Trigger Warning

My last landlady? She was nothing like you, nothing at all alike. Her rooms

were damp. The breakfasts were unpleasant: oily eggs

leathery sausages, a baked orange sludge of beans.

Her face could have curdled beans. She was not kind.

You strike me as a kind person. I hope your world is kind.

By which I mean, I’ve heard we see the world not as it is

but as we are. A saint sees a world of saints, a killer

sees only murderers and victims. I see the dead.

My landlady told me she would not willingly walk upon the beach

for it was littered with weapons: huge, hand-fitting rocks,

each ripe for striking. She only had a little money in her tiny purse,

she said, but they would take the notes, oily from her fingers,

and leave the purse tucked underneath a stone.

And the water, she would say: hold anyone

under, chill salt-water, grey and brown. Heavy as sin, all ready

to drag you away: children went like that so easily, in the sea,

when they were surplus to requirements or had learned

awkward facts they might be inclined to pass on

to those who would listen. There were

people on the West Pier the night it burned, she said.

The curtains were dusty lace, and blocked each town-grimed window.

Sea View: that was a laugh. The morning she saw me twitch

her curtains, to see if it was properly raining, she rapped my knuckles.

‘Mister Maroney,’ she said. ‘In this house,

we do not look at the sea through the windows. It brings

bad luck.’ She said, ‘People come to the beach to forget their problems.

It’s what we do. It’s what the English do. You chop your girlfriend up

because she’s pregnant and you’re worried what the wife would say

if she found out. Or you poison the banker you’re sleeping with,

for the insurance, marry a dozen men in a dozen little seaside towns.

Margate. Torquay. Lord love them, but why must they stand so still?’

When I asked her who, who stood so still, she told me

it was none of my beeswax, and to be sure to be out

of the house between midday and four, as the char was coming,

and I would be underfoot and in the way.

I’d been in that B & B for three weeks now, looking for permanent digs.

I paid in cash. The other guests were loveless folk on holiday,

and did not care if this was Hove or Hell. We’d eat

our slippery eggs together. I’d watch them promenade

if the day was fine, or huddle under awnings if it rained. My landlady

cared only that they were out of the house until teatime.

A retired dentist from Edgbaston, down for a week

of loneliness and drizzle by the sea, would nod at me over breakfast,

or if we passed on the seafront. The bathroom was down the hall. I was up

in the night. I saw him in his dressing gown. I saw him knock upon

her door. I saw it open. He went in. There’s nothing more to tell.

My landlady was there at breakfast, bright and cheery. She said

the dentist had left early, owing to a death in the family. She told the truth.

That night the rain rattled the windows. A week passed,

and it was time: I told my landlady I’d found a place

and would be moving on, and paid the rent.

That night she gave me a glass of whisky, and then another, and said

I had always been her favourite, and that she was a woman of needs,

a flower ripe for plucking, and she smiled, and it was the whisky made me nod,

and think she was perhaps a whit less sour of face and form. And so

I knocked upon her door that night. She opened it: I remember

the whiteness of her skin. The whiteness of her gown. I can’t forget.

‘Mister Maroney,’ she whispered. I reached for her, and that was forever

that. The Channel was cold and salt-wet, and she filled my pockets with rocks

to keep me under. So when they find me, if they find me,

I could be anyone, crab-eaten flesh and sea-washed bones and all.

I think I shall like it here in my new digs, here on the seashore. And you

have made me welcome. You have all made me feel so welcome.

How many of us are here? I see us, but I cannot count.

We cluster on the beach and stare at the light in the uppermost room

of her house. We see the curtains twitch, we see a white face

glaring through the grime. She looks afraid, as if one loveless day we might

start up the pebbles towards her, to rebuke her for her lack of hospitality,

to tear her for her bad breakfasts and her sour holidays and our fates.

We stand so still.

Why must we stand so still?