“Come,” said the Sultan to his hasheesh-eater in the very furthest lands that know Manhattan, “dream to me now of Brighton...”

A Tale Of Brighton

Lord Dunsany

The sandstorm started when I was at Jenny’s flat, near Preston Circus. We stayed indoors as grit lashed the windows and the casements rattled. Outside the traffic had stopped, since you could barely see in front of you. No matter how tight you closed the windows, or how carefully you sealed the edges with towels, you’d still find sand on the sill afterwards. Grains would turn up in odd places, like the back of cupboards or the bottom of the fridge.

“How long do you think it will last?” she asked me.

“They usually blow themselves out pretty fast,” I said.

“No, all of this. The strangeness.”

I’d been at Sainsbury’s at the Gyratory that day, where a djinn was serving at the deli counter. All I wanted was something nice for dinner, but he wanted to sell me other things. “I have great treasures,” he said. “Grant me one wish, and they can be yours.” “No thank you,” I told him. “Just my order, please,”

Jenny put her arms round me and placed her head on my shoulder. “I just want to be back in a normal world.”

But that’s the thing: I don’t know if normal life still exists. We were used to walks along the beach, to Sunday lunch in the North Laine. Catastrophe only happened on the news. Now everything has changed. You never know when it might come – you could be walking to work or shopping in Churchill Square when something happens. You might find shadows following you, even on a cloudy day, or a sword-wielding djinn could appear, claiming that a Mars bar wrapper you dropped had crushed his son to death. Only a halfwit or a liar could claim not to be scared. Nowhere within the five ends of the earth is as wretched as Brighton.

In the pub, a few days before, I met a man who’d spent two weeks transformed into a seagull by his fiancée’s scheming ex-husband. The spell came from a book found in a second hand shop. These days you didn’t ask how a book of ancient spells came to be for sale in Oxfam. In the back of my kitchen drawer was a pile of rubies. A year back they’d have been worth untold riches. Now you’d receive such things in return for a kind word to a beggar who turned out to be a king in disguise.

Danger lurks everywhere. I’ve heard rumours that a murderous cult is gathering in the ruins of Debenhams, under a charismatic leader who used to work on the make-up stand. Alleys lead to the wrong place at certain times of day. Shape shifters are abroad – you might see the same person four times in a day, in different forms, given away by a tattoo or scar they can’t hide.

Other countries have sent soldiers to keep order. You’re safe when they are around. The soldiers mill about, bored, chewing tobacco on street corners and pacing. But they never stay in a neighbourhood long enough. They move on and the chaos returns.

After the storm, little sand remained on the street – it seems to stash itself in our houses instead. I said goodbye to Jenny and headed to the market to buy the last few things for dinner.

Passing a coffee shop, the owner greeted me. Although he knew my name I didn’t recognise him, but stopped to talk anyway. Inside his establishment men clustered at tables, the air thick with tobacco smoke. Near the entrance were off-duty soldiers, recognisable from their new blue jeans. In the back, drug addicts skulked in the shadows among the conjurers. The café owner told me about a man who’d come with an ape. The man claimed that the ape was once human, and the creature demonstrated the actions it remembered – brushing his hair, drinking from a coffee mug and smoking a cigarette. Afterwards the man collected money, saying he was saving to hire a sorcerer to remove the spell.

I continued to the station market, which took place in the old car park. I didn’t spend long there, keeping to the food stalls near the edge. I didn’t risk going in deeper, where I might have bought something more exotic. There were treasures there, but dangers too. You could pay a hundred pounds for an egg. You’d know it was powerful, but it could hatch into good or harm. Weeks of salary might buy a tattered rug that a stall keeper said was magic. One day you might discover how to make it fly; or you could be unlucky and the rug would change into a snake and strangle you.

My best friend Katharine works in A&E and she sees all the horrors. When there is an incident the injured and the weeping descend on the hospital. Some nights it’s less busy: a woman comes in screaming because her daughter is turned to stone; a man arrives, his hand on fire, the flames not doused even when placed in water. The worst cases, the incurable ones, are kept in the hospital basement. They have people turned to statues, people whose whole body has been aflame for years, people turned to rag dolls.

But you go out and buy ingredients for meals, go to the office on a weekday. No matter how bad it gets, life goes on. You still need to eat, you still have to go to work, pay the rent. Life continues despite the danger.

Background

This story is inspired by Lord Dunsany’s A Tale of London, which is a reflection on how we build up the unfamiliar to be enchanting. I took the orientalist idea of the Arabian Nights fantasy, and mixed it with the idea of living in an occupied territory, and how people have to continue their daily lives while exposed to great risk.

This was one of a set of stories I bundled into an ebook, Famous for 15 People which I published in 2017. This was an experiment and I put in quite a lot of effort. Looking back at the statistics, the book has sold 25 copies in its lifetime. That’s not a lot and underlines how reluctant I am to do any self-promotion.

The book was still worth doing. There are some good stories in the collection and I like that they have a permanent home. I produced a new edition this week, as part of the True Clown Stories kickstarter rewards, replacing a couple of stories that I no longer felt happy with. Reading back, I had forgotten a couple of them - and I particularly loved the over-elaborate joke about Bugs Bunny making a Joseph Conrad adaptation called Hares of Darkness.

The most interesting thing was reading back to the introduction, written by my friend, Rosy Carrick. She writes about how I’m a prolific writer that has put very little into the world. It was reinvigorating to read about how my focus at that time was in “making something highly meaningful for a very small number of people… he posts tiny fictions on postcards, he sends them out as individual hand-made microbooks and origami figures.”

I still love those experiments, and have a couple I’m slowly working on at the moment. But it’s also good that this substack is providing an actual audience and I’m getting more work out into the world. Thank you for reading!

Recommendations

Rosy has been staying at mine for the last few weeks. Earlier this week, we got talking about birdsong, and discovered the Merlin app. Produced by Cornell University, it uses the microphone on a smartphone to identify the birds singing around you. It’s incredibly effective, and helped us pick out the birds singing in the valley (mostly robins, thrushes and blackbirds). It also has libraries of bird calls and songs that you can listen to and learn. It’s a lovely use of AI - one of those applications that would have seemed impossibly futuristic when I was a child.