Hastings
11th July 2021
The night before I go to Hastings I meet my friends Harry - fresh from a breakup and visiting from Ireland - and Shon in Peckham and drink a lot of white wine and espresso martinis. We were in Bar Story which is a very nothing place to drink but which I continue to gravitate towards out of habit and nostalgia. It’s where the ex of mine from six years ago brought us when I was visiting London, before I’d moved over, for the happy hour which no longer exists. I get drunk enough with Harry and Shon that I lose my makeup bag which makes me pissed off and self-recriminating because I had just bought expensive MAC concealer and a brush to apply it with, like a professional does (I assume).
12th July 2021
In Charing Cross, before I get the train, I go to the dinky station Boots. One of the rituals I like about little domestic holidays like this one is the gathering of hygiene items I could have easily brought from home. It’s not that I’ve forgotten; I want to buy the miniature shampoos and face wipes and a new toothbrush. While I’m there I pick up some cheap stop-gap makeup to tide me over until I can be bothered to invest in nicer stuff, and realise the bag I lost also contained my only compact mirror. I choose the cheapest one to replace it and run to get the train, which is mostly empty because it’s a Monday afternoon.
When I’ve settled myself I take out all my beauty products and prepare to do my face, but then realise the mirror I’ve purchased is one of those mad magnified ones which people use for minute details like plucking individual stray hairs or doing perfect eyeliner. I gawp in appalled fascination at what my face looks like 16 times closer up than I usually view it. Harrowing, obviously, though only enough to amuse rather than genuinely depress me. I do my makeup like this, in tiny quarter inch increments, taking forever. At the end I take a selfie to see how I look from a normal perspective, outside of the fun house mirror, and I have to admit that I look at least twice as polished and beautiful as I usually would.
I am arriving to Hastings at 3pm, six hours ahead of my boyfriend. I briefly considered what to refer to him as here. It’s impossible to call him by an initial without being self- consciously literary, or sounding like I think I am in wartime correspondence. Then I think, who cares, and anyway if anyone was so desperate to know the identity of my boyfriend they could find out by doing some rudimentary Instagram foraging. So I’ll just call him by his name, which is Mike. Mike is working, so can’t come until the evening. In fact he proposed the week away as us going somewhere pretty to work together. I agreed to this while knowing it was unlikely I would do as much work as I do at home (which is to say already shamefully fewer hours than most people, or so I fear anyway) while staying somewhere new and stimulating.
When I get off the train a truly shocking rain and thunderstorm begins. On the fifteen minute journey to the apartment I’ve booked, my shitty bag - which I have unwisely stuffed to the seams - bursts and all my excitable lingerie and cocktail dresses are saturated instantly. I feel glad he isn’t there with me for this part. I would be consumed by anxious responsibility, as I always am having arranged something which then goes awry in any way, my fault or not. The apartment is astonishingly beautiful just by virtue of being painted all white and directly overlooking the sea, so that the whole front room hums and glows with something that feels more substantial than light.
Mike texts to say he has been able to leave earlier than expected and is not far behind me. I throw all my wet things in the miraculous tumble dryer I could never have foreseen and put on the only dry item of loungewear that remains, a pink slip. I take a picture of myself sitting in the hilarious huge egg-shaped chair which hangs from a tenuous chain in the centre of the room looking out toward the ocean and send it to him.
When he arrives he is on a work call and soaked through like I was. He kisses me despite being on the call which I find funny and nice. At some point in the afternoon while he is still working I go to the nearest shop for basic provisions and return with a variety pack of Kelloggs cereals which we had both agreed previously were the epitome of holiday glamour and while I wait to pay and get back to him and begin the week I feel incredibly good, incredibly lucky.
13th July
Today is Francisco’s birthday, one of my best friends. I spend a few minutes looking at old photos of us, smiling at them, to upload a selection to Instagram in a happy birthday post. I think it can be a bit obnoxious when someone wishes their friend happy birthday by posting a picture where they look really hot and the friend looks meh, but in almost all photographs of Francisco and I we both look stupid and pissed but very happy. I read and do some work on the couch for an hour or two. At one point Mike is on a Zoom meeting and I hear whoever he is speaking to ask “Are you in Hastings on your own?” and he says “No I’m with Megan,” and this makes me feel content; that I am a known character in his life.
