It was eight o’ clock, Wednesday morning. I was sitting at the table, sipping a piping hot coffee and smoking a cigarette – a ritual that I performed every morning before work to get the day started. A breakfast of nicotine, caffeine and saccharine – not the healthiest trio to wake up to, but it worked wonders on my attitude.
I had finished the coffee and stubbed out the cigarette and was on my way out the door when the phone rang. I got to it on the second ring.
“Hello?”
“Who’s that?” came a child’s voice over the line. I grinned. Amy always asked the same question whenever she called, as if to make sure that I hadn’t been possessed by body-snatchers or something overnight.
“S’me”.
“And do you know who I am?” she asked solemnly.
“Sure Amy. You’re you”.
“Okay”. Satisfied. “Listen, Dad wants Cathy to look after me today ‘cos he’s got to run around like a freak off a leash…”
I chuckled – I could practically hear Daryl explaining this to Amy earlier that morning. ‘Freak off a leash’ was not an expression Amy would have come up with on her own.
“So you’ve got to phone him and tell him that I’m coming with you”, she continued. “I don’t want to stay with Cathy”.
“Phone him?”
“When I hang up”.
“Amy, I’m only going to work…”
“Pleeeeaaaassse!” Said in the impatient tones of one who knows that she’s going to get her own way no matter what, and arguing about it is just a waste of time.
“What’s wrong with Cathy?” Cathy was Daryl’s next door neighbour and Amy’s occasional baby-sitter.
“Nothing. I just want to come with you”.
I sighed, although, to be honest, I didn’t mind at all – Amy had come to work with me before, and she kept me company as I drove from one place to the other.
“Okay then. Pass me to your dad”.
“No! You’ve got to phone back and pretend that it was your idea!” Suddenly she gasped, an over-dramatic intake of air, and whispered, “He’s coming now to take me next door! Phone back quick!”
Click.
I sighed again as I dialed Daryl’s number. Sometimes I tried to remember back to when I was nine years old – wondered what it was like to live in a world where every trivial thing was a big, important secret that grown-ups were too silly to understand. Couldn’t do it.
“Hello?”
“Good morning, sunshine”.
“Hiya Joey. I was just on my way out – gotta go to the bank and sort out some stuff. Since Claire… you know… I have to see what happens to our joint account. Do you have any idea what usu fruct means, by the way?”
“Not a clue. Sorry”.
“Not to worry – I’m sure my notary will explain it to me with even more Latin terminology. So…” he asked, “… what’s up?”
“Do you mind if I borrow Amy for a road-trip this morning? I’ve got some new stuff in”.
“And you need her expert opinion and unique selling abilities?”
“Wouldn’t hurt”.
I sold toys, after all, and toys are made for kids. If the kid isn’t interested in the toy, then the toy isn’t interesting.
“Well, I’d arranged for Cathy to keep an eye on her today”, said Daryl, “but it’s not really a problem. Shall I bring her over, or will you pick her up?”
I heard Amy shout ‘yeah!’ in the background, and smiled. It was a trivial thing, but it felt like a big important secret.
“I’ll pick her up in five minutes”, I told Daryl.
***
By nine o’ clock it was already promising to be another beautiful day – the sun was already up and climbing, the sky as blue as a village-full of Smurfs. Not a single cloud to be seen. The temperature was expected to go up to a sweltering 39°C by the afternoon. Summer had come to St John. It felt good.
I was driving out to Serenity, a small tourist town just a couple of miles north of St John. The radio was on and Amy was humming quietly to the music, tapping her foot on the floor as she looked out of the open window as the world went by. She wore a pony-tail, held in place with a mustard scrunchie from which a couple of strands of hair had come loose and were waving in the wind. Every now and then she would look away from the window and stare at me pensively. I pretended not to notice, knowing that whatever was on her mind would come out quicker if I didn’t push her.
I drove straight into Serenity and into heavy traffic – most of the cars’ number plates were prefixed with a capital X, which signified hire cars. A ghost town in winter, Serenity crawled with tourists every year between May and September. Germans, French, Italians and English all came to invade the beaches and soak up the sun. At least half the buildings in Serenity were hotels or guesthouses, and all of them were full by mid-July.
The car in front of me inched its way forward as the traffic ahead crawled along like a drowsy earthworm. A bumper sticker affixed to the rear windshield claimed that the car’s owner was ‘going nucking futs’. Underneath the writing was a small cross-eyed cartoon man ripping out his hair and screaming skywards.
The driver in the car behind me leaned impatiently on his horn, as if the resultant pregnant-cow-in-distress blare possessed magical powers that would instantly make all the traffic disappear. Others joined in, and soon Serenity was anything but. I reached forward and turned the radio up a notch. REM came on, cheerfully claiming that, although it was the end of the world as we knew it, they nevertheless felt fine.
