Then –
Ah yes…
– the gradual flattening. The browning out, the bleaching. The stubby trees hunched up like pinched and twisted spinsters against the relentless slow-rolling lashes of sea breeze. The bushes, up on their toes, flaring, hissing, like angry yellow cats: lichen-ridden, feral, stray, bony, stricken. The landscape, sour and dry-grassed and mean and sulky. Low. Yanked back from the sea. Nearly dry, still resentful. Still sucking.
More roads. More mud. Tarmac. Roundabouts. More tarmac… ?-ha! Golf. There had to be, didn’t there? (Nothing grand. Just putting.)
The cuts, the banks, the creeks…
Then finally, the refineries. Balanced on the coastline like a clutch of steel reptiles. Like iguanas, nodding complacently –perhaps in friendship, possibly in challenge –towards the hoary, pewter, slate-smashed sea. Dry-clawed, shining, harsh, bulbous, slithering, contained, pristine.
Heavenly cities. Silver-streaked. Honed, funnelled, tanked-up, stripped-back, chiming and whistling (what was this? Home time? Lunch time? Some terrible emergency?). Like Dorothy’s Oz –once, twice, three times over –cursed and wizarded by crazy, metallic, sky-high titfers, neat smoke billowing in strictly circumscribed plumes (a celebratory cigar, smoked gingerly at a birth or a wedding), the odd, random bellow of industrial cantanker.
Arthur paused a while and looked about him. He was here, now, wasn’t he? He had arrived. This was Canvey. No. This was Benfleet. He was in neither one place nor the other. He was on the outer perimeters of both. One foot in either.
He pulled a map from his pocket. A piece of paper had been attached to it by a small silver clip (with another, rougher, less detailed map on top penned in thick black felt-tip). He glanced over towards the half-floating, mud-ridden clutter of the main marina. Low tide. Or low-ish –
Hmmn
Benfleet station, just behind him –
Check
The new bridge. Brick built in ‘73 –
Check
No name. Or none to be seen (did they never bother naming bridges any more, once the hopeful sixties were over?).
He set off again, crossed this unexceptional edifice –swamped in day-glo banners, for some reason; high tides? Tall ships? –took a sharp right beyond the main body of the marina, then abandoned the big road and trip-trapped back across a lesser tributary (if you wanted to string your fingers around the slim waist of the torrent, then this brief, thin segment was plainly the place to do it) over a perilous-seeming, tiny, hand-built wooden walkway, through an empty field full of broken bottles –aluminium cans, rotting paper, empty plastic canisters –and up onto the seriously-raised, neatly-grassed bank of Benfleet Creek… Curling like an adder. Man-made. Well-maintained. Quite deliciously –quite deliciously – prescriptive.
Arthur followed the creek, striding good-naturedly along its slithery ribbon. He side-winded. There were herons here, and things –if possible –were even plainer. Quieter. Sssssshhhh!
Scrub-land. Mudland. Sodden pasture. Everything just as it should be, by his reckoning –
Right.
He inspected his map again. He glanced up. Meadow pipits. And slime. Plenty of it. The tide still out, but dribbles of brown liquid trickling in like strong ground coffee through a cheesecloth filter. The earth still soggy. His boots –he grimaced –growing increasingly muddy. He walked on, heavily.
Sometimes there were horses; shaggy-maned, winter-coated, tethered by old rope to broken fences (holding nothing out, holding nothing in), exhaling fierce jets of steam at his silent passing. Head-tossing. Foot-stamping. Whinnying. Lip-smacking. Wanting attention. Wanting words, signs, whispers, kisses, anything. Just a sign. Or release, maybe. But Arthur walked on, determinedly, tightly bound as an Egyptian mummy.
Things grew wilder. He slipped and tripped through a sudden abundance of teazel and bramble, but kept his garments pristine all the while, never snagging. He ducked under the flyover…
Ah yes. The flyover. This was definitely…
Uh…
An innovation
Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?
He passed beneath it, bent double, his back-pack troubling him. The soil underfoot, he noted, still recoiling from the shock of the thunderous cacophony above. Sheep-stepped, hoof-pocked, shit-splattered. Groaning.
Out the other side. He straightened –
Ouch!
He creaked a little. Over a small stile. Onwards. And on, and on, river-winding, cold-cutting, cheeks smarting, until finally, finally, he paused again. He peered about him. He stamped his feet.
He took in the vista. He had not seen another soul in well over an hour (he’d seen the cars, whizzing past him, but that counted for nothing).
Below where he stood lay a scruffy, mud-splattered wharf-like construction. A pier. A mean, wooden finger, pointing rudely towards nowhere. One boat attached to it, but not floating. A permanent craft, of some 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 –