Tollesbury Time Forever (23 page)

Sometimes you feel a sharp sting, sometimes it’s in without you even knowing it. But when it’s in, your whole world stands still. The syringe pumps the drug slowly into the fatty tissue - slowly, slowly, oily, oily. I somehow think that the fatty tissue is the dimmest, least intelligent part of me. Thus it does not resist, nor does it remember. It consumes and disseminates without question. Think of a drop of paint in a glass of water - it spreads until the water is no longer translucent, the paint takes over, it taints and consumes and changes all irrevocably. As the paint cannot be removed from the water so the drug cannot be removed from the body. You can’t vomit it up. It is instantly a part of you, a mysterious dark and spreading web that is designed to impact upon your thoughts and your emotions. How it works, I do not know. Over the years, it has led to my hands having a subtle tremor. When I walk, I feel awkward, as if I am at times being manipulated by the strings of a puppeteer. Yet I continue to accept stranger after stranger into my house to fill me with this stuff.

Sigh for me please kind soul, for I am all sighed out.

“Well, Simon. I must be off now. Another three of these to do today. I may see you next time or it may be one of my colleagues. Take care.”

Creak.

Click.

“Goodbye.”

So there I was, medicated and treated. The sun would soon be going down and the moon would soon be rising. After my injection, I have always found that forced sleep is the only thing to keep me sane. Tomorrow would be the start of my reunification with my son. With such thoughts did I seek repose. And with such thoughts did I awaken the following morning.

You can prescribe this and administer that, but love will never be darkened and spirit will never be quelled. You may call me schizophrenic if you like, if it so please you. But my life is not about what you call me; it is about how my heart beats.

In order to prove to myself that I was worthy of my son, I needed to put into action the lessons I had been taught. The FRUGALITY children had been my teachers and I their student. But what value is knowledge if it does not change your life?

So I began at the beginning - Forgive everybody everything.

Not to forgive is to load your heart with a burdensome smouldering from which it can never truly recover. Bitterness, resentment, anger - all are emotions that weigh a soul down. I went initially for the easier forgivings, knowing that I had to start somewhere.

To kick off, I forgave Paul McCartney for The Frog Chorus and I felt a little lighter almost immediately. Just that little bit of forgiveness started the process. I then forgave Graham Gooch for going on the rebel cricket tour of South Africa. This was swiftly followed by forgiving Joseph Heller for everything other than Catch-22, Kevin Costner for The Bodyguard and Bob Dylan for Under the Red Sky.

Following these forgivings, I reflected upon how much better I felt in my soul. And through this process, my regard for Paul McCartney, Graham Gooch, Joseph Heller, Kevin Costner and Bob Dylan had somehow intensified.

I then began to believe that the act of forgiveness not only lightens your own burden but enhances your view of those that you have forgiven. Maybe that’s true. Maybe that’s just me. These were the easy forgivings.

I found it simple to forgive misjudgement. It sat well with me. Forgiving harm knowingly done was going to be so much more difficult. This led me initially to Diego Maradona and then to Margaret Thatcher. It was like a psychological equivalent of Dante’s nine circles of hell. It was about damage done and how you try to minimise the effect of it upon the rest of your life. The moment is horrid but it need only be a
moment. With forgiveness, I was realising, you could regain control, withdraw the dagger from the wound, staunch the bleeding and continue in goodness.

Diego Maradona. The hand of god. Peter Reid and Terry Fenwick with concrete boots and Peter Shilton despairing. The greatest player in the world at the time not only felt the need to cheat but to claim the hand that punched the ball into the goal was manoeuvred by an all powerful deity. He not only betrayed his unbelievable talent but he betrayed the beautiful game itself. He robbed me of a dream and he broke the hearts of children (admittedly only English ones for which he probably had scant regard.)

When genius has to resort to theft, it is a woeful time indeed. I remember feeling so angry at the time, not just that England had lost, but that a single man had deceived us all. But I now forgave him. He did what he did in a fleeting moment. And once you set out on the road of deception, it’s so hard to come back. I should know. Thus was my dalliance with football over.

On the subject of being robbed, how about being robbed of the chance to work, the chance to hope, the chance to feel part of this world?

It was the voice that first alerted me to what was to come, that strident, man-woman-man voice whose dialect was from no place I know - the villain that Doctor Who never faced - perhaps the only one that could have truly left him floundering. Margaret Thatcher. Mrs Thatcher. Prime Minister. I guess to this day you do not truly know what you did to the likes of those such as I. I like to think you were maybe just dragged along on the tide of change, of the charge to ‘progress’ - first female head of the government and all that.

But when you decided the Falkland Islands were worth killing for, well that is when I lost faith in lots of things. I felt alone in my own country, cast aside by my own people and condemned by my own naïve sense of what is right in this world. You made me a stranger and you perpetuated my alienation. John Lennon would have been appalled. William Blake would have screamed at you, defied you and been
undoubtedly, violently shunned by you. But I had neither the courage of the former nor the visions of the latter.

I just sat in my room during the eighties, wherever that room be, and shook, regaled from within and without by hurt, pure hurt. You took away my years. Yet I forgive you. I forgive you. I forgive you.

As I thunk my thoughts so I began to lose a hold upon them. I knew they were drawing me with inexorable beauty to the source of it all, the pivotal moment that led to all that was to follow. My thoughts slipped and slupped upon the muddy waterslide of my rundown holiday park memory, leading as they should, to the reservoir of my pain. The Monster of Ford's. My dad’s brother. My uncle. I could not deny that it was he that had to be forgiven for my soul to move on.

But how do you forgive a man who raped you when you were three years old?

How do you even begin?

