by Stuart Ayris
“Two men you say?”
I nodded, watching as he chewed upon his bottom lip with his yellowed teeth.
“One big and one small?”
I nodded again.
“You did right, boy,” he said eventually. “You did right.”
At that moment, looking at Zachariah as he in turn stared at me, I wasn’t entirely sure where I was safest. I detested this feeling of insecurity, of doubt and foreboding. My situation was as abstract as time itself although exactly what time of day it was would have given me some measure of relief, something for me to at least cling to. The constructs of my existence were fading in and out of vision, the solidity of what I knew to be true crumbling all about me.
And what had he meant by ‘the last time?’
“What should I do now?” I asked, meekly.
Zachariah closed his eyes and puffed upon his pipe for some moments before answering me.
“They will come for you again,” he said. “Maybe not right away, but they will come for you. They don’t give up. They never give up. Do what you been doing, boy. You be doing well.”
“I don’t understand what’s happening,” I said to him. “I don’t understand at all.”
At this, he rose slowly, like a house being built, and came over to me. He knelt down and put a thick arm across my shoulders before leaning his face right in towards my left ear.
“Just one thing, boy and you make sure you remember this,” he whispered. His voice was as of the sound of a steam train in the distance. “You don’t know me, you have never seen me. I don’t live here. I don’t live anywhere. I don’t even exist as far as anyone else be concerned. You understand that boy? You understand?”
I nodded as best I could, staring at the floor, his arm weighing heavy upon me and his stale breath permeating the pores of my face.
“Now you rest, boy,” said Zachariah, standing. He nudged me with his monstrously thick leg and I couldn’t help but roll onto my side. He fetched a heavy blanket from a pile in the corner by the trapdoor and draped it across me. I do believe it was as kind an act as he had performed since I had met him.
And I closed my eyes to all this, just closed my eyes and slept the ragged sleep of the torn and frayed. Time turned and my heart beat. The despair of the day would not abate and my clothes were as lifeless upon me as if they were the garb of a scarecrow. A sense of hopelessness overwhelmed me as much in sleep as when I was awake.
I didn’t dream, though I know not for how long I slept. It was a flat, black sleep that restored neither energy nor perspective, the kind of sleep that just leaves you restless.
I had not even the pleasure of drifting back into wakefulness, for it was Zachariah Leonard who stole that small joy. He shook me alive roughly with a cold, hard hand. I looked up at that gruesome face and he had a finger to his lips. His eyes glared at me from beneath his grimy brow as he slowly moved backwards to the corner by the door, still squatting; a silent and deadly Groucho Marx.
Still prone on the floor, I stared after him. His movement had been stealthy and silent and he merged into the shadows so easily I could barely make him out. And then the wooden door of the shack was rattled by a knock. I was losing control of my breathing as I lay staring towards the door, propped up on my elbows now, my eyes flicking to the outline of Zachariah Leonard perched in the corner like some stone creature from a gothic cathedral, all ready to pounce.
Again there came a knock on the door, harder this time.
I got up as slowly and as quietly as I could. My eyes bored into the darkness, straining to get an indication from Zachariah as to what I should do. As I stepped forward, I knew that only by opening the door would this tortuous moment end. For good or for ill, I pulled it open, careful not to bang it into Zachariah who hid silently behind it.
And there stood Penny Shoraton, framed in the doorway like the full length portrait of a beautiful princess on a castle wall. The evening sun was slipping into the marshland and a purple orange sky bled from the horizon.
I could sense Zachariah tensing. The delicacy of Penny just inches from the barbarity of Zachariah was such a juxtaposition as should never rightfully occur. And just a rickety wooden door between them.
“Hello, Simon,” said Penny in the kindest of voices. “Are you ok? I was worried about you.”
She was truly enchanting.
I was willing myself to gaze straight at her, though my whole being was drawn to the secreted Zachariah.
“I’m alright, thank you, just tired that’s all.”
She held out her hand.
