As a man approaches his fortieth year on this fast spinning globe we call home, he is struck by the sound of his decaying mortality. The ticking time bomb, tick, tick, tick, within him lets him know that the spring of his youth has long since moved on and is nothing more than a distant memory, occasionally waving from a far off hazy shoreline.
He also feels that summer has been and is now on the wane. Don’t let any man who is in his forties tell you otherwise. Oh, they will tell you that there is so much more left to life, so many adventures that there are left to take part in and deeds to be done before you start to feel the need to wind down and look back on a life well lived.
That’s crap.
Like the imaginary man of whom I have written, I reached the start of my fortieth year in a certain mood. My best years were behind me and what I had in front, the vision that stayed with me day in day out was one of perpetual and never ending death until the day I actually would be.
That imaginary man and I both knew that by turning forty there would be fewer days in front of him than there was behind him. If I had taken a one way drive from New York to San Francisco, I would be somewhere approaching Oklahoma City on Interstate 44. Occasionally there would be a convoy of trucks in my way but I would do my best to avoid them and make my way to my final destination of ‘Frisco just in time for it to finally have the devastating Earthquake that had been threatening for years. I would watch the milometer as I drove, seemingly endlessly, towards the Pacific, 40.1, 40.2, 40.3 … no turn offs, no u turns, just the occasional truck stop selling underpriced coffee and offering unwanted greasy conversation.
The day I turned thirty nine was a happy one, one of the last that I can remember; it was the last day I spent completely with my wife before she died. I woke up at three in the morning. I had never slept well, even as a child. My mother got so tired of putting me to bed only for me to be up a couple of hours later, sometimes screaming as the dreams stayed vibrant and real as I cuddled into my mother’s breasts. She never complained but she got tired, even resorting to putting a small amount of whisky in my bed time drink just on the off chance that it might give her an extra hour sleep as I slept off the start of many a drunken night with a bottle in my hand.
My wife, Sarah, thankfully never felt that need to dull the pain of my dreams and after twenty years of sleeping in the same bed together she had got used to my waking up suddenly and every time it happened her eyes would be sparkling and forgiving.
It was always a different dream that woke me. There have been several recurrent themes blistering and popping my subconscious, oozing through to my waking hours but none that ever seemed to be an underlying reason or anxiety, no repressed memory that stood out and gave me the much talked off light bulb moment where I could say –that’s it.
Sarah urged me to write down every moment of my shadow world, I wrote them all down in short hand by the light of a small side lamp. I typed up my dreams in the hope that I could analyse them in the cold light of day. Everything I had seen in those dark places was committed to paper and then to a series of 1’s and 0’s. Who was there prowling in my dreams, the context, colours, even sounds that I know I heard whilst asleep and with nervous, tired eyes.
The morning of my birthday, I had finally drifted off around four o’clock and slept through the bin men noisily taking away the remains of the non recyclable crap we had amassed during the previous week. Leftover sprouts that nobody ever ate except for Sarah’s mum, who peeled more sprouts for Sunday dinner than the entire city could ever hope to eat in a year, thin shreds of paper that had been through the shredder to stop people reading those intimate notes we often left each other such as BE BACK LATE, meeting with Thompson at six at the Uni xx… and underneath those endearing word’s that summed up life in the twenty-first century to hopeless romantics…Don’t forget to pick up sprouts for Sunday x.
Occasionally these notes were reciprocated with terms of undying love such as…and next time, DON’T come home DRUNK!
We may have missed the dustbin men concerto, (playing every week from now until you all learn that you shouldn’t have this much rubbish or we go on strike), but we didn’t miss the hammering on the door. Believing it to be an aural hallucination, we tried to ignore but the heavy clunking fist of part time officialdom rapped upon the door a second time.
