Rise Up Together

Adam L.G. Nevill

After emerging from a dark forest bearding the main road, I entered the seaside town where Mike had lived for the past five years. The dregs of natural light had almost disappeared but the road and street lighting remained dark. Resorting to high beams, I found myself willing the town’s lights to come on. They never did.

Tired after a five-hour drive to the coast, my concentration during the final leg of the journey was scant. I barely looked further than the SatNav or the road directly ahead, so my first impression of the town amounted to little more than a sense of endless rows of neat houses, dully glowing like marble at night. All of the buildings were white and crammed along the coast, bringing to mind a vast Victorian cemetery festooned with sepulchres. A town long and narrow, a harbour in the middle and an interminable A-road hemming the inland side.

At the southern tip of the town, around eight, I parked outside the white house that belonged to Mike; a three-bed molar embedded within a curving jawline of identical buildings. I hadn’t seen Mike since he left the city, half a decade before. And like many old friends, we immediately broke into sheepish grins and pitched a few comments back and forth. Mike was inside the porch. I was on the drive, shaking cramp out of my back and joints. But my relief at no longer being inside the car unspooled into an uncomfortable surprise. I felt that specific awkwardness when confronted by unexpected alterations in the appearance of a familiar person, caused by illness or age.

Mike was only forty-one, the same age as me. And, to my knowledge, he hadn’t suffered an upheaval in his personal life. He certainly hadn’t mentioned anything in the handful of emails we exchanged each year. And as he didn’t participate in social media he wasn’t easy to keep up with. His correspondence had also grown scarce, a little abrupt, and light on content during the intervening years. A gulf had grown between us, one enforced by physical distance. That was the cause. Or so I’d assumed.

His hair was grey and thinning. It hadn’t been the last time I’d seen him, and I can’t understand why men suffering hair loss allow their remaining hair to grow thick at the sides, whilst vainly attempting to fashion the meagre strands on top into a semblance of cover. A practice that only adds years to the face. If there is no hair style in a man’s future, remove the remains or take it right down. Not Mike. He seemed determined to make himself appear much older than he actually was, and ridiculous, with an arrangement of combed wisps swept backwards.

The divergence of his wardrobe from fashionable to a style far beyond his years only worsened the presentation of his head. He was also uncharacteristically overweight and there was a putty-like texture to his visible flesh, save his eyelids and cheeks. Those were pink and shiny with eczema. Pale, round-shouldered and bulgy, his paunch was unwisely emphasised by the taupe slacks he wore too high and belted tightly. Schoolish lace-up shoes and a formal shirt completed the ensemble, the latter tucked deep below the waistline. A biro was clipped to a chest pocket.

On the colour spectrum he was now grey and beige and washed-out. I could have passed him in the street without a flicker of recognition. And yet from my first sighting of him at university and until we met for his farewell drinks, Mike had been a peacock and a compulsive user of the gym. This was prior to his move to the seaside to take a job for a corporation that maintained retirement villages. A middle-management position as nondescript as his current apparel. He now looked like a man who still lived with his parents and dressed like the elderly father. But Mike had no family. No partner had been mentioned either.

The analogy of a man remaining too long in the family home, I extend to his actual home. Cosy but regimentally tidy. Clinically clean yet fussy and furnished in a style I’d not associate with anyone shy of seventy years of age, who wasn’t female and pathologically house-proud. A woman from our parents’ generation. I might have accepted his surroundings if he’d been renting a furnished property, but he owned the house.

Spotless walls, brass and glass lightshades in the hall, a pristine kitchen equipped with a tea cosy and checked tea-towels upon a wooden rack. Floral crockery. Even a bloody spice rack. A dry-wipe board for shopping lists. A calendar of improbably colourful pastoral scenes. A line of hardback cookbooks and, seemingly, the complete works of Delia Smith.

I only stopped gaping to remove my shoes, as bid by my old friend, and padded into an overly-lit living room with the curtains drawn. Therein a coffee table, one bookcase, a television, an easy chair and matching sofa with tasselled cushions. And not much else. No stereo. The Mike I once knew loved indie music and could wall a room with his vintage vinyl collection. Perhaps they were in another room.

When I peered over my shoulder to make some quip about the massive improvements in his housekeeping since our student days, I caught him deftly placing my shoes together before repositioning my bag against a wall. He then straightened the skewed mat. The latter fussing executed with irritation.

When seen in bright light, the man who settled heavily in the lounge was also bone-tired. If Mike’s mouth struggled to support a smile, his eyes couldn’t summon the strength to attempt one. Nor did mine when I spotted the heraldic symbolism printed upon the sides of the tea cups that he’d carried into the living room. A royalist too now?

When I mentioned that I could kill a beer, Mike muttered that he only had sherry. So I stuck to the watery, unsweetened tea he’d provided. Was it Earl Grey or ash that I could taste? There was something oddly fragrant yet charred about the brew, and when I set it down after two sips, Mike, with the speedy reactions of a first-class slips fielder, managed to rise from the sofa and insert a coaster beneath the mug before its base touched the polished surface of the table.

“Oh. Yeah. Sorry,” I murmured.

I was then barely able to find the will to contribute to the wretched small talk he tossed my way – How was the journey? Should brighten up tomorrow. Take a stroll along the seafront while I’m at work. Chambers does a fine cream tea – without him once looking me in the eye.

I was once made redundant by a company that had been most unscrupulous in its use of me. As the head of human resources had slipped a white envelope across the boardroom table to me, he’d looked just like Mike. Guilty, furtive, ashamed, eager for the meeting to conclude. Mike wasn’t going to sack me but he was deeply mithered by something, and I suspected he’d returned to the preoccupied state of mind that I’d interrupted on arrival.

The ceiling light and an anodyne print behind his head of a cornfield seemed of more interest to him than his newly arrived friend who he’d not seen in years. During the first twenty minutes, he even checked the sensible watch on his thick forearm several times as if I was keeping him from something vital. He didn’t listen to my answers. There were too many silences.

