Chapter 8

A Northgate-on-Sea morning during the autumn season is usually static and morose. Sky rouses ocean, as a double energy, and the other way around, charging each other with beauty and redemption. Somehow. I often think about it. The relationship between both, how they manage to endure and find their unique balance. Life. I guess everyone who lives by the sea has wondered about this kind of things. 

Unless, of course, you don’t have that contemplative side, you know, and you are a part of the army of people who are always busy and running everywhere.

Willy Cliffs  —the opposite kind of person, I can’t simply see him joining any army in the world—, says ‘The key is resting on the horizon. You just have to be patient and then you see it. There. The balance.’

But I don’t know. 

Curiously, when I asked Avner, he kept silent for a while, as if he hadn’t hear my question at all. At first, I thought he was wondering and I waited. Thought he was going to answer eventually, but he didn’t. A couple of days went by and then he looked for me up on my tree house and said point blank ‘Listen, I’ve done my thinking about that question you put on the table the other day. Cliffs. The balance is on the cliffs’. Then he sighed and turned around and I could hear him saying before he disappeared ‘Why can’t you talk bullshit as the rest of us? No, you have to bring deep questions about balance and life… Jesus!’

But I wasn’t paying attention to his rumbling in the distance. My ear just lingered in the cliffs word and as a result I went to the only Cliffs I knew —this happened at the beginning here in Northgate— back then and repeated the same question. 

Willy Cliffs owns the local ice-cream shop at 54, Main Street. Original colour: electric blue. Not anymore, due to ‘colour alteration’, which is the most popular modern disease in Norhtgate nowadays, according to Avner. Before changing colours —at least now you know Olivia Harrington wasn’t the first, and I can easily foresee some more cases in the future, so she won’t be the last either—, Willy was on his way to becoming a celebrity, being able of making an ice-cream out of almost anything. Spare me the list of flavors, please. Suffice to say that he created a cloud ice-cream and a wave ice-cream, not to mention the happy ice-cream or the Lo-lee-ta ice-cream, which makes you feel like butterflies inside your palate when you taste it. I am sure you are aware about the beginning of the famous book by Nabokov, “the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” Very original, by the way, but not good enough for the Northgate summer taste, more into tutti-frutti and shit like that. Avner’s words, as a matter of fact.

Being a risk taker, a couple of years ago Willy surprised no one by keeping his wwwTidal-Ice.creams store open after summer and by finding the courage to hang his own paintings on its walls. He suddenly became the local painter with an exhibition under the name of ‘Cliffs’. Tony told me it was a series of canvasses about the famous rocky escarpments. Apparently, there was one with Pat’s boat-house and a fat green sun behind the yellow poles. Avner believes that the whole point of Willy’s painting at that stage of his carrier was in the colour alteration, ‘but I am no art critic at all’. I was curious about it and then Tony even showed me a photo with Willy’s paintings. Well, to my mind it was kind of poetic. Wish I’d been there, but it was before my time in Norhtgate. 

In any case, it is ironical that this beautiful painting was made by such an ugly man. No offense, but Willy is this one-blind-eyed guy —do you have a recollection of those flying eyes that assault you in your worst nightmares?— who uses thick glasses for his only good eye, his face mostly hidden behind a sparse patched beard. His skin seems old cracked leather and he has a crooked smile full of bad teeth and empty spaces. As a result, Willy is by all means the ugliest person I have ever seen, which is a lot. Staring at his face produces a sense of vertigo, as if you were about to jump from the top a high bridge. However, the pure understanding of the fact that he is —let’s say— unpleasant to see makes of him the most unprejudiced mind in Northgate-on-Sea at the same time. And, as I said before, perhaps the most contemplative.

