I keep looking back, as far as
I can remember, and I can’t
think what it was like to feel
young, really young.
John Osbourne
Everyone has a secret place they go to on those days when the world seems to become too much to handle. It’s the only place one can go to escape from the biting reality of everyday life, be it a hidden garden, a desolate rooftop or even the inside of your own head. A place to recharge your batteries, take out the garbage, clear the clutter and spring-clean your soul.
I too, have a secret place.
***
I guess it’s time to tell you about Charlie.
I’m drinking as I write this. I’m not much of a drinker, as a rule, except for the occasional beer or glass of wine every once in a while, but as I type this out, I’m drinking Jack D. It’s good for numbing the nerves and putting random thoughts on hold. I tend to find refuge in alcohol when the subject turns to Charlie. Not because of Charlie, a nice guy who became a close friend in a matter of hours, but because of what happened to Charlie, and my part in it.
I want two things to be understood before I go on. First of all, I liked Charlie. He was good company, funny and charming and witty and caring. I enjoyed being with him, and I never, ever, wished any harm to come to him. I guess it’s important to me that you believe this, but then again, the choice is yours. You may believe me now – you may change your mind later. Whatever. What’s done is done.
Secondly, I maintain that what I did was the right thing to do. Perhaps even the only thing to do.
But I’m getting ahead of myself again…
***
I was out with Rachael when I first met Charlie. Just on the outskirts of St John there used to be a pub called ‘The Rack’ where we used to hang out until it closed down in ’96, making way for a nightclub called ‘Da Quiri’. The club is still there today, but we still occasionally found ourselves calling the place ‘The Rack’. Old habits die hard.
The Rack was an old-fashioned pub. No neon signs, no TVs, no DJs crouching over decks in a dark corner and no video games. Just a large room with a long bar at one end and a huge fireplace at the other, covered in the summer with a large sheet of black cast iron. Comfy sofas clustered haphazardly around the fireplace and along the stone walls, upholstered in a patterned fabric apparently selected by a student of the ‘Absolute Chaos in Burnt Orange and Washed-out Red’ school of design. A replica Wurlitzer 1015-Bubbler stood proudly in one darkened corner, singing songs for small change from within its red and gold arched bubbletop frame. The floor was shoe-scuffed oak parquet, and smoke-blackened wooden beams clung to the ceiling and challenged gravity to pull them free. Perpetually dimly-lit and smoky, the place had atmosphere – even the door (panes of bubbled glass set in a wooden criss-cross pattern) made that tortured creaking sound every time it was opened. The only concession to the 1990s was the large blacktop parking area outside the pub.
I hadn’t been out and about for a while. Three months earlier, I had moved out of my parents’ house and into my own. Three months was how long it had taken me to get settled in. Three months of repainting the walls and hanging up picture frames and moving all my stuff in and installing a new kitchen and thousands of other little things that you don’t really consider until you actually live in your own place. It took me three weeks just to choose the right colour for the bedroom walls. Another two to apply it. Someone once said that ‘home is any four walls that enclose the right person’. I knew that I was the right person – I just wanted to be sure that I had chosen the right four walls to enclose myself in. so every evening after work I would do that little bit more, until finally, three months later, I stood back and realised with almost ridiculous pride that what had once been a house was now a home. My home.
Now it was time to catch up with my social life. I showered, changed into some real clothes (I had been wearing paint-spattered, over-sized overalls for longer than I cared to think about), and headed out to The Rack.
Rachael was there, which I had expected because it was where she always went to chill out after work at the salon. I saw her through a blanket of smoke, propped up at the bar, wearing blue jeans and a thin white V-neck and smoking a Silk Cut with the evident enjoyment of someone whose workday was finally over. A half-full highball was on the bar in front of her – sparkling water or lemonade bubbled happily in the glass. As I approached her, my nose picked up the faint smell of perm solution and hairspray about her. Some people hate the smell of perm solution – I loved it. Then again, I would have probably loved the reek of drainage had Rachael smelled of it.
She looked up at me as I approached, and her face creased into a smile. But, God, she was beautiful.
“Why hullo there, stranger!” she said. “You been let out for the evening?”
I gave her my patented ‘talking to Rachael’ grin.
“I’m done”.
“Done?” Her deep green eyes sparkled, and she mirrored my grin. “You’re ready? Every painting painted, every spot spotless, every tile tiled and every fixture fixed?”
“Yep. Done”.
“Then we must celebrate your Return to Civilisation, Mr Bishop”. She turned back to the bar, and Rackliffe popped into existence as if by magic, tea towel draped over one shoulder.
Bob Rackliffe – barman, proprietor and namesake of The Rack. He was a short, dumpy man with a sad droopy face and a permanent life couldn’t get any worse expression plastered across his face. He wasn’t much of a talker – in fact, his entire range of vocabulary seemed to consist of only one sentence, which he intoned mournfully on a daily basis at closing time. He appeared to be telepathic, however, and somehow always managed to appear out of nowhere when his customers were ready to order another round.