During one uncomfortable pause in what served for conversation, I noticed the thick drapes that concealed the garden; velvet with pelmets and braided cords of gold. A mocha wall of fabric that sealed the windows and walls to the floor. They conjured an unintended theatrical effect and had they been opened and I confronted with a bored audience wearing evening dress, watching us from rows of upholstered chairs, I might not have been as surprised as I should have been.

Our mutual discomfort endured until the hour approached nine.

When Mike consulted his watch for a third time in quick succession, as if he were timing a sporting event, I could no longer hold back. “Mate. What’s up? Something on your mind? It’s been a while but I remember that look.”

“No. No. Nothing. Absolutely fine. Never been better. Just tired. Early start. Work.” He didn’t smile and his yawn, I am sure, was fake. His eyes also flitted to the wall behind his seat. He hadn’t been able to relax since my arrival but at the sight of the wall, his anxiety ratcheted sufficiently to make him paler, even breathless. Mike muttered something to himself, then bit his bottom lip. “We should think about turning in. I’ll show you your room.”

“If this isn’t a good time, you should have said—”

“No. No. No. Nothing like that. Not used to guests. You’re the first in…how long? Not sure.” He couldn’t meet my eye and peered at his shoes, the curtains, the light, the ceiling, the door, his watch again. Then stood up fast. “You must be shattered. Long drive.”

“I’m all right. First night. I thought we might have a couple of drinks.”

Mike swept up the crockery and ferried it into the kitchen before returning with a damp cloth to wipe down the coasters. To actually wipe down the coasters. That’s when I began to laugh.

Mirth I cut off at the sight of his fidgety expression; the mind behind it entrapped by an absorption that detached his awareness from me, the room, the present and drew it inwards. Into what must have been a maelstrom of fretting. I pitied him. And dumbfounded, I mutely stared at him. So reduced. Cowed, restless and antsy. The long weekend of sinking ale, swimming, wolfing gourmet burgers and fresh fish that I’d envisaged, no longer felt remote but impossible.

“Is there a pub? We can chew the fat over—”

“No! Noooo. Noo, noo, noo,” he mooed pitifully. The tone silly enough to incite the first prickle of irritation along my nape. “Nah. Knackered,” he went on. “Busy, busy, busy. At work. Need to turn in.” He faked another yawn and paced about my chair like a waiter looking to close up. His restless hands meaninglessly rearranged the television handsets. Again, he glanced at his watch and seemed to wither at what he saw recorded there. “An early one won’t kill us—”

Before he could finish another weak and unconvincing excuse for his odd behaviour, the wall behind his head was thumped hard. From the other side.

I started. “What the hell?”

Mike flinched so hard his feet nearly left the silvery carpet. He resembled a man who’d just suffered a shock; some awful news about his health or loved ones. Or, this was a man who’d been threatened. I couldn’t decide. But his hovering beside my chair developed a desperate impatience; a suggestion of his mind’s growing insistence that he act urgently. His chubby hands made a feeble upwards motion as if he were directing me to stand up. “We better,” he said, and the wafting of his hands increased as he angered.

“Mike?”

“Come on! Let’s go! We need to—”

And then the wall was thumped again, even harder than before, from the other side. A sudden, violent provocation from the neighbouring property.

“Jesus. Who is that?”

Mike swallowed to find his voice. Constructing a feeble grin, he muttered, “Bit sensitive to noise.” He rolled his eyes and tried to enlist me in an understanding of the neighbours’ concern. “You know how people get.”

“Not really. Not when it’s not even nine. When we’re only talking. At a reasonable volume. In your home.”

But Mike was already dousing the lights. And to avoid being shut inside a pitch-black living room, because he was inching the door closed before I even got to my feet, I followed him into the hall. Where he swept up my holdall, killed the lights and jogged up the stairs to a first floor that reeked of lavender.

Upstairs, he became embarrassed and tried to snigger his way out of explaining the reason for our speedy evacuation from downstairs. But he never mentioned the two thumps against his living room wall. “Bathroom’s there,” he said instead, pointing at a closet-sized space that glimmered like a sterilised surgery, its array of fancy soaps and lotions arranged upon a glass shelf. “You won’t need a glass of water, or anything, will you?” he asked and fearfully peered at the darkened staircase. “’Cus…” But he never finished.

“No,” I replied, my voice like my spirits, leaden with disappointment, as I dutifully trudged into the spare room to placate him.

His relief was evident. Delighted at his success at driving me up those stairs and into the spare room, he appeared near euphoric as if some dire psychological need had been assuaged.

The door of the spare room was shut tightly and pushed into the frame until the catch clicked. “See you in the morning!” he called through solid wood.

I half expected to hear the sound of a bolt, to ensure that I never came back out of the room. Baffled, I sat on a hard mattress and fussy duvet in the dull, featureless room in which I had been billeted. A home office. A white self-assembly desk filled one wall. That and the home computer on top were entirely dust free. A chair was tucked neatly beneath the desk. A bookcase supported manuals and folders. A brief perusal of their plastic spines connected them to business management and accounting. There was nothing else inside the space beside some pressed flowers in wooden frames, on the wall at the end of the bed.

The white walls glared. A cell with windows screened by another set of heavy, imprisoning curtains. They dropped to the floor as if to eradicate any sight of the outside world.

“What the fuck?” I asked myself. “What the actual fuck?”

Beyond the room, not a single sound arose. The residual tone in my ears hummed loudly.

“Fuck it.” I undressed to my underwear and shirt. Killed the light. Pulled back the duvet. Seeking air, I fumbled in total darkness at the side of the bed near the windows and their imprisoning acres of drapery. The house was too warm, airless and fragrant. I slept poorly without an open window.

By the time I’d fought through the swaddling cascades of the curtains and shoved a small window ajar, I realised that the streetlights still hadn’t been switched on. The road Mike lived in was obliterated by darkness and not a chink of light escaped any of the neighbouring buildings. I was too irritable to fathom why.

