HUTCHED

The airport workers are hutched in rows around the outskirts of Gatwick in southern England and some of these rows are arranged round big spiritual sheds, built large enough to house small airliners.

Weddings can be launched to heaven from these buildings. Up into lower middle horizons; complete with sunsets, palm trees, parakeets, sandy strands and fluttering, cherubically winged, cherubic babies, (usually allocated at a rate of 2.5 per (usually heterosexual) couple).

It was a wet day throughout, initially, the strangely suited man could not find the correct shed for the marital lift off that he had been invited to attend, even with satellite assisted assistance from a local taxi driver.

He shuffled around across the rear lawns of the spiritual sheds attracting rain drops to his person from recently planted orange and red leaved ornamental trees. He crept into the latecomers’ area at the back of the congregation who were just rendering “Amazing Grace” anaemic, having realised that they mostly lacked the conviction to sing it and did not know the words anyway.

British Methodism and Low Church Anglicanism, have honourable, once vigorous traditions of hymn singing. The strangely suited straggler could remember his aunts and uncles belting it out, their very souls vibrating with religious fervour, their personal pieties melding into One Lord’s brass section, which did not need electronic amplification or borrowed traditions.

The unsuited suited one did not find a jigsaw slot in the congregation to fit him, as he was neither Methodist nor Anglican (at any level), but rather an anarcho-syndicalist eco-socialist with several other silly principles as well and a big hollow mistake in the middle of his life that had coincided with the 1970’s. Then he had youthfully and enthusiastically charged as part of a quasi-generational peace jihad against what some then took to be the sex and drug taboos of the then ‘developed’ world.

The unsuited suited witnessed the marital unity of his Methodist cousin with someone else's Anglican cousin, and thought he saw all around him , the suited ones’ attempt to reknit their community that actually worshipped ornamental garden plants and politeness more reverently than any force of creation.

He never had anything against a decent whistle and flute himself though, but Oxfam had been one of the few tailors that he could ever have afforded.

Those who had hired and those who had had their clothes especially made for them on this occasion sliced, glued tied and bound the bride and groom together by means of ritual, psalm, unguent prayer and apparent attention to sermons.

The “youngsters”, (contemporaries of the splicereeroons), had formed themselves quite a nice tight little soul/gospel combo, (bass, drums, organ and keyboards, lead and rhythm and two young female soprano singers neither of whom had one sixteenth the lung power of Aretha Franklin) which sang the suited out onto wet autumn municipal lawns.

And taxi flotillas and lifts from cousins and two single decker hired buses came and took guests to receptions.

Unsuited suited was left regretting his life at a bus stop as the summer came and cried because it had just died. Indeed he might have regretted it more had he not learnt in the course of casual conversation with passers-by that he was on the wrong side of the road, for the bus to the station for the train to the Smoke.

And the when he had got himself sorted out, (gottonabus, gottoffabus), finding that his Old Age Pensioner’s bus pass worked out here where the airport workers are hutched with their hatchbacks. His breath was then so short in that decade of his life that he then could barely walk ten yards on the level and he entered the suburban station via a sloping series of wheelchair ramps and having scaled this low grade pyramid was, he was accosted at its almost apex by a local junky lady cradling a balding leopard skin print bag.

“Err I know this is a long shot..” She essayed, perhaps it she being new to the role of the medically mendicant and it being a middle class suburb.

“It is. No. I’m not giving you any money!” He snapped back projecting the fire pain of his diabetic feet at her.

And thus having established his petty bourgeois credentials he commuted back to London from his cousin’s wedding, unbothered, since he slept as the train pulled into Victoria station terminus, which was then terminally busy with the coincidence of tourists, day time town shoppers returning and people coming in for a night on the town.

A slow moving pensioner in this was a bit like an alien species dropped into a swarming confluence of army ant columns by sadistic small boy. Though he moved slowly and deliberately a nature cameraperson would have sought him out for focus and described him with commentary:

“Here is the diabetic pensioner slowest denizen of this swarming confluence of persons and traders, paraders, travellers and tourists. These massing, crossing tides of human fish, these clouds of commuting plankton swirl over around and through each other like twisting mackerel driven to shoal upwards in tighter and tighter gyres by the pointy jaws and unrelenting maws of the marlin that herd them from beneath. The pensioner plods on through this maddening moil, frequently stopping to lean stop and rest, like a timeless tortoise, an interminable termite, a five-legged tarantula or a barely mobile spatula, he grogs on regardless supporting and supported by his shopping trolley seeking out the concrete promontory long laid out in his traditional DNA by his traditional genes. That grey sacred seeming pillar that has long been the halt of the number two omnibus en route to Stockwell. Here like crabs, claw waving in tidal froth would- be travellers cling, amass and congregate and as each bus arrives the clump off to surge on to its decks, using elbow, knee and even gut-barge to secure travelling niches.”

The rain has now set in as a steady wet black background to everything that night. The air is almost water and the water is almost air. And when a slow moving pensioner gets off the number two in Stockwell he almost gets underwater there.

