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Where the Brass Band Plays

by Katie McIvor

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The day I found seaweed on my sister’s shoes was the beginning of the end, for me as well as her. I grabbed her by the shoulders as she tried to scoot past me into the house. “Audrey, where’ve you been? Were you at the beach?”

She looked behind her. At the green-slimed tennis shoes she’d left by the front door, with brownish globules of air bladders squished between the laces. A frown creased her little face.

“A bunch of us went,” she said, in the high-pitched whine she always adopted when she was being defensive. “Just along the shore a bit. It’s not a big deal.”

I crouched so our faces were level. “Audrey, you don’t go near the beach. Not without me or Dad. Okay?”

“O-kay, Ve-ra,” she sing-songed. She was only seven, and I couldn’t always tell if she was being sarcastic.

She ducked around me and slipped into the kitchen. I heard her greeting Dad. I heard the comforting rumble of his big deep voice asking her how school had been, and I stared after her with an ache that was half-panic and half-dread clenching my guts.

---

We left Dad at the kitchen table the next morning. That was where he spent most of his time since we lost Mum, and in some ways it was better than before, when he always used to be out at the factory, but in some ways it was worse. Even Audrey had given up asking when he was going back to work.

I had cleaned the slime off Audrey’s shoes, but you could still see the greeny-black stains on the fabric, like the ghost of a wave left behind at the high tide line.

We avoided the promenade. It meant taking a longer route, but I was fine with that. I sniffed at the oily air, with its perpetual refinery stink. This used to be a nice town, back when Mum and Dad were kids. People came here on holiday. Nowadays, the sea swamped the polluted shore, and the streets were dingy and salt-crumbled. Only the Dreamers could find anything good to say about this place.

A group of them stood outside the old sweet shop. Smiling, sun-hatted Dreamers. I took Audrey’s hand and crossed the road to avoid them, but I could feel Audrey twisting around, trying to see what they were doing.

It was Dad who’d started calling them Dreamers. He said it in a sneering kind of way, and it made them sound stupid when he said it, like they were on a par with the workshy benefits scroungers he read about in his newspapers. But I wished he’d picked a different name. Dreamer sounded so happy, so poetic. Wouldn’t you rather be stuck in a dream, after all, than stuck in a nightmare?

“Vera, can we go in?” Audrey said.

“What?”

“The sweet shop,” she whined. “They’ve got those big swirly lollipops.”

I whipped round. A couple of the Dreamers glanced at me, their expressions friendly, vacant. In their hands were glooping, mould-furred lumps of grey that might once have been sugar.

From the end of the street, a snatch of music blew towards us on the reeking air, and I growled.

“Audrey,” I said, bending down to stare into her face, “they don’t have lollipops. They don’t have any lollipops. Do you hear me?”

Her face crumpled. Before she could start crying, I yanked on her hand and marched off towards the school, ignoring the gentle, sympathetic giggles from the Dreamers behind us.

---

I never liked school, even before Mum disappeared. Since then it had only gotten worse. About half the kids in my class were Dreamers now. Connie, who used to sit next to me, was one of the first to change. I think the teachers must have understood how hard that was for me, because they let me switch seats without comment. Some of the teachers were Dreamers too. These days, I sat near the back and watched Connie gossiping with the other Dreamer girls, swapping hair ribbons or planning trips to the ice cream parlour or whatever it was they did. I didn’t have any friends at school any more, because what was the point?

At lunchtime the little kids hopscotched along the side of the rusty fence, holding sticks in their hands and pretending to eat candy floss off the snapped ends.

I followed Audrey after school. She and her friends walked home in a group, which was normally fine because a few of them lived on our street, but after yesterday I didn’t trust her. I trailed behind them towards the promenade. Her friends squealed at the sight of the oil- marbled water lapping the sides of the old arcade. They ran down into the shallows. Up to their shins in tepid, grey-brown sludge, they laughed and scooped up foam, as though trying to build sandcastles.

