I drove to a town on the sea whose name was apocryphal. The B&B was run by a woman composed completely of wool and tissues. Her breathing was hoarse as she hobbled up the stairs, balancing and feeling her way up with her hands gliding and pressing across the old walls. She showed me to a room on the top floor with low ceilings and rafters. A bay window looked out over the valley crowded by terraces of squat fishermen’s homes with slate roofs glistening in the rain and watching over the tide. The single bed was of wrought iron and the mattress was flat and you could hear the springs strain under the slightest weight. The landlady asked if I wanted her son to bring my luggage in and I said I only had a small bag.



I descended the hill and into the town. I walked the cobbled streets peering around alleys and up stairs that weaved up the hills of the valley. The sprawling terraces arrayed with no logic along the steep slopes. Their dark windows and greyed granite facades. The moss mottling the roofs. Watching over the quiet streets below like weary sentinels in the cold assault of the sea. Frothing and scheming and churning its dark bile like immortal vengeance. Around the headland scythes of waves with foamed white blades swept across the harbour rocking the rallied rows of fishing boats strung out like bunting.

The high street was populated by pubs and betting shops and corner shops and chippies, most of which were closed for the season. Pubs centuries old with stained glass windows, dark wood, low ceilings and walls resplendent with black and white pictures and obsolete currency. Men smoked outside. A live band or a football game could be heard from the dimly-lit interiors. There was a second hand bookshop crammed with unmarked volumes worn by moisture and sunlight. Its four rooms were minimally lit by old standard lamps and the floorboards screamed under the faded Afghan rugs. On the walls hung pictures of fishermen and etchings of the ocean in rapturous tumult on account of some omnipotence. Piles of books reaching the low ceilings housing in their faded bindings illuminated tales of men lost at sea, thalassic cryptids and loves lost. Apocryphal stories that had no moorings to a specific time or place. Eternal and universal but forgotten. The shop was run by an old man in thick maroon knitwear listening to radio 4 and tending to word puzzles in the local weekly. In another shop a younger woman sold incense and gemstones and pewter pendants of Wiccan, Celtic and Norse symbology. The wind that followed my entrance stirred the wind chimes and a black cat reclining on the windowsill.

Sounds of a waterfall and woodwind pipes trickled through the stereo. In front of the shopkeeper was a tasseographic mug and a spread of Tarot in the Celtic cross formation. She offers to tell my fortune but I refuse. I bought a pendant in the shape of the triskelion hares and placed it in a rarely-used jacket pocket. The twilight lasted for hours. As if day and night had been abolished in favour of this crimson cunctation of time. Springtime for these deferred ghosts. Smears of our effects on this unworthy world, ripples on a boundless ocean. All history could be split into periods distinct from the last. Not anymore. Now is only a long slow fading. The satisfaction of entropy. All that’s left is a shore of familiar fragments. Harkening in their shapeless shards to a time when they were whole. But even that may be an illusion. Something we impose on the past to make sense of it all. To reassure ourselves of history’s immutable movement. The warm sepia glow of nostalgia. And the sea is a churning black mass of restless spirits clawing at the remnants. Doubling the spinning firmament eternal and careless like a perfunctory queen.



I walk along the foreshore. A nameless thin strip of slate, shale, shells and pebbles curving like an endless parenthesis into the mist. Groynes blackened by decay bracket sections of the southward drift. Hanging in the high wind mobiles of hovering birds. The video tape stutters. Final blushes of chalybeate dusk on the receding mist and turning tide. Scanning the sediment and trails of deposition are metal detecters stooped and ambling like cowled monks stopping every ten or so meters to probe the wet sand with trowels finding coins contemporary and historic. I walked over platforms of stone cut from the cliff and marked by fossils of bivalves and ammonites whose positive mass dissolved into the ocean long ago. I picked a small cockle shell and washed away the sand in the swash and placed it in my pocket. A staircase from the shore lead to the headland. Near the cliff stood some kind of concrete shelter. A relic of the world wars. Where the turret used to stand imprinted on the cement. And within the walls were heaps of weeds and sand and rubbish left by kids. Entombed in the concrete I watched the treacherous horizon through a gap in the bricks. The moon low over the water searching for some aspect of itself in its curdled reflections.



I could hear them singing.

Further down the headland was a Norman chapel. The stunted grey tower imposing some tragedy. A graveyard. I walked through the tombs and their limestone headstones that had melted in the rain. At the back beneath a beleaguered willow tree was a newer headstone. It was the reason why I was here. It named the remains below as belonging to Julee Stein. Fresh flowers I couldn’t name rested against the stone. A card with her face on the front was weighed down by a ceramic vase. I placed the cockle shell onto the grave, holding it there with my fingers for a few seconds whilst I looked at the stars appear behind the willow tree. The deep blue night growing in the east.