Martyn Pig (12 page)

Two o'clock. I went into the kitchen and washed up my plate and cup, turned off the light, locked the doors, and went upstairs. Peed again, washed again, cleaned my teeth again. Into the bedroom, undressed, got into bed and fell asleep.

Another day gone.

T
he morning arrived cold, dull and heavy. I opened the bedroom curtains and gazed out at the colours of the day. Grey, brown. Brown, grey. Black. Dead green. The colour had returned to the weeds on the wall. Dead green spikes drooped with the weight of frost.

A door slammed and the young couple from next door slouched out dragging their snotty-nosed kids across the street. The father flicked a dead cigarette into the gutter, adjusted the bright red Santa hat perched ridiculously on top of his head, and aimed his remote-control key at his car. Sidelights flashed and the alarm sounded –
weeweeweeweeweewee
– then stopped.

Why? Why does
everything
have to make a noise?

One of the kids was whining about something, tugging at his dad's belt. Dad didn't want to know.

‘Get in the car and shut up,' he grunted.

His wife coughed, stuck a cigarette in her mouth, got in the car and slammed the door. The car roared into life and they raced away up the street.

Happy Christmas.

Downstairs, the sudden
pheep-pheep
of the telephone gave me a start. I swore, flicked hot tea from my sleeve and picked up the phone.

‘Hello?'

‘Martyn?'

‘Alex. You made me jump.'

‘What?'

‘The phone ringing ... it doesn't matter. What are you doing?'

‘I have to go shopping.'

‘When?'

‘Now. Mum's going to Sainsbury's. I have to help her with the shopping.'

‘Right.'

She lowered her voice. ‘I think it's all right for later, you know ...'

‘The car?'

‘Yes.'

‘Good.'

‘Do you need anything?'

What kind of question is
that
? I thought to myself. Do I
need
anything? I need a million things. I need nothing.

‘Like what?' I asked.

‘Anything. Food, bread, milk, I don't know.'

‘No, I'm all right, thanks.'

‘OK.' I heard her mum's voice in the background, telling her to hurry up. ‘Gotta go,' she said. ‘I'll see you later.'

The phone went dead.

I needed to get out of the house, that's what I needed. I needed to get some fresh air into my lungs, air that wasn't stained with the must of stale death.

The question was – where to go?

There's nowhere to go around here, nowhere that isn't full of noise and ugliness.

Where? Town, the park, the river?

The town would be jam-packed with Christmas shoppers, the park stinks ... even the river's no good. A greasy brown stew lined with tough-looking fishermen in their army surplus rags, fishing idly, drinking beer, warning you off with get-away looks.

Where? There's got to be somewhere half-decent.

How about the beach?

The beach?

Why not? There'll be no one there, it'll be empty. Cold, big, wide open and deserted ...

Yes. The beach.

I started poking around the house looking for bus fare. A pound here, 50p there. Then I remembered the money in Dad's room, the pound coins I'd placed on his eyes, and I fetched those too. The bedroom smelled really bad. Thick and gassy. Like sulphur. I covered my mouth and nose with a handkerchief and had a quick rummage through Dad's trouser pockets, coming up with another couple of quid in change. More than enough. I pocketed it all, then got out of there before I was sick.

The beach is about twelve miles away, half an hour on the bus. It's actually an island. Just a small one. A mile or so long and half a mile wide. You wouldn't know it's an island, but it is. A long straight road takes you across great stretches of muddy ooze. The ooze is the estuary, so the road is really a bridge, but, like I say, you wouldn't know it. Except when there's a high tide and the ooze fills up with a dull-grey sea that laps slowly across the surface of the road and nothing can pass until the tide goes out again. Then you know it's an island.

Today, though, as the bus juddered along the bone-dry road, all I could see was miles and miles of sticky brown mud and waxy green grasses waving stiffly in the wind. I slid open the window and sniffed in the smell of the sea. Salty, fresh, clean.