“What’s nucking futs mean?” asked Amy.
“Huh?”
Amy pointed at the car ahead of us. “Nucking futs”, she said again.
Yeah. Nucking futs. I heard you the first time, sweetheart. It’s a spoonerism. What it actually means to say is ‘fucking nuts’, indicating, in a failed attempt at humour, that the driver of the car in front of us is going completely insane. Haha. Funny, isn’t it?
How do parents handle this kind of question from their children? With matter-of-fact honesty or feigned ignorance? I had a mental picture of me being honest and Amy saying, “so, what’s ‘fucking’ then?” Had I known these words when I was nine? Probably. But I didn’t want to go there with Amy. I glanced at her. she looked back at me with open curiosity, waiting for an answer.
“It’s… um… it’s a spoonerism”, I said.
“What’s a spoonerism”, came the inevitable reply.
“It’s one of those funny English things”, I said. I inched the car forward and leaned back in my seat, adding, “like a palindrome, or a tongue twister. One of those”. I smiled to myself as I reached for my cigarettes. Go on, Amy, ask me what a palindrome is. The art of distraction. God, I’m so good with kids.
Seconds ticked by as Amy chewed this over.
“Oh”, she said, finally. A couple more seconds then, “So what does nucking futs mean?”
I lowered my lighter and slowly pulled the unlit cigarette out of my mouth.
“You know”, I said slowly, “I haven’t the slightest idea”.
***
The bastard with the sticker on his car stayed with us all the way to Kid Planet, my first stop of the day. Every time I looked across at Amy, she was mouthing the words silently, her forehead creased in intense concentration as she tried to figure out the hidden meaning, persistent as a terrier worrying a bone. I had once heard somewhere that kids had a very short attention span. Amy was obviously the exception to the rule.
“Here we are!” I said brightly, leaning over the seat as I reversed into a tight spot between a skip and a VW Polo just a few doors down from Kid Planet. I pulled up the handbrake, switched off the engine and looked at Amy.
“You ready for Roly Poly Ralph?”
Amy giggled and nodded, as she infallibly did every time I referred to Ralph Pooley as Roly Poly.
Kid Planet was a three-storey toyshop – a paradise of mystery and wonder that anyone between the ages of three and sixteen could cheerfully lose themselves in for a month. With its entrance designed to look like Aladdin’s cave, with glittering ‘jewels’ embedded in the bumpy ‘rock’ walls, and a voice-activated ‘magic door’ that only let customers in if they said ‘open sesame’, Kid Planet seemed like a doorway into another world, as distant from the hustle and bustle of summertime Serenity as the moon. And anyone who walked through that door, no matter what age, found themselves inexplicably wanting to believe in Santa Claus and The Wizard of Oz again.
Amy open sesamed us into the enchanted otherworld of boomerangs and bouncy castles, brightly lit bulbs, primary colours and plastic, and ran on ahead to seek out Ralph Pooley, aka Roly Poly Ralph, the gargantuan owner of Kid Planet. I followed at a more leisurely pace, catalogue in one hand, rucksack slung over my shoulder. Other salesmen carried their brochures and freebies in slim business-like briefcases, but I favoured my rucksack. Walking into this carnival of colour with something as somber and adult as a briefcase would make me feel like a tax inspector at a birthday party, the bad guy out of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a boring grown-up in a world built for children. My boss didn’t exactly like the idea of one of his elite sales force members lugging a rucksack around like some hippy backpacker, but he turned a blind eye to it, mainly because my sales figures were miles higher than those of the other six salespeople I worked with.
I eventually found Ralph building a pyramid of diving masks – professional top-of-the-range Scubapro ones, made of silicone and tempered glass. Ralph always insisted that Kid Planet would only stock the best of the best, a business policy that quickly rocketed his shop to the top. Amy was at Ralph’s side, wearing a fluorescent pink mask, the black strap bending her ears double. She turned to face me as I approached, and said in a hollow voice, “I can seeee yooooouuuuuuu!”
I grinned at Amy and waited for Ralph to strategically put another boxed mask in place. As far as his shop was concerned, Ralph was a perfectionist. He would spend hours setting up displays, often tearing them down again and starting over because they, in his own words, ‘just weren’t right, somehow’. Only he could see the fault, whatever it was. To mere mortals like myself, the displays looked just fine.
