CRASH
I am no longer certain who did these things that I remember doing. Different times, different places, different people. Time and circumstance laid down a sediment, fragments of experience, which gradually pressed the malleable stuff of youth into a different person. That much I do know, but along the way I had lost sight of the certainties of youth, of knowing who I am and where I belong. I could feel a nostalgia for them still lodged within me and I knew I had to find them again so that I could move on beyond the guilt.
She is not impressed. She dismisses becoming a different person as mere sophistry, a conscience on the run to evade the guilt of Anna’s death. So it might have been at the outset but not later on. As I grew older I wanted to atone for those failings and to be someone perfectly at ease with my past. Yet, whatever my motive, the experiences I gained along the way did eventually change me into someone else, someone who deserves absolution.
Such is the gist of my defence. It fails to convince. She throws it out on the grounds that personal responsibility stays with you for life however much I might change or refashion myself. And therein lies the paradox on which I am being judged. On the one hand, there is a sense in which I can say that I am no longer the person who did these things for which I am now called to account and am therefore absolved. On the other hand, however, no matter how much I may have changed since then, there is also a sense in which they are still my memories, my faults, part of my life.
She also says that there can be no redemption without faith. Now it is my turn. I reject that immediately. It seems a pretension too far, sprung from the delusion that there can be only one sole fount of all grace.
I could have excused my early faults as the betrayals of callow youth but, until they are redeemed, acknowledged betrayals of whatever degree corrode whoever I will become. I understand why politicians never feel able to admit their disasters and why criminals will not willingly confess their bloody crimes. It does not fit the person that they think they are to be capable of such horrors. But one day they will be a different person and so capable of redemption by proxy. I know it sounds too easy. She is right to be sceptical. I do not understand it but that is how the paradox dissolved for me on the road to Monmouth, a few minutes before I crashed.
When I finally finished rebuilding my old motorcycle that had lain in boxes in the garage for years I was well-aware that this body would no longer bounce down the road as it had done forty years before. Of course, they were right when they said that I could not recapture youth. Old limbs and muscles cannot pretend to those activities. That was not the point. Looking back, it is not so much the energy, the willing mind and body that are now lost as the attitude of innocence that fired them up and gave them direction. I knew that there was no honour in age just as clearly as I understood that there was no going back. Rather, I wanted to revisit that innocence of mind, to pay homage to that person and to redeem his faults before he faded forever. Redeem the past and move on into the comfortable security of old age. Then I will find release and a place to belong. It may not be very appealing but at least it is a recognisable status and identity to be part of, unless that too vanishes the moment I attain it.
But how will I know when I am old? It is much easier to see in others than in ourselves. I have seen what is waiting for me. While driving the minibus to the Day Centre I could study the pensioners in the rear view mirror and see my own future set in a tableau of life in retreat. This is how I learned the bitter truth that there is no honour in the impotence of age. The nervous shuffle of each faltering step; the fading recognition of time and place and destination. Castaways in a world that only has hints and whispers of familiarity, yet still with vivid memories of a different person long ago when ageless immortals strutted careless with youth and life was more future than past. But whose future; whose past?
Do they know they are old? Years ago they must have realised that the face in the mirror is an ever fading echo of those smooth features of youth. Sometimes, as I do up their seatbelts in the minibus, I could believe that the glint in a watery eye is really a frozen tear of rage at growing old, the final atrocity visited upon them by a callous god.
I used to think you would know you were old when you could no longer revisit the places and people of your past, but that only produces an inconclusive balance sheet. Some features are gone forever whereas others are still recognisable.
The fire station is no longer in the town centre and the old tram depot is gone where the buses used to bounce over the remaining tram lines and uneven setts. The spinning mills still stand along the canal but long gone are the mill girls who burst into the chip shop at lunchtime, bubbling with life and flecked with cotton lint. Gone too the terraced rows where, one morning heavy with a hard frost, I saw coral necklaces strung between the telegraph poles and a watery sun rising to burnish the slate roofs. These were the streets where I learned to belong, walking the long way round to our meeting place at the ‘Jolly Carter’ so that I could pass the doss house on the corner and nod a greeting to the purple skinned Negro who sat outside in fine weather. Like a longstanding regular, that route took me in through the court behind the pub, past the outside toilets and the back doors of the adjoining houses that framed the court.
