The Veteran Speaks ( Time Tunnel Tale #2)

I am a seasoned veteran of the office wars, like Mike Moorcock, or was it Nik Turner, used to declaim, on that old Hawkwind album ‘Warrior on the Edge of Time,’ ‘a veteran of a thousand psychic wars.’ After 40 odd years in office work, my mind and body are still intact, and still, I find time to write, poetry, prose, and my reviews of albums and books are all over the Internet under my many aliases.

Oddly enough, it was my revisiting of a Moorcock book, ‘The Opium General,’ which caused me to recall this memory from years ago. I opened the worn and faded book which I purchased 40 years ago, and suddenly, as we used to say back in the early ‘seventies, I had a total recall of what I was up to, good and bad, in that year. It was as if the book had been the cache in which my memories were stored, like storing your memories online! Anyway, I will tell you the story which I suppose is tenuously within the sci-fi genre, I think so, anyway, here goes: -

I was of the younger generation in the office, and along with my friend Denise, we put our fingers up to authority, and there was a lot of that about at the time, or at least what passed for it! We had a mutual friend called Gaz; he was a new ‘Executive Officer’ in the job and had recently moved up from the Central Belt to our city. He was not particularly good at the job and seemed too quiet and shy for the rambunctious older guys in the office, who were sexist to the extreme, as folk were in those days, when the social mores of the times were different. They would often be found ogling the ‘Page 3’ pinups in ‘The Sun ‘in office time. Whether it was Samantha, Linda, or Maria, their three favourite ‘Page 3’ girls, they always caused upset with their coarse comments and lewd suggestions. They always reminded me of more extreme versions of the characters from the ‘Carry-On’ films, comedic grotesques in the workplace, with their lewd sexist jokes and innuendo, who were they trying to impress?

Gaz was five years older than us, twenty-five, now to us, that was ancient, but he got on well with us, we bonded over after work drinks on Friday night, like so many office workers before and since.

Gaz could not hold his drink, but after three or four pints of McEwan’s, he was telling us stories of his time in the Central Belt, and all the shenanigans he got up to there, the next pint would signify ‘home time’ for Gaz. Coming to a strange town was a weird experience for him, as he knew nobody. He lived in a rented flat near the Centre of Aberdeen, and apart from that we did not know much about him.

Like many civil servants transferred from other areas, there were usually rumours flying around about new people, but there were none about Gaz. He resembled the actor Rick Moranis, with his thick lensed specs, (like the bottom of Coke bottles, as some wag of the time said), his dark hair and floppy fringe, and his two blue work suits which looked like they were bought for growth, which was bizarre given his age. They could have been second hand, there was not much money in those days, especially if you worked where we did.

Me, Denise, and Gaz, bonded over music, he had a posh stereo, a Technics, which had seen better days, and hundreds of LPs, his taste was catholic, ranging from progressive rock, classical, heavy metal, folk, and a lot of the goth stuff that we liked. His favourites of the time  were The Cure and Joy Division., I recall him saying to me that ‘you need to read William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard, to understand what Joy Division’s lyrics are about’, which was something that over time, I thought was nonsense, but at the time, made me think that Gaz was perhaps ‘cooler’, then the persona that he presented in the office, as I had no idea who William Burroughs or J.G. Ballard were at the time.

Denise started borrowing LPs from him, as we did back then, and was staggered at what he liked, he was really ‘into’ Killing Joke, the Comsat Angels, and Japan, music she absolutely loved, and he was a big David Bowie fan, which ticked all the boxes with her.

One Friday after several pints of Heavy and nips of Grouse, Gaz and I staggered up the city’s main thoroughfare, to his flat, in Greenhill Road, a top floor garret, as he called it.

‘You’ve seen my album collection, I never told you about my books, you’ll have maybe guessed that I am a reader too, especially of sci-fi and horror.’

He opened a cabinet which was in the small hallway, and a perfectly filed mini library was revealed to me. All in strict alphabetical order, from Ballard, Philip K. Dick and Heinlein to Leiber and Lovecraft, Machen, Moorcock and Poe, a veritable feast of the fantastic and the macabre, lots of names I had heard of, but not yet read.

My reading at the time, was horror (Stephen King and James Herbert), and the few enjoyable books I read at school, ‘Of Mice and Men,’ ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ and especially ‘1984’, that would soon change ..If you’ll pardon the pun,  sci-fi was alien to me, at that time.

Gaz told me that he was also an amateur author, but not confident enough to send anything for publication, and of course, being a ‘poor civil servant’, he  could only afford an old typewriter to write on, as the personal computers or ‘PCs’ ,said to be the next big thing were the preserve of the rich at the time, and neither Gaz, Denise nor I was anything approaching rich.

One night Gaz told us, when relatively sober, that he had travelled in time.

