In which Mark meets Miss P on a bench.
Mark stood at his bedroom window, gazing into the black of night. Light spilt from the row of cottages, but otherwise, there was nothing to light the scene apart from the moon, and that was only half full.
He pulled himself away from the view and sat at his desk which he had cleared of all distractions. No computer, no phone, no photos from his old school and his old football team, no school books, no Airfix models to put together and no letters from his friends (none had contacted him, maybe none were friends after all). He allowed himself only a large, lined notebook and a biro. They were all he needed.
Apart from inspiration. The notebook’s pages were still blank; they’d stayed like that since he came to the village. Their first couple of weeks had been busy as he had been forced to help his mum prepare the bar. Supplies had been ordered, they’d had to learn how to keep the cellar, where to buy the ale, and how the kitchen equipment worked. It had been Mark’s job to clean it. It was so unfair. He’d not been able to start his book — the one that was going to show his mum how he didn’t need to go on to higher education. The one that was going to make him his fortune so that he could leave this dump and get back to London. He had no desire to return to their previous life, but he missed his so-called mates and everything that London offered; everything apart from the stepdad and the trouble he brought.
His book was his way out.
He lifted the biro and touched the nib to the page, where he wrote the words, ‘Chapter One’, and underlined them. He underlined them again and doodled in the corner of the page, waiting for inspiration to settle. It didn’t. Underlining the chapter heading a third time didn’t help, and he threw the pen across the room before grabbing his jacket.
‘Going out,’ he told his mother as he walked through the bar, and didn’t wait for an answer. She knew there was nowhere for him to go, so there was no point asking where he was going. He ignored the gang of grimy old men huddled around the tables, but felt their stares, and cut them off when he slammed the door and took in a deep breath of air. That also didn’t help.
He could walk up the hill and out to the moors, or he could wander along the shore until he reached the rocks that trapped the village. Or he could wander up among the houses on the slopes, but there was no point. The post office was shut, so there was nothing to buy, and there was nowhere that other teenagers hung out. In fact, he was pretty sure there were no other boys of his age apart from the creepy one who worked on the boat. He’d only seen a couple of girls. There was no chance of making friends here.
In the end, he sat alone on the only bench that the small bay offered and stared at the night. There was enough light to see the waves lapping at the sand, but that was it. He was alone in a dark place, with rude people, no mates and nothing to do. The only thing he wanted to do was write, and that wasn’t happening. He’d won prizes at school, he’d had things published in his local paper, he’d become something of a writing celebrity in his own classroom, but all that was stripped away from him when his mum uprooted him and dragged him here.
Mark blamed the place, not her.
Footsteps approached, and he checked it wasn’t a gang of fisher-thugs coming to give him a hard time. It wasn’t. A solitary figure emerged from the gloom. Someone was taking a late-night stroll along the patch of grass that served as a promenade. It was a woman, perhaps the lady staying in the room next to his. It was hard to tell. The shadows moved with her, cloaking her in darkness, apart from where one red light glowed, because she was smoking. She didn’t come close enough for him to talk to her, not that he wanted to speak to anyone, and so he watched her curious behaviour from a distance. It was hard to make things out in the dark, but his eyes adjusted, and he saw that she was again dressed in the crocodile outfit. She wore the same hat with the feather. The trilby’s brim lit up when she took a drag on her cigar.
Mark grew bored with squinting at her and was turning for home when the cigar tip glowed brighter than seemed possible. She must be taking one hell of a drag, he thought. The embers turned a more vivid red and grew bigger still, like the approaching port light of a vessel at night. That was one huge cigar; it lit her face. Her eyes were closed, and her lips were moving. He thought he heard mumbled words, but she could have just been chewing. The embers dazzled him now, and Mark wondered if she was holding a torch in her mouth.
Then, the strangest thing. The cigar smoke, which, until then, he had not seen or even smelt, also began to glow. It was a weird green colour, and, in places, it sparkled as if it carried glitter. Maybe she was on drugs? he thought. You’d need to be to visit this dump.
As the smoke glimmered, so it moved, but it didn’t fade away into the air. It didn’t rise up in a straight line, and yet it didn’t hang about; there was no cloud. The smoke wound up in individual spirals and twisted away in various directions, still shining even though it was away from the burning tip. He followed some strands towards the houses. One trail of it weaved its way to the inn and slipped in around the door frame. In the other direction, some wandered off up the hill among the cottages until, finally, it dispersed over the whole village.
‘That was weird. Did you see that?’ Mark called towards the woman.
Unsurprisingly, her cigar had gone out. She was back in shadow.
‘I see a lot of things,’ the woman said.
What did that mean? She was clearly off her trolley. Coming here in the first place just to be at some dumb-awful festival. Add to that the late-night dope smoking, the creaky costume and the hat, and you had yourself a total loony. Mind you, there was the car.
‘What do you see?’ She called.
