I’m at the bottom of a grassy bowl a few miles out from Winchester, the blazing sun dipping crimson below farmland that stretches out for miles beyond the fenced perimeter. Jacketed young men and women lean bored and fluorescent against metal mesh fencing. Half of them, at least, are volunteers, supposed to be stewarding the crowd. They’re only here for the free ticket the two shifts they’ve signed up for guarantees, high-vis revelers on pause, doing a bad job and unsteady on their feet. Everywhere I can smell the mingle of warm earth and green grass squashed underfoot, the sharp sweat of a thousand unwashed, blue cigarette smoke, spilled cider, cut with countryside breeze and flecked with pollen. Trees have a smell and I can smell them.
PK’s laid on the yellowing ground, arms stretched like a dropout messiah, trying to leave a lasting imprint on the earth. He’s grinning to himself, exhaling smoke and staring up into the sky. Dub from a nearby tent sends shockwaves through the soil. I can feel it in my bones. Living things dance in the air. I crush a mosquito that feeds on my intoxicated blood, its body smearing across my skin.
‘PK, get up you wally!’ I shout, not really meaning it. I’m just happy to be here, away from Bristol, from the hiss and caffeine of work, from rain and concrete. PK’s a space cadet, but he says he loves me. He waves but doesn’t get up.
I’ve got a bit of a buzz on. I want to talk talk talk. About anything and everything.
There’s a couple somewhere in their mid-thirties sitting next to me, keeping an eye on their little girl who runs about doing cartwheels and diving head-first onto the yellowed grass.
‘She’s having a great time!’ I say, out of nowhere and embarrassed at myself.
The mother looks up at me, sunlight glinting off her lip ring. She smiles and sort of squints. The dad doesn’t seem to notice, his head nodding to a repetitive bass line. Should I think them bad parents for bringing a kid to one of these places?
‘First time we’ve brought her to one of these, she’s just about old enough now. It’s all a bit of a trip down memory lane for me and Simon, isn’t it Si?’
She punches her partner gently on the shoulder.
He looks around, says, ‘What, Ade?’
‘I was saying to this lovely young thing here, this is all a bit of a trip down memory lane for us isn’t it?’ Turning to me, ‘What’s your name darling?’
‘Jess.’
‘I’m Adrianna. Ade for short.’
She speaks with the flattened vowels and watered-down Cockney of the Thames Estuary. I like her immediately. I sit down next to them and take the cigarette Simon offers to me. Their little girl continues cartwheeling and yelling at the yellow sun.
I explain to them that this is my first time here, how much I’m enjoying it, how I love the music (Oh God, the music! My heart floats), this punk-reggae-dub-ska-folk-rave-jungle-drum and bass. How I’ve been studying in Bristol and fell in with that city’s crew at the anti-fascist gigs in Stokes Croft, parties in the crumbly mildewed squats, veggie burgers in the cafes, dancing the night away in converted warehouses and old factories. A flood of ideas. New causes. Imperialist wrongs and animal rights. How I feel I’ve uncovered this great secret and want to tell the world about it, how it’s making me feel like a better person with a reason to be. I feel like I’ve found something that’s really real. Who knew life could feel like this.
‘Me and Si, when we were a bit younger than you, we had a great time up in London, those mad parties at The Balustrade before it got torn down and turned into flats. Back in the late nineties this was. We were a bit too young to have done all the free festival stuff, Castlemorton in ’92 and all that. God, I wish I could’ve been there! We went to Bristol a couple of times, too. A party somewhere near Bath, too, if my memory serves, which it probably doesn’t.’
1992 is most definitely the past to me, part of a history I’m unearthing. I still can’t get my head around the fact it’s harder to find out certain things about events in my own lifetime than those from generations ago. 1992 is the year I was born. I tell Ade this and she and Simon laugh.
‘Fuck me, we’re old!’ he says. ‘We were, what, fourteen then? I remember when I used to believe in things. It was fun.’
He gets up, stretches, and walks off in search of the toilet.
