GRECH Chapter 1

 

Something happened. There, where it happened before. What was it, when, where? In media res. In the wind. There as it blows. The wind makes our head cold and confuses us. There is almost constant wind here, where we sit or stand or lie, and it is chiefly blowing from the direction of the south-west, that is the prevailing direction, though sometimes (as a change) easterly, and one has to endure it, or make provision against it, or go with it, as is appropriate at any particular instant; for sometimes it’s mild, it softens the cheeks, glorious to relate, and sometimes it’s horrid, but that’s how it goes. It goes and it happens. That is, it sings. It sings as it sounds. A high-pitched sound in our ears, or that may merely be the tinnitus. And we sit or stand or lie in our quarters, which are partially sheltered, it has to be said, which will do. We are in media res, which is Latin for in the middle of it all, or in the middle of nowhere. We are discovered here, or we are in a position to be discovered, but to be quite frank we hope not to be, we sincerely hope to continue our life with as little fuss as possible. We lived in a house once. But our quarters here, they will do. For the time being, which is all the time we have in any case. Our quarters consist of a shelter, provided unwittingly by the Council, that is to say, unwittingly in the sense that it was not, one has to admit, originally intended for this purpose; the Council in no way intended this shelter to serve as our quarters, and so one has to admit it has been repurposed, without the Council’s knowledge, let alone express permission, but has been standing for quite a while, it would seem, though the paint on it, which is green – to be more precise, Buckingham Green – is fairly new; and incorporated into the shelter, which is of sturdy construction, is a bench, originally intended for the benefit of the public (who no longer frequent this location much), on which we sit for much of the time (when we are not walking about, or when we are not ensconced within our tent), where we might be discovered but would sincerely prefer not to be. For we forgot to mention we have a tent (contents of tent to be enumerated at a later time). And the tent is of a blue colour, sufficient for a single person, with a zip fastener on the entrance, meaning the slit by which we enter its enveloping sufficiency. And the tent, pitched by the side of the shelter, on the leeward side, that is to say the side protected from the prevailing wind, that is on the right-hand side of the shelter as one would observe if one had one’s back to the sea, is of sufficient quality for its purpose. We have not yet mentioned the sea, which is of course a continuing presence. Nor the beach, for that matter. Which is always visible, and palpable. It is made of stones. It is a long shingle beach, not much frequented these days by holidaymakers, who prefer sand. But to return to our quarters: a tent is all one needs. Or something like that. Except in conditions of extreme weather, perhaps in the depths of winter, when other temporary arrangements would have to be made. Although this winter that we have recently endured, that we are coming out of, was relatively mild, so that was of course fortunate. We lived in a house once. But it didn’t work out. Hey ho. Whatever. Built of brick, falls down. That’s the law. The bricks fall down. Eventually. However they do. Howsoever. But it wasn’t the wind that did it. It wasn’t the wind that blew the house down, that caused that sound, the catastrophic sound that echoed all along the foreshore, that caused the gulls to go up in the air. That was definitely not the wind, that terrific destructive force that brought the house down. We are not referring specifically to the house or houses wherein once we dwelt, which to all intents and purposes may survive, almost certainly survive today, wherever they are, though now inhabited by others. Almost certainly. Though nothing survives forever, is what we were working up to saying, but what a banal point. What a banal point to make. It’s the kind of thing Grech might have said. No, we will not use the G— word. We try not to think about G— these days, but it is not easy. Nevertheless. Where were we? The first house was a house of straw, remember that? I will blow your house down, the wind says, I will huff. I will puff. I will weather you down. And the next house was a house of wood. And the wind says the same. And the house after that, a house of brick. Same result, the wind says and sings, as it does. Never you mind, I will do it. I will do it, if it takes years, I will, sings the wind, prevailing from the south west, as it does in these parts. Never mind. It has to happen some time. Every time it happens. The bricks make a certain sound when they fall down. Now all of this is by way of leading up to attempting to describe the event that disrupted the peace that afternoon by the beach, the event that opened this discourse. The sound would have reached our ears almost immediately, it was that close. It was a sound clearly audible above the high-pitched sound of the wind, above the sound of the sea. It was a catastrophic sound, one that had not been heard before, more clearly audible than the rush of one of the trains as it approaches, as it swoops past, on the line behind, on the beyond section of the chain-link fencing complex, so no, it was not a train, definitely not. We have not yet mentioned the chain-link fencing, nor the trains. One hardly notices them after a while being stationed here. But this, certainly not a train by the sound of it, aside from which we are familiar with the timetable by now, we have internalised it, so can exclude that possibility, this was entirely new. The bricks make a sound, above that of the weather, the moving weather. The moving weather within the