Tollesbury Time Forever (3 page)

Wooden barrows filled the square, people calling out their wares in such a coarse accent I could barely make out the words. I was wearing my own clothes and, perhaps a testament to my lack of sophistication, did not look too much out of place. I lifted my hand to my face. It was definitely me and I was definitely in Tollesbury. It was becoming too much to think about, somewhere between truth and doubt - too much to think about. I had no idea how all this had come to be. But come to be it had.

There were no cars and there were no street lamps. The brick bus stop where all the Tollesbury teenagers hang around in order to practice flirting, pester the man in the chip van and try in vain to get mobile phone signals; that was gone too. And there was dirt and grass where there should have been concrete, a wonderful green area that looked so fine as to render the covering of it with sand and cement nothing less than an atrocity.

But the King's Head was still there, looking more or less the same as when I had last left it. I felt the same relief as you would feel encountering a friend by chance in a distant city. For me, a pub is a sign of normality, confirmation that at least
part of the world is as it should be. I have always believed I could walk into any pub in England and feel a sense of familiarity, that I would never be totally alone. I thought then also that I was probably not the first man to have staggered out of the village lock-up before going straight over to The King‘s Head. I needed to sit down with a pint and get things in perspective - if that were at all possible. This was all just a little too strange, even for my precarious mind.
 

I stood before the wooden door that led into the public bar, the sound of children running and playing cascading through the air behind me. I heard a man coughing and the hooves of horses thudding away down the High Street. All these sounds were familiar to me, yet foreign. They just didn't belong together - not here, not now; or perhaps it was I who did not belong. I leaned into the door to push it open. It remained steadfast. I was about to push harder when a woman's voice shouted down at me.

"What do you think you're playing at stranger? We don't open for three hours yet; not that you'd be welcome back, with your made up money and all!"

I stepped back and looked up to see the face of a young woman, perhaps in her late twenties, leaning out of an upstairs window. She had brown hair tied back beneath a cream coloured headscarf, which gave prominence to a round, kindly face. Despite her harsh words, there was a playfulness in her expression that I found beguiling. She sensed my puzzlement and smiled such a broad smile it looked as if her few remaining teeth would seize the moment to leap out and join their long lost brethren.

"Catch!"

The woman dropped several small gold coins out of the window, before closing the wooden shutters and retiring from view. I bent down and picked up the money - nine pound coins, 2006 vintage. No good to her it seemed; and therefore no good to me.

Well, how about that then? The pub was shut. My money was worthless. And I was a stranger in my own village. Now if
this were all a dream, it surely wasn’t me who was doing the dreaming!

Standing there outside the King's Head, I started to pick out those things I found familiar. There was the lock-up of course, lurking in the corner against the wall surrounding St Mary's Church. The low flat cottages adjacent to it were almost as they are now; though the car parts and the broken boat in the yard were absent, as was that dog that barks viciously whenever you walk by. Did it bark because it was tied up and scared or did it bark to ensure it remained tied up? Though that dog had always worried me I had at times felt an affinity with it.

I walked across to the cottage known then and now as Roebuck Cottage, and turned right at the corner onto East Street with the intention of seeing what condition my house was in. And what lay before me was magical. The dirt track with which I was confronted was so wide with no parked cars to constrict it. Where the Congregational Church should have stood, on the left, there was just a large patch of unkempt grass. There were one or two cottages beside it but on the right hand side as I walked in wonder, there was just the low wall that lined the graveyard of St Mary’s Church. And where my house should have been, there were two horses tied to a rickety wooden bar.

I just stared at these lovely animals as they stood serene and swaying, sweating a little, moving their sturdy jaws around and around, blinking with their huge perfect eye lids. They were peaceful and silent, just standing where my little front room should have been. I felt if I stretched out my arm, I would have disturbed this wonderful mirage. So I stood there and sighed, breathed deep and exhaled in peaceful perfection.

As I stared into the void, I felt a tug upon the baggy sleeve of my jumper. I looked around and there stood the dirty looking boy with the crooked teeth whom I had seen earlier outside the village lock-up. He looked up at me, no longer grinning but frowning, as if he were concentrating intently. He had a sharp looking stick in his hand. I was not sure out of the two of us who was the more perplexed.

"Hello," I ventured.

The boy just stared at me, one hand now on his hips, defiant, the other holding aloft the stick. It did indeed look very sharp.

I smiled. The boy did not. He traced a circle in the air with the stick and then drew an imaginary cross through it. Finally, he poked the stick through the circle and winked at me, smiling conspiratorially as he did so.

“Upper Outer Quadrant,” I heard him whisper. “Upper Outer Quadrant.”

Now I had never heard of the Upper Outer Quadrant. I knew Tollesbury well but unless this Quadrant had existed until the modern day, I knew I would be of little help to this boy. As I was about to inform him that he would have to seek another for directions, he ran around behind me. Suddenly I felt a searing pain at the top of my thigh as he jabbed at me with the pointed stick before running down the hill towards the harbour. It was an unsettling moment, to say the least. His intensity had seemed so real, more real than the earth beneath my feet or the sky above; more real even than the heart that now beat that bit faster within me.
 
And then he was gone.

Stability required I headed for the place where I had been the previous day, if previous day it was. I walked slowly, as if on a leash, to that part of the village I was sure had always been there, unchanged, forever - the Tollesbury salt marshes.

