Fullalove (21 page)

‘What is it?’

‘“Fullalove”.’

‘Full of love?’

‘One word. “Fullalove”. A lot of people use the names of their children, which you’re not supposed to do. Max, Leo, Alice, Jack. Today’s equivalent of the school picture in the vignetted cardboard oval. In jobs where security is a priority you’re issued with a list of passwords that the system bars you from using because they’re too easy to guess. Jesus, Hendrix, Hitchcock, Hitler. Alka-Seltzer, Aristotle, Brando, Beatles. All car makes, movie stars, football teams, holiday destinations.’

‘I know what mine would be.’ A wild smile, pygmy seed pearl teeth, a lot of gum. ‘“Ikkoku”, which is Japanese for “pilgrimage”,’ she said. ‘“The going out and the coming back”. “A voyage in the symbolic realms of death”.’

With the onset of evening, the wrinklies had retreated behind the glassed-in porchlets up and down the street, sunk deep in 1950s ‘studio couches’ they would have to be heaved out of when the time came, barricaded behind low tables and bottles of white salad cream and boot-brown bottles of sauce, gummily masticating,
legs agape. They appeared museumised, Congo capuchins, grebes, preserved in vitrines.

A key plot development for them all to chew over was the fact that I was not alone. Or, rather: Veorah B wasn’t setting out on her evening hike on her own as usual, but with a man – a suit – in tow, the two of them on apparently chit-chatty terms, each respecting the other’s space.

Like everybody who has got used to living alone (I should know), her routine is set, her timetable inflexible. At a quarter to six she had stood up and walked out of the room as if an internal alarm had gone off. She came back a few minutes later kitted out in white trainers with pink laces and thick tongues and something bubble-like, some transparent valve or gizmo, in the heel; plus a cardigan draped over her shoulders for when it grew colder later, with a chill blowing in off the sea. It seemed to be taken as given, without anything being said by either of us, that I would be going with her on her walk.

Although it is almost ten years since her husband bailed out, she said she never ceased to be aware of the possibility that he could be alive and lurking nearby somewhere, watching, nursing his hatred of her, waiting until she drops her guard. There had been reported sightings in Denmark, Manila, Prague and Australia. The last she heard he was supposedly living in a tent and working as an evangelist on the seafront at Blackpool. She keyed in a series of codes on a digital panel in the hall before we left, activating a complex network of electric eyes, smoke detectors, sequence-timers for the lights and mortice locks.

Five minutes brought us to a litter-strewn mailed area with shops specialising in beach toys and bulk-buy sweets and toffees and shabby holiday souvenirs set out in a circle around a dribbling fountain. Beyond it, at the end of a short concrete tunnel, was a harbour with blackboards advertising fishing trips and pleasure boat rides, and primary-coloured perforated metal benches set into pyramidal concrete slabs. A topless woman lay face down on a towel a few feet away from the caterpillar track of a giant dredger. The dustbins stood ankle deep in styrofoam
trays and cups. Several children frolicked naked in a rancid, almost drained-dry paddling pool.

It was around here that Veorah started to put some distance between us, striding ahead on her pistoning little legs, skirting the dreck, and leading the way between bramble bushes onto a steep upward track that ran adjacent to some aggressively fenced-off back gardens but then quite soon brought us within sight of the sea. Every half-mile or so for a while, the same handwritten notice fixed to a tree. ‘Lost’, it said above a snapshot picture. ‘Brindle bitch. Answers to “Briggie”. Loving companion desperately missed. Small reward offered by pensioner owner for information leading to return.’

Blistered sea on one side. High-piled dry thorny scrub on the other. Breathless ‘hi’s and ‘good evening’s to maundering shell-suited, bum-bagged couples, desiccated outward-bounders, people wrapped in the skins of wild animals lamming off through the bracken towards stone outbuildings and cottages patched over with driftwood, cardboard, blue fertiliser bags.

