We Are Animals E-Book

Tim Ewins

• Herausgeber: Lightning Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 366

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

'A feel-good story about how sometimes the best thing to do is just have faith that everything will work out in the end. It's the story we all need right now' – Popsugar A cow looks out to sea, dreaming of a life that involves grass. Jan is also looking out to sea. He's in Goa, dreaming of the passport-thief who stole his heart (and his passport) forty-six years ago. Back then, fate kept bringing them together, but lately it seems to have given up. Jan has not. In his long search he has accidentally held a whole town at imaginary gunpoint in Soviet Russia, stalked the proprietors of an international illegal lamp-trafficking scam and done his very best to avoid any kind of work involving the packing of fish. Now he thinks if he just waits, if he just does nothing at all, maybe fate will find it easier to reunite them. His story spans fifty-four years, ten countries, two imperfect criminals (and one rather perfect one), twenty-two different animals and an annoying teenager who just… Will… Not… Leave. But maybe an annoying teenager is exactly what Jan needs to help him find the missing thief? Featuring a menagerie of creatures, each with its own story to tell, We Are Animals is a quirky, heart-warming tale of lost love, unlikely friendships and the certainty of fate (or lack thereof). For the first time in her life the cow noticed the sun setting, and it was glorious.

Leseprobe

A cow looks out to sea, dreaming of a life that involves grass.

Jan is also looking out to sea. He’s in Goa, dreaming of the passport-thief who stole his heart (and his passport) forty-six years ago. Back then, fate kept bringing them together, but lately it seems to have given up.

Jan has not. In his long search he has accidentally held a whole town at imaginary gunpoint in Soviet Russia, stalked the proprietors of an international illegal lamp-trafficking scam and done his very best to avoid any kind of work involving the packing of fish. Now he thinks if he just waits, if he just does nothing at all, maybe fate will find it easier to reunite them.

His story spans fifty-four years, ten countries, two imperfect criminals (and one rather perfect one), twenty-two different animals and an annoying teenager who just…

Will…

Not…

Leave.

But maybe an annoying teenager is exactly what Jan needs to help him find the missing thief?

Featuring a menagerie of creatures, each with its own story to tell, We Are Animals is a quirky, heart-warming tale of lost love, unlikely friendships and the certainty of fate (or lack thereof).

For the first time in her life the cow noticed the sun setting, and it was glorious.

Published in 2020

by Lightning Books Ltd

Imprint of EyeStorm Media

312 Uxbridge Road

Rickmansworth

Hertfordshire

WD3 8YL

www.lightning-books.com

Copyright © Tim Ewins 2020

Cover by Ifan Bates

The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

ISBN: 9781785632037

For Gemma and our own epic love storyAnd for Indy, the product of that story

Contents

Part One

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Acknowledgements

About the author

Part One

1A Crab

Goa, India. 2016

The man looked to his right. Three Indian men walked along the sand holding hands, a French couple started to pack up their towels and put various beach objects into an oversized floral bag, and a cow looked out to sea, maybe dreaming of a life which involved grass.

He looked to his left. He could see the rocks where the beach ended. The sun was going down and there was an Israeli man setting up a tripod, holding his camera high to protect the lens from any stray grains of sand that might want to nestle in its cracks. A bit further down, an Indian family were playing in the water – the adults fully clothed, and the children fully not.

He saw no sign of her.

He looked right again. One of the Indian men was laughing and pushing one of the others, the French couple were halfway up the beach now, arms around each other, and the cow was still staring, or dreaming, whichever it was.

The man strained his eyes as hard as he could, but still he couldn’t see her.

He looked again to his left. The men in the family were taking it in turns to hold their breath under the waves and the women were chatting among each other and watching their little ones. On the shore, predictably, the Israeli man was rubbing his camera’s lens frantically with his t-shirt and grumbling to himself.

It was no good. She wasn’t there. Just like she hadn’t been there the day before, or the day before that. In fact, she hadn’t been there any day for the past five years. But he always looked anyway. Just in case. Because, probably, one day, she would be there, and he’d hate to miss it.

Regardless of her persistent absence, the man always loved this time of day on Palolem Beach. It wasn’t too hot, but it certainly wasn’t cold, and everyone seemed relaxed. Even the lady who paced the length of the beach all day selling melons eased off on her selling at this time, and she would often find a tourist to sit and chat with. The tourist would always buy a melon afterwards of course, but that didn’t seem to be her aim.