Ralph Pooley was what I can only describe as a fifty-three year old child. He delighted in his toys and took great pleasure in playing with each and every sample (testing them, he called it) before actually making an order. He would spend hours in his shop after closing time, just wandering from aisle to aisle and gaping in wonder at the marvel of it all. Many a time, children would peer into the window and, much to their amusement, catch a glimpse of Ralph sitting on the floor contemplating a plastic ray-gun, or shaking his head sadly at a life-size Tinky-Winky doll. The Teletubbies were the one item of child paraphernalia that Ralph couldn’t stomach or understand.
Ralph balanced the last box on the top of his creation and took a step back to admire his work, cocking his head from one side to the other like an art critic inspecting a sculpture. After a minute, he turned and looked at me.
“What d’you think?” he puffed.
I pointed to the mask that Amy was wearing. She had lifted it off her face and was wearing it like a hat.
“You forgot one”.
Ralph slowly looked at Amy then back at his pyramid, his acute business sense colliding head-on with his artistic pride. Eventually, he looked at Amy again.
“You can keep it”, he said finally.
***
It was around twelve thirty and six toyshops later when Amy finally spoke the thought that had been on her mind all morning. We were in the car, cruising along the Serenity coast-road, the sun high in the sky, the temperature baking, the beaches dotted with canvas umbrellas and colourful beach towels. For the seventh time in as many minutes, the deejay on DuneFM told anyone who was listening that it was ‘a real hot one out there, folks!’ Like we didn’t know that – both windows open and the car still felt like a pizza oven.
It was, I decided, time for lunch.
“I’m starving”, I told Amy as I slowed the car down to a stop. We had reached a zebra crossing and a group of tourists, lobster-red and peeling, were waiting to cross. “How about you? Want to go get something to eat?”
I half expected her to say no. As far as I knew, Amy had still eaten nothing but mouthfuls since Claire had died, as if her huge appetite had suddenly been stolen away from her along with her mother. So I was rather surprised, and secretly pleased, when Amy nodded her head in agreement.
The last tourist – a sunburned blonde man carrying an enormous bright-green inflatable dinosaur and a beach towel – reached the opposite pavement, and I eased the car forward slowly before shifting to second gear.
“What d’you fancy? Burger and chips? Pizza? Or something else?”
Amy turned in her seat to face me.
“Do you know where the swing is?”
“The Swing? No. What is it – a restaurant?”
“Sort of. They have burgers and stuff”. She paused, and took a deep breath. “It’s in Westbay. Can we go there?”
Westbay was a small picturesque fishing town right on the other side of the island, at least an hour away on a good day with little traffic on the roads.
“Westbay! That’s miles away! Sweetheart, I’ve still got a lot of work to do – there’s no way I’m driving all the way there for a burger, then coming all the way back here. I meant somewhere close by, like Macky D or something”.
That’s what I meant to say, or words to that effect, but my protests were cut short when I turned to look at the little girl sitting beside me. I’m not sure why. It could have been because of the intense look in Amy’s eyes when I turned to face her. Or because of the sudden realisation that this was the purpose of her wanting to come with me that morning, as opposed to staying with Cathy. She had been trying to ask me something all morning, and it dawned on me that this was it. It could have been for either of these reasons. But I think that what really made my mind up for me was the way that her slightly sagging shoulders and bowed head told me that she was expecting the answer to be no. Only a complete bastard could have refused at that point, and I hated to think of myself that way. For some obscure reason, Westbay was important to this child, and – work be damned – I was going to find out why.
“Sounds good to me”, I said as , over the radio, The Doors reminded me that people were strange.
***
I was confused. We were seated in blissful air-conditioned comfort in a relatively empty diner. The walls were adorned with miniature showcases containing various fishing paraphernalia – the one directly over our table displayed an assortment of fishhooks, ranging from the minute to a huge and cruel-looking barbed device that I assumed was used to catch whales. A fishing net was suspended from the ceiling, patterned with lobster pots and plastic crustaceans. There were many such eateries in Westbay – I couldn’t figure out why this one was so special.
What was confusing me, however, was that this diner was not called The Swing after all. Instead, it went by the somewhat less ambiguous name of ‘Captain Cook’. And yet Amy had insisted that this was the place she wanted to eat at. I glanced across the table at my nine-year-old companion – she was wolfing down a plate of chicken nuggets, chips and a strand of limp lettuce that the menu laughingly described as ‘with salad’ like there was no tomorrow. I’m pretty sure that she was genuinely hungry, but I got the impression that she was hurrying to get the eating part out of the way, and had more important things on her mind.
“Good?” I asked. My own plate was empty save for a couple of chips and the ‘salad’, which I had chosen not to eat.
Amy nodded and held out her fork with a greasy chicken nugget impaled on it.
“Want one?”
