Tollesbury Time Forever (17 page)

“That little one,” W.G. finally said. “That little one got it.”

Zachariah Leonard ceased his screaming, fell back upon the earth and just lay there, silent, slumped and spent.

I was still staring in shock at W.G. as he moved away from me and sat beside Zachariah Leonard. Zachariah lifted his arm and enveloped the young boy with it, gently holding him close. Such a display of affection from him shook me still further. He made no attempt to wipe the blood from W.G.’s face and spoke not a word. The bat lay on the grass, its job done. The night was cool and aloof.

I could stand no longer so returned to the earth. Gravity had never felt so unwieldy.

There are no rules.

“What have you done?” I asked W.G. “What have you done?”

“The little one got it,” he mumbled, his words directed more into the dirty folds of Zachariah’s grubby over-shirt than to me.

That much I had understood. But only that much. What a trio we were. It was so hard to work out the time, with no clue from the sky. I knew I had to stay awake. No sound came from up the hill so I could only think the body of the stricken child had yet to be discovered. I was thinking as calmly as I could about how to resolve this whole situation, yet this ’situation’ involved a small boy having been battered to death by a piece of wood and the young murderer dozing beside me in the arms of Zachariah Leonard.

And I could think only of my son, Robbie.

He was four years old when last I had seen him. I had decided to leave some months previously. I thought I had been kind in giving my wife a date of departure, reasoning, perhaps foolishly, it would make my abandoning of her easier to take. It was almost like I had handed in my notice - I don’t want this job anymore. Reason for leaving? Self-centred, dream-world living, whiskydrunk fool. I was miserable. My wife was constantly intense. Our lives were nothing less than painful. It’s not that we abused one another or were even offensive to
one another. It’s just that we had come together at a time when we just could not be accommodated into our own individual concepts of life. All these excuses had precipitated my decision to leave. I reasoned that it was better for all of us.

To give up your child, to give up your child.

In the story of my life, there is a vague smudge of ink, a disastrous undoing of logic. I left my son for reasons that now make no sense. I did indeed forego seeing him every night and every morning. I wilfully excepted myself from his smiles and his tears and his wonder. I didn’t see his face the first time he saw snowflakes and I was absent when he experienced the grand display of fireworks night and I was not there to comfort him when the dark scared him just a little more deeply than he could understand.

Robbie’s first day of school had been the last time I had seen him. He was up so early and so excited. My wife had tried to explain to him, in the preceding days, what school was all about and he had seemed to accept that it would be nothing less than brilliant. He would have friends to play with and he would learn things and be all grown up. It used to break my heart when I thought of what it would really be like for him, a boy with Down’s syndrome in a mainstream school in the middle of Tiptree. Not that there’s anything wrong with Tiptree, you understand.

So that morning, my wife got herself ready as if she were going out on the town. She wore make-up, something which it seemed she hadn’t done for years. She painted her nails red and looked beautiful. It was then that I realised this wasn’t just to hold her own with the other parents in the playground; for she was losing her little boy to the big wide world of school on the same day that her husband was deserting her. Joni Mitchell used to sing to me “you don’t know what you’ve got till it's gone” and Tom Waits would tell me “you never seen the morning till you stayed up all night.” They were both right. And yes, I was indeed tangled up in blue. God, she looked beautiful that day.

Julia stood in the small lounge doing the buttons up on Robbie’s shirt but a look of great concern was on his round face. He didn’t really do subtle.

“Mummy, you’ve got blood,” he said.

“Where, darling?”

“Your fingers.”

“That’s just my nail varnish. It’s supposed to be pretty.”

“Does it hurt?”

“No darling. Now stand still.”

I sat in the back of the car with Robbie as Julia drove us the short distance to the school. Robbie was soft and round and impossibly unaware of the life that faced him. It seemed to me then that the car was as much a womb as the one in which he had been carried prior to his birth. The world that he had experienced until this point had been a deceitful one of Disney videos, cuddles, warmth, chocolate and Julia‘s Elvis records; she had never really been a Beatles fan. There are some barriers, I guess, that only the best of relationships can overcome.

Robbie’s departure from the car at the sound of the bell would truly herald his birth into the cruel life of which I was only too familiar.

By the time we had got to the school, Robbie had succeeded in undoing all the buttons of his shirt, his chubby fingers having worked tirelessly to achieve their aim. He lifted his vest and patted his belly, giggling. My thoughts being far away, I had sat and watched him, unblinking, for the duration of our journey.

When Julia opened the back door to let Robbie out, she tutted, buttoned up his shirt again and lifted him out of the car. It was almost as if that episode alone had confirmed the disappointment she had felt the entire time she had known me.

“You can leave now,” she said to me, without as much as a glare in my direction. Not even a glare.

“Ok", I replied.

I had got out of the car and watched her take Robbie’s hand and lead him into the playground; the playground of fears, the playground of dreams - sandpits and grass and
concrete and fences. Her back was straight and she walked proudly. Robbie tried to keep up with her, looking back at me all the while. I slunk off. And that was that.

I had left my son and my wife so that I could pursue what? Dreams, fantasies, a brighter future? I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. It happened. That was all. Had I known of FRUGALITY then, I may have made a different choice. But here I was, years later, in a field with a decision to make.

The clarity of what I had to do was like an epiphany. A light shone down upon me, from maybe the only star in the sky. Without any conscious thought other than what I was doing was right, I stood, picked up the blood stained cricket bat and walked up the incline towards the cricket field. I passed through the nights of Robbie crying, through his terrors and his worries, through his anger and his despair. I climbed over the barriers I had erected for him and I pushed through the disgust I felt in myself.

