FALLING
I can’t be sure what time I was finished drinking the last of my whiskeys. It was possibly moments before the barmaid refused to serve me another drink on the grounds I couldn’t even stand up properly, never mind walk straight. It was kind of those two door supervisors to help me down the stairs, although they needn’t have pushed me out of the doorway quite so hard so that I almost tripped and landed in the middle of the main road in rush hour traffic.
How I got back to the house is beyond me, and I should really remember as it was only a few minutes ago.
Did I get a taxi? Yes, I must have done.
Was I sick on the way home in the taxi?
Using the garden gate as a means to turn back around and survey the way I have just walked/staggered/lunged by leaning on it and swinging back and forth I can make out that yes I did in fact get a taxi and yes I was in fact sick, on the road and a bit on the door of the black cab. I wave at the taxi driver who is now wiping my vomit from his baby and I think he waves back. I can’t really hear what he has just said but that doesn’t matter, I’m pissed, nothing matters.
Using the garden hedge to steady myself I start my long and perilous journey to the front door. Key in my hand...no, wait, that’s not my key that’s a cigarette lighter...but I don’t even smoke? Where the fuck is my key? No matter.
I land on the doorstep with my head and relax. It’s comfy down here on the pebbledash pathway, and look, the clouds are parting and...and it’s sunny! For the first time in over a month the sun’s rays massage my aching winter ravaged body. I’ve missed you sun, but I’ll be seeing a lot more of you soon when I arrive in Cape Africa in South Town for Christmas. And Lisa’s going to be there too! I love Lisa, she’s so fantastic and...
“For fuck sakes Billy, what the hell are you doing lying on the garden path,” Paul shouts at me as he opens the front door and almost trips over my head.
I smile up at him, what a great guy, and say, “I’m telling the truth on the garden path, not lying, and the truth is you my friend are my bestest friend.”
He rolls his eyes at me and I laugh at this, accepting his hand as he pulls me up to my feet.
“I only left you two hours ago, how the hell did you manage to get into this state in such a short time?”
I shrug, sensing with my acute sense of sensibleness that this is a rhetorical question.
“I think you need to go to bed mate,” Paul tells me as he lifts me into the house and we help each other up the stairs and into my room.
No sooner is the door open I manage to stumble the few steps to my bed and fall on top of the mountain of pillows, a precaution for when I am falling a lot in my sleep. Paul leaves the room, closing my door and I roll onto my back, reaching out to open my curtains so that I can feel that glorious sun on my face again. The curtains and pole come crashing down on top of me but that’s fine. I shrug them to the floor and get undressed, lying naked above my covers so that the dwindling rays massage my whole body. I can feel a tingling sensation in my legs, it is moving across my torso and up my neck to my face. I turn over onto my front, feeling suddenly energised but at the same time quite drowsy. I need to sleep. I’m pissed and I need to sleep. I close my eyes and the sun is behind my eyelids, momentarily burnt into my retinas and shining bright into my soul. It is growing, engulfing my whole line of sight, the tingling now feeling as though it is moving my whole body, charging me up into a great explosion which does not come. Instead the sun dies out and I begin to fall aslee...begin to fall asl...begin to fall...I’m falling!
My bedroom door slams open to Candy, another one of my house mates, standing there, hands on hips and a bemused smirk across her pretty face. I open my eyes properly and notice that I am now at the other side of the room and on the floor.
“Bad dream?” she asks and I blink a couple of times before standing up, my feet still tingling from the sun. She throws me a pair of shorts from the pile of dirty washing by the door and I quickly slip into them.
“No, not at all, I was just drifting off and then...” I stop as I glance out of the window. All traces of daylight have disappeared and it is now raining hard. Shaking my head I ask her what the time is, to which she smiles sweetly and tells me it is quarter past nine.
Quarter past nine! How did that happen?
“Paul,” I call out but there is no answer.
“He’s out love,” Candy tells me.
“What time did I get home?”
She shrugs and then adds, “it was before six because I got back then and you were sleeping like a little naked baby on top of your covers.”
Three hours! How can I have been sleeping for three hours? I have just closed my eyes this very second.
“Would you like a coffee? You still reek of whiskey.”
I nod, grabbing my towel which is sort of hanging up over the clothes rack that is my wardrobe, “I’m going to grab a quick shower,” I tell her as I bolt past her and across the landing to the bathroom.
“You ok Billy?” she asks through the bathroom door to which I groan a yes and jump into the sobering ice spikes which are better at waking you up than any cup of coffee.
Ten minutes later and I’m downstairs sitting at the kitchen table, Candy facing me, cups of coffee between us.
“Did you fall again?” she asks me once she’s rolled herself a spliff and lit it.
I nod, “I guess so, but this time it was different. Usually I have been asleep for moments before I fall, this time it was over three hours.”
She shrugs because she does not have any insight into my strange sleeping patterns to add, and so I too shrug, smiling a little and accepting the spliff as she offers it to me.
I still feel as though I’m half asleep.
Am I, or is this just the hangover kicking in for the second time today?
“Do you ever fall?” I ask my fellow stoner.
“Sometimes. It has never ended with the crash your falls do though. I just jump and wake myself up, happy that the bed cushioned my descent.”
I laugh at this. I wish I could have it that easy. I haven’t woken up across the room for nearly four months, and usually the booze helps me avoid any unpleasantness at all. Usually I will get a decent night sleep when I’m pissed out of my head. Why not this time?
I pass the joint back to Candy and she gets up from her seat, coming around the table and giving me a hug, “you’re a strange one Mr. Johnson but I love you for it, now I’m off meeting everyone down the pub, fancy joining us?”
I shake my head, “nah, I think I’ll try a bout of sobriety for the rest of the evening and besides, I don’t fancy like going out in this weather.”
Candy shakes her head, and as she picks up her coat and handbag mumbles, “I don’t know, you and the bloody rain. It’s any wonder you didn’t decide to go to university somewhere along the equator, then you’d have your precious sun almost all year around.”
She comes back around and gives me a quick kiss on the cheek, “and before I forget, your phone has been going off like mad for the past hour.”
“Shit,” I curse, getting up and heading off upstairs to try and find the stupid thing. I was supposed have given Lisa a call at half past five.
“No wanking in the living room,” Candy shouts up after me.
“Why would I when there’s your crisp and clean double bed up here,” I shout back down but she’s already gone and with her departure the front door slams shut.
I find my phone in my jeans pocket and check the screen. Shit! Eighteen missed calls from Lisa and three text messages which don’t seem all too great either.
IF UR PISSED AGAIN U CAN 4GET RINGING ME L8ER!!!
That was the nice one.
Oops.
Scrolling down the list I see that dad has rung me too and I then remember Paul’s message from dad to give him a ring. I select his name and press call.
The phone rings nine consecutive rings before I hear dad’s voice, slightly out of breath. He has probably legged it from the kitchen to his office upstairs so that he can receive his telephone call in private. Is he even aware that it is Friday and that mum’ll be out at bingo so he’s the whole house to himself? Probably not, that’ll be the old age creeping in.
“Hello?” he answers and I can hear his leather armchair squeak as he sits down.
“Hiya dad it’s Billy, Paul mentioned you’d asked me to ring you over the weekend...”
A pause...he’ll be trying to recall this particular conversation which he shared with Paul just five short hours earlier. It’s the old ‘forgetful Professor’ routine, fun at first but contrary to my previous remark about dad’s memory, he’s as sharp as a razor. Alarmingly so actually, he remembers everything.
“Oh, yeah, hi William, I just wanted to know if you were getting on alright. It seems like ages since we’ve had a chat, however brief that might be, outside of the lecture theatre.”
I smile, “well you keep setting us a million essays with added reading material every week dad, I usually quite busy.”
There’s a pause before, “hmm, and are you still doing most of your work upstairs in the corner booth at the pub?”
“It’s quieter than the house and a great place to observe our species taking a step back through the evolutionary process, first by degenerating the ability to speak and then losing the capacity to walk upright. It’s great watching the fifth monkey revert back to image of its ancestors.”
“Indeed,” dad tells me with a stern body to his tone before the old deep sigh and then, “you are alright aren’t you Bill. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that you’re drinking somewhat excessively. I’ve seen it a thousand times sitting in on my lectures, the bloody shot eyes, the ability to focus on anything coherent...”
I cut him off here, this is beginning to sound like another one of Professor Johnson’s lectures, “dad I’m a university student, I’m living to uni life, I’m making the grades and I’m enjoying a healthy social life. Look, it’s a Friday night and I’m not out painting the town red am I, I’m talking to you instead.”
Another quick sigh to say he’s satisfied and his worrying is over for the moment, “Ok. Now what’s this I hear about your bad dreams coming back?”
As a kid I could never seem to settle at night. Put me out in the garden on a beautiful summer day and I’d sleep forever, but come night time mum and dad used to say I was like a junkie turning my back on the gear. It was like a fever which never broke but which would constantly turn out hot and cold flushes. Eventually I’d knacker myself out enough so that I would fall asleep, only to be woken from ‘bad dreams’ which were in fact my old friend the sensation of falling and then waking up with a start. Sleep therapy was an expensive waste of time, the Doctor could find nothing wrong, and so I was drugged every night. This stopped the falling and the sweats for a decade, until I reached puberty and then it seemed my body had bigger problems to worry about. The falling has only really started again in the last year or so, since I’ve been living away from home and my night dose of night nurse. These days a belly full of beer and whiskey is my night nurse but it doesn’t always work.
