Wicker and Stone and Coral (Final part)

One was out early right big this morning. The ground still all wet. Proper Cornwish weather on a proper Cornwish road; convex with age and the years of horse and cart and more recently with the heavy-double tractors and more.

A pair of trainers, worn like fury but kept clean remaining useful past their expiration date, slogged along a narrow lane, slipping some in and out of the grassy ditch lining the road. The calves of this one thick and defined, working hard to move on from the long long shadow chasing them. The legs perhaps looking stronger than true because of the shorts so short with the slit in each side to allow them to be even shorter than anyone wants to see. A hand clutching a bottle and the other clutching itself into a fist. Pumping. Pumping fierce and endless. The mesh vest sitting light and loose on broad, rounded shoulders. Slick neck. Buzz cut. Running for fitness and for quiet and for thinking.

Easy to think when you’re running. When I’m running my thoughts run in time with my breathing. It helps me get from one to the other. This cold has snuck up on me though. Sore throat and sore ears are the measure of a man I suppose. It’s all about whether you keep going. Especially up these hills. I wonder if everyone else runs on the wrong side ​of the road. My dad always told me to. So did the fella on Duke of Edinburgh. I’ve also been told it’s stupid. I don’t know it makes sense to me. Can see cars coming for you. Not that that would stop one hitting you. The day a fella can take on a car that’s determined is the day I wear longer shorts. Hahaha. Why am I funniest when no one else is near? Maybe I should join a running club. Unless I’m funny because I’m alone. I don’t know which I’d prefer to be honest. Company or good humour. Maybe I’m not funny. No. Fuck ‘em they wouldn’t reply to me anyway, those paranoid emmets. No. None. All of ‘em’d just carry on to themselves. Whispering. Making eyes at me and about me. I’d ask wasson and they’d say, “no no don’t worry yourself there”, and go back to laughs at my cost. Sssssssellers of sssssssnake oil. Oh well. Join it. Make your life good while you’ve got the power fella. Don’t lose the opportunities. We aren’t angry or frustrated that way anymore you know that. Shite. Drifted too fine there. Back on. Think of Steve Phillips and all he’d say.

What? Blind? No, something real out there coming for me. Going like lightning though. An angry bush on wheels with a face. Oh, a car. Must be from around here ‘cause no newcomer is gonna drive like that on these lanes. Don’t recognise them though. It’s shaking the ground. Surely there’s some physics says that’s impossible. It’s only a little car after all. Jesus it’s hard to look at. I feel guilty looking at it, like I’ve no permission. Just keep running on fella. Bright as anything though. So much I can’t think strai…

The grass was moist against hot skin. He sat in a haze or a daze or something. Brushing himself off and gathering his water bottle the fella looked back the way he had run. Early morning sun reflected sharp off a murky car, that murky car that had seemed so far away just seconds before. Has my hair been singed? Fucks sake something’s been modded on that thing. It’s burning a furnace like it’s rocket propelled. Where was I? Oh, yes, one should always emphasise a ‘W’ in ‘Cornish’. It was a dark day indeed when they cut it out. If I could find shklim or shkler who done it…

The fella ran on, but struggled heavy, as though some of his very own life force had been stole away.

*

Lester’s eyes were wide-style. She had moved from giving animals a fright to aiming her pet at passers-by. He recognised their surroundings now, though, and was more than a tad relieved to be nearing the end. He could take easy her driving in small bits and increments but all at once for so long was tough on him and thus on her.

Rosy-fingered dawn awoke in a pastel of Homeric glory. Brett White didn’t know where they were headed for definite or where they were staying. She got them in the general area and gave in. Some butterflies in his tummy began working up a fuss too and he knew she sensed it, maybe she felt the Tiger II turn its attention to its interior and its passenger in search of a new and easy prey.

“I know a hostel by a beach. Won’t be no way open now but there’s some view you’ve got to see so we can just carry on past until we reach where we need to be and make the rest up as we go shall we?”

“At your service, ElAitch,” she said, unsure why there was somewhere especial they needed to be at all…but, she thought, I strung him up without him knowing much back at the stones so fuck it I can flow with him.

