Brighton

Brighton

B ELLA’S CAR IS

full of things. And not just the usual things you’d expect to find in a car, like food wrappers and discarded pay-and-display tickets. There’s a yellow Care Bear in the footwell of the passenger seat and a moon-print throw over the back seat, on which are piled several notebooks and paperback library books and empty cigarette packets. There’s a little wooden nodding-head turtle who has been Blu-tacked to the dashboard. He’s painted in bright green and purple and he agrees as I get into the car. There are McDonald’s burger boxes stuffed into various door pockets. She’s drawn eyes on some of them so that their openings transform into big, dopey smiles. And as I close my door, I notice the succulent plant that’s sitting in the cup holder.

‘First things first,’ Bella says, turning on the engine and putting the car in gear. ‘I need breakfast.’

It is very early in the morning to be commencing a road trip. I have agreed to meet Val at noon on Brighton Pier and we need at least three hours to get to Brighton, and Bella

said she wanted ‘wiggle room’ to get lost or crash the car (which I hope was a joke). And so, it is seven o’clock as we pull out of the car park of my apartment. There’s something about the light of an early-summer morning that fills me with promise. Reminds me of childhood days that stretched out beyond my view. There’s so much this day could be

, the morning sky tells me. Why don’t you take a chance, Eddie?

‘How do you feel about a McDonald’s drive-through?’ she asks me.

‘I don’t believe I’ve ever driven through a McDonald’s drive-through.’

‘How?’ Bella asks. ‘I live on them. I know there’s all the deforestation and capitalism and everything, but Yum

.’

When Bella has finished the burger she had to request specially from a team of burger concierges who seemed to know her and I’ve finished my Egg McMuffin, which was nothing like any muffin I’ve had before, or any kind of egg, for that matter, and we’ve been on the motorway for about an hour, Bella turns down the music and asks, ‘Are you nervous?’

‘A little,’ I tell her. To tell the truth, my stomach has been doing little dips and fizzes all morning. I’m wearing my cheetah shirt for luck. A suitably fantastic garment for a potentially momentous day.

‘Does she know that, were you to share a kiss, it would be your first?’ Bella asks.

‘She does not. I don’t think a no-nonsense woman like Val would put up with any such oddness.’

‘It’s not odd. You’ve just, you know, not had your chance yet.’ She switches lanes to get around a coach full of children.

One of them – an elf-faced girl in a pink anorak – waves at me. I wave back.

‘You’ll get your moment,’ Bella says as the car in front of us moves over to the left lane. ‘Maybe today, maybe not. But you’ll have your first kiss. I’m going to make sure of it. Think of me as your lucky charm.’

‘Oh, I do, dear.’

She looks pleased with this.

I watch the road ahead, the middle lane open and clear, the lines on the tarmac darting past us like Morse code dashes. Dot dot dot

. Anything could happen, Eddie

, the road whispers. Dash dash dash

. Have some faith.

When nature calls, Bella pulls off at a motorway services.

‘Shall we get Burger King?’ Bella asks as we get out into the fresh morning air.

‘It’s nine o’clock!’

She shrugs as we walk towards the service station. ‘Driving makes me hungry.’

With bladders empty and the burger monarch’s finest wares working their way through our intestines, Bella and I return to the road.

She’s playing Enya on her phone, which is connected by a bright red wire into her car’s open-mouthed dashboard. ‘My primary-school headteacher used to play this when we came into assembly,’ she says. ‘It makes me calm.’

The morning sun is getting stronger now, but the motorway is quiet. And as Bella continues to monopolize the middle lane, the rhythm of the drive sends me into a little sleep.

When I wake, we are at a roundabout and Bella’s phone says that we are twelve minutes away from Brighton Pier. My stomach drops. I shouldn’t have eaten that burger or that cursed comestible that was masquerading as a muffin.

Val. I am going to meet her. We are having a date. I wonder what she’s doing now. Is she walking her dog? Is she putting on her lipstick? Is she thinking about me? What does she think of me? Have we, in our seventeen messages to each other, begun something that will become something

?

