Them or Us

I pass to minimize the chance of being seen by the lighthouse lookout, I find myself walking down toward the ocean. The steadily increasing noise of the waves crashing against the shingle shore is reassuring and welcome. The morning sun that was briefly visible in Lowestoft has disappeared now, and the sky is again clogged with heavy, dirty gray cloud. The wind coming up off the water is bracing, almost too cold to stand. It’s raining—either sea-spray or sleet—and I ask myself again, What the hell am I doing here ?
    A long, uninterrupted, and empty roadway runs parallel with the shingle beach below, appearing to stretch right along the full length of the town, all the way out toward a crumbling pier that reaches into the sea. The promenade is a relatively straight, hardly overlooked strip of asphalt, and I’m suddenly struck by the fact that there’s something very different about this place in comparison with everywhere else I’ve been since I arrived in the area. The deeper I’ve gone into Southwold, the more obvious it’s become. The roads here in this part of town have been cleared. There are the usual burned-out cars and occasional piles of rubble lying around, but here, unlike in Lowestoft, they appear to have been moved out of the way. This is weird. No one cleans anything anymore, there’s no point. There’s barely anything left to clean with . The whole country is covered in a layer of radioactive grime that never gets touched. People usually climb over and around obstructions such as these, very rarely ever doing anything about them.
    A sudden gust of wind catches a loose window in a run-down house behind me, slamming it shut. My heart’s in my mouth and my body immediately tenses up, ready for confrontation. I grab my knife and look around in all directions, but I can’t see anyone, and I curse myself again for getting so easily distracted. Next to the house is a small corner store with a real estate agent’s FOR RENT sign hanging above the door. Its bare shelves have long since been stripped of anything of value, but, feeling exposed, I go inside.
    The store’s as empty as it looked from the street, probably cleared out just before the fighting began in earnest. Again, if this had been Lowestoft or anywhere else, the floor would be covered in crap, the furniture broken into pieces for firewood, the windows smashed, a couple of bodies left rotting in the corner … There’s a pile of papers on the end of a counter, neatly stacked next to an empty display unit as if the outgoing owners just left them there on their way out. There’s a local newspaper on top of the pile, dated last February, and I casually flick through it, this time happy to be distracted. The yellowed pages immediately take me back to a world that’s long gone. There are a few vague mentions of the beginning of the troubles that eventually consumed everything and everyone, but generally the paper’s filled with the kind of empty stories that used to be so typical and that used to matter in places like this: local merchants protesting about increased parking charges, the proposed merger of two secondary schools, an amateur dramatics group desperately trying to hawk tickets for their latest production, a new car dealership opening … For a while I’m hypnotized as I read through the TV and local movie listings, looking at program titles I thought I’d forgotten and the names of films I never got to see, but then I remember where I am and what I’m supposed to be doing and I make myself move.
    On the floor by my feet, wedged under the counter, is a postcard lying facedown. I pick it up and flip it over. On the front is a picture of Southwold beach and the pier taken on a gloriously sunny summer’s day, way back when. The colors of the postcard are still remarkably bright and vivid. GREETINGS FROM SOUTHWOLD it says at the bottom, in large orange and yellow text. Maybe I should send it to Hinchcliffe? I don’t think he’d appreciate the joke.
    I take the postcard outside with me and compare it to the real world. The original photograph must have been taken from somewhere very near to this exact spot, because the view of the pier is pretty much the same. I cross the promenade and a strip of muddy grass, then lean against the metal railings and look down toward the sea. Holding the postcard up, I can clearly see the contrast between the past and the present. Apart from the weather and the lack of color (everything