His directions were laconic some. In the back of his mind this whole journey – muffled and fuzzy, but becoming clearer and crisper all the closer they got to their destination – had been rolling a 16mm film show of that scene he loved and hated and lamented and missed. They approached it in real now and his body showed her through it all while his mind carried on playing through the scene, comparing reality to memory. The dip into the hamlet and the sharp turn that followed swift after. The house built right up to the road. The swerve away from it and then back again to correct. The track along the cliffs out the other side of the place, slightly gravelled and mightily dusted with sand blown up or walked up, and on toward the beach. Driving along the path they were, because they were the right size and no one would stop them. The cliff-top all grassy normal but interspersed with that marram and punctured all along with warrens. The smell of the ocean fresh and cleansing. The spray reaching the cliff-top every so often when the wind would pick up like we hate but love because the seawater helps you feel clean and new but gives your hair that tacky quality as though its ends were split and dead when we know we’re healthy in the hair. The sound of the waves breaking on the sand itself and the rocks themselves unquestionably more peaceful than what you stream in stereo to help you sleep, at this time uninterrupted by happy then quick after sad cheers and cries from the visitors and their children on the beach. No heavy sea stacks but sharp jagged islands – if they could be called islands – jutted up, dominated the horizon, and looked like the breach of something big proper big at intervals along its back.

She parked up a verge of grass safe away from the clifftop and the car rested, its rear wheels exhausted from the 200-odd mile prowl. They sat there, on the bonnet, watching. Just. Each admired what was all about them. Lester full up with memory of this and her with freshness.

Lester snapped his head quick to the left and looked back up the beach. The beach that hadn’t been the same since flooding had flashed down the small stream that ran from the dunes to the sea a decade before. Her instincts compelled her to do the same. Making slow progress down to the beach was some procession. Many in black had merged into one black, as though they were a group of organisms whose evolution had driven them to huddle together, increasing their perceived size and warding off predators, just like Zebra. Becoming more and more discernible as more and more progress was made, the fuzz broke into separate individuals and varying shades of grey. The early sun shone at his back and its reflection off something shone into his eyes. An urn. The shwing and smooth clatter of his dream came to him now.

The group climbed to a large pool tucked in a group of rocks, glistening with newly washed seaweed and flirting between life-pit and death-pit when bright and sporkling creatures would swim to the surface before hiding away again, where they met a pair of broad shoulders stood beside a neatly pickaxed hole in the rock. Lester flushed hot with something he knew not what when he saw his mother wedge the urn into the hole. He knew that, for years, it had been her wish for that one to be returned to the place he had loved so much during his life; still, Lester was resentful. He had fooled Brett White into leaving Shangri-La and coming here – of all places – on the pretence of a last-gasp clutching at freedom before their adult lives began proper and, while all that could be true easy enough, he had been too much of a coward to confess; double that he couldn’t shake his disgusting knowing. This burial, this morbidly beautiful send-off, would be all anyone would remember of the life that had been and gone before it had been charged and settled into pottery.

That’s down to him, he made decisions that meant this is for big time more interesting than any one sequence or aspect of his life previous. Go on Lester, Lester was getting it going good now like he could. The only way to make it worthwhile is to get famous or die young maybe, but I’m not too arsed much about the first and I’m getting past the point where I’ll contend for the other. I don’t know, the melancholy is probably catching some. It doesn’t suit me or us, though. I can feel it, at my elbow. Fate. Harsh fate. I could strike. No, a caress is more fitting. Soft me meets soft her. Caressing and learning its ways and its plans all through my fingers. Like a ribbon. Yes, that’s it son. We don’t own none of it. What’s gone or what might come. We only claim anything over this moment and this one and this one. Maybe. Some. Hard to even claim any over ourselves. Who can own billion-year-old carbon? So said Gumbril, I’m sure, our lord and saviour. Makes more sense to keep going and keep going and keep taking the days as they hit. Everything works out as you deserve in the end. The universe will arrange itself. No worrying is the best policy baby always and always and with her and with her for definite true this time – things will get done how they want to. It’s silly to have it or aim for it to be any other way. All well and good. Call her a force in life that binds me. Kierkegaard Shmierkegaard Camus Shmamus. Shfuckingwasteoftime. Is it better for the beautiful world to exist than the heap of filth? My answer will tell you, child, of all hedonism; natthikavāda, tension, modernity, postmodernity, I see it is all nothing; twist me, Spinoza, with your freedom of expression; “Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception…” Cartesian (anti of course); caring; dead. Which am I? Which is she? Which are we? HERE AM I laying claim to the scalp of intellectual thought thousands of years in the growing I should have thrown her letter into that fucking bonfireeffigypieceofshitcuntwickerman. Who the fuck sends letters anymore and why the fuck did she send one to me? Mother. Come now. Really. Really, Mother, come now. An INVITATION to a funeral. What? And now I haven’t got that picture of Ernesto - he’d like that ‘cause we are kindred energy and spirit and thought and insides. Fuck. Fuck off. Why am I here? Calm, boy. We don’t get like that no more you know that. Go back some seconds to when you were thinking and philosophising gently.