We get completely lost on the way into Brighton, turning down endless residential streets as the clock inches nearer and nearer to twelve. Once we have found our way, we merge into a long and impatient queue of traffic. It is already 12.01. Val might think I have stood her up, and so Bella, visibly stressed, tells me, ‘You’ll have to just hop out.’

And hop I do.

I ask for directions to the pier from a man with a hat that I think is fantastic and I would very much like for myself – a tweed deerstalker with a red feather. He points, and I feel a fool because the pier is behind me, standing proudly in the calm waters. The man heads off before I get the chance to ask him where he bought his hat.

We’ve agreed to meet outside the entrance to the arcade – on the benches, where there’s a sign for ice cream. Of course, I don’t know where that is, but I have been repeating those instructions to myself so that I don’t forget them.

I walk along the pier, past a woman walking a wonderfully fluffy dog, past a toddler in a yellow rain mac pointing at the sea and shouting to his mother. I am hurrying, a little

out of breath. It would be terribly ungallant of me to stand her up. I will my bad knee to go faster. And then, on the bench in the centre of the pier that is closest to the arcade, beneath the sign for ‘Ice Cream’ I see the crossed legs, the sensible shoes and, as I get closer, a purple rain cagoule, the violet scarf and the pink earrings belonging to Val.

My fingers feel sweaty and, as I imagine we are about to shake hands, I wipe them on my jacket. Val hasn’t seen me yet, so I take a moment to breathe. On the railing beside me, a gigantic seagull regards me with a beady eye that seems to contain a certain amount of evil within it. But I tell myself perhaps he is trying to communicate some encouragement. Go for it, Eddie. At your age, what have you got to lose?

And then he flaps his giant wings, which makes me jump, and he takes to the air.

Go for it, Eddie. What have you got to lose?

He does have a point.

I walk up to Val quickly so that I don’t have time to consider, for example, whether I smell of Burger King or if my collar needs aligning or if I can think of anything dashing to say.

And I stand before her. Ready to be evaluated on the criteria for love.

‘Val?’ I ask. She looks up from her phone and appraises me. Face, outfit, posture. I wonder what conclusion she comes to.

She smiles, but if this is her fullest smile, it doesn’t completely convince. I’m not sure how I fared on the appraisal if this is the smile she smiles after it.

‘You must be Eddie.’ Her voice is lower than I imagined it, and much more confident. She stands and holds out a hand. No going back. I shake her hand and I am unsurprised to find that her handshake is firm.

‘I’m so sorry I’m late,’ I say.

‘How was the drive?’ she asks, neither forgiving nor condemning my lateness. She pulls her purple handbag on to her shoulder and slips her phone inside.

‘Not too bad,’ I tell her.

‘Shall we?’ she asks, gesturing to the pier.

Despite the McDonald’s and the Burger King, I realize that I’m hungry.

‘Would you like an ice cream for the walk?’ I ask her, pointing to the ice-cream kiosk, where the attendant is leaning on the counter and reading the paper. ‘I believe we mentioned that on the chat. My treat.’

‘Thank you,’ she says, ‘but no.’

And I think that is the moment that I know.

We walk through the arcade, with its bright lights that buzz and dazzle, the claw machines with the merry music and plastic prizes. There are three little boys in matching neon-orange sweatsuits running about. Val neatly sidesteps them and walks smartly, ever so slightly ahead of me, and leads us out to the open air again. The wind is whipping about, and I wonder if the man with the wonderful hat is successfully holding on to it. If it flies off, it might become mine.

‘Will this be your first online date?’ I ask Val.

‘It will. However, I went on a date several months ago with a man I met at the garden centre.’

‘How was it?’

‘Oh, terrible, he was very dull.’

I hope I’m not dull.

‘Well, this will be my first,’ I tell her. And I don’t elaborate on all the firsts that this could be. I try to smile at her, but she is looking out over the water.

