Part 1: Assassinations
22nd November 1990
At 9:30 this morning, confirmation finally came. Downing Street issued a statement announcing the resignation of the Prime Minster. After an evening of being confronted by her Cabinet colleagues with the hard truth, that she would lose a second round of elections, Margaret Thatcher bowed to the inevitable and stepped down as leader of the Conservative Party and as Prime Minister. Mrs Thatcher had previously informed the Queen and the Cabinet of her decision. The first woman Prime Minister of England and the longest serving ruler since Gladstone, will make way as soon as her successor is chosen.
From outside the door of Number 10, this is Alison Clarke for the BBC.
It's memories that I'm stealing
Joy in the morning and celebrations. Not bile or retribution, simply happiness at seeing the green shoots of optimism through the snow of a hundred year winter. The sudden excitement that the unexpected event can drop into life like a falling farmhouse.
It was the 27th anniversary of the assassination of John F Kennedy, and Dom and his mates had been drinking since lunchtime. Not that the two events had anything to do with each other. Instead it was the news that had filtered out during the morning, that had caused radios to be unearthed and turned on at workplaces across the country, that had the unemployed get off their bikes and head to the TVs where daytime fluff had given way to an early version of rolling news: Thatcher had resigned. The wave of joyous relief had sent half the population to the pub where an impromptu national party had taken off and danced and declaimed through to closing time.
You know how it goes. First pint, they sat and savoured the moment. Dom sat at the table by the window, the small round one with a manky leg righted by piled up beermats. With him from the beginning was Adam, just about the only native Londoner he knew. He was another skiving office worker, equally ill-suited to the petty rigours of the working life, so that the added frisson of their truantism gave an extra spice to the occasion.
Dom raised his full first glass. ‘We should take a moment of contemplation, remember the many times we’ve had together these past eleven and a half years, be grateful for those moments. And thank fuck the bitch has gone.’
Adam raised his glass in return. ‘May all good things come to pass at last to those who wait and fight.’
Trev arrived somewhere between the second and third pints. A West Country native, he was working as a chippie’s mate, a precarious occupation at the moment with yet another recession in full bite. Still, his foreman was an old Irishman who hated Thatcher with a spitting vengeance, and as soon as their boss had left for the morning, he’d slipped off to the pub himself and told Trev to do the same. ‘Let these Thatcher-lovin’ cockneys stay an’ finish up son,’ the foreman had said. ‘Get yerself away down the pub and I’ll see you in the mornin’ if ye can make it. Carpe diem. Take pleasure in life where you can find it ‘cos it’s been in fuckin’ short supply under that cow.’
‘A toast’ said Trev, now settled with a full glass. ‘Happy days are here again.’
‘Shit man, it really seemed sometimes like this day would never come’ said Dom. ‘You know what I mean? Like you’re trapped in some bad dream and can’t wake up.’
‘Can you imagine’ said Adam ‘that there’s people just a bit younger than us, who’ve never had a shag that wasn’t under Thatcher.’
‘Aw, that’s fuckin’ sick mate’said Trev. ‘You can’t think of sex and Thatcher in one image.’
‘Yeah man, fuckin’ gross. You get the next round for that.’
Somewhere after they’d stopped counting, probably round the half dozen mark, Janey had shown up. In she walked shedding layers of coats and tops as she approached the table. There were now ten celebrants scattered round their corner, in various stages of liquid refreshment. Janey came to Dom, pulled his head back and kissed him on the forehead. ‘You rat-arsed already I see.’ It was statement, not a question. ‘Think you can make it to the bar and get me a tonic my love?’
‘As it’s you and as you’re so fat right now, I can do that my beloved.’Dom turned to the rest of the table. ‘Anyone else? Dan? Trev?’ Taking orders, Dom moved away and left Janey talking with Katrina, one of the few other women in the pub.
‘How long to go now?’ asked Katrina.
‘Just over two weeks officially’ answered Janey.
‘So it can be any day now?’