“Dad, they’re not bad dreams, I’m not waking up in the middle of the night crying like a baby and wanting my mum, this is me drifting off to sleep and then suddenly being snapped back to reality so hard I manage to throw myself out of bed” and across the room (although I’m not going to mention that).
“And how often does this happen? When was the last time you fell?”
I check my watch, “urrrrr...thirty five minutes ago was the last time it happened and they occur night, often several times a night. It’s back to the same drill as when I was younger.”
“And they’re more often when the weather’s warmer?”
“Yep, as soon as the sun is out I’m like a jack in the box all night.”
I wait for the next question, is he going to ask me to name the Capital of Brazil for ten bonus points? I hope not, I’m crap at Geography. Like dad, I’m a little bit of a history buff.”
“This isn’t affecting your studies is it William, because if it is I’ll enquire about you seeing another specialist.”
“Dad, don’t worry. I’m fine...well, I’m better than fine actually, Paul has invited me on his family Christmas holiday to Cape Town at the end of term, and for free as well.”
“That’s, that’s fantastic...” he stutters and then pauses, probably trying to muster a little more sincerity in his tone because we both know he would much rather have me at home for Christmas. Our family may not be a large one, Just Dad and uncle Eric on his side and my grandparents and my mum’s sister on hers, but what we lack in size is made up in prezzies. Ha ha, I’m a big kid at heart, “we’ll miss you on Christmas day.”
“Yeah, I know, but you’ll still have uncle Eric to play Jenga with, no doubt he’ll leave it until late in the evening as usual before turning up but hey...”
“I’m concerned Billy,” dad tells me now. Just what I need, dad chill out for once in your life! Were you actually born with your stuffy Professor’s jacket and half moon specs on?
“I’ll be fine. We’re staying at their gated house with swimming pool and...”
“No, not about Christmas, I’m sure you’ll have a great time and I wish I was going in your place, no, what I’m concerned about is your sleeping and I don’t want you to think that you can’t speak to me about anything that might be on your mind. No matter how silly it may sound.”
My phone beeps, call waiting, it’s Lucy.
“I’m fine Dad, listen, I’ve got another call I need to take so I’ll speak to you soon ok?”
We say out goodbyes and I laugh at dad’s last words. I wonder how he’d respond if I told him I seem to be able to literally catapult myself across my room while I’m asleep? Or if when I told him about...shit, what am I doing going of on a tangent, Lisa’s on the line waiting for me to speak.
“Hi there sexy,” I tell her.
“DON’T YOU HI THERE SEXY ME!!!”
Women.
Monday, 2 November 2009
Chapter Five
BAPTISM OF LIFE – A MEMOIR
Chapter Two
Battle scars
I have loved many women in my time, taken many wives, and given life to may sons and daughters. I do not feel my prolonged life has been a curse, indeed for almost two hundred years I have been on a quest to try and understand why it is my cells regenerate at such an alarming rate, and why only the very few have been granted such gifts.
I remember the first time I was shot, within minutes I was up and about as though nothing had ever happened. If it had been anyone else witnessing my radical recovery I believe things may not have turned out quite the same for me, but as it was, it was Corporal Chesterfield who watched in amazement as my organs repaired themselves and then my chest cavity closed.
The year was 1916 and I had joined the 1st battalion of the York & Lancaster regiment two months into their campaign on the Somme. Having seen so much blood shed already in my life when the Great War, the war to end all wars, broke I was content on staying out of this one. At the time I was passing myself off as a forty year old Professor of English at Cambridge University and was exempt from fighting in the war. It was only when I started to see more and more young men leaving the town to go and fight that I too signed up. I couldn’t sit back and watch the mortal give their lives while I knew I could perhaps make a difference.
After passing basic fitness training we were shipped off to the Somme where I was awarded the rank of Captain. It was only a few days later while enjoying a quite cigarette on night watch when I was introduced to Corporal Chesterfield.
‘Captain Johnson sir,’ a voice in the dark. I turned and saw no one but then into the moonlight moved Eric. ‘I have been posted onto night watch with you sir.’
I smiled. It had been over a century and a half since I had saved him from his villagers questioning his mortality and I must say the man had paled somewhat in that time. It is only later that we realised why, and found his immortality came with friends.
At first I believe I may not have recognised me, and if he did he certainly did not show it. The first night on watch together was uneventful and we scarcely spoke. In the trenches there is much silence and contemplation, we are alone in this world and we hope to get back home to see our families.
‘Who are you back home sir?’ Eric asked me on the second night of our posting together. The sky was clear and the moon shone down upon no mans land like a search spotlight, looking to depict the enemy to both sides.
‘I am a professor at Cambridge University, and you?’
My words hung on the cool night air for a very long time, so long in fact that I had almost forgotten shooting his question back at him. Eventually he answered, his voice hoarse like the cries of the wounded we could hear further down the line, that day’s casualties from no mans land.
‘I am a student back home, studying to join the priesthood.’
‘A very noble profession my good man, but why then, might I ask, do you find yourself on the Western Front? Surely you might find yourself exempt from enlisting if you path was for something greater?’
Eric then took his time to turn and face me before saying, quite clearly, ‘the very same reason you find yourself watching over the tides of death night after night.’
I nodded at this. I had been wrong, the man had recognised me from his grandson’s funeral and I would not shame myself to try and deny that Dr Steel had not been yet another alias. Instead I stood up from my perch and held out my hand. Eric grasped it with a firm grip and stood to meet my eyes.
‘Why did you intervene that day three life times ago? How did you know?’
I shrugged my shoulders and told him, ‘I have spent almost my entire life searching for men like myself, the divine who possess a further step in the evolutionary chain.’
Eric held out his hand to stop me, ‘let me stop you right there because if not we will be a loggerheads with one another all night. I am a follower of the Lord, I respect your opinion but let us not discuss the point of origin of our gifts because you will think me naive just as I will see you as a blasphemer.’
Although I wanted him to listen, although I felt I needed to sit him down and talk to him about natural selection, explain how the myth of a God was in fact instilled upon civilisations long before either of us as a form of control, and that the first worshiping civilisations in fact worshiped the earth, making them naturists and, in a sense, none believers also, I felt to follow this course might alienate my new found comrade.
Instead I simply nodded and said, ‘understood,’ and then we spoke at length of our experiences. Although I imagined us the same many years ago when I came by the quiet Mr Chesterfield living in the rural Lancashire dales, throughout our discussions I found subtle differences in our evolutions which made me question my theories of how the divine came to live amongst man. Back then I had yet to discover the likes of cell rapid regeneration, and DNA mapping was light years away, but I imagined us the next step. For the fittest to survive they had to adapt themselves to the ever changing world, and the most perfect form of survival would be to regenerate tissue mass quicker than it might diminish. In Eric I became aware of more startling feats of divinity, but first it seemed I would show my hand.
The day I was shot was the day almost our whole platoon was wiped out. We were ordered over the top and into no man’s land to make a push for the German lines. Upon our briefing we were led to believe the enemy had all but vacated the trenches we were soon hoping to call our own. Throughout the morning heavy artillery bombarded our destination with the most awesome fire power no mortal man could ever hope to survive, and with Corporal Chesterfield by my side we led the attack. No sooner had we made it out of our trenches we were annihilated with heavy machine gun fire, mortars, and the crack aim of the German sharp shooters. Further forward we pushed, zigzagging across the barren landscape, through swampy foxholes and the cried of our dying comrades. And then I felt the wind being taken out of me not twenty yards from the enemy line but still further I pushed forward, deafened by the constant stream of fire, blinded by the mud being kicked up from the ground, unaware all this time that I was in fact the last man still upright and still pushing forward. Another shot, this time catching me in the arm and I was spun around with the sheer force. As I fell to my knees, back now to the enemy, I surveyed the ground I had crossed, now littered with the debris of the men who had followed me to their deaths. I was completely alone, and then, seemingly to appear from out of thin air Eric picked me up and lunged us both into a watery foxhole.
‘My God you’re hit,’ he cried out, his arm around my neck to keep my head from falling under the murky swamp, maroon with the blood of men lost underneath our feet.
I laughed at this comment for some reason. Maybe it was the shock and adrenaline battling through my system, I don’t know, but when I peered down at my torso I watched with Eric as my fatal wounds healed. A few moments later I was as fit and as healthy as the day William Wallace was hung drawn and quartered for the baying crowd at Smithfield in London. I stood in the crowds that day and watched as my doppelganger was hung drawn and quartered, but that is another story.
‘Are you read for that final push sir?’ Eric shouted into my ringing ears as I knelt forward, heaving almost at the stench of the rotting bodies which shared our hole.
Later Eric told me I had grinned wildly at this suggestion and charged with a feral like fury spurring me on. As we reached the enemy’s line Eric appeared to jump the barbed webbing which was there to keep us out, landing upon two German soldiers and as he gutted one with his bayonet he sunk his teeth into the neck of the second, ripping out his jugular and then gutting this man also.
