Dear Micks,
Happy new year!! I hope you are all safe and well. Sorry for such a long absence. Naughty Charlotte. Twack. I will explain myself in my next posting. Meanwhile, here is an excellent story by Mario Reading, author of the Nostradamus Trilogy. Check out his website, he's got a very interesting biography. He's also a big fan of The Field. Hooray!
Bath Story
We’d gone to see an Art Film in Bath – Mother by Joon-ho Bong. It had been a little depressing. It turned out that the doting mother of the learning disabled son accused of murder was capable of murder herself on behalf of the boy. Then that the son they’d assumed was innocent was, in fact, inadvertently guilty. The dead girl had lobbed a rock at him – she was fed up with men following her – and he had lobbed it back. The snag was that it had hit her on the head. Then, being learning disabled, he had forgotten all about it. Cue his mother going on the warpath. She had finally ended by killing the rag-and-bone man who had witnessed the crime, and burning his shack down around his ears. By the end, we still didn’t know if it hadn’t been the mother who had caused her son’s learning disability in the first place by trying to poison both him and herself with Paraquat when he was six years old. My wife held out that he had been born that way, and Mother had been depressed, and wanted to end it all, but I felt that she had been really poor, and fed up with life, and because his brain wasn’t fully formed, the Paraquat had damaged him in some way and made him stupid. My wife, who works with learning disabled people herself, doesn’t believe that stupid is the correct word to use in such circumstances. I don’t agree with her. Stupid is as stupid does. The boy was stupid. At one point he goes along with a slick friend of his who maintains that it wasn’t him who karate-kicked the wing mirror off a Mercedes that nearly ran the learning disabled boy over, but the boy himself. There’s more, but I’ve forgotten it. This is two or three weeks after we left the cinema, and memory is fickle. Suffice it to say that the film overturned all your preconceptions, and gave you a few new ones to gnaw on. Which means it was pretty good, as films go. If depressing.
This morning I woke up with a dream that my wife had just told me she could be a lesbian. Then she told me that she could be attracted to somebody else. “Another woman?” I asked. “No. A man. And I have lied.” “Have you already betrayed me?” I asked in the dream. “Not yet.” I didn’t believe her. Let’s face it, she’d admitted herself that she’d lied to me. Or maybe she was lying when she told me that? “What is his name?” “Gulbransson.” Well that’s the name of the street my brother lives on in Germany. And my brother has early onset Parkinson’s, so that puts him out of the picture. I suppose this all comes from reading Truman Capote before one goes to sleep.
Anyway, my wife and I were leaving the cinema in Bath and crossing the road just by Pulteney Bridge, when these two young guys careered around the corner in a red Volkswagen. They were going way too fast, and they had to swerve to avoid us. “Slow down, you’re going too fast,” I shouted, waving my hand at them. The driver, maybe twenty-five years old, stopped the car and backed up. “Fuck off, old man. Who are you to tell me I’m going too fast? Cross at the fucking crossing.” There was more of the same. I walked on with my wife, ignoring them. I am not an old man. I am fifty-seven years old. And I’m still pretty big and muscled. I don’t scare easily. So I ignored these two and walked back over the bridge with my wife. I felt it was significant that they didn’t get out of the car. Felt rather proud of my sangfroid, if the truth be told. So we walked over the bridge and round to where my car was parked. Well these two young guys turned up again, as it was rather predictable they would. They stayed in their car and just watched us, though, hurling invective. “You’re offending my wife,” I said. “That isn’t acceptable. So we’re just going to leave.” I don’t know why I said that. Whether or not we would leave was none of their business, if truth be told.
We drove away and they followed. Also predictably. “They’re following us,” said my wife. She doesn’t scare easily. I noted that they were following us at some distance, as if they thought in some way we hadn’t seen them. Thought in some way we might be ignorant of their whereabouts. We headed out of Bath in caravan. “Looks like they want to follow us home,” said my wife. “As if,” said I. “They’ll get bored in a little while and turn back.” Privately I reckoned they would try to cut us up, but I didn’t want to say this to my wife. She probably thought it herself and didn’t want to say it to me. This is how misunderstandings occur.
Soon we were across the canal and heading for Warminster. They were still following us, maybe two hundred yards back. “Maybe they’re bored,” said my wife. She’d hit the nail on the head in my opinion. Whenever we passed through a village I stuck exactly to the speed limit. What I was telling them by this was that I, at least, didn’t speed through built up areas and put people’s lives at risk. The reality, of course, is that I do. But I intended to keep the moral high ground in this affair. Each time I slowed down, they slowed down too. We were maybe half an hour from Bath by this time, and I knew that, very soon, I would have to decide where to take them. But first I would give them a chance to fuck off out of there. At a narrow part of the road I overtook another car, leaving it so that they would not be able to follow me, as a third car was approaching. They waited a while and then overtook. It was then that I understood we wouldn’t shake them. I decided to play the Pied Piper. I would drive them straight to a police station. The only problem was that I didn’t know where the Police Station was in Warminster. And I didn’t fancy driving around town, with them on my tail, and asking someone. By now it was well after midnight. Most police stations would be shut anyway. It wasn’t like South Korea here, which is where the film we had been seeing in Bath was set. The police station in that film looked like something out of Bullitt. Our police stations aren’t like that. Everyone goes home at six, leaving a few cruisers to attend to parking violations and boy racers. And these guys weren’t boy racers. They were both in their mid to late twenties, with a clean car – they should have known better, in other words. I imagined what they would be saying to each other in the car, and it was something to do with ‘respect’. I obviously hadn’t shown them the proper respect. I was meant to be an old man. I was meant to be frightened of them. But, curiously, I wasn’t. Well at least I didn’t seem to be. Everybody is frightened most of the time, if you ask me. Frightened of death. Frightened of illness. Frightened of the vagaries of fate. I’m just like the others. Marginally sad most of the time. And frightened. But I don’t show it because I went to public school and watched The Dam Busters.
