Richard, Do You Remember? a story at Spillwords.com

Richard, Do You Remember?

written by: Nick Adigu Burke

Do you remember when we were kids, living so fast we could hardly breathe, let alone savour the most cherished of our teenage moments? Youthful days we thought would last forever, but were over, just like that. I often joke, and thank God: if it weren’t for the memories, so fleeting was our childhood, that we might never have known we’d been there.

Funny, isn’t it: how time disfigures even our strongest plans. As mates, we’d laugh about growing up and growing old; the wives we’d marry, and the kids they’d bear. We wondered about the lives we’d have, and the tracks its dramas would mark upon our faces. We wondered about jobs and careers, and all the ails and pains we might endure. Now, twenty-four years on from teenage laughs, we’re still wondering.

Can you believe it’s been a quarter of a century since we last hung together – a whole generation since our fates last intertwined? You joked about the Snail of Time dragging us – slowly – towards the future: time crawling so slow that no one knows where it goes: remember? I called you a crazy dipshit; only now, I know what you meant.

You know, while time has taken you far from me, we are very rarely apart; you are an indelible charm, a talisman, pinned upon the walls of my psyche, always around to rouse my memory or to burn nostalgia in my heart.

Only yesterday you were here – with me, as I warmed my back in the late summer sun. What prompted this, I don’t quite know: perhaps missing you. Anyway, I decided to retrace the steps we trod in childhood.

As I retraced those steps, as I passed each of our old haunts, I wondered if you’d remember our childhood as I do: with fondness, with pain, with an ache to relive those memories as Bill Murray relived his, in Groundhog Day.

Ah, back then Summers lasted forever, eternal days of sunshine that stretched way beyond ten O’clock. Days that sweetly smudged into bubble-gum skies: powder pinks and powder blues – good enough to eat. Remember that summer smell? The constant aroma of freshly mowed grass and barbecue flavours. Do you remember as I do? I ache to be kids again, splashing in moonlit lakes or sprawled in dew-damp fields, eyes affixed to the divinity of stars. I wish we could build dams in streams, build fires fit for kings and our queens. I wish we could camp without tents, and stop up until dawn to talk about aliens, and the birds.

Summers back then were magic: a sea of shimmery roads, breathless dogs, and water fights. They were a soundtrack of cheesy pop, all-day birdsong, fans in whirr, and the buzz of lawnmowers on the vacant breeze.

It might sound weird, but sometimes, at night, I lie awake with tears in my eyes. These are the moments I find myself praying the most. I pray that our lives were still incubated by childhood. A simpler existence, contoured by more horizons and a lot less borders. I pray for smoother days, smoother than the pebbles we’d skim across The Pandy. But how ravenous life is – for change. The late-to-get-dark nights that added leniency to my mum’s, and your nanna’s curfews – gone. Endless Summers, and the optimism of youth – disappeared. Now replaced by bosses and eternal creditors.

Back then, if only we’d known the car-crash, trajectory of life, we’d have savoured the glory days, cherished them, reignited all the greying embers of Summer.

I remember the day we first met: the first day at St Mary’s. Through a crowd of gnawed lips and puckered foreheads, your attitude was a force to behold; lighthouse-bright among the rocky treachery of unchartered experience.

You were the only one of us high school newbies who dared wear a smile that day; a demeanor, further brazened by a face as placid as a sunrise lake – not an anxious ripple in sight. You were so self-assured – a star trooper at home in our new and alien world. Even at eleven years old, I could sense you were the type to spit in the eye of fear or, taunt danger with a sharpened stick. It was as though you knew something none of us could ever know: the essence of life perhaps; God’s master-plan – who knows. Your spirit was simply incredible; the eighth wonder of the world, I used to joke.
I can’t believe three decades have passed since that first encounter. But they do say, time flies when you have fun, and in those days, boy, did we have fun.

***

I began my trip down memory lane through the bend in the railings, the one behind the disused swimming baths, on Church Street?! Can you believe that gap is still there?

I squeezed through the bars: tighter, now age has gotten a grip of me. And after re-counting my ribs, I strolled along the old canal. I felt like a ghost, returned to hallowed ground as I swept past the weeping willows, still hunched over the caramel water, sobbing their existence away – over girls we’d joke.

From there, I passed the new, posh apartments where the meadows used to be: the aroma of buttercups and summer daisies, killed by the inorganic stink of wet paint and fresh putty. Momentarily, I hovered there, in suspense, like the dragonfly our youthful hands failed to catch. I closed my eyes, and arced my thoughts to Mr Strange, the gnarled sycamore. The ancient fellow that once guarded that patch, but was so kind to allow us to use his rope-swing, with its rapid, belly-bubbling oscillations!

