My First Colouring Book (7 page)

So I made a plan. I knew it would cost me money, but it was the only solution.

Oggy helped me along the way by confessing on the second night – after seeing off a whole bottle of expensive malt whisky in my ‘welcome' cabinet – that his stories were a fiction: they were how he stayed alive. There was no sister, no ‘special' baby in hospital. Every day for the past five years he'd hitched from his sleeping place – a railway station – to Chester and back, telling stories. He had a gift, he said. Within minutes of getting into a car he could tell what sort of story the driver wanted to hear. I'd been easy, he said. And he was right, I'd been a pushover. But Oggy wasn't a bad man either – he wasn't doing anyone any real harm. Merely redistributing wealth, he said, and practising one of the oldest professions – storytelling.

It was a joint decision, in the end. We came to a mutual understanding. He'd always wanted to go to Glastonbury: all I had to do (and it wasn't much, given my resources) was to book him a ticket and take him there with some spends in his pocket. And then he would disappear out of my life for ever. A few weeks later he was gone, and I have to say I rather miss him (spiritually, you understand, not physically!). In return he gave me two very positive and life-enhancing experiences, which'll look good on my heavenly CV. He left me a story, which I've sold to Reader's Digest (without mentioning the Glastonbury bit!) and which I've told to countless people all over the world. And he's still in my address book – I call him sometimes, but he's never there.

Lastly, he found me the love of my life. It's like a fairy tale – as if Oggy had imagined it all and told it to someone in a car on the road to Chester. Tomorrow I marry Rachel Forman at the church where we met. It will be a day of joy and celebration (and we'll honeymoon at Glastonbury!). Rachel knows about Oggy. I told her the truth. And that was fine by her, she said, holding my hands in the kitchen and making me tremble. She said she loved me, and she forgave me. Rachel Forman wants to be my wife for evermore.

Glory to God on high – and praise be to St Omobuono of Cremona, who gave all his food and drink to a beggar one day and, on refilling his flask in a stream, found it full of wine.

red

IT'S THE hottest day of the year so far and the town lies squat on the ground, a scorched pancake swimming in a syrup of lethargy.

A dying jellyfish stiffens slowly on the sands and a tiny aneurysm drifts within it, a bubble trapped inside its spirit-level skin. A fat old man (who may be me sometime in the future, I'm not sure) lies breathing softly on a hot and tousled bed. His apertures suck the air for oxygen, and the rolling dunes of his body shine with sour sweat. Seeping through the tinnitus of summer he hears ghostly echoes, disembodied hoots and honks from the traffic, and a steady beat which may be the clack of the Chinaman's wok as he prepares food in the take-away, five doors down from his flat.

Someone arrives suddenly by his bed. A nurse – she wants to puncture him again. His arms are already strewn with violets and bluebells. To her it's blood, to him it's ichor. When he was a young god he exchanged the clear liquid of his vigour with lovers, many. Now his lifeblood is dark and turgid. The wok clicks and clacks in the distance, but it's not the Chinaman – it's different, a mechanical noise. Where is he?

I want to send a message to this old man. A final memo from me to him, on a day unknown, wet and windy or dry and dusty, I don't care. A mental note that will arrive during his final few seconds, when his breathing rattles to an end and his eyes puddle into two small plastic jellyfish.

Slowly, he twigs what's going on around him. They've moved him to the hospital. A trading post – he can hear them doing business over his body, bartering. Soon his family will hand him over, swap him for a morning off work and a jarful of ashes, lumpy and grey. The ritual is underway. Someone will throw in a posy of flowers, too, and a couple of damp handkerchiefs. In another room, out of sight, the crucibles are fired up: they're preparing to melt him down.

The wok's clack-beat is suddenly irregular. No, it's a machine. Systolic, diastolic. Someone's heart. It's struggling, it's in crisis. Is the old man on a sweaty bed in his final throes, is he about to depart? There's a deathly silence.

Listen old man, this is the last story you will hear. Are you listening?

