The Uncommon Life of Alfred Warner in Six Days

by Juliet Conlin

  First published 2017

  by Black & White Publishing Ltd

  29 Ocean Drive, Edinburgh EH6 6JL

  www.blackandwhitepublishing.com

  This electronic edition first published in 2017

  ISBN: : 978 1 78530 113 1 in EPub format

  ISBN: 978 1 78530 082 0 in paperback format

  Copyright © Juliet Conlin 2017

  The right of Juliet Conlin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Ebook compilation by Iolaire, Newtonmore

  ’Twas night in the dwelling,

  and Norns there came,

  Who shaped the life of the lofty one;

  They bade him most famed

  of fighters all

  And best of princes ever to be.

  – Helgakviða Hundingsbana I

  Poetic Edda

  But if I were in a state of sin, do you think the Voice would come to me?

  Joan of Arc

  What I don’t get, like . . . is when I tell someone about them [the voices] . . . everyone assumes they’re coming from inside my head, and not outside, you know?

  – Tommy H., 23, voice-hearer

  Contents

  Title Page

  Day One

  Two Thousand and Five

  Day One

  1932

  Two Thousand and Four

  1932

  Day One

  1932 - 1934

  Day One

  Two Thousand and Three

  1934

  Day Two

  1934 - 1938

  Day Two

  1938 - 1939

  Nineteen Ninety-Nine

  1939 - 1944

  Day Three

  1946 - 1947

  Day Three

  1948

  Nineteen Ninety-Six (Part II)

  1948 - 1949

  Day Four

  1949

  Nineteen Ninety-Six (Part I)

  1949 - 1950

  Day Five

  1951 - 1955

  Nineteen Ninety-Five

  1955 - 1958

  Day Five

  1958 - 1960

  Day Five

  1965 - 1967

  Nineteen Ninety-Four

  1968 - 1969

  Nineteen Eighty-Eight

  1969 - 1972

  1972 - 1987

  Nineteen Eighty-Six

  1987 - 1988

  Day Five

  1990 - 2005

  Day Five/Six

  2005

  Day Six

  Day Three Hundred and Seventy

  Two Thousand and Fifteen

  Author's Note

  Day One

  The day I met Alfred Warner, né Werner, he had travelled over seven hundred miles eastwards and was sitting, hungry and exhausted, on a regional train heading from the airport towards Berlin’s central train station, Hauptbahnhof. He had been so intent on keeping an eye on his suitcase, which sat in the train’s luggage rack, wedged between a bright pink hardshell wheely thing and a filthy beige rucksack (it worried him to think that his case might be jammed in too tight for him to remove it, unless the owners of the other bags took theirs out first) that he had completely lost track of the stations. He had written down the entire train route, stops and all, on a sheet of paper the night before, after his granddaughter Brynja had rung to tell him that she was so sorry, but she wouldn’t be able to make it to the airport to pick him up, and that she would meet him at Hauptbahnhof at around two o’clock.

  Alfred reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out the piece of paper, knowing even as he did so that he had packed his reading glasses in his suitcase.

  Blind as a bat bat bat!

  But he unfolded it anyway and rested it on his thigh.

  ‘It’s easy to find, Grandad,’ Brynja had said on the phone. ‘Just take the regional train all the way from the airport. You can’t get lost.’ And then she had laughed. As if it were that easy. A loose, unselfconscious laugh that curled off in all directions. Alfred was beginning to dislike her before he’d even met her.

  A whoosh of hot air came out of the radiator grille underneath his seat, almost burning his calves. He jerked his legs out in front of him, causing his feet to collide with the shins of the man sitting directly opposite.

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ he said, and then corrected himself: ‘Entschuldigen Sie bitte.’

  The words coming out of his mouth were behaving badly, foreign words in his native language that made him sound slow, or worse, senile.

  It’s those NHS dentures. They’re not used to the lingo.

  But the man opposite just shifted in his seat and waved the apology away with a scowl. The heat emanating from beneath Alfred smelled slightly foul, and he was suddenly worried that the smell might be coming from him. He pulled his jumper away from his neck, tugged once or twice, and sniffed as furtively as possible, but all he could detect was a faint mixture of sweat and the lavender shower gel he’d used in this morning’s bath.

  Kssss, you’re not the stinker, then.

  The train began to slow and several passengers got up, rearranging coats, jackets, scarves, and blocking Alfred’s view of his suitcase. He got to his feet, keeping his balance with some effort, and tried to make out the name of the station through the opposite window. The train was at a mere hissing, shrieking crawl now, but Alfred’s eyes still couldn’t quite focus on the passing station signs long enough to read them. He sighed and turned his head back to the luggage rack. A young woman dressed in black was blocking his view of the suitcase, but he could see her tugging at the pink wheely case. A moment later, she had jerked it out of the rack. And Alfred’s suitcase was gone.

  He shuffled past the woman in the seat next to him, entschuldigung, entschuldigung, down the aisle towards the luggage rack, breathing heavily as he tried to avoid stepping on the handbags, coats, and toddlers that were blocking his path, and reached the luggage rack just as a pony-tailed youth was heaving his beige rucksack from the shelf. Alfred lifted a hand to tap the young man on the shoulder, noticed the tremor, and dropped it again.

