Desire Line, page 2
Those who had made it over the bridge wouldn’t be coming back. At least it wasn’t Tess’s road in. Suddenly— Yori?
Tess! Where was she?
Where d’you think?
Spiky if she thought she was talking to her boss but jokey to a sexual partner. I said OK, instantly breathless, picturing her shiny-faced and definitely not in a fleece suit. Nude. Or in material her sparrow’s frame would show through, it being her main attraction, that and the way she says I’m all toast-ty! as she does now. (She’s more Welsh than you hear in town). Day off, eh? I wish we were— but her wish gets drowned out by Libby shouting, ‘Fuckinghell!’ above my head. Above her head the good grey slates must be grinding together like teeth. A dragon was touching down by the sound of it and about to swipe us with its tail—
So we got The Wave. But The Wave’s not the thing. What it caused is the thing. And to be honest every meteorological blip on the earth’s so well covered if you’re watching them they’ll blend. Towyn, that I described at the start, could easily be somewhere in France a decade on. It doesn’t take many years to become a quiz question. ‘Atlantic City or Rhyl? Ten seconds, team!’ So not to make a drama of it, I survived. Obviously. But I want to say this. Don’t credit any reports of panic. Buses loaded with families continued on inland. Exits blocked as entire fascia claddings and street furniture made landfall in the traffic and had to be dragged out. And Rhyl people stayed calm. Over fifteen hundred of them boarded vehicles of every sort and pulled back from the edge with their babies, gadgets and pet-carriers. See them. Not a work day anymore, a crowd had gathered on the promenade near the weak spot opposite Church Street, dead centre of our Victorian seafront. Through a gap between ruined shops and SuperWaterLazer, the esplanade was taking a pounding and cheers went up at every Splat! Until round eleven, forty minutes off high tide, when the sea broke in. It swept across the open expanse of the Events Arena and at one edge of this half-acre flat, pavers were loosened. As they lifted, the water became a tumbling trommel of brick and hard-core until the entire surface peeled back like orange skin. Round One to Water. Next came what Rhyl had wanted for decades. The hated ghost-hole of litter and tat, The Children’s Village, derelict food concessions and rides, a perfect symbol of the That’ll Do For Rhyl vernacular, was reduced to flinders. The Little People’s Café raced Pirates’ Den and a bright yellow roundabout to be mashed into a reef of wreckage three metres high and stretching right along the face of the old arcades.
A Wave hates everything, even its own. The Seaquarium’s rear doors were stove in. At first the tubular viewing enclosures channelled a cataract straight through to spurt out the front entrance and, engineered against static pressure, the tunnels kept their integrity until flotsam arrived heavy and sharp enough to crack the toughened plastic. Then an entire marine collection, from sentient cuttlefish to blank-eyed dogfish, found itself heading inland.
Only SkyTower, our late-twentieth century ‘attraction’ bought from the city of Glasgow second-hand, stood. A 75-metre steel needle had a viewing cabin designed to go up and down like a doughnut on a stick, its sole claim to fame in Scotland being to make Diana, Princess of Wales, nauseous. Now looking a prime target. A corset of reinforcing rods gave rigidity but this was the Irish Sea at its base. Yet the needle stuck to its plinth on pilings sunk into the Triassic sandstone. Would they be enough? Eight bolts screwed into eight threaded sockets. Eight bolts each the height of a man. If you carried SkyTower’s statistics in your head, suddenly it became too little, too human-scale. ‘SkyTower’s holding!’ I remember shouting and punching the air. ‘Lucky number 8!’ While further east, evacuation of Waterhouse’s magnificent Royal Alex Hospital continued. (But patients might as well have stayed put to watch the scrubby grass covered by a tide that failed to make it across the road. I guess few things can cheer up the sick more than the well-world sinking into turmoil.)
West was a different story. The gradient gave any break-in the extra oomph needed to sweep into Marine Lake and swell it to join the Clwyd where pure brine already lipped the embankment. Once the flood had found a level, one continuous sheet of water would comprise lake, river, estuary and sea. You could’ve got in your canoe at the Miniature Railway Museum (UK’s Oldest!) and paddled to the Isle of Man. Or Iceland. A news crew captured the town again as the rest of the country salivated for lunch. It showed East Parade was still standing though gappy with a channel of floating timber and fibre-glass panels flowing down it. West Parade was virtually unrecognisable, subsumed in the new shore line. The helicopter hovered over what had once been a Lifeboat Station. Ha, ha! This image would become crass as it was reused during the day though presumably someone at a safe distance thought neat!