Sarah opened her eyes and smiled at me but that day was not going to be her day, there was no way I was going to get out of bed before her. She grinned and shouted out at the top of her voice, “Bare with me”. The shrill of her voice echoed down my ear and I roared in mock anger as she scooted out of bed and grabbed hold of a dressing gown from the back of the door before hurrying down stairs to answer the door. I heard her talking in almost excited, breathless tones before she finished her conversation with the person who had disturbed our morning, she shut the door back onto the cold, damp morning air.
“It’s from your brother”, she called up the stairs. She didn’t wait for an answer as she knew I would be groaning inside. I succumbed to the inevitable and trudged my way wearily through to the bathroom before cheering up at the thought of the day ahead.
“Thirty nine…wow”, I mused as I took one look in the mirror. One or two gray hairs had appeared on an otherwise full head of hair. No bags, duffel or otherwise under the eyes, not bad for a man who took the art of serious drinking, well…seriously. Eyes still bright, teeth, mostly there, one missing from a fight at school twenty five years earlier but had never bothered to get done. Small spread appearing in the middle but I looked better than I did at eighteen, when I hardly ever ate and exercised too much.
All in all, not bad for the amount of miles I had put on the clock, Faculty functions, dealing with fellow tutors, the odd student who couldn’t grasp the basics in literature without using Wikipedia to back up their argument. Drink, dope, reading and music…what a fucking life it had been.
Today was special; both of us had managed to get the time off to help me celebrate. Easy in my case as I had never worked a birthday at the University, in fact, even as an undergraduate I had never been within a mile of the campus. For Sarah, it was more difficult. She never seemed to get away until the day was nearly. Her immediate supervisor in the Psychology department had never let her have the day off, apart from once on my thirtieth. A desperate day as we seemed to do nothing but argue. This year was different; she was downstairs in the kitchen singing away like a nightingale. Her voice had always intrigued me and there was a time when we were younger that I had tried hard to get her to take it up professionally. The same depressing noises and self doubt would always surface and after a while it became a subject that no longer was touched.
I finished washing and went back into the bedroom to get dressed; I heard Sarah come to the bottom of the stairs once more and smiled for the umpteenth time that morning as she informed me that my coffee was going cold. The main room of our terraced house was a jumble of C.D’s on racks, films on racks and books on the science of Psychology, the latest line in Stephen King novels and books on the Middle East, Egypt and rack of books on Iraq.
“Do you want to open your parcel”? She inquired, her hand hovering over the brown, heavy looking box. I looked across at her and grimaced.
“No, it can wait; it will only be documents relating to various trust funds anyway, it’s not like he ever remembers anyway!” I replied, possibly with more venom than I had meant to.
Sarah lowered her hand and touched the parcel gently; I got her meaning straight away but I shook my head, a bit more gently than before and told her I would look at them the following evening. Nothing was going to spoil the mood I was in, not even finding out the trust fund my brother and I had was up a couple of thousand pounds.
Sarah nodded and kept smiling. She excused herself from my company as she left me to my luke-warm coffee and proceeded to go upstairs to change.
I sat back and let my favourite chair immerse me as I sipped the juices and let the caffeine start its therapeutic work. I started to relax as I heard Sarah dashing around upstairs, record breaking time in the shower and a new personal time in putting on her clothes. I laughed at the thought and looked across at the space where she had been sitting; on the edge of her chair was the box. It looked heavier on second glance and for the briefest of moments I was tempted to open the modern equivalent of Pandora’s Box. This no longer held the diseases, sins and evils that had terrified the world, no this held greater sins within its padded franked parcel, charts, projections, bank statements, and your investments may go up as well as down, …in uncertain times trust us to look after you…, blah, blah, blah.
I placed the now empty cup back on the small wooden table in front of me and stood up. It could wait… It would still be there later, so much joy to look forward to, why waste it all now!
I locked the front room door and went out into the hall; I put on my old, black leather jacket and brushed my hair. Sarah was soon by my side looking as beautiful as ever, very little make-up on; she wasn’t the type of girl who needed it. She pulled on her own leather jacket and checked that her purse was in the pocket lining, satisfied she smiled again at me and I thanked whatever being was in the heavens that day that they had blessed me with such a great wife.
