Dead Man Walking (Part One)

© 2012 David Jasmin-Green

Harry and Phileas had walked for miles. In another half an hour they would reach the canal marking the border between the nature reserve and the new housing estate, as most folk still called it, though it had been up for almost twenty years, and once they crossed the winding footbridge that adults and kids alike referred to as the Curly-wurly bridge it wouldn't be long before they were home and dry. Harry was looking forward to a hot bath, a mug of criminally sweet coffee and an idle couple of hours surfing the internet while Phileas snored his head off in his basket.“I'm tired, buddy,” Harry said, “and my legs are killing me. We've covered some ground, considering that I've struggled to find the motivation to get off my arse these past few weeks; I reckon we've walked a good eight miles, but I doubt if the missus will believe that.”

Sue, Harry's wife of almost thirty years, had behaved like an old mother hen as he prepared to leave the house earlier that afternoon. “It's steak and chips for tea, so don't get back too late,” she said. “I should be back from my mum's around six. The steak's thawed and it won't take long to fry, but I can't put the chip pan on until you're here – home made chips need to be wolfed down as soon as they're ready, otherwise they go all soggy. Take care, Plum Puddin', you and Phileas haven't been on one of your expeditions for ages, remember. This is the first time you've been further than the corner shop without me since you've been ill, come to think of it, so don't overdo it. And make sure you take a hat and gloves, it's bloody freezin' out there.”

“Plum Puddin' indeed,” Harry replied. Sue had been calling him that for ages. It was a term that he associated with all things merry and bright, and he felt far from merry and bright; he felt bleak and empty, he felt like a dead man walking, but secretly he was glad that his beloved never stopped trying to raise his spirits. “I always carry a hat and gloves in my pockets, but I doubt if I'll need 'em today, my lovely. Look at that sunshine, ye of little faith, it's a gorgeous day! That new weather girl on the lunchtime news - you know, the pretty brunette with the hare lip and lopsided tits - wants bloody sacking. She's forecast heavy showers this afternoon, but it isn't going to rain. If it rains before dark I'm a monkey's uncle.”

The clouds started to roll in as soon as Harry left the house. Not long afterwards the rain came tumbling down, but the storm passed over quickly and the weak winter sun soon showed its face again. Sue sent Harry a text as soon as the heavens opened. 'Pity you didn't say you'd eat your hat if it rained, Pud, that would have made an interesting spectacle. You can forget your steak and chips, matey, I've bought a bunch of bananas for you to munch on. The 'nanas will fuel no end of monkey business and save me cooking, LOL.'

'Haar bloody haar, smart-arse,' Harry replied, feeling guilty as soon as he pressed the send button. He was being too harsh, he was being monstrously harsh, he fretted – he worried himself silly about every little thing that crossed his mind just lately. Immediately he called Sue and delivered a spluttered apology.

“Don't worry your cotton socks off about it, Puddin',” she said. “Honestly, you're worrying about nowt. You take care of the merchandise, my sweet, it's priceless, it's irreplaceable. Love you.....”

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Harry spent the introductory chapters of his illness secretly moping over little nothings, and initially, apart from being more irritable than usual, he gave few signs that anything was amiss. His sleep was the first thing to suffer, but Sue slept like a log so she barely noticed that he spent most of the night fidgeting and staring at the bedroom ceiling. Sue did notice when Harry's sex drive drained away as swiftly and surely as a tub of bathwater upon pulling the plug, but he managed to convince her that his sciatica was playing him up and that was why he didn't feel fruity. It was only when her increasingly secretive spouse started neglecting his personal hygiene routine and his appetite suddenly decreased that Sue summoned up the courage to ask him what was wrong.

“Nothing!” Harry snapped as they put away the shopping. “What makes you think something's wrong - do I look like a man with problems?” His wildly gesticulating arms knocked a dozen eggs from the draining board where he had piled the items destined for the fridge and freezer; he almost caught the box, but it sprang open and the contents jumped out of their snug cardboard nest, sailed through the air in a wide arc and smashed dramatically on the kitchen floor. Harry burst out crying, and not knowing how to deal with his shame he ran upstairs and locked himself in the bathroom.