I dozed then woke with a horrible lurch and wasn’t sure which way was up or down around the bed. Nor did I know where I was for a few disorienting seconds.

The second time I found myself half-awake I understood that I had been awoken. By footsteps outside. Slow footsteps, a shuffling, as if a group of people was quietly passing the house.

By the time I’d sat up and blinked meaninglessly, in the sensory deprivation that Mike’s spare room enforced upon a guest, and had pulled aside the curtain, I saw nothing but a greater darkness, chilly with night and extending away from a window frame I could not even see.

The footsteps had passed. There may have been evidence of a muted voice further along the street, or not.

I lay down and turned over. Then turned over again, this way and that, until I noticed the sound of traffic. In the near distance. I checked my watch. Not even two. But from the main road that hugged the back of the town, there swished a regular sound of tyres upon tarmac.

A little later I heard the sound of a battery humming. This was outside and accompanied by the sound of wheels rolling across cement. And then another group of slowly moving pedestrians with low voices crossed the end of Mike’s street. A procession that seemed to go on and on. Then fade away.

Hot, unrefreshed and stifled, my skin damp, I gave up on sleep at five and read the book I’d brought with me. But I’d not progressed far when I heard Mike shuffling about on the landing, then tinkling and tinkering in the tiny bathroom. Minutes later, I detected his careful attempts not to wake me as he descended the stairs. I dressed and went down.

To say he was more like his old self that morning would have been a vast exaggeration but at least he was more at ease than he’d been the night before. His conversation, sadly, hadn’t improved. “Up early? I always get up early. Good breakfast then off to work. Help yourself to cereal and toast. Jam and stuff in the fridge. I won’t. Friday, so I treat myself to a bagel and pastry. Pick ’em up from a small place close to the office. Tea?” It went on for some time. Cheery yet forced, devoid of any real content; all driven, I felt, by a lingering residue of the immense relief he’d felt last night on the landing outside the spare room.

To dam the stream of his drivel, I said, “Dark place, this. No streetlights. What’s that all about?”

“Cutbacks. Social care for the elderly consumes the entire council tax budget and nigh on all the money from central government.”

“I thought this place was wealthy.”

“Oh, it is. Money they’ve got down here. Most expensive bit of coastline in the country. But the average age is pushing eighty and the burden on social care is immense.” He seemed to want to say more but held back, then changed the conversation. “I won’t be home until five. What you gonna do with yourself today?”

When I mentioned that I’d check out the seafront, he nodded vigorously. “Cool. Good call. Good, good.” He gave me laborious directions to the best car park that were pointless after the first right turn ‘up a dog leg’, so I stopped paying attention.

“I thought,” I interjected, “that we might go out and get something to eat later. And—”

“No chance. You have to book and as Saturday is the biggest night of the year here, everything was hoovered up weeks ago for the entire weekend. And nothing’s open past eight anyway.”

“You’re kidding me. Eight?”

His head bobbed up and down, which made his extra chin quiver like a goitre and the muffs of hair at the side of his head sway like sea creatures. “Start of the season! Air Show. Steam trains. Regatta. County show. Farmers’ markets. Starts this weekend.”

“Takeaway?”

“Don’t worry about all that. I’ve got plenty in.” And then he made haste to leave. “Left you a spare key. Don’t lose it. Oh, and can I ask a massive favour?” he said, while sweeping up his car keys and a leather wallet that contained the work he must bring home to diligently fuss over in the home office.

“Shoot.”

“I leave the curtains closed. Never open them at the back. Or the windows. Back is kinda…out of bounds. So please don’t open them.”

I stared, and awaited the reasoning behind the unusual request.

“Yeah? They stay shut.” He emphasised the instruction in an anxious tone similar to the one he’d adopted to encourage me to go to bed at nine.

I nodded. “Before you take off, can I get your Wi-Fi code, mate.”

“Ah! Slight problemo. Only comes on between seven and eight.”

I stared. And stared some more.

“It’s…complicated,” he said. “But, later, yeah. Gotta fly. There’s a bacon, sausage, double cheese, hash brown bagel out there with my name on it!”

I waited for the sound of his little car to hum away, then strode into the living room and heaved aside the heavy curtains.

To find myself confronted by a wooden fence.

Close to the glass, a wall of panels separated by concrete posts stretched at least twelve feet high. It had been constructed with new timber. Between the fence and the back of Mike’s house, a spotless gravel trench, a foot wide, ran along the rear of the entire property.

I unlocked one half of his French windows and pushed the door until the edge struck the fence. I squeezed myself through the gap and stepped out and into the gravel trench. As I pondered the enigma of a fence erected so close to Mike’s house, I puffed on my electronic cigarette.

When the first cloud of exhaled vapour drifted over the fence, a door on the neighbours’ side was thrust open. Followed by a hurried scuffing of feet across gravel, then grass. In the gaps between the fence panels, a small figure wearing a red cagoule, that I saw in glimpses, raced along the barrier. A shrill voice, breathless with outrage, shattered the early morning silence. “You! You’re smoking!”

After my shock receded, I managed, “I’m not.”

“I can see it! Smell it! My husband has a respiratory condition! You should have been told!” The fabric of the woman’s coat scraped the fence as she searched for a slot through which to peer. A flash of white hair whisked across the gaps and a small fist struck wood and made me jump. “You cannot be out here!” The woman was furious.

“What?” I asked, shocked, and embarrassed by how intimidated I felt.

“It’s not to be opened! This is ours!”

“This bit of gravel?” I managed. “On Mike’s side of the bloody fence?”

“You cannot! You will not! Set one foot further than the threshold!” The little figure in the red coat was now spitting with rage. Polyester swished as she stalked backwards and forwards like a predatory cat behind bars. “The curtains! The door!” she screamed when a bloodshot eye finally found a peephole. An eye wild and wet that fixed upon me and drilled its madness at me. “You cannot set one foot further than the threshold! This is ours!”