I patted my own pocket and realised that my own wallet wasn’t in there; I cursed silently and reached into the jacket I had worn the previous evening and took the black leather holder out of the pocket. I looked inside and thought, well there’s enough in there till dinner!
Stepping outside into the crisp February air, I was taken aback by how bright the sun seemed as it hung low in the sky like a Christmas tree ornament placed on the very lowest, bottom branch, almost like an afterthought, something to give the tree that extra little sparkle! I turned away from the bauble and locked the door behind me and took my wife’s hand for the second to last time and walked towards the bus stop.
We had started a conversation about where we going to go in town and as ever the thought of popping into the travel agent came first, then and only then a beer to celebrate. We turned the corner out of our road and looked down the main vein of arterial road that would take us into the town. As I turned my head I saw the bus looming close, winding its way past lost shops and properties that had been up for sale, lease and finally back up for sale within the time it took a Government to screw up an economy.
I let go of Sarah’s hand and urged her to run for the bus, she started to beg me not to run, what did it matter in the scheme of things if we got this bus or the next, or even the one after. We had plenty of time, all the time in the world.
The bus was quite close now and I started to stick out my arm, almost in mock salute to an armed vehicle carrying its war weary heroes off to the daily battle of the front, where credit cards would take battering, cash would become a casualty and various store cards would read the posthumous eulogy.
I urged her on and in a fashion she got to the stop just as the bus pulled up. Even for a weekday the bus was at the point of overflowing and as I showed my pass to the disgruntled driver I looked casually for the briefest glimpse of two seats together but to no avail. I convinced a young man who I thought I recognised from the University to stand up and let Sarah sit down. She slumped into the chair and I made an observation that she was out of condition. Her breathing was slightly laboured and she had gone a bit white. I shrugged it off for the time being, there were bigger plans to deal with without starting an argument about the lack of exercise on her part, and I resolved that I would bring it up over the weekend.
The bus made its way along the four long miles into the city centre and more people got on than was strictly legal, it took all my strength to hold onto the overhead handles that were provided to keep you upright and make you look ungainly as the bus swerved other buses and cars in its desperate attempt to get you to your point of destination on time and with as few bruises as possible. It always struck me that a form of travel that could reach a frightening top speed would allow its passengers to stand and be chucked about without any irony as slightly ludicrous.
The shaker maker finally pulled into the town centre after a thirty minute drive, not bad for the time of day and considering the amount of other cells making their way to the heart. I was off the bus before Sarah as I seemed to have been pushed towards the front during the journey. I took the few steps from the open door and I looked through the window where my wife’s head was resting against the stained plastic window. She didn’t notice me, I tapped once but there was no recognition for a moment. I had noticed inside the bus that the windows were still a dirty grey colour from all the rain we had for the previous couple of days. Even if she had heard me tap the plastic, I would have just looked like a badly drawn smudge, a slightly disturbing scene from the Tony Hart big book of horror.
I watched her get up slowly. She seemed tired, more than I had ever seen her before. I met her at the door to the bus and smiled. She stared at me; almost hesitantly she asked if I was alright. I thought for a minute, should I say something, I had vague memories of her being like this once before, many years before, when youth was still on our side and the whole of academia lay before us, ready to be conquered and laid to waste. That time ended badly and nearly drove us apart. No not today, I was not getting involved in the politics of the self. There would be time to self reflect on what I thought was the matter.
We walked through the busy shopping centre, people bustling about with no direction, no idea where they were going or why they were there. Bags swung out, full with shopping. Children cried out for the toilet, full of too many soft drinks and cheap sweet tasting food.
Half term, of course, every year it was the same bloody thing. People everywhere, milling around like desperate flies as they filled their day by shopping for things they didn’t need in a futile way just to amuse their kids. “Look Gemma, if you are a good girl I will buy you that film you want, let’s just enjoy the day and avoid any possibility of staying at home where you will drive me insane”.