“I've called the doctor, Puddin',” Sue said as calmly as she could through the bathroom door. “You have an appointment in forty five minutes.”

“Well you can bloody well cancel it, 'cos I'm not going!” Harry roared.

“I've never seen you like this before, Harry, and I didn't know what else to do.”

“All right, all right, I'll go and see the quack,” he sobbed. “I need a check-up from the neck up; I've never had a mental MOT, and I guess it's long overdue.”

Nearly six weeks it had been since that first appointment. Doctor Thomas said Harry was suffering from stress and depression, probably because his business wasn't doing too well, she concluded after a brief chat, and she prescribed a course of antidepressants. Harry took one of the semitransparent pills, curious looking things like tiny glacier mints, every morning as instructed. He was improving one small step at a time, Sue could see that, but Harry was blind to it; the pills eroded the sharpest edges of his misery and left his troubled bedrock untouched as far as he was concerned. Harry wasn't at all happy about being on medication. He was fifty one years old, and apart from downing a couple of Paracetamol to ward off an occasional headache he avoided pills and potions like the plague. The most serious illness that he had ever suffered was a nasty bout of flu that struck him down the winter he turned forty five, but even that had only kept him indoors for a few days.

“It's ridiculous, Sue,” he grumbled as he left the doctor's surgery after his last appointment. “It's a piss-poor prognosis if you ask me, and I'm thinking of seeking a second opinion. Thomas says the drugs take time to kick in, and the time varies from patient to patient. She reckons that I'll have to see a psychiatrist if I don't improve over the next couple of months, and I can't have that. I'm not bloody depressed, I'm just feeling a bit down, that's all. I can't put my finger on what's bugging me, that's the worst part of it; we've been through harder times than this in the past and I've kept my pecker up one way or another, and I dare say I'll go where no man has gone before in the future without falling to pieces like this. I'm just trying to fight my way out of a trough on the graph of my eternal struggle, just like every other bugger on the planet - that's life, I'm afraid. This is nothing to worry about, love, I'm sure of it.”

Even now, when he was clearly on the mend, Harry secretly suspected that his mental mash-up was irreparable. He doubted if any pill under the sun was capable of turning back the clock, he doubted if anyone apart from God could rewire his burned out fusebox and debug his infected software. Ever since he was first smitten he had tried to show the world (and especially his missus) a brave face, but if he was truthful he was worried sick about what was happening to his mind.

“Christmas is done and dusted, Phileas,” Harry said breathlessly as he reached the peak of the hill, “and its gaudy accoutrements are ready to be packed into the loft for another twelve months. I don't know why I'm telling you this, buddy, minor inconsequences like the passage of time are no skin off your nose. There's just a day and a half left of December, and good riddance to it. Once it's dead and buried we'll have a bright new year to deal with, or maybe a shitty one. If I say something negative like that in front of Sue she accuses me of being a misery guts - she expects me to behave like the heart and soul of the party even though I feel like a bag of warmed-up shit.

As you know, Phileas, since perhaps the beginning of November I've been plagued by a creeping dread of I don't know what. Really, I haven't got the foggiest idea what's troubling me, but it's not the ups and downs of my business, I can tell you that much. Carpets and flooring are always a low priority during the festive season. Come April or May a lot of folk will have put the expense of Christmas behind them; then they'll start thinking about tarting their houses up, then we'll be fighting the crowds in the shop and we won't have a minute to call our own. We just have to sit out the storm and keep the wolves from our door until then, that's all.

It's something insubstantial that's troubling me, old pal. I know I've told you all this before, but I'm gonna have to tell you again, because I haven't got anybody else to talk to. Sue's as hard as a rock, she takes the rough with the smooth like a good 'un, just like I used to, and she can't get her head around my shapeless, formless worries. It's something sinister, Phileas, is my demon, it's something dark and sneering, something possibly satanic, I suppose. It's something truly dangerous, I fear, either that or I'm about to loop the loop and scream bloody murder as the men in the white coats drag me off to the funny farm.”

Harry hadn't told doctor Thomas about the most worrying details of his illness, and neither had he told Sue. He hadn't divulged the full story of his deep, ethereal dread to anyone, apart, of course from Phileas, but Phileas didn't count. Phileas was the only being in the universe that Harry trusted to keep his mouth shut, he was the only living soul that he could count on not worry pointlessly like people worry, but that was because Phileas was a dumb old dog.

