Recently rejected by Interzone - sad face
Sticky Bob lived in a big caravan around the back of the houses on the landward side of Borth High Street. Officially home to a handful more than fifteen hundred people, nestling in the very heart of Cardigan Bay, Borth was a strip of Welsh resort town that flanked more than six kilometres of occasionally wondrous but mostly wet and windswept beach on the Irish Sea. Bob was one of a number of unrecorded Borth residents, however, those who’d slipped through the net by accident, design or, in Bob’s case, a little of both: a stubbornly perverse lassitude, quite common thereabouts. In the run up to mitigation, our agency noted that a disproportionate number of middle-aged men in Borth wore their hair in a ponytail.
Now, I can testify that Bob couldn’t see the beach because of the row of terraced houses that he lived behind. If he ever bothered to look out of the bay widow at the end of his caravan, he did have a panoramic view past the railway line over Borth Bog, Cors Fochno in Welsh, two-hundred and sixty-four acres of raised peat mire. From our satellite data, however, it seems that Bob kept those curtains drawn. It’s likely that he couldn’t be bothered with the effort of opening them. It was, I’ll allow, a bit of a drag, quite literally. Formerly bright fuchsia pink, the curtains were sun-bleached and desiccated. The caravan itself wasn’t even registered as a shed. Like Bob, it had no permission at all.
When one of them remembered, it’s likely that Bob paid the woman who owned the garden in which his caravan slumped something by way of rent or towards the electricity bill. His ‘sort-of landlady’ lived in the three-storey house between Bob, the beach and the sea. Mad Alice, people called her, though she never did anything even remotely insane. Unless it was insane to own six dogs, all old, mostly crocked in some way, a leg missing here, a deaf ear or two there. These dogs she trailed daily along the beach, meeting most everyone in town, greeting all and sundry while they fussed over her charges, anyway the least malodorous of the pack. Her Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Jason, moved like a spastic Jack-in-the-Box, trotting with his front legs while the rear caught up in a series of sporadic flea-hops. Strangely, people were particularly fond of Jason.
We have footage.
Mad Alice and Sticky Bob didn’t have a rental agreement or anything at all in writing. Most often, the evidence of her home suggests, Bob just gave her the odd jar of produce or some promotional merchandise from ‘The Honey Factory’ where he worked, dispensing golden, amber and cloying dark nectar from all around the world out of barrels into jars.
Hence, Sticky Bob.
He drank at The Friendship Inn. Indeed, most of his wages ended up behind the bar in that quirksome pub. Imagine, if you will, as I do, the flaccid fivers lying in the till drawer, smelling damply of eucalyptus, clover or heather.
But I’m making Bob’s life sound seedy, and it wasn’t, not particularly anyway. It was just a life like any other. A Borth life, true enough, so lived to the rhythm of a different drummer, a sozzled ambient jazz drummer perhaps. But it was not an excessively disreputable life. And certainly not threatening, not in any way.
Not then.
It is not justification I seek, but the lyrical home truths beyond our stark statistical deceit.
A guidebook that I found in Bob’s caravan has this text highlighted in once fluorescent yellow marker: ‘Borth is a one-street town trying desperately, but not quite succeeding, to be a real seaside resort – it’s dog eared and not very pretty.’ Celebrating this less than glowing review, a smiley face in the margin is drawn in the same faded yellow ink. Our evidence suggests that residents celebrated the town’s off-beat, shall we say, delinquencies. A limited edition, locally produced T-shirt, popular among a coterie of residents and not for sale to visitors, petitioned ‘Keep Borth Weird!’ On its back was a fish, surfing a wave and smoking an enormous joint.
Bob just fit.
Everyone in Borth had their story, and everyone knew everyone else and all about them, though no-one had committed these tales to paper. Or, rather, no-one admitted to that act.
It was in the Friendship that Sticky Bob first had the itch.
This, I should certainly not be telling you.
