by James Newman
“What did you do?”
“What would you do?”
They both knew the answer and the laughter rose again as the bottle was drained and they ordered another.
“You didn’t really, did you?”
“Well, it’s not as if it’s the first time.”
“I’ve never tried it...there.”
“It’s okay, I mean as long as he doesn’t go telling all his friends about it.”
“Yeah, as if he would, right?” Rose smiled.
“I’ll just say he’s lying. You know what they are like. Always making up stories about who they’ve shagged and what they made them do. As if they think, that we, don’t you know, enjoy it too.”
“It’s what their mothers tell them, I guess.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry about what?”
“You know the stuff that happened with your mum. I guess you never had anyone to teach you about it.”
“That’s where you are wrong, darling. My Swedish au pair taught me everything I needed to know. Believe me. She spared no details.”
“Pray tell?”
“She told me all men are basically stupid and if you make yourself hot and cold you can drive them crazy.”
“Hot and cold?”
“Turn them on and off like an oven. Keep them working for it. Use it, she said. A woman must use it.”
“So you did have a motherly chat.”
“The best.”
“No fatherly chat?”
“Don’t go there.”
“And this other one, Jimmy?”
“The thing with Jimmy is, we met as kids, you know, there’s a special bond there. Grown-ups are so fucked up. We’re fucked up. The guy over there flipping pizzas is fucked up. The taxi drivers. The mothers and the fathers. What happens to us? But when you have that innocence. Those long summer afternoons, it seems, somehow, you, know, somehow, pure. We were friends as kids. I like him.”
“Are you living in the past?”
“I think so.”
The pizza arrived and they tucked into the olive, tomato, the mushrooms and spinach. Piano music played pretentiously as they both pretending to be vegetarian, pretended to enjoy the pizza. Neither were impressed by the food. The wine and the conversation. “There’s one thing about Jimmy that I haven’t told you,” Rose said. “He grew up on the site.”
“What site?”
“Green Street Green. The gypsy site.”
Her friend dropped her fork. It rattled on the tiled floor of the restaurant. “For God’s sake, Rose, stay away from him as far as you possibly can. You know what those people are like. They’re animals.”
“But he’s different. His mother died and his dad left the country, they were all he had.”
“Believe me. If he has spent more than one year with those animals then he will turn into your worst nightmare. Trust me on this. A guy hangs around with dogs is going to be infected with fleas.”
Rose lifted up her glass and drank.
To a flea circus.
HOME ALONE
Perhaps most of us are fluctuating in an adjustment between the imaginary world, broken memories and wish fulfillment the reenactment of pain-full real-life situations in solitude, on the page or in our minds in order to somehow solve the mystery of our own unique painful predicaments. Like music from our youth, the familiar melodies, like memories, strangely comfort us when we revisit them through liquor and wonderment. After all, any artist will tell you that the devil has the best tunes.
I guess any father would wish his son to be not only successful in his life but also to have some degree of happiness. How can we ask, however, such things from children of the street. They grow up nervous, weary, paranoid and vicious. As if a threat is always one step away ready to bite to wound. Strangers are not to be trusted, if that stranger happens to be the man that left him for dead. In the canal, mother dead.
I have tried with meditation and dreams to reel back the spool of time, yet there is a block there. Like Jung observed there are two personalities or complexes. One: here and now and two: back then.
My mind will not let me travel back then through relaxed states or through the brute determination of self-will (what a stupid notion) to travel back.
I awoke this morning to a nightmare scene placed in an alternative childhood. I am at the top floor of a council estate as a gang of street kids approaches. I want to run, need to escape yet I cannot, paralyzed with fear they approach as they attack I awake in sleep paralysis, unable to move for several minutes.
My heart beats furiously although my mind is aware of the condition, which I have had since a child and was in fact one of the reasons for my mother’s over-bearing care. What got the whole cauldron of misdiagnosed conditions bubbling. As a baby I would lay still for hours, never crying, eyes wild open, observing the world with terror.
Then as normal motor senses returned I ease my mind by asking simple questions about how Jimmy was cared for. How was he fed and clothed, educated?
Six months old. How was he nourished as a child? Would the gypsy community have access to baby milk formula? Or perhaps one of the women on the camp had also given birth and he had suckled from her. So was the milk that fed him a metaphor for that what nourishes me. As I raise the bottle, hungry for poison, tired, defeated, laid he in my bed, bottle beside me. Perhaps tomorrow, I will feel stronger.