“Come with me,” she beckoned. “It won’t help you to stay in here on your own all the time. “
I heard a small noise as of something breaking from behind the door. It seemed Penny had heard nothing, for there was no reaction on her part. Perhaps it was just the sound of Zachariah’s grin cracking his face. I stepped out of the shack and followed Penny as the door closed silently behind me. I did not take her hand for there are some things that you just shouldn’t touch. I swear the whole shack shook as we left.
We walked across the edge of the marshes and then up the hill to the village green. In the time it took us, the sun went down and the moon came up. There were a couple of people standing on the green talking whilst I could see several others just ambling along aimlessly. An elderly man was leaning on the wall outside St Mary’s Church, staring into the grave yard. White stars spattered the early night sky and I began to feel some sense of safety as I became a part of this quaint English scene.
Ah the perfect blackness of an English country sky is surely the blackboard upon which the angels sketch their heavens.
“Would you like me to introduce you to anybody?” asked Penny, touching my arm gently. “They are all very nice people.”
“It’s ok. I don’t feel all that sociable. Sorry, this is all a bit weird for me at the moment.”
“I’m sure it is, Simon. I’m sure it is. You will get through it though, I promise you. You always have done.”
Penny Shoraton truly had me hooked, I don’t mind admitting.
“Let’s have a drink,” she said.
I looked down, scratched my neck and followed her into the King’s Head. All that was missing was the collar and the lead.
Zachariah Leonard suddenly seemed a million miles away.
The pub was more crowded than the last time I had been in. There was an altogether busier feeling about the place. There was music, of a sort, being played by a lady over on the far side of the bar. She had a guitar propped on her lap. On it were scrawled the words ‘This Guitar Kills Psychiatrists’. Though she plucked the strings for all to hear, she sang only to herself. I saw her lips moving and I saw the tears as they eased from her startled eyes. She could have been a hundred years old. Her hair was all yellow and grey and the bones of her face told of a former beauty. Perhaps that was why she was crying.
“One ale for my friend here and a water for me please, darling,” said Penny to the young barmaid.
“Will that be a small ale or a large ale, Miss?”
“Oh definitely a large one I think. He is definitely a man who needs a drink right now, aren’t you Simon?”
I sighed and gave her my best sheepish look. She smiled, winked at the barmaid and led me over to a table by the fire that burned all red and yellow in the iron hearth.
Penny sipped her water. I gulped my ale. And in that moment was encapsulated the very difference between us.
“Take your time,” she said. “There’s no rush.”
Her voice had an accent I couldn’t quite place. I could have listened to it for eternity, though it did little to improve the taste of the ale. I could hear other voices murmuring in other parts of the pub. The lonely woman played on and time, such as it was, passed.
“This is hard for you, Simon, isn’t?” asked Penny, breaking the silence that had swelled between us.
I nodded. I found it so hard to talk to her. She must have thought me very
ignorant. I drank some more of the ale as she stared at my tankard. She seemed pleased I was getting through it. Even I wasn’t as uncouth as to allow a lady to buy me a drink and then not finish it.
“We can help you, you know, Simon – Weepy and Nardy and myself. Even the boy, Adam, has his uses. The serving girl here is nice too. Her name is Carrie.”
I still could not relate Penny and Carrie to the others - Weepy and Nardy, Zachariah Leonard - even the boy who clearly hated me. I never wanted to see them again, yet I wanted Penny Shoraton to be with me always. Everyone was trying to help me, it seemed, but help me to do what? To get back home? My recollection of life before waking in the village lock-up was becoming frighteningly vague. It was as if all this were real now and my former life but a dream. In just a few days, years of experiences and memories had shattered into disparate shards that now lay abandoned across the landscape of my mind.
“I don’t know how I got here. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here and I don’t know how to get home. I don’t know who I can trust and I don’t know who I should fear.” I blurted this out, not in a loud fashion, but merely stating it as undeniable fact. Then I downed the remainder of my ale.
