A mini-disclaimer as well - I don't want to offend anyone, so please note there is one use of the dreaded 'F-word', close to the start of the story. It's the only one, and, in my humble opinion, it isn't used gratuitously, but if you're likely to be offended, please note that it is there.
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Sometimes, when you least expect it, life can write a postscript. This is mine.
My life had changed, in a moment. That moment had been on a summer morning, a bright, beautiful summer morning, three years ago, on the unlikely stage of the forecourt of the railway station in my home town. A classic example of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or, dependent on perspective, the right place at the right time. Each day, each moment, you make decisions, and those decisions ramify in ways that you can't begin to calculate, still less understand, eventually making you a completely different person in a completely different situation than you would have been had you chosen to follow an alternative path. There is a version of quantum physics where each of those decisions is like a fork in the road of history, every firing of every neuron in every brain, every random decomposition of a nucleus in a radioactive element creating a new, parallel universe, infinite bifurcations ranging from the almost identical to the unrecognisable, all according to the random occurrences or conscious decisions that make up each instant of time. In my case, the immediate series of events that led me to this particular point in the continuum of multiverses were, amongst, no doubt, myriad others : that my mother-in-law had been ill, and that my wife wanted to visit her; that I hadn't been able to go because of work commitments, which meant that my wife and daughter had to catch the train rather than us going together by road; that I hadn't been able to park close to the station because of road works, and had needed to leave the car a few minutes walk away; that a few minutes earlier the same morning, a 13 year old boy had chosen to tell his parents that he was in love with another 13 year old boy; that, unbeknownst to anyone, the boy's father had a brain tumour which left him vulnerable to fits of uncontrollable anger, but which had never manifested in that way until that moment: that the father caught up with his son, who had run out of their house when the man had turned into a screaming maniac, and had begun to beat the boy with the apparent intention of killing him, immediately outside the station just as I walked out of the main doors of the building.
"Dad, stop it! Dad, it's me, Alex! Oh, Lawrence, help me, I love you!" the boy choked out between gut-wrenching sobs and cries of pain as the blows rained down on him.
"You filthy little bastard, I'll kill you and that other little pervert!"
The man, in the intensity of his rage, obviously didn't see me approach him, so that when I grabbed his shoulders and pulled him up and away from the boy, he was taken completely by surprise, stumbled back and almost fell over the plastic fencing protecting the road works. The boy, aware that something had changed, even if he wasn't quite sure what, looked up, looked straight into my eyes for two, maybe three seconds, before instinct kicked in, he jumped to his feet and ran for his life, almost being knocked down by a bus in the process. In the few seconds it took for the bus to pass, the boy had completely disappeared, presumably through the alleyway opposite that led towards the town centre. I was drawing breath for a sigh of relief when it felt like a tree had fallen on me, such was the ferocity of the blow to my head.
"You queer-loving bastard, you should mind your own fucking business!"
Then another massive blow, then darkness.
****
Any account of my next few weeks is, perforce, a combination of what I remember, what I was told later and what I could reconstruct. I was taken to my local general hospital, which, to my good fortune, had a unit which specialised in head injuries, mostly because of the considerable number of military installations in the area. Of the immediate aftermath of the incident, I remember almost nothing, except intermittent bouts of terrifying pain in my head, interspersed by periods of complete oblivion which could have lasted for seconds or months, so utterly dark as they were. Almost the only thing which I clearly recall from those early days was...it's difficult to know how to categorise it...an experience, let's say, dream or hallucination could cover it, I'll leave that to the psychologists, but an astonishingly vivid experience, like watching a high definition, almost 3D, film - no, not watching it, but living it, that's how real it seemed - about me and a boy called Alex, who was having trouble with his parents because of someone called Lawrence, who seemed to be his boyfriend. The names, the situation meant nothing to me, I didn't know any boys by the name of Alex or Lawrence, or indeed any boys at all - my daughter went to an all-girl school, wasn't really old enough to have a boyfriend herself, none of my friends had school age boys, although there were one or two toddlers around. There was one other thing that stuck in my mind about the dream, or whatever it was, though - Alex had kissed me, twice, delightful, never before or since in my life kisses that seemed to go straight to some deep place in my psyche that I hadn't even known was there, then looked at me with what I can only describe as 'bedroom eyes', an implicit invitation that it had taken every ounce of resolution I possessed to decline.
