Breaktime

  He had scrawled one word.

  Interlude

  I’ve had enough for a while. Am in need of light relief. Anyway, there is now a passage of time between Helen’s departure and my next encounter. I did nothing after she left but mope about the place, mentally and emotionally flagellating myself. I have no intention of going through all that again here. It is so embarrassing. So please take it that this space covers the intervening three hours. Use your own imagination to fill in the details. Why do I have to do all the work!

  Telephone Call

  Hello?

  Hi, Mum, it’s me.

  Hello, love.

  How is he?

  Not so hot, love. How are you?

  I’m fine. Is he worse?

  I don’t know. They don’t tell you anything.

  They must say something, Ma.

  O, they say don’t worry and he’s as well as can be expected. But what does that mean to anybody?

  Should I try and telephone him?

  I shouldn’t, dear.

  Why not?

  It would only upset him.

  Why? How could it upset him? I’d have thought he’d be pleased to hear me.

  He’d be pleased to see you.

  But he can’t, can he? He can talk to me though.

  That’s just it, dear. Your dad thinks you should have stayed at home with me, you know. It would upset him to talk to you on the phone. And that would only make him worse.

  He might get another attack.

  Another attack would kill him.

  Do you want me to come home now?

  I’ll manage, it’s all right.

  But do you want me to come home?

  You’re there now, love, you might as well do what you went to do.

  I’ll come if you want.

  Ring in the morning. He’s low but he’s not on the danger list. He’ll be all right.

  Goodnight, love.

  Goodnight, Ma.

  Downer

  Six-fifteen: Ditto is in the public bar of the Bishop Blaize. By six-thirty he has downed two pints of best bitter and is staring at his half-consumed third. Never in his life has he consumed so much alcohol so quickly. A sharp-pained headache is brewing across the left side of his skull. With fierce concentration he tries to deal with a confusion of conflicting emotions.

  He feels guilty at leaving his father and mother for a less than necessary purpose. He is annoyed at himself for feeling guilty, an annoyance compounded by anger at allowing guilt to oppress him. Helen’s rupturing departure adds anxiety to this recipe for depression; and frustration. If she maintains her disaffection, his journey is wasted and his desertion of home and parents a squandered ordeal.

  Of course, this self-scourging is accompanied by a chorus of conditional justifications. If his father had not been so provocative, he would never have suffered his heart attack in the first place. But, Ditto knew, whatever the cause of the trouble, a break would have happened between them sometime anyway. After all, he had to gain his independence somehow. Etc., etc.

  The concatenation is universally scripted from an early age; why torture us all by rehearsing it again here?

  What disturbs Ditto most of all as he glowers at his beer through inexperienced boozer’s wet eyes, is an undercurrent to his storming emotions, the meaning of which he cannot yet be certain about. In that calm centre where our sanity takes refuge at such times, he wonders if it is fear that his father will die while he, Ditto, is nefariously absent from the family hearth that gives him greatest distress? Or is it something less reprehensible?

  (In his present self-abnegatory mood, he will not acknowledge himself able to feel anything honest and noble. But between mental brackets he toys for a moment with the prospect that this gripping undercurrent, the real engine of his turbulent feelings, is a grieving love for the man who lies now drugged to unconsciousness in a starched hospital bed attached to bottled life by plastic tubes. But the thought is unbearable and he slams closing brackets across the words.)

  At which moment, six-fifty-three precisely, enter in high-stepping temper the awaited pals.

  ‘Kiddo has turned to drink,’ says Jacky.

  ‘So we can down him,’ says Robby. ‘I’m glad you smirk, drummer boy, and glad to find you raring at the ready for our evening’s adventure.’

  ‘We’ll just have a pint or two before we go,’ says Jack.

  ‘If we must,’ says Robby. ‘Though kiddo looks as if he’s had enough already.’

  ‘Get stuffed,’ says Ditto, sour from his thoughts and his beer.

  ‘I just have,’ says Robby, ‘and even I need time to revitalize my vitals, as it were.’