“A pint of your finest beer at once, Mr Rackliffe, if you would be so kind”, said Rachael in a regal voice, “And another sparkling water for the lady!”
We waited expectantly, but Rackliffe simply gave a barely perceptible nod and disappeared behind the counter, either to retrieve a beer from the fridges below or for a quick stroll in a parallel dimension somewhere. The next time we looked, the beer and the sparkling water were on the bar, looking as if they had never not been there.
“How does he do that?”
I shrugged as I absent-mindedly traced a line in the condensation on the glass.
“I’m sure he lives in…”
“Rachael? Rachael Sands?”
Rachael turned at the sound of her name.
“… five dimensions”, I tailed off weakly.
Never mind. It wasn’t that funny anyway.
The newcomer was tall and thin and looked about my age. His blond hair was long and pulled back into a ponytail. He seemed to be into denim – he wore faded jeans, a denim shirt and a denim jacket. There was a button badge pinned to the left-hand pocket of the jacket. It read ‘P.U.S.H.’ in big black letters. Underneath, in smaller print, were the words ‘Pray Until Something Happens’. He was smoking a tailor-made cigarette; obviously decent tobacco because it didn’t stink to high heaven like most roll-ups do.
“Oh my God! Charlie!” Rachael practically screamed. She sounded pleased. “How are you? Long time no see”.
My mind instantly flashed back to when I had walked in and Rachael had spotted me. I hadn’t got an ‘oh my God!’ I had got a ‘why hullo there’. Somehow, it didn’t compare.
I watched Charlie carefully as he grinned at Rachael, a crooked likeable grin.
“Thought it was you”, he said. “Saw you as soon as I walked through the door. Said to myself ‘That must be Rachael Sands’. Still got the same scruffomatic anti-hairstyle, I see. Cute as an extremely cute thing, and unique as something that there’s only one of”.
I later found out that Charlie spoke like this all the time – making up his own words like the Oxford English Dictionary was something that happened to other people, and using weird expressions that made an odd sort of sense if you thought about it hard enough. And it was true – Rachael did indeed sport a scruffomatic anti-hairstyle. She wore her hair short so that there would be less of it to control, or so she claimed, but it still refused to be mastered, sticking up in tufts and angling out in all directions. An anti-hairstyle. Definitely scruffomatic. Wonderfully cute.
“This is Joey”, said Rachael, waving her hand in my direction. “Joey Bishop – meet Charlie Tupper”.
“Hey”, said Charlie.
“Pleased to meet you”, I smiled awkwardly.
I promised the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, no matter how stupid or petty-minded it made me look, so I must at this point admit that I wasn’t as pleased to meet Charlie Tupper as I claimed to be. Nothing to do with Charlie – he could have been anyone. Or any he, to be exact. Certain thoughts flashed through my love-sick mind like a freight train through a tunnel. They went something like…
Who is he? – he knows Rachael – Rachael knows him – they seem pleased to see each other – does he fancy her? – does she fancy him? – he seems likeable enough – bastard – where did she meet him – etc etc etc.
Paranoid, I know. That’s how badly I had fallen for her. A cocktail of crème de menthe jealousy with a twist of possessive longing. I knew, of course, that Rachael had other friends besides me. That didn’t bother me at all. I just wished I knew exactly how friendly these other friends were. I’m not proud, would rather have kept my thoughts to myself, but… the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
So help me God.
***
It turned out that Charlie and Rachael had met each other at a mutual friend’s wedding. I knew the mutual friend, had been invited to the wedding and had been unable to make it due to a weekend sales seminar at work. A weekend spent learning how to sell products to indifferent shop-owners by breaking through the barriers of my ‘comfort zone’, until I had a wider ‘comfort zone’ to break through again the week after. “Eventually”, the bright-eyed, smiling lecturer had said dramatically, “your comfort zone will expand and encompass the whole area!” On the whiteboard behind him he had drawn a dot, which was meant to represent me, surrounded by a circle, which was meant to be my personal bloody comfort zone. It looked like a tit. The lecturer also looked like a tit. I felt like a tit. I had really wanted to go to that wedding. I had seen the photos, later. Rachael had worn her tiny red dress…
So…
Charlie joined us at the bar, declined the offer of a beer, claiming that he had ‘totalled his tee years ago’, which in Charliespeak meant that he didn’t drink anymore, and proceeded to fit right in. that was one of the first things I noticed about him, right after his crazy paving way of speaking and his football injury limp – he possessed the remarkable ability to just fit right in, like the centre piece of a large jigsaw puzzle. After just five minutes it was as if I had known him all my life. And in spite of my mind-gnawing paranoia, I found that I couldn’t help liking him. He was ‘people like us’.
He smoked like a chimney, already expertly hand-rolling a new cigarette as he mashed the remains of the last one into the ashtray. “I’m a social smoker”, he explained, lighting up yet again. “It just so happens that there’s society everywhere I go. So now I chain-smoke like a kipper factory – and naturally I blame society. Like everyone else with an addiction affliction”. He exhaled a lungful of smoke and grinned as he added, “and since I’m a card-carrying member of society, I also blame myself”.
