Through My Eyes. Again
Copyright© 2019 by Iskander
Chapter 1
Saturday, 13th October 1962
He stood on the far side of the railway line, the untrimmed growth crowding the fence hid him from curious eyes. The public footpath slanted on up the hill towards the woods at the crest.
Was this the place? Or should he seek greater privacy in the woods? The climb would be in full view from the village...
No, it must be here. Delay might corrode his resolve.
Shrugging off his coat, he pulled the drawing compass from his schoolbag, its newly sharpened point glinting in the thin October sunlight. No knife, so no single smooth slice to a fast fade: multiple punctures, the extra pain his reward for that failure.
He dropped his bag, the strap slithering down his arm and he sank back into the matted grass edging the undergrowth. The thick wool of the school jersey moved easily up his arm. The diagrams of the wrist and forearm in his mother’s anatomy text were clear in his mind – the artery drawn in carmine ink. The point of the compass teased his skin.
How many punctures he would need? Would he need to pierce both arms? Possibly.
He slid his other jersey sleeve up past the elbow. He would cry out with each plunge and needed the camouflage of a passing train. His mind drifted, strangely detached, then came the distant clatter of an approaching train, its low speed and loud clanking marking it as a goods train – perfect.
The point poised over the chosen spot and the clamour grew. A bit closer ... he rested it on his skin, ready for the first stab.
I jerked in surprise, pricking my skin with the compass in my hands. A bead of blood formed on my wrist and I leaned forward to lick it but stopped in shock: my wrist ... was not mine, with no greying hair, no age-marred skin.
And yet ... it was the wrist of this body: it flexed when I commanded.
My tongue dragged across the skin and saliva stung in the tiny puncture. The blood left a smear in which a smaller droplet formed. I rotated my hands, revealing fresh, pale skin with none of the blotches and well-known scars from seventy years of living.
Above was a hill crowned with woodland and a footpath losing itself in the autumnal russets and yellows. Surging to the surface of my brain came the memory: the hill behind my junior school back in England.
I sat there. I had been relaxing half a world away with a glass of Australian Shiraz. I must have dozed off. But no previous dream had ever been this sharply drawn; each strand of yellowing grass beside me executed in exquisite perfection.
What had stirred this distant memory to surface with such preternatural detail?
The thought halted me: whilst asleep, I was critiquing my dream?
I glanced around, expecting the dream to spiral away ... only a whispering breeze, chilling my arms and legs. Minutes passed. Another train slipped into my world, building to a crescendo before rushing away.
I surveyed my body – skinny legs sticking out of grey corduroy shorts, grey knee-length socks, black lace-up shoes, glasses on my face. Such a youthful body – the body of my youth – and it had been about to spike its artery. The dark emotions of my younger self flooded me in a roiling tide. My head jerked up and tears ran down my cheeks. The bitter memories of these bleak times flooded back– the school bullies, my father’s beatings, my impotent raging, my loneliness. Eyes closed, I took a stuttering breath. The rawness of these teen emotions was agonisingly sharp for a seventy-year-old.
And I knew when I was as well as where: my first contemplation of suicide, aged twelve years. But ... I had thought about it on the far side of these railway tracks. I had not set about the deed - and not here.
Dream, or nightmare, this was no memory.
I could have sat there by the railway line and waited for something to happen, but the cold was seeping into me: time to go. If a dream, this could end somewhere else as well as here.
My hand still clutched the compass. I opened my school satchel and dropped it in, pulled my jumper sleeves down to my wrists, donned the blue school mackintosh and cap and set off, back across the railway line, through the village to the bus stop. I wanted a number seven bus, which would take me close to my house, but what came was a number six, which meant a mile walk and a steep climb home. I sighed and climbed to the top deck.
The conductor followed me. “Tickets please.” Her lilting West Indian accent was still a novelty in the rural Kent of 1962.
For a moment, I froze and the conductor’s sunny smile morphed towards a glower, but my twelve-year-old memories served up the knowledge of the season ticket in its leather case, firmly attached by a cord to a button in my left-hand coat pocket. I dragged it out and the smile returned as she moved on.