For Borth, it was the perfect storm, as people say all too often and far too glibly these days, a combination of disastrous and, in this case, highly improbable events, all of which were manmade to some degree, intentional or otherwise. When the storm was brewing no-one was worried, least of all, I suspect, Sticky Bob. For him it would surely have been more a perfect excuse not to go to work than a threat. Mad Alice just as surely tutted about not being able to walk the dogs, and other residents too were evidently a little put out. But I doubt anyone was seriously concerned. Borth is built on a shingle bank and has a long history of flooding. Some quirk in the administration meant that the government had spent many millions on Borth’s sea defences after the last inundation, when the town had to be evacuated. Thousands of large rocks were shipped from Norway to help construct artificial reefs. I guess they needed to be seen to be doing something, however small, however pointless. And if I dug deeply enough, I am sure I would find a link between the minister responsible and the company that completed the contract for the sea defences. Anyway, with that job done it seemed logical enough, this time around, for folk to believe that they were safe in their beds. Such faith in a community of so little faith, it’s touching.
It is touching.
Our drone footage shows that most people were more concerned with the rash of bites that they were scratching at all the time. They blamed bed-bugs, lice, midges, sand flies… Fleas. In fact, no one had any real idea about what was going on. Mad Alice bathed all her dogs in a pungent prescription from the vet, but she herself was already covered in bites. Jason seemed to tic more frequently than ever, and Alice was the first person to experience the swellings that turned to blisters in her armpits. She tutted some more and applied a mild antiseptic cream which, even if it hadn’t been way past its expiry date, would have proved wholly ineffective. And, even if she’d been so minded, she couldn’t have gone to the Doctor because the surgery had closed until the storm passed. It was the same for everyone afflicted.
Perfection was coming together with a poetically terrible beauty.
It’s true, for instance, that the Cors Fochno blaze started when lightning struck an electricity pole and produced an enormous fireball that ignited the earth. A freak accident of nature, you might say, though nature was already synonymous with human intent or at least knowing disregard. Our agency is testimony enough to that. But what is also true is that the emergency services were held back on the pretext that it was too dangerous to tackle the deep raging peat fire during the storm. So, the fire-engines and ambulances returned to their stations, while police cars kept their distance and officers manned the barricades. In this case, other agencies had precedence.
Specifically, ours.
Oh! I do like to be beside the seaside!
When the lights went out in Borth, the town was already under a metre of water. Sticky Bob did what any right-thinking citizen of that borough would: he headed for The Friendship. To his credit, CCTV film does show that he did try to check that Mad Alice and the dogs were okay. When she didn’t answer the door, though, I assume Bob shrugged, metaphorically of course, conserving the energy he needed for his next move, which was uncharacteristically strenuous. For he boarded the sit-on-top kayak which previously had only grown a coating of algae in Alice’s overgrown and brambly garden, disregarded for years until this fateful moment. Buffeted and almost capsized by the gale, Bob ploughed his slow slalom course into town as waves crashed onto what had been the B4353 road. As a paddle, he wielded a metre-long, hand-carved wind turbine blade.
Like the kayak, that blade had been left behind some years ago by the caravan’s former tenant, a man whose story Bob evidently knew very well: Appropriate technologist, inappropriate conduct; damned by the technicality of an age limit more than his gender preference. He’d left town in a hurry, one step ahead of some pretty rough community justice that was brewing in the pub, stirred up by the little girl’s uncle, no saint himself from what I’ve read. The appropriate technologist’s story, and particularly the fiction on what happened to him next, make for disturbing reading, I can tell you. At least, I could have told you, if time permitted. But we must stick with Sticky Bob, who, had in mind only one port in a storm.
I do like to be beside the sea!
Wholly in character, many Borth resident sacrificed their own homes to bring sandbags with which to surround The Friendship. One enterprising punter even rigged a generator that kept the pub humming. Apart from the fact that the customers wore wellingtons or had plastic fertiliser bags over their feet, tied at the knee with polypropylene orange baler-twine, we recorded that The Friendship functioned much as usual despite the twenty centimetres of water that had seeped under their flood defences into the barroom. And despite the fact that everyone was sick. Not perverted, ill. If you’ll pardon the confusing idiom, everyone was feeling extremely under the weather. The rain beat down and the wind howled banshee, gusting in every direction with a force that cleared the town of bird and animal life. In the pub it was all hands to the pumps, beer not water, as the crowd inside grew - and grew thirstier.
Parched, in fact.
