windows of madness (part 8)

Llewelyn
1964

It was his first day at secondary school, and Llewelyn trudged down the road under the open scrutiny of his neighbours, who lined their windows like Angels of Death as he passed before them. He was resplendent in full kit, including dark green blazer, green and yellow striped tie, sticky white nylon shirt, grey short trousers and a large green school cap. He carried a brand new brown leather satchel, containing propelling pencils, a Parker cartridge pen, one 12” ruler, a protractor, three rubbers (not the barber’s sort), a compass and his Dad’s old slide rule. In his blazer, he had two Blue Ribbon wafers with twisted ends, a gigantic biro which had seven different ink options, and a large white handkerchief with one post-breakfast bogie already encrusting the centre. He was probably ready for anything, but he felt more like a self-conscious prat.
And he was.
He didn’t see anybody at all for the first quarter of a mile, and this gave him time to relive the nightmare of choosing his uniform. His mother had received a number of welfare vouchers which could be exchanged for the requisite clothes at recognised retailers, and she intentionally chosen the swankiest shop in town to begin her search. The shop staff were absolutely askance when his mother flourished the vouchers in front of their toffee noses, and they made her pay for her unprecedented audacity by encircling Llewelyn as if he were an exhibit in a penny museum. His eggshell shyness did not respond well to this ordeal, and he would always remember those twenty long minutes trying on different sized garments, while his chubby face went explosively crimson, his puppy fat bare legs trembled for release, and the rows of soulless eyes silently ridiculed him.
But the summer holiday as a whole had gone quite well, probably because he knew it was his last one before the ‘big’ school and he had to make the most of it. He’d regularly walked down to the foreshore, through the museum gardens with their meandering paths, duck ponds, Victorian drinking fountains and stone built Regency Halls, past the parked Ford Zodiac’s, Sunbeam Rapiers and 2 stroke Saab’s, to the clamorous world of amusement arcades, deck chairs and shell fish stalls. Indeed, over the six-week break he’d managed to accumulate £6. 10s. 6d. in pennies and three penny bits by skilfully playing the fruit machines and discovering their secrets.
In between these profit-making activities, he managed to keep sporadic contact with one or two friends from primary school, and they spent some quality time sailing model yachts on the local duck pond, rolling Corgi toys in the gutters, burying treasure on the beach, and digging pits for visitors to fall into. He kept one set of Corgi cars in their original boxes, wrapped generously in tissue paper and buried deeply amongst his string vests in the chest of four drawers. They received a pious yearly inspection, and were then sold for a song in 1984 to fuel a transient interest in Yoga books.
For his birthday he received a ‘Binatone’ transistor radio which boasted three wavebands and over a hundred stations from all over the world. This was entirely true, but two or three stations invariably shared the same position on the tuner, so he always listened to the new Radio One on a background of German news broadcasts and distant classical music. It only added to the thrill, however, when he first heard ‘Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown’ by the Rolling Stones; its throbbing base line cutting through the white noise and wavering foreign tones, like a fall of mortar shells.
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Mad Dogs and Englishmen....

The town where Llewelyn lived is said to enjoy one of the best views in Europe, as the bay sweeps around golden sands, fading Victoriana and a colourful harbour, towards the most magnificent, towering headland, and its Neapolitan reflection in the rock strewn sea beneath. There are many vantage points to the south, including dozens of oak benches dedicated by past visitors, and a variety of shelters with strange oriental embellishments.
But as the years passed by, Llewelyn noticed how quickly people turned away from the wonderful view, and reverted to observing each other. They rested their backs on the cast iron railings or perched at right angles on the ends of seats, and watched ordinary human beings walking by. They watched and they watched, and they watched.
In fact, one day a middle-aged couple hauled a heavy steel bench completely around, so that they could ignore the annual regatta, and monitor the patrons of a nearby café.
People were unnaturally sociable, Llewelyn thought.
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“Oi! Look at this! It’s Andy Capp!” commented some eloquent intellectual behind him, breaking into his reverie.
“Bloody hell! He looks more like Andy Pandy with that haircut.”
It was Llewelyn’s first contact with the older boys at the school, and for a further ten minutes he gritted his teeth as the pithy insults followed him down the road towards the winding school drive, and his stomach churned. By then, other victims had come into view and he was able to hide gratefully amongst them as they all slid down the hill like an unstoppable green anaconda on its way to the jungle. He spotted a few familiar faces in the yard which helped to calm his nerves, but his fried bread breakfast came back to haunt him with a vengeance when the bell went, and his leaden legs turned involuntarily towards the big, arched door.
