Lightwater

Originally published by Hotshoe, photography by Timothy Briner

I’ve been asked to tell what happened between Gary Osborne and the Kirchner kid in the Walmart car park back in the summer of 1992. They tell me Gary is in trouble, but no one will say what sort. Truth is I haven’t spoken to Gary more than a handful of times since we finished school that summer, but we were tight at the time, and I was there when it happened, so I’ll try to tell it the best I can.

Gary’s folks lived in a run-down shack on Lyons, which is still about the roughest part of Lightwater. Every morning Lou and I would meet at his front door and walk with him to school, and every morning he’d lift up his shirt to show us cigarette burns and fingernail marks left by his mother the night before. We were a team back then, each of us running away from something: for Lou it was her dad, who had been drinking heavily since her mom left; for me it was the hole left by my brother Lawrence, who had died in Iraq the previous summer. Grief filled our house like fog: everywhere I looked I saw his face gazing back from pictures, and I felt sure I could hear his voice mumbling through the wall next to my bed when I woke in the middle of the night.

Mostly, though, I think we were escaping Lightwater: the dirt roads lined with blinking bar signs and church billboards advertising redemption with 1-800 numbers; the gun nuts and the gang-bangers, the overweight and the out of work waddling like zombies in and out of fast food restaurants. We created a world of our own to escape the smothering sadness of this dead town: we built a fort in the woods, vanquished imaginary enemies, signed contracts of lifelong friendship with blood drawn by a penknife from our thumbs. When dark set in and we were forced to turn home we’d walk arm in arm, whistling songs as we went, whispering reassurances at each other’s front doors.

Then one day the Kirchner kid turned up in class. He wore a sequined jacket and a single silver glove, and he was so small that his spats and white socks swung above the floor. The whole class was in hysterics, calling names and throwing stuff at him, but he never so much as turned around, just sat facing the front until Mrs Mayfield walked in and put a stop to the chaos. Rumours began circulating that he lived alone with his mother, that the pair had moved from Memphis after his father, a bank clerk, had been killed in a heist; others said the kid was being treated for cancer, something that gained credibility when he started wearing a fedora hat to school a few weeks later. But mostly we were obsessed with the rumour that the kid’s mother had once worked for Michael Jackson, and that the singer remained a family friend. Kirchner reputedly claimed that Jackson had visited the family home in Memphis soon after his father’s death, and that he would be coming to see him here in Lightwater any day now. I paid it no mind, but it whipped the school up into a frenzy: some of the younger kids started following him around like a prophet, as though the Christ-like figure of Michael Jackson might materialise by his side at any moment. But mostly it was just more ammunition for the bullies.

Which brings us to what happened in the Walmart car park. It was a Saturday afternoon, not long before the end of the school year, and Gary was in a black mood. His mother’s abuse had lately slipped into behaviour that left no marks on his body, and which he refused to talk about. We were seeing less and less of each other outside school, which I suppose is what happens – Lou would soon be heading to university in Texas, and I was preparing to work for my uncle’s print shop in Calvary. We’d met for breakfast at McDonald’s, after which we planned to head to the forest and dismantle the old fort, and the air had been heavy with the sense of an era ending. After leaving the restaurant and walking through the car park we’d seen the Kirchner kid sitting on the curb like he was waiting for a ride, still in his sequined jacket and hat despite the heatwave, and Gary had just flipped – stormed up to him, started throwing accusations about his dead dad, about this Michael Jackson bullshit. I remember how bright it was, blinking through the heat haze to see the kid look up from under the rim of his hat and then go back to staring at the curb, and the next thing Gary was launching a series of kicks and punches, beating him in the body and the back of the head, the whole thing shimmering like a mirage, like one of those cartoon fights where all you see is the occasional fist or foot poking out of a cloud of dust. I remember being unable to move, just standing and watching as Lou tried to pull him away, and him hurling her to one side and continuing to kick the kid, who was now lying on the floor. In the end a couple of army recruitment scouts saw the commotion and intervened, by which time a sizeable crowd of onlookers had gathered.

Anyway, the rest you know. Gary was suspended, and the kid stayed away from school for the rest of the year. I saw Lou occasionally between classes, but we didn’t speak properly again until August, when we heard that the kid had died during treatment for cancer. She was working tables at Pizza Hut, saving up for college, and I was already manning the storeroom at my uncle’s print shop. We met one Sunday morning, picked up a bunch of flowers and walked to the Kirchner house to pay our respects. His mom sat us on the couch, gave us milk and cookies, asked about our relationship with her son, then led us to his room, where a dozen candles were burning around his bed, and a Michael Jackson CD was playing quietly on the stereo. I remember the opening chords of Liberian Girl starting up, and at that moment glancing over at a corkboard and seeing a photograph of Michael Jackson and the Kirchner kid, arms around each other, smiling for the camera.

That was the day the heatwave broke. By the time Lou and I left the house it was raining heavily, and we walked without speaking through deserted streets to the edge of town, led each other by the hand through the forest to the old fort, where we kissed for the first and only time under a canopy of trees flashing with lightning and echoing with distant thunder. I guess that last part isn’t exactly relevant, but I sometimes feel it’s the only truly bright moment in my life – nothing but darkness leading up to it, nothing but darkness after. I dream about it often, and sometimes when I wake in the middle of the night I still hear voices through the bedroom wall, only now they’re our voices – Lou, Gary and me. I guess I never did escape Lightwater after all.

The Chattering Man

There is a man standing in the middle of the desert, and his teeth are chattering.

Two things tell me that he is in the middle of the desert. Firstly there are dunes on all sides, similar to the one that he appears to be standing on top of; a marbled panorama of sun slopes and shadow faces and elegantly coruscating peaks, the whole scene feathering endlessly outward towards the horizon. This is the first thing.


Secondly, the man’s clothes – ragged strips of what was once a white shirt trussed about his shoulders, khaki trousers hanging in ribbons around his ankles, everything stained with dust and sweat. No shoes. Unshaven, of course – cheeks hollow behind a rough beard. Face and forearms burned to the point of looking almost scaly, as though he were only half human, half returned to some slithering desert animal. His wild eyes kaleidoscopic, and his teeth chattering, the hollow clatter of bone on bone echoing in the heat haze.

This man has been appearing to me for weeks in what I warily refer to as visions. There has been nothing sudden about his appearances: there have been no spilled coffees or embarrassing screams; I’ve not glanced in any mirrors and found myself looking instead into those spiralling eyes. It’s more a transmission than a visitation, something I can tune into at will on quiet tube journeys; as though he is there waiting, and always will be.

The more time that passes, the more convinced I become that this man has no history; that there was no plane crash or prison escape, no archaeological expedition from which he became separated. I doubt that he belongs to any nation or century, and were I capable of looking down to inspect the sand around him, I doubt I would find any footprints leading to this place.