‘Shut up Simon, you miserable bastard!’ shouts Ade.
Looking at me, she winks.
‘Ignore him. We used to do all that kinda stuff, what you’re talking about. Became a bit much after a while though, you know? I left all that for a long time. Had a kid. Found Simon back when I moved back to Kent. Now Jenny’s old enough, we wanted to start listening to some good tunes again, you know?!’
‘So Simon’s not the…’
‘No, he’s not. Her dad and me separated a long time ago. I know Simon from when we were kids. Funny where life takes you.’
*
PK’s roused himself and we’re full of energy, walking long rounds of the festival as darkness descends and the real chaos begins. Machine-gun beats, heavy thump of reggae, klezma, Irish folk, all seeping out of the different tents and stages, mixing into a cocktail of vibrating noise. Performers from a fucked-up circus are out in force, stilt-walking harlequins stepping confidently through the crowds with painted grins, fire-juggling heathens, shapeshifters. A mechanical dragon, its neck a straining mass of gears and pistons as it eyes its audience, belches flame into the inky night. We walk through this riot. Tonight, I’m a synaesthete, the music tasting apple-crisp and strong, fluorescent lighting pricking my nostrils with pungent and earthy aromas, the taste of cider a burst of distorted guitar. Ahead, two chainmail figures stand on opposite platforms, blue and red electrical current coursing off them. They swivel, face each other, enact a staged battle of energy and light that I think must be impossible, but there it is, it’s real. PK mentions someone called Rayden and a video game. I think of immortals in the heavens flinging lightning bolts on capricious whims and for the first time in my life I feel I’ve found that other world I was always looking for.
*
Back in Bristol and back to work. It took me a few days to shake the hangover fuzz and the disappointment of being back. But this is my home, I love it here really, it’s got everything I need. Family are close by, Mum and Dad still together. PK laughs at me and says I’m the odd one out with a stable family and parents who still say they love each other. I feel strangely embarrassed announcing this fact to my new circle. A lot of them, especially the boys, wear their shitty childhoods and the pains they’ve suffered as a kind of badge. I know a lot of it is bravado, like the lads with shaved heads who talk about football firms with a glint in their eye – like they’ve ever been anywhere near football violence. They want life to be rougher and more violent – more exciting – than it is. That was the past. At least they’ve found somewhere they can belong for a few years. I have, and I wasn’t even running away. Mary, my sister, only one year older than me, doesn’t get this stuff at all. She’s into Blue WKDs and TOWIE and clubbing, but she looks so much like me and we have the same sense of humour and I wonder how that can be.
I’ve friended Adrianna on Facebook. She lives somewhere called Faversham, in Kent. I can visit any time I want, she said. Probably just one of those things people say when they’re at festivals, happy and disconnected. I click through a few of her photos from a place called the Hollow Shore, mottled shingle beaches and circling herring gulls, Jenny with bucket and spade somewhere sandy, Simon stubbled and gruff, planting his lips on Ade’s cheek. Looking at them I feel a pull towards something. Children? A life-partner? The nineties? All and none of that.
*
The bang-bang of the baristas getting rid of used coffee grounds and the hiss of steam wakes me up. Back at work, asking mothers, businessmen, students, tourists, if they want a pastry with their coffee and do they have a loyalty card? It’s enough to kill any remaining buzz I had from the weekend. The pay here’s bad, the manager’s an arsehole, but it’s okay I guess, for now. You’re lucky you’ve got a job, my mother reminds me constantly. Dad stays silent mostly when this subject comes up and I fear I’m disappointing him or that he thinks me lazy. Most of my colleagues are Mediterraneans who speak various levels of English. I’ve become friendly with a Catalan girl, Sierra. She’s from somewhere near Barcelona, originally. I asked her why she moved to England and all she said was that things are worse in Spain. Not the weather, though, I said, and that made her laugh. As soon as I saw the T-shirt she changed into after a tiring shift, I knew we’d hit it off. All stark black and white, FIGHT WAR NOT WARS. It’s like being in the masons or something; a secret code that others can spot a mile off. Hiding in plain sight. I don’t want to be elitist, I hate cliques, but this just feels good.