When she came out, Audrey’s hands were green with algae, and ropes of bladderwrack had wrapped themselves around her ankles like chains.

I didn’t know whether to storm down there and make a scene. Would yelling at her in front of her friends make her see sense, or would it only make things worse? I’d yelled at Connie enough times. Shaken her, grabbed her by the arms, pleaded until hot, acid tears burned my throat. Just stop it, Con. It’s not real. Can’t you see none of it’s real?

Instead I stood by the old chip shop, watching Audrey and her friends splash away down the promenade towards home.

A whispered snatch of music made my blood freeze. An old-timey voice, wavering, warbling and faint: Oh I dooo like to beee beside the seeeea-siiiiide…

“Go away,” I whispered out loud.

The seagulls screamed over what used to be the beach.

“Not Audrey,” I said. I clenched my fists and stared furiously out at the water. “Not Audrey, okay? Leave her alone.”

Someone snorted behind me. I gave a small, stupid squeal of surprise. When I turned, it was only one of the starving, flea-specked donkeys that used to carry laughing children up and down the dunes. The donkeys were abandoned to roam wild when their stables flooded. Most of them had drifted off to live on the moors, but a few were still trailing around town, living off scraps and leaving worm-infested droppings all over the pavements.

I was about to walk away when I heard the snort again. It wasn’t the donkey; it was a human-sounding snort, like someone trying to stifle their laughter. In the alleyway, a knee-high shape was moving. Two of them. Their shadows jerked and twisted in the flicker of the streetlight.

“Poor little girl,” said a distorted voice, the voice of an actor holding his nose while he spoke. “Poor little girl doesn’t know what’s real and what’s not!”

The puppet hobbled out of the alley. His face was unnaturally red: chin, nose, cheeks, all were the same aggressive, sun-burned red as his pointed hat. His red-haired wife followed behind him.

“She doesn’t know?” said Judy. “Punch, what do ya mean she doesn’t know?”

I shut my eyes. Clenched my eyelids hard together. When I opened them, the puppets were still there, their little immobile plastic hands held over their faces, mocking me.

“Your little sister knows,” said Mr Punch. “She’s not stupid! Ahahahahaha.”

“Ahahahahaha,” said Judy.

I took a step closer, thinking that would scare them away. Instead, they both lurched towards me. Their eyes were dead and empty, strained wide between painted lids. I turned and ran, splashing through scummy puddles, and the seagulls overhead screamed at me as though I’d done something wrong.

---

I didn’t go home. I didn’t want to be around Audrey, didn’t want to see the seaweed trailing unnoticed from her ankles and the blank happiness bubbling inside her eyes. I couldn’t lose her as well. I couldn’t.

I climbed the abandoned pier and picked my way between rotting wooden boards to the far end. There were signs saying DANGER and KEEP OUT, but most of them had been torn down by the Dreamers, who liked to come out here and pretend to play on the broken merry-go-round or the listing, peeling helter-skelter. Today, though, I had the pier to myself. I dangled my legs over the side and stared down into the foamy water that lapped the pillars only a few feet below me.

The jellyfish stared back.

There were more and more of them every year. Even in the winter, with the warming water to sustain them, they swarmed the coast and washed up in toxic, glistening puddles all along the promenade. They were bigger every year, as well. While other fish and crabs and birds succumbed to the poison in the ecosystem, the jellies thrived.

From up here, they looked like giant blind eyeballs, unblinking and bobbing in their translucent bells.

The jellyfish were the real reason I wouldn’t go near the beach any more. Nobody knew for sure what had happened to Mum, but if she did go into the sea, there was a good chance the jellies had got her. You’d have to be insane to swim in that water. With jellies that big, just a few stings could be enough to send you into shock.

What I hated most about them, though, was that they never attacked the Dreamers. Only the sane among us had to worry about being stung. Dreamers could swim with their children in the old tidal pool, which was now always full to the brim, even at low tide, and the pram-sized jellyfish floated peaceably among them like great harmless globs of snot. The Dreamers weren’t aware of them, and the jellies seemed unaware of the Dreamers, too.

