by Stuart Ayris
“Hello, darling. What can I get you?” asked the girl behind the bar. She looked to be about thirteen years old, though I have always been poor at assessing age. I, myself, can range from anything between nineteen and a hundred during the course of a single day.
I had no money, none that I thought she would take, but then I have been in that situation before. As I was thinking of a way of willing her to give me some alcohol, I heard a voice that brought me back to reality. Yes, reality. I recognized it instantly, for how could I forget it? It was the man from the salt marshes.
“He will have ale.”
So I sat down at the old man’s wooden table by the window, a table whose grain and distress I could have stared at for eternity. I wondered whether it had been made from the same great tree that had provided the beams for the ceiling and, if it had, how sad that they should be so parted, destined just to gaze at each other forever, never to touch. The pale light from the candle in the centre of the table wavered and glowed as if acknowledging my musings. So incandescent and uncertain was that flame, it could have been my own soul at that moment.
The girl brought my drink to me in a stained metal tankard and set it on the table. For a moment I felt like I had an ally - the alcohol, not the girl. I tasted it - the alcohol, not the girl. At first, I almost gagged. The liquid slid down my throat, warm and weak. This surely couldn’t be alcohol. The taste was indescribable. There could have been anything in it - vegetables, wood, leaves - anything at all. Then I realised, it wasn’t about the taste. It was in the sitting down in peace that you got your relief in this place; the antidote to toiling in the fields, hammering at the anvil, dredging the Blackwater for clams and oysters. The ale itself was not the sustenance; the relief came in the act of imbibing, the feel of the tankard against your lips, the subsiding of your thoughts and the way your bones just melded with the earth on the floor and the wood at your elbows.
When this became apparent in my mind, the ale entered my body as would the water of bliss. It clouded my thoughts briefly before seeming to settle them down, slowing them almost. This feeling did not last. For the bark of the old man’s voice dispersed it as a flung stone doth scatter a flock of pigeons.
“Where did you sleep last night?” he asked.
”What is your name?” I countered. My voice sounded weary but fearless.
To my surprise, the old man leaned back in his chair and looked at me, a smile breaking across his leathery face.
”I am Zachariah Leonard,” he said, as if I should have already been aware.
Slightly disconcerted, I supped some more ale.
“Zachariah Leonard?”
He nodded slowly.
“So, last night. Where did you sleep?” he repeated.
“I slept in the churchyard, by the wall.”
“A good choice.”
He appeared to be wearing exactly the same clothes as the previous day. The wayward candlelight, afforded me glimpses of just how dishevelled he really was.
“Yesterday evening,” I said warily, “you seemed as if you had been waiting for me, as if you knew I would turn up. And you were sitting in a place where I always used to sit.”
Zachariah leaned forward and put his elbows on the table, clasping his huge dirty hands together. He peered up at me from under the dark brim of his crooked hat.
“Oh no,” he said. “It is you who has been waiting for me. You have been waiting for me your whole life. That’s the truth, boy.”
It was oh so quiet in there, so quiet.
“But how can that be?” I asked.
“It be, and that is all,” he said in almost a growl.
Zachariah drank a huge glug of ale and noisily banged his tankard back on the table, as if having made a decisive point. He stared across at me and nodded towards my tankard. I was to drink up. I closed my eyes and downed the remainder of the ale, feeling almost immediately as if I had been anaesthetised. Perhaps I had been. He rose and I followed him out into the evening air as if we were chained together. The girl winked at me from behind the bar as I passed her. I looked back over my shoulder and saw she was writing something down on a board. She seemed very pleased with herself indeed.
We walked together back towards the marshes, Zachariah in front and I behind, his crab like gait propelling him like some devious clockwork toy. And after some time, we arrived at a wooden structure, hidden away amongst some trees and bushes. I hesitate to call it a house. It was literally just four walls, a roof and a door. It looked like it had been plucked from a low budget horror film and placed in the foliage by some mischievous hand. It was close to where we had sat the previous evening though I had not noticed it. So at least he actually lived somewhere. In my eyes, that fact alone made him slightly less ghoulish but no less appalling.