At places on the wall along the seafront, youths were spreading their jackets like wings and leaping into the air to be carried several thrilling meters on the wind before making a wet, undignified and evidently hilarious landing in the rising flood waters on the road. Between flights, they scratched at their bites or surreptitiously squeezed the buboes that swelled on their necks. One vomited and it was flecked with blood, but he kept leaping and flying, laying the blame for his ‘up-chuck’ on the cocktail of stuff they’d all drunk, snorted, popped and smoked.
We see everything in every one-horse town.
Back in The Friendship, farmer Dai Tight bought an unprecedented round. And not just for folk who had done him a service in the past and whom he’d promised a drink, folk who, over the years, had resigned themselves to a lifelong drought from his quarter. No, Dai treated everyone in the pub, confuting his nickname, generous to a fault. Suddenly jocular, the former ‘misery-guts miser’ confessed his sins and explained to his audience that, in his view, given the still rising tide and the wall of fire coming in from the east, not to mention the bites, blisters and fevers, there was no escape. Sticky Bob raised his glass, adding that Dai didn’t know the half of it, which drew a laugh from the punters though they ailed.
They did not know the half of it.
Some people with four-by-four vehicles, not The Friendship crowd, weekenders mostly or off-season tourists from the numerous caravan parks that bordered the town like a sickly sage-green fringe, did drive through the flood water in an attempt to escape. They got only as far as the road blocks. Not having had contact with the locals, some of those people weren’t even ill. For them there could be no going back to Borth, though, no return. But no exit either.
We followed our standing orders to the letter.
Most Borth residents had a ‘thing’: singing in choirs, swing-dancing, acro-yoga, making jewellery or ceramics, playing music, landscape painting… It was a genuinely Bohemian place. Rejecting any cultural ‘boho’ reinventions of style, most Borth women plainly didn’t give a hoot for fashion. Those among the imploring crowd we found in the Friendship corroborated that. Throughout the storm, the fire, the plague and right up to the advent of the fourth horseman – lens-flaring spotlights, florescent Hazmat suits, matt black steel - one young woman, Atalanta Eeyore Eyesore, braved it all. Putting aside her own suffering, she took the most astounding photographs. Very clearly, that was her thing. Not all of the photographs were what you’d expect, not just monumental waves and walls of fire. One shot was a close-up of blood on the pebble beach, contours and colours lit and shadowed by flames, puddled with pink foaming sea water. It was an exquisite collage, quite, quite beautiful, compelling even without the context. Born and raised in Borth, Atalanta Eeyore Eyesore had changed her name to this crazy variant as a statement of internal torment because…
Ah, but as with our paedophilic appropriate technologist, Atlanta’s too is a tale which is largely for another time. We recovered her camera and downloaded the photographs. It’s artistically tragic but adjudged politically essential that they will never go on public view. As with an ever increasing range and number of artefacts these days, they are ‘inadmissible evidence’.
I do like to stroll along the Prom, Prom, Prom!
I remember Sticky Bob so vividly for two reasons, very much connected. First off, he was the last one that we mitigated. Whom, I should say, whom we mitigated. I find it easier to objectify, but that’s escapist. We should never let ourselves off the hook at all easily. Personally, I feel duty-bound to squirm, though duty comes into it less and less these days. We found Bob in his caravan in the final throes of fever, beset by rigors, buboes oozing pus that soaked through his shabby clothes, clothes covered in blood flecked vomit, his and, I suspect, that of others.
The other reason I must recall him is that Bob was a writer. That was his thing. Sticky Bob’s art was secret. He kept a diary and more, daily notes supplemented with a steady string of stories: rumour, gossip and insinuation nestled together in fact and fantasy. That’s where I learned of the inhabitants of Borth, the imagined fates of the paedophile, the searing biography of Atalanta Eeyore Eyesore, and all the other tales of woe, derring-do, intrigue and sin. At least, Sticky Bob’s fabulous versions. Mystical folk tales. There was a stack of notebooks in the caravan when I entered. Bob experimented with forms, so his record was as stories, poems, streams of consciousness, scripts for plays and films... He puts my own bureaucratic reportage to shame, I’m afraid.
In the most prosaic language, though, his diary revealed that he had given Mad Alice a stuffed toy bee that had come to the Honey Factory with a shipment from Mexico. Complete with sombrero, the bee was a promotional mascot for any stall the business customer might plan. But the Honey Factory didn’t plan any. So, Bob took the bee home and gave it to Alice. He thought the dogs might get a kick out of it. When we found the bodies, arranged stiff-limbed like halo around Mad Alice, Jason still had the bee in his mouth. We never found the sombrero.
