N is for Nihilism

Before the early 1990s Mostar was a pleasant town where restaurant lights danced on its rivers to the delight of tourists who visited its famous Medieval bridge.  By the end of the decade it was a visitor attraction again. When I arrived there, against my will in 1993, it was a hell hole and a testimony to man’s inhumanity to man.

In Bosnia in the early 1990s the Bosnian Serbs turned against the Bosnian Muslims and implemented a policy of ethnic cleansing. In Mostar the Croats fought the Serbs and later turned against the Moslems, splitting the old town in half.

In a basement in eastern Mostar, we slept and woke to the rhythm of the mortars. The whine of the shells and the shrieks of the injured were all part of our daily routine. Mostar was testimony to the fragility of peace and how when things go bad, they can go bad quickly. The kindness of the strangers who had let Jacques and I share their cars back in France, was a distant memory, as was the turquoise waters of Greece.

Each day swarthy men would put their faces next to mine and urge me in a foreign tongue to get out and fight. Each day my body was unwilling to move and I was racked with thirst due to the shortage of water. Sometimes there was even a beauty to these sun drenched streets despite the jagged and wrecked buildings. The mountains above me held a serenity. Then I would be forced to fire at dusky figures at the end of the street. Sometimes woman and children would pass the ever shifting front line. There would be screaming and livid red pools would split the grey in two.

The only fighter who took an interest in me was called Drago. We would share fire water liquor in a bunker and he would tell me about how the Serbs were pulling down the minarets to the south of us and how his cousins were raped by the neighbors they had drank coffee with for the last 30 years.

“It is war and it is the worst thing I have ever seen,” he told me. He would pump his large first in the air. “Give me boredom any time. Even my wife, God forbid.”

Drago told me the Muslims were constrained by international restrictions on getting arms and were pitted against regular soldiers. Yet their ranks were being boosted by sullen bearded men from Afghanistan and the rest of the Middle East.

“Mujahideen. They have cold eyes and even colder hearts. They would shoot me in the head without a second thought for not bending down far enough when I pray. You might think this war is bad but it’s tame compared to the atrocities they have seen. “

I wasn’t convinced. One Friday they sent me out down a narrow defile known as “sniper alley.” From the morning there had been a steady boom, boom of gunfire. Our objective was to force our way down the alley and take out a Croat position on top of an old bakery. We could see the shadowy figures up there, moving across the barbed wire. We could hear shouts and screams. A harsh rattling of a machine gun fire sounded down the alley and we flattened ourselves against a wall. I saw the bullets pushing up dirt and mud. 

Then I saw him in the mud and the filth of the alley. The child must have been only four but he had the face of someone older. It was contorted in a rictus of pain. The child was holding his stomach and black liquid was swelling out and running into the mud and the slime of the street where the shelling had blasted apart the sewers months ago. I ignored the shrieks from my company and found myself running into the alley to scoop up the child. He looked at me intently, his eyes were already whitening over and saliva ran down my arms. The black liquid continued to pump from him. I was close to a doorway when I heard the deadly rattle of the machine gun resume. Something that felt like the jagged edge of pain was searing at my leg, gnawing and biting. I went crashing to the floor and the guns resumed. After that there was nothing; just a numbing darkness and a vision of a bloody skein being pulled over the moon.

M is for Mostar

High on a rounded hill overlooking the glittering Aegean we laid Jacques to rest.  The olive grove by the cemetery looked onto two of the sturdy stone wind mills . It had been one of the artist’s favorite spots. He was a long way from his native France and there was not a single family member at his funeral. It was how he would have liked it.  I knew my time in Greece was coming to a close so I breathed in the citrus infused air. I smelled the pine from the big somber trees behind me and the salt of the sea. I heard the distant bells from the goats on the hills blending with the mournful singing as we laid him in the ground.

I hugged the old men and walked away from the roughly hewn cross that marked the artist’s final resting place. I laid his easel on his grave. As I walked away on the meandering path by the shimmering sea I felt more alone than I had ever done before. Jacques was the closest thing I had to a father. I was 19-year-old and all alone in the world. I had my paints and easel and very little money to make it home. But I had a piece of paper with an address of a lawyer who Jacques had told me to meet in Budapest. Now I had to get there somehow.

I went to the harbor and was told a trawler was leaving for Patras in a couple of hours. The skipper was a friend of Jacques and he gave me a free passage to the Greek port.  Patras was an ugly mass of ships and all of the foulest aspects of the sea were congregated in its oil soaked water. The skipper from Koss had given me the name of the captain of a cargo ship who was looking for crew members who would help with loading and unloading. I soon found myself in a stifling office that reeked of cheap cigarettes as the vastly overweight captain looked over his heaving bosom at me.

“You don’t look like you have had a lot of experience at sea,” he said staring at his boots that were up on a chair.

“Not a lot.”

“Well right now I don’t care. You get free passage to Trieste and we part after that. No papers. No payment, right? If you disappear overboard you never existed.”

