Two short pieces about my best friend who also features in the essay Ghosts of Saint Francis, and who died in Pakistan in 1994.

A PIER DISAPPEARS

Sitting on Swanage pier, my stomach chronically fermenting, ageing muscles tightening then losing their snap; a discreet underbelly flop, memories gestating below, waves massing at the horizon, then spilling out and fizzing on arrival; a passing undertow glimpsed between the slats, seaweeds’ arms remonstrating, silver shoals of small fish funnelling through for their catch, then disappearing into the shadows.

To be in a moment, a young gull filleting and fussing with a mollusc scrap, floating, riding the currents, its beak of playful daggers; and in the far-flung meadows rising from the sea, my dog is on show, a ginger flash, poppies strewn in his wake, chicks chucked up into the sky, running for the pleasure of it.

My youngest daughter is at play too, each sentence interrupted by a cartwheel or headstand; my eldest, moulding words that fly out from her senses; and me, my face a blank ghost’s, mind soured against the computer screen, everyone’s stories better than mine, the endless chitchat, the horror of everyday news and egos on repeat; I crawl to bed and my wife asks, ‘why so late?’

Along the pier, wooden slats embossed by silver plaques, small jokes and blessings, odes to lost holidays, engagements, memories of loved ones, a candyfloss kiss, sticking plasters on kids’ knees, sunburn cooled with bicarbonate and aloe vera – oh, hello Vera, I thought you’d never say yes – fifty years married and not a dry eye when they’re gone.

A tipping boat mast tinkles, I turn to see the pier’s diving school, where you came in the nineteen-eighties long before I lived here; your passion, not mine, and you sat just here downing a pint, picking at a sandwich, food was never your thing; diving the wrecks, an old galleon, a WW2 Frigate, a misguided sailboat, dazzling tragic plunder; and then you took a wrong turn a decade later in Pakistan, lost your footing and drowned, your body never found.

I dreamt you were still alive last night, infinitely young, sitting in a waiting room with someone I didn’t recognise, smiling expectantly at the door; and I was about to go in, but something stopped me, a chill on my neck, rain trickling down my collar; a breeze picks up, a heavy wave punches the pier, and I open my notebook to write to you, before the ink seeps away and all the pages are gone.

The One That Got Away

At the end of their futile search for your body, your mother and brother built a circular cairn from grey rocks and wild mountain flowers. The cairn sits on the shore of a mountain river in northern Pakistan. I’ve only seen it in a picture taken by a guide from the search party. The water is moving fast, a shimmery blur, whilst the rocks are as pale as ash, as if communing somehow with your missing body; mingling dust, sieved of life or hope. The cairn’s careful position by the river suggests a plea for closure and meaning, an inference that you might have died close by, or somewhere similar, met a recognisable watery death – it’s what a spiritualist would later interpret from your spectral visitation back to our world to announce matter-of-factly that you were ‘okay’, and had lost your footing and drowned, all over quickly, painlessly, in a rush.

At sixteen, we’d been drawn to each other, despite initial misgivings, by a strange otherness that put most people off, melancholic missteps in each other’s shadows, avoiding the bustling sparkling school corridors for secret hideaways and quiet oblivion. I took a train to find you on Newhaven harbour late one night, your secret other world laid out – you always did need time on your own – your fishing rod ready, its weight cast out into the murky dark, your small grey tent nestled by the harbour wall, two gutted mackerel, their eyes exploding, sizzling outside on a pan. I’d nervously brought along some beers, not quite acquiring the taste yet, and we drank and ate and looked up at the stars, and never caught a thing.

Years later, a fisheries PHD took you to work for the National Rivers Authority – your self-deprecating Keystone-cop stories of dodgy searchlights, overpowered boats snagging banks and upturning in pursuit of poachers, making everyone laugh – and then to Pakistan to work for VSO on lake fisheries projects, your life cruelly snuffed out at the end of your posting. A few cassettes I’d made for you – The Velvet Underground’s Pale Blue Eyes, REM’s Everybody Hurts – the latter a coded plea as if I’d sensed something was up and needed to say everything would be okay – along with letters from your friends and family, photos of your son, left on the bedside table in the walking lodge you stayed in before your final mountain climb.

No reply ever came back to us, no explanation was offered. Well, you always were a little guarded and cryptic; even your uncharacteristically plain-speaking visit to the spiritualist left more questions than answers. Wry humour was usually your first line of defence: I think of the picture hanging in your family’s home, dressed in a traditional shalwar kameez, you smile as you extend your arms out wide to measure a huge fantasy fish, the universal fisherman’s joke of the giant catch that got away, three young Pakistani boys with you and in on the joke, clapping their hands together and laughing delightedly.

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Both pieces were published in Banshee last year https://bansheepress.org/shop/p/issue-15-springsummer-2023