I have begun to think that the man is instead a symbol of what it is to glimpse something so enormous and absolute that it renders the human body a broken vessel, the functions of sight and speech redundant, the world in which we once lived an endless plain, beautiful and terrible and ultimately uninhabitable. Perhaps he is a warning against accidentally unlocking a part of our unconscious minds capable of understanding that which we call the universe: to go from flippantly meditating on the scale of the cosmos to tripping a switch in the brain and suddenly seeing the whole thing in parallax: the nebulous star factories and the spiralling arms of pulsars stretching light years into space, the twisted forms of galaxies colliding, innumerable worlds simultaneously being and not being, countless civilisations raised and returned to dust.

Perhaps the man symbolises what it is to leave behind notions of time and space, the tinnitus whine of a few centuries of superstition and religion, and to momentarily stare at the whole thing in an awful ellipse of simultaneity. I think of Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett, of a description I once read of those early days in which he and his friends would sit in their London flat tripping on LSD, each moving closer to a vision of the universe unravelling, the star heart of the whole thing beckoning them inwards until one by one they would shake themselves free and claw their way back to what they had previously known as reality. Except Syd, who would be smiling and weeping, eyes still closed, skinny limbs sprawled awkwardly as the infinite part of his mind unlocked and he floored the controls into the flowering heart of the sun.

Syd who ended up a broken man, his brain ‘fried’, as the papers like to put it, locking away his adult life in his mother’s house in his hometown. Looking like a ghost in those few pictures snapped on the grey streets of Cambridge, his bicycle with a basket, his once wild eyes seemingly empty.

A warning then, but a warning applicable to the human world only – a world measured in minutes and described in diaries; a world in which a car can be referred to as ‘big’ or ‘small’, where the sun appears to sink and then rise behind the horizon. In the grander narrative of star factories and spiralling galaxies, such warnings are presumably just more white noise drifting into the ether along with Hitler’s speeches and NASA’s proclamations of peace; in such a world perhaps it makes mathematical sense to sacrifice the faculties of speech and sight to stare momentarily into the spinning eye of the universe. But this is not the world we live in.

Our lives follow an emotional trajectory. We carry with us the memories of the people we love until we ourselves are just memories in the minds of others. We stare at the undulating grey sea and picture ourselves as children; we look up at the stars and smile, then look away. We embrace our friends warmly, shake the frail hands of our fathers for longer than we need to. We watch Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler and weep, believing that we have seen a man encapsulate the human experience on screen. Perhaps we have.

As someone only marginally less sceptical of science and sense perception than religious dogma, I’ve long believed that the only promise of an afterlife I desire is an assurance that all this will go on long after I’m gone. Yet more recently I’ve been cradling a small flicker of hope that we might, in the moment of our death, be granted a single, totalising glimpse of the universe in its entirety, shedding the shackles of emotional consciousness and understanding existence in ways that cannot be put into words. By that point there will be no more diaries to keep, no more dinner parties to attend, no further need for the faculties of speech or sight. The man in the desert will no longer be a vagrant, no longer a fugitive from society; against my better judgement I indulge the image of him smiling, his eyes no longer wild, teeth no longer chattering, the sands around him no longer hostile or barren, but blossoming with the beauty of everything that lies above and beyond and within them, all of which is his, all of which may one day be ours.

Dark Matter

Dream I have written a potentially world-changing piece of music, and am desperate to carry it back to the land of the living. Wake to find the notes still in my head. After one round, realise it is the tune to ‘How Deep Is Your Love’.

Finish shaving. Constellations of tiny black hairs decorate the sink like a negative print of our galaxy. Reminded of a documentary on dark matter – the 70% of stuff in the universe invisible until recently due to its failure to reflect light, and tessellating previously disparate galaxies into an unthinkably complex whole. Try to dispel the unhelpful image of galaxies as remains of an enormous pre-cosmic beard.

Wait for a bus on Brixton Hill in biblical rain; my brown leather shoes, three days out of the box, are already tiger striped with water stains. Find myself watching a large puddle on the road, the report of rain on which seems to be tapping out a code; after a while, it becomes hard not to see a pattern emerging, as if the code were an SOS or warning on loop. Every passing car tyre shatters the surface of the puddle into a shimmering squall, tiny waves colliding until calm is restored and the rain begins tapping out its message once more.

Top floor of the 159, windows so steamed that the Thames looks like something from a Turner painting. All over the glass are fingerprints and handprints, signatures and abstract sketches, some looking days old. In black marker pen, on the grey plastic beside my seat, someone has scrawled the words: ‘Death is when you sleep sleep.’ I wonder how often, if ever, the writer stumbles across his work, and if the coincidence makes him feel momentarily as though existence is more than just a random assortment of sensory experiences.

At the studio find myself reluctant to work. Make tea, tidy up, spend an hour pitching for an article on the actor Harry Dean Stanton, whose documentary portrait – Partly Fiction – Spencer and I saw at the Curzon last night. Mention in the email that as a boy I was so obsessed with HDS that for two years I insisted my schoolmates call me Cyrus Dean Shahrad (none did). Wonder if they’ll think I’m making this up, and what kind of idiot they’ll consider me either way.

Spend another hour reading about the movie online. Most reviewers mention HDS in the back of his limo talking about how the fact that the earth orbits the sun at 17,000 miles per hour makes him nervous (“there’s nothing I can do about it”), or the drive back from the bar when he gazes out at the smog smothered Hollywood light show, noting that nothing matters because the earth will soon be gone (“and that’s not a negative concept… it’s liberating”).

Head out to buy an energy bar from Whole Foods, largely an excuse to cheer myself up by wandering past the Tofurkey products in the vegan aisle. Resist the urge to begin another text exchange with Spencer of song titles altered to incorporate the word ‘Tofurkey’ (‘Play Tofurkey Music White Boy’, ‘The Wrong N*gga Tofurk With’). Always seem to get the same girl at the checkout counter; always she looks at my lone protein bar and the twenty pence pieces I count out to pay for it with a mixture of pity and disgust.

Manage to achieve a negligible amount of something resembling work in the afternoon. At 5pm leave the studio and meet Daniela for coffee in Foyles. Brief discussion about whether her cappuccino is topped with a fern leaf or a feather, after which we spend a while deciding who has the worst tattoo among the various art students secretly sketching customers, unsubtle glances at their subjects revealing faces distorted with the seriousness of their endeavour. At some point find myself explaining my theory on the part of the self that in moments of crisis – a plane going down, a car flipping over – steps out from the shadow of the ego and makes time stand still, allows for clarity of thought previously cluttered by the accumulated detritus of consciousness; how I believe this accounts for the various stories of angels taking people’s hands and leading them to safety in moments of near death or disaster. Notice as I talk that Daniela is giggling and looking over my shoulder – at a waiter, it transpires, whose low slung trousers are revealing a sizeable builder’s crack as he gathers up cups. By the time we leave the fern/feather on her cappuccino is gone, replaced by foamy dregs that remind me of the froth that fringed the shores of Camber Sands when we played there as kids.

Harry Dean Stanton has a picture of the Milky Way on his wall; on it is an arrow disappearing into the nebulous starlight of one spiral arm with the legend: ‘You Are Here’.

