It was the unsteady navigation of that top step, the three foot square top step that you have to cross to go to the toilet in the blackness of the early hours where the only light is the shrouding orange emanating from the street lights and penetrating the edges of ill-fitting curtains in the spare room. As some of you reading this will be able to relate to, the early hours visit to the toilet something most have only the latter years to thank.
That step, the life changing step, 3.14am the bleary eyed trot down the landing, bouncing from wall to wall and unhooking the baby gate, we still have up for the grandchildren. Then it happened, and I don’t know if any of you have ever experienced this before, that pivotal moment when everything seems to stand still and you are able to stop and purvey everything, not sure if it is a psychological anomaly, you think this has actually happened but in reality you have had a moment of pure open mindedness when you take in immaculate details to be recalled remember it in extreme detail later.
But this is what happened to me, the gate
swung open and when it clanged against the wall, everything stopped, this just coincided
with the very instant I fell. As I came
out of my momentary trance I lost my footing on the top step went over
painfully on my ankle, the pain was instant and bad, but didn’t last very long
as I fell and landed on my shoulder on half way down the stairs and the pain as
my shoulder joint separated was definitely worse, and my entire body flipped or
bounced, you choose, and landed on my back with my head on the bottom
step. Surely when I was found by the
paramedics it probably looked like I had decided to fall asleep there.
My sight was blurred and cloudy and
everything looked black and white, I am not sure why I was able to see anything
at all, it was the middle of the night and I distinctly remember turning the
lights off and locking all the doors. A
routine I have been serious about for many years, I am getting on now and the
scare stories you hear about on the TV about the elderly being preyed on by
opportunists and downright scoundrels.
I know of a few people who are a little more remote than I am who have
had intruders, one of who had been injured in an attack but the rest stayed in
their rooms and let it happen. I have
been vigilant since then and make sure my safety is paramount. I have my son and grandchildren to think
about and being seventy eight years old means I am unable to do a great deal of
things I had previously been able to.
A black blurred shape came slowly into my
field of vision and I thanked whoever was looking after this disassembling
world for that company. The shape in
what vision I had was like seeing a silhouette through dirty net curtains and
all I could think of was the hooded children that went around terrorizing
everyone, this was my fear of the opportunists taking advantage of my
situation.
A warm and wet unwelcome feeling spread
across my pelvis and pooling around my lower back as my bladder gave up the
fight and I urinated. The same feeling
was across my shoulders and head that because it was elevated knew couldn’t be
related. It must be blood from my head
and shoulder causing this.
The shadow came in closer to me and took up
most of what I was able to define, I said, “Are you the paramedics?” and the
soft voice replied in a very relaxing manner, “I am not your paramedic but I
will help you whilst they are coming.”
That voice had already started to relax me,
in the few seconds since I first saw the person I had a comforting feeling and
the pain was subsiding. He kept me
relaxed by asking me questions that kept my mind lucid and my thoughts away
from what I had just done. To keep me in
this comfortable state he asked me to tell him about my earliest memory.
I had this seemingly long conversation
about that day, it was my fifth birthday, a mere seventy three years ago, and I
remember this as though I was reliving it every day. Me and my best friend, I can’t remember his
name, not everything in this memory is clear, went outside on a bright clear
day in the beginning of October with balloons, the remnants of the early year’s
party that had just finished. We walk to
the field next to our housing row and kicked loose stones out of the farmers
dry stone wall, as we peered over the top we could see the beautiful landscape
of the Snowdonia mountain range in the distance, the wind was blowing straight
towards it and we had a balloon race to see whose could reach the summit of
Mount Snowdon first.
As clear as a summer’s day the balloons
were taken, but although the mountains were about thirty miles away as the crow
flies we watched then fly, taken on the wind and far away, we were convinced
that we could see the balloons even after they had actually disappeared from sight. All the way to the summit we had a neck and
neck race and I distinctly remember seeing the balloons hit the summit. My balloon had just won the race by a nose. We were giddy school children at that
point. I was jumping around at my
victory and he was kicking his feet in the uncut grass at the foot of the wall
with his head slumped.
I even told my companion about the night we
had spent as a family just a few days after my birthday when we found out my
father, an armorer in the RAF, had been posted to Hong Kong, BFPO1, and we had
out an old battered atlas to find out where it was and was convinced I knew
where it was, but doe to my lack of formal education at five years of age, I
couldn’t even spell it let alone know how to use an atlas. I think my guess was a few thousand miles
away from where we were going to be spending two years of our lives.
My companion said after it was obvious that
my side of our conversation had stopped, “So you lived in Hong Kong, I have
been there myself on a number of occasions.” This baffled me even more, as to
the identity of the strange silhouette I was exchanging these polite details
with. “Whereabouts were you?”