It was not a trauma that I could sit at home and think about. I felt ill at ease bringing a memory as sordid as that not just into my house, but into Tollesbury itself. It’s not something to which this corner of my earth should ever be subjected. I would have to travel where Uncle Len lay.

Well if you ever plan to leave Tollesbury

Take the 91A to Witham from the square

Close your eyes and you’ll be there.

Get the train from Witham to Shenfield

Taxi then to Brentwood, pay the fare

Close your eyes and you’ll be there.

Train goes from Brentwood to Harold Wood

Stops at Gidea Park, all is good

You’ll see nothing much but Gallows Corner roundabout

Tesco Superstore, don’t forget The Plough

Raphael’s Park, Marshalls Park, train slowing down right now

Now you cross over to platform four

Fall off the train, run down the stairs

Close your eyes and you’ll be there.

Train goes from Romford to Upminster

Slip your ticket in the slot, out you go

You’re out on the street, not far from the cemetery

Park to the right, shops to the left

Left right, left right, darling come along with me,

You get on the bus number three-seven-oh

Your childhood is about to be laid bare

Close your eyes and you’ll be there.

And there I was at the gates of Upminster Cemetery, the gates to Heaven, the gates to Hell; and all was silent in my world. At that moment, the universe did not exist save this corner of Essex where the dead are buried. Some were set adrift and aflame in the stone crematorium that stood, shoulders shrugged, in the centre of the whole green set-up; others were just put in wood and dug into the cold, cold English ground.

I felt as if I were surveying an ancient battlefield, a war between armies of stone and armies of flowers, a battle for the domination of this sacred earth. As my eyes flickered over the scene, I had a sense of movement, a feeling that as my gaze turned so the object I had just regarded, be it stone or flower, had altered slightly, had momentarily parried a blow or tightened a grip on a helpless victim. Dullness and colour, death and life grappling in perpetuity, there never being a victor except for motion itself.

In terms of where to look for Uncle Len, I left that purely to chance. I knew he was buried at Upminster Cemetery because my parents had brought me there for the funeral. They had been separated for about three years at the time and never saw each other again, as far as I knew, after that day.

I had been eleven years old and had chosen to sit outside the gates for the duration of the ceremony. I believe my
parents thought it was due to an overwhelming sense of loss on my part that I could not face seeing Uncle Len being buried. I was overwhelmed, it’s true - but with what I perhaps still cannot say. I just remember the rain falling so hard upon my young self as they buried him, trying frantically to be entirely drenched by it, to be cleansed of him, to be drowned in God’s tears, to be rid of the smother of oil and grease.

So now my fifty year old self wandered around the cemetery like an old ghost, drifting in and around the gravestones, floating about them like some drunken spectre, fiddling with his keys, looking for the front door to his end of days home. And like the inebriated fool I am, I eventually found what I was looking for - Uncle Len’s grave. I sat before it, cross-legged - a child back in his first ever classroom.

There were no dates marked upon the stone - just the inscription:

Here lies Zachariah Leonard ‘Len’ Anthony

Well, well.

No dates - no birth, no death, just the assertion that there he lay in the dirt. But I knew he was not there, had perhaps never been there. For he lives in my mind, in my ether, in the stars, in the damp, in the marshland country around my home and in the bubbles in my stagnant beer. He moves when I move and he awakens when I sleep. He is the sweat of me and he is the absolute peak of my pain. He is the silent end to my screams and the crack in the pot of my gold. He is not in the ground at all. I knew when I saw that stone that it was a lie. I couldn’t even convince myself that the flowers had won. Though the day be sunny and clear, I could feel nothing but ice cold rain smacking down upon me.

So there I sat waiting for forgiveness to come to me. But how do you forgive a man like that who has done you such wrong? I started to think it was impossible. And it would have been impossible indeed had I continued to hate him. For in that moment, I realised that true forgiveness can only consume you if you can find it in yourself to love the one you are forgiving - yes, love. So as I stared at the words chiselled into the stone, I
became my Uncle Len and I entered the soil to rummage around in his bones in search of his soul.

"Working at Ford's is a fuck of a job. You’re on the line like a fucking machine, covered in oil and grease. I never thought that would be my life, not that I had any dreams mind, what with any chance of childhood happiness being blown away by Hitler, my dad disappearing in a tank in Egypt and my old mum taking in bloke after bloke as if they were washing. And the odd one or two of the bastards took more of a fancy to me than her, did stuff to me they said was normal. When I told mum once, she hit me and accused me of trying to ruin any chance she might have of a new life. And my older brother, he worked at Ford's with me, he had it easy - got himself a bird early on, moved in with her and her parents soon as he could, give her one too many and got her pregnant.

Then this perfectly perfect baby appears from out of her a few months down the line. They called him Simon. Me and my brother did opposite shifts at Ford's. His wife worked during the day as perfect Simon got a bit older so I helped out taking care of him. I would go round there to that house of bliss, me with fuck all except for a shit job and all this hatred. And I would see perfect Simon all white and sweet and like a fucking angel. And I would see what should have been me, what I could have been like, the hope and the future, the childhood, the life - all those things that were denied me. So I would give him a big hug and lose all control.

I never hurt him mind, not in a way that anyone would have noticed. He would struggle the first few times but then he just wouldn’t say a word. It was like he wasn’t even there. And I would go back to work on the factory line and all I could feel was the most intense shame and disgust for myself. I wanted to go and tell everybody what I had done, to break the cycle, to get what was coming to me. I had become the worst a man can be but I just could not stop. If I did give it a break for a while, my whole fucking wretched body would shake with rage like a fizzed up corked up bottle. And I would have no choice but to go back and release the tension.