Dead dog on the pavement. I eye the driver’s eyeballs to
make sure she really is sorry, like she says she is. I’m not sure if the eyes
are wet from the guilt or from the Margate wind. Council van pulls up. It says
‘Waste and Disposal’; some burial. Sleep tight small creature. I turn away as
the man in the uniform polo shirt takes a bin bag out of the van and scoops him
up, placing him inside another bin bag, ready for the grand wasteland burial,
with all the trimmings, the teabags and the coke cans. I see the head flop and
the blood on the pavement and I turn away, hand to my mouth.
Another Sunday been and gone. Dead dogs, “Fuck you” written
on someone’s front door, beside their letter-box, churches with demolition
orders, brothers stabbing each other playfully, bright boys skipping school,
there’s shit on the pavement that seems to be seeping up eternally. Boys
running cold down alleyways saying, “He’ll pay, I’ll make him pay.” It’s just
another day, another day.
I move house from the quaint, quiet haven of the tourist
city where an English god looks down on all; the place where god is stacked up
in stone blocks that touch the sky, where the streets are cobbled and
boys go to the school of kings where they learn how to speak more loudly than
the girls and the rest, they learn to thrive and to turn their collars up
against the world and barge on through, aided and abetted by centuries of greedy
golden bias. I trade in the safe and the bland for the sea and the treachery,
the dog mess and the string vests, the fake tans and the empty seaside
bandstands.
The boys and girls beside the seaside learn different skills.
They are kings and queens wearing stolen copper crowns. They learn how to
survive, not how to thrive. They are harder and their experiences more
essential, more desperate. They know how cold the wind can blow and they know that
there are no spare blankets in the empty cupboards. They haven’t seen mum and
dad for some time but not because they are closed off and up into boardings;
but because they have never met dad and mum is always at work or looking after
the others who are smaller than they. But the sea shines bright in the sun and
makes promises of escape to distant lands. The sea keeps making promises that
it cannot keep.
Frances goes out in the morning to visit the charity shops.
She comes back later with books and concern. She says that she has examined the
faces of the people here and they all look as if they are experiencing trauma. I
laugh, but yes, she is worried and she is right. I noticed this the other day.
The faces are perplexed or angry or worn with suffering and despair. She says
that they won’t meet her eyes. Mistrust. Do not make eye contact.
Unless you are Jenny. Jenny makes eye contact with as many
as possible. She enforces it. I like Jenny’s rules. Say it like it is, be
friendly, be open, don’t board yourself up; that is only for the broken. Never
give up. Jenny, 75, braces herself against the wind and the hostilities and
aims to make community. Tireless.
Pavements hosting all manner of visitors. Sofas, dirty
unsprung mattresses, broken plant pots, egg shell, banana skins but no
slapstick payoff, seagulls picking through tatty grease-soaked chip-papers
pulled from overflowing sun-baked bins, cigarette butts from here to eternity, empty
paracetamol packets, the constant rattle of empty cans rolling home to the
gutter, shoes – all sizes all colours, lolly-pop sticks coated in colourful sticky
e-numbers, chewing gum fresh from the mouths of babes, a crumpled cardigan
settling into the fabric of the tarmac, spit, bottle tops, broken glass, old sewing
machine, dirty nappies and feet thumping on through, keep thumping on through; drop
but don’t stop, don’t stop.
The days are getting hot and there is heat on our skin, making us want one another. Girls looking at boys as they swagger past, shirts
off, muscles flexing. Boys looking at girls, the eternal fascination with legs,
legs, legs, short shorts, light summer dresses hanging lazily from sun-brown
shoulders. Heads turn and turn and skin burns whilst the adults think ahead to
the time when the sun will go down and when heat might pass from skin to skin,
lip to lip. Mouth to mouth, we breathe life back into one another in the dark. Just
wait for the sun to go down.
The children are absorbed in other past-times. They run and
totter on the sand, legs unsteady beneath ecstatic hearts and they cannot hide
their excitement at the sandcastles to be built and the bucket and spades do a
roaring trade, whilst the adults plaster the sunblock onto their small people and
watch them run off into the water, splashing and screaming when that first wave
hits their ankles and they brace themselves for the next and the next all day
long until the sun gets tired.
Sand in sandwiches, crunching in mouths with warm cheese and
wilted lettuce. Shells picked up and cherished until the next favourite is
found and pocketed and the last is forgotten. And then sandals and shoes and
dry clothes are reunited with owners, always with difficulty and barely-behind too-small
towels held by up by mum.
A little bit of sand is taken home in shoes and in the
corners of castle-shaped buckets that swing from pushchairs as the sun goes to
bed and the night sky lights up with dramatic scene-stealing effect and it’s
the most beautiful thing that you have seen all day, apart from the one you’ve
got your eye on, who, by now, with any luck, is standing beside you, beside
you, getting closer and closer by the minute. With any luck they’re beside you.
With any luck this is sun stroke; stroking brought on by the sun. The sun makes
us fall in love so quickly.
