Boracic Lint

by Martin Bryce

that the scene had changed. For the worst.

  ‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’ The Bull asked.

  We were somewhere dark, damp and foul-smelling. ‘What have I forgotten, Mr Flowers?’ I stammered.

  The Bull said nothing, but pointed to a sheet of cardboard which was covering a figure lying on the ground.

  ‘Who is it?’ I asked with a tightening feeling in my throat.

  ‘One, like yourself, who has chosen to disappear,’ the Bull replied.

  ‘No. No, you see I haven’t. That is, I had, but I’ve changed my mind. I like it here. Well, not exactly here in this precise place, wherever it is, but in the other place, you know the world, thing, place.’ But the Bull was already fading from my sight. No, don’t go, Mr Flowers! You can’t leave me here like this. I’m a changed man. I want the other things, the things I had before. Please, Mr Flowers, it’s Christmas!’

  ‘Sanctimonious claptrap.’ The Bull’s words, well mine, echoed as if they’d been spoken in a vast, awesome canyon. The canyon that used to be my soul. ‘The world which credits what is done is cold to what might have been. The words of Tennyson, lad. The one who comes after me will show you the way you have chosen.’

  All fell profoundly silent.

  Hardly had I got my bearings back in my room when I heard a weak, irregular tapping at my door. So soon, I thought. Not even time for a cup of Nescaff. I was, however, well prepared for this new visitor. After all, Goldman and the Bull hadn’t been so dreadful and this was probably Brian performing another of his charitable acts. I opened the door boldly.

  ‘Come in, Brian,’ I said. ‘Have we time for a quick cup of…’

  My blood froze at the sight of the thing which stood before me. Tall and swaying slightly, it was dressed in a black cloak and on its head, which was lowered as if in mourning, it wore an enormous mortar board hat with a long tassel.

  ‘Are you he that follows Mr Flowers?’ I asked, now shaking fairly violently. The figure nodded silently, its head still bowed. And then it steadied itself with one hand against the door frame. ‘Are you… death?’ I gulped.

  Slowly the hideous thing raised its head to look at me. Its cheeks were sallow and sunken, its eyes glazed. It had several days of greying stubble.

  ‘Might as well be,’ the thing slurred in reply. It was the fallen Professor. I was a little relieved.

  ‘Do you have somewhere to take me?’ I asked. Professor Poltergeist belched and retched slightly. ‘And do you have something to show me?’ I continued, trying to be helpful. He nodded and scratched his head thoughtfully. ‘Is it my death?’ I coaxed.

  ‘Ah!’ It said holding up a finger as if it had just discovered some profound truth. Slowly and unsteadily it began to turn away. ‘It’s over here, somewhere.’ With a flourish it pointed away into the distance, losing its balance as it did so. I caught it just before it fell.

  ‘Come on, Professor,’ I said. ‘Let’s get this thing over with.’

  ‘Thank you, dear boy,’ it said. ‘You haven’t got a drink on you by any chance, have you?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Thought not,’ the Prof said, shaking his head sadly. ‘And they call this the spirit world.’ It found this remark amusing and snickered a little before sinking into the morass of drunken depression again.

  It gestured languidly with its hand and suddenly we were standing on a wild and windswept beach. The sound of storm waves crashing against the shore was deafening and staying upright against the gale-force wind was difficult. It was impossible for the Prof who was now proceeding on all fours. The blue flashing lights on top of the police car and the ambulance drew my attention immediately. Nearby, a small group of people was gathered around something on the ground. Something that was covered by a white sheet. I approached them leaving the Professor to follow as best he could.

  As I drew closer to them I began to recognise the people in the group. The two policemen were Bolingbroke and Cade, but now in uniform. The two ambulance officers were, my God! Harry and Mandy! And the ship’s Captain was none other than Brian himself.

  ‘And you’ll recognise him, Captain if it is him?’ Bolingbroke asked.

  ‘Well, he’s only been in the water for a couple of days,’ Brian said matter-of-factly. ‘He shouldn’t be too far gone. Let’s have a look.’

  Now I knew who it was under the sheet.

  ‘No! I don’t want to look!’ I cried. I averted my gaze as Mandy drew back the sheet from the corpse’s head. But whichever way I turned, however tightly I closed my eyes, I could not blank out the scene. I looked in horror at my own face. It was my face, ghostly white and beginning to bloat, of that I was certain. But it was a bitter and twisted looking face, not the face of a man who had died at peace with the world. And although I knew that the corpse on which I now rested my gaze was that of a man no more than two or three years older than myself, it was almost as though the face was that of a man in old age.

  ‘That’s him,’ Brian said unemotionally.

  ‘Dear, oh lor’,’ Harry said. ‘Poor ol’ Wally. Never was much good at noffink. Seems ‘e wasn’t much of a swimmer neiver.’

  ‘Let’s get him to the morgue Mandy said,’ as she and Harry went to the ambulance for a gurney.

  ‘And you say nobody knew where he came from?’ Cade asked.

  ‘He used to live rough round the docks,’ Brian replied. ‘Sometimes he’d pick up work as a deckhand on the ferries, but it was a desperate man who took him on.’

  ‘Did he have a name?’ Bolingbroke enquired.

  ‘People used to call him Santa. God knows why. I certainly never knew his real name. Has he nothing on him to identify him?’

  ‘All his clothes are second-hand rubbish,’ Cade said dismissively. ‘And what he’s got in his pockets isn’t going to be much help. An empty bottle of some foot treatment, a battered old tobacco tin, a toy soldier, guardsman by the look of it, with pins stuck in it for some reason and a battered hip flask with some cheap whisky in it. Funnily enoughwrapped up in a bag from Harridges. Oh, and there’s about one pound fifty in loose change. Whole lot wouldn’t come to more than three quid. We’ll get forensic to check the dental records, but it looks like he lost some teeth in a fight a few weeks back.’

