Hiccups (7) - Symptoms 10 to 11

Symptom 10. Losing your job

I guess it would have happened anyway, hiccups or no hiccups. The Council was disappearing, being split into two, divided into Swansea Council and Port Talbot. The resultant beaurocracy, the loss of the economies of scale, the cost of numerous leaflets, adverts and memos meant that hundreds of jobs had to go. Most of them would have to be casuals, temps like me, as the Council(s) wouldn’t then incur redundancy costs.

I was called into the boss’s office and told to take a seat. It was then that he told me about holding my nose and ears as a hiccup cure, though I didn’t try it ‘til later as it’s an undignified pose in which to get dismissed. Generally I had a good appraisal. He was sympathetic about my hiccups, though he acknowledged that they affected my phone manner, and he also mentioned the fact that I always looked tired, worn out. But the reason I would have to go was my temporary contract, though I still had a week left to work and he hoped I’d stay for all of it and of course he’d give me a good reference. And do try holding your nose and ears. It had always worked for him you see. I don’t know if he’d ever tried it with just holding the nose. Or just holding the ears! It’s not the sort of thing you think about when you’ve just been fired. Or made redundant, or I guess just being told that your contract wouldn’t be renewed, so strictly speaking I hadn’t lost my job at all. That was the optimistic way of looking at it.

I went out for lunch with Lara that day, regardless of what Sheena might say. Sometimes you just have to not care. We went to the café at the Leisure Centre. Lara had a vegetarian all day breakfast and I had a coffee. It was more crowded at lunchtime than it had been first thing.

We sat down at the same seats we’d sat on that morning, with a view overlooking the sea. There was a paper on one of the chairs that hadn’t been there earlier, and some brown stains on the table that had been there for years. I read the paper while Lara ordered at the counter. It was the local paper, the daily, lunchtime edition. On the front page was a picture of a middle-aged man. It was the story teller. Apparently he had been found dead on the beach, drowned, washed up. No foul play suspected. He must have died not long after I’d parted from him. I wondered how he’d met his end, what strange twist of fate. Had he killed himself? Had the squirrels finally driven him beyond the line, that fine line that divides story telling and madness. Had he ran into the sea to end his sad life? Or was there a more sinister reason?

But when Lara returned with my coffee I forgot all about the storyteller. We talked about what I might do to find another job, we talked swimming and the strength of our bones, and about the fact that she’d just been told that her job was safe. Some good news at least.

The afternoon session passed without incident. Several people gave me their condolences, including Sheena, though I could tell by the look she gave me that she’d noticed my lunch with Lara, there was the unmistakable glint of mischief hiding underneath her smile, the first seeds of gossip taking root. I went back home, took a beer from the fridge, and started to cook some pasta for me and Nina. She was sat there at the kitchen table, submerged in Proust. I told about losing my job and she said how sorry she was, but that I’d soon get another, seemingly oblivious that it was not at all easy to find work in Swansea. Some time we’d have to talk about where we wanted to live once she’d finished her exams, should we move to a town with jobs in it, where there was a clearer future? But that could wait. Now was not the time. It was a nice moment, as she hugged me and told me that she loved me. It was the first time she’d said that in a long while. I just said ‘hic’ and asked her what she wanted with her pasta. It’s not easy being romantic when you’ve got hiccups.

Symptom 11. Encountering strange men on the beach

That night I went for a walk on the beach again. I’d gone several hours without thinking about the story teller, but as I walked towards the beach his absence was everywhere apparent. It was a windy night, an almost stormy wind that I had to fight my way through, an uneasy clumsy of body movements. Maybe the gods were angry at the storyteller’s death, maybe the relative quiet and calm of a balmy summer evening on the beach is only possible because of the existence of storytellers, bringing a sense of perspective and order to the world, maybe when a storyteller dies a great storm rages from the heavens striking the Earth in anger, making squirrels shake fearfully in their lofts, not daring to dance in case they outrage the gods still further.

The beach looks spectacular on such a night. The sand tears through the air, each individual grain illuminated by the moon’s rays, but the beauty hidden by the sheer force of it. I walked down the steps tentatively. The sand was a raging torrent, wannabee sand-waves imitating the merciless power of the ocean.

I timidly set foot onto the beach and was immediately blasted by the wind and sand, felt my body raised by the sheer might of it. The sand was blasting into my face, rattling against my glasses, so I turned round, walking with my back to the wind. I felt as if I was floating, with the wind-rush pushing me along. Sand was flying beside me, millions of individual grains forming one great mass in flight, like a giant sandy flying carpet. I thought about the story-teller. He would have loved a night such as this. I wondered what story this would have inspired in him. Something exotic I expected. Something far fetched, an Arabian adventure, or an Arabian-style adventure, set in Wales.

