I went in once with you. For a laugh. You were surprised at my surprise. Amused by being amused by the amusements. You tripped over toddlers and caught your knee on the sharp metal corner of the shooting range. Expleted. Health and safety I said. You hopped and rubbed and made a scene. Strode to the motorbikes. Climbed on sat astride, popped a token in the slot, hunched and leant and twisted and swung and grinned and gritted until you swung wrong so far wrong that you powered into a large concrete wall. Screen flashed blood and fire.
We burn him at Seafield. We stand, all of us, two metres apart, legs adrift, hands clasped behind our backs. Twisting fingers and tired lips and eyes rubbed pink raw. Lining the road per regulations. He chose a horse and carriage. The horse wears a red ostrich plume. A strange choice for a poet, the horse says, as it trots past. Clopping silver iron on tarmacadam grey. I’m not fond of red. It doesn’t go with my eyes. The horse winks. A masked policeman holds the traffic until the horse swings into the crematorium. White van man leans on his horn. I give him, all of him and his kind, the finger.
You held your nose at the smell. Jif and candy floss and pine fresh and Brute and burnt beef fat and chips. So many chips. We used to eat chips together. In shorts and flopping sun hats, legs dangling on the wall. Before we met. With brown sauce and vinegar. You liked them fresh. Insisted they cooked them in front of you. The horse with the red ostrich plume is not a lover of chips.
You pointed at the hunch of the woman at the penny drop. The penny dropped and the coins shovelled and the woman roared. She shovelled pennies into the pocket of her yellow pinny. You gave her a thumbs up. Your thumb wore stars and stripes. You couldn’t hear yourself speak for the merry go round. You queued for tokens and went from machine to machine. All that kerfuffle and flashing and strobing and YOU ARE MY DANCING QUEEEEEEEEEN OH SEE THAT GIRL WATCH THAT SCENE you pulled out plugs and pulled down levers and you won a green spotted dinosaur and a rip off Barbie with black eyes and a purple bullet proof vest.
I come here for the pier but the pier is long gone. A woman in a periwinkle blue headscarf points at the groynes. It’s just the groynes now, hen, she says, the pier was washed out to sea. Before the war. Or bombed. You know how people are. Can never make up their minds. That’s sad, I say. She nods. You had to pay, she says. And we never had enough money for the seven of us. Just the wee ones went. Right to the end to get their ha’pennies worth.
You won. The claw grabber coming down on the blue bear’s head, grasping it by the ears, shaking it, shaking it, the blue bear is yours and you are victorious and an army of small girls are up against your legs begging for the blue bear and your feet are sinking in the dank damp of the once proud carpet and everything is pinging and pinking and flashing and dashing and rising and falling and racing and burning and losing and losing and losing so much losing the penny dropping and the woman in the yellow pinny coming at you, coming for the blue bear and you are raising your arm, your fist, your stars and stripes thumb, not in victory.
The pier. I can’t believe the pier isn’t here. I’m sure it was the last time. She drowned. The little girl. With the coin in her hand still. Her brothers on the beach with buckets and spades digging moats and building castles or houses or dungeons or race tracks or the gun barracks that sit horny on the other side of the thorned white cliffs of chalk. Her mother in the arcade. Her aunty Wilma queuing for candyfloss. The horse says he could see it coming. No good comes from a pier. He shakes and stamps and we file into the remembrance garden for the outdoor service. Only four of us are allowed in. Or is it six. The chip is warm grease and squidge in my hand.
The penny drops. Except it doesn’t. The claw does not pick up the violent pink teddy with the baleful plum pudding eyes. The pinball machine is silent, sulking, stiff, the ball caught in the clown’s leer. The vacated ice-cream containers are frigid empty. I peer through the grill at the piled high of wretched soft toys. Waterloo. Knowing my fate is to be with you. Waterloo. Shuttered. Locked tight with rusting padlocks and a straggled smear of old gold paint.
SANDERLINGS 