Authors: John Marrs
Bradley put me in contact with its entrepreneurial Dutch owner who admitted he’d blindly purchased it through auction on description alone. I wrote him a detailed, twelve-page proposition, explaining who I was, my feelings towards his property, my qualifications and skills that would enable me to resuscitate it.
I listed the work it so fiercely required and an approximate timescale and costing. Then I crossed my fingers and waited. A fortnight later, Bradley approached me over breakfast.
“I don’t know what you said but the tight fisted bastard’s on board,” he smiled, and offered me a congratulatory handshake.
“Really?” I replied, genuinely surprised I’d been taken seriously.
“Yep. He’s wiring the money into the hostel’s bank account on Monday so you can get started when you like. He’ll probably sell it once you’re done though.”
At that point, I did not care. The news delighted and excited me in equal measures as for the first time in months I had something to focus my attention on other than myself.
August 13, 3.15pm
Few people have a greater impact on shaping you than the friends you cultivate when you’re a child.
Every boy needs reliable peers to offer him a reflection on the journey into manhood. With each acquaintance I made at the Routard International, I reflected more on the ones I’d cast aside; specifically my best friend, Dougie Reynolds, who arrived in the eighth year of my previous life.
He’d moved to Northamptonshire with his family from Inverness. His policeman father had accepted a transfer to take charge of a new unit and uprooted to the street next to mine.
Our friendship wasn’t instant. Roger, Steven and I glared at the lanky, sapling-armed boy ambling into the classroom with his auburn hair and a coarse, unintelligible accent, like he’d just alighted a space ship. And during his first few days in our territory, he was given a wide, discerning berth. But he paid frustratingly little heed to our feigned disinterest.
I’d just reached a personal best of twenty-five keepie-uppies on the village green when he wandered over to me.
“Bet you I can do more,” he grinned, and struck a defiant comic book superhero pose with his hands on his hips.
“Go on then,” I sniffed and deliberately threw the ball too hard at his chest. By the time he’d reached fifty with ease, he’d claimed victory and headed it back to me. A little humiliated, I began to walk away.
“Arch your back a little,” he said suddenly. “Put your arms out for balance and focus on the centre of the ball.”
I reluctantly followed his advice, and it was only when my bare thigh smarted from the repetition of skin against leather that I stopped at fifty-one. I concealed my smile. That was all it took to cement the foundations of a friendship spanning two decades.
But I was unsure whether it was his affable personality or his stable family life that captivated me the most. Dougie belonged to the perfect family, compared to mine at least. A mother, a father, a brother and a sister - everything I’d have killed for.
Dougie Senior greeted his wife Elaine with a kiss to the cheek on his arrival home each evening. And she’d respond with an infinite supply of hotpot dishes and mouth-watering casseroles. Their family banter filled the dining room as Michael, Isla and Dougie each told their parents all they’d done that day. No detail was too insignificant to be left out.
My friends all adored Elaine and I think found her sexy before they knew what sexy meant. Her curls glowed like a Christmas tangerine, her skin was milky and freckled and she possessed a voluptuous Monroe-like hourglass figure. She never asked me about Doreen, but I’m sure Dougie had explained her irregular presence. I wasn’t bothered if she pitied my circumstances at home. I was just grateful for the attention from a mother, even it wasn’t my own.
Dougie’s parents treated me like a part-time son. My place was set at the dining room table regardless of my presence. My sleeping bag remained on a camp bed in Dougie’s bedroom and they’d even bought me my own toothbrush and flannel. All the Reynolds children were encouraged to invite their friends over and their house resembled a youth club with the number of children passing through its doors. But Elaine took a shine to me the most.
As an only child, I was fascinated by the unfamiliar world of sibling relationships – how they played, learned and fought with each other. They taught me the definition of family. But watching them bred resentment in me towards my father. The head of Dougie’s house was not the ghost of a man overtly consumed with his louche wife to notice his own neglected son.