I laughed when I remembered the time Rob fell from that bloody thing – into the water. Man, did he scream: thought he would drown, until we finally got him to stand.
The humour of that memory drifted away, and I, drifted beneath the Oakenholt flyover. That monster devoured the lush meadow we used for camping, but can you believe, a monster still scarred and scorched by the fireworks we hoped would destroy it.

For a moment, I watched the world blur by: fast cars, a war of noise, garish colour, in full-throttle. Amidst that urbanised chaos, and beyond the scorch marks on the flyover wall, I read, “Daz and Baz were ‘ere!” still there after all these years. The red paint of their unoriginality, faded, yet forever immortalised on the lifeless grey.

I smiled, and kept on toward the rot of Jones’s Boatyard. The din and heave of industry muffled by the dead hush of recession. The boats gone, replaced by a festered graveyard of rust-red shopping trollies, misplaced traffic cones, and other inanimate creatures.

Warmed by the sun, I rested for a while on the creak, creak of the ancient lock gate. There, I remembered, and laughed. Those Canadian geese: vicious, weren’t they? They raided you good, by the lock-keeper’s cottage – do you remember? After much shooing and windmilling of your arms, you gallantly lost the battle, and the geese squawked out of there with your jam sarnie. While vowing to exact future revenge, you bought us chip baps from The Fry Inn Chippy, only to argue all the way home, moaning why it was called a bap and not a muffin.

From Jones’s, I left the canal, via the elm canopied Donkey Path, breathlessly climbing its insane incline to St Mary’s footy fields. The shimmered sun, and the essence of wild garlic, always there to resurrect memories of happier days.
I tried to savour that nostalgia, feel its heat rise from the pit of my belly into my cold, adult heart. For my heart always warms to the fun and laughter we took for granted.

I sighed. I was sure I had just felt my teenage spirit leave my body, ghostly, in its desire, to forever remain in that special place.
I rested, on one of the bollards, at the top of the path. Those bollards!

Remember, when the council erected them? In ninety-four, after some of us kids used the steeps of the Donkey Path as a drag race track – for shopping trollies. Poor Kim Metcalf broke her arm. Remember how twisted it was?… the last straw for the council, we reckoned.
On that bollard – I thought, and gazed upon those empty footy fields, and although the final whistle blew many years ago, I imagined myself as Robson, then Giggs, then Eric Cantona: Gods under the floodlights, skilled to set the world ablaze.

Boy, do I miss those thirty-a-side matches, with runaway score-lines and jumpers for goalposts. I miss the blind camaraderie, the euphoria of goals we thought meant everything. I miss grass stains on jeans, sliding on knees, flyaway balls, and dramatic falls, I miss it all. Those were the days, as people often say, but even “those days” cannot puncture the wheels of commerce. The girls on the touchline – in giggled whispers, replaced by the rumble of diggers, each with the devilish audacity to bury future memories.

In the golden distance, I swore I heard the dinner bell of St Mary’s. Its archaic ding-ding-ding, ding-ding-ding, a summon for the schoolies to form orderly cues. But it was just my mind at play. Funny how nostalgia spurs the conscience to cast such spells.

I crossed Northop Road, to gaze closer at St Mary’s main classroom block, its red bricks, near black against the crimson sunset. St. Mary’s, an institute still proud and stoic, but not for long. The weeds in command, the bulldozers readied, and the kids transferred to the fad academy on the edge of town.

I peered through the steel fence, erected by the contractors, all a glare at the science block that shivered my spine. I still can’t believe you blew-up lab twelve – on our last day of school. Mr Williams threatened you with jail; you pleaded insanity, and the other kids hailed you a hero.

From the site of your gas-attack, my attention drifted to the posse of Scotch Pine, gangly, like the spotty six-formers that used to smoke among their needles and cones. I swear those trees still whisper the pain of our first ciggy. You went purple, and coughed up your chip “muffin”, and I nearly pissed myself laughing. You called me a donkey dog, and vowed never to smoke again, and to be fair, you never did. But funny, to this day, I still don’t know what a “donkey dog” is.

Richard, remember when school, for us, meant ties around heads, pretending to be Bruce Lee, truancy, detention, and listening to the Joshua Tree. It was dogs eating homework, bullies, and old-man McGurk. It was dodging his flying board-dusters, his insults, and metalwork. It was self-conscious showers, festering P.E. Kits and verruca socks, and ripping adults for saying school days were the best of their lives. We hated school. Then, later realized, those adults were right.

Between Legoland’s white-boxed houses and St Mary’s, on the dirt track, I thought about the time we rested our stitches, there. That cross-country run almost ended us. Remember our lame attempts to buy the overseers’ silence – the Burrows twins’ – their eyes rolled, in angst, to our chat-up lines? Pure camembert, too cringe to even think about.

