The Ring of Power (1)

"Fucking ring of power, I hate it."

 

We had lent our camper van to a friend of a friend, Tom. We no longer used it, we'd been about to sell it, it was no longer taxed or insured, but another friend of a friend's friend had a place where Tom could pitch it, there was even a shower and toilet he could use, so we lent it to him until the council could get their arse together and find him somewhere to live. It ended up taking them seven months.

 

"We liked him though, Tom, the man in our van, he was funny, clever, down on his luck but nothing wrong with that. He used to come round our house to watch TV, there were no such facilities in our camper van.  He would sit there, mouthing off at everything we watched, like our own private Gogglebox.

 

Often he would nail the programme dead with a withering one liner that perfectly summed up everything wrong with the show. "Stop flapping your arms and act, you cunt," he'd once shouted at a certain incarnation of Dr Who.  Other times, though, he would just babble. "Hah, where are your sherry glasses now?" he once shouted at Trevor McDonald during a documentary on knife crime.

 

So there was no way he was going to sit through the whole of the Lord of the Rings without saying something.

 

He lasted ten minutes. The first second the ring appeared he shouted: "Fucking ring of power, I hate it," and, something he'd never done before, he switched the TV off.

 

He sat there, staring at the blank screen, twitching uncontrollably.

 

"Are you alright?" my wife said. "Can I get you anything?"

 

"Tea," he said, desperately, the way a drug addict might request a hit.

 

"What is it?" I said.

 

He stared at me for a while, then said: "If you ever write about this, it must be a special story, your 500th or something, not just another piece of crap you churn out."

 

"Fine," I said. I constantly write about real life incidents, I don't think I've ever written anything you could properly call 'fiction', but I'm used to censorship. My wife constantly forbids me from writing about personal matters, which is why, incidentally, there has never been a character called Julie in any of my stories.

 

"So what is it?" I said again. "Don't you like Lord of the Rings?" (A lot of people don't).

 

"Na, it's not the flick," he said, he had a way of making the word 'flick' sound like 'fuck', mainly because he said the word 'fuck'. Sorry, I'm censoring, he called films fucks because "They're too fucking long," like novels or plays.

 

"Na, it's not the fuck," he said, "It's the ring. The fucking ring of power."

 

I said nothing. You didn't interrupt Tom while he was talking, it would be pointless, like shouting at the people on Gogglebox (and only Tom did that).

 

He reached into one of his pockets - Tom was all pockets, seemingly hundreds of them, in every fold of every item of clothing, even his socks had pockets, they contained everything you could ever think to put in a pocket, he would pull out fags, sweets, gum, useless pieces of paper, really important pieces of paper, phone numbers with no name on that Tom would make us ring to find out who they belonged to (usually someone that claimed never to have met Tom or anybody remotely like him), receipts, photos, clumps of grass, a ball bearing, scratchcards (used and unused), condoms (thankfully just unused), Christmas tree baubles, whistles, notepads, a golden compass, scissors, half a torn tarot card, God, the word 'God' written on a crumpled piece of paper ("how the fuck did God get there?" he'd said, slumping depressed, as if his pockets had spoiled by God's unexpected appearance).

 

This time he didn't pull out God, or sweets, or baubles, he took out a ring, a plain gold ring, one I'd never seen him wear, one I'd never heard him mention.

 

"This is my fucking ring of power," he said.