My account of the flood’s suspiciously neat itself because most of the information’s the post-happening kind. Yes, I was there, my updates coming from every media. ‘This battered, once-popular north Welsh resort now braces itself for midday’ – another editor smartattacked, reminding the audience where we were, what we were. But someone who worked for me – technically – a local man, Glenn Hughes, was out in it. He voice-overed the flight of Old Woolworths roof towards the Forward Rhyl office that employed us.(It missed, just.) That’s Glenn for you. His house sat in the water’s path yet with partner Alice Norman safe in Spain, he thought he’d cruise the prom. ‘Look, look Yori. You gotta see this. It’s Venus off the top of LoveSync— she’s going past now. Loo-ok-k! There’s her tits still moving in the water.’
‘Get back. Glenn! They’re saying—’
‘Yeah, yeah. Bet you’re nice’n’dry, lucky bugger. Hey, Yori! I am a camera!’ He was on a rioter’s high, no doubt about it. Before we broke I heard, ‘Aw-w, this is disaster porn!’
Having just missed the seawall breach Glenn made it to Gaiman Avenue. For no reason. He wasn’t invited. Nobody ever is. I can’t afford to encourage interest. Rain was falling like gravel, souvenirs of our birthplace whizzed down the road at head height, but something must watch over the Glenn Hugheses of this world. Big compared to a half-Japanese, and wild-eyed and haired now, he looked like the Storm God himself on the doorstep.
Glenn’s got at least fifteen years on me but now you’ll picture older than he looks. Alice among other things keeps him in shape so you need to think of a big muscular body topped with one of those square, comic-book faces dictated by the subframe— brow ridges, nose, cheekbones and jaw, an Adam’s apple like a corbel for the chin, all solid foundations for a rugby player, say, or a boxer not that I know if he was either. But straight from outside, his skin has post-match hyperflush. His electric-blue waterproofs dripped on my polished floor and a sudden twist round and he gives me a shower. The single other occasion he’d ‘dropped in’ had he taken off footwear without prompting? Too late. Collapsed onto a seat with fuckme,only then he leans forward and undoes his boots. He muttered, ‘They say the surge’ll knock out the whole of Kinmel.’
This was the opposite bank of the River Clwyd, a blight of cheap housing and ex-holiday camps. Rhyl’s barrio it’s been called. ‘You sound pleased. Anyway I don’t think so.’
‘’S’right!’
And then fury broke over me in its own wave. I’ve got a temper nobody knows about and kicking him would feel so good, Glenn sitting there in his pathetic too-young for him clothes (tight jeans, the sweatshirt covered in Indian script he couldn’t understand) and putting on this nadatodowithme attitude, a spectator. I really hated him. ‘Not bothering you though? You’re—’ I remembered too late the location of his own house.
He was paying more attention to his repulsive spongy boots. ‘Tight-arse,’ he said. ‘Go on, shoot the messenger!’
(Honestly? He turned out totally correct— two thousand static caravans, their occupants fled not a moment too soon, were about to swarm inland. Models called Gallant and Rhino burst apart spilling mock-leather banquettes, dogbeds, broken toys, roller blinds and high-chairs across the fields. This ersatz material hasn’t any patina of age to look forward to and makes unrottable garbage. As with nuclear waste all that could be done was burial).
