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.

C is for Clovelly

You get to an age when the family holiday  - once the highlight of the year – becomes a cringing embarrassment and a last resort for teens with no better offer to take up.

To me Clovelly was the last resort. It wasn’t big and brash like Newquay or Bournemouth. There were no nightclubs or even fish and chip shops. Clovelly was a cobbled street that wound up the side of a cliff. It was tumbledown homes and blind alleys. Clovelly was nowhere to hang out with and no one to do it with.

"Clovelly - Harbour by Franzfoto 

From the table by the bay window of the Blue Dragon, I watched two fishermen struggle with their nets. The rope was slippery and the water the viscous, dark green of a sea monster. My gaze switched from the fishermen to my fork and the sausage languishing in a watery lake of baked beans. It was 9 a.m. I had exactly 13 hours until I could sleep again.

I looked at Gracie as she scribbled in her notebook. Gracie was just over a year older than me but the gap felt as wide and cold as the Atlantic out beyond the foreboding cliffs. In an hour the low slung convertible owned by the boy she had met a month ago would bounce over the cobbles and he would take her out of this place, to Ilfracombe or Barnstaple or God knows where, but it would more closely resemble civilization. Gracie looked through me as if my 15-year-old complexion made me as dour as the rugged walls of the Blue Dragon.

Dad looked sheepishly on. “So. I suppose it will just be you and me Campbell as your mother has a headache. I can take you out fishing.”

I looked back at him but the nausea was rising in my gullet from the baked beans and the cheap sausages and my bowels were muttering. The idea of the cold, briny water left me underwhelmed.

“I don’t want to go.”

Dad said nothing but I could see his face working. I knew he wouldn’t keep his silence long. Finally he stood up and the words rose up in him.

“Campbell. Was there really any point in this? I can’t see why you wanted to come away with us. All you’ve done is mope. At least your sister is getting out.”

I muttered a few half formed words under my breath.

“I beg your pardon, Campbell.”

“Nothing Sir.”

“Oh cut out that Sir crap.”

I looked balefully over the harbor, my eyes as bleak and grey as the day that was wrapping Clovelly in its clinging garments. I waited for a final salvo. My father always had to get the last word in.

“Honestly Campbell. I don’t see why you can’t be more like your cousin. You know he’s leading a young mission trip on a walk to Santiago de Compostella. He’s a model of youth.”

Great uncle Arthur was slumped in the corner. I had watched carefully as he’d moved a clumsy hand up to scratch his testicles through his pants. Now he twitched and sat up at the sound of Monty’s name.

“Yes, yes,” said the old man. “A fine and upstanding model of youth. The very best.”

And he went back to examining the spittle that had gathered in a frothing pile on his pipe.

I pushed my chair back and went silently to my chilly bedroom. I stayed their reading and gazing at the clouds that drifted over the Bristol Channel for eight hours. Then under the cover of darkness, I walked up the steep cobbled hill. I found an alley that was sheltered from the drizzle. I rolled a joint and felt the warmth and mellowness make my body slack. Later back at the harbor that the American visitors told me was quaint, I heard the fishermen talking. They had finished their long day of toil and one of them was telling the other what he would do to his wife. Or maybe it was the other man’s 

wife. I could not be sure because the conversation was fractured by the keen breeze. 

The bleakness of the night was palpable and I was already missing the cozy intimacy of my joint.

B is for Bravo

“Oscar Bravo, Oscar Bravo, do you read?” shrilled Carl Phillips into the radio headset. “Sod it. He’s off air. He’s dead in no-man’s land.”

I kept my thoughts to myself. We were hunkered down in the room that smelled of cheap disinfectant behind the drill hall. No-man’s land was an area strewn with old tires behind the hangar. The worst thing that could happen to Davies was being caught by Team B and subjected to an hour of boredom out of the exercise. They called it demobilization. These weekend warrior games were feeling increasingly pointless.