‘Yeah. I’ve let boyo have this one, as it’s kind of a special occasion, then he’s got to keep it together for a while.’ Janey gestured in the direction of Dom, stood vacantly waiting at the bar, as she spoke.
‘He’s going to be there for the birth then?’ asked Katrina.
‘Of course.’
‘I always pictured English men standing outside the hospital corridor, smoking cigars and trying to avoid seeing anything unpleasant.’ Katrina had a tendency to ramble, and Janey was beginning to hope Dom would get his finger out and get back here with her non-alcoholic drink so that she could feel annoyed about something else as everyone sat and drank and smoked around her. But Katrina, pausing only to brush her flopping red mohawk from her eyes, went on regardless. ‘In Germany of course we don’t have births in hospitals but at home. Always home births. And naturally the men are always present. German men wouldn’t dream of being absent for the birth of their child even if they wanted to.’
I bet they wouldn’t, thought Janey, as Katrina laughed. ‘Ah Dom there you are, with a refreshing glass of tonic. Just what I wanted.’ Dom wasn’t drunk enough yet to miss the sarcasm. ‘Please gods let the next tonic I drink be with half a bottle of vodka.’ She took a look around at the assembled rabble and raised her drink.
‘To the end of the mad old bat’ she said. ‘Cheers everyone.’
Janey had left after a brief. She’d only shown up for good form’s sake. Pubs were too smoky and the company of loads of pissed people when you were not only sober, but also going through all sorts of physical aches and pains, was not her idea of a good time. Her last words to Dom had been ‘You can sleep on the couch tonight sunshine’
By the stage one of Dom’s oldest mates, Ray, arrived most folks were several sheets to the wind. Ray spoke with a Welsh accent which became impenetrable when he was drunk or too stoned, which was pretty common. The booze had ravaged him over the years, but the smack had kept him looking good. He had the face of a twenty year old and the liver of a sixty year old and no-one was quite sure of his real age save that it was somewhere in between the two.
‘Hey Ray you ol’ bugger’ said Dom, throwing an arm round Ray’s shoulders. ‘What the hell kept you? Too fuckin’ monged to come out and celebrate this special occasion?’
‘Ach, what difference does it really make?’ said Ray, ever the point of light. ‘There’ll just be some other noxious turd to replace her.’
‘Well if you’re gonna take that point of view’ said Adam ‘then you may as well ask who’s pulling the strings anyway? ‘Cos sure as hell it ain’t some politician. Not even Thatcher.’
‘Yeah, but it’s still worth celebrating getting rid of her’ said Dom.
‘You didn’t get rid of her,’ said Ray. ‘She was got rid of by her Tory mates. The establishment decided it had had enough of her and they got rid of her.’
‘Nah’ said Trev. ‘It was the poll tax. We got rid of her with that. Otherwise they’d have kept her around.’
Dom supped deep again and finished his pint. ‘Well, that and that she was a fuckin’ looney’ he said. ‘Your round Trev.’
By the hour that closing time approached, the party had started breaking up amidst general inability to function coherently. Nonetheless they’d been busy making plans to found a group whose purpose would be to research into the hidden faces of the establishment, to uncover the true rulers of the world.
Needless to say, sleeping dogs were let to lie the next day.
Janey and Dom were busy with much bigger events. They were going to have a baby any day now and the last thing she would want was Dom pissed as the contractions kicked in. He climbed the stairwell to their flat, his mind dwelling on small fantasies, wondering what he would do should the waters already be broken, so to speak. He had done his best over the last 38 weeks to be the fine supportive partner, had attended the classes when appropriate, been to the hospital for the echo, and was truly looking forward to the whole event with great enthusiasm. He was to be a father and it was something for which he felt mentally and emotionally ready.
