A Cleansing of Souls (3 page)

As Tom stared out of the train window, he tried to imagine how the land had once looked, free from all the blemishes of progress that were becoming more and more prevalent the closer the train got to Big Town. With each scene that passed, he consciously removed the steel pylons, the telegraph poles and the golf courses. He discarded the aircraft that flew so slowly overhead, the black smoke that billowed from all around and those strange, squat buildings with the barbed wire and the ‘Keep Out’ signs.

And there before him lay a sight profound. Stretches of unbroken forest, dark and green, strolling majestically into the distance; people in the field, writhing with the earth until sweat stung their eyes; and sheafs of corn in giant, endless rows, marching in time to empty stomachs and blistered skin.

Tom was sure that man had once sought merely to live - to eat, to live, to survive. Just to live. He had sought not to conquer nature but to exist with it, respecting it, fearing it even. But little by little, this basic simplicity had been stripped away to reveal burns and scars and scorched hearts. One insistent word had precipitated the fall to enrichment. And that word was ‘more’. This unbridled yearning had ensured that with each improvement in productivity, in economic management and in streamlined efficiency, so there would be born upon this earth a new generation of the deprived.

So as this young man's agrarian vision began to fade so the scenes before him became infiltrated by dirty grey buildings with jagged windows and factories left to rot beside rivers and streams that had themselves turned green and black with the grimy power of failure. Foliage crawled over the rusty corrugated roofs, forcing its way into the bleak interior. Rows of houses like rabbit hutches filled the train window, each back garden separated from the other by a rickety wooden fence to which was attached what seemed to be one continuous washing line from which damp clothes hung limply. No sun ever dried these clothes, not even on the hottest of days. That task was left to the rattling wind that tormented these dwellings day and night. Each garden contained more stone than grass, more shadow than light.

And the train roared on.

Tom became shocked by the squalor and the coldness of all he saw as he approached Big Town. He as much as passed judgement on the people, with one fleeting thought condemning them; for he had to protect himself. But in that instant, he learned his first lesson. For as the train edged into the final tunnel on its approach to the station, it was his own face that he saw reflected in the black window, his own face. And in that face fluttered an expression of aloofness and subdued contempt. And as the train came out of the tunnel and eased into the station, Tom felt ashamed. The feeling hit him in the stomach and almost wrenched the guts out of him. Shame. It's as good a place to start as any. Try it some time.

So the train hissed and shook and stuttered to a halt, having delivered Tom Spanner to Big Town.

Tom’s father sat at the kitchen table, both hands around a mug of coffee that he had no intention of drinking. The thin, aromatic steam drifted into the air and produced moist droplets on the distraught face that gazed into it. How could he tell her? How could he tell his wife that their son was gone?

There had been no note, no goodbye. Tom’s clock radio had gone off at the usual time and
, half an hour later, the fabulous DJ was still spewing out fabulous details of another fabulous competition. Tom would be late for work. His father had gone into wake him but he had not been there. Gone. And that was when he had noticed it. The guitar was missing too. No guitar. No Tom. The guitar never left the room. Tom always turned the clock radio off. He had intentionally tuned it to a radio station he despised in order to ensure he didn’t lie in bed listening to it.

Perhaps he had just gone out for the day, had taken the day off, had gone to meet some friends? There was something in the air though, a finality, a strange emptiness. The father and the son were a part of each other, yet neither really knew it, not yet. You or I may have jumped to a different conclusion, but the father knew. It felt somehow inevitable. And that was it. Gone – a terrible, empty word.

So here he sits, waiting for his wife to come downstairs and ask him why he has been crying.

“Have you seen this, love?” came a voice from the hallway. “It’s a bill from the electric people. I thought we had sorted that one out. We did that one didn’t we?”

Tom’s mother shuffles into the kitchen in her long pink dressing gown and the fluffy pig-shaped slippers her son had bought her last year for her birthday. She is holding a brown envelope lightly in her hand.

“We did, didn’t we?” she asks again.

“Did what?” replies her husband, his voice barely audible.

