It’s not a place you’d find by accident. Or rather, it’s not a place you’d want to find by accident. Some people make pilgrimages here, black-clad and weighed down by rucksacks full of books, but these people know to be gone by dark. Those who find the place without meaning to, glad of food and warmth on an empty road, they soon wish they’d followed their satnavs somewhere else - but nothing that happens to them is worse than the proprietor’s suffering.
Howard Philip Lovecraft, tall and sallow, stands behind the counter and wonders which of his sins he is tormented for. He greets each customer, bowing slightly, placing a copy of the menu in front of them. He hasn’t aged since he started here and although his Rhode Island accent has faded, his manners, and his mannered manner have remained. He grinds his teeth when someone uses a mobile phone. He objects to the rudeness of his customers, their ignorance of good behaviour. He cannot stand the world he finds himself in, how noisy it is.
Despite Howard’s hard work, it’s not much of a restaurant. He keeps the Formica tables and plastic chairs as clean as possible but however hard he tries the surfaces are always sticky. The salt clumps together and must be replaced weekly. Food wilts in the fridge and it’s only regular deliveries from a mouth-breathing man with flabby jowls that keeps the larders supplied. Sometimes Howard questions this man, sure he must know something, that someone must be paying for the food, but the driver pretends not to hear him. He has arrived every other day without fail, never ageing, the same as Howard.
Each morning Howard wakes and considers his predicament. He closed his eyes in 1937, praying to an empty universe that it would be for the last time: then opened them to find himself somewhere he didn’t know, his life continuing with no meaning or reason. He walked downstairs to discover the restaurant and felt compelled to maintain and serve it. He had no choice but to clean the room and open for business. He learned from his first customers where he was – by a small road on England’s south coast, just off the A259. He’d never left North America in his life and could not understand why he should be here. Surely, if this is hell, it must mean something?
He hates the customers and shudders at the thought of touching warm coins that have festered in their pockets. When handing back change he avoids contact with them, dropping money into their palms from inches above. Sometimes the coins drop and scatter and he must scramble to collect them, sweating and apologising. He loathes cleaning dirty plates, rinsing cutlery that has been in their mouths. One night he’d stood outside and broken every piece of crockery, taking great care over each one. Next morning the floor of the dining area was covered by damp footprints and the shelves had been restocked with new plates and bowls.
Often he enters the restaurant in the morning to be greeted by a strong smell of the sea. Some days are worse and he finds claw marks on the walls and some of the cutlery chewed and broken. Other days he finds dead rats outside the door, with no injuries to be seen. But he keeps a good place, despite the effort required: slime gathers on the underside of the tables, mould streaks the windows if they are not wiped each day. In the worst nightmares of his first life, the ones he used for his writing, there was always some logic, even if no more than hostility and hunger. Howard wonders what is gained by him wasting days serving coffee and clearing up dead flies?
Sometimes, after closing, he would walk towards the sickly yellow glow of Hastings. But, after a mile or two, Howard always finds himself back at the restaurant. He’d lived a life of little – what had he done to deserve this? It wasn’t the despair he wrestled with. Rather, it was hope with which he struggled each night, resisting the possibility he might wake to an explanation – or that he would not wake at all. He wishes the world would disappear, but instead it lingers like a guest who will not leave. Has he truly been here over seventy years, never growing older? Or maybe he has imagined that time, just as he might have imagined that first life in Rhode Island?
Many writers suffer similar fates. Jorge Luis Borges fills cars at a petrol station in Hayling Island. William Burroughs works in a travel agency in Wolverhampton, but he is certain this is punishment and that he deserves it. Philip K. Dick marks off consignments on a clipboard in a Morecambe warehouse. If these men were to meet they might figure out what had happened to them. But they are condemned to their own private hells, no way to escape.
Eat at Lovecraft's by James Burt was read by Becky Hands-Wickes at the Liars' League Crime & Punishment event on Tuesday 9 September, 2008
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