The Reason I'm Still Here

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Martin Price

© Martin Price 2016

Smashwords Edition

The right of Martin Price to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988

All rights reserved. Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, no part of this e-book publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the purchaser

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents and events are all from the author’s mind. Any resemblance to persons either living or dead is purely coincidental

© Cover design by Carmine Trip

Also by this author:

Becoming Hugo Forst

Flowers from a Different Summer

Luvya Getcha

Sad’s Place

Steam

Marsha’s Bag

As the Flies Crow

A Twisted Pair ( Marsha’s Bag & As the Flies Crow in one book )

Short Stories:

Africar

Bad Return

For Katie

Table of Contents

Part One: But you don’t know what love is. You only know the difference between right and wrong. And that is not love.

Part Two: We will strike your island, whatever the cost may be, and we will strike on the beaches, and on the landing grounds, and in the fields and in the streets and on the hills, and you will surrender.

Part Three: That’s how the world is, both dark and light, with the moon on one side and the sun on the other.

Part Four: You could have saved him, you were older than him, but you didn’t. I want you to leave.

Part Five: But you never remember tracing the curves of darkness.

Part Six: Understand that love is often in the places that you can’t see it.

The End / Back to Top

Part One: But you don’t know what love is. You only know the difference between right and wrong. And that is not love.

My name is Wes Churchill, which is why they chose me – me with my old TV and my old video recorder.  Of course, I told them I wasn’t Winston Churchill, not even a relative as far as I knew, although they say if you’re a male with the same surname as another male, then there’s a four out of five chance you’re related somewhere along the way.  Nonetheless, all that aside, I am not Winston Churchill, just plain old Wesley Churchill: in my late-fifties, divorced, and in a dream-world much of the time.

Then came the message, suddenly there on that old TV of mine, and I thought it a joke.  Had to be.  Not that I could work out how someone could play such a joke.  So I just did as I was told, I recorded that message, all the time staring at the screen with a dry mouth, a thumping heart, and a brain that seemed to have frozen solid.  Staring, staring, staring.  Staring at a fuzzy, washed-out picture of a shiny space-age city that jutted up from the ground, viewed from what appeared to be a hillside on which grass, just like the grass here on earth, wavered in the breeze.

Afterwards, I looked out at my garden, and the colour out there, heightened by the brightness of the sun, was too much for me to bear.  Gave me a headache.  I put on my sunglasses, my old Ray-Bans, and went out for a walk in the woods opposite my place.  As I walked down the path, I turned and saw my little, scruffy terrier sitting on the windowsill, looking at me as if to say, Aren’t you taking me?

Well no, I wasn’t, so I said to him, ‘Sorry, maybe later, but not this time around, my old friend.’

My heart was still thumping, and sweat dripped off my face, and when I wiped it away, it just came back, drip, drip, drip.  God, I felt sick.  For a moment, I even began to hyperventilate, but I knew what to do, having suffered from panic attacks before, and after a while I managed to calm myself down.  My throat burned, my eyes hurt, and my whole body ached.  One moment the wind was generous with its cooling breeze, and then, the next moment, it stole it away, leaving me standing there in a wall of heat.  I found a bank of soft grass under the shade of a tree, and there I sat, my head between my knees, thinking that when I got back home, I would play that tape and it would be blank, that obviously I had made it all up, and that would be good in one way, but not so good in another.  It would be good in the way that I wouldn’t have to tell the world it was doomed if it didn’t change its ways, but not so good if that tape was blank, because it would mean that clearly I had gone mad.

Must have.

I thought of Jennifer then, more precisely, I thought back to the time I smashed up her car with a hammer.  Not out of anger.  I just wanted her to talk to me, to tell me how she was feeling, to tell me where I had gone wrong, and then hopefully how I could make things better between us.  But then, screaming and crying, Jennifer called the police, and they came of course, and rightfully so, because I was a man with a hammer, and what I didn’t take out on the car I might just take out on her – that’s what the police thought.  Nor could I blame them for that.  But then again, I blamed Jennifer, not the police.  They were just doing their job, the way that Jennifer along with that prick, Ronan Wheeler, were doing a job on me, on my mind.  My mind that was usually as steady as a rock, but on that day it wasn’t, the reason being that every time I tried to talk to my wife ( my now ex-wife – no surprise there ), she would grab her keys, get in her car, and drive off, until finally I’d been unable to stand it any longer and I snapped.

After that, she moved in with Ronan Wheeler, and I was issued with a court order to stay away from her, me, a man who had never said boo to a goose.  When I received that order, I took one look at it, and thought: How did it come to this? How?

Then I began to cry, and once the tears started I couldn’t stop them, and if I could get them to stop, then it was only for a moment, and then they’d start up again.  In the end I grew so frustrated with it all that I went to bed, thinking I would have the most awful dreams and wake up bawling my face off.  I didn’t.  I slept for ten hours straight, but unfortunately they were not ten salutary hours. While I slept, something had broken, something big, something terribly critical, and when I swung my legs out of bed, my only thought was to grab a long length of rope, take it up into the attic, tie one end around a rafter, the other around my neck, and then fall through the attic’s trap-hatch. Snap! My neck broken. Dead.

