Grave Expectations by Alice Bell

Author:Alice Bell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Corvus

10

This Is the Police

Claire had been to Brighton before, but when she was quite small. She remembered a beach that was uncomfortable to sit on, and an aquarium with a depressed octopus that wouldn’t come out of its pipe. These things did, Basher assured them, still exist. Although they’d probably gone through several new octopuses since then – but Basher said the current one did seem pretty depressed whenever he saw it, which was quite often. He had an annual pass to the aquarium, because he liked going there on weekdays sometimes to sit in the underwater tunnel that went through the big tank (which apparently all aquariums are legally mandated to have) and eat some sandwiches and read a book.

But Claire did not remember anything else about Brighton and, not having been there since Soph had attached herself like a spiritual mollusc or carbuncle, they both looked around with interest as they left the flat.

It was sunny, but blustery. Clouds were chasing each other across the sky so quickly that the street was flickering dark-bright-dark very quickly, like a child clicking the sun’s light switch on and off to be annoying. You could see the sea from the front door of Basher and Alex’s building, if you looked down the hill to the right, but it was a narrow strip of iron-grey with a lot of houses and shops in between them, and it was dotted with white bits where the wind was catching the spray. At this distance the sea wasn’t the stirring, poetic sight Claire had expected. It reminded her of the bonnet of a car spackled with birdshit, in fact. She decided not to say this, and instead plumped for the traditional, if vague, ‘Oh look, the sea!’ because she thought that was what you were supposed to say when you saw the sea.

‘Yes,’ said Basher, without looking. ‘The sea. I am afraid we’re going this way, though.’

The four of them went left, up the hill to the other end of the street, and then set off roughly parallel to the sea, so they kept getting glimpses of it. Sophie pointed out some kind of attraction that must have been on the beach front – a giant metal pole with a big glass-and-metal doughnut-shaped thing going slowly down it. Claire thought it looked like a ring toss in slow motion, but Soph said it was ‘well Freudian’.

They walked into town, past nice front gardens with gnomes and rambling roses, and side streets that had houses painted in different colours, and residential streets with those weird trees that look like angry fists because, for some reason, the council wouldn’t let them grow branches. Claire noticed that a lot of the electric feeder-pillar cabinets in the street were covered in graffiti of cartoon characters saying something encouraging.

Alex peeled off, explaining that they wanted to explore the mounted dildo art idea and had got a hot lead from a Facebook group on a number of broken Big Mouth Billy Bass.

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