An old, stout, confused woman, with jumbled memories, stands on the waterfront.
She mourns a boy she spent an April night with so long ago. A drunken proposal, after a tea-dance on the pier and illicit nips of brandy. Swaying in the wind on the edge of Bawley Bay like skinny reeds. In that place where General Gordon smiled, Pocahontas cried, and Lady Franklin once waved at two wooden ships that sailed off into the ice.
He’d called her “My pretty flutterby…like a fritillary!”. He was the only one who ever had.
“Oh you daft boy… but I’m no painted lady… more a plain cabbage white”, she’d teased. “Anyway we must love like mayflies now.”
Or something like that. For wishes and covenants were as slippery as fishes back then, and there was no time to waste. He flew off next day and, like so many, he never came back to her.
An old man with a burn-scarred face stands on a small patch of crumbling tarmac… to the south…on the high ground near Riverview. He stamps on those last remains of a once rumbling runway, with jumbled thoughts. All has changed, except that easterly chill. “We take off upwind to fly and we sail off upwind to die” he mused. “It’s always against us.”
He looks down towards the river with rushes of faded memories like hers. One reel is still so clear and sharp. That waitress he danced with in ’42, who took him back to The Royal Clarendon Hotel. You don’t forget your first… her smell… her skin… the hair down there. A prince that night alright.
She’d always assumed he’d died … so many did. He’d actually bailed out blazing over France and spent the rest of the war as a POW. …came back weary and glad at first, then skinny, ugly and bitter.
He spotted her just once… a few years after he returned … from a distance… one spring in the ’50’s, walking with husband and children… on the old Medway canal towpath that came to be called Peanut Road.
He’d turned away unseen. Would she have recognised him? Probably not.
Such things happen in wartime…and in its aftermath.
We eavesdrop near the shore. Each flash a starlight pinprick. Every occultation a gap between heartbeats. Those little blinking houses ; So far away, And so far apart. Talking by signing, And calling out in sound too. For they cannot see.
Talking by singing Their vocabulary is small I can name each light with a song Or write one song for all Two words ‘Off’ and ‘On’ So it should be a short and simple task Our song But we do not find it so.
Around here, the murder of Lilian Edmeades and Malcolm Johnson still has a power to paralyse tongues. People can’t bear to talk about it, and they may change the subject very quickly if you mention it… or pretend they don’t remember.
1961 I went walking
Out by Denton
With a bucket for some eels
And an apple for the ponies.
There were lovers on the bank
And I saw Edwin
Out shooting rabbits on the dyke
But I just went home.
We go out walking still you know
Out past Denton to Shorne
Past The Ship And Lobster
(what’s left of it all these days?)
Hear the watermen yelling
Like lapwings on the marsh
Or skylarks in the mud
I saw Edwin
Saw Lily from the church and she’s kissing a boy
Mad Edwin’s whistling ‘Come Back To Sorrento’
Dreams of Connie Francis
Walking back
Hands in his bulging pockets.
There’s two graves
And one inscription
on a heart shaped stone
For Lily from church and her boy
She was kissing
‘Come Back To Sorrento’
Behind me
I just went home.
The double grave of Lilian and Malcolm who were murdered by Edwin 10/9/61
So I’m hugging her tight. A rear waist lock with my legs outside hers, my ankles hooked around the railings. My cheek pressed against her bare back… in case she has the sense to slam her head back into my face. She’s stronger than she looks, and very determined… so it’s dicey and intimate at the same time.
We didn’t say much. Most of it was wrestling and wriggling and heaving and grunting noises. There’s no way I’m letting go …If she goes, I’m going down with her… to the end… to prove a point.
There’s always gallows humour, and I was getting pissed off. Try and make this girl laugh to break through.
“Oh, the fucking irony of this.” I said, “Here we are…The first time in years that I’m holding a pretty woman… with tits to die for, by the Thames on a warm summer evening. And she’s trying to fucking drown herself… and I’m 67 with a heart condition…and that’s a hernia the size of a grapefruit in case you’re worried about the lump pressing into your arse…”
She snorted, couldn’t help herself. Perhaps we’re getting somewhere at last.
“Ooh. I’ve got a hiatus hernia”, she goes, “Had it for years. Gaviscon addict me. But that won’t help you …not with one way down there in your balls like that.”
So, we had this brief, lucid, surreal discussion about me getting a better truss, inguinal hernia operations, keyhole surgery versus being cut open, and NHS waiting lists, and I thought I’d got her good.
But then she said, “Nice try Fucker!”, and she tried, and failed, to bite me and got her leg further over the railings. But I was not letting go.
And then later…towards the end. Nearly thirty minutes later. Where does this stuff come from? My mind dredged up the most random thing. I found myself singing that stupid Andrew Gold song; “Never Let Her Slip Away”…and she joins in…and we both sing it quietly as the police arrive to prise us apart with her crying in frustration and us both bloody and snotty.
She only cried when she knew for sure that I’d scuppered her plan and that I’d never let go. And even then, she didn’t cry for long.