I have to say that I don’t have much fondness for mobile phones. They turn people away from the world and force them to stare into their world, which is nothing but a hole filled with a colourful nothingness, but that day, five years ago, my mobile phone saved my life, truly it did – I would not have made it to my landline phone. My legs would have taken me straight to that long length of rope and that would have been that. But my mobile phone was on my bedside table. I snatched it up and pressed my eldest daughter’s number, and even then, some kind of calculating thought must have kicked in, because I called her, not my youngest daughter, whose mother is Jennifer, whereas my eldest daughter is from a previous relationship and so mostly she’d take my side in all this. Not that it was about taking sides. No, it was simply about needing my daughter, needing all of her, and to hell with any sideways distractions.

‘Please come,’ I begged her, the moment she answered, the tears spilling down my face again. ‘Please come and help me, please, please, please.’ And she did come, thank God, and although she and I have had our ups and downs, she was the perfect most beautiful help to me, and she held me like a child, and she settled me down until I no longer wanted to grab that long length of rope and take it up into the attic.

‘I’ll stay,’ she said, planting kisses on my head and rocking me gently. ‘I’ll stay for as long as it takes, and Freddie can look after the kids, and it’s about time, too. I do everything for that man. I get up at five-thirty, every damn day. God, he pisses me off, him with his all of this and his all of that, like he’s the only one with work to do. So yes, I’ll stay, of course I will, it’s the right thing to do.’

My head slipped down into her lap, and now that my nose was pressed against her jeans, I could smell her children on her, my grandchildren. She reeked of everyone but herself: the scent of those who dribbled on her, spilled on her, and brushed past her, like she was nothing but blotting paper. I wondered about her then, the little dark-eyed ghost that she was, floating in and out of my life. I wondered what I could do to make things better for her, and I vowed, if I pulled through this, to do just that, to not just make changes to my own life but to hers as well. And I did just that. And now things are good between me and my little dark-eyed ghost.

~

She drove me to the doctor’s. I couldn’t – my car looked like something that might end up in a ditch, with me sobbing behind the wheel, or worse, I might take out a roadful of people and end up being a killer.

When we got to the doctor’s, the reception was packed with people coughing, sniffing, snorting, trembling, or simply sitting there looking too thin and with faces as pale as milk. There was a woman in a coat that was either pink, orange, or some shade of purple that I couldn’t work out, and it gave me a headache. I put my hand in my daughter’s lap, my shaking hand, and she squeezed it. Began to rub it, too, with a thumb, and I wondered right then what I’d done to deserve this angel beside me. Not much – that’s how I saw it. I’d been given an angel, all right, an angel I’d never appreciated before, and I thought that God, if He was behind this, must be easy to mug off, because He’d given me something for nothing.

It was windy that day. The branch of a tree slapped against the reception window and I jumped. I’m sure some of the people in there must have seen me jump. It seemed like I bounced up in my chair, they must have seen that, but nonetheless no one reacted. They just sat there, likely full of their own troubles, and mine were nothing compared to theirs.

The doctor was a big man with a patchy beard and he was wearing a shirt that looked as if it hadn’t been ironed. His glasses were round and much too small for his chubby face. It was strange. I suddenly felt like the doctor and I was here to tell him that he needed to lose a little weight and to smarten himself up. But I told him nothing, and he told me nothing. Not then, anyway. Instead, it was my daughter who piped up. She let the doctor know what had happened to me, mainly about how I’d gone from being a closed, distant man, to someone who needed to be cuddled and soothed, and who, dear God, just couldn’t stop crying. And right on cue, yes, I began to cry, all right, as if to prove her point.

The doctor did not mince his words. ‘You’ve had a breakdown, Mr Churchill,’ he said, his eyes looking bigger than the glasses around them. ‘It’ll be a long road back for you, that’s if you do get back, and if you do, then it won’t be the same road, anyhow. It will always be different. It will have changed.’

I didn’t know what he meant by that. I wanted to stand up and slap him, and hard enough to make his little, round glasses fall off his fat bearded face. Still, as time went by I understood, all right, or at least I understood some of it. It was about how, once a mind has been broken, it can be mended, yes it can, but it will always be full of little cracks that can let the darkness back in, if you’re not careful. You have to look after yourself, that’s the thing. Consciously look after yourself, the way you never had to before. You can take all the medication you want, and attend all the counselling sessions, and I did both, although I found neither much of a help. The medication made me feel sluggish, and the counselling sessions were usually taken up by one person who constantly talked about themselves. So I started going for walks, which was my way of consciously looking after myself. Started going for walks in those woods opposite my place that had simply been full of trees before the breakdown, but after that, they became somewhere in which I started to find a little peace.

