Down Memory Lane

I awoke from the sort of grayish swoon that had become all too common recently and found myself behind the wheel of my Peugeot.The long, straight, Edwardian terrace-lined street I was parked on was instantly familiar to me: Park Road, Bearwood, out in the western suburbs of Birmingham. I'd lived there for seven years, moving away with work some five years ago.

I'd been meaning to make a doctor's appointment for months, but, you know how it is, I'd just been too busy.I felt fine most of the time.I felt fine now, but I had no memory of at least the last hour of my journey. That was the scary thing; I must have been capable of steering the car, braking, looking out for traffic etc while actually unconscious at the wheel.

What was the last thing I remember?Passing the southern fringes of the Malvern Hills I think,   looking wistfully northwards at that familiar line of jagged green against the bright Spring sky and thinking of all the happy times I'd spent up there.That was a good 40 miles away! What must other drivers have thought, glancing over and seeing me slumped in the driver's seat, eyes either closed or open and glazed and unseeing, somehow avoiding swerving across the lanes of the M50 despite my conscious mind having switched itself off .

The blackouts ( or grey outs. Grey outs seemed a somehow more accurate description. The only impressions I had of these lost hours were of an all encompassing fuzzy greyness, like windscreens misted over with condensation, the earth below an aeroplane blanketed in stratus cloud, cold and damp and comfortless) were happening more frequently these days. I wondered if there might come a point when I would spend more time greyed-out than alive, whether one day I'd just lose myself in that endless mist and they'd never be able to find me.What was it? A brain tumour?A series of minor strokes increasing in their intensity? But no, surely I'd feel ill in my waking hours. I'd be wasting away; dark shadows would be appearing beneath my eyes. But on the contrary I woke from these fugues feeling awake and alert, ready to tackle the world. I looked in the rear-view mirror. I looked fine. I had colour in my cheeks. My eyes were bright and I peered into them and could almost feel the storm of thoughts and passions whirling behind them, keeping me alive, driving me onwards. I'd met dying people. There'd always come a point when something had given up inside them, leaving a void in their eyes where the mental spark firing them from birth had already left their body, months before the physical one departed. 

But my eyes in the rear-view mirror weren't hollow, or empty. They were brimming, spilling over. My spark was still there.Perhaps I could leave off that doctor's appointment for another few months.

Park road, Bearwood. A happy home for 7 years of my life.I'd lived alone here, but I was still happy. I had plenty of friends but I didn't need them for my life to feel fulfilling. I'd been at my happiest in that house on my own of an evening, feeling the light drain from the sky and sipping a rich red, reading a book, listening to music or just staring into space, feeling the silence humming around me. I felt nostalgic for those days. Life was now immeasurably better in so many ways but also somehow more complicated, more full of people, things, events. Those quiet solitary evenings waiting for night to come had become a dear memory, a little capsule of time that I could prise open just a little on my increasingly regular journeys into the past.

I was lucky in that my job allowed me to fit these journeys in. A third of the year away from home with work might seem a curse to many, but there was no home I really missed any more, no family waiting to welcome me at the threshold when I'd been touring for weeks. I loved the dusty back stages of the many theatres I performed in, the familiarity of the cities, seaside resorts and provincial towns that we visited again and again, year in, year out. At the end of performances however I never hung around to savour the acclaim of the audience, never tried to dull the adrenaline swirling through my veins by swilling pints in the local hostelries. I faded into the darkness, either to visit some nearby spot associated with my past or if there were none, then simply returned to my hotel to lose myself in sleep.

Park Road stretched out before me, a mile-long street of mostly neat Edwardian brick terraces. 77 was a little ahead of me on the right; it was easy to spot because of the comma-shaped stone decoration atop its apex. Other houses had pyramids, pineapples and pagodas, all built at a time when architects had some appreciation for the individuality and quirkiness of life. I hadn't parked right outside my old house. I suppose I was a little worried that if my old neighbours Norman and Val appeared they might think it a little odd I'd returned for no reason other than nostalgia. At least from here I could spot them before they spotted me and have time to come up with a more reasonable excuse for being there.Then again, the less suspicious part of my mind told me they were kind people and more than likely would welcome me with open arms and ask me in for a cup of tea.