I saw all these child-parent conversations go on as we made our way past other closed down shops. In my head this seemed worse than the sight of the closed down shops in my part of the city. There it was like the outer shell was dying but there was still blood colouring the complexion, giving it that faded salmon feel. In the town however it was if the internal organs were shutting down, the vital, life affirming organs were not being fed with much needed cash injections. Oh yes there were plenty of people around but it wasn’t like enough to keep some shops open.
The shoppers of yesterday, those who scrimped and saved for everything they bought had been replaced with easy credit, easy virtue and hard realities when the system started to die. Their young charges hustled round ever decreasing shops as if it was a big adventure, to shops with closed signs hanging over the door which proclaimed the death knell. I envisaged a virtual zoo where onlookers, the interested and the scientific would stare into an empty cage, the grass having grown too high to keep under control and the rusted sign attached to the cage door giving a description of the animal that used to lie within.
“Here lies the remains of the British economy, we think it died sometime in the early part of the twenty first century. Cause of death, gorging and overeating. It is sadly missed!”
I shook myself out my stupor and we were on our way to book our holiday, then the answer to most of the world’s problems, a beer and a laugh.
As we fought our way through the remainder of the shopping graveyard I heard police sirens, screeching, hollering somewhere in the distance. It sounded like a chase was occurring through the City streets. I twisted my head slightly and figured that it was down by the docks somewhere, sadly, nowhere near enough to watch.
Forgetting it as quick as I had heard it we made our way into the travel agents. Once there, the outside world with its depravity, its stink, its inhumanity was gone. All there was to savour was plush royal blue carpets, good upholstered seats and a friendly smile willing to take our money with just enough fawning to make us feel as if we were in charge of our choices. It was our decision on where that trip was going to be. It was our choice to fly and touchdown on different soil.
The transaction was over, quite painlessly and quickly. We had spent the last few weeks going over the merits of various places we had not been too before and old favourites which we couldn’t wait to see again. We had spent weeks whittling it down to half a dozen which soon got whittled down further to three. The choices were to go back to Hamilton and savour the ghosts of my grandfather’s haunts, second choice was to see Sarah’s father in Rome where he worked at the University and take in a tour of the Italian peninsula whilst there or a trip on the Nile. The three choices had been whittled for the third time down to two as we found out that Carlo would not be there when we would be, he would be away with his third wife somewhere in the Balkans. In truth I was quite pleased, I had been to Italy as a younger man and although the countryside was very beautiful, there was something intangible about some of the major cities. It was if the ghosts never rested and were still happy to haunt the present day politics and thoughts of every citizen.
So two had become one, two weeks in Ontario, visiting relatives, dinners, lunches, socials, new cousins to hold, mourn dead ones we didn’t even know. Coffee here, tea there, “oh can you bring such and such as we can’t get it over here”. That’s not a holiday! It’s what you do on your day off!
All of that, or two weeks floating down virgin territory with just ourselves for company. The splendour of the Nile, the majesty of the sphinx, the Valley of the Kings, cocktails, sun, new friends who won’t make it onto the address book. I know which one I was going to suggest.
So there it was, a two week vacation on the Nile, life could not have been better than at that moment.
We came out of the travel shop hand in hand; I knew I was fortunate to be with Sarah and resolved to not have as many drinks that day, it wasn’t just my birthday, it was a day for both of us!
The first thing I noticed that the mayhem of noise that I had heard down by the docks earlier had gotten closer, I stopped briefly for a moment, let go of Sarah’s hand and listened. Certainly a lot of police cars, but what were they chasing? I thought I heard the sound of a motor bike being driven at high speed and concluded that the boys in blue were chasing some young idiot around town. My next thought was of o.k. nothing to do with me, a nice day, don’t even want to watch.
