a seventeenth story...'Beyond Calais'

I walked through the double door.  Three or four of them were gathered around a high table in the middle of the room.  They all looked up in unison.  The table had wheels.  ‘He’s come to identify the body’, announced the escort, on seeing their collective complexions darken.   

The tall one in the long grey laboratory coat beckoned me over with a grave nod as the escort snapped her high heels together, and turned sharply to leave.  He had a face the colour of wet clay.  I could see the perspiration on his forehead. 

One of his assistants, a young woman with sandy hair, vacant eyes of the palest blue and a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose whipped out a clipboard from behind her back and clicked the top of her retractable ball point pen once, then twice.  She was also wearing a long grey laboratory coat.

‘Your name?’ said the tall one, scrutinising me beneath his nostril hair.  ‘Luke’, I replied trying hard to tear my gaze away from the body, covered by a grey tarpaulin.  ‘I’m a friend of the family’. 

There was a short pause. 

‘A friend?’, whined a short man wearing thick, round, black rimmed spectacles.  ‘Yes’, I replied noticing the short man for the first time.  ‘I see’ he continued, fingering his putty like chin. 

‘Did he have..many?’.  The tall one inquired.  ‘Yes, he did’, I said at once, surprised at their interest in such personal matters.  ‘How many?’ The young woman interjected swiftly, ball point pen at the ready.  ‘Ten, perhaps fifteen’ I replied, rather discombobulated. 

‘His name is Daniel, is it not?’ continued the tall one apace, the beginnings of a thin and unpleasant smile forming around the corners of his mouth, ‘or should I say, was…Daniel’, he corrected himself, pausing for effect.

I was already beginning to feel ill at ease to add to my confusion.

The room was large and sparse.  Three of the four walls were fronted by what resembled enormous slate grey filing cabinets; the floor was green-grey laminate with a dull shine; the sole source of light was from four low energy bulbs attached to the ceiling in a line over the centre of the room where we now stood.

‘What happened to him?’ I asked after a moment had passed, and then rather more earnestly, as if by way of appeal to the tall imposing man, ‘please, will you tell me why I’m here?’

Thwack! The tall one brought the metal scalpel in his hand down onto the edge of the table where the body lay covered.  ‘Ha!’ he exclaimed loudly, ‘Ha!Ha!Ha!’, then peering at me as if I were some strange exhibit in a museum of the human form, he sneered, ‘You know why you are here, don’t you?’.  I shrank back from his protruding jaw, his exclamations still ringing in the air like residual gunshot. 

He drew himself up to his full height, a full six or seven inches above mine and added, his voice full of revulsion and accusation, ‘you’ve known all along haven’t you.  You faggot’.  He spat the word faggot out of his mouth as if it were a scrap of rancid meat.

Instinctively I took another hasty step backwards to distance myself from this violent and verbose attack.  ‘No’, I protested shrilly, ‘no, I really don’t know why I’m here’, and then all of a sudden remembering part of the reason for my visit, ‘except, to identify the body of course..’

‘Identify the body!!!’ guffawed the tall one even louder than before, his small mean eyes popping their sockets, ‘You nasty little boy!!’.   The short man wearing thick, round, black rimmed spectacles echoed the tall one and pointed at me with a stubby finger: ‘tell us what you saw’, he whined, ‘tell us, or we may have to tell you!’

~

Oh! What hadn’t we seen?!  White marshmallow mountains, purple hills, vermillion skies, streets strewn with confetti, great towers of ice and foam melting in the perfect noonday heat, a rabbit, a hare, a fine bowler hat, a talking éclair.  How we had gurgled with pleasure, as if it were the first day of our new born lives, our pupils as big as buttons beholding the wonder of life in a thousand brilliant fragments.  And then in the evening, as the fat old sun was setting, we bathed in a river of champagne steaming with bubbles, before we lay on the warm, flat rocks by the river bank, our bodies soothed and our minds at peace with Mother Nature, God’s good air and all creation.

~

But, I could not tell them of this – the tall one, the short man, the young woman with the ball point pen.  No, they thought they already knew, and I was sure it was what they wanted to hear. 