One more check, he thought. He looked to his right. This time he could only see the cow, who hadn’t moved her holy self one inch. The men had gone, and the couple must have made it back to their beach hut. Then he looked to his left. The family continued to play, the cameraman was mounting his camera, seemingly content that he’d saved his lens from a sandy death, and a bar worker was bringing out a sign which read ‘COCK-tails – buy one, get two free’.

The man scowled.

Three girls were climbing over the rocks where the beach ended, back onto Palolem, and the man wondered whether they’d enjoyed their day. He knew where they’d have gone because Palolem was the closest place he’d had to a home in forty-one years.

He knew that over the rocks they’d have found another smaller beach with rocks at both ends. Over the next set of rocks, they’d have found a much bigger beach which would’ve taken them about an hour and a half to walk down. And then, when they’d have reached the end, they’d have found more rocks. Some people would get bored of exploring at this point and turn back, but he’d noticed these girls leave early in the morning, so he guessed that they’d carried on to the next set of beaches and rocks. ‘What an exciting day they must have had,’ thought the man – he used to love exploring.

‘That was awful,’ said one of the girls, and the man sighed.

He was sitting four bars down the beach from the COCK-tail bar, but he still jumped when the DJ played the first thud of music. He wondered whether they’d started playing the music louder or whether it was the direction of the wind. It had definitely been getting earlier – it never used to start thudding until after dark. He sipped his red wine and closed his eyes.

‘Silent disco tonight, ladies?’ The man opened one of his eyes to see a young male with ginger hair, an insanely wide smile and a hint of crazy in his eyes next to the three girls. The boy was luminous from the waist up.

‘Another poxy vest,’ the man mumbled under his breath and then re-shut his open eye.

Even with his eyes closed, he knew that the vest would be bending his knees in time to the thudding. His neck would be bobbing along too, and he’d probably have his mouth slightly open. They always have their mouths slightly open, he thought.

The man exhaled loudly and opened both eyes lazily.

‘Yin?’ the vest asked the girls. It was amazing, thought the man, how only when he was speaking, did the vest’s mouth appear to close. What did he mean, yin? The man knew a few languages, but he had never heard ‘yin’ used in this context before. He’d heard of yin, as in the yin usually followed by yang. And he’d heard of yen, the currency. He even knew the meaning of yìn (a Chinese verb, meaning ‘to print’), but it seemed such an unlikely verb for a vest to be using to sell a silent disco in South India.

‘Yeah, we’re in,’ answered one of the girls, and the man felt silly – ‘Y’in?’ – of course.

The vest, bending his knees in time to the thudding, neck bobbing, and with his mouth slightly open, handed the girls some flyers and watched the three of them walk off.

If the man ignored the music, as he had grown used to doing each night, he could hear the gentle lapping of the waves on the beach, the quiet natter of the melon-selling lady with her chosen tourist, and the sounds of a few birds communicating in their bird way (‘Cacaaa?’ one bird would ask, and another would reply ‘Cacaaa!’ in agreement, and then they would steal some fish from the fishermen). It was getting cooler now and he pushed his toes into the sand below his chair as he drifted off into a blissful sleep.

* * *

‘Silent disco tonight, old-timer?’

The man awoke and saw a boy with ginger hair, an insanely wide smile and a hint of crazy in his eyes peering down at him. He was bending his knees in time to a different, quicker-paced, thudding. His neck was bobbing along, and his mouth was slightly open.

The man stood up and walked towards the shore, ignoring the intrusive vest completely.

He looked to his right. The cow was now wandering up the beach by herself, gently waving her tail and probably looking for grass. The melon-selling lady was finishing her conversation with her chosen tourist and exchanging her last melon for a few rupees.

Then he looked to his left. He could see the rocks where the beach ended. The Indian family were now out of the water – the adults fully clothed and the children fully not – and the Israeli man was packing away his tripod, holding the camera high to protect the lens from any further stray grains of sand.

In both directions, he saw several gatherings of bubbler crabs, all rolling the sand into tiny balls behind them. That’s what bubbler crabs do.

Still, the man saw no signs of her.

He made his way back to his chair, past the vest, who, amazingly, hadn’t moved at all and was still staring at the spot where the man had been sitting originally, as if the man had remained sitting there the whole time. The man sat down, took a sip of his red wine, looked at the vest, and paused.

‘Pardon?’

‘Silent disco tonight, old timer?’

‘Old timer?’

‘Old timer. Y’know. Not like, old timer. But, old-timer.’