climate, which is a structure built of weather systems, how they circle. Make circles, that is, of sound and motion and much else. That sounds good, make a note of it. Though it may not be of use. May not be to the point. We are straying from the point. Which is: the falling bricks make a sudden sound, startling, out of kilter with the ambient sound and the recurrent sounds. That’s what happened. And then later it happened again. After it had happened before, well then, blow us down, it happened again. And it set all the herring gulls into a flap, the bricks falling down like that. But they did not fall; they were pushed. There were men working, that was the reason, they had been there for a few days, they’d been noticed, up towards the east of this vantage point, set up with their vehicles next to the beach around the construction site, which first had to be a destruction site, because there can’t be one without the other (construction and destruction, that is, another example of co-dependent binaries, about which we’ll have more to say later), the site anyway boundaried with security fencing and warning notices for many days before that sound came, proclaiming that the building was suddenly in the throes of being brought down, with great smoke billowing. The assembly of yellow machines in the day leading up to it should have served as a warning. It went unheeded. But the herring gulls certainly did not like that. It was a shock. They made their displeasure plain. That’s how that happened. It happened, and happened again. There was shouting too, there were warnings or cries of alarm. What cries? Who was crying out? The men or the birds? They flew up in the air. The birds, of course. Chaotic, turbulent moments. And then the men and their machines had another go. And the gulls, leaving their own stations on the various roofs around upward of the beach area, shouting with great emotion, fly up in a great pandemonium (or palace-of-all-the-demons), a hullabaloo, what to do what to do? they shout. They are silvery-grey and white, with their pink legs and yellow bills, and they fly around the grey and silvery early spring sky in one turbulent moment after another. And now the wrecking ball came round once more, smacked that old building in the face again, whack, and down come more bricks, bang bang, and up go the gulls. Well, the gulls are shocked, truly they are, by this repeated transgression, this invasion of their quotidian abyss, and they’re all talking about it, as we know, for we know them well, the several pairs that had been beginning over the past week or two to snoop around the rooftop sites of their old nests, feeling that time come around again, the time for refurbishment, to get it on and give evolutionary processes another prod, that is to say, in short, they’d been thinking of baby-making. What were they saying? The wind is one thing. That is what it will do. It will sing, for all it’s worth. But this, this was an outrage. A human intervention, an egregious display, a violent demonstration of the law of entropy, that is to say the transition from house (on whose roof there might have been an opportunity for nesting, for baby-making) to mere bricks. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men are powerless, not that the herring gulls give a great deal of anything for king’s horses or king’s men, no more than we do. From house to bricks, that serves as a classic demonstration of the second law of thermodynamics, as the birds in their abyss understand very well, and as will become better understood, except that understanding itself violates entropy, so it’s always a long losing battle. But a calm is coming. It must come, surely. The gulls resettle. The men took no notice, of course, engrossed as they were in their tasks. We know each one of them – the gulls that is, not the men, whose meanings and motivations were obscure to us at this point; they are starting to settle – the gulls – they are resuming their pair bonds right now, where they were wont to build their bower, as they have been these past few weeks, the pair on the garage roof to the left, the pair on the building overlooking the derelict and abandoned beach huts a little further on, the others from yet further afield. The building that was being dismantled had not, so far as can be determined, itself functioned as a breeding station. So it wasn’t a question of anybody losing their homes, in this instance. It was a building whose function was never clear. Reality is not what it seems. What is it, what’s it doing, the gulls’ hullabaloo? It’s just a response, that’s all, a response to threat. The fading light drinks it all up. In media res, in the middle of the whole bloody thing, or in the middle of nowhere. So after that there was quiet for a while, the smoke settling on the piles of collapsed bricks, just the occasional shout from the men, but this interleaved with moments of renewed calm. And what it was, the men were packing up now, for it must have been approaching four o’clock in the afternoon, and at this time in the early spring the light would be beginning to fade across the beach; we were still some way off the solstice. Their machines had been turned off, the juddering had stopped – the juddering having come into consciousness for the first time precisely because of its sudden absence, precisely because previously it had been an unremarked feature of the aural environment, an underground rumble not otherwise perceived. That’s how it happens. The yellow machines, tarnished by rust. The machines would be good for another day, but the bricks, of course, were now in a more than somewhat disordered state; the collapse was considerable. (We have read recently by the way that there is a 90% chance of human society collapsing within decades, but we are not in a position to make a meaningful assessment of this prediction.)