It was difficult to tell whether Charlie was being serious or not. He had this haphazard kind of weird logic that he could apparently spout out without actually engaging his brain. And he had a theory about everything from politics to pantomime.
So we sat at the bar, talking about the odd assortment of stuff that people normally talk about in bars, until Rackliffe appeared from out of somewhere none of us could quite see, gave his watch a meaningful tap and dutifully recited the one line we had ever heard him utter.
“Haven’t you lot got homes to go to?”
I looked around the Rack and realised to my surprise that we were the only people still there. Rachael looked at her own watch, and spoke through a yawn. “It’s gone midnight. ‘S bedtime, gentlemen”.
We walked out of the pub. The night felt cool, the air fresh and clean after the fogginess of The Rack. A full moon hung lazily like a dull bronze medallion in the cloudless black sky. It was peaceful – the only sound the scraping of our feet on the parking lot’s tarmac, and the sounds of bolts being drawn behind us as Rackliffe locked up. Seconds later, the lights in the pub went out.
There were only three cars left in the parking lot. One of them was Rackliffe’s Volkswagen Beetle, which had seen better days, although so long ago that it probably didn’t remember them. The piece-of-crap Toyota Starlet was mine, and Rachael, who lived minutes away in a tiny flat above a bakery, had come on foot.
Which probably meant that the Porsche was Charlie’s.
Shit!
I’m not much of a car-person - unlike Daryl, who would launch enthusiastically into endless monologues consisting of nothing but numbers and words like ‘carburetor’ the minute he heard a passing engine – but this car was cool. Even standing still it looked as if it was breaking the speed limit. Sleek, streamlined and jet black like the silhouette of a panther caught in mid-pounce, not actually moving but giving an overall impression of acceleration and power.
Charlie caught me looking.
“Used to be my dad’s pride and joy”, he said off-handedly. “He sort of gave it to me. Reluctantly”.
“How’s that?” I asked, still looking at the car. We were walking towards it as if drawn by a magnet. It was one of the older models, with the sticking-up-bit at the back, and the curvy lines along the body.
“He died”.
That drew my attention away from the car. I looked up sharply at Charlie.
“Oh”, said Rachael quietly.
“Um… that’s too bad. I’m sorry”, I started, bemused.
Charlie shrugged. “Don’t be. Everyone has to die someday. My dad’s day came last year. Went to bed and never woke up. Just like…” he snapped his fingers, “that”.
“At least it was painless”, I mumbled, resorting to clichés, figuring that clichés became clichés because they were so effective. “That’s the way I’d like to go – in my sleep”.
Charlie jammed a cigarette in his mouth, and looked at me as he lit it, the flame throwing a dancing goblin shadow over his features. He took a long drag, exhaled a jet of smoke, and twisted his lips into that twisted grin of his. Only this time it looked more like a grimace.
“Then make sure you never get married”, he said. We stared at each other for a little longer, and I saw, or imagined I saw, the ghost of a memory flicker in his piercing blue eyes. Then he blinked.
“Time for me to get going, I’m afraid. The bed beckons”. He patted his pockets. A frown creased his forehead and he said ‘oh shit’. He patted his pockets again, this time a little more frantically. Then he sighed resignedly. “looks like I’ve done it again”, he said.
He looked sadly at his car – the kind of look that a mother gives her child when he presents her with a school report containing nothing but Fs.
“I’m the proud owner of the ultimate penis compensator”, he said ruefully, “and I’ve gone and lost the keys to it”.
***
Okay, so I invited Charlie to spend the night at my place. Before you start thinking what a nice guy I am… don’t. My reasons were purely selfish.
First of all, Charlie lived in Olive Hill; a small town that was a couple of hours’ drive from St John. It was already one ayem, and I had no desire to finally make it home at five in the morning, then get up at half seven for work. Not happening.
So we decided that Charlie would stay with one of us for the night.
Think about it.
Me and Charlie.
Or Charlie and Rachael?
See what I mean?
***
Have you ever wondered how your life would have turned out if, at some point, you had made one decision instead of the other? Would it be completely different, or are all the paths we choose to walk down mapped out in advance by some higher power, God or otherwise? Maybe it’s best not to worry about it too much because we’ll never actually know what may, might or could have been. Puzzle over it for too long, and you could end up asking yourself questions like ‘who the hell am I, anyway?’, and that’s never a healthy state of mind to be in.
Still, I can’t help wondering how things would have turned out had I not hastily suggested that Charlie stay at my house that night. Or possibly, if I hadn’t yet finished doing up the house, I wouldn’t have gone out at all, and would never have even met him in the first place.
You see, I didn’t know that Charlie had a girlfriend when I first met him; an Olive Hill local named Amber who I only met twice – once when Charlie moved out, the second time seven years later. And I didn’t know that Charlie’s house was actually her house. Had I known, I might not have been so quick to offer Charlie a place to stay for the night, and then, when he and Amber broke up about a month later and he needed a place to live, he probably wouldn’t have called me. He would probably never have moved in with me, and what happened would probably never have happened. Probably.
