The Time Traveller
1: A Funny Thing Happened…
Someone had to invent time travel, didn’t they? Well, why not me? Oh, I know the old joke - we are all time travellers, moving forward in time one second per second. But I mean an actual, honest to goodness, real creation!
And there I would sit, in the gardens, holding that acorn, that nut, that seed - you know what they say, ‘great oaks from little acorns grow’? And so did my discovery. From an inspired point of view some time ago, I planted that acorn, to see the sapling turn into a tree, spreading its limbs out, searching for a home. And here it found me again, sitting, waiting for it to come. From one little inspirational thought - a supposition; a desire - it sprang.
#
You know I would watch them. Even now I would watch them, despite that mess of a middle age they have all fallen into as a band, with those distinctly tired, weak albums over the last decade or so.
But back in the day they were good. I mean really good. Simply put, I was too young then, too young to do what I really wished I could have done - followed them all round the country on their Never Defeated Tour, back in the Eighties. Oh, then they were a powerhouse, a global sensation. They were a damned miracle, and everyone who knew what real music was would listen to them on vinyl, on cassette - wherever and whenever they could. Maybe I exaggerate a little, but you weren’t there. You didn't feel the power of the mighty Woodrowe, when Ben bashed a good one out on his drums, carrying that rhythm, Eddy rode that bass, Susie chugged away contentedly at those power chords, feeding out a melody for Callum to counter with his own, cutting the accent to those strong vocals of him also, to build a full sound, a solid brick wall of melody, structure and tone. I suppose if that wasn't your taste back then, well, what can I say? All I can do is apologise - apologise to your ears for having to listen to that crap you must have listened to. And probably still listen to.
But it was that eponymous album, Centwine, with its song Future Dystopia, that made me the man I am today. One great summer, back in 1986, I had nothing better to do, so watched an interview with Dave Cambridge on telly. It was then that I realised even Rock Stars were intelligent and had something to say. Most of them did, anyhow. Usually when they could stay off the blow, the girls and the booze long enough to have an intelligent thought. Anyway, after that epiphany of an interview, came on that same song, attached to the dodgy early Eighties quality video they must have paid for with their first set of royalties. Perhaps not, but it was certain that by now they would have paid for it, a thousand times over.
It was an awful video. It really was. But the power of the song more than made up for it. Hey, fine, I was a child, but they still do something to me, even now. Granted nowadays it’s usually when they play those old classics, even if a little slower or missing notes completely, the drums just off the pace a little bit and the complicated riffs in their twenty fourths now somewhere closer to sixteenths, but damn it! They were still Woodrowe, even if older, and playing at being young men and women. So was I, I suppose? Somewhere along the way the music stayed the same and the people around it grew older. Well, that’s the true beauty of music. It’s timeless - even if the audience and the performers weren’t.
But hey, if you invent time travel, what are you supposed to do with it? I chose to go back to 1984, of course. To follow Woodrowe on their country-wide tour - the fabled Never Defeated Tour of that same year. Naturally.
And as I sat there, beneath that oak tree, some twenty to twenty five feet in height, I did it. I travelled time.
There I was, still me, still seated, holding the acorn I had plucked from the tree that was not there, but would be. I planted the acorn in the ground, so that it would grow to provide the seed for its own creation some years down the line. I then stood and left the gardens. Where I was going, I wasn't quite sure. First of all I would need to establish when I was, then work it from there.
#
“You’re mad. You’ll never manipulate time! It’s a fallacy!”
“Someone’s got to try, Pete. Why not me?”
“Because, I don’t know, it’s utter lunacy?”
“Ah, but we don’t know what we’re truly capable of until we really try.”
“I want to marry a supermodel, but it isn't going to happen, is it?”
“Isn’t it? Have to tried?”
“Well, no, but -“
“There you are then. Try it, Pete. You never know until you try.”
“Hippy bullshit, mate.”
“Nah, just - wishful thinking?”
“Its a waste of time. You must see that.”
“So is walking. So is talking. So is breathing. So is reading and writing. So is driving and watching telly -“
“Alright. I get the point. It’ll be your own time you're wasting, I suppose.”