‘What I saw where?’ I asked in reply.  ‘What you saw…when you went beyond’, the tall one replied, turning the metal scalpel over in his left hand.  The young woman with ball point pen scribbled something on her clipboard, clicked her pen twice.  ‘Beyond?’, I played along. ‘Beyond..’ repeated the tall one.  A light above our heads flickered and went out.  I drew breath.  ‘Replace the bulb!’ the tall one ordered, not taking his small mean eyes off me.  Somebody scuttled out of the room behind us.  ‘Now what did you see?’, he pressed. 

‘Nothing’, I replied as convincingly as I could.  The bulb flickered back into life almost as quickly as it had gone out.  ‘Nothing of interest?’, the short man whined, touching his bald patch sceptically.  ‘Nothing’, I said again, with a surfacing hope I was beginning to gain parity in proceedings. 

‘Do you wish to see the body?’, inquired the tall one, gesturing with his scalpel toward the grey tarpaulin on the high table.  The room had taken on the air of a mausoleum.  ‘Yes’, I replied, but waited for an invitation to step forward.  ‘Show him the body’, the tall one instructed the young woman with the ball point pen.  The young woman rested her ball point pen and clipboard on the table next to where I imagined the head to be and took the edge of the tarpaulin in both hands, between finger and thumb. 

I stepped forward. 

‘Are you sure you want to see the body?’, whined the short man, ‘dead bodies can be disturbing you know’, he added condescendingly. 

Biting my lip, crossing my palms, I asked them to show me.

Slowly and very deliberately the young woman pulled back the grey tarpaulin, the familiar crop of blonde hair emerged followed by the low brow and.. ‘Stop!’ I called out, ‘Stop!’.  The young woman stopped, and gazed at me quizzically with her pale blue eyes devoid of empathy or compassion.  I had realised in that very moment seeing Daniel dead would kill off any chance I had of ever bringing him back to life. 

‘What did you see when you went beyond?’, asked the tall one again, a measure of aggression returning to his voice, ‘we know what you saw..so tell us’, the tone carried a pre-meditated threat.  ‘I saw nothing’, I replied defiantly, ‘not a single thing..’, although fully aware lying was a trick I had never fully accomplished.  ‘Beyond..there is nothing?’, coaxed the tall man, staring at me curiously with his head to one side as if evaluating the truth in my assertion.  ‘You didn’t have any rum per chance?’, he persisted, thin smile returning to his lips, ‘You didn’t pursue any pleasures of the flesh?’, he chuckled maliciously.  And, clearly enjoying himself in the cruel way evil men do when tormenting their victims, ‘you didn’t pop and party pips, did you??’. 

I didn’t know what to say.  What in the hell were party pips anyhow, I wondered, and mercifully I was immediately saved from answering any of these questions by the short man.

‘I can smell meat’, whined the short man breaking the brief silence, ‘I can smell meat in his socks’, he went on, jabbing another stubby finger in the direction of my feet.  ‘Meat!’.  The tall one took his eyes off me at last and turned his smouldering gaze on the short man.  ‘What kind of meat?’ he asked the short man.  The short man adjusted his thick, round, black rimmed spectacles. ‘Raw meat’, he whined, his nose, a fat, bilious knob, twitching ever so slightly.  The tall one swallowed and smacked his thin lips.  ‘MEAT!!!’ he roared, and lunging forward toward me so his angry bulging features were but a yard from mine, whispered with barely controlled ire, ‘where did you steal it from?’

Confronted with such rancour and spite, I decided in an instant that honesty was after all the best policy.  ‘There is no meat in my socks’, I stated summoning a look of what I hoped would be pure innocence,  ‘I did not steal any meat’, and then almost by way of concession, ‘you can have a look for yourself if you like..’ 

The tall one looked down at my socks, back at me and then down at my socks again, unsure of himself for the first time.  ‘No…meat?’ he stammered, ‘No meat’, I confirmed.  ‘No party pips either??’, he moaned quietly, the contours on his wet clay face creasing in anguish.  ‘No party pips anymore’, I confirmed a second time, again utterly confused by this raging monolith of emotion. 