Farsi class from 6-8pm, after which I walk through Leicester Square in the pouring rain for no reason. Pause outside the Pizza Hut on Cambridge Circus, where my brother and I once ate as children following a surprise trip to Les Misérables with our father, who had always been too busy at the hospital for nights out. Remember the excitement of racing to get changed after school, the flustered drive for the train; recall there being spots of blood on the collar of Dad’s shirt from surgery, and how quickly he fell asleep once the show began. Twelve years of living in London, and still the best memory of the city I have is of the three of us sitting at this window eating pizza after 10pm, looking out on to a rain soaked night like this one.

After a while I walk on to Trafalgar Square, my new leather shoes now ruined, and catch the 159 home. It’s not until the bus is passing over Westminster Bridge that I turn and see the words scrawled on the plastic beside me: ‘Death is when you sleep sleep.’

Crossing

Originally published by the Quietus

Howling wind wakes him before dawn. He slides across the futon, feet finding carpet. He hadn’t expected to sleep. He tries to recall his dream – thinks it may be important, under the circumstances – but has only a fleeting sensation of part of it having taken place on a train. He lets it go, switches on a lamp.

Standing at the kitchen counter he eats two pieces of toast from a loaf bought as he drove into town late last night – the expensive stuff, studded with seeds. As he eats he looks out the window at the darkened courtyard, pot plants upturned and trees twisting in the wind. He thinks back to the summer his mother bought this flat as a holiday home, how she’d joked about the pensioners that populated the place, the minimum age required for purchase; how she and his father had entered what she called ‘a grey area’. He’d ignored the joke at the time. They weren’t old.

He washes and dries his plate, reassembles the futon, switches off the boiler before locking up. Outside the cold air claws at him – he hadn’t banked on it being so cold. Wind wails in the trees and unsteadies his footsteps as he walks to the car. Once inside he sits a moment with the heating on, breathing on his hands and looking out the windscreen at a crescent moon and a single star in seeming alignment over neighbouring fields. He keeps the lights off as he rolls down the drive, turns them on once he is out in the country lanes.

He catches himself smiling in the rear view mirror. The act of driving is such a rarity that it never fails to spin him back to the summer day when he’d passed his test, driven alone to school, pulled into the car park to find Lucy Sanderson standing by the language department, arms full of folders. He’d parked beside her, leaned out the window and asked if she’d wanted to go for a spin – so unlike him that he felt he might burst into flames as the words left his mouth. She hadn’t said yes or no, just looked around and climbed in the passenger side.

He’d driven out the gates and down the hill. After a couple of minutes he’d switched on the tape player, and the car had rung out with the album he’d prepared to listen to in celebration after the test, but had forgotten to play. Down at the New Amsterdam, staring at this yellow haired girl Mr Jones strikes up a conversation. He’d turned and looked at Lucy, who had caught his eye and laughed, her blonde hair dancing in the breeze from the open window. He didn’t want to look too long for fear she’d disappear.

When he felt they’d gone far enough he’d turned around and driven back to school. Nothing said between them, not even when he’d dropped her at the language building and she’d picked her folders off the back seat and stood outside, leaning on the passenger window a moment and smiling quizzically in at him. Then she was gone, skirt swishing as she disappeared into the red brick building, and he was back on the road. Lay me down in a field of flame and heather, render up my body into the burning heart of god in the belly of a black winged bird. It was only later that he’d considered the possibility that, had he tried to kiss her, she might not have refused. Might have allowed him. Might even have encouraged him.

He’d known then that Lucy Sanderson wasn’t like the others. She never taunted him about his towering size or his geological slowness, never mocked him for his academic underachievement despite his bookishness, despite his head full of useless facts, despite the claims of certain liberal teachers – those that didn’t laugh at him along with the students – that he might be some sort of idiot savant, in possession of some uncanny academic power that might land him a place at Oxbridge (claims they had quickly distanced themselves from once his exam results came through the following summer). She’d been 18 then, which made her 36 now. He pictures her as a doctor or lawyer, tries to imagine her husband and children, the whole family gathered around a dinner table or Christmas tree.

He’d kept an eye out for her in town that summer after school, days he’d spent in the library, wearily toeing the line that he was still researching potential careers despite his reading being limited to the religious practices of ancient Egypt, his area of interest at the time. He’d kept an eye out for her in the public park, where he’d sat each lunchtime with his Walkman and his sandwiches until the afternoon he was attacked by a group of boys who’d been expelled from the year below him. And he’d kept an eye out for her on the bus home, seated at the front with the old folk and adopting their slumped demeanour, the cynical way they watched the town roll by – the rain coloured multi-storey car parks, the office blocks to let, the people swarming like insects in and out of openings. A town full of dead ends, though even then he’d sensed the presence of something endless and nameless beyond the clouds; even then he would sometimes imagine himself kicking free of the earth and swimming upwards to meet it, the towns below him shrinking to single cell life forms, lungs bursting as he fought to escape the atmosphere and break into the infinite beyond.

It’s almost 6am when he arrives at West Bay. He picks a spot in the middle of the deserted car park, tries to buy a ticket from a machine that isn’t working. Thinks about leaving a note, decides against it. He passes unlit pubs and tackle shops, pauses at the spot on the harbour where he had once sat as a child dangling for crabs. Remembers how they had circled a while in the bottom of his bucket before stopping and just sitting there, waiting for the end. How the thrill of catching them had paled in comparison to the wonder of tipping them back into the water and watching them scamper away.

He follows the path to the seafront, stands with his back to the wind and looks out on to the rolling black ocean. A handful of lights from fishing boats wink like stars on the horizon, the first hint of sunlight creeping through cracks in the cloud. Behind him, the wind rattles a sign outside the stand where his grandmother had once bought him ice creams. He remembers her telling him how she and his grandfather had come to this beach at dawn for a walk on the morning he’d been sent to the war, and found themselves surrounded by couples seeking solitude for tearful farewells of their own. He looks out at the sandstone cliffs rising in columns over a spit of shingle to his left, finds himself picturing dozens of couples walking like ghosts in the shadow of the rocks, embracing amid spray from the waves.

He thinks of his father lying on the floor of the garden shed, surrounded by fragments of the plant pot he’d been tending to when a heart attack had killed him where he stood. He’d been in his bedroom reading about how souls were ferried across the mythological River Styx when his mother’s cry had reached him from the end of the garden. He had earmarked his page before descending the stairs, Dante’s description of that mournful crossing echoing with every step.

He follows the promenade west, cuts on to the path straddling the ragged Jurassic cliffs as they rise towards Golden Cap. The wind tears at his clothes and howls in his ears as he climbs. Seagulls play in the currents of air that rush around the cliff edge, wheeling and diving and barking in what sounds like amusement.

Memories come to him unbidden, like a box of photographs upturned on a table and picked at random. He finds himself recalling how his father had set up a telescope in his bedroom on the evening of his tenth birthday, shown him how to use the constellation wheel and retired with a smile, leaving him to an open window and a clear September night. An hour later he’d marched downstairs to inform them that it was all wrong; that there were no constellations, no pattern to the stars – that it was just a visual fluke of Earth’s place in the universe. He recalls how his father’s face had fallen.

