An old, stout, confused woman, with jumbled memories, stands on the waterfront.
She mourns a boy she spent an April night with so long ago. A drunken proposal, after a tea-dance on the pier and illicit nips of brandy. Swaying in the wind on the edge of Bawley Bay like skinny reeds. In that place where General Gordon smiled, Pocahontas cried, and Lady Franklin once waved at two wooden ships that sailed off into the ice.
He’d called her “My pretty flutterby…like a fritillary!”. He was the only one who ever had.
“Oh you daft boy… but I’m no painted lady… more a plain cabbage white”, she’d teased. “Anyway we must love like mayflies now.”
Or something like that. For wishes and covenants were as slippery as fishes back then, and there was no time to waste. He flew off next day and, like so many, he never came back to her.
An old man with a burn-scarred face stands on a small patch of crumbling tarmac… to the south…on the high ground near Riverview. He stamps on those last remains of a once rumbling runway, with jumbled thoughts. All has changed, except that easterly chill. “We take off upwind to fly and we sail off upwind to die” he mused. “It’s always against us.”
He looks down towards the river with rushes of faded memories like hers. One reel is still so clear and sharp. That waitress he danced with in ’42, who took him back to The Royal Clarendon Hotel. You don’t forget your first… her smell… her skin… the hair down there. A prince that night alright.
She’d always assumed he’d died … so many did. He’d actually bailed out blazing over France and spent the rest of the war as a POW. …came back weary and glad at first, then skinny, ugly and bitter.
He spotted her just once… a few years after he returned … from a distance… one spring in the ’50’s, walking with husband and children… on the old Medway canal towpath that came to be called Peanut Road.
He’d turned away unseen. Would she have recognised him? Probably not.
Such things happen in wartime…and in its aftermath.
So I’m hugging her tight. A rear waist lock with my legs outside hers, my ankles hooked around the railings. My cheek pressed against her bare back… in case she has the sense to slam her head back into my face. She’s stronger than she looks, and very determined… so it’s dicey and intimate at the same time.
We didn’t say much. Most of it was wrestling and wriggling and heaving and grunting noises. There’s no way I’m letting go …If she goes, I’m going down with her… to the end… to prove a point.
There’s always gallows humour, and I was getting pissed off. Try and make this girl laugh to break through.
“Oh, the fucking irony of this.” I said, “Here we are…The first time in years that I’m holding a pretty woman… with tits to die for, by the Thames on a warm summer evening. And she’s trying to fucking drown herself… and I’m 67 with a heart condition…and that’s a hernia the size of a grapefruit in case you’re worried about the lump pressing into your arse…”
She snorted, couldn’t help herself. Perhaps we’re getting somewhere at last.
“Ooh. I’ve got a hiatus hernia”, she goes, “Had it for years. Gaviscon addict me. But that won’t help you …not with one way down there in your balls like that.”
So, we had this brief, lucid, surreal discussion about me getting a better truss, inguinal hernia operations, keyhole surgery versus being cut open, and NHS waiting lists, and I thought I’d got her good.
But then she said, “Nice try Fucker!”, and she tried, and failed, to bite me and got her leg further over the railings. But I was not letting go.
And then later…towards the end. Nearly thirty minutes later. Where does this stuff come from? My mind dredged up the most random thing. I found myself singing that stupid Andrew Gold song; “Never Let Her Slip Away”…and she joins in…and we both sing it quietly as the police arrive to prise us apart with her crying in frustration and us both bloody and snotty.
She only cried when she knew for sure that I’d scuppered her plan and that I’d never let go. And even then, she didn’t cry for long.
“Because I love her… I’m hoping that I never recover…I’ll never let her slip away”. Awful! The schoolboy shames! What would my thirteen-year-old classmates have said?
“That song’s for girls… Are you a homo Johnny? HEY! …Everybody! Johnny’s a homo…a Bay City Roller Boyo… probly wants to bum David Cassidy!”