“No thanks”. The nuggets were square and coated in that kind of batter that looked – and probably tasted – like fiberglass. I had never seen a square chicken before.
Amy polished off the rest of her meal and washed it down noisily with lemonade. Then she abruptly stood up.
“Come”, she commanded.
“Huh? Where to?”
“To the swing”.
“I thought this was The Swing?”
“It’s down there”, she said, waving her hand vaguely in a direction. “By the sea”.
“Don’t you want to wash your hands first?” I asked.
She looked at me with impatient brown eyes.
“I’ll wash them in the sea. Come on. I want to show you something”. Before I could argue any further, she grabbed my hand in hers, and practically dragged me out of my seat.
“Amy, I haven’t paid yet”. A waitress smiled at me as we hurtled past.
“You can pay when we come back up. We always do that. They don’t mind”.
We? Who’s we? I stared at the back of Amy’s head as she towed me along behind her like a kid’s pull-along toy, and found myself wondering how many thoughts, experiences and memories resided in there that I had no idea existed. I had always looked at Amy in relation to myself – now the realisation hit me that her life didn’t just stop when I wasn’t around to see it happening. Nobody hit a pause button until the next time I was on the scene. Amy wasn’t just my best friend’s daughter, and I wasn’t just her father’s best friend. Amy had uncles and aunts and teachers and school-friends and hopes and dreams and ambitions that I knew nothing about. She had a life of her own, and I was just a tiny part of that life, just one piece of the jigsaw puzzle. I hoped I was an important piece, at least.
Sometimes, that’s the most we can be.
***
Everyone has a special place…
The swing was exactly that. Amy led me round the back of Captain Cook, where a narrow cement path inclined steeply down towards the sea. We passed through a metal gate that arched over our heads, upon which the legend ‘Barbeque Bay’ was embossed. Rust had eaten away most of the yellow and green paintwork – corroded orange and black showed through like the glimpse of a tiger in the wild. Something crunched under my foot – a lone lump of charcoal, having escaped from the grill of some past barbeque, turned my footsteps black.
We rounded a bend in the path, and there was the swing, standing alone and peaceful on a grey slab of man-made shoreline, facing the sea. Designed to accommodate two people, a wooden seat hung suspended by four thick chains, once painted the same yellow and green as the gate we had just walked through, before the sea salt had mercilessly flaked away the emulsion. The swing had a slightly magical air about it, as any forgotten man-made object does when merged with the beauty of nature.
A slight breeze caused the chains to creak as we approached, as if the swing was greeting us. I realised that anyone seated here at the right time would be rewarded with a wonderful view of the sun setting over the horizon. I made a mental note to remember this secret place for the next time romance entered my life. This instantly triggered off thoughts of Rachael. I took a deep breath and filled my lungs with the sea air. Then I lit a cigarette and sauntered over to Amy. She was sitting on the swing, staring out to the sea. I sat down next to her, making the seat rock gently. Someone had carved ‘Cta Were Here’ into the wooden support. I traced the letters with my fingers as the sea lapped lazily against the cement. Neither of us spoke, but the air around Amy was full of words not yet uttered.
When she turned to look up at me, I was surprised to see tears in her eyes.
“Amy? What’s the matter?”
For a while, she said nothing. I didn’t push her. When she did speak, she said, “Mummy and me used to come here all the time”.
The penny dropped.
Not Cta, but C+A. Claire wrote her capital a’s in the same shape as her lower case ones.
C+A. Claire and Amy. Lonely nights, while Daryl was at work. Let’s go for a drive, Sweet.
I realised that I could never bring any object of my affection here. This place belonged to Claire and Amy. It was sacred. I could not belittle it in the name of romance.
I flicked away my cigarette and watched it spiral down to the water, a miniature comet on a trail of smoke, heard it fizz out as it hit. I wrapped an arm around Amy as she shivered and tears trickled down her face, and we sat there for time immeasurable.
***
That evening found me back in Serenity, on the beach, alone. I slipped out of my clothes and into my swimming trunks. Donning my wetsuit, facemask and flippers, I slid silently into the water, making barely a ripple. The refreshing coolness seeped through my suit like cold, probing fingers, massaging away the aches and pains of the day. My flashlight beam danced along the seabed and I kicked lazily away from the shore. An octopus jetted past under me – on any other occasion that octopus would have been tomorrow’s spaghetti sauce, but tonight I wasn’t here for hunting. The octopus could live to see another day.
Eventually I stopped swimming and just floated face down in the water, listening to my regular breathing as it hummed through my snorkel. Then I turned off the flashlight.
Total sensory deprivation.
No sight, no sound, no smell or taste. No sense of touch except for the weight of the torch in my hand.
