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‘Ah, come and join us. Although I must warn you, we’re as boring as two old fuck-ups can be …’
‘I’m sorry, I’m looking for Mr Buchanan …’
‘I know who you are …’
‘Really?’
‘You’re Rey Michaels’ lad …’
‘I’m his nephew, yes …’
‘Well, of course …’
‘Yes, well …’
‘Excuse me …’
He takes me to the other side of the bar and through a door into the back office. We sit down at his desk. He offers me a whisky, good Scottish stuff, cool as you like. I want to tell him that his actions are just like actions in films I’ve seen – the way he slouches in his chair and pulls the bottle of whisky from a drawer underneath his desk – but I don’t, instead I nod and watch him pour my drink. He hands it to me and I slouch back in my own chair just like him. The whisky burns the back of my throat, it starts a beautiful fire inside me.
‘It was sad … What Rey did … I liked him. He was a private man, kept himself to himself … You know, not that many people came to visit. I knew nothing about him, really, only the things he wanted me to know … I liked that about him, I even admired him for it. There’s so much space in this world, yet most of us feel restricted, like there’s no scope for another perspective, trapped in the moment, one to the next … With Rey, it didn’t seem like that, not to me, it seemed like he had all the space he wanted … then, you know, all this … He was a good man, I think, underneath it all …’
‘I never really … We didn’t see much of him, I guess …’
‘Whatever his problems, you know … Whatever was going on inside his head, in his life for him to do that, you know …’
‘I know … It’s hard to imagine …’
‘He would come here … He’d sit in the corner, reading a book, something about the stars and the planets, he was into all that … Sometimes he’d talk into his phone, but not like a conversation with someone, just into his phone, like he was recording his own voice … He had all the new gadgets … I don’t know what he was saying, he’d just speak into it, you know, discreetly. Some people thought it was odd behaviour, but I didn’t. I liked it, it kept people in here on their toes, they thought he was talking about them, keeping an eye on them or something, but he wasn’t … but what were they to know, eh? If he wasn’t doing that, he would sit there reading his books, he was always doing that, obsessed with the stars, he was. He has a huge telescope at his caravan they say, did you ever see it?’
‘I can’t remember ever having … maybe this is a new thing … I haven’t seen him in such a long time.’
‘…’
‘…’
‘Here … These are the keys … I own the site he lived on, so I have spares.’
‘Oh, thanks …’
‘Do you know where it is?’
‘I’ll find it.’
‘Number 27 … The address is on the key ring. It’s not far … Give me a call if you have any problems.’
‘Okay, thanks.’
‘Right, I’ll get back to that lot outside.’
‘Yes.’
I walk back into the bar after Mr Buchanan, leaving him to serve the man in the Dr Feelgood T-shirt another drink. Before I leave I buy four bottles of strong cider. I figure I’ll need more to drink once I’m inside Uncle Rey’s caravan. The barmaid looks at me pitifully as I hand her the money. I shake my head when she offers me the change. I thank her and walk to the door; just as I step out into the cold air, the smell of iodine and salt in my face, I hear Mr Buchanan wish me luck from behind the bar. I turn round to thank him, but it’s too late, the door has already shut behind me.
caravan 27
At least it’s stopped raining now. I walk up the grass verge and along the sea wall, with the jetty on my right, in the direction of Thorney Bay. The wind seems warmer walking this way, blowing in from the estuary along the water, up past me, following the oil tankers and container ships as they plod towards Tilbury in the opposite direction. I stop just before I reach the caravan site to watch a large container ship pass by. It takes about ten minutes. The whole of the estuary and its immediate surroundings must be reverberating with me. I wonder what all the fish must make of it? It must affect them, such a tremendous force echoing through the water and the earth below it, all the way down, shaking everything in its wake: my feet, the sea wall, the Lobster Smack, Mr Buchanan, the caravans, the entire island.
