The Last Resort

A traveller’s tale

Photo by Cristofer Maximilian on Unsplash

‘Call some place paradise and you can kiss it goodbye.’ Virgiline stands on the balcony and looks out at an unrepentant sea. ‘Don Henley was on to something, don’t you think?’ She turns back towards him. Despite her youth, the cigarettes are out to kill her. Her voice is deep pitched, with the rasp of a key in a rusty lock. It catches.

Words spin in his head, all jockeying for position. None reach the line. His mouth opens. His mouth closes. He says nothing and claims her words as rhetorical. Yet the real reason is stranger. It’s like she’s reached inside his head, and with a slight tug on a wire, has spoken his thoughts out loud.

She returns her focus to the sea. The waves sweep into the small bay where some fishing boats rise lethargically with the swell. The music hasn’t returned. But it will. He knows it. Coming slow, insidious, nailing him here to this place. He follows her gaze out to sea, both enchanted. But the silence is breaking them. Her cracks appear first.

‘No use always running, Nathan. Some time, some place, you’ll have to face it. We all do in the end. Give it up.’

The Black Cat Bar and his best friend, Max. It always returns to that. The moment when it all changed. Between that day at The Black Cat and now, is a yawning expanse of nothing. Where did Max go? Is he dead?

At the Topi Inn, in the grave of the night, Vigiline’s words come back, reaching out, scratching him like a hypodermic needle. They fuel his hypnogogic twitching and turning.

‘Give it up,’ she whispers, and he can almost feel her smoky breath on him.

Nights aren’t for sleeping. And instead of her physical presence, he receives a limp wheeze of air on his naked skin. A stupid desk fan that isn’t up to the job. Not for this heat and humidity that rots everything. It barely manages to blow dry the sweat on his body. By the time it squeaks round again, a whole lot more sweating is done and ready. How much of this nocturnal unrest is from heat and how much from dreams is hard to say. And who the fuck cares, anyway? Even so, the faint beat of the fan’s blades is a reassuring counterpoint to all the misplaced voices and sweet faecal smells, rising up from open drains and reaching out to a fuzzy-lined border.

What is this place, anyway? Someplace east.

He followed the coastal road, tracking the sun towards an unknown vanishing point. Looking, always looking, ahead, up until now. What is this now? He doesn’t know. But his travels are over, at least for a while. It hardly matters. He just sits and then lies and watches and waits. Is this it? Has he reached the point? He’s not used to not moving. He has to stay vigilant. This is no rest.

It’s a strange place. Plenty of sea, plenty of sand, all of it in profusion. Down by the jetty people come and go on the old ferry. A strange, ragged procession of lonely people. The ferry emits sulphureous fumes. It is pock-marked with rust and looks only fit to be a giant fucking colander. Just as well the sea remains languid. At least for now. Only the most gentle and lazy of rollers will do, nothing to alarm the alarmed, fetching up on the scorching sands before retreating, hissing back into that vast and brooding calm.

‘A penny?’

He feels her gaze. He’s dry. He has no more tears. ‘You wouldn’t. Trust me.’

‘Breakfast then. Paradise should be enjoyed.’ He tosses aside Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Not his normal reading , but the only book he can find here.

They both order banana pancakes. He manages to leave off the arrack. Instead, he orders Anker beer. These days without sleep, the morning is just a continuation of the night. Especially when it takes place in an open loft of scattered mattresses and hungry bed bugs.

‘Welcome, to the Topi Inn, my friend.’ A greeting that repeats in eternity.

Normally he eats alone. But today it’s okay. He enjoys the routine of having breakfast on a communal balcony that stretches the whole width of the guesthouse. Only a handful of solitary people are here for breakfast. They come, they go, without word or sign of acknowledgement. Despite the early hour the sun has already burnt off the dawn mist and is ranging high and triumphant. There is fire in the sky and Prometheus is chained to a rock, his liver devoured. Nathan digs into his pancake, sips his beer and waits for the music to return.

In the gaps, he’s four years old and listening to the words, High in the sky is a bird on a wing/Please carry me with you. The first of so many that rooted him to the earth. All his consciousness fixed on that one moment while whole worlds froze and were trapped behind the bars of the music and the white spaces between the words. The Springfields came and went, but the lesson stayed. It was all in the music.

But this is different. He listens as it comes at him again, coming fast across the bay. And there is nothing between them.

‘Virgiline?’

She looks up at him and wipes pancake goo from the corner of her mouth with a paper napkin.

He tilts his head, staring out to sea. ‘Hear it?’

Virgiline frowns. ‘Suppose.’

He snaps his head round and stares at her intently. ‘Really? Do you hear it?’