“I’ll try not to.”

The captain just stared at me.  “Well what are you waiting for? Get on board.”

Once on board the cargo ship I hauled crates around the deck in the teeth of a biting wind. Fortunately, when the ship has left port there was little more to do, so I sat around in the cold sleeping quarters reading a book under a bare light bulb. The rest of the crew comprised of swarthy Slavic types who paid me little attention but get into animated conversations that sometimes resulted in fist fights. As we crept up the coast of Yugoslavia as it fractured, I thought of Italy and the train journey to Budapest. I was wishing away the time on board the bulk carrier.

Then, one evening something strange happened. The other crew members had been on edge all day, talking more loudly than usual and drinking spirits. Now they were all gathered on deck as the ship slowed its speed. I made out a few twinkling lights and realized suddenly we were heading for land.  The notion agitated me because we were not due in Trieste for a few days.  However, the ship kept moving toward the dark land. I also noticed the lights on the side of the vessel were turned off.  We slid into a port and suddenly people were prodding and pushing me and getting me to pick up heavy boxes that were hoisted over the side of the ship. When I looked again most of the crew members had big, sinister looking guns slung over their arms.

I was pulled into the back of a truck in which the other crew members sat on a wooden bench, fiddling with their guns. The man who appeared to be the leader threw one at me. “You’re going to need it,” he muttered.

For two hours we drove up steep paths over mountains in darkness. At times we heard the far off boom of explosions in the night and the rattle of small arms fire. Later I recalled the presence of ancient, gaunt buildings. I looked up and saw ugly holes in the side of masonry where windows should have been and jagged edges. The sound of gunfire was alarmingly close now. A ghastly face like a jack lantern looked into mine. I smelled stale whisky and saw the dark nubs of his teeth. “Welcome to Mostar friend.”

Chapters from my novella Transitions are entirely fictitious and no resemblance is intended to real people or events.

L is for Loss

November arrived in Kos in the form of cold, driving rain across the beach. The pristine sands of summer seemed a distant memory as the heavy tides brought in driftwood and the trash of Greece and Turkey  from the Aegean.

I wondered then what would sustain us because all of the tourists had left and there was nobody left to buy paintings. It didn’t stop Jacques going out in all weathers and painting windmills. We remained at the hotel and we were allowed to stay in the room free in exchange for painting a mural in the lobby. It was a stilted affair of vine leaves, plate smashing and all of the other clichés of Greece, but Jacques urged me to put my misgivings aside and to go through the motions. I wondered what Jacques’ plans for us were then but whenever I asked about the future a far off look came into his eyes and he patted me on the shoulders and wandered off. In the evening we would hang out with Jacques’ cronies in the bars and we would walk back to the hotel with an uneven gait past the colorful shipping boats moored up for the winter.

Jacques seldom coughed when he was out drinking with the elderly Greeks but once he was back at the room the hoarse rasping would sound in his lungs and he would mutter about not having long left in the world. I never took him seriously until one night when he asked me to sit down with him. I remember the scene well. We were in a courtyard bar in the old town and the waxy light of candles fell on his face. He had the visage of one of the Greek gods he spoke so highly of then.

He hesitated before talking to me gravely, gesturing up at Orion in the cold winter sky. “I always wanted to be like him. I wanted to be a hunter and to be immortal in the night sky,” he told me. “Alas mortality catches up with me. You need to prepare yourself for the fact I will soon be dead Campbell. I have valued your company in my last days, but don’t think me soft boy. I would not have spent them with you, had I not seen the tremendous potential you have as an artist. I have got by emulating the best my boy but I am a pale imitation. You are an original, which means you may never be wealthy in your lifetime.”

I clasped his hands at the time. “You have taught me all I know. Without you I would never be painting like this. You cannot leave me in this way.”

I felt dizzy then. The emptiness of the island and the wide swathe of the Aegean washed over me. I was spinning in the cold heavens with Orion strung high above me.

Jacques’ steady grey eyes met mine and I sunk into his familiar silence. When he finally spoke it was measured. “Campbell. At some point I want you to visit my lawyer in Budapest.”

“Where?”

“It’s Hungary dear boy. I have the address. I can’t recall whether it’s Buda or Pest. He will know to expect you. I didn’t make much money in life but I would rather you have it than the vultures who I once called my family. The details are in the drawer by my bed.”

“Jacques please don’t be so cold. Have another Ouzo.”

“You are in denial I am afraid. A touching if misguided state of mind. You will curse me if I don’t give you this information now. Please don’t think it will be easy for you. I’m not going to help your passage to Budapest. Like most things in the world, you will have to find your own way.”

Two weeks later I contemplated the corpse of the artist on his hotel bed. Jacques eyes were sagging and lifeless and all the joy had left his mouth. I did the one thing, I knew he would have wanted me to do. I pulled out my easel and drew the body, sparing nothing in my depiction. Tears wetted the canvas and sobs welled up in me but I kept on painting. The end result was brutal and barbaric and yet there was a latent power in the corpse. I knew it was my best piece of work so far.