I spat into the murky water, hoping to hit one of the jellyfish, but the yellow foam was so thick I couldn’t even see where my spit had landed.

---

I didn’t say anything to Audrey when I got home. I didn’t want Dad to worry. Audrey kept shooting me guilty looks during dinner, but I ignored her.

After she’d gone to bed, I sat with Dad in the dark kitchen. He was watching the shapes on the television, which he’d moved in here after Mum disappeared so we wouldn’t have to sit on the sagging sofa without her. I was trying to decide whether I should tell him about Audrey. I’d cleaned her shoes again so he wouldn’t notice. The bladderwrack I’d found clogged in the plughole after she’d had her bath. Its salty smell clung inside my nostrils. In the end, I went to bed without saying anything.

The squawky nasal voice woke me in the middle of the night. He was singing, right beside my ear, “Oh I do like to stroll along the prom, prom, prom, where the brass band plays tiddly-om-pom-pom.”

I couldn’t move. I lay there trembling, hoping he would go away.

“Does it make you feel big and clever?” squeaked Judy in my other ear. “D’you want to be the only one left? And you won’t be, anyway. It’s the first sign, you know, talking to us.”

“Go away,” I tried to say, but it came out as a whimper.

“Your sister is happier,” said Mr Punch through his oversized nose. “She’s smiling. She hasn’t smiled since your mum ran off, has she?”

“She didn’t,” I choked, “she never – ”

“Oh, she did,” squealed Judy. “Your mum ran off to be with us, Vera. Because she couldn’t stand it any more. The doom and the gloom and the – ”

“Boom and the ba-doom and the om-pom-pom!” finished Mr Punch.

“Go away!”

“Oh, away we’ll go,” said Mr Punch, and his grinning face rose up above my bed, his nose and cheeks and chin flaring red through the darkness, “to a place we know, where the cockleshells are found!”

I shut my eyes. It was just a bad dream, I told myself. I wouldn’t open them again until the morning.

In the morning, a row of cockleshells lay broken apart on my windowsill, and the yellow-tongued creatures inside had slopped out to die in puddles of slime on the hot, flaking paint.

---

Dad was in the kitchen, making pancakes. He had his sleeves rolled up. The smell made me feel ten years old again, like the safe, happy, comfortable child I used to be. On Saturdays, Mum always used to have a lie in while Dad kept us entertained with pancakes and the children’s programmes on TV.

I sat at the kitchen table and hugged my knees, wishing Mum really was upstairs in bed. Opposite me, Audrey hummed along to the radio, her hair shining in the morning sun.

“Here we are,” said Dad. “Your favourite.”

He said it a little tentatively, as though he couldn’t quite remember. The plate of blueberry pancakes he put in front of me smelled so good I almost smiled. Then I looked down and saw that his trouser legs were rolled up too, right up around his knees, and the gaps between his toes were crusted with damp brown sand.

My stomach went cold.

Audrey chattered away as she ate, syrup dribbling down her chin. She and Dad were laughing about something while he drank his grapefruit juice.

I couldn’t speak. I picked at my food, then told Audrey we were going for a walk. “Get your coat.”

“But it’s sunny,” she said.

“It might rain later.”

“That’s my Vera,” Dad said. “Always the pessimist.” He ruffled my hair, smiling, though there was a faint look of puzzlement in his eyes.

“We won’t be long, Dad.”

“Be back for lunch,” he said. “I was thinking fish and chips.”

While I waited for Audrey, he unfolded one of the old stripy deck chairs and positioned it in the middle of the overgrown lawn, with a view down towards the refinery. I glanced back at him over the garden wall as we left. He had his newspaper spread across his lap, a fresh cup of tea in one hand, and a red cotton handkerchief over his head to keep the sun off his bald patch.

“Lovely day, girls,” said our neighbour, Mrs Seaton.

I ignored her – Mum had stopped speaking to Mrs Seaton years ago, when her family first became Dreamers – but Audrey piped up, “Vera thinks it’ll rain later.”

