by Haydn Wilks
“No worries, mate.”
The train slows. He fiddles with a panel above the door. The doors spring open. You brush past him, onto the platform, mind somersaulting over the odd impression you’ve left, the incredible misfortune of ‘request stop only,’ the smoking gun which will lead to your capture.
But as you walk, you let that fear fall away from you. Whatever happens, happens.
You suspect you’ll have trouble finding the street, and this suspicion becomes an almost crushing sense of certain failure as you leave the station platform and step onto a single lane road, lined with trees and fields, completely unlit in the near-complete darkness of a cold December evening. You close your eyes, as the sole other disembarking passenger talks and laughs with the girl driving the car that’s picking him up. They zoom off to the right. Your left arm tingles. You follow it, through the dark and wild, no cars oncoming. You walk and walk, a farmhouse appearing on your left after five minutes, a van causing you to step to the side of the road after five more, a car causing you to do the same a little after that, your mind in the blank trance state of an endurance hunter, some primal knowledge, a dog-like scent of your prey drawing you on, further, through thirty minutes or more of darkness, until time and direction and England and Britain and what it means to be human have lost all meaning to you. The hum of distant cars, like the soft rush of an irregularly running river, grows louder. The single-lane road opens out onto an intersection, cars intermittently chugging along it, a white bed and breakfast on the corner, a Union Jack flapping in the chilly wind outside it.
Go straight, instinctive GPS whispers to you.
You cross the intersecting road, see a cluster of housing opening up beyond the field at your left, and then notice the street sign beside you: Southwold Road.
A huge smile spreads across your face as you walk, instinct having guided you here with incredible accuracy. You try to suppress it, to return to the trance of an endurance hunter, but your happiness is overwhelming. You pass along a row of semi-detached houses, a little village in little England, counting the number on the doors as you go, until you reach number 24, two cars parked in the driveway in front of it, a light on in the living room. You stand outside, the near-silence of the night undercut only by that distant buzz of odd-rhythmed car river, and TVs turned up too loud, for Christmas specials and variety shows. You slip your phone from your pocket to check the time: 19:04. You stare at it, it wanting to tell you something. It quickly flicks over to 19:05. You wonder if there’s any significance to that sequence of numbers, if anything of importance happened in those years. You wonder if maybe that was when the houses along Southwold Road were first constructed, but glance up again at the house in front of you, and realise their far more modern constructions, these slope-roofed semi-detached middle-class standard housing units you’d find clustered in similar developments all across Britain. You think of World War 1, and try and remember if it started in 1914 or 1915, but whatever, that’s ten years after anyway. Consumed by curiosity, you tap on the Google icon on your phone screen, tap in the date – 1904 – and Wikipedia tells you it was a leap year, starting on Friday in the Gregorian calendar, or Thursday in the Julian calendar, and that on January 7, the distress signal CQD was established, only to be replace two years later by SOS, and on January 12, Henry Ford set a new automobile land speed record of 91.37mph (147.05km/h), on January 25, Harold Mackinder presented a paper on ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’ to the Royal Geographical Society of London, February 7, the Great Baltimore Fire in Baltimore, Maryland, destroyed over 1500 buildings in 30 hours, February 23, for $10 million, the USA gained control of the Panama Canal Zone, March 4, Russo-Japanese War: Russian troops in Korea retreat towards Manchuria, March 26, 80,000 demonstrators gather in Hyde Park, London, to protest the importation of Chinese labourers to South Africa by the British government, March 31, British expedition to Tibet – The Battle of Guru: British troops defeat ill-equipped Tibetans, April 8, Entente Cordiale signed between Britain and France, April 19, The Great Toronto Fire, April 27, Australian Labour Party becomes first such party to gain power, May, June, July – a car roars past, and snaps you free from the phone screen, back to 26 Southwold Road, and you realise you’ve been distracting yourself, delaying the inevitable, and that what has been begun must be finished.
You return your phone to your pocket and approach the door.
