Hysteria Island, Chapter One

Today Cromer stands weary and sodden, viced between grey clouds and grey surf and held fast against the idiot rocks of Great Britain by great straps of sideways rain and booming North Sea gales. Faded remnants of a time when Queen Victoria sat on the posh toilet no longer adorn across the seafront, they're just there in tribute. It's like a bad cover band of a seaside resort. The pier, once seen as a phallus of empire, jutting into the bodies of water which we held to be our own, now stands flaccid and diminished. Washed out plaudits for the pier of the year award from years ago range across the archway at it's beginning. The promenade from which it spurs is just as violently lifeless. It's one of those 'I'm not angry, I'm disappointed' type of places. The arcades and funfair, taking the brunt of the sea surge at its terminus are enough to make you kill yourself, or at least gloves and a balaclava.

Up at cliff level around the cursive loop of its one way system is a town swollen in the perpetual damp by charity shops and cafes selling all day breakfasts and crab buckets. In one of which, Jane's Pitstop; sea glimpses, vaguely dirty coffee cups and an unending circling of gulls above, stands Jane herself. Former glamour model, now hardcore post-everything feminist and proprietor. Sweating lank strips of bacon and the bleakest of black pudding in a pan shuffled by a hand within thin blue latex gloves almost splitting where they meet with the angles of her elongated Burberry painted nails. Forty eight year old Jane Elizabeth had always been, when it came to fashion; #Zeitgeist

Even when emancipating sisters across the world it was important to stay on the shoulder of the latest cardigan, that's what makes people listen. That's what made 44k subscribers. And that put value in life. This greasy spoon, although safely in the middle range of eateries around town, had not been the life that she had imagined back when the body was firm and emotions soft. The future had promised much but its arrival, almost imperceptible in its reversing into the present, gauged only by the creep of grey hairs and collapse of poise, had disappointed. The modelling jobs dried out, the suitors thinned out and the lifestyle bottomed out. There had been a decade and a half of self destruction, the usual. But and after all, the ego insisted on being sated. She had finally washed up on the east coast, woke up and cleaned up and opened up the Pitstop and then the swell of feminism that had swept the country fired her up.

And the stray man who has escaped from somewhere else is very polite and smells a bit like straw.

"Opiates, opiates, bring me my opiates."

Was that Shakespeare? Rolls up to the counter and orders; "I'm ready for my opiates."

But he talks how he looks; half dead with palsy and soaking through with floral patterns; shying away yet multiplying with a shaking brand of hard anxiety. Mysteriously he thinks it makes him look younger; the shirt, with its mauves and creams and blues and such. It doesn't.

"Roy, you're not in Gods waiting room now."

"Young lady, what are you talking about? It's time for my opiates."

"How about a nice cup of tea?"

"Oh, that's a promising idea."

"How many sugars today?"

"Five."

"Take a seat and I'll bring it over."

This was a familiar game. Jane watching him stagger to a window table, takes a step back and taking the phone out of the cradle that's hanging on the wall she dials from memory, Poppyland Care Home.

The train coasted into the station, wheezing through beaded curtains of precipitation, hydraulic brakes steaming as it slowed and stopped and gently nuzzled the very end of the line. A riff of tremolo alarms played along its flank as the doors nervously opened and deposited their load. Bundles of pushchairs and anoraks, overnight bags and over-week luggage, of walking frames, packed lunches and status updates all tumbled off. Families trying to and failing to influence the weather with industriously milled smiles and deep mined laughter.

Killer Ken, prefix newly attached, was last off the last carriage, Daily Flail rolled and wedged under his arm like a social thermometer, counter-balanced by a single brown case held in opposite hand.

How much time, he wondered, must pass for a tradition to become traditional? A year or two? Five? A decade? And how many people must buy into it? The unknowable mechanisms of bank holiday weekends and of history whittled and withered until it fits neatly onto a page within a chapter. And from there forgotten by most. Perhaps the world had always done and will continue to just do the same things over and over.  Perhaps the sheer depth and complexity of it all could only be truly known through some higher combination of formula and equation, something quantifiable and tangible but nonetheless unknowable. One shouldn't speculate overly. He was certain, however, that something had to change and he alone knew what that was.

The crawl of passengers, freshly unpassenged, down the hill towards town like molasses, in damp darkened hats and coats, began to break into streamlets and puddles as nuclear families and circles of friends branched off into supermarkets and Ice Cream parlours and public toilets. Killer Ken, as was usual on these trips to mother, headed at first straight down towards the front, to the very edge of the country.

Mr Jones, alternatively sucking his teeth and chewing his pen, built a fore and middle finger paradiddle on the edge of desk into his nervous rhythm. The spreadsheet he surveyed over the top of his impractically tiny spectacles offered little by the way of good news. In fact aside from marginal savings in the columns labelled 'Refreshments' and 'Cleaning Products', the news was exclusively on the wrong side of neutral.