I had a good hour to wander around the area, enough time to take in Bearwood High St,the sweeping parkland of Warley Woods where the remains of a Georgian manor house lay hidden in the undergrowth,piles of crumbling red bricks being slowly strangled by briars and bindweed. Number 77 was as it had always been in my time there; the same curtains hung in the living room window, their lower folds probably still stained with the same tea I'd spilled there years ago; the same wire mesh covered the same alcove below the comma-topped roof where midnight-cooing pigeons had disturbed my sleep until I'd paid some workmen to do something about it. Beyond the tea-stained curtains, hidden from sight, was the long, cool, bare-brickwalled sitting room and beyond that my old garden, scene of long-ago dancing in high Summer in the cool of water sprinklers, late night wine-fuelled singing on the patio to the flickering of tea lights. All long gone now, impossible to recreate, unless one day I bought the house all over again and somehow re-enacted not only endlessly in my mind but in reality all the happy times I'd lived through there.I could invite the same friends I'd known back then, wherever they were in the world, all older now, hair thinner, skin wrinklier, some no longer with us at all. Would we just start where we left off, would the same easy conversation flow, the same laughter ring out?Perhaps not. Perhaps (and my heart sank when I thought this) things were never really like that at all, and the intervening years had suffused those days with a warm glow that never really existed in the first place?

I moved on, hurrying past Norman and Val's. I had a strange fear of being seen. Passing their open living room window I thought I saw a blur of movement within, more of a shifting of the light than anything else. I turned my face away, pretending to closely inspect the opposite side of the street, hoping that even if they saw me walking past they might not realise it was me. At the far end of Park Road, just before I turned right towards the High Street, I looked back. The whole of  the street that was once my home stretched behind me, rising gently towards the woods, and I could still see the ornamental comma on the apex of my roof. As I looked, a stooped, white-haired figure emerged from my neighbours' house, stopped on the pavement and seemed to look intently towards me. Norman. I thought about waving, but still hoped he might not realise it was me and rounded the corner hurriedly.  I wanted to avoid passing their house again so thought about a circular route that would lead me round to the far end of Park Road. I could get back to my car without having to run the Norman gauntlet again. Then I scolded myself for being so ridiculous, told myself to man up and decided that after checking out the High Street I'd simply turn back the way I came and if I bumped into him, well, then we could have a lovely chat and reminisce about old times.

Little had changed there. Feeling parched I found a newsagent to buy a bottle of water. I allowed a woman in ahead of me and was quite surprised when she let the door bang in my face. People in Bearwood had always seemed so kind and polite and I worried things had gone downhill since I left.Further down I passed Webb's Garden Supplies, its green sign faded and weatherbeaten, its owner's name barely legible. The man himself was just inside serving customers. In the old days he'd always looked not long for this world, thin and withered, wisps of once-reddish hair clinging to the scaly, mottled skin of his mostly-bald scalp, his movements ponderous and carefully thought-out as if every act caused him pain and his whole life was spent working out how best to avoid it. Strangely enough he looked a lot better; he'd put on a bit of weight and moved quite agilely as he reached up to fetch a can of weed killer from a top shelf. His eyes briefly flicked my way and I raised a hand in greeting, before clumsily transforming it into an attempt to scratch my head when I realised he wasn't going to respond. There was no reason why he should, I thought to myself. After all I'd only popped in a few times for some slug pellets and some sort of spray to cure the blight on my hollyhocks. After all, it was quite bright outside and I was probably silhouetted by the sun.

I turned away and caught my reflection in the window of the hardware store opposite. It had been a long, wet, dark winter and my face looked pale, almost unnaturally so in the glare of the sun. I felt the past dragging me back again, back to the days when I'd waited at this very spot for the bus into town. Why was I always like this? Why couldn't I just walk down a street, drive past a range of hills, smell a familiar scent or hear a familiar song without forever associating it with a time that was dead and gone? I wouldn't even have been wandering through Bearwood at all if it wasn't for this constant drag, this chain fastened to my ankle and dragging me down into the depths of the past when I should be forcing myself to the surface and gulping in the sunlight of the present. I thought again of today's journey, of the green jagged ridge of the Malverns sliding away in my rear view mirror and then those moments of greyness as I somehow made my way here, only struggling back to lucidity when I'd reached another destination associated more with my past than my present. I wasn't ill, I thought to myself. I wasn't dying. I'd become so fixated with the past that my memories had become more real than my current existence. I had to change or those moments of clarity would surely become rarer until one day I'd be trapped in my own memories,dribbling at the mouth and  fading away quietly in the corner of a nursing home.

I swam back to the surface and saw my pallid face staring emptily back at me from the hardware store. I looked even paler than before, maybe from the shock at realising what had become of my life.I stared and the colour and the blood continued to drain from me until my cheeks took on the greenish tinge of a days-old corpse. Something seemed fastened around my neck and I felt my throat but there was nothing there. My reflection's hands meanwhile remained hanging limply by my side and my eyes rolled upwards in their sockets. My mouth gaped and my tongue lolled out, bluish and hideously extended.