“Oh, really, Vera,” chuckled Mrs Seaton. “On a day like this!”

“Pollution and rising temperatures create unpredictable weather patterns,” I said coldly.

Mrs Seaton leaned on her washing line and laughed until we had rounded the corner.

“Where are we going?” Audrey said.

“I want to show you some stuff. And I want you to really think about it, really seriously. Can you do that for me?”

Audrey cocked her head. For a moment I expected a sarcastic, sing-song reply, but then she said, in a small, solemn voice that sounded tired beyond her years, “I’ll try, Vera.”

“Okay.” I felt awkward. “Good girl.”

We started with the tidal pool. Despite the blistering weather, there were no swimmers today. I crouched on the crumbling wall and pointed.

“Can you see those jellyfish?”

Audrey shuddered. “Big, horrible ones.”

“That’s right.”

“Loads of yucky see-through legs.”

“Tentacles. Yes. Can you see them floating around?”

Audrey peered into the water, concentrating. She said slowly, “I can… kind of see them. But they’re like ghosts. Like big, pale ghosts under the water.”

My chest felt tight. Below us, a particularly big and mean-looking jelly drifted as though watching us, its lucent, gelatinous bell held steady in the lapping waves.

I took Audrey along the promenade. Every few paces, I had to pull her arm to keep her from walking straight into the oily puddles flooding the pavement. At the far end, she sniffed the air and her eyes lit up.

“Fish and chips!”

“No, Audrey. Look.” I pointed at the old chip shop’s boarded-up door, at the sheets of newspaper pasted over its windows. “It’s shut, see? It’s been shut for years.”

“But Dad said we could get fish and chips for lunch.”

“I know.” My throat closed up.

I took her along the old pier. We stood by the railing, the thick, salty wind billowing out our clothes. Audrey screwed up her eyes. “Can’t you ever see any of the nice things, though, Vera?”

“Like what?”

“The… the sliders. Ice cream sliders. We got some after school the other day. The ice cream goes in between the wafers, and it kind of slides around while you’re eating it, and if you don’t eat it fast enough – ”

“I know what sliders are.” My voice was iron-hard and heavy. “Nobody sells them here any more.”

“Yes, they do.” Audrey blinked innocently. “We got them from the stall by the arcade.”

“There is no stall by the arcade.”

“Yes, the one with the – ”

“Audrey, look. Look.” I gripped her shoulders and pointed her gaze towards the abandoned arcade, its corrugated walls vomiting paint flakes into the sea. “There’s nothing there.”

I couldn’t see her face from behind, but I felt her beginning to cry. Her shoulders twitched, then lurched, then twisted out of my hands. She ran back across the swollen, wobbling boards.

“Audrey!”

I chased after her. She was fast for a little kid, and her neon-yellow raincoat was disappearing down the steps to the promenade before I had even rounded the helter-skelter. I cursed and sped up, my feet skidding on long arms of kelp which had thrown themselves across the pier.

Halfway down the steps, Punch and Judy were waiting for me. They spread their arms and danced from side to side, blocking my way. Their mouths opened wide, teeth bared, ready to sing. I snarled at them.

“Ohhhh IIIIII doooo – ”

“Leave me alone!”

I lunged at Punch. His hat came off; underneath, his head was shiny and bald and red, like he’d fallen asleep in the full sun. I grabbed a fistful of his red jacket. The material felt wet and squishy, warm as though alive, and somehow slimy. I lifted him off the ground, and his painted eyes stared at me, through me, dead and unseeing and inanimate.

At my feet, Judy had fallen still.

I dropped Punch and ran down the steps. Audrey was gone. I crossed the promenade, crashing through ankle-deep water, and yelled her name. A small voice in the back of my mind whispered, insistently, that she had gone into the sea, just like Mum, but I shut it off. Audrey wouldn’t do that. She knew she wasn’t allowed in the sea.