"I'm afraid to say that I really cannot see any other solution. It's simply not sustainable. We're in a pickle, I'm afraid to say. We are stagnating."

On the other side of the desk Julia and Martha visibly stiffened in their respectively uncomfortable chairs.

"Mr Jones, these are people not customers and not objects."

"I'm afraid to say that customers is exactly what they are, Martha. Paying customers no less. And what are we all to become in death but objects?"

With no rebuttal forthcoming other than a muted sigh of despair disguised by Julia artfully with a yawn, Mr Jones continued; "No life force, no circadian rhythms to keep the dancing parts moving, no consciousness. At the onset of death, we become albeit newly inanimate, inanimate nonetheless, objects. It is very clear to me, I'm afraid to say that Poppyland Care Home has been in crisis for some time now. We must innovate to compensate."

"What about the families? They won't go for it. It doesn't feel right, Mr Jones. I'm sure the residents and the families just won't go for -"

"The residents here are in our chance and subordination, they instil in us, from arrival to departure a sense of trust that we will invariably make the right choices for them. As for the families, I'm sure that the opportunity for a one stop shop, so to speak, will ease the burden of a challenging time, both financially and emotionally."

"Instil in them." Julia said.

"What?"

"Wen instil in them." She said again, eyes turned downward towards her hands now steepled in her lap but restless. Mr Jones looked up at her and blinked his raisin eyes.

"I think it works both ways." Said Martha who always looked to defuse situations before they became worse situations. Perhaps his eyes were more currant like.

The duty manager phone began to cheerfully hum Auld Lang Syne from Julia's breast pocket, illuminating her robust bosom in digital green.

"Hello?" She said squashing it against her face.

"Yeah, hi. It's Jane from Jane's Pitstop; good food, reasonable prices."

"Hi Jane, it's Julia."

"Oh. Hi."

"Hi. How can I help?" 

"You still hanging out with those Women's Institute wimps?" It could be said that the two J's had a certain history of a certain animosity.

"Yes, thank you. How can I help?"

"Still making jam?" Julia could almost feel the contempt warm and breathy against her cheek.

"How can I help, Jane?"

"Roy is here again.

"Again?"

"Again."

"Okay, we'll send somebody down." She sighed and hung up and re=pocketed the phone. Martha looked at her, Mr Jones looking mildly nonplussed at the interruption asked; "Problems?""

"Roy's escaped again."

"Oh no, oh dear." Said Martha who always looked to catastrophize situations before they became catastrophic situations.

"How? Why wasn't he being watched?" Asked Mr Jones, exasperation flushing his cheeks and colouring his tone.

"We're all in here, Mr Jones. You called a meeting. I'll go and get him."

"We're stagnating." He said almost entirely to himself. "We are definitely stagnating."

The sediment of a dream lay gritty upon his cerebellum when he woke up and almost immediately he fell off the bar stool. He lay there for a moment and then another. The desperation was thick and sticky on the carpet in this place. This place being at this precise moment, The Smugglers; arguably the oldest and definitely the seediest pub in town.

"You alright Spencer?"

"Uh huh." He said picking himself up and righting the stool and sitting back down, elbows parked on the bar, head in hands.

"You know, Spencer; the whole point of us opening early is so that people can eat breakfast before they booze themselves onto the floor." Len the landlord said, his voice stalled at some previously undiscovered waypoint between pity and disdain. "you look like shit."

"Uh huh." Rubbing his eyes with the heels of his palms. "Screwdriver." He pushed an assortment of coinage across the bar.

"Big breakfast?"

"No."

"Mega breakfast?"

"A Screwdriver. Please. A double." Spencer looked around, momentarily disorientated. "Why isn't the Jukie on?"

"You know the rules; no music before two." Replacing glass to bar runner he eyed the rubble of coins with something approaching disgust. "Gets people rowdy."

"Yeah, well, it's a ridiculous fucking rule."

"Rules often are. And gesturing palm up and open at the money he added, "Governments often are. There's not enough here, have you got a note?" Spencer looked at him and then the coins and then at him again. "There's enough."

"I'd just prefer a note." He shrugged impatiently. "You'll need the change for the Jukebox. At two."

"Put the television on then. I just had this terrible dream that we were having a conversation." And shaking his head he handed over a fiver.

"Sure."

North Norfolk it turned out was nothing like California. Not in psychic sickness nor in weather. In fact, if indeed beauty is in the eye of the beholder,  then still nobody thought it was a beautiful summer's day in Cromer, or anywhere else at all. It was late June 20- and it was Independence Day on Hysteria Island.