ABIDE WITH ME (three stories)
(1)
The words did not remind me of a funeral, funnily enough – they reminded me more of a wedding. I suppose the resonance of ‘bide’ with ‘bride’ helped.
A bride with me. A long-lasting commitment between two people to each other in the sight of God: intrinsic with ‘abide’: the real word that the famous hymn used. A hymn commonly sung at the F.A. Cup Final in an ancient Wembley, its towers symbolising patriotism as well as nostalgia.
But at a funeral there was only one commitment in the face of God. A commitment by the body in the coffin, its bones broken to fit. But that person, as symbolised by that body in the coffin, was already gone, its life spent, its commitment perhaps already made at the point of earlier death. These are thoughts about him that went through my mind when I re-heard the hymn. Thoughts about him when I only thought about the hymn to write this.
Long before that there had been stories concocted between me and him: a book of stories entitled ‘Only Connect’, a collection of dissimilar plots and words and styles and attitudes and other indefinable qualities between two dissimilar people, radically dissimilar people despite being father and son, yet connected by fictions that they had written and blended together when both had been alive, and not just one of them alive.
Yet if this were a ghost story, a fiction in itself, then maybe, just maybe, a collaboration would still be possible, a true resonant ‘connect’ via the original ‘Only Connect’: via the veil: a blurred area overlapping life with death. But fiction is fiction, it can never be real, however based upon reality it seems to be.
Mum and Dad. Bride and Bridegroom on that day in 1945, now divorced by death. Then in a 1970, a new Bride and Bridegroom, thee and me, as yet undivided by time’s slicing blow. Yet we are all groomed for death. A death that we all pray is yet another fiction. A disconnect between truth and plot.
I heard the distant cheering before the throng fell eventually silent for a full-throated hymn to sound out across the rooftops and then into our own distant room via the wire sculpture on the chimney. Then silence as yet another fiction fell into place with its inevitable ending.
(2)
The blob expanded as my throat grew less constricted. And the blob, by expanding, became less dangerous, less horrific. Its initial appearance had indeed been a startling sight – a tiny slick expression of slime balanced perfectly like a jewel at the end of Adam’s nose. I had been rather disgusted by the way Adam ignored it as, I knew, all the time, he was fully aware of it. My throat had originally tightened through terror.
Disgust turned to this eventual terror as a result of an abrupt turn of his head during a moment of silent conversation as we listened to someone entering the front door downstairs. The wobbly bead of green substance fell upon his bristly chin whereupon it began visibly to bubble within itself as if fired by a self-perpetuating force of thought. Only tiny internal bubbles, as it was merely a comparatively tiny bubble itself containing them.
“Who’s that coming?” he asked.
I assumed it was my wife Evelyn who had let herself in, despite my having changed the locks earlier in the day. She could climb any tree, as they say. “By the way, you have something on your chin,” I said.
I was gob-smacked. I couldn’t believe I was so frightened by the sight of an ordinary snotty dewdrop upon such an ordinary face. Adam was a friend of mine because he
Adam had been telling me about ordinary matters all morning, to take my mind off my own marital mishaps. He told me of the football match. The TV programme that he and many others no doubt had watched in common last night. The prospect of going round the pub together. Good solid blokey things. Nothing strange, nothing untoward, nothing deep, nothing, indeed, crustaceous or blobby.
I sat staring in disbelief as the green polyp settled into the grain of his chin, as the footsteps, slowly, wound their way up the tenement block’s stairway from the front door which had sounded nearer than it actually was when it had been slammed by the person rising towards us by a piecemeal legwork of no particular recognisable rhythm.
It was with some relief, as I have already indicated, that I saw the blob was swelling, growing bigger, only to fall in dangling daredevilry like a string of identical blobs from the chin towards Adam’s lap. Only to regroup as a single discrete blob. It was as if increasing size was a diminishing force. As if it would soon burst and disappear as a spray of misfired infections. It was now not horrific at all. I grew less and less frightened.
The thing just squatted there upon his trousers and exercised itself without now even appearing to be on the brink of self-destruction. I sighed with relief, for my own throat had relaxed and was able to breathe more easily. Indeed, I amply felt I was
I could handle size. I could handle anything big but I couldn’t handle tiny beads of sweat or gobbets of stale marrowbone jelly or finger-pinched coughed-up pellets of pus.
Adam smiled, knowing that I was more relaxed, despite the heightening footsteps outside. He patted the thing as if it were a pet. He had by now placed it on the floor. He offered me to stroke it. He wiped his hands down his trousers as if to remove a slick residue.
“Off to the pub then?” He smiled.
I could depend on Adam to bring things back to the run-of-the-mill, the bread-and-butter of life, making me feel better, and thus able to block off the shuffling and shambling directly outside my flat door. It couldn’t be Evelyn. She’d’ve walked straight in. Like Adam, she did not stand on graces.
Perhaps Adam had already ordered the curry, which usually
Adam laughed. He squatted on the floor alongside the ‘thing’ that by now had grown as large as him. Like a real Granny Smith, huge and overripe, having outgrown her usefulness as an apple.
If that person shambling outside my flat door was either who or not who I thought it was, who was I?
I was not frightened at all because it was me that was frightening. Or perhaps extraordinarily frightened, without knowing I was.
(3)
Once upon the train from Nottingham to St Pancras, I often glimpsed up from a book called 'Travels in the Scriptorium' to read the passing landscapes. I took for granted that the sunlit fields and lakes between the gaps of losing concentration from the book were typical of the East Midlands area; indeed not only did I feel it was typical but also was that very part of England. Well, naturally, what other feeling could an instinctive traveller like me have? I did not question it. Only hindsight has since given me cause to question it: gradual hindsight, a slow dawning upon me that the landscapes I glimpsed so casually during glances from my book were odder than Britain could ever be: glimpses of foreign lands: an unexpected, unwanted holiday abroad - but an unwanted holiday is hardly a holiday at all.
How I later knew such glimpses were a Fantasy of Britain, I still wonder. But this was the East Midlands proper and I was simply imagining that the views from the train window were foreign ones, lit by a sunshine that today freakishly brought out the natural colours as if they were painted by an artist. This caused me to gain momentum in losing concentration from the book 'Scriptorium', one of those typical fiction works I customarily enjoyed: enjoyed in a serious way since, one day, I wanted to be a writer of fiction myself.
*
I seemed to have always imagined myself to be a character in my own body, but following the experience just recounted of today's train journey, I decided I was wrong. The body was something one could not control; it was something that imposed thoughts and wants quite divorced from the mind within it and, thus, affecting that same mind in an unruly fashion, indeed making that mind into quite a new character divorced from one's own naturally wanted character - and this had likely been happening all my life: a permanently unwanted holiday from the landscape of me.
(unpublished)
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