They filed up the worn concrete steps for the first time and the new boys sat cross-legged on the ancient parquetry floor of the assembly hall, while endless hordes gathered behind them and the teachers mounted the dais in front, exhibiting their weird side show variations. An aggressive man who looked like a cross between Benito Mussolini and Groucho Marx then silenced the whispering mass with one rabid look, and Llewelyn’s first day at secondary school had begun.
The premises had originally been used as the Boy’s Grammar School, but a 1960’s modernist glasshouse now had that privilege, leaving Llewelyn and his fellow morons to take over the stage. It was really a bigger version of the primary school, with Victorian redbrick solidity, soaring Gothic arches, flag poles, sash windows, green slimy outside toilets and a mysterious frieze running along the front of the building which served to trap wayward tennis balls. The population included most of the local council estate boys, and a number of notorious miscreants from the nearby care hostel for ‘difficult children’, who hung about in non-regulation bright striped blazers like felons in a rock breaking yard. There were three vicious fights on the first day of term (old grudges by the look of it), and Llewelyn noted how quickly the other boys packed around the combatants ten deep to ensure cowards could not escape. The routine noise and brutality was appalling.
After the assembly, Llewelyn clumped up to his appointed classroom, occupied one of the tiered wooden desks, and inspected its contents while he waited for the master to arrive. There was a multifarious collection of grimy reading books, old rulers with bits chewed off, broken pencils and sweet wrappers. This particular desk had a remarkable green and yellow collage plastered under the desk lid which rather mystified him, until the boy who shared the double desk told him that his brother used to empty his nose onto it every morning for four years.
“Jacklin”
“Yes sir”
“Jessop”
“Yes sir”
“J-----”
“Yes sir” Llewelyn replied,
There were to be about 750 calls of the morning register during his stay at the school, and that was as near as any of them got to a conversation in lesson time. There were no sophisticated seminars or tutorials in those days, only direct teaching followed by questions and answers to assess retention, but then they all shared the ridiculously old-fashioned view that the teacher would probably know more about his specialist subject than the witless pupil. Their form master was both good-natured and able, only bridling when they corrupted his name (Aubrey) to ‘Strawberry’.
In order to minimise his exposure to the cutthroat playtime society, Llewelyn enrolled at the library, signed up for the chess group and assessed the lower playground for quieter areas. ‘Strawberry’ appreciated his perspective straight away and encouraged his scholarly pretensions throughout the fours years he spent at the school; kindly calling him a “slow developer” when he failed the ’12 plus’. Beyond school, his semi-detached relationships continued as before, and for a while his studious nature was almost threatened by associations with a few anarchic elements. One ‘bad’ lad was banned from calling for him at home, so they arranged a bizarre alternative whereby the friend would stand at the end of Llewelyn’s street and give three long blasts on his dad’s bugle. He knew, of course, that he wouldn’t have to pay the ultimate price for his growing delinquency because the death penalty had been abolished in 1965 (and anyway he was now the school chess captain).
His sex education continued unabated, and on one occasion his nefarious friend asked him if he “ever got a bone in it”, before they resumed their karate chopping of some discarded tiles in the undergrowth. He later showed Llewelyn some nude women in a dog-eared, stained magazine, and explained that their completely smooth nether regions ‘were filled with wax’ to outwit Mary Whitehouse and the censors. By 1968 Llewelyn’s plodding studiousness finally prevailed and he was given a second class passport to do his ‘O’ levels at the local ‘Tech’.
But by then more important things were happening at home.
For a while, his mother’s frightening monthly rages continued, and he could clearly recall being locked in the shed at the back of the house, while the young seedlings he’d been cultivating indoors were being flung into the rockery. She habitually regaled people with extravagant stories about his idleness (he didn’t do enough gardening she said), the disgusting state of his underpants, and his disloyal nature. Even the man who collected their monthly insurance premium was not spared the full, unexpurgated account - his fixed professional grin slowly cracking around the edges as he sidled towards the bolted door.