And the girls would have tittered too, and said “fie!”, and then I would have punched someone…probably Paul Stentiford because I hated them all, but he was smaller.
Why would I have stored away a soppy relic from my early 1970’s adolescence so deeply, considering I loved Slade, T. Rex and The Sweet, and was edging towards Black Sabbath and cigarettes and a stolen Fiesta magazine?
I just found out that some cooler friends; proper Metal heads among them, have been closet Andrew Gold afficionados for years. I suppose he died quite young and hasn’t had the MOJO hipness replacement operation yet…though he’s on that waiting list for sure. Come on though! Was he really that good?
I really don’t want to hear that song again. Or Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You”, which was playing on the jukebox when we finally got back to the pub…and which the algorithms saw fit to put in my YouTube feed the next morning. That really was a bit close to the bone…a low blow. Once that song starts you must see it through… whether you hate it or love it.
Nice try Hope Sandoval you fucker with your mystery wordplay. Stay out of this. Not your circus, and not your monkeys!
I feel like this week I’ve seen the glam side of the sex industry …Melissa Todd, Britain’s most pricy dominatrix, at a poetry reading on Sunday at The Mole Hole; then the most miserable side of that industry just two nights later.
Juxtaposition. Maybe it’s the new food of love…play on.
ii
To anybody passing we’d have seemed a couple, but there was no-one passing and it’s away from the road and the pub; and dark. If it hadn’t been for the smart woman running the pub that night, who had a hunch and came looking for me, we could have been there hours. Either that or in the river.
Even if I’d had my phone with me and a free arm; thumbing 999 on a mobile in this part of town is sketchy. You connect to the Essex call centre rather than the Kent one and, these days, since the ferry closed, Essex is another country across a watery border. The police will be late, but aren’t they always? They did turn up though.
Nice clothes, articulate, late thirties perhaps? Mid forties? These days I find guessing a woman’s age harder. An independent escort, and I’m pretty sure of that. A south-east London accent mixed with curious moments of pure Bristolian…the weird accent mix was why I noticed her when I was at the bar.
It’s a bit embarrassing, but a couple of years spent collecting rent around Argyle Square in the early 1980’s means I have a nose for that stuff…quite literally in this case as I smelled not even the faintest whiff of perfume… and we were about as close as lovers could be, and perhaps closer than many ever get, for over thirty minutes.
Discreetness is important. Her first story that it was “just a Tinder meet gone wrong”, didn’t add up. Women don’t put on their sexiest clothes, complete with red “come fuck me” heels for a date… and yet forget to spray on a dash of scent. Nah! Much less do they leave a half-drunk glass of wine, a classy leather handbag, mobile phone, and said red shoes on the table…then walk barefoot… a hundred yards down the riverside, over broken beer bottles and worse, to the one area with no decent lighting.
Or maybe she’d got dressed for this special occasion and, logically figured that L’Eau D’Issey or whatever, would be wasted in the water. My initial hunch was correct though.
Eventually she let on she’d been beaten up by her husband a couple of days before. And attacked by a client earlier in the day. She never used the word ‘rape’, but she knew I’d know. She had old bruises on her boobs and fresh bleeding welts on her legs and arms; so it’s likely that was true.
“That’s nothing though…” she told me, “So what. Nothing new. It was fair fights and believe me I gave plenty back. They won’t be hurting me again…Never. Nobody cares and this is what I want. Just let me go. Leave me the fuck alone and you can all tell stories in that pub tomorrow.”
“As it happens, actually, I do write songs and poems and I really don’t want you to be in one of them”
“Well ack-shoo-ally…” mocking my middle-class filler word, “… You can Piss Off!”
“But I’m still not going to let you go. Ever.”
Her daughter’s ‘A’ level results were disastrous. She wouldn’t be going to uni. You do all that shit to ensure your kid has a better life…and well, I suppose you’d feel a failure as a mother. Now that would be properly grim…hearing the only reason you ever did the job call you a “useless…never there for me slag.” That could flip a tough woman over the edge, and that was a thing she kept coming back to. Funny thing is I spent years teaching in girls’ secondary schools. It seemed best not to mention that though.
