The Pattern Mafia- Southend on Sea
CHAPTER FORTY TWO
The Story So Far … There was a third sun
The metal railing on the pierhead stings the unwary hand and the August sun glares back from wooden decking. The wind is up scuffing the sea below, sending waves smacking into the pier’s black metal pylon legs. The Eagle Line’s ‘Waverley’ paddle-steamer rolls slowly on the swell, its red, white, and black funnel is smoking leisurely, it’s decks are busy with disembarking passengers.
In the distance the coast is lined with white buildings. The great white bulk of the Palace Hotel, the blue and white of Rossi’s Ice-cream Parlour. The Royal, the Grosvenor, and the Horseshoe Café all shoulder one another aside for custom alongside Penny Arcades and Candyfloss stalls, Cockle Stalls for the poor and Tearooms for the genteel. The sails of the mock Golden Hind moored at the Regency pier pavilion are smaller than postage stamps and wavering in the heat. Here at the pier-head far out above the glitter of waves, the wooden deck ,as broad as an ocean liner, is crowded with holidaymakers.
Ed the Ted looks around slowly, blinking in the bright sun, his pale face turning white with shock.
‘Nah,’ he says to himself, ‘Nah!’
There are mothers and fathers down from the Smoke and the wilder parts of Essex for the Summer Bank Holiday, their children running about them in gay orbits. The crowded Dolphin Cafe has put tables and chairs out in the sun with a ‘Patrons Only Please!’ sign to ward of the non-paying, the deckchairs on the Sun Deck being full. The breeze reeks with salt water and fish and chips. A group of Southend girls in bell skirts and stilettos stroll past, eyeing Ted.
Then there is another girl in another bell skirt with Max Factor eyes that hold your soul in their gaze, walking towards him under the hot August sun. A girl he knows.
‘Welcome back,’ said Hollywood.
‘I’ve been here before?’
‘It’s a construct that we thought would put you at your ease. You have fond memories of this place.’
‘You blanked out my memory, the day I buried you. The day I woke up in Southend.’
‘You asked us to. You said you didn’t want any weird bollox.’
They are sitting at a table at the Dolphin. There is a China pot of tea and two cups and saucers on the table and a chromed rack of sandwich triangles, cheese, fish paste, and cucumber. The sea breeze ruffles the white tablecloth and blows a strand of hair across the girl’s face. She wears crimson red lipstick, that season’s colour taken from the movies, and her eyelashes are mascaraed, and her eyebrows are plucked and shaped. She is movie star lovely, drawing dangerous looks from the flocks of Essex girls on parade.
‘Where am I really?’
‘You asked that last time as well. You are really here and all this is real, Southend–on-Sea, the summer of 1963. We have shut away the greater reality. It frightened you when we opened your perception; we didn’t realise your limitations were at a structural level. We assumed it was a bug, not a feature.’
‘But how can I be here?’
‘The limitations you believe are immutable are set by your perception of reality, which is very limited I’m afraid. I can’t explain it to you, you are not capable of understanding the same way an ant cannot comprehend one of your machines. It can experience one, but never understand it.’
‘That huge space?’
‘There merest fraction of reality, simplified for you.’
‘It’s beautiful.’
Ed the Ted looks away from Hollywood at the people and the distant sunlit promenade.
‘Are we really so limited?’
Hollywood covers his hand with her own. Her hand is flesh and muscle and bone. There are veins below the surface of her pale skin. Her hand is warm and soft. She is human, but also something else. She squeezes his hand and, without thinking, he turns his hand to meet hers and they hold hands together under the hot August sun.
‘There is beauty in your reality,’ she says smiling reassurance. ‘We see that. It might be less complex, less profound, but it is still beautiful.’
‘What exactly are you? And don’t give me any bollox about it being too complex for me to understand, just tell me.’
‘I am the interface for a sentient pattern forming matrix from the beyond. The matrix is what you might think of as a spontaneously self-assembling cognitive structure within the greater reality.’
‘See, that wasn’t so hard was it.’
Hollywood laughs, ‘Not for me. How was it for you?’
‘That’s weird, that you have a sense of humour.’
‘I am here to learn from you. That is my function. In essence I am a question seeking an answer.’
‘A sentient question.’
‘Yes, that works as a description.’
‘But that doesn’t explain the humour.’
‘Becoming like you is part of the answer.’
Ed looks into her stolen eyes and her stolen face, feels the warmth of her palm in his.
‘Where is my Charli?’
‘Integrated into my pattern, as are you. This partial reality has been created for you exclusively, so I may understand you more deeply. Charli is in a partial reality of her own.’
‘But she is safe?’
‘Yes, of course. We seek to extend patterns, not to destroy them. We revere all patterns.’
‘But we were killed.’
‘And yet here you are.’
Ed lets the fear go and it boils away from him. He feels weak suddenly, exhausted from holding himself together against the onslaught of weirdness. Feels himself dissolving into the sunlit sky and the happy crowds, the swell of the sea in the cool dark shadows beneath the pier, drifting with the breeze, stirring the hard bright grains of sand gritting the worn timbers of the decking. He is drawn to the amber purity of the sand. Focusses on it. Stands before sand grains the size of mountains alive with sunset light, traces the light falling on their crystal faces and filling their glowing fissures. Deeper still he can feel the precision of their structure, the endlessly repeating geometry as rhythmic as a song. She brings him back, holding his hand to her lips, calling his name.
‘It’s easy to get lost,’ he says.
‘It always has been, you just didn’t know how. Now, shall we finish our tea, and you can show me your world?’
Ed lay with Hollywood in their room in the Palace Hotel. She sleeps on her side, nested like a little bird, her breath slow and gentle. Ed feels her chest rise and fall under his arm, her wild dark hair loose. The room is bright with moonlight, the tall window to the balcony cracked open and the surf whispering from the beach.
They had spent the day as boy and girl. They walked the Southend pier back to the shore hand in hand. They sat on the beach and watched children playing in the sea until Hollywood had leapt to her feet and ran to the surf, calling his name, calling him to join her so of course he had to. She cast off her shoes and hitched up her skirt just like any other East End girl and waded into the water, screaming her shock at the cold with a grin as wide as the sky. They shared fish and chips from a page from a newspaper, the chips salted and stained with malt vinegar, the batter deep and crisp, flakes of fish falling from greasy fingers. Her accent changed, as did her language, leaving the flat vowels and lazy rhythm of America for the speed and staccato edge of a natural born Cockney. He taught her rhyming slang which she loved and, joy of joys, he taught her how to jive on the promenade to the thud and chug of a Wurlitzer. She whirled to and fro, bell skirt swinging and flashing her slim thighs until he caught her in his arms, and she rested there. Her head lay against his chest. She breathed deeply, human heart beating.
And then it was evening. They watched the sun setting over the estuary and the lights on the Kursal began to fill the darkening sky. Ed led her through the Kursal’s chaos and joy and together they moved in and out of the many lives. They passed like lovers viewing places they might stay. Much later they returned to the Palace Hotel to the room he could never remember booking, but there it was, and in the dark he undressed her, and she lay down on the big white bed in the moonlight and reached for him.