Then in the mid 1960’s his mother tried to rebuild her social life with weekly visits to an upmarket nightclub, and regular outings with a variety of eligible men. He quite enjoyed the idea of having a father at last and sometimes sat on the staircase listening to their conversations and wondering what was happening during the lengthy silences. But after a while it became clear that none of the men were “trustworthy” enough and his mother was “too frightened” to enter into another relationship. He contented myself with looking at old car magazines, and working out how long it would take him to save up for an ‘E’ type Jag if he got a part-time job after school.
His irrational cravings began to reach out of the house like the hand of a drowning man.
By 1966, at about the time of England’s World Cup victory and his first paper round, the situation suddenly declined and Llewelyn found the monthly blips becoming permanent problems. His mother began to spend longer and longer periods in bed, complaining of vague female problems and projecting blame consistently in his direction for her alarming physical deterioration.
“You’ve worn me out” she whispered.
He suggested the doctor, but she emotionally refused, sending him instead to the chemist for strange parcels which were handed over with querulous looks, but no comment.
It then became an exercise in wish fulfilment, as every evening he walked home from school hoping that she would have got up during the day, and that the windows would not be dark as he rounded the corner with a queasy feeling rising in his gut. But more and more she remained in bed and the breakfast pots would stare at him through the half-light, as he drew the curtains and walked upstairs past the picture of the weeping urchin, and into the shadows of his mother’s bedroom. A sickly sweet smell would often meet him and like travelling on a macabre roulette wheel, he would wait to see if rage, muteness or tears greeted his inadequate hello. Then it would be down to the kitchen to select some tins for their tea, put on the telly and hope that ‘Blue Peter’ would nullify his thoughts with its cheerful faces, cardboard castles and licking pups. But the situation was becoming acute, and he couldn’t help his fourteen-year-old mind contorting and twisting into a revulsion which he knew was morally wrong, but seemed unavoidable. It was as if a probing blackness was surrounding him as he squatted in front of the smoking fire every night, looked through the 40-watt smog at the tatty remnants of their 1950’s heyday, and sensed the building blocks of his mind being inexorably rearranged.
Although his mother’s illness started slowly enough, with just occasional periods of bed rest every month or two, by 1968 she was almost totally bedfast and still refusing to see the doctor. She had told some story or other to the neighbours, and they contented themselves with occasional civilised enquiries at the door, and probably intense speculation at home. One neighbour had even been duped into shifting a single bed downstairs so that his mother (who was then only 40) could sleep permanently in the living room, without this apparently raising further alarm. Llewelyn just drifted along with a combination of childish naivety, the conditioned fear of defying his mother’s wishes, and the even greater terror of hearing the worst if professionals were brought in.
They struggled on for quite a while on the basis of regular light meals prepared by Llewelyn, and better meals prepared by his mother when she had ‘remission’ from the illness. He did the shopping at the ‘bottom shop’, and they did the basic laundry between them on good days. But it was an impossible position and his mother moved from white-faced stoicism and secrecy, to appalling candour as she began describing her problems in stark revolting detail. She was “haemorrhaging badly”, “bleeding both ways”, and was having to use a bucket as a toilet downstairs. She was scared of what the doctor might tell her and she was getting through a pack of large external sanitary towels every day (thus Llewelyn’s trips to the chemist). It reached crisis point during the Christmas of 1967, when they spent the holiday in a daze of alternating anger and despair, and she gathered him into her arms to finally admit:
“I think I’ve got cancer”
A neighbour sent for their old doctor and immediately tests were arranged, revealing within a short space of time that his mother had a non-cancerous growth in her womb. They had apparently been sharing the agonies of the last two years for no good reason, and a hysterectomy would set things right. They both breathed a sigh of relief and Llewelyn reflected on how terribly callused he‘d become to suffering. Little did he know, that the problems were in many ways just beginning.
The time his mother spent in hospital was like a morbid religious holiday, as he hung warily between feelings of loneliness and anxiety, and the new-found thrill of independence. After a short recuperation, his mother came home and for a while there was honeymoon period of mutual sensitivity, but it wasn’t long before he noticed that there were some strange changes occurring in her personality. She was deeply immersed in the whole experience of illness, and didn’t really seem to expect full physical recovery, or the resumption of a normal life. She was extremely negative about her general prospects, saying she was totally “worn out”, and seemed to take little interest in anything but her ordeal.
“I’ll soon be dead” she commented in the morning.
“I’m finished” she said at bedtime.