It was a massacre. Two invincible English knights against a frightened army of the Hun. We were both awarded medals for our courageous valour, but unfortunately both Eric Chesterfield and Captain William Johnson were killed in action upon their next skirmish in no man’s land. Neither of their bodies were recovered and given a proper Army burial, but hey, that’s life.
I had found a contemporary with whom I shared a bond which most of humanity would not understand. We were the same but different, and as the Great War ended Eric and I travelled across the Atlantic to America. In order to understand our gifts we would need to employ only the brightest teams of scientists to help us figure out what exactly are gifts were and how they worked. This would need money, and in 1919 prohibition in the United States enabled us to earn more money than we would ever need...it was also in the year 1919 that I found out to what extent Eric’s gifts had hold over him as well as he over them.
I place my pen down besides chapter two. Earlier on, after throwing the opening chapter in the waste paper basket in my office, I fished it out and finished the blasted thing. It has been too long coming, this memoir of mine, and I hope somewhere within the pages I have yet to write I find a truth and a purpose to my existence. Each time I put pen to paper I find myself transported back to a much simpler time, when the grey areas in society were few. Man new right from wrong, man policed his own life, and if man was wronged then he would seek to put that wrong doing right. Now, I am not knocking the governments and policing bodies of today, indeed in the past I have tried both as a means to earn a living and more importantly, try to get an insight into humanity as it changes.
Things change, friends, family, and loved ones die, and I move on. It seems it is just Eric and I who are destined to walk hand in hand upon this earth for all of eternity. I have found no one else with the ability to live beyond their years and this worries me somewhat. It means, for one, that Darwin was inaccurate in his theory of evolution. Maybe I still have the long search ahead, or maybe I am not looking hard enough. I know there are people out there who can do some amazing things, and I wish they would help me help us all to understand our purpose on this earth. Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection states the purpose in life is to reproduce, to pass on life so that future generations can do the same, and slowly throughout time all species will either adapt to their ever changing world or die out. If this is true then why have I watched my sons and daughters live and die so many times over?
I have sired over fifty children in my eight centuries on this planet and followed their children and their children’s children etcetera, down the ages, and only Eric has avoided the grave like his great-great-great grandfather. I will never reveal this to him; I do not think this would do the boy any good to know he is a part of my lineage. There is a question he has asked me often through the years, and that is why was I at the funeral of his grandson. The answer now is obvious, because I have been present at the funerals of all of my ascendants, waiting and needing a sign that I am not alone in this world.
With all of my ascendants but Eric and Billy long dead and buried I am beginning to feel like maybe time is running out for me. There are people in this world who know about me, although only one or two a century has always been my rule. When too many discover the impossible they begin to wonder if there is any personal gain in this knowledge. I have, in the past, trusted too many a man at once with my secret so that they could help me discover more like me quickly, for their lives are short. This has always ended badly and resulted in me having to disappear, assume a new identity, and often slay the betrayers. This is...
“Damn that phone! And at this hour,” I find myself crying out as the phone on the desk in my study rings. My wife, Billy’s mother, is at her Friday night Bingo with the girls so I should really answer it and take a message, this modern device rarely sounds for me.
Chapter Two
Battle scars
I have loved many women in my time, taken many wives, and given life to may sons and daughters. I do not feel my prolonged life has been a curse, indeed for almost two hundred years I have been on a quest to try and understand why it is my cells regenerate at such an alarming rate, and why only the very few have been granted such gifts.
I remember the first time I was shot, within minutes I was up and about as though nothing had ever happened. If it had been anyone else witnessing my radical recovery I believe things may not have turned out quite the same for me, but as it was, it was Corporal Chesterfield who watched in amazement as my organs repaired themselves and then my chest cavity closed.
The year was 1916 and I had joined the 1st battalion of the York & Lancaster regiment two months into their campaign on the Somme. Having seen so much blood shed already in my life when the Great War, the war to end all wars, broke I was content on staying out of this one. At the time I was passing myself off as a forty year old Professor of English at Cambridge University and was exempt from fighting in the war. It was only when I started to see more and more young men leaving the town to go and fight that I too signed up. I couldn’t sit back and watch the mortal give their lives while I knew I could perhaps make a difference.
After passing basic fitness training we were shipped off to the Somme where I was awarded the rank of Captain. It was only a few days later while enjoying a quite cigarette on night watch when I was introduced to Corporal Chesterfield.
‘Captain Johnson sir,’ a voice in the dark. I turned and saw no one but then into the moonlight moved Eric. ‘I have been posted onto night watch with you sir.’
I smiled. It had been over a century and a half since I had saved him from his villagers questioning his mortality and I must say the man had paled somewhat in that time. It is only later that we realised why, and found his immortality came with friends.
At first I believe I may not have recognised me, and if he did he certainly did not show it. The first night on watch together was uneventful and we scarcely spoke. In the trenches there is much silence and contemplation, we are alone in this world and we hope to get back home to see our families.
‘Who are you back home sir?’ Eric asked me on the second night of our posting together. The sky was clear and the moon shone down upon no mans land like a search spotlight, looking to depict the enemy to both sides.
‘I am a professor at Cambridge University, and you?’
My words hung on the cool night air for a very long time, so long in fact that I had almost forgotten shooting his question back at him. Eventually he answered, his voice hoarse like the cries of the wounded we could hear further down the line, that day’s casualties from no mans land.
‘I am a student back home, studying to join the priesthood.’
‘A very noble profession my good man, but why then, might I ask, do you find yourself on the Western Front? Surely you might find yourself exempt from enlisting if you path was for something greater?’
Eric then took his time to turn and face me before saying, quite clearly, ‘the very same reason you find yourself watching over the tides of death night after night.’
I nodded at this. I had been wrong, the man had recognised me from his grandson’s funeral and I would not shame myself to try and deny that Dr Steel had not been yet another alias. Instead I stood up from my perch and held out my hand. Eric grasped it with a firm grip and stood to meet my eyes.
‘Why did you intervene that day three life times ago? How did you know?’
I shrugged my shoulders and told him, ‘I have spent almost my entire life searching for men like myself, the divine who possess a further step in the evolutionary chain.’
Eric held out his hand to stop me, ‘let me stop you right there because if not we will be a loggerheads with one another all night. I am a follower of the Lord, I respect your opinion but let us not discuss the point of origin of our gifts because you will think me naive just as I will see you as a blasphemer.’
Although I wanted him to listen, although I felt I needed to sit him down and talk to him about natural selection, explain how the myth of a God was in fact instilled upon civilisations long before either of us as a form of control, and that the first worshiping civilisations in fact worshiped the earth, making them naturists and, in a sense, none believers also, I felt to follow this course might alienate my new found comrade.
Instead I simply nodded and said, ‘understood,’ and then we spoke at length of our experiences. Although I imagined us the same many years ago when I came by the quiet Mr Chesterfield living in the rural Lancashire dales, throughout our discussions I found subtle differences in our evolutions which made me question my theories of how the divine came to live amongst man. Back then I had yet to discover the likes of cell rapid regeneration, and DNA mapping was light years away, but I imagined us the next step. For the fittest to survive they had to adapt themselves to the ever changing world, and the most perfect form of survival would be to regenerate tissue mass quicker than it might diminish. In Eric I became aware of more startling feats of divinity, but first it seemed I would show my hand.
The day I was shot was the day almost our whole platoon was wiped out. We were ordered over the top and into no man’s land to make a push for the German lines. Upon our briefing we were led to believe the enemy had all but vacated the trenches we were soon hoping to call our own. Throughout the morning heavy artillery bombarded our destination with the most awesome fire power no mortal man could ever hope to survive, and with Corporal Chesterfield by my side we led the attack. No sooner had we made it out of our trenches we were annihilated with heavy machine gun fire, mortars, and the crack aim of the German sharp shooters. Further forward we pushed, zigzagging across the barren landscape, through swampy foxholes and the cried of our dying comrades. And then I felt the wind being taken out of me not twenty yards from the enemy line but still further I pushed forward, deafened by the constant stream of fire, blinded by the mud being kicked up from the ground, unaware all this time that I was in fact the last man still upright and still pushing forward. Another shot, this time catching me in the arm and I was spun around with the sheer force. As I fell to my knees, back now to the enemy, I surveyed the ground I had crossed, now littered with the debris of the men who had followed me to their deaths. I was completely alone, and then, seemingly to appear from out of thin air Eric picked me up and lunged us both into a watery foxhole.
‘My God you’re hit,’ he cried out, his arm around my neck to keep my head from falling under the murky swamp, maroon with the blood of men lost underneath our feet.
I laughed at this comment for some reason. Maybe it was the shock and adrenaline battling through my system, I don’t know, but when I peered down at my torso I watched with Eric as my fatal wounds healed. A few moments later I was as fit and as healthy as the day William Wallace was hung drawn and quartered for the baying crowd at Smithfield in London. I stood in the crowds that day and watched as my doppelganger was hung drawn and quartered, but that is another story.
‘Are you read for that final push sir?’ Eric shouted into my ringing ears as I knelt forward, heaving almost at the stench of the rotting bodies which shared our hole.