As the nurse skims towards your bed you will hear her soles squeak on the chessboard floor tiles – she will come to you as your body loses its own pattern, begins its slow descent towards ground zero. Moments before the rictus I will be with you for our final exchange. Old man – this is my message, which will be your final thought. When the nurse comes to tattoo more purple on your chest with her electric machine, don't look at her eyes. Listen to her soles, squealing like two frightened little pigs. Then you'll remember…

A day in December, long ago. Grey and gruesome after weeks of rain, saturated, a dead cat floating in the water butt, fur all matted together. You were nearly thirty, late twenties for sure. Quite handsome, still in good shape. It was late at night, with cold hard rain. A party going on in the background. Someone was playing an acoustic guitar, someone else was banging spoons on dirty crockery.

There was a house in New Orleans, they call…

God, those parties: raised voices, the usual menagerie of drunken shrieks and laughter. A glass shatters on a floor somewhere and a hoarse collective
hooray
fills the smoggy kitchen. But you were relatively sober. Why? Perhaps you wanted to keep an eye on her.
You always did have a small-town streak in you. Bit of a jerk, really, staying off the booze just to keep tabs on her. If you expect it to happen it will, boyo. Sure as eggs. She ran off in the end, didn't she? Women don't like that sort of thing, being watched, doubted. You took a long time to learn. Anyway, round about midnight you heard a squeal of brakes outside the house. Just after the band left. That's right, you've remembered. There was a band there. Hardly anyone noticed them shuffling off because the party had skidded out of control by then. Christ, it's flooding back now – it was her birthday, nearly everyone legless. The band left, and then you heard the bang. Trademark sounds of the twentieth century: tyres screeching, metal crumpling, glass breaking, then a lone disc of metal – hubcap perhaps – tinkles on the tarmac at the end. It was the same that night so long ago, wasn't it old man? Are you still with me? Can you hear me through the seeping hiss of summer? Cover yourself man, your gooseskin flanks are naked for all to see. Pitiful. What's that white residue around your slack old gob – a high tide mark, foam? Medicine perhaps. Don't go to sleep, you won't ever wake again. Concentrate. What happened next?

You ran out of the house, yes ran, you old fool. Haven't done that for a while, have you? There was someone with you. Tall, dark, on the periphery of your social group. Peter? Paul? Don't start searching your memory, for chrissakes don't start the ABC thing now, we'll be here for ever. Is that the idea? Stuck on a hospital ward for eternity going
ABCDE what the F was his name
, the tall dark boy who came after you through that massive front door, across the wooden footbridge clank clank clank, across the gleaming black pavement and into the road? Can't remember, won't ever remember again. Gone forever. He's a silhouette now, can't even remember his face, can you? Nice bloke, going out
with one of the girls. Good manners, no trace of any dark matter swirling around him. Wholesome, that's the word, he was nutritious. One day a middle-aged woman will snuffle into her handkerchief and say he was such a lovely man, he was the best daddy in the world. Could be happening right now: hundreds of weeping people, biggest funeral ever seen, popular figure, doting husband, greatly loved father and grandfather. Not like you, old man. So forget him.

What's that noise… is the Chinaman slapping his wok again, five doors down?

No. It's closer now. Systolic, diastolic. Dum-dum, dum-dum…

The drum is beating again outside the trading post but this time the drummer's right by your ear. They've wired you up, old man – to a machine. Your private spokesman is describing physical carnage and chaos, that final helicopter flight from Saigon. That faltering, diminishing beat is your own heart, loud-speakered out to those who can't enter the stadium of death. And the medics, traders in turmoil, dealers in decay, are all around you, striking deals with your mortal friends. When the music stops you'll be taken away. Swapped for a plastic sweetie jar full of the greyness extracted from you, your honeycomb shattered. Your body will be hot-wired by a gang of po-faced funeral directors, driven around then torched. Yeeee-haaa.

But let's stay in the past for now. Let's go back to the accident outside your door, the rolling hubcap, the deathly silence immediately afterwards. You and the nameless, faceless one are standing by a motorbike which is lying on its side in the road. It's raining slantwise across the orange streetlights so you pull your collar up and study the scene. There has been an accident. A man lies unconscious in the road, near the bike, which is still hot. You can hear end-of-performance, off-stage noises – clicks and clacks, the sound of a cleaner in the wings, sweeping up broken glass.