W.G.’s face was large in my mind, his grin when he hit that on-drive, his loneliness and his rage. The two became one for me - W.G. and Robbie. So now you see there was only one thing for me to do.

The sky was pink when The Walrus found me. I was lying on the cricket pitch, curled up like a baby, cradling the bloodied bat as if I had fallen upon it in battle. I had been awoken some moments earlier by the shouts of children and had spent the intervening time readying myself for who knows what.

“You need to come with me,” said The Walrus, sadly. He looked deep into my very being and sighed, nodding as if in that moment he understood everything.

I rose stiffly, leaving the bat on the pitch and followed him. My gait was awkward and my back ached as I walked behind him. It was as if iron shackles had already been clamped about my ankles. The cricket pitch disappeared into the earth and the stumps became mere twigs once more as I left them behind. I had no idea what form of justice I was about to face, only that I deserved it. And it felt so good.

When I got to the front of the barn, the children were waiting for me. Each had their head bowed and their hands clasped behind their back. On command, they stood behind The Walrus.

“In front of me Simon, if you will,” The Walrus said to me.

I did as I was ordered.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Back to where you came from. It is time for you to return now.”

And thus did I arrive in the village square once more.

It was a bright day, with the sun gaining height in the Tollesbury sky. I breathed in the air and felt it drift down into my lungs, simultaneously moist and dry, filling them up before being expelled again. In and out. In and out. This motion, I realised, was all that kept any of us alive - this automatic function of drawing air into the body only to breathe it back out again. I tried to hold my breath but my body would fight against me until I had to relent and allow the air to return once more to the world. In and out. In and out.

I could hear the birds warbling and I felt for a moment I could taste England. The sense of belonging I had at that instant was absolutely palpable; belonging to this village, to this country, to this time. Love flowed through me, washed over me, dabbed my brow, dried me softly and left me cleansed.

The door to the village lock-up was already open. I stepped into the dark space and turned as the bolt slid across with a deep clang. It was a pleasing sound and I continued trying to listen to it as it faded away, seeking the vibrations as they drifted into the earth and the trees and the souls of all those that stood outside. Even the smell of urine and vomit and the odour of men that emanated from every crack in every piece of wood that housed me, even those things brought pleasure to me at that moment. They were signs of life, of the past, of the inevitability that all things must transform and temporarily end before evolving and going on and on and on.
Just urine, vomit and sweat to many perhaps. But not to me - I was savouring all.

I sat down and closed my eyes not caring for a moment if I ever moved from this spot. My world consisted then of just four old walls that were just large enough to contain me. I understood such small proportions. Everything was within reach. There was no movement that was not initiated by me. And, most reassuring of all, there were no people, no-one with whom I felt compelled to interact, no judges, no conspirators, no thieves, no lovers. Just me - the Child-Killer - a man simply awaiting his fate - the confirmation he required that he was indeed not meant for this world.

Sleep did not take me. I was awake yet drifting between one world and the next, a trance like state within which I could not be harmed. I could see my internal organs, how every part of my body worked. I could feel my liver, touch my lungs, smell the fragrance of my mind. These were deep sensations, incalculable in their meaning, incontrovertible in their evidence that life was all an illusion. My eyes see not what your eyes see - not really. We are all sentient beings encountering our own entirely unique experiences, floating in time, suspended in moments which we are taught to call life-times; taught by those who strive erroneously to make sense out of all of this.

Before I knew what was happening, there was a loud crack that shook me instantly. I covered my ears as the noise continued. It gradually came to my consciousness that somebody was hammering upon the door in front of me. I stood once more, tremulous.

“Out, drunk!” called a guttural voice.

The door to the village lock-up opened and I fell into Tollesbury village square. As I looked down, trying to gain my balance, I noticed I was kneeling in filth and straw. There were cattle wandering in front of The King’s Head and several people ambled about all dressed in dull, loose clothes. A smell of dung plunged into my lungs and I could do nothing but try to cough it out. A small boy walked towards me and leaned
over my confused frame. I was on all fours, more akin to the cattle than the people.

”What’s happening?” I asked the boy. A graveyard grin cracked his grimy little face in half and I expected one of his few remaining teeth to tumble out of his mouth and imbed itself in the dirt before me.

“Away boy!” shouted a large man who now stood before me. He held a wooden baton in one hand. It must have been he who had rapped upon the door of the lock-up and he who had yanked me out.

I stayed on the ground and leaned against the closed door of the lock-up. Before me, on two old armchairs, sat Weepy and Nardy. Penny Shoraton was standing behind them looking achingly beautiful. I could look no further than her.

“Where have you been, Simon?” asked Weepy.

In considering my reply, I could only smile. For where had I been indeed?

“It would help if you could tell us, Simon?” added Nardy. “It would assist us in helping you.”

I was truly in a state of bliss.

Weepy and Nardy exchanged a serious glance and then addressed me in unison, their voices intertwined, even their gestures mirroring one another.

“You have destroyed the life of a child. You took away his hope, his chance of a life of fulfilment. You valued your own foolish dreams above the wonder of an innocent. That child did you no harm. For all we know, he loved you, thought of you as a hero, a saviour, a superman. You have denied him the anticipation of birthdays, happy Christmases, the applause as he crosses the line in the sack race, the pat on the back when he is substituted at half-time, the confirmation that he is loved. You contradicted the absolute belief of a child that there is no evil in this world. And there is no greater crime than that.”