A place I Remember

I stared out of the train at the fields and mountains as we sped by. Sheep grazed on the lush, green hillsides, white specks becoming smaller in the distance. Closer to the tracks, cows lolled in fields peppered with buttercups in the Spring sunlight, a child’s swing moved in the breeze in an orderly garden, horses looked up vacantly at the passing carriages. It wasn’t raining, and at that moment it almost seemed like nothing in the United Kingdom had changed. That just like the sceptic’s believed, there had been no such thing as climate change after all. My Kyle had been right, all along – but now he was gone, and so he never had a chance to say “I told you so”.

Opposite, Joshua fiddled with his camera – an old 2010’s model with a giant, cylindrical lens which changed the focus and two dozen buttons across the top that mostly performed unknown – and undesired – tasks. The train was practically empty and we had the carriage to ourselves. Few people travelled by train any more – most considered it too time consuming.

“The battery will run out,” I said, absently. My own camera, like most people’s was inbuilt in to my EYEsleeve, although mine was black and not flesh coloured as was the current trend. Joshua didn’t reply, although he snapped the lens cap shut and turned off the machine.

“How far does the train go,” He said. I swiped at the wrist of my sleeve and checked the live Infolog. “Only as far as Machynlleth – The floods are too bad after the Dyfi Estuary.” I glanced again at the Infolog – we were only about fifteen minutes away.

“When I was a kid – you used to be able to switch trains at Dyfi Junction. Go all the way up the coast line, there were some beautiful places. Sandy beaches, the seaside.” I sounded wistful. Joshua shot me a look. “What?” I said.

“You, and the stories of your misspent youth,” he grinned.

“It wasn’t misspent,” I replied crossly. But perhaps some of it was. Now the country was in the state that it was I sometimes wondered whether I had always made the most of everything at the time, before it had become the way it was now. For Joshua and the younger generation, it was different. They couldn’t remember.

“Bee” Joshua said, motioning to the window and snapping me out of my daydream. The train was slowing down and pulling in to a station where a lonely guard in a waterproof suit stood on the platform waving a red flag. He started towards us as we disembarked, looking us up and down with our equipment bags and the camera.

“Afternoon,” he said in a thick Welsh accent “News crew is it?”

“No,” I said, perhaps a little too brusquely, “I’m an independent, this is my photographer.” The sun appeared suddenly from behind a cloud shedding a beautiful golden glow on the countryside around us. The solar panel on my EYEsleeve glowed.

“Well, would you look at that,” The guard remarked, “You brought the sun with you!” He looked up at the yellow orb as if he hadn’t seen it in weeks, which perhaps he hadn’t.

“We need to get to Aberystwyth,” I said, ignoring him. “Is there a hovercar hire nearby?” The guard started to say something but then seemed to think better of it and directed us to a place just opposite the station. We left him on the platform, holding his sleeve skywards with a contented smile on his face.

****

We hired a level two hovercar from a guy in skin tight waterproofs with a shaved and tattooed head. I recognised the shop – it had been a garage thirty years prior, although I declined to mention the fact to Joshua. I let him drive it, since he preferred to, and gave the directions as best I could with most of the street signs missing. As we neared the coast, the roads and the surrounding fields became increasingly waterlogged and we had to keep gaining height.

“Are you sure it’s going to be safe?” Joshua asked cautiously.

“Yes,” I replied, “The sea levels are down. That’s what all the reports say - besides, it has barely rained for days.” My companion did not look convinced, but he said nothing and kept driving. After a few moments, I cried out, “There it is!”

We had cleared the hilltop and there below was my hometown, Aberystwyth. From a distance it looked just the same as it always had done, although a torrent of water ran down Penglais Hill practically turning it in to a river in its own right. Joshua put the car in to auto and started snapping pictures with the old digicam excitedly. I looked out of the window at the old University, the hospital, now practically derelict. As we neared the bottom, muddy water sloshed around boarded up shop fronts, but it was less than a couple of feet high. I pulled up the map on the car’s viewfinder and typed in the location I wanted; “Great Darkgate Street”. The hovercar continued forward, winding past a building that had once been a corner shop and another, the roof caved in and windows smashed, which I had a memory of once being an Italian restaurant.

There was nowhere dry to land the car so we hovered forward until there it was; my eyes filled with tears involuntarily as I remembered Kyle and myself arm in arm on a Saturday night, stumbling and laughing past the Superdrug and the Thornton’s chocolate shop, past the opticians where I used to work, getting money out at the Santander cashpoint on the corner before ordering a pizza to take home to our flat on the seafront – by now likely obliterated by years of storm damage and rising tides. The car moved slowly, passing what used to be a betting shop but now, with its front wall half caved in, seemed to be a meeting place for the local seagulls.

Further ahead, a large building which had been a Woolworths store when I was a child and later on, a “Poundland” was completely open at the front, like a raw and gaping mouth, its insides sloshing with sea water, weeds and broken furniture.

“Stop!” I commanded the car suddenly. Josh looked up from his camera,

“What is it?” He asked quizzically. He followed my gaze to the building next door – A restaurant. It had been the Carlton, when I was in my early twenties, although later it had obviously been called something else as the faded and weatherworn sign read “The Blue Bay”. I looked at the young journalist, embarrassed. I had lied to him about my reasons for wanting to take this job.

“Josh, we need to get in. I need to find something – it’s…. important.” He looked at me, irritated and then confused – but then his features softened, as though he, a young twentysomething of the modern world saw something else in this woman, pushing her sixties and who remembered an entirely different kind of World.

Joshua moved the car towards the third story window – what would have been the first floor of the restaurant - and set it to park. The window was boarded but the boards were rotting at the edges and I pried them off easly. Behind them the windows were smashed through. I opened the side door of the car and climbed in, as Josh steadied my hand. “Be careful, Bee.“ He said, with genuine concern.

Inside, the floor was covered with only a few inches of water in which bits of paper and old fragments of smashed crockery floated like an unlikely collection of flotsam. I flicked the torch on my EYEsleeve which illuminated the sad, decaying room. For a moment I felt lost, trying to remember the layout of the old restaurant where my late husband Kyle had slaved away during his last year of University, desperate to finish his degree after his Father’s firm had gone bankrupt. I remembered thinking how lucky I was that a small town girl like me would catch the eye of this handsome, intelligent geo-science student. I used to come and meet him here, when he was working late, after I had been out with the girls and everyone else at the restaurant had gone home leaving Kyle to lock up. We would have a drink at the bar, just the two of us – and then one day, we found a loose floorboard, right beside the glass washer. And we made a time capsule full of little notes, a lock of our hair, a cocktail umbrella, a favourite poem, a sea shell…..

****

In the eerie light I found the bar surrounded in smashed glass and age old recipe books with their yellowed, water stained pages, but the floorboard creaked in the same place it had done before and I prized it open, and lifted out the box.



1499 words

This story was written for "Invalid Item"  with the prompt "Great Darkgate Street"