In Black And White Photographs

I have not come to the outskirts before.  Why would I have?  The town has enough.  Everything you would ever want.  All that is known about the outskirts you could write in the gaps between digits on my payslip.  I am not the only one who until this day was happy to stay walled in by the river, the hills, the bay, and the sea.  Nobody ever comes out here.   Except for the more audacious ones.  Who come back with their long tales.  One reason I have come out today is because the long-taled ones say you can see Liverpool if you stand on your toes out here. 

The sea is like an old photograph of a painting of the sea in black and white.  But more real.  And it fills me with such elation and what I recognise as a hunger for change.  What change I cannot tell.  No Liverpool though.  But I’m not on my toes yet.

I can see no houses here, but I know there must be some around.  Probably around that corner up ahead.  Or behind that line of trees to my right.  I know there are people who live here.  And work here.  I have just never seen any of them.  I think I spotted one of them in town once.  He didn’t look like the rest of us. 

I have always imagined the people by the sea to lead a singularly harder, more punishing existence than we the others – a life of spatter and constant dredge, handling sticky organisms the day long, with blisters all over their fingers, cuts from the hooks, and struggling of an evening to get those soppy wellies off.  However I cannot deny I find myself attracted to that existence.  Must be better than that blanket of ennui back in town.  And now that I am here with the sea wide before me I find it even more alluring.

As this thought comes to me, a figure of a man appears on the embankment.  Tumbling over a wall, he comes onto the road and begins walking towards me.  It is as if he has come straight out of the sea because there appears to be no other place he could have emerged from.   But then again I can’t see over the wall.  Maybe he has a dinghy down there.  He wears a pair of blue joggers with a reddish flannel shirt tucked into them.  His face, as he gets closer, is aged, but not at all tired, the eyes on him big and intense.   He looks like those people from the outskirts I have imagined, and like the one I spotted in town, except less mysterious.  There’s familiarity in the clothes.  I have seen those flannel shirts in Penneys.  He must have someone go in to shop for him.  Or does he do it all by himself even?

The man very nearly walks right past me until I interrupt to ask: Did you come from the sea?

Yes, he says, stopping.  I work in there. 

I work back in town. 

Oh, you’re from town, are you?  What are you doing out here?

Just looking.

Not much to see, he says.

Someone said Liverpool.

Yes, I’ve heard someone say that.  They weren’t from around here.

What do you work at in the sea? I ask him.

What business is that of yours?  What do you work at?

Eh, I’d rather not say.

How do you make money?

I put the hours in, I reply, evasively.  They can’t take that away from me.

But they do, don’t they?  The government. 

I would love to work in the sea, I continue, still evasive, slippery as a fish.

You wouldn’t like the hours, he says.

I would gladly take them.  To sail the wide open.  All the fresh air.  Away from the cars.  And from those numbskulls back in town.

Oh, numbskulls, are they?

Not all of them.   

Silent and frowning, the man opens his bag and takes out a small folding blade knife with a bone handle.  It looks like it has been in someone’s family for years.    

Well, I have a job for you seeing as you’re unemployed at present, the man says.

I am not unemployed, I protest.  I already told you.

All you need to do is go over there to the bank.  Climb over that wall.  Further down, you’ll see a tree.  And a pathetic creature tied up to it.  It needs killing.  Would you?  The reward will be . . . substantial.

Why me?

You look a reliable sort.

I am.  But that’s not what I mean.  Why don’t you do it?

I can’t bring myself to.  I have lived and worked too hard out here to deal with these aberrations anymore.  Yes, I could do it.  I have done it.  But I have enough money now to be able to pay you to do it.  Got it?

What do you want me to do?

Stick it.  Kill it.  Haven’t you ever killed a thing?  Don’t you come from the town?

Yeah, but . . .

I am certain I cannot take a knife to another living thing as it is an act which I know will trouble me for the rest of my days, however something comes over me in that moment.  A desire to be one with the outskirts.  At one with the sea-folk.  And the paycheque. 

I take the knife.  The man nods, satisfied, points me to the wall he had earlier clambered over, and I head towards it.  When I get to the wall, I can see the tree below.  A dreamy cypress.  But no creature.  However the tree is large and shaggy, its long flaccid branches swishing so briskly in the wind that I imagine it might still be there, somewhere under the flowing leaves. 

When over the wall, and walking along the beach, it occurs to me that I do not know what sort of creature is waiting for me.  But it’s too late now to go back and clarify.  And if I do that, he might think I’m a coward.  Or worse, unreliable.

At once I am aware of the paucity of natural sounds around me.  Forever inclined to think the coast would greet me with birds and the slow roll of waves and the smell of sea and all that, I suddenly realise nature is not there.  Even the wind has chosen to veil its normal din.  It is like I am in a black and white photograph.  Except I know I am not.  It is just that I am in Ireland.

When I arrive at the tree, I see there is a rope alright.  But nothing attached to the rope.  Either the man I met is a lunatic or the creature has come loose and run free.  And then I see footprints in the mud.  Webbed toes, looks like.  Fleeing.  Maybe the man wasn’t a lunatic after all.  I wonder what or who it was he had tied up.  But there is no point in chewing it over.  Whoever or whatever is gone.  Towards land judging by the direction of the footprints.  Why?  There doesn’t seem to be much there. 

I turn back to the embankment and look for my newly obtained employer.  He is gone. 

The knife looks like an expensive one so instead of throwing it away I put it in my pocket.  If I see him on my way out of here, I’ll give it back. 

I resolve then in that instant to get a job soon.  The man was right.  I had been lying all along.  I do not have a job currently.  I am not shy about telling you now, reader, the truth, so that you may trust me going forward with these things I write down.  For if there is anything I truly aspire to be it is reliable.  This is something I mean to put down on the old curriculum v after all.  When I get back to town.  Something for later. 

For now, I think I’ll just stand here where I am, on my toes, looking for Liverpool.