Acid Bubbles (11 page)

John leaned in close, saying, “Peter, Peter, Peter.”

All this time he was kneading my shoulder very firmly with a grasp that had me almost breathless. He was one strong guy who meant business, and was far scarier than Hartley Sparrow with his fiery redhead Millicent. He leaned very close in to me as if he were a lover in the mood to kiss me gently on the ear lobe. I thought he was going to mutilate my ear with his teeth. I don't know why I had this thought. Perhaps it was something in my hidden memories. I tensed inside, I may have even moved my head back a fraction.

“Peter, they think you owe them three grand and a little bit of merchandise. This is true. Before you find their money and their merchandise what I want is my seven grand and five thousand tabs of acid. Do you understand me? Understand me? Understand me?” John whispered.

“Yes,” was all I could manage. My vocal chords were almost solid with tension at the thought of this massive amount of money I'd done something with. The worst thing was no matter what torture they put me through I couldn't tell them. They could be ripping my testicles from my body with hot tongs and I'd still have no idea.

“He's good for it. He doesn't want you boys seeing his private stash. I'll go with him!” John amazed me when he said these words to Harry. What was his game with these people?

Harry was sitting deep in his throne with a furrowed brow, having all the appearance of a man in the depths of concentration considering all the options. He leaned forward and stared into my eyes before saying,

“Peter, I know where both your houses are (both!). And John has been doing business a long time, so I don't want my friend Dave to fall out with you.” He looked flushed, like a man who was having problems with his blood pressure.

John intervened. “I intend to be in business for a long time. I don't want any trouble, and my ex-friend here has agreed to sort it out, but secrets are secrets. If Peter comes through we're back to being mates, back to being, as you put it, Nazi twins.” His appearance was so relaxed either he was very sure of himself or a good actor.

John then grabbed me by the hand and took me over to a weight bench. At the bench he picked up a barbell with, I estimated, 60 lbs on it. Holding it out in front of him one-handed was an impressive feat in itself. He dropped it on to the leather topped bench. The barbell hit the bench with a sickening crash making an impressive dent in the leather covered surface.

“Did you see how deep that dug into the leather? Could you imagine Dave and Smiggy holding you down? I would drop it and you would see it falling straight down towards your eye sockets. Your face would be smashed. You might be dead, or blinded, or a cabbage.” John loudly faux whispered these words to me and his laugh was loud given out to the whole room.

John led me by the hand out of the gymnasium away from Harry and Dave. On the way towards the kitchen we passed what appeared to be a library. It was an impressive room with thousands of books lining the wood panelled walls, all very sumptuous with its antique lamps and a huge desk. To my surprise at this desk was a large figure bent over studying books. This bulky man was sitting in a wheelchair banging away on an old-fashioned handle driven calculator. He looked up and our eyes met, it was very disconcerting. It was Lenny the Helmet! I was going to say something but Lenny, on seeing me, just shook his head sadly and made a rude gesture moving his hand up and down as if clutching a stick. John roared with laughter.

John continued holding my hand like some demented lover as we walked past the fidgety smoking Smiggy and out through the kitchen where Miriam blew me a kiss. John saw this and sniggered.

“If Harry ever found out you were fucking Baby Doll?” John said. He didn't continue, but I knew what he meant. Then he looked at me.

“Of course you're safe on that score with me,” John added. At this I realised the baby doll liked both the Nazi twins. Now I wasn't quite sure if she was blowing me or my firm handed guide a kiss. I even thought we may have had a threesome. It made me shudder!

Outside, John Smith was very casual, much more pleasant and far less businesslike.

“I think you've got something figured out. You're playing those bankers aren't you?” he said to me. I had a revelation at that moment. He thought I had invented some elaborate hoax, a scheme in which the twins would come out as the top locals (businessmen). Again he pre-empted me.

“Right, Peter, where's our profit? Where are the tabs? And how does Lenny the Helmet fit in with all this?” John said. I couldn't imagine the person I'd been before today. Did I hold in the dark recesses of my mind the workings of an elaborate scheme? Questions were being asked and all were going around answerless in my head. The now very casual John was moving towards the big Rover. I had a feeling we'd shared many adventures in this car. I was wondering if I was going to sit in the passenger seat and be expected to spill the beans, or was my fate the commodious boot. I had the strangest sensation others had travelled in it, some with one-way tickets.

John stopped as we reached the car complaining about his shoe. I didn't know if this was some kind of ruse. It was not. His shoelace had come undone and he wanted to tie it. He put his foot up on the front wheel and I looked inside the car. There, in the centre console, were the keys hanging in the ignition. What was coming over me? Panic I suppose, coupled with the urge to run for it. I had to do something no matter how rash to make my escape.