In the end, Alice left the top off the tube of antiseptic cream.
I don’t know why Bob quit The Friendship that night and chose to wade home – the kayak was still moored at the pub - but I suspect it was for his writing, the diary and especially the stories. His thing. When I tried to draw the bay window curtains to admit enough light from the bog fire to allow me to read the first notebook that I picked up, the curtain crumbled to dust and parchment-like flakes.
There is no art in what I do – what I used to do. The Borth which I read about is anathema to me: These quirky-quotidian people and their extraordinary-ordinary lives, their needless-vital projects; their mundanities, dreams, passions and tragedies.
I did not classify the diaries and stories as evidence.
I did not submit them to be judged inadmissible.
My agency’s work was – is - to clean up after climate change related disasters. C-ReDs, we called them in in-house jargon. They tell us that this work is strictly necessary. The one thing it has in common with Bob’s project is that it too is clandestine. No one must know we were here, my innocuous sounding agency, or what we really do for the Ministry. And no one must know that the fleas which infested the Mexican honey-bee toy would not have survived in Borth were it not for the, thus far, only mildly warmed local climate. Plague can be a matter of a fraction of a degree. Though it seems paradoxical, that marginally warmer climate also increased the frequency and severity of extreme weather events like the winter storm which hit the town. It is still the job of others to muddy the waters linking extreme weather events to climate, the academic experts whom the Ministry funds so generously.
To come completely clean, here in my own diary-story, I confess that I mitigated Bob personally. I took away his pain and his burden. Nobody special, and in the wrong place: Just one more unlucky citizen of Borth.
But they all live on and nightly rebuild and boisterously inhabit this ghost town as I read and re-read the stories of Sticky Bob, the writer. Fugitive in his mouldering caravan, surrounded by Atlanta’s exquisitely agonising images, my absorption is punctuated by waves crashing against the ruins of the flood defences, building inexorably for the next big storm that may wash away my own sins.
Where the brass bands play, ‘Tiddely-om-pom-pom!’
Sticky Bob lived in a big caravan around the back of the houses on the landward side of Borth High Street. Officially home to a handful more than fifteen hundred people, nestling in the very heart of Cardigan Bay, Borth was a strip of Welsh resort town that flanked more than six kilometres of occasionally wondrous but mostly wet and windswept beach on the Irish Sea. Bob was one of a number of unrecorded Borth residents, however, those who’d slipped through the net by accident, design or, in Bob’s case, a little of both: a stubbornly perverse lassitude, quite common thereabouts. In the run up to mitigation, our agency noted that a disproportionate number of middle-aged men in Borth wore their hair in a ponytail.
Now, I can testify that Bob couldn’t see the beach because of the row of terraced houses that he lived behind. If he ever bothered to look out of the bay widow at the end of his caravan, he did have a panoramic view past the railway line over Borth Bog, Cors Fochno in Welsh, two-hundred and sixty-four acres of raised peat mire. From our satellite data, however, it seems that Bob kept those curtains drawn. It’s likely that he couldn’t be bothered with the effort of opening them. It was, I’ll allow, a bit of a drag, quite literally. Formerly bright fuchsia pink, the curtains were sun-bleached and desiccated. The caravan itself wasn’t even registered as a shed. Like Bob, it had no permission at all.
When one of them remembered, it’s likely that Bob paid the woman who owned the garden in which his caravan slumped something by way of rent or towards the electricity bill. His ‘sort-of landlady’ lived in the three-storey house between Bob, the beach and the sea. Mad Alice, people called her, though she never did anything even remotely insane. Unless it was insane to own six dogs, all old, mostly crocked in some way, a leg missing here, a deaf ear or two there. These dogs she trailed daily along the beach, meeting most everyone in town, greeting all and sundry while they fussed over her charges, anyway the least malodorous of the pack. Her Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Jason, moved like a spastic Jack-in-the-Box, trotting with his front legs while the rear caught up in a series of sporadic flea-hops. Strangely, people were particularly fond of Jason.
We have footage.