Except. His life was over. There could be no kidding himself any more. These nights out with the boys were going to get rarer and rarer until he should become one of the fatherhood zombies for whom popping to the pub for two pints was a noteworthy and carefully planned event. Should he ever have a night out with Janey again, it would probably be the logistical equivalent of invading a small country. Or worse still, he might become one of those fathers who rarely gets out of the pub, who when he does see his children, sees only his own bitterness and disappointment. The sort of man overgrown with resentment and unable to bear the heavy weights of small domesticities.
Entering the key in the lock of the front door was a simple act that revealed his many years of experience in the arts of boozing... No more of those juvenile fumblings trying to find the slot. His was a smooth entrance, slow and considerate, all the dregs of mind he could drag together concentrated upon the task in hand. He pulled together what he could remember of how to pretend not to be quite as hammered as he was, just in case Janey was awake, and closed the door behind him. Not that the pretence ever fooled her, but it was more a question of the etiquette of the situation. The darkness of the flat though made it clear that she’d already gone to bed and he relaxed. The last few shreds of pretence to sobriety fell away, and no longer paying attention he tripped over the new baby chair carefully stored in the middle of the corridor. Dom fell headfirst into the doorpost and knocked himself senseless.
17th January 1961
Dominic Shaughnessy was brought into the world, middle son of a trawler mechanic and a Methodist housewife, in Hull General Hospital. While Dom and his mother were enduring the trauma of birth, his father drank and smoked in the pub across the road. Somewhere many thousands of miles to the south, a man who’d tried to bring peace and freedom to his country was being tortured, mutilated and murdered. His body would later be dissolved in a bath of acid.
Whilst the long labour drew on, many thousands of miles to the west, the man who had greenlighted the first man’s death, by saying that the victim should be eliminated, was giving his farewell speech as departing president to the American people.
There are images. And words. Many words. With power.
Three speeches to resonate, three speeches to call out.
Patrice Lumumba on Independence Day for his country. Tears, Fire and Blood. Refusing to listen to the young Belgian King praising the horrors of Leopold’s private fiefdom. There in that dank world of dignitaries, paternalism and plush curtains he speaks of the atrocities that have occurred and calls on the people of the Congo to make a just and free land, calls for the transformation and liberation of Africa.
It was a speech that humiliated the Belgian King Badouin by confronting him with undiplomatic honesty and terrified the American powers that be, afraid that integrity in a leader would somehow drive him into the arms of the Soviet Union. Caught in a political struggle and a grasping for the Congo’s mineral wealth, Lumumba, the former beer seller, was already condemned.
On the day Lumumba was finally murdered, flickering images of the old man speaking. And the tone of the voice. He sounds like the wise scientist character from a Fifties Sci-Fi film. He’s warning us, not of giant radioactive mutant ants or the unavoidable approach of another planet on a collision course with our own, but warning of the dangers of the Military Industrial Complex. He warns us of the ever-spreading power of the permanent war machine, warns against its acquisition of unwarranted influence. Urges the citizenry to educate themselves and remain alert.
Eisenhower addressed the American people through the still relatively new medium of television; a 19th Century man never knowing the way future presidents would be broken into 10 second chunks by the medium he used. A complex man, a soldier who bossed the CIA and a Republican who ordered paratroopers to Little Rock. The first man to accept the constitutional resignation of the American Presidency, you watch the fearful footage of the speech and wonder if he knew, even as he spoke, what was happening in the Congo?
Dom was born in the early hours of the next morning as the future shape of the world was being sealed.
Two days later. Another speech. Another old image of a man, this time stood on a lectern surrounded by men in hats, lecturing in that strange mix of oratory and hectoring. Speaking of the heirs of revolution, the revolution of hope. Telling the people in the huts and villages around the world that America would not let one colonialism be replaced by another. But speaking always through the cracked prism of the Cold War, of a conflict beneath the surface in which he believed intently, which he saw as imminent. Not tempered by war but traumatised it seems.
The new young president elected on a wafer-thin majority told his nation that they should not ask what their country can do for them, but what they can do for their country. Told the world to demand America be held accountable to the high standards they demanded of the rest of the world. He would initiate the path into Viet Nam that led thousands of Americans and millions of Asians to make the ultimate sacrifice for his country and its military-industrial complex. And Kennedy, of course, would survive as leader barely longer than had Lumumba.
