Short Story: Click by Jade Hobby

Jade Hobby

The path down to the pier is cordoned off by barriers. An unnatural, post-box red underlines my view. A large yellow DIVERSION sign glares at me in the midday sun. I scan around, undeterred at first. Then I see green netting strewn across the jagged rocks that would have formed my alternative route below the promenade, obscuring the shocking pink graffiti of Jonesy and Emz that is scribbled across one of the larger, smoother, rock faces. In the near distance, a crowd of heavy machinery and high-vis vests wait ready to thwart any attempts I could make at dashing past. Exclamation marks warn me to KEEP OUT. And, short of stripping down to my underwear and going for a wild swim to circumvent the obstruction – which I seriously consider for a moment – I suppose I must.

30 Minutes Earlier.

I didn’t plan it, but here I am. Tentatively tiptoeing across the iron bridge as though there is a hole melted in the tarmac somewhere and I won’t notice until I slip through. You know, like before. But this time you won’t be here to reach out and catch me, or splash around with me in the river, or look on unwittingly as I begin to drown. It’s the bridge we crossed so many times to get to that place, our place, the place where we weren’t supposed to go.

The first time you told me to meet you here I wasn’t quite sure where you meant; you just told me to park up close to the sea front and head downwards and west, you’ll see it. You said you would come and show me the way and I said no, I’m capable of getting there myself, thanks. You challenged me that way – with you I wanted, if nothing else, to prove that I could stand on my own two feet.

Today I walk through the marina, guideless, but my feet carry me instinctively, navigating the railed walkways that separate the bodies of water where boats are tethered to wooden jetties in neat little rows. They bob up and down, rock gently from side to side, floating white vessels that gleam in the morning sun as masts clink and sails ripple in the calm summer breeze. I can name them now, the different types of boat – fisher boats and sailboats, trawlers and cuddies. We’d met a woman once, at the Coast Café, who taught us all about them. We always met people, you and I, wherever we went, because you were endlessly curious. Curious to learn their stories, their secrets, just as curious about them as I was about you.

The woman had frizzy bleached hair and a lipstick-stained snaggle tooth and if she stood she could have been mistaken for a rugby player – much taller and broader than you. But she sat, alone, on a crusty metal chair, black coffee slurping out of a china mug she shakily gripped with tobacco-stained fingers. She stared with blood-shot eyes at a group of people gathered at the steps. Little boys giggling at each other with ice-cream chops. Mothers staring at hand-held screens wearing dry robes and chunky trainers. She looked sad, you said, and off you went to say bore da as I scuttled in your wake, peeked out with a shy smile from behind you when you introduced me, your mate. We ended up pulling up two other crusty chairs next to her and she revelled in telling us all about how she’d ended up in Swansea, how she now lived in her dead dad’s prized boat. Before we left, you asked if you could take her photo and suddenly the whites of her eyes shone. You scribbled your Instagram handle on her napkin and told her to just be her, and so she posed, leaning back on the chair, cross-legged and proud, with her long-emptied mug, gazing out at the water. CLICK, CLICK.

I feel the heat of the sun on my bare shoulders, warm wind licking the dampness of my exposed back, as I make my way towards the lock and wonder if I’ll get to watch the barricades open like jaws ready to gobble up returning fisher boats. The last time we were here it was cold and wet, verging on stormy, and I thought that the fishermen must have been mad to be out that day. But then I must have been mad, too, to follow you, sneak through that hole in the wired fence and let you haul me up onto the wall of the west pier. To balance on the edge as the wind whipped our faces and to smile and shout as you tickled me and then held me as the waves crashed below, as though the ferocity of the sea and the sixty-foot drop would not almost certainly end in your death, mine, or both.

It’s nothing to look at, really, the concrete pier; functional rather than aesthetic, the partition where the beach ends and the docks begin. But it is an immense, hardy structure that defied the bombs of war and is now a scarcely trodden hideaway where fishermen cast their rods, youths smoke weed, and tramps curl up to sleep. You wanted to take pictures of me by it once, next to Jonesy and Emz’s neon masterpiece. But when your lens was on me, I just froze and looked away like I didn’t want you to see, didn’t want you know; but you’d CLICK, CLICK anyway. Just like all the other photos where we both remained shadows, finger smudges, toes on the periphery of the scene.

I still have them on my phone, videos of choppy waves bubbling as the blueness of the sky bounces off the mirroring sea; images of the red, the orange, the flames of the sun setting behind Mumbles hill, and the seal, remember the seal? You named him something silly like Reggie or Reginald and you were so excited that you’d seen him. Doubt he’ll be here today, mind, you’d said as I peered over the edge into the grey. But wait, there he’d been, his little nose poking out of the water, his button black eyes, his shiny skin shimmering as he barrel-rolled and disappeared into the deep. Blink and you’ll miss him, or maybe he was never there at all.