And as I followed Zachariah Leonard into his shack, I felt that my life was about to change forever.
It be, indeed.
Let it be.
My eyes adjusted to the gloom; though it took my nose a little longer. There were no windows, though a ragged hole in the roof seemed to serve as a chimney of sorts. Zachariah Leonard lit a small fire in a dirty grate against the back wall and a make-shift flue directed the emerging smoke into the darkening sky. I soon found myself feeling warm and light-headed.
My host, if I may call him that, sat on the floor and leaned against the wall to the left of the fire. I could not tell if his eyes were open or closed, whether he was awake or asleep. Had I not seen him walk in and slump down, I would have assumed he was nothing but a pile of rotten clothes; a pile of clothes, as I saw now, puffing upon a pipe.
I could hear the sound of my own breathing as my lungs became accustomed to the density of the atmosphere; tobacco, sweat and dirt merging with the all-consuming gloom. This was where the working man was born. This was where he first came kicking and screaming to life, obdurate, burning and at odds with the world. It was as raw a place as I had ever experienced and it both shook and thrilled me in turns.
I slid my back down the coarse wooden wall by the door and stretched my legs out before me, crossing my feet. If only I had a cowboy hat to push down slightly upon my brow and a good old cigar to light. Thus, we sat opposite one another, the length of the shack between us. I put my hands on the floor and felt what seemed to be dirt, or perhaps it was sand. The light from the fire edged into the darkness, lighting the inside of the shack like a stage; for surely, that is what it was.
“Now, listen, boy,” said Zachariah, eventually. His voice was a low, menacing simmer. “It starts here. This is where it starts and this is how it starts.”
He took a drag of his pipe, blurted out the smoke and coughed. No smoke-rings here, I thought; and definitely no singing about gold.
“These is hard times, boy,” he continued, “hard times for every man, woman and child in this land. Gone are the days when you reaped what you sowed. There are people we will never meet who dictate our every move. They say they speak for us but they will never speak to us. Them that fought the French now fight their own masters and they will never win, for you cannot fight what you cannot see, boy and that’s a fact, a damnable fact. You cannot fight what you cannot see. A man is guaranteed nothing, not comfort or friendship or money or love. The harder he works for these things, the farther away they be. That is the sadness of it all.”
He spoke slowly and with an underlying anger that seemed only to be quelled by my presence. Had I not been there to listen to him, I fear he would have destroyed everything before him. Zachariah Leonard was undoubtedly a violent man. I was glad I was by the door and I glanced briefly over my left shoulder just to remind myself of that fact. It brought some measure of relief, but if truth be told, not a great deal.
“Comfort; friendship; money and love.” He spoke these words with intense gravity, pausing between each one, being sure I heard them. “You know of these things, these taunts, these abominations?”
I nodded, though I am not sure whether he could see my res
ponse through the darkness. But he continued anyway.
“Let us take first, ‘comfort’. Look around you. I felt your disgust when you entered here, I saw you draw breath and I saw you grimace. Yet this is my home. This is my comfort. I have straw for a bed and a roof to protect me from the rain. There is little light as I am sure you have noticed. But for what reason should I want light? Why should I want to see? I am safe here. I am comfortable. It belongs to me and no other. It is in the feeling, you understand? Any fool can see. A dolt has eyes the same as a wise man. It takes a deeper man to feel.”
I wasn’t sure where this was going, so I just listened. I felt that one word from me, however innocent, may have led to an eruption of anger from the man who smouldered across the other side of the shack, an eruption from which I surely would not survive. It was the sheer eloquence of this almost bestial being that perhaps scared me the most. He was like no-one I had ever met before.
“Then, ‘friendship’,” he went on. “Friendship.” He said this word with such contempt it would not have been at all surprising had it hit me full in the face. He spat into the fire. His phlegm sizzled in the heat of the flames like the cracking of a whip. “Friendship,” he said once more.