She said she had worked in a school once but hated school holidays…didn’t surprise me. Everyone in her business hates school holidays, bank holdays..and the third week of the month before pay day. But the school summer holidays are the worst because the men can’t slip away.
When the police did arrive, and she realised she was more likely to be sectioned than die, she asked them to call a man. I’m sure ‘Darryl’ was her driver or her security. He certainly wasn’t someone she knew well. And he wasn’t her pimp because she was in charge.
The police and I clocked ‘Darryl’ straight away. Turning up in his Merc and sunglasses on his head, with cool, slightly embarrassed indifference. I’m sure he’d driven her there…or more likely the Clarendon Hotel and, rather than wait as usual, until she’d done the client, she’d sent him home early. This nonsense was above his pay grade and their attempt to portray themselves as a plausible couple were laughably useless.
I don’t ever praise the police. I don’t like them, and they don’t like me…for old reasons. But to be fair, once they arrived, they did a good and sensitive job, and they weren’t going to let her go with him. ‘Darryl’ tried not to show it, but he was pleased about that. If she did manage to convince them that she’d “had just a few too many and fancied a swim”, then the cops would follow them ‘home’, and he said his kids were asleep. That slip was a blooper and a half… “My daughters”. I bet he said it on purpose. ”My”.
You will find that men who wear sunglasses on their heads at night are seldom who they really are.
Her fingers moved towards his hand but he put it in his pocket.
iii
There were two situations in the past when I saw jumpers and, in both cases, if I’d figured out what was happening, and had even five seconds warning, I could have intervened.
One at Hong Kong airport was an exercise in well executed banality. This businessman sitting opposite finished his crossword. He neatly folded the newspaper and put it into his leather briefcase, drained the last of his morning coffee, checked his shoelaces, calmly walked two steps to the stairwell parapet and vaulted over…straight down the gaps between the flights into the check in area. Bastard did it in front of a thirteen year old girl.
I still can’t bear to talk about the other one and never will.
Perhaps those missed opportunities helped me recognise the signs this time. But one out of three is a shit ratio and I don’t feel good or remotely heroic about this one. It really doesn’t work like that.
I know she won’t thank me. I know we don’t fix these things just like that and it’s quite likely she’ll try again. She was composed, had made up her mind, like she was in a Ketamine state of grace, a bit disassociated but knew what she was doing.
Gravesend, when a high tide starts to ebb, is the most effective place to slip away silently in deep roaring undercurrents; away from cameras…out to the sea… or at least to the marshes. You won’t be found for days. It’s a very harsh thing to say but Dartford Bridge is for amateurs and attention seekers. Your remains will be found quickly if you jump from there. The bridge is making a statement, the big final fuck you look at me, gesture. You’ll be on the telly. An incident icon on the satnav screens of stationary cars. You’ll hold up the traffic for at least half an hour and get all manner of reactions from the people who never noticed your misery.
Such a pro…She wanted to slip away unseen, unheard, sober, un-smelt, in her loveliest dress, leaving the accessories behind. She wasn’t going to need the handbag, fags, phone, bank cards or those blood-red shoes…or the rest of that medium glass of Cabernet.
Did I do it for her, or for my ego, or the ungrateful kid she’d leave left behind? I really don’t know…I really didn’t think about it. Was I just another bloke forcing his will on a woman who felt she’d made a final and rational decision, based on the evidence of lifelong experience…of the men she had known?
Even worse…was I just a cliché…the middle-aged man with a saviour complex; a sort of St Vitalis of Gaza in a truss, untying the woman from the railway tracks? Now there’s a late-night pub discussion about free will, performative masculinity and early Hollywood iconography if ever I heard one!