The caravan site is surrounded by a perimeter fence topped with huge, ugly rolls of barbed wire, running its entire length. It looks like a prison yard. The early evening light doesn’t help, and the lack of sufficient street lamps only heightens the all-round miserable mood of the place. I walk down from the sea wall and all the way around it to the main entrance. At first I want to turn back, but then I think of Uncle Rey: what he did, what I have come here to do. So I continue towards the main gate where I can see a small wooden hut with a light on. There’s a shoddy-looking sign on its door: ‘SITE OFFICE’. A man is sitting inside reading a crinkled copy of the Sun. He’s young, younger than me by a mile, but his face seems old: his eyes look like two oyster shells, and his skin is tough-looking, battered and bruised, weathered in all seasons like a fisherman’s. He looks up at me. His face is expressionless; all manner of emotions could be pouring through him for all I know.
‘Mr Buchanan’s just phoned. Number 27 is just over there, back towards the sea wall. It faces the wall. The generator is on, you’ll be pleased to know, but you’ll have to pay the ten-pound fee, of course. We’re running it, you see, so that you can use the caravan in comfort.’
‘Thanks, here.’
I pay him the money and leave him to his newspaper, walking out of his office without saying anything else. I can hear him shout something to me, something about ‘contacting’ him ‘should there be any problems’. I shake my head. Why do people always say these things? I make a decision not to use the main gate, if I don’t have to, again. I wave my hand, hoping that he might see this and read it as some kind of acknowledgement. I leave it at that.
It takes me longer to find Uncle Rey’s caravan than I expected it to. They all look the same, for a start. This, coupled with the fact that many of them aren’t actually numbered, making it difficult to determine the layout of the site. In fact, I stumble on Uncle Rey’s caravan by accident, just as I’m about to break my word and walk back to the small hut at the main entrance. It’s a sorry-looking thing and I half wonder how Uncle Rey managed to live in it for so long, pretty much the majority of his adult life. But he had, seemingly choosing this God-awful place deliberately, as if to ridicule himself, or persecute himself, even: a constant reminder to him that his life was meaningless.
Looking at caravan 27, it makes perfect sense to me: just the way it looks, the way it feels, how it sits there, all dishevelled and broken-looking. Though I didn’t expect it to have been painted dark green, thick with brushstrokes like an oil-painting. Nor did I expect it to have its own fenced-off, scruffy garden area, complete with garden shed. A big shed, too, like a workshop: the sort of shed media types have built in their gardens. It looks incongruous next to the brutal barbed wire on the perimeter fence and sea wall: a proper den of solitude and tranquillity, a man’s castle, where he can retire, sheltered away from the world in peace. I can see Uncle Rey right here, before I even open the door. I can see him pottering about, sitting in his shed, watching the sun set behind the sea wall, looking out through the barbed wire. It feels really odd.
The door has seen better days. I could force it open without the key if I want to, but I don’t. The first thing that hits me is the stench: a musty, earthy smell that seems alive, like something is growing inside. Which is odd, as it’s a place of death: Uncle Rey’s suicide. I run inside holding my nose and open all the windows, leaving the door open, too, hoping the cold sea air will start to clear through it all, eventually expelling whatever it is that’s causing the smell. I stand in the middle of the room, holding my breath, taking it all in: the complete and utter mess. Ordered chaos reigns supreme: tapes, records, books, newspapers, videos, DVDs, radio equipment, magazines, stacked in every available space, huge towers of information, which look like they might topple over if I move. My first thought is: I’m going to fucking kill Cal. Followed by: It’s much bigger than I thought. And it is; it’s a huge caravan. I exhale slowly. The living area is huge; offset from it is a kitchenette; and beyond that there is the bathroom and master bedroom. I’m surprised, I thought it was going to be dingy, way too small for me, but it’s actually big, bigger than my poky flat in Islington even. At least it seems like it is. The living space and the bedroom certainly are.