But even then, something was missing, and I didn’t know how that could be, because it felt like something I hadn’t had before, so how could I miss it? Then she came out of the river, only she didn’t come out of the river, of course she didn’t, but it seemed that way, when really she just came out of all the brown and green shadows down there. This woman, this old woman, with her dog. She came up the steep hill before me, wading through the long, dry grass from which insects rose and buzzed all around her, but she flapped them away with a hand that I could almost see through, like brown paper. On her head was a scarf that was cream-coloured with bright-red roses on it, and it was daintily knotted under her chin. Her face was deeply-wrinkled, but it did not give her a sad look, the way it can do that to some people, like the real person under there has become lost somehow. Those wrinkles, they made her face soft and pleasant and cheery, like old age had carved a sainted kind of happiness into her. She made me feel humble, and immediately, too, like I had no right to be ill, that I should appreciate the world for what it was and put an end to all the tears running down my face.

‘Ah, there you are,’ she said, when she reached me. She said this like she knew me, even though we had never before laid eyes on each other, so far as I knew, but because she was old, I made no comment on that. I just looked at her and smiled, and a short while into that smile, and I realised I was giving her a real smile, not the smile I pulled for the sake of it, given that underneath I was just falling apart and really I didn’t want to smile. Still, I smiled for her, all right. Just smiled and smiled and smiled.

‘But you’ve always been there, haven’t you?’ she went on. ‘Like a shadow that can be trod on but can’t be pinned down, so all it does is slip under everyone’s feet, and there it goes, slipping away. But you can kiss me if you want, and if you do, then things will get better, I promise you that, and haven’t they already, in a way?’

‘Yes, my daughter!’ I said. ‘I found her.’

‘No, you didn’t find her,’ the old woman said. ‘Like you, she was always there.’

‘Yes, always there,’ I said, like a man who’d been hypnotised.

‘Everything we need is always there,’ the old woman said. ‘We just need to take hold of it. So kiss me.’

And I did.

And then: ‘Take hold of this.’

And I did. I took hold of what it was that she pressed into my hand, and then she was gone, back down that steep, grassy hill with the insects rising up and with her flapping them away with her paper-thin hand. Then into the brown and green shadows she disappeared down by the river there.

I stood with my mouth open for what must have been a couple of minutes, that was all, and yet it felt like an hour. Then I went to walk back home, but when I looked down, I saw the loop of a tan leather leash in my hand, and on the end of it was the dog, sitting there, gazing up at me with big, lovely eyes.

I looked back down the hill, but she was gone. I could see no path that she might have taken, either. It was all trees and grass and bushes and the river and that was all. Her with the cream-coloured scarf around her head with the bright-red roses on it that I would have spotted, and easily, had she been down there, somewhere.

‘So, you are mine then,’ I said finally to the dog. ‘And you have always been there. I just needed to take hold of you.’

So I did, I took hold of him, and we walked together through the woods. I heard a faint tinkling noise, and I realised it was his collar with a little ID tag on it. I bent down, thinking I would find a disc on the collar, but no, it was a cross, a plain silver cross with the dog’s name on it.

‘Jesus,’ I said, laughing, and I took him home, and when I got in, my two daughters were there, and they are good friends now. They didn’t used to be before Jennifer left me to live with Ronan Wheeler. They used to argue or ignore each other, and these days it makes my heart swell every time I see them together, talking and touching each other with such affection.

‘So who’s this little fellow?’ my youngest daughter said, when she saw him come trotting into the house with his head held up high.

‘Jesus,’ I said, smiling, and both the girls thought I was swearing when in fact I had simply told them his name, that his name was Jesus.

‘His name’s Jesus?’ my eldest daughter said. ‘How will you be able to call his name out, in the park, say, with all the other dog-walkers around?’

‘Jesus, I don’t know,’ I said, beginning to laugh, and then my daughters began to laugh, too, until we were falling about with tears running down our faces. Jesus didn’t laugh. Jesus just stared around at us, all aloof and knowing and spiritual and appearing to be capable of many wondrous things.

~

On the way back from the doctor’s that day, my eldest daughter stopped off at her place, her place with the broken-down fence and the weeds in the garden. She was dressed in those jeans of hers that smelled of everyone else, but they were tight around her thin but still shapely body, and she was wearing a high top, and there was a decorative metal bar through her bellybutton, and her long hair hung down her back like some kind of black magic, and my thoughts, while still fatherly, turned to how desirable she was, moreover, to how little she had gained for being so beautiful.

She came back out to the car ten-minutes later with a big bag in one hand and a smaller bag in the other: one for her clothes, the other for her bits-and-bobs. She slung them in the boot, closed it with a slam, hard enough to rock the car, and then Freddie was there on the doorstep, and, as was not unusual for him, there was a fishing rod in his hand. ‘So what am I going to do then?’ he asked. ‘I’ve got all of this and all of that to do, and what about the kids?’

‘You look after them,’ she said. ‘It’s simple. You get up early, you go to bed late, and everything will run like clockwork.’

Freddie came down to the car, disgruntled, and made a winding action with his free hand. I rolled