I screamed and Webb's glass front shattered, my green death's head splitting into hundreds of smaller shards landing on the pavement around me and staring sightlessly up at me. Suddenly people were running towards and around me. I saw Webb clambering up from his hands and knees and stumbling over to a female customer whose cheek was red with blood. 

"What the hell was that?" Someone said. "Did someone throw a stone or something? Bearwood never used to be like this!"

Quite a crowd had gathered but despite being nearest to the accident no one seemed to take a blind bit of notice of me.I checked myself for cuts but all of the glass had been blown into the shop, leaving me completely unharmed. They were right; Bearwood had never been like that in my day and it really was time to move on, head into town, do the show and perhaps afterwards have a drink and a bit of a laugh with my colleagues. I turned and headed back the way I'd come, up the High Street and them left into Park Road. Ahead, halfway up that gently rising street of Edwardian terraces I could see my old neighbour Norman struggling to put the bins out for tomorrow's collection. Again came that strange feeling of not wanting to be seen, or, at least, of not wanting to be seen by anyone who knew me from my previous life here. I slowed, hoping that by the time I got anywhere near Norman and Val's place at number 75 he'd have finished with his bins and headed back inside. 

Instead, he turned and saw me. I froze, hoping to somehow merge into the scenery, that my legs would sink into the pavement or that the stunted fuchsia bush next to me would suddenly spurt into life and grow new, shielding branches to cover me. I was still some 20 houses away from Norman. He was getting on; his eyesight probably wasn't great and hopefully he'd just see a tall, blurred, dark-haired person and think nothing of it.

He also seemed to freeze for a few seconds, gaze locked my way. Then he slowly shook his head, pushed his green recycling bin a little further onto the pavement, and headed back into the alleyway between his house and my old one. I hurried off towards him, breaking into a run and desperate to get past the mouth of the alley and back to the safety of my car before he saw me again. As I passed it I saw him a little way down with his back to me, about to pull another bin out into the street. He seemed to stop what he was doing and shudder, as if a horrific thought had suddenly filled his mind. 'Keep on going!' I said to myself. I didn't want to have to make up implausible excuses for my presence here, down memory lane. This was all getting a little ridiculous. I had to give up these increasingly frequent trips into the past, into chapters of my life that had long since come to a close, that I had ceased featuring in. I needed to get back into my car, drive into town and start living my life a little.

I felt the greyness spilling into my mind as soon as I was behind the wheel. I realised that the next thing I'd be aware of would be passing the Malverns again, or visiting the house on St Albans where I was born, or wandering the beech woods of Hertfordshire where I used to walk with my parents. And while I felt a brief surge of panic as I realised I could no longer fight it, this was soon replaced by a warm comfort in the inevitability of it all, and then all was grey.

Norman was having a bit of a strange day. He'd woken feeling jumpy and nervous at the prospect of some inexplicable impending doom. He'd immersed himself in work to try to get over it, hacking at some weeds in the back garden before relaxing in the front room with Val and a steaming cup of tea. They were sitting in companionable silence when a figure passed the window, its edges frayed through the net curtains, its face a disconcerting pale green as it glanced briefly in. 

"Did you see that?" said Norman.

Val glanced up from her magazine. "See what?"

People walking past their front window was hardly a rare occurrence but there was something strange about this one's movement. Ok, sometimes it was difficult to see properly through the nets but it was sunny outside yet the figure seemed to flicker as it walked past, like on one of those old movies where people's movements looked jerky. And the window was single-glazed and they often complained about the noise of people walking past but this time he hadn't heard a thing. The person had walked in complete silence.

Later, putting out the bins, Norman kept his eyes firmly on the pavement, unwilling to look up and down the length of Park Road. The distant tinkle of breaking glass broke his resolve and he glanced to his right, in the direction of the High Street. A tall figure had just rounded the corner and was walking briskly towards him, its face a white smudge beneath a mess of dark curls. He didn't like the look of it at all; there was something fixed and rigid about that face while the rest of the body moved jerkily beneath it. Its neck seemed drawn to one side and as it drew closer Norman was sure he could see something white dangling from it. He closed his eyes tightly, hoping to dispel the image and was shocked to realise he'd succeeded. The figure was gone, but he thought he could still see something down there. Perhaps just a few dry leaves whirling in the breeze. Despite all of that something about the figure had seemed slightly familiar but when he made the connection and realised who it reminded him of, he scolded hi