Ten Sorry Tales

by Mick Jackson

  The rest of the time he was blissfully ignorant. He was locked away deep within himself. All except for one solitary occasion when he briefly grasped that he’d somehow muddled up being asleep with being awake. For one awful moment he understood that he was sleeping, without having the first idea how to bring himself around. He wanted to call out – to break the spell – but his cry for help was stuck deep in his sleeping body. Then another dream swept in, embraced him and drew him back into the deeper reaches of unconsciousness.

  It was a long, slow hibernation, and it took its toll on the boy’s poor mum and dad, who themselves began to drift around the place in their own half-waking state. Their hair turned grey from all the worry. Their dreams were full of pain and fear. But on one otherwise ordinary Sunday morning their suffering finally came to an end.

  The boy’s mother was quietly tidying his room around him and sat on the bed for a moment, to catch her breath. She talked to her son, as she’d done a thousand times before, about whatever happened to be on her mind – all the little jobs that needed doing and how the summer was slowly coming around. She brushed his hair to one side with her fingers, kissed him on his forehead and rested her cheek against his sleeping face. She closed her eyes and whispered a few kind words to him, and was breathing in the smell of his hair when she thought she felt the flicker of an eyelash against her cheek. And when she sat back there was her son, with his eyes wide open, looking up at her.

  She called out to the boy’s father, who came running up the stairs even quicker than the neighbours’ twins had once run down them. And he and his wife sat and stared at their son, who lay there, blinking and looking all around him, as if he had been washed up on some forgotten shore.

  It took him a while to gather his senses and a good while longer to cobble together his first words. He opened his mouth, but his throat was as dry as bracken.

  ‘I’ve been asleep,’ he croaked.

  He desperately wanted to get up but all his muscles had grown weak and withered. So his father took one arm around his shoulder, his mother took the other and between them they managed to get him to his feet. As he limped along he had the most peculiar feeling: either his parents had been busy shrinking or he’d been busy growing up.

  In fact, he’d grown no more than most boys do between the ages of ten and twenty. When he fell asleep he was four foot six. When he awoke he was six foot two. He leant against the window ledge and looked out at the world he’d last seen ten years earlier. The birds were singing. The clouds slowly rolled across the sky. Then he turned and headed back towards his bed. On his way he passed a mirror and caught sight of some young man resting on the shoulders of his own mother and father. He stood – quite stunned – and stared at the young man, who stood and stared right back at him.

  When word got out that he’d woken up the queue of well-wishers stretched right down the street. And when he was finally strong enough to go out on his own, people would run up to him and shake his hand and tell him how they never doubted that he’d eventually wake up again.

  Once he’d fully recovered he decided to go back to school, to complete his education. The other children found it hugely entertaining to have a tall young man sitting among them, and for the first few days they kept looking over at him, to see if he’d nodded off again. But after a while they grew accustomed to his presence and treated him much like any other child.

  Mister Winter had retired a couple of years earlier, when he’d grown too old to throw his chalk with any accuracy, and a young woman called Miss Hayes had taken his place.

  *

  Miss Hayes was roughly the same age as her new pupil. The boy’s parents suggested he ask her out, but it didn’t seem quite right somehow to be asking out one’s teacher, and he never got around to it.

  After a couple of terms he gave up on the whole idea of schooling and got a job on a nearby farm. He worked there most of his life and lived to a grand old age, but it wouldn’t be true to say that he was happy. There were too many days when he felt profoundly out of sorts. He didn’t like being in rooms when the doors were closed. He was afraid of the dark and in the summer he slept out in the garden, where he could look up and see the stars.

  All too often he felt like a boy trapped inside a man’s body. He could be dreadfully shy and sometimes had terrible trouble finding the right words for what he had to say. And when he closed his eyes at night he would sometimes wonder if that strange, fathomless sleep was waiting for him and whether he would ever again have to endure that awful feeling of being deep inside a whale.