He remembers the weekend five years ago when he’d surprised his parents by accompanying them on a trip to the new flat, cramped in the back of the car with pot plants and a picnic hamper, his father stealing occasional disbelieving glances in the rear view mirror. The following day he’d walked with them to Bridport market, where he’d bought a 170 million-year-old ammonite chipped from the Charmouth cliffs he’d once clambered around as a child, and later they’d sat in Bucky Doo Square eating sandwiches, surrounded by tourists and pigeons like any other family. He’d been tracing a finger along the fossil’s polished spiral when he’d looked up and seen his mother and father smiling at him, hope like colourful bunting strung between them.

He remembers the day last year when his mother had come home in tears following a routine hospital checkup. He’d been researching Jacobean witchcraft trials at the time, and over subsequent weeks and months his reading had been interrupted by the doorbell and the phone as a procession of doctors and relatives called or stopped by. Once a day he and his mother ate dinner at opposite ends of the table like an estranged couple. There was no anger between them, just nothing left to say. He’d been holding her hand when she passed away in the hospice on the stroke of new year, ten days ago now. There were cheers and fireworks from the far side of the river, and in the stillness her face had flashed white and red from the light show outside.

That was the moment that he felt whatever had been tying him to the earth this last few years finally come untethered; felt himself floating high above the bowling alleys and the boarded up boozers, the sounds of cars and conversations flattened by distance. That was when he had finally glimpsed the vast otherness that awaited him on the far side, cosmic clouds like wings unfolding.

A sudden squall of cold rain, seemingly brighter than the air around it, starts without warning and stops just as suddenly. The cliff path is descending now, winding its way towards the beach at Eype. He walks side-on to avoid slipping on mud, bracing his feet against rocks, occasionally stooping to steady himself with a hand on the grass. At the bottom he walks through a small pass in the cliffs and out on to a shingle beach dotted with upturned wooden boats, their frames battered, paint peeling. He sizes them up before settling on a two-man tub with the name Eloise, lifts it to check for oars before flipping it all the way over. He takes its frayed rope in hand and drags it with great effort towards the water, breathing hard and fast through his nose, clenching his teeth as the sea rushes to meet him, filling his socks and trousers, tumbling stones cackling in the surf. He presses on, knows there will be plenty of time later to feel cold. A slackening of the rope tells him that the boat is now waterborne, but he doesn’t dare turn around, instead wades harder into the waves until suddenly the shingle bar drops beneath him and he is up to his shoulders, crying out at the shock, his brain fizzing with instructions, only some of which he can decipher. He forces himself to breathe, but all that comes are great open mouthed gasps, and almost immediately a black wave breaks against his face, choking him with salt water. His whole body has frozen in protest, but he manages to feed the rope through his hands until the boat is upon him, and slowly, with painful inefficiency, he begins to crawl into the tub. Halfway through another waves almost tips him headfirst into the sea, but he clings to the wooden pew and finally tumbles into the bottom, his back crooked against the oars, legs poking awkwardly over the edge.

He drags himself on to the seat and begins to row out to sea, frantically at first, exertion the only thing distracting from the crippling cold, his whole body shaking, jaw clattering. The boat pitches and lurches on the waves, whitewater spilling over the prow until he is up to his ankles, but the wind is with him, and he feels himself cleaving through the chop until suddenly the sea beneath him is calmer, the waves more gentle, and he knows that he is out beyond the breaking surf.

He lets the oars fall to his feet, sits back and allows himself a moment to gaze out at the rim of the world. The crescent moon and single star appear painted now against the pale coming of the sun, the first rays setting a crown of pink fire on the crest of Golden Cap. A single stone holiday home hugs the cliffs as the path rises from Eype – a postcard scene, but as he looks he sees only shelter, no different in essence from a mud hut or council flat, a painted cave or a castle. A place for life to survive, to look away from the infinite that roars on all sides. He thinks of the polished ammonite sitting on his mantelpiece back home, of Lucy Sanderson’s yellow hair dancing in the breeze, of the easy affection in his grandmother’s smile as she watched him devour his ice cream; he thinks of the crabs waiting patiently in the bottom of his bucket, of the drunk singing Auld Lang Syne in a nearby room as his mother’s hand had slackened in his, of the boys circling him in the park, spitting through bared teeth. All connected by a simple cosmic coincidence, their existence a side effect no different from heat, or light. And yet.

All you had to do was kiss her, he thinks. Lean across the car, put your hands on her hair. Let gravity do the rest.

After a few minutes he sees a light come on in the living room of the house. He clambers over the seats, braces himself against the stern of the boat, squints through the dusk and the mist of waves breaking on the shore. Standing behind the glass of the patio door is a boy, no older than six or seven, his small frame draped in a dressing gown. Up before his parents, presumably, scanning the channels for cartoons. He’s too far away to be certain, but he feels sure that their eyes are meeting, and in a split second in which the sea feels utterly calm, the boat completely still, he becomes convinced that the boy has raised his hand, and is waving to him. A moment later the world comes lurching back to life, salt wind howling and the boat physically leaning into the current that pulls it slowly, inexorably out to sea.

He waves back.

Marie's Place Is Empty

Originally published by the New Statesman

I walk along Fatemi Avenue in Tehran amid the swirling dust of a gathering electrical storm, the tulip-shaped towers of the Hotel Laleh swimming in a heat haze over honking afternoon traffic. I muster a smile for the doormen in peaked caps and gold lanyard and stroll purposefully into the foyer, freezing after a few steps and looking around me. For ten days this visit has loomed over my annual trip to the Iranian capital like the black flower of the hotel itself; now that I’m here, I haven’t the faintest idea what I’m doing.

The glamorous trappings of the lobby haven’t changed in seven years: an enormous art deco chandelier still forms an inverted pyramid of light over tables and chairs, the former dressed with red and white flowers, the latter upholstered with mock Gucci embroidery and occupied by a mix of bemused tourists and bored looking businessmen. There’s an unmanned grand piano, a bronze statue of Hafez’s tomb, a marble reception hung with mandatory portraits of the ayatollahs, eyes narrowed as though scanning the lobby for licentious behaviour.

I spot a receptionist studying me with interest, and in a split second convince myself that this is the same man who checked Marie in the night she arrived in 2005; who cracked a joke about Rupert Murdoch when she mentioned the Sunday Times, and who managed not to stare at her eye patch the way I had when I’d met her at the taxi rank ten minutes earlier. Suddenly self conscious, I turn and walk into the lobby, sit and order a pot of tea, aware only after the waiter has departed that I’m seated at our old table; that opposite me – to paraphrase a popular Iranian saying – Marie’s place is empty.

I’d been in Tehran for three months when Marie Colvin arrived to cover the presidential elections for the Sunday Times. I’d somehow wrangled work as home news editor of a national English-language newspaper despite my abysmal Farsi, a job that entailed rewriting largely unintelligible newswires on earthquakes and plane crashes (so many earthquakes and plane crashes), and righteous affirmations of Iran’s nuclear program. They were exciting and unsettling days: exciting because I was finally doing what everyone back home would see as ‘real journalism’ after years of travel writing and reviewing; unsettling because I felt like a fraud, and not just because of my second-rate Farsi.