But it did happen.
Inevitable or escapable? Who can tell? The fact is that it happened. Charlie moved in with me after some discussion about rent and whatnot; he did his fitting-in magic, and pretty soon it was as if he had always been there. His ‘just until I find somewhere else’ became seven years. My house became our house.
And then, a month before the unspeakable happened and Claire was stolen from us by Death’s bony grip, Charlie left. Just like that. No goodbye, no reason, no explanation. Just a quickly scrawled note saying ‘I’ve got to go’ left taped to the kettle, where he knew I would find it first thing in the morning when I had my coffee.
He left everything behind but his car.
The next time I saw that car, it was on TV. Busy-looking policemen were strutting around with media-induced efficiency, clutching clipboards for props and either yelling out orders or nodding wisely for the cameras as, behind them, a crane fished the Porsche out of a reservoir. Muddy water gushed out from the interior via the broken windows, and grey sludge oozed across the body like lava from a sick volcano. The tyres were slashed, headlights destroyed, bonnet gone, engine worked over with a sledgehammer. Someone had smashed the car up badly. It no longer looked like the silhouette of anything – it looked like a fugitive from automobile Hell…
But that was later.
***
It was Monday evening, two weeks after the funeral, and it had been a tough day at work, dealing with irate shop-owners who wanted to know where their orders were. I was buggered if I knew, but after spending the day groveling, promising and wheedling, I finally walked into the house at around half six. Feeling tired and hungry, I tossed my rucksack into the nearest corner, and headed towards the fridge. I had two options – last night’s pasta, which hadn’t been that good, or Saturday night’s pasta, which, frankly, had been shite. I quickly created a third option and spent a minute searching the phone book for the number of the closest Chinese takeaway that also delivered.
As I curled up on the sofa, waiting hungrily for my cartons of grease to be delivered, I found myself thinking of Rachael, which had long ago become a daily occurrence and therefore did not come as much of a surprise. The alien voice in my head woke up and sighed here we go again, as if to remind me what a sad bastard I was.
The problem with thinking about Rachael was that once she got into my head, it was almost impossible to get her out again until I was emotionally drained. I toyed with the idea of giving her a call, but then I immediately dismissed it – that would lead back to square one, with Rachael and Colin whispering sweet nothings under the moon of love while I repeatedly banged my head against a brick wall in the background. That was more than I could handle. I was not going to call her.
No way. No could do. Forget it.
I called Rachael.
She answered on the third ring.
“Hullo?”
There was music playing in the background – The Pixies were belting out ‘Monkey Gone to Heaven’. I’d given her that album for her last birthday. I decided that it was a good sign.
“Hullo to you too”.
“Joey! Found your phone at last?” She sounded pleased. “Or do I just have some contagious disease that I don’t know about?”
God, I had missed her. The sound of her voice was sending a rush of blood to my head, where that little bastard alien was intoning over and over again this is a bad idea this is a bad idea.
“You wouldn’t believe how busy I’ve been”, I told Rachael feebly.
Oh, nice one said the alien sarcastically.
“Is that all? Nothing’s wrong, is it? Only it seems like you’ve been avoiding me lately, Mr Bishop!”
She spoke lightly enough, but I think I could detect an undercurrent of anxiety in her voice.
“Nothing’s wrong”, I assured her.
“Then let’s meet up one day soon. D’you realise that we haven’t had a good gossip for almost two months? That’s a long time for people like us”.
People like us. Meaning, I assumed, people who had grown up together and shared every day of their lives with each other. Daryl was people like us. Amy was people like us. Colin was definitely not people like us. There was an invisible line that divided people like us from everybody else, and Colin was without a doubt on the wrong side of it.
“That’s true”.
“How about Thursday night?” Rachael said suddenly. I was already looking for an excuse while simultaneously wanting to agree with anything she suggested, when she added, “Colin’s going to be at work until the early hours of the morn, designing some new hi-tech programme that will help him to design even newer, higher tech-ier programmes in the future, or something absolutely dazzling like that. I’ll be all on my lonesome at home. We could go out. Have a couple of drinks. Dance. Exaggerate our sexual adventures. Whatever”.
I thought about it. It was not a good idea.
No way. No could do. Forget it.
“Thursday it is”, I said cheerfully.
“And don’t you dare leave me hanging”, Rachael commanded. “Because if you do, an eternity of pain and suffering in hell will be a walk in the park compared to ten minutes with me, a couple of hairpins and a tampon. You have been warned, Mr Joey Bishop”.
“Warning heeded, Miss Rachael Sands”, I answered in mock terror.
There was a click as she put the handle in its cradle. Rachael never bothered with saying goodbye. She always insisted that it was obvious when a phone-call was over anyway, and goodbye was an unnecessary punctuation mark. She was weird like that sometimes, was Rachael. Weird and wonderful.
