THE SHAPE OF THE WATCH ON THE WRIST

A woman looms towards us, silhouetted in the blazing sun so that she looks like a cardboard cut-out of herself. Because my head is aching and spinning just a little, she looks like a cardboard cut-out of herself as done by a child. She points at us and says ‘You’re going to be so burned in the morning.’ She walks away. She comes back, a returning silhouette, and says ‘So, so burned.’ She walks away again. My head feels like somebody is playing lacrosse with it. Somebody who has never played lacrosse before and has no idea of the rules. I wish the sun would get turned off with an audible click.

I’ve never sunbathed before; some people love it and it’s their idea of a holiday but I prefer a nice cool art gallery, perhaps with abstracts called The Sunbathers that I can make jokes about along the lines of ‘Well, he should have put more sun cream on’ as I point to a splash and a line. My wife and I and her sister and her husband are on holiday in the USA. We’ve been to New York and we’ve driven in a hire car the size of a furniture shop up to New England and we’re staying in a motel near a beach. I can’t remember the name of the motel or the beach but because I very rarely get headaches I can recall the shape and whirring machine of the headache. It’s the shape of Benbecula and it whirs like a third hand hair dryer.

All these decades later, I can’t recall why we all decided to sunbathe, given that none of us were sun worshippers. Maybe we had had enough of sightseeing and wanted to make sights of ourselves; maybe the extreme heat and burning orb in the sky made us lethargic. Maybe (we were young then) we thought that’s what young people should do. We found a quiet area of the beach and lay down on towels. We were, I’m ashamed to say, desultory about sun cream in a way that we wouldn’t have been today. We threw a bit on. We rubbed half-heartedly. The sun grinned and started to cook us.

We stayed where we were all day except for trips to stalls to buy ice cream and hot dogs. That’s two separate trips. At the ice-cream stall the man listened as I placed my order and asked ‘What part of New Zealand are you from? I love New Zealand!’ I told him I was from Barnsley but I could tell he didn’t believe me. ‘Hope you guys have got plenty of cream,’ he said, ‘I know you don’t get a lot of sun in New Zealand.’ I wandered off. ‘Hey, Kiwi!’ he shouted. ‘I meant sun cream not ice cream!’ His laugh was as brittle as toffee that was too hard to be chewed.

It was hard, because we’d never done this sunbathing thing before, to decide when we’d had enough. I, for one, felt slightly uncomfortable but maybe that’s how sunbathing always was; maybe the reason people lay prone without moving was that they were in too much filigreed agony to move. In the end, we let the sun decide for us as it began to fall into the sea. I looked around. We were the only ones left on the sand. I glanced at my watch; I hardly ever wear watches but I’d taken one on this holiday for reasons that remain obscure to me. It was 6pm and it felt like we’d been horizontal for ever apart from hot dog and ice cream verticalisms. We decided to go back to the motel and then go out somewhere to eat gigantic steaks and enormous bits of cheesecake.

Before we went out, though, we’d sit down for a minute, just have a minute like the old people we would one day become, having struggled up a long hill. Just for a minute. The room was whirling and somehow moving up and down at the same time, as though we were taking part in a psychedelic earthquake session. We all lay down on the various hard beds. I held on to my bed to stop it trying to walk away but that just seemed to make it angry.

I felt simultaneously hot and cold, like The Great Fire of London and The Great Freeze of 1948 were happening at once in this motel room with its Bronze Age air conditioning that sounded like a Frank Zappa out-take. One of us, or maybe all of us, said ‘I think we’ve been out in the sun too long.’ The sentence hit us like a hard brick of fact. We had a kind of sunstroke, I reckon. We were Yorkshire cats and the sun had stroked us. I stood up and took my watch off because in my fried state I thought that if I didn’t know what time it was I might feel a bit cooler.

I took my watch off but my watch was still on; my skin had reddened around where the watch had been and so I was wearing a ghost watch that was probably still telling me the time from before I lay down on the beach’s hotplate. I felt a laugh bubbling up from somewhere. I opened my mouth and the laugh fell out, followed by another and another. I shook like somebody miming an earthquake. The others saw me and they started laughing too. Soon we were laughing so much that none of us could breathe; we were still terribly, terribly hot and the laughter was at the tremulous edge of laughter where it elides into counterfeit pain and then into real pain. The laughter subsided until I said the words ‘New Zealand’ and then it began again. It subsided again. I held up my arm with the invisible watch and the laughter began again. It subsided again until I said the words ‘So, so burned’.

Listen: you can still hear it above the sound of the waves.