“Pay it, the electric. The electric people.”

He looks up at her now and sees how strong she looks yet he knows she is forever on the verge of breaking apart. And she sees his raw cheeks and the way his jaw just seems to hang so loose. And she is scared.

“George, what is it, what’s happened?” Her words are quick, urgent. Her heart is thumping, thumping, punctuating the words.

There is a pause, a terrible pause that lingers in the air.

“George?”

“I think Tom’s gone.”

Freeze Frame.

Bang.

George moves his arm to reach for his wife but he is moving now in slow motion. The mug of coffee by his elbow rolls onto the linoleum floor with a clonk that rings out deep and solid like a church bell. And this is the cue that sets his wife moving. She turns and runs upstairs with a
heart-breaking awkwardness, her slippers dragging her down, sticking to the stairs as if there were glue upon them.

And, arriving in the bedroom, it is not just the absence of the guitar that hits her, but the missing photograph of Little Norman. She screams a loud, guttural scream that causes her husband to physically flinch downstairs in the kitchen where he sits, so terrified.

They had both been through too much, what with Little Norman, and now this. Yet, deep in their hearts somewhere, there had always been lurking the knowledge that Tom would one day leave them too. And that was what really hurt. On this evidence alone, evidence based purely on love and instinct and despair, they had both arrived at the same conclusion, the right conclusion. Their son, Tom, was indeed gone.

So as the coffee drip, drip, drips onto the faded tiles of the kitchen floor, George Spanner prays for the first time in his life. He just closes his eyes and prays. Sometimes it’s all you can do.

And far, far away, somewhere across the other side of Big Town, a young girl weeps beneath the sweating body of her father.

So here we are on the streets of Big Town, where people scurry about like ants searching for scraps on a rotting corpse, though it be the corpse of a king. They know where to go and they know where not to go. This is their town and these are their secrets.

Buildings looked down upon Tom as he passed them, his eyes big and wide. There were massive hotels fronted by nothing but glass, a doorman outside each one, stately and demure, benign acquiescence in every twitch. There were huge shops that glowed and buzzed, music pouring from them, squeezing people in and squeezing them out again. But on this day, the illuminations of the shops were as nothing compared to the sun. They were but pale imitations. For the heat of that sun, especially in Big Town, could burn the very streets upon which you walked.

Some of the structures in Big Town were so elegant, so impressive, that Tom would just stand before them and gaze up at the stone carvings around the windows, those elaborate, tortuous designs, and he would touch that dusty façade in the hope that some of its splendour may pass into him. Then he would look up further still only to see the top half of the building encased in steel restraints, gripped fast in silent anguish by the iron claws of modernity. Was it the eradication of history or the preservation of it? Tom wasn’t sure. Of one thing, though, he was certain – he would not be contained or held or restricted. Not any more.

The people in the street along which Tom walked kept their heads bowed, as if by instinct. It was unwise to catch the gaze of another and it seemed so much easier to make your way looking down rather than ahead. They were a people of generations, of tribes; a constitution of disparate parts that combined to comprise the inhabitants of Big Town. Each was alien to the other. It was in their attire, their gait, their fear and their anger.

Big Town had always been a sombre town and Tom saw it now, in the character of the people that he passed and in the buildings about him. It was a desperate town, a sinister town, a town that harboured all the excesses of the human form.

Be careful, boy.

Some of the people looked up at Tom with a wary eye as he approached them and they stepped just a pace wider than was really necessary in order to get by him. And they would glance back furtively over their shoulders at him when they were a safe enough distance away.

Tom began to feel a growing sense of uncertainty as he walked on. Big Town was a strange place and he was a stranger. He felt eyes upon him from every direction. His first thought was of blood. Maybe he had bitten his lip. Perhaps his nose had started bleeding. He knew how blood disturbed people.

