harriers, a bird endemic to the region, coil and pirouette over the reeds at sunrise as Jenny – she called the birds skydancers – lay snoring in my lap, my coat her improvised duvet. Danny smoking thick spliffs and telling us his tales of the overgrown hoverport near his home, the Sons of Cain out on the island, the spearbird his dad swore he saw.
I can still see Helena and Adrianna spinning stones towards empty Stella cans propped on rotting breakwaters. The mud at low tide, exposing lugworm coils and strange detritus laid out in patterns waiting to be decoded.
I miss the wrecking days. I miss the slow ebb of narcotics leaving my body, pissing in the reeds at dawn to the sound of birdlife, buzzing crickets and the strange looped grunt of mating marsh frogs. It was during the wrecking days that I realised the artificial and natural were not different at all. All existed in the world, and all was true.
Back then we were small town kids with underground ambitions, heading for the places where reality thinned and the decadent and divine could be indulged. The only good system was a sound system, we all agreed, and we had better drugs than you. The raves and parties, dancing around crackling fires that turned blue with salt, form the core of the wrecking days. I can’t ever forget them.
But years go by. Now, Jenny says I can’t let go, that I’m stuck there somehow in the stinking mud, being dragged down below the murky water choking on reedroot and the plastic shit chucked in there by a world that didn’t care. What scares me is that I find the thought compelling, and then I think of Danny, screaming in a cell, or on a ward, or wherever he may be.
*
Over the water from the Hollow Shore, across a strip of water called the Swale, lies Deadman’s Island. It has a real name somewhere on an OS map, something official printed on paper, but, as Danny was fond of saying, the map is not the territory. The map is wrong – living in London taught me that.
On a clear day and at low tide, you could see the rotted and rusted remains of one of the prison hulks that had gone down in a hazy past. Scuttled or an accident, none of us knew, and historians still speculate about what really happened, as if that matters. But the French bodies that washed up on the Hollow Shore and Deadman’s Island joined a soil that already held the bones of their comrades. Grisly relics from the days of Old Boney. Prisoners who’d died on the ships, ravaged by cholera, dysentery, the busy fists of the English. Forgotten bodies in shallow graves, buried beneath the soil of our hollow shores.
So: Deadman’s Island.
It made me think of the choose-your-own-adventures I still had copies of. Could imagine a pulp paperback depicting a skeletal soldier rising from the mud, a place of only death and life. During the wrecking days, I would look out at the island and wonder if there was a time when the world was not at war.
Deadman’s Island was home to heaving clouds of Brent and Canada geese, scoter and scaup, black-throated divers and occasional sightings of little auk flocks out on the horizon. Danny’s old man Fen, birder that he was, claims to have seen a pair of nesting spearbirds on the rocks of the north shore of the island. Impossible, of course, but Fen and Danny alike were bullshitters; it was a family thing, bred in the bone, charismatic and unreliable. The spearbird was extinct, as much a mythology now as the Sons of Cain, bestial half-men that archaeologists claimed to have found evidence of in the island’s soil. Those are just the mangled remains of the French prisoners, was the counter-argument, but the Sons are popular folk-devils of the area, grinning not-men that the people of the coastline need more than they could ever admit. The Sons lead a whole host of strange things that were said to have once inhabited the wetlands. Black curlews, white herons. The ghost of a booming bird that resembled a crane. Spearbirds.
And, the straw revenants.
*
The very last time I saw Danny, before he went under (or fucked off, got banged up, topped himself), we sat in a pub in Tottenham, drinking a new fashionable brand of IPA, many years after the wrecking days. Danny had a habit of speaking in soundbites, as if he were quoting choice nuggets from a larger text only he had access to. His eyes were calm, and the strange things he said were like statements of literal fact.
What I mostly remember him saying was, ‘Memory is a marsh.’
*
I don’t want to paint too rosy picture of the wrecking days. I hope I’m clear headed when I look back. Obviously, there were things that were fucked up and it was irresponsible and dangerous to our health. But I loved it. I may, in the end, have lost a friend, but I met and fell in love with the woman who remains my partner to this day. I saw sunrises that could stop your heart, birds that could snatch the breath from your lungs and carry a loving soul to heaven. I saw things that simply couldn’t be.
Some of us can’t deal with that, some of us can, and if we can, we deal with it by shutting parts of ourselves down.
