by Alan Parry
I bussed to work most days that summer, along the coast, turning a sharp right at the pier. On clear mornings I could see its legs reflected in shallow seawater puddles, but as a rule there was a catatonic sea-mist sleepily approaching the land. The distant waves were like the voice of lost souls. Soft light briefly cut the shape of mountains on those early mornings at Devil’s Island Fairground, before the punters poured in through the bottleneck gate. I’d watch a ride girl sit and play guitar. She sang like a child. Her hair was a red fuzz and she had a fine length of neck. I always wanted to say hi, but she didn’t belong in my racket. Sorry guys like me don’t speak with choice young women like her, that’s how it is.
Grief can ruin a man. For a year after grandmother’s death, a heavy light hung low in the sky. My world was a badly exposed photograph. I watched myself growing hazy in the shaving mirror — becoming thin and shapeless. My sister noticed my disappearance. She came to my room, sat by my feet and told me that she’d seen a friend with a summer job find a reason for being. ‘Maybe something like that will be good for you.’ Embarrassed for both of us, I promised that I’d look for something. I said anything just to be alone again.
I had known for years that I was destined to be detached. You see, when anxiety reaches the tips of me — my fingers won’t move — my hips lock. I do not dare to be vulnerable, I just am.
After a couple of weeks, hiding behind murky gauze curtains, startling ten year olds I began to feel at ease with the role. I had what it takes to act, and there I was, performing. I’m not much of a people person. The mind is an oil slick. It suited me to work alone, buried in the fairground finery of the Devil’s Island Ghost Train, where purple rhapsody walls had hackled flecks in the paint that stood like the hairs on hyena necks. Fairgrounds give you what you pay for, they spook you with cartoon horror: cobwebs, vaulted ceilings, and backlit, faux stained glass windows depicting vampires and tall staircases. I knew the longer I stood there in the sable light, that the real scares didn’t come from me, or the mechatronic beasts that emerged from hoarse and hokey coffin lids. No. Here where chill fills the tunnels — there are no stars and no hope.
That folk ever rode the Ghost Train a second time meant I ought to have been held in high regard, but the dolt who spun the waltzers was valued more than me. I got it. Mannerly young actors like me got nothing. Boys, with combed hair and clean nails don’t make friends easy. I cannot help but think in concentric circles and part of me wants to know what I was lacking.
It was in the darkness that I became the face. In the bump of spurious thunder; when long shadows had life. I was something else. Something befitting.
I practiced awful crashes of laughter and smoked chains of cigarettes until my throat rasped, so that when the cart wheels locked and turned, I could let roar like a falling mine and the punters’ fear would flap in the wind. I would watch it burn itself into the whites of their eyes, as knee-high fog lit up the rusting tracks.
When nobody puts any value on what you do, you begin to find good in the worst of places. I loved to hold the prop axe in my hand, and to feel it struggle. To smite somebody! I liked how my cumbrous, blood-spattered apron rustled against my thighs when I chased after the carts, swinging the heavy, blunt blade about my head. The hunter and the hunted. Passing through, those sitting upright in the clanking wooden carts never knew for sure if a shadow was a shadow or my dirty little bag of bones. Those sitting upright in the clanking wooden carts thought they were safe but you cannot be safe in the cold pockets of a strange house. What I’d give to have unleashed a colony of gulls on them when they least expected it, to have had the power to command the birds. The weight of me pushes this idea away.
Eventually, I was beaten by the stupidity. The monotony. Hours crept rather than trickled. Somehow night was brighter than day — lights stuttering — buzzing and burning away. That summer, spent hiding in dark corners, the days became the night, the smiles became shrieks. It became so real there was no other life. With each creaking step, came the slow drip of water. I knew the angles of the adit well, loved their shadows on the track and the cloying scent of cotton candy that came in on the breeze. But I didn’t know me or what I was capable of.
How many of us really get to stand on the precipice of night and all that it entails in permanence? I held that luxury — that clear stream of thought and there was rain inside of me. I always wanted to know what was wrong with me. I found that I enjoyed the company of screams.
Alan Parry, a Merseyside-based writer, editor, and lecturer, is celebrated for his writing that blends gritty realism, open-ended narratives, and musical stylings. His work, published by Dream Noir, Streetcake Magazine, and Ghost City Press among others, draws inspiration from Alan Bennett, James Baldwin, and Stan Barstow. His debut Neon Ghosts (2020) was followed by: Belisama (2021) Echoes (2022), and Twenty Seven (2023). He performed his debut spoken word poetry and prose show Noir (2023) at the Morecambe Fringe Festival.
Find him on Twitter, @AlanParry83.