I’d realised on arrival that I didn’t have the character of a news journalist; that I lacked the cynical swagger and the deadline in the blood. I wrote the occasional whimsical piece for publications back home – a story on underground poetry clubs for the New Statesman, another on coffee shop youth culture for the BBC – but when I pitched similar human interest efforts to the Sunday Times (a paper whose foreign editor had called me at Heathrow to express his happiness at having someone ‘on the ground’), they were turned down, and I was encouraged instead to put together something on the forthcoming elections. I didn’t have a mobile, so the foreign desk kept calling my grandmother’s house, where I was staying, only to have her bark insensibly down the phone until either party hung up or I realised what was happening and jumped on the line.

Still, as the first round approached I managed to write something on the elections – a few hundred words towing the widely accepted wisdom that former president and remade liberal Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani would sweep to victory (he had recently appeared on a Time magazine cover with the headline ‘Iran’s Next President’). I wrote it under the pseudonym Ali Bandari, something I told the Sunday Times would ensure against a conflict of interests with my own paper, though it was actually because I’d been refused a journalist’s visa, and could be arrested if my name was discovered in foreign publications.

Rafsanjani found himself vying for the second round against Tehran’s mayor, a hardliner called Mahmoud Ahmadinejad whose rare appearances in the international press had been as a caricature spouting semi-comical quotes about cutting off hands and strangling democracy. The story acquired an extra page and the Sunday Times sent in the cavalry – hence my meeting Marie Colvin at the Hotel Laleh that June evening, attempting to sound fluent as I bantered with her taxi driver and ordered a pot of tea at what would become our regular table.

She asked my opinion on what might happen at the ballots; I swallowed my pride over the first story (‘Rafsanjani’s seemingly full-blooded independence looks set to propel him to victory,’ says Ali Bandari), and told her what people were now saying in the office: that Ahmadinejad had a real chance of winning. That while Rafsanjani had been measuring his head for the crown and receiving the international media at his palatial Tehran offices, Ahmadinejad had been touring the provinces in a beat up orange bus, speaking in mosques and emphasising to the common people that it wasn’t just their right to vote, it was their Islamic duty. It had also become clear that he was Ayatollah Khamenei’s choice for president; beyond that, little else seemed to matter.

We had three days before Marie needed to file the story, days I spent almost entirely in the office, sometimes empty save for the caretaker’s son who careered around the floor in a plastic pedal car, crashing into desks and upturning chairs. I blackened my fingers flipping through back issues of the paper in enormous bound folders, filled notebooks with background on the candidates – details of Rafsanjani’s two terms as president between 1989 and 1997, of Ahmadinejad’s possible role in the American hostage crisis of 1979. When I did leave the office, it was to visit disparate parts of the capital and conduct interviews with potential voters – from wizened merchants hunched over sacks of dates and dried limes in the downtown bazaar, to Gucci-draped Persian princesses drifting around uptown shopping malls, headscarves serving as little more than hammocks for their dyed and dreadlocked hair.

At the end of each day I’d hop in a battered cab to the Hotel Laleh, euphoric and exhausted, arms laden with bundles of printed and photocopied paper, feet wincing with blisters. Marie and I would face each other over our usual table, a pot of tea between us, and I’d fill the gaps in her story, providing political context and local colour that her schedule of rigorously enforced press conferences left her unable to pursue. Once done with business we’d settle into our chairs and exchange war stories – hers filled with snipers and hostages, mine with ski resorts and secluded city bars. If she found my situation comical then she didn’t let on; she seemed impressed by my diligence, and implied that I might have a promising career at the Sunday Times, news she dropped into the conversation without realising that it caused the entire lobby to begin tilting beneath my feet.

That Friday morning I took my Iranian passport to the Tajrish mosque and purpled my finger with a vote for Rafsanjani. The results began filtering in the following afternoon, a day I spent glued to my computer, newswires piling up beside me as I refreshed the online vote count and watched Ahmadinejad snake closer to victory. Every hour I called the Laleh to update Marie, her smoke-stained phone voice instilling in my mind a timeless picture of the journalist’s hotel room: curtains closed, ashtrays overflowing, papers strewn over an unmade bed.

By the time I arrived at the hotel that evening Ahmadinejad’s victory had been announced, Marie’s story filed and her taxi to the airport booked. We drank a celebratory pot of tea, the piano occupied for the first and only time by a young man fiddling Persian flourishes into schmaltzy 1980s ballads. Afterwards she walked me to reception, shook my hand and gave me her card, scribbling her personal email on the back and encouraging me to drop her a line when I got back to London. “If you get back to London,” she said, winking to imply that she knew only too well how hard it would be to tear myself away.

I decided to walk back to my grandmother’s house that night. The streets were quiet after days ringing with protests and street parties and the names of candidates screamed from passing cars. The city seemed to have admitted defeat, to have folded in on itself to regard this latest development from a fearful distance. Yet I found myself smiling as I walked, swinging my steps in time to a piano ballad and greedily dismantling a bar of chocolate given to me in parting by Marie – a woman who had helped me find in three days what had previously eluded me for three months. Who had stopped me from feeling like a fraud.

Behind me, the dusk sky was scattered with bats, and the funereal towers of the Hotel Laleh receded for the last time, or so I thought.

Squirrels (Parts I & II)

I

A few years ago, two friends and I began renting a house at the top of Brixton Hill. It wasn’t a glamorous house – there’d been a hypodermic syringe sitting on a mantelpiece when the estate agent had shown us round (an ornament she made a heroic effort to ignore) – but it was big: a massive kitchen, large living room, creepy basement, a garden, and four bedrooms split between three of us, though our third was a lawyer caught up in a big case abroad, and couldn’t have spent more than a month in the house that whole year.

Best of all was my third-floor garret, separated from the rest of the house by two sets of doors and comprising a bedroom, a bathroom and a small office that I turned into a music studio. My housemate Will was using his own bedroom as a design workshop, yet entire days would go by without us bumping into each other; half the time I didn’t even know if there was anyone else in the building. I remember thinking from day one that it was the closest thing to an ideal living situation I’d ever encountered in London, and wondering how long it would be before something broke the spell.

The answer came a few weeks into our stay, when I woke one night to the sound of scurrying in the loft space a few feet above my head. As the veteran of more than one drawn-out campaign against domestic rodents, I knew from the noise that these weren’t house mice – there was an awful implication of mass to the bodies I heard scampering over floorboards and burrowing into boxes, and I felt sure I could discern the sound of claws scraping along exposed pipes.

The following morning I called our landlady and told her there were rats in the attic. There was a pause, then a sad sigh. They weren’t rats, she said, they were squirrels. They’d found their way in the previous summer via an overhanging branch, after which she’d had pest control in to lay traps, blocked up all the holes and trimmed back the trees, hoping that would be the end of it. She said she’d send someone over, and apologised for any inconvenience in the meantime.

