and clouds for company

MP3: Lawrence English-and clouds for company

The edge of the town sloped away into an ornate wooden place near the precipice of a cliff. Everything, all the buildings, shops, even the road itself, had the quality of being carved and painted into weathered old wood, giving the impression of boat decks or old funfair rides. There were no hard edges at this end of town. Objects were curved and made smooth by the weather.

I could see that the things in the town had been painted brightly in block colours once. But the prevailing wind off the sea had softened the colours down to stains through which you could now see the knots and rings in the wood.

At the furthest part of the town, at the very edge of the cliff in fact, was an oval shaped bar. I walked toward it because I could hear the pop of fried food and smell scrambled eggs. The barman waved me over. He was serving drinks from this little wooden corner of the world with nothing behind him except the eight inches of cliff top upon which he stood. Behind that, a dizzying drop to the ocean itself, which, he later told me, was about a mile and a half below. I looked out. It was so tangibly, deeply blue and so still that it could have been the hard surface of an exposed sapphire. A trawler sat frozen on the horizon.

He pulled a pint of smithwicks for me and left it on the counter. I considered it for a while and made to drink from it but it remained there as things do in dreams. I asked the barman why it was so quiet in town today. He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes and he asked me if I couldn't see that everyone was below at the water. The children were saying goodbye to their parents, he said.

Sure enough, I could make out a crowd of tiny black figures as small as mites. There were hundreds of them at edge of the the sea, moving around with miniature flags and bunting. I could just about hear music too, a circular instrumental lament that the barman told me could break the hardest heart.

He returned to preparing his eggs and I watched the distant ceremony unfold. Wave after wave of people broke free from the crowd and walked out into the strange sea until they were gone. The crowd grew lighter and the warm eddies of musical wind carried broken snatches of children crying. I rested my head against the wooden bar in sorrow, and the last thing I heard was the barman telling me the children would be back up in time to play at a night-time fair, but that I'd be gone by then. And so I was.