AMBULANCE CHASERS
A collaboration with Stuart Hughes
Tom's marble was lodged in his throat ... following Arnold's ricochet of his own marble against Tom's. Each had a heart of fire. Men and marbles.
The choking sensation of neither swallow nor regurgitation made Tom - in a moment of strange reflection - think of the time when his Grandmother died from a snapped fishbone in the throat. The breath drowned. The eyes themselves twirling like marbles. Her squawking pleas for help as she beat her own breast.
Arnold's daughter - Gloria, wasn't it? - rushed in from the kitchen, her skirt billowing, her low-cut blouse shimmering.
"For God's sake, Dad, bash him on the back. Quick!"
Or at least that was what her mind said. Her voice was full of food, suffocating the almost autonmous sounds she tried to make. Each word was a muffled plea for meaning.
Arnold - a man who loved children's toys - ballooned his cheeks, his eyes rolling with an unspoken message of stifled violence.
Eventually, old Tom woke to the fact that he was either dying or as near to that process as it was possible to be with a conscious mind intact. Indeed, many of his grown-up memories had seemingly vanished into thin air, into the thinnest air - into a time when breathing was second nature and summer holidays never-ending periods of delight amid buttercup meadows.
Tom tried to breathe, but his windpipe was blocked by the marble good and proper. A clear glass spheroid, coloured through the middle with blue, green and yellow. Pretty colours, Tom thought. But not pretty enough.
Death was inevitable now.
Death was blue.
Death was green.
Death was yellow.
Nothing could clear it. His throat itched as his body made involuntary attempts to dislodge the obstruction. His mouth opened and closed - like a demented goldfish - going through the breathing motions by rote. Breathing was second nature and his cogs and gears continued to whir and clunk as they always had, even though the mechanics no longer supplied any life-preserving function. Still his throat itched. The itch was death.
His death.
He could feel himself becoming lightheaded, intoxicated almost. Nothing was real anymore, nothing mattered anymore. His vision was becoming blurry. Arnold and Gloria were about somewhere, but he could no longer see them clearly. Why don’t they do something? A small voice in a distant part of Tom’s oxygen-starved brain asked. Why don’t they help?
But it didn’t really matter. Tom knew he was dead, and they were only watching him go through the closing moments of his life. His friend Arnold and his friend’s daughter, Ambulance chasers both of them.
Tom felt himself falling, falling towards the green void.
But can voids be green?
Or any colour?
Could voids even be black or white?
Tom peered through the empty haze of blue.
Tom peeped between the whirling yellows.
Whorls.
Knurls.
The marble was a stone knot.
Or the Adam’s Apple was...
“Are you okay, Uncle Tom?” asked Gloria, leaning over him through the screen-saver kaleidoscopes and strobes whence he could not extricate his eyes, tussle as he might through the veiny pulps of each pupil-centred white.
Her breasts were breathing, the nipples almost fully visible because she was more concerned with his well-being than her own demeanour. But it was strange that he could muster sufficient wherewithal to notice her charms when in such choking throes.
It was not only strange, but downright disgusting.
Surely, he had known Gloria since she was a child. Tom was not her real uncle, but good as. Arnold had even invited him to be her Godfather.
“Dad’s chasing up the ambulance. It will be here soon.”
Hear soon? Tom heard her speak, but the words either meant nothing or something they were not meant to mean.
He could indeed hear - if that was the right word - Arnold on the phone. Screaming. Or, rather, shouting. Arnold was not screaming. It was Tom screaming. He heard the screams, at least, as if they were his own screams.
He extended his hand towards Gloria’s face. She lowered her mouth to his. Like someone trying to suck out snake poison from a bite, her fangs betokened a deep, deep kiss that would draw the blockage from his throat.
But Arnold and daughter were out pursuing amblances, shrieking their own sirens to compete with the whining, whirling ones that only real emergencies could boast.
Weren’t they?
Perhaps, Gloria was not this creature with the snakebite smile. Nor even vice versa.
Whoever or whatever, its eyes spun like planets with cores of rainbow fire.
Tom was a child again, amid those warm buttercup meadows. His friends, boys in the main, were hiding from him. Arnold was bloody obvious, though!
“You silly bugger!” Tom shrieked, as he saw his friend’s backside barely disappear up a tree. Arnold couldn’t play hide and seek for toffee.
Nor even for humbugs.
Especially not gobstoppers.
All the boys loved the sweetshop on the corner of Dutton Road, and they soon ran off to waste their pocket money on sherbet dips and Trebor fruit cocktail chews. Or a packet of used stamps for their albums. Oh yes, it was not only a sweetshop, was it? Or a pair of lead soldiers. Or model buses or matchbox tanks and army ambulances. Or a bag of clunky, rattly, sparkly prize marbles.
Young Tom stepped from the sweetshop, the sweetshop that was oh-so-much-more, and a cold, disquieting aura of deja vu gripped him, gripped him so tight that he could feel all the breath being sucked out of him.
Tom knew he was going to die.
Not some time in the future.
But here.
Now.
Today.
He was only a kid and he was going to die.
The deja vu gripped him tighter, squeezing its clammy fingers around his throat, choking the very life out of him, and somewhere in the distant future old Tom realised he was remembering the very first time he died.
Young Tom stepped off the pavement and into Dutton Road. He held a paper bag of sweeties in his left hand and a string bag of marbles in his right. The marbles clunked and rattled with each step he took. His throat itched, he was light-headed, intoxicated almost.
As young Tom stepped into the road, voices and sounds invaded him. His friends - and maybe someone else too? - were shouting and screaming his name at the top of their lungs, calling him back. He heard a strange whooping siren-like noise, very familiar yet he couldn’t place it. There was a blaring horn, spinning blue pulses, screeching brakes.
He wanted to heed the shouts and screams of his friends, wanted to turn back and walk towards the pavement, but the intense aura of deja vu hugged him with its firm grip, squeezing all the life out of him, like a boa-constrictor when it crushes its prey.
And then the whole world around young Tom exploded into excruciating pain and darkness. As if the regressive surge of deja vu was enveloping him within an icy globe of inevitability.
But deja vu needed memories to feed it.
Deja Vu. Already Seen.
AND ONLY AN OLDER TOM, ONE WHO’D BARELY SCRAPED THROUGH O LEVEL FRENCH, COULD KNOW WHAT DEJA VU REALLY MEANT.
Had the young Arnold climbed down that tree in the buttercup meadow, after that heart-stopping game of hide and seek had finished? Tom could never remember.
Had he fallen?
Had the fall actually snapped his neck as easy as a fishbone?
.
Old Tom fondled the teardrop face and lowered his own even further than tears could drop. He sensed a heart-stopping love. For a sweet, sweet girl.
But Gloria was the creature that Arnold never lived to spawn. The trouser-snake he never allowed to bite.
Tom kissed the empty air, his marbles finally slipping down senility’s slope towards Heaven’s void...
He tasted salty tears and realised they were of his own making.
Hear a heart here in the ears as well as filling a throat with crimson sogginess, each spasm failing to dislodge the raddled nipple-stone from the rattly, clunky string-bag of a lung.
And the kid chased spinning colours forever.
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