writing_shadows

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.

The dull rattle of the rails is beginning to hit me like repeated hammer blows to the temple; there is honestly only so much you can do to avert a hangover like this one. I down another pint of water, this one fizzing with Alka Seltzer, and try to convince myself that I’m not going to die before Glasgow. It’s a tough sell; even for me.

Even for me.

But try as my body might, I have no regrets; not about last night, anyway. Maybe it has taken me all day to manage three meetings that should have been wrapped up by lunchtime and maybe I won’t be able to see straight for the lights boring into my brain by the time I get home, but it was something that I needed, more than I knew. Just to sit, and drink, and talk, and drink, and listen, and drink.

James was startled when I told him I needed three more bottles of rakia for the cabinet. God; I hope he didn’t think I got through that much alone. Of all the wrong impressions he could draw about what I might have been doing last night, I think that would be the worst. If he told Ruby I was having an affair she would know it wasn’t true, but if he told her I was Lost Weekending when I was supposed to be painting the Cambridge nursery… She worries enough to believe that, especially if I drag myself through the door still teetering between drunk and hung-over, and with the weight of guilt and self-loathing I’ve been carrying this past week.

The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

I know that I am leaving myself open to misconstruction, but I needed this. I needed to talk and I think, in the end, it could only have been to her.

I’m not sure anymore what I wanted from last night, however often Tinker asked the question, but I think a part of me knew that I needed to talk to someone who might understand. Not just a soldier, but a killer; someone who knows death like I know death; someone who can understand responsibility, blame, without shrouding it in guilt.

Someone who might even be worse than I ever was, but for very different reasons.

Thousands are still asleep
Dreaming of terrifying monsters,

I doubt anyone else could have understood so clearly what I meant when I told her I was glad I didn’t meet her twenty years ago. Even looking at her now, after so much time and so many changes, for a moment I didn’t see the woman, just the weapon, and I was awed by the potential.

Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston's or Crawford's:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,

It would be an abominable cliché to say that fatherhood is the most daunting adventure I have ever faced, but there would be truth in it. How could it not be for a man who knows as I do how to bend a mind to his will? How could it not be for someone who knows the harm he could inflict on a child’s fragile psyche?

That part, I don’t think she understood. A retreat into normality, she accused me of, as though this was my norm.

Still, it was a goad to me, because I know that she could have been half right. I might have chosen to fade away, bury myself in domestic concerns, as though my children’s future was a thing isolated from the world. She helped me there, to look beyond the immediate.

And shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

I have changed, but I am still the man I was twenty years ago. Older, wiser, kinder, softer, significantly the worse for drink, but still the same man. That is what no-one else seems to understand. I am not a different man with memories of someone else’s past; I am the man who wielded the knife, who aimed the gun, who planted the bomb and turned innocents into soldiers and assassins. I am the killer, although I choose to live another way.

I love them, and they love me. That’s not meaningless, it’s everything to me, but because they love me they can’t ever really know me; not the dark heart. But it is enough that someone can.

The train rattles on; into the darkness, out of the darkness.

This is the night mail, crossing the border,
This is the night mail, crossing the border,
This is the night mail, crossing the border...