I wandered down Glyndwr Road, where the Mannering’s are no longer kings. The vroom-vroom of their revving dirt-bikes and quads, replaced by the guttural jibber-jabber of Poles and Slovaks – Communists, as you’d probably joke, but a huge improvement, nonetheless.

Life is beyond recognition; Time, hungry for change, ravenous for the youth and beauty of everything. Everything, except for your “Richie 4 Emily B” artwork, still beautifully adorned on the gable wall of the Candy Box. “Bloody testosterone!” Old man McGurk would’ve yelled. What a dinosaur, that graveled catchphrase, mimicked a million times.

Toward Gwynedd Park, I wandered past the Hovis shop, where we’d buy bottles of White Flash with fake ID, and Swinny woods where we’d pinch our noses and drink that poison.

Ahh, the first time we got pissed. Under petrol skies, how you howled when I dropped to all-fours to become a cow. And me, almost pissing myself when the roundabout launched you into the privets.

You loved Gwynedd Park, especially the tyre swing, where you first kissed Emily Burrows. You walked on air for days, but not before kindly playing cupid between me and her twin, Ellie. I’ve never forgotten Ellie’s lips – how could I, nor our kiss beneath the monkey bars. I was hypnotised, well and truly. Our passions with the twins, anaesthetised all the pain of puberty; made us kings of the summer, kings of life; reckoning all the eyes of the universe were upon us.

From then on, we became experts, always in debate over what we each deemed, the perfect kiss. Eyes closed, or eyes open? Head left or, head right? We’d laugh about teeth that clash, and excess saliva; share stories of bovine breath, and overexuberant tongues. We both agreed though, a kiss was as magical as Mars and Venus in collision: the rise and fall of lust and love, and the creation of that tingle we hoped would last forever. But our optimism was swiftly doused when we realised that not even forever lasts forever.

Beyond the park’s fenced perimeter, I walked across the rugby field – to the car park, kicking the heads off dandelions, pretending to be you, pretending to be Bruce Lee. I laughed out loud, recalling your attempt to bust that brick in half, remember? The brick that nearly shattered all the bones in your fist? Mr Bennett was so pissed-off you couldn’t bowl for a month, or more importantly – for me, do my homework!

I took our short-cut back through Swinny woods, the echoed tap-tap-tap of a woodpecker, the only sound to counter the snip-snap of twigs beneath my feet. I slowed my pace when I reached the place where the bullfrogs used to mate, and found myself belching, just as we’d often mimic.

Heartache soon crippled me, however. Literally bent me double as I came to the entrance of Blackhills Lake. The black arch and gold lettering, as I remembered, but not with the fondness of youth.

I kept my head bowed for almost the full length of the Amber trail, up to the lake itself; the call of storks, mallards, geese, and the rest of their feathered pals, committed to the silence of my heartache.

It was twilight, and soon dark, when I stared at the murky lake. My heart plummeted to the soles of my feet. The creaky jetty, in the distance, still like a witch’s finger, crooked, casting spells to still the feral water. I gulped hard. Cruelness dwells beneath that mirror-glass surface – I always feel it. An evil betrayal of tranquility, a betrayal of you and your unrivalled spirit.

That fateful day leapt like a demon into my heart, then my mind, roaring and clawing my conscience. Tears filled my eyes as I recalled the cops finding your lifeless body, half-submerged in the reeds.
It was too much; as though all the World’s pain had forged itself into a dagger to skewer my heart. How could you be dead: how could such a beautiful abundance of energy fade – just like that? It went against all I knew, all I believed, all that was possible. I couldn’t accept you were gone, and after all these years, I can’t accept you’re no longer around for us to share in one another’s sorrows and joys. But death has a habit of crystallising the most beautiful souls, before time and age can taint what the heavens so benevolently gifted. Death immortalised your beauty and youth, and instilled it in the memories of all who knew you.

Though you were many years gone, on our wedding day, Ellie and I kept a place for you on the head table. I guess we hoped your death had been a terrible dream, and you would breeze through the door at any moment: hair slicked back, armed with smiles and jokes, but it never happened. You know, you’ll always be our best man. We love you forever.

Still, I’m left to agonise the events at the lake that day. An anguish, magnified whenever I see your sister about town. Heartache has brittled her, aged her almost beyond recognition. Your death broke something inside of her, something that I fear, only her own death shall now repair!

If only we were kids again, I could have saved you. I could have saved you from me: from my reckless stupidity. I’m so, so sorry, mate – truly. I shouldn’t have shoved you so hard: I only meant to buzz you up. I shouldn’t have been so fucking careless. I shouldn’t have froze. I shouldn’t have forgotten your fear of water… I should have screamed for help. I should have done what I know you’d have done in my shoes… You would have moved heaven and earth to save me. You wouldn’t have failed me, as I so miserably failed you. Richard, I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.