Tollesbury Time Forever (29 page)

Somebody passed my window and shortly after there was a knock upon my door, a gentle knock, a knock that reminded me of the tapping together of drumsticks that our drummer used to do to count us in on the slower numbers.

I got up to open the door and there stood a man I hadn’t seen before. He looked as wayward as I as he delved in his trouser pocket. He glanced up at me apologetically as he retrieved a sad photograph of himself on a rather tatty name badge. Stuart Ayris - Community Psychiatric Nurse - Blackwater Mental Health Trust. My nurse for this week. Hey ho.

“Please come in,” I said, almost feeling sorry for him.

Whether it was a newfound confidence in myself or a lack of confidence on his part, I had the feeling that we were on an equal footing. Maybe he was as mad and confused as I.

“I’m sorry the house is a bit of a mess,” I ventured.

“Should I take my boots off?” he asked.

Boots! He wore cowboy boots!

“No, it’s ok,” I replied.

“I’m Stuart, by the way. Sorry, I didn’t introduce myself.”

“Hello Stuart.”

“So how are you? Sorry, I meant to say that I’m here because Frank is on leave this week and he asked me to do your injection and see you and stuff. I hope that’s ok.”

“Of course.”

He didn’t seem to know where to look.

“So how have you been, Simon? What have you been up to since Frank last saw you?”

He spoke quickly and his accent reminded me of my dad.

To tell or not to tell, that is the question! Whatever I say, they write in their books and type into their computers and call
that treatment. But what could I ever say that anyone would understand. Whenever I tell them what I really think, they increase my medication or drag me into hospital.

“I’ve not been up to much really. It’s pretty quiet around here.”

“It seems like a nice place. I’ve never been here before. My wife grew up in a village - it’s the sort of place she would like.”

I smiled and nodded. Already I maybe knew more about him than he knew about me. Funny how it all happens.

“So you work with Frank then do you, Stuart?”

“Yes. I’ve not been with the team long though.”

“And what does your wife do?”

“She’s a nurse as well.”

“Oh. That’s nice. Did you want a drink, tea or coffee or anything?”

“No thank you. I’ll be fine thanks.”

“So your wife is a nurse like you then?”

“Well she works on the wards. Has done for years. I’ve not been qualified that long.”

“Then I’m sure I may well have met her. I was a patient not so long ago, earlier in the summer.”

“It‘s Penny, my wife's name. Penny Shoraton. She kept her maiden name because she said pennyayris sounds like some sort of infection. She speaks about you a lot. It’s actually really nice to finally meet you.”

Penny Shoraton - the angel of all angels, the beauty of the beautiest, the absolute light of all that is perfect in this world. Penny Shoraton. I could not help but sigh at the very thought of her.

“She is a wonderful nurse.”

“Thank you.”

“My wife has spoken about her. I think they know each other.”

“They are good friends. Mo, too, from the café. Proper little witches of Tiptree when they get together.”

 
“And Carrie, the barmaid?”

“I’ve never met her, but Penny knows her.”

It all began to make some sort of sense to me now - Julia’s little network of informants, all letting her know how I am and what I’m up to. Seems I’m not the only spy in the village after all!

“And Old Jed, the man with the golden retriever. Do you know him?”

Stuart shook his head.

“Am I as mad as you thought I was?” I asked.

Stuart leaned back on the settee and looked at me properly for the first time. He smiled the sort of smile I had seen once when someone had given me the wrong medication.

“To be honest”, he said, “I don’t really believe in mental illness and madness and tablets and all that. We’re all just people trying to get through life as far as I'm concerned. That’s the only way I can see it. I think some people just make it too complicated, too big. I don’t really understand anything at all. I guess I’m not too much help to you am I?”

The boots hadn’t lied it seemed.

“I have come to the conclusion, Stuart, that it’s just about not getting caught. Bob Dylan once said - ‘if my thought-dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.’ That’s what it’s all about really. I have wonderful thought-dreams yet people over the years have tried to take them away, make them disappear with tablets and injections.”

 
“But you have tried to kill yourself before, haven’t you? A few times from what Penny says.”

He had a point. And it was a point upon which my theory of the nature of madness often came to a clumsy end. My thoughts, experiences, hallucinations, delusions, whatever you want to call them, had oftentimes ended up with me in a bad way.

“I’m sorry,” said Stuart. “Not for me to say really. Sorry.”

“No, no. It’s fine. You are very easy to talk to.”

“Thanks. Not what Penny says.”

Without knowing it, he was patching up my heart.

“The times I have tried to kill myself have obviously never ended in me actually dying. And they have always been
for a reason - unless you have been interrogated in Berlin, been fired from a successful band or sacrificed your life for that of a child I guess that won’t make any sense. Each of my suicide attempts have been a culmination of experiences that have in turn led to new understandings for which I am very grateful. And what is death but a new experience? And anyway, if I had not been hanged in July, would you be here talking to me now?”

“Not been hanged? I thought you had hanged yourself. That’s what I read anyway.”

“It’s all the same,” I replied.

A peaceful silence came to us both and we each studied the dusty wooden floor, searching for clues.

“Do you mind if I use your toilet?” he asked, eventually. “Lot of coffee today. Kind of comes with the job.”

At that, he clomped up my stairs and out of view. The clomping stopped when he reached the top and well before he had reached the bathroom. I knew then that he had seen what I had been up to since the last time Frank was here. He was looking at the writing. Not having any interior doors had made it impossible for him to have missed my scribblings. I had covered my bedroom wall, worked my way along the landing and had extended my work to just at the level of the top stair. Well a man has to express himself. And if every time he opens his mouth he has a tablet shoved in, he has to find alternatives.