So events occur, unremarked by the vast number of the planet’s peoples. Years down the road, chains of consequence can be teased out by those who take the interest, who have the audacity to consider they might have the right to make decisions for themselves. But most see simply the whirling vortex of chaos and the capricious hands of distant powermongers impacting their lives and can only whisper “So was it ever”.
Early one morning the sun was shining
Dom awoke, pleased to notice on his return to consciousness that he was apparently neither drunk nor hungover. At least, his head felt clear in a way he certainly hadn’t expected given the drinking. It was even more disconcerting to find himself sat in a small clearing, surrounded by trees. It was very green. That he noticed: the greenness. The light wasn’t bright, it was filtered by branches above in an almost painterly way, but the green was light and vivid. He seemed to be sat on a slightly raised spot in the clearing, a hillock placed like a dais for him to survey the mystery.
The smell roused him, triggered the beginnings of thought to reboot. Smell takes the route one approach to the brain. It raises memories without intervention of thought or rational perception, until we’re left remembering times gone without any obvious rhyme or reason. This smell spoke to him of a childhood in woodlands and forgotten friends; of a glorious freshness and his dog stinking from splashing into ditches; of the sudden rampant, riotous emergence of life and also of figures so long out of mind that they were nameless and indistinct as ghosts.
It smelled of Spring.
That word ambled across his thoughts. Spring. Looking now, he could see it. That light, flashy green of young leaves. Early blossoms on a chestnut. Words, memories, descriptions of the plants around him fell back to mind from forgotten times. But what the hell was it doing being spring? Winter was approaching the last he remembered. A dischord roared to his conscious mind.
His other senses now began to contribute and his picture of what was around began to gather some sort of coherence. He could hear a few indistinct sounds, nothing so clear as birdsong or the chirruping of crickets, but simply that absence of total silence that suggested a world quietly busy doing its thing. He could feel some pleasant warmth on his face from the sun, which he could just make out through the branches. And he could feel some less pleasant dampness soaking into his trousers from the damp grass beneath him.
What the hell was going on? What the fucking hell was going on?
Dom stood up. The grass beneath him was springy but damp, thickly clumped, the fresh layer of spring growing over the many dead layers of years past. The confusion, the uncertainty, precluded panic but he stepped hesitantly down from his hillock and tried to drink in his surroundings, to draw some kind of meaning from what he saw. He looked around again. There was little to see besides a close dense forest and the track leading through this glade. No answers to be had anywhere he could see.
It didn’t feel real. So presumably this was a dream, but it seemed most unusual. Everything around him had the appearance if not the essence of reality. The picture was fully drawn, not hazy at the edges as dreams tend to be. There were countless details, not coming into being solely for him to notice, but apparently leading their own independent existence regardless of his observational role. Insects buzzed amongst the trees and crawled on the underside of leaves. Birds hopped as brief shadows in the branches without once interacting with the puzzled Dom.
Normally, as he dreamed, there would be part of his consciousness watching his movement and monitoring his thoughts. Taking in events without being a part of them. But this time, there seemed to be no hidden self standing outside. This world seemed to be all.
But still it didn’t feel real.
At the side of the path, near-hidden in the darkness of the branches and the tangled green overgrowing all, was a signpost. It was a simple wooden thing, rustic and functional, with directions carved on its two arms.
“Way Out” read one direction. “Far Out” read the other.
‘Ah. Symbolism.’ muttered Dom. ‘Stupid symbolism at that.’
He began to trudge in the direction of “Way Out”. Away from the glade, the trees began to close in quickly, the undergrowth was dense: nettles and cow parsely blossoming and dozens of other plants he vaguely remembered but of which he could no longer remember the names. As a boy he had often wandered in the woods. That had been a long time ago, but re-experiencing it now was actually very pleasant. It seemed most practical to simply put his questioning of what was happening to one side for now and follow his path, so to speak.
