Godfrey stopped mid-sentence, his pint
hovering beneath a bottom lip bitten in confusion.
I reminded him of who I was, and why we
were here, and how we’d met, as arranged, early this morning, at the metro stop
of St Peter’s Square.
Spotted him, I had, from about 500 yards
away, his arm outstretched, raking that colt carving along the high windowsills
of the Midland Hotel; a sequence of small avalanches and sharply drawn back
curtains succeeding him along Lower Mosley Street.
He shook his head. It was no good.
Not 6am it had been. Still dark. It’s the
same day Godfrey, just a few hours later. I’d shouted you be careful when that
tram tooted you from the pavement edge. You hurried along behind it, passed the
war memorial and down the wrong side of the station’s safety railings. Missed
the incline, you did. And you just stood there all the while, two feet below me
on the tram track, shaking the hand I reached down you in assistance, not a
thought of climbing back onto the platform. I don’t know what gets into you
sometimes.
Is it coming back?
Godfrey reached over for my notebook,
asking whether my hieroglyphs - as he called them - might always be counted
upon to prove the absurdity of such behavior. Behavior he’d likely live in
perpetual embarrassment of - should half of it be true.
I read Godfrey the notes we’d made on the
back pew of the cathedral before the remembrance service had begun. About how - after he’d clambered onto the platform - we’d watched the ground floor windows
of the Midland, as rudely awoken patrons relinquished hairdryers and half knotted
ties, cuffing-out condensation patches to peer in a blur through crown glass
windows; images distorted to grotesques; fun house reflections nosing the windows for the inconsiderate window cleaner below.
Listen, I read: ‘We watched them all
appear, one by one at the windows, like condemned men peering through portholes
on a ship of fools. Or how the rippled panes tailored earth-tone roundels of
each inhabitant’s work wear – browns and blacks of shirt and suit surrounding
beige face blobs near the centre…’
Godfrey sipped his pint; nodding in
approval.
‘…Squinting eyes behind the pane’s pontil
mark magnified whites and pupils into the inner concentric rings of a series of
sepia rendered archery targets. All busy rat-a-tatting their wrath down to
street level, where it was lost among tram toots and taxi horns.’
Godfrey shook his head. He didn’t remember.
Nice line that though, about the roundels. Had he thought of it? Peculiar, you
see, because he did actually remember those circular RAF insignia as being in
sepia. As if the medium through which one came to associate those days - old
photographs and postcards and such - had, over time, replaced the colour of memory.
Like if you watch a home video enough times
you’d come to recognise the event from the camera’s point of view. Memory
strained, as it were, through sun spots, lens flares and the third person, said
Godfrey.
He grinned, shaking his head. This business
about the hotel windows, though. He supposed it sounded likely. He couldn’t
after all respect a late riser - a conviction imbued by a thousand or more dawn
calls from the damn Foxdon cockerel, which over time he learned to consider as
a warning from God against sloth and the importance of being an early bird,
because…
I stopped him. He’d said this earlier. How
he too learned to be an early bird, because anything left in the same place for
too long during those days was likely to be obliterated, right?
Godfrey exhaled and set his pint down. He
peered over the top of his spectacles; the slow roll of his kind brown eyes
tracked the sub dial of my watch through sixty seconds; breaking off to meet my
gaze through the thick mass of unruly eyebrows that shrugged apology for his
memory. A result, he explained, of the many nervous moments out on the
airfield, awaiting inbound squadrons that his more flippant self might only
joke had aggravated his tennis elbow to the point where he’d been forced to
stop wearing a wristwatch.
He sipped his pint. His more flippant self,
maybe.
I didn’t have the heart to interrupt
Godfrey again as he explained, for the umpteenth time, that the present was a
habit he’d been forced to retire from a long time ago, for fear of his health.
And that the time spent recalling the moments he’d missed had obscured contemporarily
to the point where it took recent events a while to sink in, as if the
previous couple of hours were a proving ground on the way to record; an acid
test for what he took with him to deep storage.
Godfrey’s exile from the contemporary meant
that by VJ Day, he’d all but forgotten how to tell the time. He’d re-learned,
he explained, according to the array of grand gateaux balanced on silver cake
stands in the Lawn Street bakery window, which were cut, to this day, to give
passersby a tempting cross section of their filling. One could still gauge a
literal degree of popularity by their missing segment, and tell the time by the
radii of their remains: The half past five of an overdone, un-iced Madeira; the
five to midnight of the last sliver of delicious lemon drizzle.
Already half five on that succulent
banoffee when he’d walked past this morning. See, he was remembering now well
enough! Some wise fellow bagged his slice for lunchtime, no doubt. Early risers
indeed. Be sold out by 10am that one. Delicious. It was coming back to him now. His trip in on the metro; getting off too early at G-Mex, or whatever it was
called these day, and following the tram down the incline passed the Midland.
Under the circumstances of Godfrey’s
sporadic memory loss, I agreed to straighten out any inconsistencies or
repetitions that might make his story sound disingenuous.
However, I could not grant his request - I
explained, laughing - that near to the start of its publication, I could insert
a disclaimer asking readers to consider both his and my poor temperance for any
shaky temporality therein: A shame, said Godfrey, given the amount of pubs
between here and our destination.