  ‘Entschuldigung.’

  The young man turned and smiled.

  ‘Sorry, no German,’ he said.

  Alfred thought he recognised a Scottish accent.

  ‘That’s all right,’ he replied.

  Where’s he from? Go on, ask him!

  ‘Can I help ye?’ the young man said, negotiating the rucksack onto his back and bumping it into several people in the process.

  ‘My suitcase. I can’t seem to find it,’ Alfred said, embarrassed at the trace of desperation that had crept into his voice. The train had come to a full stop now and Alfred was becoming very anxious that if this was indeed his station, he would need to get his suitcase and disembark.

  ‘It was just here – ’ He gestured towards the pile of luggage still on the rack, then turned back to the man and suddenly spotted his case standing in the aisle a couple of feet away. The young woman must have put it there when she was getting her own case out. ‘Oh,’ he said, his voice small. ‘There it is.’

  ‘Need any help getting it off the train?’ the young man asked.

  ‘Are we there?’ Alfred asked.

  Are we there? Are we
there? How’s he supposed to know where you want to get off?

  The man began to move slowly towards the door along with the other passengers wanting to disembark. ‘We’re at Hauptbahnhof, if that’s where you need to be,’ he said over his shoulder.

  Alfred felt his head tremble on his neck. The young man took this as affirmation and picked up Alfred’s suitcase.

  ‘I’ll just pop it on the platform for you mate, all right?’ Then without waiting for an answer, he headed for the door.

  Alfred stepped slowly and carefully off the train, concentrating on keeping his balance while being jostled and bumped by those in more of a hurry to get on and off.

  Impatient lot.

  He hadn’t had a proper piss since that morning at home; he had tried to go on the aeroplane, but the door to the small and smelly cubicle had stubbornly refused to lock, and the fear of the door swinging suddenly open and his being exposed to a plane full of passengers with his flies undone and his shrivelled, seventy-nine-year-old sex poking out for all to see had made peeing all but impossible. He had only managed to squeeze out a few hot, painful drops of urine. Then, on the train, the pressure on his bladder had taken centre stage again, but he hadn’t dared to seek out the toilet, in case a) someone stole his suitcase, and b) he missed his stop.

  And so now he was sitting on the platform, not managing to think beyond a visit to the toilet and wondering how he might politely put his need to Brynja when – if – she finally turned up. The cold blew along the platform through the station, from one tunnel opening to the next. Alfred could barely remember what she looked like. She had sent him a photograph with her third letter, the one containing the aeroplane ticket, and in which she had said she was thrilled that he was coming, but he had forgotten to take the photograph with him. He’d laid it on the low walnut side table, one of the few items of furniture he had been allowed to take from his home in Barton Road to Gladstone Court Care Home, but the nurse had rushed him out of the door that morning – bad-tempered that he wouldn’t be there over Christmas even though he’d said he would be, and now there would be three left-over Christmas dinners, what with Eleanor Dougan passing away unexpectedly the night before and Frank Martins deciding to spend the holidays with his daughter after all – and he’d been in the taxi speeding towards Birmingham Airport before he knew it.

  ‘And make sure to tell her about your diabetes,’ the nurse had shouted at him, confusing his (good) right ear with his (bad) left. ‘We don’t want to have to start you on jabs when you get back, just because you couldn’t say no to the Christmas pud.’

  And although Alfred knew he wouldn’t be back, he nodded and smiled.

  Indeed, six days after I met him, Alfred Warner died of heart failure.

  Two Thousand and Five

  They’re coming. They’re coming now. You can feel them coming before you even hear them. It’s always the way. Every time. It’s one fifteen and you have to leave the house soon if you want to be there on time. But there’s no way you can leave the house if they are there. There’s no way you’re taking them with you. No way.

  You feel them coming before you even hear them, a slight shift in air pressure just before a thunderstorm. And even as you start humming, a counter-stimulation one of your doctors suggested, you know that humming to prevent the voices from coming is as effective as raising a fist to the heavens to prevent that thunderstorm. And sure enough, they arrive, in a low-level crackling, peppered with the occasional cough and grunt.

  The little girl’s voice arrives first through the static, sharp and clear: We know, don’t we. Don’t we. We know. We have too much gravity. Too much, tooooo much gravity. We know about the gravity, don’t we. We are heavy, heavy in the gravity.

  You stop humming as you realise you are rocking backwards and forwards on the soles of your feet. You are still standing in the hallway, keys in your left hand, jacket in your right, ready to walk out the door.

  Ooooh, so heavy. Bryn, Bryn, Brynja, the voice says, mocking you by rolling the r, revving it like a motorcycle.

  It’s too late to take your meds now. You stopped taking them after Erich left, when you needed to feel the pain to feel alive. Because otherwise, what’s the point? It’s too crazy Brynja, he said, after the fire. I can’t live like this, he said. This is not going to work.

  If you’re lucky, it’ll only be the little girl. The others might not follow. There’s no way of telling.

