Tollesbury Time Forever (25 page)

“It is such a wonderful day, I think I will take a stroll to Tiptree. Let’s save that stamp shall we?”

Beauty, beauty, beauty.

It’s here, there and everywhere…

So Saturday 30th August soon came around. As does the man, Mr Cash. And I thank you for that and so much more.

I arose as the dawn birds chirruped and I squinted through my bedroom window at the blue sky morning. I have my curtains open always and the windows too for to be awoken as the light of the sun doth appear in the sky and to be alerted to the fact by a vibrant orchestra of unseen choristers is a pleasure of life indeed. I had begun to notice in recent times the softness of pillows and the coldness of sheets. Again, pleasures of life, sir. And when you notice such things, life can seem just that little more bearable.

What to wear, what to wear? The denim shirt, the Beatles T-shirt or the checked lumberjack shirt? It has only ever a choice of those three since I lost my baggy jumper. I went for the Beatles T-shirt after a moments thought. I have long had a belief that when the Fab Four are with me, I always need to say just a little less about myself. It gets tighter on me as the years go by. One morning I will wake up and the T-shirt and my skin would have merged into one - and what a fine morning that will be.

The bikers that at times congregate at The King’s Head claim that Mo’s Café in Tiptree does the best full English breakfast in the land. Praise indeed. I used to go to Mo’s when I first met Julia, though I had never met Mo at all. The café was cheap and clean and it accepted us. The anticipation about going there and hopefully seeing my wife again after all these years was tempered by the fact that Mo’s may have changed, lost its way, given into the charge of progress. But if Mo’s had become a different place, my Beatles T-shirt and I would perhaps represent those that still had a foot in the everpast.

One busridedream and I was there. It was eight o’clock in the morning and the sun was already climbing. Tiptree High Street was clear of the take-away debris and the underage supermarket discarded cans of a village Friday night. And
Mo’s was before me smelling of a bacon, sausage and hot coffee paradise.

The first thing that hits you when you walk into Mo’s Café is the very greenness of it all. It is as if the ridged carpet were a patch of grass around which has been erected four walls. The wooden panelling that reaches about a third of the way up each wall is a lighter shade of green than the carpet yet a darker shade still than the pale green of the rest of the walls. The four out of five square lights that work in the suspended ceiling act as gentle suns that shine wanly down upon this genuine corner of a struggling man’s heaven. As I stood at the door and looked around, I felt like I was the lead character that Roald Dahl never wrote - Simon and the Giant Apple. He missed a trick there.

“What’ll it be sweet ‘art?”

The lady that had addressed me spoke with the assuredness of one who was in charge. She was tall and sturdy and had the name Mo tattooed on the top of her left arm. Nothing else - just Mo. Though this was not a pub, Mo was most definitely the landlady of this place.

“Sweet ‘art?”

“Sorry. Erm. A black coffee and a sausage sandwich please. Thank you.”

“Ok my darling. I’ll bring it over, love.”

I went and sat down at the table nearest the counter and faced the door so I could see when Julia arrived, if indeed she would. I have learned during my times that sitting with my back to people, whether it be in the day room of a hospital or in The King’s Head, engenders in me an anxiety and fear that is difficult to suppress. It’s in the learning of such lessons that I have for periods of my life been able to cope. Of course, the tablets and injections help, Doctor, of course they do. Although if you could just prescribe me a sausage sandwich and a steaming mug of coffee every Saturday morning, I’m sure I could manage the rest of the week free of your ingenious concoctions.

Clonk.

“There’s your coffee, my dear - butty on its way.”

“Thank you.”

A woman with her back to me, behind the counter, was pushing sizzle crackle sausages around a big open hob and there were three other customers beside myself in Mo’s Café that Saturday morning in August.

The other table beside me was vacant, as were the four tables positioned end to end down the centre like some sort of primitive tennis net. On the other side, both tables were occupied, one with a man tucking into a huge mound of food; at the other sat a bald man with a much older gentleman. Both looked forlorn. They looked not at one another but at their respective mugs. I could not see if they were empty or full. Every now and then, the younger man would reach out and squeeze the squeezy ketchup bottle in the centre of the table until a bubble of red appeared at the top of the nozzle. He would then relent and the ketchup would return with a sigh to its plastic home. The older man seemed not to see what I saw. If he did, he made no comment. Perhaps the action soothed them both.

My sausage sandwich was plonked in front of me by Mo and this disturbed my reverie.

“Do you have any sauce?” I asked timorously.

“Yes, sweet ‘art,” replied Mo. “And plenty of cheek,” she added, smacking her own ample behind and returning moments later with two bottles of ketchup. “The cheek’s not available though, darling - not on a Saturday.” She smiled and returned back to her post.

Mo was formidable indeed. I felt that were the most persistent of criminals to have entered the café, they would have left only with a handful of change having broken like a wave upon Mo’s defences. Instead of robbing the place, they would have just ordered a bacon bap to take away.

As I sipped my coffee, a white haired man bespattered with paint pushed open the door.

“Anyone ‘ere got an Audi Quattro?” he asked, all East London accent and blue eyed grin.

The assembled customers, such as they were, either shook their heads, mumbled ‘no’ or looked down at their
respective tables hoping he would go away. I was the latter - for I was waiting only for Julia. Time was ticking.

“Then I reckon I’ve probably got away with backing into it then! Cheers people!”

And he was gone. Bowling, bowling, bowling.

As the door closed, the man who had been sitting by the window approached the counter with his empty, bean-stained plate.

“Cheers Mo - gorgeous as ever!”

“And did you like your breakfast, Clint?”

Clint? Brilliant!

