The Professor of Desire Presents

…and?

…and?

…and?

ACT I

That’s how you do it.

Before—before the fish and the fairgrounds, before the Punch and Judy and the Pier—Charley had rather liked the shipping forecast. It broadcast four times a day. He made it his business to try and catch all four. On days when he slept too late to tune into the earliest, at 05h20, he went through the day muddled and disappointed until the 12h01 broadcast set him to rights. His favorite was the last of the night, at 00h48, because of the music.

He can’t listen to the forecast in the station, obviously, in case the sound scrambles or otherwise obscures the transmission. He does it in his head, instead.

He goes through all the regions, Viking through Fastnet, Irish Sea to Southeast Iceland. He pays special attention to the forecast he makes for Wight and Dover, because those are closest to Brighton, where he lives in a secret room in the wrought iron cupola of the less-popular West Pier, and spends his days monitoring the continual, meaningless transmission of continual, meaningless numbers over the long-range wireless. His room, which is small, nonetheless has two roundish windows from which he can see outside. One faces inland, to the rocky beach and holidaymakers in their beach huts and deckchairs. The other looks out over the waters. He’s always pleased when he does the forecast right.

Charley has worked at the numbers station for some years. He didn’t seek it out. It happened to him. Most things in life seem to happen to him without his conscious input or desire. The man who offered him the job—older, with stern grey hairs at the temple and the unmistakable whiff of the City in the cut of his suit—must have seen something of the numbers in Charley, when he sought him out at Lime Street station. It’s the first and only time in his life that someone has wanted him in this way.

Still, he’s proud of his work.

His mum thinks he works in a bank. She’s proud of his work, too, though she doesn’t understand why he has to be so far away. There’s plenty banks in Liverpool, after all, and then he could still come home for his Sunday lunch.

My Charley’s ever so good with numbers.

In a way, she’s right.

Charley believes in the bodiless anonymity of numbers. The rise and fall of radio waves, the patterns that perpetuate themselves. He understands, abstractly, the way he understands most things, that he ought to care about what the numbers are doing. What they stand for, where they’re going.

What he does care about is that they make it there with a minimum of fuss. He aspires to be that minimum of fuss. If he could, he would disappear into those oceanic currents of information, sink below that surface and swim.

The sound is echoey and big, like being in a cathedral. The disc is starting to pick up a scratch in the middle of the recording, a raspy hitch after “O hear us when we cry to thee.” For the briefest moment, a drowning sailor’s fate hangs in the balance. Then, the needle catches.

A reel-to-reel machine records Charley’s transmission. It will rebroadcast the recording until the next telegram. Sometimes the reel-to-reel picks up distant, tinny echoes of the Wurlitzer organ and carnival barkers, the music of the Palace Pier’s helter-skelter and carousel. No one has ever told Charley to worry about this, so he doesn’t.

The rest of his time is his own.

Some of that time needs must be taken up in the business of everyday life, of course. Visiting the baths, the shops. Picking up the envelope of his wages (distinctly modest, but sufficient to his modest needs) from a left-luggage locker at the station.

Sometimes men come alone, hunched at first, tentatively rising as their lungs fill with sea air and their ears with the gulls’ harsh cries.

Charley responds to the feeling of men’s eyes on him. His movements become a little more deliberate as he tries to slip between the edges of their attention. He thinks they want his bag, the contents of his slim envelope. He doesn’t recognize his own awkward grace, his self-consciousness that reads as a performance. Charley believes, more or less, that because he’s never wanted anyone, no one in turn has ever wanted him.

But just because he doesn’t understand the slantwise invitation in the men’s eyes and hands and hips, doesn’t mean he isn’t curious.

Glub, glub.

This isn’t the first time he’s followed someone like this.

This is what Charley does, when he’s not in his room on the pier, alone with his endless numbers. He is Britain’s foremost naturalist of human desires. And where better to conduct his study than in Brighton, 1964, where someone is wanting something—desperately—all the time, and sometimes they even get it, too.

Charley has watched children at the coconut shy, winning and losing. He has cataloged their ecstasy and their heartbreak, the way that their faces crumple into wet, fleshy misery when they lose.

Charley has watched women at the tombola, clutching their tickets in sweaty hands till the card tears, mouthing the numbers, knowing-just-knowing that this time is it, the big score. Their number up, their ship come in.

He has watched schoolgirl pashes rise and fall. Young couples on their honeymoons, families. First kisses on the deckchairs, last kisses outside the theater. He watched, with uncharacteristic fascination, the day when the usual hassle between mods and rockers turned incendiary, blossoming into a pitched battle that spanned the beach from Brighton to Hove and resulted in no small amount of property damage; though not his property, so it was easy enough not to care about that, at least.

He’s no naïf. He’s seen all that and more, too. Teenage romance blossoming under the boardwalk, her skirts around her waist and her eyes all aflutter, him coming off into her hand, or too early, or not at all.

He watched, once, while a group of boys no older than fifteen beat a grown man for his wallet.

Esca…esca…risen…risen…

ACT II

Down in the lanes, he loses the stranger. Charley peers into windows, glances down alleys, but there’s no sign of his quarry. The atmosphere changes, becomes oppressive, like a gathering storm. He’s been here before, of course he has. Brighton’s not so big as all that. But he’d swear he’s never seen these shops before, these dark-curtained pubs. He keeps hearing snatches of something, like a half-familiar song, a hymn remembered from a childhood of churchgoing, the echo of the stranger’s non-language.

A fug of tobacco and hash and sour sweat hang in the air, a chlorinated stink. A twilit carnival world apart from the bright, clean blue and gold of the seashore and pier. And yet the sea is just on the other side of this looming darkness, its salty sweep constantly brushing against his ears.

Alone in a chaos, Charley feels the boundaries of his self dissolve. He staggers. The assault on his sensorium disorients. His mouth fills with a thick taste: salt, silt, mucous.

Their glassy eyes, the moist sheen of their skin, remind Charley of the jellies that breach and die on the rocky beach.

From behind, Charley hears laughter. The sound of Brighton, the sound of the seaside, of the summer. But it’s close, very close. It presses on Charley. Him on his knees, his trousers becoming wet and sticky with assorted effluvia: perhaps they are laughing at him.

But then: the familiar sound of the slapstick and swazzle as the Professor begins Punch’s song.

With his left hand, the Professor makes Punch caper, too. His nose and chin hook towards each other, gleefully malicious, leering. The little cap on his head bounces, to-fro, to-fro as he moves. His right hand, fisting Judy, lies silent against the far side of the stage. Desire, violence, dysfunction. A pattern perpetuating across time and space. And yet, behind all that, Punch and Judy are forever linked: two pieces of one whole, the same electricity animating each to move upon the other. Even to hurt, even to hurt.

They claim the boardwalk, they pack the piers till bursting. They dance and thrust and fuck until the West Pier vibrates, until it sparks and smoulders and shakes apart.