  A row-boat in the cellar

  The most unusual thing about Mister Morris was the fact that he was missing a leg. It got blown off when he was a soldier a long, long time ago. He’d been sitting in a trench in the middle of nowhere when a shell came screaming out of a clear blue sky. The same terrible shell that blew Mister Morris’s left leg off also killed his best friend Frank. One minute they were crouching in their trench, talking about cricket, the next minute young Frank was dead.

  After the war, Mister Morris got a job in a hardware shop, selling screws and glues and nuts and bolts. If someone was hanging a door, he’d tell them what sort of hinge they needed. If they were putting up a shelf he’d tell them which brackets to buy. Whenever a customer bought a light bulb Mister Morris would insist on checking it. He’d slip the bulb out of its cardboard sleeve and twist it into a socket behind the counter. If it lit up he’d say, ‘That’s a good ’un.’ If it didn’t (which wasn’t very often) he’d say, ‘That’s a bad ’un,’ and throw it in the bin.

  For forty-two years Mister Morris sold bottles of turps and methylated spirits and gave his customers advice on brushes and bradawls and brooms. He spent all day hobbling about the shop on his wooden leg (which had a shoe neatly fastened to the end of it), without uttering a single word of disgruntlement. He was a popular man – a mine of useful information. And when he finally retired the other members of staff took him out to dinner and gave him a watch for his waistcoat pocket, with an inscription which read, ‘Time to put your foot up, old son.’ At the end of the night Mister Morris shook hands with his old colleagues and hobbled off down the street. But when he woke on the Monday morning he decided that he was going to need a project to keep him occupied.

  For some people, retirement can be a bit of a shock to the system. They suddenly find they have far too much time on their hands. Some stay in bed, trying to catch up on all the sleep they think they’ve missed out on. Some study. Some watch daytime TV. But it can be hard changing the habits of a lifetime. They wake up early, even though they didn’t set the alarm. They miss the old routine. And the days can sometimes seem to stretch out before them like an empty, friendless place.

  Some people miss the company of their old work-mates and begin to wish they’d never left their job. Mister Morris felt no such thing. But he knew he needed something to keep him busy, and began to wonder what sort of project he should set himself.

  Every morning of his first week of retirement he made a pot of tea, boiled himself an egg, then walked along the river which wound its way right through the town. He could write a book, he thought. A book about working in a hardware store. Or maybe a book about the war.

  He liked cycling. Perhaps he could cycle from one end of the country to the other. He went to the library, to find out how many miles it was from Land’s End to John-o’-Groats, but, having found out, suddenly felt that perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea after all.

  He could take up fishing. He was very fond of fish – especially when they had a few chips beside them – but didn’t relish the idea of sitting around all day waiting for them to swim along.

  On the Thursday morning Mister Morris was standing on the riverbank, watching the water quietly sliding by. He knew he was getting close to thinking up an interesting project. He could feel it in his bones. He remembered a holiday when he was a boy. His father hired a boat and rowed young Mister Morris and his mother out on Lake Winderme
re.

  The idea lit up in his head just like a light bulb. He would build himself a rowing boat.

  ‘That’s a good ’un,’ he said out loud.

  Mister Morris turned and hurried home. He went straight down into his cellar, where all his saws and hammers stood to attention along one wall. He stood beside them and wondered what sort of boat to build himself. He could build a kayak, he thought, like the Eskimos paddle themselves around in. Or some other type of canoe. He tried to think of all the different boats he’d ever come across. He quite liked the idea of building a coracle (if only because he liked saying the word) but in the end he settled on an old-fashioned row-boat, like the one his dad had hired sixty years earlier. It seemed like the sort of boat most fitting for a man his age.

  He drew up some plans, worked out how much wood he’d be needing and paid a visit to the timber yard. And for the next couple of months he rose early, had a decent breakfast (cereal … toast and honey … pot of tea), then went down into the cellar and put his overalls on. He worked steadily right through the day, emerging around one o’clock for a light lunch (soup … cheese and pickle sandwich) and around three or four for another pot of tea.