There had been a time when he was younger when he had taken to reading as he walked, on his way to the pub or to the park. It had been his way of denying the world. Books were real to him; they were his guides, his way of rationalising his feelings. It had been whilst deep in a book on Lenin that he had walked almost directly into a stone pillar. He had entered the pub some moments later to have people stare at him, fear upon their faces. And on checking, there had been blood oozing down the side of his face. He felt now, walking through Big Town, as if he had just stepped into that same pub again.

So Tom put down his bag and felt his face with his fingers. No blood. He then turned and looked at his reflection in the tinted window of the shop beside him. And at once he saw a dangerous man, a man with dark, straggly hair, unshaven face, oversized denim shirt that hung loose to the knees of his torn and faded jeans and a guitar by his side. The window could not even begin to reproduce the aura of yearning and desire that emanated from this young man - that indefinable presence of a man in search of his life.

Throughout his life, Tom had been on the edge of things. He had been the perpetual substitute, the twelfth man, the could-do-better and the must-try-harder. He had been the boy at school whose nickname was so frequently and indiscriminately used that when his real name was called each morning in the register, his classmates would scour the room for the newcomer. And he had accepted all this as being just the way his life was. There are some who shine and achieve and there are those who just get by. And there are others within whom there dwells a steady, sullen rage. With each cold Saturday morning on the touchline, with each fresh humiliation, so had grown Tom’s rage, though never had it overwhelmed him. Still, there it dwelt. There it simmered.

Of all things, Tom Spanner was no rebel. He did not possess that paradoxical coldness of heart so inherent in the rebel. He considered the feelings of others even to the detriment of himself at times. Any token act of revolt was commonly tempered by multiple acts of meek obeisance. The cause of the rebel may be just, but someone somewhere must suffer the pain of the rebel’s fury.

So, looking in the window at the man before him, Tom saw neither a confused man nor a frightened man. He saw a righteous man, a man of bounteous humility and goodness, kind and forgiving. He was tranquil and at peace. It was as if he had finally come to rest.

“From now on,” he said to himself, “I will be a good man.”

The angels sang.

Flowers bloomed.

And you know now that this boy is surely heading for a fall.

The sweat, the fumes and the clatter of machinery played like an orchestra of the age, crashing and discordant. Big Town was just a vast piece of tragic music, awesome, incomprehensible. The notes, the instruments and the tunes are ours and ours alone.

So as the flutes and the clarinets soothed the harsh violins, the resonant hum of nature made its mellow entrance. It was a silent explosion, an effusion of greenery. Tall conifers lined a gravel path, their wiry frames resplendent in such verdant finery. The path opened up into a circular gravel clearing that was ringed by wooden benches and punctuated at intervals by bright yellow litterbins that looked truly alien in so luscious an arena.

The birds twittered and warbled as Tom walked slowly across the gravel, feeling it crunching satisfyingly beneath his feet. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. He had been walking for three hours – yet he was still just a forty-five minute train journey from home. He sat down on the bench, Beautiful Guitar leaning against him, and drifted into sleep with only the imperious sun to watch over him.

As Tom slept, small birds fluttered down to spy upon this newcomer, their sweet chattering ranging from the melancholic to the exultant. Each sound emanating from each tiny beak was entirely of its own. At one stage, a whole throng of birds gathered on the gravel in front of him, babbling and chirruping, strutting and dancing. It would not have been at all surprising if they had laid him on the ground and secured this sleeping giant with ropes. Eventually, they dispersed in threes and fours emitting salutary chirps and strangled farewells as they floated back up to the clouds.

When Tom finally awoke, he was no longer alone on the bench, though all the other benches remained vacant. Beside him was a man. The man smiled. He wore a dark pinstriped suit that was crumpled and marked and his shoes were drab and dirty. His hair was thin on his head, possessing a translucent quality, yet it did not age him. Pale blue eyes seemingly forever on the verge of tears gazed at Tom above cheekbones that could at any moment have broken through the pallid skin of his face.

Tom did not meet the man’s gaze. In truth, he was still not fully awake. He was in a strange place and felt an aura that was not at all familiar. It was so quiet and somehow delicate and forlorn. As these thoughts eased in and out of Tom’s mind, he felt a need to break away for a moment. He recalled a hamburger van just outside the entrance to this sanctuary, a simple burger van. Familiarity. Normality. So he got up and made his way towards it, his legs betraying him a little with their stiffness. He was hungry anyway.

