There And Back Again Lane

Bristol, BS8, 1994.

This is a

Crawford Street, London, W1, 2009.

Kerplunk! – [Oilcan]

You pass a château; it belongs to the village at the end of your journey.  You come to a church, and turning left, find yourself in front of a bar and shop combined.  A woman is standing on the steps, and two children turn about on their bikes.  She calls to someone inside as you stop before her to ask for Monsieur Drouet’s house.  To your surprise she knows your name.  The young man who then appears and grasps your hand turns out to be Monsieur Drouet’s son.  It seems he will take you to the cottage.  He puts a helmet on and scooters up the road, having indicated that you should follow.  The girl and the boy also follow on their bikes, so providing you with a welcoming cavalcade.  The procession turns left at a junction, then stops abruptly when the scooter turns in up a driveway on the right, where the two outriders fall away.  This cannot be the cottage, for its roof is more intact than you have been led to believe yours will be.  After the scooterist has gone inside, a woman past middle-age comes out, and with great friendliness introduces herself as Madame Drouet.  You are struck by her voice, which has both the playfulness of a child and the joviality of a not discontentedly ageing mother.  She in turn fetches her husband, and it is he who escorts you to your new home.

By a path through an orchard, and past run-down wooden outbuildings, the cottage is not more than thirty metres away, standing in a garden of sheep-munched grass and randomly scattered apple trees.  In one corner there is a fenced-off vegetable plot.  On the far side, in the fence running along the road, there is a rusting, white-painted gate.  Trees line the bank beyond the road.  Though a small man, Monsieur Drouet looks physically strong, and is as quiet as he seems powerful, with well-worn, leathery skin and a canny but bashful face.  He is very much like one of the old boys with whom you worked on the farm – the village man the world over, the semi-independent paysan.

Half of the storm-damaged thatch is covered with black plastic sheeting held down by strips of wood nailed to the structure of the roof – you notice this, looking up, before you take in the cottage as a whole.  Some of the sheeting has torn, and flaps gently in the summer breeze, revealing the gash in the thatch, like a cross-sectional diagram.  Monsieur Drouet eyes it with detached concern, and you eye it with detached surprise.  The cottage is long and one room thin.  The thatch droops low over the white walls and burgundy-coloured wooden beams.  There are three doors along the front, one a back door to the right-hand room, the front door to the left, and another still further left, presumably to a shed.

The key won’t turn in the lock.  It takes all Monsieur Drouet’s wiry strength to open the front door.  As he does so, you puzzle out his dialect to mean that he’ll oil the lock for you.

Daily Mirror

Holborn, London, 1992

Alone in London

King’s Cross, London, 1992

The London nobody sings.

Penalty for neglect £2

Thetford, Norfolk, 2007

Tall vehicles beware

John Islip Street, London, SW1, 2004

Largest duvet machine in North Norfolk

Cromer, Norfolk, 2008

Polite notice

Bedminster, Bristol, 1993

Kerplunk! – [Four]

The last few weeks slipped away, before you slipped away, in  stomach-constricting horror at the possible emptiness ahead, at all the bonds you were loosening by leaving, perhaps to the point of loss.  Now this morbid embrace of six months of discomfort vanishes at an imagined and momentary point of perfection.  Whichever route you follow, you have escaped – temporarily – you have successfully fought  the wish to close out the world and sleep, mollycoddled by inertia, sedated and oblivious.  There is no-one to depend upon for the feeling of being alive but yourself, and you accept the responsibility after having fled from it for so long.

You make good time, eating up the road, fearing no hill.  You are disinclined to stop, even with dark coming on.  Far from any town that may have a hotel, and failing the wayside appearance of a chambre d’hôte, you will have to find a spot to sleep.  The descending rows of an orchard seem to offer cover from both the road and the night air.  You bed down and once again eat your road meal, watching the stars through the narrow alleyway of trees; free from the screening orange glow of London, they are brighter, closer, milkier.  With heavy legs and on a full belly, sleep comes soon to a less tormented mind.

