I Remember...

I remember when this pier used to sparkle and shine, glinting like a new penny in the early morning and lit-up like a firework at dusk. Arcades filled my ears with music and the sound of coins and laughter. The air smelled of candy floss mixed with the salt of the sea and I drank ginger beer with my friends and leaned out over the polished railings to watch the waves. It was a magical place then and a simpler time. A better time. Not like today.

I pass slowly by a bench and a group of teenagers. Three of them are smoking, there’s a bottle of something being passed around and a baby in a pram. The young lady rocking it backwards and forwards is wearing trousers that are skin-tight so that if my eyes were better I might be able to see everything.

Young lady? That’s not a young lady. I remember a time when there were young ladies who wore skirts in bright colours and neatly pressed cotton shirts. Young men too. These lads here aren’t worth anything, to themselves or the world. Baggy trousers and dirty jumpers, if I’d been seen like that my old mum would’ve wept.

I remember when the way you looked reflected on your family, and pride had value. I look sideways at the young people as I shuffle past.

Young people didn’t drink in my day. Alcohol wasn’t something that happened, except for a well-earned pint on a Friday night, and then you had to earn it. Young people don’t earn anything anymore.

Young people didn’t have babies until they were married either. I remember Jonny Gibbs had a girl called Sue. Lovely girl, she was, a redhead with pale skin like milk. We saw her sitting on that bench with the other girls and Jonny said he was going to be stepping-out with her and we all laughed. Next day we saw them walking along the seafront, eating ice creams as big as their heads. He was cool as you like, was Jonny. If I sit down here and look I can see it as it was back then.

The sun was shining. The young people were everywhere, this was a place for the young. Parents and the old folk stayed on the beach on deck chairs or towels or picnic blankets, under bright parasols. My old gran used to come down here with all of us and set herself up in a deck chair on the beach. Every hour I’d run up to the Lyon’s cafe on the corner for a cup of tea, and carry it carefully down the beach to her without spilling a drop. She’d take it off me and wink and give me a mint imperial. I can taste it now.

When I was older I’d stand at the railings over there and watch the girls as they walked in the shallow water, laughing and jumping over the waves as they rolled in. We’d whistle at them and they’d blush and walk away, glancing over their shoulders at us as they went. That was how I first saw my Mary. Lovely she was, in a blue bathing suit with a red belt. She had hair the colour of chestnut and bright blue eyes.

Everything sparkled; the sea, the shoes, the smiles, the grease on the newspaper-wrapped parcels of fish-and-chips.

The wind whips my face and I feel the cold seeping into my bones. It’s grey again and the peer is wet with the spray of the sea. I hear a high-pitched cackle from one of the teenage girls on the other benches and I take a deep breath before rocking forward to stand up. My knees grind like sea on shingle, like the way the world grinds now.

The doctor says I need to walk more, she says I need to walk for at least thirty minutes everyday to help with my arthritis. I say I’m just getting old and that’s how it goes. Gerald says the doctor wouldn’t be worrying about our bones so much if she had some babies to look after. I agree with Gerald.

My knees creak and I lean on my stick for balance. The handle is worn smooth with years of use and the hand that grips it is gnarled and misshapen. I remember running the length of this pier, the wind in my hair, my short shirtsleeves straining against my arms. My old dad had kept me back after dinner to help with the dishes. He’d said it was mum’s holiday too and my friends could wait. He didn’t know I was meeting Mary. She looked perfect, standing there under the lamp post. Her hair was curled and she was wearing a yellow skirt with a blue belt and blue shoes, with a white shirt and a blue neck-tie. She looked like a girl from an advertisement, like the ones you used to see on the side of the bus.

I must’ve made the distance in not much more than 3 minutes. It takes much longer now and that’s with the wind behind me. I look down and see the gray water heaving below. The sea looks the way I feel; tired and heavy and cold.

If I squint I can see the water breaking on the rock-pools down by the shore. When I was a little lad I played there in my swimming trunks with my bucket and fishing net. The other children did too, while our folks lay on the beach getting brown. There was no one going to hurt us, no one to cause us trouble. Not like now. I remember Jonny, only eight then, slipping on the rocks and gashing his knee on a barnacle. He went crying to his mum and his dad said “what you do that for?” like he’d meant to do it!

