SLATE

I took it as a bad sign when I ordered a screwdriver, and in front of me the barman plunked down a glass with a measure of clear liquid in the bottom and an open carton of orange juice.

Danny Bryn smirks at that. “Not much call for it around here,” he says apologetically, drawing on his glass of dark fruits. When the light strikes it, the black liquid inside shines red like dried blood does not.

“Did you ever see the Fawlty Towers episode? When the Americans come to visit. One of them orders a screwdriver and John Cleese doesn’t have a clue what they mean, like it’s the most exotic, out-of-this world-”

“The one with the Waldorf salad, yeah. ‘What is a Waldorf, anyway? A walnut that’s gone orf?’ Yeah, I know the one.”

That was meant to be set in Torquay, but one sea-side town’s much like another. The bar in here has pictures of old shipping routes up on the walls, alongside brass dials for determining the direction of the wind or some such.

The bar is almost empty, but it doesn’t seem it, there’s a small group around the corner from us, under the big windows that look out onto the pier and let in the sun’s last faint efforts of the day. An old man reads a poem about how you can’t get a decent bacon sandwich no more. And behind us, opposite the bar, are two men with shaved heads and bomber jackets, roaring with laughter over nothing in particular, and a young couple sitting opposite them laughing along as well. 

We shuffle off into the upper recesses of the pub – up a little flight of stairs, into a nook formed by a pillar and a jutting wall, where we can’t be seen. This part isn’t quite a second floor, perhaps a mezzanine? More likely this section was once a different building altogether.

“You want to see the goods?” asks Danny, and I incline my head. He swings his briefcase up onto the table, which makes the contents clunk and scrape together, not so terribly loudly but still enough that I peep out of the nook, instinctively watching my back. Then he draws out a rectangle of stone.

 At first glance it’s grey, like I had expected. But then I take it in my hands, tilt it this way and that, and while it stays grey there are other shades inside it – now a hint of purple, now faint green, the kind of colour the sea gets on an interesting day – the same way that, to truly paint human flesh convincingly you must add a little touch of arterial blue.

“It is this slate that graces the roof of the White House.” He chuckles to himself. “This kind of slate.”

It’s familiar, too – it’s the slate, what you’d picture when you imagine a slate roof, multiply this one on the table by a couple of dozen and you’d actually have a slate roof. Big square scales overlapping, like on almost every building I’ve seen in this town. This bar has them, sharply swooping gable roofs like a cliff-edge.

“Course, they get the best, from all over. You go to DC and you’ll see them pink cherry-blossom trees you wouldn’t normally see anywhere outside Japan.”

“Oh, have you been there?”

Danny snorts at that. “Not selling you a cherry blossom tree, am I? Supposedly the blossoms themselves are perfectly edible…”

I run my fingers around the edges. Not laser-smooth, chipped and uneven like the end of a tooth, but then again up on the roof who will even notice? It’s grainy on the thin ends, and Danny takes it in his hands too, pointing at these rougher edges.

“Easy to split, see? That’s how it comes out in big flat panels. When I was in school they took us on a trip up into the mountains to where they still do it. Nothing fancy. They just take a big raw block of the stuff, and something like a plastering trowel, and they go-” He karate-chops his hand down on the table, and the sudden movement in this relatively calm space makes me jump. “Chop! Chop! Chop! Most natural thing in the world. So how many were you after?”

I take out the blueprints of the new build and rattle off the dimensions of the roof surface. He quotes me a price far below any of the reputable firms I’ve asked.

Out in the car park, he stacks the slates up nicely in my boot. The car park doesn’t actually adjoin the pub, it’s a little way up the hill, and from here I can see the straits, the pier stretching out into the sea and the island beyond. Driving up into town I’d seen the island, off in the distance, and it had looked like one wild expanse of forest, nothing but trees on the horizon. Now I can see it is inhabited, can see man-made structures between the nature – here a stately old country house, there a block of flats from Miami in the ‘80s.

At a sound from behind us I turn, already accepting the guilt, but it is only two boys, walking out of the forested road that follows the coast. One of them, a tall, lean lad with bushy hair, straightforwardly asks “What are you two doing in this river?”

“River?” I say.

“We are in a river,” the boy tells me, with a wide gesture along the road. “It is up to our chests.”

“Just out for a swim,” Danny smiles.

As the boys pass I hear the other one gently explain “We’re not in a river, you’re off your head.” Then they are around the corner and gone.

“Come down the pier with me,” says Danny. “I want to show you something.” The booth by the entrance is empty, but we pay anyway, dropping a few coins into the box. Then we walk out into the middle of the straits, along the pier. I feel vaguely wrong-footed, especially when I look down and see the waves sloshing through the cracks between the boards. Black seaweed flits in and out of view.

There are little kiosks at regular intervals along the way, tiny single rooms with onion domes, but all are shut and locked up, and most look as if they’ve been unused for some time. A sign on one offers chowder, and by now I am hungry. The fences along the sides, which seem dangerously low if a good gust caught me, are strung with fairy lights.