  ‘We know him alright,’ Bolingbroke said. ‘But only because of the tattoos on his arms. Ruby on the left, Rowena on the right. Had him locked-up on several occasions for drunk and disorderly, but we’ve never found out who he really was.’

  ‘Well, I’m not surprised he went over the side.’ Brian said sadly, shaking his head. ‘Pissed as a newt most of the time and he was a dreadful seaman, even though he did talk a couple of times about having been in the Navy.’

  ‘Sounds like nobody’s goin’ to miss ‘im much, then,’ Harry said as he and Mandy loaded me roughly onto the gurney. ‘Come on, Mands, let’s get ‘im down the morgue, It’s perishing out ‘ere.’

  It was quite enough. I couldn’t bear to listen to any more. I went over to the Professor who was slumped over the bonnet of the police car, snoring loudly. I shook him.

  ‘Can I go home now, please?’ I demanded through chattering teeth.

  The Prof shook his head and pointed a bony finger at the silhouette of a small church standing on a bleak headland some distance away. Instantly we were standing in the graveyard.

  ‘It’s here somewhere,’ he muttered after about ten minutes of trying to read headstones in the dark while drunk. ‘It’s a new grave we want.’

  I was standing before such a grave. ‘Is this it?’ I whimpered. He lurched over to it, tripping frequently on the tussocks of wiry grass and cursing roundly. He bent down to read the writing on the stone.

  ‘Ah,’ he said eventually and pulled himself upright. With as much ominous presence as he could muster, and it was minimal, he pointed a wavering hand at the slab as a command for me to read it myself. Then he fell o
ver backwards declining the Latin verb, ‘to die’.

  I crouched down and with heavy heart and trembling lips read the inscription.

  HERE LIES THE BODY

  OF AN UNKNOWN ACTOR

  WHO DIED ON STAGE EVERY NIGHT

  The last act is tragic,

  However happy all the rest of the play is:

  At the last a little earth

  Is thrown upon our head

  And that is the end forever.

  Pascal

  And in tiny letters at the bottom, Another fine tomb from Taylor’s monumental productions.

  Silhouetted against the Moon, across whose face black clouds scudded, I let out an anguished cry.

  ‘Is this all we leave? A poet words, a musician notes? Aye, in this mortal world ‘tis all, and while mortal we must make mortal joy and let the critics gnaw upon our bones. But this! These words in stone are another man’s words, not mine. Can I not carve mine own epitaph? Am I to be denied even that final dignity?’

  The Prof’s drunken rendition of My Way did nothing for the dramatic atmosphere I was trying to create with my soliloquy in that desolate windswept place.

  ‘Tell me, Professor! Tell me it is not all. Tell me it doesn’t have to be this way!’ I grabbed at the recumbent form and shook it.

  ‘You did it your way,’ it sang and then disappeared completely, leaving me clutching nothing but an empty cloak.

  ‘NO!’ I screamed as the final chord of My Way from the celestial orchestra faded. ‘Help me, spirit! Help me! Don’t leave me here. I have a life to live! I haven’t even started yet and now it’s over. SPIRIT!’

  SCENE 18

  I was writhing and screaming under my duvet when the awful hammering on my door started again.

  ‘NO, please, no more! Haven’t you done enough for one night?’ I yelled. ‘Go away! Just go away!’

  The hammering started again.

  ‘You alright in there?’ Hammer, hammer, hammer. ‘What’s goin’ on?’

  I took my head from beneath my pillow. It was Mr H’s voice. I leaped out of bed and cautiously opened the door.

  ‘Is that you Mr Higginbottom?’ I asked joyfully. ‘Really you?’

  ‘Who the bloody ‘ell d’you think it is at this time of night?’ H demanded toothlessly. ‘And what’s all this noise about? You’ve given Mrs Higginbottom quite a turn with all your shouting and wailing.’

  ‘It is you, Mr Higginbottom! And you’re not another ghost?’

  ‘Ghost? Do I look like a bloody ghost?’

  ‘Well… Well, none of the others did either, but no, it really is you! Yes, yes it’s you. Oh, I’m so happy I could cry. D’you know how happy I am, Mr H? No, of course you don’t. How could you? Oh, let me feel you, Mr Higginbottom, just to make sure.’

  He leaped backwards.

  ‘Yes, you’re right, Mr Higginbottom, quite right,’ I said rubbing my hands all over my body. ‘It’s me I should be feeling, not you. It was a dream after all, a terrible, terrible dream.

  I hopped and skipped around the room and then did a somersault onto my bed.

  ‘I’m not dead, Mr H!’ I said crouching on the bed. ‘Did you hear? I’m not dead and now I never will be!’ I skipped around the room some more. ‘D’you know what I’m going to do, Mr H? Do you?’ I asked as I danced round him on the landing. ‘No, how silly of me, of course you don’t. How could you? I haven’t told you and I’m not going to tell you, either. Oh, you and Mrs H are going to get such a surprise when you discover what I’m going to do. Tra-la, tra-la. Isn’t this a wonderful life, Mr H? Isn’t it just?

  ‘You’ve gone potty,’ he said. ‘Stark, staring bloody mad. You should be locked up!’

  ‘Locked up!’ I repeated brightly. ‘Locked up! Yes, how right you are, Mr H.’ I grasped his hand and shook it. ‘What a splendid idea! Locked up! Delightful! Quite delightful! But I won’t be, not now, Mr H, not now. I’m a free man, truly free. And