SUNDAY IN MEMORY LANE (Episode 14)

1976 continued - eleven weeks of heatwave and psychic connections

Dougie stretched on the bed and recounted all that he knew about the torrid deception that had been pulled on me for so many years. He said that all the boys were discussing it in the pub earlier that evening and they had some pretty lurid anecdotes to air. Tony had screwed their girlfriends, cracked unfunny jokes about them and used misogynistic expressions in his most drunken moments, which had even disgusted them and none of them were saints. He mentioned, in passing, that Jai had gone home early because he had a streaming cold. Jai was a Big Jessie, of course.

Dougie wasn't feeling so good himself and, after smoking just one joint, he fell asleep fully dressed on the bed. I dug out a warm sleeping bag and unzipping it fully. I draped it over him. I climbed into bed alongside him and went straight to sleep too.

I woke up feeling very strange and quite cold in the early dawn. I was clammy and my hair was damply clinging to my face. I had the vestiges of a dream lurking in my memory and I concentrated to remember it. I remembered being dressed in black jeans and a white jumper with a black and white patterned head scarf tied at the back of my neck and white plimsolls.
I had gone to a place with double doors that opened towards me. I had opened them to find a densely packed and smoky room with a bar at the other end. Jai had been at the bar, laughing with friends and he had waved happily to me. I had closed the doors, feeling relieved that he was well again and that was all I could remember of the dream.

Artwork: Sleepwalker by Elena Dudina

Wide awake, I got up and quietly left the bedroom, padded along the corridor and went into my kitchen to make my usual coffee. Dan was still sound asleep but the room was bitterly cold, so I again turned the electric oven on to take the chill off it. That January was a bad one.
I was kneeling on the floor, kissing Dylan good morning when the door opened and Dougie whispered, "What are you doing?"
"Making coffee!" I mouthed silently, "Do you want one?" He nodded, scratched at his tousled hair and went back to the bedroom.
With the fire on full again, we basked in the luxurious heat, chatting until Dan got up to go downstairs and use the bathroom with Dylan keeping guard over him as always. They scampered back up the stairs and dived onto the bed with us. It was one of those mornings when getting up seems like the maddest thing in the world to be doing, so we popped Bob Seger on the record deck and dealt the playing cards out to play "snap" with Dan instead. At three and a half, Dan was learning numbers fast and I was very proud of him.

Around mid morning Jai knocked on the door and the first thing he said was, "What were you doing in my bedroom last night, Fran?" Dougie and I looked at each other with surprise and I assured Jai that I had been at home all night. Dougie nodded in confirmation. Jai looked absolutely baffled.
"No." He said firmly. "No, Fran. I woke up in the night and you were standing next to my bed. You opened the wardrobe doors and stood there staring inside for a minute. I spoke to you but you ignored me. Then you shut the doors and left. I had to get out of bed to close the front door because you left it wide open!" I spluttered with surprise.
"But I don't even know where you are living now, Jai!" I said incredulously.
"I am staying in your old bedroom in Tony's house!" he said, getting agitated. He was convinced that I was playing some sort of weird game with him.
The similarity between this account and my dream was uncanny and so I asked "What was I wearing Jai?" and he thought about it. "Black jeans and that thick white jumper you always wear. Oh, and I remember you had your hair tied back with this." And he picked up my headscarf from the top of the cabinet near the door.
Both Jai and Dougie were looking at me oddly.
"Crikey!" I said "This is well spooky! The fact is, I woke up at dawn this morning and I had been dreaming." I explained my memory of the dream as best I could. "I have sleep walked in the past." I confessed.
"But how did you get into the house?" Jai asked me. This question hung in the air like a spectre. I no longer had a key to my old home. We all just looked at each other confused. I asked Jai how he was feeling. "Dougie said you had a streaming cold last night!" He looked more confused than before at that.
"Oh yeah!" he said scratching his head. "It is gone now!"

Doing psychic things is something I cannot seem to control. I have foreseen things so accurately that my family have asked for lottery numbers or Grand National winners, to cash in on this strange gift of mine. The problem with it is that I am not sure how it works exactly and it really does not seem to work on demand.

When I was a child I saw my father's car on the back of a low loader, badly smashed up. But the accident did not happen until a week later.

When my brother Roy had a motor scooter, he slid around an icy corner on his left thigh and I jumped out of my seat, five miles away, with the pain of it. I had closed my eyes in pain and could tell my family exactly where he was, because I was seeing through his eyes. He limped home with a badly scraped thigh, pushing his disabled scooter an hour later.

My baby step brother, Harvey, was almost strangling himself with his bedsheet on one occasion when I was babysitting and I could feel a throttling sensation. I ran up the stairs and untangled him, but I inadvertently transmitted my anguish to my father, who was at a dinner dance at least ten miles away. He came rushing home worried sick.

These are just a few easy to convey incidents.
There have been thousands of others.

I had sleep walked when I was pregnant. I had dreamed that I was at the office and had walked out of our bedroom door onto a non existent hallway. I had tumbled badly down the steep cottage stairs which descended directly to the kitchen. I had twisted my ankle. Tony put a padlock on the bedroom door after that and I had to use a bucket if I needed to pee during the night.

The incident that Jai described could have been another sleep walking event, I suppose, but there really is no way of knowing how I got into the house. Jai was sure that the front door was closed and the back door was always kept locked at my former home. We never figured it out.

My twenty fourth birthday was nothing special that year, except for the fact that I was depressed and could not shake it off. My birthdays always come up on me unexpectedly, being at the beginning of March, close on the shortest month of the year. I remember starving all that week. It was a grim period, that is for sure.