Back to the story. In an almost unprecedented display of British sarcasm, Willy began to be known as Willy Cliffs when people in Northgate went and see this first painting exhibition and they realised that each and every one of the canvasses which hanged on the store was a variation of the Northgate’s cliffs with those strange colours and nothing else. Believe it or not, it was a strong disappointment seeing there was no other subject. As dogs, cows and ice-creams. And the colour thing, you know. Some said that it was a bit repetitive. No, ‘monotone’ was the word someone used. Had Avner been around, I would have said it was him. But he was in London by that time, I presume. Anyway, clever as Willy is, he made no fuss about it and he reacted painting his house with all the colours of his famous tutti-frutti ice-cream deconstruction, which was a must for tourists and the favorite one for a good Northgater. When asked, he shrugged and said that ‘monotone’ was a latinism meaning ‘one-colour’, which certainly made Willy’s point. Whatever it is. Something to do with colour alteration and identity? Who knows.

So when Avner said ‘Cliffs’ being the key to understanding the balance in Northgate, I went to Willy Cliffs right away and asked him. That’s when he said ‘Horizons’ and I wrote back that I thought the solution was the tide. ‘Tidals’, I wrote, ‘like your store’. Although Willy is normally so quick with the words, he stood still as if he was having a kind of stroke. His face transposed into an impossible grimace and I felt like I was going into free fall. I worried, of course, and I was about to call an ambulance, but after a while he came back to earth and asked ‘What did you say?’. 

So I repeated ‘Tidals’ and he —after another long pause— said ‘Do you mind if I take your idea? There’s something great on that thought of yours. I will credit you, of course’ and this is how we got to the present.

Now. 

I open the door and the bell rings and he turns around. Willy’s store is worth to be seen. He has made so many changes on it, but I guess the best one is when he decided to tear down the back-store wall and he decided to paint right in front of everybody. So whenever you enter the place, you can find him mixing colours, either for his delicious ice-creams or for his paintings. So everywhere you look you can see colours and colours, because he has covered the walls with strokes and dots and other forms of brushstrokes, as if his local were a gigantic palette. Do you have that Francis Bacon’s paint-room on your mind, don’t you? Bearing that in mind, please, imagine this messy thing and then tidy it up and pick a clean arty style and there you go: now you have the beautiful wwwTidal-Ice.creams store right before your eyes.

And this is the thing: Willy Cliffs is intending to arrange another exhibition soon. His third. No, he won’t show me the paintings. ‘They are almost ready, but I want them to be a surprise. Specially for you, my girl’.

Which makes me go back to the second one, titled ‘Winds’. It was interesting, if we are to trust Tony’s opinion; and a fucking disgrace, if we attend to the painter. Willy was disappointed to learn that Northgate doesn’t give a shit about art. Fortunately, one of the best things about Willy Cliffs is his almost total absence of memory. ‘I happen to forget almost anything. My best and worst side, at the same time’, I’ve heard him say.

‘Hey, girl! What can I do for you today? I know, I know, no need to write. You need a nice wwwTidal-Ice.creams ice-cream as a dessert, ‘cause you haven’t had time to cook your scones nor the triffle for that dinner you are preparing. Which is so nice of you, by the way, now that Avner is so busy and everything. And it’s great you haven’t baked anything, ‘cause one has to live after all, uh?’ 

And he starts to point at the new flavours and to explain to me how he has managed to capture the exquisite taste of a raindrop or the wonderful freedom of a rainbow. 

‘It wasn’t easy, I promise, but I am making progress, as well as with my new series. I am painting the key, my girl’. 

‘What key is that?’, I ask. I should have asked how the hell he knows about the dinner. But.

‘Well, the one you gave me once, of course’.

Silence.

I point at the vanilla ice cream. He shows his deception with a new sneer all over his picassian face.

‘So will you greet Avner and her fiancee for me, won’t you? And what about that Helen? What does she do for a living? Is she from London, like you?’

More silence.

‘That cheeky bastard of Avner boy. Who would have said…’

Here we go again.

© Enrique Armenteros Caballero, 2025

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