I put my own telephone back in its place as the alien in my head chanted stupid stupid stupid…
“Shut the fuck up”, I said pleasantly. I went to the kitchen and checked the calendar on the fridge to see if it was Thursday yet. Nope, still Monday evening. Three days to go.
Three days to go.
I too, have a secret place.
***
I guess it’s time to tell you about Charlie.
I’m drinking as I write this. I’m not much of a drinker, as a rule, except for the occasional beer or glass of wine every once in a while, but as I type this out, I’m drinking Jack D. It’s good for numbing the nerves and putting random thoughts on hold. I tend to find refuge in alcohol when the subject turns to Charlie. Not because of Charlie, a nice guy who became a close friend in a matter of hours, but because of what happened to Charlie, and my part in it.
I want two things to be understood before I go on. First of all, I liked Charlie. He was good company, funny and charming and witty and caring. I enjoyed being with him, and I never, ever, wished any harm to come to him. I guess it’s important to me that you believe this, but then again, the choice is yours. You may believe me now – you may change your mind later. Whatever. What’s done is done.
Secondly, I maintain that what I did was the right thing to do. Perhaps even the only thing to do.
But I’m getting ahead of myself again…
***
I was out with Rachael when I first met Charlie. Just on the outskirts of St John there used to be a pub called ‘The Rack’ where we used to hang out until it closed down in ’96, making way for a nightclub called ‘Da Quiri’. The club is still there today, but we still occasionally found ourselves calling the place ‘The Rack’. Old habits die hard.
The Rack was an old-fashioned pub. No neon signs, no TVs, no DJs crouching over decks in a dark corner and no video games. Just a large room with a long bar at one end and a huge fireplace at the other, covered in the summer with a large sheet of black cast iron. Comfy sofas clustered haphazardly around the fireplace and along the stone walls, upholstered in a patterned fabric apparently selected by a student of the ‘Absolute Chaos in Burnt Orange and Washed-out Red’ school of design. A replica Wurlitzer 1015-Bubbler stood proudly in one darkened corner, singing songs for small change from within its red and gold arched bubbletop frame. The floor was shoe-scuffed oak parquet, and smoke-blackened wooden beams clung to the ceiling and challenged gravity to pull them free. Perpetually dimly-lit and smoky, the place had atmosphere – even the door (panes of bubbled glass set in a wooden criss-cross pattern) made that tortured creaking sound every time it was opened. The only concession to the 1990s was the large blacktop parking area outside the pub.
I hadn’t been out and about for a while. Three months earlier, I had moved out of my parents’ house and into my own. Three months was how long it had taken me to get settled in. Three months of repainting the walls and hanging up picture frames and moving all my stuff in and installing a new kitchen and thousands of other little things that you don’t really consider until you actually live in your own place. It took me three weeks just to choose the right colour for the bedroom walls. Another two to apply it. Someone once said that ‘home is any four walls that enclose the right person’. I knew that I was the right person – I just wanted to be sure that I had chosen the right four walls to enclose myself in. so every evening after work I would do that little bit more, until finally, three months later, I stood back and realised with almost ridiculous pride that what had once been a house was now a home. My home.
Now it was time to catch up with my social life. I showered, changed into some real clothes (I had been wearing paint-spattered, over-sized overalls for longer than I cared to think about), and headed out to The Rack.
Rachael was there, which I had expected because it was where she always went to chill out after work at the salon. I saw her through a blanket of smoke, propped up at the bar, wearing blue jeans and a thin white V-neck and smoking a Silk Cut with the evident enjoyment of someone whose workday was finally over. A half-full highball was on the bar in front of her – sparkling water or lemonade bubbled happily in the glass. As I approached her, my nose picked up the faint smell of perm solution and hairspray about her. Some people hate the smell of perm solution – I loved it. Then again, I would have probably loved the reek of drainage had Rachael smelled of it.
She looked up at me as I approached, and her face creased into a smile. But, God, she was beautiful.
“Why hullo there, stranger!” she said. “You been let out for the evening?”
I gave her my patented ‘talking to Rachael’ grin.
“I’m done”.
“Done?” Her deep green eyes sparkled, and she mirrored my grin. “You’re ready? Every painting painted, every spot spotless, every tile tiled and every fixture fixed?”
“Yep. Done”.
“Then we must celebrate your Return to Civilisation, Mr Bishop”. She turned back to the bar, and Rackliffe popped into existence as if by magic, tea towel draped over one shoulder.
Bob Rackliffe – barman, proprietor and namesake of The Rack. He was a short, dumpy man with a sad droopy face and a permanent life couldn’t get any worse expression plastered across his face. He wasn’t much of a talker – in fact, his entire range of vocabulary seemed to consist of only one sentence, which he intoned mournfully on a daily basis at closing time. He appeared to be telepathic, however, and somehow always managed to appear out of nowhere when his customers were ready to order another round.
“A pint of your finest beer at once, Mr Rackliffe, if you would be so kind”, said Rachael in a regal voice, “And another sparkling water for the lady!”
