Shaped by history, shaped by the events of a past unrecorded, unheralded, he parks his little red car, decants his little grey wife and pads around to the boot in order to fetch the array of food shopping, bags carefully arranged side-by-side never one-on-top-of-the-other in the cramped space. His little speckled beige & grey moustache twitches over the extra effort of it all, wishing for all its worth that the supermarket where they did their weekly shop wasn’t German born and bred, wishing that the car he drove wasn’t Japanese out of Slough, wishing that the leather loafers he had on his feet hadn’t been stitched together in some Bangladeshi clearing house.
Biodegradable plastic in each hand, he noticed that the dye on the shoppers he had been carrying was beginning to come off in his hands:
forefinger – yellow
index finger – red
thumb – black
A dawning as he arrived panting at the doorstep of their 2-up 2-down semi, there 25 years to the month where pleasantries consisted of asking one another if “you were alright”, answers in the negative strictly off limits, of course! It was a dawning as unpleasant as seeing next door’s unmentionables fluttering on a breezy sou’wester on wash day, HIS HANDS WERE TURNING INTO THE COLOURS OF THE GERMAN FLAG BEFORE HIS VERY EYES!
Teetering, close to toppling, he gains the sanctuary of his porch extension painted in patriotic red, white and blue hues, dumps the shopping without ceremony, and clambers up the axminster-coated (‘good British firm that!’) stairwell, swaying and sweating, taking steps two at a time to get to the bathroom for a thorough scrubbing, passing the Union Jack affixed to the corridor wall and assuming a scale akin to the Bayeux Tapestry! Though comparisons such as these in this house were strictly off-limits!
In the freshly non-Delft tiled bathroom he uses Dove, lathers up his palms – no effect, he uses Palmolive, suds up his digits – no impact, he uses detergent, he tries paint stripper or turps, resorts to apple then wine vinegar, beads of sweat popping out all over his temple and brows. A voice, female, from far away downstairs cautions against water abuse, “Bob, bills!” “Bob, bills!” She trills with a hard edge in her voice. A Thatcher-like reminiscence comes into the man’s mind as he resumes his fruitless cleansing activities with the plug stopping up the tap water in recognition of his wife’s cautionary shrieking. “Remember the bills, Bob!!” Her coda. He remembered.
“Psoriasis”, he said when his wife noticed that he was wearing gloves at the dinner table while carving the Sunday roast. “Poor you…” she said.
A day or two later when he ventures into the neighbourhood peppered with Neighbourhood Watch signs in lace curtained windows, he is still gloved. He worries of the suspicion that this could engender amongst his fellow suburban residents. Then, one day at a local BNP branch meeting, his hands become excessively sweaty, uncomfortably so. He tries with all his might to resist the urge to free his upper limbs, focusing on the vitriol coming from the Chair, the usual anti-Merkel contra-Macron invective, fulminating much as usual on the arrogant superiority of their collective ways. Meanwhile, Bob, in his gloves continues to sweat, and the sweating is joined by the straining. The Chair’s high-pitched falsetto appears to rise to a crescendo, a fist smashes into a palm as a final point is made, he sits back down. The heat has risen. There is an imbroglio. Bob can stand it no more. He rips off the first glove. Gasps. He rips off the second glove, the left. A deadly silence descends. In a fit of twitchy nervous tension, he inadvertently touches his nose. The silence deepens, and is broken only when the treasurer of the Newtown BNP branch points an accusatory finger at Bob as he begins to put the offending handwear back over his fingers.
“Lor’ luvv-a-duck, his hooter come over all German-like, would you believe it, f_ _ k
me!” Rather not looks flash from office holder to treasurer, treasurer to vice-Chair, vice-Chair to events secretary, events secretary to….. and a shamed ex-member-to-be heads for the door marked ‘EXIT.’
After the Party excommunication on the grounds of Wanton Germanification, his wife takes him shopping. He wears balaclava, mask and heavy woollen gloves of an indeterminate muddy shade. They walk through the habitual carapace of affordable ‘bro-daubed’ ‘f_ _ _ off’ bricks and mortar. The ambivalence of identity sourced as graffiti. They bow their heads passing by on the other side of free expression. Indications of class in the collective gait they adopt as they arrive at the local convenience store where absolute automation is the calling card of ‘victual commerce.’ The man under the balaclava and mask is gratified. His garb, his aspect is no indicator of complexity (or otherwise) regarding small talk conversation, something which was the cornerstone or raison d’etre of the local shop, and which Bob and his ilk were set on ‘taking back control.’ But that was before. Now he wore ‘other’ on his very skin pigmentation. He looked on as his wife sought out bar code and little red laser gun to complete each transaction with a climactic trill.