A couple of days later the Rentokil guy showed up. He was a sinister sort, speaking slowly and with an emotional blankness that I assumed could only have come from prolonged exposure to the suffering of small animals with expressive eyes. Access to the loft was via a ceiling hatch in the corridor that joined my garret with the stairs leading back to the rest of the house; I waited anxiously while he poked around up there with a flashlight, returning a few minutes later to tell me that he was going to set up a few guillotine boxes. “Only thing big enough to take out squirrels,” he said. He asked me to guess what he used to bait them, and I told him I didn’t know. He produced a Topic bar from his overalls. “Squirrels can’t get enough of these things,” he said, unwrapping and biting into it in a way that was deeply unsettling. “Developed quite a taste for them myself, over the years.”

He told me that the traps went off with a loud bang, and that I’d probably be better off sleeping elsewhere for a week or so. I didn’t tell him that I’d vacated my own room that first night, and had since been sleeping on a nest of sofa cushions on the living room floor. Over the coming days I spent as little time as possible in the garret – I continued to work in my studio, but seemed incapable of listening to music for more than a few seconds without becoming convinced I could hear tiny claws skittering somewhere in the mix. I’d pause the track and sit waiting for a bang and a terrible scream, but there was only silence. On a couple of occasions the Rentokil guy returned to dispose of bodies that he carried out the attic and down the stairs in bin liners; once I heard him chuckling to himself as he poked around in the carnage above me. Yet in all that time I saw and heard nothing more of the squirrels themselves. The whole unpleasant episode, it seemed, might yet come to a close without my having to stare into the abyss itself.

Until the morning of my birthday, a weekday on which I crawled back into the house around 7am after a night spent celebrating with a girl I was seeing. I remember the feeling of contentment as I walked back up the hill, the first commuters filing on to public transport like condemned men and women while the rising sun set clouds alight. I remember stopping to pick up a box of cereal and eating two bowls at the kitchen table before sinking into the sofa cushions for what I felt sure would be a long and conclusive sleep, only to wake, no more than an hour later, to the sound of a man screaming.

I ran into the kitchen in time to find Will closing the door to the garden behind him, his morning cigarette still unlit in his fingers, his eyes wild and head shaking slowly. He told me not to go outside. I asked why, and he said because it was my birthday, and no one should start their birthday looking at something like that. I stepped around him, opened the back door and walked out into the garden, and saw something that even now I struggle to describe, despite the fact that I only have to close my eyes for a moment to see it printed against the black canvas of my subconscious.

It was half a squirrel. More than half a squirrel, perhaps, but certainly not 75%. Nor by calling it half a squirrel do I mean to suggest that it was neatly bisected along some obvious biological fault line – I wasn’t looking at the front end of a squirrel, nor the rear end. There was a front and a hind leg remaining, but they were both on the same side; the other side was a cross-section of bones and burst organs hanging in pink and blue ribbons. There was no tail, but there was a head, and the black eyes were open. The trail of blood told a horrifying story: the animal must have somehow worked its way side-on into one of those grisly guillotines, losing limbs and organs in the process, expending the last of its life force crawling out of the loft before either climbing or falling down the tree into the garden.

I’m not sure how long I’d been staring before I became aware of Will behind me, cigarette in one hand, bin liner in the other. He told me to go back to bed, that he’d sort out the mess. I didn’t argue. I picked up a card and a present from the kitchen table as I passed through, gathered my duvet from the living room and moved back into my bedroom. I never heard another squirrel scurrying around the attic, the Rentokil man never came to pick up the last of his traps, and I’ve never been able to look at a Topic bar since.

II

That was nearly four years ago. I’m still at the top of Brixton Hill, living alone in a one-bed flat in a big white block that under cover of night you might convincingly pass off as ‘art deco’. A nice enough place – clean and bright, glorious views of Telford bus garage, the 24-hour engine sound of which is a great balm to my tinnitus. I’m not here much – the place is a holding pen of sorts, a white pod in which to sleep and eat, to check emails and recharge appliances between days spent making music in a Soho studio. It’s not often that I find myself stuck in the flat with time to kill, but when I do, I tend to go walking in Brockwell Park, and that’s exactly what happened last Sunday evening.

The sun was setting by the time I arrived, but the heat of the day still lingered on the lawns; picnickers remained scattered around piles of crisp packets and empty cider bottles, parents sat gazing as their babies stumbled after butterflies, young couples lay entwined in each other's arms, drunk on desire. I’d bought a coffee en route, and I sipped it on a hill overlooking the city skyline, which shimmered against a canvas of electric yellow cloud. I thought how calm and stately those towers seemed, and wondered what my preference for viewing London from a distance said about the potential imbalance of the active and contemplative parts of my life. After half an hour or so, a cool breeze picking up and the hills clearing of people, I stood and began making my way home.

That was when I saw the squirrel, a crumpled pile of fur at the base of a big tree lining the path. Not a baby squirrel, but certainly no more than a kid – small paws undeveloped, body no wider than a belt. He lay motionless on his stomach, back twisted awkwardly and rear end elevated in a way that suggested a nose-dive towards the earth. I stepped closer, noticed simultaneously that his fur was crawling with lice and that his little chest was rising and falling so faintly as to be almost imperceptible in the gathering shadow. My mind turned over a dozen different instructions on what to do when discovering the victim of a violent accident, none of which seemed applicable to squirrels. With a single hand I gathered his body in my fingers, attempted gently to lift him from the ground, at which point his front legs began stretching uselessly, paws clawing at the grass, his breathing quickening though his eyes remained closed.

I called my brother, a doctor with a garden and a great deal of empathy, and he told me, as I feared he would, that the humane thing to do would be to end its misery. He warned against breaking its neck with my hands for fear of bad dreams if it went wrong. He asked if I had a spade to hand; I told him I did not. He suggested finding a large rock with which crush its skull, and I said I’d have a look, hanging up and sitting back down beside the squirrel. I couldn’t recall seeing any large rocks in my years walking Brockwell Park, and I didn’t intend to leave the thing to start looking now. I took a moment to focus my thoughts, glanced around the park to make sure I wasn’t being watched, reached over and took the squirrel’s head in my fingers.

At that moment I heard squeaking from high in the tree above me, and looking up I saw another squirrel, no larger than this one, frantically crying out as he skittered over branches. I stood and watched, certain I was about to witness a second plummeting squirrel turned into a twisted pile of limbs. His ability to cling to the tree was untrained – I couldn’t shake the image of the pair of them breaking out of the nest without parental permission – and more than once I watched him lose his footing and skid perilously close to the edge of the branch, all the while emitting a terrible babyish whimper filled with what sounded like familial loss. When I knelt back over the injured squirrel, his eyes were open, and he was making a wet, drawn out whine of his own, breaths that sounded like broken bricks being dragged along a broken road.

At that point I did what seemed the only thing left available to me: I took out my phone and began searching online for nearby animal hospitals. I got some advice from a lady who ran a charity in Croydon, left a message with a man who operated a volunteer animal ambulance in east London, listened to a recorded summary of the weekday opening hours of a rescue centre in Beckenham. Finally it occurred to me to call the RSPCA, the receptionist at which said they’d send an ambulance to my flat if I could find a box to carry the squirrel home in. I hung up and made a quick circuit of the few remaining picnic parties in close vicinity; none had any boxes, nor did the bins yield anything but sauce-encrusted takeaway cartons. I returned to the squirrel, removed my jumper, lifted him gently into it, and began walking over the darkening earth in the direction of home.