Later Eric told me I had grinned wildly at this suggestion and charged with a feral like fury spurring me on. As we reached the enemy’s line Eric appeared to jump the barbed webbing which was there to keep us out, landing upon two German soldiers and as he gutted one with his bayonet he sunk his teeth into the neck of the second, ripping out his jugular and then gutting this man also.
It was a massacre. Two invincible English knights against a frightened army of the Hun. We were both awarded medals for our courageous valour, but unfortunately both Eric Chesterfield and Captain William Johnson were killed in action upon their next skirmish in no man’s land. Neither of their bodies were recovered and given a proper Army burial, but hey, that’s life.
I had found a contemporary with whom I shared a bond which most of humanity would not understand. We were the same but different, and as the Great War ended Eric and I travelled across the Atlantic to America. In order to understand our gifts we would need to employ only the brightest teams of scientists to help us figure out what exactly are gifts were and how they worked. This would need money, and in 1919 prohibition in the United States enabled us to earn more money than we would ever need...it was also in the year 1919 that I found out to what extent Eric’s gifts had hold over him as well as he over them.
I place my pen down besides chapter two. Earlier on, after throwing the opening chapter in the waste paper basket in my office, I fished it out and finished the blasted thing. It has been too long coming, this memoir of mine, and I hope somewhere within the pages I have yet to write I find a truth and a purpose to my existence. Each time I put pen to paper I find myself transported back to a much simpler time, when the grey areas in society were few. Man new right from wrong, man policed his own life, and if man was wronged then he would seek to put that wrong doing right. Now, I am not knocking the governments and policing bodies of today, indeed in the past I have tried both as a means to earn a living and more importantly, try to get an insight into humanity as it changes.
Things change, friends, family, and loved ones die, and I move on. It seems it is just Eric and I who are destined to walk hand in hand upon this earth for all of eternity. I have found no one else with the ability to live beyond their years and this worries me somewhat. It means, for one, that Darwin was inaccurate in his theory of evolution. Maybe I still have the long search ahead, or maybe I am not looking hard enough. I know there are people out there who can do some amazing things, and I wish they would help me help us all to understand our purpose on this earth. Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection states the purpose in life is to reproduce, to pass on life so that future generations can do the same, and slowly throughout time all species will either adapt to their ever changing world or die out. If this is true then why have I watched my sons and daughters live and die so many times over?
I have sired over fifty children in my eight centuries on this planet and followed their children and their children’s children etcetera, down the ages, and only Eric has avoided the grave like his great-great-great grandfather. I will never reveal this to him; I do not think this would do the boy any good to know he is a part of my lineage. There is a question he has asked me often through the years, and that is why was I at the funeral of his grandson. The answer now is obvious, because I have been present at the funerals of all of my ascendants, waiting and needing a sign that I am not alone in this world.
With all of my ascendants but Eric and Billy long dead and buried I am beginning to feel like maybe time is running out for me. There are people in this world who know about me, although only one or two a century has always been my rule. When too many discover the impossible they begin to wonder if there is any personal gain in this knowledge. I have, in the past, trusted too many a man at once with my secret so that they could help me discover more like me quickly, for their lives are short. This has always ended badly and resulted in me having to disappear, assume a new identity, and often slay the betrayers. This is...
“Damn that phone! And at this hour,” I find myself crying out as the phone on the desk in my study rings. My wife, Billy’s mother, is at her Friday night Bingo with the girls so I should really answer it and take a message, this modern device rarely sounds for me.
Chapter Four
THE HUNGER
It is dark again, but then that is not really any change for me. I am a man who lives his life within the cloak of darkness. The wind and rain sweeps mercilessly through the isolated graveyard and somewhere in the distance the flicker of a lightning bolt illuminates the evil sky. It is, after all, an evil night.
As I kneel before the crumbling grave of my grandson I can’t help but weep. So many of my loved ones had lived full and happy lives and then, as nature had intended, passed away to make room for their offspring to do the same.
I am one of the exceptions to the rule.
Somewhere along the line I slipped off Mother Nature’s table and disappeared into the abandoned shadows of existence. Hopefully, after tonight though, I will be allowed to rot in peace as my grandson’s corpse had over a century ago.
I can feel it inside me now, the hunger mounting like sulphuric acid on the tongue, and unless the doctor arrives soon I will once again be a slave to that hunger and look to seek my fill.
Kissing the granite which now represents my grandson, I stand up, pulling up the hood on my trench coat and disappearing into the night.
‘Eric, you have enormous power, and if you will just work with me I believe we can cure the terrible afflictions which you suffer as part as your gift.’
The Doctor’s words echo through the night to me. The words always filled with such urgency.
What on earth is there to be urgent about Doctor? Neither of us is going anywhere any time soon. Where you get to live your lives and bask in the glory of civilisation, I spend my eternity trapped to the darkness, labelled a monster by society and shunned out into the cold. Yes I have killed in cold blood but so have you Doctor. We are the same person only we live on opposite sides of the fence.
Walking on through the graveyard I can see houses past the stone perimeter wall. Everybody is indoors and out of the wind and the rain with their loved ones, watching television, surfing the web, eating dinner, settling in for the night, cosy in front of the fire. I can remember when there were real fires, not the new gas and electric gadgets civilisation warm themselves in front of nowadays, but wide open fire places. Those fires would fill al of the room in the house with smoke and cause you to cough the next morning but they didn’t half keep the chill from you bones.
It’s sad reminiscing over the life I once lived but at the same time that sadness fills me with joy, or at least maybe a satisfaction of knowing that I still have my emotions and that the hunger has not raped me of them yet.
Not yet.
The church clock chimes eleven times and I make my way silently from the yard, keeping to the undergrowth for my own protection as much as anyone who might have decided to take a stroll in the bitter winds and fierce north-western rain. As the wind downsizes towards a breeze I catch the scent of an animal, possibly canine, and the distinct foulness of rotting meat on the animal’s breath almost turns my stomach. I read somewhere once that in Korea they eat dog meat as a dish, out of choice. Even just the thought of it revolts me; I mean their blood is dreadful enough, even when the hunger is in full swing, but to digest the meat...
Using the shadowed silhouette of a cluster of conifer trees I float upwards, my hunger now subdued from the concentration it takes for me to levitate myself. The initial floating had come to me quite quickly after the change; it was learning to control direction and speed that has taken time.
As I soar high enough into the sky so I don’t catch the eye of the local man walking his dog, I sigh heavily into the storm and will myself over to the church roof. Sitting down next to the frozen gargoyles that surrounded me I pat the closest spiritual scarecrow on the head and smile at the irony. These demons were posted on top of churches and cathedrals throughout the world to keep the mythical likes of me away:
Evil spirits do not come near,
We are Gargoyles, you can see us clear,
Surrounding our homestead to provoke much fear,
Move on sons of Satan, you’re not welcome here.
The thing is though, history and the myth makers have got it all wrong. I am no son of Satan and I feel no more in tune to evil spirits than before my change. I am a God fearing, God loving animal of the night. It is God who has no love for me anymore, not the other way around.
At my grandson’s funeral in the nineteenth century I had been outcast from society. How was it that a man did not age and yet all around him everyone else did? Benjamin had died an extremely old man of sixty-five and yet there stood his own grandfather appearing no older than twenty-five. There was an up roar. Over the years prior to my grandson’s death he would come and visit me, and I him. We were very close and I was close also to his family, I adored his wife and children. Of course Benjamin knew about my refusal to age, and always he played along, introducing me as a distant nephew to his family. The problem came in the shape of an elderly minister who had put two and two together and come up with six six six.
‘You sir are the nephew of the late Benjamin Chesterfield?’ the minister asked me after Ben’s funeral.
‘Yes father I am,’ I had told him.
There had then been hushed words between the minister and a few of the local men and women, the occasional glance in my direction and finger pointed my way, and then the minister approached me again.
‘What do you have to say to the allegations that you sir are in fact the grandfather of the deceased?’
What could I have possibly told the man? ‘Yes father it is true, this is in fact my one hundred and third year on this earth?’ I would have been hanged to no avail right there and then.
‘Who father, would suggest such a preposterous remark?’ I asked, and then came forward an elderly gentleman I remember as a neighbour of my son’s household some thirty years previous.
‘You sir are Eric Chesterfield,’ the gentleman said, ‘and I have watched all my life as your family grew older and yet you stayed youthful... The devil,’ he spat.
After that last remark there was a riot. The whole town turned on me, including Benjamin’s family, a family I had loved and who had loved me. I was branded an imposter, the walking dead, the devil himself, and I’m sure if a kind stranger had not stepped in right there and then I would have been buried alive.
That kind stranger, a new face to the town Dr. William Steel, stepped in and held the lynch mob while I made my way out of my local church, the very same church in which I am sat upon now, for the very last time. I didn’t see Dr. Steel for one hundred and fifty-two years. It was 1916 and already I had spent two months in a trench watching my friends and country men die all around me. It was early September when Dr. Steel, or rather Captain William Johnson joined us at the Somme and up until then I was unaware of there being anyone else like me.
