Tollesbury Time Forever (28 page)

Can four - that was the crest of the hill. In a pub, if you leave before the fourth, you can retain your dignity, your self-respect, your sanity even. There is something in the fourth that differs from those preceding it. It must be a chemical thing. There is no going back from the fourth. But there I sat at my own table in my own little house and drank down that fourth can. The effect of it was to make me stand and wander around for a moment, like a man who has placed a bet at the Bookie's, a bet he knows he cannot afford to lose.

I sat back down. The race was on, the horses were raging and the crowd was roaring. Simon Anthony and Scrumpy Jack were neck and neck coming up to the fifth.

Both were over safely and that bottle of Jack Daniels pawed at the floor of its stable like some sort of ancient beast of ancient times, disturbing the earth beneath it and the wanton air around it.

By the time I had drunk the fifth can, I needed to use the toilet. I tripped up the first step of my staircase (how grand!) but made it back down without further mishap. I thereafter eschewed the dining chair and just sat on the floor, my back resting against the wooden door of the kitchen. Now that felt more right - legs outstretched, wood behind me. This was my territory now.

Number six went down as if it were not even alcohol. I guess, over the years, that had been my downfall. Only every third or fourth drink ever affected me. Those in-between just seemed to set me up for the next milestone. Yet had I tried to speak, I know my words would have been slurrrred and my mind would have been almost blank.

It is drinking on my own that has led me to drink so much - whether it be here in my home or at The King’s Head. I declare that I have never been drunk except when forced to engage with others. I hoisted that flag upon the battlefield and felt rather pleased.

Where are you now mine enemy? But I knew exactly where he was. I could see him shimmering like gold, gazing at
me as I downed the eighth and final can of Scrumpy Jack. The infantry had fallen, but here came the boom-boom cannons - and I was to be its boom-boom fodder.

You see, cider is just a chemical added to all the other chemicals in your body. It enhances some parts of you and debilitates others - there is a certain balance to all that, a consideration for what is required and a gentlemanly salute to your predicament. Whisky however confronts you with the power of the alchemist. It corners you, does not allow you to leave until you have opened up to it your heart and your mind. It whips you and you take it. It pushes you over and it smacks you hard. It is a punishment, a punishment that I have not only endured during my life, but begged for. For it unbridles your thoughts and makes them seem tolerable.

I knew all that, but still, after my eight cans were gone, I unscrewed the top off my nemesis friend. We were to dance together one final time. No glass for me. Just straight from the bottle, intimate, just my cider mouth and Jack Daniel’s burning, open neck. Wash over my tongue oh fire and let’s just see what happens.

At first it blurs and blinds and the pain is all, a pain not of hurt but of shatter and bleakness, of the splash of a hard wave and the crack of a bat upon ball. You have to take it to make it and you have to shake it to break it. The smell alone has a colour and the taste a texture. You just have to let it become a part of you and welcome that transmutation of tations, that elaborate thronging of foreboding. Come and get me, swallow me whole and take me down to the nether parts of the deep dark land of my soul. More and more and more. This is not a drink, it is a rope that pulls upon my past, my present and my future. It tugs and guides and pulls and glides, dragging me ever further to the very root of my clid clad mountain.

Up for air and in once more. One width, two widths, red stripe, yellow stripe - I spit water out from my lungs and laugh at your tears young lady. Tis fun, fun, fun with the finest hot chocolate in the world at the end of it. The Dene of Hills and The Hill of Dene - come back and make me a child once more
- oh give me back that spark of youth that was not quelled in the wash of adult despair. Tears are just water and salt. The ocean is but of tears and the universe is nothing but a twink. The world is not real. There is glass beneath my feet and I am glad of it and I will stamp with all my might to prove it so.

Half way down. Proud and dirty and uncaring. Come on!

My boy shines!

Yeaaaaah you burn no more, you sparkle not! You are but flat to me now for I am building up my walls and my defences, my wood and my armour - you control me not though you be as beautiful as ever you were. I am now a-gulping and you are but a-sulking.

I recall now being in the sandpit of my youth - a small boy looking much like me is there too, sporting (yes sporting!) a red and black checked shirt and he plays with such abandon that he makes me an adult in his presence. He has no care but in what he creates. He takes the shoddy spite of all and just adds it to the sand, creates the landscape with hands of pure silver - he has flags and sticks and magic tricks and beauty brilliant wild and crashing and I am instantly in love with him. Yet destined was I never to see him again. It had always been a sense of woe to me but now in this whisky bourbon shift I see I was blessed. I am blessed.

 
BLESSED AM I AND ALL THAT SAIL IN ME!

Oh God if you do exist, spare me now a wink of your murmur, a dinky donk of your wisdom. It’s all a game, I know that now. A game where everybody wins who sees nothing for, I repeat - THIS WORLD IS NOT REAL!!

I sigh a sigh and wave goodbye to invisible ladies and choo chonk sailors who fall upon me with their wealth and but float away as they touch the tinge sodden breakings of my broken heart - a heart that reforms before me, clinging to the floor, supping and sapping the dust and the claw and the whisky and the cider and the beer and the schiz, schiz, schiz and I AM WHOLE!!

AND HOW GREAT AM I??

The bottle is empty.

I am floating.

I am above all.

I am you.

I am you.

And as the sun rose in the Tollesbury sky, the morning did indeed greet me with angels.

It was a new day.

It was a new time.

“Hello Carrie.”

“Hello Simon.”

“What do people drink in here if they don’t drink?” I asked. My voice was barely audible.

“If they don’t drink?”

“Yes.”

“You mean if they don’t drink alcohol?”

