It’s not that I didn’t like it, he said, refusing to meet my eye, It’s just that I didn’t know why you called it ‘Turn your face towards the sea’. I toss a pebble towards the water, missing the edge. A middle-aged couple stumble past over the shingle. Not quite 9am but it’s already too hot for clothes, so I take most of mine off, and limp towards the water’s edge, pebbles biting into the soles of my feet. You’re nearly 40, he shouts after me, and you’ve still got a funny walk. You’ll never get anywhere in life with a funny walk, and you can’t always run away from problems by jumping into –
The sea. Glorious instant of annihilation as the ocean folds me into its salty, cold embrace. Wash me, thoroughly, from my iniquity. Consciousness switches off momentarily as the brain checks in on the more basic life-support functions. Still breathing. Self returns to find my arms and legs beating out a crawl, pulling me from the shore. I feel the burn of the cold water on my abdomen, the burn of the hot sun on my back.
Last night I tried to compose something for CentreRight about the state that Gordon Brown is in. But I was blocked by the superfluous nature of anything I could produce: how many more articles can anyone face about the three options facing Labour MPs, about the likelihood of a ‘make or break’ conference, and the ‘urgent’ phone calls between plotting cabinet ministers (apparently monitored anonymously by the Westminster lobby, relayed breathlessly on page after comment page) or the likely successor, or the need for a general election post-Brown? And most of these articles are written by insiders. You’re just an amateur, I tell myself crossly, a rank amateur with a funny walk. In any case, it’s quite obvious (pace Louise) that they’re not going to do anything.
I stop swimming at that thought. I’m far enough from land so that the people there are indistinguishable. The tide bobs me around; I’m quite close to the West Pier. Once magnificent, once the master of its domain, once a hive of activity, it is now a burned-out wreck, slowly dissolving into the sea. The sight of this pier makes me think always of the chilling scene in PD James’ novel The Children Of Men, where the protagonist witnesses the ‘solution’ to the over-abundance of elderly people in a society which is producing no more young. The old are tied into boats which take on water, pushed out to sea, and drowned. This act is called The Quietus; it’s one of the most horrific scenes I’ve read in a novel (in fact I don’t think that it made it into the film).
Labour MPs are enduring a political Quietus now, aren’t they? For all the theorising about who might do what with whom, about what Great Event may happen at Conference, we all know that they’re not going to do anything, that all this talk is just that – talk, a displacement activity. They are metaphorically locked into a vessel which is no longer seaworthy, which is slowly but surely taking on more and more oily, toxic water, which no-one is bailing out. There’s only one conclusion to this but it won’t come quicker for us wishing it to be so.
I look again at the ruin of the pier. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a
stately pleasure dome decree. This is the future of the New Labour
project: a few rusting machines dotting the landscape, monument to the
folly of believing in the perfectability of humanity through state
fiat. We just have to be patient and let time take its course.
I swim back to the shore and limp back to where I started. He hands me
a towel. Did I ever tell you, he says, smiling at my frown, that I love
your funny walk?