It's a short trip from a shared bag of chips on a storm-blown pier to a little ray of hope for a new year of possibilities, writes MICHAEL HARDING
I MET A girl on Brighton pier last week and although the wind was gale force, it wasn’t cold. I was eating fish and chips outside Horatio’s Bar, sheltered from the storm by a glass wall, and from speakers above my head Bob Dylan bellowed out, It Ain’t me, Babe, a song I often sang as an adolescent, when I was frightened of intimate relationships and preferred exploring my own dark interior with narcissistic abandon.
A few guys in overcoats were collecting money for the bumper cars. A gypsy woman with grey hair and a crystal ball wrapped an overcoat around her and sat in a barrel-top wagon waiting for customers; everything as it used to be in Bundoran in 1967.
Except that I was on a long pier into the sea. Young couples laughed and clung to each other in the wind, but I remained in the shelter, for fear of losing my chips. I felt lost between sky and earth, comforted only by the sea around me, because water is attractive to people in sorrow.
White horses heaved around the pier, the sand beneath making a muddy syrup of the sea. Birds rode the wind, waves crashed on the distant rocks, and France was somewhere out there in the mist.
Suddenly a girl by my side asked me for a light. I said I didn’t smoke. She took one of my chips, an enormously unexpected intimacy, and my eyes watered with tenderness.
“Are you alright?” she asked.
“It’s the music,” I lied.
She was wearing shiny black leggings, a yellow skin-tight top and she had amber eyes with vertical pupils, like a crocodile, which unnerved me. But she explained that they were Gothic contact lenses.
“I was clubbing in Camden last night,” she said. “I don’t know how I got here.”
I said: “I know how you feel.”
Earlier in the day I was at a funeral and got separated from the other mourners. I ended up completely lost, between an ornamental pond and the children’s graves, which were clustered together, and decked with Christmas cards and teddy bears. “And there were geese as well,” I added.
“In the graveyard?”
“Yes,” I said. “Very beautiful.”
I asked her did she want coffee. She said: “Tea.”
So we walked up the maze of narrow lanes, full of jewellery shops, where she stopped every so often to gaze at engagement rings in the windows.
I purchased our drinks and cup cakes in a shop as dainty and delicate as a lace dress, but when the girl with the crocodile eyes finished her tea, she went outside to have a smoke, and never returned.
“I’m not the one you want babe, I’m not the one you need,” I whispered at the window. As a teenager, I used to sing that song with fierce intensity, romanticising solitude, and utterly unconscious of the wounds that were about to hurtle me through life, from one year to the next, in a state of boozy agitation, until last summer when my childhood caught up with me, and darkness finally descended, and I almost drowned in sorrow.
But now I am swimming my way out of sorrow. I go every day to a leisure centre, and I know that when I dive into the pool everything is okay. There is a shape to my body that finds unity in the swim, and my mind too becomes coherent, in the movement through water, in my goggle-eyed observation of the blue floor, and the occasional shiny black of another swimmer’s costume.
In that chlorinated world I hear the gurgling of everything that ever happened in my life, from my first womb waking to last night’s dreams.
And I know that if I keep swimming and listening in that silent underwater refuge then everything that should arise will arise; whatever hidden hurt or wound there may have been in childhood, where anxiety grew like mushrooms on the wall of an unopened room, will all emerge, and come to the surface of consciousness eventually, as I swim my way into the future. That, I suppose, is my hope for the new year.
But even I could not resist the glitter in the jeweller’s window in Brighton.
I stood there a long time daydreaming over a platinum eternity ring and wondering if, maybe, it is not too late in the day to surprise the beloved with a new song.