C-The Beer and Fags Diet:Chapt.Two:Transience One

CHAPTER TWO

Transience One

"With your back to the Rising Sun turn left and head back into the
village along Worminghall Road.
At the sharp left bend turn down Church Road, walk to the very end and
visit St Nicholas's church.
This Norman church has avoided destructive restoration and its interior
is especially atmospheric. Go
in and try and find the frame for Nine Men's Morris, an ancient game
known to Shakespeare, which
has been scratched into the windowsill of the north triple
window."

I left the truck in the car park at the Rising Sun. I felt guilty as it
was closed and
there was a sign saying "This Car Park Is For Customers Of The Rising
Sun Only."
I'd make amends by having a pint later. I started walking towards the
church. It
was now a cold November morning with damp in the air and low grey
clouds. I
wished I'd brought my gloves.

There was a bad car accident in Oakley a couple of weeks ago. I live in
Oakley but I
didn't even know there'd been an accident till I went to get my hair
cut in Bicester. The
girl told me that a young bloke in his early twenties had been driving
to work at five
o'clock in the morning. Just outside Morgan's Mini Diggers he'd swerved
to avoid a
lamb in the middle of the road and had hit a lorry coming the other
way. The young bloke
was trapped in his car and couldn't get out. Then the petrol tank
exploded. I just hope the
poor bastard was unconscious when it went up. I wonder how fast he was
going. I wonder
if he was helling it because he was late for work. The girl claimed
that she knew him and
that he used to drink in The Nightingale in Langford Village. I went
past the crash scene
the other day. You can clearly see where the tarmac is black and
scorched from the fire.
People have left bunches of flowers but they're beginning to look a bit
tatty now. It's
such a shame when that happens but I suppose it's inevitable. I'm going
to drive more
slowly in future.

Last year a young lad in Oakley committed suicide. On the Monday me and
Charlie and
Simon had driven up north to see a Radiohead concert in Warrington.
Radiohead are
known for writing depressing songs that are supposed to make people
want to kill
themselves. As we approached the concert we walked over a bridge.
Charlie joked that
there'd have to be coppers on the bridge after the concert to stop
people chucking
themselves into the river, but everyone I saw that night seemed to be
having a good time.
A few days later I found out that my sister and her partner from Leeds
had been a few
feet away from us at the same concert but we never noticed each
other.

We stayed the night in a Travelodge in Warrington and the next morning
me and Simon
drove back to Oakley nursing our hangovers. Charlie went straight from
Warrington to a
business meeting in Blackburn. When we got home I had a shower and put
on my suit
and tie to go to work. As I got into my car I realized I only had four
fags left so instead of
heading off to London I turned right to the village shop. I bought my
fags and as I was
getting back in the car I acknowledged Rose, our cleaner. She didn't
respond at first but
when I called again she came over and said she was sorry but she was so
upset about the
news that she hadn't noticed me. I told her I had no idea what she was
talking about and
then she told me what she knew about the lad killing himself.
Apparantly he'd been in the
Royal Oak on Sunday night and seemed fine. Around nine o'clock he went
home. After a
few minutes at home he told his Mum he was going out again but he never
came back.
On Sunday night his Mum thought he must be asleep in his car but the
next morning
when she found his car still there and no sign of her son she obviously
became worried about his
safety. By Monday evening the concern was such that his mates organized
search parties.
They found him at midnight hanging from an oak tree just outside the
village. He'd used
the tow rope from his car to make the noose. He'd jumped from a high
branch so as to
break his neck rather than be strangled.

To this day nobody knows or will admit to knowing why he did it. He
didn't have money
troubles or woman troubles and he didn't seem to be involved with
drugs. Everybody had
great sympathy for the parents. They're parted now but both still live
in the village. Their
other two sons have both spent time in intensive care after car
accidents. There was a
collection and a memorial bench has been placed overlooking the playing
fields. The
other day I went for a walk to find the tree where he'd done it. A
plaque saying "Billy
Boy" had been nailed to the trunk and somebody had decorated the place
in Oxford
United's colours. The plaque looked great, but like the flowers at the
accident scene the
other stuff was beginning to look tacky.

I've nearly died twice, along with my wife and kids. The first time was
in autumn 1995.
My best mate, Ed, was working in America and I took my wife and kids to
visit his
family. They were renting a large house in the small Spielbergian town
of Pocquoson,
just outside Norfolk, Virginia. The garden of Ed's house fronted on to
the shoreline of
Cheasepeake Bay and Ed had bought a twenty foot long cruiser.