For the next hour, I searched all over town. I looked in the alley where I’d seen the donkey, ran all round the school playground, and peered through the windows of the old sweet shop. Whenever I spotted any Dreamers, I raced up to them and asked if they’d seen my little sister in her yellow raincoat, but they just smiled and laughed, as though I was playing a game. The sun had drowned under hot, boiling clouds that swarmed across the sky like an algal bloom. As I ran up the low hill towards the bandstand, it started to rain.

The bandstand was where we used to go with Mum. On Saturday afternoons, she would take us for a walk along the beach, buy us ice lollies, and then head up to the bandstand, where a local brass band played every week during the summer. They played all her favourites: Oh I Do Like To Be Beside the Seaside, Strawberry Fair, the Radetsky March, and others I didn’t know the names of. I hadn’t been back up there since she disappeared.

In the rain, the bandstand looked almost normal. Deserted, quiet, decaying, just as it was all winter before the men came round with fresh paint ahead of the Easter Fair. But this year, nobody was coming with paint. The Dreamers didn’t bother with things like that, because they couldn’t see the damage and decay. To them, the bandstand would always be perfect, always pristine and new and clean, no matter how badly it crumbled apart in reality.

One of the boards beside the steps had fallen off. Beyond, in the dim, stale space beneath the bandstand, I could see a yellow raincoat.

I crawled through the hole. Sitting next to her among the dried-out rabbit droppings, with the rain pattering above us, I put my arms around my sister and hugged her tight. Her face was puffy with tears.

“I’m sorry, Vera,” she mumbled.

“No, I’m sorry,” I said. “Really. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“I just… I can’t see those things. Or I don’t want to. They’re sad. Why would I want to make myself sad all the time?”

I cuddled her, trying to think, looking for a way to explain. “But don’t you want to live in the real world, Audrey?”

She said, “What if they’re both real?”

I thought about this. What if they were both real? A world where the future was collapsing, the water was polluted, and the jellyfish had stung our mother to death – or a world where the past was ever-golden, the sun always shone, and the little children could play forever in the warm, safe sea?

What if I was the one who’d got it wrong? And even if I wasn’t, I thought, I should have learned by now that you can’t control how other people see the world.

“I’ll try, Audrey,” I found myself saying. “I don’t believe in it, but I’ll try.”

She squirmed her snotty face into my shoulder.

“I just want you to be happy,” I whispered.

“Look,” she said. “It’s sparkly.”

From up here, we could see the sea, the wide open stretch of it, with the town hidden by the curve of the hill. The sun was trying to break back through the rainclouds and had cast a swathe of thick, mustardy light across the water. And Audrey was right: the water was sparkling. If you looked at it just right, it sparkled.

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Host Commentary

PseudoPod, Episode 978.

Where the Brass Band Plays, by Katie McIvor

Narrated by Eliza Chan; hosted by Scott Campbell audio by Chelsea Davis

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Hey everyone, hope you’re all doing okay. I’m Scott, Assistant Editor at PseudoPod, your host for this week, and I’m excited to tell you that for this week we have Where the Brass Band Plays, by Katie McIvor. This story is a PseudoPod original.

Author bio:
Katie McIvor is a Scottish writer. She studied at the University of Cambridge and now lives in the Scottish Borders with her husband and baby daughter. Her short fiction has appeared in magazines including The Deadlands, The Dark, and PodCastle. You can find her on Bluesky @mckatie.bsky.social, Twitter @_McKatie_ or on her website at katiemcivor.com.

Narrator bio:
Eliza Chan is a writer and occasional narrator of speculative fiction. It amuses her endlessly that people find her Scottish accent soothing. Her #1 Sunday Times bestselling debut novel FATHOMFOLK and sequel TIDEBORN— inspired by mythology, East and Southeast Asian cities and diaspora feels — are out now from Orbit. Her short fiction has been published in The Dark, Podcastle, Fantasy Magazine and The Best of British Fantasy. When not working on her current novel or reading, Eliza can be found boardgaming, watching anime, toddler wrangling and dabbling in crafts.