‘I’m sixty-four!’ said the man, as a small wave washed away hundreds of the bubbler crabs’ small balls of sand.

‘I said, not like, old timer, but that’s quite old...timer. Sorry. My boss says I’ve got to be friendly. You’re a young man. Just not as young as me. But I’m youuung. Like, really young. Especially to you.’

The man stared at the vest, and the vest stared at the man. ‘My name’s Shakey,’ said the vest, trying to be polite, and then they stared at each other for a few more seconds.

‘Shakey,’ said the man.

‘Shakey,’ said Shakey. ‘Silent disco tonight old-t...?’ His sentence trailed off.

The man was making things difficult for Shakey, who was, after all, just doing his job. Shakey had met people like this man before. Another stupid moustache, he thought. He hated moustaches.

2 Another poxy vest

Goa, India. 2016.

You could be forgiven for thinking that vests can see in the dark. They’re regularly found at night and they’re often luminous. They congregate on small beaches in Thailand and India, or on large beaches in Australia for the high season. It’s on these beaches that they successfully, quickly and loudly find themselves. They find that the country they’re in is in actual fact their spiritual home, and they always seem to be holding a small plastic bucket of vodka and Red Bull.

The truth is that vests cannot see in the dark – not everything, anyway. They can only see other vests. They rarely see workers, restaurant owners, cleaners, the elderly or parts of the world without sand.

After dark, vests glow. This attracts other vests, and they discuss the ways in which the small particles of eroded rock beneath their feet have changed their outlook on life completely, and how they don’t know if they could live in a Western society again. They discuss the blogs they’ve written (which are normally about small plastic buckets of vodka and Red Bull) and then later they find that they’re both in the new spiritual home for two months, and that they’re going to share the same flight home. Then they discuss the ‘not even in the cinema yet’ film it turns out they’d both watched on the flight out.

* * *

If you were to go through Shakey’s backpack you would find one pair of shorts (he would be wearing the other pair), no less than eight luminous vests and three pairs of sunglasses. You might also find a small plastic bucket. Shakey was certainly a vest.

‘Sleeves are heavy,’ he would tell other travellers if they asked. ‘I’m packing light.’ But the truth was that he’d spent the past six months in a gym lifting dumbbells, and that he liked the look of his arms.

While on a fishing trip recently, a girl vest had asked Shakey what his best experience in India had been so far. He’d intentionally gone misty-eyed and looked slightly over her shoulder and into the distance. He’d been aiming for a ‘man of the world’ look, but he had actually been thinking ‘can she see my bicep?’ and ‘is she looking at my bicep?’ He tensed his bicep.

‘I was sunbathing on Palolem beach, listening to my headphones and using my sarong as a pillow,’ he’d said, ‘when an Indian man took me in as one of his own.’ At this point he rubbed the back of his red hair with his hand and moved his gaze from the distance and directly into her eyes. He paused for an uncomfortable seven seconds before telling her how the Indian man had been dressed in beige, both on his top and on his bottom half, and how he had sat down next to Shakey, singling him out from everyone else on the beach.

‘He must have seen me as some kind of a...a kindred spirit,’ Shakey explained, still tensing his bicep even though it was beginning to hurt. He was beginning to burn from the sun, too.

The Indian man had asked Shakey if he wanted to join him and his family for a meal. Shakey had accepted, not through reasons of gratitude or intrigue, but in the hope that he would one day get to tell another vest about it – hopefully a girl, and maybe on a fishing trip.

Shakey told the girl how he had sat with the Indian man and several other people from all around the world and eaten naan, chapatti, samosas, dal, chana masala, and how it was all rounded off with several beers. Then he paused. ‘I’m a vegetarian,’ he said, while further raising one corner of his insanely wide smile, before looking into the distance again. ‘It was quite spiritual,’ he carried on. ‘I mixed with the locals, ate local food and drank local beer.’ He noticed that his bicep had become slightly limp so he tensed his other arm and turned his body so she could see. ‘And it only cost me 2,500 rupees.’

The girl widened her mouth in awe. The boy she was with had immersed himself so entirely into the Indian culture that he had been eating in local family homes and meeting with kindred spirits. It was exactly the kind of thing that her guidebook had told her she should be doing.

Of course, what Shakey had actually done, was go to a family-owned restaurant.

She smiled at Shakey and he smiled back. ‘Wow,’ she breathed, and then she touched his slowly burning bicep.