It was obvious that Ed couldn't wait to take us out on his boat, but
first me and Ed went
for a few beers at Hooter's because the barmaids wear bikini tops and
hot pants. Then we
called into a broker's to insure the boat. The broker's office was
staffed by two women in
their thirties and one of them couldn't take her eyes off Ed. It was
one of those situations
you find now and then where it's lust at first sight. I swear that if
Ed had asked her into
the back room to fuck him she'd have gone. She wasn't particularly
attractive but she was
okay.

Then we collected my wife and kids and got on the boat. My wife's
called B. At the time
my son was four and my daughter was three. For some reason Ed's wife
and two young
son's didn't come so there was just the five of us. The sun was
shining, the water was
calm, and we were on holiday. All was well as we headed out to sea. But
almost at once I
noticed stray wisps of smoke coming from the engine compartment. At
this point it was
hardly noticeable so I didn't say anything, but a few minutes later B
also noticed it. I told
Captain Ed but he said it was probably just a bit of spilled oil
burning off the engine or
something. We kept heading out to sea and the smoke kept getting
thicker. Eventually B
and I decided to take a closer look. We lifted the cowling from the
engine compartment
and found that the engine was ablaze. I showed Ed and he agreed to head
back to land,
but as he went to turn the boat round we lost all power.

We assessed the situation. We were a mile out to sea in a burning boat
with no power, no
radio and two very young children. On the whole I'd rather not have
been there. Ed got
the fire extinguisher and emptied it into the fire, which went out for
a few seconds then
re-ignited. Then he got a distress flare but he didn't know how to
launch it. He tried to
read the instructions on the side of the flare but then thrust it at me
saying he couldn't
make sense of them. By now the back of the boat was burning fiercely
and the flames
were spreading around the sides of the passenger cockpit. I tried to
read the instructions
and could immediately see what Ed meant. It was quite impossible to
concentrate and the
instructions might as well have been in Chinese for all the sense they
made. It didn't
really matter anyway as by now there was a hundred foot plume of black
smoke rising
high into the sky. We all put on lifejackets. It was clear we couldn't
stay in the passenger
cockpit so we crawled through the windshield and regrouped on the front
of the boat. The
flames came nearer. It was getting very hot and I was petrified of the
whole thing
exploding so we decided to abandon ship. B slipped into the water first
with Camilla,
then me with Rupert, then Ed. We tried to get as far away from the boat
as possible.

By now a small fishing boat had spotted us and started coming to help
but he stopped
about thirty yards away and started shouting at us. He said he wouldn't
come any closer
because he was scared of an explosion. We slowly splashed our way to
deliverance.
When we got within range he maneuvered the boat so that B and Camilla
could be taken
on first but then he shouted that he was alone on the boat and couldn't
help us to get out
of the water as he had to sail the thing. The side of a small fishing
boat looks surprisingly
high and steep when you're floating in the sea beneath it. I'm not sure
how we did it but
we all managed to climb on board, first B and Camilla, then me and
Rupert, then Ed. We
were safe. On deck there was a rough table upon which stood a small
pile of shellfish.
We'd obviously ruined our saviour's fishing trip. I hoped he could
afford the lost profits.

We chugged back to shore. Ed's boat burned and slowly sank. There was
no explosion
after all. My babies huddled on the floor of the tiny wheelhouse,
soaked and forlorn,
while I smoked one of our saviour's cigarettes. As our rescuer tied up
his boat Ed and I
emptied our pockets and handed him all the money we had. He got $70 in
sodden bills for
saving our lives. Then we had to endure a mob of emergency services and
gawpers who'd
collected on the jetty. All the police seemed to be interested in was
whether we'd been
drinking. Well of course we had but we denied it.

We went back to Ed's house and started drinking strong liquor. Over the
next few days
we held endless post-mortems but we came to no conclusion as to what
had started the
fire. I tortured myself that it could have been caused by a cigarette
that I'd casually tossed
away, but I never said that much to anyone else. Shortly afterwards I
think I may have
suffered a mild form of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Certainly I
seemed to be forever
pondering on what would have happened if the sea had been rough, or
cold, or if the fuel
tank had exploded , or if there'd been sharks. At the following New
Year's Eve bash in
Oakley Village Hall I had a minor breakdown when I convinced myself
that I'd tried to
save myself before Rupert. But that may have been the effect of the
drink.

