Authors: Calvin Wade
NICKY – December 2010
It was midnight and I was in bed reading a Bill Bryson book, when Simon arrived back from Joey’s. I heard him wandering through to the kitchen, then opening and closing cupboard doors, no doubt craving chocolate and undoing some of his recent good work in attempting to lose weight. He was also moaning about it being freezing. The timing on the central heating only stayed on until nine thirty, so it probably wasn’t much warmer in the house than it had been outside. At about quarter to ten, I had retired to bed, allowing myself the luxury of an electric blanket.
After a few minutes of rooting, Simon arrived in the bedroom, looking cold and a little drunk.
“How’s Joey?” I asked.
“No different,” Simon replied, “I don’t think he’ll be joining a monastery any time soon, but if this house gets any colder, I might. Just for a bit of warmth.”
“I’ve told you, Simon, we need to watch how often we have the heating on, it costs a fortune.”
Simon started to undress, whilst exaggerating his shivers. The fact that we were having a coherent conversation was convincing me he wasn’t too worse for wear.
“I tell you what though, Nicky, despite Joey having a big, fancy, warm house, a load of money and more gadgets than Sir Clive Sinclair, I wouldn’t want his life for all the tea in China.”
“He must be lonely,” I said in agreement.
“Definitely. He likes to tell you about all the women and all his mates, but it’s a superficial existence. He hasn’t got anyone that means the world to him and he doesn’t mean the world to anyone else. I feel a bit sorry for him. He’s all show.”
Without actually saying he did have someone, a family even, that he adored and who adored him, Simon kissed my name on his wrist. He did it in a bit of an uncoordinated manner, though, which was a shame for him, as, without him knowing, he blew his sexual chances for the evening! I was about to suggest he come over and kiss the real thing, rather than just the tattoo, but there is nothing arousing about a drunken man when you are sober. My desires could wait for another day.
“I’ll tell you something else as well,” Simon continued as he got himself into bed next to me.
“What?”
“We solved that Doris Meadows mystery.”
“Simon, there wasn’t a mystery. She has a gift, that’s all there is to it.”
Simon made a playful grope for me. I had a feeling I would be politely refusing him for a while, so I put my book on my bedside table.
“Well, that’s where you are wrong, sexy pyjama lady!”
“Simon, can you keep your drunken wandering hands to yourself! These pyjamas aren’t sexy! They are warm, winter pyjamas. The only reason you think they are sexy, is because, once you’ve had a drink, you think I’m sexy in anything.”
“I think you are sexier in nothing!” Simon said in a loud, childish, drunken voice.
“Simon, keep your voice down, the kids will hear you. Take your mind off sex for one minute and tell me what you mean about Doris Meadows.”
“Oh yes, Doris Meadows!” Simon said, now seemingly thinking about our actual conversation rather than about sex, “the cunning old dear set me up!”
“No, she did not!” I protested.
“She did, Nicky. I mentioned to Joey a while back on Facebook about Colin calling you ‘Miss La De Da’ and we also discussed your Mum’s death and low and behold,
as if by magic, Doris Meadows, super psychic, mentions those very things. She’s just an old fraud. Good on her for getting away with it, but she’s a charlatan.”
Simon then proceeded to sing ‘The Only One I Know’ by The Charlatans, loudly and off key. I gave him a prod.
“Simon, shut up! You’ll wake the kids. Why would Doris Meadows have been looking into your Facebook account?”
“She will have researched the audience’s history and then hacked the Facebook accounts of the interesting ones,” Simon explained.
“Simon, do you really expect me to believe this? This is not the MI5 we are talking about here, you know! It is a woman of about ninety! Doris Meadows wouldn’t even know how to switch on a computer, let alone hack into one.”
“Maybe she pays someone else to do it.”
“Simon, stop looking for logical explanations for everything. Sometimes bizarre things happen. Not everything is explainable. There is a difference between spirituality and magic tricks,” I firmly stated. This didn’t just seem like a criticism of Doris Meadows to me, it seemed like a criticism of my belief system. I was always going to fight my corner.
“Nicky, there is an explanation for this, though. Doris Meadows or someone else on her behalf, has looked into my background, read up about Colin’s death and then gone snooping on Facebook.”
“Facebook has privacy settings,” I argued.
“My account won’t have. I’ve no idea how to put them on.”
“Your account will have privacy settings because you didn’t set your account up, Will did and he will have put them on.”
“Maybe,” Simon mused, “I still think she’s a trickster.”