I questioned what was missing in my father’s make-up that rendered him unable to keep hold of Doreen. Why hadn’t she loved him like Elaine loved her husband? What did he lack that drove my mother into the arms of other men? He lacked nothing, of course. My negativity merely masked what I felt were my own failings as her son. I knew the man who had offered me as much as he could also had his limitations. So what I couldn’t get from him, I stole from the Reynolds.
But the most important lesson I learned from spending time with them came years later. And it was that if you scratch the surface of something perfect, you’ll always find something rotten hidden beneath.
August 26, 3.15pm
While neither Bradley nor I trespassed too far into each other’s pasts, my gut instinct was that he was a reliable sort. My history was as irrelevant to me as it was to anyone else, so I would never have voluntarily revealed my true colours to him.
Such aloofness was a self-defence mechanism born out of bad experiences. Because the more you trust in someone, the more opportunities you give them to shatter your illusions. But as much as I cared to think of myself as a solitary unit - and against my better judgment - I still needed a Dougie Reynolds in my life. Bradley came close to filling that vacancy.
It was during a lock-in at the village pub a decade earlier, and with several pints of Guinness loosening our lips, that Dougie revealed the disease running through his family. Out of the blue, he confessed his father was a violent wife-beater who regularly knocked the living daylights out of Elaine.
Sometimes he’d hone his skills in front of his family. But for the most part, he kept his hobby behind the bedroom door. Dougie explained it was why they encouraged their friends to spend time at their house. Because if left alone, some minor incident would likely occur and inspire Dougie Senior into hurting her again. Our friendship offered them a temporary stay of execution. He’d used me.
I masked my ever-increasing dismay while he tearfully recalled his family’s swift departure from Scotland. Elaine had been attacked so badly that she’d been hospitalised for a fortnight – her husband’s lightening bolt blows broke her jaw and five ribs. Instead of offering their support to Elaine, Dougie Senior’s colleagues encouraged her not to press charges against one of their own and offered them a fresh start elsewhere.
But my disappointment wasn’t directed at the culprit, as it should have been. It was towards his son. Dougie had urged me to buy into his idyllic home, knowing full well what it had meant to me. Any sympathy or understanding he should have expected was greeted by stone-faced, silent, selfishness instead. The snow globe in which I’d placed the Reynolds had been shaken so vigorously, the contents would never settle again. He’d cheated me out of the only stability I had known. Ignorance was bliss, and I’d liked bliss.
I was also disappointed with Elaine’s failure to remove herself from the side of a sadist. At least my mother had the strength to leave us for a reason, no matter how weak it was. Elaine had plenty of them but she’d stayed and she’d lied, like all women do.
Eventually Dougie must have read my expressionless face and realised my lack of compassion meant he’d confided in the wrong friend. So the conversation petered out, was brushed under the carpet and never discussed again.
Years later, I learned Dougie wasn’t all he seemed either. If I’d allowed myself the opportunity to know Bradley better, he would have probably disappointed me too, so I kept him at arm’s length. It was better to remain on my island than drown in somebody else’s sea.
September 7, 8.10pm
“He’s dead, man. Shit.”
Bradley gently rolled Darren’s rigid body from his side and onto his back. He lay there with his eyes clammed shut. His forehead was as pale as a winter’s dawn.
“He certainly is,” I sighed, then pulled a patchwork blanket up over his bare chest and covered a face devoid of expression.
“Better call the Doc then,” said Bradley, picking himself up and walking towards the reception’s payphone.
With my eyes fixed on my friend’s movements, my hands darted under the dead man’s bed to find his backpack. I relied on touch to open the metal fasteners and fumbled around until I found my prize. I crammed it into my pocket as Bradley hung up the receiver and turned around.
“Doc’s on his way,” he shouted.
*
Darren Glasper appeared on our doorstep a month or so before his demise. Our hostel was cheerful, and most importantly for the traveller on a budget, inexpensive. And like myself, the intoxicating lure of the town’s unfettered, relaxed anonymity was all it took to persuade Darren to remain there longer than first planned.