Find her on instagram @elizachanwrites or on her website www.elizachan.co.uk.

Now, the candy floss may not be real but the story we have for you, we promise you, it’s true.

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Well done, you’ve survived another story. What did you think of Where the Brass Band Plays by Katie McIvor? If you’re a Patreon subscriber, we encourage you to pop over to our Discord channel and tell us.

Here what Katie said about this story: “This story grew out of the feeling that we live in an increasingly polarised world. More than at any time I can remember, it seems as though people exist in different realities, regarding not just one issue but many. Politics, climate change, gender distinctions, public health – it can be isolating and even traumatizing to realize that the people around you see the world so differently to the way you see it. At times, it can feel as if you’re going mad. This story ties that sense of isolation to the continuing decay of the UK’s once-bustling seaside towns, and to the ongoing problem of coastal pollution.”

Most people, at least in my county your mileage may vary, hear polarization, they think of the Left/Right political divide. I think this story does something different with that so let me explain.. The Left and the Right are both angry. This anger is from the shared notion that Things Are Shit. You can tell this by the large amount of vitriol and arguments on both sides. There are massive disagreements on how things became shit, what things are actually shit, and how we fix the things that are shit. But Things Are Shit. That’s not the Dreamers. The Dreamers are happy. The Dreamers don’t care about your issues and The Discourse. The Dreamers ignore you.

Vera tries to keep herself and her family in the reality of the desolate seaside town. She seems to be the sensible one that warns not to go into the basement, not to explore the abandoned asylum, not to read the Latin out loud. The horror of being Cassandra and seeing her world be destroyed and no one around her caring. Everyone seems to be just enjoying themselves when they should be grieving. Feeling the pain of loss. Vera feels that grief, knows that grief and everyone, even her whole family, is abandoning her to be alone in her sorrow.

Is Vera’s perspective reality or is it as a delusion of a darker hue? Kids still go to school, people still hang their laundry, people actually get together. Are things as bad as Vera thinks they are? Are the jellyfish even real? They may not be great but Vera seems to be trapped in her own doom spiral. She’s becoming that relative you block because all they post is about how the world is going to Hell because of what their pet cause is. Is she the monster haunting the Dreamers? Is she becoming like Robert Neville, a cautionary tale, a Legend.

Now maybe, just maybe you can reach beyond the bubble, beyond the filters, beyond the algorithm. See a bit of what they see and hopefully they can see a bit of yours. Forge a new reality where there are jellyfish in the water but the sea does sparkle. That’s not guaranteed and it’s scary as hell to put yourself out there but sometimes the fear is worth it.

Onto the subject of subscribing and support: PseudoPod is funded by you, our listeners, and we’re formally a non-profit. One-time donations are gratefully received and much appreciated, but what really makes a difference is subscribing. A $5 monthly Patreon donation gives us more than just money; it gives us stability and reliability and allows us to keep coming back, week after week.

If you can, please go to pseudopod.org and sign up by clicking on “feed the pod”. If you have any questions about how to support EA and ways to give, please reach out to us at donations@escapeartists.net.

Those of you that already support us: thank you! We literally couldn’t do it without you! It looks as though the Apple-taking-a-cut-from-Patreon thing may have been overturned, but just to be on the safe side, if you do want to sign up, do it through a browser – including one on actually ON your phone – as it might be cheaper than if you go through the official Patreon app.

And, if you can’t afford to support us financially, then please consider leaving reviews of our episodes, or generally talking about them on whichever form of social media you… can’t stay away from this week. We’d love to see you on Bluesky: find us at @pseudopod.org. If you like merch, you can also support us by buying goodies from the Escape Artists Voidmerch store. The link is in various places, including our latest social media posts.

PseudoPod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Download and listen to the episode on any device you like, but don’t change it or sell it. Theme music is by permission of Anders Manga.

And finally, PseudoPod, and Jane Lane], know…. You are not the misery chick

See you soon, folks, take care, stay safe and watch out for jellyfish.