Tollesbury Time Forever (10 page)

Penny rose from her chair and walked over to Carrie, who then escorted the former beauty from the pub via the back door. It was time for her to go it appeared. The large measure of ale I had consumed seemed to be slowing everything down
for a moment. The smoke in the pub from the various pipes and the dwindling fire in the hearth were gathering around me. I wondered if I would be able to stand, let alone walk. As it was, Penny Shoraton returned to help me up from the wooden chair and led me outside onto the village green.

“I will walk with you back to your shack,” said Penny, supporting my arm.

She was so close to me. I could smell her purity and her naturalness for they were fragrances so tangible, so real I felt I could reach out and touch them. Was this love or was this madness? I have since come to learn that there is little difference between these two most life threatening of conditions. As we walked slowly in the black night, I swear I could see a glow around her.

When we reached the shack, she bade me goodnight and drifted off towards the harbour.

I pushed open the wooden door and stood there waiting for Zachariah for I firmly believed he had not moved from his hiding place and that he would swiftly be upon me.

A rumbling sound came from the far corner. I could see nothing through the gloom. I closed the door behind me and stood there trying to make out what was happening. And then I smiled with both relief and not a little amusement. The sound was that of a man snoring, the sound of a man in a very deep sleep indeed.

As I approached, I saw Zachariah curled up on the floor. He suddenly looked so vulnerable, a shadow of his waking self. He was a sleeping bear of a man but just as vulnerable to sleep as the rest of us. Whether he dreamed, I knew not. I somehow doubted it. I deemed it more possible that in his sleep, he created my nightmares - and perhaps yours too.

So I lay down in my own dank corner and brought my knees to my chest, wrapping my arms about them both for warmth and security. And with Penny Shoraton in my heart and Zachariah Leonard on my mind, I let the ale do its work.

Angel and Devil.

Beauty and Beast.

If only it were that simple…

There are times in Tollesbury when a mist comes up from the marshes and from the fields. It seems unconnected to any weather system. Be it the heat of the summer or the bitter chill of winter, lawless bands of cold fog will consume the tracts of marshland just as a throbbing guilt will devour the heart of a sinful man. But you do not stop there, oh clouds of hell; you enter my brain, smothering my thoughts and clothing my fragile mind in the raiment of the utterly confused. And I break out, yearning and gasping, into the clarity of the day, believing in my heart that the fog is there for me and me alone.

I cannot recall a time when I ever felt totally in control. Confidence eluded me as I had grown and my understanding of the world had fractured more with each encounter. Nothing was simple except my innate need to comprehend all that happened to me in every waking moment. It might be easy for you but, for those such as I, it is a torture that the word ‘illness’ can never fully communicate. To understand the look, the inflection, the intention or the meaning of my fellow human being had always been a task akin to climbing the tallest of mountains for poor me.

Poor, poor, pitiful me.

Poor, poor, pitiful me.

Julia and I had met in 1980. I had been drunk in a pub in Chelmsford and she had sobered me up. She had looked upon me as a challenge and began by throwing away my Jack Kerouac books. I believe she saw the future, even then. She kissed me and told me she loved me. I wish I could tell you more about our courtship (as she liked to call it) but I cannot. I remember our early relationship as I do snippets from a really bad sitcom. I was maddeningly unfunny and the only laughter there was came in cans. Our wedding I recall vaguely as being
a tawdry affair. I had never been taught how to love. I hadn’t known where to start.

The notion of having children had never entered my mind. So self absorbed was I as I grew into adulthood, the idea of settling down in any way had been anathema to me. Jack Kerouac had consumed me in my early twenties and it wasn’t long before I threw myself into a life of cheap wine, cigarettes and a broken notion of my place in society, or lack of it perhaps. I adopted the persona of the maligned fool, the misunderstood genius, the perennial recalcitrant. Jack Kerouac, you see, had the eyes of an angel and the spirit of the devil. He mesmerised me and tantalised me, toyed with my mind and led me down paths no young man such as I should have trodden. He was me and I was he. God, I loved that man and in many ways still do. The shimmering vision of a man who is one too many mornings and a thousand miles behind will always be an intoxicating hero to me.

And I was given a little baby boy for my gargantuan, inconsequential, metaphysical struggles. A little baby boy.

My son was born in 1982. He was christened Robin, but I never liked that. It was Julia’s choice. All that came to mind for me was the cheesy grin of Robin Gibb or the moronic despair of Batman’s sidekick, the Boy Wonder. From the day he was born, I called my boy Robbie.

The year Robbie was born, Graham Gooch took a team of cricketers to South Africa, a country that had been banned from competing in international sport since the end of the sixties because of apartheid. Italy beat West Germany 3-1 to win the World Cup for the third time. The Clash released Combat Rock. John Lennon had been dead for two years and Paul McCartney went to number one with Ebony and Ivory. I hated him then more than ever, or so I thought; the Frog Chorus or whatever it was called was still to come. Oh, and the Falklands War happened. Margaret Thatcher was re-elected the following year on the back of it and England, my England, changed forever. I was twenty-four years old.

Robbie is now twenty five or twenty six. To my shame, I cannot be exact. When he was small, I could never bear to go
to that hospital to visit him. My reluctance to see my own son engendered a murderous hatred in Julia and she conveyed her feelings to me with charming alacrity; in essence, she was thoroughly disgusted. I could never make her understand how I felt about Robbie. It all hurt too much. Jack Kerouac hadn’t prepared me for having a child with a severe disability, neither had the Beatles or The Clash. Thus my close encounter with the real world merely led me back to the fantasy realm of my mind.

