The long high road sloping down to the distant coast sparkled with the blinding reflections of sun on an endless snake of cars. Chrome bumpers, body strips, window and door surrounds, bonnet ornaments and petrol caps shimmered and diffracted crazily in the haze of boiling engines and midday heat. A far-off strip of blue-grey - the sea! - underscored a cornflower sky.
Later, the car I was in stopped opposite the beach where a line of shops stretched to the horizon. The driver got out, disappeared into one of the shops, probably for cigarettes, came back, and gave me an icy-pole in a wrapper with a picture of a helicopter on it.
*
Endless summer days. We are sprawled on beach towels, which were probably tasseled and multicoloured - but who would remember that detail? - on the sand in the shade of some kind of building, a yacht club or boat launching house or a covered pier. I lick the last sweet droplets, setting in the heat, from inside the torn waxed wrapper. Next to me, my father crushes a cigarette end into the sand, and the acrid fragrance is of the western isles: brine, kelp, smoke. My mother and siblings are present, but I only know that because they had to be - there is no event, no stubbing of cigarette nor taste of raspberry to bring them into concreteness - they remain pictured in the memory like the circles of confusion* that earlier danced in the sun over the nose-to-bumper cars of a thousand humans.
Mid-afternoon. A shop, probably of souvenirs, decorated shells, buckets and spades, postcards, sea kitsch. I am holding an oval green bath sponge on which is printed an image of an evil red face, grinning like an omniscient Punch who has just murdered someone. The medieval visage will wear off in the bathtub over time, but never in memory. One of the circles of confusion has bought it for me. A four-year-old loves everything it is given, even a novelty bath sponge.
The cigarette butt. The paper wrapper redolent of strawberry. The evil Punch face. These were real. Memory fills in the rest from likelihood.
*
Out on the sun-blinding street we walked back to where we had crossed earlier from the beach. Then another real thing, a memory that could never be colour-by-numbered. He, the man who had given me a raspberry icy-pole and had then smoked moodily on the beach, was being carried. The hotel was just beyond; his drinking friends had emerged untidily into white hot sun from the cool deep darkness of the tartan-carpeted and tiled interior where a bow-tied barman had been too busy, far too busy. They looked like drunk pallbearers with a coffinless body. I knew nothing about death; I thought, non-judgementally, that he was asleep.
*
Years, decades passed. The story put about that he had been a drunk had long failed my nascent detective, or perhaps lawyerly, instincts. He had never returned home from work drunk, nor become drunk at home. His beachside episode bore the hallmarks of a sudden bender; a spree alien to his sober - perhaps too sober - nature.
Ten years after a ‘Some Enchanted Evening’-infused wedding, some other enchanted evening had occurred, during a beach holiday. He had found out.
*
The house in which we stayed for the week lay two streets behind the shops, within earshot of the carnival’s screams, the late hotel customers’ loud obscenities and, hushing everything else, the insistent wash of the sea, each soft breaking wave a contented snore, like in a cartoon. In the night, I walked out into the back open garden ringed by trees. High in one of the trees, perched on a horizontal branch, sat an owl, its soft furry middle feathers covering its feet like a king’s mantle.
* ‘Circles of confusion’: out-of-focus photographic images refracted into obscuring rings of light. Japanese name: ‘bokeh’.
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