We walk around the fairground at the end of the pier and we try to estimate the last time each of us was on a roller coaster. For me, it has to be at least fifty years ago. What have I been doing with all this time? For Val, she recalls going on a roller coaster with her son when he was fifteen or so, and she hadn’t known it was to go upside down and she vowed, Never again

. Her son works in Australia now, she tells me. She expects him to be taller each time he visits, even though he’s in his early forties. She got so used to him growing that she is not ready for him to stop.

She asks me if I have children and I tell her I have not.

I feel a pang of guilt about Pushkin, so I remind her I have a guinea pig. She tells me she doesn’t like rodents. And I feel another pang of guilt. Pushkin is many things, but a rodent he is not. At least, not in my eyes.

Speaking of rodents, I ask her if she would like to go on the Crazy Mouse roller coaster, because it makes me sad to think that I may never go on a roller coaster again.

Val tells me her neck wouldn’t be able to take it and wonders whether rides such as that have an upper age limit, anyway.

We read the limitations on the sign at the entryway to the queue for the Crazy Mouse and find that it does not.

I ask her again if maybe she’d like to just risk it, and she declines.

We turn course now, back down the pier, and I struggle to think of anything to say. Fortunately, Val asks about my job.

‘I don’t know how I’d feel about sorting through other people’s knickers,’ she says with a laugh.

I sense she wouldn’t enjoy hearing my anecdote about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles briefs, so I ask her about her work and she reminds me that she was an accountant for nearly fifty years.

‘And did you enjoy it?’

‘Not really,’ she says. ‘The people were fine, but the work was dull.’

Fifty years spent at a job she didn’t like. I could happily work another fifty years at the charity shop and never have the same day twice.

‘Well,’ Val says. And then neither of us says anything.

‘Do you have any plans for the rest of the day?’ I ask.

‘My sister will call at six.’

‘That’s nice.’

‘It’s her turn,’ Val says, as though it can’t be nice because she is simply adhering to their pre-arranged schedule. I wonder what Val expected of this date. Because I expected sharing an ice cream and laughing and, so far, we have done neither. I try to think of a joke I could make, but I am feeling quite flat.

‘And you?’ she asks. ‘Do you have any plans for the rest of the day?’

‘Just the drive home,’ I tell her. ‘I imagine I’ll sleep for a lot of it.’

‘Yes.’ She smiles, and there’s a little release.

‘Did you ever think,’ I ask her as we make our way back

through the arcade to where we met, ‘that you would live this long?’

She looks at a large seagull that descends from the sky and flaps on to the roof of the shelter that runs down the centre of the pier. ‘I don’t suppose I ever thought about it. Why? Did you?’

‘Not at all. I would never have imagined myself living to ninety.’

‘And yet, here you are,’ she says.

‘Here I am.’

When we reach the bench where we began, Val offers me her hand again and tells me it was nice to meet me. I wonder if it was. And then she pulls her cagoule more tightly around herself, thanks me for driving all this way and heads off in the direction of land.

And I watch her go.

I turn back towards the arcade and spot the ice-cream-kiosk window. We were going to have an ice cream on the pier, so that is what I intend to do.

With my 99 ice cream in my hand (with an extra Flake, because the man said I looked like I’d had a hard morning, and when I told him that I’d been on a first date and she’d already left, he added a second Flake and an extra squeeze of raspberry sauce), I walk down the pier towards Brighton.

Off I go, with seagulls screaming at each other in the sky and two of them on the pier before me fighting over something beige in a takeaway burger box.

I find Bella seated at a sticky booth in a 1950s diner, which is so vivid and in no way how I remember the 1950s.

I wonder if other people remember the 50s like this – milkshakes and jukeboxes and colour – simply because they have been told so many times, over and over, that this is what the 1950s were like. What will the themed diners of the 2020s be, I wonder? Hand sanitizer and face masks and toilet roll stockpiled into towers, probably.

Bella is also eating an ice cream. A big Knickerbocker Glory from a tall glass with an extra-long-handled spoon so she can get to the bottom.

When I sit down opposite her in the booth, she gives me a confused look. And then checks her phone. ‘Thirty-seven minutes?’

‘It felt like longer.’

‘Do you want a burger?’ she asks.