Chapters from my novella Transitions are entirely fictitious and no resemblance is intended to real people or events.

K is for Kos

Geraldine told me her brother was arriving in town to pick her up. I blanked out the date but one morning I found the bed empty and a small note on her pillow.

“Au revoir darling. We had the best of days. Think of me whenever you see a swallow.”

Geraldine had always talked about how she had admired the birds for the way they soared on the air currents. Now one had taken her away. It occurred to me that I had no idea what I would do with my life. I was about to get evicted from the small apartment overlooking the river and I had little money. The thought of England was unappealing. I walked to the square and wondered if it was too early for a Ricard. Without Geradline it seemed pointless and the small, intimate squares were vast and gaping places with nowhere to hide. Jacques was already set up for a day of painting. There was still warmth in the morning air but the chill would move in in a matter of weeks.

“Campbell. I saw your girl,” said the old man.

“Oh when?”

“A couple of hours ago after first light. She got in a car with a bear of a man. I didn’t fancy him and I can’t say she seemed to.”

I looked bleakly at the grand houses that ringed the square. Jacques had the good sense not to dwell on the girl. He let the silence and the grand morning light wash over us before he spoke again.

“You know I am leaving too.”

“Oh?”

“I’m going to Greece my friend. It will be warmer there and I can paint the antiquities. I may stay for a year or two. I feel the cold more in France now.”

I said nothing. An unpleasant image of Monty was forming in my mind.

Jacques cleared his voice. You are quite the student Campbell. You have great potential. I would like you to come to Greece with me.”

I had little hesitation but didn’t want to appear overly keen. Jacques also wanted to make it clear it would be no holiday.

“We will have little money. We will sleep on the beach and we will paint or we will die. You’ll need to develop quickly because we will live by selling our paintings.

The next few months were among the most interesting in my life. We hitch hiked south taking rides from tourists and workmen and lovers heading to the Cote D’Azur. There were people who drove past in swanky cars and spat at us on the roadside but most of the people we encountered were charming and renewed my faith in mankind. They were all fascinated with Jacques who would alternate his tales about the great artist he was related to – from Renoir to Monet to Mad Vincent himself.

For a while we hung out in the squares of Nice, painting sun dappled cemeteries, people on the shore and markets ripe with fruit. Passers-by always commented on our vastly different styles. I saw the world in bright brush strokes and primary colors and Jacques filled in the tones in between. 

Sometimes Jacques would grunt in disgust at my work and quietly pack up his easel and walk away along the shore. I had learned at an early stage not to follow Jacques but to carry on painting. One on occasion when Jacques’ bad mood had subsided he returned to find a small crowd of people gathered around my work. One man was jabbering enthusiastically about my painting of a church tower with a clock. It soared up unwavering into the heavens, solitary and curiously sad. The man brought out a wad of notes and I handed over the picture with a tug of melancholy. To him it was just a tower; to me it was a lonely milestone on a far off spring day.

When we made enough money from our painting, we boarded a ship for Italy and then another to Greece. Many of the people on board were holidaymakers, basking in the late summer sun, Italians flaunting their bodies and girls in minuscule bikinis, as well as backpackers taking a cheap passage to the Greek islands. I was their same age but felt apart from them. I was always intensely staring at the horizon and gauging the roll and fall of the waves. People generally ignored the old man and me and showed little interest in the seascapes we produced from the boat.

We spend a week in Athens, striding the dusty streets with sore feet and hanging out in bars with old friends of Jacques, drinking the potent Ouzo. One day in the late afternoon we climbed up to the Parthenon and felt awed by the soaring columns and the majesty of ancient Greece. When we had seen enough of the sites, Jacques said it was time to board a boat to the islands to chill out for a while. I wasn’t sure where this odyssey was leading but I went along with him.

In early September we saw the high limestone cliffs of Kos rise out of the turquoise water. Over the next week we slept on secluded beaches and on the roofs of houses of the old Greek men who Jacques befriended. We painted the ancient windmills overlooking the glittering sea and the ripe olives in the groves. We whiled away the afternoons in fields heavy with cicadas. My skin became so brown, I was unrecognizable as the erstwhile pallid drug addict who had been taken to France. Kos was the closest thing to paradise and our paintings proved popular with the tourists who thought we were traditional Greek artists. Jacques did little to counter the misconception as we took their money. I would laugh at the irony of the situation as I took money from British holidaymakers who little suspected I was one of them. I had just taken a different course.

We moved to a room in a hotel that was winding down for the season. I would sit by the swimming pool in the afternoon, but on occasions the feel of the water would send a tingle down my spine and make me long for Geraldine. On those occasions I would throw myself more vigorously into my paintings and my blues and whites would become even more vibrant.