Shoving away the season ticket, I wondered what else I had with me. My pockets turned up fluff and a handkerchief, so I opened my school bag: a French text, a Latin grammar, Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, three exercise books. Opening one of these revealed my awful handwriting. My stomach clenched – my father goes wild about this.
Goes wild?
My twelve-year-old brain told me he would be waiting for me at home, ready to thrash me for even an imagined transgression. But twenty-five years ago, I had insisted on viewing my father in his coffin: I needed to see his corpse, to know it was finished.
My memory was a confusing melange: both a twelve-year-old’s and remembered through six decades.
I dived back into the bag finding the Horse and his Boy, my favourite from the Narnia series. I escaped into a simpler world, escaping the turmoil I was feeling.
My twelve-year-old brain warned me to pack up and head downstairs for my stop at the foot of Mickleburgh Hill. Trudging upwards, my satchel banged annoyingly against my thigh until my twelve-year-old brain told me to hook the strap over the opposite shoulder. After the climb, the road flattened out before I turned down my street.
About halfway to our house, a boy was sitting on a low wall, idly kicking his heels into the bricks. He glanced up as I approached and then went back to staring at his feet banging on the wall.
I stopped – anything to delay the arrival home. “You are new around here,” I said, realising I had never seen him before; he wasn’t part of my memories.
His eyes narrowed quizzically. The feet stopped kicking. He stared up at me with wide, almost black eyes. “Neu ... new... Ja.”
He was speaking ... German. I had learned the language in senior school.
“D ... umm.” I had nearly replied in German – but my twelve-year-old self wasn’t supposed to know his language. “Um ... who are you?” I spoke slowly as I suspected he spoke little English.
He gave me an unblinking stare for a second or so and then jumped off the wall and headed rapidly back down the road in the direction I had come. I almost called after him, but I didn’t know what to say in English he might understand. I watched him turning the corner at the end of the road without a backward glance. I had never met – or even known of – a German-speaking boy around here. It looked like the world of my childhood but at the same time, it wasn’t.
What would I find at home – my mother, father and sister or complete strangers who would throw me back on the street? Was this reality or a dream?
The kitchen lights were on and I walked warily towards the back door. A head with a long pigtail appeared in the window and turned, glancing at me. It was my bossy older sister as I remembered her as a teenager. She sniffed dismissively as I climbed the two steps to the back door.
My father was seated at the kitchen table, a malevolent presence looming towards me.
“Why are you so late?” He snapped the question, voice coiled with menace.
Our final physical confrontation, one Christmas day when I was fifteen, crashed into my consciousness. I had silently urged him to touch me imagining I would hammer him. But he had turned away for reasons I still could not fathom.
But now? Now, I was too small. The angst and anguish behind my afternoon’s decision flared through my brain, swamping any control from my seventy-year-old self. I fled through the house crying impotently, pursued by my father’s yells. Slamming my bedroom door behind me, I threw myself on the bed and sobbed.
It was dark when the bedroom door opened. Light from the landing crept in, waking me. I lay still. The slight hint of rose scent and swish of a skirt: my mother. Her hand touched my shoulder.
I must have flinched, but I remained curled around my satchel.
“Will, do you want any supper?” She asked.
I shook my head.
“Shall I bring you something here?”
My stomach lurched and, again, I shook my head.
Her hand left my shoulder and, with the same faint swish, she walked out. The room descended into darkness as she closed the door and a terrible fear claimed me. I could not go through this childhood again. Even with a seventy-year-old perched on my shoulder, I couldn’t do it. I would take a knife next time.
But ... was there a way back from here? If this was a dream – what would happen if I went to sleep – would I wake, reach out and find my glass of Shiraz? If I killed myself here, would I wake there? Had I had a heart attack and died back in my old world – and what would happen if I killed myself here? What was the importance of the differences in this world? My brain swirled: questions without answer.