“Exactly.”
“I still think you’re mad.”
“They thought the same of Professor Saul H. Rankin.”
“Who?”
“If you don’t know who, you won’t understand why.” I smiled.
“Whatever. It’s all a bit pie in the sky for me now.”
“The greatest ideas usually are to the ones around them.” I said, still smiling, but adding a wink just to hammer it home.
#
Sometimes we remember things and are certain they’re real, but they turn out to be dreams. Sometimes the opposite happens, which is rarer but still occurs. I can’t count on my fingers and toes, nor the ones I borrow from the next person either, the number of those incidents that have happened to me. I recount a memory, with the participant present, and to a one they tell me that never happened. It’s unnerving, but only if you discount the possibility that the dream is in fact real and all we see is the dream. Confusing, I know, but look at this way - if we dream something, we live within that dream. We exist, we make decisions, and those decisions have consequences. How is that any different to so-called real life? Are we living any less of a life in our dreams than we are in supposed reality? As the good old Christians seem to think, we are all sinners fighting for our place in this world to sit at the side of our Creator in Heaven? So is this world, to them, simply an illusion? Does that mean that the only true life we must want or desire to lead is the one when we are dead in this one? So, I ask again, is a life led in the contentiously named Dream World any less than the one led in the supposedly waking, or Real World? It’s certainly a quandary and a half, don’t you think?
Like the rape of the girl, I don't know, I think I’ll call M.
Is it true to say that we remember the negative things more easily than the positive ones? Is this because negative memories are weighted more? Or is it because positive memories are transient, and have no solidity?
She was cute, sure. Not stunning.
As kids, around fourteen, our want was to explore, particularly places we weren't supposed to. There used to be this old Victorian House, condemned pretty much, and everyone from School had been in there at least once. It was supposed to be haunted, and I only thought I saw something to assure this girl she too had seen something. I didn’t. At least I don't think I did. Some performed Ouija sessions in the basement on the weekends, and the tales were chilling. But it got so popular that eventually the Teachers got to know about it, and there was a thing in assembly telling all kids that the house was off limits. The usual crap.
Another place we went was a building site, where they were building affordable houses for this new estate. We did the usual, of smashing in plasterboards, ripping out electrics, breaking windows and setting little fires - no workers were around I have to add. We weren't insane.
Anyway, time was up and we planned to head home, across the field, overlooked by no one. No one cared about security then, and the over use of CCTV hadn't even begun. I’m a bit hazy on how it all started, but I’ll do my best.
The two rapists, two people I knew - not well, I have to admit - grabbed her, pulling at her jeans, pulling them to her knees. They forced her to lie down, one at each shoulder. They made her pull her knickers down to meet the jeans, until they forced both off completely. Things happened, and not all of them stuck into my memory. Something this serious, one would have thought I would remember every tiny detail. Trauma or shock perhaps? Or that it was simply a dream that I confused as a memory?
So one of the rapists, they undid their own jeans and took out their erect penis, and forced her to take it with one hand, then the other one did the same. She was forced to masturbate them, until one, let’s say the right one, forced her to suck his dick. Next thing I remember is the other one reached for her vagina and began rubbing. It is difficult to remember if she was facilitating the two out of fear, but I remember very little after that, thinking, “Why am I still standing here watching? Why don’t I just go home?” So I did. I don’t remember the journey, just the intent.
That I stood watching, does that make me no better than her rapists? Neither of whom bothered to recognise I was there. And was part of me wanting to join in? I had never seen a girl naked before, never mind touched one. I certainly hadn't had sex by then, but I was certain of penile manipulation to exert pleasure. Or wanking, in common parlance.
Still to this day, I have no idea if I imagined it, I dreamt it, or it actually happened? It’s like one massive blob of uncertainty, waiting for some clarification that would never come. That girl died a few years later. People said it was an accident, but I’m not sure. Frankly, I’m not even sure that bit’s real either? Jesus, do I have an active imagination.
You know, it was the desperation and the pleading that I found appealing. I wanted her right then. Is that wrong?
Sexually, I developed early.