  He sits at Ditto’s side, patting his arm, which Ditto draws away.

  ‘Fear not,’ says Robby, ‘there is no danger.’

  They wait, silent, till Jack has placed three pints on the table and sat down facing them.

  ‘Our friend,’ says Robby to Jack, ‘is on a downer. I recognize the symptoms. And know the remedy.’

  ‘A good stiff drink is what he needs,’ says Jack.

  ‘No, no. Adrenalin. That’s what he needs. The smack we manufacture for ourselves without aid from doctors and other pill pushers.’

  ‘Stop nattering and sup your beer,’ says Jack.

  ‘One last word, executioner. I’ll lay you both a bet—nay, will lay you both if you like—our adventure tonight will revive kiddo’s flagging spirits a treat. You still game?’

  The question is unavoidable.

  ‘Maybe,’ says Ditto, not without difficulty. ‘Depends what you want to do.’

  ‘Don’t toy with your glass then,’ says Robby, ‘and look at me when I’m speaking to you.’

  Ditto cannot help an involuntary glance and an unwilling smile.

  ‘Ah, so it’s the old gags you like best! We have vays of making you vile,’ says Robby, his laughter infectious. ‘As for this evening, dear friends: we begin with a public meeting, after which—doubt it not—you will be only too happy to engage in the titillatious romp I have in mind, a mystery escapade, an assault upon the bastion of boredom, an attack on high-toned hypocrisy, an antic night of convention breaking.’

  ‘You’re a right windbag when you try,’ says Jack, drains his glass and stands. ‘Come on then, Sunshine, one more before the fray, then we’ll be off.’

  Party: Political

  Seven twenty-six. The market hall. Stale with aftertaste of festering vegetables. A cavernous hangar with concrete floor, windows high under iron-strutted roof-without-ceiling. An assortment of stackable chairs laid out in melancholy rows. A gaggle of forty-or-so people scattered about, leaving the first two rows and six ranks at the back yawningly empty. Down one wall, three trestle tables, scarred and bruised from their more usual market duties, bearing cups on saucers, plates of plain biscuits, bottles of milk, bowls of sugar, and a tea urn, all attended by a balloon-bosomed daleslady in blue print dress. At the front, another trestle table, this time its market-worn skeleton shrouded in a motheaten green velvet covering. Two chairs behind. Pinned, botchily, to the front of the covering a poster, wrinkled with crumple-creases: GET GOING WITH LABOUR.

  Enter the three escapaders.

  ‘I hope you are going to behave yourself tonight, young man,’ says a voice from behind. A cockerel of a fellow peers at Robby, a knotty, tweed-jacketed, open-neck shirted man with a toothbrush moustache. A man with a mission, a belligerent in the Great Battle.

  ‘Why, comrade,’ says Robby in mocking astonishment, ‘we can assure you categorically that at this time we have no intention of disruptin’ the deliberations, though I must take this opportunity to warn you that we reserve our constitutional right to engage in legitimate dissent if we feel it necessary and any attempt to prevent us exercisin’ our democratic rights will effect consequences for which we cannot be ’eld responsible.’

  ‘Look, laddie,’ says the man, ‘don’t get cheeky with me. I don’t give a damn who your father is, if you start mes
sing about, out you’ll go—along with your poncey pals.’

  He pushes our three friends aside and parades down the aisle to a seat in the first occupied row, where with nods and thumb-jabbings and animated mutterings, head turnings and hitchings of his body-bulging jacket, he indicates to his companions the presence of (and, no doubt, his recent exchange with) Robby, who, during this pantomime, seats himself in the empty back row, Jacky on his one side, Ditto on the other.

  As soon as I sat down I knew I was not normal. Since leaving the pub I had felt like an arthritic marionette. Stiff but unable to stand unaided. My headache, during the two-minute walk supported on either side by my companions from the pub to the market hall, had gone from volcanic eruption to flushing soda-syphon. In my inside, I wanted to be sick; on my outside, I was uncannily aware, my face wore a popeyed grin. I did not know where I was being taken, nor by now did I care.