The fishing group had not really done much fishing up to this point. The boat owner had briefed them on some very basic safety points (don’t jump off the boat, don’t put the hook in your mouth/eyes/near your genitals, and don’t forget to tip) and then he’d set up each fishing rod by himself. The tourists had spent the following hour just chatting as the boat chugged on, so it came as quite a surprise when the girl’s fishing rod started violently jolting in its holder.

She moved her hand away from Shakey’s arm and screamed. Shakey grabbed the fishing rod from its holder and pulled backwards, imitating a TV programme he’d seen. The rod pulled forward against him.

‘Give me!’ shouted the boat owner as he ran up behind Shakey, and Shakey thought that giving him the rod was probably a good idea. He looked back to the boat owner and tried to pass him the rod by letting go of it. The rod hit the inside wall of the boat, flipped overboard and landed in the sea.

He’s such a hero, thought the girl vest as she skirted around the visibly distressed boat owner towards Shakey, and then they kissed. Somewhere, under the boat, a small milkfish celebrated its victory with a piece of bait and a rod.

Yes, Shakey was as vesty as a vest could be. If there was a hierarchy among the vests, Shakey would probably be the king. But there would be a good chance he wouldn’t realise he was the king, and that’s why there is no vest hierarchy.

* * *

Being a vest is only a temporary condition which is normally cured by the vest holding onto the material that’s loosely hanging by its side and pulling its hands upwards and over its head. Once this process has been followed, the vest begins to realise that there is no spiritual home, it has crabs living in its flip flops and that it is in desperate need of a shower.

Often, later in life, a vest will become something useful like a doctor, a builder or a teacher. No one will know about its two months of being a vest, and an ex-vest will tend to lie about it. Lots of ex-vests will revisit the spiritual home some years later with their children and there will be new vests scattered around the beach.

Ex-vests don’t usually like new vests, and they tend to mumble about them under their breath.

‘Another poxy vest,’ they mumble.

3 A cow

Goa, India. 2016.

The man was mumbling under his breath, and although Shakey couldn’t make it out exactly, it sounded like he might be saying that the silent disco was going to be the poxy best… Or something like that.

The music from the COCK-tail bar was getting louder and ever more intrusive.

‘How silent is a silent disco exactly?’ the man asked. Shakey sat down on the chair next to the man but he didn’t answer the question. This was good, thought the man, because now Shakey was at least being quiet, but it was also bad, because now they were sitting together, as if they knew each other...as if they were friends.

The sky turned to a dusty orange and the waves slowly calmed to form a flat, open field of blue – it would have been a truly beautiful sight to have enjoyed alone.

The bar owner took away the man’s empty glass and the man ordered the same again. Shakey, much to the man’s surprise, ordered a vodka and Red Bull and requested that it be in one of those little plastic buckets.

‘Why are you here?’ asked the man a little too loudly.

‘Initially? To find myself,’ answered Shakey. ‘Now? I think something bigger,’ and then he rubbed the back of his head with his hand.

‘No. Why are you here, now, sitting next to me?’

‘Oh. I’m being as silent as a silent disco, if you don’t put on the headphones, that is. If you put on the headphones they can be very loud. Would you like me to be as loud as a silent disco next?’

The man exhaled and frowned. ‘I’m afraid I find even your presence loud. To me, your mere being here is like a thousand out-of-tune and out-of-time trumpets playing a symphony of bad hip-hop songs. Badly.’ He put emphasis on the words ‘hip’ and ‘hop’ which made Shakey visibly cringe.

Shakey had met people like this man before. He called them moustaches and he didn’t like them. He found them to be rude and stuck in their ways, but frankly he had been handing out silent disco flyers for two hours – he was hot and in need of a drink. He just wanted to enjoy the sunset and to sit next to someone, anyone, to whom he could pretend to be flyering, should his boss see him. This rude moustachioed man would have to do. Shakey did, however, try his best not to sound like a thousand out-of-tune and out-of-time trumpets playing bad hip-hop music, badly, but he found it difficult as he wasn’t sure what it was that had made him sound like that in the first place.

‘Did you say that you were finding yourself, initially?’ asked the man, and Shakey confirmed that he did. ‘So, are you telling me that you’ve succeeded? That you’ve found yourself now?’ and Shakey confirmed that, yes, he had. The man, with one eyebrow down and one eyebrow up, enquired as to where it was that Shakey had found himself so easily.

‘In the sand,’ Shakey replied confidently and with a shrug, and then neither of them said anything for a few moments as the man took that in.