You stand and stare at it: a thick black thing with a golden knocker in the centre.
You delicately lift the knocker, take in a deep drawer of breath, try to remember the lyrics to ‘Away in a Manger’.
You let the knocker drop softly. You hear conversation over the sounds of television inside. You sure the knock’s not been heard. It’s not too late to back out.
And what then?
You think of the fridge-freezer, the Fast-Slow Cooker, the smashed up laptop, the defrost-soaked bed, Emilia in Bulgaria, Christmas alone.
What kind of life is that to return to?
You stare at the knocker.
What kind of life is that to return to, empty-handed?
You grasp the knocker, slam it three times.
Fuck.
You hear voices inside; Mrs. Ecclestone: “Who’s that?”
Mr. Ecclestone: “I dunno.”
Mrs. “Well, go and answer it.”
Shuffling footsteps through the hallway.
You look to the left of the door; you could press yourself against the wall, let him stick his head out, ambush him, gain the upper-hand…
The door opens. A kind, mild-mannered middle Englander in his early 30s wearing a pale blue polo shirt with a crème cardigan over it stands in front of you. Mr. Ecclestone.
“Hello, can I help you?”
Your lip quivers, trying to remember if the second line of ‘Away in a Manger’ begins with ‘the little Lord Jesus’ or ‘no crib for a bed’.
“I just came to wish you a Merry Christmas.”
He looks at you quizzically, with the kind of expression a less polite man would underscore with the words: “And who the fuck are you?”
“I just moved in down the street from you,” you bullshit, answering his unasked question, “I thought it’d be nice to get to know all the neighbours, what with it being the festive season, and everything.”
“Oh, isn’t that nice?” he smiles. “Well, why don’t you come in out of the cold, have a mince pie or something?”
“Sure, I’d love to!”
You follow Mr. Ecclestone through to the living room, to great beaming Mrs. Ecclestone, her sweetly sleeping infant in her arms. You sit on the armchair opposite her and can scarcely believe you were contemplating eating her sweet little young one. She and he ask you questions over mince pies, you throwing out instant answers to all of them, all of it bullshit, wanting to leave as quickly as possible. You glance at the television, at some Strictly Come Dancing best-of-the-year highlights package, at every break in conversation, asking no questions of your own, until two mince pies have been eaten, and you rise to your feet, utter some utter bullshit about having to call on more of the neighbours before the evening’s done, then head back out onto Southwold Road, back along the one-lane road, through tree-lined darkness, past the B&B with the Union Jack waving in cold wind outside it, past more trees, a farmhouse, and finally, the station platform. You smoke two rollies in the twelve minutes it takes for the next train to come, then board, take your seat, and stare out at rolling darkness, tears welling up behind your eyes, some horrible sadness, some horror at the nothing you’ve become, caught between monster and kindly neighbour-visiting middle Englander, an impossible contradictory mess of a human soul.
“Tickets from Brampton,” the conductor says, stopping beside you.
You flash him the orange-backed card you purchased in Cardiff. He frowns.
“Sorry, this is one-way only.”
Fuck. Almost £120, and you didn’t get a return.
You didn’t even get a fucking re
turn.
You hand over your debit card, charge another £12.50 to it to take you to Ipswich, then look out the window and reel, the delusions of being an endurance hunter, in touch with your primal side, completely leaving you. You are nothing but an unemployed fuckwit in a cash-driven society. You are less than nothing. You are nothing divided by nothing. An impossibility.
Ipswich comes, and the information board shows no direct trains back to Cambridge. You find an old man in Greater Anglia railway uniform. He tells you to change at Norwich. You tell him you’re trying to get back to Cardiff. He laughs and says you’ve no chance of that tonight.
You smoke another rollie, buy another £32.30 train ticket, pass through Diss and Stowmarket, change at Norwich, pass through Wymondham, Attleborough, and Thetford, and feel so overcome by failure and inadequacy and patheticness, then you bolt off the train at Branston, determined to make something of your night, to get some kind of return on your exorbitant outlay on train fare.