I stop for a moment to hold my grizzled hand to my face to stop the wind, and my elbow cracks. I can see the dark hollows that were so full of life when I was a lad. They’re full of rubbish now. A torn shopping bag, a disposable coffee cup, a few plastic bottles. It’s a shame, the shrimps and crabs and little fishes won’t like that one bit. I was always interested by the pools, the way the seaweed swelled and the shrimps pushed themselves through the water and the fish swam in clusters, changing direction at the same time. I could’ve watched them for days. But then my old gran would shout my name, she had a pair of lungs on her, did gran, and I’d be off up the cafe again for her tea.

We came here every summer, we did. Mum, dad, gran, my brother Mike and my sister Vi. Jonny’s mum and dad, and his brothers. Sometimes my aunt Rosemary would come with uncle Sam and my cousins. We’d rent a couple of caravans and we’d all muck in. One year me, Mike, Jonny, and Jonny’s brothers shared one bed, there were six of us all in there together.

My old dad worked hard, six days of every week. When we were at home he was a hard man, always ready to keep us in line with his belt or his slipper when we were misbehaving. Then when he got here it was like a cloud lifted. He’d see the green grass between the caravans, and breathe in the fresh sea air and he’d smile. He wouldn’t stop smiling all week, and neither would we.

My dad and Jonny’s dad worked at the same factory, building cars. Both of them were big men. I remember when Jonny brought Sue back to meet us all, and Jonny’s dad got a bit lively and started dancing with her. She was staying with her parents on the other side of the park, and they’d come down from Leicester. Of course it was just after that trip that Sue turns up on Jonny’s doorstep, all pregnant and homeless and Jonny asks her to marry him.

In those days things were simple. You got a girl pregnant, you married her and you looked after each other. Now there’s no rules. You get pregnant and you can even choose to not be pregnant anymore! Whoever thought of such a thing? Jonny’s old dad might have been a hard man, but he would never have left pretty Sue on the doorstep. He brought her right on inside and Jonny’s mum got her some tea, and Jonny got back from work and when he heard everything he proposed to her right there and then. No hesitation. Simple. Jonny’s dad said that was his proudest moment.

I didn’t meet my Mary for another two summers after that. Jonny was on the beach with Sue and the baby, and I was up on the pier watching the girls with my brother Mike, and Jonny’s brothers, and I saw her in the waves. The sea was almost the same colour as her bathing suit. I was struck dumb by her, I was.

I focus on the waves as they reach up the beach. There’s no roar of water, just a sucking sound like gums finding dentures in the morning. Everything’s shades of grey. I’m sitting on another bench, the peer stretching out over the water to my right. It’s getting on, it’ll be dinner time soon. I rock forwards and get up again, creaking to a standing position. The nights are drawing in.

It was Mary’s idea to move down here after I left the Railways. She said we always loved it and the sea air would do us good. She said it would be like being on holiday every day, and it was for a time. Not like now, it’s different now.

The lamp posts are coming on as I shuffle down the boardwalk, past the boarded-up shop fronts and the fish and chip shop. Fish and chips have changed too. They used to be greasy in a good way, but now the grease feels sticky and clings in my throat. There are more kids sitting outside in the neon light. They look like ghosts, drifting through life, not really living. When I was their age I lived. This boardwalk thrummed with life and the shops were all open late. Ice Cream vans stood along the edge until gone nine o’clock at night. I remember walking down here with Ben, we were swinging him up as we went. It was well past his bedtime and he was insisting on an ice cream and I was saying that it was too late, and Mary said what are holidays for, so I bought him one. He still didn’t understand going to sleep when it was light out. He was just a little lad, like a sparrow, playing by the rock pools and Mary worrying about him slipping and gashing his knee on a barnacle.

I get to the gate and look up at our house, the front door with Mary’s roses growing all around it. The little front garden with the crazy paving and pot plants. The gate at the side leading to the garden where I grew vegetables. The lights shining out of the living room and kitchen windows look like eyes shining in the dark. I can hear a television set. A woman’s face appears at the window, she sees me and draws the curtains. She looks a bit like Mary, that woman. Hair the colour of chestnut and soft curls. She’s in there with her kids, but I’ve never seen her husband. The house looks the same, except for the weeds growing up through the paving stones. If I stand here long enough I can remember it as it was. I used to come home from the shop and see Mary standing at the kitchen sink. She’d look up and smile at me and I’d take a moment to look at the house before walking up to the door. The door was always unlocked. There was no need to worry back then.

