On Shifting Sands

Let’s start with when I joined the army. That seemed like a steady job but the day I enlisted the Prime Minister said such and such a pariah state were a clear and present danger and we went to war. I did okay. I was caught in a roadside ambush but I wasn’t too attached to that arm anyway.

That same year I was orphaned and used a pat on the head to buy a cheap house in rural Norfolk. Life was almost idyllic. I admired the Victorian sturdiness of the village school, the awesome medieval carpentry in the parish church roof kind of blew my mind, as did the 15th century rood screen- which somehow survived the iconoclasts. The lighthouse was a blast too. It was a locale that made one misty-eyed about olde England and Shakespeare and centuries-old country pubs.

As for my little house, well it was built too well with room to swing any size feline in. You know, solid. None of your cavity wall this and breeze block that. Real bricks, a cosy bay window and an old-skool toilet that flushed whatever I was clearly full of into oblivion. I just can’t shut up about the plethora of things I liked about the place but I should mention the sticking point was the house, bungalow if you prefer, fell into the sea. Well it was a particularly windy year, I must say. The coastline normally retreats by a metre per annum but it can be several more, so I've discovered.

You can take the Bible literally, sometimes. Do not build a house on sand. Take that as a metaphor, if you will, concerning certain choices made in my life. Anyway.

Eventually, the insurance coughed a house up in Stockton-on-Tees. Shortly after I married, and then the ground seemed to move from under me again. I was suffering short-term memory loss vis-à-vis the improvised explosive device and my wife took advantage by telling me we weren’t married and it wasn’t my house. Well, how was I to know?

It had all started so well. Take our first night. We were in bed surveying each other’s bodies like they were rich unchartered territories, which a Gen Z might frown upon as a colonial turn-of-phrase. Yet, how else could I describe that quietly electric sense of cards laid on the table when one is first au naturel?

“You have exquisite areolas,” I said to her.

“And you,” she replied, “just about have an adequate cock.” As she said it, a lorry thundered past, rattling the window frames and muffling her words.

I don’t know, that amused us at the time. And when I kissed her, that seemed to wrap the moment in a little bow. And yet I tend to think the moment- however sweet- foretells a bitterness that appears to lie outside its bounds. DNA is in every one of our cells, wedding photographs reveal marriages will sour and I’m not sure our kissing that night was all that. Looking back, I remember her kind of wincing and I just brushed it off. Now that, is building a house on sand.

So that was a bit of a setback. And for a while I lived in a caravan. Quite the come down from a 3 bed semi. Even one on a floodplain in a rough area. But the thing about caravans, they’re little worlds that re-write the rules of space. You think Pluto is small, a dwarf planet in the celestial sticks, then you see it beside its moon, Charon, and Pluto seems correspondingly large. Then you see a computer simulation of Charon beside most solar system moons and, crumbs! Charon actually holds its own. If it smashed into our planet it wouldn’t be bye bye mankind, or dinosaurs, or small mammals. No, bye bye Earth. And that’s how it goes with caravans. Those little pods cocooning itinerant night owls in Japan made mine look rather airy.

The only trouble was I was a willing worker on an organic farm, the caravan came with the work and it wasn’t a permanent arrangement. More like 10 days.

Happily, on my lunch break I won the lottery and decided to have a baby. Not an easy thing for a man of my age, but on the back of this lucky break I thought I'd give it a shot. Don’t judge me, you may find yourself playing supermarket sweep with your life when time is running out. Everything is fine until you’re 59 and then you start wandering onto Thai bride websites. But I wasn’t quite there. I was for tapping hastily tapped in telephone numbers and one contact in particular was delighted my luck was in. It was ‘your girl’ Jessica Party and she definitely made a case for nominative determinism.

We partied everywhere. In clubs and casinos and, when times were hard, a multi-storey car park. Come to think of it, she didn’t attend that one. That must have been a solo effort. I think it was the day I checked my online account and discovered I was overdrawn following a cheeky January sale purchase, seemingly a part payment. She walked out my life wearing one shoe I paid for. Maybe another client of hers paid for the other.

What happened to the child idea? I don’t know. Dreams are money pits. Birth rates fall in uncertain times.

I suppose I should have realised £10000 is not a big win. Not these days. My online acquaintances kept telling me it wasn’t ‘A life changing amount’ and I should have invested it in blockchains and non-fungible tokens. But as is so often the case in life, the goalposts keep shifting.

See, when I was a spring chicken property was the hot stuff, but now it’s an unrealistic prospect for many of us. One has to think tech shares, crypto, drop shipping, answering questions on Quora, selling your soul on YouTube. But by the time one wises up and realises where the money is everyone wants a piece of that cherry, like those homeless Chinese singing into their smartphones in underpasses.

