 |
| 'Steampunk' courtesy of Pixabay.com |
To be honest, I still don’t remember how it happened. One minute I was watching a pair of cats playing piano and then up on the screen popped this wild-looking man with a tangled shock of long, silver-grey hair, a beard and moustache. His startled brown eyes were wide open, staring directly at me, and then, after a moment or two, he asked me to say the word ‘bloppit’. Totally random, I know, but I said it anyway, just like that…’bloppit’….and at that moment my whole life changed. I can’t explain it….at all, really, all I know is that I started to see time differently from that moment on.
Ever since that day, I’ve never seen time in terms of one thing happening after another and then something else happening because of what went before, if that makes sense. I could suddenly just make a decision to say ‘bloppit’ and go back to anywhere, anytime I wanted to.
To begin with I was like a kid in a sweetshop, greedy for the past. I couldn’t get enough of days gone by, of people that I’d only ever known from photos, TV documentaries. It was as if the whole of history suddenly became my own memories, my personal history. I mean, in our own heads we’re all time travellers; we’re constantly going backwards and forwards in time, 24-7, there’s no sense of the passage of time in our memories. But for me, now, time works differently. I can go back and actually be a part of other people’s memories, speak their language(s), understand what they’re saying, understand what they mean even when what they’re actually saying is something completely different.
To tell you the truth, I don’t know who or where I am half the time. One minute I’m sitting next to Napoleon Bonaparte (arrogant little twerp, Frenchmen are always the same) just before the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the next it’s 1944 and I’m in the War Cabinet discussing the Normandy landings with Winston Churchill (a bit of a p*sshead, no doubt about it, but a diamond bloke all the same). Over the last two years I’ve had really interesting chats with Julius Caesar (a real hardnut, worried about going bald), Henry the Eighth (one sandwich short of a picnic but you wouldn’t want to cross him), William Shakespeare (lived in his own little dream world, or rather his own big dream world), JFK (lived to chase women, how he found time to run his country I’ll never know), Adolf Hitler (you don’t want to know!) and many, many others.
For a while, I loved it: learning new languages, history, psychology, picking up lots of useful tips as to how to get on in life, many of which I might even use if I ever get around to actually getting on with living my life. But….there’s always a ‘but’, isn’t there? It’s like I said before, if you’ve been living other people’s lives for a long time, you start to forget who you are…who I am, or was, or could be. Call it an identity crisis, if you like, but I wanted to learn more about me. And so, just like that, one day I made up my mind to go and see my Mum and Dad….in April 1959, eight months before I was born.
‘Bloppit’ I said, and here I am…Romford in 1959. The sun’s shining, not a cloud in the sky, the grey buildings of 2018 now brighter, whiter, confident in their newness. There aren’t as many cars on the roads but the ones that are were all made down the road in Dagenham: Ford Prefects, Anglias, Cortinas. All the men, young and old, are wearing shirts and ties, no shorts, even though it’s a hot day, and all the ladies and girls are dressed like their mothers, their grandmothers. There’s a radio somewhere playing ‘Return to Sender’, the unmistakable voice of Elvis changing the world song by song. Very soon that radio will be playing ‘She Loves You’ by The Beatles and everything will start changing much, much faster.
It’s the same, but not the same; ‘the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there’ and Romford in 1959 is another country. I’m standing outside the Debenhams building with no intention of buying anything, looking at the concrete pillars that will be coloured a dirty grey in 2018 but that now, in 1959, are an almost gleaming white. And then I see them - my Mum and Dad, fifty-nine years younger.
They’re walking together arm in arm, only recognisable from old photos they’ve shown me down the years, along Romford High Street. Those photos must still be in the attic of their house, fifty-nine years in the future. They’re dressed up to the nines, Saturday best, smart as you like, off to somewhere special.
All of a sudden I can’t catch my breath, my heartbeat’s gone into overdrive, banging away nine to the dozen, loud enough for my Mum and Dad to hear. Oh fuck, they’re heading straight towards me! Fifty feet away, now forty, thirty, ten…I suddenly decide that I can’t face this…whatever the fuck you call it.…this meeting. I’m not ready, don’t know what to say, and so I turn away and keep my head down, make to cross the road.
“Wotcha matey!”
A voice I recognise, but at the same time different to the one I’ll come to know, the pitch very slightly higher, and sounding younger. I look back in the direction of the voice and see two fresh-faced young people gazing at me, smiling, friendly. Their faces are familiar, much-loved and yet it’s as if these people are from another planet. They looking at me like they know me, which they don’t, they can’t, at least not yet, but as they come closer their smiles are replaced by bewildered frowns. They’d been expecting to see somebody else, obviously. The young man, my father (!), speaks first.
“Oh sorry, mate…we thought you were somebody we…” He falls into a confused silence and I can’t speak either. Even if I could think of something to say I wouldn’t be able to say it.
The dreamlike silence is broken by the sudden appearance of another familiar face, out of the blue. Another young guy about the same age as my Mum and Dad, wearing a suit and tie, apparently oblivious to the blazing hot weather, with short black hair, a beard and moustache.
“Hey you two, how’s tricks?” he jovially asks the young couple.
I try but fail to remember where and when I’ve seen this guy before. The younger version of my father looks pleased to see him as they shake hands, all smiles, while my mother casts her eyes to the ground. Her cheeks flush crimson but it’s not due to the hot weather, even I can see that. My father nods in my direction as he speaks to the man with the beard.
“You could be brothers,” he says.
My mother really looks at me then, as if for the first time, and I have the strangest sensation that she knows why I’m there. But then she’s always known what I’m thinking about, always been able to see right into the heart of me, into my soul.
The man with the beard glances in my direction and I finally recognise him. His hair was longer in 2016, and silvery grey, his older, lined face bearing witness to the fifty-seven intervening years, in fact to all of time. But the brown eyes are the same, blazing with life, and they’re now staring at me with a new intensity, as if sharing a secret, a secret that must remain so.
“Bloppit!” he says.
And so here I am, back in 2018 and back in Romford. I’ve never seen Mr. Bloppit, as I call him, again and I don’t expect to, not now he’s shared his secret, one that I will never share with another living soul for as long as I live. This afternoon I’m going to visit my Mum and Dad, but first I’m going to get a haircut, get my beard and moustache shaved off. I know that’ll make Mum happy, she’s never liked the beard, said it didn’t suit me. We’ll sit in their front room with our cups of tea, discussing the football and the telly and the weather and many more things besides. On first recollection, these conversations won’t mean anything very much, but one day, in time, they’ll mean everything.
Copyright owned by Steve Ellis
=============================================================================
Comments
Post a Comment