Ill again. Why do I always get ill? When I was young, I used to swim almost every day, so I used to think my constantly snotty nose was caused by the chlorine in the pool water. Whenever I reached into my pockets or my bag, there’d be wet tissues or wet swimming trunks, and because I absolutely would not give up the one, I accepted the other. I was one of the youngest boys to ever swim in the national finals and probably could’ve swam at an international level if I hadn’t given it up. Still, some things are worth more than fame and fortune, and if I did it all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing.
I finish my fag, make coffee, take a quick shower and put my cycle gear on; best thing with a cold is to fight it – if you sit back for a moment, it’ll hold you there for a week. I give Barb a kiss on the head, being careful not to wake her, and go down to the garage to get my bike. We can only really afford to run one car, but it’s no problem, because I love to cycle. Not only does it keep me fit, it also means I get a breath of fresh air every morning (as long as I’m early enough to avoid the rush hour traffic) and it draws a natural line between work and home. Sometimes, when I’ve had a hard day, I can get on the bike in a right old temper, but, by the time I get home, everything has been cycled and I’m Mr Serene again.
I must admit, the cleaning job does have its challenges and there’s times I long to be back in a job that pushes my brain a bit harder, but times are hard and – like I keep telling Barb – there’s a lot of poor folks out there who aren’t lucky enough to even have a job right now, so I’ve no real cause for complaint. But still, people don’t treat you with a great deal of respect when you work as a cleaner. Some of the students in particular at UCL have not yet learned how to climb into another man’s skin and walk around in it, as Atticus says in To Kill a Mockingbird. Most of them will go out of their way to avoid you at all costs; some of them throw rubbish at you, and then there’s an even smaller group who make the effort to talk to you, but then these ones are generally so deeply patronising that you end up wishing that they’d thrown a Coke can at you and been on their way.
There’s one particular student who has taken the time to learn my routine around the Science Faculty and he waits for me diligently every Tuesday and Thursday morning between 9am and 10am, which is when I do the lavatory cleaning. No matter which circuit I’m on, and there are five of them which Pauline and I rotate around, he will be waiting, reading the Financial Times in a cubicle, and no sooner does he hear me walk in and begin to scrub the toilet bowls, than he starts spouting out some nonsense like:
“Here is the goal, whence motion on his race
Starts: motionless the centre and the rest
All moved around.”
He then steps out of the cubicle and calls out, “Good morning John,” then he washes his hands and leaves. I never say a thing and I have no idea how he got my name. Now here’s the weird bit: whenever he uses a cubicle, he will leave a small sticker on the cubicle door or the toilet lid, or wherever (it’s often hid and I have to go look for it before I can scratch it off), and written on the sticker it says ‘Primum mobile’ and also, in the toilet bowl, there will be an immaculate, enormous turd which will require flushing. I looked up the meaning of ‘primum mobile’ one evening and it is a medieval astronomical term meaning ‘first moved’, so I guess he’s just trying to say something clever about his first movement of the day. I asked Pauline about it, but she said she’d never seen him. Mind you, she generally has to make sure the men’s toilets are clear before she cleans them, just as I have to with the women’s, so she wouldn’t have. She told me I should complain about it, or say something to him – you know, tell him to flush after he’s used the toilet – but I honestly don’t mind. I’ve seen a lot worse and I almost look forward to hearing what he’s going to say each week and finding out where he will have hidden the sticker. I think I might even miss his enormous stools if I were to show up one Tuesday or Thursday and find an empty bowl after he vacated the room. I can’t begin to imagine what Barbara would think if I told her about this strange little episode, which has being going on for almost a year now (including during holiday time – he is very diligent). She’d really think I’d lost my marbles, never mind me getting drunk on water!
I like to take different routes through London: I’ve lived here all my life, but I still find new places and things to see, even if it’s just that something has changed since I last went through. The city is constantly evolving and it fascinates me to watch the people and everything that they bring ebb and flow around me: the fashions, the styles, the cultures, the businesses, the restaurants, the music, the archaeology; everything in a constant state of flux. I fancy parks today, so I opt for Queenstown Road, which will take me down to Battersea Park and then over Chelsea Bridge, up through Belgravia and between Hyde Park and St James’ Park. Then I’ll freestyle it up through the back streets of Chinatown and finally cut across to Gower Street, which will take me to the front door of UCL.
Even after a proper breakfast (i.e. coffee and a fag), I’m still well early after Barb’s sleepwalking, but I’ve only been going about five minutes before things start to go awry: roadworks on the Chelsea Bridge. So I swing the old Condor onto Battersea Park Road and head up towards Vauxhall Bridge. As I’m early, I cut through to the Thames Path so I can follow the bank of the river. After a bit of weaving and a little hop up onto a pavement, which will do my aluminium rims not a bit of good, I turn onto the waterfront and face towards the sunrise, which is just coming over the horizon. The first rays of morning light are catching the clouds overhead and, for a few short moments, the reflected daylight seems to become polarised by the clouds, as if they took all the light that was there and somehow inverted it.
Symbiotic; that’s the word. I knew I’d get it! The light changes back to normal grey, which has pretty much been the standard for this year. The end of my enlightenment.