The next move I was planning wouldn't be too smart, nor would it be logical. Or was it? I was in the shit, he wanted me to take him to where the stuff was stashed. I woke up yesterday morning with my mind a clean slate. Some things had come to me by instinct and not through memory. I had no way in this new old world of knowing where the stuff was. It could have even been stashed in my car, though this had been subjected to a thorough and violent search by those bastards Dave and Smiggy. They could be hanging me out to dry already in possession of the money and the drugs. They would be making off with enough money to buy a couple of houses, nice houses.

I was readying myself to give John one huge kick in the bollocks. He would fall like a wounded buffalo. He seemed able to read my thoughts, slowly looking up at me with his wry smile.

“Look, Peter, if you're playing me your fucked. We've both got secrets, and I don't want to know where you keep anything. I wouldn't let you in on all my little secrets, so I'll be about for the next day or so doing business locally,” John said. He winked while looking back at Harry's house checking on the eyes watching us from the windows.

“I'll be keeping an eye on you. I'll see you at 6pm tomorrow night in that shit hole, The Cauldron. We can square up and carry on as business associates, and I hope good friends.” John said this as he was taking his foot off the top of the wheel. His eyes fixed on mine.

“You don't think you could kick me in the bollocks and get away with it do you?” he said. Then he laughed once again, cheerful bastard. I was thinking he was going to take me in the car back to my place, or places.

“Be good to me Pete and run along smartish. Find me the seven grand and five thousand tabs pronto,” were John's final word's as he climbed into his car to drive to God knows where. If I hadn't been sure of something before, I was certain of it now.

“Damn me, I'm a bloody drug dealer!” I said these words out loud to myself. Internally the idea sounded bad, but when spoken out loud it sounded appalling and terrible.

As I walked away in a torpor brought on by too many questions with no answers, a final question popped into my head.

“Two houses… I own two houses… Where's the other?

The daytimes were sleep filled blurs, a vague broken experience full of drugs and drowsiness. I was starting to lose grip on any kind of cognitive reality, just living in a vague dreamlike state. I understood at some level I was travelling downhill on the way to death. I had to do something to drag myself back into the world of the living. My addiction to Jennifer's universe was all-consuming. I wanted to be there all the time. The more I had it, the more I wanted it!

Journeys to the other dimension of crystal clear sensation, and staggering robust physical health were dominating all my thoughts. Any hope I had of fighting in the real world was slipping away. I had to latch onto something harsh in an effort to fight back, to be aware of the world in which I lived, not some ethereal parallel universe.

What to do, how to shock myself back to reality came to me in a brutal moment looking at my reflection in the mirror.

I was shambling around the house in my pyjamas, the heavy cotton type you buy from large chain stores. These were one of the only two pairs of pyjamas I possess. Normal life is a place where I used to live, a place where I was not being looked after by various friends and nurses. In normal life I always sleep naked. Now these two pairs of heavily machine washed striped pyjamas were starting to look very disturbing as I discovered when I passed the full-length mirror in the hallway.

I was gaunt with sallow flesh, prominent cheekbones, hair just wisps clinging to my head. I was becoming a victim of the genocide of cancer. It came as quite a shock bringing back memories of two strange days spent in an emotional semi-drunk conversation with Bob Wilson's widowed mother Rachel. What I saw looking back at me was a victim from a Nazi concentration camp somewhere in eastern Poland. Why you may ask do I think of a concentration camp somewhere in eastern Poland with no specific name. The answer is quite simple. The only description I've ever had of life in a concentration camp came slowly from Rachel Wilson over the course of two long days with many cups of tea, and a little too much brandy. She could never bring herself to say the name of the camp.

The discovery that I looked like one of those newsreel films taken by the Allied forces as they moved across eastern Europe shocked me to the core forcing me into the realisation that I was slipping away from the living, so I started an exercise, a grim exercise in memory. Thinking about beautiful days full of sunshine, joy and
bon ami
was no good for me. This was a reminder of my night-time preoccupation with a parallel universe and Jennifer. Thinking of beauty was like an addict thinking of his favourite fix…

No I was going to concentrate on everything Rachel described to me after our long talk through two days and one night. This grim exercise would teach me that these survivors did so with a brutal determination to hang on to life. Others, no matter how determined they were, had perished through disease, brutality and random murder. I was not going to fall to brutality and random murder, but I was falling too easy for the soft option. I had to stand up in the daytime and fight the tough battles.