I had been the Air Training Corps for six months but the drill hall still carried a menace of its own. Where else in my world could one half-hearted salute or drooping beret lead to a grown man shouting at me?

“You just take it don’t you,” Phillips would shriek. “You take it you dumb mother.”

He’d always be jabbing at something with a pen or twitching. He oozed ADD in the same way his facial acne wept on a humid day. Increasingly I was beginning to feel this was not the real deal.

 I joined because I wanted to fly and my first experience was a positive one. I had been ushered into a room with a small and wizened red headed man who was the Commanding Officer. There was a tiny, lovingly-painted model of a Spitfire on his desk.

I had joined with Billy Brown who had not lasted the course due to an uncontrollable mouth disorder. He moved to pick up the Spitfire and the CO made a small motion like swatting a fly that stopped Brown’s hand in mid air, although it didn’t stop his mouth.

“In the Battle of Britain or sommit?”

“That’s right,” said the small CO, his eyes not moving from the joining papers.

“No way. You didn’t fly a Spitfire?” said Brown.

“I was indeed a Spitfire pilot. Biggin Hill.” The CO was clipped and economical with his words.

As Brown’s mouth meandered on I fell to musing about how this small man had been scrambled round the clock to the skies black and bristling with Nazi Heinkels.  I thought about how his comrades had risen into the clouds at breakfast and never returned for lunch, how his plane had plummeted hundreds of feet over London with the docklands ablaze from the fires from German bombs. He was one of the few who had triumphed against all odds against the many. Now he signed documents and made uniform requests for cretins like Billy Brown.

Two months after joining the Air Training Corps, the CO had a stroke and was taken to a nursing home. His replacement Peter Hall was a car salesman from Tewkesbury.

My cousin Monty joined the regiment at the same time. Despite having no previous knowledge of drill maneuvers, he picked it up quickly. Monty gained stripes before me, but I was eventually promoted to corporal.

Two years into my time in the regiment we conducted a night exercise on a disused airfield in Wales. By this time Carl Phillip’s shrill voice was a distant memory. He had left to sniff solvents or skirt. My team was young and keen, but the map reader mixed up his hangars. We hunkered down behind an old air raid shelter, where we could ambush Flight C. I looked up into the cold night sky thick with a web of stars, peaceful and unclouded by bombers, and I drifted away. I lost all notion of time and command. I was as anonymous as the stars. The exercise seemed insignificant and distant. Suddenly there were shouts and the sounds of a struggle.  The flight we intended to ambush had crept up on us and taken us prisoner.

I was in the debriefing. It was uncomfortably hot in the drill hall. Sergeant Monty DeVere had his small pointer stick. He pulled down a map of the airfield on the screen with an efficient snap, folded his muscular arms and looked squarely at me.

“This was a classic case of an inability to think outside the box,” he said levelly. “Flight A had a clear ambush plan. It did not work but when they failed to see the enemy they didn’t switch to a plan B. They also failed to take stock of where they were and to make adjustments. If you are a one trick pony I’m afraid to say, you are not going to win any races.”

“Is that original or did you steal it from one of your father’s friends?”  I muttered.

The low backdrop of whispering ended in the drill hall and the air cadets started to pay attention.

“If that was a question, you should know the rules,” continued Monty. “Save them for the end. I am only a very small way through my extensive criticism of your performance tonight.”

It was the last time my patchily shined boots would squeal on the drill hall floor.

A to Z Challenge - A is for April

It's April Fool's Day but the A to Z Challenge is not a ruse. It's actually here. My theme this year will form a mini-novel. I'm thinking it may be too late to back out right ???

A is for April

April is the cruelest month. Everyone knows that. But April can be the most beautiful month too. I recall how it pushed tulips from the ground like spears and waxed sweet-smelling hyacinths.  The grounds of the castle were dotted with them, but I felt empty and sick at the sight of them. They were like an army of stiff sworded flowers between me and the clock tower and the egg shell blue water of the Irish Sea.