“Think what you like, Simon, but I still think Colin spoke to her.”
“No chance. Colin died in 1986.”
“His spirit might not have done.”
Alcohol allows people to find a passage from jovial to morose in one easy step. Simon was no different. I could feel his mood changing.
“Nicky, his spirit did die and do you know how I know this?”
“How?”
“I’ve been thinking about this. Colin loved me. If Colin, twenty five years after his death, still had a voice, he would have put me out of the misery that has been looming over me for a quarter of a century. He would have been able to see me tormenting myself about what exactly happened down at the canal. He wouldn’t have been bothered abut ‘Miss La De Da’, friendly dogs in heaven and your Mum. He’d have just yelled, ‘It was Boffin! It was Boffin! It was Boffin!’ or whatever the real truth was. Someone who is probably still alive is still hiding the truth about Colin’s death and if Colin could have told me who that someone is, he would have done.”
“Simon, we can’t possibly expect to know what the rules are on the other side.”
“Nicky, I don’t think there is another side, but even if there is, I knew our Colin better than anyone and the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that was not him.”
“Well, I still think it was.”
We went to sleep on that slightly acrimonious note. I hope one day Simon does find out what happened to Colin, because every now and again, especially after a drink, I can still see how much the mystery surrounding his death still haunts him. Simon’s opinion is that Colin is not resting in peace and until his killer is found, he never will be.”
SIMON – February 2011
I am a pretty regular bloke. I like the simple life. I am pretty insular and a day without drama or incident has always been a good day as far as I’m concerned! It took me more than thirty seven years to have my first really crazy idea. Having a tattoo on my wrist wasn’t earth shatteringly mad but it did give me a thrill to do something out of character. It was, however, only the first item on a ‘bucket’ list that was made in my head after Arthur’s collapse. Once the first item was ticked off, I moved on to the second.
The idea came courtesy of Facebook. I am not a big fan of computers, mobile phones or any sort of gadget, I still like vinyl and cassettes, but whilst I have remained technologically in the 1980’s, the rest of my family have moved on and sometimes they drag me into their world kicking and screaming! Nicky made me aware of the whole ‘Friends Reunited’ craze. In Britain, Friends Reunited had been putting old school friends back in touch with each other for years, often for the common good. Occasionally though it lead to old romances from teenage days being re-kindled and new marriages falling apart. Facebook took things several steps further. It didn’t just establish two way communications between old school friends, it created a community for every individual, placing everyone in the centre of their own inner circle. It was not just for school friends either, any friendship, no matter how tenuous, could now be re-established via Facebook.
To be honest, there were not too many friends in my life that I was desperate to re-connect with. Most of my friends, of which I only had a few, were still in touch or in most cases, were not in touch but I knew where they still lived and would see them around sometimes as I drove past them or they drove past me. These friendships were now on, what I would call, a “friendly wave” basis and that was enough for me. On Facebook, I had added the likes of Joey Neill and a few friends from cricket, but there wasn’t much point being on there just to connect with people I saw already.
There was only one friend, who was actually from my school days, who did not fit that standard mould. His name was Richard Tyler. Joey Neill had always been my best friend at Euxton Church of England Primary School, so when I discovered Joey’s Mum and Dad would be sending him to a private Secondary School, I began to worry about who I would end up hanging around with at school. I was never going to slot naturally into the ‘Groovy Gang’, nor would I be able to adequately converse with the ‘swots’, the ‘sporty folk’ were also out, as were the ‘tough kids’. I just wanted to befriend an average sort of kid, not sporty, not overly clever or thick or kitted out in a Sergio Tacchini tracksuit, just a bog standard kid.
Richard Tyler turned out to be the boy who passed my criteria check. Richard wore NHS glasses, had greasy, dark hair with a severe fringe that led to some of the older kids christening him ‘spade head’, but we had common ground and almost immediately after starting Parklands, my Secondary School, we became best mates. He lived in Brinscall, which is five or six miles from Euxton, so I didn’t see much of him outside of school, but in school, from the ages of eleven to fifteen, we stuck together whenever we could.
At fifteen, the tectonic plates beneath our feet took Richard and me in different directions. Richard’s Dad was a teacher, a Deputy Head at a primary school in Brinscall. Richard was always mentioning how ambitious his Dad was for a Head Teacher’s role and in 1988, he managed to get one. This was great news for Mr.Tyler, but not such great news for me, as it meant the Tyler family moving to a tiny village in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, called Bishop’s Cleeve. Throughout the rest of our teenage years, we exchanged regular letters, but, for reasons I can’t really recall, the letters became less frequent and eventually stopped altogether. When Friends Reunited became popular, I kept hoping he would register on the Parklands page, I only registered myself because of him, but it was a phenomenon that did not draw him in. Like me, I doubt there were too many friends that he was desperate to trace.