We waited expectantly, but Rackliffe simply gave a barely perceptible nod and disappeared behind the counter, either to retrieve a beer from the fridges below or for a quick stroll in a parallel dimension somewhere. The next time we looked, the beer and the sparkling water were on the bar, looking as if they had never not been there.
“How does he do that?”
I shrugged as I absent-mindedly traced a line in the condensation on the glass.
“I’m sure he lives in…”
“Rachael? Rachael Sands?”
Rachael turned at the sound of her name.
“… five dimensions”, I tailed off weakly.
Never mind. It wasn’t that funny anyway.
The newcomer was tall and thin and looked about my age. His blond hair was long and pulled back into a ponytail. He seemed to be into denim – he wore faded jeans, a denim shirt and a denim jacket. There was a button badge pinned to the left-hand pocket of the jacket. It read ‘P.U.S.H.’ in big black letters. Underneath, in smaller print, were the words ‘Pray Until Something Happens’. He was smoking a tailor-made cigarette; obviously decent tobacco because it didn’t stink to high heaven like most roll-ups do.
“Oh my God! Charlie!” Rachael practically screamed. She sounded pleased. “How are you? Long time no see”.
My mind instantly flashed back to when I had walked in and Rachael had spotted me. I hadn’t got an ‘oh my God!’ I had got a ‘why hullo there’. Somehow, it didn’t compare.
I watched Charlie carefully as he grinned at Rachael, a crooked likeable grin.
“Thought it was you”, he said. “Saw you as soon as I walked through the door. Said to myself ‘That must be Rachael Sands’. Still got the same scruffomatic anti-hairstyle, I see. Cute as an extremely cute thing, and unique as something that there’s only one of”.
I later found out that Charlie spoke like this all the time – making up his own words like the Oxford English Dictionary was something that happened to other people, and using weird expressions that made an odd sort of sense if you thought about it hard enough. And it was true – Rachael did indeed sport a scruffomatic anti-hairstyle. She wore her hair short so that there would be less of it to control, or so she claimed, but it still refused to be mastered, sticking up in tufts and angling out in all directions. An anti-hairstyle. Definitely scruffomatic. Wonderfully cute.
“This is Joey”, said Rachael, waving her hand in my direction. “Joey Bishop – meet Charlie Tupper”.
“Hey”, said Charlie.
“Pleased to meet you”, I smiled awkwardly.
I promised the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, no matter how stupid or petty-minded it made me look, so I must at this point admit that I wasn’t as pleased to meet Charlie Tupper as I claimed to be. Nothing to do with Charlie – he could have been anyone. Or any he, to be exact. Certain thoughts flashed through my love-sick mind like a freight train through a tunnel. They went something like…
Who is he? – he knows Rachael – Rachael knows him – they seem pleased to see each other – does he fancy her? – does she fancy him? – he seems likeable enough – bastard – where did she meet him – etc etc etc.
Paranoid, I know. That’s how badly I had fallen for her. A cocktail of crème de menthe jealousy with a twist of possessive longing. I knew, of course, that Rachael had other friends besides me. That didn’t bother me at all. I just wished I knew exactly how friendly these other friends were. I’m not proud, would rather have kept my thoughts to myself, but… the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
So help me God.
***
It turned out that Charlie and Rachael had met each other at a mutual friend’s wedding. I knew the mutual friend, had been invited to the wedding and had been unable to make it due to a weekend sales seminar at work. A weekend spent learning how to sell products to indifferent shop-owners by breaking through the barriers of my ‘comfort zone’, until I had a wider ‘comfort zone’ to break through again the week after. “Eventually”, the bright-eyed, smiling lecturer had said dramatically, “your comfort zone will expand and encompass the whole area!” On the whiteboard behind him he had drawn a dot, which was meant to represent me, surrounded by a circle, which was meant to be my personal bloody comfort zone. It looked like a tit. The lecturer also looked like a tit. I felt like a tit. I had really wanted to go to that wedding. I had seen the photos, later. Rachael had worn her tiny red dress…
So…
Charlie joined us at the bar, declined the offer of a beer, claiming that he had ‘totalled his tee years ago’, which in Charliespeak meant that he didn’t drink anymore, and proceeded to fit right in. that was one of the first things I noticed about him, right after his crazy paving way of speaking and his football injury limp – he possessed the remarkable ability to just fit right in, like the centre piece of a large jigsaw puzzle. After just five minutes it was as if I had known him all my life. And in spite of my mind-gnawing paranoia, I found that I couldn’t help liking him. He was ‘people like us’.
He smoked like a chimney, already expertly hand-rolling a new cigarette as he mashed the remains of the last one into the ashtray. “I’m a social smoker”, he explained, lighting up yet again. “It just so happens that there’s society everywhere I go. So now I chain-smoke like a kipper factory – and naturally I blame society. Like everyone else with an addiction affliction”. He exhaled a lungful of smoke and grinned as he added, “and since I’m a card-carrying member of society, I also blame myself”.
It was difficult to tell whether Charlie was being serious or not. He had this haphazard kind of weird logic that he could apparently spout out without actually engaging his brain. And he had a theory about everything from politics to pantomime.