Branston.
The name strikes you as you emerge from the station, to a typical little town of two-lane roads and terraces.
Fucking Branston.
Even now, in your journey through England, through Britain, to the depths of your soul, you can’t get away from him. Him and Dave. The pair of dickheads whose lives are so wrapped up with your own.
The thought of where you are, all the hatred and disgust and sheer loathing associated with the name of the place calls back those primeval instincts that sent you to Southwold Road. In a state of true top-of-the-food-chain prey-lust you wander, through quiet streets, lights on inside homes, Christmas decorations flickering in their windows, ready to make something of it all. You take a left and a right through streets lined with all the same kind of semi-detached British blandness, until you stop outside one at random, decide this is the place, check both ways to see no-one’s around, then slip quietly through a gate into a back garden, with a pond at the edge of it.
You round the house and trigger a back light, flooding the dark of night with illumination. You press yourself against the wall of the house, breathing heavy, fully attuned to your surroundings. You hear the distant chatter and crap of television. The triggering of the light’s brought no attention. You wait for it to go off again, then move carefully around the home’s exterior, to French double-doors, light faintly reaching them from the distant living room. You crouch beside them, grab a stone, step back, setting the light off again, then hurl the stone through.
“Fucking hell!”
“What the fuck was that?!”
The clamour of voices in the closer-than-it-seemed living room startle you. There’s too many of them. Fight or flight kicks in, fight clearly impossible. You look behind you, at a fence, briefly consider clambering over it, but in a split-second sense that they’ll be drawn to the back garden, and the shattered window, so instead bolt round to the gate you came in through, back out onto the street, and run, taking lefts and rights, heart pounding, no-one about, no-one to see you. A few streets away, back near the station, you see a hotel, and decide to call it a night.
You try not to seem too odd and dishevelled to the lanky shaven-headed lad behind the counter, but as he hands you your room key, you register the complete disinterest and long-shift inertia etched deep into his non-descript face, and realise that the little outburst in Branston is unlikely to ever be traced back to you.
What about CCTV? you ask yourself, noting the camera trained on you in the lift, making an effort not to stare at it and arose suspicion in the minds of future police officers.
You move along carpeting covered in zig-zag patterning to hide years of accumulated shit and street germs, stop outside room 320, and hear voices further down the corridor: the raised voice of a man and a woman, and then a baby crying. A baby crying.
You clock another CCTV camera on your floor, and head inside your room, where you instantly try and calculate from the sounds you’ve heard which room they were staying in. It was clearly on the opposite side of the hallway to your own room, perhaps five doors down. Four? Six? You can always work it out, head back out there, try your luck.
It suddenly occurs to you how odd you look, checking into a hotel this time of night, without a scrap of luggage. And if the police cross-reference CCTV cameras from the street…
Like they’d give a fuck. It’s almost Christmas.
It’s almost Christmas.
You smile, and the smile soon becomes a laugh, as you repeat the sentence to yourself, over and over: It’s almost Christmas.
Another year over…
What have you done?
You bounce across the room like an errant toddler, and without removing your shoes, start bouncing up and down atop the mattress, head grazing the ceiling, until you collapse back onto the bed, its weak springs throwing you up a little off it, and then you lie there, laughing to yourself, quite given up to some temporary insanity. It’s almost Christmas. For some reason, this is the funniest thought that’s ever occurred to you.
You spring out of bed, return to the corridor, and pace down it, listening quite deliberately outside the doors on the opposite side for any sign of the earlier argument. Outside room 311, you find something that matches up with it; the quiet conversation of a post-quarrel couple making amends with each other.
You try the door handle.
Locked.
Panic strikes in an instant, and you rush back along the corridor, to room 318, try and open it, fiddle with the handle harder, think for a moment you’ve locked yourself out, suddenly realise it’s not yours, and return to the correct room beside it.
What now?
You sit on the edge of the bed and stare up at a switched off television screen. What now? indeed.