A gortex ground bag will shield you from the next morning’s heavy dew, but not from insect bites.  You scratch and cycle your way through a succession of villages and towns of varying size.  The pays de Caux.  Not far off now.  You lunch on a bank by a junction, under the shade of trees and at the centre of a stretch of fields.  A distant water tower perches at the top of a long gradient.  An occasional car grinds to a halt at the junction, and the driver exchanges a nod or a wave with you.  Such greetings seem like signs of acceptance, that if the driver were not on the road from A to B, for reasons as numerous as C to Z, then they could think of no better thing than to be cycling freely, and beyond that feeling of freedom, aimlessly.  Perhaps they are thinking of no more than a month; you, however, have signed up for six.  You are not sure this makes for a stay, a holiday, or a sentence, always with the chance of remission for good behaviour.

Despite the mind- and muscle-loosening effort of cycling, you are a little too tensed up to eat much, and when you have packed the baguette away, you are hit by the first breaths of a winding depression.  You would prefer not to move, but rather to remain at this transitory beginning of your adventure.  The end of the journey will mean a commitment to the place to which you are travelling, and the reality of that place fills you with anxiety.  The kinetic hope which has fuelled the journey itself will be of no use to you when it ends.

You cycle more slowly, as if towards a halt.  You check the roads more often on the map.  Your stomach turns over, your legs feel drunk.  This, then, you begin to realise, will be your immediate scenery for some time to come: crests and dips of gently undulating chalk, rivulet valleys fed by ambling or cantering tributaries.  The villages are not so very old, but nor are they young, their character largely unaffected by new building.

Festooned with flowers

He had seemed so normal in his abnormality. No different from dozens of my peers at school, girls and boys, in that respect. A generation of ordinary kids with freakish personality traits, or freakish kids who had somehow managed to contain themselves within the ordinary every day reality of late 20th century Britain, and who had, come the 21st century, freakishly blossomed, or wilted.

The day the ambulance men came, I should have handed him over to them. The psychiatrist on call at A&E would not have taken anything like as long as it took me to realise he ought to be sectioned. But I had taken him in, I had allowed myself to become responsible for him, and more than that, to fall heavily in love with the contrast between his slim wildness and his unassuming gentleness. And now he was waving bread knives in the face of my petrified elderly neighbours. How I managed to talk them out of ringing the police, I have very little idea. I remember begging them not to, without suggesting who exactly it was that they should not call. I blamed Bill’s ‘somnambulant nightmares’, which wasn’t so very far from the truth. As long as they don’t open the door in the middle of the night again, I don’t think they’ll come to any harm at his hands. And at least he was sufficiently surprised by their appearance – visibly elderly humans who have almost certainly never raised a hand against anyone their whole lives long – not to think that they were the Peldastiquon or Gedavippio he now believes are keeping him here against his will.

I froze though when he accused me of being in league with them. Then I exploded with frustration at how my care, my love, was being misinterpreted. ‘Go if you think anyone is keeping you here – no-one, least of all me, is standing in your way.’ For more than a solitary moment I thought the bread knife was going to end up in me. Those same ambulance men would be back to hurry me away for life-saving surgery; my consciousness heightened by imminent death, I could hear their conversation over my prone body as the ambulance rushed me away: ‘I knew there was something fishy about that bloke’. But it seemed to bring him to his senses, and I led him inside to bed.

There was always the possibility that my retired neighbours would think better of accepting my entreaties and appeasement, and ring the police to tell them about the knife-wielding homicidal maniac that I was harbouring next door. That was just one of the thoughts that was keeping me awake as he slept. In the absence of sleeping pills, I had given him three antihistamine tablets – one had always been enough to knock me out.

But the police calling and what the homicidal maniac might do to me in the privacy of my own home were not in fact the source of my greatest anxiety. Could there be anything worse than this dual threat to a continued and peaceable existence? Well, yes, there could.