Station Road was wide, tree-lined and empty, bereft of houses and pavements. There were no street lamps or manholes or wheelie bins or vehicles - or a station for that matter. It was the space and the openness of it all that really hit me. I always thought Tollesbury to be small and remote, a village cut off from the modern world; but this was truly rural and uplifting, broad and majestic. Yet, as I walked, I experienced a throbbing longing for that which once was, though it be all around me.

Indeed, what was about me now was a stillness and a peace that I had rarely known before. The marshes stretched to the horizon torn, gleaming and intricate, leading down to the dark depths of the Blackwater Estuary. Elegant birds flew high
above, all silence and grace. White, powdery clouds formed in the sky doing their best to conceal a darkness that peeked out from behind them, ready to pounce upon the glorious light that consumed this early Tollesbury evening.

So intent was I on the grand display before me, I failed at first to notice the hunched outline of a figure some twenty yards to the right of where I stood. It was sitting cross-legged, gazing down into the dank water. I felt as if I were being watched. This was not paranoia, doctor. This was more real even than that.

I breathed slowly, apprehensive yet compelled. For these were my marshes. I felt more at home there than in my own house; though clearly that land upon which my house stood was, at that moment, being grazed upon by a couple of sturdy mares. As I approached, the figure didn't move at all. When I was but five yards away, though, it spoke in a gruff, growl of a voice that could have been the rumble of a tractor engine, the clatter of falling rocks or the creaking coming to life of an awoken conscience. I doubted even then that a mere man could speak like that.

"Sit," he said.

So I did, just where I was; a little in front and to the left of him. His head remained bowed. I was at once his to command.

That's when I got a really good look at him. I will start with his clothes, for that was all I could see to begin with. Despite the warmth of the evening, he was bundled up as if for a cold winter's night. Atop his head was a cloth hat some ten inches high, widening to a drooping brim as it rested just above the line of his eyes. I wasn't sure how it managed to keep its form, so flimsy did it look. And as I peered closer, I saw there was a tighter hat beneath, made of what could have been wool, clinging to his skull; were it to be removed, I believed his entire head may have crumbled into fragments.

There was a dirty grey piece of material wrapped about the man’s neck. It could have been sketched in charcoal and nailed to his throat. Its ends were torn and ragged, as if someone had ripped an old scarf in half.

A dark brown, heavy coat enshrined his body. It looked like some kind of tarpaulin draped over him, a cocoon from which he had once grown, maybe, screaming into this world.
 
The coat was fastened at the front by two buttons and gaped open from the stomach downwards, revealing a grimy undershirt whose colour I just could not determine - it was maybe a combination of sweat and filth, whatever colour you would like to imagine that to be! The sleeves were too long, entirely obscuring his hands. Were he to have been equipped with paws, I would not have been surprised; though I would of course have been terrified. But at least that would have been an immediate type of terror that would have enabled me to flee, rather than this growing, deepening horror that fixed me where I sat.

Covering his crossed legs were black trousers that seemed too wide and too short. His feet were bare and clean and so at odds with the rest of his grubbiness; perhaps he had been bathing them in the salty water of the marshes. Clean feet indeed, though there were hairs upon them where perhaps there should not have been hairs.

It was as I was studying his feet that the man turned to look at me. His face was surely carved from the very earth itself; that mixture of dirt and debris, sand, silt, clay and stone that had congealed and hardened over the centuries to form the crust of our world. His mouth was straight and stern, with barely a top lip. His lower lip protruded slightly but was all the more prominent for the lack of a companion. His nose was flat and broad, with nostrils that were but holes in his face and no more. The upper part of his countenance was shaded by the crooked brim of his hat, but that didn't stop the most sad and chilling eyes I had ever seen from pouring into me. Sad and chilling though they were, more than anything they were lifeless - and for lifeless, read deathly. There was no glint, no shimmer, no sign at all that a living, breathing human being existed beyond them.

So there we were upon the ground. He looked down again and I could not help but stare at him.

And then he spoke once more, turning his large head quickly to me as he did so.

"When did you come?" he asked plainly.

"What do you mean?"

"When did you come?" he repeated, slower this time, emphasizing every word with a rasp of his tongue, spittle forming on his hanging bottom lip.

"Where?"

"Here! When did you come here?"

"Erm, today; last night. I'm not sure."

He paused, considering my answer.

"As I thought," he murmured, nodding. "Heard the splash."

This made no sense to me at all until I realised where he was sitting. In an instant, I saw myself as I was the previous evening, drunk and forlorn and trying in vain to kill myself. The man had been staring all this time into the exact same marshy pool into which I had allowed myself to fall. And I shuddered at the coincidence, if coincidence it be.

There was nothing I could do but to sit and to wait. I could not tell you how many minutes went by, though I can tell you that every second seemed crucial as if there was a pattern to be followed, a script that was being directed by people unseen. All I know is that as I was about to speak, the man swivelled round in one frenetic, lithe, movement, his legs still crossed. And there I was, face to face with him. I breathed deep, gulping air as if it were cider.

As I looked across into his face, I sensed it slacken a little. Was it tiredness? Or maybe disappointment?

Though I had been about to speak, I honestly had nothing to say. In such a moment, anything I could have said would have been entirely meaningless anyway. There was a depth to this moment far greater than any words of mine could have filled. So I just left it to him.

"You are here because you are meant to be here. I am here because it is the only place I can be. I have waited here for you for some time, lain dormant, you might say. Now don't
you be letting me down, boy. You don‘t want to go letting me down. Not again."

He continued in that flat, atonal voice of his, slow and dull. And it made me listen all the more.

"You will learn from me boy.”

He took a pipe from his pocket, filled it slowly with tobacco, lit it and sat and puffed.