This is probably the furthest you can get from the reality and drudgery of everyday life without actually being dead.
Everybody has a special place they go to every now and then…
This was mine.
I had finished the coffee and stubbed out the cigarette and was on my way out the door when the phone rang. I got to it on the second ring.
“Hello?”
“Who’s that?” came a child’s voice over the line. I grinned. Amy always asked the same question whenever she called, as if to make sure that I hadn’t been possessed by body-snatchers or something overnight.
“S’me”.
“And do you know who I am?” she asked solemnly.
“Sure Amy. You’re you”.
“Okay”. Satisfied. “Listen, Dad wants Cathy to look after me today ‘cos he’s got to run around like a freak off a leash…”
I chuckled – I could practically hear Daryl explaining this to Amy earlier that morning. ‘Freak off a leash’ was not an expression Amy would have come up with on her own.
“So you’ve got to phone him and tell him that I’m coming with you”, she continued. “I don’t want to stay with Cathy”.
“Phone him?”
“When I hang up”.
“Amy, I’m only going to work…”
“Pleeeeaaaassse!” Said in the impatient tones of one who knows that she’s going to get her own way no matter what, and arguing about it is just a waste of time.
“What’s wrong with Cathy?” Cathy was Daryl’s next door neighbour and Amy’s occasional baby-sitter.
“Nothing. I just want to come with you”.
I sighed, although, to be honest, I didn’t mind at all – Amy had come to work with me before, and she kept me company as I drove from one place to the other.
“Okay then. Pass me to your dad”.
“No! You’ve got to phone back and pretend that it was your idea!” Suddenly she gasped, an over-dramatic intake of air, and whispered, “He’s coming now to take me next door! Phone back quick!”
Click.
I sighed again as I dialed Daryl’s number. Sometimes I tried to remember back to when I was nine years old – wondered what it was like to live in a world where every trivial thing was a big, important secret that grown-ups were too silly to understand. Couldn’t do it.
“Hello?”
“Good morning, sunshine”.
“Hiya Joey. I was just on my way out – gotta go to the bank and sort out some stuff. Since Claire… you know… I have to see what happens to our joint account. Do you have any idea what usu fruct means, by the way?”
“Not a clue. Sorry”.
“Not to worry – I’m sure my notary will explain it to me with even more Latin terminology. So…” he asked, “… what’s up?”
“Do you mind if I borrow Amy for a road-trip this morning? I’ve got some new stuff in”.
“And you need her expert opinion and unique selling abilities?”
“Wouldn’t hurt”.
I sold toys, after all, and toys are made for kids. If the kid isn’t interested in the toy, then the toy isn’t interesting.
“Well, I’d arranged for Cathy to keep an eye on her today”, said Daryl, “but it’s not really a problem. Shall I bring her over, or will you pick her up?”
I heard Amy shout ‘yeah!’ in the background, and smiled. It was a trivial thing, but it felt like a big important secret.
“I’ll pick her up in five minutes”, I told Daryl.
***
By nine o’ clock it was already promising to be another beautiful day – the sun was already up and climbing, the sky as blue as a village-full of Smurfs. Not a single cloud to be seen. The temperature was expected to go up to a sweltering 39°C by the afternoon. Summer had come to St John. It felt good.
I was driving out to Serenity, a small tourist town just a couple of miles north of St John. The radio was on and Amy was humming quietly to the music, tapping her foot on the floor as she looked out of the open window as the world went by. She wore a pony-tail, held in place with a mustard scrunchie from which a couple of strands of hair had come loose and were waving in the wind. Every now and then she would look away from the window and stare at me pensively. I pretended not to notice, knowing that whatever was on her mind would come out quicker if I didn’t push her.
I drove straight into Serenity and into heavy traffic – most of the cars’ number plates were prefixed with a capital X, which signified hire cars. A ghost town in winter, Serenity crawled with tourists every year between May and September. Germans, French, Italians and English all came to invade the beaches and soak up the sun. At least half the buildings in Serenity were hotels or guesthouses, and all of them were full by mid-July.
The car in front of me inched its way forward as the traffic ahead crawled along like a drowsy earthworm. A bumper sticker affixed to the rear windshield claimed that the car’s owner was ‘going nucking futs’. Underneath the writing was a small cross-eyed cartoon man ripping out his hair and screaming skywards.
The driver in the car behind me leaned impatiently on his horn, as if the resultant pregnant-cow-in-distress blare possessed magical powers that would instantly make all the traffic disappear. Others joined in, and soon Serenity was anything but. I reached forward and turned the radio up a notch. REM came on, cheerfully claiming that, although it was the end of the world as we knew it, they nevertheless felt fine.
