69. A snake eating its own tale

This story will begin shortly. And it will begin with an ending.

It will begin with a pathetic, squalid ending when I find him cold and still on my settee.

This story will then proceed in reverse. It will flow uphill as I try to unravel what happened, and why and when, and look for who could have done that to him during an evening I have no memory of.

Finally, this story will end with a beginning. It will finish when I finally reach the headwater of these events, the beginning of the end that started this whole sorry tale.

And as it ends, I will realise that I made this story begin and I made it end. And I will realise what it was that happened that night that I can’t remember. And it will feel like a snake eating its own tail, and I don’t think you’ll like me anymore.

But, as I say, first it begins with an ending.

68. Full Fathom Five

Under a dark sky, upon a heaving sea, in a boat, was a girl.

She was bent and thin, and her boat was small and frail. Together they were thrown by the swell and beaten by the waves, flayed by the rain, and pushed, pulled and jostled by the wind.

The boat offered no shelter from the storm. Rain and sea foam soaked her flesh, and the wind chilled it to her marrow.

The tempest threatened to overwhelm the boat and the girl. But they didn’t fight the elements; together they rode the swell and let the gale direct them.

She braced and balanced herself inside the boat. With her left hand, she paid out a plumb line. Despite the storm, she was determined to understand what lay unseen beneath, to sound out the profound, to fathom the depths.

And down there something was moving.

67. FFS: TOD TBC

One of my favourite things is that TLA is a three-letter abbreviation for "three-letter abbreviation".

That’s the kind of thing that is racing through my head right now. Because in about one second’s time, the car I’m in is about to be hit by a bloody great truck. It’s a DAF truck, you see, and I’ll wonder what “DAF” actually stands for.

When it does hit, I think it’ll be pretty much the end of little old me. It really is a very large truck. But in the meantime, we have all the time in world, at least until I’m done telling my story. That’s the beauty of a flashback, you see. I can basically tell you my whole life story. And if I tell it really slowly, like, taking a second to recount each second, I guess I can have my entire life all over again.

Don’t go away! I wouldn’t wish being subjected to that on my worst enemy (Who’s that? you ask. Well, you’ll need to read on to find out. See? Foreshadowing). Anyway, don’t worry; this will be my life story without all the dull bits and more of the good bits.

So why don’t you indulge me and let me tell you just how I got here? We can’t halt the inevitable, but we can at least put it off for a few hours. And surely you wouldn’t begrudge me a few hours more? Would you?

66. The Second Coming

Day 66, i.e. two thirds of the way through. And what's two thirds of 100? 66.6 recurring.

The second coming had not been a roaring success.

For a start, there had been no fiery chariot. That shouldn’t have been important, but it transpired that, without it, the believers were not so believing. And there were an awful lot of others ostensibly like him, asking why people just couldn’t be nice to each other and not try to fill the holes in their hearts with metals and stones.

More pertinently, it also transpired that the people who looked after his Church were not desperately keen on being contradicted, especially about the poverty thing. And so they’d burned him at the stake.

The second second coming had been even worse. He had performed his miracles, but all it had created was disagreements. How had he done it? Was it really a miracle? And there were now all sorts of different groups bickering over the future of his Church with the kind of myopic pedantry that used to amuse but now dismayed.

Indeed, they had agreed on only one thing – turning water into wine was probably blasphemous and most certainly witchcraft. So they’d hung, drawn and quartered him.

But the second second second coming was probably the worst to date. There was a fiery chariot and columns of flames and everything. The people heard. But they didn’t want to listen. It turned out that most of them were quite happy, thank you, with the sinning. And some of those who should have been believers were somewhat cynical about being told that, yes, their lives were cold, brutal, short and basically miserable, but that didn’t matter because as long as they listened to him it would be worth it when they were dead. And some of them just didn’t like him and refused to recognise him.

And with that, and without realising it, they killed their God.

And that is where I make my second coming. Please allow me to introduce myself: I am nothing if not patient.

And I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.

And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.

65. Setting Sun

She had cast a long shadow over his life.

Actually, that wasn’t fair.

She cast a warm glow from behind him, like a summer evening's sun. It was his stupidity getting in the way of that which cast the dark shadows in front of him.

64. Tracks Of Her Tears

She had felt on the verge of tears for weeks , as if she’d had a high-water table or a Spring tide.

Then the waters came and she felt utterly drained, like a cloud that had rained itself away. But now the sun was weakly showing through.

63. On thin ice

The ice creaked and squeaked beneath his feet.

He was far from the shore, walking on thin ice.

Beneath his feet, he could see the lake water, half hidden by the clouded glass of the ice. Not hidden enough for his liking. The waters looked cold, black and bottomless, with only the brittle, frozen shell of ice to support him.

The ice creaked again.

It was too far away to turn back. Taking a deep breath, he walked on, walking on water.