Charlie's Story

Charlie’s story

That night the moon was full and the sky was clear. It was bitterly cold, but so beautiful that even the commuters paused on their scuttling walk home to admire the silver light and midnight shadows of the moon-lit landscape.

The old man shuffled. Impatient bustlers huffed their way past, resenting the fact that they had to share the pavement with anyone so slow and pondering. But he was oblivious to all this. He moved along as if in a dream. He didn’t look up as he crossed the streets, didn’t hear the blasting horns of cars grinding to a halt as he walked into their path. He followed his route instinctively, almost as if he was on a track.,

Charlie had been asleep for so long that his current state of awareness was almost too much to bear. Last night, it had all burst into his head. His name, his life, the guns and guns and guns. The information that had been so long buried in the depths of his mind that doctors thought he would never remember who he really was and had given up trying to find out.

Everything seemed so clear all of a sudden, like a veil had been drawn away. His ears picked up layers of sound, his nose was bombarded with smells more vivid than any he remembered. Last night he came to his senses in the truest sense of the phrase, but felt as if he had woken up after only a moment where his mind had wandered. Like the second it takes to come back from a particularly intense day dream.

But he had missed so many moments. A life time of them.  Charlie had only been 15 that summer morning all those years ago (.As soon as it was light he had gathered up his gear, looked around the stark room , crept down the carpeted stairs and shut the door behind him. Only 15 as he walked down Silent Street thinking thoughts of gallantry, honour, pride and glory. It was 1918, and although he didn’t know it, if he had left only a few months later he would have missed his chance to give up his life for ‘king and country’.

It was not a very long wait, just a few weeks. The postman delivered the yellow paper into the trembling hands of Charlie’s mother. Missing in action, presumed dead. Although his aging parents were proud of him, they had known from the moment they found his note, that their boy, their only child, would never come back to them from the war. They died without knowing how their son had died, or where.

But Charlie had not been killed. Everyone close to him had died in the bomb blast, but Charlie, shielded by the falling body of his best friend, had survived. Survived in a way. Physically he was unnaturally perfect. As they stripped him to look for wounds they found barely a scratch on his skinny, still-growing frame.

Charlie was not his real name, but that’s the name he was given, because when they found the senseless boy, covered in the blood of his comrades, his identity tags had been lost. The number that identified him, the name his parents had given him, all gone. And his mind with them.

He did not speak at all, and even though they listened while he slept, he did not even speak a word in his sleep. In the throws of his worst nightmares he called out in anguish, but only in an incoherent scream. The nurses, pretty in their white livery, liked this silent stricken boy. They named him Charlie because it suited his nose, or so said Kitty, the little chatty one who helped him dress each day.

As far as the doctors could see, there was no physical reason for this amnesia, yet it persisted. After a year of trying they gave up. Finally Charlie was invalided out from the army, and not knowing what else could be done, they placed him in a home for ex-service men.

Charlie carried on walking as the darkness of night deepened. It had been a little after 6pm when he had started to walk, away from the institution which had been his home for almost his entire lifetime. He had out-lived all of the staff or patients, and even some of the buildings that had been there in 1918. But did not look back as he stepped away from the nicely kept lawn, and started the long drudge along tarmac pavements hot and sticky from a day of smoggy sunshine.

It was 11pm now, and although his trembling legs would not carry him fast, he seemed to be filled with an energy that made him feel he cold walk all night, walk all week, or just walk until he reached where he was going. He didn’t know where that was, it was a feeling, and echo, a dream of a place. A house in a street that he had left, and which now he knew he needed to find.

As the night wore on the sounds and sights of the present seemed to fade away. No more cars on the street, or flickering neon in the windows of kebab shops and late-night corner shops. The hooded youths gave up on their loitering and headed home, and the lurching drunks found somewhere flat where they could lay down and dream of better times.

Looking up as he crossed a street the deserted streets seemed serene and timeless, and Charlie felt a wave of anticipation pass over him. ‘I’m coming home, I’m coming, I won’t be long now. Maybe mother will have made me tea, and Dad won’t be too cross with me for running off’. Charlie’s mouth strained to make the words, and his dormant voice grated and rasped as it came to life after so long. The old man mumbled as he walked, and the stray cat crossing his path failed to note the unique qualities of a voice not heard in over 90 years.

Any place can become unfamiliar and uncanny in the middle of the night, when the streets are empty and lit by the yellow glow of street lamps. But for Charlie the night rendered the streets more familiar. It hadn’t changed so much, this unfashionable, forgotten corner of London. The tube didn’t run to this area, and the bombs of the blitz had left it well alone. Charlie’s feet did not pause as he got closer to the place he was heading.

Whether he knew it or not, Silent Street was waiting for him. The pavements he had played on every day for the first 15 years of his life had not forgotten his tread. The old tree at one end of the street still bore the scars of his pen-knife scratchings, and a weather-beaten wooden bench next to the church had his initials carved with a flourish.

Silent Street had once been a busy street, but when a new warehouse blocked off one end it blocked out so much more than the passing trade or short-cut walkers. With half the street now cut off entirely from the surrounding suburb the air itself seemed to stagnate, and time slowed to a lazy crawl.

While the 21^st century got hurriedly underway, with buildings going up, going down, people moving in, moving out, and traffic day and night, Silent Street went nowhere. Inhabitants continued as they always had. Children played in the middle of the street, old women had hour-long conversations outside the sells-everything shop, and having found their haven, people stayed in their homes until death or dementia tore them away.

No one remembered Charlie, because there never had been a Charlie in Silent Street. But in her more lucid moments Mrs Morris at number 32 remembered the good-looking boy who had lived next door, then gone away to war with the others who never came back. For so long after that Silent Street had been a female place, with only the grumble of old men to cut through the sharp chatter of girls growing up with no boys.