‘Would you like any muffins or pastries with that, miss?’ I ask a middle-aged woman trailing a truculent adolescent and a silent husband behind. The woman looks tired and says, ‘No thank you, dear.’ I don’t bother to ask her about the loyalty card. Will that be Ade and Simon in a few years? Me and PK? A group of students come in with those sanded-down accents from somewhere in the home counties. I’d describe one of the men as a brayer. Wearily, I take their order.
*
Friday night. Sierra and I have just finished a long shift, it’s already seven o’clock so we dash back to mine and I give Mum a peck on the cheek before we head up to my room to get ready. I stick the stereo on as we take turns to shower, some fast and energetic Spanish ska punk Sierra dug up on Spotify. Mary knocks on the door and jokingly tells me to shut the fuck up and I tell her to piss off and Sierra looks briefly startled but I tell her it’s okay, it’s just what we do.
We swig from a plastic bottle, own-brand orange juice and economy vodka sloshed together. We don’t have much money and this is how we propel ourselves through the nights.
Then we’re out into the warm dusk of a West Country evening, the sky retaining a memory of the day’s heat, hair done up, jackets on, badges pinned in place. Heading up to The Croft, passing the THINK LOCAL, BOYCOTT TESCO mural, remembering those hooded faces and the smashed glass of a few years back, through the busying streets to meet PK and our mates. It’s a warm night so everyone’s outside before the gig, swigging from cans of cheap cider, a haze of smoke, some dodgy haircuts and tattooed boys and girls preening like peacocks. When I’m here, doing these things, I feel like I’ve shed some sort of skin, pulled the rubber mask off to expose who I really am. I can feel that I’m getting closer to something.
*
Adrianna, against my expectations, has stayed in contact. She seems to actually like me. She’s invited me and a friend, if I like, to stay with them down in Kent. A little weekend visit. It’s not a place I’ve ever been to.
The furthest south east I ever got was a gig in New Cross a year back, staying with one of PK’s mates in a disgusting flat near Goldsmiths. I remember waiting at a thronged platform for the Overground, all conversation drowned out by a passing Freightliner with its endless metallic roar, Maersk and P&O rusty containers squealing on the tracks. I had a perverse desire to hop on to one of them, an American dream, just let the train take me where it would.
I jump at Ade’s offer. I love being by the sea and I want to explore the country more. Is it odd that I’ve visited Europe and the USA but not Kent? I mull that one over. I’ve never seen the Scottish Highlands, the Yorkshire Moors, the Trough of Bowland or the Forest of Dean. I want to. I took PK to Bath; we cycled there from Bristol along the railway path, built over an old track bed. I wanted to tell PK about how I felt about this layering of history, the old Victorian track beds below the soil, on our way to a place with its Roman spas, its Norman sacking, King Offa of Mercia, and us on our bikes. The words didn’t come.
I want to ask Ade and Simon questions. They’re links in a chain that I want to be part of. She’s talked about doing some walks. It all seems so grown up. I choose to go on my own, PK is too much of a liability. I find him embarrassing at times if I’m honest, and Sierra, well, I want this all to myself. Maybe next time.
I catch an early to train to London Paddington, sipping shit coffee from a cardboard cup, battle my way across the underground against unhappy commuters and irritating tourists. This city, it’s so big, I travel for an age and still really get nowhere. I disembark at St Pancras, wander around a bit while I wait for the train to Faversham, stand outside looking up at the salmon-pink spires. People everywhere. I smoke a cigarette and say sorry, no, I don’t have any change to three different people. Then I hop on the train, a high-speed, and rumble out of London through Stratford (I press my face up against the window trying to look at the Olympic Park, see only harried shoppers and the Westfield logo floating above some sci-fi fortress), Ebbsfleet, which seems to be only a place of concrete, train-tracks and wires, and into Kent proper. Some of it looks nice – green farmland, cows and public footpaths. The train fills with lads with baseball caps and a dog and that sort-of cockney voice. White middle-aged women with short blonde hair chatter among themselves. The overweight ticket inspector has bad breath and I try not to inhale as leans over to inspect my ticket.