Sexual depravity and sexual proclivity. I think everyone’s suffered a bit with that? Except most people aren't brave enough to admit it.
And I never had much luck with the ladies. Quite frankly, I had plenty of chances, but not the wit to understand it.
I send a Valentines Card in School once to a girl I can’t even remember the name of. Years later she revealed her reciprocal feelings, but back then, we were both stupid kids, and I was too blind to see the clues, the non-verbal communication misinterpreted entirely into rejection. Maybe I have Aspergers.
And there was Nina Constantine. A plump girl with large breasts. Not that her breasts came into it, but she was actively attracted to me, instigating friends to entice me to ask her out. I rejected a chance. Christ, what was wrong with me?
And Maxine Hutton. She was not conventionally attractive, having very sharp features and a tom-boy attitude. She was mad to have fancied me. But she did, and I just didn't see it. Oh, I always had the words, the charm, the ability, but I was screwed with the looks to back it up. I can regret it now, or I can take solace in the fact that I was desirable once. But there is nothing of me to fancy anymore. Ever searching for the unobtainable.
See, I believed the Scriptwriters back then, when I watched Private Benjamin - that Eighties film - where her husband dies during sex of a heart attack. It made me scared of sex for a very long time. I didn't know about Plot Devices back then, of course. Everybody lies.
Then there was Kerry. I did nothing because I didn’t recognise the signs.
The incident that predominantly stayed in my mind was the first girl I properly asked out.
We lived in houses opposite each other, and the first time I had seen her, I fell for her. She wasn't exactly the girl of my dreams, but she compelled something primal in me, something I obviously had never felt quite like before.
One day I noticed that Kerry was staring at me from her bedroom window. I can’t confirm if she was touching herself or not, but I like to think she was. I was watching telly. Noticing her and confident enough at the time to do so - something beaten out of me by years of rejection, I might add - I performed some suave and sophisticated wave and smile to her. She waved back and suddenly remembered herself, where she dropped below her windowsill. I smiled to myself, half expecting the reaction. I wasn’t arrogant. I just wanted to see if she actually liked me. That was the proof I needed and I was happy. Who wouldn’t be?
Perhaps she was just infatuated with me, but I picked my moment purely on instinct.
On the perfect day, I began the seemingly endless walk from my house to hers. The road that separated us was like a vast canyon fraught with danger and devilish distance. Anxiety burned my blood, seared my muscles and made me dizzy, some kind of haze that I walked through. But I had to do it. I knew I could have aborted at any time, but my body and mind where not in my control. It wasn’t until I reached her front door that I realised I wasn’t prepared, not at all. But instinct took me this far, and it would steer me right for the question.
The actual question and the answer become immaterial in the valley of time, but once on the date, this is where it failed.
Here it was, handed on a plate - this girl, this boy - and even though it was blindingly obvious and staring me in the face - nothing. I had no idea what to do, how to read or react to the signs she exuded. Look, call me a loser, but I have to say that in this context, Kerry had a responsibility too. If she had wanted something to happen, surely she could have pushed it too? I think in this case it was just two shy people devoid of a natural ability to bond with someone, given the simplest of stimulus. You know, I think all I needed to have done was put my arm around her and that would have been that? But I was shy. I was embarrassed. And hindsight is a vision of maturity - at least in this case. Oh, I know I’m not perfect. Never was. Probably never will be, but sometimes, just sometimes, I think we all need a well aimed kick up the arse.
Still it was my first time, so score one to me. Trouble is that back then I did nothing because I didn’t recognise the signs. I suppose that’s always been the commonality throughout most, if not all, of my relationships - be they plutonic, lustful, friendly or loving.
And, you know, eventually Kerry moved to some provincial town, much like where I had come from, and had married a man who could have been me, in another life. I must have been the blueprint, the one she was supposed to have? She must have passed that infatuation in me to another, a simulacrum. Me but not me.
I left it all too long, feeling time away equals less memory of what could have been. But honestly? It still hurts. I could have had it all, if only I knew what to look for, or even when I had it, what to do. Perhaps I would never have been this bucket of flesh which is all that’s left of a man just surviving.
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