As the months went by, she spent most of her time sat in the fireside chair, with eyes closed and arms crossed. She avoided doing any household chores and the house became untidy, cluttered and dirty, while Llewelyn began to resent the househusband role she was obviously ascribing to him. She eventually appreciated that there was a problem herself, and this time she had no hesitation going to the doctor, who diagnosed ‘nervous debility’ and prescribed some of the new ‘wonder’ tranquillisers that were then appearing on the market. These did nothing more than mildly sedate her for a short period, adding to her lethargy, and making her more dependent on the medical system. She became addicted to the tablets for many year and didn’t receive a minute of professional counselling or specialist mental health advice that might have helped re-motivate her. By the time this was suggested in the 1970’s, she firmly believed that her problems were a combination of physical incapacity, congenital ‘nerves’ and acts of unchangeable fate. Any implications that she was experiencing psychiatric or psychological problems were greeted with massive temper loss, embarrassing scenes, threats and tears. She finally trained the G.P.’s to leave the idea well alone.
“I’ve given up” she said. “I’m jiggered.”
Llewelyn was at this time old enough to be rather looking forward to a more independent, freedom loving lifestyle than was possible in the family home. This necessarily brought him into savage conflict with his mother, who was equally intent on retaining his domestic services. Some of their exchanges would never be forgotten as she went scarlet with rage, called him every name in the book and attempted to bombard him with blows as he scrambled out of the house. She waylaid every neighbour, friend and acquaintance to update them on his perfidy, and harangued his stunned friends on the doorstep if they were ill advised (or curious) enough to call for him. He retained indelible images of his mother with her feet up on the chipped, 1930’s tiled mantle piece, surrounded by unopened mail order catalogue parcels and mountains of magazines, picking the dead skin off her shins and asking him to turn the telly off for her, because she’d “had enough of that tripe”. She seemed to love the miserable silence and razor tension that ensued, while to him it was like a swirling black hole which was slowly swallowing him up.
“I can’t last much longer” she sobbed.
A long time later Llewelyn realised that she was probably suffering from clinical depression following an accumulation of significant stresses and problems; the original divorce, the single parent restrictions, the distrust of other men, the horrible physical illness, the hormonal and psychological changes that followed the hysterectomy, and the fear of work which came when her maintenance and benefits payments eventually dried up. As a result, he was stretched between basic family loyalties, disaffection for what I could see developing around him and adolescent cravings for freedom. Even the realisation that she was depressed came far too late in the day to make much difference to his ingrained feelings of resentment and injustice. In the years to come, his old attitudes would always overpower newer tolerant thoughts.
“I haven’t the strength to go on” she said one day. “I’m……..”
“Finished” he unwisely interjected.
“Smack!” came the response, as she leapt across the room like a kangaroo and landed a smart right-handed slap to his temple.
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Mad as Hell

One day Llewelyn had done something to offend his mother, and she charged after him like a rhino through to the kitchen, her eyes wild with fury, screaming abuse, raining slaps around his defensive arms, mad as Hell. His first impulse was to escape into the garden and just hang around outside until she’d cooled down, but for some reason the door was locked. As he wrestled with the handle and fiddled with the key, he could feel further blows stinging the back of his head and neck. Multiplying and getting harder. Much harder.
Like a cornered animal, he turned around and fought, pushing her hard against the old washing machine. He heard her gasp as he made for cover upstairs, and as he passed her astonished face, he instinctively knew that something had changed. The sitting duck was no longer sitting, and temper had found its place, like all things. The physical attacks were finished.
He had grown up.
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The boy is the father of the man.

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Kate
2007

I thought if I played it cool and didn’t contact Kate, she might ring to see how I was, send me a conciliatory note, or turn up at the unit door in a tearful, contrite state.
But she didn’t.
In fact, there was no communication at all, and I found myself yearning for her company like an abandoned puppy. I began to wonder whether I could somehow engineer a ‘coincidental’ meeting on neutral ground, and when Sidney mentioned a staff night out at the local heavy metal club (The Steel Balls), this got me thinking. Kate often went there on Saturday nights with her mates, and there was a fair chance we might bump into each other. Then, who knows?
Of course, I would be incredibly nonchalant and barely notice her at first, but my luminous persona and studded biker jacket would soon attract her, like a helpless moth to the flickering flame. I would make her work hard to recover my favour and patronage, while various other women basked in my sun-like charms and wove themselves around my legs like adoring eels. But then, with an impatient snap of my fingers they would be gone, and Kate would gradually reassume her proper place in my munificent affections.