When I caught up with Veorah she was doing stretching exercises on a grassy promontory that dipped gently and then collapsed precipitately in a heap of grey cuboid rubble into the sea. She was on the ground, contorted in a sort of semi-splits, trying to achieve a contact between the toe of one trainer and her head. Below us, two tiny figures were fishing off an oblique column of rock. In the deep distance, the hut where I had eaten hot dogs earlier in the day, its appearance inducing now a kind of loneliness and nostalgia that I recognised as sentimental, unearned. Power boats ripping through the old-gold.

She whipped back her hair, perspiring, blowing hard, and lay staring at the sky. I sat down on the grass slightly behind and not quite beside her and neither of us said anything for a while. On the path above us, the occasional evening footslogger, curiosity whetted by the recumbent figures, looking and not looking, walking for the sake of walking, imprinting the dust.

‘The flow of pilgrims in Mecca is counter-clockwise, against the normal passage of the sun. Whereas Buddhist pilgrims walk
around their sacred stupas in a clockwise direction, along the path of least resistance, going with the flow.’ There was a map of the pilgrimage route around the Buddhist temples on the Japanese island of Shikoku pinned to Veorah’s living-room wall, along with maps showing Irish holy places, medieval, Marian and twentieth-century shrines.

Skellig Michael, Lough Derg, Croagh Patrick, Our Lady’s Island, Knock. Awa, Tosa, Iyo, Sanuki. Fatima, Garibandal, Lourdes, Zeitoun in Cairo, Medjugorje. The Kop, Kent State, the Texas Schoolbook Depository, the Dakota building, Graceland. The place names joined with thick pencil lines to make the shapes I had at first taken to be diagrams for Formula One circuits or acupuncture points; the shapes traced and laid over one another in – I guessed – the search for correspondences, echoes, hints of synchronicity with the nine-sided, roughly kite-shaped figure you get – that Veorah had got – by linking the police memorial sites in a chain.

With the Yvonne Fletcher memorial numbered ‘1’, reading clockwise, in chronological sequence, they went: 1, 2, 7, 3, 5, 4, 9, 6, 8. The rape sites – 5, 2, 4, 6 – were marked by coloured pins. I was certain this was where the story was – ritual, shrines, post-literate paganism, folk mysticism – and had already made a number of unsuccessful attempts to get a conversation going in this area. ‘On the M25, the circular ringroad, there are fifty per cent more accidents on the clockwise carriageway than on the anti-clockwise one‚’ I tried again. ‘You are more at risk in the autumn and least likely to be involved in an accident if you choose to go anti-clockwise in the spring.’

‘My father thought this was heaven on earth‚’ she said, ‘these few miles of the coast. He bought a plot here for next to nothing after the War, and built a cabin on it with scraps of material he brought down by bus and bicycle on his days off from work. I was born in the shack town in a black timbered house on stilts called “Perseverence” spelled wrong. It was like growing up in the Wild West.’ The heat of the day radiating from the hard packed earth at twilight. She gathered a bunch of tiny, garnet-coloured
flowers where she was sitting and put them in one of the button-holes of her cardigan.

We walked on for a while, in single file because of the narrowness of the path, until we came to some candles in coloured glass bottles planted in the earth. There was an offertory box for donations towards a more permanent memorial to the local woman who, a plaque explained, had been murdered at this spot almost exactly a year earlier while walking her dogs. There were bunches of flowers, a jade plant in a pot, a card printed on chlorine-free board from a renewable source, placed there by the woman’s son: ‘I used to watch you so intently when I was a baby and a toddler, I studied your every move. I wish I could say “See you soon.” Your son ——.’

A light flickered in a cylinder jar with Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech printed on it, the last few lines disappearing into the ground.

We took the circular route back to Seaton, following dimming lanes to a farming hamlet where the shadow show against the windows of the only pub easily reeled us in.

The Stand Alone was white-painted, broad-walled, erratically added-onto, thatched – and stood alone in the fork between two unlit roads, still little more than tracks. The apple-knocker rusticity extended inside, where the ceilings were low, smoky, con-cussively beamed, the walls bedizened with bridles, ferrets and weasels in cases, rods and reels, fishing flies mounted and framed. All of it, it became clear pretty quickly, by-the-yard and brewery supplied.