Danny couldn’t. He said it was because, simply, he saw things too clearly. Like he saw the world for what it really was and that was what was making him come undone.
I imagined my friend seamed and stitched, waiting to be pulled apart, a future unravelling.
So, when we all agreed that the straw revenants could not be real, that we’d fed for too long a diet of cheap speed, indie horror films and C.L. Nolan stories, I knew Danny didn’t believe it. He knew he had to try and pass as any other contented inhabitant of the grey towns we grew up in, but I knew the stitched things with faces of dirty sackcloth and bodies of sharp straw were as real to him as the skydancers and marsh frogs.
And what can I say? The Hollow Shore did – does – have a mythic quality to it. There’s just something about the place. I feel the pull of the marshes myself and, even now, I find myself walking the cracked concrete and dirty tarmac of Tottenham and imagine boggy ground and sibilant sedge all around me. At weekends, you’ll find me down on the London marshes, watching the river rats and their boats (I love their names, all Ginnys and Peg Powlers). I listen to the hum and crackle of the pylons, watch young men and women jog by red-faced along the towpath, listen to the hoot of coots, and feel at ease.
I read about a condition called Jerusalem Syndrome. Certain people who visit the holy city are just more susceptible to the power of the place. It doesn’t matter a bit what religion they claim to be a follower of; anyone can be taken by it. They think they’re a messiah, a new god, someone’s salvation, that they see things for real for the first time. The place unravels them. Then the Israelis wheel them off to a treatment centre.
The Hollow Shore? It’s like that.
*
Jenn and I tried not to talk about what happened to Danny after that evening in the pub.
If the subject ever came up I’d think
life doesn’t go in the direction you may have hoped
friends ebb, flow
a ghost may just be delayed understanding
did I let him down?
what now
We decided that too many psychedelics and Danny’s pre-existing despondent outlook on life made for a bad combination. When we all became city-dwellers and saw each other only a few times a year – Danny, to his credit, always came to the get-togethers – he’d still talk of the wrecking days and the revenants waving in the fields, the white herons we knew were not there and the booming bird that, I admit, I did hear.
But we didn’t want those stories. The past was too painful.
Those things we thought we saw and Danny still claimed he did, they were the fanciful imaginings of young people with fresh itchy tattoos and a green man iconography, with sturdy constitutions able to run on amphetamines, coffee and fags. People with enough hope to still believe that the world was fundamentally a place that could be understood.
Age gave me a gift that Danny was denied; I know that there is more to life than what we can perceive. Danny’s failing was that he thought he could understand.
The true tragedy of our lives is the knowledge that we don’t know.
*
The thing was, the area we came of age did have something funny about it. The old boys with beards who sat in the pubs – Old Neptune, The Black Curlew, The Hollowshore Arms, The Sea Giant, The Son of Cain – would mutter about how the earth we walked on was the body of a fallen giant. Fen went on endlessly of the birds that died out hundreds of years ago but who could still be seen. It was all a matter of perspective, he said. That was the thing that most birders lacked, said Fen: imagination.
In those same pubs, me and Danny picked up the story of the old fisherman with a slate-blank stare and a Tesco shopping bag; see him and your days were numbered.
A phenomenon akin to the Brocken Spectre that made it seem as if a watery and majestic giant was striding out at sea near the horizon.
Our friend who endlessly retold the story of what his father saw out in the woods of Germany and somehow brought back with him. A forest devil, clawed and furred.
Adrianna had her stories of Finland and The Troll Church. We all knew about the whale that washed ashore, bloated and pure. The green hags of England’s canals that preyed on the beaten-down.
Somehow, these things all linked together. I knew this, but Danny felt it.
The vampire hunter lived in our town, pedalling its small streets on an antiquated bicycle. He’s famous, I remember my mum whispering to me as a kid. I saw him once during the Oyster Festival, standing on the beach just staring at the little ones as they constructed the oyster cairns, shell grottoes lit from within by flickering candlelight. On the Hollow Shore, we had our own way of fending off the darkness, a darkness I could always sense. I saw my friends, my family, the relationships I entered into, as bursts of brief pyrotechnics or slow flickering flame that lit up the endless night. All to be ultimately extinguished, but that was not the point. The fight against the void, that’s what life was about. That’s what the wrecking days were to me. Our doomed resistance.