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The travellers crossed an expanse of undulating, heavily wooded terrain that older locals referred to as the Old Tip. The land had last been used as a refuse dump while Harry was learning to cross his t's and dot his i's; he barely remembered the place in its original state, and looking at it now you would never guess its history. The oak, ash and beech that the council had planted forty odd years ago were still in their infancy, but dotted amongst them were faster growing invaders whose seed was smuggled in by the wind and by animals and birds, and around the edges of the plantation were a number of trees that were established long before the site was landscaped. Harry was a tree buff (or a tree pervert, as Sue playfully called him) and he particularly enjoyed studying his subjects at this time of year when he could relish their full, naked beauty. “Winter trees are nature's finest abstract sculptures,” he said to Sue a good many years back. “Or God's sculptures, take your pick.”

“Trees without leaves are unsightly,” she replied. “To me they don't look healthy, they're parodies of green, living trees and they give me the heebie-jeebies. They look skeletal, they belong in old, neglected graveyards with creepy, tumbledown churches. Shit, Harry, I don't know how you can look at them in the wintertime, you bloody dendrophile. Ha!” (calling Harry a dendrophile always tickled her). “Especially old, gnarled trees. I half expect their trunks to have ugly-buggly faces like those awful walking trees in Lord Of The Rings.”

“Deciduous trees in wintertime aren't creepy, they're not funereal and they aren't dead,” Harry grumbled. “They're just having forty winks, they're replenishing their energy for the next growing season. I find trees particularly beautiful at this time of year, and I can't understand why any intelligent person would think of them as sinister.”

Harry's favourite tree on the site, perhaps his favourite tree of all time, was just a stone's throw away. “She's just around this bend,” he said to Phileas as he struggled to keep his footing on the muddy slope strewn with sodden, half rotted leaves that made walking uphill a precarious business. “You remember the old girl, you always piddle up her, you old devil. She's an ancient crab apple, a real beauty with a zigzag trunk that's is in the process of being clothed in ivy, which is a crying shame if you ask me. I've got a good mind to tear the damned ivy down, because in time it'll mask the sudden changes of direction that make the trunk so interesting. The old lady's boughs sprout at sharp angles that compete against one another and gradually melt into soft curves as they thin and divide and spread - you couldn't make a more pleasing spectacle if you tried, which makes me suspect that God has more to do with the creation of such marvels than I used to think in my misguided young manhood. Any thoughts on that, Phileas?” Phileas, of course, didn't answer; instead he sniffed at the base of an old hawthorn for a while before leaving his mark on a bent over thistle beside the pitted trunk and plodding exuberantly on his way.

When Harry rounded the bend and set eyes on his beloved tree he was so shocked that his legs buckled under him and he sat on the trunk of an old, rotten silver birch at the edge of the path that had been felled by the wind some time ago. “Oh no,” he whispered, a single tear running down his cheek. “Please Lord, punish the spiteful bastard responsible for this..... this travesty. Please God, if you're listening, if you really give a toss, turn back time and make amends for this unforgivable sin.”

The crab apple had exploded. It had been struck by lightning, Harry concluded, or else it was a prime example of God's eternal mystery. Perhaps for reasons known only to Himself the Almighty had personally smitten the tree with a gigantic, white hot axe in one awesome swoop that split it straight down the middle. Half of the trunk, though mostly stripped of bark, still stood, supporting its three remaining branches, the ragged stumps of two more and a few strands of burned ivy, but the rest lay in a partially incinerated heap on the ground. The remnants of a once tremendous beauty clutched at the darkening sky like a mauled hand cursing the Lord above for allowing its destruction to come to pass. Harry stared intently at the yellowish heartwood of the jagged trunk, its edges seared by a terrible heat. He felt as if an integral chunk of his memory had been spirited away. He felt that if he gazed at the pale timber for long enough his furious mind would etch his unspoken blood red angst directly into it its rippled surface, he felt that if he concentrated hard enough a flurry of ghostly hands would carve a zigzag totem pole effectively mapping out his relentless misery.