Looking up at the night sky the clouds part momentarily and I am basked in moonlight. The hunger, the beast, the sickness my condition endures stirs restlessly, letting out a roar from within.
It is almost time.
Soon I will lose control of my senses, soon the veil of blood will fall down upon me and I will be powerless, soon the beast, the infection will have taken over my senses. It needs its feed and is relentless in its quest. For two hundred and twenty so years the beast and the hunger have gripped me like a vice every night, lusting for blood and needing the blood of the living to take the pangs away, at least for a while. Then the beast will sleep and so to can I.
I can now feel the thirst and looking up at the church clock tower I whisper, “Where is he,” to the gargoyles, “it is quarter to twelve, where the fuck is he!”
The mist is beginning to move in over my eyes. How long before I am at the hunger’s mercy? Already I am beginning to fantasise about the taste of the red, how my lips would quiver slightly as I lean my head down towards my victim’s neck. That soft flesh beneath which lay my desired...
“STOP IT,” I scream out into the night, shaking my head violently from side to side.
I need to concentrate on something, anything, as long as it keeps me from turning. That is the hunger’s great ally, the power of suggestion. It will leak those soft images into my head so that I can almost smell the fear of my victim as I imagine draining them of their life.
I set off upwards, higher and higher up into the night sky, trying almost to outrun the plague that is burrowed deep into my psyche. My skin begins to tighten, another sign that I am now delaying the inevitable. Higher and higher, searching the ever receding graveyard for the Doctor but he is not there. Thunder cracks and with it a bolt of lightening, scorching the earth momentarily and lifting close by silhouettes from the surrounding streets and into the night sky.
A scuffle.
Four figures, one of them fighting off the rest.
It appears the good Doctor may need my help as much as I do his.
It is dark again, but then that is not really any change for me. I am a man who lives his life within the cloak of darkness. The wind and rain sweeps mercilessly through the isolated graveyard and somewhere in the distance the flicker of a lightning bolt illuminates the evil sky. It is, after all, an evil night.
As I kneel before the crumbling grave of my grandson I can’t help but weep. So many of my loved ones had lived full and happy lives and then, as nature had intended, passed away to make room for their offspring to do the same.
I am one of the exceptions to the rule.
Somewhere along the line I slipped off Mother Nature’s table and disappeared into the abandoned shadows of existence. Hopefully, after tonight though, I will be allowed to rot in peace as my grandson’s corpse had over a century ago.
I can feel it inside me now, the hunger mounting like sulphuric acid on the tongue, and unless the doctor arrives soon I will once again be a slave to that hunger and look to seek my fill.
Kissing the granite which now represents my grandson, I stand up, pulling up the hood on my trench coat and disappearing into the night.
‘Eric, you have enormous power, and if you will just work with me I believe we can cure the terrible afflictions which you suffer as part as your gift.’
The Doctor’s words echo through the night to me. The words always filled with such urgency.
What on earth is there to be urgent about Doctor? Neither of us is going anywhere any time soon. Where you get to live your lives and bask in the glory of civilisation, I spend my eternity trapped to the darkness, labelled a monster by society and shunned out into the cold. Yes I have killed in cold blood but so have you Doctor. We are the same person only we live on opposite sides of the fence.
Walking on through the graveyard I can see houses past the stone perimeter wall. Everybody is indoors and out of the wind and the rain with their loved ones, watching television, surfing the web, eating dinner, settling in for the night, cosy in front of the fire. I can remember when there were real fires, not the new gas and electric gadgets civilisation warm themselves in front of nowadays, but wide open fire places. Those fires would fill al of the room in the house with smoke and cause you to cough the next morning but they didn’t half keep the chill from you bones.
It’s sad reminiscing over the life I once lived but at the same time that sadness fills me with joy, or at least maybe a satisfaction of knowing that I still have my emotions and that the hunger has not raped me of them yet.
Not yet.
The church clock chimes eleven times and I make my way silently from the yard, keeping to the undergrowth for my own protection as much as anyone who might have decided to take a stroll in the bitter winds and fierce north-western rain. As the wind downsizes towards a breeze I catch the scent of an animal, possibly canine, and the distinct foulness of rotting meat on the animal’s breath almost turns my stomach. I read somewhere once that in Korea they eat dog meat as a dish, out of choice. Even just the thought of it revolts me; I mean their blood is dreadful enough, even when the hunger is in full swing, but to digest the meat...
Using the shadowed silhouette of a cluster of conifer trees I float upwards, my hunger now subdued from the concentration it takes for me to levitate myself. The initial floating had come to me quite quickly after the change; it was learning to control direction and speed that has taken time.
As I soar high enough into the sky so I don’t catch the eye of the local man walking his dog, I sigh heavily into the storm and will myself over to the church roof. Sitting down next to the frozen gargoyles that surrounded me I pat the closest spiritual scarecrow on the head and smile at the irony. These demons were posted on top of churches and cathedrals throughout the world to keep the mythical likes of me away:
Evil spirits do not come near,
We are Gargoyles, you can see us clear,
Surrounding our homestead to provoke much fear,
Move on sons of Satan, you’re not welcome here.
The thing is though, history and the myth makers have got it all wrong. I am no son of Satan and I feel no more in tune to evil spirits than before my change. I am a God fearing, God loving animal of the night. It is God who has no love for me anymore, not the other way around.
At my grandson’s funeral in the nineteenth century I had been outcast from society. How was it that a man did not age and yet all around him everyone else did? Benjamin had died an extremely old man of sixty-five and yet there stood his own grandfather appearing no older than twenty-five. There was an up roar. Over the years prior to my grandson’s death he would come and visit me, and I him. We were very close and I was close also to his family, I adored his wife and children. Of course Benjamin knew about my refusal to age, and always he played along, introducing me as a distant nephew to his family. The problem came in the shape of an elderly minister who had put two and two together and come up with six six six.
‘You sir are the nephew of the late Benjamin Chesterfield?’ the minister asked me after Ben’s funeral.
‘Yes father I am,’ I had told him.
There had then been hushed words between the minister and a few of the local men and women, the occasional glance in my direction and finger pointed my way, and then the minister approached me again.
‘What do you have to say to the allegations that you sir are in fact the grandfather of the deceased?’
What could I have possibly told the man? ‘Yes father it is true, this is in fact my one hundred and third year on this earth?’ I would have been hanged to no avail right there and then.
‘Who father, would suggest such a preposterous remark?’ I asked, and then came forward an elderly gentleman I remember as a neighbour of my son’s household some thirty years previous.
‘You sir are Eric Chesterfield,’ the gentleman said, ‘and I have watched all my life as your family grew older and yet you stayed youthful... The devil,’ he spat.
After that last remark there was a riot. The whole town turned on me, including Benjamin’s family, a family I had loved and who had loved me. I was branded an imposter, the walking dead, the devil himself, and I’m sure if a kind stranger had not stepped in right there and then I would have been buried alive.
That kind stranger, a new face to the town Dr. William Steel, stepped in and held the lynch mob while I made my way out of my local church, the very same church in which I am sat upon now, for the very last time. I didn’t see Dr. Steel for one hundred and fifty-two years. It was 1916 and already I had spent two months in a trench watching my friends and country men die all around me. It was early September when Dr. Steel, or rather Captain William Johnson joined us at the Somme and up until then I was unaware of there being anyone else like me.
Looking up at the night sky the clouds part momentarily and I am basked in moonlight. The hunger, the beast, the sickness my condition endures stirs restlessly, letting out a roar from within.
It is almost time.
Soon I will lose control of my senses, soon the veil of blood will fall down upon me and I will be powerless, soon the beast, the infection will have taken over my senses. It needs its feed and is relentless in its quest. For two hundred and twenty so years the beast and the hunger have gripped me like a vice every night, lusting for blood and needing the blood of the living to take the pangs away, at least for a while. Then the beast will sleep and so to can I.
I can now feel the thirst and looking up at the church clock tower I whisper, “Where is he,” to the gargoyles, “it is quarter to twelve, where the fuck is he!”
The mist is beginning to move in over my eyes. How long before I am at the hunger’s mercy? Already I am beginning to fantasise about the taste of the red, how my lips would quiver slightly as I lean my head down towards my victim’s neck. That soft flesh beneath which lay my desired...
“STOP IT,” I scream out into the night, shaking my head violently from side to side.
I need to concentrate on something, anything, as long as it keeps me from turning. That is the hunger’s great ally, the power of suggestion. It will leak those soft images into my head so that I can almost smell the fear of my victim as I imagine draining them of their life.
I set off upwards, higher and higher up into the night sky, trying almost to outrun the plague that is burrowed deep into my psyche. My skin begins to tighten, another sign that I am now delaying the inevitable. Higher and higher, searching the ever receding graveyard for the Doctor but he is not there. Thunder cracks and with it a bolt of lightening, scorching the earth momentarily and lifting close by silhouettes from the surrounding streets and into the night sky.
A scuffle.
Four figures, one of them fighting off the rest.
It appears the good Doctor may need my help as much as I do his.
