It’s July 2021 and the Covid unlocking continues; some of the poetry and music gigs that me and my mate Luke Carver Goss do, having been postponed in 2020, are reappearing and we’re playing at the lovely Kirkgate Centre in Cockermouth and I have a plan. I have a Coast-based plan that’s going to form some kind of ringing, symphonic climax to this book. After all the interior journeys there will be an exterior journey. A sea breeze will ruffle my hair like an affectionate auntie might. There may be a view of a watery horizon; in my mind I will sip espresso at a bijou beachside café and pretend I’m in a contemporary novel or a Sundance film. I won’t just be unshaven; I’ll have stubble.
After the Cockermouth gig I will stay in somebody’s spare room and the next morning I will catch the 7.08 bus to Workington and I will walk by the sea to remind myself that the sea is still there and I will make some kind of narrative, something that draws the whole story together. I’ve been to Workington before, but there is coast there and there is sea and there are clouds that float over the sea and that is good enough for me. Then I’ll catch the train to Carlisle and slowly rattle home.
I excitedly tell the organisers of the gig about my plan and one of them comes up to me in the dressing room where I am supping tea. He is wearing a mask and so I stop supping tea and put my mask back on. He tells me, through fabric, that all the trains from Workington to Carlisle or, as he puts it, ‘from Workington to anywhere’ are cancelled the following day. My heart sinks; I had looked forward so much to this finale. I had, let’s be frank, half-written some of the sentences and quarter-toned a few of the paragraphs. I could get a few buses, of course, but I wanted the indefinable romance of rail. I am crestfallen. Coastally crestfallen. I am so crestfallen that I drink some tea through my mask.
Then Luke stops cleaning his accordion and offers a solution. ‘I’ll drive you to Workington and we’ll have a wander by the water,’ he says, and suddenly the dressing room light seems stronger and brighter and my life seems to have more purpose.
Then it’s time to do the gig and it goes like a dream to say neither of us have performed in public for more than a year and all through the two halves and the encore the coast beckons. The coast beckons, smiling.
I stay in the house of someone who has a railway in his garden and late into the night I watch engines trundle round between the roses as sheep bleat on the hills beyond the fence. There is a subtle cruelty to this because there are no real trains for me to gaze at in the morning. The tide has gone out on my first plan for tomorrow and the tide has come in on my second plan. The weather forecast isn’t good but that doesn’t bother me; the present is rubbing the past away and I’m here to make memories, not dredge them up. I ask my host about bijou cafés in Workington and he thinks hard and suggests a place that might, he thinks, still be open.
I sleep fitfully, dreaming of giant gulls carrying me away as though I am a chip.
Luke and I drive to Workington; the town is like New York in that it is built on a grid system and people are rushing along the grids like characters in a video game. I visit the Luckiest Lottery Shop In Cumbria, planning what I’m going to do with my millions. I’ll let them change my life. Clouds build huge walls and so we decide to go to Slag Bank, a place that somebody at the gig the night before recommended to us. I like the way the two syllables are like the sound of boots on a path or shouts when you tread on something sharp. I like the way there is no room for romance in the univowelled words.
In the car park a man and his wife eat bacon sandwiches and drink steam from a flask. Dozens of dogs drag owners up the narrow path towards the top of the banks, which are literally piles of slag from old ironworks on a peninsula that juts out to the sea. We walk up the hill, past an iron crucifix that was erected by a local man, Peter Nelson, in 2014 in memory of his wife. There’s something stark and unforgiving about it, like the landscape itself.
It’s starting to rain. I had another plan that I didn’t want to tell Luke about. I wanted him to take his piano accordion up to the top of the slag bank and he could improvise a piece that was part elegy for, part celebration of the sea that I’d been thinking about so much for the past year and a bit. The plangent sound of the accordion would carry a long way and maybe (in my head) the dog walkers and their dogs would form a circle around Luke as he played and one of the dogs would begin to howl and then they all would.
And Luke would begin to play more quietly and I would tell one of the stories that I’d been gathering for this book, and then I’d tell another. Occasionally Luke would play a little louder but then he would dip under my voice and provide what they call a bed in the world of broadcast audio.
Then a small coastal miracle would happen. Someone would step out of the circle and into the middle. They would start to tell us all, tell you all, about their sand life, their pebble life. The dogs would howl quietly in a kind of dogharmony. The rain would stop.
This didn’t happen, of course. The rain got heavier. Luke and I stood at the top of the slag bank and I regretted that I was wearing a cheap suit. This didn’t feel like a bijou café; the sea looked like the kind of tea you imagine got served in prison in the 1950s. We turned and wandered back to the car. I imagined this as a kind of ending; it isn’t. I need to go back inside. Back inside myself.