* * *

Four bars down, the DJ in the COCK-tail bar looked across the empty beach and out to sea. Then he turned and scanned the bar he was in. It was also empty. Where on earth was everybody? He set his laptop to loop, left the DJ booth and stepped onto the sand. Along the beach, about four bars down, he could see someone luminous sitting next to a man holding a glass of red wine. Beyond them, he could see a wistful-looking cow. The DJ, who was also quite luminous, thought for a second and then started off towards the man and the vest, having decided that cows probably don’t like listening to music much. After a few steps he saw the vest turn its head.

‘Shakey!’ the DJ said to himself happily. The DJ liked Shakey because Shakey always really lost himself in the music.

He ran back to his booth – they must not be able to hear, he thought as he turned the thudding music up as loud as it would go.

‘What an infernal racket,’ said the man. Shakey wasn’t sure what infernal meant, so he agreed happily that it was indeed an infernal racket, and quite a good one at that. The cow looked up from the sea and towards the COCK-tail bar. She shuffled her back legs, kicked up some of the sand behind her and then she turned her entire body to face the DJ.

* * *

‘What were you doing in the sand?’ the man asked, now resigned to a conversation with his new companion.

‘I think I’ve always been in the sand, spiritually,’ Shakey replied, ‘but it’s taken my physical self to travel the world to meet my spiritual self and now I’ve formed my whole self, y’know?’ The man looked at Shakey in disbelief, which Shakey mistook for confusion, and so he continued, ‘like when the Power Rangers come together to form Megazord,’ as if to explain what he had meant. The man ignored this.

‘Where exactly did you look for yourself, before the sand, that is?’

‘Well. Just India so far.’

‘India?’

‘Goa.’

‘Just Goa?’

‘Just this beach really.’ Shakey looked a little embarrassed. ‘My parents met in India. Not Goa exactly, but I really like beaches, so...’

The man scoffed. ‘It’s lucky your spiritual self was in the sand on this beach then, isn’t it?’

The cow had started walking towards the COCK-tail bar and was now standing directly in front of Shakey and the man, blocking their view of the sea. The waiter brought over the drinks and shouted ‘shoo’ at the cow, but she didn’t move. Instead, she let out a rare, quiet and malnourished ‘moo’, leaving her mouth slightly open. Then she nodded her head slowly, repetitively, and maybe, just maybe, in time to the music.

‘What’s your deal anyway? What were you looking for on the beach earlier? When I came over you completely ignored me. That’s pretty rude, yeah?’

‘Jan,’ said the man.

‘What’s that?’ asked Shakey.

‘A woman,’ said the man, more in the direction of the cow than to Shakey.

Shakey asked where she was. He was hoping she would come back quickly so there would be three of them. Maybe she would dilute the man’s rudeness, like polite water to his arrogant concentrated squash.

‘When did you see her last? Maybe she’s getting a drink before she meets you.’

‘1978. I last saw her in 1978, and as to where she is, I don’t know. That’s why I was looking. If she is getting a drink before she meets me, she’ll be pretty damn drunk when she does turn up.’

‘Man,’ said Shakey, and then, ‘jeez,’ and then, ‘are you ill?’ to which the man inhaled sharply.

‘No, I’m not ill. I’m just waiting, that’s all. You must believe in...’ and then he trailed off, realising how silly what he was about to say would sound to the vest if he said it out loud. ‘You talk some utter crap,’ he said instead.

But then the man thought for a second, and he decided that he didn’t mind sounding silly in front of this vest. Everything Shakey had said so far had been silly, even his name was silly, and if nothing else Shakey had been incredibly forthcoming himself.

‘I’m waiting for fate,’ he said. It did sound silly. It was true though – fate had, as far as the man understood it, always brought him and Jan together in the past. ‘We never had to look for each other before. She was just there anytime I needed her. Until 1978, that is.’

‘What happened in 1978?’ asked Shakey.

‘I don’t know,’ replied the man and then he took a long sip of his wine.

He explained how he’d always loved travelling, even before he had met Jan. ‘People say it’s a small world,’ he said, ‘but it’s not. I’ve seen a lot of it and I promise you it’s really very big. But we kept bumping into each other, Jan and I, and that had to be fate.’ The man took another sip of his wine.

Shakey noticed the increased speed with which the man had started drinking, so he put all four of the straws from his bucket into his mouth and took a massive gulp to join in.