From somewhere behind the woman, another elderly voice barked. Male, husky with age and exhaustion, that raised itself admonishingly. “Go back inside the house! Get inside! How dare you! We will have our privacy!”

“It’s not even your—” I cut myself off when I recalled the ardour with which Mike’s instructions were imparted and how his apprehension had ascended to real fear the night before. The thumps on the wall were a signal. A signal indicating that he must go to bed, initiated by this pair. They were his neighbours. Not mine. His problem. This was supposed to be a relaxing weekend reunion with an old friend, beside the sea, so I stepped away, telling myself that I wasn’t going to make an awful situation worse for Mike. The fact that the confrontation had shaken me enough to feel craven, I suppressed for the sake of my own self-esteem. The intensity of the neighbours’ rage was astonishing and the confrontation went some way to explaining why my old friend had been so nervous the night before. My ignorance of the rules had put him on edge.

I slipped back inside his house and slammed the door.

The neighbours continued to shout at me from behind the fence but I couldn’t hear them properly through the double glazing. Struggling to order my thoughts, I took a seat and continued to puff away at my ecig.

Why allow a pair of rude old bastards get away with this? They must have fenced off his back garden. Appropriated it. The idea made me smile, grimly. It was absurd. Because surely his house had come with a rear garden? And even the little gravel trench on his meagre side was also out of bounds to him? Surely not? And I could only assume that he wasn’t allowed to open his curtains, or windows, at the back, nor cross ‘the threshold’. It’s complicated. It certainly appeared to be.

The spite and fury in the silly old creature’s voice became trapped inside my skull like an echo and when clarity returned, I realised I’d had enough. The visit was a write-off. I’d scoot around the seafront, say cheerio to Mike when he got home, then take off to salvage the rest of my short break from work. Back on home turf. I didn’t want to witness any more of what Mike had become, nor the awful arrangements he endured with his vile neighbours. And his living in a town where everything closed at eight! I’d seen nothing of the place, as it had been caped in darkness the night before, but I already loathed it.

I let myself out the front and drove to the ring-road to find a sign that would lead me to the town and seafront. And passed through the labyrinthine monoculture of housing painted a brilliant white. Every garden was immaculate, symmetrical, exploding with floral colour, the edges of each drive and front lawn worthy of the regimental parade ground. The properties varied in size, from vast mansions to tidy maisonettes, but I’d never seen such uniformity, precision and order in any town or city suburb before.

Residents were occasionally glimpsed but only within front gardens bordering the starkly clean streets. They all appeared to be fussing over their hedges and flowers and ornamental trees. Up ladders and trimming, mowing, weeding and plucking, and hosing down pristine paving with jet washers. All boomers, or older.

Every third house had the curtains drawn or shuttered against the day. And I didn’t see a single old car, either stationary or mobile. The private cars were new. Four-wheeled-drives and performance vehicles were favoured here. The few that were mobile were driven by an assortment of grey and white heads; some forms so shrunken they could barely see over the dashboard. Wizened passengers were often sunken into the murk of the rear seats; figures as small as children wearing dark glasses.

I quickly grew weary of the Union Jack flag and Cross of St. George, displayed at every opportunity to enforce some prideful sense of belonging to a culture and place where only the blind might have suffered confusion about their whereabouts.

The traffic moved slowly and wound thickly in a progression to and from the satellite retail estates, lining the inland side of the town like a castle’s outer walls. I passed half a dozen of these enormous operations that were surrounded by oceans of tarmac gridded with white lines. DIY stores, garden centres, warehouses the size of airports selling pet supplies, cafés, bakeries, mall-sized supermarkets. Traffic islands, neat verges and dual carriageways necklaced the retail estates. At every set of traffic lights, a complex array of signage listed attractions: botanical gardens, zoological gardens, a steam railway, seafront.

I picked up the signs to the sea. My need to see a wide expanse of water was equal to my desire to escape the interminable roads and glaring white buildings and the compulsive order of the gardens and streets, the combed grass and polished gravel. Pretty, no doubt, yet ostentatious and stifling in its conservatism and uniformity. I found it ghastly and failed to understand its attraction for Mike, though the town threw light upon Mike’s wardrobe and his fussy little house and its fragrant interior. That terrible particle-board desk stored in a chintzy spare room… It all began to make more sense in daylight, as if he’d become overwhelmed and transformed by the presiding status quo.

Perhaps he’d felt obliged, even coerced, to conform to the prevailing consensus. Even more alarming, there was a servile and timid air to my old friend, whose pitiful existence seemed to revolve around his labours for retirement villages. His entire being seemed to have been engulfed by the aged, their culture, values and needs. Precipitating his premature aging.

After thirty minutes in the town’s suburbs and outskirts, I longed to see a young face. The first I encountered was working on the seafront. She wore a green apron and served coffee in one of the countless tearooms and cafés that thronged streets and lanes winding from the idyllic town centre to the shoreline. Many of her peers performed similar tasks; waiting upon tables, pushing wheelchairs, picking up litter, emerging from public toilets with a mop and bucket, carrying cases into hotels, while aged guests shuffled behind, prodding with canes and gesticulating to emphasise arrangements that were to be followed.

The service industry workers struck me as cowed, put-upon, unnaturally silent and morose. They reminded me of Mike. Though his fretting and pettiness possessed a sharper edge of despair.

Maintaining the standards of the suburbs, the seafront and streets of the town were Singapore-immaculate. Probably washed daily, and I experienced a horrible deference when placing my feet upon them. Not a single bin overflowed. The buildings were painted the pastel of seaside ice creams. Iron awnings and fences gleamed onyx. Knightsbridge, Mayfair and Marylebone came to mind. Hanging baskets drew the eye, their bouquets as vivid as still-life paintings. Not a single storefront was dark. Each was filled with light and colour and plump with tastefully arranged merchandise.