M. Taylor
JOIN THE HIGH SOCIETY
JOE WALKED from the office and hit a café near Liverpool Street Station. Once a working man’s joint the place had turned into a tourist attraction run by Poles. Five years before builders ate there – now American tourists use it as a pit-stop on the grand old tour of quaint London Town. And it was a town now, the traffic flowed, the streets were clean, rich bankers rode bicycles and jogged around the city. The need to establish oneself by polluting the city in a car to earn face was something of the past – the east. He had to admit the place was cleaner and the service was fast and efficient. A cup of tea and a bacon sandwich served on thickly sliced bread, he ate greedily. Paid, stood, and his legs carried him towards Ledenhall market. Suits circled the financial center like vultures circling a kill. He was dressed in a pair of black jeans and an overcoat. Dressed like a man who spent his time in bookstores. His first stop was the Lamb Tavern for a pint of ale. His thoughts turned to James Hale and how he had failed to make it back to London. The suits drank and spoke about business. None of them could suspect that Joe knew every nuance of the insurance game and considered the majority of these players, with their big houses in the country, mostly amateurs. He had been at the height of his game and then had lost out to the herd. This bothered him on an intellectual and financial level, but spiritually, he had made the right decision to leave the West – at least back then it made sense. The truth was a man could be happy anywhere and the more money he had in his pocket the less it all meant. He had an idea that wealth was a complex condition that could only be analyzed clearly through episodes of acute poverty. Poverty such as coming down from a drinks and drug bender with nothing in your pocket but time. But this was just an idea. And ideas were like raindrops. They came and went and meant nothing to a man in a box underground with nothing but a bunch of flowers and memories, good, and bad, held by those that knew him. That is why he admired Taylor, took the case.
Art lives longer than life.
The London ale was so magnificent he ordered another. Golden, amber, sunburst, absolute richness alien to the cheap Asian lager he had tolerated back east. He had a job to do. Took the tube from Bank to Convent Garden. Walked through the market, through Charing Cross Road and Leicester Square as the October sun lit up the city. It was magnificent. As he hit Trafalgar Square the sun was bright overhead. Artists sat on the steps and sketched pictures of the architecture, the Lions, the column, and the blue chicken that had sprung up from some post-modern artist’s wildest dream.
LUMP
I MUST have looked at th
at rizla paper more than a thousand times. Stared at the telephone number. Having a ruck after a game of football is easy. Performing armed robbery is another piece of piss. But telephoning the girl you want to spend the rest of your life with.
Different fucking ball game.
Found the answer in a bottle.
A bottle of Bells. More or less downed the son of a bitch and then dialed the number from a telephone box across the road from the squat.
Was half-expecting Byron to answer. Instead I got this well-educated, ex-catholic school girl who I recall making daisy-chains on a summer’s lawn, saying:
“Hello?”
“Hi. It’s Jimmy.”
Heart did a few summersaults and I bet hers was as cool as a salamander’s. But you never know. Some hide fear better than others, some have been through it all so many times it doesn’t mean a thing. The less you care the luckier you are in love and poker and pit fighting, I guessed.
“Hello, you. I’ve been thinking about you. Why didn’t you call before?”
Thinking
About me.
I was stuck for an answer. ‘I was too scared’ wouldn’t cut it. Instead said,
“Been busy.”
“Too busy to invite me out for a drink?”
It was that easy.
A WITCH’S HAT
JOE KNOCKED on the door of the grand old Victorian house. Amanda Jones opened the door. Her back was stooped, like she was in discomfort from some incurable condition.
“Joe Dylan, from the East. You hired me.”
“Please, come inside.”
The house hadn’t changed much since the seventies. Pictures hung on the wall. Those awful prints of children looking longingly at dogs, three ducks flew in formation across the living room wall. She showed Joe to a single-seat chair. He sat and took in the room. A plant slowly dying, a writing desk, a gramophone. It was as if the place hadn’t been touched in decades. Miss Jones spoke: “You have travelled so far. Can I get you something. A drink?”
“Whatever you’re having is fine with me.”
She moved slowly as if the distance to the drinks cabinet was uncharted territory, poured two gin and tonics into slim-jim cocktail glasses. She trundled back to where Joe sat and he looked at the glass and raised it to his host. She gingerly sat in a chocolate Chesterfield and took a small nibble on the liquid. Joe slammed his in one. For a moment wished he hadn’t. He got up and refilled his glass.
Bombay Sapphire. He drank to the British Empire and the East India Trading Company, or at least that was what he told himself.
“Tell me about the kid, anything out of the ordinary, anything that would separate him from a crowd. Did he walk funny, wrinkle his nose when disturbed. Did he have any interests, or dis-interests. Did he like women, boys, did he like to dress up in military clothes and play in the dirt, or did he stay inside a shaded room, curtains drawn escaping into some dull thriller where the hero gets the girl and saves the planet?”
“The thing is,” she said, “the boy is special.”
“Mentally deranged?” Joe ventured.
“Quite the opposite. Gifted. At school he was a great writer. He won poetry competitions one after the other. We took him to read on the radio.”
“What happened on the radio.”
“He swore, insulted the DJ.”
“That’s too bad."
“But he is talented at writing.”
“His father is rather good in that department.”
“Strange. Do you think it is genetic?” she asked.
“I know that musical ability is. Three generations of my acquaintance are pitch perfect. I can’t tune a ukulele. But writing. I don’t know. My idea is that it comes from bad experiences and loneliness. I guess the writer spends a lot of time alone. Perhaps all writers are on a mission to find the missing part of their lives. He reads a lot. The father has dug himself into a hole with his writing. Wrote two best-sellers, that’s why I’m here. To find him and take him to his father.”
Amanda turned on her television set and played a video. The Detective watched the footage.
