Illustration © Mhairi Braden
‘Who’s that?’
‘That? Oh that’s only Luke. He’s a bit of a fixture, round here. Bit of a character, if you know what I mean. Propping up the bar every night, playing his guitar and taking requests from the punters for a few coins. Pete doesn’t mind it. Works alright for him. Local colour. Bit of music. Brings in the business, doesn’t it? Pete’s over there. He owns this place.’
‘He any good?’
‘Pete?’
‘No, that guy. Luke. Is he any good on his guitar?’
The bearded man talking to you pulls a face. ‘He sounds a bit like Neil Young. Which is fine, but he hasn’t really got his own sound, his own voice, y’know? Ah he’s just a bit of a laugh.’
Later, up at the bar, ordering another pint of the local cider – which is tart and still and slips down all too easily – you find yourself next to Luke. He’s facing away from you, bending someone’s ear about how he plans to quit drinking and move to America. From the way he’s talking, you can tell it’s not the first time he’s said these things. You lean over and give him a nudge. Without glancing round, he brushes you away. You try again and this time he looks over. He’s had quite a few drinks, you can tell – but then in fairness so have you, and so has everyone else in this place. It takes a moment for his eyes to focus.
‘Am I in your way?’ he says.
It doesn’t come out sounding like a threat. In fact he seems strangely genuine.
‘No,’ you tell him. ‘Did you say you were moving to America?’
He turns to face you properly then. ‘I don’t recognise you,’ he says. ‘I don’t know you, do I?’
‘I’m just visiting.’
‘An outsider.’ He says it with a part-grin, part-grimace.
‘I suppose so.’
He nods, slowly, like what you’ve said means something. ‘It’s not even about America,’ he tells you then. ‘It’s that I’m stuck here, you know?’ he breaks off, as if grasping for the right words. ‘It’s that I’m always the drunkest person in this place. And that’s why they need me. That’s who they need me to be. They all need someone else to be the drunkest person. Someone else to be more of a mess than they are.’
You feel suddenly uncomfortable, and try to brush this off as a joke. ‘Nice to be needed, at least.’
His mouth twists, like he’s tasted something sour. ‘It wouldn’t have to be America,’ he says. ‘It could be anywhere. Sometimes, I’d like to just step out, into nothing, and disappear.’
‘Huh,’ is all you can summon to say.
Everyone around you in the pub is talking and laughing and chinking glasses and shouting over the noise of their neighbours, but for a second it’s as if the volume’s been turned down on all that commotion, and it’s just you and him, somewhere peaceful, somewhere else entirely. Suddenly, he looks almost sober, and an awful lot more serious. Then –
‘Luke!’ comes a roar from across the pub, and soon the bearded guy with the baby face who was talking to you earlier – the one who was telling you about all the different people lined up at the bar – is here again, his arm bearlike around Luke’s shoulders.
‘Play us a song, Luke,’ he’s saying. ‘D’you know, this woman was asking me’ – he gestures vaguely in your direction – ‘she was asking me if you were any good? C’mon, show her. Show her what you can do.’ He thumps Luke so hard on the back he chokes, then turns to you. ‘What d’you want to hear, love? Come on. Any song. Tell me any song, I guarantee old Luke here will know it.’
You remember the coldness with which this same man said to you, he hasn’t really got his own sound, his own voice, y’know? Ah he’s just a bit of a laugh. He’s slurring his words now and it’s as if his drunkenness has spread to Luke, who has slid back into being unfocussed, bashful, sloppy, all spluttering good-naturedness.
‘Come on,’ the bearded man says again to him, when you still don’t say anything. ‘How about that Neil Young one you always do? You do a good Neil Young.’
He buys another round of the local cider. Luke grimaces after he sips his, but the bearded man doesn’t notice.
‘Go on, Luke. Down the hatch. Fire up those lungs. Get on with it.’
‘Cheers, then,’ Luke says, raising his glass and downing the pint.
The bearded man laughs at this, like it’s the best joke he’s ever been told. ‘Classic Luke,’ he splutters.
You take a sip from yours and feel the world start spinning.
Later, when Luke is sitting up on the bar, guitar in hand, the whole pub caught up in a mixture of singing along, heckling, shouting requests – throwing chips at him to get him to shut up and buying him drinks to make him continue – he sings the words ‘in the desert you can remember your name,’ and for a moment, he doesn’t sound anything like Neil Young. He doesn’t sound anything like the comical drunk he seems known as round here, either. He sounds, instead, more like the man whose eyes you avoided as he told you,
Sometimes, I’d like to just step out, into nothing, and disappear.