‘The last thirty-eight years, however, fate must have found it hard getting us together because I’ve not seen her.’

‘Man,’ said Shakey again, and then, ‘jeez.’ No matter how many times he’d told other vests that he’d met his kindred spirit in that restaurant owner, he wasn’t really feeling comfortable with the man opening up like this.

‘Yes, well. Maybe I am ill then,’ said the man under a stifled laugh. ‘Anyway, I thought I’d give fate a hand this last five years, and I’m not getting any younger, so I’ve stayed here. Now fate just has to get Jan here, and when it does I’ll be looking, just like I was earlier,’ and then he apologised if he had seemed rude, even though he knew that he had and he didn’t care.

‘How long are you going to keep looking? I mean, you’re living on a beach indefinitely like a hermit or something.’ The man smiled at this. He still felt a bit silly for talking about Jan to the vest but at least Shakey had actually been listening.

He had no answer though. He didn’t know how long he intended to stay on the beach and he didn’t know how long he would keep looking. Maybe Jan would never turn up. He wasn’t worried about recognising her – she was beautiful, and he was sure she would still be beautiful in her older age. But what if she, or indeed fate, had stopped trying? What if, out of the three of them, he was the only one still paying any attention?

‘What’s your name, old-timer?’ Shakey asked.

‘Jan,’ replied the man.

‘No. Your name,’ Shakey asked again.

‘Jan,’ replied the man again. There was a pause.

‘Because you’re finding yourself, and when you look around the beach, you’re really looking for you?’ asked Shakey, looking like his head might explode with deepness.

‘No. Jan is called Jan, and I am called Jan. We are both called Jan. She is a girl, and I am a man.’ Jan the man really didn’t enjoy saying this. It was hard to say without sounding like he was reciting a children’s poem.

‘Man-Jan?’

‘Sure. If it makes it easier for you. Manjan,’ said Manjan.

* * *

Four bars down, the DJ looked again across his empty bar. Where was Shakey? He normally loved this particular thudding song. He glanced towards the beach to see if Shakey was on his way, maybe with his wine-loving friend. He didn’t see either of them, but he did see a cow with her mouth slightly open and her head nodding along in time to the music. The DJ put his hands in the air excitedly and pointed towards the cow.

‘This song is for you,’ he screamed with delight, dancing in time to both the music and the cow. The cow shuffled her back legs and once again mooed. ‘Beach cow, this one is for you!’

Manjan watched this from his chair four bars down. Even the cows on this beach were adapting to suit the times. They’ve survived centuries with hardly any grass, and now, it seems, they’ll survive the loud, thudding music too. This made Manjan feel slightly jealous. He wished that he could adapt to change quite so easily.

Manjan asked why Shakey was called Shakey, and Shakey laughed.

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ he asked, and then he held onto one of Manjan’s hands and shook it lightly, as a parent might do to a baby. Manjan had no idea why this was obvious, but he enjoyed it just the same.

Once Shakey had stopped, they both looked back out to the no-longer-obstructed sea view, one smiling more widely than the other, but both happy.

‘Manjan,’ started Shakey, still looking towards the sea, his smile slowly disappearing, ‘what if Jan’s dead?’

Manjan’s smile quickly faded too and he took another sip of his wine. He thought about it for the first time ever, and then answered the only answer that was acceptable to him.

‘She’s not,’ he said.

4Classic moustache

Goa, India. 2016.

You can’t always tell if someone is a moustache by the physical presence of hair on his top lip. What makes a moustache a moustache is his determined refusal to accept change in any way. Sometimes a moustache will have a face entirely void of hair, but there is a sure-fire test to find out if he is indeed a moustache. You just have to suggest that he grow a moustache. A true moustache would snort at you disapprovingly – ‘I’ve never had a moustache before, why should I grow a moustache now?’ he’d say. This is a typical moustache response. It’s classic moustache.

Of course, if a moustache does possess an actual moustache, there is a good chance it will have been there ever since his adolescent face will have allowed it to be.

Millions of moustaches all over the world sit in their homes complaining that television programmes aren’t what they used to be and that there are too many channels these days anyway. Don’t even get them started on supermarkets. Most moustaches tend to stay indoors, shut off from the outside world, and they only communicate with the people they have direct contact with. A moustache will never check his emails. This is for the best though – have you seen the amount of spam emails supermarkets send these days?

