Oh Well

It was on a heady day in August that James saved a man’s life.
Not unusually, he’d been drinking pretty much all day. Being a Saturday meant that he had his wages.
‘I’ve got me wages on board and I’m going to use them,’ he’d say.
I’m not being reminiscent because James isn’t dead. No, he’s very much alive and well, although it has to be said; he is the type of person one normally associates with an early grave.
Coming from a small village near Dumfries, James was left to fend for himself from the age of ten with his father out at sea and his mother remarried on the other side of Dumfries.
If he had gone with her, he’d have had six shades of purple booted out of him at the new school for coming from where he did. The two villages had never got along and so James decided to stay at Castle Douglas with his father.
He learnt how to cook for himself and kept the house clean and tidy. There was the only one there most days.
His father would return on the Friday afternoon, give James ten minutes and a few bob and then he’d go down to the pub in the village and not come back till dawn Saturday. At lunchtime, James would watch as his father scraped himself out of bed only to waddle back down to the pub for another quiet session. At dinnertime, he would stumble back steaming. By then, his movement would be slow and slovenly, his requests slurred and often misplaced.
‘Where’s me tea, woman?’ he’d sometimes say, so sozzled he’d forgotten she’d gone.
Often, if he made that mistake, he’d turn a wee bit nasty and have a go at James, but it never came to blows. It wasn’t his father’s fault that he was an alcoholic and James was aware of this. Saturday evening-in could hardly have been described as cosy or familial, but the fish and chips were reliably good and once his father had sobered up, normally just before Match Of The Day came on, they sometimes played cards and even talked.
Those fifteen minutes meant a lot to James, and to his father. Although this was his emotional limit (and he found it difficult stretching to that), his father would often take to the sea remembering these little snippets of love for his son that kept him going through the week. All else was lost. The sea provided him with loneliness and the pub gave him oblivion from the truth of his life. One cancelled out the other.
Sunday always came and went with few words exchanged. James had things to do with his friends of a Sunday while his father would skulk off to the pub for lunch, only returning for the afternoon conk-out and then the snore-riddled night slumber. He was always up and out by five Monday morn.
At fifteen, James was very young to leave home, but opting for a job at the docks in Glasgow seemed the best solution all round. The move would put an end to watching his father slowly kill himself with booze.
He’d worked on boats in the past, mostly for the young couple that ran a small hotel and offered trips around the coastline to their customers. By the age of twelve, James had successfully stripped their little fishing boat to its bare bones and welded it back together to a satisfactorily seaworthy standard.
When he was twenty, James came back from his first real holiday, on Ibiza, and saw that the world was a far bigger and better place than Glasgow, only to find out that his best friend had taken his girlfriend while he was away.
So with a few hundred pounds in his pocket, James bit his lip, packed his bag and hitched down to London. The drink and drug culture in Glasgow had seen him close to death, mostly from trying to protect his violent best friend from his own stupidity, so it really was time to move along.
He visited his father for an afternoon but by that time the old man had shrivelled into a cavernous shell and was almost unrecognisable. His hair was all but gone, his nose had reddened and blown up, with veins, hairs and blotches apparent. And he was still chain-smoking.
As he said goodbye at the village pub, James looked into his father’s shot eyes, searching for signs of someone, trying to goad him into thought, but there was no one in.
He shed a tear or two on the bus heading for the motorway, and made a pact with himself never to return to Scotland.
He found his feet well in London. There were plenty of docks dotted around town and he made a good start by renovating six floating restaurants at Charing Cross on a decent daily rate, hopping between the bowels of the gin palaces and running errands.
After about five years, the boats were seen to be in adequately good order and James found himself without work, but not for long.
He’d strayed towards Putney on a number of occasions and liked it there, so when a friend offered him a full-time job at his metal works off Oxford Road, he took it without hesitation. He found himself a nice room in a large shared house and settled down to some hard work and even harder drinking/drugging/partying.
It wasn’t long before he found himself taking on extra work on board the houseboats around Putney Bridge.
One customer asked James to build a small but fast fishing boat made entirely of metal and when he presented him with the boat and the bill, the customer paid him for materials and said that the boat was his. It was a gift for the work he’d done on the river.
James was on top of the world, with his own boat moored at Putney Bridge for him to use any time he wanted. He and his pals would go up and down the Thames every Sunday come rain or shine, laden with beers, cigarettes and hashish.
When James saved a man’s life, that heady, hot Summer’s day, he’d only just tied his boat up after a morning searching for driftwood down in Barnes and Kew, when several people started to shout from up on Putney Bridge.