Having introduced me to Friends Reunited several years earlier, it was Nicky that introduced me to Facebook too. She had become pretty addicted to it, posting photos of the kids on there, accumulating hundreds of ‘friends’ and seemingly wasting quality time playing farm games! The kids were on it too, but at first, I kept away, telling them I’d rather listen to a good play on Radio 4, read a book or have a laugh by listening to one of the old classics like ‘Hancock’s Half Hour’ or ‘Round The Horne’. Nicky always said I’d been born a generation too late or even two!
One day though, a couple of years back, I think I must have been feeling particularly and unusually sociable. It must have been an evening that Nicky and I had shared a bottle of Sancerre that had been on a half price offer at Tesco, as I remember being half cut when I asked whether Nicky or Will would show me how to set up a Facebook account.
“This is strange,” mocked Will, “it’s like seeing Laurel & Hardy in colour! It’s not natural. You’ll be listening to Jay Z next.”
Cheeky so and so.
Even for a technophobe like me, Facebook was relatively straightforward. I made sure Will altered the settings so I only communicated with a carefully selected few. I had a nose around old school ‘friends’ pages for a couple of hours, delighting in the fact that some of them looked even older, greyer and fatter than me! I particularly enjoyed seeing the pages of girls who would only give the time of day to handsome boys at school, many of whom were now what my Mum would politely describe as ‘rotund’ with leathery faces and wrinkles showing the belated evidence of their 1980’s sunbed addiction. A few were now grandmothers and most, somehow fittingly, were divorced. Selfishness and vanity are not great strengths in any marriage. That first Facebook evening, I was too busy wallowing in the decline of the teenage princesses, to seek out Richard Tyler, so after adding four friends, three of whom I shared a house with, the other being Joey Neill, I signed off.
Two years after losing my Facebook virginity, I was up a ladder, letting my brain wander aimlessly, as it so often does on my window cleaning round, when Richard Tyler came into my mind in a ‘I wonder whatever happened to...’ moment. So, that evening I returned to Facebook, inputted the name Richard Tyler in the search field and then looked through the dozen or so Richard Tyler’s with photographs that appeared. I have to say, not one bore a striking resemblance to the child I knew, but there was one guy who now had long grey hair and a wispy grey beard who was sporting a hippyish look, who I thought , at least, bore some sort of similarity. His Facebook page revealed he was single, though did not mention whether he had ever married, none of the photographs on his page gave me any indication that he had children, they were mainly pictures of Richard scuba diving in exotic locations around the world. I found it interesting though, that his current location was listed as Chester rather than Cheltenham. Had I definitely found the right Richard Tyler? The only way I could be certain was to ask him, so sent a ‘Friend Request’ and a message asking him if he was originally from Chorley because if he was, he used to be my school friend. The second bit probably went without saying, given we were best friends for four years, but some people have lousy memories!
The fo
llowing night, Richard Tyler had been back in touch and thankfully, it was the correct Richard Tyler and he did accept me as a friend. At school, he had been no brighter than me, but he had obviously just been a late developer as he ended up going to Sheffield University to study Law. He had decided whilst studying though that there was as much chance of him being a solicitor as there was of him being a professional gigolo, so as soon as he had graduated, he went travelling around the world, alone, for twelve months. Whilst travelling up the East coast of Australia, he had discovered and fallen in love with scuba diving. He subsequently qualified as a deep sea diver, working for oil companies all over the world, but in recent years had decided to live a less dangerous life, so had found himself a scuba diving job at Blue Planet, the huge aquarium in Ellesmere Port, Wirral. I had never heard of the place, so I googled it, which was when my next crazy idea came to me, that linked in to the second item on my ‘Bucket List’. The thing I have now discovered about crazy ideas though, is that they don’t just materialise over night, they take a lot of planning.
It was necessary to confide in Richard about what this crazy idea was and he was still the generous, kind hearted, well meaning person he had always been, he helped me every step of the way and brought my crazy idea to life. It worked out better than I ever could have imagined and having managed to get one crazy idea in the bag, I was hoping to get another one in before cold feet got the better of me!