Thereupon, the tall one grabbed my shoulder and before I could react buried his soggy face into my armpit.  ‘No meat, no party pips, no rum, no flesh’, he weeped, huge wet throbbing tears staining my jacket, his right hand clenched in vicious grief around my epaulettes, his left, hanging limp from his side with the metal scalpel, no longer seemingly a menace, loose in his fingers. 

‘NO MEAT!’ shrieked the young woman suddenly, her pale blue eyes rolling into the back of her head before she collapsed in a dead faint onto the body covered by the grey tarpaulin.  ‘No Meat!’, whined the short man on his stubby little knees, his thick, round, black rimmed spectacles misting up.  ‘No meat!’, sobbed the tall one clutching to me like a giant ape.  ‘No party pips anymore’, wailed the girl, momentarily recovering from her dead faint.  ‘No rum!’ whined the short man again, beseeching some imaginary deity hidden in the celestial pattern of the ceiling above.  It was as if I had just opened Pandora’s Box and all the woes of the world had flooded out, the scene before me was of such wanton misery.

‘We want party pips!’, proclaimed the short man sorrowfully, his thick, round, black rimmed spectacles now in his outstretched hand, waiting for an arm to reach down through a crack in the reinforced concrete heavens and provide for him.  The tall one on my shoulder had stopped moaning, but would not lessen his grip on me which sent a swift shot of unease up my spinal column and into my poor overburdened brain.  The tall one was too heavy for my slender frame to sustain upright for very long.  I could feel the strain in my knees and an aching pain in my shoulders. 

Then, and without warning, the table with wheels, on which the body lay, started to trundle slowly across the floor, moving with a kinetic energy all of it’s own – the unconscious girl draped on top, her long grey laboratory coat giving her the appearance of a mythological harpy. The short man, still caught in his quasi religious entreaty failed to notice, but the tall one on my shoulder, slumped backwards and staggered around to witness the trolley come to rest against one of the enormous grey filing cabinets on the adjacent wall.  The impact of the collision, although slight, had the effect of knocking out one of the large draws and a cold vapour rose from inside.

‘No rum anymore!’ groaned the tall one and lurched in the direction of the enormous filing cabinet like a demented troll.  ‘No meeeaaaaaaat!’ whined the short man at length pawing at the divine air with his fat creamy fingers.  ‘Time to go’, I told myself under my breath, and prepared for what I imagined would have to be a swift exit in spite of all the commotion.

It was at that moment the girl shrieked again, and fell off the trolley where she had been slumbering, the tall one froze in his tracks, and the short man was taken right out of his old testament reverie.  The body under the tarpaulin was moving, the obtuse shapes of the limbs were stirring; the tarpaulin began to rise up and down as the lungs in the chest began breathing.  Inside Daniel’s head a light shone again, and his eyes opened.

The whole room was gripped by an electrifying stillness, hope and expectation had at last dropped in to pay a visit.  I shot a glance at the tall one, and was relieved to see inertia had seized him, the girl was hiding herself under her long grey laboratory coat and the short man waited in a crawl position. 

‘Dan’, I cried out, my voice seeming distant, ‘Dan?’, I tried again, ‘Dan..dan…dan….dan…..dan……..dannnnn.’. 

~

And lo, inside Daniel’s head something registered and the first traces of memory came back to him.  He had been in a garden, and there had been wooden picnic tables, and other people, real people.  And there had been the railway, and the heavily laden goods trains rolling past.  There had been fresh hay under foot and he had felt the late afternoon sun on his back.  There had been pretty bar girls, with foreign accents and fluttering eyelashes, there had been the lilywhite butterfly that had alighted on his knee. 

Yet another memory returned - a touch memory - the feeling of his warm fingers wrapped around a cold mug of beer; then came the taste of salt on his lips and the sharp acridity of lime wedges and the scald of a tequila shot cleansing the roof of his mouth.  And one by one the endless glasses of rum, the party pips, the raw meat, the holes in his old cotton socks, the dawn chorus, his nest of blankets behind the black leather sofa, the wooden floor boards, the hum of drunken conversation, singing Bon Anniversaire,  a lone traveller’s journey beyond Calais, and finally the one AM finish.     

Daniel sat up on his high table, and with every conviction said: ‘Here’s to BLOC!’