So we sat at the bar, talking about the odd assortment of stuff that people normally talk about in bars, until Rackliffe appeared from out of somewhere none of us could quite see, gave his watch a meaningful tap and dutifully recited the one line we had ever heard him utter.
“Haven’t you lot got homes to go to?”
I looked around the Rack and realised to my surprise that we were the only people still there. Rachael looked at her own watch, and spoke through a yawn. “It’s gone midnight. ‘S bedtime, gentlemen”.
We walked out of the pub. The night felt cool, the air fresh and clean after the fogginess of The Rack. A full moon hung lazily like a dull bronze medallion in the cloudless black sky. It was peaceful – the only sound the scraping of our feet on the parking lot’s tarmac, and the sounds of bolts being drawn behind us as Rackliffe locked up. Seconds later, the lights in the pub went out.
There were only three cars left in the parking lot. One of them was Rackliffe’s Volkswagen Beetle, which had seen better days, although so long ago that it probably didn’t remember them. The piece-of-crap Toyota Starlet was mine, and Rachael, who lived minutes away in a tiny flat above a bakery, had come on foot.
Which probably meant that the Porsche was Charlie’s.
Shit!
I’m not much of a car-person - unlike Daryl, who would launch enthusiastically into endless monologues consisting of nothing but numbers and words like ‘carburetor’ the minute he heard a passing engine – but this car was cool. Even standing still it looked as if it was breaking the speed limit. Sleek, streamlined and jet black like the silhouette of a panther caught in mid-pounce, not actually moving but giving an overall impression of acceleration and power.
Charlie caught me looking.
“Used to be my dad’s pride and joy”, he said off-handedly. “He sort of gave it to me. Reluctantly”.
“How’s that?” I asked, still looking at the car. We were walking towards it as if drawn by a magnet. It was one of the older models, with the sticking-up-bit at the back, and the curvy lines along the body.
“He died”.
That drew my attention away from the car. I looked up sharply at Charlie.
“Oh”, said Rachael quietly.
“Um… that’s too bad. I’m sorry”, I started, bemused.
Charlie shrugged. “Don’t be. Everyone has to die someday. My dad’s day came last year. Went to bed and never woke up. Just like…” he snapped his fingers, “that”.
“At least it was painless”, I mumbled, resorting to clichés, figuring that clichés became clichés because they were so effective. “That’s the way I’d like to go – in my sleep”.
Charlie jammed a cigarette in his mouth, and looked at me as he lit it, the flame throwing a dancing goblin shadow over his features. He took a long drag, exhaled a jet of smoke, and twisted his lips into that twisted grin of his. Only this time it looked more like a grimace.
“Then make sure you never get married”, he said. We stared at each other for a little longer, and I saw, or imagined I saw, the ghost of a memory flicker in his piercing blue eyes. Then he blinked.
“Time for me to get going, I’m afraid. The bed beckons”. He patted his pockets. A frown creased his forehead and he said ‘oh shit’. He patted his pockets again, this time a little more frantically. Then he sighed resignedly. “looks like I’ve done it again”, he said.
He looked sadly at his car – the kind of look that a mother gives her child when he presents her with a school report containing nothing but Fs.
“I’m the proud owner of the ultimate penis compensator”, he said ruefully, “and I’ve gone and lost the keys to it”.
***
Okay, so I invited Charlie to spend the night at my place. Before you start thinking what a nice guy I am… don’t. My reasons were purely selfish.
First of all, Charlie lived in Olive Hill; a small town that was a couple of hours’ drive from St John. It was already one ayem, and I had no desire to finally make it home at five in the morning, then get up at half seven for work. Not happening.
So we decided that Charlie would stay with one of us for the night.
Think about it.
Me and Charlie.
Or Charlie and Rachael?
See what I mean?
***
Have you ever wondered how your life would have turned out if, at some point, you had made one decision instead of the other? Would it be completely different, or are all the paths we choose to walk down mapped out in advance by some higher power, God or otherwise? Maybe it’s best not to worry about it too much because we’ll never actually know what may, might or could have been. Puzzle over it for too long, and you could end up asking yourself questions like ‘who the hell am I, anyway?’, and that’s never a healthy state of mind to be in.
Still, I can’t help wondering how things would have turned out had I not hastily suggested that Charlie stay at my house that night. Or possibly, if I hadn’t yet finished doing up the house, I wouldn’t have gone out at all, and would never have even met him in the first place.
You see, I didn’t know that Charlie had a girlfriend when I first met him; an Olive Hill local named Amber who I only met twice – once when Charlie moved out, the second time seven years later. And I didn’t know that Charlie’s house was actually her house. Had I known, I might not have been so quick to offer Charlie a place to stay for the night, and then, when he and Amber broke up about a month later and he needed a place to live, he probably wouldn’t have called me. He would probably never have moved in with me, and what happened would probably never have happened. Probably.
But it did happen.