 

 

 

 

Peace returned to the foreshore. Our flock seemed finally pacified, anyway. The men were all gone now, having knocked off for the evening. Something happened, that was all the gulls knew. They would have already forgotten about it, in fact. Our friends the herring gulls, of the species Larus argentatus. They are, as even the naturalist Tinbergen, who loved them, acknowledges, not that bright. But in our own mind the memory trundled and acquired freight along the way, in a manner not altogether welcome, but for a while below the level of consciousness itself. Something occurred, and then faded into the past. And so evening drew on – a snack that had been snuggled away previously was consumed, the last of the contents of the Paisley-patterned thermos flask was drained, the bladder was relieved behind the rocks way over yonder, the teeth were scrubbed and any residue spat onto the shingle, the tent was readied, blanket gathered together about oneself. And all these preparations were being made for the night ahead, as usual, when the next thing occurred. It was an internal occurrence this time. Something else – call it a thought – occurred. It slapped us on the face, metaphorically. Pah! Call it a thought. An idea or opinion produced by thinking, or occurring suddenly in the mind. Well, that’s a rather circular definition. (Idea? opinion?) But here it was, anyway. The nub of it was this. If there had been destruction, this thing called thought went, it must surely be followed by construction. For what would have been the point of going to all that trouble? The assembled machines, the cohort of personnel, the time taken? To simply remove a redundant building? For no reason? It had been there, mouldering, evidently for many years. No, there would be more to it than that. Construction must be being planned. For certain, almost for certain. But how to obtain even more certainty? More detail? There might be a notice, possibly a copy of a planning application. Or a public information notice. A notice that would provide the relevant information, unwelcome though it might be with its implications for our future status. In short, what was the plan? These things have to be faced, unfortunately. Such was the inner discourse. Thoughts like these never wander aimlessly into their own private domain to be lost forever; no, these were rigorous thoughts, of the type that assemble themselves into sequences that make sense; sense of a significant nature, with potential consequences, impacting right here. And now. There was a need for more research, anyway: that had been established. Yes, there were almost certainly notices on that site, it may now be recalled, that had previously been overlooked, that might repay further study in order to discover any clues therein as to the purpose behind this demolition, and what phase two, shall we say, might be, once phase one, demolition, had been achieved. But now dusk was gathering, and such a foray to research the facts further would not just be another irruption of an unwanted nature into normal procedures and protocols for the evening, but would also represent a considerable effort in terms of discerning any available small print; and it wasn’t of pressing need anyway to do this, to walk the fifty or a hundred metres to the now deserted site, to try to make out what was going on (if any of it was legible, even printed or written down at all), and to walk all the way back. It could easily – more easily – be done in the morning, and there would be no significant disadvantage. This is how the thoughts were going, along these lines. Thoughts tend, one finds, to gather momentum as dusk gathers, as the number of passers-by, never great around here, around this rather desolate part of the beach, diminishes even further, and we are left alone with them, the said thoughts, here in the abandoned commonwealth of consciousness. Yes, these are fair thoughts indeed; they would undoubtedly pass the Turing test with flying colours, dare we say, they would without question establish our humanity. At the very least. There is life here yet. Circumstances may be diminished in scope compared with previous times of plenty. But there is every reason to believe that, seasoned with an admixture of seasalt, our thoughts as we dwell here are becoming stronger, more spaced out in time, clearer, less hurried or jumbled. There is more chance than ever, one feels, of arriving at sound and reasoned conclusions, of reaching mature judgements, untainted by partiality, bias, attachment, bad politics, affairs of the heart, prejudice, racial or other hatreds, congealment of attitudes, naivety, blindness to the facts or excessive reliance on irrelevant variables. To achieve such a state would be to live well. To be content to hear the wind bluster and make no commentary. No question of that.

 

 

 

 