There were no tattoo parlours, betting shops, fried chicken takeaways, pizzerias, sports clothing shops. My efforts to find a vaping shop were made in vain. Not even the area outside the train station – a universally grubby quarter on my many travels – had been marred by a blob of chewing gum, or lozenge of dog mess. And it was a pity I needed nicotine liquid and not what was being sold in one of several gourmet butchers, florists, fishmongers, mobility scooter showrooms, estate agents, golf stores, delicatessens, or assisted living agencies.

At least there were three independent bookshops, though one only sold cookbooks and a second was hopelessly swamped with mass market thrillers, suspense-with-romance novels, puzzle books, Sudoku and confectionery. The third was marred by a lifesize cut-out of a popular gardening celebrity, as well as a promotional poster for the biography of a motor sports celebrity. I couldn’t make myself go inside.

Beyond the town, I found the effect of the sun upon the glittering sea and deep red sands so arresting that I became disoriented. And the long, ethereal sweep of coastline, undulating over valleys into the far misted distance on either side of a harbour packed with huge white yachts, made me feel tearful. I’d not seen anything so beauteous in years. It didn’t seem part of England but of an imagined idyll. I was surprised I’d never seen a picture of the vista. How had it escaped stampedes of holiday makers and travel writers and bales of Sunday supplements?

I also failed to observe one infant, or a single pushchair in the town or seafront. No children played on the sands. No mums and nannies strolled and laid down picnic blankets. Later in the day, no pupils from local schools trudged home, even after I’d lingered until well past four. No youths kicked footballs or sat upon walls prodding phone screens. With the exception of the uniformed staff, I saw no one but the aged. And they were everywhere.

Ravenous by lunchtime, I’d planned to sit down, eat my pasty and drink a coffee in one of the Victorian shelters facing the sea, or on one of the many benches, but this proved impossible. Each was filled with massed lines of elderly residents, who sat joylessly and confronted the eternity of water. Others faced the sea in an infinity of expensive cars parked on every section of kerb beyond the beach huts. My hellos went unanswered. My nods were unreturned. It wasn’t easy to tell but I fancied I was being watched with disdain, even suspicion.

Walking beyond the harbour, about two miles out of town to where the villas with sea views dwindled, I found a strip of headland studded with more wooden benches. And I sat before the fence of a gargantuan golf course. As it vanished into the southern distance, the manicured grounds seemed to exceed the coastal length of the town. A few thin, colourful figures hobbled across the shorn grass and swung away between the distant mounds. Beyond them the course was empty, and barren.

The bench I’d selected had an elaborate floral arrangement tied to the armrest and a brass plaque drilled into the backrest. Idly, after unwrapping my pasty, I surveyed the first memorial.

Always in our hearts. Cherished wife. Beloved Mother. Adored Grandmother. Respected Great Grandmother. Friend to all. June Hazzard, 1903–2021.

I required all of my fingers to establish the preposterous lifespan of the woman my seat was dedicated to.

Once I’d finished eating, I moved along the perimeter of the golf course. It wasn’t possible to walk anywhere else; the golf club’s coastal boundary was protected by an unnecessarily menacing wire fence and allowed a few feet of earth for those who walked the public land of the coastal path. And as the steel barrier shimmered into the distance, the path either disappeared beneath the wire, or the fence suggested itself liable to push a walker off the cliffs.

The next bench, dedicated to the ‘loving memory of Richard M.T. Cord, MajGen’, listed his birth date as 1900 and his death in 2015. Its neighbour celebrated the memory of a Margaret ‘Babs’ Forester who’d also lived some way past one hundred. I walked to the end of the course and only stopped calculating the monumental lifespans of the locals, bench by bench, when I, at last, discovered a plaque remembering a chap who’d only made it as far as ninety-eight. ‘Taken by the sea he’d sailed his whole life’ was the explanation given, suggesting he’d not expired through old age and one of its many infirmities. A sailing ship was engraved below the text.

After the previous night’s restlessness, I napped for a while. By the time I returned to the seafront in late afternoon, it was emptying. A shading of dusk and the easterly breeze skimming off the tranquil sea was sufficient to drive the populace inland.

I made my way back to Mike’s in light traffic. Rush hour didn’t amount to much. A few service vehicles. Builders, gardeners and pet groomers, and the odd slowly driven performance vehicle. When I pulled up outside his house, I presumed it was the woman from next door, who’d shouted at me for opening the back door, who was now on her knees and pointlessly digging a trowel into a showpiece of a flower-bed beneath Mike’s kitchen window. Her thin, scowling mouth was visible beneath the brim of a large straw hat.

Her husband stood ramrod straight, his back to me, before the hedge that divided the properties, and administered secateurs to a plane of privet that any spirit level would have judged perfectly flat. Neither of them acknowledged me.

I let myself in.

Mike was waiting for me. And Mike wasn’t happy.

As well as angry, he’d been crying and was genuinely shaken. The only relief he seemed able to achieve, from this tormented state, was by scolding me; though only after coaxing me to the rear of the living room and away, I felt, from the kitchen windows at the front, through which the neighbours were visible.

I felt like a child, or a henpecked husband in a Seventies sitcom, chastised for coming home from the allotments smelling of beer. He paced and twisted his fingers about his fat hands but struggled to look me in the eye. His voice never managed more than a whisper. “I told you. Last thing I fucking said! Don’t open the bloody curtains. Or door at the back. One simple thing. Godammit, what were you thinking?” I let him continue until he was repeating himself as well as experiencing some difficulty breathing.

“Mike,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Not to me it’s not. You live next door to a pair of horrible cunts—”

“No! Stop!” He tried to push the words back inside my mouth, one clammy hand actually closing over my nose and mouth. I pushed him away.

“In a sterile, cultureless desert of unfeasibly ancient people—”

“You musn’t!” His soap-reeking hands fell upon my face again.

“Fuck off!” I roared at him and shoved him hard, against his ridiculous wall of curtain.