Mad Alice and Sticky Bob didn’t have a rental agreement or anything at all in writing. Most often, the evidence of her home suggests, Bob just gave her the odd jar of produce or some promotional merchandise from ‘The Honey Factory’ where he worked, dispensing golden, amber and cloying dark nectar from all around the world out of barrels into jars.
Hence, Sticky Bob.
He drank at The Friendship Inn. Indeed, most of his wages ended up behind the bar in that quirksome pub. Imagine, if you will, as I do, the flaccid fivers lying in the till drawer, smelling damply of eucalyptus, clover or heather.
But I’m making Bob’s life sound seedy, and it wasn’t, not particularly anyway. It was just a life like any other. A Borth life, true enough, so lived to the rhythm of a different drummer, a sozzled ambient jazz drummer perhaps. But it was not an excessively disreputable life. And certainly not threatening, not in any way.
Not then.
It is not justification I seek, but the lyrical home truths beyond our stark statistical deceit.
A guidebook that I found in Bob’s caravan has this text highlighted in once fluorescent yellow marker: ‘Borth is a one-street town trying desperately, but not quite succeeding, to be a real seaside resort – it’s dog eared and not very pretty.’ Celebrating this less than glowing review, a smiley face in the margin is drawn in the same faded yellow ink. Our evidence suggests that residents celebrated the town’s off-beat, shall we say, delinquencies. A limited edition, locally produced T-shirt, popular among a coterie of residents and not for sale to visitors, petitioned ‘Keep Borth Weird!’ On its back was a fish, surfing a wave and smoking an enormous joint.
Bob just fit.
Everyone in Borth had their story, and everyone knew everyone else and all about them, though no-one had committed these tales to paper. Or, rather, no-one admitted to that act.
It was in the Friendship that Sticky Bob first had the itch.
This, I should certainly not be telling you.
For Borth, it was the perfect storm, as people say all too often and far too glibly these days, a combination of disastrous and, in this case, highly improbable events, all of which were manmade to some degree, intentional or otherwise. When the storm was brewing no-one was worried, least of all, I suspect, Sticky Bob. For him it would surely have been more a perfect excuse not to go to work than a threat. Mad Alice just as surely tutted about not being able to walk the dogs, and other residents too were evidently a little put out. But I doubt anyone was seriously concerned. Borth is built on a shingle bank and has a long history of flooding. Some quirk in the administration meant that the government had spent many millions on Borth’s sea defences after the last inundation, when the town had to be evacuated. Thousands of large rocks were shipped from Norway to help construct artificial reefs. I guess they needed to be seen to be doing something, however small, however pointless. And if I dug deeply enough, I am sure I would find a link between the minister responsible and the company that completed the contract for the sea defences. Anyway, with that job done it seemed logical enough, this time around, for folk to believe that they were safe in their beds. Such faith in a community of so little faith, it’s touching.
It is touching.
Our drone footage shows that most people were more concerned with the rash of bites that they were scratching at all the time. They blamed bed-bugs, lice, midges, sand flies… Fleas. In fact, no one had any real idea about what was going on. Mad Alice bathed all her dogs in a pungent prescription from the vet, but she herself was already covered in bites. Jason seemed to tic more frequently than ever, and Alice was the first person to experience the swellings that turned to blisters in her armpits. She tutted some more and applied a mild antiseptic cream which, even if it hadn’t been way past its expiry date, would have proved wholly ineffective. And, even if she’d been so minded, she couldn’t have gone to the Doctor because the surgery had closed until the storm passed. It was the same for everyone afflicted.
Perfection was coming together with a poetically terrible beauty.
It’s true, for instance, that the Cors Fochno blaze started when lightning struck an electricity pole and produced an enormous fireball that ignited the earth. A freak accident of nature, you might say, though nature was already synonymous with human intent or at least knowing disregard. Our agency is testimony enough to that. But what is also true is that the emergency services were held back on the pretext that it was too dangerous to tackle the deep raging peat fire during the storm. So, the fire-engines and ambulances returned to their stations, while police cars kept their distance and officers manned the barricades. In this case, other agencies had precedence.
Specifically, ours.
Oh! I do like to be beside the seaside!