A moustache living predominantly outdoors is a different breed of bristle altogether. Places change, and societies change. The world changes. In fact, the only things that don’t change are the moustache’s opinions and his upper lip (however decorated, or not decorated, it might be). A moustache outdoors is constantly outside of its comfort zone. As a result, these are the worst kind.

* * *

Manjan was one of those moustaches that did sport an actual moustache, and quite a moustache at that. It was long and grey, and it tickled the rim of his wine glass with every sip. He wouldn’t have it any other way.

Over the past five years, he had established a comfortable routine on Palolem. In the morning he would scan the beach for Jan before enjoying a spot of yoga and a fruit salad in a nearby health restaurant. Then he would scan the beach for Jan, read a newspaper or chat with the melon-selling lady for a while. He would use the same health restaurant for lunch (but this time he would order a masala dosa), before scanning the beach for Jan. In the evening, after he had scanned the beach for Jan, he would sit in the very same bar he was sitting in now, with a glass of red wine, sometimes chatting to the bar owner and sometimes alone with his thoughts and memories. He would stay there until sundown, when he would have a quick look around in case Jan had turned up, and then he’d find his way back to bed. It was repetitive, and it was predictable.

Today had been a day like any other for Manjan, except today Shakey had sat next to him, and yesterday he had been called just Jan. They’d been sitting quietly for quite some time when Manjan said, ‘I hate this beach,’ flatly.

‘Whoa!’ exclaimed Shakey. ‘I don’t know if I mentioned at all, but this sand is me, man. You hate this beach and you hate me.’

After a few seconds of thought, Manjan replied.

‘Sometimes. I hate this beach, sometimes.’

If Shakey truly believed he and the beach were one, then this statement rang true for both. Manjan did hate the beach sometimes, and, in the short time he had known Shakey, he also hated him sometimes. Only sometimes, mind, and that wasn’t bad.

‘What’s wrong with the beach?’ Shakey asked.

‘It’s changed,’ Manjan explained, and Shakey remembered that Manjan, as interesting as he had first seemed, with his stories of a lady who was probably made-up (I mean, he couldn’t even think of a name for her different to his own), was still a moustache. He decided not to listen to whatever Manjan had to say next. It would probably only serve to kill the buzz he was beginning to get from his vodka and Red Bull.

Manjan shuffled the back legs of his chair into the sand and then leant on them slowly to make himself comfortable.

He explained how he’d first come to Palolem with Jan, just for a week, when he was twenty-five. Travelling was still exciting then, and every new place he visited felt like an adventure, especially with Jan. Palolem had felt special. He’d fallen in love with the beach the moment the soles of his feet had touched the sand, and by the time they’d left, Jan seemed equally taken.

They’d visited a spice farm, learnt to ride motorcycles, and tried yoga for the first time. One day, they had climbed over the rocks at the end of the beach and found another beach with rocks at both ends. Over those rocks they’d found yet another beach, which they’d walked down for about an hour, and then, at the other end of that beach, they’d found more rocks. It had been a magical week. If fate had a plan to bring him and Jan together again, Manjan felt certain it would be on Palolem.

‘Since then,’ Manjan said, while Shakey nodded absently but politely, ‘the beach has changed. It used to be quiet, peaceful and fun, but now it’s loud and full of vests.’ Shakey instinctively frowned when Manjan said ‘vests’. It was the first word he’d really noticed, and he assumed he was being insulted. Then he realised that frowning was almost an admittance to being whatever it was that Manjan was accusing him of being, so he rubbed the back of his head with his hand and smiled his insanely wide smile. This annoyed Manjan more than the frown. Nothing he’d said had warranted an insanely wide smile.

‘The good old days eh?’ said Shakey, hoping this might end Manjan’s monologue. Manjan sighed.

‘I’m watching Goa fall apart around me,’ he said ‘and I’m talking about it to the source of the problem. To make it worse, you’ve not even been paying attention.’

‘What are you doing here then? If you hate it so much, why not just move?’

Manjan flinched at the thought, and then sighed again. He’d travelled the world – he’d spent most of his life doing it, in fact – but he couldn’t leave Palolem now and he knew it. The beach had become his lottery ticket and he had the same numbers every week. If he stopped buying the ticket, Jan would turn up, he was sure. No, he was stuck on Palolem.

‘Because there’s nowhere better than Palolem,’ he said, ‘and I’m meeting Jan here. No no, I’ll be staying on Palolem thank you very much,’ and then he stuck out his bottom lip in a pout so that the very ends of his moustache hairs scraped the inside of his mouth.