  In the evenings he walked along the bank of the river and imagined himself rowing up and down it. He pictured himself rowing upriver to a country pub and sitting and doing the crossword; pictured himself rowing downriver to visit the hardware shop.

  Mister Morris liked the smell of sawdust. He liked the feel of the wood after the sandpaper had smoothed it away. Most of all, he liked the smell of the varnish. By the time that boat was finished, it must have had about ten coats of the stuff brushed onto it. It was as brown as a kipper and had the same treacly glaze to it as that boat on Lake Windermere.

  He finished the oars and gently placed them in the rowlocks. He stepped back to admire his work. The boat sat on its trestles, like something in a museum, and Mister Morris felt enormously proud of himself. He thought of all the care he’d taken in the boat’s construction. All the sweat that had soaked into his shirts. But even as he stood there admiring his beautiful boat he felt a strange chill creep across his shoulders, as if something awful was about to come to pass.

  He looked at the boat – so big and strong and solid. Then he slowly turned and looked back up the stairs. The cellar door seemed suddenly small. He looked back down at the boat. His mouth dropped open. And bitter tears welled up in his eyes.

  For a while Mister Morris sat in his kitchen and pretended to listen to the radio. He couldn’t stand to see his mighty boat trapped down below. After about an hour, he went back downstairs, found the tape measure and did some calculations on the back of an envelope. But whichever way he came at it, he couldn’t find a way of squeezing such a sizeable boat through such a narrow door.

  What upset him most – more than all his wasted effort – was the fact that the boat was now unable to do what it had been specifically built for. It was imprisoned, like some poor wretch locked up in a dungeon, far away from the water on which it had hoped to sail.

  In the weeks that followed, Mister Morris did his best not to think about it, whilst actually thinking about it a great deal of the time. He went to the shops, cooked his dinner and listened to the radio but kept finding himself down in the cellar, staring at his stranded rowing boat.

  One Wednesday evening he was walking by the river when he noticed how high the water was getting. There had been a lot of rain lately (which was not that unusual) and he thought no more about it until he was woken in the middle of the night by the sound of people shouting in the street. He stuck his head out of the window. All his neighbours were standing around in their pyjamas and wellingtons.

  ‘It’s the river, Mister Morris,’ one of them called up to him. ‘It’s burst its banks.’

  Mister Morris closed the window and hopped back into bed. He sat there for a couple of minutes, thinking. Then he strapped his wooden leg on, found his dressing gown and went down the stairs.

  When he opened the door to his cellar he was confronted by a scene that both horrified and delighted him. Cardboard boxes and tins of varnish were floating in three feet of water. Jars of screws and bottles of beer were bobbing about the place. And in their midst, looking serene and stately, drifted Mister Morris’s rowing boat.

  He made a lasso out of a bit of old washing line, twirled it above his head once or twice and threw it in the direction of the boat. Then Mister Morris slowly drew his row-boat towards him, like a rancher drawing in some wild-eyed horse. He gently eased himself off the stairs on to the boat’s broad cross-bench and, once he was settled, carefully pushed himself away from the stairs. And for the rest of the night Mister Morris rowed blissfully back and forth between the walls of his flooded cellar, through all the flotsam and jetsam of his life.

  It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. At least he got to practice how to do his turns. Most of his neighbours spent the next few days standing around complaining and saying how they’d never get over it. Meanwhile, Mister Morris was down in his cellar, finding his sea legs, and might well have slept in his precious boat if he hadn’t thought it would be a bit uncomfortable.

  By the Thursday afternoon it had more or less stopped raining and, not long after, the water level began to fall. Mister Morris rose early on the Saturday morning, hoping to squeeze in another couple of hours’ rowing, but opened the cellar door to find the boat (and all his bits and pieces) beached in several inches of mud.