Many weeks afterwards Ed told me that his insurers sent down divers to
salvage the boat.
Don't forget, it had only been insured for a couple of hours before it
went down. They
still don't know for certain what caused the fire but they think it was
probably a fuel leak.

I wonder how many times each of us has been close to death without
knowing the danger
we were in. I've flown a lot in my life, for many years I averaged a
flight a week. I
wonder how many of us have been in an airliner where a critical
component was on the
point of catastrophic failure, or where a mid-air collision was
narrowly avoided without
the passengers realising. I wonder if I've ever been so drunk that if
I'd had one more
drink my brain would have started to shut down my vital systems, or if
when I stopped
smoking it was just ten fags before the one that would have started
lung cancer. I wonder
if I've ever had a large blood clot lodge in my heart for a fraction of
a second but then
break free to dissolve harmlessly.

The other time we all nearly died was in 1998. It wasn't as dramatic as
the boat incident
but it was probably more dangerous. We were driving home to
Buckinghamshire after an
Easter weekend break in Kent. We were in a great big Ford Scorpio
estate with the adults
in the front and the kids in the back. B was driving because we'd
stopped for lunch at a
Little Chef and I'd had a couple of beers. We took a wrong turning in
Guildford and
ended up speeding south-west towards Hampshire instead of north-west
towards Bucks.
We were on a dual-carriageway and the area between the two roads was
wide and thick
with bushes and shrubs. As we drove along it looked like we were coming
to a gap
between the carriageways which would allow us to do a U-turn and get
back on the right
road. Unfortunately, when we pulled into the gap we found the crossover
point had been
barred with a row of stakes and we couldn't turn round after all. We
were safe enough
where we were, but the only way to continue was to pull out of the gap
and into the fast
lane. This was quite dangerous but with care it could be handled. I
should have
remembered that B panics when she's under pressure.

I told B to do exactly what I said. Being in the passenger seat I had
the best view of the
traffic speeding up in the fast lane behind us and so she was to do
exactly as I said and
not to do anything without my instruction. She said she agreed and
understood, then she
inexplicably began to move out into the path of an oncoming saloon car.
I screamed at
her and she aborted the move back into the the gap. It was over in a
fraction of a second. I
went berserk and told her again that she was risking all our lives
unless she did as I said
and nothing else. I then saw a huge aggregate lorry steaming down the
hill in the fast lane
towards us. He was flashing his headlights at us, clearly indicating
"For fuck's sake don't
pull out!" B pulled the car out of the safety of the gap and directly
into the path of the
speeding lorry. There was no point in screaming, I just closed my eyes
and waited for the
impact. I will never know how he missed us. I truly honestly deeply
thought they'd be
picking up mushy bits of my family from Guildford to Bournemouth. My
life didn't flash
before me as I was so scared that I wasn't capable of intellectual
function. My first
inkling we could survive came when I heard the Doppler effect from the
lorry's horn as
he drew alongside. I forced my eyes open and saw the lorry moving
smoothly past us on
the inside. It was so close I could have opened the window and touched
it without
stretching. The lorry accelerated and we decelerated , the lorry got
past us and we made
our way to a lay-by where we sat in silence for a while. Then B
explained that she had
taken his flashing lights as an invitation to pull out. How anyone
could arrive at that
interpretation in that situation, and then be willing to gamble their
children's lives on it is
way beyond me. I couldn't bring myself to speak to her for the rest of
the journey home.

I still find it very difficult to forgive her for what she did that
day. I often think about it
but try to force it out of my mind as it can easily flip me into
depression.

As I walked down the lane to the church there was a water-filled ditch
to my right,
and as I approached them a family of ducks waddled up the other side.
The leaves
were falling from the trees and blocking the ditch up. The houses in
the lane were
big yet managed to retain the appearance of homely cottages. The owners
of these
houses have obviously got a lot of money. What happened to the rural
poverty we
hear so much about?

The church was very old. It's ancient outer and inner doors were both
made of
heavy wood and I was astonished to find them both unlocked. I only went
a couple
of steps into the church. It smelled musty and it was too spooky to go
further or to
spend more than a few seconds there. Of course I was alone, but it was
really very
frightening.

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