All I know is that when I phoned the police next day they told me simply that she was alive, getting ‘follow-up’, and in a safe place. I hope she makes it. I want to know that I made a difference for the better but, barring an equally random encounter, I never will. We might see each other at the ASDA checkout, pretend we’ve never met…and that’s as it should be. Hah maybe I’ll start humming Strangers In The Night to see if she joins in!
The people who really stepped up, and who are missing from this tale so far; the ones who intervened first, who called the cops, who mopped up the mess, who watched over me and her as we struggled, who say they would have dragged me away if it had all ‘gone tits up’, who finished their shift at the pub and locked up…who gave me that hug I didn’t think I would need…were women. They were brilliant. Having more blokes there would surely have led to nowhere good.
I’m pretty sure I was incapable of acting otherwise even if I had thought about it. And I really, really, would have followed her down into that water if she’d got away …out of stubborn pride at keeping a promise. Dumb, eh? But I was never letting go…I told you that.
So, call me toxic and spank me with a spare rib. I probably did it because walking away or minimising your involvement, requires analysis. My exes will gladly confirm that conscious analytic decisions are not my strong point. Could I have said “Not my circus, not my monkeys” and walked away? Nah… it IS our circus, and we are all the monkeys.
One last thought.
There is something. I very nearly said it to her, but I couldn’t get the words out in the moment. I didn’t have the breath, and it didn’t seem important at the time…and despite wishful thinking, it wouldn’t have made any difference at all.
“Don’t spoil my future memories of a town I never expected to love this much, and which I will have to leave too soon”.
I think back to another half-hour; at the very top of Rochester Castle, where I held a woman who I hardly knew, arms around her belly, in a similar, though gentler way, twenty-five years ago. Whenever I see those ruins, I feel the sort of deep fondness that I want to feel for this town.
I never expected to be this bruised and discombobulated. There are moments in our lives that are… like dipping randomly into a fucking Bukowski anthology!
London 2003 and Dartmoor in the early 1960’s, a dead girl, a lost courier, a broken radio and the way time and space degrade signal and memory. Image courtesy of Rider’s digest 2007 : Ray Johnson alias ‘Dylan’ on an Express Despatch bike swinging west onto Piccadilly from St James Street. Many thanks to Dave Gurman for identifying the despatch rider and location.
ONE:Carry on through
It’s summer 2003 and the office girls are flirting with the riders at the pelican crossing. They do that.Why?
Unintelligible crackling static…a demented dalek walkie-talkie on my left shoulder.
‘Someone Call?’
The last firm I worked for used Motorola Dolphins… digital handsets…clear as a bell… the microwaves burn your skin…you end up with a red left shoulder, but they work all the way to Calais. This courier outfit takes pride in an antiquated ICOM system with an effective range of about a mile… less in the rain. It’s a joke. We only attempt to use our radios if we can actually see the tip of the office aerial up on Hither Green Lane…or we’re above it…Crystal Palace is good …and Forest Hill…and anywhere near the river…except New Cross and Deptford. My controller, Vicky, fails to see the funny side. Time and time again.
‘Nothing’s wrong with our radios…and anyway there’s no weekly rental…just the eighty quid deposit…count yerself lucky’.
Every rider complains, every rider is ignored and every radio is bordering on useless.
The wrong way Miss Controller….but Charlton it is.
Roger is never enough. It’s always ‘Roger Rodge’. It’s a courier thing.
I don’t know how you write the soul of static…that ‘kxkxkkxkx’ sound…it doesn’t matter much to you, but it’s a major part of my world; those anonymous, senseless interjections which corrupt meaning or memory in direct proportion to distance or time. It will be ‘kxkxk kxkxkx’ from here on. That will have to do.
This job, this kxkxkx of a job, is pretty much the only white trash job left in England. Name me another. The police? Haha.The army? Not as risky;not even in wartime. We have a sort of professionalism. We are brave.We are quicker.We have good hearts and firm arses. In winter we get colder than anyone else living and we get as lonely as the dead and we get smellier than the dead in summer. All for one and one for one unless you crash.