Again, bearing my soul in order to take my
mind away from the pain and uncomfortable situation I wished so badly to be out
of I said, “We were in the New Territories, a few miles up the road from RAF
Sek Kong. The mountain all round covered
in forests and beautiful greenery. My
reminiscence of that time spilled out of me, watching the authorities chasing
down and capturing rabid dogs, being stuck in school whilst the golf ball size
hail stones fell dangerously from the sky, the Christmases when Father
Christmas talked to us on the military telephone, one of those big green one
you see so often in the American war films.
He was also delivered to us not only on the back of a green fire engine
on the run up but also in a big green military helicopter onto our school
sports field during our end of year party.
That was what defined the magic that completed the Christmas in the UK
forces in a tropical client.
“What else?” he said, wanting me to keep my
mind occupied and away from this pain, life affirming pain that your wishes
could not give to your most dire enemies.
“One of the things that has a burning memory for me is the time, I must
have been about five or six years old, I woke up and told my mum about a dream
I had. It was a vivid and perfect dream,
one of those dreams when you wake up and its reality actually seems real in
every detail, mannerism and fact. Your
eyes open and for a minute you do not believe you are lying in the same bed you
went to sleep in, but have actually woken up in the bed of your dream. It was a man, a grey haired old man stood in
front of an old sand stone building. It
wasn’t until after I had told her about this dream, after hearing the tale I told
my mother she told me that seven years before my birth my great uncle Mac had
died, an elderly Scottish Gentleman who lived in a sand stone town house next
to a river. He was silver haired and
wore very distinctive black glasses that I managed to describe to her making
the dream all the more real.
A sudden burst of pain shot through my
shoulder and I could feel the creep of fresh warmth, around the base of my
throat, the warmth of my blood pooling in that little indented area and then
overflowing and running onto my chest and down under my arms, “Stay with me?”
my companion said, “Tell me, you are still in your childhood, what more” I screwed
up my face as another bout of pain shot through the vertebra in my neck and
into my head, “focus on me not the pain,”
“Have we met before?” I said, and in reply
the man said, “I have one of those faces that everyone thinks they have met
before.” I don’t know it I actually smiled at that statement or if it was in my
head, “You have lived a long life and you only seem to be talking about the
beginning of it, carry on and focus on those things and on me, you will not
notice the pain.”
“We were living in the New Territories in
Hong Kong when I had that dream, it was a great place for a child to grow up,
this was back when Hong Kong was a part, albeit a rented part, of the United
Kingdom. I took my very first
photograph, I still remember it, they were building a new play park, on our
complex and I could see it from the balcony of the apartments three or four
floors up from mine. The was a slide, it
was large and must have had twenty steps to get to the top and a long stainless
steel, brand new run down to the bottom.
I photographed it, a landscape that was completely dominated by this
slide and the brown soil that surrounded it.
The supports and steps were painted a fresh orange colour and the hand
holds all the way up, were painted sky blue.
Although after my dad got them developed he ripped it into small pieces
I can still see that picture clearly in my head. I can still feel the disappointment of see it
ripped without care into small pieces.
That park dominated the time spent in the Orient, it was the site me and
my brothers watched the authorities chasing down and capturing rabid dogs, we
saw the trucks taking away bananas from the plantation not far off, and more
truck bringing in loads of toys for storage for the refugees someway off.”
I drifted for a little while not into the
darkness around me but into memories for my childhood. The memories bounced around into different
ages, starting school after school depending on where we had been posted to,
the horror stories other child would tell me about certain teachers in the
school in Scotland, the horror stories about abandoned builds and shelters that
were used during one war or another although I never heard of most of the
places actually being involved in any wars.
When my memory cleared the comfort of the man’s
voice was telling me to, “Stay with me” and I came out of it and he said, “So
you were stuck up a cherry tree with a bad feeling in your belly.” I had seemed
to jump forward in time a few years, but did I speak it out loud, I don’t remember
saying anything but had this conversation vanished from my head because of the
amount of pain I was in.
“So you have danced on the same stage as
Madonna then, that is impressive!” he said, my memories jumped another 15
years, I used to tell people this to get a rise out of them, to make me seem
more interesting than I was, few questioned me about it, but in essence it was
true, Madonna appeared in the Hacienda in Manchester in the nineteen eighties
and whilst in college in Manchester I danced on the very stage she had, the
just happened to be 10+ years between the two moments. I often found by telling people things and
omitting pertinent pieces of information made the story into a conversation that
could make more of what it was, rather than the gloomy boredom that ultimately
came out of stark silence.