Chapter Three
DOWN THE PUB
It is raining outside now and in some strange way this seems to add weight to my hangover. I’ve got to wonder if I have that Seasonal Affective Disorder because as soon as the sun comes out my mood tends to brighten up. Living in the north west of England though, this happens very rarely and I spend most of the year depressed for no reason. That, I suppose, is why I find myself in the pub more often than not. More than living a typical university student’s life, I find I am depressed and then head of to the pub on a daily basis. Hell, I even have my own table at The Moon Under The Water on Deansgate. Upstairs, pass the bar and head into the corner and you will see me there most of the time when I am not in lectures. Sad isn’t it? But hey, that’s the name of my mood disorder. I’ve tried the happy pills but the only thing that brings me out of my depressive daze is the sun. I’d make a rubbish vampire.
I’m here now, sitting at my booth reading through the comments dad wrote on my essay when Paul walks upstairs and makes his way over.
“Alright pal?” he asks and sits down across from me, sliding over a pint and then hissing.
“What?”
He nods in front of me at the glass, “don’t you think it’s a bit early for the whiskey?”
I shake my head in response, “ I blame the weather.”
“Oh yeah, right,” he laughs, “the weather, the perfect excuse to drink hard spirits on your own in a badly lit booth in a pub in the middle of the day.”
He’s just trying to get a reaction out of me but I’m not biting, not today, I’m too depressed. Did you know that this year there were just eighteen days of sunshine? Eighteen! What kind of a joke is that!
“I’ve just come from speaking to your dad,” Paul tells me and this time I do bite.
“My dad or Professor Johnson?” I ask, because there’s a difference. My dad taught me how to swim and ride my bike; Professor Johnson simply teaches me that my essays aren’t worth the paper they’re printed out upon.
“Urh...well both, kind of. Professor Johnson seemed a bit distant when I asked him a question about Charles Darwin but then your dad kind of took over, swinging our conversation around to you.”
“Me? Why, what was he saying?”
Paul shrugs, “I don’t know, he asked me if I’d read your essay and I told him I had and I thought it was good, and then somehow we got onto your sleeping pattern.”
“My sleeping? You didn’t tell him about my nightly falling sessions did you?”
I grimace on Paul’s part followed by a slight nod and then, “yeah I mentioned them, and he appeared concerned.”
“Of course he did. He’s wants to know if I’m pissing all of Granddad Johnson’s hard earned money I inherited last year up the wall.”
“Your Granddad died last year? Shit, I’m sorry, I didn’t know, you didn’t mention it at the time.”
I smile, “I never met the guy, dad told me he died when he was young and left a load of money, some of which I inherited upon my twentieth birthday, in his will.”
Paul shakes his head, “but how does your sleeping patterns tell him you’re on the piss all of the time?”
“It doesn’t, but he’ll assume my interrupted sleep patterns are because of drinking. What exactly did you tell him?”
A shrug, a sip of his pint, and then, “just that there was a point when you were jumping, or falling, a lot in your sleep and that it has calmed down a lot recently. Anyway, have you got that sorted yet? You said you were going to go and see someone.”
I nod a yes to this but the truth is I haven’t seen anyone. I don’t know what causes my slip from almost sleeping back into real life and usually a heap on the floor. There was a point during what pitiful summer we had that it was happening every night, ten times a night. I hardly slept a wink for weeks but it didn’t matter because there was sunshine and those warm rays seemed to energize me.
“He also asked if you’d give him a ring this weekend.”
I frown at this and Paul lifts his hands to his face in defence, muttering something about a gun and a messenger. Why the hell would he want me to ring him? We don’t do phone conversations. Usually it’s a voicemail asking me to give my mum a ring, that she hasn’t spoken to me for a while and she’d like to hear my voice. What on earth would I have to talk about to dad? Genetics? Biology? Charles bloody Darwin?
“Anything else?” I ask a little too harshly. That’s another thing about me when it rains, I can be a right twat with people.
“Well,” Paul says, reaching into his satchel, “I was going to put something across to you which I think you’d like, but if you’re in your twatty mood then I’ll ask someone else if they’d like to go accompany me and my family to our Christmas retreat in Cape Town.”
I grin. Despite the rain Paul has managed to drag me out of my SAD depression and my hangover in one swoop. Christmas in Cape Town, South Africa, sun, ohh glorious sun!
“When?” I ask eagerly.
“Next Saturday. Straight after we break up for the Christmas holidays. One of Lisa’s mates couldn’t make it so there is a free first class ticket going if you fancy it?”
I laugh out loud, “of course...Christmas in the sun, first class all the way, and the prospect of seeing your sister in a bikini on the beach, what more could any red blooded male ask for?”
“Fuck of Billy, she’s too young and innocent and you’re trying to use the fact that you know he has a soft spot for you to piss me off.”
I laugh again, “no mate, Lisa is madly in love with me and she’s not too young at all. She’s nineteen, and contrary to what you might think with those brotherly blinkers on she is not a virgin.”
“Don’t,” he tells me with a smirk as I embark upon our age old argument.
“How old were you when you lot your virginity?”
“Fifteen,” he sighs, bored already because we have echoed this conversation a million times before.
“And how old was the girl you scarred for life with your tiny pickle?”
“The same,” he adds.
“And she probably wasn’t half as fit as your...”
“Okay, I’ve heard it all before,” he interrupts, putting up his hands to stop me. “Yes or no right now, are you coming?”
I nod.
“That’s fantastic because now you can be my winger.”
I raise my eyebrow, “winger?”
Paul nods. “Lisa’s mate is an absolute stunner and I reckon I can get in there.”
“That is fantastic Paul,” I tell him, “because then we can double date. You and this bird and me and...”
“You’re not shagging my sister Billy. No way, no how, she’s my baby sister, you’re my best mate, and I don’t want to have to choose sides when you eventually get bored and dump another one.”
“Ok, ok, I’ll leave her alone; I won’t speak to her, or look at her, ok?”
Paul nods, “Good. You can have anyone else, the bikini clad world is your oyster, but if I find out you’ve shagged Lisa while we’re away I’ll burn your passport and return ticket on a barbecue and you’ll have to figure out another way of flying home.”
Charming, I think, and then I shake on it. Lisa will be disappointed though, especially since we have spent the past two months seeing each other in secret. Paul will come around eventually, I mean, it’s not as if he’d really try to kill me if he caught me in bed with his little sister.
It is raining outside now and in some strange way this seems to add weight to my hangover. I’ve got to wonder if I have that Seasonal Affective Disorder because as soon as the sun comes out my mood tends to brighten up. Living in the north west of England though, this happens very rarely and I spend most of the year depressed for no reason. That, I suppose, is why I find myself in the pub more often than not. More than living a typical university student’s life, I find I am depressed and then head of to the pub on a daily basis. Hell, I even have my own table at The Moon Under The Water on Deansgate. Upstairs, pass the bar and head into the corner and you will see me there most of the time when I am not in lectures. Sad isn’t it? But hey, that’s the name of my mood disorder. I’ve tried the happy pills but the only thing that brings me out of my depressive daze is the sun. I’d make a rubbish vampire.
I’m here now, sitting at my booth reading through the comments dad wrote on my essay when Paul walks upstairs and makes his way over.
“Alright pal?” he asks and sits down across from me, sliding over a pint and then hissing.
“What?”
He nods in front of me at the glass, “don’t you think it’s a bit early for the whiskey?”
I shake my head in response, “ I blame the weather.”
“Oh yeah, right,” he laughs, “the weather, the perfect excuse to drink hard spirits on your own in a badly lit booth in a pub in the middle of the day.”
He’s just trying to get a reaction out of me but I’m not biting, not today, I’m too depressed. Did you know that this year there were just eighteen days of sunshine? Eighteen! What kind of a joke is that!
“I’ve just come from speaking to your dad,” Paul tells me and this time I do bite.
“My dad or Professor Johnson?” I ask, because there’s a difference. My dad taught me how to swim and ride my bike; Professor Johnson simply teaches me that my essays aren’t worth the paper they’re printed out upon.
“Urh...well both, kind of. Professor Johnson seemed a bit distant when I asked him a question about Charles Darwin but then your dad kind of took over, swinging our conversation around to you.”
“Me? Why, what was he saying?”
Paul shrugs, “I don’t know, he asked me if I’d read your essay and I told him I had and I thought it was good, and then somehow we got onto your sleeping pattern.”
“My sleeping? You didn’t tell him about my nightly falling sessions did you?”
I grimace on Paul’s part followed by a slight nod and then, “yeah I mentioned them, and he appeared concerned.”
“Of course he did. He’s wants to know if I’m pissing all of Granddad Johnson’s hard earned money I inherited last year up the wall.”
“Your Granddad died last year? Shit, I’m sorry, I didn’t know, you didn’t mention it at the time.”
I smile, “I never met the guy, dad told me he died when he was young and left a load of money, some of which I inherited upon my twentieth birthday, in his will.”
Paul shakes his head, “but how does your sleeping patterns tell him you’re on the piss all of the time?”
“It doesn’t, but he’ll assume my interrupted sleep patterns are because of drinking. What exactly did you tell him?”
A shrug, a sip of his pint, and then, “just that there was a point when you were jumping, or falling, a lot in your sleep and that it has calmed down a lot recently. Anyway, have you got that sorted yet? You said you were going to go and see someone.”