‘Classic moustache,’ Shakey said to himself, but he actually found himself feeling sorry for Manjan. This grumpy moustache was living in the past – waiting for it to re-happen even – but he was completely lost in the present.

‘Nowhere better than Palolem,’ said Manjan again, matter-of-factly, resolutely and to himself, wondering if he meant it.

‘Nowhere better than Palolem,’ agreed Shakey quietly.

* * *

When a vest removes its vest, that vest becomes a person, but if a moustache removes its moustache, or indeed grows one, it just becomes even more grumpy. A moustache must escape a routine, and a frame of mind, to escape its true moustache.

Some moustaches have always been moustaches (often, these are the ones collecting football stickers in their childhood bedrooms at the age of fifty-five), and some moustaches gradually become moustaches as they grow older and begin to miss the good old days. Some moustaches – moustaches like Manjan in fact – used to be vests themselves.

That was back in the good old days though, and oh, how Manjan missed the good old days.

5A fish

Fishton, England.1965.

When Manjan was younger his family and friends had called him Jan, because back then he had not met Jan the girl, nor had he met Shakey the name creator, and, well, Jan was his name, so that’s what they called him.

Jan lived with both of his parents in the small seaside town of Fishton, England. In the summer the town was alive with folk music, exciting pirate-themed arcades and restaurants with queues all the way down the street. Jan loved all these things (he was only human after all) but what he loved most about summer in Fishton were the tourists.

He would find tourists from exotic places like Hull or Milton Keynes and he’d ask them about their home towns. He learnt little titbits of information from them, such as: in Hartlepool, people have something called a patty with their chips instead of fish; and in Birmingham some of the people do their shopping in a bull ring, which sounded dangerous, but fun.

Once he spoke to a man from Cornwall who ended everything he said with ‘aar’. Jan thought this was fascinating, so he decided to copy the man and to follow him for what turned out to be an entire day. The man understandably found this annoying, but unfortunately he always punctuated his annoyance by saying ‘aar’.

‘Aar,’ little Jan shouted back. By the time the man from Cornwall had climbed into his car to leave, he and Jan had attracted the attention of three dogs who wanted to play with them, and they’d both been offered jobs at the pirate-themed mini-golf.

In winter, though, when all the tourists had fled Fishton, Jan found it hard to pass time. There weren’t any interesting people to talk to. Fishton, in the winter, was full of people from Fishton, and Jan already knew about people from Fishton. They were all either fish catchers, fish cleaners, fish sellers, or fish (and at the rate at which they were being caught, cleaned and sold, you didn’t want to be a fish).

Jan’s attention would always turn away from people, and instead he would stand at the harbour watching the boats coming in, fantasising about where they might have been or where they might be going next. Maybe one would be off to try a patty in Hull, or maybe they’d be going to Birmingham to do some extreme shopping. Mainly, Jan liked to fantasise that one of the boats might be going straight out across the North Sea to whichever country lay on the other side. Jan wanted nothing more than to cross the North Sea.

* * *

Once, when he was thirteen, his school had made him take a test to see what job he would be suited to when he grew up. Jan hadn’t wanted to take the test because he thought he knew what the outcome would be. The test was funded by the Fishton fish factory and every year it turned out that nearly everyone who took the test was suited to a life of either catching, gutting, cleaning or selling fish. Jan didn’t know exactly what he wanted to be when he grew up, but he knew it didn’t involve fish. He thought it probable that whatever it was, it wouldn’t be in Fishton.

He took the test. Jan, as it happened, was not suited to a life of catching fish. He was not suited to a life of gutting fish, cleaning fish or selling fish, either. Instead, Jan was told that he’d make an excellent ‘box-packaging specialist and technician’.

At first Jan was relieved, but then, after he’d thought more about the words ‘box’ and ‘packaging’, and less about the words ‘specialist’ and ‘technician’, he felt like he had, himself, been gutted.

When he had got home and told his parents about the test they had been deeply proud of him. His father was a fisherman, and his mother sold fish in a local fish-and-chip shop.

‘You can carry on the family business,’ his father had remarked gleefully, and when Jan had asked him what he meant, his father had said ‘the business of fish!’

‘Of boxes,’ Jan replied.

‘Boxes for fish!’ his mother whooped, apparently not noticing Jan’s lack of enthusiasm.

‘Everything in Fishton is fish,’ he answered, and then he ran upstairs to sulk while his parents hugged each other and cheered. Jan loved his parents, but they certainly weren’t dreamers.