The blankness of the television keeps you in a blank state as time passes, you making a firm decision not to check your phone, not to give a fuck about what the mandated time of day is ever again, but to experience the passing of time as they did back in pre-history, letting the stars and your instincts and the changing of weather be your guides through the seasons. You make a promise to yourself to break free of all the trappings and bullshit and empty moral posturing of modern society altogether. You presume to have passed an hour or more dwelling on this, at which point you rise from the bed and fling open the mini-bar.
You rinse a surely-filthy glass beneath the bathroom sink, return to the mini-bar, pour a hefty shot of Jack Daniels from a small bottle out into it, then top it off with half a can of Heineken. You sip heavy on your odd concoction, and begin mindlessly working your way through an array of chocolates: Twix, Mars, Snickers, Dairy Milk. You move on to two small packs of Pringles, one sour cream and onion, the other ready salted. Quite satiated, you turn the TV on, Newsnight, and let serious faces in suits talk of all the horror unfolding in Syria as you drain off the rest of your Jack & Heineken, pour out another, then recline upon the bed, and wonder what it’ll take for those serious BBC news presenters and the army of producers and film archivists and unpaid runners and whatever else behind them to throw their energy into a comprehensive five-minute piece on your own misdeeds.
These thoughts and the alcohol and the satiated stuffed feeling from all the junk you’ve eaten, along with a final thick rolled cigarette to cap the night off, ashing into the Heineken can, send you off into a deep dreamless slumber.
You awake with the telephone ringing behind you.
The sound brings panic, a certainty that the game is up, that the police are at the front desk waiting for you, that all the chaos of the last twenty-four hours has happened to coincide with Dave or Emma entering your room to investigate the fridge-freezers incessant humming, but the panic dissipates as a dispassionate female voice on the other end of the phone tells you checkout was twenty minutes ago.
You leave the hotel without giving your key card back to the front desk staff and completing the formal checkout procedure, a realisation which only occurs to you some minutes later, as you enter Bran
ston Station, shake your head at the mad coincidence of ending up in a shithole named after that cunt, of all places, and board the next train to Norwich.
A full workday’s worth of hours and more than a full day’s salary on train tickets later, you’re back in Cardiff.
You stagger back across town, beat, the night and the days and weeks, months, & years having all gotten the best of you, mind a fractured mirror image of warped sick Brit globalised society, some faint thought within that you are nothing but a by-product, a symptom, the dose that prompts immune response, and you think American anti-vaxxers might have a point, that little drips like you will leave the whole system autistic.
These fragmented non-sequiturs are all you can bring your mind to as you reach Cathays, approach the door, try your key in the lock, see there’s another on the other side blocking your turning of it. You knock. A man answers. Dave? He looks different; changed. You wonder if you’ve not slipped fully out of sanity, into some alternate world of your mind’s own creation, as the not-Dave smiles.
“Alright mate? I’m Phil. Emma’s brother.”
He holds a hand out. Through sheer force of custom you shake it, as Emma moves into the hallway, Christmas party hat askew upon her head, clutching a glass of white wine.
“Hey!” she says, uncharacteristically thrusting herself at you for a hug. “I thought you’d gone home for the holidays.”
“Yeah… no… I just… I’ve been at Emilia’s.”
“Yeah? I thought you said she was back off to Bulgaria?”
“Yeah…”
She’s not after further explanation, instead leading you into the living room, offering explanations of her own; the living room’s fully occupied, Emma’s family spread across the sofa and armchairs, the sprawl of a pre-Christmas spread covering all the surfaces; half-drunk wine bottles, pulled crackers, told jokes, cheese platters, other odds and ends, party hats sat atop the tipsy heads of Emma’s mother, her slimmer younger fitter sister, and Emma’s niece, her sister’s kid, a toddler playing with toys on the floor, making a racket, as the other settle in, drinks are poured for you, and in a daze you’ve entered into it, a family Christmas, ITV playing on the television.
