Wednesday. 21 September 2011. Hastings Old Town.
It worked, the casting of wine on the waves, the small sacrifice of burger buns to gulls: the sea was no longer peevish, it was raging. Tom’s kinetic effects were in play, white-foamed crest chased crest. Our swan, still nameless, sat brooding on her nest of stones. Like a flood of untapped narratives.
We were going nowhere, the minders said. Old Tom, now hooded, looked more than ever like Max von Sydow in one of Bergman’s less cheerful pieces, something like The Shame. Boats of the dead sailing through a sea of corpses. Young Tom, who was never without a yellow tray of cold chips, maintained a bright and lecherous smile, as he peeled down his wetsuit and fantasised his role in Dr No. The depressed crew, now scattered on the shingle, were all in different movies.
There was nothing for it but to gather around the fire and swap yarns. Anonymous Bosch began by showing us his finger, the one that had been attached back to front. Andrew had already mentioned this, as a recommendation. He told me that AB had been out in the wilderness, in a tepee, where, having sliced through this digit, he stitched it on again with odds and ends of twine. If it had been an arm, we might have got the funding for a docu-drama. I pictured the Pacific Northwest, Patagonia, the Antarctic. ‘Where did this happen?’ I asked. ‘Preston,’ he said.
Bosch was hitching back from Manchester to his hometown – so he began, clearly on something of a roll – when, walking on the embankment beside a motorway, he fell down an open manhole. Straight into a sewer.
The audience, hugging beakers of cooling coffee roared. It was Bosch’s deadpan delivery.
Knocked out and buried in waste, he soon recovered his senses, found a ladder, clambered out, to raise his thumb and the re-attached finger. Smeared head to toe in gobs of Mancunian shit, he was not an attractive pick-up. When a lift was finally secured, the driver, after a few minutes, pulled up and asked him to move into the metal container at the back of his truck.
Beyond yarns to keep our spirits up, there was junk food. Mel, the ever-obliging runner (and driver), was having trouble with her contact lenses, which, she said, were full of milk. I pointed out Marine Court, that concrete Mother of Swans, once the tallest block of flats in Britain, and she saw something that looked like a squashed cloud. Her driving was cheerful and brisk, as she hit the buttons to mix conference calls with her personal playlist. She held a powerboat safety licence that was useful for the coast-road, but nobody let her anywhere near a boat. She ferried in pizza boxes, battered fish, chips (for Young Tom’s breakfast) and ice-cream cones with chocolate pencils for Kötting’s comedy turns. Nick, an old hand, kept his energy up with packs of hobnob biscuits and ginger nuts. Mel confessed that every time she could get away for a few minutes from the gloom of the shore, she scarfed an ice bun and played the machines in the arcade.
Driven to the recognition that if we did not move now, we would never move, we were caught in the hypnotic spell of Calypso’s cave: candyfloss, frying fish, and Kötting’s pancake makeup – which for some reason he smeared on one side of his face. We dragged the protesting swan along the shingle and around the arm of the breakwater. And then at a delirious rush, against the waving of insurance papers and lifejackets, to the edge of the sea. The libations worked. A passage was secured. The breakers let us through. We were away and peddling towards the first headland. ‘No further,’ Andrew warned. ‘I have given my word.’ But the swan had a life of its own. Salt washed off the newly painted eyes. Blind, the white beast bestrode the waves. Musicians from a ‘70s timewarp chorused us out. ‘You can’t film that,’ said the line-producer. And he was right. Anything doubtful or ambiguous, such as dogs and children, came with heads like buckets of bees. Like the way innocence is depicted on television, licence plates and infant faces seething in ectoplasmic deletion. We were between worlds. Our swan belonged and soon we would join her, marine ghosts. The Toms loved it, health-and-safetying us to the point of swamping our craft as they swept in circles around the wallowing plastic bird. Young Tom taunted the starving Andrew by holding up pickled eggs and then swooshing out beyond the harbour arm, grinning like a stoat.
In long black coat, hair tossed by the wind, the keening singer, Kirsten Norrie, gave a performance of otherworldly intensity, staring through the lens with Scottish eyes. Waves crashed at her back. Her unaccompanied voice rose and fell with heart-song passion, recalling the drowned, the fabled shapeshifting swans of legend. It was the final element, stars twinkling, lights of the town strung along the curve of shore burning gold and red. Tomorrow we would begin. Sea-roads, older than the Normans, older than Romans, revealed themselves. It only remained, after we beached the swan for the night, to pay our respects to the statue of Edith Swan-Neck in Bulverhythe. Do you recall John Keats when he put up at the Bo-Peep Inn?
Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breeds
Along the pebbled shore of memory!
Edith, mistress of the slaughtered Harold, bends over him in tender, vampiric embrace. A corpse recovered from the field at Battle in 1066. Kötting judges the composition to be ‘Medieval’, ‘fourteen-hundred and something’. Nick reckons it is Victorian, like a sentimental history painting rendered in poxed white stone. ‘Takes hundreds of years for lichen to grow like that,’ Andrew muses. ‘Unless it’s on one of Patrick Keiller’s road signs,’ I reply, with rude pedantry. But now, it is acknowledged by all, we’re ready. No going back. Open sea tomorrow. And the swan has a name: Edith.
Hi
Could you please enter our Sohemian Society event with Iain Sinclair in your events diary?
The details are:
Iain Sinclair will address the Sohemian Society on Roland Camberton and his novel Scamp.
Venue: The upstair’s room, The Wheatsheaf Pub, Rathbone Place, London W1.
Date and time: 14th November at 7.30pm. Admission £3
Thanks
David Fogarty
Hi, done.