Boxed ‘Brooke Bond’ placed safely in the sanctuary of the bagging area as their last purchase, the shop having run out of loo roll, he appraised a shadowy aura at the plate glass window frontage. And just as he was twisting his neck for a more definitive view, he took a mental note of forward motion coming from the same direction, this shadowy figure was now on the move! His final frame of reference followed in due course as there he stood, a hulking great non-caucasian with multi-tattooed biceps, bulging in the wake of frequently pumped iron, standing arms folded giving him a steady custodial stare. Bob sensed what was coming next. Simultaneously, his wife, Ethel, after wishing in turn the ethereal voiced essence inside the automated check-out machine a jolly farewell, was examining the purchase receipt with a fine toothcomb.
And sure enough there it was, “Excuse me, sir, would you mind stepping this way….?” Meanwhile, Ethel is counting, matching product with item listed on the receipt, concerned that the machine has pulled a fast one on her.
“I’m sure this isn’t right, just doesn’t add up, let’s see…ah…here it is, milk times two, only one in me bag, thought so, that effin’ machine’s bleedin’ diddled me. Wait till I tell Bob…..Bob!….Bob! Now where the dickens can he have got to?”
In a store cupboard with six CCTV monitors balanced precariously on a fold-up table, Bob and ‘Store Security’ are engaged in animated confabulation:
“We have reason to believe, sir, that you were acting in a suspicious manner by the frozen fowl aisle, and that you have secreted a bird about your person.”
“I were only weighing up a coupl’ o’ birds wi’ me hands like, gloved as you can see.”
“Our automatic fowl counter placed surreptitiously in all the requisite compartments around the store indicates that one bird remains unaccounted for. And, if you don’t mind me saying, sir, you do come across as somewhat suspicious, indeed a suspect, if I may say so.” The giant security officer stretches fingers, cracks knuckles and narrows eyes in reinforcement of the accusation.
“What?!! Just coz o’ these!!” And gloves are pulled off in a fit of pique. There is a silence, heavy with intent as looks are exchanged between the accused and accuser, one of defiance, the other of surprise. Throughout the interregnum, an inquisitive face had mooned around the half-opened door, the attached neck craning to see if she had stumbled across the place where a misplaced husband could be found. Not lost for words – EVER – Ethel states the obvious, “oh, there you are, I’ve been looking for you everywhere, you know, ‘fowt you’d done a bunk!” The suit-wearing bulked up security man meanwhile apes a tennis umpire during a rally with head pivoting from wife to husband and back again in the anticipatory angles of required response. ‘After all, wasn’t it in the manual of marital relations that it was the lady who was not for turning and the husband’s ears for burning?’ He thought. And they fold arms, wife and store detective, eyes levelled in anticipation of their need to know.
Bob puts his now exposed hands on the table, and as he does so, a frozen fowl – tricoloured – drops from his person onto the floor with a resounding thud. A look that could be read as ‘sheepish’ appears from under the raised balaclava.
“Oh no, fowled out!!!” His eyes shine – but not in delight, while the round, dark eyes of the triumphant security man ripple to an even greater circumference like a pebble in still waters.
“Time for a reckoning, sir, I reckon…”
“A resolution?”
“That too.”
“A solution?”
“And that, madam.”
There is a hiatus, a shift in consciousness and location, the rabid Brit with the Germanic mitts called Bob enters into another dimension. It is his release, a dimension that could have been a fifth or even a fourth. He enters into a kaleidscope of strange occurrences; a formal letter delivered which ends ‘yours fartfully’, a cat with a devilish face rubs up against his leg, there’s a summons to attend a ‘frozen fowl manufacturers’ annual convention in Kalgoorlie, a manically flapping blue tit flies straight into his kitchen window temporarily stunning itself – is it all real? Can it all be true? What does it all mean? He wondered and wondered anew as he is presented with a return to sender letter forwarded from Vancouver in December 1974 by Glenn Gould; an inquisitive, innovative 10-year-old attaches worms to a string in turn attached to a long, thin stick and approaches the back yard coop of his next door neighbour with a black plastic stool in his other hand.