The bus was almost empty. Just me and a funny-looking girl at the back reading a girl's magazine. She had too many teeth to fit her mouth and kept adjusting her lips to cover up her sticky-out teeth, like a fish, sucking in water.
Gloop-gloop
. I watched her for a while then got fed up with that and looked out of the window. We were on the island now. The bus was rattling along narrow roads lined with high hedges and wind-whipped trees, their branches occasionally scraping against the windows as the bus squeezed in tight to the side of the road. Behind the hedges lay dead-looking fields dotted with birds – seagulls, lapwings, rooks – pecking at the icy ground. Farmlands passed by in a blur of emptiness. Ramshackle buildings, tangled angles of weather-faded boards and rusted roof iron. Cob walls, wiremesh, sheets of corrugated iron, a gutted tractor. Stables, too, half-acres of hard-packed ground laid out with strange patterns of coloured show-jumping bars. Horse manure for sale in blue plastic sacks. False barns selling fruit and veg and false fresh eggs. Faded signs: Pick-Your-Own, Pallets For Sale, misspelled Baby Rabitts, Boxer Pups, Cockatiels. Pubs: The Dog and Pheasant, The Rose, Live and Let Live. Small rows of tiny cottages, hidden turnings, meaningless signs, churches in the middle of nowhere ...

It felt strange being out of the house. Exciting, but a little scary, too. I wasn't used to it. My world consisted of my house, the street, school, and the occasional trip to town. Anywhere beyond that was an adventure. Pathetic, really. The exciting part about it was that no one knew where I was. No one. Not a soul. Apart from the bus driver and the fish-mouthed girl, of course. They knew
where
I was, but they didn't know
who
I was. I don't know why I found that exciting, but I did.

As we rounded another tight corner something glinted in the distance, a silver streak. I squinted through the smeared window, but was unable to distinguish the sea from the sky. It was all just a blanket of aluminium grey.

The bus moved on into the heart of the island. Mud hollows, marshes full of wet brown reeds, more emptiness. Long-legged birds patrolled the mud banks, waders, sliding their long curved beaks into the brown slime, looking for worms and mud-grubs. Grub. That's all they had to think about. Nothing else. Nothing to worry about but grub. Lucky birds.

Now I could see the sea. Far away, a thin sliver of shine at the end of the mud. A long black container ship was slinking across the horizon, low in the water, silent. Where was it from? I wondered. Where was it going? What was it carrying? Sugar? Grain? Molasses? What are molasses? Mole asses. Mole arses. A boat full of moles' arses.

The bus turned a corner and the sea view disappeared.

I sat back and closed my eyes. The first time I came here ... when was the first time I came here? Years ago. With a friend, I think, someone from school. What was his name? I forget. He wasn't really a friend, just someone I hung around with for a while. I never liked him. He had a lazy eye, whatever that is. He wore glasses with a patch over one lens. Always had a bunged-up nose. He spent the whole day going on about how
fandasdig
the beaches were in Greece, or Majorca or somewhere. How
hod
it was, how clean it was, how
priddy
it was ...

Who cares?

After that I always came here on my own. And always in the winter, when it wasn't hot and it wasn't clean and it wasn't pretty.

One thing's for sure, I never came here with Dad. ‘Beach?' he'd say. ‘What d'ya wanna beach for?' Dad never went anywhere. We never went anywhere. Even before Mum left, we never went anywhere. Never had a car. Dad couldn't drive. We never had a holiday, never went to Greece or Majorca, never went anywhere at weekends, never did anything ...

‘Hey!'

The bus had stopped and the bus driver was calling down the aisle.

‘You getting off, or what?'

To get to the sea you have to walk down through this sleepy little village, along the coast road for a while, then turn left down some steep steps that lead to the beach. There was hardly anyone around, just a couple of old ladies creeping around on walking sticks and a doddery old boatman with a half-dead dog. As I moved on down the coast road a lonely clinking sound drifted in from the rigging of small boats resting in the distant mud. Seagulls screeched and squabbled, circling aimlessly in the breeze.

The sky was dark and heavy.

As I stepped down onto the beach the shingle crunched beneath my feet. It felt momentous, as if I'd stepped into another world. Away from civilisation. Away from cars and houses and shops and buskers and Christmas carols and plywood reindeer ... away from everything.