“Yes.”

I looked furtively about me. Just Jim and Bill were in, as usual.

“Shall I just get you something, Simon?” asked Carrie.

She was smiling more than I felt she ought.

I nodded.

She poured me a pint of orange juice and lemonade. It was a beautiful colour.

“Aye, aye! Looks like old Simon’s gone poofter on us!”

It was Bill, having spied my drink.

“Poofter, poofter, poofter. Well who’d have known it? You see that Jim? Girl’s drink.”

“Leave him alone Bill,” said Jim, softly. “Hello Simon, lad. You okay?” he added.

“Yes, thanks.” I replied.

“Good man.”

“Good man?” spluttered Bill. “Good man?? Have you seen what he’s drinking? Soon be me and you as the only real drinkers in here Jim. Fucking orange juice and lemonade! This used to be a proper pub!”

“Any more of that,” said Carrie to Bill, “and you and your boyfriend there might find yourselves drinking down the Legion!”

At that, Carrie Caseby, the most beautiful barmaid in all the universes, leaned forward and whispered into my ear.

“Not long now, Simon. Not long. Your Robbie is delicious.”

“What day is today, Carrie?” I asked at last.

“Thursday.”

“My nurse is coming tomorrow. Then it’s the weekend. And then, on Monday, I think I’ll be seeing Robbie.”

I spoke as a child.

I drank my orange juice and lemonade.

It was disgusting.

But from that moment on, I didn’t care.

 
I was just counting down the minutes.

Listen.

Do you want to know my secret?

Closer now.

And I don't mind if you tell…

Imagination is life and life is imagination. All my years, that truth had evaded me, yet looking back I had surely always known it. From so young, I had lived on the brink of reality, teeter tottering into the well of what the world would call ‘madness’. It is a fact that my eyes have seen wonders and my mind has experienced great things.

Closer.

At five years old, my bedroom wallpaper depicted Cowboys and Indians in various poses, some on foot, others prostrate and yet more still resplendent upon fiery horses. The pattern repeated itself all around me, whirring and moving slowly until I felt the square bedroom become a circle. That was when the Cowboys and Indians moved; making war and peace, always searching and never finding. Hair flowed and sand drifted across my landscape. Now whether they became real or I became paper, I know not. But I did become one with them. I sat upon a cliff for a day and a half, warming myself in the cold American night with a fire of my own devising. I was an Indian scout watching out for the white man, the pale face, the foreigner in my land. And I was the lonesome cavalry officer who had been parted from his troops and taken in by a squaw, nursed back to health and set free upon the wide majestic plains.

And one fateful night, back when I was five years old, the Indian scout me met the cavalry officer me. I rose from my fire and stared at my enemy. And I walked towards the flames and closed my eyes. My mother found me in my bed in the morning and asked me why I had been crying. I had not the
words back then to explain. And I barely have them now, forty-five years later.

At the age of thirteen, I was inducted into the dark world of counter-intelligence. The service had never before known anyone of my sharpness of eye and ability to hide in the shadows. I was known throughout Europe as ‘The Shade’. Mission after mission was thrust upon me and I toiled for my country. I wandered the streets till my feet were beat and I recorded every car that passed, made a note of the description of each person who so much as glanced in my direction. And in my sketch book, I worked it all out - the cars that never moved, the people who exchanged scraps of paper and the windows whose curtains only ever opened when the moon was at its brightest. I connected all with dark arrows until it all made sense.

But the spy world just wore me down in the end. It was as my career was nearing its finality that I learned something fundamental about my character. I was nothing without approval. When you are ‘The Shade’, you go unnoticed for that is the very trick, the very lie upon which your reputation as a master spy is built. The spy must not want affection or approval. Great though I was, I had to turn my back on my country. I was sixteen when ’The Shade’ handed in his badge and gun. It had been a tough time indeed.

Just when I thought the world had disowned me, I became a bass player in a rock and roll band. I was so cool you would not believe it. Even my own band members did not know my name. I never spoke you see, just stood on stage, unmoving, defiant. As the drummer crashed and the guitarist wailed and the singer roared, I kept them all together, drove them on and led them to blues heaven.

I was given the task of documenting our gigs and I did so religiously - from set lists, to information about the venues, crowd sizes and even little stick diagrams of how we were set up on stage. Playing bass in a blues band was the perfect antidote to the deception of my spying years. I was there for all to see yet I remained an enigma. I dressed all in black, wore dark glasses and a Stetson hat.

The band played on, the band you’ve known for all these years, but I became lonely and heart-broken. The fame satisfied me no more than did being ‘The Shade’. I longed to go deeper, to go back into the history of the world, for I was at last seeing as I entered my thirties that time is entirely meaningless. As the world did not exist, so neither did time. And neither did I.

I spent the next ten years as a reclusive author smoking lots of dope and drinking lots of whisky. I had several best selling novels that you may very well have read. I used different names in order to reduce the impact of my fame on the village of Tollesbury. There were times when I saw someone in the pub or at the bus stop reading one of my novels, my pseudonym writ large upon the cover. I admit I was occasionally tempted to inform the reader that I was indeed the author. I resisted, however, retaining my anonymity to this day.

You may not be surprised to hear that I declined all requests to be interviewed.

So where was there left for me to go but back in time? The present appalled me and the future was just blank. I knew I was of the earth and of this land - the five year old Indian scout had been as close to my true self as ever I had been. And thus had I found myself in Tollesbury, the year being 1836. But you already know that, don’t you?

Life is Imagination.

Imagination is life.

Such thoughts did I think as I sat in my old armchair, waiting for the nurse to come into my home and inject me.