The hot drink I couldn’t not offer gave Glenn his second wind. I had a live stream on of teenagers in a water-fight along Vorderman Road but it wasn’t enough for him. Dramas needed to be played out. A natural mimic, he did some woman’s refusal to leave her bedsit only one street back from the front with falsetto cursing of rescuers from the piano nobile window. But the illogic of the damage was Glenn’s main fix. In Abbey Street a trio of empty properties remained upright— with the just-completed clinic next door pulverised. He found that particularly hysterical. It was as if surrendering his home (‘in the front door andout the back by I left, couldn’t stop it— Alice’ll have us well covered—’) had freed him. Neighbours were sending him images of his street anyway. Why be there? he wanted to know. At first he checked them and then stopped even that and his cool wound me up all over again. ‘She was talking of a bit of a change round anyroad and—’ We were both hypnotised by the sight of a cancer-screening trailer (logo Take An Hour And Save Yourself Years) gliding along the prom like a big white barge, a movie director’s dream. Glenn thought someone he recognised was in the next shot, changed his mind and then he fell asleep, mid-sentence. When I turned to ask about saplings on Stanmore Street put in all of six weeks ago, his head was thrown back, mouth agape, arms and legs splayed, Vitruvian Man dropped off his wheel and nothing at all godlike— but nor is he the clown I seem to have cast him as.
There’s more to Glenn, I acknowledged, mopping round his steaming big feet. I should make an effort now and again not to want to hack him to death. You raise the daito above your head and bisect the target in a single downward swordstroke—
—but he’s Rhyl-born like me and hasn’t been tempted away even though Alice Norman manages hostels in Malaga, meaning Glenn could idle in the Spanish sun. He chooses to stay and work. Like me. Yet The One Big we have in common, work, is the problem. Impossible to supervise in the office, he pretends to have a sly, undermining expertise about every past project. Maybe not pretends. He can pinpoint where Clear Skies Café was for example quicker than you can zoom in on the map and tell you the list of charity shops that occupied underneath. He has the only original photograph of Rhyl’s subterranean Little Venice, all arches and frescoes*, something so unlikely even Rhyl people think it’s a fiction. I’ve tried to trip him on minor details. No luck. But his sex life when Alice is home gets described daily— and drinking friends’, the music group’s and mine (invented, depraved). I’m his supervisor. I’m the one person he’ll ever meet that values what Glenn has and to me, instead of generosity, he hands on his collection bit by bit. It’s a power thing. And Rhyl’s the great leveller.
I went next door and grated fierce radishes in my galley kitchen, making work the way you do when— I nearly said there’s a death in the family. Stupid thing to think even at this point though you’ll see what I mean, later on. Grating was better than doing nothing against the rock and roar. I could feel the punishment we were getting. While we wait for the flood to overtake us I’ll explain how come. Child Yori up in his attic grew to love buildings by listening to them. I learned to identify even a downspout dribble as the housecreature’s bleed and every creak as a knot in its spine. It left me with a mind that could reach out now to all that decorative plasterwork coming up in blisters, wrought iron being ripped away like fingernails and the gable end’s sigh as it fell on its knees. Once a glamour girl but finding she was unloved, Rhyl had stopped taking care of herself years ago. Self-harmed in fact. And finally she gets a slap in her only asset, the profile she’s turned to the sea since 1800.
It was enough to break your heart if you had one (mine was never fully installed, according to Kailash). Instead I grated radishes. These were off an illegal day market, the junction of Vaughan and Bedford and were the dark round sort you can’t usually get, with the bitterest blowback I’ve ever tasted. I worked them like a maniac till heaps of identical size and profile were lined up on the counter. Five centimetres high, five apart. Should’ve been calming. Wasn’t enough. For distraction, there was only Glenn left— maybe a sketch? – no a caricature, big up the nose, inflate the cheeks to make Tess laugh—
—and then it registered. Highwater had come and gone. We were here. Yet because of what came after, I can’t remember being relieved. I guess I was. On-screen rehashes looped through the swamp of Foryd Harbour, then a window shattering on Harkers Arcade, a girl being piggybacked by a grinning boy. The same family climbed into an orange inflatable but the strapline was detailing an explosion in the Scottish Parliament Complex now. Injuries. Suddenly there’s an image switch to Enric Miralles’ famous Edinburgh frontage. Three of his childish ‘Think-Windows’ made for the politicians to sit in are now stab wounds, ragged as Halloween pumpkins’ eyes. Much internal damage. Some deaths feared.
So Rhyl had failed again by being not wrecked enough. The worst must be over?
Yeah.