I nod a yes to this but the truth is I haven’t seen anyone. I don’t know what causes my slip from almost sleeping back into real life and usually a heap on the floor. There was a point during what pitiful summer we had that it was happening every night, ten times a night. I hardly slept a wink for weeks but it didn’t matter because there was sunshine and those warm rays seemed to energize me.
“He also asked if you’d give him a ring this weekend.”
I frown at this and Paul lifts his hands to his face in defence, muttering something about a gun and a messenger. Why the hell would he want me to ring him? We don’t do phone conversations. Usually it’s a voicemail asking me to give my mum a ring, that she hasn’t spoken to me for a while and she’d like to hear my voice. What on earth would I have to talk about to dad? Genetics? Biology? Charles bloody Darwin?
“Anything else?” I ask a little too harshly. That’s another thing about me when it rains, I can be a right twat with people.
“Well,” Paul says, reaching into his satchel, “I was going to put something across to you which I think you’d like, but if you’re in your twatty mood then I’ll ask someone else if they’d like to go accompany me and my family to our Christmas retreat in Cape Town.”
I grin. Despite the rain Paul has managed to drag me out of my SAD depression and my hangover in one swoop. Christmas in Cape Town, South Africa, sun, ohh glorious sun!
“When?” I ask eagerly.
“Next Saturday. Straight after we break up for the Christmas holidays. One of Lisa’s mates couldn’t make it so there is a free first class ticket going if you fancy it?”
I laugh out loud, “of course...Christmas in the sun, first class all the way, and the prospect of seeing your sister in a bikini on the beach, what more could any red blooded male ask for?”
“Fuck of Billy, she’s too young and innocent and you’re trying to use the fact that you know he has a soft spot for you to piss me off.”
I laugh again, “no mate, Lisa is madly in love with me and she’s not too young at all. She’s nineteen, and contrary to what you might think with those brotherly blinkers on she is not a virgin.”
“Don’t,” he tells me with a smirk as I embark upon our age old argument.
“How old were you when you lot your virginity?”
“Fifteen,” he sighs, bored already because we have echoed this conversation a million times before.
“And how old was the girl you scarred for life with your tiny pickle?”
“The same,” he adds.
“And she probably wasn’t half as fit as your...”
“Okay, I’ve heard it all before,” he interrupts, putting up his hands to stop me. “Yes or no right now, are you coming?”
I nod.
“That’s fantastic because now you can be my winger.”
I raise my eyebrow, “winger?”
Paul nods. “Lisa’s mate is an absolute stunner and I reckon I can get in there.”
“That is fantastic Paul,” I tell him, “because then we can double date. You and this bird and me and...”
“You’re not shagging my sister Billy. No way, no how, she’s my baby sister, you’re my best mate, and I don’t want to have to choose sides when you eventually get bored and dump another one.”
“Ok, ok, I’ll leave her alone; I won’t speak to her, or look at her, ok?”
Paul nods, “Good. You can have anyone else, the bikini clad world is your oyster, but if I find out you’ve shagged Lisa while we’re away I’ll burn your passport and return ticket on a barbecue and you’ll have to figure out another way of flying home.”
Charming, I think, and then I shake on it. Lisa will be disappointed though, especially since we have spent the past two months seeing each other in secret. Paul will come around eventually, I mean, it’s not as if he’d really try to kill me if he caught me in bed with his little sister.
Chapter One
THE HANGOVER FROM HELL
I’m hung over. My eyes feel like they’re bleeding, I had that strange dream again last night when I eventually did drag myself to bed, my head is about to explode all over the lecture theatre, and now the Professor is talking to me! Of all the people he could have picked on he decided I was the best victim. Isn’t that just dumb luck?
“There is nothing any more special about you than there is the rest of this class William, so why is it you cannot do what everyone else does?”
That’s Professor Johnson and he doesn’t like me because I’m not enjoying his class. The reason for this is because I never really wanted to study genetics in the first place. I am doing it to try and please my father, who is Professor Johnson. Imagine telling your only child that he is not special. Tut tut tut daddy and you’re wrong.
“I’m not a sheep,” I tell him, and listen to a few muffled laughs echo around the auditorium.
He smiles and then turns his back on his students who are all waiting for his next move, all eager, pens poised and ready to strike down upon their notebooks to scribble whatever the master may drivel. It really is pathetic, I mean we all know that we descend from apes, that our DNA is ninety eight percent identical and at some point many moons ago we decided to swing down from the trees and walk, and then continue walking. That is fact, and I understand how people like to know where they’re from and how they think studying our ascent to the planet’s dominant species will ultimately hold the key to predicting where, as a species, we will go next, but come on! It’s sunny outside, I’m still half drunk from last night, and I want a top up beer with my mates down the pub.
Professor Dad turns with my essay paper in his hands and clears his throat, “Well Mr William Johnson...”
Ouch. He knows I hate being called William.
“...on this occasion you are in fact special. When asked to discuss where next you think evolution will take this planet of ours and its species you chose superheroes and superpowers...”
Another echoing of sniggers, this time at my expense.
“...and for this you have received and extra special super F. Perhaps for next term you might think about switching to a Creative Writing course because the scientific world isn’t yet ready for red capes and invisible men.”
Now they’re all laughing at me.
What do they know?
Dad...ur, I mean Professor Johnson, is smiling, revelling in his spotlight. He’s enjoying watching his only child squirm, where he should really be sticking up for his off spring. Isn’t that part of the way of the world, to give life and then defend that life from all predators? Look at him, down there in front of the class. He’s like the aging wilder-beast which pushes it’s calf towards the pouncing lion so that he can make a swift escape.
The bastard.
I’m telling mum.
But seriously though, perhaps I should explain the essay. Having studied the evolution of life on earth, from the first single celled organism and then moving forward a couple of hundred million years to when fish heaved themselves out of the water and took their first steps on land, and then onwards still to apes and then us, it appears we have evolved as much as any species might ever hope to. I mean, what else is there for us? Are we going to one day wake up with another head? And if so, what purpose would that have apart from to greatly annoy the original? My essay was a serious theory of where humans as a species might be heading (excuse the pun).
Who was it that said people typically only use about ten percent of their brains? Was it Albert Einstein? Possibly, and although I know what was meant by this is that at any one given time only ten percent of the brain’s neurons are firing, it still makes you think. In my essay I asked a big ‘what if’, and I’m classing that what if as the same ‘what if we get down from the trees and walk for a bit?’, the apes once chose but...what if telekinesis, teleportation, invisibility and flight is our next step? Would it be possible to unlock some of that other ninety percent of our brain power to achieve this? And have people been living amongst us for centuries having mastered these feats? Or is this theory so outlandish that I deserved my F and need to stop watching daytime cartoons and reading comics?
“Class dismissed,” Professor Johnson announces.
I stand up. No more lectures for the week, it’s Friday and now I can get back to doing what University students do best...
“William, could I have a quick word please?”
A couple of my fellow students turn and smile on their way out of the lecture theatre. I slowly sit back down and begin packing up my laptop case, head down flat on the table and now pounding even worse than before. Why oh why do we drink? Now that’s an essay question I know I could answer and receive an A for.
The theatre clears and dad makes his way up to where I’m sitting, smiling the sympathetic smile I remember as a boy. The Professor’s disappeared now; it’s just me and my dad.
“How are you Billy?” he asks.
I shrug, not really wanting to make eye contact because then his suspicions will be confirmed. Bloodshot eyes = drinking too much and squandering my only chance of a decent degree following in daddy’s footsteps.
“I’m fine,” I tell him, shrugging again, and he nods at me and passes across my essay paper.
“It’s an interesting theory Billy but it doesn’t quite cut it for this class. Just keep your head down son, get your degree, and then the world is for your taking. You don’t ever have to think about another form of natural selection or DNA strand again after next year if you don’t want, but please just study hard now and choose the right path.”
I nod and dad stands up, patting me on the back and then making his way back down to his desk at the front of the theatre. For a while I stay seated. For how long I’m not sure. It was those last four words which dad had said to me that kept me stuck to my seat.
Choose the right path.
Was this the right path for me?
A first in Genetics and then off to spend my days in some lab somewhere studying the mundane, the occasional field assignment to the greenhouse counting how many types of tomato plants evolved from their one common ancestor. Is that the path I am destined to walk down? Because I want more than that and I know somewhere inside there is more for me in this world than that, I just need to find it...but first a pint.
I’m hung over. My eyes feel like they’re bleeding, I had that strange dream again last night when I eventually did drag myself to bed, my head is about to explode all over the lecture theatre, and now the Professor is talking to me! Of all the people he could have picked on he decided I was the best victim. Isn’t that just dumb luck?
“There is nothing any more special about you than there is the rest of this class William, so why is it you cannot do what everyone else does?”
That’s Professor Johnson and he doesn’t like me because I’m not enjoying his class. The reason for this is because I never really wanted to study genetics in the first place. I am doing it to try and please my father, who is Professor Johnson. Imagine telling your only child that he is not special. Tut tut tut daddy and you’re wrong.
“I’m not a sheep,” I tell him, and listen to a few muffled laughs echo around the auditorium.