Up ahead in the distance I can see a figure crouching down next to a person in a wheelchair. It looks like the crouching figure is giving the person in the wheelchair something. Suddenly it starts to rain heavily and I lean forward and then back, to put on my lights, and when I look up again at the two figures the one man has lifted the other out of the wheelchair and laid him on the wall that overlooks the river.
Then he pushes him in.
I almost fall off my bike. I have to stop because I don’t think I know how to cycle all of a sudden. The figure looking at the river turns and walks away. I force myself to put down my bicycle, which has become inoperable, and make myself walk forwards. This helps and suddenly I can jog and then I am sprinting towards the spot where the wheelchair now stands alone. I glance at the river as I race along and see it is swollen and brown-beige in colour from all the sediment that has been dragged from England’s fields by the floods. I hit my spot about five yards from the wheelchair and dive right over the wall.
I fall.
Then I’m under, sinking deep into the murk, my arms flailing wildly from side to side as they pull me down looking for a trace. The current is strong and I think I might be getting dragged too far. I try to turn, but this is hopeless. My lungs are burning, but I ignore them. I pull hard into the current and suddenly my arms are in silt and I’m disorientated and kicking and swinging wildly. Too long now, much too long. Suddenly I feel stone under my left hand. The wall. Far too long. A hand. I try to hold it. I try to hold it. Long. Gone.
Something about sound underwater. Like cushion. Like coming home. Safety in the arms of your mother. Safety in the womb of your mother. Regression. Like the distant sound of the television, when you lie feverish on the couch with another day off school. The sound of screeching children in the swimming baths, like Spanish whales, as you hold the steps, keeping yourself under, just a little longer, counting ninety, ninety-one, ninety-two, but two minutes is so far – how does Danny do it?! Keep counting as the Spanish whales ring around you. You stand in front of your father in your swimming trunks blubbing. He smiles, he says it’s j
ust a race. He takes out his handkerchief and wipes your nose and takes your hand.
The hand moves. I squeeze, I kick. My head screams, up, up, up…
Stetson
I have a recurring dream. It plays out over many scenarios, but the story remains the same.
In one version I am the first person to arrive in North America. How I have got there is unimportant, but what is important is that I am the only human. I move west, diligently surviving: hunting birds and rabbits, finding berries and mushrooms, drinking from clear mountain streams, sheltering in caves and bivouacs that I make from bracken and branches. Always alone and always moving further from humanity. Each new vista, sunset and starscape is heart-stoppingly beautiful, virgin and untouched and, as I make my way, a melancholic little tune loops beneath my hat.
“Moon River, wider than a mile,
I’m crossing you in style someday,
You dream maker, you heartbreaker,
Wherever you’re going I’m going your way.”
Month by month, the tune becomes sadder and sadder as the terrible truth of my situation deepens within me: I am utterly alone and will never see my own kind again. But still I press on. Still, I hope.
Then, in that godlike way of dreams, my perspective pans out and I become aware of time spinning forwards. The slow creep of days that I had been living accelerates into weeks, months, years, decades, centuries. I watch my body reclaimed by the earth, next to the riverbank where I died, the ribs turning mossy before disappearing under a flood. I see new arrivals, pioneer groups and individuals radiating out across the land, building structures and settlements of increasing size and complexity, initially fitting into the fragile mosaic of existing ecological niches before drilling them out and replacing them with carpeted, macadamised cityscapes of steel and glass. Suddenly the land is full and there is not a starlit desert road without a warm human body driving through its darkness.
It is at this precise moment in my dream, when I am linked to and aware of every human on a teeming continent, that I realise that I am truly alone, for even at this moment of complete immersion, I am still separate. And as the sad little tune plays on, I understand, more than ever, complete despair, for when I was alone I had hope, but now I am together I have none.
*
It is early and I am sitting in the darkness of my room, tracing the petals around the edge of my tattoo. My finger then follows the letters of the name emblazoned on the scroll that lies across the rose, as it often will. Light worms around the edges of the thick black curtains and finds its way to my ink-stained skin, seeking out the years that are hidden there. It’s a hell of a thing to lose your child; to lose that which can bring you closest to togetherness. It’s hard to carry on loving a world that can take away your most prized treasure and abuse it, beat it, murder it, leaving the empty shell discarded in the wasteland.
Not many people walk in Abbey Wood or Bostall Wood anymore. Years of accumulated tales about flashers, hoodies with crack pipes and rampant Dobermans are enough for people to turn their shuddery backs to their floral curtains and the woods beyond, hunching a little closer to the cold blue light of their TVs. It was not always this way. On any given Sunday afternoon in 1968, nothing but the meanest of weather would keep the good people of Abbey Wood from taking a post-roast constitutional stroll in the woods. But there was nothing mean about the weather on that particular Sunday afternoon. The warm April sunshine lit up the lazy trajectory of gadflies, as it dappled through the canopy. Annie ran ahead of us, her hair flashing gold as she jumped over logs and ducked under low branches at the edge of our sight, an ephemeral little bouncing sprite made of fragile bones and flushed capillaries. Annie at her happiest, armed with her wooden ball, the wooden whistle I made for her and a tin of peppermints. She was muddy-legged, rosy-cheeked and curious. She was ready to take on the world. Bouncing along at the back of her head, she wore the little cowgirl hat that Uncle Derek, who was over from Texas a month back, brought for her along with a Moon River LP, which she would play over and over. He was in London on business and brought Stetson hats for all of us. Lilly refused to wear hers out, saying they looked silly, but Annie and I wore ours proudly along and said “Howdy” to passers-by, lifting our hats respectfully.