But having noted all this, the wind and the waves seemed to have died down towards evening, from a roar in their daytime pomp to a hush, with the occasional isolated gust providing a late flourish. That was the way it was going, on the evening that is being spoken of. The evening following the double crash of bricks. A sort of diminuendo. Poco a poco. Throughout all of this, the tent had stayed firm, pitched as it was in the lee of the shelter, as has already been described. The only interruptions: the trains, on the other side of the path and the chainlink and barbed wire fence. At this time of the evening there would be just two an hour, one in either direction, the up and the down. The rush of that, but you don’t notice it after a while; it’s just like the waves, a crescendo, the climax, then a diminuendo back into the distance of memory, reduced to the dimensions of a punctuation mark. And that double rush per hour is in a different time signature from that of the waves, which we haven’t mentioned before. Well, they may have been mentioned in passing, or they may have been implied. The sea we have certainly mentioned. The sea is always there. It doesn’t need to be mentioned. It’s always happening. There – where it happened before. Even in episodes of high wind, the waves never quite reach us. The beach is wide and commodious enough to prevent that occurring, even at high tide. The sea is not the ocean – that lies to the west – but the English Channel. Admittedly, a storm surge, in excess of eighty or a hundred miles per hour perhaps, if it were to coincide with an unusually high tide, might pose an existential problem for our station. But most of the time we are all right, it is safe enough. So it was that evening, an evening like any other, except inasmuch as nothing is like anything else. At these times the sea is more frequent, obviously, by which we mean the waves are, because the waves are inseparable from the sea. It depends on whether you want to think in frequency or wavelength. So the evening wore on. A little more chill. It was at this point that the decision was taken to get up from the bench in the shelter, have a last look, a last shuffle around and then retire to the tent. The torch was checked: still some battery life left. There was always more reading to be done. A last look along the shoreline, then, past the garage to the left, the beach huts a little further on, the building site just past that where there was now a pile of rubble, and to the right the continuation of the pathway that passes this shelter, no bicyclist or pedestrian there now, and beyond, the headland, and then at the back of us the railway line behind the fencing, with the pedestrian bridge over to the west, and the further buildings behind that, and at the front the beach and the sea, which shall eventually, we hope, be described in all its immensity; but that will have to wait for the mental and imaginative resources to permit. A gloom coming over all this. It was by now quite cold. This past winter had not been too bad, we have already mentioned, it was only now and again that refuge had had to be sought, when the kene cold blowes through my beaten hyde, and the wriggly tails wagged, and all of that, but it was at this point that we would look forward to the spring. It was at this point. That was the point of it. But what was that out on the horizon? It’s always grand to behold the vessels that stand out, as they pass, always from left to right, from east to west, for that’s the shipping lane visible from this vantage point. We love to watch them. If we had an emblem, it would be an anchor. There was a particularly large vessel now visible through the gloom, standing on the horizon – so we quickly grabbed the treasured binoculars from within the tent – a pinprick or two of light maybe visible on its superstructure but mainly consisting of a wall of cargo packed into standard containers of many shades stacked maybe as much as a dozen high and twenty across which if you were hard up against it would have the overwhelming effect of an immensely tall building. And all stacked tightly onto the hull, black and low-seeming with the block capitals M S C painted thereon, but actually itself the height of a considerable building. So, a ship out at sea, a container vessel, noted. And another beginning to appear to the left of it, following it, probably a tanker, and at the extreme left yet another like it, but not so large. Almost a fleet, in fact. All heading as always towards the mighty ocean off to our right, westward ho, heading into the prevailing wind, which was by now very much dying down, as has been explained. It seemed from time to time that a considerable metropolis could be discerned on that horizon. Houses might be imagined. Slowly moving cities might be imagined. But enough. They were, one by one, quickly disappearing, stage right or is it stage left? into the greyness that enveloped the distance at this time, and would soon be forgotten. The enduring appeal of “a boat across the water”. Soon gone. Too many ideas. They thrust themself into the brain, and need to be resisted; it is not good for the general health. No, it was time to turn in, zip up the entrance to the tent, get in the sleeping bag, turn on the torch for some reading before the visit of Sister Sleep. She would be arriving from a long way away, as always. The visit of Sister Sleep, sometimes though rarely accompanied by Sister Dream, was always to be welcomed. Deep alpha waves alternating with rapid eye movements, in that familiar rhythm, that was the hope for the next seven or eight hours. One would then become, as we all were once, no more than a column of air like any other. But a ship out at sea, a fleet, a house, a creak. All these useless elements. And the sea itself? As we have noted, it is always there, that is the principal feature of it, just the being there, and so there it was again that evening before retirement, the sea, which has not yet been adequately described (for it’s beyond our powers at present, or at least our inclinations), just being, and the evening now flows into night. Best get in the tent, was the thought. The evening had come. It was passing away. As it always does. The houses that nestle well away from the shoreline started to close in. We felt we were falling. We found ourself falling. It was a familiar feeling; it has been extensively described elsewhere so there is no need to elaborate. But suffice it to say, immersed in the ocean of consciousness, we have felt this way for some time now. When you have descended for some time, the floor eventually, inevitably comes to greet you. But this, like all other phenomena, will pass.

 

GRECH is published by Grand Iota, 2025
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