And with that stillness came an explanation of sorts. He conceived of it as a “seeming”. It seemed to be a dream, but much more than that too; and seemed also real in an unreal way. There could be a cause but nothing he could grasp from memory. It could be the strangest of dreams. Or perhaps this was a coma? He’d heard the strangest of things happened to people in comas.
Or maybe he’d taken some acid or some mushrooms? He didn’t remember taking any, and they’d certainly never had any impact like this upon him. But he vaguely recollected that he’d drank a bit too much last night, so who knows what stupid acts had seemed like a good idea at the time.
Or he could be dead. Given that there was some amorphous metaphysicality to the whole thing and given that he had no idea what came after death besides being pretty sure there were no gods or godbotherers involved, that was a possibility.
And he didn’t feel panicked. Or even too concerned. It was nothing over which he had control and there can at times be a supreme and relaxing freedom comes from surrendering all pretense to control. All he could do was continue walking the “Way Out” path. He suspected the hamfisted symbolism of his unconscious was bound to provide more clues soon enough.
Not fade away
Dom was good looking. More handsome now than when he was younger, when beautiful was nearer the mark. Or “pretty” if you’d wanted to tease him. And he’d used it to party his way through much of his life since adolescence, that he’d be the first to admit.
But that uncertain pride and joy - in his own moralistic amorality, in his careful and attentive carefree abandon - lay in his past now. He didn’t fear age and maturity; he had sown enough oats to have few regrets. What bothered him was the process of assimilation and the attempt to exercise some of life’s lessons into a coherent vision, a structured explanation of sorts. He was not prone to disillusion or pessimism, but in recent times he’d heard himself talking much less about the intrinsic beauty of life, and much more about the tiresome grind of work and his managers, about the cost of living and the crap on telly. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to become older or mature, but he didn’t look forward to the process if this incessant bitching and disappointment was some fundamental part of the story. Worse yet, with a kid on the way, what sort of father would he be, what sort of example would that be to set? The stereotype picture of a knackered old failure.
And what of his relationship with Janey? Would they become two more tired old farts, gradually decaying into mediocrity until getting divorced in advanced middle age and spiralling off separately into eccentricity and loneliness?
It seemed vital that if he had learnt anything in the past fifteen or thirty years that he should now try to practise what he’d learnt, if only to prevent this slippery road hurtling him into the sort of tedium that he’d dreaded and raged against since adolescence.
Something happening here
Somewhere above the canopy of the forest was a sky as blue and lightly mottled with lazy, fluffy blue clouds as any childrens’ picture. Not that much sunlight penetrates deep into such a dense forest, but the air was mild with it. Insects buzzed around in beams of sunlight, giving a mid-morning feel to the day. Memories drifted back of this country life.
When he was young, he had known virtually every tree and plant and curve of the earth in the woods around the village where he grew up. He knew the way through every thicket and a dry route through the muddiest paths. He knew where the chestnut trees had the toughest conkers and where the holly had the reddest berries. He knew which plants could be chewed for thirst or which berries were edible but gave him headaches if he ate too many.
Dom had only once returned to that village – his parents had long since moved away – and he was surprised by the casual beauty of the place. As a child, the privileges of his environment had been simply part of the given fabric, that was the world beyond worlds in which his dreams and being were shaped. And he had recognised it as privilege only much later, from the aspect of a life in the city, for that advantage he had been given was not one of wealth or class, but of closeness to the world that was untouched by humans. Closeness to the rhythms of seasons and the way things grew and died. Learnt familiarity with the dirt and the blood and the beating heart of life going on, without direction or director, for its own sake only.
In London, he’d looked around the grim graffiti’d walls of his housing estate one night, tripping and cynical (never a good combination), and had comprehended the truth behind the cliché, that only humans were capable of creating ugliness. All nature was beautiful; even the most gruesome parasite had at least the capacity for arousing curiosity. Only humans had managed to introduce dreary and bland ugliness into the world. And for all that it was not the most original of perceptions, it was the first time he had missed the earth of his childhood and the country beneath his boots since leaving home for the city.