“To be honest Mo, give me a bucket next time and top it right up!”

The cook turned at this stage, mock aghast in her gentle eyes and interjected.

“I just don’t know how you can eat all that at this time of the morning, Clint! I feel sort of guilty cooking it for you!”

“Did a forty mile bike ride before I got here, love. Left at six this morning. Gives a man an appetite that does, Shirley!”

The old man who sat with his ketchup-squeezing companion turned round in his seat and addressed the people at the counter.

“I did forty miles myself this morning. Going round in fucking circles.”

Clint laughed. Mo knew better.

I then glimpsed a small boy shoot out from behind the counter on roller skates.

“You be careful in here, Lee. If you want to go that fast, you go outside,” instructed Mo.

And so he did.

“Be the next Robin Cousins, your boy, Mo!” Clint exclaimed.

“Who?”

“You know, that skater bloke.”

“Oh, yes, I remember. Who was that other one?”

“Torville and Dean,” said the cook, over her shoulder.

“Which one was the man, Clint?”

“Neither of them, Mo. Poofters both of them! Not that your boy is going to be a poofter. Didn’t mean that. Anyway, see you next Saturday, Mo. Have a good week.”

“You too, Clint,” replied Mo, although I sensed she may well have wished him to perhaps come off his bike in front of traffic at some stage during the next seven days, such was the vigour with which she began to wipe down the counter.

The door opened once more - it was nearly half past nine. The latest entrant to the scene was a woman who looked to be nearly a hundred years old. Her blue white hair stood out from her wrinkled visage as if she were being dragged up to heaven by it and the frown lines on her face were but a testament as to how desperate she was to stay upon this earth. She wore a dark blue dress with yellow flowers upon it and she walked with a dignity that all but made me melt.

“Hello, Mo,” she said when she finally reached the counter. “Do you have any sausage rolls left?”

“Do you mean sausage in a bread roll or sausage in a pastry roll, Mary?”

“In a pastry roll, dear.”

“You want the bakers just down the road, Mary. They do sausage rolls that will knock your socks off. We do just the bread ones here.”

“Thank you, dear.”

“See you again next Saturday, Mary?”

“Yes, dear.”

And Mary sauntered out of Mo’s café with the same dignified walk, out onto the street and more than likely off to the bakers to ask for a fry-up. This is indeed a marvellous place.

The two other men in the café got up, handed their plates and mugs to Mo and slowly left.

“Turn round the sign on the door, won’t you, love,” Mo called out to them. They did as they were bidden and I was left alone, save for Mo. Even the cook seemed to have gone. My coffee was going cold and the word OPEN was facing me, dangling on a piece of card secured with a drawing pin.

I sighed and made to get up.

“Stay where you are, darling,” said Mo, standing behind me and securing me to my seat with a heavy hand.

“Another coffee?”

“Erm, yes please. If that’s alright?”

“Course it is. Wouldn’t have asked you otherwise.”

She then bent down to whisper in my ear.

“She’ll be here soon, sweet ‘art. Probably still deciding whether to put on some lippy if I know Julia. You just relax, Simon.”

And that was how it was. A tingle went through me like the first time I heard John Lennon sing Twist and Shout. That had been a moment when I had sensed a deeper side to human life soulness and this moment now compared. Mo’s café and John Lennon both occupied the same place in my heart from that time to this. And I think John would’ve liked that.

So there I was in Mo’s Café in Tiptree, waiting for Julia who, evidently was in cahoots with Mo - the latter having adjudged that I was not the maniac of legend but a lovelorn man anxiously anticipating the arrival of his wife. But so many years had passed since last I’d seen her, I wasn’t sure she would even recognise me. Yet Mo had obviously picked me out and we hadn’t even met before.

I’m sure that if I hadn’t had that gorgeous sausage sandwich and that hot black coffee I may well have become just a little, shhh, whisper it, paranoid!

The door clicked, the green greened and my heart stopped. There she was, Julia, my wife. I hadn’t seen her for nearly a quarter of a century yet she still nailed me to the floor with her beauty. Were I of porcelain, I would have shattered, were I of paper I would have crumpled - but I was just a man; so my mouth went dry and a heat came to me. And I knocked over my mug of coffee in the process of coolly scratching my head. Just a man.

Julia sat down in the chair opposite me. Her eyes were as blue as I ever remembered and she smelled just like the air that has ever kept me breathing. I swear she looked no different from that day in the car when Robbie first started school.
Except now she wasn’t tutting at me. And I just could not take my eyes off her.

“Would you like a drink?” I asked.

“I think I have one on its way,” she replied.

And indeed she had. Clonk.

“Thank you for coming. I didn’t think you would.”

“Well, Simon. I haven’t seen you for a few weeks - and I still only live just around the corner so what else was a girl to do?”

She smiled and reached out to cover my hand.

My heart beat hard as the blood rushed around me like so many children in a playground on the final day of school. A few weeks? I hadn’t seen her for more than twenty years yet she had spoken of our last meeting as being in terms of a few weeks ago.

She read my mind better than any Doctor could.

“Simon, my love. I am your wife, what the hospitals and the police refer to as your ‘next of kin’. Each time over the past twenty years when you have been admitted to hospital, when you have been Sectioned, when the police have picked you up, when you have gone missing, when you have appealed against your Section, when you have tried to kill yourself - each time, they have contacted me.

I could probably tell you the names of every nurse who cared for you, every social worker that sought my permission to Section and every doctor who shook his head at me. And I have cried lots of tears.

I have tried to help people to understand you and I have visited you whilst you lay with tubes coming out of you. I have let them Section you and I have told them of places where you are likely to be found when you have run away. And I have done all these things out of love.