I was as certain as my potter’s hand that I was pregnant. For the fifth time. That it was the fifth time gave my certainty a strong case, without any need to test it. The ‘man’ who must be the father was under the impression that he was an alien from a planet called Badezon. I couldn’t help feeling that a paranoid, homicidal extraterrestrial was not ideal fatherhood material, nor for supporting a woman through a fifth pregnancy when the previous four had all ended prematurely. But he couldn’t do worse than the uncommunicative, listless earthling who had overseen each successive failure with increasingly grim reluctance. No, that was not quite fair. Who but a saint would not have wished to escape from the repetitive horror of that time?

Of course I was scared that history was about to repeat itself one dangerously final time. But the fear was intermingled with sudden stabs of optimism and joy that went beyond those I had experienced before. Perhaps that’s what it took to allow me to make it to term and beyond – alien genes! I had often had the sense that Bill was directed to me; by what force I hesitated to speculate. But might this not be an act of kindness on that force’s part? Hadn’t I always known that by allowing Bill into my house in the first place, I was giving my consent to whatever followed? Leaving aside the craziness of the notion that inestimable and unknowable forces might be persuaded into acts of kindness, and the opposing sense that I might really be the subject of an inter-species experiment, I was incredulous that the part of me that I had exerted such an effort to control and then to shut away for good, that part had now burst back into centre stage of my mind, projecting madly, calling out to its audience – my body – to raise the theatre’s rafters with its applause and festoon the platform with flowers, milking the congratulations, revelling in the glory, and seeing nothing but a rosy future for us all together.

What a majestic combination we would make: human, alien, and humano-alien child.

Kerplunk! – [Three]

You leave the coach-loads of over-confidence behind and search for a hotel, which soon presents itself, overlooking the estuary.  The old wooden room and the placid grey view relax your fatigued body and mind, so that later you have energy enough to explore the town.  The streets all return to the monumental water, and your steps drift, Somme-somnambulant, past the tree gardens of the houses facing the bay, to the point at the end of the quay come promenade where the setting grey sets most impressively.  Turning, you find the steely frame of un cabinet téléphonique, and thinking to impress with what you can see and where you are, you crank open its door to ring home.  But no-one’s in, and no-one but yourself can stop the familiar sound of home’s ringing tone.

The next morning, you are some way into a ten kilometre diversion before you realise you have forgotten, or have not been reminded, to return the Hôtel du Port’s room key.  You worry the less about the curses the staff are undoubtedly sending after you for their having required that you hand over an extra unwrinkled note to cover what they call ‘taxe de voyage’.  Unless St. Valery-sur-Somme has recently declared itself an independent state, you suspect this is more a directly pocketed tax on the English than a legitimate levy.  The diversion reroutes you past a bird sanctuary; the reward for the extra strain on your legs is a sudden Red Arrow display, black and white birds glinting silver in the sun as they turn and airily rise.

After days both hot and cold, this one is lukewarm, and your knuckling-under body responds well, falling into a rhythm which allows your mind to run freely ahead, step sideways, glance behind.  The road into Eu is a speedy, shaded hill descent, with the sun above the trees creating a brief maelstrom of backlit greens, marking your arrival in Seine-Maritime, and also your first taste of Normandie.

Beyond the town, gliding first along Roman avenues, then less rhythmically around the lanes encircling hilltops, you reach an intensity inexplicably arrived at, the first emphatic certainty of the rightness of what you have done and the way you will live.  It is a kind of elemental joy you have only ever experienced alone, that used to send you charging along a London street, giddy with dumb pleasure; a happiness born of motion, or more accurately of self-generated speed, as well as real or imagined good fortune.  Conversely it is an intensity which you meet in the most hapless situation, a carefree frenzy that comes upon you when stuck waiting on a slip road at a motorway junction with a minimal flow of traffic, alone and indulging in an act of faith, absolutely sure of the lift that’s soon to come.  Whether it is arrival, or expectation, or attainment, here it is again.  And it, in part, is what you came here for.