Julia would not let Robbie out of her sight when he was first born. She would barely leave the house except for essentials. Whilst she sat and stared at him as he lay sleeping, I would get the bus from Tiptree to The Recreation Ground in Tollesbury and watch the village cricket team. I would take with me a few cans of cider, a pencil and a pad of paper, always glad to be away from the claustrophobic atmosphere of the house, unaware, so desperately unaware of just how much darkness I myself contributed to that all pervasive gloom.

Whenever I went to The Recreation Ground to watch the cricket, my breathing always slowed. I would greet the scene before me with a deep sigh and lie down at the edge of the chalk boundary. The Tollesbury team was made up of a wonderful mixture of serious children, local drunks and eccentric old men - the first group becoming the second and the second becoming the third as the years drifted by. The games always meandered on through the morning, each game ending in the same result - a communal visit to The King’s Head.

I was, and perhaps always will be, a character on the nether regions of exactly where everybody else is at. Were I to be absent, I would not be missed. Present, I am acknowledged and no more. Such is my fate.

Watching cricket, for me, is like wandering around a museum. You are in turns confused, delighted, moved and at peace. Just as there is no other place on earth like Tollesbury, so there is no other sport that matches the oh so English game of cricket. As Bob Dylan (a constant reference point of mine
for all truth in this world!) once said, “do not criticize what you don’t understand.”

Cricket, boring? I smile as you judge and weep as you leave.

And I would use my pencil and pad to keep score, marking off every single run and every dot ball, keeping a perfect record of the game. I say ‘perfect’, but the names of all the players were merely from my imagination. As long as there were eleven on each side, I didn’t care – at least not until the end. For then, having emptied my last can of cider of its final golden drops, I would cross out the names of the batsman that had scored the most runs and the bowler who had taken the most wickets. And in their stead, I would write in my laboured scrawl the name ‘Robbie Anthony’.

As my little boy lay back at home, his mum protecting him from all the ills that may further befall him, he would be totally unaware that his drunken dad had once more pronounced him Man of the Match and King of the World, for yet another week. In my ever erratic mind, I was the proudest father on this earth. In reality, I was barely able to look at my own son without breaking in two.

It’s all about schisms. There are times when we splinter and there are times when we are whole. Though I have found the more I break, the less whole I am able to become. You can come back, but you can’t come back all the way it seems. Life has been chipping away at me for many years, sculpting me roughly into a man whom at times I hardly recognise; a man whom you will ever pass by. I try to kill myself and I end up in more of a mess than ever I was before. Sitting in my nowhere land, making all my nowhere plans for nobody.

“You keep talking to yourself, boy you will be here for a long old time.”

Zachariah Leonard had risen. For the first time since I had met him, his stench really hit me. Sweat oozed from his pores as he moved to the door. He hauled the smell of death behind him as if it were in a laden sack. I was beginning to notice these things about him now, my senses becoming ever
more keen. For I knew then, as he peered out of the doorway, that this was about more than mere survival.

Looking back at me, Zachariah curled a gnarled finger in my direction and bade me join him. As I crept towards him and stood by his side, I saw immediately what had moved him to alert me. The door to the shack was ever so slightly open and through the crack I could see a dishevelled looking figure asleep in a wooden chair.

“You know what this means, boy?” whispered Zachariah, his very essence blazing into my eyes.

I shook my head, afraid to speak, afraid to move; just plain afraid.

“They have you on The Watch.”

“The Watch?”

He nodded gravely, breathing noisily through his nose, primitively exhaling the stale air from his lungs as if he were no more human than a factory chimney.

“They have no trust for you. It is that girl. She has gone back to them and told them of your thoughts. That is what she does. She is a dog, boy, nothing more than a dog that comes whenever Weepy and Nardy call her. She disgusts me and she would disgust you if you had any wits about you. Now they have you on The Watch, your time here will be never ending. You have to prove to them that you can be trusted yet you will never get the chance. Is that what you want, boy? Does that please you? All for a stupid, treacherous girl?”

There was nothing I could say.

“It is time for us to leave,” he continued, suppressing an urgency in his voice that seeped out through his wide and staring eyes. “Mark my words, boy, that dolt sleeping on that chair has been there all night. This is what they do. This is what it has come to. When they are desperate, this is what they do. It is for their own protection and no more. They don’t all sleep though. We have been lucky. This is our moment. If we don’t leave this instant, it will be too late.”

For this rock of a man to be so concerned was sufficient for me to act swiftly upon his words. My heart thudded and my thoughts raced like a video on fast forward. I was getting the
gist of what he was saying but the details evaded me. Before I could take stock of what was happening, Zachariah had dragged my by the arm and we were wading knee deep through the Tollesbury marshes.

I knew not quite from what I was running and I knew even less about where I was heading. I would like to say these feelings were particular to the situation in which I then found myself but I cannot; for they could have applied to me at any time of my life from early childhood until the present day. Such has been my wayward existence, forever hiding and never in control of anything, not even of my own visions.

Tension was encroaching upon my world with every sodden step I took. It was as if my sloshing feet were pushing the buttons of some fairground attraction for as I forged on, so it seemed all of Tollesbury awoke. Alarmed voices spattered the morning air. Lit torches brought soft light to the fog but the heavy mist dispersed the lights with cool derision. I could just about see Zachariah as he ploughed on ahead with the strength of ten men. I dared not look behind, though in truth I would have barely been able to see a thing, such was the density of the mist that now engulfed all.

“Come on, boy,” shouted Zachariah. His voice was ghostly and ominous.

The ground firmed up and I realised we had left the marshes behind us. I guessed we were heading in the direction of Tolleshunt D’arcy for any other path would have led us into the depths of the murky Blackwater. I had emerged from those depths once but did not relish taking that chance again.