*
‘So there’s this guy, some crazy ex-hippy road-protestor, he hangs out in The Neptune with a pint of Whitstable Bay, wrote this book where he claims that the UK is actually in the shape of a giant angel. Psycho!’
Simon bangs his pint down, the glass imprinted with the Shepherd Neame logo, hoping for laughter. Ale sloshes onto the wooden table. I laugh and Adrianna manages a polite titter. On the table the Kentish Gazette absorbs some of the spilt ale, a headline stating APEMAN OF KENT SPOTTED IN TUNBRIDGE WELLS slowly blurring.
We’re sitting outside The Old Neptune, a crunch of shell and shingle every time someone shifts their arse, the slow sighs of the rolling sea only thirty metres away. The summer’s been good, but today is, even for England, unseasonably hot. Chubby-armed men and women soak rays into lobster-red skin, dogs pirouette in circles of aggression and black-headed gulls float overhead. A child of about five digs his sandcastle bucket into gravelly grey sand and proceeds to tip the contents over his own head.
‘Odd kid,’ says Simon. ‘This pub was featured in Venus, with Peter O’Toole,’ he announces.
He’s already told us this. A pause.
‘What do you mean, the UK is a giant angel?’ says Adrianna, lighting a cigarette and grimacing.
Dry smoke drifts. Jenny is off near the water’s edge throwing pebbles toward the horizon and yelling at something.
‘I don’t know, I didn’t write the fucking book, did I?’ says Simon.
‘Well, good story,’ says Adrianna flatly, rolling her eyes.
Another pause. I look at my feet, swig my ale, fiddle with my piercings. I think of the country as an angel in flight, a trapped giant sleeping beneath the loam and rock. I think of the festival, of the pseudo-Celtic and Anglo-Saxon signs incorporated into the design of LPs I love. I remember a trip we took to North Wales when I was a kid, me and Mary, Mum and Dad. Look at the white quartz, Dad said. That’s the remains of the white dragon. The red and white fought, and the red won. I like that story.
Ade watches the gulls.
‘Where’s Sofia with those pints?’ she adds, finally, flinging away her cigarette onto the pebbles.
Sofia is Ade’s younger sister. A local artist. Wooden gulls and stuff, driftwood carvings.
Three minutes later, a perspiring Sofia appears with a tray of four fresh pints, beads of condensation sliding down the glass. Whitstable Bay. Ade and Simon live near the Shepherd Neame brewery in Faversham. I’m conscious of my accent down here.
‘Alright!’ she says.
Her dyed blue hair has come loose and hangs limb-like down the right side of her face. She hands out the pints, looking out to sea as shimmering sun glistens on the burning water. Children splash and scream in the shallows. A serious older woman, cap in place, swims laps further out. Ade’s dog, Penny, snaps in confusion at the foam. Jenny throws stones at nothing. On the horizon, a row of concrete towers rise from the waters. The Maunsell forts from World War Two, Simon says, and I nod but don’t know what he means.
‘They had a picture of Peter O’Toole in there,’ says Sofia.
‘Simon told us already,’ says Adrianna.
*
After I’d arrived at Faversham, Ade picked me up in her battered car. We sat in their house drinking coffee with Jenny looking at me suspiciously and sucking on a lolly, the spaniel Penny (we’re both Crass fans, explained Ade) barking his head off in excitement. I looked at what hung on their walls. Gig posters from the late nineties and early two-thousands. A reproduction of a map of Kent, dated 1776. A print from The Gallery in Margate, from a 2012 exhibition by Helena Williams, titled Salt Woman. A small framed photograph of Ade in an earlier, more punkish, incarnation.
We decided to take the short drive to Whitstable, swim, wander the fish market, sink pints at The Neptune. (‘I’m a veggie,’ I said. ‘But you must try the oysters,’ said Ade.)
