The village people, when Max Haze came upon them, had already come to terms with the fact that, one day, they could be drowned or, at best, marooned by the encroaching creeks. For years now, come high water, Packhorse street would be awash and the landlord of the Bridge Arms on its corner would evacuate his regulars to the meeting room upstairs.
“Come on, Toby, it’s no good sitting there - even my bar stools are not high enough to keep your little pinnies from getting soggy.”
The old man, in the dirty flat-cap, would eventually follow the rest, mumbling to himself of what his late wife would have thought of such goings on, up the teetering stairs of salt- seasoned wood. There, they would gather, in a cosy group, talking tall of the old days when, some claimed, they had to climb even as high as the sloping roof to clear the rising waters.
However, they all had to come round to admitting that it was now beginning to get as bad as the tales they told. They accepted it, with equanimity, sitting as they did on sandbags along Church Avenue, mulling away the day by instructing each other how to husband fish and grow seaweed in window boxes. He will always remember the sight of all the locals, pipes burning like bonfires, as they talked into the night of how they might fare, come the Storm that God promised them every Sunday.
Why did Max Haze go there in the first place? He supposed he should blame his agent, who had told him to get the “feel” of the place.
“That place, buddy, will soon be big. And if we are first with the pre-story...”
Max shrugged. He knew old Luke’s pre-stories. He was famous for them. Max had fallen flat on his face several times, as a result of Luke’s “hunches”.
Anyway, that being said, Max had to say that he began to agree with Luke as he motored in from the west. The salt marshes stretched as far as the eye could see, even flatter in the distance than they were close up. Max reckoned God got the world record for horizon throwing when He was practising round here, a personal best in distances. At first, the atmosphere did not permeate into the cab where he, in all innocence, squatted behind the wheel. But, soon enough, he felt nuances of it through the windscreen - a feeling that his mind was lost in its own endless expanses (for you only use a small bit of your mind for most of your life). He imagined a creature of long thin bones straddling from horizon to horizon and honing its mandibles ready for Max’s eventual disembarkation like a winkle from its shell.
The most telling moment was freewheeling into the village itself, starting most of the inhabitants with the snorting juggernaut that he drove. He came into the village rather suddenly which, if supplied with the luxury of hindsight, is surprising seeing that the landscape was so rather flat. The houses were much like those terraced tunnel-backs you often find up north, with ginnels threading between the small backyards. The only difference was their being taller than the normal “2up2down”.
The main Street, if that is not a misnomer, was darkened by these leaning residences, where washing-lines strung between the roof-trees did not seem to have the space they needed to breathe. The kerbside gutters were almost swollen rivers, he thought, if he could be allowed to exaggerate just for a moment.
He cursed Luke for sending him on such a trip, up a creek without a paddle, as it were. How did Luke know that a story was about to break in this back of beyond? His sense of smell for a scoop had always stunk... Booking a room at the Bridge Arms was not easy. The landlord, who obviously did not like customers at all, gave Max Haze all the excuses in the world for why he could not let a room to the likes of him.
“I don’t hold truck with lorry drivers here.”
“I’m not a lorry driver, as such, I just happen to drive one,” Max replied with as much sense as he could muster. The landlord looked at him askance. Then at the regulars. Then back at Max.
“I’ve got a room on the ground floor. The rest higher up are all taken.”
“That’ll do nicely,” Max replied, much against his better judgement.
*
Max rang Luke about 10.30 p.m. Luke said he was in bed and why was Max ringing? Max tried to explain the bad vibes, but Luke seemed to be talking to somebody else for the whole of the conversation. So no joy there.
One for the road, Max thought. And he ordered a large honeydew whiskey at the bar-hatch, where the landlord was leaning along with the rest of the drinkers.
“We don’t serve just anybody after half past ten,” he muttered.
“I am a resident at this pub tonight, so I’m not just anybody,” Max retorted in as unfriendly a tone as he could manage.
He ended up being served a half-measure in a smeared glass and he took this off to his assigned room which was flush with the bar, behind what turned out to be a wall little better than a breakfast cereal-box.
It was difficult to sleep, it goes without saying: what with worrying about whether he had parked the articulated properly (had he left on its lights? was it on double yellow lines in the narrow street? would a crazy local let down its tyres or siphon out its battery acid?) and the nagging doubts about the whole affair (was Luke stringing him along? could he afford to continue paying wages to Max in view of the impending collapse of his newspaper?) and the rising indigestion as the pub-fare took on its true identity (now that it was out of sight among the stomach juices) and the incessant chatter of the locals into more than just the small hours (gradually seeping into his dreams as he dozed) and, finally, their clump clump up the wooden stairs as the wind and rain got up...
He would never forget his dreams that night. He was back out in the surrounding salt marshes, and the bony monster had become a reality rather than just a figment of his imagination. He could hear its clicking, above the roar of the lorry’s engine. He could see its jaw, yapping like Luke’s but without the flesh and much much bigger. He glimpsed its appetite, not for belly-fulfilment (for it did not seem to have a belly at all) but for something even more basic, as it thrashed a thickening tentacle that belied its spare ribs.
He woke before he could fathom the dream’s depth.
The bed was floating in what he could only describe as black jelly. His body felt so bad, he would have exchanged its metabolism for the direst seasickness known to man. He became closed in, for the bed had been taken up to the cracked ceiling, with the door somewhere below. He yearned for the endlessly open horizons which, earlier, a comparatively sane God had seen fit to grant the world.
*
By morning, he had slept it off. He skipped breakfast, even though he felt hungry.
His lorry, as it turned out, was neatly parked and, as Max cranked the ignition, its life-force tripped easily into stutter-free.
He drove steadily down Packhorse Street, wondering why some villagers were perched up on the roof-crests along with the T.V. aerials. He had to get back to London quick, to brief Luke as to the goings on. The telephones were out...and the tickertape no doubt.
The lean-to houses crowded him in, as if they were set on preventing his his egress to the salt marshes. One old lady villager, with slight chin beard, peered at him from her own particular tunnel-back house, her mouth opening and shutting on silent speech bubbles. Max Haze grounded his truck against the steepening wall of a tall terrace and tried to radio Luke, but could only get a completely fictitious weather forecast on Radio 4.
published 'Exuberance' DFL Showcase 1990
LAYING DOWN THE HAZE: http://expressblogs.com/blogs/index.php?cat=1066&blog_ID=Simonymous
=============