I took my wife’s hand once more and walked no more than ten yards when I heard a young girl’s voice call my name out. I turned and saw the assistant from the travel agents wave at me. She was urging me to come back inside the shop. I let go of Sarah’s hand and quickly went back to the shop, inside it turns out I had forgotten to sign one piece of paper necessary for the trip. I cursed my stupidity and thanked the lady for being so organised. She smiled a watery smile, one that was of no consequence to her mood. I figured that now I was just somebody who had to be transported from one place to the next with the barest minimum of fuss, she had my money, now I was just a number, a statistic for the balance sheets.
Back again on the street, the sound of a motor bike engine being pushed beyond its capacity was so close that I was conscious it was within striking distance of me. I turned my head towards the bottom end of Bold Street to see crowds scattering in all directions. A few screams were audible but generally there was just confusion. The bike rounded the corner and barely missed the bus that was carrying its passengers back down towards the station. One of the police cars following the bike was not so fortunate; it slammed straight into the side of the bus. The view was obscured to me at that point, as the machine shifted its course as the full weight of the car slammed into his metal shell.
The second police car having more time to think came out the other side and continued to chase the bike. Others around me had stiffened or taken flight into the shop doorways. I watched as the bike rider looked behind him to see if he was still being followed or possibly to take in the carnage that he would now be accountable too.
I remembered at that moment my father teaching my brother to ride a bicycle for the first time. He had got the mechanics of it quite quickly and how he had dispelled any worries that our father may have had about letting him onto the main road too hastily. I came out with them to the top of high sloping road that led out of the estate and onto the main Buckingham Road, not so much out of brotherly pride of watching a sibling achieve an important life lesson but more of, shall we say morbid curiosity of how he would cope on one of the busiest roads around.
To begin with, he did well! He wobbled slightly at the start, but then again I still did that and I was much older than him. He soon got into his stride and I found myself yelling support for him as he picked up speed. My dad had positioned himself at the half way point of sloping hill, ready, in his words; to get to him should he need help. My brother soon passed him and with no traffic to overtake him he was son enjoying the freedom of the open road.
Then, just as it looked as if he would be just fine, a lorry came round the roundabout at the bottom of the hill and turned left. My dad and I both watched as my brother decided to veer towards the lorry coming the other way.
When we asked him about it later, he put it down to panic, a simple error of timing and not knowing what to do. I think, to this day, it was more of a dare or a death wish. I figured just at that moment, he saw the lorry and thought,”Well why not, I can beat that truck, I’ll scare the driver and end up on the pavement before he passes me”.
Well he was right; if indeed that it what he was trying to do, he just beat the lorry and its surprised driver by the width of a wheel, he mounted the pavement like a pro and skidded to a halt just as the lorry’s brakes kicked in and left the impression of tyre marks half way up the road.
My dad had stopped the irate, (and to be fair, shocked) driver from belting my brother, calming him down and at the same time accusing my brother with stern, fatherly eyes. The driver shouted some choice words at my brother, got in his cab, flicked us all the bird and drove off. The wheezing of the lorry as it shifted into first gear stayed with me for the rest of my life.
My brother was banned initially from going on his bike for a month. I never saw him use it again.
The expression on my brother’s face was similar to that of the bike rider as he turned his attention away from the carnage behind him and back towards the greater carnage to come. I just, perhaps the width of motorbike wheel, avoided being hit but lost my balance in the attempt and fell backwards onto my back; I heard something crack as I landed. I didn’t register the pain though, not till hours later when I finally came round.
I twisted my neck and my head around to watch the bike career completely out of control and straight into the path of Sarah. She hadn’t moved a muscle during the entire time. I was reminded of my brother for the second time in a matter of seconds. “Oh well, go on then, I’m not moving, try to hit me Mr. Lorry driver”.
The Bike hit her with such force that she was sent back through the air at speed. She didn’t stop when she hit the window of the shop behind her; she didn’t stop as she went through the assortment of baby clothes that had been placed neatly on hangers for proud, perspective parents to delicately run their fingers through. She only stopped when the brick wall got in her way and the life force within her died. I closed my eyes and went to sleep.
Ian D. Hall