After some moments, the clomping recommenced, and Stuart returned to the settee. I did not mention the writing on the walls and neither did he. He did though begin to assemble my injection, doing so with the silence and concentration of a hunter in the dusk. I had seen it done a thousand times, but on each occasion, my heart sought refuge and my soul escape.

It always felt as if I had been found guilty of some crime for which now I had to be punished, to be filled with a drug that would contain me, survey me, control me until the next time when my system would be topped up - another needle, another face, another nurse doing society’s bidding - saving the fine people of this nation from the mad ones such as I, the ones whose thoughts and behaviours are not what the good
doctor ordered. Stab - you’re cured mate - well not cured, obviously, but it’s the best we can do for now.

And when your cowboy boots have clomped out of my house, my friend, I will lie on my bed and think of how best to write all this on the remaining walls.

 
“Do you trust me, Simon?” he asked, syringe in hand.

“I’m sorry?”

“Do you trust me?” he asked again.

I nodded.

“Well that’s handy,” he replied.

At that, he unsheathed the needle and revealed its sharp point which dripped with the oily fluid that would be soon injected into me. I waited for him to go through the pleasantries - which side do you want it? Standing up or lying down? Here or upstairs etc? But he said none of those things. In fact, he just let out a deep sigh and expelled the liquid back into its vial. Then he put all the pieces, including the syringe, into a little yellow container and snapped it shut.

“What are you doing?”

“Just giving you your injection,” he replied.

I didn’t know what to say. There was nothing I could say.

“Oh, just to let you know that your wife asked my wife to ask me to remind you about meeting her at the Scout Hut down the road at seven on Monday. There’s some sort of thing going on for disabled people.”

He stood as if to leave. And I shook the hand of my cavalry soldier allowing myself to linger there in his flesh for just a while longer than I ought.

On Saturday 6th Sep2008, I awoke; a free man. No alcohol sweated through my skin and no oily medication grasped at my thoughts. My emotions were my own and the puppeteer’s strings dangled at my side like a spider’s web sliced to pieces. I was neither a diagnosis nor a walking corpse. I was a man once more. I did not shudder. I did not shake. For the first time in as long as I could remember, there was not a blurring around the edges of my world.

The morning light shone upon me as I sat at my old wooden table, drinking my coffee and munching my toast. The White Album was on the CD player. The day was just beginning. I was Simon Anthony, a fifty year old man living in a small house in a beautiful English village. And I realised that wasn’t at all a bad thing to be.

I spent the majority of that weekend writing on the walls of my front room and dining room. At times I had to stand on a chair, but then when I reached the bottom of a wall, I would lie down flat on the dusty floor, my old knees creaking a little as I made my way back to the surface. I did not read back over anything I wrote. The upstairs had been completed some days ago, but I couldn’t even remember where I had started and where I had finished. It was of no concern. I was just passing the time, adorning my little home with the thoughts and remembrances of its only inhabitant.

Yet even then, with just the kitchen left to go, I had a feeling that once I had run out of space to write upon so perhaps my story would end.

Thus Saturday and Sunday wore on and I entered Monday aching and stiff. It’s a strange thing, this writing lark, spending all your time working away at something no-one will ever read, or would ever want to read, just to get a few things off your mind in order to pass the time. Still, it has kept me out of the pub, I suppose.

The Scout Hut was about a fifteen minute walk from my home. I was never in the Scouts. I was in the Boys’ Brigade for a while I think but things like that are vague to me these days. There was dodge ball I think and cold floors and dust and grey windows and a breeze and then there was the tuck shop with penny-chews and sherbet and high church ceilings. There was marching and blue hats and badges and saluting and a stage upon which nobody ever stood. That was the Boys’ Brigade to me.

I had never before been to the Scout Hut, although I had of course passed it on my walks and my wanderings, seen it from the outside, guarded by recycling bins and a car park. For that to be the place where I would finally be reunited with my son, well, if it was in a novel, you would surely never believe it.

The minutes passed and the hours turned to flowers. The light was light and the day drifted into the evening as the sun did fall in grace beneath the gaze of its sibling stars. All was pale - there was neither darkness nor brightness. It was as if the world itself were awaiting further instruction. And so I did leave my home that Monday evening and walk slowly down East Street, turning left at the Butcher's and on towards the harbour.

God, this village is beautiful. The closer I get to finding the true meaning of my existence, so does the living universe around me just astound all the more. It is there for us all.

It is a sadness of our society that we are taught to open our eyes and see as opposed to being taught to close our eyes and feel. When, as we grow, we stumble upon this error, we can only hope it is not too late. I am truly one of the lucky ones.

So there I was in my English village, on the horizon of the world, a dot, a speck a blib blab blib, a triumph of our times; there I was, standing outside the door of a small hall on a summer’s eve like a renegade about to enter the saloon of his ultimate falling. From within, the door was pulled open and Julia, my wife, filled the void as I ever believed she would.

“Hello Simon,” she said, touching my arm gently. “How are you?”

“Not bad,” I replied, trembling, quaking, shaking, rocking and rolling. “Not bad.”

“I should have explained,” added Julia, coming out now and closing the door behind her, during which time I briefly heard music and gabbling and people and hum. “Every month there is a get together of carers and families who know or have someone with a disability. We move around the area. We are in Tollesbury about twice a year.”