The hamburger squirmed within the soggy bun and the onions slithered free onto Tom’s hand only to scamper clean up his sleeve. Eating with speed, he devoured the burger before he arrived back at the bench. Then he felt a sudden, sickening fear - the Beautiful Guitar. But there it was, on the gravel, leaning against the bench. He picked it up and sat down, placing it between his knees. It was awkward, uncomfortable. But it was his.

Remember Humility, Tom - keep hold of your visions, mate.

And the man beside him looked on.

“You play?” asked the man, softly, his voice kind and reassuring, almost childlike in its sense of wonder.

Tom looked across at him and looked away again.

“It’s a fine thing to play an instrument,” continued the man in that same melodious, engaging voice, “a fine thing. A gift, I’m sure.”

The man mused for a while, intent, thoughtful. It was as if he were listening to the most wonderful piece of music right there, right then.

Tom’s eyes turned briefly to the stranger. He was of an indeterminate age. Tom couldn’t decide how he felt about him. And as he turned away again, the man suddenly spun around as far as he could whilst remaining on the bench and leaned over to Tom offering his hand.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said the man, “how rude of me! My name is Michael. It is a pleasure to meet you. Ah, to expect you to converse with me with such a lack of introduction. Well, so far have I sunk perhaps.”

Tom did not turn towards Michael, though he had flinched with the sudden movement. He just stared at the ground ahead of him.

“I’m Tom,” he murmured.

Michael mirrored Tom’s posture, leaning slightly forward, elbows resting on thighs. Tom was his friend. No question. No doubt about it.

“Good, good,” he said softly, smiling with a sad affection.

There was a moment of almost complete silence in this natural haven that even the birds observed. The only sound was of Big Town imploding across the horizon. And there were the two men, two strangers, side by side on a park bench, both with more in common than either could have imagined.

At last, Michael sat up and spoke, his voice mellow and smooth. It could soothe you with a mere syllable.

“May I see it, Tom, your guitar? It’s just that things of beauty do so fascinate me.”

Tom was grateful for the intrusion into his thoughts - the Beautiful Guitar. His coolness melted a little. Some control had been passed back to him. The ethereal ground upon which he wavered became more solid now. So, slowly, he laid the hard case across his lap and unsnapped the catches. And he lifted the lid delicately, as if unveiling a lost treasure.

“My, my,” said Michael with due reverence, “well, well.” He looked at the Beautiful Guitar closely along its entire length, studying it with those pale blue eyes, barely breathing. “Do you mind, do you mind if I hold it?” he asked. “Of course, I’d understand if you felt unable to allow me to. It is such a wonderful instrument. And we have only just met.”

Tom felt all the pride of a father with a new-born child.

“All right,” he replied, looking now at Michael.

He
passed the Beautiful Guitar to Michael who held it gently with hands soft and white, fingers thin and light.

“Exquisite,” Michael murmured to himself. “Quite exquisite.”

After a few moments of staring into the guitar, he handed it back to Tom who put it back in the hard black case and returned it to its former position.

The Beautiful Guitar was Tom’s chink of light. Michael had seen that immediately.

“Well, Tom, what do you do from day to day, I mean, in this world of ours?”

Tom did not reply immediately. He was a little thrown by the question. But Michael allowed him time, for they had plenty of time. He just sat there in the sun waiting for the young man to answer.

“I’m a musician,” replied Tom, eventually, looking into the distance, trance-like, heart weary and mind trying to make sense of so many things.

Michael looked at the boy, studying his frame, getting a feel for him.

“Why, a musician. That’s wonderful. A musician. A star.”

He beamed at Tom, who suspected he was being ridiculed. But there was no ridicule, nothing but wonder and honesty. Tom did not know at that time that Michael was incapable of any form of derision. There were a lot of things of which Michael was capable. But Tom did not know that then.