I'd never bothered about dreams, I didn't often remember them, and when I did, they didn't seem to make any great sense. I'd read that they were the brain's sensory processing apparatus trying to make sense of random firings of neurons during sleep, and presenting sounds and pictures that were a 'best guess' based on the input, and that anyone purporting to 'analyse' your dreams was basically a charlatan. This dream, though, was so different in quality, in intensity than anything I had previously experienced, that I asked my neurologist about it, some weeks into my rehabilitation, although I didn't go into the subject matter in any great detail.
"Bright lights and medication, in a nutshell. It's nothing to worry about in itself - many people report similar things, I'm convinced it's where most of the stories you hear about 'near-death' and 'out-of-body' experiences come from," he explained.
If that was nothing to worry about, there were plenty of other things that were. I'd found out what had happened at the station, my wife had told me on one of her first visits when I was reasonably conscious and able to hold some sort of conversation.
"You were a hero, Dan."
"I don't feel very heroic, I just pulled this guy away from the boy he was attacking, felt a massive bang on the head and woke up in here."
"You've been a celebrity round the area, you've been on the local TV news and in the local papers, you know, 'Have-a-Go hero saves boy from brutal attack', that kind of thing. It turns out that he was ill, though, the father, he has a brain tumour, inoperable, he's not expected to live more than a few weeks, and when he came to his senses he was so upset about what had happened, trying to kill his son, and you as well, and then finding out he's going to die on top of that. Poor man."
"Poor man?! He tried to kill me with a shovel!"
"He couldn't help it, though, his tumour meant that he couldn't control himself. I mean, if you had that illness and found out that Lucy was a lesbian, what would you do?" Lucy was our daughter.
"What has Lucy got to do with this?"
"Nothing, but it turned out that the reason that the man had flipped out was that he'd found out his son was gay. Still, at least if the boy had been killed, it wouldn't have been any great loss to the world, there are plenty of other gays about."
"Is that meant to be some kind of joke?"
"What difference does it make to you? You don't like gays any more than I do."
"I've got nothing against gays, I know at least one at work and he's just one of the lads. If you met him in the street, you'd never know in a million years that he was gay, unless he told you. I certainly wouldn't think it acceptable for someone to be killed, just because they're gay."
"Well, I know you've had a bang on the head, but I didn't think it would mean you were signing up for the Gay Liberation Front."
"If that's the smartest thing you can think of to say, I think you'd better go. I'm due to see the psychologist shortly, anyway."
"If that's your attitude, I will go. I was going to bring Lucy down after school, but I don't think I'll bother now, we'll come tomorrow instead. You might have calmed down a bit by then."
Looking back now, that conversation was the beginning of the end of our marriage. Liz and I had been together for almost 20 years, we met in our late teens, she wasn't a local girl, she was from the Midlands, at college in the area studying tourism management, she never did use her qualifications, we fell in love, boyfriend/girlfriend, engaged, big white wedding, 2 or 3 years after the wedding when it was just the two of us, then, just as it was starting to look as though we might be fated not to have children, the positive pregnancy test and its inevitable upshot at the end of the regulation nine months. The ideal child, pretty from a baby, nice personality, intelligent. Sold our first house for a pretty good profit, used the equity to move up to something nicer, so far, so conventional. But then something unconventional, unforeseen happens, things are said and done, and the person you thought you knew and expected to spend the rest of your life with turns out to have facets that you'd never seen and wished you never had. I couldn't believe how callous she sounded, let the boy die like a rat in the gutter, and then use access to our daughter to get at me because I'd said something she didn't like. If she didn't like that, how much more would the contents of my dream upset her.
We drifted apart pretty rapidly after that, especially as it soon became obvious that I wasn't going to be able to go back to my old job, it was classed as safety critical, and no-one in authority in my company was going to take the risk of passing me fit when I suffered from blinding headaches on a weekly, if not a daily basis, and when I was prone to lapses of concentration, even to the extent of sitting for 20 or 30 minutes at a time staring vacantly into space. The company were very good about it, they didn't want to be seen to be treating the 'Have-a-Go hero' shabbily, bad for PR, of course, so I was given a reasonable severance package and a pension, I also had some critical injury insurance and received some criminal injury compensation, so money wasn't going to be an immediate problem. The issue of what to do next, still in my thirties and having effectively taken early retirement on health grounds, turned out to be a game breaker, however.