  It was a horrible mess, but Mister Morris rose to the challenge, and as he scooped up the mud and wiped down the walls he was already looking forward to the possibility of other, even more disastrous floods. From that day forward every drop of rain would lift his spirits. Every black cloud would give him hope. He kept a close eye on the river but it never really looked in any serious danger of coming over the top.

  He decided to think ahead. It seemed highly likely that the river would flood around the same time the following year. If he could create a little more space in his cellar he would have more room to row about. So he embarked on a year-long programme of earth removal. He bought a pick and a brand-new barrow and started hacking away at the cellar wall. His first tunnel was five foot high and six foot wide and headed out under the street, where it soon came up against all sorts of drains and pipes and other obstacles. So Mister Morris started a second tunnel, which headed under his back garden, and on this his progress was both swift and sure.

  He supported the tunnel roof with odd bits of timber he’d picked out of skips. On a typical day he might spend four or five hours tunnelling, then sleep for an hour or two. He would cook himself some dinner, then wait until nightfall. And in the early hours of the morning he would carry the buckets of earth up the stairs to his waiting barrow and wheel it off down the moonlit streets.

  On the first few nights he dumped the earth in his neighbours’ gardens but it was clear that there was a limit to how long he could get away with that. So he wheeled his barrow down to the river and tipped the soil into the water, where it sank without a trace. This was a much more practical way of going about things. Mister Morris thought that in time it might even help to raise the water level by an inch or two. Nobody seemed to mind an old man wandering around the place with a wheelbarrow after bedtime. A town’s streets are surprisingly quiet between the hours of three and four a.m. Only once did Mister Morris have any trouble, when a police car pulled up alongside him as he emptied another barrow-load of earth into the river.

  The policeman wound down his window and shone a torch into Mister Morris’s face. He asked Mister Morris if he’d mind explaining what he was up to.

  Mister Morris looked down into his empty barrow then back up at the policeman. ‘I’m retired,’ he said.

  The policeman took a moment to chew this over. His own father had retired a couple of years earlier and was for ever getting up at half past five to do the hoovering. The policeman told Mister Morris to make sure he didn’t wake anybody up whil
st he was about his business. Then he wound his window back up and drove off into the night.

  Progress continued at a steady rate. Five months after he first started Mister Morris estimated that the tunnel was approximately a quarter of a mile in length. If he could keep on at the same sort of pace he reckoned he’d be out of town and under Birch Hill by the time the rain came round again.

  About a month before the floods were expected Mister Morris tied his boat to the bottom banister to stop it being swept away. He grew more and more excited but one Tuesday night, after a hard day’s digging, he was walking alongside the river when he noticed some activity up ahead. He got a bit closer and saw a dozen soldiers standing in a line between a lorry and the river, passing sandbags from man to man.

  Mister Morris suddenly felt quite sick. He approached one of the soldiers on the riverbank and asked what they were doing.

  ‘Don’t you worry, sir,’ the soldier told him. ‘That river’ll not be breaking its banks this year.’

  The soldier took a bag of sand from his mate, dropped it on top of all the others and stamped it into place with his boot. Mister Morris looked at all the sandbags piled up along the edge of the river and the lorry-load of sandbags waiting to be piled on top of them and felt that chilly feeling sweep over his shoulders again.

  He’d spent the best part of a year working on this project. Every day straight after breakfast he’d sat in his boat, imagining paddling down his own home-made tunnel. He’d even bought some greaseproof paper to wrap around his sandwiches and a flask for his tea. But now all the life seemed to suddenly drain right out of him. And all the effort he’d put into the tunnel seemed to catch him up. For the first time in his life he felt like an old man. A useless, worn-out piece of work.

  Mister Morris stopped his digging. He took to his bed and listened to his radio. And all the time his mind was piled high with those blasted sandbags which were keeping the river at bay.