We then stood in silence for a while. Each of us panting. Delirious with emotion. Until Mike sat on the floor. He sobbed twice, then abruptly stopped when he seemed to remember some foolishly neglected concern. He glanced fearfully at the light-fitting and shot to his feet. “Can you see if they’ve gone,” he whispered like a frightened child and pointed towards the kitchen.

I checked but only after I’d snapped myself from a timidity that was contagious around him, inside his horrid perfumed house.

The neighbours had cleared off and I felt disproportionately relieved to find the front lawn empty. “You let them walk all over your front lawn like that?”

“They make the garden nice.”

“But it’s intrusive.”

“The front’s theirs. As well.”

“I don’t understand. You only own the house? Why would you buy a house when you don’t own the front and back gardens? And don’t say it’s complicated or I’m going to take a shit through their letterbox.”

Mike visibly shuddered. “I signed them over. Front and back. Couldn’t take it anymore. Squabbling about the border. Was for the best. If you lived here, you’d understand.” He checked his watch. “Come on. We’ve time.” He raced for the front door. Then paused, one hand on the latch, to whisper, “Keep your bloody voice down. Even outside.”

This air of conspiracy seduced me enough to comply; the anticipation of secrets soon to be disclosed was too great a temptation. I’d grown desperate for some kind of explanation for his preposterous situation, perhaps for the very town he had chosen for a home.

I followed him into the street.

Head down, he scurried a few feet ahead of me, up a hill between a canyon of gardens worthy of Babylon and houses as polished as imperial tombs, until we reached a small park fronting what looked like an old primary school.

Inside the park, Mike indicated that I should follow him to a spot beneath the branches of an oak tree as if he meant to conceal us when out in the open.

“Thank fuck,” I said, nodding at the school. “So there are some children here. I bet the town can just about scrape enough of them together to fill that one small building.”

“Volume,” he said and pressed one finger to his lips.

“We’re outside. No one can hear us. Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Please. And it’s not a school. Not anymore. It’s a care home. Converted. The people here…”

“Are all old.”

“The ones you are seeing.” Mike sighed and closed his eyes. “They are the children.”

“Come again?”

“All of them. The people, residents. The ones you’ve seen. Are the children. These are the young ones that you are seeing. Their parents are still alive.”

“Hang on. Hang on. Not possible. And what has happened to you? We’re hiding under a tree and you’re…” I recalled the plaques on the benches, the wizened, mummified heads I’d spotted in the rear of passing cars.

Mike’s forehead glistened with sweat. “The parents and grandparents run everything. Make every decision. Or, rather, they execute the will of the mayor. It’s passed on, passed down. The workers arrive by train and road. From outlying, inland towns. Places that are not so nice.”

“Did you just say grandparents?”

“Oh yeah. Lots of them are still alive.”

“Never. That would make them…” My maths failed.

“It’s not uncommon in this town to still have living parents when you hit a hundred.”

“Never.”

“Or grandparents.”

I sniggered. “So where are they?”

“They won’t be seen by day. They don’t look so good. What’s left of their old eyes can’t cope with much light, particularly sunlight. Most are in care homes, retirement villages, or live with their children. And they don’t sleep well at night.” He seemed to draw into himself then, become absorbed again by his cyclic preoccupations, his mania.

“You are absolutely fucking with me.”

“Alas. I am not.”

I thought back to my restless night and the sound of cars, of groups shuffling through the streets in the early hours, the whir of a mobility scooter. “How? How is it possible?”

“The keys.”

“What?” I kept my voice down so as not to agitate him further. He was ill and had quickly adopted the swivel-eyed aspect of a conspiracy nut. Soon exasperated, as if I’d forced him to explain algebra to an infant, he searched for analogies, metaphors, similes with which to make his revelations simpler for me to grasp. He must have then dismissed them all before checking his watch and gazing at the sky.

“Mike?”

“Remember,” he muttered, looking past me. “That TV show? Benny Cadabra. We’re the same age. Think we even talked about it once when we were stoned. Early Seventies. Creepy as fuck.”

“Fuck’s that gotta do with anything?”

Mike gently raised a finger to his lips to shush me. “Benny used to read the kids’ minds on his show and then give them what they wanted? Toys and crap. He knew what they were thinking. What they wanted. Always. Everyone assumed he’d been told what the kids wanted, by their parents. But a few in the industry always claimed that he was genuinely psychic. All I’m saying is, there is a lot of that in this town. Particularly acute next door, I might add. But it wouldn’t matter where I lived in this place. It’s a common trait. An ability. You remember Benny Cadabra’s magic carpet? Used to float it about the TV studio. You could see the wires. How we all laughed! But he didn’t need them. The wires were a ruse to disguise the fact that he could…really do that. Float.”

I turned away. Had given up. It was that time: bag, car keys, hit the road. Sometime within the last five years, my old friend’s mind had blown like a fuse. For some inexplicable reason, as we stood beneath the branches of a tree in an empty park, so that no one could overhear us, he was now rambling about a disgraced children’s entertainer we’d seen on TV when we were in primary school. An alleged sex offender. I seemed to remember that the testimony of his juvenile accusers was discredited but the taint had ruined his public life. I’d assumed he’d died in exile. It wouldn’t have been unreasonable for anyone who even remembered the freak to have assumed the same.

Mike exhaled and seemed to deflate as his chest fell. “Benny Cadabra. Also known as Benny Tench. His real name. He’s the mayor here. All on the Q.T. Low profile.”

I paused. “He was in his sixties when we were in nursery. That would make him…”

“One hundred and nine years old. And still running the council. Through intermediaries. A chairman if you will. He found a neglected community of retirees here. When this place was a rundown seaside resort. As I understand it, Cadabra was part of a movement that had existed since the 1800s. With some strange fucking ideas. A cult, if you must. They were like freemasons. Ran charities, the usual stuff. Smokescreens before they seeped into politics. When Benny showed up here, with the tabloids chasing his fat arse for kiddie fiddling, he made inroads at the council. Way back. All long before my time. But back then, he used the movement’s keys to take over. His influence spread. Like a virus.”