Chapters from my novella Transitions are entirely fictitious and no resemblance is intended to real people or events.

J is for Jacques

The honeymoon moved seamlessly into cohabitation. Geraldine had amassed some money and we rented a small cottage in a small Alpine spa town called Les Baines de Deux. In the mornings a pure mountain sun slanted through the roughly hewn window set in deep stone and lit up a shaft of unsullied light on the pale wooden floor boards. We would open the balcony doors to a riot of wild flowers and the sound of a rushing stream and we would drink the acrid coffee of the mountains and embrace.

The air was thinner up here and the whole world seemed to be purified. I never felt the pull of narcotics. My only addiction was Geraldine with her long legs that browned during the long summer days and the wistful look in her eyes as she toyed with her knotted hair in her mouth.

I felt little sense of time that summer. I drank in shady places by the rushing river with its sluice and dancing water weeds. I was oblivious to the drawing in of the nights and the chill that crept over the cobbled streets later at night. During the days we would take long hikes in the Alpine meadows choked full of flowers and laugh as the rain storms moved in quickly from the mountains and drenched us to the skin. But now and then Geraldine would say things that would vanish my sunny disposition momentarily. She’d talk about dreading Christmas with her family or Hugo, the boy her family wanted to her to marry.

One day I found her sat on the wooden floor fanning herself with a letter. I asked her about it because we never received correspondence.

“My family,” she said.

“Oh.”

She pulled me to her and put arms around me that felt frail like a chicken’s. “Campbell. In two weeks we run out of money and my brother is coming to get me. I revealed where I am living on the condition that they didn’t send me back to rehab.”

I was silent for a matter of minutes as many jumbled thoughts rubbed their awkward angles against each other. “I knew nothing of this.”

The girl shrugged. “You knew this was not forever Campbell.”

I stared out the window at the slab of blue and the hint of mountain ridge behind the mill and thought of the paradise that would soon be lost.

“Anyway,” said the girl, jumping to her feet. “We have two weeks. Let’s go out and get drunk.”

The shadows were lengthening when we got to the town square. There were always artists here with their easels. We usually walked past them but this time I stopped to admire their work. I stopped by the paintings of a white haired man who must have been in his seventies who was painting the high mountain ridges in loving brush strokes.  There was an ethereal quality to the man’s paintings of the soaring glaciers and skyline meadows. It made me think of Monet at 8,000 feet. The old man squinted at me and nodded.

Geraldine was mesmerized too. They had a brief conversation in French before the man turned to me. “Ah Anglais. You have not the painting tradition but seem interested,” he said.

“We have had a lot of accomplished painters. But the French painters have more imagination,” I said.

“Well put. Have you ever tried your hand?” The old artist pulled down some paper on a second easel and handed me two paint brushes. “Have a go. Paint that mountain ridge.”

“Oh I couldn’t possibly.”

“Yes go on. What do you have to lose?”

I picked up the brushes and dipped them in his palette, splattering a verdant dark green on the canvass. My representation of the contours and ridges felt childlike but as I kept applying paint to the canvass a strange feeling came over me. I felt the curves and descents of those dizzy ridges. My hand moved down the inclines and up the sides of a glacier. It felt like an act of love. The old man who introduced himself as Jacques, looked on impassively. When I had finished I surveyed the final results. The painting looked brutal and had a child-like quality. Yet at the same time the mountain scene had some kind of primal power to it.

“Oh God Campbell. Get a job at a bank,” said Geraldine.

Jacques said nothing for a few moments. When he did speak it was slow and deliberate.

“I don’t know. The boy has something. I have never seen a first effort like this. So… purposeful and savage,” he said. “This is real potential.”

Geraldine shrugged and walked off towards the bars. I moved to follow her. As I walked off Jacques tugged on my sleeve.

“Come by tomorrow. I can teach you how to work on that raw talent. In a few weeks I will be going to Greece but I’d like to work with you.”

“OK. I’ll come by,” I said, smiling at the old man as I followed in Geraldine’s slipstream.

I is for Idiot

Geraldine assured me the security guard was an idiot. She had spoken to him a few times during her late night walks around the chateau and said he was a dull witted individual who was obsessed with the obscure statistics about Paris Saint Germain. Geraldine knew a bit about the team and would get him into conversations about the legendary goalkeepers in the 1970s. It was a tactic on her behalf to soften him up. She also made sure to wear her flimsiest of dresses on her walks around the castle.

“He wants me so badly,” she told me, as we hid in the shadows behind the vast laundry room. All that lay between us and the freedom of the bare mountains was the bored idiot sat in his dimly lit box.

One morning she approached me in the Great Hall. “Tonight is the night,” she told me, placing a provocative finger on my lip. Her perfume made me think of the exotic flowers in some lush green valley in Provence.  