The stench continues to make me gag. The whole caravan is thick with it and the more I move, the more I seem to interfere with it, as if my contact with it helps each particle to multiply. It moves around me in great thick swirls, slowly. I wade through it to sit down on the sofa. I sink into it and wait for the cold sea air to begin its work. The thought that this is where he was found, hanging from a rope he’d attached to a support in the caravan’s roof. I’m thinking of it as an actuality now. It happened in this room, just by the side of this sofa. His body found in a crumpled heap, after the rope had eventually worked itself free from the support. His body lay here for a whole week before it was found festering among all his stuff, his body fluid in a pool beneath his feet, the pile of newspapers his body had knocked over still strewn across the floor. I look at the pile of newspapers; there they are, all over the floor, next to a box of CDs. I start to shiver as the cold sea air begins to fill the caravan, through the windows and open door. Soon the musty, dead odour is replaced by that familiar smell of the sea around here: iodine, salt and seaweed mixed with something industrial, something from the oil refinery.
I look around the room. Somehow I have to make sense of all this: his belongings, his life. I have to work out what can be thrown away and what should stay, and the more I think about it, the more I don’t want to throw anything away. It doesn’t seem right just now. It all belongs to Uncle Rey, none of it is mine, I don’t have the right to any of it, and besides, I hardly knew the man. It’s his detritus, not mine. It’s the aftermath of an event I had no part in. His event, his aftermath. It doesn’t seem right just to discard it all.
I stretch out on the sofa, resting my tired arms and legs. To my right is a huge record collection, all of it vinyl. I look down to find an old record player on a shelf, speakers on either side of it. I switch it on. There’s a record already on it, an album by Dr Feelgood. I’ve never heard of them before today. Then I realise that it must have been what Uncle Rey was listening to the night he took his own life. It was the last thing he’d listened to. It must have meant something to him. I put the needle onto the record and wait for the first track to fill the room, and I smile as I hear the distinctive vinyl crackle before the opening track, ‘She Does it Right’, begins. At first I think it’s just some ordinary, bluesy pub track. But I sit there and listen to the whole album, enthralled. When it ends I look through Uncle Rey’s collection, where there’s more of the same: about thirty Dr Feelgood albums in total, some of them live recordings from the BBC. Before I put on the next record, I phone Cal. I open a bottle of cider and pick up my phone. He answers immediately.
‘Jon, where’ve you been?’
‘I phoned you earlier …’
‘I must have missed it. Are you there?’
‘Yes, I’m here.’
‘I’ve been travelling to France today, been a fucking right ’mare … What state is the place in?’
‘It’s as I imagined it to be, how it’s always been, I guess. Stuff everywhere, I mean loads of stuff … gadgets, records, books, piles of newspapers and magazines, paper all over the floor. I don’t really know where to start.’
‘Just clear some space and try to locate anything that might look important. We can sell all his shit. Just look for his legal papers and all that crap, letters, bank stuff. I’m sure there’s money tied up somewhere, that’s the main thing …’
‘Right … There’s lots to go through …’
‘And family stuff, don’t throw any of that away …’
‘I don’t want to throw any of it away … It’s quite sad, Uncle Rey living here all alone … It’s such a sad, depressing place, Cal. Like a prison camp. Was it always like this?’
‘Listen, you know I never liked him, the creepy fucker. And Dad hated him. Just strip the place and then get the fuck out as fast as you can …’
‘Okay.’
‘Keep me posted, Jon. I have to shoot now, need some shuteye, meetings all day tomorrow, on a fucking Saturday, what sort of life is this … keep me posted.’
‘Sure, Cal.’
‘Bye.’
‘Bye.’
SATURDAY (#ulink_3f1058f8-b161-5232-9435-bd9864babc80)
along the sea wall
It was an uneasy night’s sleep. I dreamed that the sea was pouring in through the windows of the caravan and I couldn’t get out. When I awoke in sweat-drenched fits, taking sips from the dregs of my cider, the tankers’ engines and the low, intermittent foghorn blasts kept me awake. I mostly just lay there on the sofa, looking out of the window into the night. I listened to more Dr Feelgood in the early hours, just before sunrise. I became lost, listening to each track while trying to map the whole of Canvey in my mind. I had a vision of Two Tree Island in the moonlight, just away from the creeks; the muddy shallows of Heron Island and Puffin Island; the warm, thick mud along the banks of Benfleet Creek, a barren inlet, crafted in time. Images of Curlew Island and Sandpiper Creek, which I explored in my youth when the tide was out, came back to me, memories I hadn’t realised I owned, reappearing at first in shards.