He’d talked about it with Janey one day. Since learning that she was pregnant, there had been an unformed thought going through his mind, until they’d been sat one day in a bar and the thought had instantly become fully shaped. ‘London’s no place to raise a kid,’ he’d said.
It felt almost a heresy against his adopted city, but that city had become more bitter lately. It was too like the first germinations of parenthood; his observational consciousness recognised and applauded this apparent lapse into responsibility.
‘Ye gods, are you thinking of moving to the country and settling down?’ asked Janey. ‘What’s happening to you?’ But she smiled as she said it.
‘I dunno, I just don’t really want the kid to grow up in this shit. It’s only gonna get worse, you know that.’
‘Well there’s shit all over’ Janey said. ‘Which particular sorts of shit are buggin’ you the worst?’
Dom thought, but only very briefly. It felt as if the words had been sat eagerly waiting their chance to tumble out. ‘The schools are crap, the kids are all getting desensitised. I don’t want a boy growing up posturing, macho and violent, and I don’t want a girl growing up bitchy and aggressive, judging and judged on appearance.
‘The cops are psychos, which just adds another layer of psychos ‘cos there’s enough out there already. Housing is already so fuckin’ expensive you either have to sell out totally or you can only afford to live in a fuckin’ ghetto. It’s dirty. It’s self-righteous and pathetic at the same time. It’s a loser of a city.
‘And the worst of it is, nobody can get out. It’s trapping people here, trapping them in their tiny fuckin’ expectations, until they think all the world’s answers are here, when really it’s just another fucking prison.
‘And it’s going down the toilet quicker and deeper every day.
‘London’s a big, stinking turd of a place.’
‘Are you finished ranting man?’ asked Janey when the flow seemed to have stopped.
‘Yeah. Sorry. I wasn’t really expecting that.’
‘Fair enough. It doesn’t particularly bother me. But I think a lot of that’s true about all England y’know’ she said.
‘You want to go back to Ireland then?’ asked Dom.
‘Fuck no’ said Janey. ‘That’s a shithole too. But if you’re serious, then we should find somewhere to go. And we’re not going to do it overnight. So listen sunshine, I’ll go along with you, but I’m gonna be a wee bit busy carryign a bairn, so if you want us to go somewhere better, I expect you to get it together to make it happen.’
Ah, expectations. Janey was certainly making the burden of expectation clear these days. For fifteen years Dominic Shaughnessy had explored his own neck of the world and had evolved himself as a person. At least, that was how he described it to himself in these drunken mists. Now, suddenly, he would have to learn to be truly responsible - not just for himself, but for an individual and very dependent life.
He wasn’t entirely confident he could handle this much responsibility. To be truthful, he’d rather avoid any responsibility whatsoever, but that seemed less and less like an option. He’d talked himself into not merely becoming a father, but taking his family to a better life.
Frankly, that would have to wait to see if they could surf or stay afloat for the initial waves of parenthood. Of all the friends he knew who’d already taken this children step, none of them had so far had a surviving relationship. All split up. Guys wandering off haggard and women trapped and pissed off and lonely. It didn’t seem there were a huge number of laughs to be had.
There was, after all, no cultural training remaining. In the old days, it could be imagined that a young man lived in a community where he was surrounded by all generations, where the lessons of child-rearing were closer to hand. Where responsibilities, privileges and expectations were codified and clear. Not that this rigid codification was something which appeals, but in its deconstruction undeniably something also was lost. A sense of certainty and its benefit – the perception of knowledge about the future - was gone and replaced by some vacuum of ignorance and the secret world of parenting.
It came down to the loss of shared knowledge and exposure to the experience which would have been part of a young person’s knowledge back in the days before the atomisation of the extended family and the community. Ironic that Thatcher, icon of a generation which harped on about the family and revered their parents’ tales of the wartime community spirit, was the one who said that there was “no such thing as society” and raised on a pedestal the petty self-obsessions of a capitalist individualism.