Lying there fully dressed was uncomfortable, so I crept over and cracked open the door. I heard muffled voices from downstairs. I took advantage of the relative quiet and got ready for bed. I pulled the covers over me and drifted off to sleep.
When I woke, I glanced round at my childhood bedroom. No glass of Shiraz for me – I hadn’t gone back. I lay in bed, immobilised by my crushed hope and this strange situation.
I heard my parents head out for communion. The front door closed, and the sound of wheels crunching across the gravel drive came to my ears. I decided to make my escape, to find time and space to think. Hurrying into my clothes, I scurried downstairs where my sister was preparing breakfast. I grabbed two slices of bread, slapped on some lime marmalade and slipped an apple into my pocket...
My sister walked back into the kitchen. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going out. I won’t be back until after lunch. Bye.” And I flew outside, down the garden, across the back fence and into the field.
Would my childhood sanctuary be here in this world?
The marmalade sandwich had picked up some dirt from its encounter with the fence; I ate it anyway as I walked down the field towards the derelict house and its overgrown garden.
This had been my private escape – specifically the massive cedar tree. I could lie back and hide, high in its enfolding arms, invisible from below. Across the field, its top branches rose above the fruit trees. I clambered over the rickety fence and pushed through the overgrown shrubs to the tree. The cedar was huge and under its shading arms nothing could grow through the thick carpet of old needles.
I wiped my sticky fingers in the long, dewy grass at the edge of its shade and walked in beneath it. There was a single way into the tree and it required some acrobatics. I reached up and grabbed the lowest branch in both hands, swinging my feet up. I scrambled round the cold, dark bark and started the climb.
I was reaching for the final handhold before the fork when a head poked out above me. I almost fell, waving my wildly grasping hand to regain my balance; a hand clasped it, placing mine on the branch.
“Vorsicht.” It was the German boy, telling me to be careful. Those large, dark eyes stared down at me. We sat in the fork, each leaning back against a spreading branch, assessing one another.
He was the same height as me but slender, wearing long, grey trousers and a baggy blue jumper over a grey shirt. His hair was longer than my short back and sides. Mine, however, was blandly mouse-brown whilst his was a glossy black, matching his eyes. His features were delicate set in pale skin.
After long seconds of mutual examination, he flicked the long fringe out of his eyes and tapped his chest. “Col.”
Oh, my god. In this world is this my friend, Colin – Col?
My Col was English, well half English, half Canadian.
In this dream, this world, Col was German?
He was not at all like my Colin, who had been (or perhaps is?) blond-haired and blue-eyed.
Bewildered, I tapped my chest. “William ... Will.”
“Ach so. Willi.” He smiled. “Wo wohnst du?” He shook his head when I didn’t respond. “Wo ist dein Haus?” He wanted to know where I lived. Pretending to not understand German was important as I was not supposed to know it. Meanwhile, my brain spun around this huge anomaly.
“House?”
“Ja. Dein ... you... Haus?”
“Oh.” I waved vaguely through the cedar branches to where part of our roof was visible. “Um ... you?” I was still not thinking clearly.
He pointed in the opposite direction, across some vacant land to houses along Sea View Road. I knew where my Col lived, and it wasn’t in Sea View Road. Col was eyeing me speculatively as all this bounced around inside my head.
“You are new here.” I said, in a somewhat accusatory tone as if it was his fault he wasn’t my Colin.
“New ... here?” he said, pronouncing the words with great care, tasting them for their meaning. “Yes... zwei Wochen ... two...” he held up two fingers and then shrugged, seeking a word.
I paused, as my brain started working again. I held up seven fingers. “Week?”
He counted my fingers. “Ja, Woche ... aber zwei ... two.” He held up seven fingers, twice.
I nodded, “Week is Wocke.” mispronouncing it.
“Ja – aber Woche, Woche.” He emphasised the German ‘ch’ sound which doesn’t exist in English.
“Woche, Woche,” I copied and then said “Week.”
“Veek.” I smiled and corrected him, emphasising the shape of the lips for the ‘w’ sound, which didn’t exist in German.
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