For most of us it’s a living come to via misfortune; a sort of Foreign Legion without the silly hats and guns. We are an anarchic democracy of misfits. It’s work that amplifies your foibles and obsessions. Do the job more than a couple of years and you will be partially crazy. Do the job for longer and the statistics you’d rather not know about come into play. Maybe you have a small problem or a troubled love, or cash worries, or you’re far from your Balkan home in an alien city? Well this is just the job for you. You’ll dwell and re-think and obsess until some mobile phone wielding cunt of a BMW driver sideswipes you into the gutter and then you’ll get up, climb back on and dwell some more. Right now I am dwelling on Dead Doris. Next week I may dwell on you.
I am a motorcycle courier called Kilo 72, or rather ‘Kilo Seven-Two Seven-Two’. So good they named me twice. I spend upwards of ten hours a day dancing around on my poor aching balls delivering trivia to soft faced twats who complain whenever the temperature of their ergonomically designed offices falls by a fraction of a degree and who’s idea of hell is probably a busted mouse. Mostly I risk my life carrying cosmetic samples or artwork from PR agencies to media companies; but I’ve carried almost everything that will fit on a bike at least once and a few things that almost didn’t.
On Friday I delivered Penhaligon’s organic face cream to Vogue, Marie Claire and Sophie Ellis Bextor. I did drops for the Ministry of Sound and the Ethiopian ambassador. I am faceless and anonymous. I can gain entry into any London office by wearing a helmet and radio, mumbling ‘courier’ into an entry phone. I have delivered packages to people who know me and they have had no clue as to my identity under these battle clothes. From 8 AM ‘til 6 PM the trusty tool between my legs is home. I am not fast. I ride a slow old Honda 250N…the Superdream…the original despatcher’s tool…useless above 60mph,but lithe in traffic, comfortable and tough.
The fast don’t last. Couriers never describe each other as ‘fast’…that word is reserved for fun times or for deathwish amateurs. ‘Fast’ is an unlucky word. When we’re good we’re ‘quick’…and I am quicker than some.
‘Kilo 72-72 POB times 2… SE7 headed EC4 and KT13’
‘Er Kilo72 carrion threw kxkxkx easy four then kxkxkx Katie…thirteen’
‘Roger Rodge’
‘Summer Wunelsecall…69 to Mimi fuxkxkx Grub some grub… Roger Rodge’
I know what the controller is saying most of the time. Mind you, it took a few months. Translation: “Number 69 to me me me and grab some grub.” So Lucky Boy 69 gets to snack back at the office. Kilo 72 (me) has to ‘Carry On Through’ to postcode areas EC4 then KT13. No Bombay Bad Boy pot-noodle lunching for me today.
An easy one …Blackheath -> Deptford-> Rotherhithe -> Tower Bridge -> Upper Thames St -> Puddledock -> Tudor St -> Temple…16 mins.
Drop…
‘Print here please’.
Fag break.
Now off to KT13 Walton on Thames.
Blackfriars -> Stamford St-> Waterloo-> Vauxhall-> Wandsworth -> Kingston, then along the river on the gloriously secret A3050. Nice and smooth. Deceptively relaxed and in that emptiness zone. Thinking today’s obsession over and over. Self hypnotised into sharpened awareness through repetition of just one question or fantasy. You see every nail lying in the gutter, every face on the pavement, every one of the thousands upon thousands of cars you overtake. Then you forget them.
This rhythm of life is the the one that will keep you alive.
See ->Assess -> Pass-> Forget
Seen-> Assessed-> Passed -> Forgotten.
Sometimes I use the twenty-five percent trick for red lights. Jump one in four when it’s safe and the rest will be green. Bad you say? Well I drive defensively, with target avoidance skills engaged and escape routes constantly planned. I learned to ride in the seventies when brakes had single pot calipers and tyres were skinny.
The unpredictable always happens. See, assess, pass, forget.
I’d better get on to the Dead Doris stuff.