Elaine and I were fed up of our extreme poverty, but a glimmer of hope arrived in the shape of a friend who was starting a late night American style burger restaurant. He offered us work, unofficially. We were very interested because he planned to pick us up at 7pm on the weekend evenings and we would be working until midnight in Colchester, a garrison town half an hour’s drive away.
This sounded ideal, we thought, until he turned up with the tightest shortest denim hot pants we had ever seen and tight white t-shirts emblazoned with stars and stripes. He wanted us to wear leather boots with this ensemble and we both stared at him askance.
"Sounds a bit slutty!" I worried, but Fidel was certain that this apparel (or the lack of it) would bring the punters through the door in droves.
He was right.
It did.

Elaine and I worked like demons, dashing between the tables filled with squaddies loaded with alcohol and testosterone. They were young, energetic and very fit. By the time we got home each night, we stunk of burger fat and chips. We fought off umpteen, bum smacking, almost hairless soldiers who had been set free from the Colchester barracks for a rare binge. We suffered the worst, cringe background music every night, but Fidel seemed to think it was superb. If I hear just a few bars of Demis Roussos ever since, I shudder and my skin crawls!

To make it all worthwhile, we earned a small fortune in wages and tips, so we stuck it out as long as we could.
Fidel was raking in the cash and was devastated when, after a very successful spring, we announced that we were burned out and wanted to pack it in. Dougie had been freaking out at me because, if there was one thing he knew too much about, it was the bad habits of squaddies around women.
He would arrive at my flat just as I got home, around 1am and shake his head in horror at my dreadful outfit every time he saw it. I would go and bath quickly, change into a soft comfortable kaftan that reached the floor and was sparingly perfumed with a precious few dabs of Topaz by Avon, which I loved at the time and was infinitely preferable to chip fat stink.

The relationship I had with Dougie was very important to me and, as the weather warmed, so did our intimacy. I could not fault Dougie. He was super fit, such an expert lover and very attentive. His visits became nightly. He never tried to move in with me and never placed any restrictions on what I did. He was careful not to cost me anything and continued to pop coins in the electric meter, usually when I was not looking. Our relationship was entirely secret and he was most particular to keep it that way. I never knew where he kept his clothes and other belongings. He said he was ‘lodging’ somewhere nearby. I did not like to pry, so left it at that.

Dan's fourth birthday on the 25th of May 1976 was a scorching day, so we packed a special lunch and spent the day on the beach. We were getting so brown so quickly that year and, as June rolled in, the skies remained totally clear all day long.
It was the driest, sunniest and warmest summer of the twentieth century so we literally lived on the beach for eleven full weeks.

One day, Dan and I were wading out to sea at low tide. I could feel someone watching me from onshore. I stopped, sensed exactly where the sensation was coming from and turned to focus on the spot. Tony was standing on the high promenade alone, watching us.
He stayed there for some time and then suddenly disappeared. I wondered if he would come down to see Dan, but he did not. It was curious the way he never tried to be with Dan during that time, I could not understand it at all. He had adored Dan before we split up.

Dan was developing ideas of his own. One morning he must have got out of bed very early and, dressing himself, he had gone walkabout alone. When I awoke the house was silent and I found Dylan asleep in the kitchen, but no sign of Dan. Trying not to panic, I quickly dressed and went looking for him. I knocked at all the neighbours but nobody had seen him. I ran to Elaine's and she came to the door in a nightie.
No, Dan was not there.
She quickly dressed and we scoured the busy amusement arcades, the beach and the pier.
By midday I was beside myself. My mouth was permanently dry and I was running out of ideas. We took to asking people in the town if they had seen a copper haired four year old on his own anywhere, but nobody was able to help us.
At 3pm my hysteria was unmanageable and I returned to the flat to check there for the last time before I went to the police. Dan had been missing for eight hours at least by then. It was eerie without Dan's constant babble and I lay on the bed sobbing.

I have a gypsy technique for finding lost things and it involves visualising the item and then opening up the focus to examine the surroundings. It usually works very well, so I set about forcing myself to relax into a deep meditation. I counted my breathing, slowing it down and deepening it progressively. Then I visualised Dan carefully. I expanded the vision until I saw him playing in the garden of our former home. He was with his Dad!

I pelted out of the flat and ran all the way to Tony's house.
I hammered my fists on the door and there was no reply.
I hammered again and again.
I knew they were there, I just knew it.
Eventually Tony opened the door and I could barely speak.
"Is Danny here?" I croaked hoarsely and Dan came running down the hallway towards me. My legs gave way and I hugged him so tight he giggled because he could not breathe.

When I stood up I was murderous with hatred for Tony but mindful that we had never argued in front of Dan and I intended to keep it that way.
"When did he arrive?" I asked as coolly as I could muster. "Oh, about 7 o'clock this morning!" came the sneering arrogant reply.
"And you did not think to let me know? Or bring him home?" I demanded to know. "You are a spiteful see-you-next-Tuesday, Tony!"
Tony narrowed his eyes and said, "You should take better care of him then, shouldn't you?" In reflex, I slashed at his face with my long fingernails, fully intending to gouge his eyes out, but he managed to body swerve backwards just enough to avoid contact.
He was laughing at me.
"Ooh Dan!" he sniggered, "Mummy's cross with Daddy now!" Like this was an achievement or something. I grabbed Dan's hand and, with as much dignity as I could manage on shaky legs, I walked away.

As we walked home, I asked Dan how he had crossed the main road on his own and he said that he had used the pedestrian crossing and an old lady had helped him.
'A lady? What lady helps a four year old cross a main road on his own at 7am?' I was thinking, but I was doing my best not to burst into tears of relief at finally having my precious boy safe and sound again. My nerves were shot to pieces when I found Elaine to call off the search. We smoked a joint and, not for the first or last time, were extremely grateful for the gentle soporific effect taking the frazzled edge off another dreadful day.