By this time my wife and I were making jokes to cheer ourselves up. But it had gone beyond a joke. You don’t follow someone for an hour late at night unless you have some intention to harm them. What if we had been really old? And really frightened? What then? Maybe I would have had a heart attack, or piled up the car and caused a tragedy. This is how the news is made. Everything you see on the news starts this way. With people behaving without thinking. Then it magnifies until there is a disaster and the journalists turn up. I could see the journalists turning up to this one. ‘Middle-aged – well, late middle-aged – man and wife held up on highway. Fight ensues. Man triumphs. Youths routed. Man ex-SAS. Knew how to use his fists. Warned youths that they were lethal weapons. Youths would have none of it. Routed.’ Well, it’s not how journalists write, but it’s how I was thinking. By this time I was quite angry – cue frightened. Fright and anger go together. If you get frightened, the best thing to do is to get angry. Then you forget you are frightened and behave inappropriately. That way you have some chance of turning things around before they go too far. It was at this point that I remembered about the police station in Salisbury. Which is well away from our home. I have passed it many times. It is a solid building. Large. Designed to house dozens of police. Maybe there would be one housed there at one in the morning?
I drove on. “They’re still behind us,” said my wife. “Do you think we ought to phone the police?” “Don’t look back,” I said. “I have a plan.” I told her what I had in mind. She laughed. She’s a cool customer, my wife. “They wouldn’t be that stupid,” she said. “Oh yes they would,” I said. “I’m going to be the Pied Piper and lead them straight to…where did the Pied Piper lead the children to?” “Hell?” my wife said. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that at all. “No,” I said. “I think it was the mountain where that old king sits, and his beard wraps itself round and round the table. And when it goes enough times around, he is going to come out with his army and save Germany.” “Are the children part of his army?” “Who knows,” I said. And I didn’t.
Well these two boys are still following us as I enter the outskirts of Salisbury. They are still hanging back, as if they think we don’t realise it is them in the red car two hundred yards behind us. “They’re still behind us,” says my wife. “They are falling into my trap,” I say, although I don’t really believe it. They can’t be that stupid, surely? We are nearly at the police station when I say, “I am going to give them one last chance.” Why do I say that? Why do I decide to give them one last chance? Have they given us a chance? Not on your life. Maybe I think they will still go away and think better of the whole affair. Maybe I think they think we haven’t noticed them, and that half the fun is gone if the people you are following don’t know they are being followed. Like a stalker stalking somebody who doesn’t know they are being stalked. Where is the fun in that? I pass the police station without looking at it – I don’t want to tip them off – and go to the main roundabout. I coast around it. They follow. Surely they must have seen the police station as we passed it? They can’t be that dumb. I take them around the roundabout and back towards the police station. They follow. I drive into the police station and park in front of the main door, which is locked and bolted. But there is a telephone set into the wall beside the door bell. The two boys continue on a few yards along the road, and then pull up onto the kerb, hidden from us by a bit of greenery, in the shape of a raggedy hedge. “They’re still there,” my wife says. “Hiding behind the hedge.” “They must be insane,” I say. “Shall I go down and check?” my wife says. I told you she was a cool customer. “No!” I almost shout. I don’t want her to spoil my plan.
I pick up the phone and a woman comes on the line. “What can I do for you?” she says. “We’re being followed,” I say. “All the way from Bath. These two young guys are following us and I am fed up with it. They are parked a little way along from the police station.” “They are still here?” she says, unbelievingly. “Yup.” I say. “Still here.” “I’ll send a squad car. Just stay where you are.” “We’re not going anywhere,” I say. “We want to see this thing out.”
A few minutes later a squad car arrives and parks in front of the boys. I should say men, really, as they are in their mid to late twenties, but in my opinion these are not men yet. Nor probably will ever be. A policeman walks towards us from the direction of the red car. We discuss what happened. We are given an incident number. 413. I remember it to this day (three weeks later). “I suggest you two head on home while we keep them talking,” he says. “Yes, Officer,” I say. I’ve always wanted to call someone officer, and here is my chance. We get into the car and drive away from there – in the opposite direction to our house, needless to say. I intend to go cross country to get there. I don’t want to run into these two again just as they are leaving town. They will have my number by now, and will recognise the car after all those miles in our company. It wouldn’t be fair on my wife to subject her to another hour or two of this sort of harassment. I look at her. She doesn’t seem harassed. I realise that I am the only one who is harassed.
“I think the mother giving the child Paraquat was what turned him into a learning disabled,” I say. “No,” my wife says. “I don’t think so. I think she decides to kill herself and him because she is too poor to cope.” I still don’t agree with her, but I decide to give it best. It has been a long night.
© Mario Reading 2010
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