“We’re going to the seaside,” I tell my three-year-old, Jordan, who smiles, claps his pudgy hands as if he understands. A weekend to Hastings, that once-upon-a-time town, defeated in battle, one date in classrooms, that never gets forgotten.
I’d planned an impromptu escape from London. London, adopted home town, where the foundations of life had blown apart like demolition footage, two and a half years back. This trip – not so impromptu, more of a surrender, to that yearning, that battle cry of mine, for freedom, for elsewhere. Ever since Gavin had left.
Hastings, where William had shot an arrow in Harold’s eye. Hastings, where I’d worked summer seasons, long back. An English teacher to flocks of foreign teenage students, all bronze-limbed and high on freedom. Twenty long summers ago, really? I’d stay out till dawn, always stumbling upon the coolest, longest after parties. And I still managed to get up on time the next morning to give a lesson on the past perfect.
“You’ll be able to paddle in the sea,” I tell Jordan as I wet wipe ketchup from his chin. He’s such a sweet, calm boy, full of hugs and smiles. His dad gone, moved on, when Jordan was just a year. Like having a baby was something you could move on from.
*****
We catch the early Saturday train from Victoria. Commuters, tourists and don’t-want-to-be-heres, crisscross on the concourse, step over rough sleepers outside Starbucks. Jordan wheels his Buzz Lightyear suitcase carefully behind him. I grab his hand to go faster.
I bag the window seat with a small table, the perfect size for our card games. Whatever we play, UNO or Snap, he wins every time and I don’t engineer it. I pass him his juice carton and a cheese sandwich which looks huge in his small hand, wobbly, like it might drop. He munches it and I pick up the What’s On guide to Hastings. His eyelids droop. He rests his head on my arm and soon drops off to the rhythm of the train.
The pictures of Hastings Castle, the remnants of its walls, conjures up memories of my younger days in the town. My stomach knots and fizzes. The beaches, the booze, the weed, the pubs. The parties, the gigs, the one-night stands, the revolving doors. Even weekends were crammed as we’d frogmarch students on day trips, count heads on stuffy coach trips and escape to the shade as they shopped – never dropped – in blazing July heat in London and Brighton and Stratford-upon-Avon. I flick through the What’s On guide, a flipbook of my past, mesmerising, I can’t stop.
We check into the bed and breakfast on the seafront opposite the newly revived pier. Risen from the ashes. Arson. It looks dejected, as if clutching to the hope of better times ahead. Now, it’s just a vast viewing platform with picnic benches upturned from the winds. Where are the fairground rides, the children shrieking and clutching sticky ice-creams? What’s a pier without the smell of cheap burgers, candy floss and fish and chips? Our hotel, too, looks like it needs cheering up. It’s off-white façade with rust streaks, like never-ending tears, from the Juliette balconies, tarnishing the paintwork.
An hour later, we sit at outside tables, in the almost-square in the centre of Hastings. The noon sun breaks from behind the clouds, high up above the jagged castle ruins on the cliff edge. I order fish fingers and chips for Jordan. He’s busy playing Mario on his Nintendo. I sink into my chair and breathe in the fresh sea air. Closing my eyes, the warmth of the sun kisses my eyelids. A far-off seagull cry carries on the warm breeze. My skin, taut with all the packing, hurrying, keeping to a tight timetable, goes slack and I feel buoyed up as if floating in the warm summer sea.
“Here’s your food, mam.” I startle and come to as the waiter puts a plate of steaming, fat chips on the table. I shake salt on them, splash on vinegar and grab one, grinning.
As I sip my coffee, Jordan forks peas into his mouth. I fill with warm, woozy love for my son, so intense, so right.
At the hotdog stand opposite, the man with a crooked paper chef hat, draining boiled onions from the vat, is a double-take of my old landlord Jim. I shake my head. No, he’d be in his eighties now. I laugh it off. A young, slim-hipped guy, in an off-the-peg suit with sharp creases, knocks our table as he passes. In that split second, he’s the spit of Pete, a teacher, a friend, well, someone I was close to. I can see him back then, strumming the guitar at the beach parties we organised for students. He was the only one who could play more than a few chords of Yellow Submarine, so he landed guitar duty. How can twenty years ago feel this close? And yet, when I look at Jordan, it feels a lifetime back. Life goes one way with someone, the planning for a life created together, then, pop.