"Now you haven't got your job to tie you down around here, Dan, we can move nearer to Mum and Dad. It's not as if you've got any family to speak of locally," Liz said one day not long after I'd come out of hospital.
"I don't want to move to the Midlands, our life is here, we've got a nice house, Lucy's happy at her school, all her friends are around here. What's brought this on?"
"Well, you can't drive any more, and if anything happened to my parents, I wouldn't be able to get home, and if you were to...if anything was to happen to you, I'd be stuck here on my own. It's not my part of the world."
"It's easy enough to catch a train, and, anyway, you know how to drive, it's just that you normally chose to let me do it, when...when I was able to. You've lived down here for nearly 20 years, nearly half of your life, you've got more friends here than you have in the Midlands."
"You're just being selfish, you've never liked my family."
"What's given you that idea? I've never had a cross word with any of your family. And as for being selfish, I've lived here all my life, Lucy's lived here all her life, you've lived here for years, and now you want to uproot us all on a whim - I reckon you should think about what you're saying before you start throwing words like 'selfish' around."
"Whim!" she shouted, "You call wanting to look after my parents a whim? You've changed, Dan, I can't seem to talk to you any more."
Physician, heal thyself, I thought, but I just wasn't in the mood to argue. I withdrew into myself, into silence, perhaps the change I'd most noticed about myself since I was injured was that withdrawal, even from myself, certainly from the world, as though I was becoming a hermit of some kind. It was as though I was looking for something that my current life couldn't provide. I'm a bit young for a mid-life crisis, I thought with wry humour.
As winter approached, I spent most of my time at home, lacking the motivation to go out into the world as it became colder and wetter with the season. Liz and I were becoming more like 2 people who happened to share a house than a married couple. One outlet I was finding and enjoying was through a programme run by the hospital, a kind of an occupational therapy course where I was learning to draw and paint. I'd always been terrible at art when I was at school - I remember one especially humiliating experience when my art teacher had made me hold up a particularly inept painting in front of the class, as an example of how not to do it, presumably. Whether it was anything to do with my injury, or whether it was just a case of finding the right teacher, I don't know, but, all of a sudden, I found the techniques of art falling into place, and progressed very quickly from pictures that might have shamed an infant school class to some which looked almost professional. I became very enthusiastic about my twice weekly sessions, though whether Liz didn't notice, or did notice and didn't care, I'm not sure, but it led to another deterioration in our relationship after one particular lesson.
"I'm really getting into this art course - I've never been able to draw or paint before, but I've surprised myself with how well it's going."
"Oh yes," she said, non-committally.
"The teacher even thinks that I might have a real talent, that I could paint professionally."
"You, a painter! You can't even paint the bathroom wall without making a mess of it. Your teacher must be blind!"
"Thanks very much for the vote of confidence," I said bitterly. "You accuse me of not wanting to do anything, then when I find something I enjoy, you just want to shoot me down in flames."
"Be realistic, Dan, you're nearly 40, you can't just expect to wake up one morning and be the next Picasso."
"I'm not suggesting I'm the next Picasso, but then neither are the artists who sell their stuff to the tourists down in Cornwall."
"If you think I'm going to live in Cornwall, think again, mister. I'm already far enough away from my family without moving to the ends of the earth. Anyway, speaking of my family, I've got something I've been meaning to tell you. I'm taking Lucy to Mum & Dad's for Christmas, she hasn't seen them for ages."
"And I have no say in this, evidently".
"Look, you're not exactly sparkling company, are you? All you do is sit around all day like some kind of zombie. It won't make much difference to you whether we're here or not."
"Has it occurred to you that this might have something to do with my head injury? If I act like a zombie, it's because you seem to treat me like one. Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't you the one who said the person who tried to kill me was a 'poor man' who 'couldn't help himself' because he was ill? Now you're treating me like I'm a criminal!"
"You're getting hysterical. We're going away for Christmas, get used to the idea. You can go to Cornwall, or Timbuktu if you like, just don't do anything to spoil it for us."
She got up and stormed out of the room. I sat staring fixedly ahead for a few moments, all I could think was that the last vestige of the person I'd loved for almost the whole of my adult life had just walked away. Then, for the first time since that fateful summer morning, I broke down and cried.
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I am late getting started on this. Just finished the first part, really like it, now on to the second.
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