I would force myself to remember in all the details stories the widow Rachel told me just a month after the funeral of her only son Bob. It was the winter of 1990 and all the world was changing. The Berlin Wall, glasnost, and finally I could talk with someone who might know about my wilful forgetfulness.

I didn't go to the funeral because I was a long way away, unaware of Bob's tragic death during one of his very long destructive alcohol binges. It was his coping mechanisms when things were getting too much, beyond control. So it wasn't until after the funeral that Jane my sister managed to contact me.

Jane had attended the funeral. She was a friend of the family. Bob's sister Louise was a lifelong friend of Jane's. Both had been anxious young girls meeting for the first time on their first day at junior school, later, on to the same senior school. This friendship had lasted into adulthood. Louise became a doctor and my sister Jane a very successful vet, particularly with small aggressive designer dogs. She loved them all. I did not.

Jane told me that after the funeral Rachel had pulled her to one side asking if she knew of Bob's great secret. It was obvious Bob's mother thought I might have shared a confidence with my sister. They knew he had some dark secret haunting his past, but he'd never revealed it. My sister asked Rachel why they hadn't asked Bob over all the years.

“It was his father who stopped him talking because he didn't want any more suffering in his life. He told Bob he didn't want to hear of it, to be a man, and not a baby. He never told Bob about our wartime sufferings, just the edges of it. If we could live through all that there's nothing you could do in a town like this to compare with what we suffered. So I suppose Bobby sucked it back in and held it there like a toxic ball for years. He never spoke of it, just cried at night for months. I could hear him weeping through the walls and Abraham insisted he'd get over it like we all did. Did we? I don't think he ever did.” Whatever it was, Rachel's explanation was no explanation at all.

This is when my sister told Rachel I'd come and see her. She was more than a little surprised I'd come to talk after what happened to me in the early 70s. I was looking for answers and didn't realise how shallow the pool was. So on a bright cold February day I arrived with enormous trepidation at Rachel's new maisonette. I was glad it wasn't in the old family home with its textures, its smells, and my happy boyhood memories of the place.

It felt very cold as I walked up the drive of the very neat maisonette. I don't know if it was cold, I think I was chilled by the thought of the ghosts we'd disturb. Rachel had seen me approaching. She had been waiting, looking out of the window, seeking answers. And by the time I climbed the few steps outside to her front door she was waiting to open it. I didn't even knock. It swung open and I was greeted by a sixty-year-old Rachel who on that day looked older.

“Hello, Paul, I'm very surprised indeed you can see me after what happened in 1973, or was it 74?” Rachel said, as a greeting.

“Hello, Mrs Wilson. Well I'm here, but I don't know exactly what you want from me. If I can help I'll do my best,” I replied. It was a strange start to our day.

“Please call me Rachel you're a grown man. I think you can answer some of the things I never asked Bobby. Please come in and sit in the lounge. Would you like a drink of something?” She talked very quickly driven by nervous anxiety.

I went into the lounge and sat down on her new sofa. I didn't recognise one single piece of furniture in there. It was as if she had expunged everything from her previous life. I think she'd moved because the old house with all its memories triggered sadness. My host had gone off into the kitchen to get me a cup of coffee. “Not too much milk, a tiny bit of sugar, and yes, I would like some biscuits.” I knew what she was going to ask me. I also knew I'd disappoint her.

She returned with a tray. On it were two mugs of coffee, a large barrel of biscuits, two small slim stemmed eastern European looking glasses, and a large bottle of brandy. I'd no idea the conversation was going to need so much support from alcohol. I had scant clue at that time of what was to come out from inside that truth telling brandy bottle. We sat drinking coffee for quite some time, talking of the weather, people we knew, just general chitchat. All mundane talk until after we'd finished our coffee and biscuits. This is when we got down to the nitty-gritty.

“Bobby came home so dirty and broken. What thing had happened?” Rachel asked. She talked rather strange English. She had a very good accent, but still managed at times to sound very Polish even though her accent was more or less Home Counties English. I knew all too well what she meant: the answers she was looking for. I had no answers, no truths, no anything, but how could you tell this grieving widow, who'd recently buried her only son, that I didn't know anything about the night nineteen years ago, and after all this time I'm still asking myself the same questions.

“I am not lying Mrs Wilson, sorry Rachel, but I really don't, in all honesty, have a clue what happened. I've racked my brains for nineteen years and have no answers. I visited Bob once in 1973 to ask him about that night. I told him I couldn't remember, he told me I was a liar and knew the real truth. I'm afraid Bob knew the truth. I cannot for the life of me remember anything” I was sorry these were the words I had to say to the anxious and disappointed face of a grieving mother.