“What’s nucking futs mean?” asked Amy.
“Huh?”
Amy pointed at the car ahead of us. “Nucking futs”, she said again.
Yeah. Nucking futs. I heard you the first time, sweetheart. It’s a spoonerism. What it actually means to say is ‘fucking nuts’, indicating, in a failed attempt at humour, that the driver of the car in front of us is going completely insane. Haha. Funny, isn’t it?
How do parents handle this kind of question from their children? With matter-of-fact honesty or feigned ignorance? I had a mental picture of me being honest and Amy saying, “so, what’s ‘fucking’ then?” Had I known these words when I was nine? Probably. But I didn’t want to go there with Amy. I glanced at her. she looked back at me with open curiosity, waiting for an answer.
“It’s… um… it’s a spoonerism”, I said.
“What’s a spoonerism”, came the inevitable reply.
“It’s one of those funny English things”, I said. I inched the car forward and leaned back in my seat, adding, “like a palindrome, or a tongue twister. One of those”. I smiled to myself as I reached for my cigarettes. Go on, Amy, ask me what a palindrome is. The art of distraction. God, I’m so good with kids.
Seconds ticked by as Amy chewed this over.
“Oh”, she said, finally. A couple more seconds then, “So what does nucking futs mean?”
I lowered my lighter and slowly pulled the unlit cigarette out of my mouth.
“You know”, I said slowly, “I haven’t the slightest idea”.
***
The bastard with the sticker on his car stayed with us all the way to Kid Planet, my first stop of the day. Every time I looked across at Amy, she was mouthing the words silently, her forehead creased in intense concentration as she tried to figure out the hidden meaning, persistent as a terrier worrying a bone. I had once heard somewhere that kids had a very short attention span. Amy was obviously the exception to the rule.
“Here we are!” I said brightly, leaning over the seat as I reversed into a tight spot between a skip and a VW Polo just a few doors down from Kid Planet. I pulled up the handbrake, switched off the engine and looked at Amy.
“You ready for Roly Poly Ralph?”
Amy giggled and nodded, as she infallibly did every time I referred to Ralph Pooley as Roly Poly.
Kid Planet was a three-storey toyshop – a paradise of mystery and wonder that anyone between the ages of three and sixteen could cheerfully lose themselves in for a month. With its entrance designed to look like Aladdin’s cave, with glittering ‘jewels’ embedded in the bumpy ‘rock’ walls, and a voice-activated ‘magic door’ that only let customers in if they said ‘open sesame’, Kid Planet seemed like a doorway into another world, as distant from the hustle and bustle of summertime Serenity as the moon. And anyone who walked through that door, no matter what age, found themselves inexplicably wanting to believe in Santa Claus and The Wizard of Oz again.
Amy open sesamed us into the enchanted otherworld of boomerangs and bouncy castles, brightly lit bulbs, primary colours and plastic, and ran on ahead to seek out Ralph Pooley, aka Roly Poly Ralph, the gargantuan owner of Kid Planet. I followed at a more leisurely pace, catalogue in one hand, rucksack slung over my shoulder. Other salesmen carried their brochures and freebies in slim business-like briefcases, but I favoured my rucksack. Walking into this carnival of colour with something as somber and adult as a briefcase would make me feel like a tax inspector at a birthday party, the bad guy out of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a boring grown-up in a world built for children. My boss didn’t exactly like the idea of one of his elite sales force members lugging a rucksack around like some hippy backpacker, but he turned a blind eye to it, mainly because my sales figures were miles higher than those of the other six salespeople I worked with.
I eventually found Ralph building a pyramid of diving masks – professional top-of-the-range Scubapro ones, made of silicone and tempered glass. Ralph always insisted that Kid Planet would only stock the best of the best, a business policy that quickly rocketed his shop to the top. Amy was at Ralph’s side, wearing a fluorescent pink mask, the black strap bending her ears double. She turned to face me as I approached, and said in a hollow voice, “I can seeee yooooouuuuuuu!”
I grinned at Amy and waited for Ralph to strategically put another boxed mask in place. As far as his shop was concerned, Ralph was a perfectionist. He would spend hours setting up displays, often tearing them down again and starting over because they, in his own words, ‘just weren’t right, somehow’. Only he could see the fault, whatever it was. To mere mortals like myself, the displays looked just fine.
Ralph Pooley was what I can only describe as a fifty-three year old child. He delighted in his toys and took great pleasure in playing with each and every sample (testing them, he called it) before actually making an order. He would spend hours in his shop after closing time, just wandering from aisle to aisle and gaping in wonder at the marvel of it all. Many a time, children would peer into the window and, much to their amusement, catch a glimpse of Ralph sitting on the floor contemplating a plastic ray-gun, or shaking his head sadly at a life-size Tinky-Winky doll. The Teletubbies were the one item of child paraphernalia that Ralph couldn’t stomach or understand.