Hours later, I stood in the shadows behind the kitchen block . I had my back to the wall and my gaze was lost in the stars high above the Alpine peaks and the vastness of the blue heavens. Geraldine told me she would meet me at 9 p.m. It was 9.10 p.m. and there was still no sign of her. I took to pacing, wondering if she had been apprehended. I felt some of the fear prisoners of war must have felt as they prepared to lower themselves into the tunnel they had dug out of a Nazi prisoner of war camp. Finally, I felt a reassuring hand on my shoulder. It was Geraldine and she looked both fragile and tough all in one in the shadows behind the kitchen block.

From where we were standing we could see the guardhouse and beyond that a bridge over a high chasm to freedom. A dim light illuminated the guard house and I could see a pale face in the small square of light.

“OK darling,” she told me. “You will know when.”

I watched her walk provocatively toward the gatehouse in her flimsy yellow dress.

I saw Luc the security guard stumble to his feet as she arrived at the gatehouse. I saw her lean toward him and stretch her long bare arm out to the epaulet on his right shoulder, brushing his flimsy badge of power. I saw him starting at her chest and felt the pinpricks of jealousy in my own. Her hand remained on him and I saw her throw back her mane of dark hair in laughter. The idiot visibly puffed up in the pale light. The last thing on his mind was securing the facility. The two figures merged in the half light and dissolved into the guard house. It was the cue for me to leave the shadows. I walked carefully across the courtyard and past the guardhouse. 

I didn’t dare look through the gap in the door, but carried on across the short drawbridge and onto a road that was hidden by the bulk of the mountain. Geraldine had told me to keep walking down the brittle road until I came to a small town where I would find a tavern.

On the winding road down the hillside, I felt like I was in occupied territory. The lights of cars came around the lips of the road with a whooshing sound. I kept expecting brakes and the breath of dogs on my legs. Then I reminded myself I had left a rehabilitation facility not a prison. Still my breathing was fast and urgent until I reached the cobbled streets of the small village and was bathed in the waxy yellow light of the tavern. I expected suspicious looks but the bar tender addressed me politely and I ordered a Pastis. As the licorice warmed me, it occurred to me that this was the first time in six months, I had been treated as an equal. 

Freedom felt warm and fuzzy and oddly exhilarating. I emptied my glass, beamed at the man behind the bar who returned the smile and ordered another. The feeling of insecurity was burning out of me. When Geraldine finally arrived, I kissed her so passionately that she recoiled. I felt new scratches on her neck.

“How was the idiot?”

“The idiot is a beast.”

I felt all a bit hot and cold before raising my glass.

“To freedom.”

Geraldine smiled and I pulled her to me across the bar.

Chapters from my novella Transitions are entirely fictitious and no resemblance is intended to real people or events.

H is for Honeymoon

It wasn’t really a honeymoon but we joked it was. It was the only way we could endure the long lectures about how we could live meaningful lives and make it through the group role plays. I had not even thought about drugs now for many weeks, but would still face invasive cross examinations by a bewildering array of doctors and psychologists.  

As the hours in the tiny anterooms and the great hall crept by our eyes would drift to the clock waiting for 4 pm when we could strip off and change into our swim wear to make it onto the roof terrace.

Grenoble

In the afternoon we would chat and smoke. Our touches were confined to brushes in passing, nothing to alert people to the nature of our relationship. Then at night we would return to the terrace. We’d look at the lights of Grenoble and the canopy of stars high above the Alps and we’d make love under the furry lawns and dizzy realms of the Milky Way. Sometimes we’d swim naked and hold each other as we shivered against the night sky. Sometimes we’d talk into the early morning and sup on the harsh Cognac that Geraldine had hidden in a secret pocket in her suitcase. We’d feel the sway of the lights and the dizzy heights above us and be gripped by a giddy hedonism.

We joked it was a honeymoon because it was the closest either of us had been to one. I knew Geraldine was sleeping with me because there was nobody else sane enough or young enough to sleep with at the chateau. I knew she’d be discharged and forget about me, but some nights when her tears anointed my face, I wondered if my assessment had been accurate.

As is the way with honeymoons, ours came to an end in the most unglamorous of circumstances. One night two maintenance workers came onto the roof to fix an air conditioning unit and caught us in a naked embrace. They called Madame Bouvret, the formidable building manager, who escorted us down the stairs, a paunchy hand gripping each of our shoulders. She then delivered a lecture to us in broken English. Access to the terrace had been taken away and with it the only thing that made life bearable at Chateau Lac Dumain.

Apart from Geraldine I got to thinking more and more about my parents. My mother’s letters oozed concern but there was something restrained in them. My father’s were perfunctory. None of them made mention of when I would get out of here. The weeks had morped into months and the hot summer sun beat down on the chateau. I missed the pool every day. Increasingly the ornate iron lattice on the window of my room came to resemble the bars of a cell. I could come and go within the confines of the castle but would often find staff gazing at me down the hallway or hear the light steps of orderlies following me. Geraldine kept her distance but about two weeks after we had been banished from the terrace, I found myself next to her in recovery circle. I felt a small pressure on my hand and picked up a piece of paper.  I placed it in my pocket and read it in the bathroom. I watched the warm light playing over her ornate writing.