Mike’s mind drifted. “You know, the hospital is the town’s biggest employer. It’s almost as big as the town itself. Considered to be a temple. It sustains. Recycles. Lengthens lifespans. And it’s not just medicine that they practise there. Oh no.” He paused, as if struggling to continue with this disjointed rambling, until a compulsion forced him to blurt, “We don’t count. You and me. Not meaningfully. Too young. None of the workers. Utterly disempowered. Lot of us. Broken. Indentured servants. Me too. You know, the Brexit vote was higher here than anywhere in the UK. Only radical Tory candidates even stand here. The other parties tried to establish a foothold once or twice. Last time, their combined votes were 134 out of a potential fifty thousand. And those, I think, were mistakes in the voting booths. Down here, their eyes aren’t so good.” Mike paused and checked his watch. “I need to eat something and it’s getting on.”

It couldn’t have been much past seven but I followed the hunched and beaten figure back to his dismal, isolated, fenced-off house.

The two meals he served on trays had been microwaved; a Lancashire hotpot for me, shepherd’s pie for Mike. And yet it’d taken him half an hour to fumble two cartons in and out of a machine and to pour the steaming contents onto plates. “Sherry?” he asked, absentmindedly.

I demurred.

“Bit of telly?”

I demurred again.

“Wi-Fi is up if you need it? Well, there’s fifteen minutes left.”

“Out of your hour,” I said automatically, though my interest in anything he had to say had dipped since we’d returned from the park.

“Privilege.” Mike pointed his fork at the wall and spoke around the revolving mulch of mince flopping between his bulging cheeks. “Sometimes they take it down completely.”

“The people who stole your garden and tell you to go to bed at nine?”

Mike nodded and tucked into his pie.

“Do they buy your clothes too?” I said and experienced an urge to simply scream with laughter.

Mike nodded, his face expressionless. “She lays them out for me. They’ve house keys.”

“What?”

“Searches. She spends more time in here than me. Looking. Mooching. Bank account, that too. He manages my finances. Gives me pocket money.” Mike shook his head and sighed. “How it works here. Top down.”

I felt cold and stiff upon my velvet chair.

“You have the keys. Or you don’t,” he muttered.

Now it was my turn to look at my watch. “Mike. Mate. I’m off first thing. Cutting it short. Sorry, I’m done. Too much. To take in. And seeing you like this…makes me very uncomfortable.” I’d have left as soon as I’d finished eating but didn’t fancy driving in the dark, for hours. I’d have struggled to stay awake. But if we were to go to bed at nine, at least I’d be on the road before six.

He smiled at that. “Totally understand. Don’t blame you at all.”

“Why even invite me down?”

“Was going to ask you to be my best man. It’s been arranged.”

“What?”

“She’s eighty-eight. Claims she’s eighty-three. But I’m not fooled.” He glanced at his watch. “Getting late.” He collected our plates. “Gimme a knock in the morning before you take off.”

The neighbours’ bang against the living room was particularly fearsome that evening. They must have used an implement. And it wasn’t even half eight. They were displeased.

I turned out the lights on my way upstairs.

Bereft of alternatives, I sat up in bed and read for a couple of hours until my head began to drop. With the light turned off, I was instantly swallowed by darkness and fell asleep within minutes.

As the night progressed, I must have risen from the depths of sleep in stages. Around midnight, though mostly unconscious, I possessed a vague peripheral awareness of the house around me and the street outside. And through my dreaming mind, I heard a car engine grumble to life and I became aware of traffic. The noise must have been travelling from the ring-road.

And there was distant applause. I think. Closer to the house. Raised voices came and went continuously, in and out of my sleep, yet failed to fully wake me. Perhaps this went on for hours, or mere minutes; I have no way of knowing. But the ambient sounds were incorporated into my dreams of a long parade, shuffling through an endless darkness, and of a motorcade of wheelchairs whirring, of near mummified brides carried on litters by terrified migrant workers, of tiny elderly men propped up like proud generals inside pushchairs, of houses that were marble inside. And I heard a furtive bumping of glass…then something dry and sharp prodded at my mouth, before feeling my face.

That woke me and the soft thumps against glass continued into my full awakening.

“Mike,” I said, twice, but wasn’t answered. I could see nothing and slapped about for the bedside lamp. And never found it. Nor my phone. It was hopeless. I was forced to stumble, bent over and terrified of collisions, towards a memory of where the door must be.

And as I raked my hands through the air, seeking the wall and the light switch that it must contain, the fumbling upon the windows persisted. And increased, as if whatever was on the other side had become excited by the idea of movement within the room.

Something out there began to make firmer contact with the glass too, like a full hand or head, gently bumping. And as I reached the light switch, I heard the swish of the curtains across the window I had left open.

My breathing steadying and dizziness subsiding, I investigated the commotion against the house’s exterior. But with the curtains open and ceiling light on, the glass was a mirror and I saw little of whatever had finally ceased in its bumping to flap upwards, as if to escape the glare. I only glimpsed the tail of a garment made from a pale cloth.

I killed the light and allowed my eyes to accustom themselves to the darkness, then returned to the windows. Something that I will wish, for the rest of my life, that I had not done.

Several of them were outside, hanging in darkness.

Sat up cross-legged, or just floating upon their fronts as if upon water.

In expectation, their insubstantial heads were turned towards the open window. Excitement was expressed in that frail cooing and the papery muttering of dry mouths.

One of the old things of the air must have awoken me by reaching through to touch my face. At the mere thought of them getting inside, I seized the latch and slammed shut the window.

I could do nothing then but stare, and pant as if from some great physical exertion. And I watched the thin forms sway and hover nearer and paw their lumpy extremities at the window panes. Their little mouths moved and gaped but I heard nothing from them once the window was sealed. But beneath the wizened and elderly figures drifting in empty space, a small crowd had gathered and stood upon the pavement below. They were little more than silhouettes with their arms either raised above their heads or engaged in the soft applause I’d heard in my sleep. I had a sense that the group on the ground were both congratulating and encouraging these sticklike and barely living things that levitated beyond my window.