The world we passed through seemed created entirely for the occasion. Heavy shadows lay over the residential streets leading away from the park, yet the sky remained a sort of powdery blue, the clouds faded pink, no longer electrified at the edges by the sun, which had long ago set, but all the more beautiful for it. I pointed this out to the squirrel, who I had named Shen; I told him that the thing about sunsets, with their solar pyrotechnics and ceremonial stages of apocalypse, was that they were constantly changing – perhaps that was what made them so powerful, I said, the compressed span of their cosmic collapse instilling in us a sense of what our own lives probably look like in timelapse. But this thing that followed – this pale blue sky, these pink clouds – seemed in its majestic calm to imply something endless and peaceful following the firework shows that our little lives comprise.

It wasn’t easy to tell amid the shadows how much of this was going in. Shen remained slumped against the folds of my jumper, his front legs splayed at the same awkward angle they’d occupied in the park, his eyes closed. I gave him a gentle poke and saw his head shift, his little paws clutching empty air, and I sped up a little. I kept talking as we approached the flat; I told Shen about the building, which I felt no qualms describing as ‘art deco’ given the cover of darkness, and I apologised in advance for the mess – I’d not known I’d be having guests, I said. I told him not to expect anything grand; I explained about the studio in Soho, and how this was just a holding cell, a place to sleep and eat and recharge appliances. The usual spiel. If he was judging me, he managed not to show it.

Back in the flat I laid his broken body down on the living room floor, noticing as I did so that the jumper he rested on was already seething with lice. I set to work with a pair of scissors and a small cardboard box snatched from the recycling bin outside, padded the thing out with an old T-shirt and scattered a few raisins at the head end in an attempt to make it feel more like a luxury squirrel carriage than an IKEA squirrel coffin. I laid Shen inside – his breathing was almost imperceptible now – and carried the box out on to the balcony, where we sat looking south over Streatham. I apologised for the scaffolding, cursed the ongoing renovation work, pointed out Telford bus garage and made passing reference to its soothing qualities for a tinnitus sufferer. Just small talk. There was so much I really wanted to say – how I knew about life sometimes feeling like a crap carnival act, the garish colours and sad jokes, everyone dancing like puppets in an attempt to convince themselves that the days made some sort of sense. I wanted to tell him that everything would be fine if only he could get back into his tree, find a spot where he could see the sky unencumbered by buildings, and sit watching the clouds drift awhile. I wanted to tell him to fight. I wanted to tell him to live.

“There’s so much left for you to do,” I began.

At that moment the buzzer went. I paused, gave his head a parting stroke, then carried the box downstairs and out into the car park, where I found the ambulance driver standing beside his vehicle. My heart sank a little at the sight of his white van – part of me had been expecting a team of nurses and a gurney, an on-the-spot defibrillation before the thing screamed off towards the hospital, sirens wailing. As it was, the man smiled patiently – a kindly, middle-aged face, bushy moustache – and took the box that I held out to him. He peered inside, looked back at me with a sad expression. “Looks like he’s fallen out of the nest,” he said. “Probably not much we can do.”

I followed him to the rear of the van, where he placed the box carefully on one of a number of shelves, most occupied by similar-sized boxes, before locking up and heading back to the driver’s seat. He passed an envelope through the window, told me about the importance of donations, and thanked me for caring about animals as he started the engine. I waited until the van had turned out on to the street before walking back to my flat and out on to the balcony, where I sat a while longer watching the pink clouds strung over Streatham like a choir of Renaissance angels, the engines of Telford bus garage tuning up as though for a requiem about to begin.

Shahnameh

He is there, my father, and I am here. Me on the balcony, collar up against the morning breeze, hands clinging to a cup of anaemic French tea; he hunched over the dining table of our diminutive apartment, surrounded by inverted kiwi skins and shards of consumed croissants, baguettes of varying freshness stacked like logs in an antiquated timber town. He catches my eye through the balcony doors that I’ve drawn for privacy, and I smile to signify that I’m nearly done writing; he looks away, half shaking his head to let me know that I’m frittering away time I should be spending in the overgrown garden, a can of weedkiller in one hand, secateurs in the other.

In recent weeks I’ve taken great care to overuse the words ‘working on my father’s flat’ when describing this trip to friends – a phrase I like to think conjures up images of the pair of us paint-speckled and halfway up ladders, tool belts clinking authoritatively as we tend to leaking roofs or disappear beneath sinks to repair plumbing. Instead we’ve spent our time thus far sipping tea in socks and shorts, my father flipping through a procession of nature shows and soap operas in search of a football game, me absently turning pages in the current affairs magazines that I buy as many times a year as I travel by plane.

We left yesterday morning from Luton Airport, the long-term car park of which staged a scene tinged with the sort of manic near-disaster that I remember from the start of so many childhood holidays. We’d wasted half an hour crawling around banks of parked cars without finding a space, the stereo relentlessly skipping a CD of Iranian sitar music until I leaned over and switched it off, leaving the air pregnant with panic and my father’s muffled curses. By the time a spot appeared we had just twenty minutes to make the gate, bundling bags from the boot and sprinting to a dilapidated plastic bus shelter that rattled in the dawn wind.

“It’s like a bus stop in the African desert,” grumbled my father, a comment that made me wince when he repeated it to a family of holidaymakers who joined us moments later. When the bus finally arrived I muscled Dad through the middle doors to stop him verbally abusing the driver, then took a seat a few rows back from him, watching as he gazed with weary resignation at the procession of hangars and cheap hotels. I thought of the packet of shortbread in his jacket pocket, the parking reference scribbled hastily on the back of his hand, and as passengers accumulated and he disappeared behind squabbling teenagers and sleepy couples I experienced a sense of my father’s fragility such as I’d known when we’d parted on London buses, and I’d been forced to watch through the window as he crossed the street and disappeared like any other human being into the midday crowd.

***

As the sun sets on our first full day my father drives us to a nearby cliff walk skirting a number of isolated beaches and rocky inlets, the volcanic nature of which has led to me noting on our rental site that the area is affectionately known as the ‘black pearl of the Mediterranean’, a name I may well have made up, or subconsciously lifted from a pirate movie.

I’ve spent the afternoon working in the garden to the downstairs flat, pulling up small colonies of daisy headed weeds that have gathered since last summer and hacking at hedgerows with rusty secateurs, and as we drive I pick at cuts, burns and blisters on my hands while gazing out the window at the passing resort. I see couples idling on benches with ice creams, children like baby chicks cycling behind their mother’s bike, shell coloured stucco apartments with names like La Grande Conque and Palais De La Mer. As we hover at traffic lights I hear the whistling masts of boats bobbing in the harbour like plastic birds, the mosquito whine of a distant moped, and it occurs to me that this is just another French beach town with no discerning characteristics save its successful embodiment of so many types and tropes: the nightly din of a dozen different backing tape singers competing for listeners in harbourside bars, the rattle of rollercoasters in the eyesore amusement park, its scaffold-clad Adrenaline tower looming over the surrounding countryside like the gallows of some giant race. It’s a place that smells of ice cream and sun cream, of cigarettes and underage sex, a washed out stereotype no different from the semi-abstract beach resorts of Persona or Betty Blue – a canvas of the unbearably mundane, and a backdrop for seismic emotional shifts.