I felt happy, I don't know why. Perhaps it was the emptiness of the place. Cold, wild, unwelcoming. Raw and open. Hostile. Blameless.

The wind had died to almost nothing and the air was still. Icy cold bit into my bones. I buttoned my coat and pulled my woolly hat down over my ears and headed out along the beach. The sky seemed to lower itself to the ground as I followed the shoreline, walking slowly, head down, aiming for a distant point where the beach narrowed and disappeared into the sea. The further I went, the quieter it became. The sea was heavy and calm and the shingle had merged into a fine dry sand that silently soaked up my steps.

I thought no harboured thoughts, just walked the strand-line kicking up jewels. Polystyrene, plastic, municipal junk. Driftwood. Floats. Fish boxes. Sandals. Bones of fish heads. Razors, gapers and whelks. Countless tiny seashells, flesh-pink and paper-thin. A thick stink filled the air as I passed the dull black carcass of a dead porpoise. Pale grey meat showed where the rubbery skin had been hacked open by the propeller of a boat. Ripped apart. I imagined it thrashing helplessly in the sea, screaming unintelligible screams.

Dying.

I paused, weighed down with a sudden sadness.

Snow began to fall. Big, fat, lazy flakes, fluttering, seesawing, circling, taking their time, riding down slowly through the cold thickness of the air. Soft white crystals as big as coins. A surge of excitement raced through me as I looked up into the sky and saw nothing but white darkness. Millions of snowflakes dropping from the sky like invaders from another planet, silent and serene – menacing.

It was awesome. An alien world.

As I gazed up into the sky I wondered how I'd look to God if he was up there. I imagined myself as a tiny black dot, a blind particle crawling through the snow and sand. An insect. Going nowhere. Alone. Indeterminate, immeasurable and shapeless.

Nothing much at all.

I looked down and moved on. Forget it, I thought. Think of something else. Think of something solid. The sand, the snow ... what is it? What's it made of? Come on, think. Sand. I don't know, rocks, stones, shells, fish bones, all smashed up by the sea, pulverised over millions of years. Sand. Sandcastle. Sandpiper. Invisible sandpiper. Sandpaper. Sandwich. Cheese sandwich. Cheese on toast. What about the snow? What's snow? What's it made of? Frozen rain? No, that's hailstones. Or is it? I don't know. Snow's made of crystals. Symmetrical patterns. Every snowflake is unique. Is it? How can you tell? Is there a record kept of every single snowflake that's ever fallen? There
might
be two that are the same. Who knows? Snow. Snowball. Snowdrop. Drop of snow. Snowgoose. That's no goose, that's my wife. Snowshoe. Bless you. Snowman. Walking in the air. Abominable. Snow. Snow. Quick, quick, snow ...

I looked up. Flat nothingness stretched out in front of me. White, grey, black, white, grey, black. Sand, sea, sky. I was hardly moving. It was like walking on a treadmill, walking but not getting anywhere. Time seemed to have disappeared. Not stopped or slowed down, just disappeared.

Forget it, I thought. Just keep walking. Keep moving. Keep thinking. Sea. The sea. Salt water. Brine. Brian. Call me Brian. Destiny. Sea. Adriatic Sea. South China Sea. Irish Sea. Red Sea. The Dead Sea. The dead see. Atlantic Sea? No, it's Atlantic
Ocean
. What's the difference between a sea and an ocean? I don't know, what
is
the difference between a sea and an ocean? I don't know. Sea. Seashell. Michelle. Seashore. Seasick. Sea-slug. Seaweed. Sea-dog. Salty sea-dog, har har. Seaplane. Sea-Scout. See you later, alligator. Sea anemone. See an enemy. What else? The sky. Hell, I don't know what the sky is. The sky's just the sky. The sky's the limit. Pie in the sky. Steak and kidney pie. Snake and pygmy pie. Sky diver. Skyscraper. Sky rocket. Sky lark. Sky sandpiper. Sky piper. Sea-piper. Invisible piper ...