The wind nips at my neck and the colours fade back to grey. The windows don’t shine anymore and I notice the window in the roof where the new woman’s had the loft converted. Somewhere to put the kids I suppose. I shuffle on, grinding my bones like a gear stick in a rusty car. Like the old Morris Traveller I had loaded up to the roof with our worldly goods when me and Mary moved out of my old mum and dad’s. That car was a tank it was, the way it just kept going. All our stuff, moving, and then Mary laid out in the back in labour with Ben, screaming blue murder. He almost killed her, he did. I remember the terror of that drive and scrubbing the blood off the wood after. She was in hospital for two weeks before they’d let her come home, and the doctors said she couldn’t have another one. Mary said we could risk it, but I put my foot down. That was the only time I ever did.

I push the gate open and shuffle up the path to the front door of the big house. It opens before I get there and there’s that black nurse standing with her hands on her hips. She says I wandered off and it’s past dinner time. She says they were about to call the police. She unbuttons my coat before I have a chance to prop my stick against the wall and makes me sit down again to take off my shoes. I can’t reach, so she takes them off for me, nattering on about how I shouldn’t go out for so long, about how I should be back before dark, about how it’s not fair on them if I don’t eat with the rest. I’m not hungry anyway, but that doesn’t matter. They’ll make me eat.

I go into the next room and sit in a chair. As I sit down it makes an uncomfortable farting sound as the air escapes from the plasticised seat. Gerald laughs and I ask what’s for dinner. He shrugs and goes back to watching his TV show.

I remember sitting around a table with Jonny and Mike and all Jonny’s brothers. His oldest brother, Stephen, was going to marry my sister, Vi, the next day, and we were all talking and drinking and playing cards. There was a single light hanging from the ceiling over the table. The rest of the house was dark. The girls were back at my house doing whatever they do before a wedding. That was after Jonny married Sue, but before I met Mary. We played Rummikub until three in the morning. We couldn’t watch TV then. TV stopped airing at half-past-twelve in those days and good job too!

I look at Gerald. He’s concentrating on the screen because he has to lip-read and he’s dribbling a bit. A tray arrives in front of me and I look down at the strips of soft meat with mashed potato and thick congealed gravy. The nurse asks me if I’m going to eat any of it, but I know it’s not really a question. I pick up the fork and stare at it for a moment. My hand is gnarled and clumsy. I remember when I learned how to use chopsticks. Ben came back from  the University for a week and he bought us chinese takeaway. We’d never eaten chinese food before and he taught us how to use these silly bits of stick to eat with, and I was so hungry I kept at it. Mary dropped her chicken in her lap and we both got a lot of sauce everywhere. That was a good night. Ben was in Sheffield studying engineering and we were so proud, although Mary always wanted him closer to home.

I feel gravy running down my chin and the nurse wipes it away. She’s feeding me again then. Or was it another one last time? They all look the same and they don’t stay around long. I chew and swallow, chew and swallow.

Ben never came home again, not really. He left University and got a job in London and went off and rented a flat. He came home once in awhile, for birthdays and Christmas. Mary always cried when he left. Then he met that woman, Clarissa her name was, or still is I suppose. She was from the South somewhere and after that we saw him even less. We met her once or twice before the wedding, and she was nice enough I suppose. But Mary always thought he’d move back up to us and marry a local girl. Home is home, you know.

I suck on my meat and swallow without having to chew. I don’t know why they bother to call it meat, because it’s nothing like meat as I remember it. I suppose that’s what happens when you start getting your meat from imports. I remember running down to the butchers at the end of the street when I was a lad. That butcher got his from an abattoir up the road, and that abattoir dealt with local farmers. Now you don’t know where it’s coming from and it’s lost its goodness.

The nurse takes my tray away and I sit back in the chair. Mary used to cook the most wonderful dinners. Pies with golden pastry and roasts with crispy potatoes, and yorkshire puddings as light as air. If there’s one thing I’m pleased about, it’s that Mary never came here. She’d have hated it. She liked things ‘just so’ did Mary, even at the end. I never could get the hang of it all, all that cooking business. I didn’t want to. But then Ben comes and brings me here so I don’t have to worry about it.

The nurse appears and says it’s time to go to bed. She leads me out of the room and I see the other chairs are empty already. She says I look far away and I think I wish I was love. Then she asks if I know who she is, and I can’t think. She’s a little blonde one and there’s been more than one little blonde one. I think one of them was called Teresa. Then she asks if I know where I am and I don’t know because I never could remember the name of this place. It’s one of those homes for old people to live in until they die, because their kids don’t want them. I don’t say this to the nurse, I just squeeze her hand. It would hurt her feelings if I said that. She means well.

The world isn’t as bright as it used to be. I remember when it was crystal clear, like a sparkling diamond. I remember the colours and tastes, the smells and sounds, the good times and the bad. I remember it all.