Ralph balanced the last box on the top of his creation and took a step back to admire his work, cocking his head from one side to the other like an art critic inspecting a sculpture. After a minute, he turned and looked at me.
“What d’you think?” he puffed.
I pointed to the mask that Amy was wearing. She had lifted it off her face and was wearing it like a hat.
“You forgot one”.
Ralph slowly looked at Amy then back at his pyramid, his acute business sense colliding head-on with his artistic pride. Eventually, he looked at Amy again.
“You can keep it”, he said finally.
***
It was around twelve thirty and six toyshops later when Amy finally spoke the thought that had been on her mind all morning. We were in the car, cruising along the Serenity coast-road, the sun high in the sky, the temperature baking, the beaches dotted with canvas umbrellas and colourful beach towels. For the seventh time in as many minutes, the deejay on DuneFM told anyone who was listening that it was ‘a real hot one out there, folks!’ Like we didn’t know that – both windows open and the car still felt like a pizza oven.
It was, I decided, time for lunch.
“I’m starving”, I told Amy as I slowed the car down to a stop. We had reached a zebra crossing and a group of tourists, lobster-red and peeling, were waiting to cross. “How about you? Want to go get something to eat?”
I half expected her to say no. As far as I knew, Amy had still eaten nothing but mouthfuls since Claire had died, as if her huge appetite had suddenly been stolen away from her along with her mother. So I was rather surprised, and secretly pleased, when Amy nodded her head in agreement.
The last tourist – a sunburned blonde man carrying an enormous bright-green inflatable dinosaur and a beach towel – reached the opposite pavement, and I eased the car forward slowly before shifting to second gear.
“What d’you fancy? Burger and chips? Pizza? Or something else?”
Amy turned in her seat to face me.
“Do you know where the swing is?”
“The Swing? No. What is it – a restaurant?”
“Sort of. They have burgers and stuff”. She paused, and took a deep breath. “It’s in Westbay. Can we go there?”
Westbay was a small picturesque fishing town right on the other side of the island, at least an hour away on a good day with little traffic on the roads.
“Westbay! That’s miles away! Sweetheart, I’ve still got a lot of work to do – there’s no way I’m driving all the way there for a burger, then coming all the way back here. I meant somewhere close by, like Macky D or something”.
That’s what I meant to say, or words to that effect, but my protests were cut short when I turned to look at the little girl sitting beside me. I’m not sure why. It could have been because of the intense look in Amy’s eyes when I turned to face her. Or because of the sudden realisation that this was the purpose of her wanting to come with me that morning, as opposed to staying with Cathy. She had been trying to ask me something all morning, and it dawned on me that this was it. It could have been for either of these reasons. But I think that what really made my mind up for me was the way that her slightly sagging shoulders and bowed head told me that she was expecting the answer to be no. Only a complete bastard could have refused at that point, and I hated to think of myself that way. For some obscure reason, Westbay was important to this child, and – work be damned – I was going to find out why.
“Sounds good to me”, I said as , over the radio, The Doors reminded me that people were strange.
***
I was confused. We were seated in blissful air-conditioned comfort in a relatively empty diner. The walls were adorned with miniature showcases containing various fishing paraphernalia – the one directly over our table displayed an assortment of fishhooks, ranging from the minute to a huge and cruel-looking barbed device that I assumed was used to catch whales. A fishing net was suspended from the ceiling, patterned with lobster pots and plastic crustaceans. There were many such eateries in Westbay – I couldn’t figure out why this one was so special.
What was confusing me, however, was that this diner was not called The Swing after all. Instead, it went by the somewhat less ambiguous name of ‘Captain Cook’. And yet Amy had insisted that this was the place she wanted to eat at. I glanced across the table at my nine-year-old companion – she was wolfing down a plate of chicken nuggets, chips and a strand of limp lettuce that the menu laughingly described as ‘with salad’ like there was no tomorrow. I’m pretty sure that she was genuinely hungry, but I got the impression that she was hurrying to get the eating part out of the way, and had more important things on her mind.
“Good?” I asked. My own plate was empty save for a couple of chips and the ‘salad’, which I had chosen not to eat.
Amy nodded and held out her fork with a greasy chicken nugget impaled on it.
“Want one?”
“No thanks”. The nuggets were square and coated in that kind of batter that looked – and probably tasted – like fiberglass. I had never seen a square chicken before.
Amy polished off the rest of her meal and washed it down noisily with lemonade. Then she abruptly stood up.