  ‘Why are you fetching me to the dungeons?’ I said as we entered the hall, for so it seemed.

  An exchange took place between Robby and a cantankerous custodian. I listened and understood their conversation entirely.

  ‘We must behave ourselves and damn our fathers or he will mess us about,’ I said earnestly to Robby when we were seated and I had recovered from not having to stand up.

  ‘That’s about it, kiddo,’ he said and patted my knee.

  I considered the room carefully.

  ‘Why are we attending a prayer meeting?’ I asked.

  But received no reply.

  ‘Or is everybody sleeping?’

  ‘Dreaming,’ said Robby. ‘Wakers asleep. No more.’

  ‘Someone should tell them,’ I said.

  ‘I doubt if they’d listen.’

  ‘He’s never that tight on five pints,’ said Jack.

  ‘Who?’ I asked, leaning across Robby to hear Jack’s reply.

  ‘Never mind, Sunshine,’ he said. ‘We’ll look after you.’

  Robby pushed me back up straight in my chair.

  Two men appeared at the table in front of the serried rows. One sat. The other stood. The seated one disturbed me. I felt I knew him. The face: features of it instantly recognizable, other parts unknown. A disturbing visual cacophony.

  ‘Comrades,’ the standing man said in a gravel voice. Tall, balding, mush-faced, prunesqualler. ‘Our guest this evening needs no introduction. We all know of his many achievements and of his commitment to the working class struggle.’

  I watched and listened and sawheard in minddazzle.

  Went on the standingman, ‘government people solidarity people people party people policy party left people party-strugglesocialistwelcome’

  A waterfall of fryingpan exploding lightbulbs.

  The standingman sat, the sittingman stood.

  And spoke; an eloquent precision.

  The sittingstanding talking man sat.

  Fryingpan exploding lightbulbs waterfalled again.

  ‘That was a load of elephant’s,’ yelled Jack through the cascade.

  ‘All balloon,’ said grin-grimacing Ditto.

  Robby was Vesuvius before Pompeii got its historic comeuppance.

  The hall silence. The standingsittingman stood again.

  ‘stimulating honest peoplecomrade grateful socialist questions’

  The again standing standingsittingman sat again.

  Robby suddenly was standing at Ditto’s sittingside, leaning forward, hands white-knuckled grasping the green tubular steel frame of the infront canvas-covered chair.

  ‘I would like to ask our speaker when, if ever, he intends to demonstrate his solidarity with the working class by putting his considerable income where his not inconsiderable mouth is?’

  ‘Furthermore, does our speaker condemn absolutely the hypocrisy of those who live by preaching the doctrine of socialist change, let’s not use the dirty word revolution,’

  ‘while they themselves hold shares and directorships in important capitalist firms,’

  ‘not to mention their willingness to compromise on such matters as nationalization, the public schools, the maintenance of the House of Lords,’

  ‘and the careful use of backhanders, sinecure jobs, personal gifts and spurious business deals to sweeten local party officials’

  ‘When will you sleepers wake!’ yelled Robby as the surge engulfed him.

  Ditto panned for Jacky; could not find him.

  ‘Don’t potter, Thompson,’ he yelled, ablaze and hurling himself at the trembling surge breaking over Robby.

  Chairs atomized.

  A table subsided beneath assaulting bodies, spraying coruscating china in smithereens.

  Trip in regain dodge balance fling forward to rescue and combat support, did Ditto.

  An advancing bonewall.

  Party: Paean

  When he woke to consciousness, he wondered if it was really him lying there.

  Sound of water.

  Sound of trees.

  Sound of breeze in trees.

  Sound of water.

  Feel of stone.

  Hard feel of hard stone.

  Feel of breeze, cool.

  Smell of green.

  Smell of brown.

  Smell of breeze over water.

  Smell of sick.

  Beer-vomit.

  He retched. Jack-knifed up, sitting, doubled, turned, threw up. Was clinging to an edge of stone and heaving into a flow of water inches from his obeisant face.