TWO:Peas kxkxkxkx
Windy Post Cross
“Lonely there, betwixt moor and sky,
Where great grey clouds go drifting by,
And the peewit utters her plaintive cry,
The windy post stands silently.
The hope of the gay little leat;
That through the gorse and heather was straying,
Singing and sparkling there at their feet;
Drowning their sighs and their cares in its waters’
From: The Windy Post V. L. Phillips, 1923.
She died. A long, long time ago. I was five. She was three. Her name was Doris Vanstone; an old woman’s name. A young Doris in 1963; named after Miss Day…a frump choice even then. There’s not many girls called Doris now. I met a couple of Dots but they were all Dorothies. We had a girl at school later on, ‘Piggin Doris’; a pretty, sweet girl but not my Doris. ‘Piggin’ Doris is well and fat and forty-five but she’s not my girl.
My Doris
Drowned in a canal
Four miles from home
On her own
Blue dress
One dirty white sock
No shoes.
My friend.
The kxkkxx job is about distance and time. Understand it. Know it. Some people never get the hang of it. Too late, or too early. I figured out time before I could read and Doris made me think about miles per hour. About just how she could travel from my side to nowhere, from catching eels in a small stream at the edge of Dartmoor to weed snagged whiteness in a stannary town canal.
The middle of Tavistock, not on our side of the town; a long, long walk from Windypost Cross for my three year old Doris. Maybe she did walk three mile just to drown. On a whim, in the wind, just before her lunch.
Tavistock Canal
Nobody ever asked me. Maybe no one thought to. Maybe nobody saw us playing. They didn’t think, “That’s just not likely.” We were always together. Mostly with my sister but not with my sister that day. I can’t remember why. Chickenpox maybe.
Grown-ups can be very thick. Nobody asked. No kindly red-faced Constable Knapweed enquired. Later we had a visit from Michael Heseltine while he was canvassing for the general election. Everybody fussed and smiled. He shook my hand, “Polite young man.” I wondered if he would ask me about Dead Doris. This tall blonde posh man.
He didn’t.
We were 20 yards from my back door and 30 from hers. I went home to lunch and so did she … at least as far as the narrow road which separated our houses. I called “sausages”. She would have squeaked “peas” back to me. Our joke… every day… when our mums called “Din-ner!”
That last word she said to me… ‘peas’. Not shouted…just a quiet high girl voice. A sunny, windy voice against a faded bracken and yellow flowered gorse Dartmoor backdrop.
‘Sauskxkxkxkes’ …… ‘Pekxkxas’… ‘Please?’
Time
Wind
Static.
Degraded by
Time-static.
Gone.
THREE: Fordson Thames Model E83
In 1965 there were hardly any cars… well of course there were loads of cars but not many makes and models. They all had a different sound. I could pretty much identify every one . Austin A40’s, Morris Travellers, Ford Anglias. That’s the thing about the old engines and more importantly rear wheel drive. The transmission tunnel, coupled with the gearbox and the resonance of the body shape combine to give each model a distinctive sound. Nothing sounds like a Morris Minor and nothing sounds like a Beetle. Vans were just as identifiable…even more so.
A Fordson Thames Model E83. They were ugly fuckers and unreliable. Someone had one. A no-name man but I knew his sound. Summer evenings just past bedtime, whining up the hill on the edge of the golf course, then left towards Down Road. A cream coloured…something… red brown seats? Nukmbkxkr plkakxte… kxkxkxkx? No chance. I think it had windows not panels; more like a small post bus.
The No-face Man. No-name Man. This man with van. Time… the crafty silent cousin of static kxkxkx’d it. Did I ever see his face? He spoke to us twice. A kind man … my sister and me… as we started the walk back from Whitchurch School. A van by the kissing gate which led into the fields…where we’d leave the road and cut through. That’s all gone now.
‘I know your mum. Hop in an I’ll take you home… quicker… big bull in that field…and creepy-crawlies.’
We knew better and walked. There were only silly sheep and cows there but we watched out for a bull…and wasps.