During his thinkophising, Mother and her mourning party had stood in silence – broken sporadical by pops and, once, a purr when the creatures in the pool would come to the surface. The sea had been eerie too. Too quiet. Too respectful. Yet, it can be impatient as all others. The dozen or so Black-and-Greys gathered were near knocked into and about the pools and the rocks by a sudden onslaught of water and foam.

HA! Lester, careful to keep his elation and the guilt that followed soon after, to himself, was still getting into it good like he could. Was that too far? Where has the darkness gone? My moral transgressions are clear to any now. Just as theirs are to me. Serves them right I’m sure of it. Does it? It serves them something. Contrition maybe. Contrition beyond the obvious. If they feel bad for themselves and regret coming here to do all this shit then they’re selfish. They’re just as bad as any other. A double helping of the real world. That’s it. That’s a gentler way of putting it baby. Well done, Joe. NO. Not Joe nor Joey nor Joseph. Lester. What was that? And they’re gone. Good riddance. The final bunch of English have left and we can be as we are and as we want just like I promised her yesterevening. How are we? How do we want to be? Calm and tranquil. That’s us. That’s what we strive for. If we try hard enough and act hard enough it’ll just come natural-style, no need to inject botox into them frown lines baby. All this for that. Driving all that for this. Double or quits spectral and incorporeus. No schedule or itinerary for the next two days. What am I to do? She’ll think I’m boring when that’s all I don’t want to be. Ooo I could pervert it all now. Pervert the bond now so that I might view its future, to glimpse what we might become; it could falter, it could stutter and stall and stagnate and die. She has all chance of being the great dictator of each of our lives, standing over the world with corpses strewn around. I’d be the first bonafide time traveller. I haven’t learnt anything either. I already knew his life was boring and pointless and didn’t want to end up that way. This, this is good though. I could do this, sit here, for all time. With her. Maybe I should, we should. Find a lake somewhere that isn’t too popular, live in a tent, live off the land, read off the pages, listen off the vinyl. I’m dwelling on this aren’t I? That’s exactly what I preach against isn’t it? Leave it behind and leave it to them and the rocks and the fish and the sea-spray. Greatness, knowledge, renown, friendship, pleasure and possessions, all is only wind, only smoke: to say it better, all is nothing.

The sea was spraying angry now. It looked to be targeting The Pool more than anywhere else, as though cleansing the land it had claimed long ago, purging it of the dull and tedious spirit just embedded there safe in urnery for perpetuity.

“You’re crackling, ElAitch,” Brett White, who for all this time – though thoughts run quick in comparison to the ticking of a clock – had been sat watching Lester’s face screw up and tighten then relax back to normal over and over, brought him back to her.

“Hmm? I’m sparkling did you say?”

“You’re fizzing. I don’t know what it is or why it is. Can’t describe either neither. I could feel it humming off you constant with shocks jumping from your hand to mine and to my mind though. Are you well?”

“I’m at a standstill to tell you the truth, sweet. I reckon you’ll have to direct me through it all. If that’s okay with you, of course?” Lester’s thoughts were twisting and moulding into something a long time coming, confirmation of which by her would ease him and rest him and make him fizz for all time. “Will you grow old with me, Brett White?”

“I’ll grow old with you, Lester,” she said, as one of those replies made before the speaker has had time proper to think it through, but thankfully is congruent with their true wishes and wants and needs. “Have we any schedulinery for today, though?”

The sea aimed at them now. Its spray, however, falling short, glistened with the strengthening sun on the barrier of energy that enveloped Lester and his girl, and Brett and her boy. The two bodies melted into one, it seemed.