When asked what the hell did he think he was doing(?) by this selfsame neighbour, the boy replied, “going chicken fishing!”
Bob’s Great Aunt presents him with a framed photograph showing her dog, a setter, playing the piano.
“What’s its name?” He asks.
“Leonard Bitestein.”
“No, the piece?”
“Cavalcade of the Animals, of course, Debussy.”
And on and on. Fandango.
It’s a state that defies description. There are no beards or hipsters in this dimension. There is no distinction between race, creed, colour, function or nation. Then, there is the ordinary, everyday apparition of ‘Brezhnev’, looming, multi-coloured, a hologram, making an appearance, a haunting presence dissolving into vapour like a genie from a lamp leaving behind only the eyebrows, as an ethereal left behind voice chants, ‘vere ees toilet? ‘vere ees toilet?’ in a miasma of irrelevance. I mean whoever heard of an apparition or hologram activating waterworks or voiding innards? In this realm there are no arms or legs, arses or willies – only facial recognition! At this time of ‘pressing need’, ‘Big Bo’ would be ignored, and he (‘Big Bre’) would dissolve in a moody puff of smoke only to materialize in the dimension that required daily bodily fluid outtage. Then he would return ready to torment throughout the realm with a new chant in the form of a question: ‘vot ees my legacy?’ ‘vot ees my legacy?’ in rather fractured English, though everyone who is anyone knows that the real Brezhnev, the Brezhnev of historical heft spoke only Russian, except when in Vladikavkaz where he conversed in a curious hybrid dialect which encompassed throat reverberations that bordered on the aboriginal. Though, of course, in the Arts World, he did feature in ‘Letter to Brezhnev’, an 80s film made in England that featured Scouse, but that doesn’t count. So, in this realm of the disembodied Bob found that he had a licence to roam, to ‘Live Free’ in a without borders way. At first, he couldn’t quite comprehend an environment undivided where there was no ‘Laos in Chaos’ since Laos was a four-letter word devoid of context and/or meaning. At first, confusion reigned in a place where there was neither Neitzsche nor Water Feature, Plato or Couch Potato. What to do? How to adapt? What credo to adopt? That was the moment when Brezhnev the hologram appeared like a fairy godmother, father(?), though he wasn’t originally a Brezhnev, he was a huge red star that morphed into a Brezhnev making gestures, a visual cliché, a nostalgic novelty. As such, it was an unclassifiable, unrecordable event unlike the actual time of his ascension to the throne of politburo power, though this was getting dangerously close to superimposing the physical state of recent history recorded upon the mental, the spiritual, the gaseous, the elemental. After all, this was a world that in actual fact put the ‘U’ into unclassifiable!
The summons came through the post. He had to sign for it, he noticed a Roger Moore impression on the brows of the postie when the signature fluorish of the pen (left-handed) had been made with his gloves on. ‘Gloves in April?’ could be read on the face of this particular deliverer with the peaked cap, fag dangling dangerously from a bottom lip that had seen better days than this one. Bob was about to call upstairs, “Ethel, that’s the postie arrived!” Then caught himself with a catch in his throat while recollecting that Ethel had decanted herself to her sister’s place since the police interrogation at Newtown Constabulary which had established not only that Bob was a shoplifter, but that Ethel was ‘accessory after the fact’ too and that she would be receiving her own summons to the Crown Court. Luckily, he had been spared the agony of having to go into work looking like an anarchist molotov cocktail brandisher, thanks to the Sun King Sunak and his magically extending furlough scheme. Ah, how he loved the sound of that word on his still Great Britain Provenance tongue, “Fur-lough ho-ho-ho…..Fur-lough ho-ho-ho…..” he took to rolling around in his mouth whilst watching his Russian Blue hamster (named ‘Maggie’ naturally enough) putting in the hard miles on her treadmill, those little pink feet a blur in the habitual testament of her accelerating velocity. Nowadays, he had plenty of time to do some Maggie observing in between tending to the brassica in the immaculate allotment that had been in the family for decades. His TLC knew no bounds or boundaries as he crouched low over his cruciferous vegetables, a servant in the service of plant genus of the conventional kind. So, to him, the blue-green heads of cabbage became the equivalent of pre-pubescent imaginary friends. But it was when he had given them names and conjured up repartee between individual brassica that he sought help.