We told mum when we got home. She blew up.
“Don’t talk. Don’t get in cars. Don’t make up stories. Don’t lie.”
“But he was a nice man”
We knew she was right though.
When he tried again we decided not to tell Mum… less trouble. We talked to him and he showed us a trick and said our Mum was his friend and she’d be glad if we took a lift with him but we still walked home. We never saw him after that second time. Did I ever see his face? Heard him lots though. Fordson Thames E83. I saw one in that Heartbeat programme on the telly the other night. Groan,clatter,whine.
Doris didn’t go to our school. Too young. Anyway I reckon she was two years dead by then. I was seven. Her big brother Colin was fun. We used to play glove puppet shows with dead rabbits and chickens in the shed. Then we’d help him skin and pluck them. I loved playing with the rabbit skins best.
FOUR:Broken Rabbits
On the roundabout at the end of Beckenham High Street there is a large shop called “Pine Markets”. There are wooden samples outside on the pavement and its large plate windows are of frosted glass. Not much pine furniture is sold there. It’s the headquarters of Air Time Leasing; an ordinary, boring, corporate name. ATL Inc is the holding company for Tantalize TV who make, master and distribute pornographic movies. Good clients for us couriers. Small packages, well addressed.
Anyway, I was to take a master tape…”British Housewives III” (Dir: Ben Dover) to the Ann Summers HQ in Whyteleafe near Caterham. I used to go there a lot with the previous despatch company, delivering prototypes from a company called Bishop Designs Ltd in Sydenham; usually packages about 8 inches long by 2 inches wide.
So a nice easy run there, sun’s shining, bike knows its way. Pull into the yard… Shit… package is gone … every couriers nightmare. I had to drive back slowly, panicking all the way to Purley before I found it…a small black clenched latex fist, dusty in the gutter. It still looked serviceable but the jiffy bag nearby was mangled. So I did what good couriers do. I went to a corner shop and bought a large brown envelope and addressed it to the original recipient; one Rebecca Davies. I placed the dildo in the envelope. No-one the wiser.
Rushed back to Ann Summers Ltd, asked for Ms Davies.”She’s in the loading bay office”. I’ve been to the place a lot, but I’ve never been in the warehouse. I’m impressed. This is a huge industry. They have 40ft high narrow aisle racking with fly by wire cherry pickers. It’s almost as big as the old BT warehouse in Crayford. Crates and crates of sex toys, lingerie, astrolube, magazines and films. The thing that cracks me up though is the “Returns/Faulty bay. There are three huge cages full of reject Rampant Rabbits with a sign that reads “Crush/Recycle.” I advise you never to buy a blue one as they were far and away in the majority. There must have been 10,000 of the things in various states of desolation.
“Delivery.”
“Rebecca’s not here. I’ll sign.” said a bald sweaty man wearing an Ann Summers tie and carrying a shovel. He signs my docket. Unreadable scrawl. No good. I have to cover my arse on this drop.
“Print please”. He prints.
As I leave the place I look down at the docket. The printed name is mine. My initial reaction was to mutter “Fucking joker” to myself…but how could he have known my name? It must be genuine. My namesake works in a warehouse shoveling condemned vibrators for a living. And I think I’ve got a shitty donkey’s job.
FIVE: Horsey Girl
I guess
You’d be the darkest one
Maybe more like the shadow
Of a Stallion
Or a river
You would be a still one
Perhaps running so deep
I would need to rent
A bathyscaphe
Nonsense?
So?
Chuck in a free verse curveball. As I said, the unexpected will happen. Poetry is a kind of distracting static here. It won’t kill you.
See
Assess
Pass
Forget.
SIX : Lavinia Parker
Lewisham Council meals on wheels van slicing through the junction at Lower Sydenham on a red light. Her red light not mine. In the rain she nearly got me. Blond hair, mouth like an ‘O’. On the bone… they often are.
