The Key to Anchor Lake ✓

08 : The Anchor Lakey

25th September 2016

THE ANCHOR LAKEY: Episode 5

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Intro: A segment of Ludovico Einaudi's "Fly" is played on the piano over a track of rustling trees and whispering.

SUKIE:

Hi, guys! Welcome back to the Anchor Lakey. Thank you to everyone who showed up to the café for the book club the last couple of weeks. It's been so nice to get to know more people in town! I can't believe we've been doing this for a month already, and you're still listening. Unless those viewer figures are all from my mum.

OLIVER:

And mine. I think between them, the parental units may be responsible for a good thirty percent of all our listeners so, uh, shoutout to Sara and Helen, I guess?

SUKIE:

Today's episode comes with a major breakthrough. It's taken four weeks, but Oli has finally finished reading The Key to Anchor Lake, after much persuasion and encouragement.

OLIVER:

In my defence, it's a really heavy book. It's dark, and it's sad, and it can be pretty hard to read. I got the impression that Mary was angry and cynical and I know those are kind of my trademarks, but ... yeah, it was hard.

SUKIE:

Have your feelings about the book changed now that you've read it?

[Oliver pauses for a few seconds and sighs]

OLIVER:

Yeah, I guess. Obviously, I understand it all a lot more now. And after reading it, I've given up on the idea that it's all a bunch of fiction from the mind of some crazy lady, 'cause there's a lot of hard fact in there.

SUKIE:

As I've been telling you for literal years.

OLIVER:

But I still think – and you're gonna hate me for this, I know, but we'll work through it – that whoever Mary is, she's a crazy old superstitious lady. She writes like there is a legit curse, like this whole town has some unavoidable fate. But that's bullsh-

[Oliver cuts himself off with a cough]

That's a load of crap. Buying into the idea of some kind of decided destiny means you don't do anything to change it, and you just let life happen. Pure evil in the form of a man deciding to kill a load of kids isn't a curse or some predestined four-times-a-year disaster. It's awful, but I think it's a bit ridiculous to say that, oh, it was destined to happen because it was twenty-five years since that bomb exploded.

[Oliver is clearly agitated, jigging in his chair]

Let's be real. When you look at the earlier stuff, like the plagues and droughts and storms and fires, all that is stuff that was happening all over the country. You could probably throw a dart at a map of the UK and find a town that's had all the same crap happen. They just haven't had a Mary who has conjured up a weak link and cherry-picked the right things to fit this pattern she's decided.

SUKIE:

I think that's a bit reductive.

OLIVER:

But look at almost any year, and I'm sure you'll find other bad stuff that's happened. There are tragedies every year. But Mary decided these are the ones that matter. Why is she the leading authority? Who is she to decide? How come she includes five dead in a landslide in 1669, but she never even mentions that lorry crash that killed six people in 1987? Because it doesn't fit her pattern. The one she chose.