Our conversation continued in the same
vein, when I say conversation I don’t know if I actually said anything, I have
no recollection of saying anything at all.
It felt like everything we talked about was in a different order to the
way it happened, and for some reason, I started talking about a time when I was
eight years old, a friend and me went sledging next to our school most of the
others there had the latest toboggan or shiny plastic sledge, but we had an old
hand made, heavy monstrosity that made me a little embarrassed but the end goal
was to sit down and slide very fast down a steep hill. A small laugh came from my comforter and he
said, “Tell me more.” So I did, but there was an air of confusion in my head,
why would he be so fascinated by a children’s story all about sledging, but I
continued and told him how it was cut short by me being cut off at the ankles
by an unstoppable sledge that hit me hard and sent me in a complete somersault
landing hard and barrel rolling down the hill to the very bottom. The thought of the pain I remembered made my
current pain rear its ugly head again.
“Calm yourself, keep focused on me, you
have told me a great deal but you are not telling what I believe is your
happiest memories. Think of those and
tell me.”
I thought, it didn’t take me too long to
put things straight in my head, “September 19th 2008, this was the
day my wife came out of the toilet in the first house we brought. She was holding the dry end of a pregnancy test;
we had been trying for six years after being married for nine. We looked at the little window and within
seconds, the little pink lines appeared and I distinctly remember saying to
her, as the tears started to flow from her eyes, that the instructions said to
wait three minutes. We waited three
minutes, then after five we were still watching it and after thirty minutes of
rechecking we both decided that it wasn’t going to change and that we were
actually going to have a baby. And as
all good news is not good news until someone else confirms it she did another
test. Same process, the lines appeared
almost immediately and then we waited and waited and phoned the doctors, and
talked to our GP. This is also the
wonderful man who had referred us to a specialist for the fertility treatment
and subsequently talked us through other options, all he had to say to us on
this occasion was, “Congratulations.” Through our happiness we neglected to see
what a major change this was going to be to our lives, we endured a full nine months
of morning sickness, post natal depression, a vigorous post natal infection and
a massive amount of sleep loss.
His first tooth at three months, his first
unassisted steps just before his first birthday, first day at school which was
hard for my wife to leave him for such a large amount of time. Birthday parties, his need to continually eat
hotdog sausages, watch Sonic and Super Mario on YouTube, illnesses. Heart breaking illnesses allergic reactions,
swimming, his addiction to the beach and going in the sea, although he said it
was a river. His first day in high
school, watching emotionally as he walked to the bus stop with a back pack that
looked too big for him and a blazer that made him look little and vulnerable.
The pain rose again in my head, the blood
pounding harder making me feel both hot and cold at the same time, the
increasing size of the blood pool under my neck and back was more and more obvious
to me. The click of fingers was rapping
at my consciousness, as I remembered the last eight days just before my mother
died which was when I was twenty six and only 3 months after my wedding, I had
always told my mum I would dance with her on my wedding day. A sort of final gesture as she became only my mother and
not the main woman in my life, but she couldn’t she had a sore hip, I thought
it was her sciatica playing up, but I wasn’t to know that two months later she
would be taken into hospital only to leave to go to a hospice to spend her last
eight days of life lying medicated until finally her race had been run.
“Ah her they come” my companion said, as I
heard elephant like footsteps descending the stairs behind me. “Dad, oh no dad.” A sudden urgency took ahold
of his voice as he shouted for his wife to call an ambulance, “What took you so
long?” I asked him, “You woke me when you were walking down the corridor I
heard you fall and came running.”
I weakly said, “What is the time?” and he
told me it was 3.14 am, but that was the time I got up to go to the toilet, “But
I have been here hours, this man has been keeping me calm.”
“What man” he said and I replied, “I am
starting to see a little clearer now”
My companion said over the words my son was
saying, “And the time is now here for you to repay the debt you have held for
the past forty years”
I said weakly, “Yes we have met, I knew I recognized
you.”
He said, “Yes we have, we shouldn’t have
though, you have seen something a rare few in all time have”
I said, “As a child, my son” I turned my
head to as best as I could to look at my son, “fell down the stairs, he was
mortally hurt and you were hunched over him.”
He said, “I don’t hunch, I am more graceful
than to hunch.”
“Yes, I asked you to spare him and you
obliged me.”
“Now I am here to get what you owe me.”
“Not
him, please.” I begged.
He Said, “No not him, you have had a good
and full life and others thought you were better in this world until your time.”
“Thank you”
At this he disappeared and from the gloom,
another figure walked beautifully towards me and held out her hand, my wife had
come back to me and the lifelong promise I made to her I can now keep.
“I promise I will be yours for life and
whatever is after this one, you are my soul mate and I will be yours for all eternity.”
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