“I miss you. Meet me at the well at 9.”

The well was now disused and in a part of the courtyard that was in a blind spot from the administrative buildings. At 9.05 p.m. it was in darkness . I paced nervously for a few minutes before I saw her languid figure pass across the courtyard.

We kissed quickly and she took my hand. “Campbell. I can’t talk to you for long, for fear they will discover me,” she whispered. “I have not heard from my family now for  six weeks which is unheard of. I am scared, Campbell – yes scared that they have disowned me for real this time.”

Her small face was so drawn, that I wanted to cradle her head in my arms but then a fire came into her eyes.

“God obsessed bastards.”

“So what are we going to do Geraldine?”

The girl tugged on my arm. “We are going to escape. Tomorrow night we will be out of here. Meet me at the same time, same place tomorrow night. Bring a small bag with belongings.”

I tried to ask her the many questions that were crowding my mind but she was already a spectral shadow, sliding back across the courtyard.

Chapters from my novella Transitions are entirely fictitious and no resemblance is intended to real people or events.

G is for Geraldine

I watched the peaks and the gullies where the gleaming ice was as razor sharp as the frosted air, shimmering below me. Then the picture broke up as I lowered myself into the chill waters of the pool. It was spring in Grenoble but the snow lingered on the high peaks of the Alps, even though the air was warm on the swimming pool terrace.

I fell into my trick of imagining I was a guest at an exclusive resort on the shores of a Swiss lake rather than a grim castle where drug addicts were rehabilitated by a combination of new age techniques and Medieval impatience. Up on the cool slates around the pool, I could distance myself from the therapy sessions. The shouts and squeals of those going through a long and painful withdrawal at Chateau Lac Dumain reminded me that my problems were not serious compared to many of the lost souls who ended up here. 

On the terrace the sky was cloudless and the mountains had a high white serenity that made me long for the purity of the elevated places. There was just one fly in the mirror of the pool and it was hard to banish the intrusive thought that I had now been here for 10 weeks and heard little from my family beyond the carefully written letters I received from my parents every week that bore the signs of Monty’s coaching.

There was no mention of my future after this place. When I broached the issue of my release with the administrators I was greeted with Gallic shrugs. I wondered what I had signed but nobody ever gave me a straight answer.

“You will hear from your family soon Monsieur. Your recovery is good. Yes?” the beetle browed administrator would tell me.

 I became more disconcerted on the occasions when I looked over the parapet and saw the thickness of the walls. Increasingly the white uniforms of the orderlies at the gatehouse started to look like military regalia.

Twelve weeks into my stay there was a new arrival who bore little resemblance to the others here. I first saw her lying beside the pool in a red two piece, one leg raised in the air as she look lusty puffs on a Gauloise.

I was shy about talking to random strangers but I found my glance returning again and again to the girl who flicked her dark locks around her neck and paid little attention to me at first. The next time I got in the pool I used the steps near to where she was lying, even though there were steps closer to me.  As I was about to lower myself I heard her gentle voice across the terrace.

“Monsieur?”

I turned to her and made to attempt to use my halting French.

“Yes.”

“Oh American?” she said.

“No British.”

“Oh,” and the girl’s eyes narrowed, displaying a small hint of disappointment.  “Ave you been here long Sir?”

I stood and surveyed her. I estimated she was about 22-years-old. Her body was languid and she had olive skin. She had a little excess weight over the band of her bikini bottoms which made her slightly more attainable and attractive to me.

“Too long, I’m afraid. Why are you here? You don’t seem…”

“I know,” said the girl. “I don’t seem like a crack addict. I’m not screaming for God. I am something worse Monsieur British. I am an embarrassment to my family. I swear and I smoke pot and I sleep with boys – although not usually ones wearing Speedos,” she added, her eyes moving briefly down my stomach. “So every now and then my family send me to the Chateau to teach me a lesson.”

By now the thoughts of the cool waters of the pool had passed and I squatted on the slate tiles next to her. “Tell me. How do you get out of this place?” I realized there must have been something desperate in my expression because she moved back a little and something flecked appeared in her otherwise flawless brown eyes.

“They didn’t tell you? You get out of here if and when they want you to. People have died here. My family usually relents after three weeks. Did you not read the papers?”

“I was a bit out of it at the time.”

“Well you may be out at Christmas Monsieur British. You won’t be eating your roast beef for a while.”

“Oh please.”

It’s OK,” said the girl, and she stretched a reassuring hand to mine. “You’re not the only person I have encountered here who is confused.”

“Do you come here often?” I asked her, clunkily conscious of how it sounded like the most mawkish of chat up lines.

“It’s my favorite solitary confinement holiday. Let’s just say I don’t share my family’s devoutly religious beliefs.”