Inevitable or escapable? Who can tell? The fact is that it happened. Charlie moved in with me after some discussion about rent and whatnot; he did his fitting-in magic, and pretty soon it was as if he had always been there. His ‘just until I find somewhere else’ became seven years. My house became our house.
And then, a month before the unspeakable happened and Claire was stolen from us by Death’s bony grip, Charlie left. Just like that. No goodbye, no reason, no explanation. Just a quickly scrawled note saying ‘I’ve got to go’ left taped to the kettle, where he knew I would find it first thing in the morning when I had my coffee.
He left everything behind but his car.
The next time I saw that car, it was on TV. Busy-looking policemen were strutting around with media-induced efficiency, clutching clipboards for props and either yelling out orders or nodding wisely for the cameras as, behind them, a crane fished the Porsche out of a reservoir. Muddy water gushed out from the interior via the broken windows, and grey sludge oozed across the body like lava from a sick volcano. The tyres were slashed, headlights destroyed, bonnet gone, engine worked over with a sledgehammer. Someone had smashed the car up badly. It no longer looked like the silhouette of anything – it looked like a fugitive from automobile Hell…
But that was later.
***
It was Monday evening, two weeks after the funeral, and it had been a tough day at work, dealing with irate shop-owners who wanted to know where their orders were. I was buggered if I knew, but after spending the day groveling, promising and wheedling, I finally walked into the house at around half six. Feeling tired and hungry, I tossed my rucksack into the nearest corner, and headed towards the fridge. I had two options – last night’s pasta, which hadn’t been that good, or Saturday night’s pasta, which, frankly, had been shite. I quickly created a third option and spent a minute searching the phone book for the number of the closest Chinese takeaway that also delivered.
As I curled up on the sofa, waiting hungrily for my cartons of grease to be delivered, I found myself thinking of Rachael, which had long ago become a daily occurrence and therefore did not come as much of a surprise. The alien voice in my head woke up and sighed here we go again, as if to remind me what a sad bastard I was.
The problem with thinking about Rachael was that once she got into my head, it was almost impossible to get her out again until I was emotionally drained. I toyed with the idea of giving her a call, but then I immediately dismissed it – that would lead back to square one, with Rachael and Colin whispering sweet nothings under the moon of love while I repeatedly banged my head against a brick wall in the background. That was more than I could handle. I was not going to call her.
No way. No could do. Forget it.
I called Rachael.
She answered on the third ring.
“Hullo?”
There was music playing in the background – The Pixies were belting out ‘Monkey Gone to Heaven’. I’d given her that album for her last birthday. I decided that it was a good sign.
“Hullo to you too”.
“Joey! Found your phone at last?” She sounded pleased. “Or do I just have some contagious disease that I don’t know about?”
God, I had missed her. The sound of her voice was sending a rush of blood to my head, where that little bastard alien was intoning over and over again this is a bad idea this is a bad idea.
“You wouldn’t believe how busy I’ve been”, I told Rachael feebly.
Oh, nice one said the alien sarcastically.
“Is that all? Nothing’s wrong, is it? Only it seems like you’ve been avoiding me lately, Mr Bishop!”
She spoke lightly enough, but I think I could detect an undercurrent of anxiety in her voice.
“Nothing’s wrong”, I assured her.
“Then let’s meet up one day soon. D’you realise that we haven’t had a good gossip for almost two months? That’s a long time for people like us”.
People like us. Meaning, I assumed, people who had grown up together and shared every day of their lives with each other. Daryl was people like us. Amy was people like us. Colin was definitely not people like us. There was an invisible line that divided people like us from everybody else, and Colin was without a doubt on the wrong side of it.
“That’s true”.
“How about Thursday night?” Rachael said suddenly. I was already looking for an excuse while simultaneously wanting to agree with anything she suggested, when she added, “Colin’s going to be at work until the early hours of the morn, designing some new hi-tech programme that will help him to design even newer, higher tech-ier programmes in the future, or something absolutely dazzling like that. I’ll be all on my lonesome at home. We could go out. Have a couple of drinks. Dance. Exaggerate our sexual adventures. Whatever”.
I thought about it. It was not a good idea.
No way. No could do. Forget it.
“Thursday it is”, I said cheerfully.
“And don’t you dare leave me hanging”, Rachael commanded. “Because if you do, an eternity of pain and suffering in hell will be a walk in the park compared to ten minutes with me, a couple of hairpins and a tampon. You have been warned, Mr Joey Bishop”.
“Warning heeded, Miss Rachael Sands”, I answered in mock terror.
There was a click as she put the handle in its cradle. Rachael never bothered with saying goodbye. She always insisted that it was obvious when a phone-call was over anyway, and goodbye was an unnecessary punctuation mark. She was weird like that sometimes, was Rachael. Weird and wonderful.
I put my own telephone back in its place as the alien in my head chanted stupid stupid stupid…
“Shut the fuck up”, I said pleasantly. I went to the kitchen and checked the calendar on the fridge to see if it was Thursday yet. Nope, still Monday evening. Three days to go.
Three days to go.
***
Forward to Chapter Two | Part Two
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