He’d told me over supper one night that as the youngest of a family of eight, his motivation was to discover his own identity away from those who’d shaped it. At first, he’d succumbed to family convention by leaving school and becoming immersed in an unrewarding career in Sheffield’s steel mills and foundries. But Darren craved more than a lifetime of manual labour in a job he despised. So to his loved ones’ surprise, he announced he was leaving to travel the world and educate himself before returning home to educate others as a trainee teacher.
Despite the inevitable attempts to persuade him he was being foolish, he upped and left. Nevertheless, he beamed with pride when he spoke of his family and the wall behind his bunk bed was plastered in family photographs. He’d arranged them like a protective halo around his head.
Summer was a fertile period for the hostel and filled to bursting point with guests. However, the closing days of autumn were quieter and allowed the building to loosen its belt and exhale. It gave me space to sink my teeth into my renovation work and Darren and others were more than willing to act as my labourers.
He’d been afforded a four-bedroom dormitory to himself but when neither Bradley nor I had seen him that day, his lack of presence concerned us.
At some point during the night, Darren had checked out of the world he was so keen to be a part of.
*
The town’s doctor arrived within the hour to officially pronounce him dead. I’d joined Darren’s smiling family in keeping his body company while we awaited the police and an ambulance.
I wondered how his family’s lives would be affected by his death. I pitied them when I realised they’d probably never come to terms with being robbed of the opportunity to say goodbye to a son and a brother.
For a moment, I contemplated how you had coped when I had done the same. But my thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of two officers, so I left the room and wandered into the courtyard for a cigarette.
Alone, I put my hand into my pocket and removed Darren’s passport. His spirited wanderlust would live on through me. I enjoyed my time at the hostel, using it as a place of redemption and healing. But I knew I’d develop itchy feet when I eventually finished my project. And possessing no passport or international identification meant that when it came time to leave for fresh pastures, it would be problematic. But not now.
Darren and I shared the same almond-shaped eyes, hairstyles and facial bone structure. A cursory glance at his passport’s black and white photograph confirmed that. Others had often assumed we were related. As long as I avoided a razor for a fortnight, I’d match his light beard and I’d gain the potential to explore wherever I liked.
The moral complexities of assuming the identity of a man who’d yet to be laid out on a mortician’s slab were questionable. Added to that quandary was that I alone knew Darren had lost his wallet in Algeria. So without his passport, there would be no speedy way of tracking down his relatives.
But with my ability to justify my actions if my best interests were served, I told police his Christian name and his nationality and left them to fill in the blanks. It would buy me time. I stubbed out my cigarette and returned to the building to watch in respectful silence, as his body was stretchered away.
Darren and I were both freer from those who’d held us back than we’d ever been before.
***
Today, 9.50am
“When did I ever hold you back?” she roared. “How dare you! I did nothing but support you and encourage you. I believed in you!”
As each new revelation fell from his lips, her mood darkened, shade by shade, until all she saw was black. She questioned whether the man sitting before her was indeed the same one who’d promised to love her until death do they part so long ago. It looked like him; it sounded like him. Even his mannerisms remained, like the way he absent-mindedly scratched the print of his thumb with his middle finger. Or when he tapped his bottom lip to mask his anxiety.
But his recollections of life beyond her resembled nothing of the Simon of old. Was it really in him all along to live without a conscience? How could she have failed to recognise such deplorable traits in him as deceit and opportunism? Her love really had been blind.
“And you stole a dead man’s passport?” she continued, perplexed. “That’s disgusting.”
He shuffled uncomfortably in his seat, like the devil was poking him with a pitchfork. “It’s not something I’m proud of, but I did what I had to do. I had no choice,” he replied.
She drew deeply from a reservoir of anger. “Oh here we ago again with those bloody words.
You had no choice
. Please, spare me. It was the children and I who had no choice, no choice but to carry on trying to live without you. No choice but to do all we could to try and find you.”