When the lights went out in Borth, the town was already under a metre of water. Sticky Bob did what any right-thinking citizen of that borough would: he headed for The Friendship. To his credit, CCTV film does show that he did try to check that Mad Alice and the dogs were okay. When she didn’t answer the door, though, I assume Bob shrugged, metaphorically of course, conserving the energy he needed for his next move, which was uncharacteristically strenuous. For he boarded the sit-on-top kayak which previously had only grown a coating of algae in Alice’s overgrown and brambly garden, disregarded for years until this fateful moment. Buffeted and almost capsized by the gale, Bob ploughed his slow slalom course into town as waves crashed onto what had been the B4353 road. As a paddle, he wielded a metre-long, hand-carved wind turbine blade.
Like the kayak, that blade had been left behind some years ago by the caravan’s former tenant, a man whose story Bob evidently knew very well: Appropriate technologist, inappropriate conduct; damned by the technicality of an age limit more than his gender preference. He’d left town in a hurry, one step ahead of some pretty rough community justice that was brewing in the pub, stirred up by the little girl’s uncle, no saint himself from what I’ve read. The appropriate technologist’s story, and particularly the fiction on what happened to him next, make for disturbing reading, I can tell you. At least, I could have told you, if time permitted. But we must stick with Sticky Bob, who, had in mind only one port in a storm.
I do like to be beside the sea!
Wholly in character, many Borth resident sacrificed their own homes to bring sandbags with which to surround The Friendship. One enterprising punter even rigged a generator that kept the pub humming. Apart from the fact that the customers wore wellingtons or had plastic fertiliser bags over their feet, tied at the knee with polypropylene orange baler-twine, we recorded that The Friendship functioned much as usual despite the twenty centimetres of water that had seeped under their flood defences into the barroom. And despite the fact that everyone was sick. Not perverted, ill. If you’ll pardon the confusing idiom, everyone was feeling extremely under the weather. The rain beat down and the wind howled banshee, gusting in every direction with a force that cleared the town of bird and animal life. In the pub it was all hands to the pumps, beer not water, as the crowd inside grew - and grew thirstier.
Parched, in fact.
At places on the wall along the seafront, youths were spreading their jackets like wings and leaping into the air to be carried several thrilling meters on the wind before making a wet, undignified and evidently hilarious landing in the rising flood waters on the road. Between flights, they scratched at their bites or surreptitiously squeezed the buboes that swelled on their necks. One vomited and it was flecked with blood, but he kept leaping and flying, laying the blame for his ‘up-chuck’ on the cocktail of stuff they’d all drunk, snorted, popped and smoked.
We see everything in every one-horse town.
Back in The Friendship, farmer Dai Tight bought an unprecedented round. And not just for folk who had done him a service in the past and whom he’d promised a drink, folk who, over the years, had resigned themselves to a lifelong drought from his quarter. No, Dai treated everyone in the pub, confuting his nickname, generous to a fault. Suddenly jocular, the former ‘misery-guts miser’ confessed his sins and explained to his audience that, in his view, given the still rising tide and the wall of fire coming in from the east, not to mention the bites, blisters and fevers, there was no escape. Sticky Bob raised his glass, adding that Dai didn’t know the half of it, which drew a laugh from the punters though they ailed.
They did not know the half of it.
Some people with four-by-four vehicles, not The Friendship crowd, weekenders mostly or off-season tourists from the numerous caravan parks that bordered the town like a sickly sage-green fringe, did drive through the flood water in an attempt to escape. They got only as far as the road blocks. Not having had contact with the locals, some of those people weren’t even ill. For them there could be no going back to Borth, though, no return. But no exit either.
We followed our standing orders to the letter.
Most Borth residents had a ‘thing’: singing in choirs, swing-dancing, acro-yoga, making jewellery or ceramics, playing music, landscape painting… It was a genuinely Bohemian place. Rejecting any cultural ‘boho’ reinventions of style, most Borth women plainly didn’t give a hoot for fashion. Those among the imploring crowd we found in the Friendship corroborated that. Throughout the storm, the fire, the plague and right up to the advent of the fourth horseman – lens-flaring spotlights, florescent Hazmat suits, matt black steel - one young woman, Atalanta Eeyore Eyesore, braved it all. Putting aside her own suffering, she took the most astounding photographs. Very clearly, that was her thing. Not all of the photographs were what you’d expect, not just monumental waves and walls of fire. One shot was a close-up of blood on the pebble beach, contours and colours lit and shadowed by flames, puddled with pink foaming sea water. It was an exquisite collage, quite, quite beautiful, compelling even without the context. Born and raised in Borth, Atalanta Eeyore Eyesore had changed her name to this crazy variant as a statement of internal torment because…
Ah, but as with our paedophilic appropriate technologist, Atlanta’s too is a tale which is largely for another time. We recovered her camera and downloaded the photographs. It’s artistically tragic but adjudged politically essential that they will never go on public view. As with an ever increasing range and number of artefacts these days, they are ‘inadmissible evidence’.