I go out into the Old Town on my own while he continues to work. On my way I get a coffee and the receipt from Monzo comes up on my phone as “Crippled Badger Cafe” which I find funny and send him a screenshot of. I look around the antique shops and get a birthday card and a taxidermied screaming fish for Francisco. I buy a really pretty 1940’s dress in a vintage shop which is a perfect shape for my body though it is also undeniably a sort of puke green colour. I also buy Mike a copy of Life Studies by Robert Lowell because he likes to read poetry and I remember feeling very strongly about the poem “Man and Wife” in my early twenties.
In the evening we make Midsummer Pasta from the new Rachel Roddy cookbook A-Z of Pasta which is perfect and I take a picture of him with it, he’s wearing an endearing shirt and I feel soft and proud about him.
14th July
We go to the True Crime Museum which is amazingly bad, even for what you might expect it to be. The highlight is an exhibit of a monkey statue with the caption “Was it ever so exciting in the history of dogfighting as when into the Pit walked a monkey with a stick?”. The lowlight was an exhibit showing how tall different criminals are which refers to the killers of James Bulger as “Britain’s shortest killers”.
15th July
It’s my friend Crispin’s birthday today and Mike happens to have a book of Crispin’s poems here. I get him to take a photo of me in the egg chair holding the book so I can send it to Crispin as a birthday greeting. Mike takes the picture from such a position that he is visible in a mirror, shirtless and beaming at me, which makes us both laugh.
Later he buys me a novelty pen which can write in many different colours and says MEGAN on it. We eat pie in a pub and play gin rummy and are then both so tired we have to go lie down on the beach for a bit, where I place stones over his face and arms.
16th July
I fear playing crazy golf with him because I have such severely bad hand-eye coordination. I imagine I might stop the entire course from operating, but in the end I love it. The weather is unbelievable. I take several photographs of Mike sitting in the egg chair looking at the early evening light over the ocean. On the way to the fanciest dinner of our trip, we both look great and go into a photobooth to record this. Afterwards, back at the flat, we laugh a lot listening to The Turtles’ cover of “It Ain’t Me Babe” which is inappropriately upbeat and triumphant.
17th July
I put on my new swimsuit which is from a French company my friend Thea recommended to me after I admired hers. It cost a lot of money for what must be about 16 inches of fabric and strings but I like the way it makes me look. It’s rare to find clothing that I don’t think looks good because it makes me look slimmer than I really am. The swimsuit doesn’t make me look slim, in fact it emphasises the more articulated round parts of me, the parts which my brain automatically reads as “excessive”, but I think I look good, sexy in a way I didn’t think was a possibility until relatively recently. We go to another beach which involves a decent amount of climbing up and down steep gradients. It is very hot. I was not prepared for exertion and am out of breath and angry at my backpack and embarrassed for Mike to see me so put out and flustered.
18th July
We decide it would be cute to split up for an hour and go buy each other trinkets in the many curio shops. I chide myself preemptively not to take it too seriously and get a couple of jokey things related to gags we have made over the past few days. When we reunite and exchange the gifts, I am shocked that he has found me genuinely thoughtful, lovely things. Amongst some smaller bits, he’s gotten me a really beautiful art deco compact mirror to replace my lost one, and a delicate gold chain necklace with a blue charm on it the colour of the sea, also his eyes. Because he is maybe a little less naturally verbally expressive than I am, I kept thinking toward the beginning of knowing him that I needed to be careful and guarded about how I felt, what he means to me, but I feel less like that every day now. Earlier in the relationship we stayed in a Royal Marriott together and I teased him after I saw the keycard in his room a while later. I said, are you keeping it for your scrapbook? The next time I saw him he had a present for me, a mug he had gotten made up with an image of the Royal Marriott keycard tiled around it, it was amazing how much it made me laugh but also happy in the other way, and I think that was when it felt safe to let myself start to trust him.
I found it very shocking how terrified I was by the situation at first, and how angry that fear made me. I thought before I met this man that I had successfully transcended all the emotional squalour of relationships, that I could never be made truly vulnerable again, and to have that idea disproved with such violence and alacrity made me furious. Not at him, just at the possibility, all the potentiality for misery and tragedy which had now been made revisible to me. And not just the idea that he is capable of hurting me, which of course he is, but the new inescapable burden of his own vulnerability. When he went away on a work trip for a week I was anxious and unable to relax until he returned, imagining plane crashes and shark attacks and exploding buildings. Another person in my life towards whom I now think “Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die” and more urgently because I’ve only just got to meet him, there’s so much else to do, to know.
Maybe it’s only because I’m not being paid to write this that I’m able to say these things about him. Any other way would feel all wrong.
On the 19th of July he leaves very early in the morning to get back for work and I eat two boxes of the Kellogg's variety pack and feel sad and fortunate.
Megan Nolan is a writer.