Gavin, returning from a trip visiting family in Australia, said casually, I got carried away. Carried away is one beer too many. Carried away is too many nights on the lash. Gavin had married an old school flame.
He didn’t need to unpack his suitcase when he stepped back over the threshold of our London flat. Our Crystal Palace flat, in the talk of the town neighbourhood, back in the day. The biggest show on earth. Queen Victoria’s passion project, The Great Exhibition. Gardens of Eden, breathtaking architecture. It burnt down. Decapitated statues and crumbled colonnades remain.
I told him to leave. After locking the front door, I slid down the back and howled like I was giving birth. Within the hour, Jordan woke up, and life carried on.
*****
I stretch out my legs from under the café table. A shake, a hot urge, takes over my body to lift up those slabs, as if I’ll find that time again, tucked out of sight, underneath. This slab here, maybe that one, or is it those around the corner, at the end of the high street? It’s got to be here somewhere. The yearning after those memories has the force of a tidal wave, dashing on the rocks and engulfing the shore. On the backwash of the tide, I imagine that other self, emerge, as if a mirage, stumbling up the pebbled bank. I’m wearing that old hippy ruby red skirt bought for a tenner at Camden Market where beatniks and psychobillies, mods and rockers searched for looks they thought would guarantee future success. That skirt, I’d always felt pretty and free in it, flaps in the sea breeze. I remember how my hennaed hair always smelt of Old Holborn from gigs down dives when smoking was allowed. Rocking out to that Nirvana tribute band, down the Pig and Moon. Wonder if that’s still standing? My ears rang for hours, days more like. Diamond White, strong headbanger’s cider, tickled my taste buds, made me giddy, silly, forever chasing more.
That time, it’s just there, on the tip of my tongue and beyond my fingertips. Bright, loud, close. Not close enough. It’s like switching the dial on an old-fashioned radio, not quite getting the station. Like trying to thread a small-eyed needle and always missing.
“Can I get you anything else?” The waiter’s voice bursts the rainbow-edged bubble and I shake my head.
“Just the bill,”
“Let’s go down to the fun fair,” I say to Jordan, sounding jollier than I’m feeling.
My comfy trainers, now step over those paving slabs, those memories underneath, the undercurrent of my life. Along the seafront, we breathe in the smell of fried oil and candy floss. Clutches of laughing families carrying buckets and spades swing past us on the promenade and I feel the wound sting. The hole inside, the hole of a married on single parent that says I wasn’t enough, wasn’t respected enough to be broken up with properly. The hole that never seems to be filled, however much I try. A couple brush by, lean in to lick the sides of their 99 cone at the same time. I look away.
A seagull cries and swoops low, tries to grab a doughnut from my grease-soaked paper bag. Jordan laughs and I lean over to wipe the sugar off his cheeks.
“Want to go on the Helter Skelter?” His eyes widen as he follows my finger pointing to the top. We grab our coconut mats and I stay close behind him as he climbs the stairs.
The next morning, I wake to strong fingers of light coming through the curtains. I stride out of bed, a giddiness, a lightness that surprises me, confusion turning to a wide smile. Jordan’s still sleeping so I send a text to Becca, a friend who I couldn’t contact in those early motherhood days. Now, there’s a real ache to be closer. Sitting on the edge of the bed, my feet dangling, I hum. Happy there’s no place to run, no schedule to organise. I lie back on the warm bedcover.
Why don’t you? a voice booms in my head. I jolt upright it was so loud. Why don’t you?
You can have a life like this.
Escaped, the idea is addictive, something true the moment it’s out. Time, the time, for me to move on. No longer living in the what-just-happened, the anger, the confusion, the ripped-apart life. Here, I was so happy. Here, we are happy.
Isn’t this what life is? A chance to feel at home, find a home, unite with those undercurrents of joy, of strong foundations of your open-hearted self?
Jordan wakes up with a fart and a throaty chuckle. I kiss his warm, chubby cheek.
“A new adventure, son. Our new home,” I say, lifting him from his small bed. He claps his pudgy hands. This time, I know he understands.