“That’s awful,” I said. “How can your family abandon you like this?” I was acutely conscious of how something heavy dropped inside me as I said it. The girl seemed to sense it too. She seemed to be very intuitive. She said nothing and let out a plume of smoke. I was reminded then about how only the French can look cool smoking.

“Let’s talk about something else Monsieur British. What’s your favorite movie and can you join me up here after dark? They keep the key to the roof terrace behind the electricity meter on the fifth floor. My name’s Geraldine.”

Chapters from my novella Transitions are entirely fictitious and no resemblance is intended to real people or events.

F is for France

It was a fast train and I saw little of France initially.  At some time during the early hours of the morning, I woke and saw cold, blue apartment houses shuttling by the window, fractured through the condensation. I heard someone on the train say it was the suburbs of Paris. I shivered inside my blanket, a strange lonely and broken image of the Eiffel Tower like a jagged needle in the freezing, bleached out morning sky came into my mind and I drifted off again.

The next time I woke I was shaking and sweating. I felt the strong grip of Monty’s hands on me. Someone was talking about “cold turkey.” I thought it was my father but when I woke up again he was not on the train. I was alone with Monty and one of his rugby bully boy friends from public school. I had an image then of being a child and playing in a sun drenched yard with my sister Gracie. Her gap toothed smile seemed real enough to reach out and touch. Sweet, straw haired Gracie years before she became the indifferent adult she was today.

I turned to the window and was amazed at the sudden transformation. The chilly, high houses of Paris and the scaffold-like tower had been replaced with golden cornfields basking in the sun. A small Citroen farm van rolled down a dirt track flanked with poppies. The hillside was cut up by the serrated rows of a vineyard that wound high up the escarpment, ripe with fruit. The countryside literally rolled away from here like the strokes of an artist’s brush.

The scene blurred into an impressionist tableau again as the powerful medication they had given me kicked in. The next time I awoke the world outside my window had been transformed again. There was a blueness that was so bright it hurt the corners of my eyes and a line of crystalline whiteness that I could barely look at. I made out the snow on mountain peaks high and serrated, a town of spires and cupolas and a deep blue river that cut clinically through the heart of the town. Then darkness again. Monty and his minder took me out of the train and into a taxi outside the station. The car lurched up a long winding road and I thought my stomach was going to empty on the seats.

I caught occasional glimpses of the sharp little river again, now a long way below me. Finally we arrived at a chateau with turrets and imposing, ivy-clad walls. The first thing I noticed was the freshness of the air, the tang of pine and high snow that pierced my lungs. The bright light and the birdsong was cut out as if a switch has been flicked as I was led and prodded through a dark gatehouse.

I was taken to a hall with a high wooden vaulted ceiling. At the far end on a dias a small man with beetle black hair was scribbling away on a piece of paper. He barely looked up when I arrived flanked by my minders. He was not fazed in the slightest by my wild appearance. Finally he turned a moist eye to me “Monsieur?”

Monty took some documentation from the man. He scrawled his signature and handed it to me.

“Sign.”

“I don’t know what I’m signing, It’s in French.”

“It’s just the formalities for your stay here. See it says you will be here for six week to compete your rehabilitation. Then we will come and get you,” Monty informed me. The preaching tone he had adopted in the hospital had gone as had my parents. Monty was crisply formal like a delivery man handing over a parcel.

“I’m not seeing..”

The small beetled- haired man was making an impatient Gallic gesture with his hands and Monty’s rugby friend was impatiently stamping his oversized feet.

“Just sign. We have a lot to do,” said Monty.

I signed my name on the dotted line.

Chapters from my novella Transitions are entirely fictitious and no resemblance is intended to real people or events.

E is for Emergency Room

They call it Emergency Room or ER in the United States or Casualty or Accident and Emergency in the United Kingdom. Whatever the terminology, it was not the best place to end up on a Friday night.

Meth amphetamine is known as Meth or Crystal Meth in the United States and Speed in Britain. If you take Meth or Speed you are more likely to end up in ER or Casualty than if you participate in other risky behaviors such as excessive cup cake eating.

There was no icing on the cake for me that Friday night. Just a severe pain in my stomach and chest, a soaring temperature  and violent convulsions that caused me to hit a police officer as much, as  for attention as anything else. When they told me the charges had been dropped as I was wheeled through the ward I didn’t care much. There was a pain behind my eyes from three nights without sleep and a feeling of guilt. I had cheated on my beloved brown powder for Speed and it was taunting me. I had a rush of love at that moment for Dr. K.

The faces of my family were indistinct. I read concern and also something more unpleasant. I had a vision of the egg shell blue skies above a Scottish castle and the soft lines on my mother’s face as she led me by the hand down the stairs of the clock tower.  It felt so long ago.

That failure had been eclipsed by this one. Now the crowd of people around my bedside parted like the Red Sea and a substantial figure in a trench coat filled the space under the arc lights. I noted the familiar features of Monty but they had hardened and matured in the six months since I had last seen him.

