I’m walking along Brighton seafront towards the Marina to meet my daughter B from work when my phone lights up with S’s number. We haven’t spoken in ages. I’m guilty of avoiding her calls, not wanting to commit to long catchups, and by nature of the distance and what we have to discuss, they’re always long catchups. When I do on occasion answer, I’ll tidy the kitchen or do the laundry with mobile pinned between my shoulder and ear, tap running over clanking pans, the ping of a background email and phone inevitably slithering to the floor, a reminder I’m not fully present, that I can’t sit with one train of thought, that talking feels like a luxury. A check-in text or scroll through Instagram with a couple of likes is my usual, but I am a bad friend, so this time I pick up. I am walking after all. I’m still multi-tasking.
S left Brighton for Spain a couple of years ago. They’d found her on the pebbles, it had almost been too late. I’m worried all the sounds beaming through my phone might be too familiar. Triggering. The build up to that event two years past had been followed by stomach pumps and psyche wards and meet-ups in hospital car parks for hasty fags behind the bins, an animal look to her eyes that told me if she didn’t get away, this could be her new normal. So, she did a geographic and took her problems to another country where sun is guaranteed, wine is cheap, and no one can pin her down to that slow and painfully curative IV drip of therapy. I get it. I’d probably do the same.
Laughter and music from the bars that skim the prom is the backing track to our call. Ropes slap against sail-boat masts and an occasional audio gap opens onto waves and gulls, like an exhalation. I walk further, past Volks club that’s having an outdoor rave on this sunny day. A couple of homeless guys are going nuts to the music, or at least I assume they’re homeless because you don’t normally see tourists and shoppers so high in the middle of the day in a busy urban area, but maybe they are just fucked-up-anything-goes-Brighton-high doing crazy spangly leg-kicking dances with sun burnt faces, wild with fun. Further still, playgrounds and more bars, everyone hammering the booze, dogs yapping and snippets of conversations from passing roadmen… ‘Nah bro, we’re just linking not exclusive.’ Pebbles crunch under my feet, the whole of my forty-five-minute walk experienced by S as a live-feed with some added description from me, especially of the crazy ravers, and she laughs from her terrace in Tarifa where she tells me she has a fag and a glass of wine on the go as thunder clouds gather to bring rain that will be a blessed relief.
I arrive at the Marina and sit outside Pizza Hut waiting for B to finish her shift. The light is dimming, but the horizon still glows with the last gasp of the sun. Neon signs from the cluster of businesses vibrate against a lightbox sky. The scene reminds me of a William Eggleston photo, so I take a picture on my iPhone to put on Instagram with some kind of description like #egglestonmarinanights, but it looks a bit shit, so I park it.
Customers come out of the restaurant to smoke fags and I wonder if any of them have been rude to B because she says people often are. The food is cheap so they treat her the same, and because she’s young, they must think it gives them a free pass. I imagine them years from now, sitting on this bench waiting for one of their kids — who’s currently inside Pizza Hut stamping ice-cream sprinkles into the carpet — to finish their shift. What will they think about rudeness then?
They scrub their ciggies out on the pavement. I turn back to my phone, watch a kitten eat a watermelon.
Seagulls ride the air above the David Lloyd sports club that has a roof in the shape of a wave. The birds float above the pretend wave with the real waves only metres over the other side of the big sea wall. The setting sun paints their underbellies orange, and they cruise in calm synchronicity, swooping and swirling round each other, playing in the sky, so excellent at their jobs of being seagulls.
Below the gulls, a guy in a chef’s jacket pushes a noisy bin over the concrete and another group of people I can’t see are having an argument in the car park, shouting in the big empty space because they can, because the city belongs to them even though the birds have been here since this place was just cliffs and sea. I imagine the shouty lot are the sort to call seagulls vermin.
After her shift, me and B walk to Nando’s. She says she’s been craving a Nando’s for ages. Under one of the jetties, hundreds of starlings trill as they settle for the night on the big rusty girders that support the walkways. The sun has set so they’ve finished their daily murmuration miracle, but no one having their cocktails or pizzas would have experienced this ballet because, from where they’re sitting, an apartment block fills the sky. I heard recently that starling numbers are declining due to of loss of habitat. I wonder if the birds have chicks in their nests under our feet, and if those nests might be blown away in one of the weird weather bombs that happen now. And I wonder what grief might feel like to a bird, or if they even have the luxury of emotion when they’re so busy moving on from the next leisure complex or housing development, squeezed into ever tighter and more distant pockets of something resembling nature.
At Nando’s I have to give my phone number to the young server who greets us, then we’re told to wait by the door while I get a text to say, Hello from Nando’s, then we are sat at a freshly wiped and still wet table where the waiter says we’ll need to order from a QR code that’s stuck on the table, but not before I’ve created an account with Nando’s and fetched cutlery and napkins. B helps me order on the app. It’s confusing and annoying because I’m an old fart. She has to deal with dinosaurs like me all day at Pizza Hut, those same people who are rude about having to use a QR code, so I smile through it all even though inside I’m screaming for someone to come and take our order and bring me stuff because I’m in a fucking restaurant.