There would be visits to high mountains, Tantric sex, world cruises, emigration, flavoured condoms, brilliant children, separate bathrooms, unwavering rapture, and a storybook ending. We would rerun the past, and change the final cut.
Well, that was the general idea.

When the Saturday night actually arrived, I was as nervous as a kitten, and racked by indecision. Should I turn up as an old sod in the wrong place, or an aging hippy in the wrong time? My wardrobe was painfully limited, and in the end I was forced to settle for an itinerant grunge look, which was appropriately dishevelled; but exactly like Worzel Cummidge’s Sunday best. That would be just fine, though, if I could only win Aunt Sally back.
The unit staff met at the ‘Iron Rod’, which was a tough pub around the corner from ‘The Steel Balls’, owned by the same outfit. It was a spit and sawdust place with long tables, listing chairs, multifarious beers of unknown strengths, and a 1950’s jukebox which glowed expensively in the marijuana-tinted fog. There was no decorative theme as such, but the chanting barbarian hordes who hung from the rafters undoubtedly lent a certain je ne sais quoi to the proceedings and, all in all, we felt quite at home.
Indeed, we got well tanked up - crunching crisps and laughing loudly at each other’s clothes and spots, whilst carefully avoiding the menacing looks of some territorial regulars in their elite, twilit corner. But after half an hour or so of leering through the murk for interested members of the opposite sex (and finding none) we abruptly ran out of conversation, upped sticks and lumbered out towards the club.
The ‘Steel Balls’ was a remarkable institution, converted from the cellars of a huge Victorian tenement building in the centre of town. The bottom storey was famous for being externally wallpapered in fly posters, and musicologists were often seen picking their way through grimy layers of paste and pap to discover some prized artefact of ‘Blue Oyster Cult’, ‘The Scorpions’ or ‘UFO’ et al. The entrance to the club was really more like a trapdoor which dropped unwary patrons down a precipitous chute of well-oiled stairs towards a distant pink neon pay desk and a network of Vietcong tunnels beyond. The pay desk was always occupied by an ancient, shrivelled termagant and two red-necked bouncers, who bulged out of their incongruous dinner jackets like butchers on a stag night. The three of them had reputedly sat there every weekend since the club was used for ballroom dancing in the 1960’s.
So, down the chute we went, arriving at the desk in a heap, where we paid across an exorbitant sum, and merrily joined the column of tittering misfits, weekend gothic rock gods, and leather-clad fetishists, as it wormed its way towards the sweaty catacombs of the deep interior. On arrival at the bar, we waited twenty minutes or so for our pints of flat brown ale in fingerprinted glasses, and began vibrating sympathetically to the earthquake roar of Pearl Jam etcetera - booming apocalyptically from towering black speakers dotted generously around the labyrinth. Cigarette smoke rolled lazily around us like a sea fret and the open bog door revealed a dozen bodies draped over sinks and bowls in various stages of purgative agony, while those still on their feet stared vacantly through double-glazed, gobstopper eyes. It was rather like being keel-hauled in a cesspool, but the throbbing mass gradually pushed us towards the demonic, strobe-lit dance floor, and it was there that I spotted Kate.
Kate.
She stood amidst the butting heads, whirling limbs and soaring Gibson air guitars, dressed in a sprayed-on black cat suit, her yellow hair swinging wildly around her waist, while Brad Pitt swivelled his hips like Elvis on a bad burger day, and openly drooled. I watched from the shadows as they returned to their seats, and was greatly relieved to see Brad sit next to another girl, who he proceeded to lick and prod. He than circulated around the group like a fly in a jam factory, and I began to wonder if he was really a harmless eunuch, hired by the girls’ parents to amuse and protect their offspring in dubious environs. Possibly his crutch had been burnt off in a sixth-form chemistry accident, and now he was compensating with endless, conspicuous flirtation.
Foreplay instead of foreskin, as it were.
Anyway, I was completely pissed by this time, and when Van Halen came on I couldn’t resist strutting my stuff on the dance floor, carving quite a space in the sardine can crowd, and only falling over once, during the guitar solo. I expected Kate to be quite impressed, but when I turned around, there was just an empty chair with Brad Pitt sprawled in it (if you see what I mean). Predictably pissed off, as well as up, I headed for the door like Elizabeth Bennett in a drawing room huff, and didn’t look back. I couldn’t actually find the door, however, and when I eventually turned around - there was Kate with two clacking black beer bottles held in one hand.