Monty adjusted his cravat and addressed me in a formal manner that seemed to indicate he was speaking for the whole family.

“We are very saddened to see you like this Campbell,” he said in a voice that sounded far too old and gravelly for his 18 years on earth. “Drug abuse is not something we like to talk about or to confront in this family and perhaps it was our inability to face this issue that has led you to this very sad juncture. I was very relieved to hear from the doctors that you will survive this episode but if you carry on with this reckless life, we cannot vouch for your future safety. I know I speak for the family as a whole when I say we cannot just stand by and watch you wreck your life in this manner.”

There was a general hubbub around the room and my mother finally piped up.“Please Campbell. Listen to him. Monty has just secured an apprenticeship from one of the top city banks. You are lucky not to be in jail. You can learn a lot from him. Please Campbell.”

A sickness was rising in my throat that was not entirely due to the drugs I had ingested. I nodded and muttered and looked through my family to a scene beyond where a drunk was being pinned down by four nurses.

I finally managed to spit out a few words. “If that’s all, I think I need to sleep now.”

“Very well,” continued Monty, his hand firmly inside his heavy coat like Napoleon directing his armies. “But we do need you to do something for us, although perhaps it has passed the phase when your permission or otherwise is important. We have secured you a place at a rehabilitation facility in France. We think it’s for the best all round.”

He continued in a long-winded manner that he had made his own, but I was no longer listening. I could sense the family around me was splintering up into small, nervous huddles, two fifths concern and the rest disapproval at my condition. The sickness rose in my throat. I felt dizzy like I was going to relapse. I grabbed the emergency cord and pulled it hard three times. I’m not sure whether it was because I really wanted nurses to come running to my bedside or I wanted the curtain drawn around me to shut out the small, jittery cabal at my bedside.

Chapters from my novella Transitions are entirely fictitious and no resemblance is intended to real people or events.

D is for Druggie

My hometown was known for its fine buildings and artistic traditions. It prided itself on the the Pitville Pumproom, the racecourse and the Cheltenham Festival.

That’s not to say busloads of Americans came to Cheltenham or Cheltenham Spa as some insisted on calling it. Bath was on their tourist itinerary. Cheltenham was slightly off course and even those tourists who made it to Cheltenham never set foot in the Top Hat pub behind a council estate to the west of the city. The people in the mock half-timbered houses with the Audis would never venture down the ragged street that the Top Hat was on, past an industrial estate of walls topped with broken glass.

I had fallen in with an interesting crowd. My parents called it a bad crowd but I preferred the word interesting. The bar staff at the Top Hat turned a blind eye to underage drinking; in fact, it seemed to keep the place going. I started with cider – the rough edged curse of so many students in the West Country. I moved on to super strength lager, cigarettes, cannabis and then pills. I threw up and got into fights. My parents started to look at me as if I was a stranger. I told them it was a usual teenage thing.

But the night behind the garbage dump was different. Douggie said he had a treat for us. He posted look-outs on both ends of the alley, although it was hard to see how any right thinking and law abiding person would take a detour down the foul smelling alley by the dump. We had met guys who would sell us cannabis many times, but the character who showed up tonight was different. He wore a long trench that complemented his raw lantern face. As he approached I noticed the curious whiteness of his features. He was like an Albino or someone who had never seen the sun.

“This is Doctor K,” said Douggie. “He has the prescription to make you’re a day a lot better. Doctor K moved toward me. He was like no doctor I had ever met before. A foul and powerful smell of cigarettes  hit me, almost knocking me back. He stank of third rate pool halls.

“This will see you right,” he muttered, his eyes flitting back and forth like a nervous rodent’s. He pulled a bag with brown powder out of his coat and unrolled some cooking foil.

“Lighter,” he hissed.

Dave pulled a cigarette lighter out of his pocket.

“Cash.”

Douggie handed together our ill-gotten gains from gas station thefts and pickpocketing.

The pale hand kept switching and Douggie pulled some coins from his pocket. “Notes only next time,” said the good doctor, taking me in with his thin yellow smile. He took the lighter and heated up the end of the foil containing the brown powder. Then he solemnly handed out funnels of rolled up paper for us to inhale. It looked curiously innocuous there in cooking foil. He was known as Doctor K but at the moment he struck me as being more like a priest as he handed out the wafers that were the body of a corrupted Christ. As we took turns to inhale the savior’s name was invoked a number of times. The Godforsaken alley became a pleasurable tunnel and my brain throbbed and twitched. It beat sex any day.

He was a dubious looking doctor but the medicine seemed to be doing something. In no time at all the doctor seemed to be rising as if on a celestial cloud and his arms were stretched high into the heavens. As if by a miracle the blemishes on his face and the dark clouds under his eyes had been airbrushed out.

“Welcome to the wonderful world of heroin boys,” the doctor proclaimed.

Chapters from my novella Transitions are entirely fictitious and no resemblance is intended to real people or events.