Something has to give.

When you’re as slow as I am, you never catch up with life. Still, I always believe there’s something around the corner. Call it manifestation, if you will. And I was right. I’d only walked two blocks when I saw her. Was it her? I think it was. Yes. It was her. It was Gladys.

“Sandy!” she said.

“Gladys,” I said.

“Sandy!” she said.

“Yes, it's really me. I'd forgotten the sound of my own name,” I remarked.

“Where were you?” Gladys exclaimed.

“Well, last night I slept under a bush. But I was as snug as a Golden Snub-nosed Monkey.”

“I've told you not to go wandering off,” she said, mad as hell.

“I’m sorry, I’ll try not to. It’s been, what? 30 years?”

Gladys continued yelling at Sandy, a small girl standing behind me.

So I metaphorically went to Specsavers and continued my search.

I was cros­sing a busy road when an ambulance swerved. I felt like the luckiest man in Britain. If you’re going to get run over, who better? True, I didn’t survive but the mortician, what a lovely man...And he washed and ironed my top for me. Fun fact, the one with the slogan ‘My life fell apart and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.’ Bit tight on me, but an old favourite.

Yes, they did a splendid job of making me look presentable. My entangled familiar, the ex-wife came to identify the body. A Russian lady, Novosibirsk way, bit of a princess complex. She asked to be alone, then leant over my corpse and kissed me. Tongues, everything. No wincing. There’s guilt for you. And after she’d given me the best French kiss of my life- my death, I suppose- she walked towards the door, then turned back and slapped me.

And told me off for the state of my garage.

“It’s disgusting, it’s filthy, it’s vulgar. I’m going to take a picture and stick it on your coffin. I listened to your fake promises for so long. You said you’d tidy it!”

“I made a start,” I replied. But she didn’t hear me.

Well, it’s true reader. I did have a garage on the matrimonial property containing an old Austin Allegro and a few other knick-knacks. But I paid her £50 a month for it when I temporarily moved out and she insisted it was no trouble. Now she was standing alone berating my corpse for having a messy garage. A mausoleum of man cave dreams now scattered on time’s tide. She said it was making her hair fall out and ruining her life.

The truth is, we hadn’t spoken in years. She was a mercurial sort but naturally had her good points. She spoke French fluently, she was kind to tortoiseshell cats and her life had obviously not gone to plan.

Then she knelt down and threw her arms around me, sobbing. “Can’t you see you abused me, Malachku! Your stuff was everywhere.”

Malachku! Malachku? I began to think my wife might have been Czech. You never really know someone, do you? And in truth, I didn’t. Ours was a whirlwind romance. Or she was a Couchsurfer who refused to leave, depending on your POV. But time can digest toxic relationships. Normality is for the birds. I knew that. When life gives you lemons they end up going mouldy in the fridge so you’re ahead of the game if you can use just one of them.

Speaking of which, I wanted to say, ‘Do a boot sale, pet. And sell the car? Open an Instagram account called Cash in the Garage, for heaven’s sake.’

‘No stupid advice please, just try and understand,’ she said, as if she heard my thoughts.

The Allegro didn’t miss a beat, of course. I just didn’t feel confident driving it with one arm. Not until I got the hydragas suspension fixed and the prosthetic arm I bought off Temu working properly.

But yes, things were looking up. For her, at least. I see myself as a sort of matchmaker cos she ended up dating the mortician. And that appeared to be going well. But he was actually a serial murderer.

When he was chopping her up into pieces the cat walked in tail high and curling slightly, sniffing the air and placing its dainty paws together.

Anyhoo, how am I writing this, you might ask, if I died. Well, I am certainly in decline. But I haven’t been clinically dead long. If you actually study these things, like, have you read Lucid Dying by Dr. Sam Parnia? Well then, you know that the lights don’t always just go out.

Cool stuff happens sometimes when you lose all vital signs. You meet dead relatives, get a life review, feel like a billion dollars. Sometimes it doesn’t go well. Always read the label. But suffice to say, I am dead and good riddance to my body, which I do not presently miss a bit. For the time being I can only assume my brain is still running the show. Something is still making this thing jive, because I am here or something that feels like me is.

Matter of fact, during the life review we went through every thing meticulously, rather like a 5D analysis of chess. I saw things from her point of view and his point of view and how every little decision rippled through the universe like background radiation. And I began to understand that I am the Walrus.

Yes, we’re all connected. We should all be a little kinder towards each other. So I’m glad I was an optimist because to be an optimist is to be kind to oneself and others but I do regret, just a little, that I might have to come back and do it all again because my life was built on shifting sands.