The day after, Jenny would be staying at her grandmother’s, so Adrianna had suggested we take a trip up the coast, park up near the Herne Bay Downs and walk to Bishopstone Glenn and on to Reculver. Drinks at the King Aethelbert pub. Soak in the scenery, the Roman-ness of it all, the old Church, imagine a lost Wantsum Channel and bouncing bombs, a picnic in the ruins. Sofia said she was hoping to get some good sketches of this stretch of the Kent coastline.
Walking around Whitstable, it seemed that half the population supported themselves from sales of locally themed art. I couldn’t picture how she got by. There were so many Londoners here, a lot of French and Spanish, some Americans and Japanese. The streets were packed, tourism was thriving. Were the tourists part of the tourist draw? What is a manmade place in its natural state, I wondered.
*
Sofia grins as she sips her ale. Adrianna frowns. The second round of pints are finally drained and we exit the beer garden in the direction of the fish market on the harbour, pushing through busy crowds. Some sort of community festival is in full swing. The flash and snap of digital cameras surrounds me. On pebbly ground sit a crescent of toddlers, as they watch Mr. Punch insult law and order and upset the status quo.
‘My kind of puppet,’ says Simon, giving me a wink.
We push on. Next to a teetering stack of sun-bleached oyster shells, another piece of community theatre is taking place. We stop to watch, mingle with the crowd.
A young woman is portraying the part of the Devil. I admire the work of the costume designer, simultaneously evoking images of a cartoonish Christian Lucifer (I think of a crimson tail twirled, arrow-tipped) and older, more threatening pagan beings and the beasts of Hell found in medieval paintings. Sofia whispers to me with a grin that she likes ‘that Revelation shit.’ I feel grown up in these older people’s company, relish the difference of this coastal sunshine to the steam-hiss of work, the sheer drops from Clifton suspension bridge where Dad goes to watch his peregrines. My phone buzzes in my pocket. PK. I don’t answer.
An earnest young man with the clean lines and the optimism of a drama student plays the part of narrator.
‘Ladies, gents, boys and girls, this is the story of how Whitstable was founded. In the days when Canterbury was a great centre for pilgrimage, its inhabitants grew so rich and sinful that the Devil’ – at this he gestures toward the woman in demonic attire, who grins and leers, making one small child clutch his father’s leg in fright – ‘reckoned he would be justified in carrying the whole town off to Hell. Now, some of you who have ever been on Canterbury high street on a Saturday night probably agree with the Dark Lord on this one!’ This achieves the hoped-for result, a small ripple of laughs passing through the crowd. He continues. ‘On the other hand, so long as prayers were being said at the shrine of Thomas a Becket, he daren’t go near the place. Eventually, after many years, one night the priests at the cathedral were too tired to keep vigil around the shrine. Seeing his chance, the Devil swooped down,’ – the devilish actress swoops at the crowd, cries of startled enjoyment erupting from the spectators – ‘seized all the houses that he could carry and flung them into the sea off the north coast of Kent.’
Simon looks intrigued and takes a sip of water. Penny sniffs his leg.
We leave the scene of devils and falling architecture, onto the harbour which is cramped with olive vendors, couples clutching mackerel buns smeared with garlic sauce, commercial chatter, idle browsers. We detour through the fish market, polystyrene cups of winkles and mussels, cockles and whelks, dead-eyed sole, skate and bass. The smell of salt and water.
Ahead, I see a group of men and women, coal-blackened faces, colanders on their heads, grasping sticks of sturdy wood. Some grin lasciviously. A gender-bending figure in harlequin attire stands slightly apart from the main troupe, watching the crowd silently before giving a mighty shout that announces the beginning of proceedings. A shower of cockle shells is flung heavenwards as a guitar begins to strum and a woman with pheasant feathers in her hat trills on a piccolo.
‘Ade, who are they?’ I ask, taken aback.