Pregnancy, becoming a parent, was something by which all those “grow up and get real” speeches from your parents paled into insignificance, and now you found the secret. The secret that perhaps even your parents hadn’t admitted to themselves - that to say you were being realistic was only pretence. Nobody knew what they were letting themselves in for. Merely throwing themselves in the deep end of possibilities and trusting in themselves enough to hope they’d swim. Or leastways not drown, for the more pessimistically attuned. The secret of the domestic mantra of pragmatic abandonment of dreams was that it had no more solid a foundation than the most romantic of revolutionary plots.
So by what measure could it be justified, all those people giving up their hopes and dreams, all those people settling for second-hand lives and trivial securities? All those people whose lives ran out of the hope for something more true or more exciting, and became only a drab struggle for continued existence, food on the table, or the status of a few luxuries? Perhaps this was what children and the family life did for you? Perhaps this was what he had to beware of now - the crushing not of illusion, but of the possibility of living without illusion. Perhaps his life too would become so without internal meaning that he would justify it to his own children as choosing for a “realistic” decision.
It was of course the road of realpolitik and all its bastard children. Those petty compromises that drain your soul drop by drop are the same compromises that lead to the path of acceptance of blood in the sand, of not lifting a finger as the horrors get greater.
All the same steps, all forced through by the same overbearing sense of unreality.
27th November 1975
Children across the country are mourning the loss of a much loved figure today in tragic circumstances. Record Breakers star Ross McWhirter has been shot dead by the IRA at the front door of his London home. Together with his twin brother Norris, Ross McWhirter was responsible for founding the Guinness Book of Records and a regular on the hit show based on their book. The group they founded, the Freedom Association, had recently offered a substantial reward for information leading to the arrest of IRA terrorists and it is thought to be this which has lead to this terrible murder. Children across the country have expressed their sadness and anger and their refusal to give in to the terrorists.
From the Record Breakers studio, this is Alison Clarke for John Craven’s Newsround.
Somewhere
It was too soon yet for thoughts of food and water to become imperative - he was very pleased that that hangover had been given a miss - but he was also aware that such things would soon enough become important. He began to keep an ear open for the sound of a stream and to look for the vegetation giving the impression of nearby water. These things came back unexpectedly but he was pleased to know that the knowledge was lurking there still within him, awaiting its chance to be of value.
As he listened though, there was a peculiar sound, like a cough of sorts, and the rustling of branches in the undergrowth. There was the definite impression of movement and that understanding that you are not alone that comes with it. Awareness of another intelligence, awareness somewhere in the prickles of the neck that you are being observed.
Ahead of him at a bend in the track, was an animal. His mind sprung a cogwheel for a moment with surprise, but he recognised what it must be. The animal was undoubtedly a wild boar. Of course he’d only ever seen pictures of one, but the pictures all looked like this. It was quite a stunning thing, looking back at him now. Not the giant of myth, but quite big enough to meet running around in the woods.
It is amazing the impact adrenaline can have. Most amazing is how thoughts suddenly move with the speed of rapids and the clarity of pure still water. The internal dialogue and testing halts, the available knowledge to interpret the situation comes to the fore. As now, seemingly everything that might be relevant about wild boar came through his mind.
They are unlikely to attack, are much more likely to run off themselves. This seemed the most important thing to know. In fact, Dominic didn’t feel really afraid; he was watching the situation closely. In threatening situations he always watched, and later found himself hoping that if any action had been required that he would have been able to act.
Other thoughts crossed his mind. Where was he? There were stories emerging of wild boar roaming the woods of England again. Apparently some had escaped in the Great Storm of ’87. But this was a seeming he was sure, not a real place, and the grunting beast ahead came from myth not some exotic breeding scheme for a yuppie restaurant. It breathed like a drunken sleeping man, all erratic rasping and intakes of air that verged on the edge of meaning.