My wine comes in a can. I’m the only person drinking alcohol – because that’s what you do, right, when you go out for dinner? Everyone else is drinking Coke or something fizzy and sweet because it’s bottomless and you can keep filling up for free. B drinks her 7UP and says she thinks she now prefers it to Sprite, which would have been unfathomable to her before she worked at Pizza Hut where she’s allowed to drink as much as she likes. I tell her about the Pepsi challenge we used to do that was on the telly back in the day, and she looks at me like I’m a nutjob and says, ‘No one likes Pepsi.’
Three sweaty-faced blokes sit on the table opposite. Sports t-shirts meld with their pumped arms, and their gym bags — big enough to hold dead bodies — are stacked next to the table. One of them pours PERi-PERi sauce onto a spoon and licks it off while he waits for his food. A largish woman walks past, swerving their massive pile of bags. They mutter and laugh, which I suppose is something to do with shagging her or not shagging her because she’s large, and I want to press their stupid ugly heads against the window and say, ‘Look who’s fucking talking!’ but I don’t because I’m a coward trying to have a nice meal with my daughter, but mostly I’m afraid to give them an open goal to laugh about not wanting to fuck me, which would somehow make me feel bad. I wonder when the tipping point occurred between my attractiveness and non-attractiveness to morons, and I wonder why I care.
Our Sunset Burgers arrive, and they’re really good: sweet and spicy and just the right side of filthy. Me and B talk about her shift, when she’s planning to go back to Uni, and how next summer she might not have to work at the Marina because, since she’s got experience on her CV, she’ll be able to find a restaurant closer to home. She tells me Pizza Hut are introducing self-serving screens like at McDonald’s. I say, ‘Yeah, so they don’t have to pay staff anymore.’ And she says probably, but she’s not cross like me because she was born into the land of zero-hours contracts, plus she’s the future, and she prefers ordering from screens and QR codes.
We get the bus home and sit on the top deck, right at the front. A group of teenagers on the back seats are having a screaming competition. Outside, the lit city rushes past and our reflections on the windows are double exposed over the top. I try to make a video of me and B in our seats, superimposed over the buildings, but it looks shit and I look ancient, so I shelve it. The bus is surprisingly fast because it’s late and there isn’t much traffic, and I say to B, ‘We’re being thrown all over the place in this big, crazy, metal box on wheels, 70’s fairground style with no health and safety.’ And she smiles like she knows what I’m talking about even though she was only an immature egg in my teenage ovaries in the 70’s. She humours all my old-lady musings on the journey home with such grace, my heart folds in on itself.
When it’s coming up to our stop, I can’t get down the stairs because the bus is lurching so much. I worry the driver will think we’re the screaming kids mucking about and pressing the bell for a stop, so I make my footsteps heavy above her head to let her know there’s an oldie up here who wants to get off. ‘Thank you,’ I say when we finally stop, and B says thanks too as she steps off, and I realise she probably says this to bus drivers even when I’m not with her. I rub her back, willing the burn of love through my hand to work some kind of lasting protective magic.
We walk the last stretch home in silence, over the little railway bridge and onto our quiet street. Inside the house, B goes to her room to stare at her screen and wipe her brain of all the stuffed crusts and people sneezing into the salad bar. Earlier, when she’d been at work, I’d changed her sheets and dried them on the line so they’d smell of the briny air and she’d have a crisp clean bed to sleep in after her hard day. Tomorrow is her day off and she’ll sleep and sleep and I’ll let her because it’s the closest I can get to pouring goodness inside my daughter, who’s no longer a kid, but will always be my child.
I pull up my bedroom blind and open the window. Giant white clouds scud across a black sky and the baseline of a party pulses in the distance. Foxes scream-fuck on the railway sidings. On my phone I have four emails from Nando’s about my bill and asking me to rate the service.
I check the weather in Tarifa — it’s storming. I visited that southern-most tip of Spain years ago, and remember the power of the end-of-season rain that came suddenly and was over fast in a massive purging before the sun came out again, steam rising off the baked earth as we jumped back in the pool, inches higher from the downpour. But this storm is different. The ground parched and impenetrable. There will be flooding. I know it. We all know it. And this is only the beginning, God help us.
So, I turn towards the good and the simple. Putting out bowls of water for insects, even the gnarly ones. Phone calls and thunder and doing yoga in the garden. Learning that swifts have tiny legs because they live life on the wing. Cuddling the cats so much they growl. Nice wine with good friends and dancing like loons to Four Tet. Meeting my daughter from work and going to Nando’s, not because I have to, but because I want to, and I still can.
Nothing as good as air dried sheets
Ace! X