‘Yes, I said so. So what?’ She speaks slow and low, as if talking to an idiot.

‘It’s keeping me here. That music is stopping me from moving.’

‘How many of those have you had?’

‘I’m serious.’

‘So am I.’

It was a mistake to tell her about the magic mushrooms in Lovina. Now it seems so long ago. He can no longer track the days. It was before he met her on the bus coming here, when he sat next to her on the last seat out of town. And since then, every beer he consumes triggers a flashback, according to the book of Virgiline. All his experiences come with multiple question marks, and lately they’ve been piling up faster than cars on a foggy motorway. And she attributes them all to psilocybin. Virgiline likes to guide. She is one Lonely Planet.

On the bus to here, Nathan remembers how she touched his head then lightly caressed his hair for a few moments. He stopped himself from instinctively pulling away. Though it was unexpected, it was certainly pleasant. He allowed the time to stretch.

And as they talked it suddenly felt like she had always been there. The bus journey reached out to places unheard and signs unseen. And when he closed his eyes she was with him still, like he had always known but somehow misplaced the memory, somewhere in the darkness, ready and waiting. And so she came as the creator of dreams, a spinner of tales.

And she asked him, ‘How long have you travelled?’

And he shook his head. ‘It’s a protest about getting old. I thought, fuck it.’

She smiled and didn’t pursue her question. ‘Not so old.’

‘But I feel it. Each time I wake and start to move and my body protests. Then I get up and look in the mirror. Living in my head, I always forget. And every day it hits me again.’

‘Now you’re being boring.’

‘Just saying.’ He tried to smile but didn’t quite make it.

But she’s good to him. Helps him every time.

A waiter drops a metal tray, and it detonates deep inside him. There is no time for his rational side to hold the floor. Those Richard Burton cultured tones, soaking it all up like expensive toilet paper, soft, strong and absorbent. No. Already he’s back, talking to Max and then, all of a sudden, not talking to Max, never again. And the world changes forever. That is, the world of the Black Cat Bar and all life thereafter.

No time at all. Just hot and immediate, shards of metal and glass driving into his warm and steamy innards. And no sound, just a whooshing noise as the air bends and is sucked out. And all life goes with it. A bright white light… lifted into the air… And he’s in a Tom and Jerry cartoon being hit by a frying pan… stupid… stupid… white turns to black… deep black… chapel, bible-black silence… shocked and eerie… starless screams… slowly… faltering… one then two… three… multiplying… into smokey hazed air… each individual horror… rising up like a terrible orchestra… tasting… blood… metal… grit… reaching and crawling from the back of his throat to deep inside… Old Mother Hubbard looking down at him… all the king’s horses and all the king’s men…he sees his trainer, just the one, embedded in what’s left of the ceiling… between the patches of sky that still dares to be blue… what the…? it consumes him… consumes him all… red wires of pain keeps coming from behind to overwhelm and grip him in a lover’s embrace… his warm innards now sticky in his clutching hands… and worst of all there is no reply to all that surrounds him.

And Virgiline holds him. Between his choked sobs, he hears her whispers. There are all that he needs right now. Slowly she brings him back. Back from the memory of a memory. They fold into each other. Always the same ones, going back to replay.

Virgiline, who are you?

He almost says it out loud before he realises he’s back again and his pancake plate is clear, his beer bottle is empty, and the music has stopped. No need for more. It’s done its work. He breathes again.

Virgiline grabs his hand and pulls him to his feet. Her strength surprises him.

‘You need some air,’ she tells him. ‘The sea will always heal you. Remember.’

Nathan grunts and follows her out of the hotel. He squints and momentarily holds up his arm to shield his eyes from the glare of the sun. Virgiline walks quickly. He forgets how tall she is. He tries to shrug off his earlier discomfort — who’s he kidding? — his earlier terror, but still it lingers.

They shared a bed in the dormitory on that first hot night. Virgiline reasoned she needed a distraction from the bed bugs. Not the most complimentary of offers but he was fresh out of any others. And her legs were long, and her black hair and tanned skin were soft, and it all felt good enough for love. No harm in role play. It was all part of it. And somehow it helped to ground him. She told him she was from Canada, but she sounded reluctant, almost apologetic, when she revealed it. But it allowed him to forget.

‘I’ve been travelling too long,’ she said. ‘I have no borders. Only this one right here. It’s people that matter, right? Canadian, African, who cares?’

Nathan nodded, ‘Right.’ He realised that he liked being with her even though she made him feel slightly dumb, not quite worthy.