Neither Denise nor me, knew what to say to that one, she liked sci-fi books and movies, but we both knew that even the technology of the ‘eighties had not, as far as we were aware, achieved such a thing.

He told us that he had been out drinking with his work colleagues in Glasgow, after one of those training courses we often got sent on. He had drifted from the crowd, as he was getting bored with their work orientated conversations, and saw to his delight a new pub, called ‘The Time Tunnel,’ it looked good, not too trendy, or full of posers, and yes, the music sounded good. He had heard Bowie’s ‘Scary Monsters and Super Creeps’ screaming out at him, as if to invite him into the place. He entered the place, and doubted if the work crowd had even noticed he was gone. It was themed as a futuristic bar, I suppose that we all thought that all bars would be like this in the fabled ‘Year 2000’, when one imagined we would be driving around , or maybe flying around, with the aid of jet packs, and cars would be written into history, the ‘paper free office’, that had been touted by those in the higher echelons of our organization.

Gaz explained to us that this place was near to Beresford, a pub we knew from our training courses, but it was up an alleyway, across from it. I must admit, I managed to miss that, but then, when you have had a few to drink, you do miss things.

‘So, one minute I was in the Bar, being served by a lovely bartender dressed in futuristic clothes, which looked nice, and she reminded me of Gabrielle Drake in UFO, the sci-fi show from the ‘seventies, if you remember her, she had coloured hair, a bit punky looking. I drank my drink quickly, and next thing I know, I am in Glasgow, the same place, and it is 2023’, he said.

So, what would 2023 be like, we wondered, and he told us.

‘I met this guy called Frank, who reminded me of someone I had met on a course, but he was ancient, he looked about late fifties, sixty, a bit bloated, like someone who liked a drink or two.

Frank was hanging about outside, looking a bit boozy, and disorientated, as if he did not know where he was.

He was telling me about his time travel adventure, back to World War One in France, where he met an Aberdonian soldier, called Jimmy Pirie, who was an aspiring author, and a priest called Fr. Adam, who hailed from the Aberdeen area also. Fr. Adam had been a chaplain to the sick and suffering and was slightly stressed out by his time out there.

Frank had told Gaz  about the Covid pandemic, and how it had been a real ‘game changer for the world , and how his own life as a civil servant , had, like the world , been turned upside down by the dreadful contagion of 2020, and how he was on the eve of his retirement from a job he only intended staying in for a couple of years, when he started in the early ‘80s. Gaz  wondered if this Frank guy was the real pompous bugger in his course during today, he was called Frank, and he was very much someone who would be good at ‘speaking a good game’ in the workplace, or at least seemed that way in the eighties, a lot can change over 40 years. If this was the same guy, he had doubled in weight, over the years, which was conceivable.

Once Gaz finished the story, I looked at him in disbelief, a contagion almost forty years from now? I wondered how drunk he was , but to be honest he was relatively compos mentis, so I did believe this, but I would mention this to Denise on Monday in the office , on the quiet, as I didn’t really want people taking the mickey out of Gaz for his storytelling , if that was what it was.

Monday came along, the day we all hated. When you were young at work, the week seemed really long, and Monday always gave the impression of being a busy day, which I would assume is logical, as you are back to work after two days off, so the heat will be on.

Gaz came into work looking pleased with himself, still wearing the same baggy suit, but today he was carrying a plastic bag from one of the record shops in town. But it did not look like it was a record he was going to be showing us.

‘What’s in the bag?’ said Denise,

He declined to comment and made his way towards me.

“Mike, this might help you believe my story from Friday night,” said Gaz, passing me the bag.

I left the office for a few minutes, none of the managers were about, so they were not going to care whether I was at my desk or not.

I went into the gents’ toilet, put the seat down and locked the cubicle, then opened the bag.

What I beheld, was a manuscript for a book, called ‘Covid-diary’, to someone from our decade it looked like a sci-fi dystopia, set in the 2020’s, and written by someone called ’Frank Scott’ , but a cursory reading, and the giveaway title, proved that it was an actual diary of the events during the ‘Covid-19 Pandemic’, which took place in 2020, and a couple of years after. It scared me to think that anything like this would take place in my lifetime, as I had heard of the Spanish Flu of 1919, from my Grandad, who had been a child when that plague swept the world, and that sort of thing seemed to belong to a bygone age, to my mind.

I would keep this whole thing to myself, until I had spoken to Gaz, it looked like what he had told me was true, rather than a sci-fi tale of his own composition.

I would tell Denise later, but meantime would return to my desk, and get on with the mound of paperwork the deputy manager had been demanding I get done as soon as possible.

My ruminations were interrupted by a rattling at the door, someone obviously needed to use the toilet. I flushed it, and exited, with my bag in hand, which merited a funny look from Peter, the enforcement officer.

I would also speak to Gaz about this over a pint at lunchtime if we were through with the office work.