ungodly denomination. A stilted canal-boat. A hutch.
His hands were blue with the cold. He’d removed his gloves earlier, when he’d met up with…
Pale eye. Snowy owl. Ivory woman.
His mind flipped rapidly through a curious assortment of disparate images.
Cruella de Ville. Coconut macaroons. French poodles. Bambi.
Cold. It was bloody cold Goddammit. And misty now. He blew on his fingers. He inspected the stricken-seeming craft from a distance. He put his hand into his coat pocket. He pulled out a key (a small key attached to a piece of string, attached, in turn, to an old-fashioned luggage label with spidery black writing on it.
He did not read the writing.).
The air was damp now; quiet yet weighty: full-bellied with the snarl of speeding cars in the distance. He found the combination pleasing. Silence. Humming. A goose flew past him. Eye-level.
Wha?!
He jumped. Canadian. He heard its wings pumping. A clean sound. Its round eye appraised him. He shrugged to himself, almost embarrassedly.
Then, carefully –as was his way, invariably –placing one foot gingerly next to the other, walking sideways; hunched-over, knees bent; he made his way gradually down the bank (the Sea Wall, he supposed they’d call it, locally, but not concreted here, like on the coast-line proper), through the grass and the slime, without slipping –never slipping –towards this moon-craft. This wreck. This strange, scruffy, humble, chipped and creaking, something-and-nothing berth-dock-anchor. This mooring.
The mist will grow thicker, he reasoned –once he’d finally reached the boat; seeing the door hanging loose on its hinges, a window, cracked, smelling gas from somewhere, leaking, possibly–the mist will grow thicker–
It must
–and gently soft-focus this stricken craft for me…
How ridiculous these thoughts are. How utterly out of character. But he’d always loved the fog. He loved what it represented, what it implied, what it stood for.
So what does it stand for, exactly?
Arthur shrugged off these thoughts just as quickly and efficiently as he shrugged off his rucksack (the latter with possibly a fraction more difficulty –his shoulders were killing him) and then smiled up benignly at the sodden, cloud-smitten sky. These were sweet fancies. They were not typical –
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.
‘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