I do like to stroll along the Prom, Prom, Prom!
I remember Sticky Bob so vividly for two reasons, very much connected. First off, he was the last one that we mitigated. Whom, I should say, whom we mitigated. I find it easier to objectify, but that’s escapist. We should never let ourselves off the hook at all easily. Personally, I feel duty-bound to squirm, though duty comes into it less and less these days. We found Bob in his caravan in the final throes of fever, beset by rigors, buboes oozing pus that soaked through his shabby clothes, clothes covered in blood flecked vomit, his and, I suspect, that of others.
The other reason I must recall him is that Bob was a writer. That was his thing. Sticky Bob’s art was secret. He kept a diary and more, daily notes supplemented with a steady string of stories: rumour, gossip and insinuation nestled together in fact and fantasy. That’s where I learned of the inhabitants of Borth, the imagined fates of the paedophile, the searing biography of Atalanta Eeyore Eyesore, and all the other tales of woe, derring-do, intrigue and sin. At least, Sticky Bob’s fabulous versions. Mystical folk tales. There was a stack of notebooks in the caravan when I entered. Bob experimented with forms, so his record was as stories, poems, streams of consciousness, scripts for plays and films... He puts my own bureaucratic reportage to shame, I’m afraid.
In the most prosaic language, though, his diary revealed that he had given Mad Alice a stuffed toy bee that had come to the Honey Factory with a shipment from Mexico. Complete with sombrero, the bee was a promotional mascot for any stall the business customer might plan. But the Honey Factory didn’t plan any. So, Bob took the bee home and gave it to Alice. He thought the dogs might get a kick out of it. When we found the bodies, arranged stiff-limbed like halo around Mad Alice, Jason still had the bee in his mouth. We never found the sombrero.
In the end, Alice left the top off the tube of antiseptic cream.
I don’t know why Bob quit The Friendship that night and chose to wade home – the kayak was still moored at the pub - but I suspect it was for his writing, the diary and especially the stories. His thing. When I tried to draw the bay window curtains to admit enough light from the bog fire to allow me to read the first notebook that I picked up, the curtain crumbled to dust and parchment-like flakes.
There is no art in what I do – what I used to do. The Borth which I read about is anathema to me: These quirky-quotidian people and their extraordinary-ordinary lives, their needless-vital projects; their mundanities, dreams, passions and tragedies.
I did not classify the diaries and stories as evidence.
I did not submit them to be judged inadmissible.
My agency’s work was – is - to clean up after climate change related disasters. C-ReDs, we called them in in-house jargon. They tell us that this work is strictly necessary. The one thing it has in common with Bob’s project is that it too is clandestine. No one must know we were here, my innocuous sounding agency, or what we really do for the Ministry. And no one must know that the fleas which infested the Mexican honey-bee toy would not have survived in Borth were it not for the, thus far, only mildly warmed local climate. Plague can be a matter of a fraction of a degree. Though it seems paradoxical, that marginally warmer climate also increased the frequency and severity of extreme weather events like the winter storm which hit the town. It is still the job of others to muddy the waters linking extreme weather events to climate, the academic experts whom the Ministry funds so generously.
To come completely clean, here in my own diary-story, I confess that I mitigated Bob personally. I took away his pain and his burden. Nobody special, and in the wrong place: Just one more unlucky citizen of Borth.
But they all live on and nightly rebuild and boisterously inhabit this ghost town as I read and re-read the stories of Sticky Bob, the writer. Fugitive in his mouldering caravan, surrounded by Atlanta’s exquisitely agonising images, my absorption is punctuated by waves crashing against the ruins of the flood defences, building inexorably for the next big storm that may wash away my own sins.
Where the brass bands play, ‘Tiddely-om-pom-pom!’