“Doctor, it’s me brassica, keep thinking they’re talking heads…..”
“Oh yes, which one’s David Byrne, hahaha?!!”
It was a doctorial superior kind of laugh that included piston shoulder movement akin to a famous ‘sailor boy’ Tory PM of the 70s, reminiscence of Mrs T’s arch enemy that made the man lying on the patent leather couch shudder inadvertently.
“Now then, Mr.F______ , could you take me through the stages of your perceived mental disintegration. Unless, I’m very much mistaken it began when you and your wife were returning back from German supermarkt store.” Occasionally, the provenance of this particular medical practitioner would reveal itself. Another inadvertent shudder. And in order to do this I would like you to carefully watch this watch on the end of this chain….”
“Wot? Yer tryin’ ter hypnoti…..” and after a few peremptory swings BF’s eyes flicker gently to a close like a butterfly setting down on a floral stamen. Eyes wide shut. Kubrickian.
Behind those firmly shut lids all could be seen: a naked man runs over hot coals smiling broadly; a prize ram on its hind legs tips his tifter as he baas a ‘Wotcher Guv!’ in cockney tones in his direction; a red flashing neon sign announces Free Money, Get Yours Here – there is no queue; an enchantress in a leopard skin leotard gestures come hither with her elaborately manicured talon as a fluttering flier drops out of a small white biplane in low-flying flight, *Benito Ha Bisogno Di Te with the Italian fascist symbol embossed thereon, parchment and symbol yellowing with age.
Again, there is a state of decontextualisation at play in this realm of random occurrences. He feels no sensation of physicality, there is only a lightness of being as though borne away on an Arabian Nights flying carpet, and then quite suddenly he spots his shrink with the Austrian accent hanging upside down from a tree greedily munching through a ripe papaya like the hungriest of giant fruit bats. A closer look reveals the most peculiar of anatomical sights, his bottom jaw with a line of mandible-like molars has extended clean over his top lip so that they are practically touching the tip of his nose. The case of the disappearing upper half of the jaw before his very eyes, choppers made to make short shrift of any unsuspecting papaya, bunch of bananas or 2 to 3kg pineapple, all trace of professional professorial pride gone amid a tangle of bark, branch, twig and juicy fruit. How? How did reality become so subjective? But… “Tovarich, remember your Neitzsche, da? All your reality is purely yours, not mine, not that tree’s, not even that grotesque thing hanging from that tree, oh no……..” It was the return of the Brezhnevian hologram but this time, inexplicably, with impeccable RP sounds in tow… “surely you cannot imagine existence structured in any other way. You are an existentialist flytrap – albeit more Earthen than Venutian – designated to gather experiences, capture moments to ingest as memory, regurgitate in times of nostalgic remembrance or in melancholic interludes. This is your truth, your ‘reality’”
And with that homily, Brezhnev became a spiral of twisting twirling blue-grey then red vapour whisping upwards and outwards like the spread of a well-known dogma played as an elegant adagio on an angel’s harp and re-imagined by some wild-haired and whiskered wordsmith in a 4th arrondisement attic hovel without heat, hearth or curtains, blowing on fingers gone blue with coldin a cross-dimensional delve into literary history: “Hereafter, all will be made into notation for music made by gathered ranks of men in tails. Black-white black-white black-white black……..”
In front of him a blur. He tries to focus. Slowly a silver watch on a chain swinging back and forth comes into view. A heavy accent. He hears sounds not words. But gradually he comes back to the design and realisation of his old self.
“Now listen carefully, after the number five in counting, you vill avake, do you understand Mister Bob?”
Nod then count then the awakening then the fee. As he leaves, the man who had been on the couch turns his head in such a way that he sees the doctor from the upside down perspective and shudders once more.