“Hello stranger, I thought you might like one of these” she yelled.
“Hi Kate – fancy seeing you here.”
“Well, I did once tell you it was a regular haunt of mine.”
She wasn’t fooled for a minute, and clearly knew that I’d come out looking for her, but as usual I covered my embarrassment with a poor joke.
“’Haunt’ is the right word for it. I’ve seen less horror in a slaughter-house.”
“You’re so hard to please, Steve. That’s your big problem.”
I saw a pattern beginning to repeat itself, so I changed the course of the conversation rapidly, and we elbowed our way back to the seats. Luckily, we had the perfect situation in which to avoid unpleasant topics, because under the coffin-shaped speakers it was virtually impossible to hear anything but rampant death metal and a high-pitched singing noise in the middle ear. As the evening wore on, we danced together two or three times, and I felt a bit like Father Christmas with one of the grotto’s older children, but her primitive gyrations were certainly eye-popping, and I hoped for more. More came, but not quite the way I expected.
She danced with some of the other blokes too (as well as a couple of the women), and I couldn’t help feeling insanely jealous, even though I was overtly phlegmatic, and very keen to beam avuncular smiles at all the young studs as they returned to their seats. I was beginning to see for the first time just how popular Kate was, and just how democratic she and her friends were with their affections. But it was me she chose to take her home, and for a while my mind repressed a growing unease, as we retraced our past, up those old rickety stairs, to Kate’s joss-stick scented boudoir.
This time there was coffee, and God did I need it, as my middle-aged constitution did battle with a young man’s habits, and the room quaked. But we eventually adjourned to the bed, doing everything at half the speed of that very first encounter, leaving time to think, and room to judge. It should have been a dazzling reconciliation, as we went through our full repertoire of moves and countermoves, but somehow the intuitive had become mechanical, and the novel, almost dull. Worse still, there was a sense of reserve and qualification. Nothing obvious, but it was undoubtedly there. Like a knife under the pillow.
We ended in our favourite position, and I felt a tingle run around my body as Kate moaned and twisted, like a dozen times before. But this time, for the first time, there was a post-coital depression, a sort of sickly dissatisfaction and disquiet, an acute awareness of irritating little things that had probably always been there, but were now salient. I’d seen three toothbrushes in the bathroom, a pair of men’s socks on top of the laundry basket, lots of masculine faces grinning out of photograph frames, Christ knows how many different alpha-male de-odorant sprays, and some light bruises on Kate’s upper arms. Thumb and finger marks, I was sure.
Naturally, being half-cut, spent, temporarily deaf and precariously placed, I just had to push the situation over the edge (even if it meant falling on my face), simply to secure a certainty of one form or another. So I went through my list of forensic observations like Columbo cornering a suspect, secretly hoping for a mistake in the logic, but instead finding Kate laughing like a drain, and setting the alarm clock. She was in the end perfectly candid about the love interests in her life, admitting freely that she was seeing ‘two or three’ parties, just like me.
Just like me.

“Just like me?”
“Yes, Steve. I don’t take any of it that seriously.”
“But I thought you and I were serious?”
Well, maybe we were for a short while, but that couldn’t last forever…. and it didn’t.”
“Surely you weren’t seeing other people when things were good between us?”
“No, I don’t think I was. But like I say, we’re just mates now.”
“So, you sleep with all your mates?”
“No, just those I fancy”
“Isn’t that promiscuity?”
“God, you’re so quaint Steve” she laughed “that’s what I like about you.”
Quaint.
“But some people would say you’re simply a slag.”
That hurt, and her face dropped.
“Perhaps it’s time to say goodnight, then. I wouldn’t want you mixing with the wrong people.”
“Kate…..”
“Time to go, Steve. Your wife will be expecting you.”
“But….”
“No buts. I’ll see you around.”
I’d blown it, big time.

I felt as though my emergency chute had just failed to open, and I was now hurtling towards the ground at a zillion knots, with a shriek stuck in my throat, and a wrist-mounted altimeter whizzing madly around to zero. Like a crazy watch with a red line.
Tick tock.
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to be continued - parts 9 and 10 now posted
full story on www.windowsofmadness.co.uk
paperback at www.booklocker.com/books/4150.html