“Because I love her… I’m hoping that I never recover…I’ll never let her slip away”. Awful! The schoolboy shames! What would my thirteen-year-old classmates have said?
“That song’s for girls… Are you a homo Johnny? HEY! …Everybody! Johnny’s a homo…a Bay City Roller Boyo… probly wants to bum David Cassidy!”
And the girls would have tittered too, and said “fie!”, and then I would have punched someone…probably Paul Stentiford because I hated them all, but he was smaller.
Why would I have stored away a soppy relic from my early 1970’s adolescence so deeply, considering I loved Slade, T. Rex and The Sweet, and was edging towards Black Sabbath and cigarettes and a stolen Fiesta magazine?
I just found out that some cooler friends; proper Metal heads among them, have been closet Andrew Gold afficionados for years. I suppose he died quite young and hasn’t had the MOJO hipness replacement operation yet…though he’s on that waiting list for sure. Come on though! Was he really that good?
I really don’t want to hear that song again. Or Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You”, which was playing on the jukebox when we finally got back to the pub…and which the algorithms saw fit to put in my YouTube feed the next morning. That really was a bit close to the bone…a low blow. Once that song starts you must see it through… whether you hate it or love it.
Nice try Hope Sandoval you fucker with your mystery wordplay. Stay out of this. Not your circus, and not your monkeys!
I feel like this week I’ve seen the glam side of the sex industry …Melissa Todd, Britain’s most pricy dominatrix, at a poetry reading on Sunday at The Mole Hole; then the most miserable side of that industry just two nights later.
Juxtaposition. Maybe it’s the new food of love…play on.
ii
To anybody passing we’d have seemed a couple, but there was no-one passing and it’s away from the road and the pub; and dark. If it hadn’t been for the smart woman running the pub that night, who had a hunch and came looking for me, we could have been there hours. Either that or in the river.
Even if I’d had my phone with me and a free arm; thumbing 999 on a mobile in this part of town is sketchy. You connect to the Essex call centre rather than the Kent one and, these days, since the ferry closed, Essex is another country across a watery border. The police will be late, but aren’t they always? They did turn up though.
Nice clothes, articulate, late thirties perhaps? Mid forties? These days I find guessing a woman’s age harder. An independent escort, and I’m pretty sure of that. A south-east London accent mixed with curious moments of pure Bristolian…the weird accent mix was why I noticed her when I was at the bar.
It’s a bit embarrassing, but a couple of years spent collecting rent around Argyle Square in the early 1980’s means I have a nose for that stuff…quite literally in this case as I smelled not even the faintest whiff of perfume… and we were about as close as lovers could be, and perhaps closer than many ever get, for over thirty minutes.
Discreetness is important. Her first story that it was “just a Tinder meet gone wrong”, didn’t add up. Women don’t put on their sexiest clothes, complete with red “come fuck me” heels for a date… and yet forget to spray on a dash of scent. Nah! Much less do they leave a half-drunk glass of wine, a classy leather handbag, mobile phone, and said red shoes on the table…then walk barefoot… a hundred yards down the riverside, over broken beer bottles and worse, to the one area with no decent lighting.
Or maybe she’d got dressed for this special occasion and, logically figured that L’Eau D’Issey or whatever, would be wasted in the water. My initial hunch was correct though.
Eventually she let on she’d been beaten up by her husband a couple of days before. And attacked by a client earlier in the day. She never used the word ‘rape’, but she knew I’d know. She had old bruises on her boobs and fresh bleeding welts on her legs and arms; so it’s likely that was true.
“That’s nothing though…” she told me, “So what. Nothing new. It was fair fights and believe me I gave plenty back. They won’t be hurting me again…Never. Nobody cares and this is what I want. Just let me go. Leave me the fuck alone and you can all tell stories in that pub tomorrow.”
“As it happens, actually, I do write songs and poems and I really don’t want you to be in one of them”
“Well ack-shoo-ally…” mocking my middle-class filler word, “… You can Piss Off!”
“But I’m still not going to let you go. Ever.”
Her daughter’s ‘A’ level results were disastrous. She wouldn’t be going to uni. You do all that shit to ensure your kid has a better life…and well, I suppose you’d feel a failure as a mother. Now that would be properly grim…hearing the only reason you ever did the job call you a “useless…never there for me slag.” That could flip a tough woman over the edge, and that was a thing she kept coming back to. Funny thing is I spent years teaching in girls’ secondary schools. It seemed best not to mention that though.
She said she had worked in a school once but hated school holidays…didn’t surprise me. Everyone in her business hates school holidays, bank holdays..and the third week of the month before pay day. But the school summer holidays are the worst because the men can’t slip away.
When the police did arrive, and she realised she was more likely to be sectioned than die, she asked them to call a man. I’m sure ‘Darryl’ was her driver or her security. He certainly wasn’t someone she knew well. And he wasn’t her pimp because she was in charge.