“No man can be a friend with another until he is a friend to himself. He who suffers self-hatred will hate others ten-fold. Take it from me, boy. Hatred is the most natural emotion of the lonely. It is not sadness. When man is alone, he may pity himself for a time, but that pity will soon turn to hatred, a hatred of those that have what he has not – a foot in the door of the world. And from hatred comes violence and from violence comes murder. That is a man alone, I tell you. When the only way a man can deal with another man is to kill him, then that man will be a friend to no-one for as long as he lives, except perhaps the devil himself. The need for friendship and the hatred of mankind is the great debate that goes on in the head of the lonely man.”
I sat rapt and attentive, acutely aware that he may have been talking about me as opposed to himself.
“And so we come to money – the greatest killer of them all. It grabs you and sucks the life out of you. It breaks you in half and destroys every feeling you ever had. It makes beautiful women ugly and puts a knife in the hand of a man of peace. It will take back twice what it has given you and it will put you in the ground without your soul. If it takes hold of you, it will break you. Listen not to what they say about money for it will corrupt your sleep and burden you with irons from which you will never escape. It is a creation of the rich man, the tool with which the Sir and the Lord will taunt the peasant and the serf. Be not seduced by it boy and be not taunted by it. They say it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Do not listen to that claptrap. There is no heaven save what is around us, no heaven save what is within us. Mark me boy and mark me well. The love of money is not the root of all evil; it is money itself that is evil.”
I held my breath. I listened for life outside. There was not a sound.
No Heaven.
Zachariah Leonard sucked upon his pipe, as if he were drawing energy from it in order to continue. I was becoming lost in the flames of the fire, intoxicated by his voice. It was as if I were being addressed not by a man but by a mountain.
“And lastly, we have love,” he said, such sadness now breaking over him. “It is your turn, boy, for I cannot speak of it.”
He bowed his head. His talking had taken a lot out of him it seemed. Maybe he wasn’t one used to discussion. For all I knew, he had never spoken to anyone but me before; except perhaps to order ale.
I tried to swallow, but my mouth and throat had been parched by the smoke that wafted around the shack like a dark whisper. The only discernible noise was the crackling of the fire. The door to the shack may well have been bolted shut with a thousand bolts, so trapped did I feel at that moment. My only means of ending this hiatus, this purgatory, was to speak of that notion about which I too knew so little; love.
I was that instant saved by a tune that entered my head, notes that bounded through me, illuminating me from within. Such was the clarity of the music, I thought momentarily it was coming from outside my head, but Zachariah Leonard seemed not to hear it at all. If he did, he showed no acknowledgement.
“I know,” I started, falteringly; “I know that money can’t buy me love.”
Zachariah Leonard nodded slowly, seemingly impressed by the wisdom of my words. I got the distinct feeling, however, that he wanted more.
“That’s why I don’t care too much for money,” I continued, “because money can’t buy me love.”
I waited for a moment, allowing him to digest what I had just said
“Some people say that all you need is love, that love is all you need,” I added, but as I spoke the words, they sounded so hollow in so deep a moment.
At this, Zachariah made as if to rise and my heart battered my chest. He was merely adjusting his position. I still couldn’t see his face. And that troubled me more than I can say. He was waiting for me to tell him what love was and, it was clear, he would wait for as long as it took.
I looked down at my hands though I knew not why. I turned them over and gazed at my filthy palms and my eyes were drawn to the pale skin that circled the base of the third finger of my left hand. I had been married and I had a son, yet when asked about love, all I could do was repeat lines that others had sung. Julia had always told me she loved me to the point where it used to irritate me. What I wouldn’t have given then to have heard those words from her pretty red mouth, to have had her whisper ‘I love you’ to me, her soft lips resting gently upon my ear as she spoke.
This was too much, too much. I chewed the inside of my bottom lip as my eyes stung, not with the smoke but with the tears that were lining up so impatiently behind them, like the exhausted Ford workers who having heard the claxon, were now queuing up for their lunch. I let the tears tumble out upon my face and I felt lighter for it. I was thus baptized by the water of my own condemnation.