Here it comes now, the sun, slowly up over the sea wall. I get up off the sofa and open the door to the caravan; the cold air rushes in. I decide that I will explore the island, putting off the job at hand. I have more than enough time. I’m suddenly hungry, but there’s nothing to eat. I find a pot of coffee in the fridge and make some of that, drinking it out of a bowl the way French people do in films. The odour that had first greeted me has shifted, it seems. Although I’m not sure if it’s simply because I’ve become accustomed to it overnight. I give the room a couple of deep sniffs: nothing, not a trace. I potter about for a bit with my coffee, finish it by gulping it down like a meal, and then walk into the bathroom. It’s small, as in an aircraft: everything fitting together, usable in that coolly cramped way designers go for. I take off my clothes and step into the shower. The water is cold, despite paying my ten pounds for the heating. I let the freezing water wash all over me, but it’s not long until I have to get out. It’s too cold. Rummaging through my rucksack, I realise that I’ve forgotten my toiletries. I have no towel. The tube of toothpaste that I find on the shelf above the small sink has a thumb-sized indentation at the bottom of it: Uncle Rey’s no doubt. I gently rub my own thumb over it. At first I want to keep it intact, squeezing the paste from the top of the tube, but this pushes some of the tube’s contents down as well as up, and Uncle Rey’s thumb mark is altered as paste fills the indentation, so I begin to squeeze out the paste from anywhere I please, obliterating any trace of the thumb mark. I figure, during my clearance, that I’ll have to take extra care. I don’t want to obliterate any other marks or traces, no matter how small, Uncle Rey had inadvertently left behind. I brush my teeth with my finger.
I am suddenly startled by the smell of sea-grass and weeds. The odour begins to fill the caravan. The tide is on the rise. I put the same clothes back on and walk out of the caravan and up to the fence and the barbed wire. There’s a gate to my right, which is unlocked. I walk up the grass verge to the sea wall and then manage to clamber up that, so that I’m standing on it. I stand there, like I’ve accomplished something, my back to the sea, gazing out across the caravan site and the entire island, over to the creeks in the distance. I spot little yawls, floating and swinging at anchor. I can hear the familiar sound of curlews in the distance, over to my left beyond Canvey Heights, gathering on the marshes, feeding from the fruits of the sea washed up on the thick mud.
I’m still hungry, too. I decide to walk along the sea wall, around Thorney Bay, to the Labworth, a café on the south shore, built in the thirties and a place I know will serve me a decent breakfast. I run back to Uncle Rey’s caravan to grab my wallet and lock up. Just as I walk back through the unlocked gate I notice the shed. I hesitate for a moment, the urge to look inside rising in me, but my hunger prevails and I decide to look in the shed on my return.
eating in silence
The walk takes longer than I expected. When I eventually reach the Labworth I notice Mr Buchanan sitting at a table by the window. He greets me with a broad smile and gesticulates for me to come and join him.
‘Mr Buchanan, it’s a lovely morning …’
‘Yes, I like it at this hour, the freshness of the air, the smell of sea lavender … And Jon, it’s Robbie, you can call me Robbie, everyone else does …’
‘Yes … Okay, thanks … Robbie.’
‘How was it?’
‘What?’
‘The caravan?’
‘Oh … It’s weird being there, knowing … but I knew the first night would be like that …’
‘It must be difficult … Listen, there’s something else …’
‘Oh …’
‘Rey left me another key … with an address … I think it’s for a safety deposit box in Southend. I forgot to give it to you yesterday. It didn’t click. I was expecting Cal, your brother, that’s who I’d been speaking to … That’s who I spoke to when Rey was … found. I didn’t expect you to be here. But, a few weeks ago now, before … you know … Rey came into the Smack and gave me this key. He said that it “shouldn’t be given to Cal, and only given to Jon”. That’s what he said to me. It didn’t click yesterday, I was too busy thinking about that key, and who not to give it to, that I totally forgot to pass it on to you, I do hope you forgive me … Come to the Smack later and I’ll give it to you …’
‘A key … Right. Okay.’