Were you ever really there? The question perpetually obscures my memories of us, chops the images in my mind up into pixels that could scatter apart at any time, rearrange and form into something new, something different. But the negatives always remain somewhere deep in my subconscious, and they pull me now, onwards.

My feet hit the burnt-orange path, the gravel crunch-pop-pinging beneath each placement of my worn-down sandals. The wind picks up here, whistling the song of the exposed shoreline. Fingers of marram grass jut out from the sand dunes and I allow their spindly edges to trace over my outstretched palm. I’m reminded of your fingers hovering over the same palm on the first day that we met after they’d locked us all down. The nervous heat of prohibition. At times, in those very early days, I’d felt like a boxed jellyfish to you, washed up on the shore – intriguing, yet one touch in the wrong place and you’d be paralysed. During 2020 the outside world was an ocean full of deadly jellyfish. We each chose to swim at our own peril.

Which is why it felt so triumphant, so validating, when your wary fingers finally interlaced with mine. When you allowed yourself to feel my could-be-covid breath exhale into your ear lobe, onto your sand-speckled cheek. When you dared to succumb to the taste of my mouth on yours, sweet and salty. Then you’d freak out, feel guilty. Was it just me? Or was there someone else you met with to tell tales in the shadows of dilapidated buildings, or behind the shield of your windscreen as you drove through streets swarmed in dancing dandelions? Was there someone else who acted as your photographer, sometimes?

Like that time you got me to use your fancy digital camera to photograph you walking up the cobbles of Constitution Hill for your art project. The one with the million-and-one buttons and the hammerhead camera flash. Like a shark? I’d joked, and you pretended to circle me like prey before launching in to attack. If you’re going to bite me, really bite me, I’d said, as I stared at you through the view finder. CLICK, CLICK.

Afterwards, you’d peered over my shoulder at each snap. You hummed agreeably and nodded as you studied the way I’d captured the streetlight on the stone, the way the glare changed the colour of your hair. You said you couldn’t wait to show your mam – who I felt like I knew as much as my own despite never meeting her – then gently stroked the small of my back. It started with those moments. Tiny touches. The longer we were in each other’s orbit the more the touches began to multiply, intensify. Gentle caresses of knees growing into desperate squeezes on thighs. Swellings of foreboding shrouded by the light cotton of my purposefully short dress, of your silly surfer shorts. Inevitably, we’d surrender. Just for a minute, we’d promise. Then spend hours as wrapped up in conversation as we were in each other. And subsequently there were countless minutes, hours, culminating in those last three stolen hours on my rented couch before I told you I was leaving to live in a place on the outskirts of the city, and that now was a good time for whatever this was to stop. Yet, even when I had the strength to move my body away, your words still had hold of me. We just click, you’d say. So, despite the distance I’d tried to place between us, we carried on meeting – talking, touching – because you were not ready for it to end.

Here it is, the end. I reach it as I round the corner where the bay curves and reveals the head of the pier. On this crisp day it is so clear. Like a photo that’s been sharpened, its vividness enhanced – unlike your face that grows blurrier each time I try to recollect it, your features less distinct. It’s just the cobalt blue of your eyes that linger like the sea on the endless shore of the days ahead of me. If I could just get to the edge. Stand where we stood. Delight in the way you looked at the water, the world. Like things hadn’t changed. Like you hadn’t tricked me into staying with you and then finished things like it all meant nothing.

DIVERSION.

KEEP OUT.

The thick black diversion arrow guides me away from the pier and up the steps towards the neat row of seaside apartments that line what is left of the marina. I feel heavy, like my body is underwater. The same heaviness I had felt in the weeks or months before I received the text message that I knew was coming. My knees shake with the invisible weight; feet feel like they are wading through sludge. I drag them anyway, onto the first step. Then the second, the third. With each step, my chest lifts a little, loosens. I continue to rise higher and higher until I reach the top and break free from the submersion, gasping for newfound air.

I peer down at the construction site and I wonder what works are taking place, whether the site will ever be the same once they are done; whether it needs to be. Looking past the chaos, to the square platform at the edge of the pier without you in it, its emptiness fills me with something akin to comfort. I feel the need to reach into my pocket, fumble with my phone, toggle to the front-facing camera. I hold it up in front of me, squinting at the screen to make sure I have captured the whole scene behind me.

Just me. Unflinching. Gazing straight into the lens.

CLICK, CLICK.

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