On the day of the summons at Newtown Crown Court, the main protagonists gather. It is apparent that an effort has been made. Ethel is wearing light lilac shade lipstick and matching eye shadow with M&S mid-price clothes in harmony with the colours on her face. Convenience Store Security has a black felt fedora on his wide slab-like head and a sweeping black velvet cloak with a silver Oldham Athletic Club Shop clasp over his big bicep & calf bulked-up body. The arresting officer has a brand new crisply-pressed and arrow-straight creased Home Counties Constabulary uniform on display. He is also wearing it. As for Bob, he has new gloves, light tan calfskin, a straw boater with a red, white & blue circumferential ribbon, matching bow tie and black shiny brogues. The Court Reporter/Escritoireista scribbles something extant about a fashion show, but he senses a heavy frown emanating from the high benches where the Kappelmeister ruler over all in view roosts, a must-be-obeyed look on his high-caste double-chinned visage. There is a coating of tippex. All is amended. Proceedings proceed at a furious pace, a small portable freezer on wheels is pushed into court. A frozen fowl (tricoloured) exhibit A is displayed. Opening remarks on the open-and-shut case after the freezer is unlatched and bird displayed focus on the evidence and irregular colours on chicken skin. How they got there? Who put them there? Caught red-yellow-and-black-handed!
Ethel is summoned. It is quickly established that she isn’t in fact an accessory after the fact, she had been an accessory before the act, according to the Defence. But there is still a sentence. She must share court costs. She must pay the equivalent of a pint of milk. Full fat. Fact.
Security produces a fat notebook of potential filibustering proportions. He reads methodically, lingeringly, longingly in Afro-Caribbean accent until his Lordship adjourns proceedings at 1pm. He has a chat with Security in his Chambers. When they return, his notebook has shrunk enormously and has caffeine stains thereon. “It’s shrunk in the wash from judge’s spittle,” whispered pronouncement from the court wag (minus wig) sitting on the benches below, “mustah been imbibin’ Assam at the time”, he adds irreverently to anyone who’ll listen. Proceedings move on. Evidence is evidenced then subsides in a sea of sighs coming from the benches. Impatience is in the air. Evidently, the evidence hadn’t been shortened enough until at last there is the tail end of the case. Bob takes the stand looking dapper. He throws himself on the leniency of the court by admitting all, but attributes extenuating circumstances in explaining his actions in the shop to the open court. He takes off his calfskin gloves. Hands on full display. There are gasps. The colours on his digits dazzle, though similar shades on his nose had long since faded. Doctor Schmidt, the shrink, had put this down to excess nose blowing onto linen handkerchiefs. But that’s another tale in the making-do and mending of mental states outwith the aegis of this court.
After, there is the recovery. Gloves safely back on hands. There is the verdict. Read out in a deliberate decisive public school timbre. Community Service 60hours, plus full court costs. Case dismissed. The frozen fowl is wheeled out and destroyed. Ethel revitalised, new-manned click-clacks swiftly over the court aula tiling, presents divorce papers to a discombobulated Bob and click-clacks out of the building. Security comes over to have another glance at those hands, shakes his head, adds some notes in shorthand to his notebook, now that there is more space, and departs. A cheque (furlough fund) is presented to the court clerk in situ, dates of service agreed upon and inscribed in the court ledger and franked in red wax – Free! He is free to go back home, Bob back to his hamster and allotment (HHA). His legacy.
At night in his bed, he enters the sleep dimension. Alternative, third, fourth, fifth, he cannot decide. He is there hoping to meet Leonid, otherwise known as Brezhnev, though for what reason, he cannot say. His sleep is fitful. It refuses to extend into a consistent enough thread for him to meet a former Soviet leader and politburo member with unfeasibly extensive eyebrows and a predilection for kissing men of power full on the lips. Disappointment. He turns over and sleeps – finally.
In the morning, while munching his Ready-Brek oats and watching Maggie the hamster hard at work on the treadmill, he cobbles together all his ‘leftover’ money. There is enough for a consultation. Half an hour later, he is at the brass clapper on the heavy black door of Doctor Schmidt’s consultancy, but Doctor Schmidt isn’t there, Doctor Schmidt will never be there. He has returned to the Austrian Tyrol. The note on that black oaken door tells him – us – so. ‘The Mountains Of The Fatherland’ where he, Doctor Schmidt, will leave his legacy, his crumpled body at the bottom of a ravine in heavy mist after which HE will reach a dimension that will enable him to do what his patient Bob is destined NEVER to EVER do again, encounter the hologramatic essence of a former Soviet leader with those eyebrows as heavy and distinctive as anyone’s legacy who’s EVER been born or will be born beyond border of land and/or sea. And that’s a fact that is a lesson that has been learnt. I know.
Bob told me so.
*Benito needs you