‘Sorry about this.’
‘I wonder what it’s for?’
‘Like I say, it seems to be for a safety deposit box in Southend.’
I eat my full English breakfast sitting opposite Mr Buchanan while he picks out horses in the paper, taking notes in his notepad, muttering to himself about this jockey and that trainer. We don’t really speak much after our initial exchange. I don’t mind eating in silence. After I clear my plate, mopping up the egg yolk with thick-cut buttered toast, I stare out of the window, thinking about the safety deposit box. The sea is flat, mirroring the fattening vapour trails criss-crossing the sky above.
into the depths
I spend the morning wandering around the island in some kind of hushed daze. I venture up to Canvey Heights, which used to be the local dumping ground, its height the result of the island’s accumulated detritus. The views over to Leigh-on-Sea are extraordinary; to my right my eyes trace the built-up sprawl of Westcliff and then finally, in the real distance, the high-rises of Southend, and the pier, jutting out into the estuary. The sky above me is grey now; the vapour trails have all been covered up for the day. I look directly upwards, craning my neck, my head falling back. It’s immense and it frightens me a little, pressing down on me. I feel like I’m an ant or some other insect scurrying about in the dirt. It’s best to keep moving, to keep walking along so that I don’t notice it as much. I remember that I had decided to look in Uncle Rey’s shed after my breakfast so I head back to his caravan. I know the sky is above me all the way back, and it’s a struggle not to look upwards again, but I somehow manage it.
It takes me an age to find the key to the shed. I find it on Uncle Rey’s bedside table, which I think is an odd place to keep a key; he must have been in the shed each night, walking straight to bed with the key. The shed is much bigger than the other sheds scattered around the site. It’s set away from the caravan, a little further back from the perimeter fence. I open the door: the walls have been painted black so there’s not much light. I notice astronomical charts pinned to each wall. In the centre, before me, is the biggest telescope I’ve ever seen, easily bigger than me, set up on a tripod fixed to a round base that swivels. Next to the telescope, on the wall to the left, is a pulley-lever, a crude thing that Uncle Rey had obviously made himself. I naturally begin to pull it. A slanting shard of light bursts into the shed from the roof, which when I look up I notice is peeling back the more I pull. It’s made from thick, rubbery tarpaulin, and the more I pull the further it folds back, and the brighter the shed becomes. The light reveals a table behind the telescope that is stacked with more charts, books, notepads and coffee cups. I tie the pulley to a hook, leaving the roof open, and pick up one of Uncle Rey’s notepads. He’s listed everything he’d observed in the night sky: times, positions, durations and distances. I flick through pages and pages of the stuff. Underneath the table I spot two or three boxes, each filled with more notepads he’d used to record his stargazing over the years.
If only night would come now, for me to gaze into its depths, to see what Uncle Rey had seen, to reach into those ever-expanding depths. I want to study constellations, to try to work out their movements, just like he had done. I sit down and read through more of his notebooks. I spend about an hour or so doing this, before closing the roof and locking the shed back up. I put the key back where I found it. I feel excited, I’ve never really gazed at the night sky through a powerful telescope before and I can’t wait for night to fall. I sit on the bed thinking about this for some time before I notice the huge row of bookshelves on the opposite wall. I notice that it’s not filled with books, but with video tapes – old ones, some of them Betamax – DVDs, CD-ROMs and cassette tapes. At the foot of the bed are two video recorders, a DVD player, an armchair identical to the one in the other room, and a large TV. Next to the TV are four cine-cameras of varying ages, from an old VHS thing to some compact digital gadget. The TV is on a table, under which I spot a couple of old boxes filled with more CDs and DVDs, all of them, just like those up on the bookshelves, labelled by hand. I crouch down and run my fingers across them, stopping to read random titles. A number of them catch my eye.