They were pointing towards the cobbled bank that dipped down into the river and James could just about make out the top of a car slowly heading down it. The crowd were insistent that the car stopped but it appeared that the person inside was in no mood for that, and so on it went, into the water.
James hopped back on the boat, fired up Evinrude and zoomed over to the car, which, by the time he came alongside, was heading westwards at about four miles an hour. It was a white Ford Fiesta and the man inside was still asleep.
Having dozed off after one or two and an ice-cream, he’d managed to leave the handbrake half-on, allowing it to slip slowly, inexorably, down the hill and into the drink without disturbing him one bit.
James knocked on the driver’s window.
‘Hello?’ he shouted. ‘Hello there. Wake up now!’
The old man inside woke with a start and instinctively went for the ignition, imagining that a warden was asking him to move on.
‘Oi, mate,’ shouted James. ‘You’re in the fuckin’ Thames!’
The man went to open his door as he realised where he was.
‘No!’ screamed James. ‘Don’t open the fuckin’ door! Don’t open the door! Can you hear me? Don’t open the fuckin’ door!’
If he’d done that, the car would have plunged down, sucking him into the breathless abyss without warning and, in his condition, hope.
James asked him to take his seat-belt off but, even then, with the realisation that water was at his feet, the old man seemed sceptical to go along with James, his gravelly Scottish accent, dreadlocks to his chest, wild eyes and beard.
‘Just wind your window down and I’ll pull you out, OK?’ he said.
The car was slowly filling up with water and would no doubt be submerged in a few minutes, but the old man seemed more interested in his paperwork on the passenger seat.
When he started scrabbling about with vehicle registration documents and suchlike, James screamed at him one last time to get the window down.
But the old man was lost in between life and death, choosing between them, and the most James could do was watch the pained expression of a man in a muddle.
With the Fiesta only a foot and a half away from extinction, James grabbed hold of the car to keep it up but the weight of the water overpowered him in seconds. His boat began to take in heavy water.
‘Get the fuck out of there or you’ll die!’ he shouted, again, one last time.
Suddenly, the man flung the papers up in the air and wound the window down.
The car sucked in more water, throwing the car further down.
‘Give me your arm!’ shouted James. ‘Quickly!’
The man held his arm out just as the car was swallowed up. The velocity of pull took James down with the man but he clung on to his arm with an iron grip.
With the man on board, James bucketed out some water before it got the better of their weight. The crowds of people on the bridge were clapping and cheering as James rounded the boat and headed back.
Once moored up, he helped the man back on to land and the crowd came down to see that he was alright and to congratulate James for his bravery.
The old man answered a few questions to the police, holding his mouth, and went on his way.
The next day, James was up in Fulham having a drink with a friend when he noticed the old man sat with a group of friends in a corner. He tried to catch his eye but the old man didn’t seem to recognise him.
He was busy telling his story, of course.
‘I tell you,’ he said to them. ‘This fuckin’ mad Scotsman was getting right on my tits. Do this, do that, so I just let him have it.’
‘What?’ asked one of his pals. ‘You hit him?’
‘Had to, didn’t I?’ said the old man. ‘He was pulling me down, wasn’t he?’
‘Was he?’ they asked, shocked.
‘Yeah. So I socks him one, then I wriggles out the window and he drags me on to his boat. God, that hurt,’ he went on. ‘Getting on that boat really did my back right in.’
‘You should make a claim,’ one of his buddies advised.
‘No,’ replied the old man. ‘No, he was one of those penniless sorts, wasn’t he. You know, dreadlocks like a black man and all that.’
But James had heard enough.
‘What? Someone like me?’ he asked from across the bar room, sideways on.
The old man shot a glance to him but quickly returned his gaze onto his buddies.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said. ‘Yeah, I was just telling my friends about what happened.’
But James cut him off. ‘No, you weren’t. You were telling little pork pies to your brothers here. Weren’t you? Hey? About me. And my integrity. So what did happen yesterday? I’ll tell you what happened. Your friend here did everything he could to kill himself but I saved him, didn’t I, brother?’
The old man said nothing, breathing heavily through his hairy, cluttered nostrils. Looking up was not an option.
‘You’re a fuckin’ disgrace. Do you know that?’ said James, supping the last of his pint and leaving.
A week later, James found a snippet in the Wandsworth Advertiser entitled ‘Unknown hero saves elderly man from drowning in car’. There was a photograph of the old man standing outside his local pub next to the text of the story, and the moment he saw his unsmiling face, James was struck by the old man’s resemblance to his father. There was an eerie quality to those eyes. They were as remote as a whale’s and as unforgiving as the sea.