‘Bottle of Diamond White, tin of Tennents Super, packet of kingsize Rizla red.’ The first order I overheard indicated how far we were from the bought-in Isaak Walton idyll represented on the walls. The buyer was Elvisly coiffed, tattooed, female, slightly boss-eyed, part of a big group of bikers and their coozes who were the audience for an old yokel who was taking bets on two live crabs he was trying to get to race each other across the floor. ‘Prostitution, Alcoholism, Serious Substance Abuse but, above all,
a really wonderful atmosphere’, a sign announced behind the bar.

We stood as far away from the crab Olympics as possible, which wasn’t far enough to stop the terrible smell of the old man mugging us every so often as he stumbled around, flapping his arms, trying to get the half-dead crawlers to put a spurt on. The bikers flicked cigarette-ends and burning matches at them, and doused them with Tennents and mad cider sprayed between their teeth.

We were asked to move after a few minutes – shift our shanks – so that a ladies’ dart match could begin, the darters each with a fag going in their throwing hand, a floret of brown mole nestled in the sparse underarm hair. Nasal redneck music, a small digital display running a repeating repertoire of jokes: ‘Joke,’ it flashed. ‘Joke … What’s small, red and sticky? … Answer: A baby with a razor blade.’ The stutter smear of dot-matrixed laughing mouths.

When was it I gave him the matches? – the half-full box from the White Tower, Fitzrovia’s finest, with which he was going to immolate himself. I can see it all now, of course: the open fire in his hovel, the crossed planks resting on the wooden crate, inched in slowly as they burned, the water to be brought to a boil for the crabs, the thunderous blowback when he poured the paraffin on … Oh I can see it vividly now. But I couldn’t see it then, when I made him a present of the matches to get rid of the spectacular smell, and was vaguely aware of him scrambling together his crabs (which he had tried to sell us) and lurching out into the night.

He lived only a matter of feet away as it happened, stumbling distance, in a terraced cottage whose front door opened straight into the road, and where I was next to see him, hair, beard and flesh aflame, listing slowly sideways on his sofa, turning into crackling, like the picture of the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc who flambéd himself in the Saigon market in the early years of the war. (‘If only Heath was here,’ was my first thought. ‘This would go
bosh
! … right in the paper. As it is – four pars in the local free sheet, six pars max.’)

I’ve covered air crashes and therefore know what burning flesh smells like. It smells sickly sweet like pork, but acrid as
well, like when you burn a saucepan and there’s that harsh bit that lodges in your throat. First, though, there was the smoke belching round the door, then the flames when somebody from the pub bolted out and stove the windows in. The rush to witness wasn’t immediate, or even total. The music kept playing (the pub looking starship-like in the still blue night), the visual display kept putting up its jokes.

There was a strange uncomfortable hiatus between the realisation of what was happening and the arrival of the emergency services on the scene. We stood in the summer light-rimmed dark, the fire taking a hold, trying on appropriate expressions, working up suitably laconic versions of the drama, denying the life charge, the excitement. And then the loudest, the most foul-mouthed (it would have to be) of the bikers, the one in the ripped Korean bomber jacket with the pouncing tiger on the back, started plainly, without a smirk, growing in resonance as other rumbling voices joined in:
‘The
Lord
is
my
shepherd,
therefore
can
I
lack
nothing.
He
shall
feed
me
in
a
green
pasture
and
lead
me
forth
beside
the
waters
of
comfort.
He
shall
convert
my
soul
and
bring
me
forth
in
the
paths
of
righteousness
for
his
Name’s
sake.
Yea,
though
I
walk
through
the
valley
of
the
shadow
of
death
I
will
fear
no
evil
for
thou
art
with
me;
thy
rod
and
thy
staff
comfort
me.
Thou
shalt
prepare
a
table
before
me
in
the
presence
of
them
that
trouble
me;
thou
hast
anointed
my
head
with
oil
and
my
cup
shall
be
full.
Surely
thy
loving-kindness
and
mercy
shall
follow
me
all
the
days
of
my
life
and
I
will
dwell
in
the
house
of
the
Lord
for
ever.’