Short Story - Immortality
Closing the pages of The Times, Simon Dawlish sighed. What would his father General Dawlish have made of his favourite newspaper now being sold in this strange tabloid version? Nothing lasts forever his father would have said. For all intents and purposes it felt and looked like the free local Devon rag that fell upon the mat on a rainy Thursday afternoon. Indeed it was a rainy Thursday November afternoon today. Simon looked at his watch it said a quarter past three. He had better put on his coat and drive the twenty minutes to see Mrs. Winterson at Clifftop Hall in Clifftop Bay. Since he had been back in England, Simon spent an hour with Mrs. Winterson in her rambling old precariously perched grand house every Thursday afternoon, ‘talking things through’ as she called it. Simon wasn’t sure if the weekly hour spent with Mrs. Winterson (he never knew her first name in the five years that he had known her) really made a difference to his sanity or not.
In the car on the way to Clifftop Bay, Simon skimmed through the channels of the car radio. Depending on his mood and indeed the weather this would habitually sway his choice of motoring accompaniment. Heavy traffic signaled that Simon needed to listen to calming influences such as Classic FM and Radio 4 rather than the usual heart speeding dance music and aggressive rap that seemed to emulate from every other station he encountered. He remembered one particularly fraught afternoon that he had spent in the car at the end of this summer. The afternoon was still vivid in his memory even now. How odd what one remembers Simon mused a non eventful car journey two months ago. After everything that he had been through in his career all over the world, he was amazed that he still loved to drive. His best friend Robert Jeffries had been killed this year in Northern Ireland. A drunken visiting American Marine had crashed into them driving home from a regimental party. Simon liked to think that every time he stepped into his car; he was somehow preserving the memory of his best friend Robert.
Simon was driving through Peckham in South East London on a very hot, sticky Saturday afternoon. He was driving back from his ex-wife’s house after having lunch with her and the children. It had been a particularly tense lunchtime. The nervous excitement he experienced as he approached his one monthly visit to his two children Harriet and Ben. The children’s constant screaming and tantrums. He would have brought up his children differently, precocious spoilt London brats that they were, but he loved them both enormously and he would never abandon them. A house of screaming banshees in the middle of gentrified Victorian London.
Notwithstanding that his ex-wife Theodora was getting married again so soon after their divorce but coupled with the ninety degree heat; Simon could not wait to get back into the unruffled world of his air conditioned car. The soothing sounds of Classic FM hiked up to full blast to alleviate the hoards of ant like shoppers, zig zagging in front of his eyes moving fast and dangerously towards retail nirvana. As he moved ironically tortoise like in his new Mercedes sports willing the traffic lights to go green but seeming forever to be programmed on red. The stress of the self inflicted social occasion compounded with real life in all its glory before his windscreen.
Simon had just returned from Kabul just forty eight hours earlier with one arm bandaged heavily. The children had asked why daddy was bandaged up like action man. They could help him with his bandages, they had learnt about doctors and nurses at school that week. Simon turned up the radio louder the panic to find some open country was overwhelming him. The shoppers out in Peckham today were not to know that he had nearly died fighting for his country and saving millions from their peril. Whether he lived or died was no concern of theirs, only another statistic on the ten o’clock news. People would still shop every Saturday, get drunk, make love, argue, and abuse each other. Without him. Without a second thought for wars thousands of miles away. Life went on.
It was a brave thing to do Mrs. Winterson had told him when he met with her the following Thursday. Such social instances that most London people took for granted were going to be more than doubly traumatic for a war hero such as himself. ‘I’m not a war hero Mrs. Winterson,’ said Simon seriously. ‘The things that I have to do are part of my job, there is nothing heroic in cutting short the lives of young people whatever they have gotten themselves involved in,’ Simon had told Mrs. Winterson solemnly. ‘You’ve had a very upsetting year Simon,’ replied Mrs.Winterson. ‘You’ve got divorced, you’ve moved house, your best friend has been killed, we must not dwell on the past however difficult it is to move on, we must look to the future now,’ Mrs.Winterson said softly but resiliently. ‘You have masterminded deadly and important missions Simon, but I’m afraid I have to give my professional advice to your superiors,’ said Mrs. Winterson seriously. ‘I have given the matter much thought and I am afraid I do not find you in rude enough mental health to go back to the field at this time.’ ‘I understand Mrs.Winterson if that is your final decision,’ replied Simon. And with that Major Dawlish stood up and made his own way out of the library room of Clifftop Hall back out to the drizzling rain. The sort of rain that seeps into your bones and impregnates even the hardiest Barbour.
Well that told him. He was going to be pen pusher from now on. A very safe option. Good job, good salary up at GCHQ investigating any intelligence leads that his men on the field under covered for him. Life was going to be different now. Simon either had to accept it or drown in his misery. He should look at the opportunity of facing many more days and years ahead, he was only forty four for God’s sake. One of the reasons why his wife divorced him was that she never knew whether it was going to be the last time that she ever saw him as he walked out of the door on his way to his next mission. Now he was going to be a white collar worker like everyone else he knew outside of the military.
Making his way home, Simon stopped the windscreen wipers, the rain was easing up at last and the sun peaked out behind the clouds before it went down westwards for the evening. A rainbow was just beginning to appear and it arched like a magnificent Greek structure across the sky. Of all the miles that he had travelled in the army, he had thought that he would have found the end of the rainbow by now somewhere in the world. Simon laughed to himself. How ridiculous. They go on for ever stupid, indefinite and immortal.
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