Penny considered what I had just said.
“Do you trust me, Simon?”
I had to say yes.
“Thank you,” she said. “That means a lot to me.”
“So, do you have any answers to any of my questions?” I asked. Then I sighed. A sigh can hold back a tear, but not forever.
Penny leaned forward and covered my hands with her own. The touch of her fingers upon my skin almost broke me in half. I had never experienced such a sensation of longing.
Was I ashamed? Not at all. In love? Possibly.
“Simon,” she began, “I think it might be a little early to answer any of your questions. You have only just arrived, after all. But you need to know that you can trust me and that I will do all I can to help you understand what is happening to you. I can tell you that you have no enemies here. Strange as it may seem, everybody is here to help you - everybody.”
The name of Zachariah Leonard was upon my lips. Was he too here to help me in the same way as Penny and the others? I doubted it. And just as the man himself had slunk into the shadows, so his name withdrew once more into the recesses of my mind.
The once beautiful lady at the bar had replaced her mournful song with a wailing that was drawing looks from all corners. Her guitar lay at her feet. Her hands were on top of her head, wrapped in her tangled hair as if she were either trying to tear it out or to keep it from leaving her.
Penny rose from her chair and walked over to Carrie, who then escorted the former beauty from the pub via the back door. It was time for her to go it appeared. The large measure of ale I had consumed seemed to be slowing everything down for a moment. The smoke in the pub from the various pipes and the dwindling fire in the hearth were gathering around me. I wondered if I would be able to stand, let alone walk. As it was, Penny Shoraton returned to help me up from the wooden chair and led me outside onto the village green.
“I will walk with you back to your shack,” said Penny, supporting my arm.
She was so close to me. I could smell her purity and her naturalness for they were fragrances so tangible, so real I felt I could reach out and touch them. Was this love or was this madness? I have since come to learn that there is little difference between these two most life threatening of conditions. As we walked slowly in the black night, I swear I could see a glow around her.
When we reached the shack, she bade me goodnight and drifted off towards the harbour.
I pushed open the wooden door and stood there waiting for Zachariah for I firmly believed he had not moved from his hiding place and that he would swiftly be upon me.
A rumbling sound came from the far corner. I could see nothing through the gloom. I closed the door behind me and stood there trying to make out what was happening. And then I smiled with both relief and not a little amusement. The sound was that of a man snoring, the sound of a man in a very deep sleep indeed.
As I approached, I saw Zachariah curled up on the floor. He suddenly looked so vulnerable, a shadow of his waking self. He was a sleeping bear of a man but just as vulnerable to sleep as the rest of us. Whether he dreamed, I knew not. I somehow doubted it. I deemed it more possible that in his sleep, he created my nightmares - and perhaps yours too.
So I lay down in my own dank corner and brought my knees to my chest, wrapping my arms about them both for warmth and security. And with Penny Shoraton in my heart and Zachariah Leonard on my mind, I let the ale do its work.
Angel and Devil.
Beauty and Beast.
If only it were that simple…
7. Man of The Match And King Of The World
There are times in Tollesbury when a mist comes up from the marshes and from the fields. It seems unconnected to any weather system. Be it the heat of the summer or the bitter chill of winter, lawless bands of cold fog will consume the tracts of marshland just as a throbbing guilt will devour the heart of a sinful man. But you do not stop there, oh clouds of hell; you enter my brain, smothering my thoughts and clothing my fragile mind in the raiment of the utterly confused. And I break out, yearning and gasping, into the clarity of the day, believing in my heart that the fog is there for me and me alone.
I cannot recall a time when I ever felt totally in control. Confidence eluded me as I had grown and my understanding of the world had fractured more with each encounter. Nothing was simple except my innate need to comprehend all that happened to me in every waking moment. It might be easy for you but, for those such as I, it is a torture that the word ‘illness’ can never fully communicate. To understand the look, the inflection, the intention or the meaning of my fellow human being had always been a task akin to climbing the tallest of mountains for poor me.
