I Am All Stories 7

I’ve completed my piece of writing. (Or at least I think I have.) It’s odd writing something non-linear. Most stories go forward in time, and you just have to decide what to include, not what order events should come in. With this piece it’s been about making sure that the paragraphs work together, and you don’t get, for instance, two sections together when the main character is the same age, or two mentions of three o’clock next to each other. There are other considerations as well, about how meaning accrues. (Assuming it does!)

Anyway click here for the more or less finished thing: Andrew in the Maze

I may do something more with it, perhaps take some photographs as illustrations. We’ll see.

Andrew in the Maze

When the clock struck three Andrew stood up and found his bike in the long grass. ‘All downhill to night-time now,’ he thought. He crossed the rail tracks, got on the bike and rode down the lane, the grass and nettles in the verge whipping at his bare legs. The sun was noticeably lower in the sky, its light had notes of gold and copper. The scent of autumn was in the air, though he couldn’t have said exactly what that was, something burnished and crisp with a hint of cold.
He didn’t want to go home. Not really. But he didn’t want to be out after dark either. The bike had no lights. Or rather it had lights but they didn’t work. He didn’t know if it was the dynamo or just the bulbs that had gone. At the end of summer he and Kevin had biked home in the dark. At that time they had two working lights between them. Andrew’s bike had a functioning rear light and Kevin’s headlight worked. So Kevin rode in front with Andrew following tightly behind him. In the country lanes where there were no street lights the night cocooned them in darkness. There were no sounds other than the whickering of bicycle wheels, and the occasional car that growled by, too close. With no visual reference points and without having to peddle that much on the downward sloping roads, it felt like flying.

At three the chiming of the clock wakes him from his dream and its ticking is a heartbeat in the empty house. The body of his teenage self haunts his older frame.
He goes downstairs because sleep does not come back. He feeds the cat and sits on the sofa with a cup of decaf. The night holds no fears now and he can’t remember what it was that alarmed him about it when he was young. What had he been doing near the rail tracks? He can’t recall. Had he been alone? And how could there have been a clock there in the remote scrub, unless it was a church clock somewhere distant. But that is the only bit of the memory that is vivid and fixed: three o’clock in the afternoon and the clock strikes. He gazes at the blank spot on the wall where his wedding photo used to hang, until two months ago. Ruth and himself smiling, wedding clothes that seem too big for them. Eventually he dozes again while a man on the TV paints a landscape of purples and yellows, his gentle voice rocking Andrew back into sleep where his dreams are about an abortive date in a bar that never really happened.

The clock strikes three on the hospital wall as Andrew is born. The three o’clock baby is quiet and puzzles. What just happened? Where am I? Bright lights shine as giants gently clean and wrap him. They carry him to his mother’s arms. It feels like flying.

On the beach in the dark he has been allowed to stay up late by his parents. There is a bonfire and lots of people laughing. Further down the beach a sand labyrinth lit by candles in jars. He runs round the maze arms spread until he gets to the centre. Then he walks out again slowly. The sand is rough between his toes and under the soles of his feet where his sandals trap it against his skin. The hiss and rush of the sea and the laughter of people and the distant music of a drunken fairground. The lights of the seafront are tiny and he stands on the quiet beach breathing in salt and seaweed, a mile away from anywhere.

When he was young, and he can’t remember how young, he had a recurring dream where he could fly. Sometimes he was a girl, which was odder than the flying thing.
The girl Andrew willed herself into the air, and sometimes it was painfully slow to get off the ground, and she floated up like a wisp of a plastic bag, willing gravity away, until either she soared or it beat her and she sunk back to the concrete yard of the school. When he woke up it was usually 5.56am.
He can remember how it feels to loose yourself from the earth and will yourself upward. He feels he could still do it if he remembered the knack, even as an old man.

He walks in the park with Viv. He likes the feeling of her brown hand, warm and dry, in his pale one. It’s the same park where he used to bring Megan. Now Megan is a grown woman, working in New Zealand. They Skype at the weekends.
The path leads to a maze inlaid in the ground with coloured brick. He remembers his daughter trotting round the maze to the centre and then out again, Andrew waiting for her, impatient to get home. “Why can’t you just walk straight across?” he asked her.
“It’s the rule!” Megan said.
The hardest rules to break are the ones we make for ourselves.
He strolls across the maze, hand in hand with Viv. They walk to the Carillon tower as the bells start to ring out.