It takes my father fifteen minutes of parking and reparking the rental car before he’s satisfied that it isn’t going to be towed, stolen or start rolling towards the cliffs. I leave him to it, crossing to a wooden fence barring the drop to the sea and looking out at a spine-like rock formation snaking towards a large boulder painted white by seagulls. My father eventually jogs into view, huffing and puffing and holding on to his baseball cap lest it blow away in the wind, and we begin following the cliff path, pausing at breaks in the fence to peer down into small coves where women lay topless in the last of the afternoon sun, heat-swollen paperbacks abandoned beside them.

I think I’ve been hoping for a revelatory conversation, or at least a single moment of insight like that which followed my maternal grandfather’s funeral, when Dad had whisked me from the community hall wake – where I’d been avoiding triangular sandwiches and sad displays of gardening trophies and trying to forget my eulogy – and driven me to West Bay, where he walked me down the pier and related an old Iranian maxim as the sun set over the sea. “Life is like a tightly tangled ball of wool,” he’d said. “At the beginning is nothing, and at the end is nothing.”

No such insights colour our walk today. At one point my father notes how everything you love in this life ultimately leaves you, but he is referring to a pair of sunglasses he sat on earlier in the afternoon. The only other revelation comes courtesy of a story about a boat journey he and his Iranian friend Mehdi had once taken to Sète, the market town now creeping into view on the horizon. The water had been so choppy, he says, that he’d suddenly and unexpectedly vomited on to the shoulder of a man standing on the lower deck as they’d been docking. The man hadn’t noticed, but my father had felt guilty enough to present himself at the exit, explain what had happened and apologise. The man had apparently taken the news in his stride. If there is a moral to this story, I fail to grasp it.

At some point I mention that I fancy a beer, and my father says that there’s nothing stopping us having one at the cluster of bars lining the Plage du Môle, a stretch of sand another ten minutes along the coast. Suddenly it seems that this is the purpose of our walk: I picture my father and I pausing to sip our demis a few feet from the mane of the Mediterranean as the setting sun torches the sky, and my heart lightens as we turn the corner on to the promenade of Le Môle, its central square peppered with shirtless men playing boules amid small dust storms, cigarettes hanging from their lips.

I leave my father to find a toilet while I scour the strip for an establishment unlikely to offend him, settling on an innocuous terrace bar playing ignorable French pop and with only a handful of customers. I’m in the process of ordering beers when he arrives, stopping me with a frown and a flap of his hand and insisting that he wants nothing to drink. The waitress shrugs, smiles and walks away.

Very little of what is said over the following few minutes resembles conventional father-son bonding – Dad describes in detail the poor hygiene of the public toilet he’s just visited, and passes comment on a spot flaring over my left eyebrow – and during lulls in conversation the music that had appeared so inoffensive on arrival seems to rise in pitch and volume, driven suddenly by a pair of duelling electric guitars that perforate the air. I watch my father clock his surroundings with the same grim resignation with which he’d gazed out of the airport bus window the previous morning, and understand all too well what a bad idea it had been to expect him to relax in so alien an environment.

The waitress arrives with my beer and a bill for €2.90, and my father grudgingly hands over a five, inspecting the change with a look of resentment before pocketing the lot. By the time we begin arguing over the tip there’s a weary inevitability about the situation, as though we’re speaking lines in an unsuccessful play that neither of us wants to be part of, getting the final scene out the way so we can disappear out the back door as the curtain falls and a few hands clap, grab our coats and point our cars home. I barely look up when my father finally throws his hands in the air, standing with a scrape of his chair and striding off towards the shops. In his absence I sit and watch the shore rush and recede, struggling to find something resembling refreshment in the beer I’d wanted so badly, but tasting only chemicals and a ghost note like the stale smell of the store room in the off-licence I’d worked in one summer.

Ten minutes later, my glass drained, I rise and walk back along the promenade, where I find my father waiting at the head of the path and determined to act as though nothing has happened. Perhaps it hasn’t. He barely stops talking all the way back to the car – about a woman in the boulangerie that he offended that morning, about a toilet roll holder he needs to replace in flat 50, about his broken sunglasses – and I give as enthusiastic a series of responses as I can muster. I know from experience that the sadness will pass: that half an hour from now I’ll be holding on to it through pride alone, and half an hour after that it’ll be forgotten, and I’ll be seated on the balcony with a book and a glass of wine, glancing between paragraphs at my father on the couch, headphones on and eyes closed, hands manipulating the dials on his radio like a blind man scanning brail.

***

The following afternoon I’m woken by the sound of my name being called from a distance. I sit up blinking and shirtless on the baking sand of the Plage Richelieu, squinting through the heat haze to see my father staggering towards me, his dark shirt and trousers lending him the appearance of a mythical fugitive, a bearer of apocalyptic news. The pre-season beach is almost deserted: save the wash of the shore and the rustle of dune grass the only sound is a faint hammering from a nearby bar being assembled in anticipation of the coming holidays.

My father, when he arrives, is breathless with the exertion of his walk. After a few moments panting on his back he strips down to his swimming trunks and passes me a carrier bag containing oranges, sun cream and a bottle of Kronenbourg from the case we picked up at the supermarket that afternoon. This last item is a thoughtful gesture – a veiled apology, I assume, for our squabble at the bar the previous day – but the green glass is getting warmer by the minute, and I turn it down with some excuse about a headache from the sun. If he’s offended, he doesn’t show it.

He reaches for the lotion and applies it to his face, arms and chest before asking me to attend to his back, and as I do so he airs the frustration of his failed attempt to replace the faulty toilet roll holder. It’s a monologue riddled with curses for the block’s live-in handyman, who Dad believes is stealing everything from cutlery to condiments and sabotaging appliances that he knows he’ll be paid to replace. I refrain from venturing an opinion, focusing instead on my father’s back, imagining how the contours and continents of this boundless map of his being have shifted over the decades.

The lotion applied, he stands and steps into his heavy black shoes – their backs folded down like Frankenstein slippers – and begins weaving an unsteady path towards the sea. In the far distance, so faint as to seem painted against the sky, the snow-capped Pyrenees line the horizon, and as I watch my father’s slow progress across the deserted beach I imagine him as an elderly king from Ferdowsi’s Persian epic the Shahnameh, stripped of his material wealth and worldly cares and making his way gratefully to the shores of Paradise after a life filled with battles and betrayals. I watch him step out of his shoes and walk slowly into the ocean, the silver water rising to his waist before he dives beneath the surface, a series of concentric ripples the only evidence that he was ever there. I look down beside me at the pile of his things: his coiled leather belt, his tattered three-day-old newspaper, the peel of his orange. And there, balanced on top like a grave ornament, his reading glasses, their lenses already obscured by sand shifting in the mistral wind.