Poor, poor, pitiful me.
Poor, poor, pitiful me.
Julia and I had met in 1980. I had been drunk in a pub in Chelmsford and she had sobered me up. She had looked upon me as a challenge and began by throwing away my Jack Kerouac books. I believe she saw the future, even then. She kissed me and told me she loved me. I wish I could tell you more about our courtship (as she liked to call it) but I cannot. I remember our early relationship as I do snippets from a really bad sitcom. I was maddeningly unfunny and the only laughter there was came in cans. Our wedding I recall vaguely as being a tawdry affair. I had never been taught how to love. I hadn’t known where to start.
The notion of having children had never entered my mind. So self absorbed was I as I grew into adulthood, the idea of settling down in any way had been anathema to me. Jack Kerouac had consumed me in my early twenties and it wasn’t long before I threw myself into a life of cheap wine, cigarettes and a broken notion of my place in society, or lack of it perhaps. I adopted the persona of the maligned fool, the misunderstood genius, the perennial recalcitrant. Jack Kerouac, you see, had the eyes of an angel and the spirit of the devil. He mesmerised me and tantalised me, toyed with my mind and led me down paths no young man such as I should have trodden. He was me and I was he. God, I loved that man and in many ways still do. The shimmering vision of a man who is one too many mornings and a thousand miles behind will always be an intoxicating hero to me.
And I was given a little baby boy for my gargantuan, inconsequential, metaphysical struggles. A little baby boy.
My son was born in 1982. He was christened Robin, but I never liked that. It was Julia’s choice. All that came to mind for me was the cheesy grin of Robin Gibb or the moronic despair of Batman’s sidekick, the Boy Wonder. From the day he was born, I called my boy Robbie.
The year Robbie was born, Graham Gooch took a team of cricketers to South Africa, a country that had been banned from competing in international sport since the end of the sixties because of apartheid. Italy beat West Germany 3-1 to win the World Cup for the third time. The Clash released Combat Rock. John Lennon had been
dead for two years and Paul McCartney went to number one with Ebony and Ivory. I hated him then more than ever, or so I thought; the Frog Chorus or whatever it was called was still to come. Oh, and the Falklands War happened. Margaret Thatcher was re-elected the following year on the back of it and England, my England, changed forever. I was twenty-four years old.
Robbie is now twenty five or twenty six. To my shame, I cannot be exact. When he was small, I could never bear to go to that hospital to visit him. My reluctance to see my own son engendered a murderous hatred in Julia and she conveyed her feelings to me with charming alacrity; in essence, she was thoroughly disgusted. I could never make her understand how I felt about Robbie. It all hurt too much. Jack Kerouac hadn’t prepared me for having a child with a severe disability, neither had the Beatles or The Clash. Thus my close encounter with the real world merely led me back to the fantasy realm of my mind.
Julia would not let Robbie out of her sight when he was first born. She would barely leave the house except for essentials. Whilst she sat and stared at him as he lay sleeping, I would get the bus from Tiptree to The Recreation Ground in Tollesbury and watch the village cricket team. I would take with me a few cans of cider, a pencil and a pad of paper, always glad to be away from the claustrophobic atmosphere of the house, unaware, so desperately unaware of just how much darkness I myself contributed to that all pervasive gloom.
Whenever I went to The Recreation Ground to watch the cricket, my breathing always slowed. I would greet the scene before me with a deep sigh and lie down at the edge of the chalk boundary. The Tollesbury team was made up of a wonderful mixture of serious children, local drunks and eccentric old men - the first group becoming the second and the second becoming the third as the years drifted by. The games always meandered on through the morning, each game ending in the same result - a communal visit to The King’s Head.
I was, and perhaps always will be, a character on the nether regions of exactly where everybody else is at. Were I to be absent, I would not be missed. Present, I am acknowledged and no more. Such is my fate.