She laughs. ‘The Dead Horse Morris. Bunch of oddballs. Could be worse, they chuck sprouts at you at Christmas time.’
*
Simon, something of an amateur ornithologist it turns out, is talking at length about a kind of bird called a sand martin. He drives the car with Ade affectionately taking the piss, putting on a Kermit-like train-spotter voice saying, ‘Yes, yes, they’re like the swallows and house martins aren’t they, Simon, very interesting.’ I know what swallows are, of course, but I choose not to say anything. The stereo plays a compilation of free-festival reggae at low volume. Penny snores on Sofia’s lap. I watch this county through the dusty and smeared window.
We drive through a scuffed town in need of a refurbish, Herne Bay, hugging the coast, pass a row of anachronistic arcades with Wetherspoon’s drinkers spilling out early in the heat, and up onto the slopes, passing a shit-stained statue of a middle-aged man, where Simon parks the car. I hear the buzz of bees, the rustle of cow parsley. Penny leaps out of the car, barking at two Jack Russells bounding after a chewed tennis ball their owner throws for them.
‘Look,’ says Ade, and I follow the point of her arm, and see them, Reculver towers standing isolated and proud a few miles up the coast. ‘That’s where we’re going, Jess, we love it up there.’
Up here on the slopes of the Herne Bay Downs I can see far out to sea and Simon gladly points out to me the Isle of Sheppey (‘fucking inbreds there’), a glimpse of Essex beyond it, the Maunsell forts once more, the wind farms whose white turbine blades spin slowly.
Five missed calls from PK now. I don’t think he’d like it here.
‘It’s a beautiful bloody day,’ says Sofia softly, and she’s right, it is.
*
Two hours later we reach the towers, like stone melancholy guardians. I feel in some very real way that I’m at the end of something. This feels like the country falling away, a genuine border between land and sea. For a while I simply sit on the flinty remains of a Roman barracks that have survived these long millennia, dragging on a cigarette and watching Ade and Simon run around in circles with Jenny, making mock monster growls, the little girl squealing with delight. Further off, Sofia sits with Penny by her feet, sketching, looking out over the waves that crash toward the sandstone cliffs, where Simon’s cherished sand martins pepper the sky and dart in and out of their tiny tunnels burrowed into the living brown sediment.
I shout to Ade that I’m just off to take a wander, I’ll be back in a half hour or so. Want to check out the cliffs. They wave and say OK.
I walk down the path away from the church towers, stop to read a faded information sign picturing an Avro Lancaster, explosives bouncing on water, and a man named Barnes Wallis. Then up onto the clifftops where a path weaves through actual meadowland, small and clearly managed but with skylarks parachuting down into the swaying grasses, insects banging into me, chocolate-brown martins wheeling overhead, and it’s bleak here but also beautiful. That feeling I had in a field near Winchester, I have it here also, a feeling coming on so strong that it must be real, the crush of knowledge represented by the barracks and the church, the reggae songs and the tattoos, the martins and the skylarks, Ade and Simon, the bouncing bombs and Clifton suspension bridge, the red dragon and his mechanical twin, the track-bed turned bike path, the shaven headed boys and the lip-pierced girls, Mr. Punch and the coal-faced Morris men, PK and Sierra, Tesco graffiti and shattering glass, Maersk shipping containers and the crush of London, a cherubic being of stone and soil in flight. Here, up on the windswept meadow, in sight of Reculver towers, I get it, and everything connects. The wind whines like the cry of an infant.
Ahead, I see silhouettes of a strange trio standing motionless in front of a small wooden bench. A shawled Roman woman, an oyster fisherman with pots dangling from a shaft slung across shoulders, a World War Two bomber pilot relaxed, at ease, almost cocky. They are two-dimensional, sketched in metal, breeze blowing through their bodies. A house sparrow lands on the Roman woman’s head for a moment, I take in its greys and blacks and russets before it flutters off. This trio are mere effigies, a portrait bench, cast-iron remembrances in a world of amnesia.
I sit on the bench, my back to them, and look out to sea.