He smiles and then turns his back on his students who are all waiting for his next move, all eager, pens poised and ready to strike down upon their notebooks to scribble whatever the master may drivel. It really is pathetic, I mean we all know that we descend from apes, that our DNA is ninety eight percent identical and at some point many moons ago we decided to swing down from the trees and walk, and then continue walking. That is fact, and I understand how people like to know where they’re from and how they think studying our ascent to the planet’s dominant species will ultimately hold the key to predicting where, as a species, we will go next, but come on! It’s sunny outside, I’m still half drunk from last night, and I want a top up beer with my mates down the pub.
Professor Dad turns with my essay paper in his hands and clears his throat, “Well Mr William Johnson...”
Ouch. He knows I hate being called William.
“...on this occasion you are in fact special. When asked to discuss where next you think evolution will take this planet of ours and its species you chose superheroes and superpowers...”
Another echoing of sniggers, this time at my expense.
“...and for this you have received and extra special super F. Perhaps for next term you might think about switching to a Creative Writing course because the scientific world isn’t yet ready for red capes and invisible men.”
Now they’re all laughing at me.
What do they know?
Dad...ur, I mean Professor Johnson, is smiling, revelling in his spotlight. He’s enjoying watching his only child squirm, where he should really be sticking up for his off spring. Isn’t that part of the way of the world, to give life and then defend that life from all predators? Look at him, down there in front of the class. He’s like the aging wilder-beast which pushes it’s calf towards the pouncing lion so that he can make a swift escape.
The bastard.
I’m telling mum.
But seriously though, perhaps I should explain the essay. Having studied the evolution of life on earth, from the first single celled organism and then moving forward a couple of hundred million years to when fish heaved themselves out of the water and took their first steps on land, and then onwards still to apes and then us, it appears we have evolved as much as any species might ever hope to. I mean, what else is there for us? Are we going to one day wake up with another head? And if so, what purpose would that have apart from to greatly annoy the original? My essay was a serious theory of where humans as a species might be heading (excuse the pun).
Who was it that said people typically only use about ten percent of their brains? Was it Albert Einstein? Possibly, and although I know what was meant by this is that at any one given time only ten percent of the brain’s neurons are firing, it still makes you think. In my essay I asked a big ‘what if’, and I’m classing that what if as the same ‘what if we get down from the trees and walk for a bit?’, the apes once chose but...what if telekinesis, teleportation, invisibility and flight is our next step? Would it be possible to unlock some of that other ninety percent of our brain power to achieve this? And have people been living amongst us for centuries having mastered these feats? Or is this theory so outlandish that I deserved my F and need to stop watching daytime cartoons and reading comics?
“Class dismissed,” Professor Johnson announces.
I stand up. No more lectures for the week, it’s Friday and now I can get back to doing what University students do best...
“William, could I have a quick word please?”
A couple of my fellow students turn and smile on their way out of the lecture theatre. I slowly sit back down and begin packing up my laptop case, head down flat on the table and now pounding even worse than before. Why oh why do we drink? Now that’s an essay question I know I could answer and receive an A for.
The theatre clears and dad makes his way up to where I’m sitting, smiling the sympathetic smile I remember as a boy. The Professor’s disappeared now; it’s just me and my dad.
“How are you Billy?” he asks.
I shrug, not really wanting to make eye contact because then his suspicions will be confirmed. Bloodshot eyes = drinking too much and squandering my only chance of a decent degree following in daddy’s footsteps.
“I’m fine,” I tell him, shrugging again, and he nods at me and passes across my essay paper.
“It’s an interesting theory Billy but it doesn’t quite cut it for this class. Just keep your head down son, get your degree, and then the world is for your taking. You don’t ever have to think about another form of natural selection or DNA strand again after next year if you don’t want, but please just study hard now and choose the right path.”
I nod and dad stands up, patting me on the back and then making his way back down to his desk at the front of the theatre. For a while I stay seated. For how long I’m not sure. It was those last four words which dad had said to me that kept me stuck to my seat.
Choose the right path.
Was this the right path for me?
A first in Genetics and then off to spend my days in some lab somewhere studying the mundane, the occasional field assignment to the greenhouse counting how many types of tomato plants evolved from their one common ancestor. Is that the path I am destined to walk down? Because I want more than that and I know somewhere inside there is more for me in this world than that, I just need to find it...but first a pint.
Prologue - A New Dawn
BOOK ONE
BAPTISM OF LIFE
BAPTISM OF LIFE ~ A MEMOIR
PROLOGUE – A NEW DAWN
It is widely accepted these days that man evolved from apes, and that if we traced our ancestry back through the ages all of man and today’s apes would arrive at one being, the common ancestor. There was a massive evolutionary leap forward many millions of years ago, and born from our mother ape the whole of mankind set forth to conquer the earth.
Although hard to imagine the early days, slowly, through thousands and then millions of years, mankind’s path spewed off from that of the apes creating new species. Man evolved from Homo-habilis to Homo-erectus, and then finally to the Homo-sapien. At each point along this chain man slowly changed, his brain growing larger and with it he learned new tricks to hedge his chances of survival on the earth. From fashioning tools to help him hunt, the discovery of fire, creating shelter and then communities, agriculture, religion, war, construction, industry, technology, to sending man to the moon, man’s destiny as the planet’s dominate species has spiralled him to the top of the food chain where he has remained indefinitely. The survival of their species was down to their larger brain which, in turn, has guaranteed them their mantel. Man really does rule the earth.
Let us go back for a moment, back to that first leap when are ape like mother gave birth to us. While we moved on through the ages her and her species died out, but were not alone on this journey. Our cousins, whose ancestors and ours is the same, are today’s Orang-utans, Gorillas, and Chimpanzees. Over millions of years we all divided and went our separate ways and then our particular species split again, creating a sub-species. It is believed that around three hundred and fifty thousand years ago, five separate species of human lived on the earth at the same time and for about seventy thousand years. It is believed that these five ‘brothers’, Homo-erectus, Homo-ergaster, Homo-neanderthalensis, Homo-heidelbergensis, and Homo-rhodesienis lived in different parts of the world, although whether they fought or lived together in their own separate communities, it is unknown.
Now, a new dawn is upon us.
Although I can tell you for definite that evolution’s new dawn has been rising for over eight hundred years, I cannot even begin to estimate when my kind and mankind’s destiny split.
Am I an ambassador for the third new evolution of man?
Is the Homo-sapien’s time coming to a close?
These are questions I cannot answer, and I know by writing this memoir I will be putting not only myself, but my species under threat.
History shows me that Man exterminates that which it does not understand. Jealousy would arise and a new war would be fought, not between religion or politics, but this time us and the. And because I fear we still number so few, we will be slaughtered instead of embraced.
A new dawn is upon us, the divine are amongst you.
BAPTISM OF LIFE
BAPTISM OF LIFE ~ A MEMOIR
PROLOGUE – A NEW DAWN
It is widely accepted these days that man evolved from apes, and that if we traced our ancestry back through the ages all of man and today’s apes would arrive at one being, the common ancestor. There was a massive evolutionary leap forward many millions of years ago, and born from our mother ape the whole of mankind set forth to conquer the earth.
Although hard to imagine the early days, slowly, through thousands and then millions of years, mankind’s path spewed off from that of the apes creating new species. Man evolved from Homo-habilis to Homo-erectus, and then finally to the Homo-sapien. At each point along this chain man slowly changed, his brain growing larger and with it he learned new tricks to hedge his chances of survival on the earth. From fashioning tools to help him hunt, the discovery of fire, creating shelter and then communities, agriculture, religion, war, construction, industry, technology, to sending man to the moon, man’s destiny as the planet’s dominate species has spiralled him to the top of the food chain where he has remained indefinitely. The survival of their species was down to their larger brain which, in turn, has guaranteed them their mantel. Man really does rule the earth.
Let us go back for a moment, back to that first leap when are ape like mother gave birth to us. While we moved on through the ages her and her species died out, but were not alone on this journey. Our cousins, whose ancestors and ours is the same, are today’s Orang-utans, Gorillas, and Chimpanzees. Over millions of years we all divided and went our separate ways and then our particular species split again, creating a sub-species. It is believed that around three hundred and fifty thousand years ago, five separate species of human lived on the earth at the same time and for about seventy thousand years. It is believed that these five ‘brothers’, Homo-erectus, Homo-ergaster, Homo-neanderthalensis, Homo-heidelbergensis, and Homo-rhodesienis lived in different parts of the world, although whether they fought or lived together in their own separate communities, it is unknown.
Now, a new dawn is upon us.
Although I can tell you for definite that evolution’s new dawn has been rising for over eight hundred years, I cannot even begin to estimate when my kind and mankind’s destiny split.
Am I an ambassador for the third new evolution of man?
Is the Homo-sapien’s time coming to a close?
These are questions I cannot answer, and I know by writing this memoir I will be putting not only myself, but my species under threat.
History shows me that Man exterminates that which it does not understand. Jealousy would arise and a new war would be fought, not between religion or politics, but this time us and the. And because I fear we still number so few, we will be slaughtered instead of embraced.
A new dawn is upon us, the divine are amongst you.
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