Besides, I thought. It’s an ill wind…and every cloud has a… Once she had recovered from that initial trauma, that first horrendous impact, mightn’t the self-destruction of a golden boy make the rest of her own life seem marginally more bearable?
The passing of the third-floor back.
Eponymous hero.
Which reminded me: I’d never got around to finishing that paperback. Damn. I’d have liked to, even though I naturally realized how it was going to end: justice would be done, reparation made, personal growth assured. On earth as it is in heaven. Amen.
Exterminating Jack Bradley. The title was a good one but misleading. I knew only too well that even without his hugely missed family a happy ending lay in store for that particular eponymous hero. Lucky guy.
But, no, I’d got it wrong, hadn’t I? The book wasn’t called Exterminating Jack Bradley. It was called Exterminating Jack Mangam. Mr Bradley had been the old man I’d met on that other train journey, the old man I’d meant someday to take Junie and the kids to visit, the one who was chiefly waiting, so he’d said, to see his wife again. Jack, I only hope you make it, I told him now…and as soon as possible, if that’s really what you want. (And who amongst our fellow passengers would ever have thought that, of the two of us, I should be the first to go? Indeed, just three-and-a-bit days later!) Though not, Jack, as the result of being exterminated. As the result of something a whole lot gentler and more merciful. Please.
Please, God.
Then, believe it or not, I smiled. Poised on a ledge in rainy darkness, some forty or fifty feet above my own apparently less than gentle fate, I honestly did smile. Ascribe it to hysteria or insanity. Or to whatever you will.
“Exterminate! Exterminate!”
And for an instant I was back with my children and we were all watching reruns of Dr Who. Junie was there as well—in the TV room, I mean—but I was the one who was afterwards being chased throughout the house and having to clutch his chest or belly as theatrically as any well-intentioned corpse could manage…though finally being called on “to remain dead next time, darling, if you would. Supper’s ready. Hands have to be washed!” All this, to promote the triumphant malevolence of a pair of ecstatically rule-breaking Daleks—amidst the lickings and excitement of a white-haired, tail-wagging, black-eyed pup.
“Exterminate the brute! Exterminate the brute!”
It seemed like yesterday.
Yesterday… I was a big man yesterday but Lord you ought to see me now.
Now I was a little boy lost.
A lost boy.
A lost boy without the prospect of an awfully big adventure? Well, we’d have to reserve judgment on that one, clearly. It wouldn’t be long before we had the answer. Or before I did, at any rate.
But I wished I could have measured up to that man who’d been looking through the window. Was there any chance, when the judging began, he might agree to represent me?
Or would he have been subpoenaed by the prosecution? Their star witness? Samuel Groves, if only you had looked ahead! This is the man you had it in you to become!
There’d been a trial scene in that show two nights ago.
A Broadway musical, yes, but since the writers—or producers or angels or whatever—had chosen to name it as they had, you would have thought, wouldn’t you, that there’d be at least some glancing reference?
And you would also have thought—wouldn’t you?—that at nearly midnight my neighbour wouldn’t have chosen to turn up the volume of his gleeful choristers? After all, tomorrow was another day (right, Scarlett?) and people had to rise and shine.
Now there was a coincidence.
For what had he decided in his wisdom ought to be my swan song?
“…Gentlemen songsters off on a spree,
Doomed from here to eternity!
Lord have mercy on such as we…
Baa, baa, baa!”
But surely there was too much relish in it—reaffirmation—vigour. Even freshness. It sounded more like a dawn chorus. Its style might have been better suited to a song from the sixties whose words I couldn’t remember but whose title declared it rigorously opposed to any thought of doom, even doom in conjunction with a spree.
New World in the Morning.
That in turn reminded me of a novel I had read in childhood, one set on the eve of the American Civil War, by Robert Hardy Andrews. (Old Memorybags!) Great Day in the Morning.
Scarlett would have approved. New World in the Morning! Great Day in the Morning! Tomorrow was—oh, irrefutably—another day. Scarlett had been determined to make good and, whatever her failings, most people over the past sixty years or so had eventually come to admire her.
Were things any worse for me than they had been for her?
I was only thirty-six. Not all roads lead to Tara but all roads lead out of Kilburn. And I had conceivably half a century in which to explore a variety of them. I mean—if I decided not to jump.
And conceivably half a century in which to meet many of my fellow travellers. Potentially, there were thousands out there who could learn to love me, both for what I was and for what I might become; thousands whom I could learn to love back, equally.
Wasn’t it even possible that, one of these days, Matt and Ella would forgive me…allow me to grow close again?
Also, I could get another dog. A stray who, like myself, would be looking only for a fresh start and who’d want to make the very best out of whatever came her way. Or his.
Yes, a fresh start, a new world, a great day…in the morning.
And besides, of course, there was something else I really ought to think about.
Would there be any sea in heaven?
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2011 by Stephen Benatar
Cover design by Gabriela Sahagun
ISBN: 978-1-4976-8230-6
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