a first new story...'alvin the fisher king'

Alvin watched a young couple meet at a bus stop across the rain washed street, embrace, kiss, and run for the subway.  He took one last swig of his beer, closed his eyes, pitched backwards into a laurel hedge and fell asleep.

When Alvin opened his eyes he was sitting in a lush, green meadow, the sky was wide, big and blue, and a gentle breeze moved over the grass, blew through his matted hair.  Alvin’s pink tongue roved between his toothy gums, he scratched his belly, blinked at the sun.

And he was bazookered back to 1985.

1985 began on a Tuesday: Alvin was twenty three months young at the time, and playing with his Brio train set in the front room of his parents rented flat off the Old Kent Road, London, England.  The Old Kent Road had yet to undergo any kind of regeneration.  But none of this mattered to young Alvin who was more interested in chewing assorted pieces of toy railway track – he was teething.  And then there were shouts from the kitchenette where his mother was just about to stab his father to death.

It’s amazing what people will and won’t do on a hangover.

But Alvin never forgot the screams of his father, often had disorienting nightmares that also featured giant diesel locomotives and disintegrating oral crockery for ever and on.

Anyhow, back in the lush, green meadow Alvin spied an aeroplane, sailing like a beautiful dream through the stratosphere, a high-flying bird of paradise, leaving behind a pretty, white vapour trail.  His thoughts returned momentarily to the young couple at the bus stop, and he wondered what all the excitement in life was about, and why everyone seemed to be in such a rush to get somewhere, go anywhere. 

Then he rolled over onto his side and into a red ant’s nest.

Red ant bites are not, of course, fatal, though they are a nuisance.  When Alvin was a small boy, perhaps five years old, he had stumbled into a red ant’s nest when playing with donated Tonka toys in the garden of the children’s home where he was sent following his father’s death, and his mother’s subsequent removal to a maximum security prison for the criminally insane.  Alvin had cried with surprise more than anything else – ever since January 1, 1985, he had been largely numb to pain of a physical kind.

Still those little red ant bites got to him!

And Alvin felt warm tears on his face.  Looking hazily heavenwards he saw street lights winking, and raindrops shuddering from the leaves and branches of the laurel hedge where he had passed out.  With a grimace he dragged his heavily drugged body back through the foliage and upright into a sitting position.  The dark, bruising clouds that had bought about the deluge of a few hours ago had lifted and been replaced by a clear night sky.  Alvin took a deep breath, filled his beery mouth and lungs with cool air.

That first beer – oddly, Alvin could recall it well.  He had been on a cricket trip to Guernsey and he had spilled it all over the team minibus.  Someone had shaken it up, given it to him: all part of the ritual humiliation of adolescence.  But the beer, for it had been in a chill-box, was cold and refreshing, and helped the blush drain from Alvin’s face before a warm, fuzzy feeling took over his body and mind.

Warm and fuzzy, as well as – now – a little itchy was how Alvin felt sitting under eight eighths blue in the meadow.  He had wandered further on up the hill and away from the red ant’s nest to find another seat.  From his new seat, the wind had risen slightly, and if Alvin had cupped his hands to his ears he would have heard the sound of the sea, barrel waves breaking on an endless shore, salt and sand, sand and salt, right out to a stretch of beach the tide could never reach. 

Alvin rubbed his eyes with his dirty thumbs and tried standing up, there on the sidewalk.  A black taxi went by and Alvin watched it drift over the pelican crossing and be swallowed in the light/dark of the underpass.  Like a scared cow Alvin was at leisure to wander wherever he wanted, free will was his to explore; he promptly sat down on the edge of the kerb and waited.

Sitting inside on a freezing January evening in his partner’s snug suburban apartment, Alvin realised he had spent his life in awe of women - from his murderous mother, the stern, spinsterly woman who ran the children’s home where he lived between the ages of two and fifteen, to his partner, beautiful and successful by almost any measure.  He longed for a woman’s attention, appreciation, affection, simultaneously fearing rebuke at any second.  Then his partner came in, as his brain was beginning to whir, and told him to pack his bags and clear off.  Alvin stared blankly at her for a full minute, before receiving a stiletto in the head. He did as he was told.

Wandering down the middle of the dual carriage way Alvin saw a tunnel ahead.  The tunnel was in fact a continuation of the freeway underneath Blackfriars on the north bank of the brown and dirty river Thames.  Nevertheless, to Alvin it seemed altogether more intriguing and inviting, and he staggered on as if approaching Area 51, with it’s chevroned tarmac and soft-lit orange, refrigerator glow pulling him forwards. 

In the lush meadow Alvin presently became aware of a persistent growling sound, growing ever more audible.  At first he ignored it, assuming it be to be an aircraft of some sort, but soon he sensed the hairs on the nape of his neck raise, and a cold sweat issue from his pits, and he felt compelled to brush the mangy hair from his eyes - the growl had become a petrol engine howl: to his shock and surprise there were two big yellow suns right in front of him - and then nothing.