“Come”, she commanded.
“Huh? Where to?”
“To the swing”.
“I thought this was The Swing?”
“It’s down there”, she said, waving her hand vaguely in a direction. “By the sea”.
“Don’t you want to wash your hands first?” I asked.
She looked at me with impatient brown eyes.
“I’ll wash them in the sea. Come on. I want to show you something”. Before I could argue any further, she grabbed my hand in hers, and practically dragged me out of my seat.
“Amy, I haven’t paid yet”. A waitress smiled at me as we hurtled past.
“You can pay when we come back up. We always do that. They don’t mind”.
We? Who’s we? I stared at the back of Amy’s head as she towed me along behind her like a kid’s pull-along toy, and found myself wondering how many thoughts, experiences and memories resided in there that I had no idea existed. I had always looked at Amy in relation to myself – now the realisation hit me that her life didn’t just stop when I wasn’t around to see it happening. Nobody hit a pause button until the next time I was on the scene. Amy wasn’t just my best friend’s daughter, and I wasn’t just her father’s best friend. Amy had uncles and aunts and teachers and school-friends and hopes and dreams and ambitions that I knew nothing about. She had a life of her own, and I was just a tiny part of that life, just one piece of the jigsaw puzzle. I hoped I was an important piece, at least.
Sometimes, that’s the most we can be.
***
Everyone has a special place…
The swing was exactly that. Amy led me round the back of Captain Cook, where a narrow cement path inclined steeply down towards the sea. We passed through a metal gate that arched over our heads, upon which the legend ‘Barbeque Bay’ was embossed. Rust had eaten away most of the yellow and green paintwork – corroded orange and black showed through like the glimpse of a tiger in the wild. Something crunched under my foot – a lone lump of charcoal, having escaped from the grill of some past barbeque, turned my footsteps black.
We rounded a bend in the path, and there was the swing, standing alone and peaceful on a grey slab of man-made shoreline, facing the sea. Designed to accommodate two people, a wooden seat hung suspended by four thick chains, once painted the same yellow and green as the gate we had just walked through, before the sea salt had mercilessly flaked away the emulsion. The swing had a slightly magical air about it, as any forgotten man-made object does when merged with the beauty of nature.
A slight breeze caused the chains to creak as we approached, as if the swing was greeting us. I realised that anyone seated here at the right time would be rewarded with a wonderful view of the sun setting over the horizon. I made a mental note to remember this secret place for the next time romance entered my life. This instantly triggered off thoughts of Rachael. I took a deep breath and filled my lungs with the sea air. Then I lit a cigarette and sauntered over to Amy. She was sitting on the swing, staring out to the sea. I sat down next to her, making the seat rock gently. Someone had carved ‘Cta Were Here’ into the wooden support. I traced the letters with my fingers as the sea lapped lazily against the cement. Neither of us spoke, but the air around Amy was full of words not yet uttered.
When she turned to look up at me, I was surprised to see tears in her eyes.
“Amy? What’s the matter?”
For a while, she said nothing. I didn’t push her. When she did speak, she said, “Mummy and me used to come here all the time”.
The penny dropped.
Not Cta, but C+A. Claire wrote her capital a’s in the same shape as her lower case ones.
C+A. Claire and Amy. Lonely nights, while Daryl was at work. Let’s go for a drive, Sweet.
I realised that I could never bring any object of my affection here. This place belonged to Claire and Amy. It was sacred. I could not belittle it in the name of romance.
I flicked away my cigarette and watched it spiral down to the water, a miniature comet on a trail of smoke, heard it fizz out as it hit. I wrapped an arm around Amy as she shivered and tears trickled down her face, and we sat there for time immeasurable.
***
That evening found me back in Serenity, on the beach, alone. I slipped out of my clothes and into my swimming trunks. Donning my wetsuit, facemask and flippers, I slid silently into the water, making barely a ripple. The refreshing coolness seeped through my suit like cold, probing fingers, massaging away the aches and pains of the day. My flashlight beam danced along the seabed and I kicked lazily away from the shore. An octopus jetted past under me – on any other occasion that octopus would have been tomorrow’s spaghetti sauce, but tonight I wasn’t here for hunting. The octopus could live to see another day.
Eventually I stopped swimming and just floated face down in the water, listening to my regular breathing as it hummed through my snorkel. Then I turned off the flashlight.
Total sensory deprivation.
No sight, no sound, no smell or taste. No sense of touch except for the weight of the torch in my hand.
This is probably the furthest you can get from the reality and drudgery of everyday life without actually being dead.
Everybody has a special place they go to every now and then…
This was mine.
***
Forward to Chapter Three | Part One
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