Roar and stutter

I went with Stu to meet Shawn Bennett on the pier. Barry gave us a lift into town in Ade’s car, which seems to run on a perpetually empty tank. We paid our 30p entrance fee.

It was only my second time on the pier since coming to Watermouth, the first on the occasion of my interview February ‘82 when waiting for the coach home with my friend-of-a-few-hours and soon never to be seen again Neil Dickinson. . . . Now it’s high summer and the pier's crowded with holiday-makers of all nationalities in the sun sporting tanned limbs and bright clothes, playing the amusements and thronging the hot arcades to the roar and stutter of video games and the chink of coins.

The passive sea laps green and quiet at the metal legs of the pier while ‘on deck,’ Empire Pier Radio blares out its happy holiday tunes. The pier has a Ghost Train, a Helter Skelter, a Penny Arcade machine museum, the usual burger bars, archery stalls, ‘Euro-Ball,’ Punch and Judy (“That’s The Way To Do It”), gift shops . . . “fine earthenware cruet set,” a prostrate female figure, headless, knees in the air, tits as salt and pepper dispensers, “Skeleton Power Dolls” with bony erections that unfurl if you push down on the doll’s head, Big Daddy mugs . . ..

It all seemed somehow the more ridiculous and grotesque to Stu and I next to the banner newspaper headlines screaming “20 DEAD IN MCDONALD’S MASSACRE.” Lone gunman James Huberty, 41 of San Ysidro California, told his wife “I’m going hunting for humans” and took his Israeli made automatic and shotgun and revolver into the local fast food restaurant and opened fire. Twenty dead.
“It’s a slaughterhouse” said police.

After a one hour 25 minute siege a police sniper shot Huberty dead. What would Ronald McDonald say?

We waited for Shawn in the Centenary Bar at the very end of the pier and when he showed up took our drinks and sat ourselves in deckchairs, staring across towards France. Shawn told amusing stories about Gareth, who’s been taken up by a girl name of Liliana. They  met at Kamran’s party.

“He told me he couldn’t even remember what she looked like but went and stayed at her parents' house last weekend, and she’s phoned him every other day since they met, even from Italy once.”

This of course all to be taken with considerable amounts of salt considering Bennett’s less than reliable record as an informant.