Nathan follows her to the edge of the bay, and they walk along the sands together, holding hands, as if back to being lovers. And he fears it’s a part he enjoys the most. Virgiline stops briefly to light a cigarette.

Nathan starts to notice that most people are here by themselves. And they hardly notice one another. They approach a young man, squatting on the beach and looking out to sea. Nathan calls out to him, and raises his hand as a greeting.

The man looks up, momentarily distracted from his melancholy, but he stares through Nathan.

‘What is this place?’ Nathan wishes to ask Virgiline, but the words won’t come out. Yet Virgiline seems to hear, and she squeezes his hand and smiles at him as if to reassure. And just for a moment it does.

But, as they pass the young man on the beach, he still can’t dispel something he sees from the corner of his eye. Something brief and transient, but it looks like the young man’s face is changing, as if the salt tides are gradually eroding his features, each tiny grain, slipping and sliding, until the whole composition no longer makes sense.

And then Nathan remembers that this isn’t the first time, and all the other corroding faces crowd in on him. Their painted faces mix into a whorl of indistinguishable colours.

Her hand squeezes his again and he falls through the cracks of time and he’s a four-year-old singing, far, far away on the island of dreams. He tries to catch what it means but it slips away like the evening tide. But the music is him, it is in him, it is his strength, a music that plays with the waves on the shoreline. Music that holds him to this place. Healing. The place to be healed. A place so far, far away from the Black Cat Bar. It is his island of dreams.

His older sister told him stories to scare him, one called ‘The Isle of the Sleeper.’ A man is trapped on this strange island where the natives tell him not to disturb ‘The Sleeper.’ But he ends up fighting for his life and in desperation he wakes the man that he discovers sleeping in the centre of the island. And ‘The Sleeper’ is him. And as he wakes so all are destroyed. His sister smiled triumphantly announcing, ‘The End. Sweet dreams, Nath’ And she left him, impatient to go out for the evening. It’s all he remembers. Five years on and he looked at her all made up with rouged cheeks and dressed in white satin, laid out in her bridal coffin.

The stories died with her.

But his recall after so many years is a rebirth of something. He doesn’t know what, but he whispers his thanks to the sea and the shore.

The rusting ferry at the jetty blasts its horn.

‘At last,’ Nathan says. ‘I can leave.’

Virgiline shakes her head and flicks a cigarette butt into the sea. ‘No. This is yours, if you want.’

Her hand points to a small skiff that has just pushed-up onto the sand. The shallow water pulses round its hull. A woman stands beside it, holding an oar.

Nathan stares. ‘Who?’

The woman thrusts out her hand. ‘I’m Sharon. This is my boat. If you wish, if you’re ready, you can come.’

Nathan shakes the cold and wet hand. He turns towards Virgiline.

‘This is just for you,’ Virgiline answers. ‘It’s your journey.’

Nathan frowns at the woman by the small rowing boat. And suddenly it starts to fall into place and the shattered pieces begin to come together.

He looks back at Virgiline, standing behind him. ‘And you?’

‘But remember this,’ Virgiline says, ‘you are not Dante. Just as long as we’re straight on that.’

Nathan’s knees start to buckle, and he sinks onto the sands. ‘What do I do?’

‘You’re lucky,’ Virgiline says, ‘you still have choices. You may go with this fine young lady or you may… not.’ Virgiline sweeps her hand across the beach. ‘Look.’

Nathan follows the direction of her hand, looking back to his footprints in the sand. ‘You mean…?’

‘You were plucked alive from that bar. But you can call time on the whole thing or get the NHS to dig deep. The bomb was… It will take time to heal you. And trust me, it will be a world of pain and… digging deep.’

Nathan rises unsteadily to his feet and sniffs. ‘Well, I’ve paid my taxes.’

‘Then it’s just as real as taking the ferry.’

Nathan stands between the two women, feeling the water lap and tug round his feet. He glances towards Sharon. ‘You’ll still be here, right?’

‘You can’t escape this boat. You’ll see me again.’

Nathan turns away and looks into the dancing eyes of Virgiline. For a moment he sees both Max and his sister as if waiting in the light of her eyes. He breathes out, long and hard. His next stories won’t be there. Not yet. There will be time for that.

‘Take me back, please,’ he hears himself say

Virgiline holds one finger up high and draws it down slowly, from the sky to the earth. Nathan watches the fabric of the air fall open like a zip. He stoops forward, trying to peer into what’s beyond the small tear but is blinded by an immense light. And for a moment, it holds him back. And he hears again, the song now fading. And then the lonely cry of a seagull.

‘Surgeons and their lights,’ Virgiline scoffs. ‘Think they’re gods.’

Nathan is still laughing when he finally steps through.

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