The railway viaduct still spans the valley, its parapet now fringed with a fretwork of gantries and power lines. The town hall is still the same white marble wedding cake but without the Saturday night dances where we cut our teeth as 15 year olds learning how to survive in an adult world. Rick Sykes was the cock of the walk, holding court at one end of the bar. Electric blue suit, bootlace tie, a bouffon of blond hair blown into a quiff at the front and a DA at the back, he spent most of the night at the bar while his girlfriend danced with her friends. His nickname ‘Syko’ created a local reputation that left him unchallenged. Even the national service squaddies back on a 72 left him alone though their disputes and rucks left the crunch of glass under foot at home time. He was about ten years older than us so we never spoke a single word to him but we did get to be on nodding terms. That too was a kind of belonging: the imperceptible nod of greeting and recognition, at the bar or in the gents, meant that we were part of the furniture of his world, and safe, so long as we did not do something stupid like asking his girlfriend to dance. In the interval, a pass-out and a half of mild in a long vanished back street pub, affecting a nonchalant right to be there when the police inspector did his rounds with his night stick under his arm.
So much has gone and what remains is something else entirely, just like the person who once walked these streets. That’s how it amounted to a double loss; the identities of place and person dissolved in the mutability both around me and within.
Anna had a different perspective. She thought you would know that you were old when you no longer had anything to aim for: no plan nor purpose to punctuate the long daily sameness between getting up and going to bed. But, she worked in a care home and so perhaps it was simply that the residents surrendered to the benevolent dystopia that woke them, fed them, changed their pads and bathed them and, when the time came, ensured that the ambulance arrived for the final journey with its siren and flashing lights switched off so as not to agitate them. At work she always wore her hair tightly bound back lest it fall forward and drag in bodily fluids. Compared to that we had it easy on the vehicles. We just took the people from home to the day centre in the morning and back home in the afternoon. Sometimes, we might have to take a deep breath and go into a house to help the elderly passenger look for a front door key because months of a leaking catheter soaking into the carpet or incontinent nights on the mattress produced fumes that could strip the leaves from the trees as soon as the door opened. On a cold day, it might be an uncomfortable ride to the day centre with the windows open but once there, that was it: spray the seat with disinfectant, wipe it dry and it was ready for the next run. Anna had it a hundred times worse, day in day out.
Ultimately, though, it was more complex than either of us thought. To navigate successfully the rite of passage into old age I had to lay the ghosts of youth. No longer caught in its undertow of loss and regret, only then would I be free to run with the tide of age. I would not be immune to further uncertainty. Fortune could still ambush me with random blows but I would be able to face them with a new confidence of who I am.
Aiming for Cardiff was part of trying to find this release from the past, journeying alone to fulfil those eager plans we had made together. Sitting close to Montgomery castle we had watched the sun rise over Corndon Hill, stretching fingers of light through the streets below and chasing twilight shadows into doorways. There and then we planned to explore the borderlands, to follow the accent of the woman we heard in a shop in Oswestry whose sturdy brogue of rural England was lightly seasoned with dancing Welsh rhythms. Chester to Chepstow, criss-crossing the border, the human fault line, then on to Cardiff. It had been a warm night and so we lay the tent on the ground and only pulled our sleeping bags around us in the sudden chill just before dawn. As the sun rose Anna sat up, shook out her shoulder length hair and looked down on the town, resting her arms and chin on her raised knees, still with her sleeping bag tight around her. We traded the names of places on our route: Wrexham, Oswestry, Welshpool, Knighton, Newtown, Monmouth. But I had to make the trip alone all these years later.
I remember passing Ross, lying in an autumn mist, then following the Wye valley towards Monmouth. The road dropped gently into a sweeping right hand bend. It reminded me of Simpson’s corner, though slightly narrower and tighter. No problem. Just before I reached the apex, the front wheel disappeared from under me.