Rewriting Aeneid #34 1988
Rewriting Aeneid #48 1991
Rewriting Aeneid #101 1999
Rewriting Aeneid #120 2002
I count well over two hundred of these recordings – or whatever it is they are – all of them with the same title: ‘Rewriting Aeneid …’. I know the book but I’ve not read it. At least I don’t think I have – I remember Uncle Rey being into stuff like that. I pick up one of the tapes from the shelf and switch on the TV and VHS recorder. I feed the tape into the machine and press play, sitting on the end of the bed to face the TV. Uncle Rey’s face suddenly appears on the screen. It makes me jump. The tape is from 1982 and he looks how I remember him: kind of old before his time, greying and wrinkled, his large oyster-shell eyes staring right back at me. He’s smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, sitting in his armchair, the one that’s still in the other room. He’s oblivious to the ash falling from his cigarette onto his T-shirt as he fidgets and positions himself before the camera. He starts to talk, at me, he’s talking at me, his voice hits me, it’s his voice, it’s unmistakably his voice. He stares into the lens, into me.
Rewriting Aeneid #8 1982
… I always wanted to achieve … a new understanding of Virgil regarding Western morality … These writings …
[He takes a long drag from his cigarette.]
… have impressed themselves, not merely upon my memory, but … on the very marrow of my being … They have rooted themselves deeply in the innermost recesses of my mind, my addled brain, the grey matter of my being … so much so that I have forgotten who wrote them in the first place, it seems … which rings true, I didn’t write that, you see, I wish I did, he did … all of this, everything I am trying to do, is a mere appropriation of it, nothing is original. It can’t be … He wrote the words for me, old Petrarch, who himself rewrote Virgil and Homer. Old Petrarch, king of the poets, lover … not lover, ha! … of Laura … Heavenly Laura … He wrote that, not me …
[He shuffles from his seat. He leans forward to adjust the focus on the camera, the screen blurs for a second before correcting itself. He glances at the TV to his right, smiles, stubs out his cigarette, wipes himself down and resumes his conversation.]
It’s like I have taken possession of them … Petrarch and Virgil … like them, my work is left open-ended. This book I cannot write, this book I try to finish, to construct each day, this fucking book which is killing me because I can’t reach the truth … I can’t write it without their words … it haunts me each day … I am ill-equipped to deal with this sorry situation without them by my side … And even then, it’s too much for me …
I hit the pause button. His large face is frozen, flickering a little, contorted on the screen mid-sentence, his mouth ajar like he is about to scream. His voice, his voice is so real, like sitting beside me, talking to me. Only he isn’t, he’s dead and these words are from 1982, another time, another existence. It’s a strange feeling, one that sends prickles of electricity through my skin. I take a deep breath, trying to calm myself, I look around the caravan, at his things, his voice has brought life to them. I’m surrounded by his stuff, by him. His words have brought everything to life.
How long have I been planning this book, this work of beautiful fiction that will reach closer to the truth than any work of autobiography? Good question … to appropriate Virgil’s words, to bring them back into the light of day, to revalue them in my own formation, just to give them a crumbling sense of my own being, from the depth, from deep within, shedding light onto the blackness … bringing the mystery back into the light of day, each ink mark on the white page my struggle …
[He lights another cigarette.]
This book will be the death of me, that’s for sure. That’s all I know, the rest is for you to fathom. All I know is that it won’t be a beautiful book, it’ll be ugly, it’ll cut the heart wide open … that will be its beauty … How many words have I written? How many hours have I slaved away over each page? The rest I’ve burned, the stuff I hate, all of it … I start all over, again and again and again … I will start again at a later date, after I’ve lived, when I have absorbed more anguish, when the time is right.
[He gets up out of his armchair and roots about for things in the room off-camera. His voice fades, but is still just about audible.]
Where is it? Where is it? I put it here. I put it here fucking yesterday. Where the fuck is it? Fuck. Where the fuck … Ah … Fuck, here it is. Fuck … Fuck it …
[He reappears in front of the camera, sitting back down in his armchair.]