(Scottish tourist board)

It was a day that was frozen in time, but a day that could never curl up and become comfortable and sepia due to the gentleness of the colors – the blue of the sea, the yellow of the daffodils and the exquisite purple of the irises. I lined the day up in the viewfinder of my camera but the colors leached and were lost in the reproduction.

I lined up my fragile family in the view finder. Mum – her hair too corn yellow; dad – his hair thinning and Gracie, always circumspect, inward and to herself.

Monty my cousin had come along for the ride from Glasgow and he was a different kind entirely. Monty was just 13 but he had already filled out his blazer. He was a year older than me but the gap could have been five. Monty was always quoting from a non fiction book. Even now his clipped tones cut the spring silence on the lawn. Monty was comfortable with an audience.

“The Titanic was the largest liner of her generation. She spanned 883 feet from stern to bow. She was divided into compartments that were presumed to be watertight,” he announced.

Monty’s face sprung a leak and his eyes darted around in his head as he reached the climax of his tragic tale. On the night of April 14 she struck an iceberg. On April 15, 1912, she went down in the freezing waters of the Atlantic Ocean with the loss of 1500 souls.

Gracie’s face set in a firm frown. My sister’s birthday was on the same day. She was not amused. We had celebrated with party hats a day earlier.

“To the clock tower, to the clock tower,” said Dad, his joviality a little over hyped. We picked our way through the wild flowers to the mellow old sandstone tower.

“I was here as a kid. There is a great view from the top,” said Dad.

Once inside the tower, the uneasy warmth of the April sun was cut out as if we had descended into an undersea tunnel. There was a dampness and an unpleasant mustiness of floor boards. The stairs had gaping holes between them and they creaked. The higher we climbed the more hollow the space below us. My foot slipped in a gap and dad moved his hands to support me. “Steady son,”

Monty was up ahead. I caught the flap of his blazer and a whoop as he emerged into the sunshine at the top of the tower. But something was wrong. The tower was lurching in a sickening motion and my head was starting to spin. I sat down on the floor but the tower continued to moved.

“Are you alright Campbell? You look pale,” It was mum. She had that cajoling, nagging tone she usually reserved for burnt toast. Now the sickness of this morning’s eggs was upon me and I thought of embryos and babies strangled in the cold spring.

“I need to sit down,” I gasped and sat on the heavy wooden floor boards.

The party stopped and looked at me. “Why don’t you take him down Sylvia?” said Dad.

My mother took my hand and 10 minutes later we were back in the weak and inconstant sun, looking up at the clouds drifting high over the clock tower. A row of heads appeared at the top in high spirits. Monty waved in a grand arc, but his silhouette was obscured by the sun. I still felt queasy, grounded and defeated.

I had learned one of life’s most painful lessons at the age of 12. The world was inhabited by people like Monty and people like me.

A to Z Theme Reveal - A Novel Theme

Seriously I did some sort of bloghop A-Z theme reveal a couple of years ago but I am a bit out of touch with all of the blogishphere these days.

Still I have seen a few posts about the A-Z theme reveal and I thought it was high time to post as I have no theme to reveal really after doing music and animals in the past. This year's is far more exciting and ambitious. I will be writing a mini novel with one chapter every day. In many ways this is a lot more difficult than a theme and, although, I have done some forward planning I still feel the cold chill of A approaching me fast on April Fool's Day. It's less a clarion call to action that the mocking bells on the toe of a court jester but, nevertheless, it's coming at me fast.

My novel is about a troubled young man called Campbell who finds himself alone and adrift in the heart of Europe. It's about what he does next and his troubled relationship with his cousin Monty who is successful in everything he does - and knows it. In short, the type of cousin we love to hate. In order to find out if he gets one over his coz, you will have to read the whole thing, Come to think of it, I will have to write the while thing - not to mention thinking of a title. I have such trouble with titles.

Maybe it will come to me soon...but without further ado, it's time to lift the velvet curtain...