  The voice drops away, leaving behind a decreasing hush of white noise. You look up and down, from side to side, listening with your eyes. For one sweet moment, all is still. But just as you lift your arm to slide it through the jacket sleeve

  SHAME ON YOU! You slut, you dirty, filthy SLUT!

  The two women. Twins, you imagine, speaking in unison, giving their harsh, brittle voices a surreal, artificial quality. Or maybe just one voice spoken twice, one superimposed on the other like a sound technician’s recording.

  You will be punished, you will not escape your FINAL JUDGEMENT. Look at you, your jeans so tight, so tight up against your crotch. Your dirty, disgusting, bulging camel toe . . .

  Without wanting to, you look down at your crotch.

  Yes, you see! They will all be looking at you, watching you, you and your disgusting pussy-bulge.

  You let keys and jacket drop to the floor and run into the living room, to the IKEA desk over in the corner, plough through piles of paper, books, sweeping them to the floor, you don’t care, looking for your iPod, your precious music, music, but nothing’s here, so you run across the room and flip open the laptop that sits on the coffee table and switch it on. The screen lights up and you stare at the green processor light blinking furiously, trying to ignore the

  FAT! FAT and UGLY and SLUTTY! Ooh, you want them to touch you, touch you down there . . .

  until the laptop is up and running and you click open YouTube and type in Coleman and open another tab and type in Takayanagi, concentrating hard to find the correct spelling through the shouting, and you turn the volume to its highest and are hit by sound from everywhere – skewed saxophone and violent guitar, the fierce jazz fighting the voices and causing pain like glass inside your head.

  You crash down onto the couch and close your eyes.

  At some point during the screaming sax-guitar cacophony, the abuse trails off, the twins unwilling, perhaps, to fight against the noise. And several minutes later, the tracks have also ended, leaving you in silence on the couch with ringing ears and racing heart, sweating profusely and knowing you should concentrate on remembering something that was important to remember, although the inside of your head is raw like freshly peeled flesh. Needing to stay still, just for a short while, just until the nerve-endings have stopped shrieking and the nausea has passed. Lying on your back, counting breaths.

  The silence is exquisite.

  Brynja.

  Your eyes fly open.

  Brynja. Sit up.

  You sit up and immediately vomit onto the carpet. Then you start crying. Softly.

  You are being very silly.

  It is the voice you fear most of all.

  You know, I’m losing patience with you, I really am.

  Loud, powerful, voluminous. Inside and outside of your head at once.

  For a start, sit up straight when I’m talking to you. Wipe your chin. And look at that disgusting mess you’ve made. I should make you lick that up.

  You continue to sob and wipe your chin with your sleeve. You drop to your knees and lower your face to the floor. The sour-sharp smell makes you gag.

  What are you doing? Get up, you stupid girl! It’s soaked into the carpet by now, anyway. Right, let’s take a little walk to the kitchen.

  You sit back on your heels, weeping loudly now. Don’t, you say. Don’t make me hurt myself. Please.

  ‘Don’t make me hurt myself. Pleeeease.’ We’ve been through this, Brynja. I don’t know how many times. You give me what I want and I will leave you alone. It’s as simple as that.<
br />
  But I don’t know what . . . You don’t bother to finish your sentence. She is right. You’ve been through this countless times. Cigarette burns. Rope burns. Cuts: knives, razors, needles dragged across the skin, shards of glass. But you still don’t know what she wants. After all these years. For years she’s been coming at you; sometimes she gives you riddles, but they never make sense.

  (What is the point of an any-angled mirror?

  If I took away your eyes, what would you see?

  How far is a breath thrown in the rain?)

  Or you are just too dumb to solve them. But you try – oh god, you try so hard!

  She is the one you are most frightened of, because she is the one who owns your thoughts. Hers aren’t random bursts of abuse, like that of the twins; or kaleidoscopic, nonsensical ramblings like the little girl. But she knows what makes you tick. She knows what makes you sick. Haunting you, taunting you, flaunting her power over you. She knows how to get under your skin and make you bleeeeeed. And she is most cruel when you come off your meds. That’s when she really takes her revenge. She isn’t stupid; she knows you have ways of silencing her – Chlorpromazine, Largactil, Stelazine. But sooner or later, you stop taking your pills because of what they do to your mind, to your body – a thick hot blanket smothering your thoughts, your tongue swollen, breasts and ankles too, poisoning you in a way you can’t put into words to explain to the doctor. Can’t think straight, can hardly get out of bed, fall asleep on buses and trains. Wrecked when you’re on your meds. Wrecked when you’re off them.

  Get to your feet! Come on, right now! You’re worthless, d’you know that? I don’t even know why I bother.

  You stand up. Hum the first bars of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ – the first tune that comes into your head – but this is so pathetically lame you stop almost immediately. Scared of angering her. Best just to do what she says. But it’s too late. She’s heard it.

  Baby songs? Are you serious? Well that’s it, Brynja. I’ve had just about enough of this. I was going to give you another chance today, a chance to give me what I want – and you know what I want, so don’t even bother pretending you don’t – but no, you don’t want to play along. She sighs. So it’s time now. I think it’s time.