‘Sorry?’
‘You, young man on the bench. What do you see?’
‘Not a lot, to be honest,’ Mark said. ‘What you smoking? Pot?’
‘No, dear, it’s more of a plot,’ she replied and stepped out of the gloom.
Mark slid along the bench in case she wanted to sit.
‘Plots are important, as I am sure you will agree.’
‘Well, yeah. To films and things.’
‘And books?’
‘Yes.’
‘How’s it going, the book?’
‘Well, it’s going…’ Mark stopped. How did she know? He was about to ask her that very question when he found different words coming to mind. ‘To be honest, Miss,’ he said, ‘it ain’t going nowhere. I’ve been trying to write this story since we got here, but it ain’t happening. It’s this place, you know?’ Why was he saying this? ‘It’s like it’s sucked the inspiration out a me. We’ve not exactly been made welcome, know what I’m saying? We’ve gone from one frying pan into another fire. It’s all I want to do, write a story, but it just ain’t ’appening. No idea why.’
‘Something is missing,’ she said, sitting next to him and facing out to sea.
‘Missing?’ He didn’t understand.
‘A few things, actually,’ the woman said. ‘You mixed your metaphors slightly, and your grammar is questionable. But I can see that you speak from the heart. That’s how you write a story.’
‘From me ’eart?’
‘From your heart and your art, yes.’
That sounded a bit girlie for Mark. ‘I wanna write about aliens and an alternative universe where there’s a federation of starships and an evil villain called Trevor.’
‘Trevor?’
‘It’s me stepdad’s name.’
‘Even so, you must write from the heart.’
‘Are you a writer, Miss?’ Mark wondered why he was now speaking like a grateful East End street urchin. He had reverted to the voice of his childhood. A voice, and its accent, that was drilled out of him at grammar school. There was definitely something in that smoke.
‘Please,’ the lady said, ‘call me Miss P.’
‘Alright, Miss. So, are you a writer?’
‘No.’ Miss P shook her head. ‘Not quite. I am more of a re-writer.’
He didn’t understand that, so he asked another question. ‘What’s the P stand for?’
‘To be, like yourself, honest, I can’t remember.’
Mark screwed up his face in thought. ‘What you been smoking, Miss?’
‘It was a Gurkha Black Dragon. Not the most exclusive cigar in the world, I have not had to smoke one of those for a long time. This one needed to be powerful, however, so even at twenty-three thousand dollars a box, it was worth the expense.’
Mark’s jaw dropped open.
‘My all-time favourites are the tantalisingly rare Mayan Sicars.’ She sighed and sat back. ‘They recall my youth, but they are devilishly difficult to come by and costly, and so powerful they could…’ She interrupted herself with a thought. ‘But that’s another story. So, you, young man who doesn’t want to be here and who wants to write his book. What is your plan?’
‘Plan?’ It was difficult to keep up with her. ‘I dunno,’ he said, dejected. ‘I ain’t got one. I’ve got a story in me, but I don’t know what it is. It won’t come out. Don’t understand why. I used to be good at them.’
‘As I thought.’ Miss P’s voice was soft. ‘You are missing something vital.’ She stood up and brushed down her crocodile skin. ‘But I do know that you will soon find it and, when you do, you may be surprised what form it takes.’
‘Honestly, lady,’ Mark said. ‘I have no idea what you’re on about.’
‘Ah,’ she replied. ‘Honesty. It is not the easiest policy, but it is the best.’
She stepped back into the night before Mark could ask her to explain, and when he twisted around, she was entering the inn. The sound of noisy, drunk fishermen poured out as she opened the door. He wasn’t going to get much sleep that night. When the men were drinking, the bar was theirs until they decided to leave. His mum didn’t complain; she needed the money. The fishermen didn’t speak to her or threaten her, and they always paid their bill. They may be ignorant, Mark thought, but at least they are honest. That still didn’t make it any easier when they kept him awake with their racket.
He decided to stay on the bench a while and think. Perhaps inspiration would come to him from the stars that glittered in the velvet dark above, or from the semi-moon that threw its trail of light across the glittering sea like the train of a wedding dress. Perhaps a boat would slip silently around the headland, bringing a cargo of rich words and exotic metaphor. It would glide to a soft stop on the beach, its sails hanging silver in the moonlight. From it would step a young man clothed in sincerity. He would leave golden footprints in the sand like welcoming gifts, and would stand in front of Mark offering a jewelled casket of inspiration. He would be a godsend, but more than that, he would be a friend.
‘What the fuck?’ Mark sat bolt upright. ‘Where did that come from?’ He sniffed the air, but it was cold and salty, and there was nothing else. ‘The old woman’s dope,’ he reasoned.
He rested his hands behind his head and sprawled, waiting for the men to leave the bar. While he waited, the waves lapped, the semi-moon sank into the mountain, and the night thickened.
