The St. Malo air was crisp on the July morning
that I heard down the crackling line
of the only phone
box in the towering vicinity
that my
Grand Mother had
suffered
a heart attack.
I had been walking for weeks, the chance to stop
for a while and take stock,
take the map out of the bag
and contemplate my next move, one that
unlike my time in America,
I was determined
was not going to end in a premature way
with the option to carry on not taken away
from me.
I had wrestled with the choice of heading East,
I had done west, now my eyes grew big
and drunk on the prospect of finding what lay beyond
the border of France, the chance to meet
women from a strangled Europe
and further into the unknown that I could have ever dreamed,
my morning coffee, dark and bitter,
the last of the milk having been pinched by the tent two down
before they made their own way back to civility
and I wondered how my call would be taken,
I wasn’t coming back having reached St. Malo;
I was carrying on.
The phone call stunned me, I had been gone
two weeks,
had walked and hitchhiked over
300 miles
but she was static in a hospital bed
with a touch of evil hanging over her,
the vampire that stalked her blood
for the last
couple of years
was ravenous and I thought of a dark day
when I would see her no more
and the black clouds rolled over the English
Channel with history’s Armada in its tow
and I felt the first drops of rain hit me
with anger as I made my way back
to the campsite, milk forgotten.
That day I listened to the piss down, hoe down
mown down warbling of the young German
playing his guitar and entertaining the two Austrian girls
who put Heidi to shame
and I saw circumstance and honour defeat me.
No one expected me back,
I was free to roam this world for eternity
if I so wished for who can ever ask a soul
to stop wandering when the need is upon them
and the sound of the almighty
throwing his weight around inside my head
and overhead and the lightning struck
just as Heidi smiled at the sweetness of her new found Hans
I resolved in the morning
to toil back across the sea and make my way
to Birmingham,
via the sea
Via Poole,
Via Salisbury,
change at Basingstoke,
in the end via my own bed
as I suffered my own bout of Influenza
after waking up with my head in a puddle where the rain
had found its way in to baptise me
and half drown me and the sound of Hans and Heidi
still running snot like down my throat.
My nan looked at me from her bed,
wondering why I once more had abandoned
my dream of seeing life, the near shattering experience
of seeing her there with the vampire
looking on with suspicion raging
in his dead soul fed eyes, terrifying me
and all I could say was;
it can wait.
Ian D. Hall 2015