What happened next, happened in a blur of Dominic’s inaction. He had the impression that the boar was turning to trot away when there was a sound behind him. It sounded almost like another breathing sound, like a sudden exhalation. Dom got a glimpse of a flight. There was an arrow, and the boar started tumbling over and over. It squealed, a two toned, deafening sound, both high-pitched and bass. The loudness split the air as surely and violently as the arrow had split the boar’s side. On it went, a shrieking blue murder as the boar stumbled off into the undergrowth. The sound of the beast’s suffering seemed endless, a terrible roaring of loss.
As Dom turned, there was another whoosh, another arrow hit the boar, which stumbled only a few feet further into the nettles before falling dead.
The person who’d fired seemed younger than Dom, had the strangest leather hunting look going on, black hair like a flattened Mohican on a closely cropped head, and pointy ears.
‘Wonderful. A fucking elf,’ thought Dominic.
(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night
It might be said there are few things more far-fetched than getting drunk and meeting an elf, but the way of the world is strange. It was certainly strange in 1975 when Dominic fell in love for the first time. In those days when the pseudo-mystical seemed to adorn every album cover and the children were raised on television dramas of sci-fi and fantasy, an elf would barely have raised eyebrows. Certainly not compared to a normal working class lad like Dom falling in love with another boy.
Steven Mares was the other boy. He was in the year above Dom, which was sometimes an unbridgeable gap in school, yet meant nothing outside the walls of the comprehensive prison. And he shared Dom’s view on the world too. Inasmuch as that view could be said to be defined – it was perhaps more a developing piling-upon of ideas and notions which seemed to apply. Both boys were scavengers for a take on things around them; magpies gathering insights from any source that seemed to offer respite or alternative to the smothering orthodoxy of untrammelled normality.
In fact the elf figure that had appeared had that same delicate look to his face as Steven, although without the mohawk at that time. It was the last days of 1975 and nobody had a mohawk. They’d been at school together for years, but as was often the case, their friendship, if such it was, was based on location, on the small coincidence of musical taste and the larger coincidence of a shared environment, a shared catchment area for the local comprehensive. They never socialised out of school, so seeing each other out in civilian clothes and civilian life had been a shift in perception, when they’d met up one morning in the school holidays, browsing through records in the WH Smith’s in the centre of Hull. It was a few days before Christmas and the shop was filled with tinned carols and the shininess of shop-front tinsel.
As with all kids that age at that time, they were both quite obsessive about music. The first words Dom heard were ‘That’s a fuckin’ great album’.
Dom was reading the cover of “(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night”. Was that meant to be Tom Waits dubiously drawn on the cover, smoking and pondering, whilst some dishwater blonde looked on from beneath the neon?
Dom looked around to see Steven behind him who said ‘I got it a few months ago’.
‘I didn’t think they’d have it in.’
‘My brother sent me mine from London for me birthday. He’s studying there.’
‘Wish I’d got the fuckin’ money for it. If I’m lucky I might get a gift token for Christmas then I can get it.’
‘You wanna have a listen. You can come round ours and you can have a listen first like.’
“That’d be fuckin’ great. I read loads of the reviews. You reckon it’s as good as they reckon?”
“Aye, it’s fuckin’ great. There’s not many people round here who’d dig it though.”
“I never knew you were into this like. Din’t reckon anyone round here was”
“Aye, all that stuff. Like Dylan’s new ‘un, “Desire”. I wanna get that next.”
“There’s a copy over there, I were lookin’ at it earlier. Three bloody quid mind. What else you got then?”
“I got “Blood on the Tracks”, an’ “Nighthawks”, Lou Reed, Phil Ochs, that sort o’ stuff. You can come round an’ listen if you like.”
“Aye, that’d be great.”
“What you doin’ today?”
“Nowt. I was just hangin’ round, mebbe goin’ to the library.”
“We can catch the bus just after one. Come back with us and we can have a listen. We can nick some beer or Martini off me folks while they’re out.’