The bike's a 250cc two-stroke, you can smell the oil. But the engine is no longer running. The man-boy in the road is wearing black leathers and a full-face helmet. Peering into the visor (because you've been taught not to touch this prone figure) you espy that he's wearing a scarf or a facemask, covering his mouth and nose. Bad news. You also see the band driving off into the night in a big black Mercedes van, their eardrums still too stuffed with noise to hear anything real. Finally, as your dark acquaintance runs into the house to call the emergency services, you notice a trickle of thick black liquid inside the biker's helmet. The bad news gets worse. Let's leave it at that for now, old man – you're exhausted. Have a little rest while I try to recapture the scene.

At this point I can afford to think out loud, since you won't remember a word I say.

You're in a side room at the local hospital, it's a hot and windless day, and your rickety old brain cells – in their piss-stained pyjamas – are having a final dribble up yonder in the Cranial Rest Home for Retired Gentlefolk. By the side of your bed there's a bleeping monitor, which you keep mistaking for the Chinaman's wok five doors down from your flat. Your thin and purple lips are embellished with a white scum-line. You're alone. That's worrying. If indeed you are me in the future, old man, scrawny right flank exposed to the stares of passers-by (clutching their Tesco flowers and their pathetic fruit tokens), then there's much to concern us both. Why is there no-one at your bedside? No concerned children. No worried wife/lover/brother/other. Nobody at all, old man. You must have been a bastard. A sod. A selfish prick.

Me? A sod, a selfish prick? Let's leave that one alone, let's not go there. Let's go back to the crash scene, quick. Feed me another morsel from the past, oh great and masterful brain, before you slip into your tartan slippers and forget which pills you took today, before you fall down the stairs, tangled up with your last and worst dancing partner, Fraulein Zimmer.

No, let's not go there either. For chrissakes, organise yourself. Control your thoughts. Try to think clearly. Focus. We're trying to guide an old man through his last moments on Planet Earth, goddess of creation and gluer of all dust and particles into semblances and forms. We're at the site of a fatal accident, kneeling in a shallow puddle of water, by the dying man-boy you met four hours earlier as he leapfrogged joyously and youthfully up the steps of the Labour Club (helmet in hand, smiling and nodding to you as he bounded past, his buckled leather boots leaving a trail of muddy prints on the hallway floor). You happened to think, as you passed, that his prints would irritate the hell out of the fat Italian cleaning lady who mopped that floor every Sunday morning, her gargantuan, filthy-looking mop trailing stringy bits which reminded you of the puppets' hair in
Rosie and Jim
.

Kneeling by this poor boy in the rain, you realise slowly that you have to do something. His treacle-blood is seeping between the facemask and his skin, onto his lovely white neck. You remove the helmet as gently as you can, then you peel the mask downwards, away from the mouth, an unfurling of clementine peel from the fruit, his skin a pale pith in the lamplight. Somehow you remove your coat and fold it into a pillow under his head. Do you hold his head off the cold asphalt as you juggle with your coat? You can't remember. It was the black leather jacket you always wore, presumably. Blue jeans with it, always. Now, with cold air flaying you alive, the full scale of the tragedy becomes clear. He has a hole in the side of his head, above the right ear, and his hair all around it is matted with congealed blood. A car drives up and stops. You ask the driver to keep guard, then you run into the house.

The party is still going on, they haven't a clue what's happened. You push your way through a horde in the hallway, up the stairs past snogging couples, towards the linen cupboard on the first landing. You kneel by it, open its (pine) doors and grab sheets and pillowcases, newly-washed. Rising and turning swiftly, you race back down the stairs, noticing as you do so that you left dark wet footprints on the green stair-carpet as you went up them. Then you struggle through the shouting, laughing, smooching, smoking, drinking crowd in the hallway and run back into the road. Kneeling by the boy, you place a pillowcase over the wound and fold a sheet around his head to keep it clean. Your knee is being jabbed by chippings, so you stand up. Eventually, an ambulance arrives. They take him away. The rest is a blur. You can't remember what happened to the bike – who took it away? What happened to the sheets? Your coat? No idea at all. No, that's not quite correct. We can piece something together, using pictures. There's a photo of you somewhere, sitting astride your own red 250cc Suzuki, wearing that black bomber jacket. You've forgotten her name, the girl sitting behind you, grinning into the camera. But you haven't forgotten the jacket, emblem of your youth. After doing some crude mental arithmetic you realise that the girl on the bike behind you came after the girl at the party, the one who ran away because you didn't trust her. So the jacket survived the accident. You must have lifted it off the road as the ambulance jangled off into the distance.