Across the road and over the immaculate hedges and lawns, the curtains of two homes were also open. The front rooms were dimly lit with soft light and inside those ordinary but horribly homely spaces, I saw more of the town’s elderly, crawling around the ceilings like infants. Their ancient children and shrunken grandchildren sat on chairs and sofas below them and clapped their elders.

I shut the curtains and looked for my bag and clothes.

They’d gone.

“Mike!” I fled the room and threw open the door to my host’s room to find an unoccupied bed, meticulously made. The master bedroom resembled another spare room, little used by occasional guests. Not a trace of Mike’s personality had been allowed to exist within his own home.

And again, in that bedroom, came a soft, insistent bumping against the glass from outside. I knocked off the light and tore the curtains aside.

Another two of the elderly forms hovered beyond the window panes. Like newly made insects, they appeared constructed more of cartilage than flesh; of the latter there was little, and it resembled cured leather, threaded with black blood vessels. The gender of the pair was indistinguishable but the head that wore a knitted skull cap was showing teeth best suited to a donkey’s mouth. What served for eyes were hidden behind the black lenses of small, round glasses, such as the blind wear to conceal disfigurement. With the exception of the hat, the thing was naked and ribbed and too angular about the pelvis. There was no genitalia and the skeletal legs drifted uselessly like a paralysed tail.

The second figure was crying and scratching at a few remaining threads of hair upon a stained scalp. It drifted haplessly and turned in a horizontal circle.

Beneath them, Mike’s odious neighbours slow-clapped the airborne frolic and showed white teeth within stretched grimaces that might have been smiles.

Across the fences and hedgerows, at roof-height, other frail forms glimmered in the ambient light falling from open back doors. They drifted like haggard kites in insufficient wind. Occasional shrieks of euphoria, from the celebrants on the ground, pierced the double glazing.

I fell more than walked down the stairs.

And lit up the empty house room by room. A glance between the kitchen blinds confirmed that my car was missing, though Mike’s remained on the drive. And I didn’t linger by that window, dropping the blinds when the spiny back of something wearing a shiny grey wig became visible. It was bent over as if searching the flower bed for something lost; perhaps the very purpose for it even being there.

A dull clatter of applause sounded from the street.

Distant traffic ran like a full river.

Upon the coffee table I found Mike’s note.

Once a month they all go up together. The community. Them with the keys. They disport before those of us who remain keyless. And sorry, mate. I feel like a heel leaving like this. But you were my only chance to get out. I’ve done my bit. Five bloody years! And I’ve waited four just to be granted a guest.

I couldn’t leave. There was no point trying after the first couple of attempts. What they did to me… Let’s just say, I’m surprised I ever recovered. Maybe I didn’t. You’ve no idea how long twenty-four hours truly is, when shut inside a lightless house with the most senior in this community bumping around the ceiling. And they bite. I was on antibiotics for six months to get rid of the infection in my leg.

The only saving grace from all of this is that I never had to do any gardening.

My car’s out of petrol and I don’t know how long you’ll be here but while you are in residence, don’t smoke/vape in the house or open the curtains, windows or the back door. I’d recommend keeping the TV on setting 14 too. Or there will be hell to pay.

I’m still not sure how they do it but they can hear everything that you think inside the house. And where I work. Maybe inside the car too. And some of them are bloody nosey. They don’t have much else to do besides gardening and pottering and complaining. I never wrote you those emails either. SHE did, next door.

As I said, I am really, really, really sorry. In the end I couldn’t even look at your Instagram page during the Wi-Fi privilege periods. And you’re a bit of a smug cunt, if truth be told. But I hope that one day you can forgive me.

Mike

P.S. Once I’m done with them, I’ll leave your clothes and car outside your flat.

I waited until morning. When all had returned to what passed for normal in that place, I slipped away on the train. As promised, I found the car, my belongings in the boot, outside my flat. Though their presence filled me with no confidence that Mike ever managed to escape the town.

The interior of the car was cleaner than it had ever been since I’d owned it and all of the seat covers were new. The clothes inside my bag had been dry-cleaned, except for one shirt and a jacket that were missing. I’d worn them the day before Mike fled. I could only assume that he’d worn them to disguise himself as me, but they’d become too soiled even for dry-cleaning.

He never made contact with me again.

I spent a few days processing the experience and composing a report that I’d intended to make to the authorities. But no matter how many times I redrafted a timeline and my observations, what I recorded was too outlandish and deranged for the rational to take seriously. Though that wasn’t the sole reason I never contacted the police.

Upon the very day that I’d decided to visit the local police station, I became aware of an awful smell in my meticulously scrubbed and valeted car. The origin of the stench of putrefaction took some finding too. And only with the use of my steel barbeque tongs was I able to ferret out and retrieve the source of the smell.

Though bloated and blackening, two human fingers and a thumb had been stuffed between the driver’s side seat and backrest. And the removal of these digits from a hand had not been made cleanly. I’d guess that two were bitten through at the first knuckle. The third, the thumb, had been wrenched from the hand to which it had once belonged.

A warning, and one that I took seriously, while reclining upon my new seat covers and waiting for the blood to return to my face.

Try as I might to forget the town, I never will. Despite its natural advantages and pristine presentation, it continues to maintain a discreet public profile. Nothing within the place, save the advertised private retirement facilities, intended for the affluent, ever encourages anyone to visit.

Despite that, the town’s black heart still thumps like an unwelcome and intrusive hand upon a living room wall. The worm at the heart of the community is all but forgotten in the public domain, yet still the parasite writhes, unpunished and all but forgotten.

And yet I do suspect that the nearly dead become lonely. With lifetimes of dissatisfaction to express, and with so much time to fill, they occasionally delight in tormenting the odd outsider and scapegoat. Like poor Mike.