You hear the sounds of the books you read as a child in the wind that rustles the goldening greens of the fields.  And just as you sang defiantly at any passing car while waiting at a junction, fragments of song now carry you along, your bones rattling over the stones, a poor little beggarman whom nobody owns / come on beautiful we’ll go sit on your front lawn, and watch the fireflies as the sun goes down / it joins the list of things I’ll miss like fencing foils and lovely girls I’ll never kiss / dream, dream what you like, you’ve lost me this time, and I know I won’t find you, I’m lost in your eyes / it’s a happy time inside my mind, when a melody does find a rhyme / I can feel time slipping away, so what does it matter which direction I’m pointed in?

Bread knife

I began to trust my dimly-lit memories and those intensely violent nightmares, in which my wings were severed by Peldastiquon wielding ophidia.  From them it seemed safe to derive an assumption that modern day equivalents of the wing-taker sects had entered an alliance with Badezon scientists, who were themselves tasked and paid by a government that appeared to have forgotten its sworn obligation to protect its citizens from that ancient terrorism, among many other kinds.  Further, under the terms of such a malevolent alliance, my wings had been taken from me, and in their place I had received plasticizing surgery so that I could pass as human.

Facts kept falling into place.  Of course – now I understood the reason that the faces of the Badezon who took my wings showed no emotion.  The wing-takers were wearing the ophidian face masks that mythology suggested they should wear.  As for the scientists, men and women whose experimental routine dictates that they remain expressionless – poker-faced, humans would say – you could expect nothing better.

But when during the middle part of the day, I shook off the memories and nightmares, and felt myself warmed by Chan’s embrace, I was to all intents and purposes a happy human, living among humans.  The deficiency of having been rendered wingless was cancelled out here; it had no meaning.  My heart leapt at this thought, until others struck me in long and horrifying chains.  Was Chan an agent of the wing-takers, the scientists, the government?  Sandy too?  Was I in fact still on Badezon, imprisoned in some little-known and unrecognisable corner of it, where an innocent might be experimented or practiced upon?  An entertainment even, a day to day drama watched by millions Badezon over, discussed between colleagues, friends, and family as if it were indeed a fiction, and not a cage of misery into which one poor drugged and butchered unfortunate had been less than gently placed by manipulating claws?

I began to wonder whether anything I touched was real.  I imagined that this was all just a stage set, whose limits I would uncover if only I went far enough in any one direction.  Chan had entrapped me with her sweetness, her clever artist-cum-loner disguise, her entirely credible simulation of need, hunger, desire.  Seeds of hate were sown among the flowers of love.

One night I fastened upon the notion. Chan was no human, no artist, but a Badezon scientist.  A doctor or psychologist, perfectly positioned to control the subject of the experiment or the nature of the entertainment; on hand to ensure that I played by the experiment’s rules and inflicted no harm upon myself.  Witness the austerity of her gaze so habitually adopted in our first weeks.  Think of how well she calmed me when I woke from my nightmares.  Think of how she always tried to turn my thoughts to love, to loving.  Watched by millions!  Lying awake in bed in the wind-buffeted depths of the night, I became hot with shame and anger.  With an effort I forced myself not to move, struggling to contain the rage which would have me scream murderously at my captor.

But how could they be sure that I would not harm Chan?  They must be watching my every move.  This was not highlights, it was round the clock, from one day’s suns’ rising to the next.  Every Badezon knew that espionage was the government’s forte.  They would have military police – or even Gedavippio – on permanent stand-by in one of the other nearby coastal cottages in this artificial row, with a control centre somewhere close at hand – no doubt in the faceless concrete structure next to Sandy’s bar.

