A Walk Along the Promenade - 7. Scene One, A Seaside Promenade in Summer, Part 7

When he’d returned back to his mother’s home, when he was finally hidden away in his new bedroom by himself, he’d taken out his new phone and deleted all the gay dating apps off it. Who would want him now? Now he had such a deformed and ugly leg. That brief window in which he’d hoped to find a boyfriend and happiness, or at least a regular sex life, was gone forever. He’d then cried to himself, large silent tears running down his face. He told himself he was crying because of the pain in his leg, but the pain wasn’t just in his leg.

He’d spent weeks more in those braces, weeks of attending physiotherapy appointments, weeks of daily exercises to try and to build-up some strength to the muscles in his left leg, weeks of taking pain killers like sweets because the pain in his leg seemed even worse than when the cast was on it. All that time he’d only felt frustration, he could not see any end to it all, he’d never get his leg back the way it had been, it would never fully heal, he would be left a cripple, the question was just how big a cripple, but still a cripple who no one else would touch. There had been no let up during the night either. When he eventually fell asleep each night, some nights sleep wouldn’t come to him until gone three o’clock in the morning, his sleep would be plagued with nightmarish dreams, dreams that re-lived the attack on him blow by blow, broken bone by broken bone.

At seven months after his injury his mother had given him an ultimatum. Over dinner that Friday evening, she’d insisted that they eat together that evening, she’d told him:

“I need you back at work. I can’t afford for you to be sitting around here all day anymore. I need you back at work, it’s that simple.”

“Yes, right,” he replied. He’d not thought about returning to work, he’d still been so focused on his walking, which he still could only manage to do using both his crutches.

“So you’re back in work with me on Monday morning. There’s a mountain of work there for you,” she told him.

“Right,” he replied. There seemed nothing else he could say.

“I’ll drive you there, of course,” she added.

“Thank you,” he said. He was sure it was what she expected him to say.

On Monday morning, dressed in his old work clothes, clothes he hadn’t thought about in months, he’d sat himself down into the front passenger of his mother’s car. He’d bitten down on the pain as she spread along the roads to work, there was no point in complaining.

He stretched out his leg again and felt no resistance, the pain had finally eased and disappeared. A respite from it always felt so good, a moment of feeling nearly normal again. He looked along the promenade, which seemed busy with people strolling in both directions. A seaside promenade had always struck him as a strange, Victorian invention, a walkway pavement built at the high tide mark of a beach just so people could just parade along it, to be seen and to see. It said so much about that pretentious, middle-class attitude that one was so important that other people just wanted to see you and be seen in your presence. An attitude that his mother possessed in large amounts. She liked people to know who she was and when she was present at some function or another. Shaun just wanted to disappear into the background of any room, he was much happier if people didn’t pay him any attention, especially now with his crippled leg.

Slowly and awkwardly he pushed himself up from the bench, using his walking stick as a lever, until he was finally stood upright again. There was a stiff twinge of pain in his left knee, as his damaged joint made a momentary protest against movement. Leaning heavily on his walking stick, Shaun began to walk back along the promenade, heading back towards the cliff railway and then his hotel.

He had walked twenty meters or so, in his slow and wobbling gait, when a strange thought had struck him, someone was following him. He paused and glanced back over his shoulder. There was just the usual gaggle of holidaymakers, mostly elderly couples, wandering along the promenade behind him, there was no one obviously following him, no one stood there and waiting for him to move. Neither was there anyone else in front of him who was following him by keeping ahead of him. Then, to his left-hand side he saw them. Three, large, dirty white seagulls were perched on the promenade’s rail, all three of them staring at him with one of their black, sharp eyes. For a moment it was as if those three gulls knew what he was intending to do. It was a strange and uncomfortable thought, and completely irrational, those birds could not read minds, they would barely respond to human commands.

Then the right-hand seagull issued a loud squawk, stretched out its wings wide and jumped back into the air, and with a few beats of those wings it was flying away, causing the other seagulls to squawk in protest, flapping their own wings against each other.

Shaun shook his head to himself, and started walking again. He was just being stupid, he told himself.

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