Low life

28 January 2012

We parked the car and spent a carefree hour on the beach, Oscar and I. The beach was a crescent of pebbles three miles long, and we were the only people on it. A recent easterly gale had driven the tide much further up the beach than usual, leaving behind it a pebble ridge, ideal for granddads and two-year-old boys to fling themselves off, or roll down roly-poly fashion, which we did until granddad was exhausted.

Next we searched for suitable pieces for the driftwood bookcase granddad is making, and found a frayed and salted plank of eight by two. Just the job. Nearby, a stranded dogfish lay stinking among the tide-line debris. Its eyeballs were gone, its rotting flesh eaten away by scavengers right down to the exposed vertebrae, which granddad snatched up and pretended to greedily gnaw at.

We’d wandered far up the beach in search of driftwood and it was a long trudge back to the car park. I carried Oscar on my shoulders, casting a grotesquely long shadow in front, the plank under my arm. At the car, I leaned the plank against the boot and fumbled in my jacket pocket for the key. Not there. With rising panic I checked my jeans. Not there. ‘Gone,’ I said, reporting our predicament to Oscar using the most serviceable word in his still small vocabulary.

Oscar doesn’t do sympathy yet, but a problem shared, and so on. I made a deduction. The car key and immobiliser fob must have fallen out of my pocket while we were roly-polying down the shingle bank. I don’t possess a spare set. The only option, therefore, was to about turn and head back towards the rapidly sinking, reddening sun, hoping to be able to identify where we’d played by the avalanches we’d made in the ridge, and hoping against hope that the key and fob would be lying there on the pebbles, easy to spot. Which only goes to show what a ludicrous fantasist I am.

We found the trampled places in the ridge easily. No sign of a car key, though. I got down on hands and knees for a closer scrutiny of the pebbles. And after a minute or two I became aware of what lovely, astonishing things these pebbles were. To think we’d been tramping over them without giving them their due. Perfect, smooth ovals, they were; and such rich colours: jet black, translucent white, rose pink, ruby red, avocado, khaki, tan and slate grey. Each pebble was an admirable, finished article and could have stood alone as a work of art. Stand any one on a gallery plinth with a comment book beside it and six months later the number of people stating that the pebble had moved them, spoken to them, altered the direction of their lives in some significant way would probably be considerable.

The previous evening I’d been to see the film Magic Trip, which is the edited highlights of the home movie that author Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters shot of their road trip across the US in 1963, during which Kesey introduced the hallucinogenic drug LSD to the youth of America by giving free ‘acid test’ parties. Up there on the screen was Kesey himself, a Svengali figure with bushy sideburns. And there too was Beat legend Neal Cassady, mad as a hatter, at the wheel of the old school bus. And there, for a fleeting moment, seated on a sofa at a house party, amazingly, was Jack Kerouac: fat, drunk and sour-faced at being fêted by a gang of infantile proto-hippies.

At one point in the film, the Pranksters are off their heads on LSD and dancing in a shallow pond. One of them, a woman, lies down in the pond, on her front, and we see her face in close-up. She is staring down at the pond weed, utterly transfixed by it, as if it is the most interesting and beautiful thing she has ever seen in her life. And now here I was, on my knees the day after the film, with a similar thing going on between me and these beach pebbles. Five yards away Oscar was lying on his back, obliquely regarding the darkening sky. He was away with the fairies, too.

I gave way to despair and toppled forwards. My forehead rested on the pebbles and I felt their cold, smooth hardness. And I prayed. ‘Please, God,’ I said. ‘I am such a c**t.’ My usual prayer, this, in extremis. And I remained in this prostrated position, in blank despair, for a good couple of minutes. Then I lifted my head and felt with my fingertips the indentations the pebbles had made in my brow. Then I glimpsed, just off to the left, half-buried, a car key and black immobiliser fob. My joy was unrestrained. Oscar regarded his granddad’s wild cheering with only mild curiosity.

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Jamie J

January 27th, 2012 4:42pm Report this comment

Nice one Clarice.
I've been there before. The absolute horror of loosing keys and then the sheer euphoria on finding them is really not good for ones health.