Andrew bobs up and down against cracked ceiling tiles, like a stray party balloon. He looks down on himself. The doctors have finished their dance and gone away, and his body looks like an old anorak discarded in a ditch. No returning to tell his out of body experience on breakfast television.
Then he’s in a dark tunnel and there’s a white light. Of course there is. Are you supposed to head into the light? Or avoid it? He can’t remember. And anyway isn’t it just a hallucination in a dying brain, like the picture on an old fashioned TV, shrinking to a white dot? It doesn’t seem to matter either way. He feels the suck and draw of the light pulling at him. “Sod it”, he thinks and flies away in a completely different direction, laughing to himself. If you can’t break the rules when you’re dead, when can you?

He meets Sallie at the University where he is studying clock making and the theory of flight. She takes his breath away in a jar and she won’t give it back however much he pleads. He gets an inhaler and wastes away for a year because she has also stolen his heart and though he gets it back later it seems a bit less shiny than it was. He’s not even sure it is actually his, but things are a bit sketchy and loose at the university and maybe it doesn’t matter.

Andrew plays football with his daughter in the park. He is a little older than the other dads and he has never been a football enthusiast. But Megan is six so that doesn’t matter. He kicks the ball into a flowerbed and then has to retrieve it. Megan gets bored of football so he pushes her on the swings for a while. Then she runs off to the roundabout and makes instant friends with a little boy and his sister. Andrew quite envies the social ease Megan displays. Did he have that once? The ability to make friends in the twinkling of an eye? Viv will be getting home from her job soon and it’s Andrew’s turn to make the dinner but they can have another five minutes. Megan swings round and round with her new friends giggling wildly. In the distance the clock strikes three.

He wakes to find himself pushed along a corridor on some kind of hospital gurney. There’s a smell of disinfectant and the footsteps of the people pushing him along echo in the hollow halls. There is a needle in his arm and some kind of tube in his nostrils. He remembered being at breakfast and shuffling along the corridor of their bungalow to the toilet and then nothing until this. All he can see is ceiling tiles and square light fittings that slide past monotonously. The sharp bright lights hurt his eyes so he closes them. He closes his eyes. It feels like flying.

At school. Maths. The clock in town strikes 3pm. It is nearly time for the end of school. Twenty, twenty, twenty more minutes to go. Gazing through the window at the red bricks and white windows and cars, cars, cars. He’s in the school play in two weeks. He doesn’t know the words yet. But then he never knows the words. He’s destined to stumble through life, never knowing the words, or at least not the right ones. He catches the eye of the new girl, Supriya, she smiles a tiny maths lesson smile. He smiles back, just enough. He would like to talk to her after class but that would involve words again wouldn’t it? Numbers are more reliable. They do what they do without ambiguity. He likes Maths. There are right answers.
3.01. 3.01. 3.01. 3.01. 3.02. 3.02…

Andrew is divorced. He is a divorced man. He is 43. If he is not middle aged he can see it on the horizon along with the tanks and planes of old age and dementia. Stuff to be avoided. Ruth divorced him and he had a year or three of not caring much about his job as an international playboy/Olympic athlete/college administrator/astronaut/mass murderer (delete those that do not apply).
Then he met Viv and slowly slowly he doggy paddled back to the surface of life and took a tentative breath or two.
He loses weight and polishes his tarnished heart with Brasso in the night.
Viv takes him to the Edinburgh Festival and and restaurants of many colours. If he can’t quite get off the ground yet, he is practising flapping his arms in preparation. He avoids thinking about where this might be heading or how and why it could end. Don’t look too closely at the pretty flowers.

He vanishes and reappears, born in a white hospital that smells of geraniums and mint. While this brand new and oh so familiar world is still young he rests his head against the cool sheet and enjoys the lights and colours of the memories as they melt, dissolve and reform into new shapes.
“What’s the time?” asks the midwife, somewhere beyond the focus of his brand new eyes. “I’ve got to fly.”

Matthew Pegg – Writer and Designer.

Writing and other bad habits.