FRANGEA WAS paradise.
Honestly. It was. It said so in the brochures to be found at all flitterports across the Face of the World. Frangea knew how to put itself out there.
With one of the most pleasant of climates all year round, beaches a hundred miles long in great scallop-shaped bays, a restless sea with booming surf and the freshest of sea breezes, a healthy lifestyle was hard to avoid. It was a land of opportunity. It was also a land of opportunity's very near but slightly shady relative opportunism.
Octogenarians with perfect teeth and tans jostled with flawless beauties along boulevards brimming with luxury and impressively unnecessary must have goods. Very large men walked very small dogs and frisbee throwers could bring down seagulls with but a flick of the wrist, so practised were they, for leisure time seemed to be available all the time, if one sat around long enough to observe such things.
Most Frangeans were too energetic to do this however. If not group jogging, they were buying and selling, making and borrowing, and doing a few other things as well, for Frangea was the land of the free and easy.
And yet.
There was something in the air this particular Summer Pause.
Something other than the heavy aroma of burnt meat and melting rubber, salty beachcombers and spicy sponge cakes.
Something difficult to pinpoint, something frustratingly impossible to bottle and sell on a pop-up stall on the beachfront of Blossom Bay.
'Another bloody day in paradise,' Smudge tried to sum it up as he ransacked a waste bin for residual beer sippers. Like his fellow beachcombers he had a sensitive skin to the pervading atmosphere and as his small gang worked a section of the sea wall, they all of them sniffed the air with a certain apprehension.
'We missed a handout?' Glasseye croaked out. Her throat had been ruined by a lifetime of voluntary indulgence and enforced abstention but that did not prevent her having opinions even if they were devoid of depth perception.
'Nope,' Smudge assured her, then doubt assailed him at the thought. 'Hey, Crackey, we ain't missed a handout, have we?' he shouted across to a third colleague who resembled a bundle of animated seaweed as he rummaged among driftwood tossed up by a high tide.
'What's that you're saying?' the shambling figure responded, quivering a little as a jellyfish made a tentacled lunge at him from a tidal pool. There was an epic battle which the other two combers watched in complacent safety until the creature resumed its temporary home, leaving the stunned Crackey to stagger away in search of meaning to his life, his ganglia having been fried for the thousandth time in a long and weary existence.
'Still,' Glasseye said with a pained sniff that resembled a whistle, 'feels like something's missing hereabouts.'
'Know what you mean,' Smudge agreed in the way one befuddled individual might acknowledge the wisdom of another merely because words had been spoken in their hearing.
'What we need is a really good bonfire. Burn up all that driftwood. Hop and hustle round it in carefree delight and then sleep till dawn,' Glasseye croaked out with appalling enthusiasm.
'Didn't we do that yesterday?' Smudge said, trying to count things on his fingers.
'Bugger. We did.'
'Like I said, another bloody day in paradise,' Smudge admitted resignedly.
For some in certain staggers of life misery could take up home quite comfortably, put its feet up and relax, to all appearances as if it had been there all the time. Joy and gloom danced merrily hand in hand, inseparable partners. That helpless feeling could only be managed by a contrived sense of hope, self-delusion through therapy, or a highly lucrative life style.
There were Tinkers abroad that particular summer who subscribed to all three.