What had Zachariah thought of my breaking? To this day, I like to think he was maybe crying too.
Time passed. The flames in the fire were receding and the dense, putrid air was clearing just a little.
“I will ask you again, boy. What is love?”
Words came to my mouth from some source unknown to me.
“Love is what stops you from killing yourself,” I said plainly.
For that is all I truly knew love to be. My dad had been kind to me and my mum had been sad and quiet. Julia had cared for me and I’m not sure if Robbie even knew me. I guess if you were to have asked them all, except perhaps for Robbie, they would all have said that they loved me. But that was not enough for me. I wanted to love, I wanted it so much.
“It is not about being loved. It is about loving – that’s what I need.” It made sense to me then, more and more as I spoke each word. Zachariah Leonard need not have been there at all. “Yes I am lonely, as you said. But I do not hate. I hate nobody and I hate no thing. But that is not the same as loving. I need to love.”
“What do you see when you look at me?” whispered Zachariah. His voice was above me now. I opened my weary eyes and stared up at the ragged figure that loomed darkly. I hadn’t even heard him move, let alone seen him approaching.
“I don’t see anything,” I said eventually. “I feel vulnerable and I feel as if I know nothing. I feel so many things. And I am scared. I guess I just don’t know how to be in this world.”
He smiled. I could see it even through the gloom. I say smile, but it was more a crack opening up in his face.
“Then you have hope,” he said. “You have hope. Hope is a start.”
And for the first time since I had met Zachariah Leonard, gazing at him as I was, his grinning, leathery face clouded in smoke and sweat, I felt akin to him. He placed a heavy hand upon my head before shuffling noisily back to where he had previously sat, the complete antithesis of the silent
grace with which he had come towards me. Approach like a boat upon the ocean and leave like a steam engine. That seemed to be his way. I watched as he gathered some straw together before laying himself upon it. He brought his knees up to his chest and wrapped his broad arms about them. And he spoke no more.
I had lost all track of time. No light penetrated the shack. The last of the smoke waltzed lazily around the room, twisting and hovering, gyrating on this emptying dance-floor for desperate thoughts. It was enticing me to sleep, leading me on to the dark lair of my dreams. I was powerless to its seduction and it took me with gusto. I laid myself down and I was asleep within moments.
What is sleep, but the wilful act of allowing your body to shut down? You lie there waiting for it to smother you with its mischievous blanket, be it the thick, heavy one that knocks you out cold or the colourful, patchwork quilt of half remembered moments and tangential connections that plays tricks on your body and your mind; whilst all the time creating the illusion that you are in truth at rest. Thus I was regaled with forms and images that tempted and taunted me in turn.
The sea is upon me and I am but a dot in the greenish, black blue of it all. I am at one moment above and eyes to the wide sky and the next subsumed into the depths of this earth. There is no sound, never a sound. All colours flash and the firmament cracks open. A massive factory bursts from the sea bed and pursues me until I lie breathless upon an old beam, the waves crashing into me until I can hold on no longer.
Two large clouds merge into the faces of my mum and my dad and rainy tears gush forth, pelting me like bullets and swelling the ocean that now tosses me with murderous ferocity. And then the sun bursts into the sky and blinds me as I slip beneath the surface of the pearl white sea. A yellow submarine drifts by but leaves me lonesome.
In my dream, as I am sinking to my doom, a hand clutches at my sodden sleeve, a plump hand covered in chocolate. I am pulled to safety and lie on my back on the cricket pitch at The Recreation Ground. The deepest eyes I have ever seen peer down upon me. They are the eyes of the sea and of the land, of the sun and of the firmament. They are the eyes of my son, Robbie. He is gazing down at me, pleading with me, admiring me, hating me, loving me, before disappearing across the grass and into the trees, waddling backwards, waving at me as best he can, trying to smile, behaving as if he would one day see me again.