Countersteering is a good skill, though many believe it to be a myth. It’s a phenomenon where a motorcycle can be made to jumps sideways by wrenching the bars in the opposing direction to the one you want to go. It feels all wrong, against instinct, but it’s bone saving conjury.
It’s risky in the wet but I have no option…and anyway it’s a reflex for me now.
Countersteering doesn’t work with a pony. Don’t try it.
I park up and roll a fag.
Park…Pony… Pony… Park Parkkxkxkxer… Lavinia.
Lkxkxinia Lavinia Parker.Where did she come from? Out of a near miss by the Sydenham gasometers. Blonde with an ‘n’ shaped mouth and a grey pony.
I’m back in 1965 . She rode most days. I ride most days. She came out of that field through the big gate and rode past the van towards the golf links.
“Well Hello Andrew…and Sarah… nice day at school?”
A hard voice she had. Muddy jodphurs. Did she speak to him? She would have. The Kind man, No-face man, No-name man. I bet Lavinia Parker’s long dead.
The Kind man had a record that second time he met us. A seven inch vinyl single. The first one I ever saw. He was balancing it on the tip of his left index finger, spinning it and holding an open safety pin in his other hand. Trying to play it. Our world was a very quiet place then and even quieter right there. He showed us something magic. A good trick. A tiny, tinny, broken-up sound…but what song?
“…Before you’ll see me cry”
‘Show us again. Again.’
“…kxkxkkxk kxkxkxkx just what you kxkxkx to do now”.
Magic trick: music from a pin.
“…Better go now.”
Go … now. GO NOW.
We loved that song, my sister and I. There in the sun by the kissing gate that led to the fields and the walk home from school. There is something else, a fragment, a corner of the eye glimpse, and maybe I imagine it.
No. Even allowing for static I can make them out.
Moody Blues……HE HAD HER SHOES.
SEVEN:Extrapolation.
A woman once asked me what the word meant. The explanation got me into a whole lot of trouble. Then we went to bed.
I got to be good at deciphering from poor data. Filling in the gaps left by noise. It’s not difficult if you know the limited vocabulary that fits a job, or the finite number of story plots, or the repeating characteristics of the human phenotype, or the Newtonian physics of relationships.
I get practice every day in this kxkxk-ing courier job; with incomplete addresses and a broken walkie-talkie. It takes practice but it gets easier. There’s satisfaction in figuring out a whole scenario from a couple of facts, or a slip of the tongue; building truth from the one vital thing that’s missing. We riders watch pavements, faces, weather and cars with utter concentration. We see the same deadly mistakes repeated over and over. We see the same flirty smiles on receptionists’ faces as we say “sign here please” a hundred times a week. We travel the same routes over and over again. It’s just patterns.
Seen-> Assessed-> Passed -> Forgotten.
Well it’s no longer important to poor dead Doris, or to me, but I’m buggered if I’ll ever figure this one out properly.
And this is where I’m up to, in early middle age, by the gasometers, heaving nicotine, in Lower Sydenham, forty-odd years on.
EIGHT: She drowned and the Kind No-face man had her shoes in his van and nobody asked us so we never said.
We grow up and we forget how stupid grown-ups are. All they ever had to do was ask but does it matter now? It might matter, though more likely it doesn’t after so long. Static stole the sense of it and a truth that will do no good to anybody was lost for a while. That’s all.
I dwell on it often enough to get me through these dangerous days. “Kilo 72-72 Home clear in SE13.”
You lost me Doris.
“I lost you.”
Breaking up. Go again…
Old blue Honda curving at the ragged edges of tyre adhesion.
Moody Blues. He’s got your shoes
“Go now”
Before you’ll see me cry
kxkxkxkxk
copyright J Hayter 2018. First written in 2005, a few months after I stopped riding for a living. The industry was dying with the advent of broadband and I had to do something safer before my reflexes let me down. Of all the occupations I’ve had, despatch work was the one I’m most proud of…a job where there is no bullshit because bullshit will put you in hospital fast.
