Read Online My First Colouring Book by Lloyd Jones - Free Book Online Page B

Home for Retired Gentlefolk. By the side of your bed there’s a bleeping monitor, which you keep mistaking for the Chinaman’s wok five doors down from your flat. Your thin and purple lips are embellished with a white scum-line. You’re alone. That’s worrying. If indeed you are me in the future, old man, scrawny right flank exposed to the stares of passers-by (clutching their Tesco flowers and their pathetic fruit tokens), then there’s much to concern us both. Why is there no-one at your bedside? No concerned children. No worried wife/lover/brother/other. Nobody at all, old man. You must have been a bastard. A sod. A selfish prick.
    Me? A sod, a selfish prick? Let’s leave that one alone, let’s not go there. Let’s go back to the crash scene, quick. Feed me another morsel from the past, oh great and masterful brain, before you slip into your tartan slippers and forget which pills you took today, before you fall down the stairs, tangled up with your last and worst dancing partner, Fraulein Zimmer.
    No, let’s not go there either. For chrissakes, organise yourself. Control your thoughts. Try to think clearly. Focus. We’re trying to guide an old man through his last moments on Planet Earth, goddess of creation and gluer of all dust and particles into semblances and forms. We’re at the site of a fatal accident, kneeling in a shallow puddle of water, by the dying man-boy you met four hours earlier as he leapfrogged joyously and youthfully up the steps of the Labour Club (helmet in hand, smiling and nodding to you as he bounded past, his buckled leather boots leaving a trail of muddy prints on the hallway floor). You happened to think, as you passed, that his prints would irritate the hell out of the fat Italian cleaning lady who mopped that floor every Sunday morning, her gargantuan, filthy-looking mop trailing stringy bits which reminded you of the puppets’ hair in Rosie and Jim .
    Kneeling by this poor boy in the rain, you realise slowly that you have to do something. His treacle-blood is seeping between the facemask and his skin, onto his lovely white neck. You remove the helmet as gently as you can, then you peel the mask downwards, away from the mouth, an unfurling of clementine peel from the fruit, his skin a pale pith in the lamplight. Somehow you remove your coat and fold it into a pillow under his head. Do you hold his head off the cold asphalt as you juggle with your coat? You can’t remember. It was the black leather jacket you always wore, presumably. Blue jeans with it, always. Now, with cold air flaying you alive, the full scale of the tragedy becomes clear. He has a hole in the side of his head, above the right ear, and his hair all around it is matted with congealed blood. A car drives up and stops. You ask the driver to keep guard, then you run into the house.
    The party is still going on, they haven’t a clue what’s happened. You push your way through a horde in the hallway, up the stairs past snogging couples, towards the linen cupboard on the first landing. You kneel by it, open its (pine) doors and grab sheets and pillowcases, newly-washed. Rising and turning swiftly, you race back down the stairs, noticing as you do so that you left dark wet footprints on the green stair-carpet as you went up them. Then you struggle through the shouting, laughing, smooching, smoking, drinking crowd in the hallway and run back into the road. Kneeling by the boy, you place a pillowcase over the wound and fold a sheet around his head to keep it clean. Your knee is being jabbed by chippings, so you stand up. Eventually, an ambulance arrives. They take him away. The rest is a blur. You can’t remember what happened to the bike – who took it away? What happened to the sheets? Your coat? No idea at all. No, that’s not quite correct. We can piece something together, using pictures. There’s a photo of you somewhere, sitting astride your own red 250cc