Annie ran to us, her shoulders hunched forwards and hands cupped carefully in front of her. She didn’t speak, but her excitement was palpable in her movements. She was practically vibrating with delight at her discovery. Reaching me, she looked up once and then, as I squatted down, she slowly opened her little hands. There within was a tiny frog. A frog so small it was hard to imagine a fat tadpole growing into it. I imagine that the transition from amorphous blob to detail and definition must have cost it mass, in order for the frog to end up so small.
I was waiting for her to not speak. She was almost eloquent for a five-year-old girl, but she rarely felt the need to use words. Some kind of meiotic rewiring engorged her capacity for physical expression and she was acutely aware of the impact of her behaviour on others. Words were only resorted to when she dealt with insensitive individuals or metaphysical matters.
“I think he’d like to be free,” I finally whispered and she looked at me and smiled. She closed her hands carefully, stood and ran back into the trees, where I saw her squat again and release the frog, saying something quietly amphibian as it hopped from her hand.
That was when life was full. Only a few hours later, everything was empty.
My eyes look across the vast array of boxing journals and almanacs that line the book shelves on my wall as I remember the fruitless hours, crying myself hoarse, shouting her name over and over as my blurring vision searched for a trace of that golden flash in the woods once more, that little white cowgirl hat bouncing on the back of her head.
I pick up my Stetson. The inner rim is dark and smooth, with the appearance of leather, as if the hat has taken on characteristics of the living material it has contained for all these years. The rim and the pinched peak of the hat have lost their definition. The tiny buckle that can be altered to change the hat’s calibre is rusted and would certainly break if meddled with. This hat has held me captive for forty-four years: a symbol of my failure as a father.
Outside on the landing, I hear movement. An early riser moving as quietly as they can up and down the stairs.
A sound like distant thunder finds my room and rumbles through my curtains.
Change is coming, the sound says. Change is here.
I walk to the curtains and, pulling them aside, I allow the daylight which I have denied my room for so many years to come flooding in. My eyes instinctively flinch before slowly widening and taking in the sight of the morning light flickering through the trees at the end of our garden, which lies shaded and waiting below. Over the fence in the communal yard, a man is unloading flowers from a van: box after box of open-topped cartons, flashing rainbows in the sunshine. In the distance, somewhere over towards Blackheath, a huge plume of black smoke is mushrooming up into the clear azure sky.
Below me, I hear the garden door open and see Tem stepping out. He is weighed down with bags and motorbike gear. He stands still for a long time as if lost in thought and, just when I wonder if there might be something wrong with him, his phone rings and the sound seemingly wakes him from his stupor. He takes out his phone, presses a button on it and then turns and re-enters the house, locking the door behind him.
Last night, when I dreamt the dream of separation, the dream didn’t end as it usually does.
This time in the dream, I was a spaceman drifting into a new and unexplored sector of the universe. Once again I watched myself carefully maintaining my little bubble of life, as I drifted inexorably further from humanity, the void of space widening between myself and my own kind. As I tended the orchards and gardens that sustained me, under a star-studded glass roof, my work was accompanied by that same sad tune playing through the ship’s speakers and haunting its corridors.
“Two drifters off to see
the world
There’s such a lot of world to see
We’re after the same rainbow’s end
Waiting ‘round the bend
My huckleberry friend, Moon River and me.”
Once again, I experienced with absolute certainty the awareness that I will never see another human again and, once more, I watched myself press on with hope in my heart despite myself.
Time accelerated and I saw myself grow old, finally lying down under an apple tree in my garden and breathing my last. Without my guidance, my ship was pulled into the atmosphere of a planet, where the overgrown jungle that held my remains burned up in a spectacular flash of a new world’s sky. And then I saw more spacecraft, cruising through the void in my long cold wake, penetrating into this empty sector of space, first in pioneering little ships like my own, but soon these were followed by huge glittering city ships and geo-formers and my head became filled with the billions of voices and thoughts as my kind bred and flooded into every habitable planet. It is at that very moment, when I was connected to every soul in a galaxy and suddenly felt isolation and despair pressing in on me from all sides, pounding through my nerve endings and pressing me into a foetal ball, that everything suddenly stopped.
All the pain and sadness, the screaming sensory overload, was switched off like a light bulb and replaced with a warm darkness.
I felt safe and protected.
Light crept in gently through widening gaps in the walls around me and outside I could see two enormous faces smiling down: it was Annie and it was my younger self, with our cowboy hats on, looking down at me and smiling. A great surge of joy swept through me as I looked up at my beautiful little daughter and my younger self, so happy and contented to have found me.
The Laundry Basket Page 25