Imagination was what could save us, all of us, but it was imagination that stitched Danny up and imagination is easily undone.
I’d go around his place, when we were seventeen years of age, look through his books, an odd collection for a young man. Now, so many years later, I read that stuff myself, but I wonder if it got to him. The relentlessness of it all. All that Blackwood, Machen and Nolan. The nihilist tales about mucoid clowns and vengeful gods. Fucked stories of bad sex and disruptive, uncontrollable desire.
As I aged, I realised all these tales of the fantastic and the bizarre were just reportage. Postcards from the real world. But back then I still believed in realism and a sort of order.
Danny liked pitiless music too. Death metal that fetishised the English landscape, dark electronica and EBM, and the kind of techno that sounded like it was designed to punish a person after they’d already landed in hell. I didn’t mind it, but I preferred my ska and punk and reggae and folk, the rave scene of the marshes, music I could dance to without feeling I was stuck inside a cold machine that fed on warm living flesh.
Jenny says that Danny was always going to go the way he went. And I try to argue against any essential pre-determinism in the individual, ask what cruel and fucked-up god would doom a person to their own nature. But I suspect it is true.
When I look at my wife, middle-aged now but still the girl who rested her head in my lap out there on the Hollow Shore, the woman I still love despite the years of marriage, I don’t know if I see inevitability or chaos.
*
According to Danny, this is what happened:
You guys had all passed out or had coupled up and were smooching in the undergrowth. I was still as high as a skydancer, I wanted to talk and talk and my heart was fit to burst with how beautiful and mad the world could look. The colours were painful to see. Everything was loaded with meaning, dripping with the stuff. So, I made the only sensible decision: I went for a walk.
Out along the coastal path as the sun was beginning to come up, that half-time when most of humanity is asleep and those who aren’t really should be. I just walked and walked, flanking the Swale, thinking of those dead French guys and the birds my dad said he’d seen out on the island. God I’d love to see a spearbird! And for once I felt I was in the right frame of mind to do so. It was all just a matter of perspective.
And then it was like something fell away. Like I’d never known I had poor eyesight until someone slapped a pair of glasses on me. I could see – really see – the Hollow Shore and I knew why we came here and did the things we did.
Ahead of me on the path was an old fisherman whose face I couldn’t make out, a wet and muddy Tesco bag hanging from his right hand. At his feet was a white fox that never broke eye contact with me. Which struck me as funny, clichéd almost, you know? Like couldn’t this place do better than a weird fox and a ghost?
The old man didn’t speak but he sort of beckoned, and as he did my mind was flooded with all the bad shit I’d ever done and I could see the facial expressions of everyone I’d ever let down, I remembered all of the hurt I had felt in my own life, the little bitter reproaches, the cuntish behaviour I endlessly regretted, those times spent in the void with no one to provide a bit of light. And sinking down into the mud to join the Sons of Cain and the French prisoners seemed like such a blessing, enticing, it nearly got me. To sink into the memory of the marsh forever – what sweet relief that would be.
But I resisted. I surprised even myself there. I kept going, knew there was a life still worth fighting for. I thought of all you back there round the fire and how I’d miss you. I thought of my old man looking for his spearbirds. I thought of the wasted lives that lay under the mud across the water.
On I went. The sun was rising in the sky now, but it looked like the sun from the beginning of Watership Down if you know what I mean? And I hit the fields. There was a path, so I took it and I walked and I walked and that’s when I saw them. The revenants.
Men of straw and sackcloth, women that stank of farmyards and earth and shit and the outdoors. All the bad memories and lost hopes of this shoreline made manifest in a form that seemed appropriate, crudely stitched and coming apart. They were hungry ghosts. The worst of us, the cannibals that hide inside.
As I looked at them, a white heron took flight from somewhere among the dense reed beds and soared over the field. It looked saurian, a proto-bird to swoop down on primitive humans. The straw people just looked at me. There was disappointment, hunger, regret, in their eyes. They started to move towards me.
I ran. Ran and ran until I found you all again and you woke and came out of the undergrowth saying, What the fuck? but I know you saw them too, following me with their shambling run. They saw how many of us there were and that we were friends and something like love existed between us, that we were still alive, and they backed off. Melted back into the fields, scattered like grass on the wind.
You saw them too.
I know you did.