The police and I clocked ‘Darryl’ straight away. Turning up in his Merc and sunglasses on his head, with cool, slightly embarrassed indifference. I’m sure he’d driven her there…or more likely the Clarendon Hotel and, rather than wait as usual, until she’d done the client, she’d sent him home early. This nonsense was above his pay grade and their attempt to portray themselves as a plausible couple were laughably useless.
I don’t ever praise the police. I don’t like them, and they don’t like me…for old reasons. But to be fair, once they arrived, they did a good and sensitive job, and they weren’t going to let her go with him. ‘Darryl’ tried not to show it, but he was pleased about that. If she did manage to convince them that she’d “had just a few too many and fancied a swim”, then the cops would follow them ‘home’, and he said his kids were asleep. That slip was a blooper and a half… “My daughters”. I bet he said it on purpose. ”My”.
You will find that men who wear sunglasses on their heads at night are seldom who they really are.
Her fingers moved towards his hand but he put it in his pocket.
iii
There were two situations in the past when I saw jumpers and, in both cases, if I’d figured out what was happening, and had even five seconds warning, I could have intervened.
One at Hong Kong airport was an exercise in well executed banality. This businessman sitting opposite finished his crossword. He neatly folded the newspaper and put it into his leather briefcase, drained the last of his morning coffee, checked his shoelaces, calmly walked two steps to the stairwell parapet and vaulted over…straight down the gaps between the flights into the check in area. Bastard did it in front of a thirteen year old girl.
I still can’t bear to talk about the other one and never will.
Perhaps those missed opportunities helped me recognise the signs this time. But one out of three is a shit ratio and I don’t feel good or remotely heroic about this one. It really doesn’t work like that.
I know she won’t thank me. I know we don’t fix these things just like that and it’s quite likely she’ll try again. She was composed, had made up her mind, like she was in a Ketamine state of grace, a bit disassociated but knew what she was doing.
Gravesend, when a high tide starts to ebb, is the most effective place to slip away silently in deep roaring undercurrents; away from cameras…out to the sea… or at least to the marshes. You won’t be found for days. It’s a very harsh thing to say but Dartford Bridge is for amateurs and attention seekers. Your remains will be found quickly if you jump from there. The bridge is making a statement, the big final fuck you look at me, gesture. You’ll be on the telly. An incident icon on the satnav screens of stationary cars. You’ll hold up the traffic for at least half an hour and get all manner of reactions from the people who never noticed your misery.
Such a pro…She wanted to slip away unseen, unheard, sober, un-smelt, in her loveliest dress, leaving the accessories behind. She wasn’t going to need the handbag, fags, phone, bank cards or those blood-red shoes…or the rest of that medium glass of Cabernet.
Did I do it for her, or for my ego, or the ungrateful kid she’d leave left behind? I really don’t know…I really didn’t think about it. Was I just another bloke forcing his will on a woman who felt she’d made a final and rational decision, based on the evidence of lifelong experience…of the men she had known?
Even worse…was I just a cliché…the middle-aged man with a saviour complex; a sort of St Vitalis of Gaza in a truss, untying the woman from the railway tracks? Now there’s a late-night pub discussion about free will, performative masculinity and early Hollywood iconography if ever I heard one!
All I know is that when I phoned the police next day they told me simply that she was alive, getting ‘follow-up’, and in a safe place. I hope she makes it. I want to know that I made a difference for the better but, barring an equally random encounter, I never will. We might see each other at the ASDA checkout, pretend we’ve never met…and that’s as it should be. Hah maybe I’ll start humming Strangers In The Night to see if she joins in!
The people who really stepped up, and who are missing from this tale so far; the ones who intervened first, who called the cops, who mopped up the mess, who watched over me and her as we struggled, who say they would have dragged me away if it had all ‘gone tits up’, who finished their shift at the pub and locked up…who gave me that hug I didn’t think I would need…were women. They were brilliant. Having more blokes there would surely have led to nowhere good.
I’m pretty sure I was incapable of acting otherwise even if I had thought about it. And I really, really, would have followed her down into that water if she’d got away …out of stubborn pride at keeping a promise. Dumb, eh? But I was never letting go…I told you that.
So, call me toxic and spank me with a spare rib. I probably did it because walking away or minimising your involvement, requires analysis. My exes will gladly confirm that conscious analytic decisions are not my strong point. Could I have said “Not my circus, not my monkeys” and walked away? Nah… it IS our circus, and we are all the monkeys.
One last thought.
There is something. I very nearly said it to her, but I couldn’t get the words out in the moment. I didn’t have the breath, and it didn’t seem important at the time…and despite wishful thinking, it wouldn’t have made any difference at all.
“Don’t spoil my future memories of a town I never expected to love this much, and which I will have to leave too soon”.
I think back to another half-hour; at the very top of Rochester Castle, where I held a woman who I hardly knew, arms around her belly, in a similar, though gentler way, twenty-five years ago. Whenever I see those ruins, I feel the sort of deep fondness that I want to feel for this town.
I never expected to be this bruised and discombobulated. There are moments in our lives that are… like dipping randomly into a fucking Bukowski anthology!