After her third burger of the day, Bella asks if we can stretch our legs before the drive back.

So, we walk along the pier again and, I must say, it is much nicer being here with Bella. I believe we are truly friends now. I don’t know what someone like her is doing being friends with someone like me, but I am not about to question it, in case she changes her mind.

Bella insists that we get a handful of change and play on the Penny Falls and the slot machines. Her mother loves them, she says. She will keep the money she started with in one pocket and the money she wins in the other and, once the playing is over, she likes to calculate what she won and what she lost.

I feel as though that’s what I am doing now.

I pop the coins in, and it is hypnotic. Eventually, my little

gathering of coins shifts a group of three or four pennies and a plastic thing on a key ring and they clatter into the winners’ trough.

‘Jackpot!’ Bella says, coming over with her empty tub and no pennies to show for it because she gambled away her winnings too. ‘What did you get?’ she asks, and I hold up the plastic figurine.

‘Ooh, Bananaman!’ she says.

‘Do you want him?’

‘I couldn’t possibly.’

‘Please, he’s yours,’ I tell her, and she takes him, looking genuinely pleased.

‘Now what does Bananaman do?’ I ask. ‘Apart from increase your potassium?’

‘No idea,’ she says. ‘But he’s going to look great hanging from my rear-view mirror.’

We walk to the very end of the pier, where the Crazy Mouse roller coaster stands tall against the grey sky. The last opportunity for fun before France.

‘Oh, we have

to go on that,’ Bella says.

Convincing the ride operator that I will not die on the Crazy Mouse takes some time. I offer to telephone my doctor. Bella promises that if I do

die, she will help the ride operator to drag my body off the ride and throw it into the sea and then they will call the authorities and say that I fell off the pier while clutching my chest. It is at this point that I think he decides the ninety seconds of uncertainty while I ride will be worth curtailing this conversation, which has already gone on for about ten minutes. There is nobody behind us

in the queue, and he collects our ￡10 and offers his arm for me to hold on to while I climb into the ride car, which is not, as I was anticipating, shaped like a mouse. Bella squeezes in beside me. ‘Woo!’ she shouts.

‘I haven’t been on a roller coaster for fifty years!’ I tell him as he lowers the safety bar and looks at me like he wishes I hadn’t said that.

And then we are off!

We ascend the lift hill. Clunk clunk clunk, are you sure about this, Eddie?

it asks. It is very loud, and it feels as though the thing is working very hard to get us to the top of the roller coaster, but the view to the right is incredible, just the wide-open sea. Up we clunk, and I feel my bones rattle. I remember what Val said about her neck not being able to take it.

We reach the top, and I am expecting a big dip. But instead, we ride straight towards Brighton and then twist at what I can only think of as breakneck speed to face the sea, and then we repeat and then comes the first dip. Bella whoops and I clutch on to the safety bar as hard as I possibly can.

We are rolling faster now, gathering pace, turning and dipping, and Bella is still woo-hoo

-ing, and then there is only spinning, it is ocean and pier, ocean and pier, and I think they can’t possibly spin us more, we’re going to spin right off this track and I’m definitely going to vomit. But still we spin, and I grip Bella’s hand and I close my eyes, only to discover that having my eyes closed makes the spinning even worse so I open them again and I can’t even work out where I am.

On and on we spin into the end of the track, and the brakes go on with a clang and a sudden jolt and I feel a twinge in my neck and we are no longer spinning.

‘Eddie? You still alive?’ Bella asks.

‘Just about!’

It takes the help of the roller-coaster operator and Bella both pulling to heave me out of the coaster car. And the platform appears to be spinning as much as the Crazy Mouse, and suddenly it is too funny either that I just did that or that I survived it (or both) and I am bent double, wheezing.

‘Is he having a heart attack?’ the roller-coaster operator demands.

‘He’s laughing,’ Bella says in a tone that conveys that the man is an idiot, and I can hear the smile in her voice, though I can’t quite see her because I am bent over. And while the world spins a little faster than usual, I realize how close laughing, really

hysterically laughing, is to crying.

But I laugh anyway.