Gay Rioch

We have a joke. It goes:

Man: I’m off.
Woman: Where are you going?
Man: To see Gay Rioch.

(My father said)
He was an ex-serviceman who’d seen time across the Pacific gunning down chinks. At the fighting’s end he came back a queer and worked in the lighthouse. It was the only job he was trusted to do, being queer and all. The job was easy - only ships between here and Port Orval are mainland fishing vessels, foreign objects that avoid us like the plague- but he didn’t last long. He went a month after Christmas. The dock boys did for him. All had a stake in its future and, I suppose, deep down, all felt bad. The problem was his talking. Too much. They let him go because of the things he said.

They said he had voices.
He said he didn’t.
They begged did to differ, and he did too.

His shtick was with the town, itself; some shit about lines.

They had to let him go, talking that rubbish.

I guess there wasn’t too much going on at his house because Gay Rioch moved from the lighthouse to the park. He was there everyday that I can remember; carrying stuff and moving around, consulting sun dials and thermometers, moving pencils up and down paper. As kids, we’d sometime take an interest in some shiny brass instrument or weird shaped bell or something like that, but never long enough to get close. He smelt of faggot. Our parents were the same as us. They’d sometimes say, “Oh, what is this today, Gay Rioch?” and “What is that you have there?”, and he’d answer and they’d laugh. Sometimes they’d laugh before he’d even finished so that you weren’t sure if they disapproved or disbelieved. And always he answered; never angry or disgruntled. I guess he had too many voices to get truly angry.

Like at the docks, he still spoke crapola. The only thing in his defence was the repetition, like he had something he wouldn’t let go of. Like maybe the young guy who pumped all that lead into all those Koreans was still in there somewhere, fighting for control of the mind he’d once claimed total ownership over.

But oh the repetition! Of the many recurring themes, one was something he called “The Chase”.

'It', he said, was a loop-to-loop, centred on a spire; a temperature at an angle, or something like that. When he was lucky, he glimpsed a “wall”. It seemed, from what I remember, his theories were useless without access to the lighthouse or some other concentrated source of light.

He spoke of coordinating a grid from memory.

In the months leading up to Delcroix’s death, Gay Rioch had a house sale. He didn’t stink so bad people couldn’t pick themselves up a bargain. I remember Aldo skinning rabbits with a set of hunting knives he’d picked up or stolen from there. Really lovely, old things, with a deep-set magisterial embossing. At the end of the sale, everyone asked him where he was going, and he said he didn’t know. I always remember that. Later, they said he was really just moving to Richmond Park and when that happened he’d have nothing to sell but his clothes. No-one would buy them, they said. Not even for bonfire night.

On the night he went away there isn’t much to go on. Tyler and the dock boys say they distinctly saw him heading towards the bay with some kind of bag but westward tides don’t level with that. Westward tides, you see, have a habit of returning what they reel in and Gay Rioch; well, he never came back. Tyler and his boys didn’t like being told what they already knew so they just, sort-of, stopped saying it.
It’s a passing joke now –

Man: I’m off.
Woman: Where are you going?
Man: To the other town, love, the other town.

Of course, we all know he went to the lighthouse now. In the morning, they found Delcroix’s body, stiff as marble and just as cold. No sign of a struggle. In fact, word is he looked pretty relaxed. They reckon it was his ticker. For Gay Rioch, read: a pair of trousers, a shirt and a dinner jacket, some shoes and a bag of unused provisions in a heap about Delcroix’s bed. No sign of the old queer anywhere. Apparently, there were cigarette butts all over the floor; they must have been Gay Rioch’s as my mother says Delcroix never smoked.

We combed every inch of the town and beach for two days straight, repeatedly turning over where we’d already been just in case he was moving from place to place but we never found a thing, not a speck of dust. In the end, they replaced Delcroix with Faulks and Faulks was alright. People soon forgot and started talking football and Reg Hunter’s recently collapsed colon again.

They razed Gay Rioch’s house down soon after, building holiday homes over the ruined lot. An architect moved in first and then a couple looking to escape the city for months at a time. The husband works in some big shot bank and spends his weekend’s playing golf, while she stays at home with the dogs like before. My father took a bottle of red over two nights after they moved in but he hasn’t been back since; they, all three, know they’ve not that much in common.