I must not give myself away in temper, if I wanted to escape.  Yet what was to stop me surprising them now, here in the middle of the night?  They would not expect it.  In which house were the guard stationed?  It must be one of the two either side, so that they stood a chance of reaching me in time were I to attempt to kill their scientist.  Unless, of course, they had a beam permanently trained upon me from within this house itself!  One false move and I might surrender my starring role to an equally unfortunate newcomer.

Again I urged myself not to panic, not to throw on the lights and put them on alert.  I must slip from the bed as if going to the toilet.  Then to the kitchen as if for a glass of water.  Then outside, as if to scan the sky as I had done so many harmless times before, looking earnestly for the return of my traitorous people come finally to fetch me home.

I needed a weapon.  I needed my own blade.  I did not think that any of Chan’s modelling tools in the lean-to by the back door would serve my purpose, so once in the kitchen I would silently take the bread knife from its stand.  It would hardly be a match for an ophidia or cintilar, but concealed in the arm of my jumper, I might surprise at least one of my enemies with it before they took me down.

Fifty word fiction – Helium-filled

It slips from the child’s fingers, races down the aisle, bumps against the roof arch, then jumps from one carriage to the next, where a man catches hold of it.  His bald head is balloon-smooth.  At the next station he returns the inflatable to its owner with a bow.

Kerplunk! – [Two]

When your legs finally give in, and you glide to a halt in a town not a million miles from Boulogne, you fall onto your hotel bed like snow. Mental waves take over from the physical, and the voices of ghosts sound in your ears. They have the quality of presence of a dream, though you are too exhausted even to close your eyes. Quietly, happily they call you back, with a kind and loving laugh. Too tired to be conscious, too mentally taut and hungry to fall unconscious, you are held in a wakeful limbo. Familiar voices burst in your ear. Your wrecked body is far from sure that it can cope with the additional burden of emotional hangover, but it appears to have no choice.

After being countenanced with raised eyebrows and sideways glances at the friterie, you walk out of the little town to a river and a bridge, to watch the sun drop. Its disappearance signals that you are here, and no longer at home.

***

You will not be beaten by a second day of physical exhaustion nor by the rain that scalds your sunburnt face. Lunchtime, you dig into a sandy track off the main road through the forest to eat the meal that is to become your travelling staple: half a baguette, a segment of camembert, a tomato, some peanuts, bottled source water, fruit, perhaps a swig of yoghurt drink – there is always one ingredient or another missing from the set menu. In this unseen place, grim determination loses by a fall and two submissions to a freedom as absolute as you are ever likely to experience. The bargain struck, a year of work for six months without it.

You are warmer than the rain from cycling more heavily burdened than a squaddie with a thirty pound backpack and five miles more to jog. You plough on, and it is some kind of finishing line that you cross at Rue, when you can put away your blanket map of France and use in its stead a 1cm:2km map of the Somme and Seine-Maritime. Racing clouds of greys and whites chase you round the bay of the Somme. You zip car-like past the marshy wash, headed southeastward with the wind and the weight of your bike behind you. Gradually the road loops round to the west and into the wind and you slow to snail speed, your house on your back, the bad weather moving as if it is tracking you. Grim determination having gained the upper hand, it is now under threat from a misery the more complete for your inability to see the point of your actions, from the bending of your knees to the reasoning behind where these joint and muscle movements are taking you. You have no-one to blame but yourself. You wonder where it was that history happened, thinking of those muddy, wartime souls laden with a torment greater than you are ever likely to experience. You slow to a stop in the wind-spat rain. Pause. Resume.

After coaxing your body and bike into crossing the canal, you decide that St. Valery-sur-Somme is your staging post for the night. You arrive alongside the estuary promenade at the same time as two coach-loads of young generation English. Officially they are on a school holiday, but are actually embarking on sex and alcohol adventures. You never had the pleasure of a teacher-escorted holiday, but instead, a privately arranged exchange, which unsuitably matched you with a girl named Legrand. A fortnight wasted on a fifteen year old, courageous only in his timid refusal to be plunged defenceless and comradeless into a school full of young French lions.