âThis fashionable watering-place, with its eastern and its western stations, its piers, its groves of pines, its promenades, and its covered gardens, was [âŠ] like a fairy place, suddenly created by the stroke of a wand, and allowed to get a little dusty. An outlying eastern tract of the enormous Egdon Waste was close at hand, yet on the very verge of that tawny piece of antiquity such a glittering novelty as this pleasure city had chosen to spring upâ - Thomas Hardy, Tess of the dâUrbervilles
The zig-zag path was one of the only things I remembered from my last trip to Bournemouth, taken when I was eight years old. The path led from the beach, past thickets of gorse, to the Victorian clifftop mansions which had been converted into B & Bs or subdivided into flats.
Our holiday apartment was one of them. It was decorated with rich blues and golds and a cow-print rug. The bedroom lights were blue, too, glowing eerily like UFOs in the dark. The bedroom had vast windows through which you could stare at the hotel opposite, old couples breakfasting on the balcony in the bracing morning air.
I was staying there with two schoolfriends, Jahnavi and Ramiya. The trip was supposed to be a reunion with our other friend, Ash, who had spent the past year in the Antipodes. But sheâd met us at Waterloo Station with a stricken expression, explaining that she was too ill to join us. So it was just the three of us, parodying the other trips weâd made over the past year, happy in each otherâs company but also somehow incomplete.
On the first night, we walked along the beach to Sandbanks and drank rosĂ© while staring out to sea. Then we got a taxi back to town, had more drinks at a cocktail bar, and fell asleep in the enormous master bed while eating jalapeño-flavoured crisps and watching Emily in Paris. The episode didnât make any sense.
I have a postcard from the Russell-Cotes Museum, which we visited on our last day. It shows a painting titled, somewhat unimaginatively, âCockatoos, Toucan, Macaw and a Parrot.â I bought it because it reminded me of the aviary weâd walked part on the way up to the museum, full of colourful rescued birds. It also reminded me of the museum itself, which had quirky Victorian architecture inspired by the ownersâ travels, bright stained glass, and melodramatic paintings that filled entire walls.
On the back of the postcard I wrote, âI remembered the zig-zag path up the cliff, and we even went past the Build-A-Bear workshop where I got my Build-A-Bear.â Memories from an earlier trip to Bournemouth, when we came to stay with my uncle who doesnât live there anymore. A futon mattress; fish and chips in the rain; my uncle sitting cross-legged on the bottom of the swimming pool, holding his breath, like a sunken statue.
I feel like Iâve been friends with Jahnavi and Ramiya forever, but the last time I walked the zig-zag path, I didnât even know them. I still have the Build-A-Bear somewhere. I used to sleep with her in my bed, but sometimes when I rolled over in the night sheâd creep me out with her artificial heartbeat.
We got the train home at the end of the day, walking up the hill through town to the station as the fields and cliffs and sea disappeared into nothingness behind us. And the train rolled away towards London.
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