She looked shocked to the core as if somebody had stolen a precious thing. In fact the news her Bobby had come home so dirty and broken was itself a revelation to me. Why was he dirty? Why was he broken? These were things I knew nothing of. I now realise the last time I saw Bob, the day he was under the car, he knew the truth about that night after we left The Cauldron. He held it inside like a slow cancer of the mind eating away at him, leading to his eventual destruction.

To my surprise and total horror Rachel was on her knees at my feet. She was clutching at my legs, looking up to me, pleading, and shouting!

“You are lying! You are lying! You know what happened that night. Please God you must know,” she pleaded.

“I cannot remember anything about that night, and the only person who knew was your Bobby. I thought coming here would give me the answers. I don't know who is more disappointed, you or me,” I said. It was the truth. She would not stop and was convinced I knew more. I stroked her hair, wiped tears from her cheeks, held her racking shoulders, and I cried bitter tears myself. It was a fruitless journey but what else could I tell her?

After helping her to her feet she slumped into the chair sobbing with a wretchedness that pulled at my soul. I was in two minds whether to invent a tale, make up a story to give satisfaction to her needs. In the end I made soothing noises and weathered the storm.

During the storm we opened the brandy bottle, and it started to open the bubble of truth. Rachel was starting to accept I didn't know what had happened. She did, however, explain to me how Bob had tried to tell his father, shouting and screaming. Mr Wilson had pinned him to the floor and told him to suck it in and be a man, not to be a baby, not to spoil his young promising life. At which she broke down again in tears for some minutes constantly muttering, “It killed him, I know it killed him, it killed him.”

I don't know what clicked inside Rachel, but she decided to tell me something, the whole story, why Mr Wilson had told Bob to “suck it in, not to disgrace the family”. It was because Mr Wilson was in fact Abraham from Kraków in Poland, and of course not born a Wilson. You would never have known this from his accent or his grammar. In this he was a pure Home Counties Englishman. He had been successful in removing any semblance of his past life from his new existence in England.

I cannot tell you his second name apart from it began with a W. Beyond that I found it unpronounceable. I never wrote it down and I don't think it matters as he wanted to be known as Mr Wilson. He succeeded in becoming Mr Wilson, English bank manager. Rachel Majka, as she was born, became Mrs Wilson, later the widow Wilson who would lose her Bobby. This loss of her son was blamed on hiding painful past truths from their siblings, so their siblings were obliged to hide their pain from them. Suck it in, let it fester, and let it rot your insides until you die!

Rachel explained how they had both been in concentration camps in Poland, not the same camp, but different ones some sixty km apart, how, after the American forces had liberated her camp, she was sent to a field hospital. This place was full of thousands struggling in a daily battle to deal with the aftermath of what had become for the Nazis the “Jewish problem”. The American Jewish problem was how to feed all the thousands of arrivals, and at times how to feed their own advancing armies.

The other concern at the American field hospital was these starving people would damage themselves by eating too much of any food available, and some of the survivors died of kindness. Others could not survive any longer despite the kindness. Others like Rachel and Abraham managed to find salvation from the horrors of the previous two years, and each other, in this American medical camp.

Both were academics, Abraham an accountant, Rachel a chemist. There was a framed photograph now on display in the room. This was one of the few of her possessions to survive her own brutal regime of cleansing. A photograph taken on a beach somewhere in 1948 showed an incredibly beautiful Rachel, with a very sporty and darkly handsome Abraham. The couple that found each other at that hospital camp in the damp woodlands of Poland would not even recognise the healthy couple on the photograph taken on the beach at Broadstairs. When they first met they were grotesques who recognised qualities in each other, some survival instinct, similar wounds, something?

Rachel now well into her stride suggested there may be another bottle in the cupboard after this one was finished. She moved deeper into their stories, first Abraham's tortures, much later in fact the next day, her own. She wanted me to know the truth of their lives during that terrible time. She knew I didn't know what had tortured her Bobby, and wanted to explain why nothing could happen in a safe northern industrial town that would be half as bad as their lives in those rancid camps? And they'd survived!

“If I could tell nobody of the enormous horrors, then Bobby could hold his small story too. This is what Abraham told me.” Rachel decided to tell me everything.

“I want it outside of my community into a world where people communicate with others and don't hold dark secrets festering in their hearts. A world of people knowing the truth might remember and not go down the same roads again.” This statement came from Rachel, and I hope that I've remembered all the history to pass it on.