  ‘Back in the land of the living at last, kiddo,’ said Robby. ‘We thought for a while we had lost you for good.’

  The spasm remitted. He swilled a hand in the refreshing river. Performed with his palm a reviving baptism. Carefully lifted himself from the brink and took his bearings.

  Late evening; a sunglow in the low sky, enough to pick out warmly the familiar lines of Easby Abbey poking from the trees above a bend in the river, upstream. There was opaque squint and sparkle on the wrinkling backwater pool at his feet, further out a grassy little knot of an island all but reached by humping boulders, the river curling into frothy little rapids between. On the bank, across, trees cushioned upwards, a fringe to the bellying field uprising beyond to the arching blue sky sweeping dome above the cave of trees under which he and Robby and Jack were.

  Robby and Jack stretched out in luxurious ease on either side of where he must have lain, each with open cans of beer in their hands, their evening-paled faces regarding him with amusement.

  ‘That was better out than in,’ said Robby. ‘Sit down before you fall down.’

  ‘I’m okay, I feel better.’

  ‘Have a swallow,’ said Jack, holding out to him his beer can.

  He sat between them.

  ‘Seeing I’ve just unloaded the last lot, I doubt I should.’

  ‘Hair of the mongrel,’ Jack said. ‘Make you feel on top again.’

  He took the proffered can.

  ‘How did I get here?’ he asked.

  ‘Brought you in my car, then carried you the few yards down here to this Elysian waterhole,’ said Robby.

  ‘I must have been knocked out.’

  ‘Either by the thug who rammed his fist into your face or by the floor you fell upon. No one bothered much with the finer details.’

  He drank a tentative mouthful of the beer. Surprised: he enjoyed both taste and swallow. Then, reminded of the blow to his chin, he prodded and gently manipulated his jaw. No damage, but a sore bruise.

  ‘I have to tell you,’ said Robby, chuckling, ‘that that was not the only time you spewed this evening.’

  ‘O, god, not in your car?’

  ‘Nothing so ungracious.’

  ‘Where then?’

  ‘Shall I tell him?’ Robby said to Jack.

  ‘You will anyway,’ said Jack.

  ‘You must understand,’ said Robby, snuggling his back into the bankside, ‘that after you were so rudely despatched, the fracas came to a sudden stop. Which is just as well, considering you were prone in the path of the stampede. Ou
r venerable chairperson—you remember him?’

  ‘Vaguely. The standingsitting man.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Never mind. Go on.’

  ‘Well, he steps forward, our brave captain, folds you masterfully fully over his shoulder—he’s learned all the fireman’s lifts, has our Hector—and marches down the hall. Just as he reaches the door you decide—or rather, your stomach decides . . .’ Robby tries to restrain the laughter welling in him, ‘. . . decides . . . it has had enough of Hector’s . . . of Hector’s . . . Hector’s shoulder stuck in it . . . and you . . .’

  ‘O, no!’

  ‘O, yes . . . threw up. All down his back.’

  Ditto too is laughing now. ‘Like a waterfall,’ he gasps out.

  ‘Just like!’

  ‘Out, out, out!’

  ‘Right out and down the back of Hector’s best blue Sunday suit!’

  ‘O, glory!’

  ‘You’re a daft pair,’ says Jack, but he is holding his sides too.

  ‘It was great,’ says Robby. ‘I’ve never seen a crowd lose interest in anybody so fast. Our Hector dumped you like a bag of garbage on the pavement, and disappeared double quick into the bog. I was hustled out after you by my friends and neighbours. The doors were slammed behind our backs, and presto! All was over!’

  ‘No more than you wanted, I’ll bet,’ said Jack, recovered and able to drink his beer again.

  ‘Could never have hoped for such a magnificent finale, bonny lad. Pure delight.’

  Laughing so much made Ditto feel ill again. Vaguely, not specifically. The river at their feet swirlgurgled, sounding cool and clean and of melancholy purity.