As I was thinking about the storyteller a dot appeared in the distance. My mind lurched. For a moment I wondered whether he was really alive. Had I imagined the newspaper, had I invented his death? Or, more likely, had the journalist invented his death, was it just a story? But then another dot appeared beside the first. Whoever it was, whatever madman was out on a night like this, was not alone. And was therefore not the storyteller.

The dots became bigger dots, and in due course of time they became human shaped dots. For once I was up near the main road, away from the ocean, as to get to the sea I’d have to walk against the force of wind and sand.

Soon the dots were in front of me. They were two men; two large, well built men, dressed impeccably in suits and ties. Dressed perfectly for … a business meeting, a dinner in a high class restaurant, they would have fitted in at almost any occasion, but not on a beach, not on a beach with the sand blasting them in a furious gale.

But though I was surprised to see them out on such a night they seemed to be expecting me. The man on the left (that’s my left not theirs) was a few steps in front of the other man, and took the initiative in the conversation.

“Good evening,” he said. “A strange night to be out on the beach, are you often out on the beach after midnight?”

I shook my head and hiccupped a ‘no’. For some reason the men made me feel uneasy, it was something about the way they didn’t so much as blink at the furious sand blowing into their faces. Into their eyes! They walked and spoke as easily as if they were taking a stroll on a quiet summer’s day, unnervingly and inhumanly calm, whilst I was lurching like a paddle boat in a raging sea.

The two men looked at me contemptuously through the fog of sand flying between us. They clearly didn’t believe me. “All the same,” continued the man “I understand you know a friend of ours, I believe you may have spoken to him on recent nights on this very beach.” The man who wasn’t talking, I noticed, had a large cross-shaped scar across his right cheek. As I was observing him he opened his jacket, and took out a folded old photograph, which he passed to me. It was the storyteller, though a younger version of the man, possibly five to ten years younger, slightly smaller, more normal looking. This was obviously taken before the tap-dancing squirrels appeared, as his worry lines were missing.

I nodded. “I have seen him before, hic. That’s the guy that died isn’t it?”

The unscarred man nodded confirmation. He seemed surprised that I knew. “Indeed, a sad, sad loss. It is always a shame to lose one of our own.”

He made no effort to explain what ‘one of our own’ was, but continued to press me. “May I ask what it was you spoke about with the man? We feel it may be important, there was something he was going to tell us, but alas he is no longer of this world.” He looked up to the heavens as he spoke, which despite the wind and the sand cascading around us, were clear, with stars pouring light onto us, three small individuals standing on a beach on a windy night on the other side of the galaxy bathing in the light of stars that new nothing of our existence.

“So I repeat, what did the man say to you?” The man’s voice was still gentle and friendly but somewhere deep inside the words welled a threat. I thought about the cross-shaped scar. Such scars are rare and imply a world of behaviour and violence that I was unused to. I decided to co-operate as much as I had to.

I told him that we didn’t converse in the normal way, hic. I told him about the stories the man used to tell. This interested the unscarred man and he made me repeat them. I was beginning to tire under this cross-examination, fighting for my breath against wind, sand and hiccups, but feeling under the shadow of the two men, both of whom were physically stronger than myself, I repeated a couple of the old man’s stories. They were only harmless stories after all I told myself, and it wasn’t as if I was betraying a trust.

The man seemed both pleased and disappointed at my stories. When I announced that that was all, that those were the only stories I had been told, he became angry. He made a sign to the cross-scarred man who walked up to me, reached out his arms and forcibly snatched the old photograph from my hands. Meanwhile the unscarred man continued to look at me, as if studying my mind for signs that I was lying. “Are you sure that that’s all he ever said?” he continued, “that you only met him those two times, that there are no other stories you can tell me?”

“Absolutely not, hic. Those were the only two times I saw him, I know no other stories. Sorry, I hope you find out what you want to know, but I can’t help you.”

I started to walk away but the arm of the cross-scared man was blocking my way. The other man pushed his face right up against mine as if to kiss me, but he was probably just smelling my breath for lies. “I’m sorry too that you can’t help. But perhaps you can, perhaps other stories will come back to you. You will hear from us again, and that time you will give us what we want.”

The two men, in the smart black suits took a step away from me, bowed a farewell, turned and set off into the distance. Walking with the wind now they retained perfect composure, though as they moved further away it looked as if their feet were lifted from the sand and they were now walking through the air way above the beach.

I stood watching them until they were far from view. The wind was still hurtling sand against my back. I decided that it was time for me to go home. Rather than turn and face the sand face on I left the beach, clambering up nearby steps and walked homewards along the road, safe from the rages of sand and men.

Back at home Nina was still sleeping, still snoring softly. I was unable to sleep as ever, but that night I was unable to write as well. Without the storyteller’s influence I had no inspiration. With nothing else to do and several hours still to kill I picked up a new Terry Pratchett and started to read.