“I guess this is more than research for a novel.”
“You guessed right. The police are on to him. My suggestion is that you find him and take him out of the country.”
“Agreed. But where do I start looking?”
“The site has moved on. But there is one gypsy I know has stayed in the village. The government found him housing. His name is Noah and acted as Jimmy’s father for the first seven or eight years.”
“You have an address.”
“I do. Also I have something he wrote as a child. This may be of some little help, I don’t know,” she began to cry. “I just don’t know.”
The detective read it.
There’s a place in the woods. A clearing where the birds sing in the trees; foxes and badgers use for trails. A stream with a bridge made of stones. Once, I saw a kingfisher. I stopped and watched the flash of neon blue dive into the water and return with a tiny silver fish in her bill. I knew that to make one step forward would mean that the bird would fly away forever, and forever is a long time. I waited until she flew by herself. Life seemed better that way. When time is ready she shall fly. That is what time is. And that is what time will always be – something that ends.
It was Taylor’s kid alright.
“Listen, lady. I need you to do two things. One should be possible the other I’m not sure about.”
“I’ll do anything I can to help.”
“I need a witness to sign it. And then I’m going to fast track its application. What I don’t have is a photograph – anything recent and passport sized. If it’s not passport sized I can cut it. It just needs to look like him. Enough to get through customs.”
“I think, maybe, I’m not sure, but he stayed on through until he was sixteen. That would be at the secondary school, but I did ask for a picture once. From the school.” “Could you find it?”
“In this place. Heaven knows. Let me see upstairs. Help yourself to more drinks.”
“Joe did just that and watched the flames crackle in the fire. He could have lived this life. The big house in the city. Regret was a terrible animal caged with booze or meditation. He chose booze and refilled his glass. She came down the stairs wobbling slightly with a secondary school picture that looked about 35mm by 45mm. Else he could cut it.
“It’s the only one I have.”
“It’s important, Amanda. And if you could just sign. I’ll do the rest and we can get him back to his father. His father is a very famous author. Wrote The Boy in the Window. Was a best seller here I believe.”
“Oh,” she nearly fainted there and then. “I loved that book.”
“His father is a good man, please sign the application. And I’ll take him away. He won’t go to prison, madam. And you will see that the application has been dated before any of this happened. The robbery and everything.”
She signed the application and handed it back to Joe.
He caught a black cab to the coordinator’s office. Told him the story and passed over the application. “Do you think it can be done.”
“Are you kidding? I could lose my career.”
“68 Hazlebank Road. Tall, dark haired woman. Lives alone but accepts gentleman visitors. Ring any bells?”
“Jesus, Joe, you been spying on me,”
“I’m a detective,” he said. “How is your wife nowadays? Would some photos cheer her up?”
“Joe. Dylan. After all I’ve done for you. You’re one nasty sneaky bastard, I’ll give you that.” The fat coordinator said. Any way my wife and I have an agreement.”
“Does that agreement involve smuggling and distributing Grade A heroin?”
“What?”
“There’s a large lump concealed somewhere in this building. One phone call could have this place searched by the filth. And believe they’ll find it before you do.”
“I’ll get you that passport.”
“Good. And, sir?”
“What?” He said with his head in his hands.
“You taught me everything I know.”
THE END
One of the many tragic effects of alcohol consumption, even to the casual user is the loss of memory or the black-out. The memory center of the brain or the hippocampus is suppressed in activity during heavy drinking bouts leading to loss of, erm, memory. After years of progressive alcohol consumption the brain shrinks affecting all regions and can ultimately result in Korsakoff syndrome, a neurological disorder wherein the sufferer experiences amnesia, terrible confusion, anxiety, and the confabulation of truths in order to build a wall of fantasy around the addict. Hallucinations, whether they be visual or audial have also been observed in individuals with ‘wet brain’ syndrome.
I once treated a man who kept a naked women inside a water bed filled with formaldehyde. How he got her in there I never asked. She was young and beautiful, preserved, immaculate. Cane Hill, he was taken and never heard from again.
My own relationship with the bottle has increased since the knowledge that my son, thought to be dead, some twenty odd years ago has resurfaced. I have spent hours simply looking at the clock until the time comes when I permit myself the liberation of a visit to the drinks cabinet to relieve the pain of withdrawal. I have even considered the use of opiates to quell the thirst, but having observed the behavior of one of my patients and friends having used this method I have vowed not to travel down that road.
Following the death of my wife I did have a long relationship with barbiturates. A tougher drug to quit I have never known.
It was around this time that I began psycho-analysis with the dead. Channeling into those chattering voices in the night by quija board, tarot cards, crystals. Asking questions, all eliciting confused, trapped responses. Seriously considering that there be a stage between life and death I contacted a woman I thought to be my wife. She spoke of swans and the grass being greener on the other side. I never found Jimmy. One particular presence was a man who spelt out the words in broken English. I traced him back to a Polish Jew who had lived in the house years ago. Then of course the fascination turned to fear and the only thing to do was to relocate as far away from my demons as possible, to a city where devils dwelt both in dream and in waking form: Fun City.