“Is it Christmas?” I ask vaguely.

He sees where I’m looking. “They put those up when I was a kid. Used to be they’d take them down again after the season, but – council budget.”

“Here,” says Danny, straying off to one side – my stomach sways when I see over the edge – and toward an old-fashioned telescope in crumbling blue paint. He reaches into his pocket again and sticks a coin in the slot. Then, as the thing rattles into operation, he sights down it, back the way we came, searching.

I look back too, and from here the town looks so small, beneath the mountains. The land looms up at me and I can’t quite believe I managed to drive through it. Before I had thought it was the island that was unbroken nature, but no, the still dark slopes are there behind us on the mainland, any buildings there are merely a rounding error – the mountains are so big, and they are so small…

“Alright, got him,” says Danny, and steps away from the telescope, beckoning me to take his place. “Have a look.”

He holds the telescope in place as I put my eye against it. Past my own eyelashes I see, poking out from the treetops, the grey square crenellations of a castle. “Oh. Is this one of the ring of steel?” I’ve heard of that. A line of big concentric castles built along the coast to keep the locals down back in the 1300s.

Danny laughs. “Bless you, no. This one only goes back a little over two hundred years. Everyone thinks it’s coal mining we’re known for, but up here it was slate. You can see the quarries from space. Like I said, it’s on the roof of the White House. That’s how Mr Pennant made his money, that and the slavery.

“Look down on the waterline.”

I move the telescope. Below the trees is a small boatyard. A few yachts, nothing that could hold more than five or six people, low-key stuff. But as I look further the land stretches unnaturally out towards me, into the straits, it is not a natural hook but something which has been constructed. Lights blink on up the length of that spit of land in the early evening darkness.

“The slate went out through there. It was one of the first railways, from the quarry up in the mountains, came right down to the water. This is how this country works. Everything flows out. There’s no decent roads between the north and the south, you know that? Or trains either. You can get out of the country alright, though, no problem there, the coast road’s very well-maintained. They widened it in the eighties to bring nuclear warheads in through the island.”

“Well, that’s something coming in, at least.” Have I overstepped the mark, there? No, Danny responds with a mordant little grin. He pops a bottle out of his coat, wedges it against the fence, and takes the top off with the heel of his hand. He takes a draught from it and hands it to me as we walk further out. At the head of the pier is a tearoom, closed up for the night, although I get the feeling the sign has been there for longer.

Around the back of the tearoom, nothing between us and the island but a span of water, he says “In the summer you get kids crabbing off here. This used to be a fishing community. When the town was just this part of town.” I know what he means. When I came off the motorway at the far end it didn’t even seem like a town, just a thrown-together assortment of big-box stores. “But that went. It all went.”

Over on the other side, looking out towards the island just like us, is an unwelcoming gate, ringed with big metal spikes. Behind it, I can see, there’s a walkway, a staircase, tangled up with scaffolding that curls back on itself as it goes down towards the sea.

“That went too,” Danny continues. “See the opening, there? Tourist trade. Cruise ships would come right up to the pier and people’d get off. There’s piers all up the coast they’d come to, there’s one on the other side of the Orme.” He points over to the right, toward the headland on the horizon. “Come into town that way, to visit.”

Strange to imagine that’s how the town would – should – have been experienced. Walk down the pier, the opposite of the way we’ve come, greeted by that cramped little pub and that little grassy patch next to it, them and the rows of seaside houses. It’d be a half-mile walk to the middle of town from here, but that must beat being greeted by a Tesco Metro.

The boards seem to shift under me as I look over the edge again. The grey waters are receding. As they lap lower it reveals more of the steel staircase, worn dark and covered in tangled sea growth. There is another opening in the fence, further down, spotted with rust.

Danny is looking off to one side. Coming into view, out of the shadow of the headland and showing up black and terrible against the sky, is a ship. It picks its way carefully down the deeper channel of the straits, keeping carefully away from the sandbanks. “All sorts came by here,” he says. I cannot see his face. “Once upon a time.”

Now heavy boot-treads, coming up the pier. I turn, aghast. An advancing column dressed in olive and khaki, strips of clothes wound around their legs and their boots to keep out the damp. As they pass me I see them, see their faces, and they seem familiar – are those the boys who were in the river, faces drawn and proud? Is that the old man who couldn’t get his sandwich, looking like Dad’s Army? All marching off towards the sea.

Their boots ring on the gantry as they pass through the gate and down those steel steps, into the belly of the ship. Danny claps me on the shoulder, not ungently, and says “Time to go.” For a moment there is crippling, cold, existential fear in my stomach – but it is he who walks away, joining the tail-end of the column, around the spiral corners of the stairs down into the water.

The walk back towards the lights on the shore seems to take a second. As I return to my car I am passed by a group of young women who look like students, and one younger woman with a pram. For a little moment the orange street is full of their excited chatter, the little burbles of the child, before they are gone.

I’m glad we moved here, I reflect as I get back in the car. This country seems so welcoming.