Inspiration from separation. Old friends just fade away

In 1992, I was back in England after many years abroad. I met an old friend from the 1960s and was struck by how far we had grown apart. It inspired me to write this story - published later that year. The story is entitled, "Dick."

God knew what had happened to Dick in those intervening years. What terrible hammer blows had reduced him and his hopes to this wretched state? Was this the person with whom I had shared so many of my childhood days? I do not pretend to have a good memory; I do recall the intense experiences of life, but looking at Dick now, did I dream those times together or were they true?

I remember the stained russet brickwork that cloistered our playground, sometime with painted cricket stumps, sometime with a nook to protect us from marauding bands of Apache Indians, sometime as a backstop to a football game and sometime the cause of scraped knees and shins. Dick had slipped and cracked his head on the painted cricket stumps and tears rolled down his cheeks. I stared at him. Until that moment he had been only a sketch with a lock of hair hanging over his forehead and he probably would have stayed that way if he had not started to cry. I suddenly saw him; through the tears I saw him, his integrity, his humanity. Dick became the greatest, the truest of friends and he has always shone in my memory like a beacon.

At the day's end, we walked away from the limits of the school and I remember the undecided flakes of snow nestling on our pullovers as we trudged towards the tenement blocks. Behind them, dark and ominous were the mills. Sometimes, if ever I took the tram, I could close my eyes and know exactly where I was in that city. The smell of resin meant Clough Mill and the timber yard, the smell of grease meant the soap works and the hollow clunks that seemed to echo up from the centre of the earth meant the armaments factory; the Big House as we called it. We rambled and stumped through the streets and Dick said: "There must be more than this." As he spoke, he screwed his face and wagged his head. "Who cares," I said. "Who knows?" he replied and we smiled at each other as we hatched the banter that became the trade-mark of our friendship. "And who cares?" I would ask. "Who knows?" he would reply, shrugging his shoulders and wrinkling his brow and his voice has echoed down the years so that whenever I hear these words, my feelings for Dick, his scratched knees and his cracked head, come back to me, powerful flowing and warm.

Sometimes we escaped from the enveloping squalor and clambered up to the Bowstones on the ridgeway above the town. On clear days the stones were visible from the streets. They were the shafts of Saxon crosses which at one time marked the boundary of some ancient kingdom and they rose out of the ground at impossible angles as if attached to the sky by an invisible thread. From this vantage point, the town stretched below us. Row upon row of mill tops and chimneys fading into the distance and rising out of a reddish-black haze that cut the buildings off at their bases so that they seemed to be sailing above the earth. I remember Dick stroking the stones and he said: "I feel here. I feel in contact."

"In contact with what?" I asked.

He was silent for a while and then he said: "Do you think people leave something behind them when they go? Do they leave a feeling...perhaps faith?"

I remember pondering for a while and all I could say was, "God knows," and Dick said, "Yes, maybe God knows," and he was not smiling.

I recall with intense sadness that afternoon in the summer of '52. All day long we had been waiting for the rain. It had been so hot and sultry that when at last the rain came, it was a blessed relief.

"I'm going away," I said.

Dick caressed the stones for a while and then he said, "When will we meet again?" "Who knows," I said and looking down because tears pricked my eyes I asked, "Who cares?" and Dick said, "I care."

It was forty years before I returned. My world and Dick's had become separated by more than time. We had walked the same road for a while and then, when the road had forked, we had gone our separate ways and as the years rolled by we lost the intimacy that that can only come through shared experiences. But I often turned, expecting to see him walking there beside me and as life went on and others took his place, I had to turn round and peer into the distance but I always caught sight of him, of the lock of hair hanging over the forehead, of the bruised legs and the cracked head and through the mist and the crowds of people that pushed and pulled in my memory, through all the sketches and all the outlines, Dick always shone through.

Forty years had passed and now I was a visiting dignitary, invited to give a series of lectures at my home town university. I had just finished a talk on Hegel when through the window, I saw them. Rising from the ground and still held up by the invisible thread, the Bowstones rose triumphant. I walked out of the school and onto the driveway to enjoy a moment of reflection at the day's end. The sound of gravel underfoot startled me but I mellowed with the aroma of wood smoke and the damp autumnal dusk with its suggestion of mist. The sight of the stones had recaptured some emotional response to that question put to me some forty years earlier. Now, I could answer it. 

There was another footfall and out of the mist came at first a lock of hair, then a cracked and broken head and a wrinkled face and the hint of a person I had known. It was Dick. He was shuffling aimlessly as if he had no place to go. He stumped along and wagged his head and his face was pinched and wrinkled like a nut. I followed him down the street and I listened to him muttering and what he said was as desperate a thing as I ever heard. Not once did he turn round. Had he, I wondered, had he ever turned round to peer into the past as I had so often done, expecting and maybe hoping to see me there? And as he walked I noticed the people, nudging, winking and pointing at the pathetic sight. He swayed into the deepening mist and he swung his head from left to right and I heard his cry waning as he went: "Oh God, He knows. And God, He knows. Surely God almighty knows. Oh God He knows. And God, He knows. Surely God almighty knows. And God, He knows......" 

Manchester 1992

Comments

[Christopher Goddard]

Your short stories are a great read - not just once but multiple times. Hard to choose a favourite - but if I had to it would probably be the one about the leaf :)

[robert john goddard]

I shall see if I can dig it out