Wet blobs spread on parts of his unsuitable suit seeping round the edges of, or even straight through the seams of an inadequate waterproof. So with strides almost as small as to be monopodal like his night speed buggy pal, the slug, he crawls along sodden pavings and over sodden concrete north off the big back doors of Stockwell bus garage. He plods and pauses, plods and pauses, along iron railings, over two side roads and under dripping pane trees to the ‘garden’ of the Union Arms where subversive nicotine addicts are huddled under umbrellas, resolutely refusing to get married and conversing about anarcho-syndicalisms eco-socialisms as a northern hemisphere year could be beginning to end badly for them.

He has a drink or two, cracks a joke or two, learns a thing or two and maybe; but cannot settle. He can still see the rain , feel the rain, taste the rain, drink it in, spit it out and hear it fall again, (and again). There’s no way out but the crippled pensioner’s walk to the bus stop.

Later it transpires that there was another way out, to a dry party, which in this context meant a party where alcoholic drink was served on weather-proof premises. However he did not know that then and did that wet walk back again. The bus back to town, when it came, was more like the inside of a fisherman’s bait can for maggots crawling the wrong way in the rain, than a conveyance forming part of a twenty first century transport system, BUT it got you there unsuitable suit and all. It also got you to two more places where you had to wait in the rain for another bus again.

And by the time the bus was lurching up to the final stop, unsuitable suit wanted a spiritually alcoholic edge to cut through the last damp hour of the damp day and its mildewing memories. So when he could have ridden on one more stop, he got off where there was a 24 hour supermarket open. He walked in, got his wire basket and let its five to twelve hammerhead sharks take him for twelve quid for a litre of orange juice, a hunk of cheese a loaf of Polish sliced bread and a half-bottle of good old English vodka.

One more two stop bus ride, one more furlong up hill on his suburban road in the still unceased rain, resting every ten yards, leaning palm on damp slightly abrasive concrete pillar, on wooden fence post releasing a slight odour of wood preservative in the incessant dam damp.

And at last, after fumbling with house keys on neck ribbons under an undry fleece. Through two doors to privacy assured, up the wooden hill that he had bought and paid for to sit at the computer that he had brought and paid for, subscribing to the internet service that he had brought and paid for by watching repeats of TV programs that he wouldn’t have watched if he hadn’t been able to do so for free.

And it was not that he wanted a drink as such, he had a couple of cans of cider in, if it had just been that. He wanted his whole day back, or life back come to that and the vodka from the 24-hr rip off store seemed like a clean sharp blade that could cut him out a chunk back.

He was not attending a religious ceremony that he sympathised with, but did not wholly agree with. He was not making journeys around to places and through mad crowds that he might not otherwise have made. He was still wearing some clothes that he would not otherwise have worn, but at least he wasn’t getting wet any more.

British Vodka doesn’t taste of much, except, in the instance of the particular half-bottle, its orange mixer and though, (if he thought back in perspective, which he didn’t just then), he was a selfish bastard who usually sorted himself out in petty regards, so what that drink tasted of was self-control, like an action being done by a doer who does wanted to do it. Dah do Ron-ron-ron.

But, but, but; it all bit back. He drank the vodka probably until about 5 am and then he slept or perhaps passed out. The liquids worked their way around his body; and then maybe an hour or so later, sort of woke him up perhaps.

And perhaps this gets retrospective here; parts have to be reconstructed from local logic and a bit of domestic archaeology.

For instance, it seems sensible to suppose that to have fallen down, probably slipping and/or tripping and descending in a rapid involuntary knee-slicing kneel that made a one inch deep gash across left leg just below the knee cap, that the person who inflicted this on themselves dunnit from a standing or walking position. They done this by coming downhard without possibility of volition or control.

Who knows? He did not see, but what cut the cut, but the cut was done. Blood vermillion from warfarin and vodka splatter a square yard of suburban flooring and growing. Subcutaneous fat was visible round the edges of the cut and in the middle of the blood mess on the floor, an intact empty vodka half bottle lay mocking the newly wounded man.

He ignored its taunts, he knew what to do. Cloth clamped across the wound, (an Arab head cloth was first to hand), phone an ambulance, come as soon as you can, I’ll be sitting in the street on the doorstep wearing a Harris tweed jacket, wrapped in an old blue blanket waving feebly and bleeding copiously.

Wounded, get down the stairs to the street by crawling on this arse like an upended weevil to be inspected by the dawn of a relatively dry late autumn day. Light rising over suburban rooves, sure he could hear a first bird song, one note, surely not a house sparrow, they’d all long gone from London.

He had long enough to sit there and watch the light rising. Long enough not to watch his blood puddle spreading down the front garden path reach the edge of a flower bed. Long enough to wonder when to make a second emergency call, but a yellow and green motorised watermelon, a London Ambulance Service Ambulance rolled down the road.

The crew took him up and took him in; cradle to grave, accident and emergency.