No one else in the King’s Arms seems to register it though, and soon enough the moment has passed.
*
You leave Framleigh-on-Sea the next morning and don’t think much more about that night in the pub until a few weeks later, when a headline towards the back of the newspaper catches your eye:
Local busker found dead on Auger Sands
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, Luke Taylor, known to the locals of Framleigh-on-Sea for his loud and gregarious personality, and for enjoying a drink in the King’s Arms, stumbled and fell to his death from the top of Tern Cliff.
‘He was a right laugh, Luke was,’ said Danny, a Framleigh-on-Sea resident. ‘Hilarious. Could drink any man round here under the table. He was good fun to have around.’
It is not known whether Mr Taylor was intoxicated at the time of the fall, though patrons of the King’s Arms spotted him in high spirits the night before.
You drop the paper, grab your coat and your car keys, and you drive back to Framleigh-on-Sea. Avoiding the King’s Arms this time, you walk straight up the coast path, to the top of Tern Cliff. Looking down, you see figures in white hazmat suits swarming around an evidence tent on the beach. There’s a perimeter of police tape set up around the area, beyond which stand a cluster of people who look as if they could be journalists, or just prying locals. They’re clutching notebooks, cameras, and handheld audio recorders. One man is even holding a sound boom. You watch from above as they scribble notes and shout questions, trying to get the attention of the police. You think of the people in the King’s Arms the other night.
Play us another, Luke!
Do the Ozzy Osbourne impression! No, not like that, how stupid are you? The other one!
You find your eyes drawn away to the bright blue of the police tape, flapping in the sea breeze.
After a while, you hear a tutting from behind you. There’s just one house up here on Tern Cliff, and its resident, an old man in a thick woollen jumper and carpet slippers, has come to stand in his front garden.
‘Terrible thing that happened there,’ he calls over to you from his front gate.
‘Did you know him?’ you ask.
‘We all knew him,’ he says. ‘I was the one who called the police.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You won’t believe me, but I saw it. I saw him go over. I was watching from right there. In my kitchen window.’ He points, eyes narrowed, identifying the exact spot from which he witnessed the tragedy.
‘You watched him die? You stood there and watched as he fell?’
The old man swats your words away, dismissing you like you’ve completely missed the point. ‘Funny thing was,’ he says. ‘I know what everyone’s saying, but for once, d’you know, it didn’t even seem like he was drunk? Or if he was, it was a funny kind of drunk.’
‘How so?’
The old man shakes his head. ‘Strangest thing I’ve seen in a while. He wasn’t singing or shouting or stumbling around, not like normally. It was about three or four in the morning, I think. Something had woken me, I couldn’t say what. I came down to get myself a drink of water, and then there he was, walking out, over there’ – he gestures to the edge of Tern Cliff. ‘I almost didn’t recognise him at first. He seemed different. Taller. He had his back straight, and his arms out either side of him, and he kept on like that, dead careful like, until he was at the very edge. Then here’s the thing – he didn’t stop when he got there. He just kept on walking, right out into thin air.’
‘Then what happened?’
The old man shrugs, and looks away. ‘Well, he fell of course. I mean, it was always going to happen.’
Sometimes, I’d like to just step out into nothing, and disappear.
On your way back down the cliff, you look again at the evidence tent on the beach. It’s almost impossible to imagine Luke lying dead inside it. In some ways, the whole thing feels like a magic trick, a disappearing act.
Down on the beach now, on Auger Sands, you try to picture it – Luke stepping off the edge of the land quite deliberately. It feels too unfair that he should never get to leave this place, never get a real chance to be the lucid and self-possessed version of himself you witnessed in flashes that night at the pub. You look up and picture him walking, arms stretched out, head held high, stepping off the cliff edge. And then you imagine him keeping going like that, taking one step and then another and another, moving forward like a tightrope walker, edging into the blue promise of the early morning sky over the sea.
Naomi Ishiguro
Naomi Ishiguro was born in London, in 1992. Her first collection of stories, titled Escape Routes, was published by Tinder Press in the spring of 2020, and her first novel, titled Common Ground, will be published by Tinder Press in March 2021. She's a recent graduate of the University of East Anglia's MFA Creative Writing Programme, and spent two years in her early 20s working as a bookseller and bibliotherapist at Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath. The stories in Escape Routes are all slightly magical, and play on themes of traps, flight and freedom.