Notes
*The Queen’s Palace burned down in 1907 having stood at Rhyl’s exact centre for only five years. It was a proto-Disneyworld. I’d have loved it. Apart from shops, restaurant, conservatory and waxworks, below its 2000-couples ballroom was a painted ‘Imitation Venice’ with a canal and some brought-from-Italy gondolas and real gondoliers poling them. A canal and boats— underneath.
Chapter 2
Things had slackened off to the odd heavy object getting rolled. A pigeon blundered against the window and was an after image by I reacted. The sky went from dark ash to paler like a stadium roof doing its trick. By the time I’d found fresh cups and come back we’d dipped from first to ninth most viewed news item. Two arguing women in formal wear replaced us, their strapline This Slump! New Borrowing Figures. Glenn dreamed on and I watched him in an idiot’s belief that it was – even if you counted a couple from childhood – my grisliest Rhyl day so far.
Libby Jenkinson must have been in the starting blocks, weather-wise. She knocked to say she was going to her sister’s on Rawson, the next street. ‘Still blowing a gale,’ I mentioned. ‘You’ve known worse, though?’
For answer her tongue came out and she waggled its stud. ‘I can’t be here,’ she croaked. ‘I’m fed up. They’re saying it’ll go down now, the water. That’s it for us.’ Her dissatisfaction was showing in the set of a body wrapped up tight and cylindrical to the knees. The hair – a new olive oil shade, better really – was tucked under a hood. I’d never seen her leave home without full makeup and wasn’t going to. The daisies beside her brown eyes were tattoos anyway but when she focused past me at unconscious Glenn, black brows shot up, questioning, to reveal glossy puce. She hadn’t met him yet and I wasn’t up for an introduction. Why bother? He wouldn’t be here again I promised myself. ‘See you two later,’ she said and winked.
Our speech seemed to register with Glenn because his mumbling increased. There was drool. I needed Tess – if we could find a spider I’d stick it in his mouth. Shall we? Aw-w! Why d’you have to be so clean, Yori? Never nothing yuck when you wan’ it.
Otherwise, it had turned mysteriously quiet. Thorp’s roof was settling back into place and That’s it for us? Apparently. The light improved but stopped short of a proper mid-afternoon level and I lit my desk lamp and muted all news, bored if I’m honest. The day felt maimed. Who should I try connect with? My father, back in Kochi? No big consumer of world affairs, he probably hadn’t heard about Rhyl. Or heard but thought, Small moulis compared to the savagery Japan endured regularly in assorted typhoons and tsunami and heat waves so was coping pretty well with any anxiety for an only son. It might be an embarrassment to have it even mentioned between us. There’s no Japanese word for complain.
I try anyway. He’s not listening.
Groans from Glenn. Scratching like something being sandpapered. I had to step over legs to go check again on the opposite terrace. It had given the storm the finger though Number 13’s ashlar-dressings were still over-glossed in brutal black. An offense against stone. The drifts of rubbish strewn everywhere were colourful, with party hats in there and what looked like sweets but would turn out to be novelty condom packs. Handfuls of them were already being used as missiles, thrown around by Ram and Musa, the Turkish doctor’s sons from Number 21, but even they looked half-hearted, the anticlimax getting to them. More depressing, at the back of the flat I found the snapped off birch turned intruder into the yard. Definitely the saddest injury to Gaiman Avenue, it made a giant’s broom wedged against the rear exit and would need attacking with the late Mr Jenkinson’s saw. No more walk-on part in ‘A Hundred Lunar Aspects’ for you. Otherwise we seemed to have lived up to Glenn’s prediction of nice and dry. As for the rest—
I love it here. But the temptation was to pack up and not witness the worst, not be the co-heir of yet more trauma. My plotline had just been replaced by a jackass clip of Man Falls Into Own Wet Cement. Rhyl’s saviour, is living undercover, relearning it while he buffs up his grand vision and a few modest projects come in! The decrepit Warren Road site is now embraced by a brushed steel structure nicknamed, not resentfully either, The Clam. Much photographed. New build, as calculated, is starting to defuse the hostile end of another soulless rat run. And then my paint scheme for East Parade’s refurb (railings, seats, lamp standards and shelters in cool watery shades) has acted like a code word to release its charm. (So please note, I have done useful things.)
